Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 07 (47 page)

“You
don’t think he was shot by gangs, do you?”

“Nope.
Someone got him to go out to Barney’s and shot him as he walked home. I just
wish…” I cut myself off.

“What,
doll? What do you wish?”

“I
wish I hadn’t found Mitch’s picture. Of Eddie with Hector Beauregard. And at
the same time I wish I knew who he called this morning. Maybe Conrad can find
out more than we could, although it’s not too likely with Cindy and Gladys
thinking of him as a barely articulate lesser ape.”

“Conrad,
huh? You getting kind of friendly with a cop if you’re starting to talk about
him by his first name.”

I felt
myself blushing. “Let’s see if Barney will tell us anything.”

During
the short drive to the tavern I suggested a strategy to Mr. Contreras. He
agreed readily, anxious to make what amends he could for his disastrous phone
call.

Barney’s
was a small place, with one room for the pool table and one room for the bar. A
handful of old men sat at two of the scarred tables in the bar. Some had
drinks, but most seemed to be there for companionship. When they caught sight
of strangers in their midst, they stopped talking and stared straight ahead.

A
solidly built man in his early seventies got up from one of the tables and went
back to the bar. “Can I help you folks?”

We
walked up to him, Mr. Contreras taking the lead. He asked for a beer and drank
a little, then offered a comment on the weather, which Barney greeted in
silence. Mr. Contreras surveyed the room, studying the men one at a time, while
they sat stonily, occasionally directing glances of outright hostility in my
direction. It was a men’s bar, and whatever the libbers might do downtown to
places like Berghoff’s, Barney’s was going to stay pure.

Finally
Mr. Contreras gave a little grunt of recognition and turned to Barney. “I’m Sal
Contreras. Me and Eddie Mohr worked together at Diamond Head for more than thirty-five
years.” Barney drew back slightly, but Mr. Contreras pointed at one of the
tables and said, “Ain’t that right, Greg?”

A man
with an enormous beer belly shook his head slowly. “Maybe so, but… well, light
ain’t so good in here. Shine some on him, Barney.”

The
owner leaned behind the counter for a switch and turned on an overhead bulb.
Greg looked at my neighbor for a long, doubtful minute. His face cleared
suddenly into a big grin.

“That’s
right, Sal. Ain’t seen you since you retired. We’ve all been getting older,
though you look pretty good. You moved north, what I heard.”

The
other men started moving in their chairs, finishing drinks, murmuring to each
other. We belonged, after all. They didn’t have to form a posse.

“Yeah,”
Mr. Contreras said. “After Clara died I just couldn’t stay in the old
neighborhood. I got me a nice little place up on Racine.”

“That
your daughter? She turned out mighty nice. I thought your kid was older,
though.”

“Nah.
This here’s my neighbor. Vic Warshawski. She was driving me down to visit Eddie
this afternoon, so I wouldn’t have to take the el. Then we found out he was
dead. I guess you probably heard all about that.”

“Yup.”
Barney intervened, anxious to regain control of his bar. “He was just in here
not five minutes before. Then they shot him on his way home. Clarence here, his
wife saw Eddie die. When the cops and all finished talking to her she came and
got him.”

A
bald man next to Greg nodded portentously. Either Mr. Yuall or Mr. Joyce.
Having comforted his wife in her shock, he had hastened back to Barney’s to
share it with his friends.

“Mrs.
Mohr thought he’d come here to meet someone,” I ventured, hoping our bona fides
were now well enough established for me to speak.

“That’s
what Eddie said,” Barney agreed. “He was expecting to meet some man here for
lunch. He waited for an hour and finally decided he’d had enough. He ate a
hamburger by himself and left for home.”

“Did
he leave a message—in case the man he was waiting for showed up after all?” I
asked.

“Yeah,
he did, Barney,” Greg said. “Remember? He said it was some management squirt
and he was tired of waiting on management squirts, so if the guy showed up to
tell him to call when he really wanted to have a meeting.”

“That’s
right. Him getting shot like that, it went out of my mind.” Barney scratched
his thin gray hair. “But what name did he say?”

I
waited while he pondered. “Milt Chamfers? Or Ben Loring?” I finally offered.

Barney
nodded slowly. “I believe it was one of them. Chamfers. I believe that’s the
name all right.”

Greg
agreed that Chamfers was the name Eddie had given, but it didn’t mean anything
to him. He’d apparently left Diamond Head before the new owners took over. No,
Eddie had never mentioned Milt Chamfers to him or to any of them.

“That’s
quite a nice addition Eddie put on his house,” Mr. Contreras said, remembering
the script we were trying to follow. “I wish I could afford me a swimming pool
and a Buick and all. I was at Diamond Head thirty-eight years, not counting the
war, but I sure never got me a retirement deal like that.”

There
was a murmur of agreement around the tables, but Clarence explained that Eddie
had come into some money. No, he hadn’t known Eddie had rich relatives. Must
have been some distant cousin back in Germany remembering his poor American
relations.

“Used
to be the other way around,” one of the other men said bitterly. “Didn’t used
to be Americans had to be someone else’s poor cousins.”

The
conversation turned to the usual complaints of the helpless, over the niggers
and lesbians and Japs and everyone else who was ruining the country. Mr.
Contreras had a shot and a beer to be sociable. We left under cover of a flurry
of newcomers eager to discuss Eddie’s death. I was just as glad to get out
before Conrad Rawlings showed up, anyway. Assuming Mrs. Mohr made him privy to
the news that Eddie had been here right before his death.

When
we were back outside I stood on the walk, not moving for a minute.

“What
is it, doll?”

“What
exactly did you say to Eddie when you called?”

The
old man turned a dull mahogany. “I said I was sorry. I know it sounds like I
sent him out to be shot. You can’t be more worried about it than me, doll, so
give me

“That’s
not what I meant. After you talked to him he felt upset enough to
call—apparently—Milt Chamfers, who agreed to meet him, just as a pretext to get
him out on the street so someone could shoot at him. What did you say?”

Mr.
Contreras scratched his head. “I told him who you was—a detective, I mean. And
that that photo of him that Mitch had, the one from the charity, had you all
excited. And that we was on our way down to ask him where he got enough money
to support a big downtown charity like that, when I knew he was a Knights of
Columbus man from the word go. And I just wanted to give him time to think
about it first. I just wish—”

I saw
a cab coming, a rarity on this stretch of Kedzie, and grabbed Mr. Contreras’s
arm to hustle him to the curb.

“Hey,
doll, what’re you up to?”

“Get
in… We can talk when we get someplace a little less exposed.”

I
asked the cabbie to go along Kedzie until we came to a public phone, and then
to wait for me while I made a call. A few blocks down he pulled over to the
curb.

I
phoned a car rental company I know on the North Side called Rent-A-Wreck. I got
their machine, and told it I was desperate for some wheels, that I’d be there
in half an hour and hoped they’d be picking up their messages in the meantime.
Rent-A-Wreck is a shoestring operation that a couple of women run out of their
house, with the cars parked in the backyard. I hoped they were just sitting
over dinner, not answering their phone but listening to their calls.

Back
in the cab Mr. Contreras and the driver seemed to have come to a happy
understanding. Both were Sox fans with the delusions common to all Chicago baseball
lovers: while mourning the loss of Ivan Calderon they really thought this was
the year the Sox could do it. I gave the cabbie Rent-A-Wreck’s address and
leaned back against the seat, leaving them to a heated discussion of whether
Fisk should step aside for a younger man.

It
seemed to me a minor miracle that I was still alive. If Milt Chamfers was going
to shoot Eddie Mohr just because he was afraid of what Eddie might say to me,
why wasn’t he shooting at me? What had Eddie done for Diamond Head that they
funded him on such a lavish scale—but that they didn’t want him talking about?
I didn’t think Chamfers was the mastermind, either in paying off Eddie Mohr or
in getting him shot. But who stood behind Chamfers— Ben Loring from Paragon
Steel? Or Dick’s father-in-law and his brother? Or both, maybe.

By
the time we got to Rent-A-Wreck on Cornelia, I was fretting with impatience to
be moving, to be doing something, although I wasn’t sure what. I paid off the
cabbie, giving him an extra few bucks with the tip to wait in case no one
answered our ring. When Bev Cullerton came to the door I waved to the cab. He
honked and drove off.

“Hiya,
Vic. You’re lucky we were home. Callie and I were heading over to the
coffeehouse when we got your message. You trash those fancy wheels of yours?
Maybe we could rehab ‘em out back.”

I
grinned. “That’s last week’s story. I just need to get around town tonight
without anyone on my butt. You got something for me?”

“This
hot weather everyone wants a car to get to Door County. We only have one left
and she ain’t much.”

Given
the condition of most of Bev and Callie’s cars, one that wasn’t much was going
to be a real clunker. Beggars can’t be choosers, though. I gave her a twenty as
a down payment and took the keys to an old Nova. The odometer was on its second
lap and the steering had been devised to train the Bulgarian weight-lifting
team, but Bev assured me it would still do eighty if it had to. She gave us
cushions to cover the lumpy seats and held the back gate open until we had cleared
the alley.

“You
want to go home?” I asked Mr. Contreras. “Now, look here, Vic Warshawski: you
are not going to drag me all over Chicago and then dump me at home like you
think I was senile and couldn’t understand a few English sentences. I want to
know why you left that Impala down by Barney’s and what all the fuss is. And if
you’re up to something else tonight you’d better either plan on me coming with
you or just sitting in the car till the sun comes up, ‘cause you ain’t pushing
me out of here. Unless you’re planning on hooking up with Conrad—” The last
word was laced with an adolescent ugliness.

“As a
matter of fact, I’d be just as happy for Conrad not to catch up with me again
tonight.” I wrenched the steering wheel hard to the right and pulled over to
the curb, where I gave him a thumbnail sketch of the problems I’d been
pondering during the cab ride north. On top of those I was wondering what
Vinnie or the Picheas might do now that I’d discovered their slick pitch to the
old people in the neighborhood. This was the first chance I’d had to tell Mr.
Contreras about it. He was shocked and angry and we got diverted for a bit by a
sermon against those who prey on the elderly.

“Vinnie’s
a spiteful kind of guy,” I said when he’d wound down. “Who knows what he might
think up to get even. Anyway, I don’t know why I’m still walking around if Milt
Chamfers would shoot Eddie just so as to keep him from talking to me. I’m
worried that you could be in danger, too, just because you’ve been hanging out
with me—calling Eddie Mohr, going with me to see him, all those things.”

“Oh,
don’t worry about me, doll,” he said roughly. “Not that I want to die, but if
someone shoots me it’s not like I didn’t have a good life. What are you going
to do tonight?”

“I
need to find a place with a phone. But what I really need is to get into Dick’s
office.”

“The
first Mr. Warshawski,‘” the old man repeated with relish. “But what for?”

“That’s
where it all comes together: the Diamond Head bonds Mrs. Frizell bought from
Chrissie Pichea; Chicago Settlement; and Diamond Head itself-—Dick did the
legal work. I just don’t see how else to get it without looking at his files.
And I don’t know how to get in there.”

“You
can’t pick the lock?”

“I
lost my picklocks in the San the other night, but that’s not really the
problem. A big law firm like that, the juniors are working until all hours. I
don’t know how to get in without being caught. And I don’t know how else to get
what I need to know.”

He
thought it over for some time. “You know, doll, I’ve got an idea. I’m not
saying it’s a great idea, and it’d need some work, but you know who gets into
places like that without anybody paying any mind to them?”

“Cleaning
crews, but—”

“And
workmen,” he interrupted triumphantly. “They’re just part of the furniture to
management squirts.”

Mr.
Contreras had to go home to feed Peppy and let her out. We decided that I would
drop him on Diversey and pick him up on Barry, at the top of our alley. I
wasn’t very happy with the plan, but had to agree that anyone staking out the
place was more likely to be gunning for me than for him.