Bitter Medicine (7 page)

The thought of plastic Terri made me laugh a little. I got up from the floor and changed from my running clothes into jeans and a bright red knit top. I scribbled a note detailing where I was going and why and took it down to the backyard where Mr. Contreras was hovering anxiously over his tomato plants. They were heavy with ripening fruit.

“How’d they do last night?” I asked sympathetically.

“Oh, they’re fine. Really fine. You want some? I got too many here, don’t know what to do with them all. Ruthie, she don’t really want them.”

Ruthie was his daughter. She came by periodically with two subdued children to harangue her father into moving in with her.

“Sure. Give me what you don’t want—I’ll make you some real old-world tomato sauce. We can have pasta together this winter…. I have a favor to ask of you.”

“Sure, cookie. Whatever you want.” He sat back on his heels and carefully wiped his face with a handkerchief.

“I have to go see some punks tonight. I don’t think I’m going to be in any danger. But just in case—I’ve written down the address and why I’m going there. If I’m not back home tomorrow morning, can you see that Lieutenant Mallory gets this? He’s in Homicide at Eleventh Street.”

He took the envelope from me and looked at it. Bobby Mallory had been in the police with my dad, maybe’d been his closest friend. Even though he hated my working in the detective business, if I died he’d make sure the relevant punks got nailed.

“You want me to come with you, cookie?”

Mr. Contreras was in his late seventies. Tanned, healthy, and strong for a man his age, he still wouldn’t last too long in a fight. I shook my head.

“The terms were I have to come alone. I bring someone with me, they’ll start shooting.”

He sighed regretfully. “Such an exciting life you have. If only I was twenty years younger…. You’re looking real pretty today, cookie. My advice, if you’re going to visit some real punks, tone it down some.”

I thanked him gravely and stayed talking to him until lunch. Mr. Contreras had been a machinist for a small tool-and-die operation until he retired five years
ago. He thought listening to my cases was better than watching
Cagney & Lacey.
In turn he regaled me with tales of Ruthie and her husband.

In the afternoon I drove over to Washtenaw Avenue and slowly cruised past the meeting place. The street was in one of the more run-down sections of Humboldt Park, near where it borders on Pilsen. Most of the buildings were burned out. Even those still occupied were covered with spray-painted graffiti. Tin cans and broken glass took the place of lawns and trees. Cars were hoisted up on crates, their wheels removed. One was parked about two yards from the curb, partially blocking the street. Its rear window was missing.

The address where I was to meet Sergio belonged to a thickly curtained storefront. It was flanked on one side by a partially demolished three-flat, and on the left by a bedraggled liquor store. When I arrived tonight, Lions would be hidden in the ruined building, probably lounging in front of the liquor store, and signaling each other from lookouts at both ends of the block.

I turned left at the corner and found the alley that ran behind the buildings. The three ten-year-old boys playing stickball at its entrance were in all probability gang members. If I drove down the alley or talked to them, word would inevitably get back to Sergio.

I could see no way to make a reasonably protected approach to the meeting place. Not unless I crawled along the city sewers and popped up from the manhole in the middle of the street.

I still had eight hours before the rendezvous. I figured if I made every golden minute count today, I could go to Lotty, Tessa, and the Alvarados on Monday and tell them, scout’s honor, I’d done my best—now leave it to Detective Rawlings.

I swung up Western to Armitage, over to Milwaukee, where the expressway looms menacingly over the neighborhood on high concrete stilts. In a corner underneath it was Holy Sepulchre High School, where Consuelo had studied.

She had played tennis on the uneven asphalt courts there, looking adorable in her white shorts and shirt, breathing in the asbestos from the auto brakes overhead. I know—I’d watched her at a match one afternoon. So I could understand how Fabiano had found her enticing. He used to hang out in a bar up the street and wait for his sister while she was at tennis practice.
After Consuelo joined the team, he hung out at the school watching the girls, then took to ferrying the whole team to matches. And so it went on from there. I’d heard the whole story from Paul when the news of Consuelo’s pregnancy first broke.

The city has certain standards concerning bars and schools—they can’t exist side by side. I made a sweep of the area and found a couple close enough to Holy Sepulchre to be likely haunts of Fabiano’s. I was in luck at the first one. Fabiano was drinking beer at El Gallo, a dingy storefront with a hand-painted, gaudy rooster on the front door. He was watching the Sox on a tiny set attached high up on the wall out of the reach of the casual burglar. About fifteen men were also in the bar, their attention held by the game. Would Ron Kittle drop yet another routine fly ball? I could see how they’d be breathless.

I pulled a stool from the end of the bar and moved it up behind Fabiano. The bartender, talking happily at the other end of the counter, paid no attention to me. I waited courteously for the inning to end, then leaned over Fabiano’s shoulder.

“We need to have a little chat, Señor Hernandez.”

He jerked his arm, spilling his beer, and turned around, startled. He flushed angrily when he saw me. “Shit! Get out of my face!”

“Now, now, Fabiano, that’s no way to talk to your aunt.”

The men on either side of him were looking at me.
“I’m his mother’s sister,” I explained, shrugging my shoulders in embarrassment. “She hasn’t seen him for days. He won’t talk to her. So she asked me to find him, try to talk sense to him.”

He struggled to his feet in the narrow space between my stool and his. “That’s a lie, you bitch! You’re no aunt of mine!”

A man farther up the bar gave an unsteady smile. “You be my aunt if he don’t want you, honey.”

This got a round of cheers from several others, but the man to Fabiano’s left said, “Maybe she’s not his aunt. Maybe she’s from the collection agency, come to repo the car, huh?”

This drew louder laughter from the group. “Yeah, or the cops come to take it back to its rightful owner.”

“I own it, man,” Fabiano said furiously. “I have the papers right here in my pocket.” He stuck a hand into his right pocket dramatically and pulled out a piece of paper.

“So maybe he stole that, too,” the man to his left said.

“New car,
sobrino?
” I asked, impressed.

“I am not your nephew,” he screamed, spitting at me. A man of limited imagination.

“Now that’s enough.” The bartender moved up. “Whether she is your aunt or not, you must not treat the lady this way, Fabiano. Not if you want to drink in my bar. And frankly, I believe she is your aunt—because no one would embarrass themselves by pretending to
be related to you if they were not. So you go outside and talk to her. Your seat will be here when you get back and the rest of us can watch the game in peace for a while.”

Fabiano followed me sullenly outside, pursued by cheers and catcalls from the rest of the bar. “Now you humiliate me in front of my friends. I won’t take it from you, Warshawski-bitch.”

“What’re you going to do—have me beaten to death the way you did Malcolm Tregiere?” I asked nastily.

His face changed from sullen to alarmed. “Hey! You ain’t hanging that on me. No way. I didn’t touch him. I swear I didn’t touch him.”

A baby-blue late-model Eldorado stood a few feet from the bar entrance. It couldn’t have been more than two or three years old and the body was in great condition. Since the rest of the cars on the block were a step away from the junkyard, I deduced it had to be the one the men had been ribbing him about.

“That your car, Fabiano? Pretty nice wheels for a guy who couldn’t even buy his wife a ring two months ago.”

I saw another movement of his mouth, and smacked it hard before he could get any saliva out. “Enough of that. I don’t want to catch anything from you…. Tell me about the car.”

“I don’t have to tell you nothing,” he muttered.

“No, that’s right—you don’t. You can tell the police. I’m going to call them now and tell them you’ve
got yourself a new car, easily worth five, ten thousand. And I’m going to suggest to them that you collected a chunk of change from the Lions for bludgeoning Dr. Tregiere. Then
they’re
going to talk to you. And while the cops are shaking you upside down, I’m going to talk to Sergio Rodriguez. And I’m going to tell him that you’re driving these beautiful wheels because you’re dealing dope for the Garbanzos. And then I’m going to start reading obit pages. Because you gonna be dead meat, Fabiano.”

I turned on my heel and headed toward my car. Fabiano caught up with me as I unlocked the door. “You can’t do that to me!”

I laughed a little. “Sure I can. What do I owe you, anyway? Tell you the truth, I’d love to read your obituary.”

“But it’s a lie, man! It’s a lie! I got that car legal. I can prove it.”

I shut the door and leaned against it. “So prove it.”

He licked his lips. “They—that man at the hospital—he gave me five thousand dollars for Consuelo. To—to say how sorry they were that the baby died and that she died, too.”

“Wait a minute while I find a Kleenex. This story is breaking my heart—five thousand? That’s a hell of a price tag for your lady and her baby. What’d they ask you to do in return?”

He licked his lips again. “Nothing. I didn’t have to do nothing. Just sign a paper. Sign a paper about her and the baby.”

I nodded. A release. Just as I’d suggested to Paul. They bought him off. “You must have told them a wonderful story. Impressed the shit out of them. No one here would figure you’d need more than five hundred to keep your mouth shut. What’d you do?—dangle threats of the Lions in front of their white suburban faces and scare ’em to death?”

“You’re always on my case, man. You and that Jew-doctor and Paul. You can’t believe nothing good about me. I loved Consuelo. She was having our baby. My heart’s broken, man.”

I felt as though I might throw up on the spot. “Save it for Schaumburg, honey. They con easier out there.”

A nasty smile flickered across his lips. “That’s what you think, bitch.”

My foot itched to reach up and kick him in his tiny testicles, but I restrained myself. “Back to Dr. Tregiere, Fabiano. You swore you didn’t touch him.”

He glared at me. “I didn’t. You can’t lay that on me.”

“But you watched someone else touch him.”

“No way, man. No way did I have anything to do with the dude’s death. I got a dozen guys say they saw me when the dude was being killed.”

“You know what time he was being killed? Or you got a dozen guys who say they saw you no matter what time he was being killed?”

“I don’t have to take any more of this shit from you, Warshawski. You trying to lay a murder rap on me, you damn well not going to do it.”

He turned on his heel and walked back into the bar. I stood by my car a moment, frowning at the painted rooster. I didn’t like it. I wished I had a stronger lever so I could pry the truth out of him. He was holding back on something, but whether it was Malcolm’s death or not I had no way of telling.

I got back in the Chevy and headed northeast toward home. Should I turn him over to Rawlings or not? I fidgeted around with it off and on all afternoon, while watching the Cubs lose an aggravating game against New York and afterward swimming lazily around the buoys off Montrose Harbor. I couldn’t go to Lotty and wash my hands of it until I knew for certain.

At nine-thirty I dressed in dark clothes that were easy to move in. Instead of running shoes, I put on the heavy rubber-soled oxfords I wear for industrial surveillance. I couldn’t run as fast in them, but if I had to kick someone at close quarters, I wanted it to count.

On Saturday night, Humboldt Park was shaking. Cars cruised up and down North Avenue, honking horns, blaring radios at top volume. Girls in improbably high heels and lacy blouses teetered arm in arm in laughing groups. Young men and drunks surged around them, whistled, yelled, and moved on.

I drove to Campbell, four blocks from the rendezvous. It was a quiet, decently maintained street, with a sign at either end spelling out the rules: no radios, no graffiti, no honking horns. The well-kept buildings testified to the willingness of neighbors to enforce the
sign. I parked under a streetlight. If I got this far in a chase, someone might even call the cops.

I headed west across lots. One block from Campbell, the neighborhood deteriorated again. I picked my way carefully over broken bottles, splintered boards, car tires, objects too strange to be identified in the dark. Most of the occupied structures were little bungalows, not apartment buildings. Many of these had dogs in the back who lunged angrily on their leashes or against the fences that restrained them, when they heard me. A couple of times heads appeared in windows, peering to see what hoodlum was prowling about.

When I climbed the last fence between me and Washtenaw, my mouth was dry, my heart beating uncomfortably fast. I could feel the little hairs at the back of my neck standing up under the collar of my knit shirt. I hovered in the shadow of the derelict building across the street, trying to make out where the sentries were. Trying to control the weak feeling in the backs of my knees. C’mon, Warshawski, I muttered to myself, fish or cut bait. It ain’t the size of the dog in the fight that counts, but the size of the fight in the dog.

Much cheered by these admonitions, I moved from my shelter out into the street, past the cars perched precariously on old juice crates, and came to the front of the heavily curtained store. No one shot at me. In the dark, though, I could sense the presence around me of many Lions.

I rapped smartly on the glass door. It opened
promptly, the width of a chain. A gun barrel appeared. Naturally. The heavy drama of the gangs, the alleviation of the relentless boredom of life on the streets.