Burn Marks (10 page)

Bobby looked at Vinnie. “You call the cops, son?”

The banker stuck his chin out pugnaciously. “Yes, I did. They’ll be here any minute. If you’re her pimp, you’ve got about two minutes to disappear.”

Bobby kept his tone avuncular. “Who you talk to, son—the precinct or the emergency number?”

Vinnie bristled. “I’m not your son. Don’t think you can buy me off too.”

Bobby looked at me, his lips twitching. “You been trying to sell him nickel bags, Vicki?”

He turned back to Vinnie, showing his badge. “I know Miss Warshawski isn’t the easiest neighbor in the world— I’m about to take her off your hands. But I need to know if you called 911 or the precinct so I can cancel the squad cars—I don’t want to waste any more city money tonight pulling patrol officers away from work they ought to be doing because you have a beef with your neighbors.”

Vinnie bunched up his lips, not wanting to back down but knowing he had to. “911,” he muttered, then said more defiantly, “And it’s about time someone took her in.”

Bobby looked toward the street and bellowed, “Furey!”

Michael climbed out of the car and trotted over. Just what I needed to complete the transformation of romance into farce—Michael must have seen me in a clinch with Robin at the door.

“This kid here called 911 when he heard me talking to Vicki—get on the radio and find out who’s coming and cancel them, okay? And turn off the light. Guy needs his beauty sleep.”

Michael, at his most wooden, ignored me completely and headed back to the car. Vinnie tried asking for Bobby’s badge number so he could lodge a complaint with the watch commander—“your boss” as he put it—but Bobby put a heavy hand on his shoulder and assured him that everyone had better things to do with their time, and if Vinnie had to be at the office in the morning, maybe it was time he turned back in.

“Well, at least get this woman to stop conducting her business in the front hall in the middle of the night,” Vinnie demanded petulantly as he opened the front door.

“Is that what you do, Vicki?” Bobby asked. “Lose your lease downtown?”

I gritted my teeth but didn’t try to fight it as he took my arm and ushered me down the walk—Mr. Contreras would doubtless be out next with the dog if we stayed any longer.

“Elena,” I said shortly. “She’s come around a few times in the last week. Always after midnight, of course.”

“I haven’t seen her since Tony’s funeral. Didn’t even know whether she was still in town.”

“I wish I hadn’t seen her since then, either. She got burned out of her place last Wednesday—you know that SRO fire near McCormick Place?”

Bobby grunted. “So she came to you. Underneath it all you’re not that different from your folks, I guess.”

That left me speechless for the remainder of the short walk. Bobby opened the back door for me. I waved at Robin and climbed inside.

Michael was sitting in the front seat, John McGonnigal— the sergeant Bobby most preferred to work with—in the back. I said hello to both of them. They kept up an animated conversation about police business all the way to the morgue. Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have joined in.

15

At the Rue Morgue

Some practical bureaucrat put the county morgue on the Near West Side, the area with Chicago’s highest murder rate—it saves wear and tear on the meatwagons having to cart corpses only a few short blocks. Even during the day the concrete cube looks like a bunker in the middle of a war zone; at midnight it’s the most depressing place in town.

As we walked up to the sliding metal doors marked “Deliveries,” Furey began a series of morbid one-liners, a kind of defense against his own mortality I suppose, but still unpleasant. At least McGonnigal didn’t join in. I moved out of earshot, into the entryway—a small box of reinforced glass whose inner door was locked. A knot of clerks at the reception counter inside looked me over and went back to an animated conversation. When Bobby materialized behind my left shoulder, the party broke up and someone unlocked the door.

I pushed it open when the buzzer sounded and held it for Bobby and the boys. Furey still wouldn’t look at me, not even when I went out of my way to be superpolite. Last time I’d go to a political fund-raiser with him, that’s for sure.

For the public brought in to identify their nearest and dearest, the county provides a small furnished waiting room—you can even look at a video screen instead of directly at the body. Bobby didn’t think I needed such amenities. He pushed open the double doors to the autopsy room. I followed, trying to walk nonchalantly.

It was a utilitarian room, with sinks and equipment for four pathologists to work at once. In the middle of the night the only person present was an attendant, a middle-aged man in jeans with a green surgical gown thrown loosely around his shoulders. He was hunched over a car-and-track magazine. The Sox were on a seven-inch screen on the chair in front of him. He looked at us indifferently, taking his time to get up when Bobby identified himself and told him what he wanted. He sauntered to the thick double doors leading to the cooler.

Inside were hundreds of bodies arranged in rows. Their torsos were partially draped in black plastic, but the heads were exposed, arcing back, the mouths open in surprise at death. I could feel the blood drain from my brain, I hoped I wasn’t turning green—it would put the cap to my night if I got sick in front of Furey and McGonnigal. At least Furey had shut up, that was one good thing.

The attendant consulted a list in his pocket and went over to one of the bodies. He checked a tag on the foot against his list and prepared to wheel the gurney into the autopsy room.

“That’s okay,” Bobby said easily. “We’ll look at her in here.”

Bobby took me to the gurney and pulled the plastic wrapping away so that the whole body was exposed. Cerise stared up at me. Stripped of clothes, she looked pathetically thin. Her ribs jutted ominously below her breasts; her pregnancy hadn’t yet given any roundness to her sunken stomach. Her carefully beaded braids lay tousled on the table—I stuck a hand out involuntarily to smooth them for her.

Bobby was watching me closely. “You know who she is, don’t you?”

I shook my head. “She looks like a couple of different women I’ve met briefly. What did she have that made you think I knew her?”

He compressed his lips again—he wanted to yell at me but he belongs to a generation that doesn’t swear at women. “Don’t play games with me, Vicki. If you know who it is, tell us so we can get moving on tracking down her associates.”

“How did she die?” I asked.

“We don’t know yet; they won’t do a postmortem until Friday. Probably a heroin overdose. That help you distinguish her from the others?” Bobby’s sarcasm is always heavy.

“What do you care, anyway? Dead junkies must be a dime a dozen around here. And here are three crack guys from the Violent Crimes Unit only three hours after she was found.”

Bobby’s eyes glittered. “You ain’t running the department, Vicki. I don’t account to you how I decide to spend my time.”

The intensity of his anger surprised me; it also spelled in large block letters that he hadn’t chosen to be here. I stared at Cerise thoughtfully. What about her life or death could bring heat from the top down to the Central Division in such a short stretch?

“Where was she found?” I asked abruptly.

“On the big construction project going up near Navy Pier.” That was McGonnigal. “Watchman found her in the elevator shaft when he was making his rounds, called us. She hadn’t been dead too long when the squad car got there.”

“Rapelec Towers, right? What made him look down the shaft?”

McGonnigal shook his head. “One of those things. Why she was on the site we’ll probably never know, either. Nice secluded place at night if you want to shoot up in peace, but awfully far from where you’d expect to find her.”

“So what did she have that made you think of me?”

Bobby nodded at Furey, who produced a transparent evidence bag. Inside was a plastic square. My photograph was glued in the left corner, looking just as demented as the one I’d had taken this morning.

“Hmm,” I said after I’d looked at it. “Looks like my driver’s license.”

Bobby smiled savagely. “This isn’t Second City, Victoria, and nobody’s rolling in the aisles. You know this girl or not?”

I nodded reluctantly. Like Bobby, I hate giving information across police barricades. “Cerise Ramsay.”

“How’d she get that license?”

“She stole it from me yesterday morning.” I crossed my arms in front of me.

“Did you report it? Report the theft?”

I shook my head without answering.

Bobby slammed his hand against the side of the cart hard enough that the metal rattled. “Why the hell not?”

He really was pissed. I looked at him squarely. “I thought Elena might have taken it.”

“Oh.” The fire went out of his face. He jerked his head at Furey and McGonnigal. “Why don’t you boys wait for me in the car?”

When they’d left he said in quiet, fatherly tones, “Okay, Vicki, let’s have the whole story. And not just the sections you think I’ll find out anyway. You know Tony would say the same thing if he was here.”

Indeed I did. It’s just that I was too old to do things because my daddy told me to. I didn’t have a client to protect, though. There wasn’t any reason not to tell him the pathetic little I knew about Cerise, just as long as we didn’t do it surrounded by cold bodies.

Bobby got the attendant to show us to a tiny cubicle where the ME’s drink coffee or whiskey or something in between dissections. And I told him everything I knew about Cerise, including Katterina and Zerlina. “I can sign the papers if you want. Her mother’s got a bad heart— I don’t think it would do her any good to come down here.”

Bobby nodded. “We’ll see about that. What were you doing at Eleventh Street that rattled Roland Montgomery’s cage so bad?”

The shift in topic was casual and expert, but it didn’t make me jump. “Nothing,” I said earnestly. “I don’t understand it myself.”

“He came to see me with a full head of steam and demanded I run you in if you showed up anywhere near the Indiana Arms.”

Bobby’s tone was neutral—he wasn’t criticizing, just offering me information, telling me he couldn’t protect me if I got powerful people mad at me. At the same time he’d make a stab at it if I gave him the inside track on why the Indiana Arms was a hot topic. Unfortunately I couldn’t help, and in the end he got angry—he couldn’t see that I wasn’t being obstructive, that I was well and truly ignorant. He thinks I take on clients and cases just to thumb my nose at him, that I’m having a late-life adolescent fit. He’s waiting for me to grow out of it the way his six children all did.

It was two when Furey, driving recklessly and wordlessly, dropped me at my apartment. I didn’t make any attempt to be conciliating—I could understand why he was pissed, but at the same time it was just the luck of the draw that he’d seen me with Robin. It was farce, not tragedy—I wasn’t about to pretend to be Desdemona.

I waited inside the front door until his car had screeched its way up Racine to Belmont. My Chevy was parked across the street. I climbed in, made a U, and headed south through the empty streets toward Navy Pier.

The Rapelec complex was a monster. It wasn’t actually on Navy Pier of course—no development has been approved there because the aldermen can’t figure out how to divide up the zoning payoff pie. The site was on the west side of Lake Shore Drive facing the pier, a strip of decaying warehouses and office buildings that has suddenly become development heaven.

The construction site took up the whole section between the river and Illinois Street. The foundations had been poured last May. They were up about twenty stories now in the towers, but the office/retail complex was going more slowly. The sketches in the papers had made it look like a giant high school auditorium. They were taking their time with the support structure.

Bare light bulbs slung around the top of the skeleton outlined its iron bones. I shuddered. I’m not exactly afraid of heights, but the thought of perching up there without walls around—not so much the height, but the nakedness of the building—frightened me. Even at ground level it seemed menacing, with black holes where windows should be and wooden ramps that led only to fathomless pits.

By now my skin was crawling. I had to fight an impulse to run back to the Chevy and head for home. Concentrate on putting one step in front of you, Vic, and curse yourself for a fool for leaving your party clothes on, instead of changing to sneaks and jeans.

I circled the site from the outside. The blue-and-whites had long gone, leaving behind a crime-scene barricade but no guard. There were at least a dozen ways into the grounds in the dark. Looking nervously above me, I selected an entrance lined with lights that didn’t seem to have any steel beams poised to drop on it. My pumps made a soft thwick on the plank.

The boards ended at the third story. I stepped off onto a cement slab. Ahead of me and to the right shadows engulfed the floor and the beams, but the lights continued on the left where more wood had been dropped to make a crude floor cover. My palms were sweating and my toes felt ticklish when I forced myself down the corridor.

The lower floors were enclosed at this point, but no inner walls had been built. The only light came from the naked bulbs strung along the structural beams. I could see dimly into the recesses of the building. Steel beams stuck shadowy fingers upward to support the deck above. Inky splotches might be holes in the floor or maybe just some piece of machinery. I thought of Cerise coming here alone to die and the skin at the base of my neck prickled uncontrollably.

“Hello!” I cupped my hands and yelled.

My voice echoed faintly, bouncing from the steel beams. No one answered. Sweat now dropped from my neck inside my cotton sweater. A faint night breeze dried it, leaving me shivering.

The rough flooring suddenly ended in a nest of plywood cubicles. The door to the one on my right stood open. I went in. The room was dimly lit by the bulbs from the hall outside. I hunted around for a switch, finally finding a likely candidate in a thick cable. I touched it nervously, afraid I might be electrocuting myself, but the room lights came on.

Two large drafting tables were set up against one wall. Cradles holding books that looked like giant wallpaper samples covered the other three. I pulled one out. It was very heavy and didn’t handle easily. Straining, I laid it across the cradle and flipped it open. It held blueprints. They were hard to follow, but it seemed to me I was looking at a corner of the twenty-third floor. In fact, this whole volume seemed to be devoted to the twenty-third floor. I shut it and slid it back into its nest.

A couple of hard hats stood on one of the drafting tables. Underneath them lay a stack of work logs. These documents were much easier to interpret—the leftmost column listed subcontractors. Next to them were slots to fill in billable hours for every day of the week. I studied the log idly, wondering if I’d see any familiar names.

Wunsch and Grasso figured prominently as the lead contractor in the joint venture that was building the complex, Hurlihey and Frain, architects, also had put in a bunch of hours. I didn’t realize architects kept working on a project after construction started.

One name struck me as rather humorous—Farmworks, Inc. I wondered what agricultural needs a building like this had. Farmworks put in a lot of time too—they were submitting over five hundred hours for the week just ending.

A heavy step sounded on the wood flooring outside. I dropped the papers, my heart jumping wildly.

“Hello?” My voice came out in a quaver. Furious with myself for being so nervous, I took a deep breath and went out into the corridor.

A thickset black man in coveralls and a hard hat scowled at me. He held a flashlight. The other hand rested on the butt of a gun strapped to his waist.

“Who are you and what the hell are you doing up here?” His baritone was heavy and uncompromising.

“My name’s Warshawski. I’m a detective and I’m here with some follow-up questions about the dead girl you found.”

“Police left hours ago.” He moved his hand away from the gun, but his hard eyes didn’t relax.

“I just came from the morgue where I met with Sergeant McGonnigal and Lieutenant Mallory. They forgot to ask a couple of things I need to know. Also, since I’m here, I’d like to see where you found her.”

For a tense moment I thought he was going to demand some police identification, but my fluency with the right names apparently satisfied him.

“I can’t take you down to where I found her unless you have a hard hat.”

I picked up one of the Hurlihey and Frain hats from the drafting table. “Why don’t I just borrow this one?”

His cold eyes weighed me some more, not wanting to let me do it, but he seemed to be a man of logic and he couldn’t argue himself into sending me back to Mallory empty. “If you people did your homework you wouldn’t have to waste so much of my time. Come on. I’m not going to wait while you trip around in those ridiculous shoes of yours—our liability policy doesn’t pay for police who don’t dress right for the job.”

I picked up the hard hat and followed him meekly back into the shadowy maze.