Burn Marks (26 page)

38

Running into a Campaign

When I got into the Chevy, Peppy looked at me expectantly. I’d forgotten I had her. It wasn’t fair to make her sit while I tried to track down Roz, but I was afraid if I took her home I wouldn’t be able to goad myself back into action.

“Sorry, girl,” I said, turning on the ignition. “Terry and John both know who owns that bracelet, wouldn’t you say? So why won’t they tell me?”

Peppy looked at me anxiously—she didn’t know, either. A small procession of cars was moving north up State Street. I waited for them to pass so I could make a U. The tail of the procession was Michael’s silver Corvette. I tried honking and waving, but he either didn’t see me in the fading light or chose to act as though he hadn’t. I could try to catch up with him to ask him about Elena but I didn’t feel like running into McGonnigal again tonight.

I drove north to Congress. The potholes and derelict buildings gradually melted into the convention hotels fringing the south rim of the Loop. After I turned west on the Congress and speeded up, the Chevy gave an ominous whine. My stomach jolted again.

“Not at thirty,” I lectured the car. “You gotta get me around town a few more years. A few more days, anyway.”

The car paid no heed to me but increased its nerve-wrenching noise as I took it up to forty. When I brought it back down to twenty-five, the engine quieted some, but I really couldn’t drive it on the Ryan. I left the Congress at Halsted and plodded my way north and west to Logan Square.

Roz Fuentes’s campaign headquarters were in her old community organization offices on California Avenue. The front window held flags of Mexico, the U.S., and Puerto Rico, with the Mexicans on the left and the U.S. in the middle. Underneath the Mexican flag hung a huge portrait of Roz, beaming her two-hundred-watt smile, with the slogan in Spanish and English: “Roz Fuentes, for Chicago.” Not original, but serviceable.

The office was still brightly lighted. We were five weeks from election and people would be working into the dawn at different headquarters all over the county. On top of that Roz was still functioning as a conduit for community problems with the city on housing and crime. According to the papers, that was a thorn for the alderman—a gent of the old macho school—but Roz was too popular in the neighborhood for him to try going head-to-head with her.

Beyond the plate-glass window people were working with the noisy camaraderie a successful campaign brings in its wake. A dozen or so men and women sat at desks in the big front room talking, answering the wildly ringing phones, shouting questions at each other in Spanish or English. No one paid any attention to me, so I wandered past the campaign workers to the back, where Roz used to have a small private office.

Another small knot of people was sitting in there now, a nice landscape of Roz’s multiracial appeal: a white man of about thirty and two Hispanic women—one plump and fiftyish, the other not long out of high school—were deep in conversation with a wiry black woman in hornrims. I didn’t recognize the white man but I knew the woman in the horn-rims—it was Velma Riter.

The four of them fell silent when I came in. Velma, who was seated behind the beaten-up desk in Roz’s swivel chair, looked up at me fiercely. To call her expression hostile was about as descriptive as calling Niagara Falls wet— it didn’t begin to convey the intensity she was putting out.

After a puzzled glance from Velma to me, the fiftyish woman asked, “Can we help you, miss?” She wasn’t unfriendly, just brisk—they were conducting business and needed to get back to it.

“I’m V. I. Warshawski,” I said. “I was hoping to find Roz.”

The plump woman held out a palm toward the high school grad without speaking; the young woman handed over her typed sheet of paper. She scanned it and said, “Right now she’s finishing a community meeting on gangs in Pilsen. After that she’s going to Schaumburg for a fund-raising dinner. If you tell me what you need I can help you—I’m her chief assistant.”

“You’re not content with trying to stab Roz in the back—you’re coming in here to put poison in her coffee, is that it, Vic?” Velma spoke up venomously.

The young woman looked flustered at Velma’s open anger. She stood up hurriedly and picked up a stack of papers. Murmuring something about getting them typed before she went home, she excused herself.

“Are these people so close to you that you want me to talk in front of them?” I asked Velma.

“They know you’ve been trying to smear Roz.”

I leaned against the door, my shoulders too tired to keep me upright without a prop. “Have you seen some kind of smear story in the papers or on TV that you can trace to me?”

“People are talking.” Velma held herself rigidly. “Everyone on the street knows you want to stab her in the back.”

“That wouldn’t be because you told them that, would it, Velma?” I couldn’t bear to look at her angry face; I turned my gaze to a peeling poster on the wall showcasing a quote from Simón Bolívar that proclaimed liberty for all peoples.

“Why don’t you tell us why you’ve come, Ms, Warshawski? We’re all close to Roz, we don’t have any secrets from each other,” Roz’s chief assistant said.

I moved uninvited onto the metal folding chair the young woman had vacated. “Maybe first you can tell me your names.”

“I’m Camellia Maldonado and this is Loren Richter. He’s managing the finances for Roz’s campaign.”

Richter flashed a perfect Ipana smile. “And I can assure you there’s nothing amiss with them.”

“Splendid.” I put my arms on the desk and propped my chin on my hands. “I’m really exhausted. If Velma’s told you all about me, you know I almost died in a fire in an abandoned hotel last week. I’m still not quite over it, so I’m not going to make any effort to be subtle.

“Two weeks ago at a fund-raiser out at Boots’s place Roz made a special point of taking me to one side and asking me not to sandbag her campaign. Since that was the farthest thing from my mind, I was irked to say the least. And it made me think she must be hiding some secret.”

“If it was secret, then it was none of your business, Warshawski,” Velma interjected.

I sat up at that. “She made it my business. She—or anyway, Marissa Duncan—got me to put my name to a public roster announcing my support. And I backed it up with more money than I gave to all other political candidates this year. If Roz was pulling off something illegal or unethical behind my name, I damned well did have a right to know about it.”

I was panting by the time I finished. I took a minute to calm myself and focus my thoughts. Camellia and Loren were sitting stiffly, willing to hear me out but ready to slam the door on me as soon as I’d finished.

“When I started asking questions a long list of people began telling me I was a pain in the ass and to mind my own business. The first, of course, was Velma here, followed by Roz. And then, interestingly enough, Ralph MacDonald, the big guy himself—Boots’s pal, you know—warned me off. A little more subtly than Velma and Roz, but a warning nonetheless. And after the fire he warned me again, this time not nearly as subtly.”

Ralph’s name took them all by surprise. If Boots had told Roz he was siccing MacDonald on me, she’d kept it to herself.

“Well, when I was at Roz’s fund-raiser she had her cousin with her—Luis Schmidt—and Carl Martinez, his partner in Alma Mejicana. And it seemed to me that it was they who pointed me out to her, suggesting I was up to no good.”

I stopped. Something in that picture, the scene of Wunsch and Grasso huddled with Furey and the two men from Alma Mejicana, was tugging at my brain. If I wasn’t so tired, if Velma wasn’t so hostile, I’d get it. It was because he’d been talking to Wunsch and Grasso that Schmidt warned Roz. They were all connected, Wunsch and Grasso, Alma, Farmworks. And Farmworks was connected to Seligman, through Rita Donnelly’s daughter Star. Did that mean that Wunsch and Grasso were connected to the arson? My brain spun around.

“We’re waiting, Vic.” Velma’s cold voice interrupted my flurried thoughts. “Or are you trying to embellish your story to make it more credible?”

I gave her a bitter smile. “I’ll wrap it up fast. And believe it or not as you please, but worse is going to follow soon. Alma Mejicana was on the fringes of the construction business up until two years ago. They had a couple of suits against the county, claiming discrimination in the matter of bids, but they were strictly small potatoes-parking lots, a few sidewalks, that kind of thing. They really weren’t big enough for the projects they were bidding on.

“Run the cameras forward. Suddenly they’ve dropped their suits and by a remarkable coincidence they pick up a piece of the Dan Ryan action. You’ve got to be a heavy roller to play at that table. Where did they come up with the equipment and the expertise?

“Now Roz is a partner in Alma Mejicana. I’m just guessing this part—” I ignored an explosive interruption from Velma. “I don’t know whether she went to Boots or he came to her. But his support has eroded badly in the Hispanic wards. They’ve been backing Solomon Hayes to oust Meagher as board chairman. As long as they’re going with Hayes and the blacks have a different candidate, Meagher can scrape by. But lately it’s been sounding like the old Washington coalition is perking up again. And if the Hispanics got together with the black coalitions and united on a black candidate, Boots could kiss his forty years of power and patronage good-bye.”

Velma was muttering to my right, but Camellia Maldonado sat with a look of glassy composure, much as an Edwardian lady might have watched a drunk in her living room.

Loren Richter was tapping his pencil rapidly against the chair leg. “That’s not news. It’s not even a crime.”

“Of course not,” I agreed. “Coalitions, changing loyalties, that’s the name of the game. But Boots isn’t ready to turn in his chips yet. So say he went to Roz. If he put her on the ticket, she’d bring in Humboldt Park and Pilsen for him—she’s gold here. In return he’d see that Alma got a big piece of county action. They drop their discrimination suits, tie in with a dummy corporation, the work will really go to Wunsch and Grasso, who will share out the profits and everybody’s happy. Alma doesn’t do a lick of work on the Ryan—I’ve been there and seen it. They got the bid, they pay everything out to a dummy corporation, and let Wunsch and Grasso supply the equipment and the personnel.”

“You don’t have any proof of this, none at all. It’s a total fabrication,” Camellia Maldonado said hotly. “Whatever Velma said of you you’re ten times worse.”

I got up. “I’m not going to stay to fight it. I’m beat. I just wanted to give Roz a chance to answer before I go to the papers. There’s one more thing I don’t understand, though.”

“One?” Velma spat out. “Just one? I thought you understood the whole universe, Warshawski.”

I ignored her. “I don’t know why Roz thought a story like this would hurt her chances on the ticket. It’s just business as usual in this old town. When the story finally breaks the good old boys will breathe a collective sigh that she’s not a flaming radical, that she’s one of them after all.”

I turned on my heel, not listening to the three of them shouting at me. Camellia ran to the door on pencil-heels and grabbed my arm.

“You must tell us what proof you have of this terrible allegation. You can’t come in here and drop such a bomb and then just walk off.”

I rubbed my eyes tiredly. “It’s all there. You just have to go to the Ryan and look at their part of the zone. Although maybe now they know I’ve been there they’ll bring in a few minority or women workers for the photographers. But the real kicker is to visit their offices. They’re a sham. There’re only three desks occupied in the whole place. You don’t run a big business out of a cubbyhole, at least not a contracting business.”

Camellia looked at me with such anger that it made my knees feel wobbly. “I’ve worked for Roz’s success for a long time,” she hissed. “You’re not going to be able to ruin her with your lies.”

“Great,” I said. “Then you don’t have anything to worry about.”

I glanced back at Velma, sitting in the swivel chair. She didn’t say anything, but dropped her gaze to the desktop. Camellia followed me to the big front room. She was too savvy a campaigner to let the hired hands see a crisis was in the works. She shook hands formally with me at the door, gave me a big smile, and said she’d be sure to let Roz know we’d spoken.

39

Death Rattle

When I got back to the Chevy I was exhausted past the point of feeling or thinking. In some recess of my mind I knew I needed to see August Cray, to try to understand the connection that apparently lay between Farmworks and Seligman. Even if it hadn’t been too late to visit his Loop address I couldn’t have gone—I just didn’t have the stamina left to talk to anyone else today. All I wanted was to get home to a bath and my bed.

Peppy, curled in the front seat, gave me a look of disgust when I got in. She didn’t deign to lift her head— after three hours in the car she didn’t think I was good for much.

“Sorry, girl,” I apologized. “We’ll go home now, General Motors willing.”

The Chevy was grinding horribly even at twenty-five. I forced it forward like a knight with a battle-shy horse. It went about as happily. With the car whining and screaming I couldn’t follow the frantic line of thought I’d started at Roz’s any further. Aside from the noise, I was too nervous that the car might stop altogether to be able to think about anything else.

When I turned onto Racine it went on me, going from a brain-shattering whine to a lurching rattle to a final dead silence. I turned the ignition key. The engine ground horribly but wouldn’t catch. Behind me cars were honking furiously—it’s well known that the best cure for a stalled engine is for a hundred thousand drivers to blow their horns in unison.

I was less than three blocks from home. If I could push the Chevy to the curb, I could leave it there for a tow truck and walk home with Peppy. Peppy had other ideas. When I opened the door she bounded across the set divider and outside so fast I was just able to grab a hind leg before she hurled herself in front of a delivery van. I wrestled her to the ground and dragged her back into the front seat.

“You gotta wait five more minutes,” I told her. She wasn’t buying it. Usually the most docile of dogs, she snarled at me now and I had to wrap her leash around the seat divider to keep her in the car. She stood on the passenger seat barking at me furiously.

My legs had cramped up from tensing them so hard while I drove. When I stood up I almost fell over. I steadied myself against the car door.

“Neither of us is in good shape, are we?” I murmured to the Chevy. “I promise I won’t sell you for scrap if you’ll do the same for me.”

Cars were moving around me now that they saw I was stalled, but the ones farther back kept up their honking. I was too tired to react to the insistent blare. With one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the doorframe, I tried pushing the car to the curb. Too much strain in the last few days had left my shoulders so weak that I couldn’t urge the extra force into them to muscle the car forward.

I leaned my forehead against the roof. Someone across the street was adding to the cacophony on Racine. I ignored him along with the rest until finally over the din of the traffic I heard my name.

“Vic! Vic! You need some help?”

It was Rick York, Vinnie’s friend, at the wheel of a VW. I darted across the traffic to explain my plight to him. Vinnie was sitting in the passenger seat with his head pointedly turned away—he clearly didn’t think Rick should have tried so hard to get my attention.

“Do you think you could push me up the street. If I can get it back to our place, I can leave it for a tow in the morning.”

“Sure, just let me turn around,” Rick said, in the same breath that Vinnie announced they were going to be late if they waited around any longer.

“Aw, don’t be a turdhead, Vinnie, This’ll take us five minutes.”

I sprinted back to the Chevy, feeling refreshed just by an offer of help, and waited for Rick to come up behind me. Peppy didn’t like this new development at all. She left off barking to leap into the backseat and whimper, then plunged back into the front seat. I undid her collar to keep her from choking, but she jumped around so much that I had a hard time keeping an eye on traffic at the intersections.

I coasted into an empty patch across from my building. Rick honked twice and took off without waiting for my thanks. In the morning I’d find out where he lived and order a bottle of champagne for him. His kindness took the edge off my fatigue, enough so that I was able to give Peppy her due and walk her over to the inner harbor and back.

When I finally returned her to Mr. Contreras it was past eight. He was beside himself: “Let alone I don’t know if you’re alive or dead, I don’t even know where you’ve gone to come bail you out. And don’t tell me you don’t need my help. Where would you of been last year if I hadn’t known where to come hunting for you? Even if you don’t want me, you might spare a little thought for the princess here. And then people come calling on you what am I supposed to tell them?”

I ignored the bulk of his diatribe. “Just say I’m a secretive bitch who doesn’t give you a printout of my agenda every day. Who came calling?”

“Couple of guys. They didn’t leave their names—just said they’d be back later.”

His disclaimers to the contrary, my neighbor could identify any man who’d come to visit me in the past three years. If he didn’t know these guys, they were strangers.

“Probably Jehovah’s Witnesses. How’d you come to let them in? They ring your bell?”

“Yeah, they said they got the floor wrong.”

“And the side of the building?” I asked affably. “Did they leave or are they still upstairs?”

His tirade changed rapidly to remorse. “My God, doll, no wonder you don’t want to trust me with any of your secrets. Here I am falling for the oldest game in the world. They left, but what if someone else let them back in, that Vinnie guy across the hall or Miss Gabrielsen upstairs?”

Berit Gabrielsen, who lived across the hall from me, was still at the cottage in northern Michigan where she spent her summers. Mr. Contreras refused to listen to this idea but insisted on bustling me into his living room while he went up with the dog to check out my apartment. He wanted my keys but I resisted.

“You’ll be able to tell if the locks have been tampered with. They’re more likely waiting outside the door if they’re there at all. And if they are, I don’t want you waltzing into their arms—I don’t have the energy to carry you to the hospital. Besides, my car is broken.”

He was too agitated to pay any attention to me. If I’d thought there was really any danger I would have gone with him, but if my visitors had been sent by Ralph MacDonald they wouldn’t come back when they knew they’d be ID’d. I let Mr. Contreras usher me into his badly sprung mustard armchair.

I leaned back in the soft musty cushions, my mind drifting on the verge of sleep. My neighbor’s living room wasn’t that different from Saul Seligman’s—the same soft, overstuffed furniture, the same relics of their dead wives filling every available inch. And except for Seligman’s fire irons, the relics were also remarkably similar, down to the studio photos of their weddings.

I felt a tender kind of pity for the two of them, each struggling in his own way to maintain the intimacy their wives’ deaths had stripped them of. Seligman had accused me of being like everyone else, wanting him to sell his heart for a dollar, but I—

I sat up in the mustard chair. But I hadn’t been paying proper attention to him. That was my problem. Someone had been trying to get him to sell the building. I hadn’t heard that; I’d just been letting his plaints flow over me. Mrs. Donnelly knew, though, because it was Farmworks that wanted to buy it.

Her daughter worked there. To help boost her career she’d let them know the building might be for sale? Or she’d given them access to Mr. Seligman? At any rate, something about the sale, or at least about the fire, had brought that little smirk to her face because it reminded her of some special benefit to her daughter Star. But when she went to the man (woman?) she knew at Farmworks, worried because I had a picture of Star, he (she?) had killed Mrs. Donnelly and torn up the place to find any documents relating to their sale offer.

I got up and started pacing around the room, knocking my shins into a shrouded birdcage. Swearing briefly, I ran into the curio case Mr. Contreras kept in the middle of the room under an old bedspread.

Saul Seligman didn’t have anything to do with the property management company anymore. He told people he went in most afternoons, but he didn’t really leave his home to do much of anything. I’d never seen him with shoes on, only his worn bedroom slippers. Still, he hadn’t given Mrs. Donnelly a powder of attorney or anything. She would have needed his agreement to sell.

Whoever killed her had left him alone because everyone knew he wouldn’t be able to make the necessary connections. He didn’t have any documents—those had all gone to Rita Donnelly. She might even have portrayed him as mentally incompetent to her principals.

But why had they wanted the Indiana Arms? What was it about that building that someone cared so much about? I was just a derelict property in the decayed triangle between McCormick Plance and the Ryan. Of course that was where MacDonald and Meagher wanted to put their stadium; if they got the bid, the value of any property there would skyrocket.

I came to a stop in front of the birdcage before I could bang into it again. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe I could have been so dense for so long.

Old MacDonald had a farm. Of course. He had damned near every other piece of land in Chicago, why not a farm too? He’d have a little holding company that could do deals on the side without drawing the public scrutiny that MacDonald Development inevitably attracted. And why not call it Farmworks? Just the name for someone with a macabre sense of humor. And if the Indiana Arms was the last, or one of the last, bits of property standing in the way of his development, then just burn that sucker down.

Wunsch and Grasso, they did a lot of business for the county. Ernie’s daddy had grown up in Norwood Park alongside Boots and the two of them had just naturally kept in touch. Ernie and Ron had started out doing favors for the Dems-in Chicago that could mean anything from hustling votes to breaking legs of tavern owners who didn’t pay off the right people. So when they took over Ernie’s daddy’s business it expanded along with Boots’s career. So if Boots and his pal Ralph wanted them to supply Alma Mejicana with trucks and compressors and manpower for the Ryan project, they’d be happy to help out.

“What’s wrong with you, doll?” Mr. Contreras’s severe voice behind me made me jump. “You know I ain’t had a bird in there in ten years. I only keep it because Clara loved canaries. You thinking of getting a bird, don’t. You may not think they need a lot of looking after, like the princess here, but you can’t be gone all the time and have any kind of animal.”

“I wasn’t planning on a canary,” I said meekly. “Anybody upstairs?”

“We went up outside your kitchen besides going up inside here, in case you wondered what kept us. Nobody there. Seemed to me someone might have been trying to get past those locks of yours, but they held okay. Maybe you should spend the night down here, though. I’m not going to be real happy wondering what’s happening to you.”

“I’ll be fine upstairs,” I assured him. “They know you saw them. They won’t come back. Even if they could field a different crew, they’d be too worried that the cops would trace them through you. I’ll lock all the bolts and tie a rope across the upstairs landing, okay?”

He didn’t like it and went on at some length to explain why. I couldn’t tell if he was genuinely worried or if he just wanted a bigger role in my affairs. Whichever it was, I preferred the possibility of a break-in to spending a night on his sagging couch under the empty birdcage.

“I’m sleeping in here, then, cookie. The princess’ll bark if anyone comes in and we’ll be upstairs in a wink.”

I wondered briefly if they’d have a jolly confrontation with Rick and Vinnie in the middle of the night. It might be worth getting out of bed for. I thanked him gravely for his concern and made good my escape.