Burn Marks (29 page)

43

The Eye of the Hurricane

I stood in the middle of LaSalle Street trying to quell a rising tide of panic. I needed some allies and I needed them fast. It was luck, pure and simple, that had kept me from disintegrating into my component parts today. If I had, Roland Montgomery would have closed the investigation for lack of leads—or painted me as a bizarre suicidal maniac. I’d miraculously side-stepped my fate, but it wouldn’t be Ralph MacDonald’s last effort to present me with his side of the story, as he’d put it on Monday.

Maybe I was jumping to conclusions in putting Ralph behind the dynamite in my car. Perhaps it was Roland Montgomery—he had ready access to all kinds of incendiary stuff. Or Michael, getting it from Wunsch or Grasso. Michael. My stomach twisted some more. He couldn’t have tried to blow me up. We’d never been in love, but we’d been lovers for a brief sweet time. Can you want to think of a body you’ve caressed torn into jagged chunks of bleeding bones? Or did my rebuff make him want to see me so?

I shook my head, impatient with myself. This was hardly the time or place to sink into a melancholy reverie, I needed to get myself organized. The Smith & Wesson was in my backpack, that was one good thing. Of course I couldn’t very well pull it out in the middle of LaSalle Street, but I didn’t think anyone was likely to try to shoot me during the evening rush hour. I was just lucky that Montgomery had been so hot to get me in the interrogation room and break my jaw that he hadn’t bothered with the usual formalities at the police station. No one had searched me; I hadn’t had to surrender the gun and go through the tedious process of producing my permit and getting permission to pick it up again.

I needed to get to a phone but I was too scared of what direction MacDonald—or Montgomery—or Michael— might next attack from to go to my office. That was an easy place to lay a trap. For the same reason I didn’t want to go home—or to Lotty’s. If MacDonald’s mind was running to dynamite, I didn’t want him to kill Peppy or Lotty in the effort to destroy me.

I finally flagged a cab to ride the nine blocks to the Golden Glow. Sal would let me use her phone and I wouldn’t mind a little Black Label to settle down some of the more extreme lurches my stomach was giving.

As the taxi wove recklessly through the end of the rush-hour congestion, it occurred to me that Ralph probably hadn’t ordered the dynamite in my car. Most likely it had happened just like Becket—him running his fingers through his well-cut silver hair and asking tragically if no one would rid him of this meddlesome priestess. It’s always that way, I thought bitterly, from Henry II to Reagan—your barons or Oliver North or whoever does the dirty work and you wrap yourself in a mantle of bewilderment and lawyers. I never knew about it, they misinterpreted my instructions.

“You say something, miss?” the cabbie asked.

I hadn’t realized I’d been angry enough to mutter aloud. “No. Keep the change.”

Murray Ryerson was sitting at the mahogany horseshoe bar drinking Holstein and talking to Sal about the upcoming college basketball season. Neither of them broke off a spirited debate about the NCAA sanctions on the KU Jayhawks when I climbed onto a stool next to Murray, but Sal reached behind her for the Black Label and poured me a glass.

Sal’s cousin was taking care of customers at the tables. I sipped my whiskey without offering any opinion on Larry Brown’s perfidies of Milt Newman’s abilities now that Danny Manning wasn’t leading the squad anymore. When Sal and Murray had run out of ideas on the subject, Murray casually asked me what was new.

I swallowed the rest of my drink and accepted another from Sal. “You almost got your wish to write my obituary today, big guy—someone laid a bomb across my ignition coil.”

At first Murray thought I was joking. “That so? How come you’re here to tell about it?”

“Really happened.” When I got to the part where the head of the Bomb and Arson Squad refused to conduct a proper investigation, he shut me up and went to his car for a tape recorder. He was somewhat aggrieved at missing the story. He’d been at a conference out at the airport all day so he hadn’t seen any of the wires or the sensational reports the networks were trumpeting.

I told him everything I knew, from Saul Seligman and the Indiana Arms to the little scam among Farmworks, Alma Mejicana, and Wunsch and Grasso, to Roland Montgomery’s strange theory of me setting fire to the Indiana Arms and then blowing myself up in remorse.

When I finished Murray put an arm around me and gave me a sloppy kiss. “You’re wonderful, Vic. I forgive you for holding out on me last winter. This is a great story. All it needs is a little proof.”

“You don’t call a hunk of dynamite proof?’ Sal snapped a bottle of Holstein’s down in front of Murray. “Her dead body would impress you more?”

“It shows someone wanted to kill her, but not who.” Murray drank directly from the bottle. “You didn’t copy any of the stuff you found at Alma’s offices or at Farm-works did you?”

“I took notes at Alma’s offices, but I didn’t see any of the books at Farmworks. But can’t you track some of this stuff down through Lexis and the Office of Contracts and so on? And get someone in the county to tell you what Roland Montgomery owes Boots? That scares me more than anything—you get a big cop dogging you and he can kill you or frame you or any damned thing he wants. I’m shaving my head and growing a beard until this sucker blows up big enough that I’m not the only figure tap-dancing in the spotlight.”

Sal offered me the bottle again but I turned it down. I couldn’t spend the night at the Golden Glow and I wouldn’t survive if I left here too drunk to notice who was walking up behind me.

Murray went into Sal’s private office to make some phone calls. It was too late in the day to look up any records in the county building, but he was going to initiate a more thorough search through the Lexis network than Freeman Carter had done for me—now that we were looking for a tie-in between MacDonald or Meagher and Alma Mejicana, Murray could ask the system to pull together combinations of names that hadn’t occurred to me earlier.

“So what do you do now?” Sal asked. “Lay low until the storm passes?”

“I think I go home.” I interrupted her voluble protest. “I know, I came in scared, crying for help. I’m still scared but—” I broke off, trying to think my inchoate feelings into a semblance of logic.

“It’s like this. Now Murray has the story—he can get enough going by tomorrow even maybe to print something Friday or Saturday—if the Star isn’t too scared of Boots and Ralph. So as soon as Boots and MacDonald see things are coming into the open, they’ll be shredding documents like mad, be covering their tracks on the Ryan. They’re probably rounding up a truckload of Hispanic and black workers right now with documents proving they’ve been working there since the first of March.

“If they think it’s still just me on my own, maybe they’ll try to come get me. And then at least we can nail a few of them in the act.”

“You and Murray?” Sal pursed up her face in high disdain.

“I’ll do the story—Murray’ll make the pictures,” I said with a lightness I was far from feeling. “No. I think I’ll be okay at home. I was panicking earlier, wondering if Ralph might dynamite the whole building just to get me. But really, he’s much more likely to wait until I’m on my own and try something different. My old guy downstairs has been on all the stations talking about the men he saw yesterday—the pair who came calling on me in person and the pair who probably put the bomb in the car. So I can’t believe they’ll risk anything there again, at least not so soon.” I hoped.

A couple of guys in business suits came in and sat up at the mahogany bar on the opposite side from me. Sal went over to fill their orders.

I played moodily with my whiskey tumbler. The one name I hadn’t given Murray was Michael Furey’s. It wasn’t that I wanted to protect Furey, but I didn’t have proof—just a string of guesses supported only by logic. His name hadn’t even been in Star’s Rolodex.

Before I started my own offensive I wanted to know how deep Furey’s involvement went with his neighborhood pals—whether he’d just put some of his daddy’s life insurance money into Farmworks when they gave him the opportunity—or done more. Like maybe borrowed heroin from the police evidence stores so Cerise could kill herself.

If he’d done something like that—I couldn’t imagine trying to break the news to Bobby. I’d tried today without evidence. If proof came in—I shuddered. It just better not be me that lets Bobby know about it, that was all.

When Murray came out of Sal’s office I went in to call Lotty to let her know what I was doing. She’d heard the story of my bomb from her clinic nurse, who’d called after watching the six o’clock news and was well and truly alarmed. She wanted me to come stay with her, wait in seclusion until the police caught my assailant, but when she heard what response they were giving me she reluctantly agreed I was making the right decision.

“Only, Vic—be careful, all right? I couldn’t bear it if you got killed. Will you think of me before you stick your head in front of a gun?”

“Christ, Lotty, I’ll think of me before I do that. Don’t. Don’t think I’m that careless of my life. I’m more frightened now than I can remember being in a good long while. If Bobby Mallory were paying the least attention to me, I wouldn’t touch this business with a barge pole.”

We talked a little longer. By the time we hung up I was close to crying. I got up slowly from Sal’s desk and went back through the mahogany door to the bar. My palms were tingling with nervousness, but a warm afterglow from the whiskey kept my stomach in place.

The bar had cleared out. Sal was washing the empties as her cousin brought them in from the tables. She finished sticking a row of glasses in their slots above the bar and came over to me.

“You sure you want to take off now, girl?”

“Yup.” I stuck my hands deep in my pockets. My right fingers ran into metal. I pulled out the Cavalier keys—I’d forgotten putting them there. The sight of my Chevy logo stamped into their heads increased my nervousness.

Sal isn’t given to demonstrativeness but she came around the front of the bar to hug me tightly. “You be careful, Vic. I don’t like this at all.”

“It’s a far better thing that I do now than I have ever done,” I recited in attempted bravado.

“If you die you’re not going to land in a better place than you’ve ever been, so just watch yourself, you hear?”

“Do my best, Sal.”

Murray offered me a lift north, “Then maybe I’ll just cruise around the block every now and then to see whether you’re still alive.”

“Shut up, Ryerson,” Sal said roughly. “Gallows humor isn’t going down well tonight.”

We stood awkwardly silent for a few minutes. A late customer came in, breaking the spell. Murray and I left while Sal stirred a martini for him.

Murray and I have a style of banter together that somehow precludes true intimacy. Tonight I was too nervous to respond in kind to his jokes. Too nervous to respond at all. I kept rubbing my palms dry against my jean legs and trying not to imagine what MacDonald might do next.

44

An Old Friend Catches Up

Murray dropped me at the neighborhood car rental. He waited while I checked the engine—whether out of courtesy or because he was hoping for another dynamite story, since he’d missed the first, I didn’t ask. No one could have known I’d called Bad Wheels for a car; it was just my jangling nerves that made me look.

The Tempo’s engine ignited with a lurching rumble, but no flames shot out from under the hood. When Murray saw I wasn’t going up in smoke, he tore off in his battered Fiero, leaving me drumming my fingers on the wheel in indecision.

The sun had set. It would be light for another half hour or so, not really long enough for me to go hunting Elena with any confidence. If Michael had found and killed her, would it matter that her body lay waiting for me until morning? Of course she wouldn’t be alone, exactly—there were all those rats I’d seen last week.

It made my palms and feet tremble when I remembered the little ball of fur I’d encountered groping for my flashlight in the dark. I drove home, parking on Nelson west of Racine and going down the alley to the back of my building.

Peppy set up a terrific barking when I came in the back gate. Mr. Contreras appeared at the kitchen door, holding her on a short leash with his left hand and carrying a pipe wrench in his right.

“Oh, it’s you, doll. Gave me a start. I thought maybe someone was sneaking up on you.”

“Thank you,” I said meekly. “I was just creeping up on myself. I didn’t want to be ambushed in the stairwell.”

“No need to worry about that. Her highness and I are keeping a sharp eye out.”

He let go of the leash—the dog was whimpering in her eagerness to greet me. Her tail was whipping up a great circle—not the portrait of a fierce guard dog. I kissed her and fondled her ears. She danced with me back to the stairs and clattered up with me, convinced this was the prelude to a major run. Mr. Contreras trudged up behind us as fast as his stiff knees would allow.

“What are you doing now, doll?” he asked sharply when he’d invited himself into my apartment.

“I’m trying to remember where I left my flashlight,” I called from the bedroom. It had rolled under the bed, I finally saw. Peppy helped me lie flat to pull it out. She ate a Kleenex she found underneath and started to work on an old running sock half buried under the bedclothes.

“Yummy, is it?” I pulled it away from her and went back to the kitchen.

“I mean, where are you going?” the old man demanded severely when he saw me checking the clip to my gun.

“Just to see if I can locate my aunt. I’m worried that she might be dead and lying in one of those vacant buildings behind McCormick Place.” Come to that, she’d left the hospital in bad shape—she could be dead without anyone lifting a finger to make it happen. Or lying there unconscious.

“I’m coming with you—me and the princess here.” His jaw set in a stubborn line.

I opened my mouth to argue with him, then shut it again. Here was a perfect errand to restore his good humor with me—he could see the action without causing any major havoc. Not only that, Peppy could kill the rats. I accepted his escort graciously and was rewarded with a big smile and a resounding slap on my still-weak shoulders.

“Just don’t swing that pipe wrench around,” I warned him, locking the grate across the kitchen door. “You’re under a peace bond because of that thing, remember?”

He slung it decorously through one of his trouser loops and headed happily up the alley to the car with me. All the way to Lake Shore Drive and the McCormick Place exit he kept up a happy flow of talk.

“You know, your Chevy’s still out front with the hood up. Didn’t no one want to touch it. I tried getting that young fellow, the one with the tow truck, to take if off, but he was too chicken. I said, ‘Let me do it. I’ll hook it up and drive it to the garage for you, you’re too yellow to do it,’ but he just took off like a bat outta hell, if you know what I mean.”

“I know just what you mean.” Besides having steering as stiff as an old-fashioned shirt collar, the Tempo roared rather loudly. Bad Wheels didn’t pay much attention to exhaust systems—“Drive ‘em Till They Drop” was their motto. The noise spared me most of Mr. Contreras’s conversation until I parked on Prairie.

Peppy was thrilled to be part of the expedition. She strained at her leash, sniffing every pile of rubble, investigating trash heaps with the solemnity of Heinrich Schliemann. Mr. Contreras was only a hair less enthusiastic in commenting on the general decay around us.

“Been a lot of fires down here.”

“Yep,” I said shortly. Elena being a creature of rather tiresome habit, she would most likely select a place close to the Indiana Arms, as she had when she’d chosen the Prairie Shores. I was going to look at only one or two of these in the fast-fading light. The rest could wait until morning.

We went first into the warehouse two doors down from the shell of the old hotel. Mr. Contreras’s pipe wrench came in handy knocking out the boarding around the entrance—annoying, since it would make it impossible to get him to leave it at home in the future.

Once inside we let Peppy take the lead. She had a field day chasing rats. I kept my gun out in case one of them turned on her, but there were enough escape routes to keep them from becoming bellicose. After five or ten minutes of sport I called her off and kept her close to me while I explored what was left of the premises.

The interior walls had crumbled, making it easy to go from room to room without hunting for doors. Chunks of plaster lay everywhere. Wires dangled from the exposed ceiling studs. When I ran into one I let out a muffled shriek, it felt so much like a hand trailing through my hair. Mr. Contreras came stumbling through the rotted flooring to see what was wrong.

A giant tractor tire propped against one wall was the only sign that humans had ever been around. I guess it didn’t even prove that—only that tractors had been around.

When we got outside it was dark, too dark to make hunting in rotting buildings very smart. And it was too evocative of my near baking at the Prairie Shores for my taste—my clothes were wet with sweat, my hands grimy from touching the decayed walls. I was glad I’d had the dog’s support in the warehouse.

Even Mr. Contreras had been subdued by the expedition. He put up a token protest that we shouldn’t leave now, just when we were getting our bearings. When I said it was too dark to look farther, he agreed readily, volunteering to return in the morning with the Streeter Brothers.

“Sure,” I said heartily. “They’ll love the help.”

I returned the gun to the back waistband of my jeans and bundled him into the car with Peppy. On the way home he kept shaking his head and muttering comments that drifted to me only sporadically over the roar of the engine—he hoped Elena—roar, roar—not a place for a— roar—you really should do something, doll. I gave the car more gas to drown out what it was I should do.

I found a parking place on Wellington and left the Tempo there. I didn’t want to make it too easy for anyone watching me to connect me with the car. I turned down the old man’s invitation to dinner and headed up the stairs, shining my flashlight on the tread above me.

Furey was waiting at the top of the third flight. I dropped the flashlight and fumbled for my gun. When he launched himself down the stairs at me, I turned to race back down. Fatigue and injuries slowed me. He got my feet and grabbed my head in a brutal armlock.

“You’re coming with me, Vic. You’re going to kiss your aunt good-bye and then have a farewell party yourself.”

He was sitting on my back. I tried twisting underneath him, biting into his leg. He yelped in pain, but grabbed my hands and cuffed them together. Seizing the handcuffs, he started pulling me down the stairs. I let out a great cry that brought Mr. Contreras and the dog to the door of their apartment.

“I’m going to shoot both of them, Vic,” Furey hissed at me. “Interfering with the police in the performance of their duties. You want to watch? Or stop fighting and come along with me.”

I gulped in air, trying to quiet my heart enough to talk. “Go in,” I quavered at Mr. Contreras. “He’ll shoot Peppy.”

When the old man came into the hall anyway, brandishing his pipe wrench, Furey fired at him. The wrench flew to the floor as the old man crumbled. As we left I saw Peppy race over to lick Mr. Contreras’s face. I was choking on my tears, but I thought I saw him put up an arm to pet her.