Burn Marks (31 page)

Maybe she hadn’t understood me. I wondered if I should try to repeat the message, but the hoist had slid to a stop and Ernie was urging me to my feet. Still clutching my stomach and moaning, I lurched on the way out and stumbled against the concrete.

We were on the open deck at the top of the building. Around us steel beams sent blacker fingers against the dark sky. We were up twenty-five or thirty stories. A stiff wind made the girders sway and froze my marrow. The sight of open air in all directions brought on a genuine attack of nausea. I fell down, almost swooning.

Elena was on me like a shot, weeping over her poor little Vicki. While Ron tried to wrestle her away her bony hands felt behind me for my gun. He pulled her up, but she had the Smith & Wesson loose and dropped it in front of me. The sharp sound of metal on concrete echoed a thousandfold in my ears.

Ernie and Ron didn’t immediately realize what had happened. The only light came from the hoist. I could just make out the glint of the metal and scrabbled madly for the gun. I reached it just as Ernie yanked me to my feet. Fumbling it into my right hand, I slid the safety off with my thumb. I wrenched myself from Ernie and turned and shot him.

Cray was still standing in the hoist. When he heard the shot and saw Ernie fall, he closed the doors and started back down. Ron started dragging Elena toward the edge of the platform. I couldn’t make him out except as a bundle of darkness moving along the paler sheen of the concrete. I forced myself to follow him, to fight down the spinning in my head, to place the muzzle in his back and pull the trigger.

A yard from the edge Ron collapsed, falling on top of Elena. I had never killed a man before, but I knew from the way his body lay, crumpled as a dark blob on the concrete deck, that he was dead. I couldn’t bring myself to walk close enough to check—but what would I have done even if he had been alive? My hands were still cuffed and the hoist was somewhere below us.

My aunt began thrashing about, trying to move away from him. That finally brought me over to the body. Even a yard from the edge of the deck my head swam, I shut my eyes and managed to roll Ron from my aunt’s torso, I brought her with me to the center of the platform.

Behind us the crane loomed up. The pale light of the midnight sky glinted from its long swaying arm. I thought of the hole underneath, going down thirty stories to the bottom of the elevator shaft, and shuddered.

Ernie was still alive. I’d shattered his shoulder. He was losing enough blood to want to get help, but he told me there wasn’t any way to bring the hoist up myself. Ernie wasn’t inclined to talk much. I tried asking him about his relations with Boots and MacDonald and why he and Ron did so much for them, but he told me I was a nosy interfering bitch and to mind my own business before it was too late. At the same time he was peeved with me for not climbing down to the ground—he told me they nailed ladders into the openings where fire stairs would eventually be poured.

“You could at least try to get some help,” he complained. “You shot me—you owe me something.”

“Ernie, sweetie, I shot you because you were going to throw me over the side of the building. I’m not climbing down thirty stories of ladders in the dark, specially not with my hands not working.”

At that Wunsch cursed some more, this time at his partners. It seems Furey had given Cray the key to my handcuffs—he’d been supposed to undo me right before I went over—they didn’t want to run the risk of not getting to me before some passerby did. “Now look at that jerk. Takes off and leaves us alone up here to die.”

“I thought you were a real macho kind of guy,” I said disapprovingly. “John Wayne would never have lain around pissing at how rotten his pals were just because he’d taken a bullet.”

Ernie swore at me, then asked me to take off my sweatshirt to wrap him up, he was getting so cold with blood loss.

“Ernie, I can’t get it over my hands. Remember? They’re locked together. Anyway, I don’t want to hang around up here all night with nothing but a bra between me and the cold cruel wind.”

Ernie flung a few more unimaginative epithets at me, then lapsed into silence. I wished Elena would too. Playing a heroine’s role for once in her life, my aunt grew loquacious. She went on as though shot full of pentobarbital, talking about her childhood, her quarrels with her mother, what Tony—my father—said when he cut all the hair off her dolls when she was eight.

After a while I thought I might scream at the emotional inconsequential torrent. Ernie found it so intolerable, he demanded I shut her up.

“She’s driving me round the bend with that drivel,” he announced. In his own living room this probably got instant results. I could picture LeAnn giggling and saying “You’re so cute, Ernie,” but taking her offending friends or children or mother off to the kitchen. I wondered what LeAnn and Clara would do now.

“She’s not doing anything to you, Ernie. Listen to her— it’ll take your mind off your troubles.” I asked Elena to repeat a particularly tangled narrative involving my uncle Peter, a dog, and the neighbor’s flower garden.

I don’t know how much time passed that way when I heard the hoist returning. It can’t have been long, but in the dark, surrounded by the wounded and the babbling, it felt like hours.

I persuaded Elena to stop talking and move with me behind one of the girders. “Just be quiet, Auntie. They may have come back to shoot us and we don’t want to give them any help finding us.”

“Sure, Vicki. You know what you’re doing. Whatever you say. I was never so scared in my life as I was when that boy with the gorgeous eyes picked me up at the liquor store—”

I put a hand over her mouth. “Shut up, darling, for now. You can tell me about it later.”

The hoist groaned to a stop. My hands were thick with cold, I was having trouble remembering which was the right hand and which the left. I counted painfully in my head, trying to figure out how many shots were in the clip. I tried to subdue the tremor in my right hand so I could make all of them count.

I waited for the noise of doors opening or feet on concrete. When a minute had gone by with no sound, I peered around the edge of the pillar. I couldn’t see the box-like car inside the frame. Over the wind in the girders and Elena’s nervous whispers, I strained to hear. Finally I moved away from her in the dark, ignoring her piteous cry.

To my left I suddenly saw a bobbing point of light. I moved toward it cautiously, keeping my weight on my back foot with each step until I was certain I hadn’t come to some unexpected hole.

The light flickered again and went out. Ernie had mentioned a ladder in the stairwell opening. This must be Cray or some other confederate hoping to climb up and surprise us from behind.

My eyes were so accustomed to the dark that I saw the stairwell opening loom in front of me as a darker patch in the black night. I lay on my stomach and watched until the black changed again, a blob crawling up the side to the top. When a hand emerged on the deck I smashed the butt of the Smith & Wesson into it with all my strength.

Cray cried out but leaned against the ladder and brought his other hand up and fired. The bullet went wide in the night but I slid back, away from the opening, as he hoisted himself one-handed to the deck.

I aimed at the dark shape in front of me and fired. Lying awkwardly as I was, the recoil wrenched my right shoulder. I fell over but managed to hang on to the gun. Light shone on me, blinding me, and I rolled instinctively as he shot.

Somehow I managed to get to my feet and around behind one of the girders. Cray kept the light on for a moment but realized when I fired again that it made him as much a target as it did me. When the light went out I dropped to my knees and elbows and scooted to the next girder. I stopped there and listened. Elena had started talking again, in an undertone, the sound just audible above the wind.

“You can get the old woman, Cray,” Ernie called in the thread of a voice. “She’s jabbering away over here. You can find her by the babble.”

Elena whimpered but couldn’t make herself shut up.

“You still there, Wunsch?” Cray shouted back. “Keep the faith—I’ll have you down in no time.”

Cray started circling around behind me in the dark. I couldn’t keep track of where he was. I was tired and disoriented and I clung to my girder without trying to figure out his next move. Suddenly he gave a cry, a scream of such panic that my heart thudded violently.

“What happened? Where are you?” Ernie called out.

From the middle of the deck I could hear Cray screaming, his voice muffled, coming from a distance. He had fallen down the opening for the crane, but the safety nets around it had saved him.

46

On the Scales of Justice

I have a hard time remembering what remained of the night. I managed somehow to climb down the slats connecting the deck to the floor below. My arms trembled so violently that I don’t know how I made it—-more by will than by muscle. And I got the hoist up, after a painful round of trial and error. It wasn’t easy to run at the best of times; with one hand it was pure bloody hell. And I got Elena and Ernie into the cage and lowered us down to the ground.

Furey was waiting there but he’d been joined by some uniformed cops. A passing blue-and-white had heard the gunshots and swung over to the site. They were keeping Furey company until the hoist came down. I spent a good chunk of what was left of the night in a lockup at Eleventh Street—I was in cuffs and Furey persuaded the uniformed boys that I’d resisted arrest.

Furey went off to the hospital to get his knee attended to. He had bravely stayed at the construction site in excruciating pain waiting for his pals to come down—it was just his bad luck that the patrol car had shown up first.

I couldn’t get the cops who were holding me to understand that another man was on top of the building, in the nets around the crane, and that he had the key to my handcuffs. After a while I gave up trying, I didn’t say anything at all except to tell them my name. When they shut the lockup on me I lay on the floor and went to sleep, oblivious to the clamor of the drunks around me.

They got me up about a couple of hours later. I was so sleepy and disoriented, I didn’t even try to ask where we were going—I assumed it was for early morning court calls. Instead they hustled me to the third floor, to the Violent Crimes area, to the corner office where Bobby Mallory was sitting behind his desk. His eyes were red from lack of sleep, but he’d shaved and his tie was neatly knotted.

“Is there some reason she’s still in cuffs?” Bobby asked. The men who’d escorted me didn’t know anything about it. They said they’d been told I was dangerous and to leave me locked up.

“Well, get them off before I make a report to your commander,”

He didn’t speak again until they’d found a key that would work on those cuffs. When I was free, rubbing my sore arms, he laced into me with a scorching bitterness. He went on and on about me playing at police, ruining his best men, screwing up his department until nobody knew what he was supposed to be doing. I let it wash over me, too tired, in too much pain, too overwhelmed by his fury, to try to form a response. When he’d finally exhausted himself he sat still, tears coursing down his ruddy face.

“May I go now?” I asked in a thread of a voice. “Or am I still facing charges?”

“Go. Go.” The word was a hoarse squawk. He covered his face with his right hand and shoved the left in the air as if to drive me from the room.

“The boys here wouldn’t listen to me, but there’s a man named Cray trapped at the top of the Rapelec building. He fell into the nets around the crane.” I stood up. “Can you tell me where my aunt is?”

“Leave, Vicki. I can’t stand the sound of your voice tonight.”

When I left his office and got to the Eleventh Street entrance, Lotty was waiting for me. I fell into her arms, beyond surprise or question.

47

In Lotty’s Nest

Lotty took the day off on Thursday to look after me. She wouldn’t let anyone near me, not Murray nor the networks, not even the federal district attorney. Good Republican appointee that he was, he was slobbering at the possibility of bringing down the Democratic county chairman. With her characteristic flair for detail, Lotty called my answering service and told them to switch calls for me through to her—but she wouldn’t let me take any.

When I woke up finally around five I remembered Mr. Contreras. Lotty bundled me into some blankets on the daybed in her living room and insisted I eat some soup before she told me her end of the adventure.

The shot and our scuffle had brought Vinnie and Rick York to the hall. They’d been busy in the back bedroom or they might have arrived soon enough to help out—or maybe to get shot themselves. Anyway, Mr. Contreras had taken the bullet in his shoulder and was able to give Rick Lotty’s number.

“He’s all right,” Lotty assured me. “It would take more than a broken shoulder to stop him—as soon as we got someone to patch him together he had to be sedated to keep from racing off to hunt for you.”

“How did you find me?” I asked from my nest on the daybed.

“I called Lieutenant Mallory. Your tiresome neighbor knew who had shot him—-I gather he monitors all your male visitors?” She flashed a wicked grin. “A full-time job for him, my dean Anyway, the lieutenant was not at all disposed to intervene, but he could scarcely ignore the evidence of a man who’d been shot. He finally agreed to call me when they’d located you. I was afraid he wasn’t going to push hard enough—you had me very frightened, my dear.”

She compressed her lips and turned her head away to regain her composure.

“I was damned scared myself,” I said frankly. “I just didn’t understand how desperate those boys were getting.”

“At any rate, I had done a difficult delivery for the chief assistant federal prosecutor, or whatever her title was, so I rang her up and told her what I knew. I think she organized some resources to look for you, but by then you’d surfaced at police headquarters. What a loathsome place. I tried hard to get in to fetch you, my dear, but they were quite—quite physical in keeping me out.”

I got out of my nest to hug her. Lotty has an antigen against police stations—they played too terrifying a role in her early childhood—so it made her effort doubly precious to me.

I asked her about Elena. My aunt had been treated for exhaustion and had her broken finger set, but the hospital released her around noon. After telling me about Elena, Lotty tried to get me to think of other things, like the possibility of a vacation. She pulled out a giant folder of travel brochures—trips to Caribbean islands, to the Costa Brava—various warm and friendly climates that would make me forget the Chicago winter closing in on us.

On Friday, Lotty finally let the rest of the world loose on me. She laid down the law with all her imperial force: Anyone who wanted to see me had to do so on Sheffield Avenue. Unfortunately there were any number of people eager enough to talk to me to meet that condition.

First in line was Alison Winstein, the deputy prosecutor whose life Lotty had saved last year. She took me through what I knew and what I surmised. Like all prosecutors, she didn’t feel like giving much back but she did let me know that they had obtained warrants for Alma and Farmworks. They had wanted to subpoena the county contract files but Boots was a pretty wily fighter—neither he nor Ralph would turn over records without a pretty good battle.

After Ms. Winstein left I went through the account of my escapade in the papers. Murray had put together a pretty strong story without talking to me—he’d gotten an exclusive with Mr. Contreras and managed to track Elena down before the hospital released her. I grinned to myself over the interview with my neighbor. Of all the men I know, Murray is the one Mr. Contreras likes least—thinks of him as a snothead and a hot dog. Murray earned his byline on that one.

When I’d finished with the papers I called Robin Bessinger at Ajax. He’d seen the stories and was in a chastened frame of mind. “I’m sorry we questioned your judgment, Vic. You were the pro on this one. I—could we have dinner again?”

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “I’ll have to think about that. But you could do one thing for me—cut a check for Saul Seligman. I’ll take it over to him in the morning.”

“We’d kind of like to subrogate against MacDonald and Meagher,” Robin said.

“Be my guest. But don’t keep the old guy hanging. He’s had a rough three weeks, with his favorite old building going and his chief lieutenant getting murdered. I know you can grease those bureaucratic wheels. Drop it off for me on your way home and I’ll take it to him tomorrow.”

Robin agreed, somewhat unwillingly. It was perhaps the hope of dinner—et cetera—with me that made him agree at all. I was going to have to build up my strength and get over a lot of wounds before I was in the humor for much et cetera.

Lotty had gone to Beth Israel to see her more pressing patients, but she came back at lunch to heat some homemade chicken soup for me. “You’re too thin, Liebchen. I want to see those purple circles disappear from your eyes,”

I obediently ate two large helpings and a few slices of toast. While I was finishing the toast Murray showed up. I didn’t much feel like talking to him, but the sooner I did it the faster it would be behind me. And when I’d done I was glad because he knew what had happened to Furey— suspended without pay, out on $100,000 bond for felonious assault on me, Elena, and Mr. Contreras.

“They’re never going to prove a case against him with that young girl—what was her name? Cerise? Sergeant McGonnigal did tell me off the record that they’re missing some heroin they’d copped in a drug raid a month or so ago. He also figures the department’s going to sit on that one.”

“What about Boots?” I asked. “How do things look for the election next month?”

Murray made a face. “This is Chicago, sweetheart, not Minneapolis—he got a standing ovation at last night’s meeting of the County Board. And the campaign funds are still coming in—too many of those contractors owe the old guy too much. They’re not going to jump ship unless he falls below the waterline.”

“Has he backed away from Roz?”

“Same story—she’s just too popular in the Hispanic wards. Boots lets her go he can kiss the Humboldt Park-Logan Square vote good-bye. And don’t forget there’s a sizable Mexican population out in the Mount Prospect area—her support isn’t all in the city.”

“So why did she bother?” I burst out. “Why did she care what I did or who I talked to? That’s what burns me. The way people were carrying on I thought she was sitting on bigamy or illegitimate children tucked in an orphanage. Turns out it was just business as usual in this town. I’m sick to death of it, but it’s so goddamn usual, why did she think it would matter?”

Murray shrugged his massive shoulders. “Maybe she felt vulnerable. First woman Boots has backed in a big way. First Hispanic. Maybe she was afraid the rules would be different for her. You of all people ought to be able to figure that one out.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Suddenly I was very tired, so tired that I started drifting off to sleep while Murray asked me something about Elena. I tried to answer coherently but he saw I was struggling.

“You go back to bed, kid. Once more Wonder Woman saves the city. Go to sleep.” He patted me on the shoulder and took off, magnanimous because I’d let him garner so much glory.

It was late in the afternoon, after I’d slept a while, that Velma Riter dropped in. When Lotty told me who had come I wanted to dive back under the covers. Instead I staggered to the living room on woolly legs and braced myself for her onslaught.

She stood in the middle of the room twisting a copy of the Star around and around in her hands.

“Quite a story you were digging up,” she finally said in a voice like dry soil.

I looked at her warily. “It doesn’t seem to be hurting Roz much. Of course there’s still a month till the election.”

“I don’t know who I’m madder with—Roz for doing all this or you for turning on a sister and making it all public.”

I rubbed my face with the heels of my hands. “I don’t have a pat answer for that, Velma. Does being a feminist mean you have to support everything your sisters do? Even if you think they’re abusing you?”

“But talk to her in private, couldn’t you do that?”

“She wouldn’t let me. I tried. She just wants those golden apples too bad, Velma. I’m sure she’ll do a good job. She’ll be better than most, I expect. But she isn’t enough of a risk-taker to try for the apples without getting some worms to help her.”

Velma flung up her arms. “It’s too much. Too much for me, anyway. I should have stayed with photography—it’s safer.”

I looked at her directly. “Velma—your pictures are honest—and they involve a lot of risk—emotional risk, I’d think you’d want that in a woman you came out in public for. Well, I do. And I won’t take it, to be spun around—by anyone. And especially not by someone like Roz, trading on old loyalties and asking us to countenance—well, worms.”

“She didn’t do it for the money, you know,” Velma said.

I made an impatient gesture. “I know—she did it for her cousin, family loyalty, wanting Hispanics to have a bigger piece of county action. Just because her motives were so damned wonderful doesn’t make me like it any better.”

Velma stared at me unblinkingly for a minute. “Well, anyone looking at your body knows you take risks, Warshawski. I’ll give you that. I did resign from her staff today. She—she—” The wide, generous mouth crumpled. “She talked to me so sweet, you’d think that voice was every mother in the world singing a lullaby. That hurt. I had to quit.”

I looked at her and nodded without speaking. She winked back her tears and left abruptly.