Burn Marks (8 page)

11

Smoking Grandma

I climbed into the Chevy and slumped over the wheel. It was only noon, but I was as tired as though I’d been climbing Mount Everest for a week. A faint odor of vomit still hovered in the car, despite the twenty minutes I’d spent scrubbing the backseat. It slowly came to me that I was smelling my own clothes. My jeans were soiled where I’d been kneeling on the car seat—I’d just been too wound up with Elena to notice it earlier. Shuddering violently, I turned on the engine and drove south at a reckless pace, not even bothering to keep an eye out for the blue-and-whites. All I wanted to do was to get home, get my clothes off, get myself scrubbed as clean as I could manage.

I left the Chevy at a wild angle a yard or so from the curb and took the stairs up two at a time. Barely waiting to get inside to strip, I dumped jeans, T-shirt, and panties in a heap in the doorway and headed straight for the bathroom. I stood under the hot water for almost half an hour, washing my hair twice, scrubbing myself thoroughly. Finally I felt cleansed, that addicts and alcoholics were rinsed from my life.

I dressed slowly, taking time to put on makeup and to style my hair with a little gel. A gold cotton dress with big black buttons made me feel elegant and poised. I even burrowed through the hall closet for a black bag to go with my pumps.

On the way out I gathered my discarded clothes and took them to the basement. The sheets were ready for the dryer, but there are limits to my housekeeping fervor—I stuffed my jeans in with the sheets and started the cycle from the beginning.

It was a little after one by now. I wouldn’t be able to eat lunch if I wanted to see Zerlina before my meeting with Dominic Assuevo. And I guess I wanted to see her, although my enthusiasm for the Ramsay family was at low tide. I headed over to Lake Shore Drive and joined the flow southward.

Michael Reese Hospital dominates the lakefront for a mile or two at Twenty-seventh Street. I circled the complex a few times until I found someone pulling away from a meter—I was damned if I was going to pay lot fees for this visit. A guard was stationed behind a glass cage in the entryway. She didn’t care whether I was a social worker or an ax murderer, so I didn’t have to use Carol’s cover story to get a pass to the fourth floor.

The distinctive hospital smell—some combination of medication, antiseptic, and the sweat of people in pain— made me flinch involuntarily when I got off the elevator. I had spent too much time in hospitals with my parents when I was younger, and the smell always brings back the misery of those years. My mother died of cancer when I was fifteen, my father from emphysema some ten years later. He was a heavy smoker and there are days when I still get angry about it. Especially today, when I was feeling under siege.

Zerlina Ramsay was in a four-pack. Television perched high on facing walls were tuned to conflicting soap operas. Two women glanced indifferently at me when I came in but returned their attention immediately to the screen; the other two didn’t even look up. I stood dubiously in the doorway for a moment trying to decide which of the three black women might be Zerlina. None of them bore any overwhelming resemblance to Cerise. Finally I saw a sign attached to one of the beds warning me not to smoke if oxygen was in use. The woman lying there had gauze covering her left arm. Short, her massive build amply displayed by the skimpy hospital robe, she would have been my last choice, but Zerlina had been brought in suffering from smoke inhalation so I supposed she’d needed oxygen. She was attached to what looked like a heart monitor.

I went over to the bed. She turned her gaze toward me reluctantly, her eyes narrowed suspiciously in her jowly face.

“Mrs. Ramsay?” She didn’t respond, but she didn’t deny it either. “My name is V. I. Warshawski. I think you know my aunt Elena.”

Her dark eyes flickered in surprise; she cautiously inspected me. “You sure about that?” Her voice was husky from disuse and she cleared her throat discreetly.

“She told me you two hung out together at the Indiana Arms. Had a few beers together.”

“So?”

I gritted my teeth and plowed ahead. “So she was waiting on my doorstep last night with Cerise.”

“Cerise! What planet that girl come down from?”

I glanced around the room. As I’d expected, her companions were more interested in live theater than TV. They made no effort to mask their curiosity.

“Can you go out in the hall with that thing?” I gestured at the monitor. “This is kind of private.”

“Those two took money from you, I don’t want to hear about it. I can’t even afford me a new place to sleep, let alone pay back all that girl’s bills.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with money.”

She glowered at me belligerently, but heaved herself to a sitting position. Her substantial frame gave the impression not of fat but of a natural monument, maybe a redwood tree that had grown sideways but not too tall. She brushed away my hand when I tried to take her elbow. Grunting to herself, she slid out of bed, sticking her feet into paper hospital slippers lined up tidily under the edge. The heart monitor was on wheels. Rolling it in front of her, she made her way to the door and down the hall like a tidal wave—nurses and orderlies split to either side when they saw her coming.

She was panting a bit when we got to a small lounge stuck at one end of the hall. She took her time getting her breath before lowering herself onto one of the padded chairs. They were covered in cracked aqua oilcloth that had last been washed when Michael Reese himself was still alive. I perched gingerly on the edge of the chair at right angles to Zerlina.

“So Elena is your aunt, huh? Can’t say you look too much like her.”

“Glad to hear it. She’s thirty years and three thousand bottles ahead of me.” I ignored her crack of laughter to add, “I gotta say you don’t look too much like Cerise, either.”

“That’s those thirty years you spoke of,” Zerlina said. “I wasn’t so bad-looking at her age. And I sure look better than she’s going to when she gets to be as old as me, the rate she’s going. What kind of story she tell you? She and that aunt of yours.”

“Her baby,” I said baldly. “Katterina.”

Zerlina’s face creased in astonishment. For a moment I thought she was going to tell me Cerise didn’t have a baby.

“She’s picking a funny time to care about that baby, being as how she hasn’t paid much attention to it so far to date.”

“Katterina wasn’t with you Wednesday night when the Indiana Arms burned down?” I couldn’t think of a gentle way to ask the question.

“Hm-unh.” She shook her jowly head emphatically. “She left the baby with me on Wednesday, all right, but I couldn’t keep her with me, not in an SRO, you know. They can be mighty strict about who you got with you, which Cerise knew. But that girl!”

She sat with her hands on her knees, looking broodingly at nothing for a moment. The heart monitor beeped insistently, as though in rhythm with her thoughts. She faced me squarely.

“I might as well tell you the whole story. I don’t know why I should. Don’t know I can especially trust you. But you don’t look like Elena. You don’t look like an alkie who’ll do the best she can to make money out of your sad news to buy her another bottle.”

I felt a little queasy at her words. It’s one thing to think of your own aunt turning tricks with the old-age pensioners. It’s quite another to imagine her blackmailing people for the price of a drink.

“Not that I haven’t had a drink or two in my day, too, and I’ll give Elena this, she makes you laugh. You can forget your troubles with her every now and then.” She looked away again for a moment, as though her troubles had come too forcefully to mind.

“Well, Cerise had this baby. Last year it was. And this baby had all kinds of problems on account of Cerise is a junkie. She was using heroin all the time she was pregnant. I told her how it would be. She even pretended to be in a program that time they arrested her. She’d been out stealing, her and the boy she was with at the time, and they arrested her. And on account of it was the first time and she was pregnant, they let her go if she promised to go to the program.”

She glared at me again, as if daring me to condemn her for having a daughter like that. I made what I hoped was a sympathetic sound and tried to look understanding.

“Then the baby was born—and my, what a time we had! Poor little thing was in the hospital, then Maisie— the other grandmother—took her home. I couldn’t, you know. I just live on a little bit of savings I have. I don’t have social security—you don’t get it for cleaning houses, which is what I did all my life, at least until my heart started giving out on me. But I helped Maisie out as much as I could and by and by we got that baby to sleep at night and even laughing.”

“So Cerise never took care of her?”

“Oh, no, she did. Finally she did when she got going with Otis. That was in June. Then suddenly on Wednesday, Cerise comes by saying she can’t take it anymore, being home with the baby morning, noon, and night, and I tell her she should be thinking of that before she spreads her legs, you know, not two years later, but she leaves the baby and goes, saying her and Otis is off to the Dells. So I go to the pay phone but I can’t find a number for his sister, so I call Maisie and she sends her boy over and gets Katterina. And if you think Cerise is worrying about her, think again, on account of she hasn’t come near me here in the hospital,”

Maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed to me the heart monitor was beeping faster by the end of her tale, I didn’t want to ask her anything that might get her more upset, I also didn’t think I had to be the one to let Zerlina know her daughter was pregnant again.

She demanded to know why Cerise had come to see me. When I explained that she was asking me to intervene with the fire department, Zerlina snorted.

“Maybe she does think the baby’s dead. Maybe that’s why she hasn’t been to see me—she’s too ashamed. But if her and Elena come to see you together, girl, I advise you to keep your wallet in the bottom of your purse and count all your money before you say good-bye.”

I felt an uneasy twinge—hadn’t looked in my billfold before putting it into my black bag. Still, Cerise had been pretty sick, maybe too sick to go hunting for money or credit cards. Before I got up to go I asked Zerlina how long they were keeping her.

She gave a little smile that was half crafty, half embarrassed. “When they brought me in I was unconscious on account of the smoke. And they found my heart was kind of acting up. High blood pressure, high fat in my blood— you name it, I got too much of everything. Except money. So I’m kind of dragging it out, you know, until I can get me a place to stay.”

“I see.” I’d come across worse crimes in my time. I stood up. “Well, I’m glad the baby’s okay, anyway. Cerise disappeared around noon today and I’m not going to put a lot of energy into hunting for her. But if I see her again, I’ll let her know her kid is at Maisie’s.”

She grunted and got slowly to her feet. “Yeah, okay, but I got to call Maisie and tell her Katterina don’t go off with Cerise again. You take it easy, girl. What did you say your name was? Vic. And you stay those three thousand bottles behind Elena, you hear me?”

“Got it.” I walked slowly down the hall with her to her room door before I said good-bye. Back in the lobby I checked my wallet. The cash was gone and so was my American Express Card. The only thing left was my PI license and that was because it was stuck behind a flap. They’d even lifted my driver’s license. I ground my teeth. Cerise might have cleaned me out while I was hiding out in my bedroom this morning. But for all I knew Elena had robbed me when I was struggling with Cerise in the kitchen. I felt my shoulders tighten from futile rage.

I found a pay phone in the lobby and called my credit-card companies to report the cards as stolen. At least I’d memorized my phone card number so I didn’t have to stop all my phone calls. I usually keep an emergency twenty in the zip compartment of my purse; when I checked the black bag I found I’d left one in there. On my way out I used it to buy flowers for Zerlina. It wasn’t enough, but it was all I could afford.

12

Firing Up the Arson Squad

Before leaving the hospital I tried to reach Robin Bessinger at Ajax. I was hoping to cancel our meeting with the Bomb and Arson Squad now that I knew the baby hadn’t been in the Indiana Arms, but I was too late—the insurance receptionist told me he’d already left for the police department. I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and headed back to Ellis Avenue and my car.

It used to be you could go to Central Police Headquarters anytime day or night and park with ease. Now that development mania has hit the Near South Side, downtown congestion has clogged the area. It took me half an hour to find a place to park. That made me about ten minutes late for the meeting, which scarcely helped my frayed mood.

Roland Montgomery held court in an office the size of my bed. A regulation metal desk crammed with papers took most of the available space, but he squeezed in chairs for me, Bessinger, Assuevo, and a subordinate. Papers were stacked on the windowsill and on top of the metal filing cabinet. Someone should have told him the place was a fire trap.

Montgomery, a tall, thin man with hollow cheeks, gave me a sour look as I came in. He ignored my outstretched hand, pointed to the empty chair in the corner, and asked if I knew Dominic Assuevo.

Assuevo was bull-shaped—thick neck and wide shoulders tapering into narrow hips. His graying sandy hair was cropped close to his head the way the boys used to wear it when I was in third grade. He greeted me with a jovial courtesy not reflected in his eyes.

“Can’t stay away from fire, huh, Ms. Warshawski?”

“Good to see you again, too, Commander. Hiya, Robin. I tried to get you a little bit ago but your office told me you were already here.” I skirted my way past his long feet to the vacant chair.

Robin Bessinger was sitting in the opposite corner of the tiny room. He seemed a little older than he’d struck me when I first met him, but of course the hard hat had kept me from seeing that his hair had gone gray. He smiled and waved and said hello.

I squeezed in next to the uniformed man and held out a hand. “V. I. Warshawski. I don’t think we’ve met.”

He mumbled something that sounded like “firehorse whiskey.” I never did learn what his name really was.

“So you think there was a baby in the Indiana Arms, Ms. Warshawski?” Montgomery pulled a folder from the stack in front of him. I had to believe he’d practiced it, that he couldn’t know offhand what fire which folder referred to.

“I did when I spoke to Mr. Bessinger this morning. That was before I tracked down the baby’s grandmother. I just finished interviewing her in the hospital and she says she had already sent the child to its other grandmother before the fire broke out.”

“So we’re wasting our time here, is that what you’re telling me?’ Montgomery’s eyebrows rose to his sandy hairline. He made no effort to hide his contempt.

I gave a tight smile. “Guess so, Lieutenant.”

“There were no babies in the Indiana Arms when it burned down?” He swung his neck cranelike across the desk at me.

“I can’t say that categorically. I only know that the one I’d been told was there—Katterina Ramsay—had left the building earlier in the evening. For all I know there might have been others. You should check with Commander Assuevo here.”

The young man next to me had started to write this in his open notebook but stopped at a sign from Montgomery.

“You have something of the reputation of a wit, Ms. Warshawski,” the lieutenant said heavily. “Personally, I have never found your sense of humor entertaining. I hope this wasn’t your idea of a joke, to turn police and fire department resources loose on a wild-goose chase.”

“My comedic talents have always been greatly overrated by Bobby Mallory,” I said coolly. I was feeling pretty angry, but it seemed to me Montgomery was provoking me deliberately. I wanted to be the last one to blink.

“Well, the next time you feel an urge to make a joke, call Mallory, not me. Because if you do abuse departmental resources again, Ms. Warshawski, believe me, I will be calling the lieutenant and asking him to give you a good lesson in legalities.”

That seemed to be the end of the interview. Short of leaping over the desk and pummeling him with my bare hands, I couldn’t think of anything to say or do to express my frustration effectively. I stood up slowly, aligned my belt buckle directly under the black buttons, pulled an imaginary hair from my dress, and shook out the shirt. I beamed happily at Firehorse Whiskey and sketched a wave at Robin Bessinger.

I kept the happy smile on my face all the way down the stairs. Once in the hall I let the waves of anger wash through me. What the hell was eating Montgomery? It could only be his relations with police lieutenant Bobby Mallory. Bobby talks about me one way and thinks about me quite another—he might easily have told the fire commander I was a pain in the butt and a wiseass—his publicly expressed opinion on many occasions. Missing would be Bobby’s affection as an old friend of my parents’.

But that didn’t excuse the squad commander’s behavior. He could have asked me why I had called Robin to begin with. I certainly wasn’t going to start piping out self-exculpation when treated to that kind of routine. And Bessinger—why didn’t the guy speak up? I made a tight face and headed for the south exit.

“You look like a snake stood up and bit you. Can’t you even say hi to your friends?” It was Michael Furey. I hadn’t been scanning faces as I hunched my way down the hall.

“Oh, hiya, Michael. Must be sleep deprivation.”

“What are you doing here? Helping us keep Chicago safe and legal?” His dark blue eyes teased me.

I forced myself to smile. “Something like that. I’ve just been meeting with Roland Montgomery about that fire in the Indiana Arms last week.”

“The one where your aunt got caught? You oughta stay clear of arson—that’s dirty, dirty stuff.”

“Dirty work, but someone’s got to do it. Since Montgomery doesn’t want to, maybe I’ll have a crack at it.”

“Oh, Monty’s not doing the investigation?” His eyebrows shot up and he looked thoughtful.

“Doesn’t seem too interested.” I kept my tone light.

“Well, in that case—” He broke off. “You don’t want me telling you to mind your own business.”

I bowed slightly. “Call the boy a mind reader.”

He laughed a little, but there was a current of annoyance in it. “I won’t, then. But keep it in mind that if Monty isn’t touching it, there may be good reasons to stay away from it.”

I looked at him steadily. “Like what? Well, it doesn’t matter. Just to keep you happy, no one’s asked me to look at the arson. But the more people tell me not to touch something, the more I feel like reaching out a hand just to see what’s so special about it.”

He hunched a shoulder impatiently. “Whatever you say, Vic. I gotta run.”

He went on down the hall, greeting uniformed men with his usual good humor. I shook my head and went on outside.

Bessinger caught up with me as I was crossing State. “Slow down, Vic. I’d like to know what was going on between you and Monty in that meeting.”

I stopped and faced him squarely. “You tell me. I wondered why you didn’t say anything to explain why you thought it worthwhile bothering Montgomery based just on my phone call.”

He held up his hands. “I’ve been around a lot of fires in my time. I don’t step in between the accelerant and the kindling. Besides, I did try to talk to him. That’s why I stayed after you. But I still can’t figure out why he’s so angry about this one. Other than manpower shortages, but he’s taking it as a personal affront. Why?”

I shook my head. “I can see it would piss him and Assuevo to have the lab sifting through ashes for a nonexistent body. But I only called you in the first place to find out if you knew. When you didn’t I took the long route, which meant getting the last name of the baby’s mother and tracking down her mother. The grandmother, I mean.”

“You didn’t know that when you called?” His tone was puzzled, not accusatory.

“I never saw the young woman before-the mother of the baby—until she came to my place late last night. She’d left the kid with her own mother, Zerlina Ramsay, at the Indiana Arms, and she didn’t want me talking to Mrs. Ramsay. She said if I knew their last name it would get her mother in trouble, that she’d never find another place to stay. She’s a junkie, though—I don’t know if that came from drug-related paranoia or real concern about her mother or what.”

We were standing on the pavement near the curb. Patrolmen heading up State toward the entrance kept brushing against us. When I stepped aside to avoid a man being decanted from a stretch limo, I ran into a woman trotting down the street toward Dearborn.

“Can’t you watch where you’re going?” she snapped at me.

I opened my mouth to utter a guerrilla hostility back, then thought maybe I’d done enough fighting for one day and ignored her.

Robin looked at his watch. “I don’t need to go back to the office. Want to get a drink someplace? I’m afraid if someone else bumps into us, Monty’s going to have us arrested, the mood he’s in.”

I suddenly felt very tired. I’d been running since eight this morning cleaning up after Elena and Cerise. People as different as Lotty and Roland Montgomery had been chewing me out. A clean well-lighted place and a glass of whiskey sounded like doctor’s orders to me.

Robin had taken a cab up from Ajax. He walked back to the Chevy with me and we headed through the early rush-hour traffic to the Golden Glow, a bar I know and love in the south Loop. We left the car at a meter down near Congress and walked the three blocks back to the bar, Sal Barthele, the owner, was alone with a couple of men nursing beers at the mahogany horseshoe counter. She nodded majestically at me when I took Robin over to a small round table in the corner. She waited until we were settled and Robin had exclaimed over the genuine Tiffany lamps to take our orders.

“Your usual, Vic?” Sal asked when Robin had ordered a beer.

My usual is Black Label up. I pictured Elena’s flushed, veined face and my missing credit cards. I remembered Zerlina’s admonition to keep three thousand bottles behind Elena. Then I thought, hell, I’m thirty-seven years old. If I was going to get drunk every time life threatened me, I would have started in years ago. When I feel like having a whiskey, I’ll have a whiskey.

“Yes,” I said more vehemently than I’d meant.

“You sure about that, girl?” Sal mocked me gently, then went to the bar to fill our order. Sal’s a shrewd businesswoman. The Glow is only one of her investments and she could easily afford to turn it over to a manager. But it also was her first venture and she likes to preside over it in person.

Robin took a swallow of his draft and opened his eyes in appreciation. “I’ve probably walked by here a hundred times going to the Insurance Exchange. How could I have missed this stuff?”

Sal’s draft is made for her privately by a small brewer in Steven’s Point. I’m not a beer lover, but my pals who are think it’s pretty hot stuff.

I told Robin a little about Sal and her operations, then steered the talk back to the Indiana Arms. “You ever find any evidence that the owner was trying to sell the place?”

Robin shook his head. “Too early to tell. His limits aren’t out of line, but that doesn’t matter. It’s really more a question of what’s going on with the building and him and his finances. We haven’t got that far yet.”

“What does Montgomery say?”

Robin frowned and finished his beer before answering. “Nothing. He’s not going to dedicate any more resources into investigating the arson.”

“And you don’t agree?” I drank a glass of water, then swallowed the rest of my scotch. The warmth spread slowly from my stomach to my arms and some of the tension the day had put into my shoulders disappeared.

“We never pay a claim when arson is involved. I mean, not unless we’re a hundred percent sure the insured didn’t engineer it.”

He held up his glass to Sal and she brought over another draft. She had the Black Label bottle with her but I shook my head over the idea of seconds. Elena must have been affecting me after all.

“I just don’t understand Montgomery, though. I’ve worked with him before. He’s not an easy guy—not much looseness there—but I’ve never seen him as nasty as he was to you this afternoon.”

“Must be my charm,” I said lightly. “It hits some men that way.” I didn’t think it was worth explaining my theory about Montgomery and Bobby Mallory to a stranger.

Robin refused to laugh. “It’s something about this fire. Why else would he tell me the file was closed? He said they’d only reopened it because you thought there might be a body in there. Now they want to put their manpower where it’s more urgently needed.”

“I’ve never worked with the Bomb and Arson unit, but I assume they’re not too different from the rest of the police—too few people, too many crimes. It doesn’t seem so unbelievable to me that Montgomery would abandon an investigation into an underinsured mausoleum in one of the city’s tackier districts. The fire fighters and police may serve and protect everyone, but they’re human— they’ll respond to the neighborhoods with more political clout first.”

Robin made an impatient gesture. “Maybe you’re right. Insurance companies have to be more allergic to arson. Montgomery may want to concentrate on the Gold Coast, but we can’t be so picky. Even if he’s abandoning the Indiana Arms, we won’t. At least not for the time being.”

Or at least not until his boss also got his sense of priorities reorganized. But I kept that last unkind thought to myself and let the talk drift to the joys of home ownership. Robin had just bought a two-flat in Albany Park; he was renting out the ground floor while living on top and trying to rehab the whole place in his spare time on weekends. Stripping varnish and putting up drywall are not my idea of a good time, but I’m perfectly ready to applaud anyone else who wants to do it.

After his third beer it seemed natural to think about moving on to food. We agreed on I Popoli, a seafood restaurant near Clark and Howard. After that it seemed natural to drive up to Albany Park with him to inspect the rehab work. One thing kind of led to another, but I left before they drifted too far—I hadn’t packed any equipment when I left my apartment for the day. Anyway, AIDS is making me more cautious. I like to see a guy more than once before doing anything irrevocable. Still, it’s nice to get an outside opinion of one’s attractions. I went home at midnight in a far better mood than I would have thought possible when I got up twenty hours ago.