Ghost Country (29 page)

At ten Mara fell into bed twenty-three, a narrow aluminum cot like all the others. When the church bought them three years ago Mara had protested hotly. Who could sleep on such a thing? Now she knew—those who were weary and heavy-laden. She didn’t stir, even when Caroline and LaBelle got into one of their endless quarrels, when Ashley howled at a phantom, or LaBelle’s pimp tried breaking in at three o’clock. She slept until six-thirty, when a volunteer shook her awake. Breakfast, Selena, and then you have to leave.

In the morning, when she accompanied Jacqui and Nanette back to the wall, they found the area once again ringed by police: early morning commuters had discovered Madeleine’s body dangling among the spikes of the protective cradle.

B
RIAN CASSIDY LEFT
the hotel at six Wednesday morning, when his shift ended, to sleep or drink, or find a hooker on west Madison before doing either. Off and on during the night he stepped outside to make sure the crazy woman was obeying his injunction. If he saw Madeleine Carter climbing the scaffolding, taking off the belt that held her many skirts to her body, wrapping it around her neck, he might have nodded in satisfaction and returned to his office. If he saw her do those things, he never said. He was gone before the first pale commuter ran into the garage, sick from what she’d seen, demanding police, ambulance, first aid.

Madeleine had committed suicide: there was no doubt about it, the paramedic said so to the cop, although final judgment was reserved for the medical examiner.

“But the garage manager threatened her last night. I heard him. He said if she didn’t leave the wall the street cleaners would be picking up her dead body.” Mara was trying to break in on the policeman and the medic, but they brushed her off, a buzzing mosquito that they couldn’t see. “He hit her, too, and threw her to the ground. I was watching.”

Jacqui took her arm and steered her gently away. “He’s not
going to listen to you, baby. You’re homeless—no one cares what you think. Poor Madeleine. Those voices of hers did her in.”

Madeleine lay one more time, one final time, on a stretcher alongside the curb. Jacqui knelt next to her. Her rough hands smoothed the thin cheeks, now blood-swollen, death-mottled. County morgue Madeleine’s penultimate destination. A perfunctory autopsy. A waiting for someone to claim the body; if no one came, the unmarked grave of Cook County’s unwanted poor.

“Nanette, she’s gone off to phone the doctor. Maybe he can get them to bring her to him.” As though Hector Tammuz, powerless in his own department, could move Midwest Hospital’s pathologists to act.

Anger swelled up inside Mara, like yeast blowing up flour. This was Harriet’s doing, this death of Madeleine, Harriet egging on Brian Cassidy. For once, Harriet and Brian, Grandfather and Mephers, weren’t going to step on someone and pay no consequences.

Mara stumbled up the stairs to the upper world as the paramedics lifted the stretcher: a featherweight, the load barely noticeable. She didn’t see Starr watching from the shadows, black eyes wet with tears as if she’d known the dead woman personally, Luisa, at her shoulder, shaking with thirst.

Mara found a phone in the lobby of one of the office buildings and started calling reporters. She didn’t worry about finding change—she billed the calls to Grandfather’s credit card. Don Sandstrom at Channel 13, Ray Gibson at the
Tribune
, Murray Ryerson at the
Herald-Star:
This is Mara Stonds. You may know my grandfather, the neurosurgeon, or my sister, the lawyer. I’m afraid there’s been a terrible accident to a homeless woman on the premises of one of my sister’s clients.

Conversations within news rooms: Is this a story? The Stonds girl is saying dead homeless woman, visions of the Virgin, threats from the garage manager. Phone calls to the First Freedoms Forum, Maurice Pekiel conferring with Judith Ohana: Is this something to do with that kid who called you yesterday? The niece of that alcoholic
singer, Luisa Montcrief? Harriet Stonds very able lawyer, very able. Abraham Stonds, prominent in this community, very prominent, can’t tread on toes. Send Judith to the hotel to make a few discreet inquiries.

At the hotel a belligerent Mara, pacing up and down in front of the scaffolding with a sign: ask me why this hotel murdered Madeleine. The garage attendants looking on, Brian Cassidy inside because Don Sandstrom there with a camera (earlier Cassidy came outside to threaten Mara, but her anger, her accusations—I saw you, I heard you—made him uneasy, kept him from dragging her away as he had first intended).

What do you think happened here, Ms. Stonds? the reporter asks.

Mara trying hard not to sound like a fanatic. (Jacqui’s advice: If you’re going to do this thing, girl, don’t sound crazy. Bad enough you look crazy. Clean clothes from a thrift shop, hair trimmed by Jacqui: I’m not going to march, but I’ll help you look decent.)

“Madeleine Carter believed the Virgin was bleeding through a crack in this wall,” Mara tells the reporter. “She never hassled anyone, she never panhandled, but she frightened Brian Cassidy—he’s the garage manager—he got so scared he hosed her down every night, poured water on her Bible, and when that didn’t stop her beliefs, he put all this scaffolding over the wall to keep her away. My sister, the lawyer Harriet Stonds, was actually the person to tell him to put up all the scaffolding. I guess this one skinny little homeless woman seemed too scary to all of them. Last night I was standing by that girder there, Cassidy didn’t see me, but he hit her so hard it knocked her to the ground. He’s huge you can see him cowering inside there, and she was a tiny bit of a thing.”

Judith Ohana, not ready to speak to a camera, watched near the entrance to the garage. Watched the Channel 13 crew try to interview Brian Cassidy. Saw him take the private elevator up to the lobby. It’s not a sign of guilt to be wary of speaking on a camera, but the hotel wasn’t going to look very good on the screen.

When the cameras were gone, Ohana talked to Mara. Ohana
didn’t much like the girl—sulky adolescent with a chip on her shoulder about her family, she told Maurice Pekiel back at the Triple-F office. Possibly a First Amendment case. Not something she wanted to make a priority right now, but keep track of the situation in case it developed. A file with a green tab set up to hold Becca Minsky’s and Mara Stonds’s phone messages, Judith’s dictated notes.

When the four o’clock news showed Mara’s speech and Brian Cassidy hiding from the cameras, Harriet was in a meeting. It was a tricky consultation with her long-haul trucker who’d run afoul of the EPA for toxic dumping in Mississippi. Harriet, performing her old legerdemain with a skill that exhilarated her, wasn’t pleased when her secretary summoned her to talk to Gian Palmetto.

“He’ll have to take his turn like a big boy, Lauren. I can’t believe you don’t understand how to tell him that.”

“I know how to do my job, Ms. Stonds. A homeless woman died this morning over by the Pleiades. When Channel 13 called at one-thirty to ask for your version of the story I didn’t think it was important enough to disturb you. But your sister was on the four o’clock news making charges against the hotel, accusing them of murder. If you don’t think that’s important I apologize for interrupting.”

Harriet saw Lauren dimly, knew her to be angry, knew the secretary should be placated. But more present to her was Mara. An anger just as boiling as her sister’s possessed her. Ever since Mara was old enough to walk, the damned brat had been a menace to Harriet’s work, her possessions, her aloof private self. At three she’d taken a red Magic Marker and drawn all over Harriet’s social studies term paper. I’m helping, Hehwie, look, I’m helping you. That was before computers were everywhere; she’d had to retype the whole damned thing from the beginning by hand. And not even Grandfather’s warnings or a swatting by Mephers could stop Mara from ruining Harriet’s makeup or playing her records and tapes, scratching a Taj Mahal release beyond use, breaking tapes and sitting with the pieces around her, sobbing, as she
ineffectually tried to glue them back together. And now she wanted to destroy Harriet’s career, make her look like a useless fool in front of Leigh Wilton just when she was about to be made partner.

“Get me the details,” Harriet said to her secretary. “I can’t leave this meeting. These guys have a hearing in the morning before a federal magistrate and the strategy is tricky. Tell Gian … I don’t know. Send in—no, let me talk to Leigh Wilton, see if one of the partners can get up to speed on my truckers, in case there’s a real crisis over at the hotel. And find out what the accusations are … Oh, you’ve got them? Of course. I know no one is more reliable than you, Lauren, really I do. Or more unreliable than my sister. She belongs in a mental hospital. In fact”—scanning the secretary’s typed notes—“she’s picketing outside the Pleiades garage? Get me Dr. Stonds, see if he can find a way to bring her into the hospital.” Imagining Mara a cumbersome moth, Grandfather with a large net to catch and dispose of her. “And get someone to tape the newscasts for the rest of the afternoon.”

Back to her meeting, her head fragmenting again, the exaltation of the last two days evaporating as though it had never been. She had to ask her clients to repeat statements, and still couldn’t absorb them on the second or third try.

At seven-thirty Harriet finally finished the session with the truckers. Back in her office she went over her messages. A message from Grandfather: please call him at home to discuss her sister.

He was drinking sherry when she phoned, and feeling sorry for himself because of the horrible women and useless residents fate doled out to him.

He sent that prize loser Tammuz down to find Mara, he told Harriet; Tammuz, a half-wit, never returned to the hospital, Grandfather waited for him until seven. They could bring the police into it, say Mara posed an imminent danger to herself or those around her, have her brought in by force, but there might be too much publicity if he did that.

Harriet agreed: leave the police out of it for now, although personally she felt like strangling the brat with her bare hands.
Grandfather clucked in sympathy, hoped Leigh Wilton wasn’t going to blame Harriet for a situation she couldn’t control, and when would she be home?

Harriet had seven messages from Gian Palmetto: very upset, Lauren noted on the first. Even more upset. Screaming—demanded to talk to Leigh Wilton, who calmed him down (a duty of the senior partner).

Various partners were waiting around to talk to her. Some offered support, but Leigh Wilton frowned as though Harriet had deliberately sought such notoriety: had it really been in the client’s best interest to put those spikes up on the wall?

Harriet tried not to snap at her boss. “The flood Monday night might have caused structural damage. We had to brace the wall. If we hadn’t put the spikes there, to keep those homeless women out, and the wall had fallen over on them, what would our exposure have been then?”

Various partners had various ideas, and, lawyer-like, each wanted a half hour of undivided attention in which to expound them. She finally managed to sit down with a video of the news. One of her paralegals had taped all the channels and edited their coverage of the hotel into one master tape. Harriet watched it four times. As First Freedoms’ Judith Ohana had predicted, Brian Cassidy looked bad, like a mob heavy fleeing justice.

At least the hotel’s vice-president for operations had agreed to be interviewed. He did a good job: “Mara Stonds worked here for three months. We had to fire her because she drank on the job, so I’m not surprised to learn that she’s making accusations against the hotel. Fired workers often hold a grudge, although they don’t usually get a chance to flaunt it on television.”

“But the dead woman, Madeleine Carter,” Channel 13’s Don Sandstrom persisted, “is it true that the hotel harassed her because she had a vision of the Virgin Mary near your garage?”

The vice-president smiled easily. “I don’t think it’s harassment to try to keep someone from bothering our guests.”

“So you didn’t spray her with a high-pressure hose?”

“We use a hose to clean the sidewalks down there. If she refused to move, it’s possible she got a soaking.”

That didn’t sound so good. Worse, Harriet thought, the notion that the Virgin was bleeding through a crack in the wall would bring hysterical women down there, and that would generate more media. Mara had been picketing alone this afternoon. Harriet stopped the tape on a close-up of her sister’s face. Mara’s cheeks were swollen in her pugnacious look; her broken front tooth made her look not only raffish, but older. The revulsion Harriet felt against her sister on Monday night intensified.

Harriet phoned the hotel. Gian Palmetto had canceled dinner with the mayor to stay at his desk. Harriet told him she needed to speak to Brian Cassidy.

“He had to go to the hospital.”

“Whose idea was that? He can’t hide, Gian: he looked bad on the news. Faking an illness is a really stupid thing to do right now.”

“He’s not faking, Harriet. Guy broke out in hives all over his body, even on the soles of his feet. I saw him—they came on in my office. He was in agony, couldn’t stand, couldn’t sit, was having trouble breathing. They shot him full of something to calm down the itching, but he’s really sick.”

Harriet sucked in her breath in exasperation: the most macho men always seemed to collapse first. “He needs to make some kind of statement. Mara is claiming that he threatened the dead woman. What does he say about it?”

“Come on, Harriet—bunch of homeless people, crackpots, and your sister, frankly—sorry to say it, she’s ninety watts short of a bulb. Do you really take her accusation against Brian seriously?”

“It’s not what I take seriously that matters. Don’t you realize this will be picked up by the wires? What are you going to tell your corporate masters when they call tomorrow to ask if your garage manager murdered a homeless woman? Brian needs to make a statement. I’ll go to the hospital as soon as we get through with this conversation.”

Harriet’s cool voice infuriated her client: he might lose his job
and she sounded like frozen snot on a polar bear’s nose. “Get off the rag, Harriet. Guy can’t talk. His lungs are blistered, they’re filled with fluid, he’s on a respirator. Get it? Not everyone has your balls, okay?”