Warshawski 09 - Hard Time (2 page)

I stifled a sigh and dug in my evening bag for a business card. “Give me a call if you want to talk about it in a place where I can give you my full attention.”

“V. I. Warshawski?” He pronounced my name carefully. “You’re on Leavitt and North? That’s not so far from me.”

Before he could say anything else there was another stir at the entrance. This time it was Lacey herself. The waters parted: Edmund Trant extricated himself from his crowd and appeared at the door to kiss Lacey’s hands as the cameras began to whir again. Murray used his bulk to barrel his way next to Trant in time for Lacey to kiss him for the cameras. The policeman at the door greeted Lacey and directed her to Emily. I watched while she hugged Emily, signed her book, and flung herself into the arms of another Global actor on hand for the event.

While I worked my way along the wall to the front to collect Mary Louise and Emily, Lacey moved her entourage to the center of the room. The guy I’d just been speaking to managed to position himself behind the waiter bringing her a drink. I stopped to watch. Lacey greeted him with enthusiasm, so he must have been telling the truth about their childhood. But he seemed to be trying to talk to her seriously about something—a mistake in a gathering this public. Even under the soft rainbows of Sal’s Tiffany lamps I could see Lacey’s color rise. She turned away from him in hauteur and he made the mistake of grabbing her shoulders. The off–duty cop who’d gotten Emily her seat muscled his way through the crowd and hustled him out the door. When we followed a few minutes later, the man was standing across the street staring at the Golden Glow. As we came out he hunched his hands down in his pockets and walked away.

“Vic, you’ve made me
blissfully
happy,” Emily sighed as we walked past the line of Lacey’s fans. “There they are, waiting for hours just to get sight of her, and she actually kissed me and signed my book, maybe I’ll even be on TV. If someone told me two years ago that every girl in Chicago would be jealous of me, I’d never have believed them in a million years. But it’s come true.”

2 The Woman in the Road

Emily chattered with excitement all the way to the car, then fell deeply asleep in the backseat. Mary Louise leaned back on the passenger side and slipped out of her high heels.

“I stayed up all night to watch poor Diana marry Prince Creep when I was that age,” she commented. “At least Emily got to touch Lacey.”

I had wanted to go to O’Hare to join the vigil for Ringo and John, but my mother was desperately ill by then; I wasn’t going to worry her by riding around on buses and L’s after curfew. “Some guy was trying to get next to Lacey as we left. He said they grew up together in Humboldt Park. Is that true?”

“I’m glad you asked.” In the sodium lights on the Inner Drive I could see Mary Louise’s grin. “I have eaten and drunk Lacey Dowell facts for the last two weeks, ever since you called with the invite, and it’s high time you shared the treat. Lacey’s birth name was Magdalena Lucida Dowell. Her mother was Mexican, her father Irish; she’s an only child who grew up in Humboldt Park and went to St. Remigio’s, where she starred in all the school plays and won a scholarship to Northern Illinois. They have an important theater program. She got her first break in film twelve years ago, when—”

“All right, all right. I’m sure you know her shoe size and her favorite color, too.”

“Green, and eight–and–a–half. And she still likes the chorizo from her home neighborhood better than any trendy food in L.A. Ha, ha. Her father died in an industrial accident before she started making real money, but her mother lives with her in Santa Monica in a nice oceanfront mansion. Supposedly Lacey gives money to St. Remigio’s. They say she kept the cardinal from closing the school by shoring up its scholarship fund. If that’s true it’s worth something.”

“A lot.” The light at Lake Shore Drive turned green, and I swung into the northbound lanes.

“Come to think of it, you should have picked up some of these gems from Murray’s interview. Didn’t you watch?”

I grimaced at the dashboard. “I think I was so embarrassed to see him doing it at all that I couldn’t focus on what he was saying.”

“Don’t be too hard on him,” Mary Louise said. “Guy has to live on something, and you’re the one who told me the Global team axed his biggest stories.”

She was right. I knew Murray had been having a tough time since Global bought the paper. They hadn’t stopped any of his digging, but they wouldn’t print any stories they considered politically sensitive. “We have to pay attention to the people who do us favors in this state,” Murray quoted to me bitterly when management killed a story he’d been working on for months about the new women’s prison in Coolis. He mimicked his editor one night at dinner last winter:
Americans have grown accustomed to sound bites. Sex, sports, and violence are good sound bites. Skimming pension funds or buying off the state legislature are not. Get the picture, Murray?

What I’d somehow forgotten was how much of a survivor Murray was. No one was more surprised than me to get one of those prized tickets to Global’s postlaunch party—and maybe no one was more surprised to read on it that we were celebrating Murray’s debut as Chicago’s “Behind Scenes” reporter. What Murray had done to land the job I preferred not to contemplate. He certainly wasn’t going to tell me that—or anything else. When I called to ask, I spoke to an assistant who politely assured me she would give him my messages, but he hadn’t come to the phone himself.

I knew Murray had put out discreet feelers for reporting work around the country. But he was a couple of years older than me, and in your forties companies start looking at you as a liability. You need too much money, and you’re moving into an age bracket where you’re likely to start using your health insurance. Also against him was the same thing that made it hard for me to operate outside the city: all his insider knowledge was in Chicago. So he had looked long and hard at reality, and when reality stared back he blinked first. Was that a crime?

At two on a weeknight, traffic on the drive was sparse. To my right, sky and lake merged in a long smear of black. Except for the streetlights, coating the park with a silvery patina, we seemed alone on the edge of the world. I was glad for Mary Louise’s presence, even her monologue on what the sitter would charge for looking after Emily’s young brothers, on how much she had to do before summer session started—she was going to law school part time besides her part–time work for me—was soothing. Her grumbling kept me from thinking how close to the edge of the world my own life was, which fueled my hostility to Murray’s decision to sell himself on the air.

Even so, I pushed the car to seventy, as if I could outrun my irritability. Mary Louise, cop instincts still strong, raised a protest when we floated off the crest of the hill at Montrose. I braked obediently and slowed for our exit. The Trans Am was ten, with the dents and glitches to prove it, but it still hugged corners like a python. It was only at the traffic lights on Foster that you could hear a wheeze in the engine.

As we headed west into Uptown, the loneliness of the night lifted: beer cans and drunks emerged from the shadows. The city changes character every few blocks around here, from the enclave of quiet family streets where Mary Louise lives, to an immigrant landing stage where Russian Jews and Hindus improbably mix, to a refuse heap for some of Chicago’s most forlorn; closest to the lake is where Uptown is rawest. At Broadway we passed a man urinating behind the same Dumpsters where a couple was having sex.

Mary Louise glanced over her shoulder to make sure Emily was still asleep. “Go up to Balmoral and over; it’s quieter.”

At the intersection a shadow of a man was holding a grimy sign begging for food. He wove an uncertain thread through the oncoming headlights. I slowed to a crawl until I was safely past him.

Away from Broadway most of the streetlights were gone, shot out or just not replaced. I didn’t see the body in the road until I was almost on top of it. As I stood on the brakes, steering hard to the left, Mary Louise screamed and grabbed my arm. The Trans Am spun across the street and landed against a fire hydrant.

“Vic, I’m sorry. Are—are you okay? It’s a person, I thought you were going to run over him. And Emily, my God—” She unbuckled her seat belt with shaking fingers.

“I saw him,” I said in a strangled voice. “I was stopping. What could yanking my arm do to help with that?”

“Mary Lou, what’s wrong?” Emily was awake in the backseat, her voice squeaky with fear.

Mary Louise had leapt out of the car into the back with Emily while I still was fumbling with my own seat belt. Emily was more frightened than injured. She kept assuring Mary Louise she was fine and finally climbed out of the car to prove it. Mary Louise probed her neck and shoulders while I fished a flashlight out of my glove compartment.

Assured of Emily’s safety, Mary Louise hurried to the figure in the road. Professional training pushed the four beers she’d drunk during the evening to the back of her brain. Her stumbling gait on her way to the figure was due to the same shock that made my own legs wobble when I finally found the flashlight and joined her—we hadn’t been going fast enough to get hurt.

“Vic, it’s a woman, and she’s barely breathing.”

In the light of my flash I could see that the woman was very young. She was dark, with thick black hair tumbled about a drawn face. Her breath came in bubbling, rasping sobs, as if her lungs were filled with fluid. I’d heard that kind of breathing when my father was dying of emphysema, but this woman looked much too young for such an illness.

I pointed the light at her chest, as if I might be able to detect her lungs, and recoiled in horror. The front of her dress was black with blood. It had oozed through the thin fabric, sticking it to her body like a large bandage. Dirt and blood streaked her arms; her left humerus poked through the skin like a knitting needle out of a skein of wool. Perhaps she had wandered in front of a car, too dazed by heroin or Wild Rose to know where she was.

“Vic, what’s wrong?” Emily had crept close and was shivering next to me.

“Sugar, she’s hurt and we need to get her help. There are towels in the trunk, bring those while I call an ambulance.”

The best antidote for fear is activity. Emily’s feet crunched across broken glass back to the car while I pulled out my mobile phone and called for help.

“You take the towels; I’ll deal with the emergency crew.” Mary Louise knew what to say to get paramedics to the scene as fast as possible. “It looks like a hit–and–run victim, bad. We’re at Balmoral and—and—”

I finished covering the woman’s feet and ran to the corner for the street name. Glenwood, just east of Ashland. A car was about to turn into the street; I waved it on. The driver yelled that he lived there, but I took on the aura of my traffic–cop father and barked out that the street was closed. The driver swore at me but moved on. A few minutes later an ambulance careened around the corner. A squad car followed, blue strobes blinding us.

The paramedics leapt into efficient action. As they attached the woman to oxygen and slid her smoothly into the ambulance, a crowd began to gather, the mixed faces of Uptown: black, Middle Eastern, Appalachian. I scanned them, trying to pinpoint someone who seemed more avid than the rest, but it was hard to make out expressions when the only light came from the reds and blues of the emergency strobes. A couple of girls in head scarves were pointing and chattering; an adult erupted from a nearby walk–up, slapped one of them, and yanked them both inside.

I took the flashlight and searched the street, hoping to find a wallet or paper or anything that might identify the woman, but was stopped by one of the patrolmen, who led me over to Mary Louise with the comment that searching the accident scene was police business.

Mary Louise kept a protective arm around Emily while we answered questions. The officers joined me in an inspection of the Trans Am. The fireplug had popped the hood and bent the front axle.

“You the driver, ma’am?” one of the cops asked. “Can I see your license?”

I dug it out of my wallet. He slowly copied the information onto his report, then typed in my name and plate numbers to see how many outstanding DUI’s I had. When the report came back negative, he had me walk a line toe–to–toe—much to the amusement of the pointing, snickering crowd.

“Want to tell me how this happened, ma’am?”

I glared at Mary Louise but went through my paces: no streetlights, didn’t see body until almost on top of it, swerved to avoid, impaled on fireplug.

“What brought you down this street to begin with, ma’am?”

Normally I don’t let the police make my business their business, but normally I don’t have a white–faced sixteen–year–old in tow. Poor Emily, her thrilling adventure in ruins around an accident victim—I didn’t need to prolong her misery by fighting with cops over the Fourth Amendment. I meekly explained that I was running Mary Louise and Emily home and that we were taking a shortcut through side streets. A long cut as it turned out, but who could have known that? And at least our stumbling down this street might give the young woman a fighting chance at survival. All I really grudged was my damaged car. I felt ashamed: a young woman lay close to death and I was worrying about my car. But major repairs, or even a new vehicle, were definitely not part of this summer’s budget. I thought resentfully of Murray, rolling with the punches and coming up roses.

“And where had you been with the young lady?” A narrowing of the eyes, what were two grown women doing with a teenager they weren’t related to.

“We had an invitation to the Lacey Dowell event downtown,” Mary Louise said. “I’m Emily’s foster mother and I don’t let her go to events like that alone at her age. You can call Detective Finchley in the First District if you have any questions—he was my commanding officer for four years and he knows how Emily and I came together.”

After that the atmosphere thawed: one of the men knew Finchley, and besides, if Mary Louise was one of them she couldn’t possibly be involved in anything criminal. The officers helped me push the Trans Am away from the hydrant so that it wouldn’t be ticketed. They even gave us a lift home. I didn’t mind being squashed between the cage and the backseat: it beat waiting for a slow ride down Clark Street on the number twenty–two bus.

As we pulled away from the curb the people on the street watched happily: a satisfactory end to the outing—three white women carried away in the squad car.