Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 07 (53 page)

We’d
all ridden over to the Fourth Area together, Chamfers insisting that I was a
notorious break-in artist whom they’d surprised in the act. “I’m very grieved
over Simon Lezak’s death. He was trying to help out, to chase her from the
premises when we surprised her—”

“And
he got carried away by his zeal and ran over the Impala,” I butted in.

“I
don’t think we’ll ever have a clear picture of what happened under the
expressway tonight.” Chamfers addressed himself to Detective Angela Willoughby,
who seemed to be in charge of the interrogation. “Truckers don’t carry the
little black boxes you get on a 747, so we don’t have Simon’s last thoughts.”

“Hatred
and glee would sum them up pretty well; I could see the boy’s face in my
rearview mirror just before I left the road,” I said. “Did you get a statement
from the oncoming trucker? He could probably confirm that Simon was doing his
best to run me over.”

Willoughby
looked at me with flat gray eyes, but didn’t say anything. The uniformed man
taking notes dutifully wrote down my question and poised his pen over his
notebook for our next outburst.

I
tried one more time. “Were they still loading Paragon Steel materials onto
trucks when your officers showed up? The controller at Paragon might have a
word or two to say about that. And I doubt if he’d connect me with Diamond
Head’s theft ring in any way.”

Chamfers
and Peter Felitti joined in a chorus of outrage. Who was I—a sneak thief—to
question their business operations? When Dick showed up—he was the Felitti
brothers’ counsel, after all—I began to think I was going to be arrested while
the upright citizens went home to bed.

I was
certainly the one who looked like a miscreant. Besides the tears in my jacket,
the knees in my jeans had broken through when I slid across the pavement in
them! My shoes were in tatters, my hair matted to my skull, and I didn’t even
want to know what my face looked like, justice may be blind, but she does favor
a clean, neat appearance.

The
Felittis had called Dick away from some party or other, but he’d stopped at
home to change into an austere navy suit. Angela Willoughby was clearly
impressed, both by his blond good looks and his imposingly wealthy demeanor:
she allowed him to huddle in a corner with his clients.

When
he came away he talked sorrowfully to Angela about the evening’s disaster. A
subordinate had gone overboard in his loyalty to his employers. It was tragic
that Simon Lezak had died in action, but fortunate that I’d survived.

I
bared my teeth at the last sentence. “Glad you think so, Dick. Your
daddy-in-law explain to you how old Simon happened to go overboard? How he
jumped me to get me to the plant?”

“Misguided
zeal,” Dick murmured. “They knew you’d broken into the plant before—they didn’t
know how far you’d go in an investigation.”

I
jumped up, or tried to—my muscles responded with a slow crawl—and grabbed his
arnL “Dick. We need to talk. They’re not telling you the truth. You’re going to
be blind-sided.”

He
gave me the superior smile that used to infuriate me fifteen years ago. “Later,
Vic. I need to get my clients home, and I think you’d be glad to be there
yourself.”

It
was close to midnight by then. Willoughby was just agreeing that the Felittis
and Chamfers could leave with Dick, when Conrad Rawlings showed up. I’d told

Willoughby
at the beginning of the evening that he and Terry Finchley were both involved
in the case, but didn’t realize she’d actually sent someone to notify him. As
it turned out, she hadn’t: he’d picked up word from someone at his precinct
who’d heard it earlier on the police band.

Rawlings
looked around the room. “Ms. W, I thought I told you I was going to be peeved
if you went off to tackle thugs on your own without telling me. And I don’t
even get the story from you in person. Some stranger has to tell me about it.”

I put
my hands up to pat my filthy curls. “Detective Willoughby—Sergeant Rowlings. I
think you met Dick Yarborough a couple of years ago, Sergeant. These other guys
are Pe.ter and Jason Felitti and Milt Chamfers. They’re going home. The
detective here is sorry she had to bother such swell suburbanites.

“The
reason I didn’t call you to tell you in person was that I was too embarrassed:
I got jumped. Went to Forty-first and Kedzie to pick up my car, and the Felitti
brothers’ pet thug, Simon, was lying in wait for me.”

Dick
looked at me with bright, hard eyes. “Vic, we don’t need to hear that story
again. I’m taking my clients home. I can only say I warned you to mind your own
business.”

“The
thing is,” I continued, speaking to Rawlings, “the boys here are so pumped up,
they’ve forgotten about forensic evidence.”

Dick
stopped on his way out of the room.

“Fingerprints,
Richard. Neither the Hulk—sorry, Simon the Valiant—nor his sidekick wore
gloves. They jumped me at the corner of Forty-first and Kedzie when I was
picking up the Impala. Even though the car is a mess, it should be possible to
find their prints on the inside. The Hulk sat in the backseat with a gun at my
head. The sidekick sat in the passenger seat with another gun stuck in my ribs.
That’s how we ended up at Diamond Head. They forced me to drive there. Anyway,
you should find their prints inside the car.”

“You
impound that Impala, Detective?” Conrad demanded.

“It’s
been towed, Sergeant,” Willoughby said stiffly. “You get on your little mike
and tell them it’s evidence in a murder case. Not to mention aggravated
assault. I want that thing at the lab before the sun comes up, Detective. I’ve
been working this case all week now and I’m going to be pretty frustrated if I
lose it because we compacted the evidence.”

Her
expression would have melted steel, but she spoke into her mike. Dick had
turned pale during the discussion and had started talking to his father-in-law
in a savage undervoice. I couldn’t hear the conversation, but it was clearly
dawning on Dick that his relatives were landing him on a griddle. He gave me a
look I couldn’t decipher, so far was it removed from his usual cockiness, and
hustled his clients from the room.

While
Willoughby busied herself with summoning underlings, Conrad gripped my
shoulders and demanded a detailed account of my evening. I’d given him a brief
synopsis by the time Willoughby finished issuing orders to get the Impala from
the police pound to the lab.

Conrad
turned back to her. “You get a doctor to see this suspect, Detective?” Conrad
demanded.

Willoughby
lost some of the icy poise that had made her formidable during four hours of
questioning. “Her life isn’t in danger. I was trying to make sure we didn’t
have serious felony charges to bring against her.”

“Take
it from me: we don’t. I’m driving her to a doctor. You got a problem with that,
I’ll give you my watch commander’s phone number.”

Willoughby
was too professional to get into a fight with another detective in front of a
suspect. I would have been pissed in her place, too, but under the
circumstances I didn’t have much empathy to spare for her.

“I
really don’t need a hospital, Sergeant,” I said as we left the station. “I just
want to get home and get to sleep.”

“Ms.
W, I have seldom seen anyone who looked more in need of major surgery. Of
course, it could just be your elegant wardrobe. But unless you want a
high-speed chase along the South Side on foot, you don’t have any choice in the
matter, on account of you don’t have a car and I’m driving.”

He
took me to Mt. Sinai, but not even his muscle could get me to a doctor right
away—there were eight gunshot wounds and three knife injuries ahead of me. The
charge nurse had stood up to tougher pressure than Conrad could muster.

While
we waited I asked Rawlings to phone Mr. Contre-ras, who would be pacing the
floor by now—if not taking the law into his own hands. Around three, after I’d
fallen asleep on the narrow vinyl chair, I was finally taken into one of the
treatment cubicles. Conrad watched anxiously while the harried intern cleaned
my abrasions, gave me a tetanus shot, and stitched together the deepest of the
cuts in my abdomen. I also had a couple of burns on my back from the
antifreeze. In my general misery I hadn’t noticed them.

“She
going to be okay?” Conrad asked.

The
intern looked up in surprise. “She’s fine—this is all superficial. If you want
to arrest her, Sergeant, she can certainly handle jail with these wounds.”

“I
don’t think we need to do that.” Rawlings shepherded me from the room with a
packet of pain pills and a prescription for antibiotics. “Still, Ms. W, if you
go off on another junket like tonight’s without letting me know—I’m not so
sure. I might stick you into County for a month to sober you up.”

I
slept the clock around and woke to find Mr. Contreras in my living room. Even
though Conrad had phoned him from Mt. Sinai last night, the old man had kept
vigil in the lobby until we finally showed up. It was a little after four then.
I went to bed at once, and had no notion of whether Rawlings stayed or not.

Mr.
Contreras, who’d kept a set of keys, had let himself in a little after two.
“Just wanted to see with my own eyes that you was okay, doll. You feel like
telling me what went on last night? I thought you was just getting the Impala.”

“That’s
what I thought too. Didn’t Conrad clue you in?” I told him about the Hulk
jumping me, and his hideous death under the Stevenson. At the end of the
recital, after Mr. Contreras had gone over events enough to allay the worst of
his worries, I said I thought our troubles were over.

“The
only thing to worry about now is subpoenas, and they’ll be hitting us thick and
fast. But you can relax your watchdogging. And give me back my keys, please.”

“So
you can give them to Conrad?” His tone was jeering, but there was real pain in
his face.

“You’re
the only guy who’s ever had the keys to my place. I don’t go handing them
around randomly.”

He
refused to let me lighten the conversation. “Yeah, but… seemed like he was
holding you awful close last night. This morning. And he didn’t leave here
until noon.”

“I
know you don’t like it when I date anyone.” I kept my voice gentle. “I’m sorry
about that—sorry because I love you, you know, and I hate to hurt you.”

He
knotted his hands together. “It’s just… Face it, doll: he’s black. African, if
you like that better. They’d burn both of you in your bed back in my old
neighborhood.”

I
smiled sadly. “I’m glad we’re not on the South Side, then.”

“Don’t
make a joke of it, Victoria. It’s not funny. Maybe I’ve got some prejudice.
Heck, probably I do, I’m seventy-seven, you don’t change how you was raised,
and I grew up in a different time. But I don’t like seeing you with him, it
makes me uncomfortable. And if I don’t… Well, you just can’t picture how ugly
people can be in this town. I don’t want you buying yourself a lot of grief,
doll.”

“I
just got through seeing with my own eyes how ugly people in this town can be.”
I leaned forward and patted his leg. “Look, I know it’s hard—to be black and
white together. But we’re not that far down the road yet. We’re two people
who’ve always liked and respected each other, and now we’re trying to see
whether, well, our attraction is just bad old jungle fever, or has something
more substantial to it. Anyway, Conrad isn’t black. He’s kind of copper.”

Mr.
Contreras clutched his ears. “I can tell just by you saying that that you like
the guy.”

“Sure,
I like him. But don’t crowd me into making any other declarations. I’m not
ready for them yet.”

He
wordlessly handed me my keys and got to his feet.

He
tried to shake off the arm I put around him, but I kept a grip on his shoulder.
“Please don’t cut me out of your life, or take yourself out of mine. I’m not
going to say something stupid, like I know you’ll come around in the end. Maybe
you will, maybe you won’t. But you and I have been friends a lot longer than
I’ve known Conrad. It would bring me great pain to lose you.”

He
mustered a smile from some depth. “Right, doll. I can’t talk about it anymore
right now. Anyway, I been away from the princess too long. She needs to get out
more often while she’s nursing.”

I
felt melancholy after my neighbor left. I’d started an affair with Rawlings
because an erotic spark had always jumped between us, and the time had somehow
been right last week. But I didn’t need Jesse Helms or Louis Farrakhan to tell
me the road ahead would be rocky if Rawlings and I got serious about each
other.

As I
was listlessly poking through the refrigerator Murray called, practically
slobbering into the phone in his eagerness for my story. This morning’s
Herald-Star had had a fine photo of the wreckage of Simon’s truck and the
Impala, but the text was short and ambiguous. The paper didn’t want to accuse
the Felitti boys of any malfeasance, not with their political connections. They
didn’t want to take me on, though, since I’d been an important source for them
over the years. I gave Murray my version of events: I had nothing to gain and
everything to lose by being snappy with him while the Felittis gathered
ammunition. When we finished, I sent him to Ben Loring in the hopes that
Paragon Steel could provide some hard documentation to shore up my own case.