Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 08 (17 page)

I
waited in front of the house for nearly an hour. No one emerged.

A
Family Affair

“Listen,
Vic, I’m not trying to tell you what to do. I’m just trying to lay out life as
it is. You may think Fabian Messenger is a psych case—hell, from what you say,
the guy needs a straitjacket and some good drugs. But he’s got friends who
wield a lot of power in this town. You saw him at six last night, right? And by
nine Kajmowicz was talking to the Finch at home. Someone got up the ladder
almighty fast.”

Ted
Kajmowicz was deputy superintendent of detectives. A call from him to a
sergeant at home could be the chance of a lifetime—or career-ending. I could
only imagine whether Finchley had been nervous or angry or embarrassed at the
idea I’d put him on the spot with his most senior commander. I could only
imagine because he hadn’t felt able to talk to me about it—he’d gone to Conrad.

I was
trying to explain why this upset me. “It’s the idea that I’m your woman, not a
professional whom he should talk to directly. I don’t like being sent messages
by my lover telling me to behave.”

“Hey,
girl, we know it’s hard on both of us, trying to mix all the things we’re
mixing. Not just race, but you being ama—private—and me being public. If you’re
saying the Finch should have called you direct, yeah, he should have. He was
afraid he’d be too angry to talk to you straight.”

“It’s
my perversity that I’d rather face someone’s anger than be ignored.”

I
turned my head to stare out the window at a trio of boys playing cops and drug
lords. We were in Conrad’s car in front of his mother’s house, trying to clear
the air between us before going in to face Mrs. Rawlings’s heavy guns.

Conrad
had called me this morning with the news that Fabian Messenger had sworn out a
peace bond on me and that I had better never go near his daughter again. When I
asked whether Finchley had interviewed Messenger as a serious suspect, Conrad
told me he couldn’t discuss the case with me. It had not made our drive south a
happy one.

“Well,
it’s the cop in me that doesn’t want a civilian mucking up a murder investigation,”
Conrad said. “But it’s the friend in me that doesn’t want to see you burned by
someone with Fabian Messenger’s connections.”

He
put a hand on my arm. “Look, I know you’re upset, but think about this: most of
your clients want favors from the U.S. government. Your bread-and-butter,
Darraugh Graham, gets three quarters of his business through federal contracts.
On top of that he’s probably a Republican who spends a good chunk of change on
Alec Gantner. If the senator calls and tells him either to cool you down or
stop doing business with you, don’t you think he will?”

Before
I could respond, one of Conrad’s nieces danced down the walk to fetch us. She
opened the passenger door and pulled on my hand.

“Come
on, Vic. Auntie Zu-Zu won’t open her presents until you’re inside. What did you
bring her?” Jasmine, at six, was one of the pleasures of joining in Conrad’s
family life.

“It’s
a surprise. If I tell you it won’t be a surprise anymore.”

I’d
found a sterling collar pin of a crossed saw and hammer, which seemed suitable
for a woman in the trades. I pulled the little box from my pocket and gave it
to Jasmine. She squeezed it and ran down the guest list for me while I fetched
tortellini salad, my contribution to the potluck, from the backseat.

Jasmine
hurled guesses about my gift at me as she shepherded us up the walk.

At
the door Conrad turned to me.

“You’re
not going to let this spoil Zu-Zu’s birthday, are you?” he asked.

“Of
course not, Conrad. I’m not a prima donna—but I am a professional. It’s an
uphill battle getting you boys in blue to believe it; but I’m not ready to
concede defeat yet.”

He
grinned. “I was afraid you’d caught that slip.”

Jasmine,
tired of adult procrastination, got behind her uncle and tried shoving him into
the house. We laughed a little and let her push us inside.

“I
got them, Aunt Zu-Zu. I got them. Now won’t you open your presents? Mommy got
you the prettiest sc—”

“Jazzy,”
her older sister shrieked, cutting her off. “You spoil everything.

Shut
up!”

Jasmine,
an irrepressible party lover, ignored the outcry. She took my offering over to
Camilla, who got up from the floor to hug her brother and me.

The
room was packed. The whole Rawlings clan had turned out, all except Conrad’s
youngest sister Janice, a neurology resident in Atlanta. In addition, old
family friends, the tradeswomen who were working with Camilla to put together
the Lamia cooperative, and all their children had arrived. Phoebe Quirk, as
Lamia’s main investor, had shown up. And Tessa Reynolds, a sculptor whom Conrad
had dated for several years, had been sitting on the floor next to Camilla.

Mrs.
Rawlings hoisted herself from the couch where she’d been talking to Elaine, her
oldest daughter. She groaned audibly and rubbed her back to let us know how
much the effort of courtesy to her son’s girlfriend cost her. I stepped around
the thicket of people on the floor to greet her and Elaine.

“Hi,
baby,” Mrs. Rawlings said to Conrad. “You’ve been working too hard lately.
We’ve missed you. Tessa came by; I know you’ll want to talk to her.”

“Vic’s
here, Mama,” Conrad said gently.

“I
know she is; I can see. How are you, Vic?” She gave me her hand in a greeting
as formal and distant as a queen’s.

A
thickset woman in her early sixties, she’d been left a widow with five children
when Conrad was twelve. None of them had had an easy time of it; Mrs.

Rawlings
put in long hours at a bakery. The older ones did odd jobs while still in high
school. Only Janice, the baby, had had the middle-class luxury of college,
financed by her hard-working siblings.

As
the one boy, Conrad had been drafted willy-nilly as man of the family. In that
role he’d worked twenty or thirty hours a week all through high school.

He’d
still managed to be an honor-roll student—a fact that left him with no sympathy
for the current crop of high school dropouts.

As
Camilla had told me more than once, no woman would have been good enough for
Mama’s boy under those circumstances. The fact that I was white made me less
desirable than many, but apparently Tessa, now Mrs. Rawlings’s darling, used to
get a greeting only marginally less frigid than mine.

Camilla
thought Conrad would be living with his mother still if Vietnam hadn’t sucked
him up out of high school. “Conrad can’t stand to hurt anyone,” she’d explained.
“Mama would weep and moan about her back any time he talked about moving out,
so he’d stay—just a few more weeks until she feels better. And when would that
have been? No. That war was a pisser, and Uncle Sam treated Conrad just as
shitty as every other South Side black the army got their hands on. But I still
gotta think Vietnam had a silver lining.”

I
thought of that conversation now, as Mrs. Rawlings answered my conventional
greeting by putting a hand on the small of her back. “I’m fine, Vic. These aches
and pains are what you get when you’re an old woman. Of course, I wouldn’t have
moved the sofa if I’d known for sure Conrad was coming, but now that he’s
seeing you his family doesn’t—”

Her
son put an arm around her and gently moved her to her seat on the couch.

Whatever
comment he made to her was swallowed in the shrieks of the children, but in a
few minutes I saw her start to smile: a gentle, long-suffering smile—as if to
say she was only enjoying herself as a favor to her beloved children—but a
definite upturning of the lips nonetheless.

Mrs.
Rawlings summoned Tessa Reynolds to the couch. When Conrad gave her his ironic
smile and a hug I was surprised to feel a stab of jealousy. Since my divorce
I’ve embarked on a number of affairs—relationships—what have you—but I’d never
felt jealous of any of my partners’ other loves before. The feeling so
astonished me that I stared at Conrad and Tessa, trying to sort out why. I
realized suddenly that Elaine was watching me with a sly smirk about her mouth.

Kissing
my fingers at her I sat down with the group around Camilla. The third sister,
Clarissa, embraced me and slid over to make room for me.

Phoebe
Quirk, looking about sixteen in baggy jeans and an embroidered peasant blouse,
was in the middle of explaining financial details of Lamia’s rehab project to
two of the tradeswomen in the group. She eyed me warily, but continued her
exposition until Jasmine plopped down briefly to describe the food.

“Vic
brought some of her spaghettis,” Jasmine informed us. “The short round ones
that look like toffees.”

“Tortellini,bellissima
.” I tweaked one of her pigtails.

“That
means ‘beautiful one,’ “ Jasmine told Camilla. “I can speak Italian, can’t I,
Vic?”

“Molto
bene, cara,” I agreed.

“Grazie,
Victoria,” Jasmine piped back, then darted off to share her erudition with her
mother.

I
turned to Phoebe. “You were starting to explain how this rehab project is being
funded. Home Free has to raise the money to pay Lamia? Or do they already have
it in hand?”

Phoebe
raised sandy brows in a warning twitch. “Century Bank, Vic. They feel bad about
not being able to fund the original project, so they’re floating a bridge
loan.”

“My,
my—a bank with human feelings. Who’s signing? You? Lamia? Home Free?”

“We’ll
spread the risk, but Home Free has a good track record as a fund-raiser. I
don’t think we’re going to be overextended.” Her mouth tightened in anger as
the other women—a carpenter named Agatha and a painter whose name I didn’t
know—started looking anxious.

“Why
are you trying to get everyone so upset, Vic?” Phoebe demanded.

“Less
than two days after you told me City Hall was denying your permit, you get the
rehab project. That’s the part I don’t get.”

“Suspicious.
This girl is so suspicious for a living, she can’t get it out of her system even
at a party!” Camilla said to the group. “I get the sweetest birthday present
you can imagine, tied up in a bow, and Vic wants me to send it back because she
can’t read the ingredients on the package.”

Clarissa,
who worked for an accounting firm, spoke sharply to her sister. “If there’s a
problem with the funding, you should find out, Camilla. Otherwise you could get
squeezed halfway into the project. You know, if you lay out fifty grand on
supplies and suddenly the line of credit dies, not only do you have to declare
bankruptcy but your name is mud all over town.”

“My
lawyers—Capital Concerns’s lawyers—are going to make sure that doesn’t happen,”
Phoebe said.

“You
can write all kinds of guarantees into the contract, but you still spend months
going before arbitrators if something goes wrong,” Agatha, the carpenter,
persisted. “If Vic thinks there’s a problem, I want to know about it.”

“It
happened too fast, that’s all,” I said. “On Tuesday Lamia was dead, for reasons
so politically volatile that my usual City Hall source was scared to talk. Was
it just a coincidence that twenty-four hours after I started asking questions
Home Free came through for you with this rehab job?”

“Maybe
you overestimate the power of your questions,” Phoebe drawled. “There is such a
thing as coincidence, you know. Let it alone, Vic. This project is too
important—not just for the six women in Lamia, but for all the tradeswomen in
Chicago. If we can make it succeed it’ll open so many opportunities for them.

They’ll
find work they just can’t get access to in the current environment.”

She
was right. Why did I want to stir that pot? Between Deirdre’s murder,
Darraugh’s son, the mess in my office, the upcoming income tax deadline, I had
troubles enough to occupy me for some time to come. I held up my right hand,
Girl Scout fashion, and promised to leave Lamia’s affairs in peace.

Jasmine
brought Camilla’s presents over and stacked them around her on the floor. I
joined in the excitement that gifts always arouse, talked to Tessa about her
newest commission, and danced with Jasmine in a small space in the front hall.

At
five-thirty Conrad asked if we could leave. “I want to get you home in good
time so that I don’t have to race to make roll call.”

When
we said our good-byes Mrs. Rawlings was desolate. Nothing Conrad said could
persuade her I wasn’t deliberately dragging him away early in order to wound
her.

Police
Review

When
Conrad dropped me off I managed to slip inside and up the stairs without
rousing my neighbor or the dogs. We’d had a run this morning, the dogs and I; I
could leave them overnight with a clean conscience.

I
pulled the bottle of Black Label from my small liquor cupboard and poured a
drink. My unsettled life made me long for security right now: I took out one of
my mother’s red Venetian glasses, usually saved for special occasions, and
tried to capture her fiery warmth in its refractions.