Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 08 (21 page)

She
promised, but not with the air of someone placing great confidence in my
abilities. As if to test her assessment I stopped at the Messenger house on my
way north. The housekeeper opened the door a crack.

“No
reporting.” Her accent was thick, almost unintelligible.

“I’m
a detective.” I spoke slowly. “Is Mr. Messenger home?”

“No
reporting,” she repeated firmly, starting to shut the door.

Sticking
my toe in the crack, I fished frantically in my brain for the few words of
Polish I’d learned from my father’s mother. Those didn’t include private
detective, of course, but since he’d been a policeman I’d heard her mention
that. To palliate the lie I pulled out my wallet to show her the photostat of
my investigator’s license.

She
frowned at it, reiterated “Policjant,” and opened the door. When I asked again
for Fabian she answered in Polish. Disappointed at my blank stare, she said,
“No home,” and turned on her heel.

Feeling
guilty—at impersonating the police, at trespassing on Emily’s privacy—I trotted
up the stairs to her bedroom. Someone had sorted through it with an
undiscriminating hand. The times I’d been here it had held the mild disarray of
the average teenager, but today drawers stood open, trailing bits of
sweatshirts and underwear, books lay haphazardly on the floor, and papers
tilted drunkenly over the sides of the small desk. I couldn’t believe Finchley
or Neely had searched the place so carelessly. Either Fabian had vented his
rage here, or Emily had been hunting something crucial before she fled.

I
picked up the papers from the floor. They were all schoolwork—essays, geometry
problems, class notes. The essays expressed what Ms. Cottingham had called “the
standard subjects”—the intense yearning for love and death that catches you at
adolescence.

I
hoped for more poems, or a diary, but found nothing so personal. Only in the
margins of the notes, between savagely etched doodles, were occasional remarks.
“Why, oh why?”appeared, and stern adjurations to silence, in English and
French. The hand itself, although still juvenile, was tiny, as though the
writer were trying to efface her presence from the paper.

Stuck
among the papers was a snapshot of Emily with Joshua and Nathan. She was
cradling the baby, holding Joshua by the hand. The picture might have dated
from the previous summer: she wore the muddy yellow shirt I’d seen her in last
Saturday, but over shorts. Both she and Joshua stared at the camera with a
painful solemnity. I tucked the picture into my notebook and continued hunting.

A
letter from Emily’s grandmother, in the round script taught in the thirties,
thanked her for her card and described the coming of spring to Du Quoin, in
downstate Illinois. The cat was catching sparrows in the garden instead of the
mice in the kitchen. The college students were feeling their oats with the warm
weather; Grandmother hoped Emily was behaving herself and taking advantage of
her own educational opportunities. I copied down the address, wondering if
someone who saw herself as a mouse would turn to a grandmother who wrote so
prosaically about her own murderous cat.

I
took a quick look through Emily’s wardrobe. Girls today wear anything, from
leggings and smocks to tattered jeans and granny dresses. Girls whose fathers
earned Fabian’s kind of money have drawers spilling out with teddies and other
feathery lingerie. In Emily’s closet the pink wool dress she’d worn to
Manfred’s dinner hung with some of Deirdre’s other castoffs and two pleated
skirts, last in fashion when I was in high school. I shut the door, embarrassed
to have pried on such desolate ground.

After
that I couldn’t bring myself to go through her dresser, even in the hopes of
finding a hidden diary. Where the plain cotton briefs stuck out I shoved them in
and firmly closed the drawers.

I
picked up a few of the books at random. The old standbys,Charlotte’s Web and
Laura Ingalls Wilder, were mixed with Marion Zimmer Bradley and Ursula K.

LeGuin.
A dreaming child, or perhaps one in retreat from the painful world she
inhabited. I jotted some of the titles next to the grandmother’s address,
wondering what possible significance I could hope to find in them.

A fat
book had been thrown in a corner, its edge just visible where it poked beyond
the radiator. I lay down flat to pull it out. It was a copy of
Churchill’sHistory of the English-Speaking Peoples . In the dust jacket Fabian
had written “To Emily, the Alpha and the Omega. Happy Birthday. Love, Father.”

The
alpha and omega? Let alone that it was a strange thing to write to his
daughter, Fabian had never seemed to me to treat her that way. Although there
was his unexpected gentleness when I was leaving the house on Saturday.

Something
else lay behind the radiator. Impelled by what curiosity I couldn’t say, I stuck
a hand in to pull it out. It was a baseball bat, signed by Nellie Fox. I’d
noticed it, casually, last Wednesday night, in the hall umbrella stand.

The
head was covered with a dried, scabby mess. I looked at it, stupefied, knowing
what it was but refusing to accept knowledge, then stuffed it back under the
radiator and fled the house.

What’s
in a Poem?

I
drove over to the lake. The ground was still brown, cut in ugly hillocks by the
stones flung along it during last winter’s storms. I walked out to the
promontory jutting east at Fifty-fifth Street. The day was cool; the city to
the north was shrouded by fog. The water, gunmetal-blue, slapped at my feet. An
old man sat by a line, a bucket and net next to him. He didn’t look up as I
passed.

Emily
could not possibly have killed Deirdre. I made myself repeat those words. The
bat somehow had gotten into her room. Fabian put it there and threatened to
turn her in for her mother’s murder if she didn’t give him an alibi for last
Friday. The pressure proved too much for her, poor little mouse, and she ran
away. I liked it. But would Terry Finchley?

In a
second’s unthinking revulsion I had thrust the bat back behind the radiator. I
wanted to protect Emily and I didn’t want anyone to know the weapon was there.
But I would have to tell the police. Staring sightlessly into the mist, I saw
it had been foolish to think otherwise. And my first impulse, to make an
anonymous call, was also foolish: my prints were on the bat. At least I hadn’t
been so stupid as to wipe them clean. The surface might show Fabian’s as well.

I
realized my cheeks were wet. A thin rain had started to fall without my
noticing. I walked back to my car, as slowly as though every muscle in my body
had been flayed from the bone.

Going
in the Eleventh Street entrance to the police station I was struck by an
unexpected nostalgia. It’s an old precinct, still with the high wood counter,
narrow corridors, and dim lights I remember from the stations where my father
used to serve. I longed for the sight of him at the counter, waiting to buy me
an ice cream after school, or to listen to my tale of woe with a gentle smile
my mother never wore. I longed for a comfort that life could not give me.

The
desk sergeant sent me up to the detective area without even a smile, let alone
an ice cream. Several of the crew I knew were at their desks. John McGonnigal,
a sergeant I hadn’t seen for a while, looked surprised, but called out a
cheerful greeting. And Bobby Mallory, my father’s oldest friend on the force,
now a year from retirement, saw me from his office and came out.

“What’s
up, Vicki? Come to see how the worse half lives? Or do you have something on
your chest after last night?” Bobby has moved from active dismay at my career
to a grudging neutrality.

“They
say confession is good for the soul. And I have a confession to make.”

Bobby
looked at me sourly, but called Terry to his office. Finchley’s face showed a
little gray at the edges. His normal poise had been worn raw by the stresses of
dealing with the wake Fabian was churning up.

“Have
you found the girl?” he demanded. “We’ve notified airlines, bus lines,
circulated the CTA, the cab companies, and we’re not hearing anything.”

“Except
round-the-clock from Clive Landseer, Super Kajmowicz, and the networks,” Bobby
interjected.

“No,”
I said baldly. “I’d much rather be here with Emily than what I do have: the
murder weapon.”

When
I explained what I’d found and how, Bobby snarled, but Terry smiled bleakly.
“So the girl killed her mother?”

“Instead
of Tamar Hawkings doing it, you mean?” I couldn’t keep a nasty inflection out
of my voice.

“Look,
Vic, we do the best we can with what evidence we have. Now you’ve got the
murder weapon in the girl’s bedroom. How did it get there if she didn’t put it
there?”

“Fabian
lives in that house too. He could have stuck it behind her radiator.”

“And
she left it there? Come on, Vicki, think what you’re saying: Would she have
slept three nights in the room with her mother’s brains stowed behind her
radiator?” Bobby was keeping close tabs on the case—he had the whole chronology
in his head.

“And
she would have slept if she’d put it there herself?” I demanded. “You’re
suggesting that if she murdered her mother she kept the weapon as a trophy, but
shoved it out of sight. If Fabian put it there maybe she didn’t know about it.”

“Come
on—why would a man try to frame his own daughter?” Bobby, who doted on all four
of his own daughters and numerous grandchildren, couldn’t imagine a home like
Fabian’s.

“Easier
to believe the girl killed her mother?” I demanded.

Terry
pressed his temples with one hand, as though trying to make sure his head
stayed in one piece. “The important thing now is to send someone down to
collect it. Not being a private citizen like Vic, I need a warrant. And you
know how Fabian Messenger is going to react to learning you’ve been searching
Emily’s room behind his back.”

“Come
on, guys: I found the murder weapon for you. Don’t act as though I hid it there
myself.”

“Come
to that, I wouldn’t put it past you.” Bobby thought he was being funny.

“The
Finch has told me you’ve got a bee in your bonnet about Fabian Messenger.

If
you didn’t think we were going after him hard enough to suit you, you could
have put it there.”

I
smiled. “In that case I would have planted it in Fabian’s room. I wish I’d
thought of that—instead of taking evidence seriously. I did come here, even
though I knew you guys would start haring after Emily. Just as you did Tamar
Hawkings. Whom you’ve yet to find.”

I
swept from the station in a fine dudgeon. Back in my car, though, my worries
about the girl returned full force. I couldn’t swear she hadn’t killed her
mother. I didn’t have any sense of what a teenager under the kinds of stresses
Emily endured might do. I pulled her poem from my pocket and read it through
again. What if she and Fabian were the cats and Deirdre the mouse whom they’d
attacked together? I didn’t like that idea at all. It implied a thralldom to
Fabian of unbearable servility.

I put
the car in gear and drove north to Arcadia House. Marilyn Lieberman came out of
a meeting to talk to me.

“Any
news about Deirdre?” she asked. “People keep calling me, wanting to know if her
death had any connection to the shelter. And everyone on the board is worried.
You found her ... her body, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.
I feel like Lady Macbeth—in my house? Right now I’m more worried about the
kids. You heard they vanished?”

Marilyn
opened her eyes wide. “No. I tend not to watch the news. Life around here is
too harrowing without thinking about war and famine. Where ... ? Why ...

?”

“I
wish I had a clue. I’m worried that Fabian killed Deirdre and is coercing
Emily—his daughter—into giving him an alibi. That she freaked from the pressure
and took off. He’s got too many important friends for the police to push very hard
on him.”

I
couldn’t tell Marilyn about the baseball bat before the police had recovered
it. I did recount my evening at the Messengers’, and what I’d seen of him
since. Unlike Emily’s teacher, Marilyn had no trouble believing me.

“In
fact it probably explains why Deirdre did so much for us. Sal suggested she was
an abused wife, but I didn’t want to think about it. The trouble is, a job like
this—you’re giving all day long. I want support from my board—so I turn a blind
eye to the possibility that they have problems.”

“There’s
something I’d like you to look at.” I pulled Emily’s poem out of my bag. “Does
this tell you anything?”

Marilyn
read it. “This Deirdre’s daughter? Sounds like one unhappy girl. ‘A mouse
between two cats.’ Ugh. Let’s get Eva to take a look at it.”

Eva
Kuhn, Arcadia’s therapist, was conducting a group therapy session, Marilyn’s
administrative assistant told us. She’d be free in half an hour.

Marilyn
took me to her office to wait.

It was
a Spartan room, furnished with leftovers from some of Arcadia’s corporate
sponsors. Marilyn had done her best to humanize the space with plants.