Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 08 (22 page)

Artwork
by the residents gave the room a jolt of eccentric color.

While
we drank overboiled coffee women and children darted in for brief moments of
recognition. Marilyn greeted each by name, with a personal question—had this
child made a crown in artwork that morning? had that mother been to the jobs
counselor yesterday?—then picked up the thread of our conversation without
missing a nuance. No wonder she needed a board that supported rather than
drained her.

“You
find anything for that kid you’re trying to help?” she asked.

“Oh,
Christ. My bread and butter. I’d forgotten him. And I have until five p.m.
Friday. I feel like Gary Cooper inHigh Noon .” Ken—MacKenzie—Graham and his
blasted public service.

“You
tried Home Free?” Marilyn asked.

I
looked at her approvingly. “What a brilliant idea. Not just for the young
Graham. But for Deirdre. She did a lot of work there. Maybe they know something
about her we don’t.”

“Something
that’ll lead you to Emily?” Marilyn was skeptical.

“That’ll
give me a bead on Deirdre’s killer, keep the cops from fingering either Emily
or Tamar Hawkings. If Hawkings ever reemerges. Do you think a child of fourteen
would have the capacity to pound her mother’s head in?”

“Deirdre’s
daughter? You don’t really think—” She cut her remark short with a shake of her
head. “I can’t give you some kind of cast-iron assurance about the character of
a girl I never met. All I can tell you is I’ve seen people do unbelievable
things.”

“We
had a woman here for a while, she’s doing ten years now, who poured lye on her
old man while he was asleep, then coated him with molasses. He burned to
death—he couldn’t wash the stuff off. She was four-foot-eleven. The courts
didn’t care that she only had one major limb the guy hadn’t broken. And you’ve
got to agree it was a hell of a way to die. So I’m not betting on what some
girl on the brink might or might not do to her mother. Although I’m with
you—I’d rather the husband got nailed.”

“Only
if he’s guilty, of course,” I murmured.

Eva
came in on Marilyn’s sardonic snort of laughter. “That’s what we like: a
cheerful heart among our happy workers. How’s it going, Vic? You want an hour
of therapy? I’m revved up and ready to take on you or anyone else your weight
you want to name.”

“Bad
session, huh?” Marilyn said. “We want your diagnostic skills. Don’t tell her
who wrote it, Vic. Let her read it.”

“And
guess?” Eva watched while I cut a piece of masking tape to cover Emily’s name.
“In school they give you case studies where you’re supposed to make a diagnosis
and recommend treatment, but no one’s ever given me a piece of paper and asked
me to construct a case study.”

She
had played basketball, first for Tennessee and then professionally in Japan,
before deciding on a career in social work. In jeans, with a white shirt rolled
up to expose her muscular forearms, she still looked more like a ballplayer
than a therapist. I tag along after her in pickup games sometimes.

She’s
ten years my junior and from a different planet in ability. I’d often wondered
whether her fast-breaking physical style carried over to her counseling
sessions. Still, I knew the Arcadia staff thought highly of her.

She
read the poem carefully, her dark hair hiding her face as she bent over the
paper. When she looked up again she was frowning. “You’d better tell me
something about the writer. This a woman in trouble?”

“A
child in trouble.” I told her what I knew about Emily. “I’m clutching at
straws. Is there anything in that poem that would suggest that Fabian had
killed her mother? Or where Emily might go to hide?”

A
faint smile crinkled Eva’s dark eyes. “I’m a social worker, not a literary
critic. If the kid’s the mouse—and we can assume that’s true: she’s not going
to write so despairingly about someone else, even her mother—she feels violated
by both parents.She’s the one who gets hurt in the poem—the two cats are on the
prowl at the end.”

“Then
it doesn’t make sense. She wanted to make a special point about the poem: it’s
likely that’s why she went to school Monday. But if her mother was dead, would
she think of her that way?”

Eva
tapped the paper as if it were a ball she was trying to dribble. “It seems likely
that she didn’t know her mother was dead when she wrote it.”

“Maybe
she wrote it Friday night,” Marilyn suggested, leaning forward in her chair.
“Deirdre went out, leaving Emily holding the bag. If what you say about the
family is true, Fabian could have blamed Emily for her mother’s defection..

Maybe
the girl finally had enough. She can’t confront her parents—they’re out to
lunch. She knows she needs help, but not at a conscious level: she can only ask
it obliquely of her teachers.”

“Could
be.” Eva nodded. “Deirdre’s dead and she needs help more than ever.

She
goes ahead and reads the poem in class, then is overwhelmed—by having
criticized her mother, who’s dead. She might even be imagining her harsh words
killed her mother.”

“Then
how—” I clipped the words off.

How
did the bat get into her room? If Fabian was in all night—no. He was forcing
Emily to say he was in all night. It seemed all too likely that one of them had
killed Deirdre. I wanted it to be him, not his daughter, but I couldn’t want it
so badly I didn’t think the situation through.

I
took the paper back from Eva. “I was hoping it would give me some kind of
hint—either about Fabian’s guilt, or where she’s fled to.”

“The
poem makes it clear that Fabian’s guilty of something,” Eva said. “But just
what, you’d have to talk to the girl to find out. She sees herself as small and
helpless. I don’t know whether that means she’d flee to someone powerful, or
find herself some kind of bolt hole. That’s probably why she came to you, Vic.

You
seemed like a powerful outsider, big enough to stand up to the cats.”

“And
thanks to her wretched father I wasn’t able to respond when she needed me,” I
said bitterly, getting up. “But it’s possible she might have turned to one of
her teachers instead, someone who’s being quixotic in not turning her in.

I’ll
go back to the school and dig some more. Thanks, Eva. See you at the next board
meeting, Marilyn.”

Hoping
Emily might have gone there after all, I went first to my office, where I
received a rude shock. A murder in the building had sapped the Culpepper
brothers’ remaining patience with their tenants. The Pulteney was boarded shut.

A
notice pasted to the window directed inquiries to a phone number printed in
minute type.

Striking
the Scent

I
went to the coffee shop on the corner to phone and got the boarding company,
not the Culpeppers’ management office. They couldn’t help me locate the
contents of my office; they didn’t know anything about that. Just that the
building had been vacated by the end of the workday yesterday: they’d boarded
the doors at ten this morning.

“You’re
sure no one was in the building?”

“Look,
lady, we’ve been doing this for thirty years. Believe me, we’ve never nailed
anyone prematurely into a coffin yet. You got any other problems, take them up
with the building’s owners.”

His
receiver slammed in my ear. In other words, they hadn’t searched the building
first. I wondered if Terry Finchley even knew the Pulteney was boarded shut.
After all, there was still an active crime scene inside.

I
didn’t want to call back to the Central District, not after having just given
them evidence they wanted to use against Emily, but I needed to know they’d
done a thorough search of the building. Finchley was gone, presumably to the Messenger
mansion; my call was shunted to Officer Neely.

She
hadn’t known the Culpeppers were closing the Pulteney, but assured me a police
team had gone through it last night. After leaving my apartment Finchley had
detailed a crew—agood crew—she emphasized, to make a floor-by-floor search both
for Tamar Hawkings and Emily. They’d found the office Deirdre claimed to have
seen, where Tamar had been nesting, but no signs that she or her children had
been there within the last few days. And no trace of Emily.

“What
about my office, now that the building’s closed?” I asked.

“You
have to take that up with the building’s owners,” she said, as stiff as ever.

“Is
my computer sitting in it? Terry told me they were going to bring it over and I
need it.”

“Oh!”
For once she was disconcerted. “I’m afraid we’ve been so chaotic, I forgot—it’s
still in the evidence room.”

I
sighed. “Then will you put through the paperwork so I can collect it myself?”

She
apologized and said I could get it tomorrow. I was ready to hang up, but Neely
seemed to be toying with saying something else. I waited, not speaking, and was
finally rewarded.

“About
the Messenger kids. We canvassed the street, of course. One of the waitresses
in your corner coffee shop thought she might have seen the kids. But there’s no
way of knowing for sure. Even though you’re at the tag end of the Loop, there’s
still plenty of foot traffic.”

“You’re
sure they’re not in the building?” If they’d been seen here, in the coffee shop
where I was phoning, where else could they be?

“I
hope not. If they somehow eluded us ... I don’t know. I’ll see if Terry—if
Detective Finchley—will let me open up the building and go through it one more
time.” For once Neely’s stiff police mask slipped; she sounded worried, even a
bit scared.

When
she hung up I went over to the counter to find the woman who’d spotted Emily.
The waitresses all know me by sight from the years I’ve been coming in, but
we’d never gotten down to names. When I explained my errand, and showed them
the snapshot of Emily with her brothers, they treated me with a friendly
camaraderie. Business was slack; I was someone new to talk to. After a few
minutes’ whispered consultation a solidly built woman of about fifty came over
to me. The plastic tag on her massive bosom identified her as Melba.

“That’s
the girl, all right, just like I told that girl from the police.” In her slow,
strong cadence she emphasized the first syllable, making the police seem much
more ominous than usual. “It was about four p.m., just when I’m ready to go off
shift, and she come in asking for the Pulteney.

“
‘That’s right next door,’ I tell her. ‘But ain’t hardly anyone left in it now.
What you want there?’ I ask her. I wondered about her, see, since she had these
two little boys in tow, and I’m thinking, Lord, they start in younger every
day, because she wasn’t more than nineteen, tops, and the bigger boy had to be
six. And I’m wondering if she wants to hole up in there on account of she knows
it’s coming down. So I give her and the kids some tuna sandwiches and a bag of
fries. But I couldn’t honestly tell you if they went inside the Pulteney or
not.”

She
pronounced the building name majestically, with the weight on the second
syllable, evoking a brief image not of the derelict I’d rented all those years,
but the stately home for which it was named.

“I’m
wondering if there’s a way into the Pulteney basement through yours.

Another
homeless woman has been living there, but we’ve always kept the only door down
there locked.”

Melba
looked dubious. “I couldn’t let you look, not without the manager’s okay, and
he isn’t here right now. Won’t be back, probably, until tomorrow morning.”

I
pulled a ten from my bag and held it casually. She took it with dignity, but
indicated I ought to square the other two waitresses as well. Five apiece
seemed ample to me for them. Melba led me through to the back, past the kitchen
where two cooks were laughing over a game of twenty-one, to the basement door.

The
stairs were old but clean. A giant cooler stood at the bottom, the only part of
the basement they really used, Melba explained. She turned on the light by the
cooler and let me borrow the flashlight hanging there to poke through the rooms
behind it. The boiler and heating pipes sat in the first one, a system as old
as the Pulteney’s, installed when furnaces were built of cast iron and could
handle a century of heating without a belch.

Beyond
the boiler lay a series of storerooms, whose contents were a guide to the
history of the building. The most recent layer held Formica tables and plastic
booths that might have dated from the fifties, when the site was already in use
as a diner. Beyond them, I found relics of a barber shop, antique shoe repair
equipment, and what looked like the remains of a Linotype machine. I’d never
known the old printing district had offshoots this far north.

I
couldn’t find any signs of recent use of the premises. And, although I poked
and prodded long after Melba lost interest in my activities, I couldn’t see any
place where the basement connected to the Pulteney. When I finally gave up on
the project it was past four. I put the flashlight back on its hook and went
upstairs, coughing from the dust I’d been breathing. The cooks were still
playing cards. Business hadn’t improved in my absence.