Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 08 (23 page)

Melba
burst out laughing when she saw me. “You could use a week in a bathtub, that’s
for sure. Any luck?”

I
shook my head. “Could you get me a BLT while I wash some of this off? And
fries.”

French
fries are my weakness; I felt I’d earned a plateful after all that futile work.
As I went into the bathroom I heard Melba order the grillman to fry up some
fresh bacon: “The lady don’t need that heap of grease you been saving all day.”

In
the tiny mirror over the sink I could see why Melba had laughed. Grime encased
me in a layer so thick, my face and hair had turned gray. I scrubbed off what I
could under the tap, but everything I had on would have to go to the cleaners.

When
I came out I went back to the phone to call my landlords. I had a hard time
running them to earth. I finally reached Freddie Culpepper on his car phone,
much to his annoyance. He wasted valuable message units demanding to know how
I’d gotten the number.

“Sources,
Freddie. You locked me out of my office, and my rent is paid in full. I need
you to let me into the building to collect my belongings.”

“We
notified tenants who were in place yesterday. We regard you as voluntarily
abandoning the premises, which means your office and its contents now belong to
us. And don’t even think of trying to break and enter. We know your habits,
Warshawski, how you used to break into the basement despite Tom Czarnik’s
repeated warnings to you, and we’ll know who to go after if that boarding comes
off.”

“Or
if one of your own computers disappears. Along with ten years of your records.”
I didn’t have time to screw around getting a court order to retrieve my papers.

I
hung up as he sputtered something about getting his lawyers if I was resorting
to threats. Giving Melba another ten, I took the sandwich outside with me to
eat in the car. That left me with three singles and a bit of change, and an
unwelcome sense of alarm. It would be a close thing to get more cash out of my
account this week.

As a
vain hope I talked to the tender of the corner newsstand, an unshaven man with
bloodshot eyes and a black hole where his teeth once had been. He glanced at
the snapshot, but he hadn’t noticed the children. He hadn’t noticed anyone on
the street since a boy beat him up after he’d noticed the boy shoplifting and
fingered him to the cops. That had been in ’83, or maybe ’85, but whenever it
was it had permanently broken him of the noticing habit.

Discouragement
made me impatient with everything, including my own appetite.

I
gave the man my sandwich and fries and drove home.

Cop’s
Night Out

Conrad
had gone back to the day shift yesterday morning. We had agreed to meet for
supper and dancing at the Cotton Club to celebrate, but I felt too overwhelmed
by the events of the day to feel very celebratory. I called to see if I could
beg off.

“I’ve
had a tough day, too, Ms. W. I’m not asking you to drink champagne and cheer,
just help me put some of the garbage behind. And maybe let me do the same for
you.”

Put
like that I couldn’t refuse. As I went off to bathe, I realized my reluctance
to see him stemmed not from fatigue, but from his friendship with Finchley.
Finchley, whom I’d always liked, who seemed like a good and fair cop, was
beginning to act like an enemy.

I
turned on the bath, pouring in a generous dollop of juniper oil—it’s advertised
as lifting the spirits. Conrad had been right last week to call Deirdre’s death
the case he’d been dreading. It was starting to feel like a lump of leaden
porridge sitting in my stomach when we talked.

I
climbed into the green water and inspected my legs. A circle of small broken
veins near my left kneecap was an early sign of age. The dark marks on the
right one seemed just to be a bruise.

Perhaps
a delicate stomach is the luxury of a private citizen. It’s not so much that
the police slice everything into dipoles—right/wrong, black/white—but that they
rate themselves by how many people they arrest. The pressure to make an arrest
means that age or situation doesn’t count. Can’t count. So you inevitably end
up across a chasm from them: you for mercy, they for justice. You for justice,
they for law. I scrubbed my legs so hard, my skin stung when I lay back in the
water.

Over
dinner at I Popoli, I eyed Conrad warily. He seemed withdrawn, speaking in
half-sentences, not paying much attention to what he was saying. I was sure he
and Terry had been discussing the Messenger case, as well as last night’s
fiasco at my apartment.

Some
of Conrad’s depression might have stemmed from his dinner. He’d been warned at
his last physical to cut down drastically on fat; in an act of self-pity
tonight he had ordered poached turbot without sauce. Now he picked at it
morosely. After his third random remark I couldn’t take the strain, and asked
him point-blank if he had been talking to Finchley.

“He
caught up with me this evening. Just before I set out to meet you.”

“And
told you how he tried to arrest me last night?”

“Sounds
like an ugly scene all the way around. He says you impersonated a cop to go
into the Messenger mansion today.”

“Technically,
no. I showed my PI license to the housekeeper, but I didn’t know the Polish
word for it. She thought I was a cop. I’m sorry in a way that I did it. As long
as Terry didn’t take Messenger seriously as a suspect he wasn’t going to search
the house, and that bat could have lain there for decades.” I tried to keep my
tone reasonable, conversational, not threatening.

“You’re
wrong about that, Vic: Terry has wondered about Fabian. But there didn’t seem
to be any evidence hard enough for the state’s attorney to agree to a search
warrant.”

He
took another bite of fish and held his breath while he swallowed it. I scooped
some of my calamari alla marinara onto a bread plate and handed it across to
him.

“Eat
some of this. It doesn’t have any fat in it, and it’s got some flavor.

...
But as far as evidence goes, no one wanted to pay serious attention to my
saying that Deirdre was expecting someone to meet her at my office.”

“It’s
not that, Ms. W. Everyone knew you were protecting that homeless woman, so no
one knew whether to believe you or not.”

I set
my fork down with a bang. “Outrageous, Conrad. To think I would manufacture
evidence in order to shield someone I believe in. Do you think I didn’t want to
take that baseball bat today and burn it? No one ever would have known. Except
Emily or Fabian.” Or Emily and Fabian, I silently amended.

“Cool
your engines, babe: it’s a tribute to your passion for people in trouble, not a
swipe at your integrity.”

I
tried to ease the taut muscles in my face. “What happens now?”

“Now
the Finch will talk to Fabian. To the kid if he can find her.”

“And
what if Fabian makes Finchley believe it’s the kid when it’s not, when it’s
really him?”

“Give
Terry some credit, Vic.” He took my right hand and massaged it between his own.
“He can sort out the truth. Pressure won’t make him believe a lie.”

I
held my fingers rigidly, unable to respond to his touch. “Four days ago both
you and he told me Tamar Hawkings was the likeliest person to suspect, not
Fabian. You even seemed to think I would have manufactured evidence to shield
her.”

“Take
it easy, Vic. We go with what we have. Four days ago we—he—didn’t know the
murder weapon was in a missing teenager’s bedroom. An unstable homeless woman
was not an unlikely suspect. She was a likely suspect: the one person on the
scene.”

He
hesitated, then spoke in a rush. “As a favor to Terry, I went out to interview
her husband, Leon Hawkings. There’s a history of violence in that household,
but I’m not sure who’s beating on whom. The woman has a sister who tried to
kill her own husband, alleging violence, but she stabbed him when he was
asleep, not provoked, so she did five years at Dwight. Leon seemed to think—”

“That’s
a real problem for women in violent households,” I interrupted. “They know if
they fight back when the man’s assaulting them they’re going to be hurt really
badly. So they withdraw—emotionally—from the scene. It’s only later that they
can feel the anger you or another man might experience at the moment of
attack.”

“You
can’t stab a guy while he’s sleeping. Not and claim self-defense, anyway.”

“But
it’s okay to hit her while she’s wide awake?” I spoke bitterly.

His
grip on my fingers tightened. “You know I don’t believe that, Vic. Don’t put
that kind of twist on my words. ... According to Hawkings, when Tamar’s sister
came out, her old man murdered her. Tamar went off the deep end, started
accusing Leon of being an abuser, and went to a shelter. When she left the
shelter she stayed home for a week and then split with the kids.”

I
pulled my hand away to cover my head. Whose story did I believe—the husband’s
or the wife’s? Finchley’s or mine? Emily’s or Fabian’s—assuming they had
separate stories.

“You
hiding under there, girl?” Conrad asked.

I
attempted a smile and looked up. “So Finchley thinks Hawkings was demented, and
might have killed Deirdre just because Deirdre frowned when she should have
smiled? Or vice versa?”

“We’d
just like a chance to talk to her. And now to the Messenger girl. Those are the
only two people we know for sure were hovering around the crime scene Friday
night.”

“I’d
like to talk to them, too, but maybe ask slightly different questions.

...
How many people are in Joliet who never committed the crime they were convicted
of? One? Five? Five hundred?”

“All
of them, if you ask them,” Conrad said. “What’s your point? That we sometimes
get the wrong person? I agree. I don’t like it, but I won’t try to pretend it
doesn’t happen.”

“But
we execute people, including teenaged girls. We sometimes do it when we’re not
a hundred percent sure they’re guilty. Maybe they’ve exhausted their appeals,
or the evidence comes up in such a way it can’t be used on appeal. We know it
happens. So when I hear about evidence, even when I find evidence that I send
the police to, I need a lot more. Story. Context. It’s the only way to decide
if someone’s story is ... I won’t say true—but more consistent, more authentic.
I’m afraid Terry’s going to take this bat and, because he’s under pressure from
the state’s attorney, bludgeon Emily with it.”

Conrad
frowned at his turbot, now cold and flaking into pieces, and pushed it to one
side. With a glance at me, as if to see whether he could eat my food without
reprisals, he finished the share of calamari I’d given him and stuck his fork
across the table into my pasta. It was meant as a gesture of reconciliation,
the sharing of food.

“Why
do you think she ran away?” he asked. “Do you think it’s impossible she killed
her mother and is racked by guilt?”

“I
don’t think anything’s impossible. What I want to believe and what I’m able to
accept are two very different things. But can’t you imagine a scenario, Conrad,
where she’s had to swallow an enormous amount of unpalatable stuff, and the
last thing to go down is her father forcing her to give him an alibi? I can see
where that could push her past the brink, as much as if she’d killed her mother
herself.”

Conrad
coughed, his sign of distress, and started shredding a roll into tiny pieces.
The waiter hove into view.

“Is
everything to your liking, sir?”

“That
fish wasn’t too hot,” Conrad said. “Reminded me of the overcooked mush I had to
eat in the hospital when I was recovering from a knife in the abdomen.”

The
waiter blinked, as did I: Conrad usually didn’t let things like restaurant
meals bother him. The waiter offered to bring him another entree, his choice on
the house.

Conrad
coughed again. “I’d like some apple pie. With ice cream. And don’t go telling
me how much fat or cholesterol or what have you it’s got in it, because I don’t
want to hear about it.”

“Certainly
not,” the waiter said. “None of our desserts have any fat in them.

For
you, ma’am?”

Sweets
have never been my weakness. I could have eaten a second plate of linguine, but
that seemed unnecessarily piggish. I ordered a double espresso.

“You’re
at odds with two of the people I’m closest to,” Conrad said. “If Zu-Zu and
Jasmine didn’t like you so much I’d start wondering about you. Or at least you
and me. As it is, the pressure is hard to take some days.”

“Conrad,
really, I try to be polite to your mother, but she treats me so glacially that
I start to feel like a frozen mammoth when I’m around her.”

We
stopped talking while the waiter delivered both his pie and an intrusive
comment about its low-calorie, healthful properties. Conrad’s remark about his
stab wound seemed to have stimulated the waiter—he hovered within earshot,
hoping for more juice.

“You
gotta put Mama in context,” Conrad said, shooting a dirty look at the waiter.
“We lived in Hyde Park for a time after my dad died. Mama thought the schools
would be better and that it would be a safer neighborhood for the girls, and it
always has this rap as a liberal, integrated place. I was stopped and frisked
on the street three different times, just walking back to the crib. Once when I
was alone and twice with my buddies. I didn’t want her to know: she was working
two shifts, doing scut work, but they made her come pick me up from the
precinct. It was just one more insult, and not the first she’d ever faced, but
she started getting bitter. Life was too hard for her after my father died.”