Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 08 (8 page)

Deirdre
called her back and fiddled clumsily with the child’s pajamas. “Yes, Nathan.
Now that your daddy has proved to Manfred what a virile guy he is, coming up
with a baby son at the age of forty, you can go to bed.”

She
spoke loudly enough for everyone at Fabian’s end of the long table to overhear.
There was a brief pause in the conversation, like a momentary drop in current.
The woman on Fabian’s right gave a little scream of laughter and everyone began
talking feverishly. Fabian was laughing, too, but for a brief instant fury had
carved terrifying lines around his eyes and mouth.

Emily
stumbled from the room again. The two bartenders joined the waitress in handing
out cold carrot soup. By the time Emily returned to take the empty chair next to
Joshua the staff was serving the main course. The food was excellent—a
surprise, given Deirdre’s drunkenness and the rubbery hors d’oeuvres.

Deirdre’s
back was to the center table, close enough to Fabian and Gantner that she could
hear much of their conversation. The two men talked across the women between
them, with Donald Blakely chiming in. The women made a few attempts to join in,
but were shut out so effectively that they had to lean across the table and
speak to each other like small planes flying under jumbo jets.

Every
time Fabian spoke, Deirdre twitched in her chair. She made no effort to talk to
those around her, but toyed with her food while she continued to drink.

The
six of us with her went through the social pretense of pleasure in our awkward
situation. I felt as though I were swimming up a waterfall.

The
most pitiable was a young woman named Lina, who’d been stuck on Deirdre’s left.
She was married to one of Fabian’s students—the editor of theLaw Review —and
confided that she had just turned twenty-one when she married Brian at
Christmas. As her hostess divided her mind between wine and Fabian’s remarks,
Lina kept trying to talk to her—about the dinner, the house, Chicago’s opera,
anything to prove that Deirdre was fine, her angry twitches a passing
nightmare.

I did
my duty with Brian by asking him about his classes and his and Lina’s Iowa
home. A woman across from us who worked for Donald Blakely at Gateway Bank
gamely joined in with a discussion of a client in Cedar Rapids. We were doing ...
not well, but enough to make it seem we were at a party, when Lina brought up
Deirdre’s children.

“You
must be so proud of them,” she said desperately. “Everyone tells me how smart
they are. And your daughter seems wonderful with her little brothers.”

Deirdre
jerked her head up. “My darling daughter is a saint.” Her voice was heavy with
sarcasm. “I couldn’t do without her and her daddy would die if he lost her.”

Lina
turned her head, furtively blinking back tears. The rest of us sat stunned for
a moment. Finally I leaned across the man on my right to talk to her.

“Brian’s
been telling me about your riding. The only time I was ever on a horse was when
my dad got a friend in the mounted patrol to let me ride around Grant Park in
front of him. I was thrilled and terrified at once. How did you begin?”

Lina
bit her lip but gallantly produced an answer. Eleanor Guziak, the banker,
joined in, speaking in the exaggerated way people use when embarrassed.

As
Brian and one of the other men started talking I looked past Deirdre to Emily.
The girl was poking at her food, turning it over and over with her fork, but
making no pretense of eating.

“What
do you do, Vic?” Lina asked. “Are you a lawyer too?”

“I
went to law school with Fabian and worked on the Public Defender’s Homicide
Task Force for a while, but I’ve been a private investigator for ten years
now.” My tongue felt thick from mushing social drivel in the midst of the
Messenger family’s disarray.

“Oh,
Vic is one of our most prominent do-gooders.” Deirdre, apparently realizing
that she’d alienated her guests, was striving for jocularity. “She didn’t stop
working for the poor and desperate when she left the PD’s office.

Why,
she even puts up homeless families in her own office.”

Lina
turned wide blue eyes to me. “You do? That’s so wonderful of you. I get upset
every time I go downtown and see homeless people lining the sidewalks, but I
feel so helpless—”

“I’m
helpless too,” I interrupted her. “The amount of misery is overwhelming and I’m
not brave enough, smart enough, or rich enough to know what to do about it.”

“But
to put a family up in your office—” Lina began.

“I
haven’t. Deirdre’s exaggerating.”

“Come,
come, Vic. You’re much too modest,” Deirdre lunged in. “You told us on Monday
you helped a homeless family camp out there.”

She
was too drunk to pitch her voice properly. Conversation at the main table broke
off as people began listening in.

“How
do the rest of the tenants feel about your generosity?” Alec Gantner, the
senator’s son, had turned around in his chair to look at me.

I
forced a smile. “Deirdre’s blowing a small thing into a big one. I found a
woman with three children hiding behind the boiler when I went down to work on
the wiring Monday. My building is going under the wrecking ball May fifteenth;
only a handful of tenants is left. I thought the woman could live in one of the
vacant offices for six weeks, instead of down below with the rats—as you can
imagine, the basement is full of them. But when we took her three kids to the
hospital last night, she got scared they’d be taken from her and disappeared.

End
of story.”

“You
didn’t think to consult the owners?” Donald Blakely, the Gateway banker, called
over.

“That’s
why I was working in the basement: the owners haven’t cared enough about the
tenants to do routine maintenance. I certainly didn’t care enough about them to
tell them about this woman: all they would have done is called the cops and get
her arrested for trespassing.”

“They’d
be within their rights,” Gantner said.

“The
real problem is liability,” Eleanor Guziak said. “I think Donald’s point is
that if the woman gets hurt, or injures someone herself, the owners are still
on the hook for damages, even if they’ve let the building run down.”

I
didn’t think that was Donald’s point at all, but Eleanor was following the
first law of corporate advancement: make the boss look good at all times.
Donald seconded her warmly, then demanded to know where the building was.

“So
you can call the cops yourself? No, thanks. Anyway, the woman has disappeared.
I don’t know if she’ll come back to my building because it’s familiar, or stay
away because she thinks she’ll be arrested.”

“Donald
doesn’t want to call the cops. He wants to help the woman out, don’t you,
Donald?” Deirdre said.

“Deirdre.”
Fabian’s voice was heavy with warning.

“No,
don’t you ‘Deirdre’ me. I know what I’m talking about. Gateway Bank is the
biggest booster of housing for the homeless in town. We studied them at Home
Free.” She lifted her glass to toast Blakely. “So Vic shouldn’t feel shy about
giving Donald her office address. It’s the Pulteney Building, isn’t it, Vic,
down near Monroe.”

I was
surprised that she could recall that chance-dropped fact, and furious that she
had made my private problem public.

Blakely
smiled blandly at Deirdre and looked at Fabian. “The real problem is the number
of drunks and crazies who are wandering the streets.”

“Funny
how we only got drunks and crazies in such large numbers in the last decade,” I
snapped.

Gantner
and Blakely affected not to hear me. Gantner turned his back on me again and
loudly reported on a conservative think-tank study that proved most homeless
people roamed the streets by choice. I snapped my fork down on my plate so hard
that a piece of salmon ricocheted from it and landed on my silk blouse.

As I
got up to ask one of the staff for a glass of club soda, I saw Emily looking
anxiously from me to Deirdre.

I
went over to her. “What’s the problem, honey? Worried that I’m arguing with
your folks?”

She pulled
on the ends of her tangled hair. “Would the cops arrest the mother if they
found her?”

I
didn’t think that was what was really bothering her, but I answered her
seriously. “They might. Most people would say she was being a bad parent,
letting her kids live down there.”

“But
you don’t?”

“I
don’t know enough of her story. I keep thinking she may be doing the best thing
she can when she doesn’t have very many choices.”

“What
were they doing there?” she muttered.

“You
mean, how did they get there? I don’t know—I’ve been wondering about that
myself. I walked around the basement earlier today but couldn’t see any
openings into it.”

“But
what do they live on?”

“I
don’t know that either. She does manage to find food for the children.”

“Aren’t
the rats dangerous?” Her gray eyes were painfully large in her anxiety.

“Rats
won’t bother them unless they have food,” I said with more conviction than I
felt. “I go down to that basement a lot to work on the wiring and they never
come near me. I think the mother is too smart to let her children eat where
there are rats.”

Fabian
was looking at us from the end of the table, his countenance darkening. Emily,
focused on me, couldn’t see him.

“What
about the father, though? What was he doing?”

“I
don’t know. Maybe he lost his job and is ashamed that he can’t support them.”
Emily seemed to carry too many loads to burden her with Tamar’s tale of
domestic violence.

“Emily!”
Fabian’s voice cut across the table talk. “Ms. Warshawski doesn’t need you bothering
her.”

Emily
flushed again, but the anxiety fled behind the mask of stupidity she donned so
easily.

“She’s
not bothering me. I like talking to her.”

I put
a hand on the girl’s shoulder to reassure her. Through the wool dress I could
feel the tension at my touch, a forced immobility of the muscles. I removed my
hand and saw a slight relaxation. What was she afraid of? Surely not that I was
making a pass at her—but of Fabian’s reaction to me.

“You
don’t need to worry about the Hawkings family,” I said to Emily. “That’s my
job. Okay?”

“Okay,
I guess.”

She
stared at me, wanting something, perhaps some assurance about her own family
that I couldn’t give her. After a long moment she looked at her brother, who
was clutching her sleeve. She gently turned him around in his chair and started
whispering tales of bravado, how if they found rats they would beat them with
sticks, then look at them with such mean faces the rats would run away. The
little boy laughed. I wished I could have given similar comfort to his sister.

End
of Revelry

Fabian
beckoned me so imperiously that I was tempted to ignore him and return to my
seat, but Emily’s mute anguish made me accede to his summons.

“I
couldn’t help hearing your conversation with Emily just now.”

“You
were paying close enough attention it would have been strange if you’d missed
it.”

“I
heard you tell her it was your job to look after this homeless woman. I’d
rather you didn’t make it Deirdre’s job as well; she’s got enough on her hands
without taking on your stray charities.”

My
eyes opened wide at this incongruous remark, but before I could command a
coherent response he continued.

“You
should turn the matter over to Jasper Heccomb.”

“Jasper
Heccomb?” I echoed like a half-witted parrot.

“The
head of Home Free,” Fabian said impatiently.

“But
... that isn’t the same guy who led the antiwar movement on campus when we were
students, is it?”

“Heccomb?”
Blakely interjected. “I guess he was something of a radical in his youth, but
he seems to have gotten that out of his system. Runs Home Free very
effectively.”

“Come
on, Donald—if he’d gotten it out of his system he’d be underwriting bond
issues.” That was Alec Gantner. “Do you know him, Ms. ... uh ... ”

“Warshawski,”
I supplied. “He was a senior when I started school here in sixty-nine. So I
didn’t know him, but I tagged around after him. I never knew what happened to
him. When did he go to Home Free?”

“He
went to Home Free five years ago.” Deirdre spoke behind me, her voice loud,
each syllable carefully measured. “And he’s been doing just the kind of job
Alec and Donald approve of.”

Donald
turned in his chair and smiled at his hostess. “Thanks, Deirdre. I’m glad to
know that. Home Free is one of the charities Gateway supports and in days of
tight capital you like to believe your charities are well run.”

Back
in my chair I looked bitterly at Deirdre. Having stirred up me, her daughter,
Gantner, and Blakely she was calmly finishing her salad. She was even speaking
cheerfully to Lina, as though sobered by our anger. I didn’t need to stay for
any more of this charade. I’d come because—supposedly—Manfred had put in a
special plea for my presence. I’d had my moment to bask in the great man’s
sunshine. My career certainly didn’t depend on staying to butter up him, or
Fabian, or even the son of my United States senator.