Warshawski 01 - Indemnity Only (13 page)

“They wouldn’t let me look at him,” she said.

“His face was fine. Don’t have nightmares about him—his face wasn’t damaged.” She wanted more information. If he’d been shot in the head, how could
his face look all right? I explained it to her in a toned-down, clinical way.

“Peter told me you could decide whether to trust people by their faces,” she said after a minute. “But yours is pretty banged up so I can’t tell. But you told me the truth about Peter and you’re not talking to me as if I was a baby or something.” She paused. I waited. Finally she asked, “Did Dad ask you to come out here?” When I replied, she asked, “Why was he angry?”

“Well, he thinks the police have arrested your brother’s murderer, but I think they’ve got the wrong person. And that made him angry.”

“Why?” she asked. “I mean, not why is he mad, but why do you think they got the wrong person?”

“The reasons are pretty complicated. It’s not because I know who did it, but because I saw your brother, and the apartment, and some other people who’ve been involved, and they’ve reacted to my seeing them. I’ve been in this business for a while, and I have a feel for when I’m hearing the truth. A drug addict wandering in off the streets just doesn’t fit with what I’ve seen and heard.”

She stood on one foot, and her face was screwed up as if she were afraid she might start crying. I put an arm around her and pulled her to a sitting position on the shallow porch step.

“I’m okay,” she muttered. “It’s just—everything is so weird around here. You know, it’s so terrible, Pete dying and everything. He—he—well—” She hiccuped back a sob. “Never mind. It’s Dad who’s crazy.
Probably he always was but I never noticed it before. He’s been raving on and on about how Anita and her father shot Pete for his money and dumb stuff like that, and then he’ll start saying how it served Pete right, like he’s glad he’s dead or something.” She gulped and ran her hand across her nose. “Dad was always in such a stew about Peter disgracing the family name, you know, but he wouldn’t have—even if he’d become a union organizer he would have been a successful one. He liked figuring things out, he was that kind of person, figuring things out and trying to do them the best way.” She hiccuped again. “And I like Anita. Now I suppose I’ll never see her again. I wasn’t supposed to meet her, but she and Pete took me out to dinner sometimes, when Mom and Dad were out of town.”

“She’s disappeared, you know,” I told her. “You wouldn’t know where she’s gone, would you?”

She looked up at me with troubled eyes. “Do you think something’s happened to her?”

“No,” I said with a reassurance I didn’t feel. “I think she got scared and ran away.”

“Anita’s really wonderful,” she said earnestly. “But Dad and Mother just refused even to meet her. That was when Dad first started acting weird, when Pete and Anita began going together. Even today, when the police came, he wouldn’t believe they’d arrested this man. He kept saying it was Mr. McGraw. It was really awful.” She grimaced unconsciously. “Oh, it’s been just horrible here. Nobody cares about Pete. Mother just cares about the neighbors. Dad is freaked
out. I’m the only one who cares he’s dead.” Tears were steaming down her face now and she stopped trying to fight them. “Sometimes I even get the crazy idea that Dad just freaked out totally, like he does, and killed Peter.”

This was the big fear. Once she’d said it, she started sobbing convulsively and shivering. I took off my jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders. I held her close for a few minutes and let her sob.

The door opened behind us. Lucy stood there, scowling. “Your father wants to know where you’ve gone to—and he doesn’t want you standing around gossiping with the detective.”

I stood up. “Why don’t you take her inside and wrap her up in a blanket and get her something hot to drink: she’s pretty upset with everything that’s going on, and she needs some attention.”

Jill was still shivering, but she’d stopped sobbing. She gave me a watery little smile and handed me my jacket. “I’m okay,” she whispered.

I dug a card out of my purse and handed it to her. “Call me if you need me, Jill,” I said. “Day or night.” Lucy hustled her inside at top speed and shut the door. I was really toning down the neighborhood—good thing they couldn’t see me through the trees.

My shoulders and legs were beginning to hurt again and I walked slowly back to my car. The Chevy had a crease in the front right fender where someone had sideswiped it in last winter’s heavy snow. The Alfa, the Fox, and the Mercedes were all in mint condition. My car and I looked alike, whereas the Thayers
seemed more like the sleek, scratchless Mercedes. There was a lesson in there someplace. Maybe too much urban living was bad for cars and people. Real profound, Vic.

I wanted to get back to Chicago and call Bobby and get the lowdown on this drug addict they’d arrested, but I needed to do something else while Lotty’s painkiller was still holding me up. I drove back over to the Edens and went south to the Dempster exit. This road led through the predominantly Jewish suburb of Skokie, and I stopped at the Bagel Works delicatessen and bagel bakery there. I ordered a jumbo corned beef on rye and a Fresca, and sat in the car, eating while I tried to decide where to get a gun. I knew how to use them—my dad had seen too many shooting accidents in homes with guns. He’s decided the way to avoid one in our house was for my mother and me to learn how to use them. My mother had always refused: they gave her unhappy memories of the war and she would always say she’d use the time to pray for a world without weapons. But I used to go down to the police range with my dad on Saturday afternoons and practice target shooting. At one time I could clean and load and fire a .45 police revolver in two minutes, but since my father had died ten years ago, I hadn’t been out shooting. I’d given his gun to Bobby as a memento when he’d died, and I’d never needed one since then. I had killed a man once, but that had been an accident. Joe Correl had jumped me outside a warehouse when I was looking into some inventory losses for a company. I had broken his hold
and smashed his jaw in, and when he fell, he’d hit his head on the edge of a forklift. I’d broken his jaw, but it was his skull against the forklift that killed him.

But Smeissen had a lot of hired muscle, and if he was really pissed off, he could hire some more. A gun wouldn’t completely protect me, but I thought it might narrow the odds.

The corned beef sandwich was delicious. I hadn’t had one for a long time, and decide to forget my weight-maintenance program for one afternoon and have another. There was a phone booth in the deli, and I let my fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages. The phone book showed four columns of gun dealers. There was one not too far from where I was in the suburb of Lincolnwood. When I called and described what I wanted, they didn’t have it. After $1.20 worth of calls, I finally located a repeating, mediumweight Smith & Wesson on the far South Side of the city. My injuries were really throbbing by this time and I didn’t feel like a forty-mile drive to the other end of the city. On the other hand, those injuries were why I needed the gun. I paid for the corned beef sandwich and with my second Fresca swallowed four of the tablets Lotty had given me.

The drive south should have taken only an hour, but I was feeling light-headed, my head and body not connected too strongly. The last thing I wanted was for one of Chicago’s finest to pull me over. I took it slowly, swallowed a couple more tablets of bute, and put all my effort into holding my concentration.

It was close to five when I exited from I-57 to the
south suburbs. By the time I got to Riley’s, they were ready to close. I insisted on coming in to make my purchase.

“I know what I want,” I said. “I called a couple of hours ago—a Smith & Wesson thirty-eight.”

The clerk looked suspiciously at my face and took in the black eye. “Why don’t you come back on Monday, and if you still feel you want a gun, we can talk about a model more suited to a lady than a Smith & Wesson thirty-eight.”

“Despite what you may think I am not a wife-beating victim. I am not planning on buying a gun to go home and kill my husband. I’m a single woman living alone and I was attacked last night. I know how to use a gun, and I’ve decided I need one, and this is the kind I want.”

“Just a minute,” the clerk said. He hurried to the back of the store and began a whispered consultation with two men standing there. I went to the case and started inspecting guns and ammunition. The store was new, clean, and beautifully laid out. Their ad in the Yellow Pages proclaimed Riley’s as Smith & Wesson specialists, but they had enough variety to please any kind of taste in shooting. One wall was devoted to rifles.

My clerk came over with one of the others, a pleasant-faced, middle-aged man. “Ron Jaffrey,” he said. “I’m the manager. What can we do for you?”

“I called up a couple of hours ago asking about a Smith & Wesson thirty-eight. I’d like to get one,” I repeated.

“Have you ever used one before?” the manager asked.

“No, I’m more used to the Colt forty-five,” I answered. “But the S&W is lighter and better suited to my needs.”

The manager walked to one of the cases and unlocked it. My clerk went to the door to stop another last-minute customer from entering. I took the gun from the manager, balanced it in my hand, and tried the classic police firing stance: body turned to create as narrow a target as possible. The gun felt good. “I’d like to try it before I buy it,” I told the manager. “Do you have a target range?”

Jaffrey took a box of ammunition from the case. “I have to say you look as though you know how to handle it. We have a range in the back—if you decide against the gun, we ask you to pay for the ammo. If you take the gun, we throw in a box free.”

“Fine,” I said. I followed him through a door in the back, which led to a small range,

“We give lessons back here on Sunday afternoons, and let people come in to practice on their own during the week. Need any help loading?”

“I may,” I told him. “Time was when I could load and fire in thirty seconds, but it’s been a while.” My hands were starting to shake a bit from fatigue and pain and it took me several minutes to insert eight rounds of cartridges. The manager showed me the safety and the action. I nodded, turned to the target, lifted the gun, and fired. The action came as naturally as if ten days, not ten years, had passed, but my aim
was way off. I emptied the gun but didn’t get a bull’s-eye, and only two in the inner ring. The gun was good, though, steady action and no noticeable distortion. “Let me try another lot.”

I emptied the chambers and Jaffrey handed me some more cartridges. He gave me a couple of pointers. “You obviously know what you’re doing, but you’re out of practice and you’ve picked up some bad habits. Your stance is good, but you’re hunching your shoulder—keep it down and only raise the arm.”

I loaded and fired again, trying to keep my shoulder down. It was good advice—all but two shots got into the red and one grazed the bull’s-eye. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll take it. Give me a couple of boxes of ammo, and a complete cleaning kit.” I thought a minute. “And a shoulder holster.”

We went back into the store. “Larry!” Jaffrey called. My clerk came over. “Clean and wrap this gun for the lady while I write up the bill.” Larry took the gun, and I went with Jaffrey to the cash register. A mirror was mounted behind it, and I saw myself in it without recognition for a few seconds. The left side of my face was now completely purple and badly swollen while my right eye stared with the dark anguish of a Paul Klee drawing. I almost turned to see who this battered woman was before realizing I was looking at myself. No wonder Larry hadn’t wanted to let me in the store.

Jaffrey showed me the bill. “Four hundred twenty-two dollars,” he said. “Three-ten for the gun, ten for
the second box of cartridges, fifty-four for the holster and belt, and twenty-eight for the cleaning kit. The rest is tax.” I wrote a check out, slowly and laboriously. “I need a driver’s license and two major credit cards or an interbank card,” he said, “and I have to ask you to sign the register.” He looked at my driver’s license. “Monday you should go down to City Hall and register the gun. I send a list of all major purchases to the local police department, and they’ll probably forward your name to the Chicago police.”

I nodded and quietly put my identification back in my billfold. The gun took a big chunk out of the thousand dollars I’d had from McGraw, and I didn’t think I could legitimately charge it to him as an expense. Larry brought me the gun in a beautiful velvet case. I looked at it and asked them to put it in a bag for me. Ron Jaffrey ushered me urbanely to my car, magnificently ignoring my face. “You live quite a ways from here, but if you want to come down and use the target, just bring your bill with you—you get six months’ free practice with the purchase.” He opened my car door for me. I thanked him, and he went back to the store.

The bute was still keeping the pain from crashing in on me completely, but I was absolutely exhausted. My last bit of energy had gone to buying the gun and using the target. I couldn’t drive the thirty miles back to my apartment. I started the car and went slowly down the street, looking for a motel. I found a Best Western that had rooms backing onto a side street,
away from the busy road I was on. The clerk looked curiously at my face but made no comment, I paid cash and took the key.

The room was decent and quiet, the bed firm. I uncorked the bottle of nepenthe Lotty had given me and took a healthy swallow. I peeled off my clothes, wound my watch and put it on the bedside table, and crawled under the covers. I debated calling my answering service but decided I was too tired to handle anything even if it had come up. The air conditioner, set on high, drowned out any street noises and made the room cold enough to enjoy snuggling under the blankets. I lay down and was starting to think about John Thayer when I fell asleep.