Warshawski 09 - Hard Time (18 page)

Lemour’s thin lips were a line of rage. He shoved the uniforms out of the way and yanked the phone from my hand, then slapped my face hard with his open palm. I kept my arms at my side through an effort of will so intense that my shoulders ached.

“You think you’re smart, don’t you, Warshki?” he hissed.

“Phi beta kappa my junior year at Chicago. That’s usually for smart people, Lemming.” I was taking singer’s breaths, pushing air to the front of my mouth, keeping my voice light so that no cracks of fury showed in it.

He slapped the other side of my face. “Well, you’re not as smart as you think you are. If I have to take this room apart brick by brick, I will find where you put that stash. I know it’s here, you smart–assed broad. Cuff her while you finish searching,” he added to the woman who’d answered my original call.

She couldn’t look at me. Her dark face turned purply–black with shame as she locked my wrists together; she muttered, “I’m sorry,” through lips that barely moved.

The glasses had slipped off my face at a cockeyed angle. She settled them back on my nose. My neck ached. Tension. Or maybe whiplash from the force of Lemour’s blows.

The crew went through the room, then the hall and the bathroom. Brick by brick. Lemour watched, patches of red on his white cheeks, spittle forming around his mouth. I kept my video glasses on him as best I could with my arms hooked to a radiator coil.

When the team didn’t find the drugs, I thought Lemour was going to go over the brink and choke me. He may have thought so too, but his cell phone rang before he could do it.

“Lemour,” he snarled. “Oh . . . no, sir, it wasn’t . . . we did, sir, all three places . . . bitch must’ve . . . I did, sir, but I couldn’t be here twenty–four hours a day . . . I could still bring her in . . . I see. You can?” His pike’s teeth showed in an unpleasant grin. “I’ll look forward to that, sir.”

He put the phone back in his pocket and turned to me. “Your lucky day, Warshki. My—boss says if you swallowed the evidence I can’t hold you, although I’d like to bring you in and choke it out of you. You can go home. You—Holcumb, is it? Uncuff her and let her go.”

While the officer undid the lock, she whispered that her mother was an upholsterer, that she’d bring her over in the morning and get her to repair my couch, no charge. I was too tired and too angry to do anything but nod my sore neck. I leaned against the wall, my arms crossed, until the last of the battalion had left. I barricaded the door from the inside and sat on the couch. The mess in the room was now so unbearable I couldn’t imagine ever being able to work in this space again.

22 Night Crawlers

Mr. Contreras roused me from my stupor, calling on my office phone, his voice rough with anxiety: at four–thirty I’d said I’d be back in an hour for dinner, and here it was almost eight. When I told him what had happened he insisted on flagging a cab and coming to the office. Nothing I said could dissuade him, and in my fragmented state I didn’t try too hard. When he knocked on the door fifteen minutes later, I shocked both of us by bursting into tears.

“This is terrible, doll, this is terrible. Who could’ve done such a thing? That cop, that creep that wanted to arrest you last week? And he hit you? You can’t take that. You gotta tell someone. Call the lieutenant. Call Detective Finchley.”

I blew my nose. “Yeah. Maybe. What I’d like is to get some kind of padlock for the doors. Whoever broke in bypassed the code on the front door. They can break down padlocks too, but they’ll be more obvious from the street if they’re doing that.”

One of the chains had opened a big all–night home supply store not too far from my building. The old man rode over with me and helped pick out locks and tools. When we got back I was still so jumpy that I insisted on inspecting both my office and Tessa’s studio to make sure no one had arrived in my absence.

While Mr. Contreras set to work installing the locks, I made a half–hearted effort to organize the wreck. The Isabel Bishop I handled with latex gloves, putting it in a plastic bag to give to Mary Louise on Monday. I wanted her to get it dusted for fingerprints and to have someone in the department run a check on AFIS. I also figured I could pay her to put files in order: it would be so much easier for her than for me, since she was not only more organized, but not so emotionally invested in the destruction.

I did restore the couch, screw in the light bulbs that the vandal cops had removed, picked up obvious garbage, scrubbed coffee stains from the little bit of carpet. My mother’s engraving of the Uffizi Gallery had been knocked over and the glass cracked. I bit my lip but put it in the bag with the Isabel Bishop. I wasn’t going to break down over this. The picture wasn’t damaged underneath; the glass could be replaced.

The printer cartridge Lemour had dropped on the floor was leaking carbon. I threw it out, cleaned out the printer, and installed a fresh cartridge. I held my breath and turned on the machine. I hit the
TEST
button, and a page of beautifully executed font samples ran out the mouth. I felt better. One small vessel saved from the inferno.

When Mr. Contreras grunted with satisfaction that he’d got the place pretty well bolted down, my office still looked like the
Titanic
after the iceberg. Who would have thought the old room had so much paper in it?

Mr. Contreras praised my progress—more visible to him than me—and I dutifully praised his handiwork, which was actually quite impressive. With a handful of inexpensive tools he’d installed a serious lock system. Nothing is impregnable, but this would take long enough to smash that Elton or someone might wander along and interrupt the intruders. I took time to call Tessa’s mother to explain what I’d done and to leave a message for Tessa—I’d drop off a spare key before she got back from her sailing trip.

As we walked to the car, Elton popped out of the shadows. “Saw you had the cops with you, Vic. They find anything?”

“
Nada.
But the sergeant who came is in on the fix. If you see anyone—don’t call 911, because the cops may be the perps. Call—can he call you?” I asked Mr. Contreras. “I’m not home enough.”

My neighbor wasn’t pleased at my involving him with a street person, but he grudgingly agreed that I could write his phone number on one of my business cards and hand it to Elton. “Call collect,” I recklessly committed my neighbor. Illinois Bell charges thirty–five cents—it’s even harder for the homeless to come up with correct change than for the rest of us.

When we got home I insisted first on inspecting the Rustmobile to make sure no contraband had been slipped into the trunk. Then I brought Mitch and Peppy up to the third floor with me while I made a circuit of my apartment. I was ashamed of my jumpy vulnerability, but every time I thought of those bags of white powder, the skin on the back of my neck crawled.

My neighbor put fresh charcoal on the grill outside his back door and started cooking chicken. Before going down I called Lotty, hoping for sympathy—and a prescription for my sore neck. She gave not just sympathy but alarm, trying to persuade me to spend the night in the safety of her eighteenth–story apartment. I thought I’d be happier in my own home, among my own things, but told her I’d keep the dogs with me until things simmered down.

“As far as your neck goes, my dear—aspirin and ice. Ice now and before you go to bed. And call me in the morning.”

I felt irrationally bereft when she hung up. She’d offered me a bed—why did I want technical medicine instead of love? Ice, when the left side of my neck was sore to the touch? What did Lotty know about neck injuries, anyway. I stomped into the kitchen, filled a freezer bag with ice, and pressed it against the sore area, as if determined to prove her wrong. Instead, by the time Mr. Contreras phoned up to say the chicken was cooked, I could move my head more easily. Which made thinking more possible as well.

The cassettes that I’d made of Lemour in my office—I needed to do something with those. A copy for my lawyer, and maybe one for Murray. Would he run a story on the break–in? Was I testing him, to see whose orders he was following?

After dinner I went back upstairs and hooked the cassette pack up to my VCR and ran the tape. Knowing I had sat passively while Lemour grew ever more demented made me feel the violations of the afternoon all over again. My stomach clenched. I could hardly bring myself to keep watching. When I heard the call that made Lemour let me go, though, I sat up and played it back several times.

His caller kept cutting him off. Perhaps he didn’t like Lemour’s thin nasal voice. But maybe he didn’t want Lemour revealing too much on an open line. Lemour’s evil grin, and the way he said he’d look forward to that—whatever
that
was—made it clear they had some more elaborate frame in store. Although what could be more elaborate than drugs planted in my office I didn’t know. Maybe I should go to Lotty’s after all.

I stopped the tape again when Lemour said it was my lucky day, I could go home. He paused before saying his “boss” had ordered my release. A cop does not refer to superiors as bosses; he calls them by title—lieutenants or watch commanders—whatever the highest rank happens to be. So who was on the phone? Baladine? Jean–Claude Poilevy?

Maybe a really sensitive machine could pick up the voice of the person speaking to Lemour. I could talk to the engineer at Cheviot Labs about that, but it would probably have to wait until Monday. Just in case the guy came in on weekends I left a message on his voice mail.

I locked the tape in my closet safe and went back downstairs to collect the dogs. With an aspirin on top of my long day—my long week—I was asleep as soon as I turned out the light.

Two hours later the phone pulled me up and out of a deep well of sleep. “Ms. Warshawski? Is that you?” The hoarse whisper was barely audible. “It’s Frenada. I need you at once. At my plant.”

He hung up before I could say anything. I held the receiver to my ear, listening to the silence at the other end. My mind had that deceptive clarity that the first hours of a sound sleep bring. Frenada didn’t have my home phone number: when he called to scream about Regine Mauger’s blurb in the
Herald–Star,
he got me through my answering service. Perhaps he used caller ID and had picked up my number when I called his home.

I turned on my bedside light and looked at my own ID pad.
Caller unidentifiable.
The person had either blocked the call or was using a cell phone. I went into the living room. Mitch and Peppy had been sleeping next to the bed, but they followed me, crossing in front of each other so that I had a hard time moving.

I nudged them out of the way and found my briefcase where I’d left it, next to the television. I dug out the Palm Pilot and looked up Special–T Uniforms. When I phoned the plant, the number rang fifteen times without an answer. His home phone gave me only his bilingual message.

“So what should I do, guys?”

Mitch looked up at me hopefully.
Go for a run
seemed to be his advice. Peppy lay down and began methodical work on her forelegs, as if to say,
Take a bath and go back to sleep.

“It’s a setup, don’t you think? Lemour’s handler made him release me. So that they could trap me at the plant? Leaving me with egg all over my smug face, as Ryerson informed me Wednesday night? Or was this really Frenada, in serious trouble? In which case, why didn’t he call the cops, instead of me?”

The dogs looked at me anxiously, trying to figure out my mood from my voice. Maybe Frenada’s experience with the cops was the same one I’d had this evening, so that he didn’t feel he could rely on them.

A wiser person would have followed Peppy’s advice and stayed home. Maybe I am that wiser person now—experience does change you—but in the middle of the night, with that sensation of looseness that made me think I was still thirty and able to leap tall buildings at a bound, I pulled on my jeans and running shoes, put my gun back together and stuck it in a shoulder holster under a sweatshirt, put my PI and driver’s licenses in my back pocket with a handful of bills, and made my cautious way down the back stairs. To their annoyance, I left the dogs behind—if I got involved in a shooting war I didn’t want them complicating the battle.

Lemour thought he could get me, but I would make a monkey of him. That seemed to be the gist of my thinking, if acting solely on impulse can be called thinking.

I drove past the plant at Grand and Trumbull. A light was shining through one of the rear windows on the second floor. In case Lemour had set a trap, I didn’t slow down but turned south at the next intersection. I parked three blocks away.

Saturday nights on the fringes of Humboldt Park are not quiet. The streets in this industrial section were empty, but sirens and dogs keened a few blocks away. I even heard roosters crowing. Someone was running a cockfight nearby. A freight train squeaked and hooted in the distance. As it drew near, its rackety
clank–clank
drowned out other sounds.

When I got to Frenada’s building I scouted it as closely as I could in the dark. I paused outside an old delivery van, listening intently at the rear doors to see if it was a stakeout vehicle, although it was hard to hear anything above the thundering of the freight train.

I stood across the street from the entrance for ten minutes, waiting for some sign of life. Or was I waiting for my courage to build enough for me to enter a rickety building alone in the dark? The longer I stood, the more inclined I would be to go home without looking inside. And what if that really had been Frenada on the phone? And what if he really was in trouble, bleeding, dead? Then what? I took a deep breath and crossed the street.

The front door was unlocked.
It’s a trap, Vic,
the sensible voice whispered, but I slid sideways through the opening, gun in hand, palm clammy against the stock.

Inside the entrance, the dark wrapped around me like a living cloak. I could feel it grabbing at my neck, and the soreness, which I’d forgotten, came back. I moved cautiously to the stairwell, fighting the impulse to turn tail and run.

I climbed the slippery concrete stairs, pausing on each riser to strain for noises inside. Outside, the freight thumped and squeaked into the distance. In the sudden stillness I could hear the sirens and car horns again, making it hard to focus on the building. I hugged the stairwell wall, trying to make no sound myself, hoping the hammering of my heart was audible only to me.

At the top landing I could see a bar of light under Special–T’s door. I moved faster, as if light itself meant safety. At the door I knelt down to look through the keyhole but saw only the legs of the long worktable. I lay flat, trying not to think of the filth of decades against my face (how many men had spat on this floor when walking out at the end of the day?), my eye pressed against the thin slit of light. All I saw were bolts of fabric and some wadded–up paper. I waited a long time, watching for feet, or for a shadow to move. When nothing happened I stood up and tried the handle. Like the outer door, the one to the shop floor was open.

A clothes shop is probably always chaotic, but Special–T looked as though someone had tossed the place through a wind tunnel. Whoever had rampaged through my office had been here as well. The long tables in the middle where the cutting took place had been cleared; fabric, shears, and pattern stencils lay in a heap around them. Along the wall, the sewing machines stood with their covers unscrewed. A single light over one of the machines was the one that I’d seen from the street.

I moved fearfully toward a small room at the back, expecting at any second to come on Frenada’s body. Instead, I found more signs of upheaval. The vandals had taken the room apart with a ruthless hand. The intruders had been looking for something: drawers stood open, their contents dangling over the side to spill on the floor. A piece of loose tile had been pulled up and tossed to one side. Invoices, dressmaking patterns, and fabric samples made a gaudy stew on the floor. The bulbs had been removed from the desk lamp.

I was certain that there must be bags of powder on the premises, but it wasn’t a search I wanted to make alone and in the dark. I looked in Frenada’s office for the Mad Virgin shirt I’d seen on Tuesday. When a quick inspection of the tangled heap of cloth and paper didn’t reveal it, I moved to the hall. I’d see if Frenada was in the john or at the back by the freight elevator; if he wasn’t on the premises I was out of Dodge.

The toilet was in the hall that ran outside Special–T’s door. A supply closet was next to it; the freight elevator was at the end farthest from the stairs. I had looked inside the closet and found nothing more disgusting than a mop that needed a good bath in disinfectant, when I heard the scuffling sound of a door opening, of many feet trying to sneak silently up concrete stairs. A second later a train began to wheeze and crank its way up the track: if they’d waited only a heartbeat longer I’d never have heard them.