Warshawski 09 - Hard Time (19 page)

23 A Run to O’Hare

I slid out of the supply closet. No cover there. Where? No way to scale the wall, no way up to those windows. I ducked into the freight elevator. The train rattled the walls, drowning any sound of my pursuit. If they’d started up the stairs, it wouldn’t take them long to look in here. Even if I had a key to start the elevator, while it toiled downstairs a dozen men could wait outside the door and pick me off like a duck in a crate.

Fool. Damned cocky fool to plunge into this building when the whole evening was painted with red warning signs, stay away, don’t touch. Someone knew me too well, knew that I’d weigh the risks and take them anyway. Set the tiger trap. If I was a real tiger I could have leapt from shop floor to window and been on my way.

I looked around the elevator cage. The service hatch stood open. I measured the distance: about four feet over my head. I wasn’t a tiger, and I’d get only one chance on these forty–plus muscles. A light bounced off the hallway wall. I crouched, swung my arms, and jumped. My hands clawed at the edge of the opening. Left hand on a nail, grab hard with my right while I move the left, claw for purchase, fingers digging into splintery wood, biceps bulging as they hoist my weight. The freight train screeching past covered my scramble through the hatch, my rasping breath.

Above me a skylight filtered in starlight, showing ghostly shapes of cables and the wooden slab that covered the hatch. I slid it across the opening. The cage shook with the thundering of the train but settled down as the noise receded. I started hearing voices, words muffled by the shaft, then one directly under me.

“She should be here.”

My stomach heaved, felt as though it might split itself open.

“Did you see her leave home?” Lemour’s unmistakable squeak.

“No, but her car’s gone. She must have gone out through the alley before we thought of putting a watcher out back. And there’s no answer on her phone.”

“Then we beat her here. Maybe she stopped for help. I’ll get someone into the broom closet, someone in Frenada’s office. You wait here.”

The voices faded. I was sitting on a piece of metal. Now that I knew I must not move, I became aware of every surface detail—an edge like a razor cutting into my left buttock, the cable under my right foot that would twang if my sore muscles buckled.

I took slow careful breaths, the air scraping against my dry throat. I was terrified that I might have to cough. I inched my neck slowly back so that I could see the skylight. Some rungs were bolted to the wall leading up to it. If I could get to them without the man in the elevator hearing . . . Tilting my head back increased the strain on my throat, and a large cough built in my lungs. I held it as long as I could, desperately swallowing but unable to produce enough saliva to coat it. Just as I could hold it no longer the cage began to shake again. For a brief flash of terror I thought the watcher was following me up the hatch, but as the cough exploded in my chest, another train began to rumble behind the building.

Grabbing the cable in front of me, I eased myself to my feet. My left thigh trembled. I’d been bracing myself with it, not realizing until I started to move that it held my weight. I flexed my leg cautiously; even with the train as cover I couldn’t afford a loud noise here in the shaft.

As soon as the worst cramping subsided, I stepped to the edge of the cage and tugged on the rung above my head. It seemed secure. Holding it firmly I pushed with my right leg on the rung in front of me. It held as well. I stepped off the edge of the cage and began hoisting myself up. Like in Ms. McFarlane’s gym class back in high school, when we had to climb ropes.
Why,
one of the girls had demanded,
we’re never going to be firefighters.
If I got out of here—when I got out of here—I’d go back to South Chicago and tell today’s know–all adolescents:
The day may come when you’re as stupid as me, when you’ve backed yourself into an ambush and need to climb out of it.

A short climb, only fifteen feet. Five rungs to the skylight. Step, hoist, and then a final yard into space to reach a tiny platform for the work crew to sit on. You couldn’t be a very big machinist and work in this space. And why didn’t the skylight open? Didn’t they ever need to get out on the roof? I couldn’t see a latch. Was this window simply decorative?

The train continued to rattle underneath. I pulled my gun from my shoulder holster and smashed the stock, hard, against the glass. It crashed down the shaft. No one could overlook that sound. I knocked the glass clear from frame. Pulled my sweatshirt over my head and erupted through the window as the watcher underneath me shouted for backup.

I scrambled onto the flat tar roof and ran to the edge. A cop car was parked on Trumbull, blue strobes inviting, warning bystanders. Another covered the west end of the building. I backed away and ran to the other side. The freight tracks curved behind the building. The train rocking slowly through the turn cut off any escape on that side.

In the middle of the roof a head popped through the broken skylight. “Freeze, Warshki!”

I fell to the flat tar as Lemour fired. Swung my legs over the side. Extended my body by my fingertips. Lemour ran toward me. I twisted as far to the right as I could and dropped.

Like falling off a bike. The boxcar moved forward underneath me; I fought to keep upright but landed hard on my left hip and forearm.

I lay that way, rocking with the train, so happy at my escape that I almost relished the pain in my side. A badge of the adventure. I wasn’t too old to leap tall buildings after all. I grinned stupidly in the dark.

I lay that way for about ten minutes, watching streetlamps and tree branches rock past. As my euphoria at escaping died down, I began to worry about what to do next. I couldn’t ride this train out of town. Or I could, but what would I do then? A stay in a cornfield overnight. Persuade someone to give a beat–up, disheveled, specimen a ride to the nearest town. Some small–town Wisconsin cop finding me with a gun on me and not believing I had any right to it. Even worse was the possibility that Lemour was following the train. I stopped grinning and sat up.

I had no idea where I was. The city as familiar to me as the bones and markings of my face had changed into a mass of signal lights and looping tracks. I felt alone in the swirling dark. The train was gathering speed, hurling through strange seas toward strange land. A southbound freight rattled past, shaking me so hard I lay down again.

A plane floated over me, a giant grasshopper, its lights bulging eyes. Lying on my back I could see the belly light, the landing gear. O’Hare. So at least we were somewhere near the city.

The train suddenly braked, with a jolting screech that rocked me back again on my sore hip. I didn’t take time to curse or feel my bruises but scrambled crablike to the front of the car, found the ladder and climbed down. The train was still moving, although slowly. I jumped free of the slicing wheels, rolling with the motion of the train, landing on grass, rolling downhill, my gun digging into my breast, until I came to rest against a concrete wall.

I got on my hands and knees, but when I heaved myself to my feet I felt a tearing in my side that took my breath away. I leaned against the wall, tears smarting in my eyes. Gingerly, I touched the area under my holster. An edge of pain cut through me. A broken rib? A badly torn muscle? If Lemour had persuaded someone to stop the train, I couldn’t stand around waiting to heal. I had to keep moving.

When I started to walk the gun bore into the sore area. I used the wall as a brace and held my left arm up to unbuckle the holster. Checking the safety on the Smith & Wesson, I stuck it in my pocket and fastened the holster loosely around my waist.

The sleeves of my sweatshirt had gaping tears from the glass in Special–T’s skylight. The rest of me was covered with oily mud. Blood was caked along my neck and arms—cuts I hadn’t known I was getting were starting to bother me. I hobbled along as fast as I could, straining my ears for sounds of pursuit above the rocking of the train.

Bright lights above the wall I was using for support showed me every detail of the ground—refuse of fast food tossed from cars, Coke cans, plastic bags, even shoes and clothes. I limped my way along the wall to the bottom of the embankment. The street sign said
MONTROSE AVENUE.
Lying on the boxcar, I had thought I’d been traveling an hour or more and pictured myself in some unknown suburban landscape, but I was still inside the city. The unknown landscape suddenly turned on its side in my brain and I knew it. The concrete wall was a barricade between me and the Kennedy expressway. The roar I was hearing didn’t come from the train, which had moved on, but from traffic.

I followed the exit ramp up, looking nervously behind me but not seeing Lemour. Each step was now a prolonging of fatigue and pain. I made it across the expressway bridge to the L stop, where I fed singles into a ticket machine, then slumped onto a bench waiting for a train.

It was four–thirty now and the summer sun was beginning to turn the eastern sky a muddy gray. When a train screeched in twenty minutes later, the cars were half full, bringing home the night crews from O’Hare, sending early shifts into town to work coffee bars and diners. I found an empty seat and watched people sidle away from me. No one wants to catch poverty or grime from a stray homeless person. In my filth and tatters I looked worse than most.

I dozed my way downtown, changed to the Red Line, and dozed my way back north to Belmont. If someone was staking out my place I was past caring. I staggered the five blocks home and fell into bed.

24 Annoying the Giants

The gun had dug a deep bruise into my side when I tumbled from the boxcar. I’d be sore for four or five days, but if I was careful I’d be okay. Ditto for my left hip. The bruising there went down to the bone, so it would take longer to heal, but nothing was broken and none of the glass cuts in my arms needed stitches. Lotty dispensed that verdict at her clinic Sunday afternoon, her lips flat, her black eyes large with a misery that hurt me more than anger.

“Of course, being careful, taking it easy, those are concepts beyond you, as I know to my sorrow. Still, I understand what these glib radio psychologists mean when they talk about enablers.” She put her ophthalmoscope away with a snap and turned to wash her hands. “If I would have the courage to stop patching you up, perhaps you would stop breaking yourself into pieces. You are foolhardy, which, in case you didn’t know, means to be daring without judgment: I looked it up this morning. How long do you think you can go on this way? A cat has nine lives, but you have only the one, Victoria.”

“You don’t have to tell me; my body’s doing it for you.” I found myself shouting. “My arms are sore. My hamstrings ache. I can hardly walk across the room. I’m getting old. I hate it. I hate not being able to count on my body.”

“So you are going to follow Joan of Arc into the flames before your body fails you and you have to admit you’re mortal?” Lotty gave a twisted smile. “How old was your mother when she died?”

I stared, startled by the unrelated question, and subtracted dates in my head. “Forty–six.”

“And she was ill for two years? It’s a hard feeling, to know you will live longer than a mother who died young, but it is not a crime to do so,” Lotty said. “You’ll turn forty–four next month, won’t you? You don’t need to push yourself past the brink so that you burn up in the next two years. You could have found a dozen ways to learn whether Mr. Frenada was inside his building last night. Make that the intelligent use of your energy, figuring out how to conserve your strength for those times when using your body is your last resort, not your first one. Don’t you think that’s what your mother would want for you?”

Oh, yes, probably. Surely. My mother’s intensity had a blast–furnace quality, but she didn’t prize brute strength above finesse. She’d died of a metastasis from the uterus that became apparent after a miscarriage, when the bleeding wouldn’t stop and I’d brought her pads and changed my own in terror each month for years, wondering when it would happen to me, when I would drain away from the inside. Perhaps Lotty was right. Perhaps I was draining myself from the inside out of some survivor’s guilt. If that was the case, my mother most surely did not want that from me, but life.

Lotty insisted on taking me home with her. I wanted to make phone calls, see if Lacey Dowell knew where Lucian Frenada was: I hadn’t been able to raise him at his home or shop when I tried before coming to Lotty’s clinic. I wanted to talk to Murray about how he’d gotten word that Frenada was running cocaine. I even had a manic idea about calling Baladine and accusing him of engineering the dope stashes.

Lotty refused to listen to my impassioned plea for a phone—she pushed me to her guest room and pulled the jack out of the wall. I fumed for around thirty seconds, but the next thing I knew it was ten o’clock Monday morning and I was more hungry than angry.

Lotty had left a note for me: the doorman knew I was staying and had orders to let me back into the building if I went out for a walk. I should take it easy for a few days. The building had a sauna and a gym on the third floor—the spare key to her front door tucked into the envelope would open the gym.
Help yourself to fruit and bread. And Victoria, for my sake if not yours, don’t leap again without looking very carefully.

After an orange and a piece of toast I went down to the gym. It was really only a small workout room, with weights and an exercise bike, but I was able to work off some of my stiffness. A half hour in the sauna sent me back to bed. When I got up again, around one, I made a hot meal out of eggs and fresh tomatoes. The calls I’d wanted to make yesterday didn’t feel so urgent today, but I took the phone out onto Lotty’s balcony and started with Mary Louise.

When I finished describing Saturday’s debacle at my office, she said, “So you really did find drugs there. And if Lemour planted them, then you can’t call the cops.”

“I do have a videotape of Lemour in the act, which I guess I could take to the State’s Attorney. Trouble is, I don’t know anyone there personally these days, and anyway, I’m afraid Lemour might be able to make even that evidence disappear. If I thought Murray would or could do anything, I’d give it to him, but these days I’m not sure I can count on him. How about showing it to Terry Finchley?”

She hesitated. “I’ve got these children I’m responsible for. I can’t put my life on the line for some case you’re inventing.”

I sat up with a jolt that made my side ache. “Mary Louise, where do you get off with that kind of statement? You were with me when all this started. In fact, if I remember correctly, it was your panic that made me wreck my car. Which has been impounded by the cops and may well never surface again. Exactly what about that am I inventing?”

“Okay, not making up,” she muttered. “And I’m sorry about your car. If I had the money I’d repair it for you. But it’s the same story with you every time. You can’t bear to be scared or beaten, so if someone threatens you, you have to take them on, no matter how big they are. Terry warned me about that when I started working for you, he said he saw you do it over and over again and that no one’s life is worth that much principle. And in this case you’re trying to take on giants. Don’t you see? Don’t you know?”

I clutched the phone so hard my sore palms began to throb. “No. I don’t.”

“Oh, Vic, use your brain. That didn’t take a beating Saturday night. You’re trying to go nose–to–nose with Robert Baladine. Who’s his best friend? Who got him that contract out in Coolis? And who can bury a body, no questions asked, faster than you can say “Jimmy Hoffa?’ Why didn’t you take that nice little assignment Alex Fisher dangled in front of you?”

“What on earth? You yourself advised me not to touch it. And if you think I want to be bought by some—”

“I know. You’re too damned holy to be bought off by a Hollywood slimeball. One thing you’d better believe—I’m not putting Josh and Nate at risk. Thank God Emily’s in France and I don’t have to worry about her. If you keep poking at this hornets’ nest, I’m resigning and flying out of town with the boys.”

You can’t quit, you’re fired.
That’s the standard line in such cases, but I only thought it, didn’t say it. When I cooled off I’d regret it—Mary Louise is good for my little operation. But I hadn’t cooled off yet, and our good–byes were unfriendly. Especially after she said she didn’t have time to help put my files back together. She had exams, she was doing some work for a law firm that might let her take an internship, she had the boys in summer camp, she couldn’t possibly spend a week cleaning up the kind of wreck I was describing.

At first I was too angry to think, but I made myself calm down, hobbled around the apartment, studied Lotty’s art collection. Including an alabaster figurine of Andromache that I’d recovered for her by the same methods she and Mary Louise were criticizing in me today. No, dwelling on that was only making me angry all over again.

I drank a glass of water and went back to the balcony to stare at the lake. At the edge, the line where lake meets sky, a cluster of sailboats looked like bits of white paper glued to a child’s collage. I wanted to be on that remote horizon, but I had no way to reach it.

What didn’t I see and know about Baladine? Of course it was Poilevy who got him that contract out in Coolis, you didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes’s smarter brother to figure that out. But bury a body, no questions asked, as Mary Louise had said, meant Poilevy had mob ties in Du Page County. One of her old pals must have warned her about him while I was in Georgia—probably Terry Finchley.

It also didn’t take a genius to figure that Detective Lemour could do mob work on the side, not after what I’d seen of him on Saturday. And he could do it in the suburbs. Chicago cops were required to live inside the city limits, but no ordinance forbade their moonlighting in the collar counties if they wanted to. We’d had two police superintendents with ties to the mob in recent years, and I guess you have to start somewhere.

Lemour must be on Poilevy’s payroll. No, not Poilevy’s. The House Speaker wasn’t going to get his hands dirty in a way that a reporter like Murray—like Murray used to be—could uncover. Lemour was on someone’s payroll. But I already knew that. It was obvious Saturday afternoon when his unnamed boss had phoned, told him to let me go.

What I couldn’t make sense of was how all this had mushroomed out of Nicola Aguinaldo’s death. What did Lucian Frenada know that mattered to Baladine or Poilevy? Something about the Mad Virgin T–shirt dress Aguinaldo was wearing when she died. Would Lacey Dowell know? And would she tell me if she did?

I looked up the Hotel Trianon number. The operator asked me to spell my last name, put me on hold for a moment, and then said Ms. Dowell wasn’t available. Had Ms. Dowell returned from Santa Monica I asked.

“All I can tell you is that Ms. Dowell isn’t available.” She hung up crisply.

I lay back on the floor. I’d become a non–grata person since talking to Frank Siekevitz in the Trianon’s security department last week. Had Lacey put me on her index, or had Alex Fisher done it for her? I sat up and redialed the hotel and asked for Siekevitz.

“Vicki!” He was embarrassed. “I’m sorry, but the lady doesn’t want to talk to you. She put it in writing.”

“She did, Frank? Or did the studio?”

“That I can’t tell you. But you don’t want to go bothering her if the studio wants you to stay away, do you?”

“Actually, I do. I need to talk to her about something pretty important.”

“Nothing’s that important, Vicki, believe me.”

“So it was the studio.”

He gave an uncomfortable laugh and hung up gracelessly. I wanted to limp to the Trianon as fast as my trembling hamstrings would carry me, but Mary Louise’s comments haunted me. What would running to the hotel do for me, anyway? Frank would stiff me harder in person, because the giants, as Mary Louise had called them, had left nothing to chance. They had threatened him or cajoled him.

The giants knew our strengths and weaknesses. I’d realized that Saturday night: they knew I would rise to the bait, that I’d be daring without exercising judgment. Joan of Arc, Lotty’d called me. What no one around me would believe was that I really didn’t want to lift the siege of Orleans. I wanted to keep on doing nice little investigations for Continental United until I made enough money to fund my Money Purchase Pension Plan and bought me a little house in Umbria, where I’d make Orvieto Classico and raise golden retrievers.

In frustration, I turned on the television, looking for news, fearing actually to hear news about Frenada. The Global channel had local coverage at four. It was the usual tabloid stew of sex and violence: an overturned truck on the tollway with flames and car wreckage, Mrs. Muffet and Mr. Tuffet exclaiming that they heard the explosion, they thought my God it’s World War III. Nothing on Frenada—or me, thank goodness.

When the ads started I turned off the sound, but after a truck climbed the Grand Canyon and a cleanser removed oily stains from a white blouse, a map flashed on the screen, showing a dotted line connecting Mexico and Chicago. Then Murray’s face loomed over it. I hastily switched on the sound but heard only, “Tuesday night at nine. Chicago’s hottest news, from the inside out, with Murray Ryerson.”

After that I kept the station on for another half hour, watching a tedious rerun of some sex comedy and about twenty commercials, until the Mexico map finally reappeared. “Enterprise zones. The perfect route for small businessmen hoping to make it to the top. But sometimes those businesses are taking federal seed money and using it to grow cocaine. Go inside Chicago with Murray Ryerson and find out how Mexican immigrants are using such innocuous–seeming businesses as a uniform factory as a cover for drug deals. Tuesday night at—”

I switched off the set before the tag line ended. Joan of Arc or no, on my own against the giants or not, I couldn’t lie here on Lotty’s living room rug while Global used Murray to destroy Frenada’s reputation. I started a reflexive finger on the phone buttons, about to call Murray and shriek at him, when I realized it would be one of those conversations that begin with “what the hell do you think you’re doing” and end with both parties slamming the phone down.

I frowned for a moment, then went into Lotty’s little home office. She’s never felt the need to add automation to her home, but she has a typewriter. I’d used just such a primitive instrument until a couple of years ago. I scrounged in her drawers for a large envelope, typed
LACEY DOWELL, TRIANON HOTEL. SCRIPT CHANGES. BY MESSENGER
in caps across it on the diagonal. In the left corner I typed Global’s Chicago address. It would be better, of course, if I had a laser printer and could manufacture something resembling their corporate logo, but this would have to do.

Dear Ms. Dowell, I wrote.

Do you know that on Tuesday night, Global television is going to run a story denouncing Lucian Frenada as a drug smuggler? Do you know why they want to do this? Do you approve? Finally, do you know where Mr. Frenada is? I am a private investigator who has been caught up willy–nilly in his affairs, and I am virtually certain that evidence against him has been manufactured. If you know any reason why the studio would do such a thing, I will wait downstairs to talk to you, or, if you prefer, you may call me.

I included my home and office numbers, put the note in the envelope, and sealed the whole thing with packing tape. I wrote a note for Lotty, telling her I was going home and would call her tonight, and rode the elevator down to the lobby, where I got the doorman to summon a cab.