Warshawski 09 - Hard Time (33 page)

Freeman Carter was filing lawsuits for me—one against the Chicago Police Department for the violence committed against my person and against my office by Douglas Lemour. The other was against the Illinois Department of Corrections for my injuries there. Bryant Vishnikov was studying the OR films of my injuries and thought he might be able to prove they’d come from a particular set of boots. Such as those of the man Hartigan out at Coolis.

“But these cases will take years to work through the courts,” I told the Berman psychologist. “By that time I could be out of business and too broke for a settlement to help me. I want Robert Baladine to pay a price now for siccing his bent cop on me and for having me arrested on a trumped–up charge. I want that cop out of the force, and I want Baladine publicly exposed. And of course I need him off my back if I’m ever going to run my business again.” Miss Ruby had told me if I wanted to eat revenge it would give me indigestion, but it seemed to me passivity was making me sicker than revenge ever would.

The psychologist didn’t exactly endorse my wish: he told me he thought it was helpful to imagine a recovery of my own power and see where that left me.

A recovery of my own power meant I needed to recover my physical fitness. I began working out in greater earnest. Four weeks after I was found on the expressway, I ran a wobbly mile, but after that my strength grew measurably every day. On the Thursday before Labor Day, as the El Niño heat finally subsided into a bearable warmth, I felt ready to move on.

43 Planning Session

I’d decided it was time to move on, but I wasn’t sure where to go. My own apartment would leave me a sitting duck as soon as Baladine learned I’d surfaced. For the same reason, I resisted Lotty’s invitation to come home with her: I’d rather be killed than endanger her life one more time in one of my exploits.

It was Morrell who suggested that I spend a week or two in Father Lou’s rectory. I kept asking him to make sure he’d discussed it with Father Lou and that the priest understood the potential risk; Father Lou in the end sent me a terse note saying I was welcome as long as I didn’t smoke. The kids around the school were used to strange families moving in and out as the priest offered refuge to people who’d been evicted or were seeking sanctuary; they wouldn’t blow my cover through idle chatter around the neighborhood. And so the Friday before Labor Day I moved from the modern, warmly furnished rooms of the Berman Institute to a narrow bed under a crucifix and a bathroom holding a badly stained tub and toilet. It was still a big step up from Coolis.

During the weeks I was healing, Morrell or Lotty came to see me almost every day. Lotty brought flowers that well–wishers, believing I was in a brain–damaged stupor, sent to her office. Darraugh Graham, my most important client, sent a miniature orange tree and a note that said if I ever felt able to get back to work he was eager to continue to do business with me. I was touched, and relieved as well, although Morrell, collecting mail from my office, found an ominous number of letters from clients canceling my services. (
We find a large firm such as Carnifice better meets our security needs at this time. . . .
)

Mr. Contreras visited me regularly while I was at Berman. Once he learned he could bring Mitch and Peppy, he’d bundle the dogs into the Rustmobile and drive down, careful to follow Morrell’s instructions to keep anyone from tailing him. The dogs helped my recovery. When I ran around the gardens behind the institute with them, I started feeling more like myself.

A bouquet of anemones came with a note from Abigail Trant, wishing me a speedy recovery from all my ailments. After her surprise visit the week before my arrest, I wasn’t exactly startled, but I was very pleased.

I saw Mrs. Trant’s name in the papers from time to time, especially as the swim meet Eleanor Baladine had organized drew near: the
Herald–Star,
in its new role as shill for Global Entertainment, actually treated the event as front–page news. The meet was to raise money for several children’s programs dear to Abigail Trant, Jennifer Poilevy, and Eleanor Baladine. The three women were photographed around Eleanor’s pool, looking like beauty queens in their sleekly fitting swimsuits. Tickets were a thousand dollars; anyone with a child under thirteen who wanted to compete should get in touch with Alex Fisher at Global.

Another evening Lotty arrived with an outsize bouquet of scarlet and gold flowers and a letter from Murray Ryerson.

Dear Vic,

I can’t believe you’re really lying in a stupor. Half of it’s denial, and the other half is my sources: they can’t find you in any of the nursing homes in the area. So maybe Lotty Herschel will bring you these flowers and my letter.

I’m sorry you were arrested. I’m sorry you spent time in the big house. I don’t know how you got out without posting bail, but my compliments: that took some doing. I’m sorriest of all I blew up at you over Frenada’s finances. I don’t know who or how that strange data got into his LifeStory report, but it was bogus. When his sister tried to access one of the accounts, it turned out there was nothing there. For reasons I haven’t been able to find out, Carnifice may have wanted to discredit Frenada. At any rate they certainly have the technical wizardry to plant phony data on Frenada.

Anyway, I want you to know that I tried to do the right thing. I tried to tape a follow–up to my show explaining that I had received erroneous information about Frenada. The station wouldn’t allow the tape. I tried to print a story in the
Star,
but the editor blocked it. I’ve been asked to take a vacation for a few weeks to see if “I can regain a sense of proportion.”

If you’re alive and well, give me a call. On the other hand, if you’re really in danger of your life, V. I., I wish I could see you to tell you I’m sorry. And beg you not to die. I don’t think I could keep working in Chicago if you weren’t part of the landscape.

Murray

I pinned one of the flowers to my blouse and danced around the Berman gardens with it. I had a moment’s euphoric impulse to phone Murray, to relieve his own anxiety. We had worked out some amazing stunts together in the past. But I couldn’t afford to take risks right now, even for an old friend. Murray’s course this past summer had been too rocky for me to trust him based on one letter.

The day I heard from him was the same day that Morrell brought in the pictures I’d taken at Coolis. There were thirty–three: I hadn’t had time to shoot the whole roll. A few showed scenes in the jail, like the time CO Polsen was trying to pull down Dolores’s jeans, or the pustular burn on the arm of a woman in the kitchen. Where I’d had time to focus, however surreptitiously, the quality was good enough to make out detail.

Many of the two dozen I’d taken in the back room were blurred because of my nervous flying around the space, but there was one clear shot of Lacey’s face on a T–shirt, with a man in an IDOC uniform standing behind it. I had two shots of women operating the stamping machines. And somehow, at the end, I’d photographed Hartigan standing over me with the stun gun pointed down at me. I didn’t remember taking it; perhaps his shooting or kicking me had inadvertently clicked the shutter. He was foreshortened by my lying on the floor, with his head, bloated and shining in sadistic pleasure, looming larger than his body. The gun appeared in one corner.

Looking at the picture made me start to sweat. I had to take a walk around the Berman gardens before I could sit down again with Morrell. I felt embarrassed by my weakness.

“What do these pictures show, Vic? Besides the idea of a certain amount of sadism in the prison, I mean.”

I’d had a lot of time to think during my recuperation, and I spelled it out slowly, putting the events in order as much for myself as for Morrell. “A prison is a great place to run a factory. Labor is cheap and it’s captive: you never have the danger that a union will form or that anyone will protest work conditions. Even if you’re paying the workers more than you would in Southeast Asia, you still save money because you don’t have any capital costs. The state provides the physical plant. The state buys the machinery. Shipping to the world’s biggest market is cheaper than from Thailand or Burma, especially if you’re close to the main shipping routes out of Chicago. So Coolis started producing shirts and jackets for Global Entertainment.”

He frowned. “It sounds disgusting but not a reason to try to kill you for finding it out.”

“Illinois law. You can only make things in prison for sale in the prison system. Baladine and Teddy Trant at Global are good friends. When Baladine started running Carnifice Security and got the bid to build and run Coolis, the two of them probably saw what great potential there was in the captive workforce. The two men are very tight with the Speaker of the Illinois House. Poilevy ran a special legislative session exclusively on crime a couple of years ago. I think he probably promised Baladine that for enough money sprinkled around the right way he could overturn the law, but labor balked. Usually they do pretty much what the Speaker says, but they wouldn’t budge on this one, because they’d face a rebellion from the rank and file if they undercut real jobs in the state.”

Morrell fiddled with the photographs. “I still don’t get it. Did Baladine have his nanny arrested simply to send another body to the prison factory?”

“No. That was one of those things. Nicola was arrested for stealing. She was tried, and sentenced, and ended up in the clothes shop because she was small with quick little fingers and because she didn’t speak much English and the prison tries to keep discussion of the operation to a minimum. They intimidate the women who work in the clothes shop and try to keep them separate from the rest of the prison population. I discovered early on that women were scared to work in the clothes shop, even though they could make better money for piecework than they could at some of the other gigs.

“Then Nicola learned her little girl had died of asthma, the same little girl whose hospital bills put her in so much debt that she stole the necklace to begin with. She wanted to see the dead child herself and bury her, and they laughed at her. She lost her head and pounded her little fists on this guy’s chest—” I flicked my middle finger against Hartigan’s face. “He shot her with a stun gun. He kicked her. Her intestine perforated. They shut her in segregation, then they got scared and sent her to the hospital. I’m guessing the hospital said she needed expensive surgery to fix her up and even then she might well die. They thought if they dumped her body near her apartment, they could pretend she’d run away and been killed at home.”

My voice became drier and drier, more and more impersonal as I tried to keep from feeling anything about the narrative. Morrell put a hand in mine, giving me a chance to draw away if I wanted to: it’s one of the things they train you in at the Berman Institute. Let people have plenty of room to get away if they’re nervous about being touched. I squeezed his fingers gratefully, but I needed to get up, to be in motion. We went back to the garden and talked while I restlessly moved around the late–flowering bushes.

“When they got Nicola to Chicago they saw that the stun gun had singed her shirtfront. In case the medical examiner noticed the burn holes during an autopsy, they stripped off her clothes and put on a Mad Virgin T–shirt—I’m pretty sure one that Lucian Frenada had made on spec for Global.”

I explained to Morrell what I had learned about Frenada and Trant the night I’d been at Father Lou’s, right before my arrest, that Frenada had made some shirts for Global and had argued both with Lacey and Trant over what became of them.

“He claimed Trant had stolen one, and Lacey laughed it off. I did, too—why would a Global boss steal a shirt when he could get a dozen of them free anytime he wanted? But the ones Trant could get all had a label reading
Made with Pride in the USA
, a kind of
Arbeit macht frei
label we had to sew into the necks of the T–shirts we made. Why they wanted a Mad Virgin T–shirt on Nicola I don’t know—maybe Trant had a crazy idea that they could finger Frenada for the murder if anyone was asking questions. Everything they did had a B–movie feel to it; it was just the thing that a studio executive would come up with. Or maybe it was Alex Fisher’s idea.

“When they thought I was dying they took my damaged shirt off in the cell and put on another one. They made some comment about it at the time. Even though I kept blanking in and out, I was aware of what was going on, although at the time, it didn’t make sense.”

Before my arrest, I had wondered if Frenada had something to do with Nicola Aguinaldo’s death, but during a wakeful night at Coolis I remembered the sequence of conversations we’d had. It was when I asked him how a shirt he made came to be on her body that Frenada suddenly became quiet, then hung up on me. The night that Robbie saw him in Oak Brook, Frenada had gone out to confront Trant and Baladine. The trouble was, I couldn’t prove that Baladine killed Frenada—I could only guess it. I asked Morrell if Vishnikov’s autopsy had turned up anything unusual.

“Oh, that’s right: we’ve had so much else to talk about I forgot about that,” Morrell said. “Frenada definitely died by drowning. Vishnikov says he had a blow on the side of the head that could have come from slipping on the rocks by the harbor—he got it before he died, and that might have been why he went into the water. Other contusions had appeared postmortem.”

I scowled. “He was out at the Baladine estate the night he died. Robbie saw him there and later overheard a most suggestive remark from Trant, something about that taking care of the problem. I think they drowned Frenada in the pool and carted him off to Lake Michigan, but I guess that didn’t show up on autopsy.”

Morrell shook his head. “After you asked me to go back to him, Vishnikov did a really thorough study of every organ in the body, but he says there’s no way to prove whether he drowned in fresh or chlorinated water.”

I started shredding the wilted flower in my buttonhole. “If I can’t pin something substantial on that bastard, I’m not going to be able to work again. I can’t prove he killed Frenada. I can testify to someone somewhere about the shirts, but I can’t prove they’re running a factory out in Coolis either. That is, I can’t prove they’re selling the shirts and jackets and whatnot outside the prison system, not without a huge amount of effort.”

“What would it take to prove it?” Morrell asked.

“Oh, the grubby kind of detective work we used to do in the days before we could check everything out on–line. Watching for service vans like the one that carted me off, follow them, see which ones contain Global products, where they get dropped off. You could probably bribe the drivers and shorten the process, but it would still take weeks. And then there’d be hearings, and somehow during that time I’d have to come up with money to live on, not to mention money to fund the investigation. It would be easier if I could get Baladine to confess.”

Morrell looked at me in astonishment. “You don’t really think you could do that, do you? That kind of guy won’t. His self–image, his need to be the top dog—”

While he was talking I was imagining the way Baladine had come after Frenada and me: trying to plant cocaine in both our shops, arresting me for kidnapping, planting phony data on the Internet about Frenada’s finances. Baladine wasn’t just a high–tech operator; he liked to get his hands dirty. But I began to see a way in which I could use his technology to make the confession happen. Was I going to be foolhardy once again? To be daring without judgment? In a way, I didn’t care. I had been through the fiery furnace; I had been badly burned, but I had survived. No harms that befell me in the future could be as bad as the ones I had already endured.