Warshawski 09 - Hard Time (37 page)

I braced myself, waiting for the henchman to come after me, when a fireman appeared behind the altar. I thought at first I was hallucinating, or that Baladine had dragooned the fire department along with the police, and lifted my gun.

“No need to shoot, young lady,” the man said. “I’m here to put out the fire.”

47 For Those Who Also Serve

“The gunshots woke me and I saw the door to the church was open, so I snuck in. I heard everything but I didn’t know what to do, because BB was saying he had a cop to cover up for him. Then I thought, well, if the church was burning, the fire department would come, so I set fire to a newspaper in the kitchen and called 911 and told them the church was on fire. Then I was afraid I was really going to burn down the building. Is Mitch going to be okay? What did they say at the vet?”

We were sitting in the rectory kitchen, drinking more cambric tea as Father Lou and I tried to clean up the sodden mess the firemen had left behind.

“Robbie, you’re a hero. It was a brilliant idea, but next time you don’t have to set fire to the kitchen—they can’t tell downtown if the place is really burning up or not.” I laughed shakily. “Mitch is going to be okay. The vet said he took the bullet in his shoulder, not the heart, and even though he lost a lot of blood he should make it through.”

Peppy had stayed at the emergency vet to be a blood donor for her son. After the firemen finished putting out the kitchen fire, they’d gotten an ambulance for the wounded. Mr. Contreras and Baladine had both been carted off to County Hospital, although Mr. Contreras was protesting it was only a head injury, he’d survived worse than that at Anzio.

Detective Lemour was in the morgue. He’d broken his neck when he landed on the reliquary at the bottom of the stairs. The remaining two men from Carnifice Security had been carried off by a squadrol that the firemen had summoned. One of the officers driving the squadrol had been a student at St. Remigio’s six years ago. He was horrified at seeing his priest in handcuffs and was happy to accept Father Lou’s version of events: that Baladine had broken in with his two thugs, and that Lemour had died trying to rescue the priest.

“Saves trouble,” the priest said when the policeman had left. “Hard to get the cops to believe one of their own is bent. If Baladine denies the story when he recovers, he’ll have a lot of explaining to do, why Lemour was with him.”

The firemen helped me carry Mitch out to their own car. They gave Peppy and me a ride to the emergency vet and even stayed with me to bring me back to the church an hour later.

“Six o’clock,” Father Lou announced now. “Mass. Want to serve, young lady?”

I started to remind him I wasn’t even baptized, then saw his fierce look and shut my mouth. I followed him back down the hall to the church. Robbie trailed behind us. There was broken glass in the side aisle, and a piece of St. Veronica’s arm had been shot off the high altar, but the church looked remarkably placid in the daylight.

I went into the vestry with Father Lou and watched him robe. He told me what vessels to bring and just to do as he said and I’d be fine. I walked behind him to the Lady Chapel, where a half dozen women waited, teachers going to mass on the first morning of school.

Father Lou bowed to the altar and turned to the women. “I was glad when they said to me, let us go to the House of the Lord.”

48 Meet the Press

“This photograph is a close–up of a bruise on my abdomen. A forensic pathologist says he can identify at least the make and size of the boot that made it. There will be a trial, I’m suing the person who kicked me, and I’ll make an identification in court, so it doesn’t matter now whether he burns the boot or cleans it. The point is, I’m alive, and I can make the identification.”

The eleven people whose papers and broadcast stations had decided to send them to St. Remigio’s looked at each other with a kind of incredulity that said, is this what she dragged us out here for? I smiled at them, I hoped engagingly. When they had come into the school library where Morrell had set up the screen and the projector, they’d mobbed me, wanting answers to all kinds of questions, ranging from what I knew about Baladine’s injuries to where I’d been since getting out of Coolis. I promised they could ask me anything when I finished my presentation.

Murray Ryerson, looking both belligerent and sheepish, was the only one who hung back from the group swarming around me. He said he knew I couldn’t be dead, I was too much of a grandstander for that, then planted himself in a corner and made a big play of studying his own paper when I started speaking.

In the back of the room Father Lou sat with a couple of squarely built men whom the priest identified only as being from his parish council, there to help out if the need arose. Also in the back were Mr. Contreras with Mitch and Peppy, Lotty and Max, and Sal. Neither Mr. Contreras nor Mitch seemed any worse for their night in the church, although Mitch had a large bandage wrapped around his belly and shoulder. He was sitting up, grinning crazily at anyone who wanted to pet him. Morrell was off to one side, operating the projector.

It was a week after Baladine’s assault on the church. We had decided to go ahead with the show, because there were too many open–ended issues. Baladine was going to recover, and he was already trying to make a case that he had used some fancy equipment to scale the side of the church school, break in through the fourth–floor windows, and attack the priest simply in order to get his son back. I wanted my version in as many hands as possible.

“I’m starting with this picture because in a curious way it’s the crux of a difficult case involving Global Entertainment, Carnifice Security, and that perennial chestnut, Illinois politics. I’m alive, talking to you, but another young woman, who received what I believe are identical injuries, was not so fortunate. Nicola Aguinaldo died in the early hours of June seventeenth from a perforated intestine. Her body disappeared from the medical examiner’s office before an autopsy could be performed.”

We had made a still of Nicola smiling, from a frame of the home video where she’d been talking to Robbie. I explained who she was, using a slide with bullet points, how she’d landed in prison, and how I’d inadvertently found her.

“I don’t think we’ll ever know what became of her body: her grief–stricken mother was denied the chance to bury it. But my guess is that a political appointee of Jean–Claude Poilevy at the county morgue removed the body on Poilevy’s orders so that no one would be able to see what kind of boot kicked in Nicola Aguinaldo’s abdomen.”

I nodded at Morrell, who clicked up the slide of Hartigan standing over me with the stun gun. The audience gasped with shock.

“He was about six foot two, perhaps two hundred, two–twenty pounds. She wasn’t five feet tall and weighed maybe ninety pounds. She didn’t have too much of a chance against him. I managed to take this picture with a hidden camera seconds after I’d been shot with fifty thousand volts from a stun gun, right before I was kicked into insensibility.” I held up my right hand, which was in a kind of brace; I’d reinjured the fingers fighting Baladine. “Two of my fingers and five of the small bones in the back of my hand broke as I tried to protect my head.”

I heard another intake of horrified breath but continued with my presentation in a dry, academic voice. It was the only way I could speak without giving way to emotion. I went through the details of Nicola’s daughter’s death, what I’d been told by the women at Coolis about Nicola’s desperate grief and how she’d pounded on the guard’s chest when they laughed at her plea to be allowed to attend the baby’s funeral. I couldn’t look at Mr. Contreras; he was so upset that I knew my own composure would crack. I heard Peppy whining by his side with shared misery.

Morrell put up another slide. This one had a red flashing header reading
Speculation! Speculation!
We’d decided to use that to separate fact from guesswork. I told them I was guessing that Nicola was dumped on the Chicago streets in the same way I was.

“What takes some of the guesswork out of this is the fact that the guards changed my shirt before they took me out of Coolis. I was concussed, manacled, and running a high fever and not able to defend myself; they tore off my shirt and put on one that wouldn’t show the scorch marks from the stun gun.” I stopped for water, remembering Polsen touching the burned skin on my breasts. “They made a comment about not making the mistake they had before, where they had to change the victim’s shirt in Chicago, so they had clearly done this before. It’s just a guess that Nicola Aguinaldo was the person they’d done it to.

“Now here comes more speculation, and mighty interesting it is. The shirt they put on Aguinaldo had been made by Lucian Frenada. You may remember Mr. Frenada’s name: his dead body was found floating in Lake Michigan right before the Fourth of July. Everyone who isn’t brain–dead knows Frenada was a boyhood friend of Lacey Dowell, because Global has been trumpeting that information on television and in the
Herald–Star
for two months. They grew up together right here at St. Remigio’s.” I glanced at Murray. He was studying the floor.

Beth Blacksin from Channel 8 interrupted with a question about Lacey, and several other reporters jumped in. I ignored them and explained how Frenada had gone to Lacey and asked for a chance to make some of the Global Entertainment spin–off products.

“Money in movies isn’t just made on the screen. When your kid has to have that Captain Doberman T–shirt or those Space Beret action figures, the cash registers at Global are ringing. Mad Virgin shirts are very popular with young teens—they’re one of the first movie spin–off items to find a huge marketing success with teenage girls. Oversize denim jackets are another hot seller in Global’s Virginwear line.

“When Nicola Aguinaldo’s body was found, she was wearing one of the T–shirts that Lucian Frenada made as a demo for Teddy Trant at Global. You all remember the party at the Golden Glow back in June, when Frenada came and Lacey had him thrown out? He was demanding to know why Trant had stolen one of the shirts. Global didn’t want to work with him, but Frenada was highly suspicious that Trant might be going to copy some of his workmanship. Of course everyone thought Frenada was trying any tactic he could to get Lacey to influence Global into buying from him: why would a studio head, who could pick up a Mad Virgin T–shirt anytime he walked into his office, go to the trouble of stealing one from a small Humboldt Park entrepreneur?

“But I believe that is exactly what Trant did. He was at Frenada’s shop on the Tuesday night right before Nicola died. That’s a fact. This next is a guess, but I believe that in some crazy scheme, maybe caused by watching too many of his own movies, Trant stole one of Frenada’s shirts to put on Nicola, so that if any questions were asked about her death he could direct attention away from Coolis, from Global, and toward an innocent bystander.”

The room was in an uproar. I went back through the argument, ticking off the points on the slide that highlighted them.

When they seemed to be caught up with me, I went back to Baladine and his fury with me. How Global first tried to bribe me by hiring me to frame Frenada, and when I wouldn’t play, how Baladine began hounding me, culminating with planting cocaine in my office.

I played the video I’d made in my office. The group was firing so many questions now that I had to play it three times before I could go on.

“I don’t know if Baladine wanted me dead or discredited—” I began, when Murray piped up unexpectedly from the back of the room.

“He was spinning around. I don’t think he could possibly have told anyone he wanted you dead, but when some of us at the
Star
caught wind of the discussions going on about your involvement in the case, we—uh, made it as clear as we could that if anything—uh—well, a lot of people in Chicago would want to know why you got—uh—hurt. Also, I got the idea that someone high in the Global organization was lobbying for you, although Al—my contacts there—never said who it was. Anyway, I have a feeling—I was not involved in any discussions about you—but I think he—Baladine—thought discrediting you was the viable route. I didn’t know about the drugs. And I was as amazed as everyone else here when you were arrested for kidnapping. And then, why on God’s green earth you didn’t post bail—” He broke off midsentence. “I guess you were being Wonder Woman again. Take us to the limit one more time, Warshawski.”

I blushed but went on with my presentation. “As far as Frenada goes, I think they wanted him dead: he was starting to complain to too many people about Trant taking one of his sample Virginwear shirts. They thought they could discredit him with drugs; they planted some in his shop and planted some data on the Web trying to show he was a high roller. I’m afraid it was something I said that sent him hotfoot out to Oak Brook to try to confront Baladine and Trant the night of June twenty–sixth.”

Morrell ran the footage of Frenada with Baladine and Trant at Baladine’s pool. He stopped it to make sure everyone noticed the date embedded in the film.

“This film doesn’t prove that Baladine and Trant killed Frenada, but it does put the three men together the night Frenada died. Lucian Frenada had told me he couldn’t compete with Global’s current suppliers because his labor costs were too high. He also had other overhead that someone running a factory in a prison doesn’t have to deal with. The state of Illinois paid for the machines that Global gets to use. The state of Illinois pays the rent on the space for the Global factory. You can’t get lower production costs for this kind of operation, even if you go to Burma, because you can’t beat free space and machinery. And you have a labor force that can never go on strike, never balk at the working conditions, never complain to OSHA or the NLRB. It’s a beauty for the bottom line in these days of the global economy.”

There was another barrage of questions about the Global–Carnifice shop. “You’ve been most patient to listen to me for such a long period,” I finally said. “There are only a few more things I want to say. All summer, as Baladine and Trent were boxing me in, I kept wondering what was so important about Nicola Aguinaldo that they needed to find someone to take the blame for her death. It wasn’t she they cared about, but their manufacturing scheme. It had been operating smoothly, no questions asked, for several years; they didn’t want some outsider poking into Nicola’s death to upset it.

“Maybe you’re wondering how they could run that plant as long as they did with no one noticing. For one thing, they were well connected to the Illinois House Speaker, who’s got a lot of power, in and out of Springfield.

“For another, we all assume that whatever goes on behind those iron bars is protecting all us law–abiding citizens—sorry, all you law–abiding citizens; I’m out on bail facing a felony charge.” People laughed more loudly than my little joke merited—they needed some kind of release from the horrors they’d been hearing.

“Some of what goes on may be nasty, but as the corrections officers said to me and my sister inmates many times—like when a woman wasn’t allowed medical care after getting a major burn on her arm in the kitchen”—I nodded and Morrell flipped up a slide of the arm—”Coolis isn’t a resort. Inmates aren’t on vacation. We law–abiding citizens don’t necessarily want prisoners rehabilitated, but we sure do want them punished. And they get punished in carloads full of discipline.”

I finished with the slides I’d taken of CO Polsen assaulting Dolores in the laundry room. The only sound in the room now was Peppy, crying to be allowed to come to me.

“This kind of thing is a daily occurrence. I witnessed it, I was humiliated in similar ways myself. Women have no recourse against this kind of abuse. Illinois law has no serious provision for removing abusive guards or for disciplining them. It can take over a year for a woman prisoner complaining of rape or battery to get a court hearing. During that year she can be put in segregation. She can be repeatedly assaulted. And if her case is found to be without merit, then she is cattle fodder for the corrections officers. That’s daily life at Coolis.

“I understand Robert Baladine sent around an e–mail, offering to resign. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but if it weren’t for the fact that Lucian Frenada was—probably—killed in an effort to cover up the Global manufacturing operation, I’d think Baladine should resign not because of Frenada but because of the degradation of prisoners that goes on hourly in a prison that his company built and runs for the state of Illinois.”

I’d lost my dry composure. I sat down, shivering, my teeth chattering. Morrell was at my side to put a jacket around my shoulders. Murray had stepped forward along with the rest of the team in the room, but when he saw Morrell behind me, he turned on his heel and left.

Lotty and Sal and Mr. Contreras applauded vigorously, and Mr. Contreras finally let Peppy come up to me. I sank my hands gratefully into her gold fur and tried to calm down enough to answer other questions.

What the reporters most wanted to know, besides their fascination with sex in the prison, was how Baladine came to be injured.

“He says he needed to break into the church to get his son back. I believe Father Lou has made a sworn deposition that Baladine never approached him about his son. Indeed, Robbie arrived at the church only a few hours ahead of his father, who could have phoned or come to the door the way most people might. But someone watching my home apparently saw him arrive, tailed him here to St. Remigio’s, and then called Baladine for instructions. He chose to approach his son in this highly unusual way, and a police officer is dead as a result.”