Fire Sale (21 page)

“That’s a good paternal attitude,” I applauded him. “No wonder both your kids ran away from home.”

Jacqui laughed again, delighted with the rancor. Buffalo Bill snatched his cane from me and stomped up the broken walk to the front door. His wife squeezed my hand before following him, with Mr. William taking her arm again. The chauffeur opened the apartment door for them, then leaned against the building to smoke a cigarette.

I climbed into the middle row of seats, behind Jacqui. “So you called Patrick Grobian at the warehouse to track down the Dorrados? How does he know them?”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but you ought to realize that anyone who wants to move ahead in the Bysen operation has to keep track of what’s important to the big buffalo. Pat saw the girl having a Coke with Billy in September; he knew the old man would want that information. He made it his business to find out who she was. So of course he knows where she lives.”

“No one can expect to move too far up the By-Smart ladder if they’re not part of the family,” I said.

“You don’t need to be the CEO to have a lot of power and make a lot of money in a company this big. Pat knows that, and he’s a go-getter. If he was a Bysen, he’d be leading the pack. As it is, when the old man goes, he’s likely to get a good position at the home office.”

“If
you’re
in charge,” her husband said from the back of the Caddy. “But, my dear Jacqueline, you won’t be. William will be, and he doesn’t like you.”

“This isn’t medieval England,” Jacqui said. “Just because he’s the oldest doesn’t mean Willie gets the throne, although he’s like poor Prince Charles, isn’t he, waiting around for his mum to die, except in this case Willie is waiting for Daddy to die. I’m surprised sometimes he doesn’t—”

“Jacqui.” Gary’s voice sounded a warning. “Not everyone has your sense of humor. If you want to keep doing the work you’re doing, you need to learn to get along with William, that’s all I’m going to say.”

Jacqui turned around in the front seat and fluttered improbably long eyelashes. “Darling, I am doing everything I can to help William.
Everything.
Just ask him how much he owes me these days and you’ll be surprised by his change in attitude. He finally sees how incredibly useful I can be.”

“Maybe,” Gary muttered. “Maybe.”

I looked over at the apartment, thinking I should go up to give Rose a helping hand. She didn’t have the resources to face the Bysens alone. Before I got to the front door, though, the trio reappeared.

“Did they know anything about Billy?” I asked Mrs. Bysen.

She shook her head unhappily. “I can’t be sure. I appealed to the woman as a mother and a grandmother—I can see how much she loves those children, and how hard she works to give them a decent life—but she said she only ever sees him at Mount Ararat, and the girls said the same thing. Do you think they’re telling the truth?”

“People like that don’t know truth from lies, Mother,” Mr. William said. “It’s easy to see where Billy got his gullibility.”

“You don’t talk to your mother that way while I’m alive, Willie. If Billy got your mother’s sweet disposition, that isn’t a bad thing. The rest of you pack of hyenas, you’re all waiting for me to die so you can eat the company I built.” He glowered at me. “If I find you know where my boy is and you’re not telling me—”

“I know,” I said wearily. “You’ll break me in your soup like crackers.”

I stomped across the street again and turned my car around to head for home.

24

Yet Another Missing Child

I
n the morning, I went to my office early and put the metal frog into a box, messengering it out to Cheviot, the forensics engineering lab I use. I told Sanford Rieff, the engineer I usually work with, I didn’t know what I was looking for, so asked him to do a full report on the dish—who made it, whose prints were on it, any chemical residues, anything. When he phoned to ask how big a rush I was in, I hesitated, looking at my month’s accounts. No one was paying me; I didn’t even know if the dish was connected to the fire. It was what I’d said to Billy yesterday—my only clue, so I was being enthusiastic about it.

“Not a rush job—I can’t afford it.”

I spent most of the rest of the morning doing work for people who paid me to ask questions for them, but I did take some time to see what information I could get on the Bysen family. I already knew they were rich, but my eyes widened as I went through their history on my law enforcement database. I didn’t have enough fingers and toes to count the zeroes in their holdings. Of course, a lot of it was tied up in various trusts. There was a foundation, which supported a wide array of evangelical programs, gave heavily to antiabortion groups and evangelical missions, but also supported libraries and museums.

Three of Buffalo Bill’s four sons and one of the daughters lived with him in a gated estate in Barrington Hills. They had separate houses, but all in the same happy patriarchal enclave. The second daughter was living in Santiago with her husband, who headed South American operations; the fourth son was in Singapore managing the Far East. So no one had run away from Papa. That seemed significant, although I didn’t know of what.

Gary and Jacqui didn’t have any children of their own, but the other five had produced a total of sixteen. The Bysens’ commitment to traditional family values certainly carried through in their distribution of assets: as nearly as I could make out, each of the sons and grandsons had trusts worth about three times what the girls in the family got.

I wondered if this was what had Billy wondering about his family, although I sort of doubted it. No one cares too much about women’s issues these days, not even young women; I had a feeling that his sister losing out in the will was something Billy would accept unquestioningly. Jacqui was the one family member I’d met who might feel differently—but she was married to one of the men, one of the jackpot hitters, and I didn’t picture her caring about anyone else’s inheritance as long as she got hers.

Billy’s sister, Candace, was twenty-one now. Whatever she’d done that caused the family to ship her to Korea, she was still in the will, so they were fair up to that point. I searched for more specific news about Candace, but couldn’t find anything. I printed out some of the more interesting reports, then closed up my office: I wanted to stop at the hospital on my way down to Bertha Palmer High. I figured the team would like an update on April Czernin.

When I got to the hospital, though, I found April had been discharged early this morning. I called Sandra Czernin from my car, but she treated me like a porcupine treats a dog, shooting quills into its mouth.

She reiterated her accusations that April’s collapse was my fault. “You’ve been waiting all these years to get even with me for Boom-Boom, so you brought that English bitch down to meet him. If not for you, he’d’ve been home where he belonged.”

“Or out with someone from the neighborhood,” I said. I regretted the words as soon as they hopped out, and even apologized, but it wasn’t too surprising that she wouldn’t let me talk to April.

“Any idea when she can come back to school?” I persisted. “The girls will want to know.”

“Then their mothers can call me and ask.”

“Even if I did bear a grudge after all these years, I wouldn’t take it out on your kid, Sandra,” I yelled, but she slammed the phone in my ear.

Oh, to hell with her. I put the car into gear, thinking that jealousy of Marcena could have brought Sandra and me together. The image made me snicker inadvertently, and sent me farther south in a better humor.

I was early enough for practice to stop in the principal’s office to talk to Natalie Gault. When I asked her what kind of physicals the girls were given before signing up for basketball, she rolled her eyes as if I were some sort of idiot.

“We don’t do health screening here. They have to bring in a parent’s signed permission slip. That says the parent knows there are risks in the sport and that their child is healthy enough to play. We do it for basketball, football, baseball, all our sports. That document says the school is not liable for any illness or injury the child contracts from playing.”

“Sandra Czernin is angry and scared. She needs a hundred thousand dollars to pay for April’s health care, for starters, anyway. If it occurs to her to sue the school, it won’t be hard for her to find a lawyer to take you to court—a permission slip like that isn’t going to stand up in front of a jury. Why not do EKGs on the rest of the squad, cheer everybody up, act like you’re paying attention?”

I didn’t mention Lotty’s offer to do the EKGs—let the school sweat a little. Besides, I couldn’t quite get my mind around the logistics of ferrying fifteen teenagers to the clinic. Gault said she would discuss it with the principal and get back to me.

I went on down to the gym, where I found a skeleton squad. Josie Dorrado was missing, as was Sancia, my center. Celine Jackman, my young gangbanger, was there with her two sidekicks, but even she seemed subdued.

I told the nine who had shown up what I knew about April. “The hospital sent her home today. She can’t play basketball again—there’s something wrong with her heart, and the kind of workouts you have to do for team sports are too strenuous for her. But she’ll be able to return to school, and you won’t know by looking at her that there’s anything wrong with her. Where are Josie and Sancia?”

“Josie, she cut school today,” Laetisha volunteered. “We thought, maybe she caught whatever April got, on account of them two is always together.”

“You can’t catch what April has: it’s a condition, you’re born with it.” I got out my coach’s erasable board and tried to draw a diagram for them, how you “catch” a disease caused by a virus, like chicken pox or AIDS, versus how you can be born with a condition.

“So one of us could have the same thing and not know it.” This was Delia, one of the quieter girls, who never put much effort into the game.

“
You
wouldn’t,” Celine said. “You so slow, people think you don’t got a working heart anyway.”

I let the insult go unchecked—I wanted them to feel that life was returning to normal, even if normal included getting slammed. I set them on a short course of stretches, and let them go directly to scrimmage, five on four, with all the weakest players on the smaller squad. I joined the weaker girls at point guard, calling my team up, directing traffic, giving a few tips to the opposition, but putting my all into going one-on-one with Celine. After a short time, everyone, even Delia, forgot that their hearts might give out and started playing. I was hotdogging, bouncing the ball between my legs to someone in the corner, jumping up to block shots, sticking to Celine like her underwear, and the girls were laughing and cheering, and running harder than I’d ever seen them go. Celine took her play up a level and began feinting and nailing her shots as if she were Tamika Williams.

When I called a halt at four, three of the girls begged to stay to work on their free throws. I told them I could let them have ten minutes, when one of the girls screamed, “Ooh, Coach, your back. Celine, what you do to Coach?”

I put a hand behind me and realized I was wet with something warmer than sweat: my wound had come open. “I’m fine,” I said. “This is just an injury I got over at the factory, you know, Fly the Flag, when it blew up last week. You guys were great tonight. I have to go to the doctor and get this stitched back together now, but Thursday everyone who played today goes out for pizza with me after practice.”

When they’d showered and I got the gym locked, I drove up to Lotty’s clinic, feeling a happy glow from the workout—the first time I’d left the high school feeling good since—maybe since ever. Since my team won the state championship all those years ago, although even then—my mother had been dying. I had gotten drunk with Sylvia and the rest of them so I didn’t have to think of Gabriella in her hospital bed, draped with tubes and monitors as if she were a mummified fly in the middle of a spiderweb.

The memory damped down my good mood. When I got to the clinic, I checked in soberly with Mrs. Coltrain, Lotty’s receptionist. A dozen or so people were in the waiting room; it’d be at least an hour. After I turned around and Mrs. Coltrain saw the blood running down my back, she sent me in ahead of the queue. Lotty was at the hospital, but her assistant, Lucy, who’s an advanced-practice nurse, stitched me up.

“You shouldn’t be jumping with these stitches, V. I.,” she said, as severely as Lotty would have done. “The wound has to have time to heal. You stink of sweat, but you cannot get this wound wet again under the shower. A sponge bath. Wash your hair in the kitchen sink. Do you understand?”

“Yes’m,” I said meekly.

Back at home, I gave the dogs a sketchy walk, and followed Lucy’s orders on how to bathe. This meant doing the dishes first, since they’d been building up again. I hadn’t even washed my mother’s Venetian wineglasses, which I’d brought out for Morrell last week. I was dismayed by my carelessness: my mother had brought them from Italy with her, her only memento of the home she’d had to flee. I’d broken two several years ago; I couldn’t bear it if I lost any more.

I carefully rinsed and dried them, but I kept one out for a glass of Torgiano. Usually, I use something replaceable for day-to-day drinking, but my earlier memory was haunting me, making me need to feel close to Gabriella again.

I called Morrell and explained that I was too tired to make it up to Evanston tonight. “Marcena can entertain you with her elegant banter.”

“She could if she was here, darling, but she’s vanished again. Someone called her this afternoon with the promise of more adventures on the South Side and she took off again.”

I remembered Sandra’s bitter remark about Bron going off with the British whore. “Romeo Czernin.”

“Could be. I wasn’t paying special attention. When will I see you again? Could I take you out to dinner tomorrow? Fill you with organic produce and dazzle you with my own elegant banter? I know you’re annoyed that I went home yesterday.”

I laughed reluctantly. “Oh, yes, I remember: subtlety isn’t my strong suit. Dinner would be great, but only with banter.”

We settled on a time, and I went into the kitchen to deal with tonight’s meal. I’d finally made it to the grocery to do my own shopping on my way back from Lotty’s clinic, stocking up on everything from yogurt to soap, as well as fresh fish and vegetables.

I broiled tuna steaks with garlic and olives for Mr. Contreras and myself. We curled up companionably in the living room to eat and watch
Monday Night Football
together, New England against the Chiefs, me with my wine, my neighbor with a Bud. Mr. Contreras, who bets the games, tried to persuade me to put my money where my mouth is.

“Not on who makes the first first down or the biggest tackle,” I protested. “Five bucks on the final score, that’s all.”

“Come on, doll: a dollar if the Chiefs score first, a dollar if they get the first sack.” He enumerated about a dozen things I could bet on, then said scornfully, “I thought you called yourself a risk taker.”

“You’re a risk taker with a union pension,” I grumbled. “I just have a 401(k) that I didn’t even manage a contribution to last year.” Still, I agreed to his scheme and laid out fifteen singles on the coffee table.

Rose Dorrado called just as the Chiefs were mounting a heroic attack late in the first half, when I’d already lost six dollars. I took the phone into the hall to get away from the television noise.

“Josie didn’t come home from school today,” Rose said without preamble.

“She wasn’t at school today at all, according to the girls on the team.”

“Not at school? But she left this morning, right on time! Where did she go? Oh, no, oh,
Dios
, did someone steal my baby!” Her voice rose.

Images of the dark alleys and abandoned buildings on the South Side, of the girls in this city who’ve been molested and killed, flitted around the corners of my mind. It was possible, but I didn’t think that was what had happened to Josie.

“Have you checked with Sandra Czernin? She could be visiting April.”

“I called Sandra, I thought that, too, but she heard nothing from my baby, nothing since Saturday when Josie went to see April in the hospital. What did you say to her yesterday? Did you upset her so much she ran away from me?”

“I told her I didn’t think it was a good idea for her and Billy to spend the night together. Do you know where he is?”

She gasped. “You think he ran off with her? But why? But where?”

“I don’t think anything right now, Rose. I’d talk to Billy before I called the cops, though.”

“Oh, I thought nothing could be worse than losing my job, but now this, this! How do I find him, this Billy?”

I tried to imagine where he might be. I didn’t think he’d gone home, at least not willingly. I suppose his grandfather might have had him picked up—Buffalo Bill was clearly capable of anything. Billy had given his cell phone away, Josie said: obviously, my remark about the GSM chip in it had made him cautious. I wondered if he’d also ditched the Miata.

“Phone Pastor Andrés,” I said at last. “He’s the one person Billy talks to these days. If you can find Billy, I think you’ll find Josie, or, at least, Billy may know where she is.”

Ten minutes later, Rose called back. “Pastor Andrés, he says he doesn’t know where Billy is. He hasn’t seen him since church yesterday. You got to come down here and help me find Josie. Who else can I ask? Who else can I turn to?”

“The police,” I suggested. “They know how to hunt missing persons.”