Blood Shot (21 page)

31

Old Fireball

When I got back to my apartment I stopped to tell Mr. Contreras I was home and let him know Caroline would be arriving soon. My conversation with Lotty had done something to restore my equilibrium. I felt calm enough to abandon my plan for a walk in favor of a little housekeeping.

The partially cooked chicken I’d stashed in the refrigerator Tuesday night had become pretty rank. I carried it down to the garbage can in the alley, scrubbed the refrigerator with soda to deaden the smell, and bundled my newspapers out front for the recycling team to pick up. By the time Caroline arrived a little after four, I’d paid all my December bills and had organized the receipts for my tax returns. I was also feeling all my sore muscles.

Caroline came quietly up the stairs, smiling a little nervously. She followed me into the living room, turning down my offer of refreshments in a soft, breathy voice. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her so ill at ease.

“How’s Louisa doing?” I asked.

She made a throwaway gesture. “She seems stable right now. But kidney failure leaves you pretty depressed—it seems dialysis only gets a fraction of impurities out of the system, so you’re always feeling nightmarish.”

“Did you tell her about the call you got—about Joey Pankowski being your father?”

She shook her head. “I haven’t told her anything. About your looking for him or—or, well, about anything. I had to let her know Nancy was dead, of course—she would have seen it on TV or heard it from her sister. But she can’t take any more upsets like that.”

She played nervously with the fringe on one of the sofa cushions, then burst out, “I wish I’d never asked you to find my father for me. I don’t know what magic I thought you could work. And I don’t know why I thought finding him would alter my life in any way.” She gave a harsh little laugh. “What am I saying? Just having you look for him has changed my life.”

“Could we talk about that a little?” I asked gently. “Someone called you two weeks ago and told you to chase me away, didn’t they? That was when you phoned me with that incredible rigmarole about not wanting me to look for your father.”

Her head was bent down so far all I could see was her wild copper curls. I waited patiently. She would not have made the trek up to Lakeview if she hadn’t decided to tell me the truth—it was just taking her some time to give her courage the last screw.

“It’s the mortgage,” she finally whispered to her feet. “We rented for years and years. Then when I started working we could finally save enough to make a down payment. I got a call. A man—I don’t know who he was. He said—he said—he’d been looking into our loan. He thought—he told me—they would cancel it if I didn’t make you stop looking for my father—stop you from asking all those questions about Ferraro and Pankowski.”

At last she looked up at me, her freckles standing out sharply from the pallor of her face. She held out her hands beseechingly and I moved from my chair to put my arms around her. For a few minutes she nestled against me, trembling, as though she were still little Caroline and I was the big kid who could save her from any danger.

“Did you call the bank?” I asked her presently. “See if they knew anything about it?”

“I was afraid if they heard me asking questions, they might do it, you know.” Her voice was muffled against my armpit.

“What bank is it?”

She sat up at that and looked at me in alarm. “You’re not going to go talk to them about it, Vic! You mustn’t!”

“I may know someone who works there, or someone on the board,” I said patiently. “If I find I can’t ask a few questions very discreetly, I promise not to paw up the dirt. Okay? Anyway, it’s a pretty good bet that it’s Ironworkers Savings & Loan—that’s where everyone in the neighborhood has always gone.”

Her big eyes searched my face anxiously. “It is, Vic. But you have to promise, really promise, you won’t do anything that will jeopardize our mortgage. It would kill Ma if something like that happened now. You know it would.”

I nodded solemnly and gave my word. I didn’t think she was exaggerating the effect on Louisa of any kind of major disturbance. As I thought about Caroline’s frantic response to the threat on her mother, something else occurred to me.

“When Nancy was murdered you told the police I knew why she’d been killed. Why did you do that? Was it because you really wanted me to keep an eye on you and Louisa?”

She blushed violently. “Yes. But it didn’t do me any good.” Her voice was barely a squeak.

“You mean they did it? Cut off your mortgage?”

“Worse. They—they somehow figured out—I’d gone to you about her murder. They called me again. At least it was the same man. And said if I didn’t want to see Ma’s medical benefits cut off, I’d better get you away from South Chicago. So I was really scared then. I tried my best, and when this man called me back I told him—told him I couldn’t—couldn’t stop you, that you were on your own.”

“So they decided to stop me themselves.” My throat was dry; my own voice came out harshly.

She looked at me fearfully. “Can you forgive me, Vic? When I saw the news, saw what happened to you, it shattered me. But if I had to do it again, I’d have to do it the same way. I couldn’t let them hurt Ma. Not after everything she went through for me. Not with all her suffering now.”

I got up and paced angrily to the window. “Didn’t it occur to you, if you told me, I could do something about it? Protect her and you? Instead of running blind, so that I almost got killed myself?”

“I didn’t think you could,” she said simply. “When I asked you to find my father I was still imagining you were my big sister, that you could solve all my problems for me. Then I saw you weren’t as powerful as I’d imagined you to be. It was just, with Ma so sick and everything, I needed someone so badly to look after me, and I thought maybe you’d still be that person.”

Her statement dissipated my anger. I came back to the couch and smiled wryly at her. “I think you’ve finally grown up, Caroline. That’s what it is all right—no big people to clean up all the mess around us. But even if I’m not still the kid who could whip the neighborhood to save your butt, I’m not totally ineffective. I think it’s possible to tidy some of the garbage floating around on this one.”

She gave a shaky smile. “Okay, Vic. I’ll see if I can help you.”

I went to the dining room and pulled a bottle of Barolo from the liquor cupboard, Caroline rarely drank, but the heavy wine helped steady her. We talked for a while, not about our current problems, but general things—whether Caroline really wanted a law degree if she didn’t have to play catch-up with me. After a glass or two we both felt able to return to the discussion at hand.

I told her about Pankowski and Ferraro and the conflicting reports on their suit against Humboldt Chemical. “I don’t know what that has to do with Nancy’s death. Or with the attack on me. But it was when I found out about it and started questioning people about them that someone threatened me.”

She listened to a detailed report on my encounters with Dr. Chigwell and his sister, but she couldn’t shed any light on the blood work he’d kept on Xerxes employees.

“This is the first I ever heard about it. You know the kind of person Ma is—if they sent her in for a medical exam every year, she did it without thinking about it. A lot of things people told her to do on the job didn’t make any sense to her, and this would be one of them. I can’t believe it has anything to do with Nancy’s death.”

“Okay. Let’s try another one. Why did Xerxes buy their insurance through Art? Is Jurshak still the fiduciary on their life-health stuff? Why was it important enough to Nancy that she was carrying it around?”

Caroline shrugged. “Art keeps a pretty tight grip on a number of the businesses down there. He might have gotten their insurance in exchange for a tax break or something. Of course when Washington was elected Art didn’t have as many favors to hand out, but he still can do a lot for a company if they do something for him.”

I pulled Jurshak’s report to Mariners Rest from Mozart’s Concert Arias and handed it to Caroline. She frowned over it for several minutes.

“I don’t know anything about insurance,” she finally said. “All I can tell you is that Ma’s benefits have been first-class. I don’t know about any of these other companies.”

Her words triggered an elusive memory. Something someone had said to me in the last few weeks about Xerxes and insurance. I frowned, trying to drag it the surface, but I couldn’t get hold of it.

“It meant something to Nancy,” I said impatiently. “What? Did she collect data on health and mortality rates for any of these companies? Maybe she had some way of checking the accuracy of this report.” Maybe the report didn’t mean anything. But then why had Nancy been carrying it around?

“Yes. She did track all these health statistics—she was the director of Health and Environmental Services.”

“So let’s go down to SCRAP and check her files.” I got up and started hunting for my boots.

Caroline shook her head. “Nancy’s files are gone. The police impounded what she had in her desk, but someone had cleaned out her health files before the cops got them. We just assumed she’d taken them home with her.”

My anger returned in a rush, fueled by disappointment: I was sure we’d reached a break in the case. “Why the hell didn’t you tell the police that two weeks ago? Or me! Don’t you see, Caroline? Whoever killed her took her papers. We could have been looking exclusively at people involved in these companies, instead of trailing around after vengeful lovers and all that crap!”

She heated up just as fast. “I told you at the time she was killed because of her work! You just were on your usual fucking arrogant head trip and wouldn’t pay any attention to me!”

“You said it was because of the recycling plant, which this has nothing to do with. And anyway, why didn’t you tell me that her files had disappeared?”

We went at it like a couple of six-year-olds, both venting our fury over the threats and humiliations of the past few weeks. I don’t know how we would have extricated ourselves from the escalating insults if we hadn’t been interrupted by the buzzer outside my front door. I left Caroline in the living room and stormed to the entrance.

Mr. Contreras was standing there. “I don’t mean to be butting in, cookie,” he said apologetically, “but this young fella’s been ringing the lobby bell for the last couple of minutes and you two was so wrapped up, I thought maybe you couldn’t hear him.”

Young Art trailed in behind Mr. Contreras. His square, chiseled face was flushed and his auburn hair disheveled. He was biting his lips, clenching and unclenching his hands, in so much turmoil that his usual beauty was obscured. The family resemblance I saw in his distraught face staggered me so much that it muffled my surprise at seeing him.

I finally said weakly, “What are you doing here? Where have you been? Did your mother send you?”

He cleared his throat, trying to speak, but he couldn’t seem to get any words out.

Mr. Contreras, his promise not to breathe down my neck still present in his mind, didn’t linger to issue his usual unsubtle threats against my male visitors. Or maybe he’d summed up Art and figured he didn’t need to worry.

When the old man had left Art finally spoke. “I need to talk to you. It—things are worse than I thought.” His voice came out in a squawky little whisper.

Caroline came to the living-room door to see what the uproar was about. I turned to her and said as gently as I could, “This is young Art Jurshak, Caroline. I don’t know if you’ve ever met, but he’s the alderman’s son. He’s got something confidential he needs to tell me. Can you call some of your pals at SCRAP, see if any of them know anything about this report Nancy was carrying around with her?”

I was afraid she was going to argue with me, but my stunned mood got across to her. She asked if I was all right, if it was okay to leave me with young Art. When I reassured her she went back to the living room for her coat.

She stopped briefly at the door on her way out and said in a small voice, “I didn’t mean all those things I was saying. I came here to get back on good terms with you, not to shout like that,”

I rubbed her shoulders gently. “It’s okay, fireball—it goes with the territory. I said some stupid things myself Let’s forget it.”

She gave me a quick hug and took off.

32

Flushed Out of the Pocket

I took Art into the living room and poured him a glass of the Barolo. He gulped it down. Water would probably have been just as good under the circumstances.

“Where have you been hiding? Do you know every beat cop in Chicago is carrying your description? Or that your mother’s going crazy?” They weren’t the questions I really wanted to ask, but I couldn’t figure out how to frame those.

His lips stretched in a nervous parody of his usual beautiful smile. “I was at Nancy’s. I figured no one would look there.”

“Hn-unh.” I shook my head. “You’ve been gone since Monday night and I was at Nancy’s on Tuesday with Mrs. Cleghorn.”

“I spent Monday night in my car. Then I figured no one would be bothering with Nancy’s house. I—I could see it had been torn up pretty good. It’s been kind of spooky, but I knew I’d be safe there since they’d already searched it.”

“Who’s ’they’?”

“The people who killed Nancy.”

“And who are they?” I felt as though I was interrogating a jug of molasses.

“I don’t know,” he muttered, looking away.

“But you can guess,” I prodded. “Tell me about the insurance your father manages for Xerxes. What was Nancy’s interest in it?”

“How did you get those papers?” he whispered. “I called my mother this morning, I knew she’d be worried, and she said you had been by. My—my old man—Big Art had found the card you left and really blown sky high, she said. He was screaming that—that if he got his hands on me, he’d see I remembered never to betray him again. That’s why I came here. To see what you know. See if you can help me.”

I looked at him sourly. “I’ve been trying to get you to tell me a few things for the last two weeks and you’ve been acting as though English was your second language and you weren’t too fluent in it.”

He scrunched up his face in misery. “I know. But when Nancy died I was so afraid. Afraid my old man had something to do with it.”

“Why didn’t you run away then? Why wait until I talked to you?”

He flushed an even deeper red. “I thought maybe no one would know—know the connection. But if you saw it, anyone could.”

“Like the police, you mean? Or Big Art?” When he didn’t answer I said with what patience I could muster, “Okay. Why did you come here today?”

“I called my mother this morning. I knew my old man would be at a meeting, that I could count on him not being home. The slate-makers, you know.” He smiled unhappily. “With Washington dead, they were all getting together this morning to plan for the election. Dad—Art—might miss a Council meeting, but he wouldn’t stay away from that.

“Anyway, Mother told me about you. About how you’d been around but then you’d almost ended up the same—the same way as Nancy. I couldn’t stay in her place forever, there was hardly any food anyway and I was scared to turn on the lights at night in case someone saw and came into inspect. And if they were going to go after anyone who knew about Nancy and the insurance, I figured I’d better get help or I’d be dead.”

I curbed my impatience as best I could. It was going to be a long afternoon, getting information from him. The questions that were really burning my tongue—about his family —would have to wait until I could pry his story from him.

The first thing I wanted to clear up was his relationship with Nancy. Since he had let himself into her house he couldn’t very well keep denying they’d been lovers. And the story came out, sweet, sad, and stupid.

He and Nancy had met a year before on a community project. She was representing SCRAP, he the alderman’s office. She’d attracted him immediately—he’d always liked older women who had her kind of looks and warmth and he’d wanted to go out with her right away. But she’d put him off with one excuse or another until a few months ago. Then they’d started dating and had rapidly moved to a full-blown affair. He’d been deliriously happy. She was warm, loving—on and on.

“So why didn’t anyone know about it if you were both so happy?” I asked. I could just see it, barely. When he wasn’t shredding himself with misery his incredible beauty made you want to touch him. Maybe it was enough for Nancy, maybe she thought the aesthetics of it compensated for his immaturity. She might have been cold-blooded enough to want him as a conduit to the alderman’s office, but I didn’t think so.

He shifted uncomfortably. “My dad always raved on so much against SCRAP, I knew he’d hate it if I was dating someone who worked there. He felt they were trying to take over the ward from him, you know, always criticizing things like the broken sidewalks in South Chicago and the unemployment and stuff. It’s not his fault, you know, but when Washington got in charge, you didn’t see a penny going to the white ethnic neighborhoods.”

I opened my mouth to argue the point, then shut it again. South Chicago had begun its demise under the late great Mayor Daley and had been assiduously ignored by Bilandic and Byrne alike. And Art, Sr., had been alderman all that time. But fighting such a war wasn’t going to do me any good this afternoon.

“So you didn’t want him to know. And Nancy didn’t want her friends to know about you, either. Same reason?”

He squirmed again. “I don’t think so. I think—she was a little bit older than me, you know. Only ten years. Well, almost eleven. But I think she was afraid people would laugh at her if they knew she was seeing someone so young.”

“Okay. So it was a big secret. Then she came to you three weeks ago to see if Art was opposed to the recycling plant. What happened then?”

He reached nervously for the wine bottle and poured the last of the Barolo into his glass. When he’d gulped most of it down he started spitting out the story, a bit at a time. He knew Art was against the recycling plant. His dad was working hard to bring new industry to South Chicago, and he was afraid a recycling plant would put some companies off—that they wouldn’t want to operate in a community where they had to go to the extra trouble of putting their wastes in drums for recycling instead of just dumping them into lagoons.

He’d told Nancy that and she had insisted on seeing any files about the project. Apparently, like me, she’d figured it wasn’t worth arguing whether Art, Sr.’s, professed reasons were the real ones.

Young Art hadn’t wanted to do it, but she’d pushed hard. They went back to the insurance office late one night and she went through Art’s desk. It was horrible, the most horrible night he’d ever spent, worrying about his father or his father’s secretary coming in on them, or one of the beat cops seeing a light and surprising them.

“I understand. The first time you break and enter is always the hardest. But why did Nancy choose this insurance file over something about recycling?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. She was looking for anything with the names of any of the companies involved in the recycling plant on it. And then she saw these papers and said she didn’t know we—my dad’s agency—handled Xerxes’s insurance, and then she read through them and said this was hot stuff, she’d better copy it and take it along. So she went down the hall to use the machine. And Big Art came in.”

“Your father saw her?” I gasped.

He nodded miserably. “He had Steve Dresberg with him. Nancy ran, but she scattered the originals all over the floor. So they knew she was copying them.”

“And what did you do?”

His face disappeared into a little ball of such abject shame that I felt almost sorry for him. “They never knew I was there. I hid in my own office with the lights off.”

I didn’t know what to say. That he could have abandoned Nancy to her fate. That he knew Dresberg had been there with his old man. And at the same time the logical part of my mind began worrying about the problem: Was it the insurance papers or was it the fact that Nancy had seen Art with Dresberg? It wasn’t surprising that the alderman had ties to the Garbage King. But it was understandable that he kept them quiet.

“Don’t you understand?” I finally cried out, my voice close to a howl. “If you’d said something about your father and Dresberg last week, we might have gotten somewhere in investigating Nancy’s death. Don’t you care anything about finding her killers?”

He stared at me through tragic blue eyes. “If it was your father, would you want to know—really know—he was doing that kind of thing? Anyway, he already thinks I’m such a failure. What would he think if I turned him in to the cops? He’d say I was siding with SCRAP and the Washington faction against him.”

I shook my head to see if that would clear my brain, but it didn’t seem to help any. I tried speaking, but every sentence I started ended in a few sputtered words. Finally I asked weakly what he wanted me to do.

“I need help,” he muttered.

“You ain’t kidding, boy. But I don’t know if even a Michigan Avenue analyst could do anything for you, and I’m damned sure I can’t.”

“I know I’m not very tough. Not like you or—or Nancy. But I’m not an imbecile, either. I don’t need you making fun of me. I can’t fix this myself I need help and I thought since you’d been a friend of hers you might …” His voice trailed off.

“Rescue you?” I finished sardonically. “Okay. I’ll help you. In exchange for which I want some information about your family.”

He looked wildly at me. “My family? What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Just tell me. It’s got nothing to do with you. What was your mother’s maiden name?”

“My mother’s maiden name?” he repeated stupidly. “Kludka. Why do you want to know?”

“It wasn’t Djiak? You never heard of that?”

“Djiak? Of course I know the name. My father’s sister married some guy named Ed Djiak. But they moved to Canada before I was born. I’ve never met them—I wouldn’t even have heard of Dad’s sister if I hadn’t seen the name on a letter when I joined the agency—when I asked my father he told me about it—said they’d never gotten along and she’d cut the connection. Why do you want to know about them?”

I didn’t answer him. I felt so nauseated that I leaned my head over onto my knees. When Art had come in with his face all flushed, his auburn hair wildly standing around his head, his resemblance to Caroline had been so strong that they might have been twins. He’d gotten his red hair from his father. Caroline took after Louisa. Of course. How simple. How simple and how horrifying. All the same genes. All in the same family. I just hadn’t wanted to begin thinking such a thing when I saw them side by side. Instead I’d been trying to work out some way Art’s wife could be related to Caroline.

My conversation with Ed and Martha Djiak three weeks earlier came back to me in full force. And with Connie. How her uncle liked to come around and have Louisa dance for him. Mrs. Djiak knew. What had she said? “Men have difficulty controlling themselves.” But that it was Louisa’s fault —that she’d led him on.

My gorge rose so violently, I thought I would choke. Blame her. Blame their fifteen-year-old daughter when it was her own brother who got her pregnant? My one thought was to get out of here, to get down to East Side with my gun and beat the Djiaks until they admitted the truth.

I got up, but the room swam darkly in front of me. I sat back down again, steadying myself, becoming aware of young Art talking frightenedly in the chair across from me.

“I told you what you asked. Now you’ve got to help me.”

“Yeah, right. I’ll help you. Come along with me.”

He started to protest, to demand to know what I was going to do, but I cut him off sharply. “Just come with me. I don’t have any more time right now.”

My tone more than my words stopped him. He watched silently while I got my coat. I tucked my driver’s license and money into my jeans pocket so I wouldn’t be hampered by a purse. He started to stammer some more questions—was I going to shoot his old man?—when he saw me take out the Smith & Wesson and check the clip.

“Shoe’s on the other foot,” I said curtly. “Your father’s buddies have been gunning for me all week.”

He blushed again with shame and lapsed back into silence.

I took him down to Mr. Contreras. “This is Art Jurshak. His papa may have had something to do with Nancy’s death and he isn’t feeling too kindly toward his kid right now. Can you keep him here until I can make some other arrangement for him? Maybe Murray will want to take him.”

The old man preened himself importantly. “Sure thing, doll. I won’t say a word to anybody, and you can count on her highness here to do the same. No need to go asking that Ryerson guy to do anything—I’m perfectly happy to keep him as long as you want.”

I smiled faintly. “After a couple of hours with him you may change your mind—he’s not a lot of fun. Just don’t tell anyone about him. That lawyer—Ron Kappelman—may come around. Say you don’t know where I’ve gone or when I’ll be back. And not a word about your guest.”

“Where are you going, doll?”

I pressed my lips together in a reflex of annoyance, then remembered our truce. I beckoned him into the hall so I could tell him without Art’s hearing. Mr. Contreras came quickly, the dog at his ankles, and nodded gravely to show he remembered both name and address.

“I’ll be here when you come back. I won’t let anyone lure me away tonight. But if you’re not back by midnight, I’m calling Lieutenant Mallory, doll.”

The dog padded after me to the door, but gave a little sigh of resignation when Mr. Contreras called her back. She knew I had my boots on, not my running shoes—she’d just been hoping.