Burn Marks (12 page)

He allowed as how he had some left over from breakfast and opened the door, looking sternly from the dog to me, “Why’d you let the princess go in the water? Let alone it’s only sixty degrees out, the water in that lagoon hasn’t been clean since 1850.”

Characteristic. In order to be forgiven I had to be scolded. I bared my teeth in the semblance of a smile. “I know, I know. I begged and pleaded with her, but you know how it is—lady wants to do something, she does it without taking advice from anyone.”

He gave me a sharp look. “Seems to me I’ve known ladies like that, uh-huh. And then you got to just ride it out until they’re ready to listen to you again.”

I smiled significantly. “That’s right. That’s it exactly. Now, how about some coffee.”

17

An Aunt’s House Is Her Castle

Mr. Contreras gets vicarious pleasure from my thrills. He’d heard the excitement last night when Bobby had accosted Robin and me, but he’d still been on his dignity— “I know you like to keep your own business to yourself, doll” was how he put it—and so he’d kept the slavering Peppy inside. And I hadn’t thought I had blessings to count. By the time I’d stepped him through the morgue and the late-night tour of Rapelec Towers, he was palpably jealous.

“Should have taken me with you, doll. They threaten to dump a load of steel on you, I’d of known how to handle it.”

“Indeed you would,” I agreed, blenching slightly. The time or two he’d come to my defense with a pipe wrench still haunts my nightmares. “Thanks for the coffee. I’ve gotta go now—need to see a man about a dog and all that stuff.”

Or a woman about the hair of the dog, I thought grimly as I ran up the stairs to my own place. Time to nail Elena down to some approximation of the truth. I took a perfunctory shower, patted myself dry while pulling on my jeans, tucked my rose silk shirt into the waistband, and headed for the door.

I was just starting to lock it when the phone rang. I sprinted back inside. It was Robin. Robin. I’d forgotten to call him, but he didn’t seem to be bothered by it.

“Everything go okay last night?”

“Depends on what you mean. They wanted me to ID a kid whose body they’d found at a construction site.”

He made sympathetic sounds. “Did you?”

“Yeah. She was black, poor, and an addict, so the odds were against a happy ending, but it was still a shocker.”

“The cops could’ve acted a bit more human to you under the circumstances.”

“I suppose under the circumstances they were trying to jolt me into telling the truth.”

He hesitated a moment. “I don’t want to be a pest, especially after you’ve had a bad night, but have you thought any more about taking on the Indiana Arms investigation? We need to get going.”

I felt a warm little glow under my rib cage. Someone thought I was a competent human being, not a pain in the butt who should mind her own business. Even though I’d made up my mind last night to do the job, it just felt good to have someone—some man—call up and think first that I should be working, not that I should stay home and play with dolls.

“The only trouble is, I don’t know anything about fires. And I don’t think I can educate myself fast enough to do a technical investigation.”

“We don’t need you doing any of the engineering work—we hire a lab to handle that. What you can do is a financial check on the owner, see if he had any kind of motive to set the fire himself. What I hear, you’re about the best for that kind of work.”

The glow expanded from my ribs to my cheeks. “Fine.” I took the owner’s name and address; Saul Seligman on north Estes. He was in his seventies and semiretired, but he went into his office on Irving Park Road most afternoons. I conscientiously wrote down the phone number there as well.

“Could we try dinner again?” Robin asked. “Someplace near my house so the cops don’t arrest you halfway through the evening?”

I laughed. “How about Friday? I’m pretty beat and I have a lot of work the next few days.”

“Great. I’ll call Friday morning to pick a place. Thanks a lot for taking on the case.”

“Yeah, sure.” I hung up.

It was past noon now. If my aunt was still the woman she used to be, she’d just be getting up. I drove with a reckless nervousness, covering the four miles in under ten minutes, and screeched to a halt across from the Windsor Arms. A couple was sitting on the sidewalk, their backs against the building, deep in an argument over whose fault it was that Biffy disappeared. I paused long enough to figure out that Biffy was a cat. The pair didn’t spare me a glance.

I didn’t get much more attention in the lobby. The chatelaine was watching TV in the lounge, her back to me. The five or six people with her were absorbed by the intensity of feeling pounding out of the high-perched screen. One of them looked up but went back to the show as I started up the stairs.

I took them two at a time and jogged down to Elena’s room at a good trot. The door was shut. I tried the knob, then pounded loudly. No answer. I pounded again but didn’t call out—if she recognized me, she’d play possum for the next twenty-four hours.

Finally she yelled in a sleep-thickened voice, “Go away. I’ve got a right to my beauty sleep same as you, you cloth-headed bitch.”

I pounded some more, keeping it up steadily until she yanked the door open under my hand. She tried shutting it in my face as soon as she saw me but I followed her into the room.

“Sorry to break into your beauty rest, Auntie,” I said, smiling gently. “Isn’t it a little risky to call the manager a cloth-headed bitch?”

“Victoria, sweetie. What are you doing here?”

“I came to see you, Elena. I’ve got some bad news about Cerise.”

The violet nightdress still hadn’t been laundered. The mixture of stale beer and sweat it gave off was overpowering. I moved to the window and tried to open it, but it had been painted shut with a lavish hand. I sat on the bed. The mattress was about an inch thick; the springs underneath creaked and a little tendril of iron poked through into my buttock.

“Cerise, sweetie?” She blinked in the dim light. “What about her?”

I looked at her solemnly. “I’m afraid she’s dead. The police came and got me at midnight last night to identify her body.”

“Dead?” she repeated. Her face changed rapidly as she tried to decide how to react, moving from blankness to outrage. It seemed to me that one of the intermediate phases was cunning. Finally a few tears coursed down her veined cheeks.

“You shouldn’t break news to people like this, it’s really wrong of you. I hope you didn’t go pounding your way into Zerlina’s hospital room, waking her up and telling her terrible things about her daughter. Gabriella would be ashamed if she knew what you’d done. Really ashamed. Anyway, I thought you were keeping an eye on that poor little girl. Why did you let her run off and get herself killed?” She was clearly working hard to build up some anger.

“She kind of did it on her own. By the time I got back to Dr. Herschel’s Monday afternoon she’d taken off. I called the cops and asked them to keep a lookout for her, but there’s a lot of city and not enough boys in blue to patrol it. So she died of an overdose in the bottom of an elevator shaft at a construction site.”

Elena shook her head, lips pursed together. “That’s terrible, sweetie, terrible. I can’t take news like that sprung on me so suddenly. Why don’t you go away and let me digest it on my own? I’ll have to see Zerlina, and what I’ll ever say to her—you go on, now, Vicki. You were a good girl to come and tell me but I need to be alone.”

I kept the gentle smile on my face and looked up at her earnestly. “I will, Elena. I’ll go real soon. But first I need you to tell me what little scam you and Cerise had decided to run.”

She pulled herself up and gave me a look of outraged dignity. “Scam, Victoria? That’s a very ungenteel word.”

“But it describes the process to a tee. What money-making scheme had the two of you fixed on?”

“The poor girl isn’t even cold and you come here sullying her memory. I don’t know what Gabriella would say.” She plucked nervously at her gown.

The thought of my mother brought me a smile of pure amusement. “She’d say ‘Tell the truth, Elena—it will hurt coming up but then you’ll feel healthy again.’” Gabriella had held a firm belief in the value of purging.

“Well, irregardless, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I shook my head. “Not good enough, Auntie. You and Cerise showed up on my doorstep full of fear over the fate of poor Katterina. Somehow overnight that evaporated— Cerise pulled a disappearing act and you were playing mighty coy yourself. If either of you had been that worried, you would have figured out some way to get back in touch with me.”

“Cerise probably didn’t have your phone number. She probably couldn’t even remember your last name.”

I nodded. “That wouldn’t surprise me. But all she had to do was wait at Dr. Herschel’s clinic and there I’d be ready—loyal, conscientious, and industrious, or whatever the Scout motto says. No. The two of you had something in mind. Or else you wouldn’t have been so reluctant to tell me Zerlina’s last name.”

“I just didn’t think you should go badgering her—”

“Un-unh. You told Zerlina last Wednesday she couldn’t keep the baby at the Indiana Arms. What’d you do— blackmail her for the price of a bottle. Ugly stuff, Elena, but it saved the kid’s life. You knew when you saw me on Sunday that Zerlina had sent the baby away, I want to know what the hell you were doing, and why you dragged me into it.” The intensity of my feeling brought me to my feet; I glared down at my aunt.

The ready tears filled her eyes. “You get out of here, Victoria Iphigenia. You just leave. I’m sorry I ever even came to you after the fire. You’re just a damned snot-nosed buttinski who can’t show any respect to her elders. You may think you own Chicago but this is my room and I can call the police if you don’t leave.”

I looked around the room and my anger faded, replaced by shame and a wave of hopelessness. Elena couldn’t back up her threat—she didn’t even have a phone. All she had was her duffel bag and her sweaty filthy nightgown. I blinked back tears of my own and left. As I walked away under the empty light fixtures, I could hear her scrabble the key in the lock.

Out front the couple had stopped arguing and were making up over a bottle of Ripple. I walked slowly to my car and sat hunched over the steering wheel. Sometimes life seems so painful it hurts even to move my arms.

18

Not Donald Trump

What I wanted was to decamp for some remote corner of the globe where human misery didn’t take such naked forms. Lacking funds for that, I could retire to my bed for a month. But then my mortgage bill would come and go without payment and eventually the bank would kick me out and then I’d have some naked misery of my own, sitting in front of my building with a bottle of Ripple to keep it all out of my head. I started the engine and drove north to Saul Seligman’s office on Foster.

It was a shabby little storefront. The windows were boarded across the bottom; on the top right side “Seligman Property Management” was lettered on the pane in peeling gold scroll. Between the boarding and the grime on the glass, I couldn’t see inside, but I thought a light was on.

The door moved heavily under my hand; it had caught on a piece of loose linoleum that worked as an effective wedge. When I got inside I tried to tamp it down but it curled up as soon as I took my foot away. I gave up and moved to the high, scarred barricade separating Saul from the world beyond. If he was rolling in loot, he wasn’t putting any of it into the front office.

The back area held five desks, but only one was inhabited. A woman of about sixty was reading a library copy of Judith Krantz. Her faded blond hair was carefully sculpted in a series of waves. Her lips moved slightly as she slid one pudgy, ring-encrusted finger down the page. She didn’t look up, though she must have heard me working on the linoleum. Maybe the book was due today—she still had about half to read.

“I can tell you how it comes out,” I offered.

She put Judith down reluctantly. “Did you want something, honey?”

“Mr. Seligman,” I said in my brightest, most professional tone.

“He’s not in, dear.” Her hand strayed for the book.

“When do you expect him?”

“He’s not on a regular schedule now he’s retired.”

I found the latch on the inside of the gate in the barricade. “Maybe you can help me. Are you the office manager?”

She swelled a bit. “You can’t come barging in here, honey. This is private. Public out front.”

I shut the gate behind me. “I’m an investigator, ma’am. Ajax Insurance hired me to look into the fire that destroyed one of the Seligman properties last week. The Indiana Arms.”

“Oh.” She toyed with a wedding band that cut deep into her finger. “Is there some kind of problem?”

“Arson’s always a problem.” I perched on the corner of the desk adjacent to hers. “The company won’t pay the claim until they’re convinced Mr. Seligman didn’t have anything to do with setting the fire.”

She pulled herself up in her seat; her pale blue eyes darted fire at me behind her glasses. “That is an outrageous suggestion. The very idea! Mr. Seligman would no more … Do you have any proof to back this up?”

I shook my head. “I’m not accusing him of setting the fire. I just need to make sure that he didn’t.”

“He didn’t. I can promise you that.”

“Great. That means the inquiry will be short and sweet. How many properties does he own—besides the Indiana Arms, I mean.”

“Mr. Seligman is the sweetest, most honest—look, he’s a Jew, okay, and I’m a Catholic. Do you think that ever bothered him? When my husband left me and I had my two girls to look after, who paid their tuition bills so they could stay on at St. Inanna’s? And the Christmas presents he gave them, not to mention me, if I said it once I said it a hundred times, he’d better not let Fanny see the kinds of presents he gave me, not if he wanted to stay happily married, which he was until she died three years ago. He hasn’t been the same since, lost interest in the business, but if you think he would have burned down a building, you’re the one who’s crazy.”

When she finished she was flushed and panting a little. Only a beast would have persisted.

“Do you collect the rents in here, Mrs….”

“Donnelly,” she snapped. “The building managers do that. Look. You’d better show me some kind of authorization if you’re going to come barging in asking questions.”

I dug my license out of my billfold and handed it to her with one of my cards: V, I, Warshawski, Financial Investigations, She looked them over suspiciously, studying the photo, comparing it to me. For some reason my face had come out a kind of lobster hue in the picture. It always fools people.

“And how do I know you’re with the insurance company?” It was a halfhearted snipe but a valid one.

“You can call the company and ask for Robin Bessinger in the arson division. He’ll vouch for me.” I’d have to get something in writing from them—I’d better walk a copy of my contract for services over tomorrow and pick up a letter of authorization.

Her eye strayed to the phone, but she seemed to decide it was too much trouble to fight me any further. “Okay. Ask what you want, but you’ll never find any proof connecting Mr. Seligman to that fire.”

“What’s your position with the company, Mrs. Donnelly?”

“I’m the office manager.” Her face was braced in fierce lines to deflect any attack on Mr. Seligman.

“And that means you … ?”

“People call in with complaints, I get the building super to check them out, or the property manager, whoever is in charge. I arrange for bids if any work has to get done, that kind of thing. Detectives come in asking questions, I talk to them.”

It was an unexpected flash of humor; I grinned appreciatively. “How many properties are there?”

She ticked them off on her fingers—the one on Ashland, the one on Forty-seventh, and so on, seven altogether, ending with the Indiana Arms. I noted the addresses so I could drive by them, but judging by the locations, none of them was a big money-maker.

No, rents weren’t down any. Yes, they used to have a lot more people in the office, that was when Mr. Seligman was younger—he used to buy and sell properties all the time and he needed more staff to do that. Now it was just her and him, a team like they’d always been, and you wouldn’t find a warmer-hearted person, not if you looked through the suburbs as well as the city.

“Great.” I got up from the edge of the desk and rubbed the sore spot where the metal had cut into my thigh. “By the way, where do you bank—not you personally, Seligman Properties?”

The wary look returned to her face but she answered readily enough—the Edgewater National.

As I was opening the gate something else occurred to me. “Who will take over the business for Mr. Seligman? Does he have any children involved in it?”

She glared at me again. “I wouldn’t dream of prying into such a personal matter. And don’t go bothering him— he’s never really recovered from Fanny’s death.”

I let the gate click behind me. Wouldn’t dream of it, indeed. She probably knew every thought Seligman had had for twenty years, even more so now his wife was dead. As I urged the door over the loose linoleum, I wondered idly about Mrs. Donnelly’s own children, whom the old man had so generously educated.

Before getting into the car I found a phone on the corner to call Robin. He was in a meeting—the perennial location of insurance managers—but his secretary promised to have a letter of authorization waiting for me in the morning.

The afternoon was wearing on; I hadn’t had a proper meal all day, just some toast with Mr. Contreras’s foul coffee. It’s hard to think when you’re hungry—the demands of the stomach become paramount. I found a storefront Polish restaurant where they gave me a bowl of thick cabbage soup and a plate of homemade rye bread. That was so good that I had some raspberry cake and a cup of overbaked coffee before moving farther north to find Mr. Seligman.

Estes is a quiet residential street in Rogers Park. Seligman lived in an unprepossessing brick house east of Ridge. The small front yard hadn’t been much tended during the long hot summer; large clumps of crabgrass and weeds had taken over the straggly grass. The walk was badly broken, not the ideal path for an elderly person, especially when the Chicago winter set in.

The stairs weren’t in much better shape—I sidestepped a major hole on the third riser just in time to keep from twisting my ankle. A threadbare mat lay in front of the door. I skidded on its shiny surface when I rang the bell.

I could hear the bell echoing dully behind the heavy front door. Nothing happened. I waited a few minutes and rang again. After another wait I began to wonder if I’d passed Seligman somewhere on Ridge. Just as I was getting ready to leave, though, I heard the rasp of bolts sliding back. It was a clumsy, laborious process. When the final lock came apart the door opened slowly inward and an old man blinked at me across the threshold.

He must have been about Mr. Contreras’s age, but where my neighbor had a vitality and curiosity that kept him fit, Mr. Seligman seemed to have retreated from life. His face had slipped into a series of soft, downward creases that slid into the high collar of his faded beige turtleneck. Over that he wore a torn cardigan, one side of which was partly tucked into his pajama pants. He did not look like the mastermind of an arson and fraud ring.

“Yes?” His voice was soft and husky.

I forced a smile to my lips and explained my errand.

“You’re with the police, young lady?”

“I’m a private investigator. Your insurance company has hired me to investigate the fire.”

“The insurance? My insurance is all paid, I’m sure of that, but you’d have to check with Rita.” As he shook his head, bewildered, I caught a glimpse of a hearing aid in his left ear.

I raised my voice and tried to speak clearly. “I know your insurance is paid. The company hired me. Ajax wants me to find out who burned down your hotel.”

“Oh. Who burned it down.” He nodded five or six times. “I have no idea. It was a great shock, a very great shock. I’ve been expecting the police or the fire department to come talk to me, but we pay our taxes for nothing these days. Let it burn to the ground and don’t do nothing to stop it, then don’t do nothing to catch the people who did it.”

“I agree,” I put in. “That’s why Ajax hired me to investigate it for them. I wonder if we could go inside and talk it over.”

He studied me carefully, decided I didn’t look like a major menace, and invited me in. As soon as he’d shut the door behind me and fastened one of the five locks, I began to wish I’d finished the conversation on the stoop. The smell, combined of must, unwashed dishes, and stale grease, seemed to seep from the walls and furniture. I didn’t know life could exist in such air.

The living room where he took me was dark and chilly. I tried not to curse when I ran into a low table, but as I backed away from it I caught my left leg on some heavy metal object and couldn’t help swearing.

“Careful, there, young lady, these were all Fanny’s things and I don’t want them damaged.”

“No, sir,” I said meekly, waiting for him to finish fumbling with a light before trying to move any farther. When the heavily fringed lamp sprang into life, I saw that I’d tripped on a set of fire irons mysteriously placed in the middle of the room. As there was no fireplace perhaps that was the ideal spot for them. I threaded my way past the rest of the obstacles and sat gingerly on the edge of an overstuffed armchair. My rear sank deep within its soft, dusty upholstery.

Mr. Seligman sat on a matching couch that was close by, if you discounted an empty brass birdcage hanging between us. “Now what is it you want, young lady?”

He was hard of hearing and depressed but clearly not mentally impaired. When he took in the gist of my remarks his sagging cheeks mottled with color.

“My insurance company thinks I burned down my own building? What do I pay rates for? I pay my taxes and the police don’t help me, I pay my insurance and my company insults me—”

“Mr. Seligman,” I cut in, “you’ve lived in Chicago a long time, right? Your whole life? Well, me too. You know as well as I do that people here torch their own property every day just to collect on the insurance. I’m happy to think you’re not one of them, but you can’t blame the company for wanting to make sure.”

The angry flush died from his cheeks but he continued muttering under his breath about robbers who took your money without giving you anything in return. He calmed down enough to answer routine questions on where he’d been last Wednesday night—home in bed, what did I think he was, a Don Juan at his age to be gallivanting around town all night

“Can you think of any reason anyone would want to burn down the Indiana Arms?”

He held up his hands in exasperation. “It was an old building, no good to anybody, even me. You pay the taxes, you pay the insurance, you pay the utilities, and when the rent comes in you don’t have enough to pay for the paint. I know the wiring was old but I couldn’t afford to put in new, you’ve got to believe me on that, young lady.”

“Why didn’t you just tear it down if it was costing you so much?”

“You’re like everyone today, just considering a dollar and not people’s hearts. People come to me, it seems like every day, thinking I’m a stupid old man who will just sell them my heart and let them tear it down. Now here you are, another one.”

He shook his head slowly, depressed over the perfidy of the younger generation. “It was the first building I owned. I put together the money slowly, slowly in the Depression. You wouldn’t understand. I worked on a delivery truck for years and saved every penny, every dime, and when Fanny and I got married everything went into the Indiana Arms.”

He was talking more to himself now than to me, his husky voice so soft I had to lean forward to hear him. “You should have seen it in those days, it used to be a beautiful hotel. We made deliveries there in the morning and even the kitchens seemed wonderful to me—I grew up in two rooms, eight of us in two rooms, with no kitchen, all the water hauled in by hand. When the owners went bankrupt—everybody went under in those days— scraped together the money and bought it.”

His faded eyes clouded. “Then the war came and the colored came pouring in and Fanny and I, we moved up here, we had a family then anyway, you couldn’t raise children in a residential hotel, even if the neighborhood was decent. But I never could bring myself to sell it. Now it’s gone, maybe it’s just as well.”