Critical Mass (3 page)

I left through the front door so that I wouldn’t have to wade through
the kitchen again. The door had a series of dead bolts, as unnecessary an investment as the security camera over the padlocked gate. Whoever had been here before me had shot them out.

Before retreating through the gap in the fence, I found a board in the high weeds and used it to poke through the open pit. It held so many empty bottles that I didn’t want to climb down in it, but as far as I could tell, no one was hidden among them.

I took a few pictures with my camera phone and headed for the exit. I was just skirting the fence, heading to the road, when I heard a faint whimpering from the collapsed shed. I pushed my way through weeds and rubble and pulled apart the siding. Another Rottweiler lay there. When it saw me, it feebly thumped its stub of a tail.

I bent slowly. It made no effort to attack me as I cautiously felt its body. A female, painfully thin, but uninjured as far as I could tell. She’d gotten tangled in a mass of old ropes and fence wires. She’d fled into the shed when her partner was murdered, I was guessing, then panicked and worked herself deep into the makeshift net. I slowly pried the wires away from her chest and legs.

When I moved away and squatted, hand held out, she got to her feet to follow me, but collapsed again after a few steps. I went back to my car for my water bottle and a rope. I poured a little water over her head, cupped my hand so she could drink, tied the rope around her neck. Once she was rehydrated, she let me lead her slowly along the fence to the road. Out in the daylight, I could see the cuts from where the wires had dug into her, but also welts in her dirty black fur. Some vermin had beaten her, and more than once.

When we reached my car, she wouldn’t get in. I tried to lift her, but she growled at me, bracing her weak legs in the weeds along the verge, straining against the rope to get out into the road. I dropped the rope and watched as she staggered across the gravel. At the cornfield, she sniffed among the stalks until she found what she was looking for. She headed into the corn, but was so weak that she kept falling over.

“How about if you stay here and let me find what you’re looking for?” I said to her.

She looked at me skeptically, not believing a city woman could find her way through a field, but unable to go any farther herself. I couldn’t tie her to the corn—she’d pull that over. I finally ordered her to stay. Whether she’d been trained or just was too weak to go on, she collapsed where she was and watched as I headed into the field.

The stalks were higher than my head, but they were brown and dry and didn’t provide any shield from the sun. All around me insects zinged and stung. Prairie dogs and a snake slipped away at my approach.

The plants were set about a yard apart, the rows appearing the same no matter which direction I looked. It would have been easy to get lost, except I was following a trail of broken stalks toward the spot where the crows continued to circle.

The body was splayed across the corn like a snow angel. Crows were thick around the shoulders and hands and they turned on me with ferocious cries.

2

DOG-TIRED

Y
OUR FRIEND WASN’T
THERE,
but I did find one of her fellow communards. Or drug dealers, as we call them on the South Side.” I was in Lotty Herschel’s living room, leaning back in her Barcelona chair, watching the colors change in the glass of brandy she’d given me.

“Oh, Vic, no.” Lotty’s face crumpled in distress. “I hoped—I thought—I wanted to believe she was making a change in her life.”

It was past nine and Lotty was almost as tired as I was, but neither of us had wanted to wait until morning to talk.

I’d driven the crows away from the dead body by flinging my flashlight and a screwdriver at them. They took off in a great black circle, just long enough for me to look at the body and see that it had been a man, not a woman. After that I backed away as fast as I could through the dead corn. I didn’t call the sheriff until I reached the edge of the road.

The dog wouldn’t leave her vigil at the entrance to the field, despite my pleas and commands. While we waited for the law, I poured more water over her head and into her mouth. She tried to lick my arm, but fell asleep instead, lifting her head with a jerk when two squad cars pulled up. Two of the deputies, a young man and an older woman, followed the bent stalks of corn to the body. The third phoned headquarters for instructions: I was to go into town and explain myself to the sheriff.

“Oh no, get the crows off of him.” It was one of the deputies in the
field. We heard them flailing among the stalks, trying to beat the crows away, but they finally fired some rounds. The crows rose again.

I asked the deputy to help me lift the dog into my car. “Even though the dead guy in the field might have given her some of these wounds, she won’t leave while he’s out there,” I said.

When the deputy came over, the dog curled her lip at him and growled.

The deputy backed away. “You should just shoot her, weak as she is and mean as she is.”

I was a hundred miles from home, the law here was a law unto itself and could make my life miserable. I needed to not lose my temper. “You could be right. In the meantime, she’s innocent until proven guilty. If you’ll take her back legs, I’ll get her around the neck so she can’t bite you.”

The dog struggled, but feebly. By the time we had her shifted into the back of my Mustang, the two other deputies lurched out of the field at a shambling run. They had both turned a greeny-gray beneath their sunburns.

“We gotta get a meat wagon out here while there’s still some of the body left for the ME,” the woman said, her voice thick. “Glenn, you call it in. I’m going—” She turned away from us and was sick in the ditch by the road. Her partner made it as far as their squad car before he threw up.

My deputy called back to headquarters. “Davilats here. Got us an 0110 . . . Don’t know who; I drew the long straw and didn’t have to see the body, but Jenny says the crows been doing a good job having dinner off of it.”

The voice at the other end told Jenny to guard the entrance to the field; I was to follow Officer Davilats back to the county seat. To my surprise and great gratitude, Sheriff Kossel didn’t keep me long. He had me stay while Davilats drove him to the cornfield. Once Kossel returned from viewing the body he demanded my credentials.

“Warshawski? You related to the auto-parts people?” he asked.

“No,” I said for perhaps the fifty thousandth time in my career. “They spell it with a ‘y.’ I’m related to I. V. Warshawski, the Yiddish writer.” I don’t know why I added that, since it wasn’t true.

Kossel grunted and asked what I was doing down here. I gave him some names in the Chicago PD who could vouch for me.

“I was sent down here to look for a woman named Judy Binder,” I explained when the sheriff had gotten Chicago’s opinion of me (“Honest but a pain in the ass,” I heard one of my references rumble). “I didn’t know she lived in a drug house, but I went through the place and didn’t see any trace of her. Was the dead guy the only person living there?”

Kossel grunted. “It’s a shifting population and we don’t know all their names. Every time we bust them it’s been a different crew. House stood empty after the old couple who farmed that land died, then one of the grandsons showed up, started holding open house with his buddies and their girlfriends. We closed down the operation three times, but you know, it’s not hard to buy the components and start up again. The gal, Judy you say? We’ve never picked her up. They don’t have a phone, landline, I mean. If she was calling for help she did it from a cell, or a pay phone. Looks to me like the thieves had a falling-out and she got away with her skin in the nick of time.”

“The house was really torn apart,” I said.

“Could be they did it themselves while they were high. Nearest neighbors are a quarter section off to the south, and they hear gunshots out of there every now and then. One time, those morons forgot to vent their ether and blew out some windows. Heard the explosion all the way over to Palfry, but when we went out to look they wouldn’t let us in. Between the drugs and the guns and the dogs, everyone in the county kept a distance. We only arrested them when they started selling their shit out by the high school. Why’d you say you were looking for this gal Judy?”

It was the third time he’d asked: a test, to see if putting the question abruptly, out of sequence, got him a different answer.

“She left a message on an answering machine saying someone wanted to kill her. I got a call asking me to find her; the address down here was the only one I could turn up.”

This was exactly what I’d said the first two times, but I repeated it patiently: strangers who turn up at meth houses have to answer questions, no matter how many Chicago police officers vouch for them.

“This answering machine belong to anyone?”

“I’ll find that out and get back to you,” I promised.

“You’ve traveled a long way for someone you don’t know to find someone you say you never saw in your life.” Kossel studied me closely; I tried to make my face look open, trustworthy, naive. “But I’ve got your name and address and they match what the Internet is saying, so you drive on back to the big city. I’ll call you if I need you. You see crows circling around any more cornfields, just keep driving, hear?”

I took that as a dismissal and got to my feet. “You can bet your pension on that, Sheriff.”

Tension and dehydration had left me light-headed. I refilled my water jug at the station’s drinking fountain, poured water over my head in their women’s washroom, and took myself and my orphan dog back to Chicago.

Palfry Township was a hundred miles south of the city. What with rescuing the dog, finding the body, talking to the sheriff, I hit the Dan Ryan Expressway at the height of the evening rush, but I didn’t care. It felt good to be surrounded by thousands of cars and millions of people. Even the polluted air felt clean after the terrible stench of the country.

I drove straight to the emergency veterinary clinic on the North Side. The Rottweiler had lain so quietly throughout the drive that I was afraid she might have died on me, but when I lifted her out of the car at the clinic, I could feel her heart thumping erratically. She was so
weak when I set her on the sidewalk that I had to carry her inside, but when I set her on the counter, she stuck out a dry tongue and licked me once.

I told the intake staff how I’d found her, said I had no idea of her age or temperament or whether she’d been spayed but yes, I would pay bills within reason. After half an hour or so, a young woman in scrubs came into the examining room to talk to me.

“Right now her main problem, at least on the surface, is starvation, but she’s been beaten badly and there may be internal injuries,” the vet said. “Also, a dog in a drug house was probably trained to attack, so once she’s regained her strength she may prove too violent to keep. We’ll do a thorough workup when she’s had enough IV fluids and food to handle the exam. If she is salvageable, she’ll have to be spayed.”

“Yes, of course.”

The vet added, “You may have found her downstate, but we get them all the time in here, dogs beaten to a pulp for not fighting hard enough, or for losing, or just beaten for the hell of it. We’ll do our best for your girl here. I just want you to know that not every rescued dog can be saved.”

I bent to kiss the dog’s muzzle, but as I turned to leave, the vet added that I should shower and shampoo my hair and wash all my clothes without putting them into a hamper first because of the number of ticks and fleas on my charge.

No one who knows me has ever accused me of being germ-phobic, but ticks and fleas turn even a sloppy housekeeper into a compulsive Lady Macbeth. I stopped at a car wash, where I threw out all the towels and T-shirts in the car while they cleaned the interior. At home, I ran my clothes through the laundry with bleach and scrubbed myself until my sunburned arms begged for mercy.

Lotty had called several times while I was driving home. I called from the car wash to say I’d stop by as soon as I could. She was waiting for me when I got off the elevator. Even though her face was set in hard
worry lines, she insisted that I eat a bowl of lentil soup to restore my strength before I did any talking.

As soon as I’d put the soup bowl down, Lotty said, “Rhonda Coltrain told me why she called you in, but of course we didn’t talk until after I finished my surgery roster.”

Rhonda Coltrain is Lotty’s clinic manager. When she arrived at seven-thirty to prepare the clinic for the day, she heard a frantic message from someone who only identified herself as “Judy” on the machine. That was how my day started: Ms. Coltrain woke me, begging me to come to the clinic. Lotty was in the middle of an intricate repair to a prolapsed uterus that couldn’t be interrupted.

In Lotty’s storefront clinic on Damen Avenue, I replayed the terrified outburst several times until I could make out the gabbled speech. “Dr. Lotty, it’s me, it’s Judy, they’re after me, they want to kill me, you have to help me! Oh, where are you, where are you?”

I didn’t know any Judys who might be calling Lotty in the predawn, but Ms. Coltrain did. She’s usually completely discreet, but when she realized who was calling, she snapped, “I’m not surprised. She only calls Dr. Herschel when she’s been beaten up, or has an STD. And why the doctor keeps trying to help her, I don’t know, except they seem to have some kind of history together. I don’t like to ask it of you, but you’d better try to find her.”

She found the downstate address in Lotty’s private files. None of my databases could produce a phone number or even a photograph. In the end, not sure what else to do, I’d made the trek downstate.

After I described the unspeakable mess in Judy’s so-called commune to Lotty, I said, “The sheriff down in Palfry wants your name, and he wants to know what your involvement is with this Judy Binder. I protected your privacy today, but I can’t forever. It would help if I knew who she was and why you care so much.”