Fire Sale (16 page)

17

A Frog in My Jeans

“W
hat’d you do to get a police commander so annoyed with you, Pepperpot?” Morrell asked.

“Nothing he won’t get over in another decade or two.” I leaned against him and shut my eyes.

“He thinks Cookie here got him shot four years ago,” Mr. Contreras put in, “when it was his own darn fault for not listening to her to begin with. Good thing, if you ask me, ’cause it made him—”

“It’s never a good thing to get shot.” I couldn’t bear to hear Mr. Contreras celebrate Conrad’s and my breakup, especially not in front of Morrell. “And maybe I should have had that bullet instead of him. Anyway, Marcena will charm him out of his bad mood.”

“Probably will,” my Job’s comforter agreed. “She’s perky enough for a whole squad of cheerleaders.”

Morrell laughed. “She’s a prizewinning journalist—I don’t think she’d appreciate being compared to a cheerleader.”

“But she is full of zip,” I murmured, “and she knows how to home in on everyone’s wavelength.”

“Except yours,” Morrell said.

“But I’m a pepperpot, not a cheerleader.”

He pulled me closer. “I like pepper better than cheers, okay?”

“Yeah, but, cookie, you could learn something from her,” Mr. Contreras said, his brown eyes full of concern. “Look how she got Conrad Rawlings eating out of her hand, after he’d been threatening you.”

I stiffened but didn’t say anything; the old man had been so supportive all day it would be mean to turn on him, and, anyway, it would just prove his point. I looked up to see Morrell grinning at me, as if reading my mind. I punched him in the ribs, but settled back against his shoulder.

Finally, after fidgeting around the living room for several minutes, my neighbor announced he was taking the dogs out. “You two ain’t fit for anything but sleep right now,” he said, then turned brick red at the innuendo.

“Don’t worry; sleep is
all
I’m fit for.” I thanked him for all his help during the day. “Especially the spaghetti—a real corpse reviver.”

“Clara’s old meatball recipe,” he beamed.

It took another ten minutes for him to finish his strictures on Conrad, his advice for my recovery, his promise to intercept Marcena so she wouldn’t wake us when she came back.

“That’s right,” I said. “You two figure out a strategy for the Arlington track that’ll set you up for the rest of your life. Morrell and I will design a strategy for healing our torn-up bodies.”

We did pretty well sleep the clock around, at least in shifts. I got up briefly to talk to Marcena, who came up the stairs, despite Mr. Contreras’s efforts to hold her at bay, so she could fetch Morrell. Morrell hobbled out in his jeans to say he’d stay with me until I could drive him home myself.

Marcena lingered in the doorway to report on the super time she’d had with Conrad; he’d promised her a ride-along next week to round out her picture of the South Side—she’d get a Kevlar vest and everything, just like being back in Kosovo.

I felt as though my skin might ignite from the force of the energy she was putting out, or maybe from my jealousy. “You able to tell him anything useful out of your nocturnal junkets?”

She grinned. “My eyes haven’t been scanning the streets that closely, Vic, but I did want to thank you for not ratting out Bron to him—if word gets back to By-Smart about him having me in his truck, it could cost him his job.”

I felt a sudden jolt: I couldn’t believe I had forgotten about April Czernin so completely. “When did you last talk to Bron? Since yesterday? Does he know about April?”

“Oh, his daughter, right, Morrell told me. He can’t take personal calls on his cell phone: it belongs to the company, and they monitor every call he makes and gets, so I didn’t try to reach him. Anyway, he was headed for home, so I’m sure his wife told him.”

“You didn’t try to reach him yourself?” I couldn’t keep the scorn out of my voice. “Even when you found out his kid was close to dying?”

“I don’t think it would have been helpful for him to hear it fourth-hand from the hospital via you to Morrell to me. Or for his wife to talk to me if I reached her.” She sounded disdainful, like the headmistress annoyed with the poor work of an unpromising student, but at least she’d stopped bubbling over like the La Brea tar pits.

“No wonder Sandra Czernin thinks my name is mud down there. I’m the person who introduced him to the woman he’s been seeing the sights with.”

I shut the door on her, but had to open it a second later—Peppy and Mitch had followed Marcena upstairs, and while Mitch, like every other male I knew, was clinging to Marcena, Peppy wanted to be let in with me. I glared at Mitch’s retreating tail and stumped over to the phone.

Once again I got Sandra’s stilted voice on her answering machine; I figured she, at least, was at the hospital—who knew where Bron was. I left a message, explaining that I’d been hit in the explosion at Fly the Flag, and asking Sandra to call me with news about April.

I was still groggy from anesthesia and my long day with Conrad, but Morrell said he’d slept enough for the time being. He settled himself on the couch with Peppy and his new laptop. He was working on the book he’d been researching when he got shot. His original laptop had been stolen while he lay bleeding on a mud track in Afghanistan; he’d backed up most of his files onto a portable key, but there was material he was trying to reconstruct, notes he’d been taking shortly before he was hit that he hadn’t had time to organize or copy.

I went back to bed but slept fitfully, the pain in my shoulder jerking me awake whenever I turned in my sleep. At one-thirty, I woke to an empty bed; Morrell was still working. I got out two of my mother’s red Venetian glasses and poured Armagnac for us. Morrell thanked me, but didn’t look up long from his screen—his reconstruction had him totally absorbed. While he wrote, I watched William Powell and Myrna Loy dash around San Francisco, solving crimes with their faithful terrier, Asta.

“Myrna Loy solved crimes in evening gowns and high heels; maybe that’s my problem—I spend too much time in blue jeans and sneakers.”

Morrell smiled at me absently. “You’d look wonderful in one of those old forties dresses, Vic, but you’d probably trip a lot chasing people down alleys.”

“And Asta,” I went on. “How come Mitch and Peppy don’t cleverly retrieve clues as people hurl them in through the windows?”

“You shouldn’t encourage them,” he murmured, frowning over his computer.

I finished my Armagnac and went back to bed. When I woke again, it was nine and Morrell was sleeping soundly next to me. He’d flung his left arm clear of the bedclothes, and I sat for a while, looking at the jagged raw scar along his shoulder where one of the bullets had gone in. Conrad had scars like that, older, less angry, one underneath his rib cage, one in his abdomen. I used to look at those while he slept, too.

I got up abruptly, staggering slightly as the pain hit me, but made it to the bathroom without falling. Disregarding the young surgeon’s instructions, I stood under a hot shower, protecting the wound by wrapping a dry-cleaning bag over my shoulder. Come to think of it, I’d have my own jagged little scar, discreetly concealed on my back. A dainty, ladylike scar, the kind that Myrna Loy could have sported and still looked sexy in her backless gowns.

Peppy tapped after me while I struggled into a bra and a blouse. I let her out the back door before trying to make my breakfast. I had planned to go to the store this morning. No bread. No fruit, not even an old apple. No yogurt. A little milk that smelled as if it should have been drunk yesterday. I poured it down the sink, and made myself a cup of stove-top espresso, which I drank out on the back porch, hugging my arms against the thin gray air, eating some rye crackers to keep my stomach company.

I lounged around most of the day, calling clients, doing what I could at home from my laptop, finally venturing out in the late afternoon to get some food. I had hoped to get down to Bertha Palmer for basketball, but I had to call the school to cancel. Friday, to my annoyance, I still had enough anesthesia in me that I continued to be too groggy to do much, but Saturday I woke early. The thought of lounging around the house for one more day made me feel like nails on a blackboard.

Morrell was still asleep. I finished dressing, including putting on a sling that the hospital had given me with my discharge papers, then scribbled a note that I propped on Morrell’s laptop.

When I got downstairs, Mr. Contreras was glad to see me, but not happy when I announced I was going out for a while with Peppy. Even though she’s so well trained she’ll heel without straining on her leash, he thought I should spend the weekend in bed.

“I’m not going to do anything stupid, but I’ll go nuts if I lie around the house. I’ve already spent almost three days in bed—way beyond my lounging limit.”

“Yeah, you never yet listened to nothing I had to say, why should you start today? Whatcha gonna do when you’re out on the Tollway and that shoulder of yours won’t let you turn the steering wheel fast enough to get out of the way of some crackpot?”

I put my good arm around his shoulders. “I’m not going on the Tollway. Just down to the University of Chicago, okay? I won’t go over forty-five, and I’ll stay in the right lane all the way there and back.”

He was only mildly mollified by my sharing my plans, but he knew I was going to go whether he grumped or not; he muttered that he’d walk Mitch and slammed his door on me.

I was halfway down the walk when I remembered that my car was still in South Chicago. I almost rang the bell to get Mr. Contreras to take Peppy, but didn’t think I could face him again today. No dogs on the CTA; I went down to Belmont to try my luck with cabs. The fourth one I flagged was willing to drive to the far South Side with a dog. The driver was from Senegal, he explained during the long ride, and had a Rottweiler for companionship, so he didn’t mind Peppy’s golden hairs all over his upholstery. He asked about the sling and tutted solicitously when I explained what had happened. In turn, I asked him how he came to be in Chicago, and heard a long story about his family and their optimistic hopes that his being here would make their fortune.

My Mustang was still on Yates, where I’d parked it Tuesday evening. My lucky break for the week: it had all four tires, and all the doors and windows were intact. The cabdriver kindly waited until I had Peppy inside and the engine going before he left us.

I drove over to South Chicago Avenue to look at the remains of Fly the Flag. The front was still more or less intact, but a big chunk of the back wall was missing. Pieces of cinder block were strewn around, as if some drunk giant had stuffed a hand through the window and pulled off bits of the building. I slipped on long feathers of ash, the residue of the rayons and canvas that had gone up in Tuesday’s fireball. With my arm in a sling, keeping my balance was tricky, and I ended up tripping on a piece of rebar, landing smartly on my good shoulder. The pain made my eyes tear up. If I injured my right arm I wouldn’t be able to drive, and Mr. Contreras would have a field day, probably field month, full of “I told you so” s.

I lay in the detritus, looking at the low gray sky overhead, flexing my right arm and shoulder. Just a bruise, nothing I couldn’t ignore if I put my mind to it. I twisted around and sat on one of the pieces of cinder block, absently picking through the remains around me. Fragments of windowpane, a whole roll of marigold braid miraculously intact, warped shards of metal that might once have been spools, an aluminum soap dish in the shape of a frog.

Now that was a strange thing to find in a place like this, unless the bathroom had been blown to bits and this had fallen through to the fabric storage area. But the bathroom had been a nasty utilitarian hole: I didn’t remember seeing anything as whimsical as a frog in it. I tucked it into my peacoat pocket and pushed myself back to my feet. Just as well I was in jeans and sneaks for this particular adventure, instead of a backless evening gown: the jeans could go through the washer.

I went as far as the back wall, but the ruin inside looked too unstable to risk going inside for further exploration. The front was intact, but the fire had started in the back, on the building’s Skyway side—out of sight of the street. I could have gone in through the loading dock, but that meant hoisting myself up, and my shoulder gave an almighty jolt when I tried it.

I returned to my car, frustrated by my limited mobility, and headed north, keeping the pace sedate so I could steer one-handed. When we got to Hyde Park, I parked outside the University of Chicago campus, and let Peppy chase squirrels for a while. Despite the cold weather, a number of students were sitting outside with coffee and textbooks. Peppy made the rounds, giving people that soulful look that says, you can feed this dog or you can turn the page. She managed to cadge half a peanut butter sandwich before I called her sharply to heel.

When I had bundled her back into the Mustang, I went into the old social sciences building to scrub the worst of the ash off my clothes and hands: I couldn’t visit April looking like a Halloween ghoul. As I turned to go, I saw the gash in my coat’s shoulder, where they’d cut it away from me in the emergency room. I didn’t look like a ghoul, but a bag lady.

18

Visiting Hours

B
alloons and stuffed animals lined the scuffed corridors of the children’s hospital, looking like desperate offerings to the arbitrary gods who play with human happiness. As I wound my way along halls and up stairwells, I passed little alcoves where adults sat waiting, silent, unmoving. Passing the patient rooms, I heard snatches of overly bright talk, moms using sheer energy to coax their children to health.

When I got to the fourth floor, I didn’t have any trouble finding April’s room: Bron and Sandra Zoltak Czernin were fighting in a nearby alcove.

“You were out screwing some bitch and your kid was dying. Don’t tell me you love her!” Sandra was trying to whisper, but her voice carried beyond me; a woman walking the hall with a small child attached to an IV looked at them nervously and tried to shepherd her toddler out of earshot. “You didn’t even get to the hospital until almost midnight.”

“I came here as soon as I heard. Have I left the hospital for one second since? You know damned well I can’t take calls on the truck phone, and I get home to find you gone, the kid gone, no message from you. I figured you and April were out, you’re always taking her off someplace, buying her crap we don’t have money for.

“As far as you’re concerned, I don’t exist. I’m just the paycheck to cover the bills you can’t pay on your own. You didn’t even have the sense or decency to call me, the kid’s own father. I had to get the news off the answering machine, and it wasn’t you who called but that goddamn Warshawski bitch. That’s how I find out my own kid is sick, not from my own wife. Mrs. High-and-Mighty, Virgin Mary had nothing on you for purity, and you wonder why I look for human flesh and blood someplace else.”

“At least you can be sure April is your daughter, which is more than Jesse Navarro or Lech Bukowski can say about their own kids, all the time you spent with their wives, and now, now they’re saying April has this thing with her heart, this thing, she can’t play basketball anymore.” Sandra’s thin aging face was twisted in pain.

“Basketball? She’s sick as a horse, and you’re upset she can’t play a stupid goddamn ball game? What’s with you?” Bron smashed the wall with the palm of his hand.

A nurse making rounds paused next to me, gauging the level of anger in the alcove, then shook her head and moved on.

“I don’t care about the stupid goddamn ball game!” Sandra’s voice rose. “It’s April’s ticket to college, you—you loser. You know damned well she can’t go on your paycheck. I’m not having her do like me, spend her life married to some creep who can’t keep his pants zipped, working her life away at By-Smart because she can’t do any better. Look at me, I look as old as your mother, and talk about the High-and-Mighty Mother of God, that’s how she looks on you, and me, I’m supposed to get down on my knees and slobber thanks because I married you, and you can’t even support your own kid.”

“What do you mean, I can’t support her? Fuck you, bitch! Did she ever go to school hungry or—”

“Did you even listen to the doctor? It will cost a hundred thousand dollars to fix her heart, and then the drugs, and the insurance pays ten thousand dollars of it? Where are you going to find the money, tell me that? The money we could’ve been saving if you hadn’t spent it on drinks for the boys, and the whores you screw around with, and—”

Bron’s head seemed to swell with anger. “I will find the money it takes to look after April! You cannot stand there telling me I don’t love my own daughter.”

The woman with the small child approached them timidly. “Can you be a little quieter, please? You’re making my baby cry, shouting like that.”

Sandra and Bron looked at her; the little girl on the IV was crying, silent hiccupping sobs that were more unnerving than a loud howl. Bron and Sandra looked away, which is how Bron caught sight of me.

“It’s goddamn Tori Warshawski. What the fuck were you doing, pushing my girl so hard she went and collapsed?” His voice rose to a roar that brought aides and parents scurrying to the hall.

“Hi, Bron, hi, Sandra, how’s she doing?” I asked.

Sandra turned away from me, but Bron erupted from the alcove, pushing me so hard he flung me against a wall. “You hurt my girl! I warned you, Warshawski, I warned you if you messed with April you’d answer to me!”

People watched in horror as I carefully righted myself. The pain coursing down my left arm brought tears to my eyes, but I blinked them back. I wasn’t going to get into a fight with him, not in a hospital, not with my left arm in a sling, and, anyway, not with a guy so worried and helpless that he had to pick a fight with anyone who looked at him crossways. But I wasn’t going to let him see me cry, either.

“Yes, I heard you. I can’t remember what you said you’d do if I saved her life.”

Bron pounded a fist against his palm. “If you saved her life. If you saved her life, you can kiss my ass.”

I turned to Sandra. “I heard you say it was her heart. What happened? I never saw her weak or short of breath at practice.”

“You’d say that, wouldn’t you?” Sandra said. “You’d say anything to protect your butt. She has something wrong with her heart, it’s something she was born with, but you ran her too hard, that’s why she collapsed.”

I felt cold with a fear that Bron hadn’t inspired in me: these words sounded like a prelude to a lawsuit. April’s treatment would cost more than a hundred thousand dollars; they needed money; they could sue me. My pockets weren’t deep, but they sure hung lower than the Czernins’.

“If she was born with the condition, it could have happened anytime, anywhere, Sandra,” I said, trying to keep my voice level. “What do the doctors say they can do to treat her?”

“Nothing. Nothing but rest unless we can come up with the money to pay their bills. All the blacks, they have it easy, just show their welfare cards and their kids get whatever they need, but people like us, people who work hard all the time, what do we have to show for it?”

Sandra glared up the hall at the woman with the small child, who happened to be black, as if the four-year-old had designed the managed care companies that decreed what medical care Americans could get. A nurse who’d come out of one of the patient rooms stepped forward, trying to intervene, but the Czernins were in their own private universe, the world of anger, and no one else could get into it with them. The nurse went back to whatever she’d been doing, but I stayed on the battlefield.

“And I’m married to Mr. Wonderful here, who hasn’t been home one night all week and then acts like he’s Saint Joseph, the greatest father of all time.” Sandra turned her bitter face back to Bron. “I’m surprised you even know your own daughter’s name, you sure as hell forgot her birthday this year, out with that English bitch, or was it Danuta Tomzak from Lazinski’s bar?”

Bron grabbed Sandra’s thin shoulders and started shaking her. “I do love my daughter, you damn cunt, you will not say different, not here, not anywhere. And I can get the fucking money to pay for her heart. You tell that SOB doctor not to move her, not to check her out of the hospital, I’ll have the money for him by Tuesday, easy.”

He stormed down the corridor and slammed his way through a swinging door that led to a stairwell. Sandra’s mouth was a thin bitter line.

“Mary had the Prince of Peace, I get the Prince of Pricks.” She turned her scowl on me. “Is he going to ask that English woman he’s been screwing for money?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I don’t know if she has any.”

And who forks over a hundred grand to the daughter of a man she cares about only as a good story to tell her friends back home? I didn’t say it—Sandra was only clutching at straws; she didn’t have any sense right now, no sense of what was possible and what wasn’t.

“You said the insurance would cover only ten thousand dollars. Is that your insurance?”

She shook her head and said through tight, thin lips, “I can’t get coverage because I only work thirty-four hours a week. By-Smart says that isn’t full-time work, it has to be forty hours a week. So Bron buys the insurance, for him and April, we decided we couldn’t afford to cover me, and when the hospital, when they called the company yesterday, it turns out that that’s all the coverage she gets for being sick and we pay, Mother of God, we pay two thousand six hundred dollars a year. If I’d known, I’d’ve been putting all that money in a savings account for April.”

“What is it that’s really wrong with April?” I asked.

Sandra twisted her hands together. “I don’t know. The doctors use fancy language so you won’t know if they’re doing the right thing for your kid or not. Were you working her too hard because she’s mine?”

I wished I’d listened to Mr. Contreras and stayed home. All I wanted right now was to crawl into a cave and sleep until spring.

“Can we talk to a doctor? If I understand what the diagnosis is, maybe I can help find treatment.” I was thinking of my friend Lotty Herschel, who’s a surgeon at Beth Israel Hospital on Chicago’s far North Side. Lotty treats her share of indigent patients; she might know how to help the Czernins dance around the insurance system.

“She fainted once, last summer, when she’d been at a basketball camp, but I didn’t think anything of it, girls faint all the time, I know I did when I was her age. I wanted her to have every opportunity, I wasn’t going to have you lord it over my kid the way you do over me.”

I blinked, reeling under the flow of words and the contradictory ideas jostling for airspace. I was about to utter a reflexive protest, that I didn’t lord it over her, but when I remembered our history together I felt myself blushing. That night just before the homecoming dance, if I could call up one evening of my life to do differently that would be the one, unless it was the time I’d snuck a pint of whiskey from Lazinski’s the night my mother died—enough. I had enough bad memories to make me squirm all day if I dwelt on them.

The nurse who’d tried to intervene in Sandra and Bron’s fight was still lingering nearby. She agreed to page a doctor to come to April’s room to talk to the family. While we waited, I crossed the hall to April’s room. Sandra followed me without protest.

April was in a room with three other kids. When we came in, she was watching television, her face puffy from the drugs she was taking. A giant teddy bear was propped up next to her in bed, brand new, holding a balloon that read, “Get Well Soon.”

April shifted her groggy gaze from
Soul Train
to her mother, but her face brightened when she saw me. “Coach! This is so cool, you coming to see me. You gonna let me come back to the team, even if I miss next week?”

“You can rejoin the team as soon as the docs and your mom say you’re ready to play. Great bear—where’d he come from?”

“Daddy.” She flicked a wary glance at her mother: the bear had probably already been the focus of a quarrel, but I found it heartbreaking, Bron wanting to do something for his daughter and coming up with this outsize toy.

We talked a little about basketball, about school, what she was missing in her biology class, while Sandra fussed with her pillows, straightened the sheets, pushed April to drink some juice (“You know the doctor said you have to have lots of fluids with this drug you’re taking.”).

By and by, a young resident came in. He had a chubby, cherubic face, complete with a circlet of soft dark curls, but he had an easy way about him, bantering lightly with April while he checked her pulse and asked her how much she was drinking and eating.

“You got that big bear there to try to scare me off, huh, but I don’t scare that easy. Keep him away from your boyfriend, though, boys your age can’t stand up to bears.”

After a few minutes, he left her with a nod and a wink, and ushered Sandra and me down the hall, out of April’s earshot. I introduced myself and explained my role in April’s life.

“Oh, you’re the heroine who saved her life. That how you got your arm in a sling?”

I hoped hearing the doctor call me a heroine would soften Sandra’s views of me. I explained briefly about my injury and asked what the story was on April.

“She has something we call Long QT Syndrome. I could show you the EKG and explain how we know and why we call it that, but what it really means is a kind of arrhythmia in the heart. With proper treatment, she can certainly lead a normal, productive life, but she absolutely has to give up basketball. If she keeps playing, I’m sorry to put it bluntly, Ms. Czernin, but the outcome could be very bad.”

Sandra nodded bleakly. She’d gone back to twisting her fingers together, thumbs pushing so hard that the backs of her hands were covered in purplish-red welts. I asked the resident what the proper treatment was.

“We’ve started her on a course of beta-blockers to stabilize her heart.” He went into a long explanation about the buildup of sodium ions in the chamber, and the function of beta-blockers in stabilizing the ion exchange, then added, “She should go to a pacemaker, to an implanted cardioverter defibrillator. Otherwise, I’m afraid, well, it’s a question of time before there’s another serious episode.”

His pager sounded. “If there’s anything else, please page me. I’ll be glad to talk to you at any time. We’re going to discharge April Monday if her heart is stable, and we’ll keep her on the beta-blockers for the time being.”

“Like I can afford those,” Sandra muttered. “Even with my employee discount, it’s going to be fifty bucks a week for her medication. What do they think, that only rich people get sick in this country?”

I tried to say something commiserating, but she turned on me again; our brief moment of rapport was gone. There was a limit to how much time as a punching bag I felt I owed her; I’d passed it some time back. I told her I’d keep in touch and headed down the hall to the stairwell.

On my way out the hospital’s front door, I almost collided with a tall teenager, who was entering from Maryland Avenue. I was intent on my own thoughts, and didn’t look at her until she gasped, “Coach.”

I stopped. “Josie Dorrado! This is great that you came to see April. She’s going to need lots of support in the weeks ahead.”