Warshawski 09 - Hard Time (11 page)

14 Crumbs from the Table

When I got back to the city I was too worn out by the heat to go to my office. I’d been planning on buckling down on my project for Continental United, but I went home and showered and lay down.

As I dozed through the midday heat my conversation with Abigail Trant kept coming into my dreams. In some of them she was sweetly commiserating because my work interfered with my social life. In others she was standing on the sidelines as BB Baladine threatened me. I woke for good from a nightmare in which Baladine was choking me while Abigail Trant said, “I told you he didn’t like to be threatened.”

“But I wasn’t threatening him,” I said aloud. “It was the other way around.” And what was I supposed to do, back away from Baladine because he interpreted any approach as aggression? Anyway, maybe Abigail Trant was right about Baladine’s character, but I thought there was more to the story than that—some issue about Nicola Aguinaldo, either her life or her death. Perhaps when she escaped from prison she approached Baladine and he interpreted that as a threat, knocked her out, then ran over her. As he got back into his car the emblem came off his loafer. My research said he was a Porsche man. I wondered if his Carrera had been in a body shop lately.

It was all a load of speculative nonsense. Except for the fact that Nicola Aguinaldo was dead. I wished I could talk to her mother. Why had Abuelita Mercedes disappeared so suddenly just at the time her daughter died? Maybe if I went back to Aguinaldo’s neighborhood I could find the mysterious Mr. Morrell, the man asking questions about people who escaped from jail. I made myself an espresso to cut through the dopiness I felt from dozing in the heat, and got dressed again.

I dumped my sweaty jeans in the hamper and chose my outfit carefully—Abigail Trant had made me feel like a grubby hulk. I laughed at myself, a little shamefaced, but still put on clean linen slacks with a big white shirt, even dabbing on lipstick and powder. The result didn’t approach Ms. Trant’s perfection: a polished appearance is like any other skill—you have to work at it a lot to be good. Maybe weekly visits to Parruca’s would help, too.

Saturday is errand day in Uptown just as in Oak Brook, but the girls here were doing chores, not taking riding lessons. When I rang Mrs. Attar’s bell, a sullen Mina, huffy at having to dust, came to the door. The girls had mentioned someone named Aisha; it was Aisha’s father Morrell was talking to. After some grumbling, Mina directed me to the other girl’s apartment, two doors up the street.

Aisha’s father was home, looking after a small boy who was wearing only a diaper. The man greeted me with unsmiling reserve and didn’t move out of the doorway. In stilted but passable English he demanded to know what business of mine it was whether he had a daughter named Aisha? When I explained my errand, the man shook his head. He was afraid the neighborhood girls liked to tease strangers. He didn’t know anyone named Morrell. His wife might have known a woman named—what was it? Abuelita Mercedes?—but she was at the market; the name meant nothing to him. And now if I would excuse him he was very busy. I handed him a card, with a request to call me if he ever heard from Mr. Morrell. It fluttered to the floor in front of him, where I left it.

It was humiliating to be mistaken for an INS officer. Or an agent of a foreign secret–police force. I didn’t know which would be worse.

There might have been something more profitable I could have done with the rest of the afternoon, but I went home and worked on personal projects, matting some prints I’d picked up at a flea market. One of the pictures showed a young woman about Aguinaldo’s age. She was partly dressed, in a kind of camisole, and was staring at a window; what I liked about the picture was the reflection of her face in the glass.

I started wondering about the shirtdress Aguinaldo had been wearing. The lab’s report had explained only how they’d tested the outside of the fabric for automobile traces. Maybe the inside of the shirt could tell me something about how Nicola Aguinaldo had died.

I was actually feeling edgy enough to try the lab. Of course no one was answering on a Saturday afternoon. I worked my way through the voice menu and left a message in the mailbox of the guy who had signed the report on the Trans Am.

Sunday morning I went out with the dogs for another early swim, keeping an eye open for Lemour. Back home I told Mr. Contreras I would take Peppy to the office with me for company. I assured him I’d be back by four: he and the dogs and I were joining Mary Louise and her foster sons for a picnic. Mary Louise and I get together once a week to go over work; this week we’d decided to combine it with a family outing.

“Okay, doll, okay. You got a water dish down there? It’s too hot for the princess to go all day without drinking.”

I bit back a sharp retort. “Her comfort is my main object in life. And my office is air–conditioned. I hope no animal–rights people are out throwing yellow paint on her today, because she just won’t give up that big old fur coat, not even in June, will you, girl?”

Peppy grinned in happy agreement and clattered down the stairs with me, her tail waving a pointed put–down at Mitch, left at home with my neighbor. At my office she ran first to Tessa Reynolds’s studio. Tessa is a sculptor. These days she was working with marble; the dust made her short dreadlocks glitter under her bright lights. She waved a muscular forearm at me, gave the dog a quick scratch, but was too deep in her work to take a break.

If Tessa wouldn’t stop to talk I had no choice but to go to work myself. While my computer came up I pulled out my phone books and started calling everyone in the metropolitan area named Morrell. I didn’t try anything smart—just the unvarnished truth: V. I. Warshawski, private investigator, looking for the man asking questions of immigrants in Uptown. Of course half the people weren’t home, but those who were either didn’t know what I was talking about or affected not to.

“Enough, Warshawski, get to the stuff you know you need to do,” I muttered, inserting a CD–ROM with a cross–directory for Georgia phones and addresses. Checking phone numbers was mindless work; my thoughts kept creeping back to Aguinaldo. Baladine said she’d faked an illness to get sent to the hospital. Mary Louise said the prison had reported an ovarian cyst. Did Baladine know that was faked? Or that the report was a fake?

When I was with the public defender, my clients found it impossible to get medical care. One man with lymphoma had a tumor constricting his diaphragm and died in solitary for causing a disturbance when he tried to summon help. It was hard to believe that Coolis was so tender of their charges that Aguinaldo could have faked an illness. And once she’d fled the hospital, how had she gotten to Chicago so fast?

I put down my notes on Georgia and went to the cupboard to pull my Illinois county maps. Peppy, lying under a table, half–sat up to see whether I was leaving. She lay down again when I returned to my desk.

The hospital in Coolis sat on the northwest end of the town, the prison side, where growth was fastest. If Aguinaldo had left in a supply or laundry truck, they would have gone out the service road, which followed Smallpox Creek. I squinted through my magnifying glass to bring up the details. Assuming she’d hopped off the truck before it reached the town center, she had limited choices—she could follow Smallpox Creek on foot north to Lake Galena or try to hitch a ride on Route 113, which led from the hospital past the prison as well as northeast away from the town.

There was only one crossroads between the hospital and the prison, Hollow Glen Road, which intersected again with 113 a mile north and another state road a mile south. It might be worthwhile to see if someone picked her up—assuming Robert Baladine hadn’t been waiting at Hollow Glen Road in his Porsche. Those queries were ones that only the police or state marshals had the resources to undertake. I put the map down in frustration.

I went back to my paying client’s work and forced myself to stay with it, copying numbers into a file, then laying them across a blowup of the area where Continental United’s trucks were coming to grief. I was hard at it when Tessa popped her head around my door.

“Your friend Murray is outside—he rang my bell by mistake. Shall I let him in? He’s brought some talent with him.”

My brows shot up in surprise, but I followed her to the front door. Murray was outside with Alex Fisher. She had on skintight jeans and a big mesh shirt, which revealed not only her Lycra tube–top but the sharp points of her breastbone. As she and Murray came in, I glanced at Alex–Sandy’s feet, but of course if she owned Ferragamos with a missing emblem she wouldn’t have them on.

Murray stopped to talk to Tessa. “Sorry you couldn’t make it to the Glow Tuesday night. You missed a great evening.”

Tessa gave him the kind of polite brush–off she’d learned from her years jetting around the world with her wealthy parents. I always envy someone who doesn’t have to go to the jugular. As I promptly did.

“Sandy—sorry I didn’t recognize you right away Tuesday night. You looked a lot different when you were urging us all to the barricades back in law school.”

She flashed an empty smile. “I’m Alex now, not Sandy—another one of the changes in my life.”

She surveyed my office with frank interest. I’d divided my share of the warehouse into smaller spaces with pasteboard partitions, not because I need a lot of rooms but because I wanted some human scale to the place. Aside from that and good quality lighting, I hadn’t invested heavily in furnishings.

Alex–Sandy seemed to be preening herself, perhaps imagining her own office by contrast, when her eyes widened at a painting on the partition facing my desk. “Isn’t that an Isabel Bishop? How did you come by it?”

“I stole it from the Art Institute. Do you want to sit down? Would you like something to drink?” An elderly woman whose grandson had been stripping her assets gave me the Bishop in lieu of a fee, but that didn’t seem to be any of Alex–Sandy’s business.

“Oh, Vic, you always had a bizarre sense of humor. It’s coming back to me now. Do you have Malvern water? It’s hideously hot out—I’d forgotten Chicago summers.”

“Malvern?” I stopped on my way to the refrigerator. “Did you introduce BB Baladine to that, or the other way around?”

“I didn’t know you knew Bob. I think it’s something we probably both learned from Teddy Trant. He spends a lot of time in England. Do you have any?” It was said smoothly, and it was even plausible.

She sat on a stool next to the table where Peppy was lying. The dog had gotten up to greet her and Murray, but something in my tone must have sounded a warning, because she crawled under my desk.

I offered Alex–Sandy a choice of tap water or Poland Springs, which is cheap and no different from the foreign imports as far as I can tell. Murray took iced tea, which Tessa makes fresh and drinks by the gallon when she’s working. We share a refrigerator out in the hall and write scrupulous notes about who’s taken what from whose shelves.

“Murray says you’ve become a private investigator,” Sandy said when I’d sat at my desk. “It seems like strange work for someone with your education. Did you get tired of the law? I can totally understand that, but my own fantasies run more to retiring to a ranch.”

“You know how it goes, Sandy—Alex—middle age comes on and you revert to your roots. You left the barricades for the boardroom; I couldn’t stay away from my cop–father’s blue–collar work.” I turned to Murray. “Sandy was always on my butt for not joining protest movements with her. She kept telling me that a blue–collar girl—whatever that is—should be in the forefront of organizing struggles.”

“You have to learn to move on from those old battles. These are the nineties, after all. Anyway, Murray suggested your name when we were mulling over how to help Lacey with a sticky situation.”

A crumb from the Global table. Maybe Murray had been as embarrassed as I by our conversation the other night and was trying a subtle amend. I could see him at dinner with Alex–Sandy. At the Filigree, or perhaps Justin’s, the hot new hole on west Randolph, Murray leaning across the table toward Alex’s modest cleavage:
You know V. I., you know what a prickly bitch she’s always been. But she did the legwork on a couple of the stories that built my reputation and I hate to leave her standing in the dust. Isn’t there something Global needs that would give her a break?

“Global has a gazillion lawyers, detectives, and strong–armed types to protect their stars.” I wasn’t hungry enough yet for a crumb, I guess.

“It’s a little trickier than that,” Murray said, “at least as I understand it. Since you were at the Glow on Tuesday, maybe you saw the problem.”

“Lucian Frenada,” Alex said briskly. “He and Lacey had a boy–girl kind of understanding twenty years ago, and he won’t accept that it’s over, that Lacey’s moved on and he has to also.”

I stared at her blankly. “And?”

“And we want you to make that clear to him, clear that he has to stop harassing her, calling her, or hunting her out in public.” Alex spoke with an irritability that definitely hadn’t changed from her old harangues.

“I don’t do bodyguard work. I’m a one–woman shop. I have people I call on for support, but if you want guaranteed protection you need to go to an outfit like Carnifice.”

“It’s not a bodyguard kind of situation.” Alex looked around for a table and put her drink on the couch next to her. “She says she’s not afraid of him, but that he’s embarrassing her.”

I made a face. “Murray, if this was your idea of a favor, take it somewhere else. If she’s not afraid of him, she can talk to him. If he’s bugging her, the studio has the muscle to make him back off.”

“You didn’t used to be stupid in law school,” Alex snapped. “If it was that simple we’d be doing it. They were childhood friends, stood up for each other when the rest of the street harassed them for being geeks. She can’t bear for his feelings to be hurt, because he rescued her at least once from some serious bangers in the stairwell. Beyond that, the guy is a kind of model enterprise–zone leader. If it looks like a big corporation is persecuting him, we’ll have a lot of hostility in the Spanish press, and of course that would be damaging for Lacey’s image.”