Windy City Blues (18 page)

With an ill grace he said, “We believe she has been selling Defense Department secrets to the Chinese.”

“No,” I said flatly. “She wouldn’t.”

“Some wing designs she was working on have disappeared. She’s disappeared. And a Chinese functionary in St. Charles has disappeared.”

“Sounds pretty circumstantial to me. The wing designs might be in her home. They could easily be on a disk someplace—she did all her drafting on computer.”

They’d been through her computer files at home and at work and found nothing. Her boss did not have copies of the latest design, only of the early stuff. I thought about the heavy voice on the phone demanding money, but loyalty to Alicia made me keep it to myself—give her a chance to tell her story first.

I did give him everything Alicia had said, her nervousness and her sudden departure. That I was worried about her and went to see if she was in her house. And was shot by an intruder hiding in the crawl space. Who might have taken her designs. Although nothing looked pilfered.

He didn’t believe me. I don’t know if he thought I knew something I wasn’t telling, or if he thought I had joined Alicia in selling secrets to the Chinese. But
he kept at me for so long that I finally pushed my call button. When the nurse arrived, I explained that I was worn out and could she please show my visitor out? He left but promised me that he would return.

Cursing my weakness, I fell asleep again. When I next awoke it was morning, and both my cold and my shoulder were much improved. When the doctors came by on their morning visit, I got their agreement to a discharge. Before I bathed and left, the Warrenville police sent out a man who took a detailed statement.

I called my answering service from a phone in the lobby. Ernesto had been in touch. I reached him at Torfino’s.

“Saw about your accident in the papers, Warshawski. How you feeling? … About Dauphine. Apparently she’s signed a note for seven hundred fifty thousand dollars to Art Smollensk. Can’t do anything to help you out. The don sends his best wishes for your recovery.”

Art Smollensk, gambling king. When I worked for the public defender, I’d had to defend some of his small-time employees—people at the level of smashing someone’s fingers in a car door. The ones who did hits and arson usually could afford their own attorneys.

Alicia as a gambler made no sense to me—but we hadn’t been close for over a decade. There were lots of things I didn’t know about her.

At home for a change of clothes I stopped in the basement, where I store useless mementos in a locked stall. After fifteen minutes of shifting boxes around, I was sweating and my left shoulder was throbbing and oozing stickily, but I’d located my high school yearbook. I took it upstairs with me and thumbed through it, trying to gain inspiration on where Alicia might have gone to earth.

None came. I was about to leave again when the phone rang. It was Alicia, talking against a background of noise. “Thank God you’re safe, Vic. I saw about the shooting in the paper. Please don’t worry about me. I’m okay. Stay away and don’t worry.”

She hung up before I could ask her anything. I concentrated, not on what she’d said, but what had been in the background. Metal doors banging open and shut. Lots of loud, wild talking. Not an airport—the talking was too loud for that, and there weren’t any intercom announcements in the background. I knew what it was. If I’d just let my mind relax, it would come to me.

Idly flipping through the yearbook, I looked for faces Alicia might trust. I found my own staring from a group photo of the girls’ basketball team. I’d been a guard—Victoria the protectress from way back. On the next page, Alicia smiled fiercely, holding a swimming trophy. Her coach, who also taught Latin, had desperately wanted Alicia to train for the Olympics,
but Alicia had had her heart set on the U of I and engineering.

Suddenly I knew what the clanking was, where Alicia was. No other sound like that exists anywhere on earth.

Alicia and I grew up under the shadow of the steel mills in South Chicago. Nowhere else has the deterioration of American industry shown up more clearly. Wisconsin Steel is padlocked shut. The South Works are a fragment of their former monstrous grandeur. Unemployment is over 30 percent, and the number of jobless youths lounging in the bars and on the streets had grown from the days when I hurried past them to the safety of my mother’s house.

The high school was more derelict than I remembered. Many windows were boarded over. The asphalt playground was cracked and covered with litter, and the bleachers around the football field were badly weathered.

The guard at the doorway demanded my business. I showed her my P.I. license and said I needed to talk to the women’s gym teacher on confidential business. After some dickering—hostile on her side, snuffly on mine—she gave me a pass. I didn’t need directions down the scuffed corridors, past the battered lockers,
past the smell of rancid oil coming from the cafeteria, to the noise and life of the gym.

Teenage girls in gold shirts and black shorts—the school colors—were shrieking, jumping, wailing in pursuit of Volleyballs. I watched the pandemonium until the buzzer ended the period, then walked up to the instructor.

She was panting and sweating and gave me an incurious glance, looking only briefly at the pass I held out for her. “Yes?”

“You have a new swimming coach, don’t you?”

“Just a volunteer. Are you from the union? She isn’t drawing a paycheck. But Miss Finley, the head coach, is desperately shorthanded—she teaches Latin, you know—and this woman is a big help.”

“I’m not from the union. I’m her trainer. I need to talk to her—find out why she’s dropped out and whether she plans to compete in any of her meets this fill.”

The teacher gave me the hard look of someone used to sizing up fabricated excuses. I didn’t think she believed me, but she told me I could go into the pool area and talk to the swim coach.

The pool dated to the time when this high school served an affluent neighborhood. It was twenty-five yards long, built with skylights along the outer wall. You reached it through the changing rooms, separate ones with showers for girls and boys. It didn’t have an outside hallway entrance.

Alicia was perched alone on the high dive. A few students, boys and girls, were splashing about in the pool, but no organized training was in progress. Alicia was staring at nothing.

I cupped my hands and called up to her, “You’re not working very hard at your new job.”

At that she turned and recognized me. “Vic!” Her cry was enough to stop the splashing in the pool. “How—Are you alone?”

“I’m alone. Come down. I took a slug in the shoulder—I’d rather not climb up after you.”

She shot off the board in a perfect arc, barely rippling the surface of the water. The kids watched with envy. I was pretty jealous, myself—nothing I do is done with that much grace.

She surfaced near me but looked at the students. “I want you guys swimming laps,” she said sharply. “What do you think this is—summer camp?”

They left us reluctantly and began swimming.

“How did you find me?”

“It was easy. I was looking through the yearbook, trying to think of someone you would trust. Miss Finley was the simple answer—I remembered how you practically lived in her house for two years. You liked to read
Jane Eyre
together, and she adored you.

“You are in deep trouble. Smollensk is after you, and so is the FBI. You can’t hide here forever. You’d
better talk to the bureau guys. They won’t love you, but at least they’re not going to shoot you.”

“The FBI? Whatever for?”

“Your designs, sweetie pie. Your designs and the Chinese. The FBI are the people who look into that kind of thing.”

“Vic. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The words were said with such slow deliberateness that I was almost persuaded.

“The seven hundred fifty thousand dollars you owe Art Smollensk.”

She shook her head, then said, “Oh. Yes. That.”

“Yes, that. I guess it seems like more money to me than it does to you. Or had you forgotten Louise Carmody getting shot? … Anyway, a known Chinese spy left Fermilab yesterday or the day before, and you’re gone, and some of your wing designs are gone, and the FBI thinks you’ve sold them overseas and maybe gone East yourself. I didn’t tell them about Art, but they’ll probably get to him before too long.”

“How sure are they that the designs are gone?”

“Your boss can’t find them. Maybe you have a duplicate set at home nobody knows about.”

She shook her head again. “I don’t leave that kind of thing at home. I had them last Saturday, working, but I took the diskettes back …” Her voice trailed off as a look of horror washed across her face. “Oh, no. This is worse than I thought.” She hoisted herself
out of the pool. “I’ve got to go. Got to get away before someone else figures out I’m here.”

“Alicia, for Christ’s sake. What has happened?”

She stopped and looked at me, tears swimming in her black eyes. “If I could tell anyone, it would be you, Vic.” Then she was jogging into the girls’ changing room, leaving the students in the pool swimming laps.

I stuck with her. “Where are you going? The Feds have a hook on any place you have friends or relations. Smollensk does, too.”

That stopped her. “Tom, too?”

“Tom first, last, and foremost. He’s the only relative you have in Chicago.” She was starting to shiver in the bare corridor. I grabbed her and shook her. “Tell me the truth, Alicia. I can’t fly blind. I already took a bullet in the shoulder.”

Suddenly she was sobbing on my chest. “Oh, Vic. It’s been so awful. You can’t know … you can’t understand … you won’t believe …” She was hiccuping.

I led her into the shower room and found a towel. Rubbing her down, I got the story in choking bits and pieces.

Tom was the gambler. He’d gotten into it in a small way in high school and college. After he went into business for himself, the habit grew. He’d mortgaged his insurance agency assets, taken out a second mortgage on the house, but couldn’t stop.

“He came to me two weeks ago. Told me he was going to start filing false claims with his companies, collect the money.” She gave a twisted smile. “He didn’t have to put that kind of pressure on—I can’t help helping him.”

“But Alicia, why? And how does Art Smollensk have your name?”

“Is that the man Tom owes money to? I think he uses my name—Alonso, my middle name—I know he does; I just don’t like to think about it. Someone came around threatening me three years ago. I told Tom never to use my name again, and he didn’t for a long time, but now I guess he was desperate—seven hundred fifty thousand dollars, you know.…

“As to why I help him … You never had any brothers or sisters, so maybe you can’t understand. When Mom died, I was thirteen, he was six. I looked after him. Got him out of trouble. All kinds of stuff. It gets to be a habit, I guess. Or an obligation. That’s why I’ve never married, you know, never had any children of my own. I don’t want any more responsibilities like this one.”

“And the designs?”

She looked horrified again. “He came over for dinner on Saturday. I’d been working all day on the things, and he came into the study when I was logging off. I didn’t tell him it was Defense Department work, but it’s not too hard to figure out what I do is defense-related—after all, that’s all Berman does; we
don’t make commercial aircraft. I haven’t had a chance to look at the designs since—I worked out all day Sunday getting ready for that damned meet Monday. Tom must have taken my diskettes and swapped the labels with some others—I’ve got tons of them lying around.”

She gave a twisted smile. “It was a gamble: a gamble that there’d be something valuable on them and a gamble I wouldn’t discover the switch before he got rid of them. But he’s a gambler.”

“I see…. Look, Alicia. You can only be responsible for Tom so far. Even if you could bail him out this time—and I don’t see how you possibly can—there’ll be a next time. And you may not survive this one to help him again. Let’s call the FBI.”

She squeezed her eyes shut. “You don’t understand, Vic. You can’t possibly understand.”

While I was trying to reason her into phoning the bureau, Miss Finley, swim coach-cum-romantic-Latin-teacher, came briskly into the locker room. “Allie! One of the girls came to get me. Are you all—” She did a double take. “Victoria! Good to see you. Have you come to help Allie? I told her she could count on you.”

“Have you told her what’s going on?” I demanded of Alicia.

Yes, Miss Finley knew most of the story. Agreed that it was very worrying but said Allie could not possibly turn in her own brother. She had given Allie
a gym mat and some bedding to sleep on—she could just stay at the gym until the furor died down and they could think of something else to do.

I sat helplessly as Miss Finley led Alicia off to get some dry clothes. At last, when they didn’t rejoin me, I sought them out, poking through half-remembered halls and doors until I found the staff coaching office. Alicia was alone, looking about fifteen in an old cheerleader’s uniform Miss Finley had dug up for her.

“Miss Finley teaching?” I asked sharply.

Alicia looked guilty but defiant. “Yes. Two-thirty class. Look. The critical thing is to get those diskettes back. I called Tom, explained it to him. Told him I’d try to help him raise the money but that we couldn’t let the Chinese have those things. He agreed, so he’s bringing them out here.”

The room rocked slightly around me. “No. I know you don’t have much of a sense of humor, but this is a joke, isn’t it?”

She didn’t understand. Wouldn’t understand that if the Chinese had already left the country, Tom no longer had the material. That if Tom was coming here, she was the scapegoat. At last, despairing, I said, “Where is he meeting you? Here?”

“I told him I’d be at the pool.”

“Will you do one thing my way? Will you go to Miss Finley’s class and conjugate verbs for forty-five minutes and let me meet him at the pool? Please?”

At last, her jaw set stubbornly, she agreed. She still
wouldn’t let me call the bureau, though. “Not until I’ve talked to Tom myself. It may all be a mistake, you know.”