Bitter Medicine (16 page)

Mr. Contreras came back over to me as soon as Dick walked off.

“Excuse the language, cookie, but the guy really is a prick. He tell you what you want to know?”

“A whiff of it. And yes, he really is a prick.”

We arrived at my little Chevy in time to see Dick squeal by ostentatiously in a Mercedes sports car. Yeah, yeah, I thought, you made it big, man. I get the message:
If I’d been a good girl I’d get to ride in those fancy wheels instead of my little beater.

I unlocked the doors and helped Mr. Contreras into the passenger seat. As he babbled happily along at my side, I wondered. So Monkfish wasn’t paying his own bill. Dick was right—it wasn’t my business. Nonetheless, I was consumed with curiosity.

The next week passed in a frenzy of work. I joined a team of medical professionals in restoring Lotty’s building. While they sorted records, reassembled files, and took a careful inventory of controlled drugs, Mrs. Coltrain and I did manual labor. We cleared glass, glued chairs together, and scrubbed all the examining tables with heavy disinfectant. On Friday the insurance company sent over a glazier to replace the windows. We spent the weekend on a final cleanup.

Tessa came on Sunday to paint the place. A group of her friends tagged along, and the waiting room was transformed into an African veldt, with beautiful grasses and flowers and herds of animals sniffing alertly for lions. The examining rooms were turned into undersea grottos, with soft colors and fanciful, friendly fishes.

Lotty opened for business again on Tuesday, with several reporters hovering over her patients: Did they
feel it was safe? Did they worry about their children coming to a place that had been attacked? A Mexican woman drew herself up to her full five feet.

“Without Dr. Herschel, I have no child,” she said in heavily accented English. “She save my life, my baby’s life, when no other doctor would treat me because I cannot pay. Always I come to her.”

My face healed during this time. Dr. Pirwitz took out the stitches the day we reopened Lotty’s clinic. My cheek was no longer sore when I laughed and I went back to running and swimming without worrying about damaging the skin.

I continued to see Peter Burgoyne, somewhat sporadically. Often a funny and knowledgeable companion, he also worried about details in a way that could make him hard to be around. Friendship was hosting a seminar on “Treating Amniotic Fluid Embolism: The Whole Team Approach.” It was his show, his chance to show off what he’d accomplished at Friendship, but I wearied of his fretting—about the paper he was presenting, or about logistics that a competent secretary should have been handling. He continued to worry about Lotty and Consuelo to a degree I found unpalatable. While his concern for my health and Lotty’s progress in restoring the clinic was well meant I saw him only once for every two or three times he called.

I continued a halfhearted inquiry into Malcolm’s death, but got nowhere with it. One afternoon I took his keys from Lotty and went into his apartment. No
clues leaped at me from the appalling havoc. I played the answering machine, which had somehow survived the onslaught. It was true several people had called and hung up without leaving messages, but that happens every day. I left the building depressed but no wiser.

Detective Rawlings picked Sergio up late the following Saturday—deliberately, to keep him off the street until someone found his lawyer late in the day on Sunday. The bond had been set for fifty thousand on the aggravated battery charge, but Sergio easily made bail. We had a trial date of October 20—the first in a long series of motions and continuances by which Sergio would hope to get charges dropped if I failed to show up for one of them. Rawlings told me five Lions, including Tattoo, were prepared to testify that Sergio had been with them at a wedding party all through the night in question.

I wondered uneasily what form Sergio’s revenge might take and never left home without the Smith & Wesson tucked into my waistband or purse, but as the days passed without incident I thought he might be willing to wait it out in the courts.

I had a second interview with Fabiano on Wednesday of the week Lotty’s clinic reopened. Once again I tracked him down in the Rooster bar near Holy Sepulchre. The swelling in his face had healed; only a few discolored bruises remained. The men in the bar greeted me warmly.

“So, Fabiano, your poor aunt returns.” “When he
showed up with those bruises we knew he had insulted you once too often.” “Come here, Auntie, let’s have a kiss—I appreciate you if this garbage doesn’t.”

After taking Fabiano outside with me, I went over to the baby-blue Eldorado, inspecting it ostentatiously.

“I hear you drive that car of yours too fast. Banged your face into it, huh? Car looks okay to me—must be harder than that head of yours, which is really astounding.”

He looked at me murderously. “You know damn well how my face got hurt, bitch. You don’t look so good yourself. You tell those Alvarados to leave me alone or they see your body in the river. Next time we don’t be so easy on you.”

“Look, Fabiano. If you want to fight me, fight. Don’t go sniveling to Sergio. It makes you look ridiculous. Come on—you want to kill me, do it now. Bare hands—no weapons.”

He looked at me sullenly, but said nothing.

“Okay, you don’t want to fight. Good. That makes two of us. All I want from you is information. Information about whether your pals in the Lions had anything to do with Malcolm Tregiere’s death.”

Alarm suffused his face. “Hey, man, you ain’t laying that on me. No way. I wasn’t there. I didn’t have nothing to do with it.”

“But you know who did.”

“I don’t know nothing.”

We went round and round on it for five minutes. I was convinced—from his fright and his words—that he
knew something about Tregiere’s death. But he wasn’t going to talk.

“Okay, boy. I guess I’m going to have to go to Detective Rawlings and tell him you were involved in the murder. He’ll pick you up as a material witness, and we’ll see if that makes you talk.”

Even that didn’t shake him. Whoever he was afraid of was a worse threat than the police. Not surprising—the police could hold him for a few days, but they wouldn’t break his legs or his skull.

He wasn’t brave physically; I grabbed his shirt front and slapped his face a few times to see if that got me anywhere, but he knew I couldn’t be berserk enough to really hurt him. I gave it up and sent him back to his beer. He left with half-tearful warnings of revenge, which I would have dismissed unthinkingly if not for his alliance with Sergio.

I stopped by the Sixth Area. Rawlings was in; I told him about my conversation with Fabiano.

“I’m convinced the jerk knows something about Malcolm’s death, but he’s too scared to talk. After two weeks that’s all I’ve been able to come up with. I don’t think there’s one damned thing else I can do on this case.”

Rawlings’s heavy smile gleamed. “Good news, Warshawski. Now I can concentrate on my investigation without worrying about you creeping around a corner in front of me. But I’ll pick up Hernandez and see if I can sweat him.”

I had supper with Lotty that night and told her that I had done what I could about Malcolm.

“Aside from my wounds and the few bruises that Fabiano got, I would say the results I’ve gotten on this case have been nonexistent. I’m going to have to find a paying client pretty soon.”

She agreed, reluctantly, and the talk turned to her efforts to find a replacement for Malcolm. When she left, around ten-thirty, Mr. Contreras didn’t even come to his door. Almost two weeks with no action had persuaded even him that the premises weren’t in danger.

I was still curious about where Dieter Monkfish had gotten the money to pay for Dick’s legal services, but with all the work at the clinic I hadn’t had time to do anything more than phone my attorney. Freeman Carter was the partner with Crawford, Meade who handled their small criminal caseload. I had met him when married to Dick and had found him the only member of the firm who didn’t believe he was doing the world as well as the legal profession a favor by participating in it. Given the size of his fees I used him only on occasions when the forces of justice genuinely threatened to flatten me.

Freeman expressed himself delighted, as always, to hear from me, wanted to know if I needed help with Sergio Rodriguez, and told me I should know better than to call asking him to divulge anything about any of the firm’s other clients.

“Hey, Freeman, if I always assumed no one was going
to tell me anything, I might as well go home and go to bed for the duration. Just thought I’d try.”

He laughed, told me to call him if I changed my mind about prosecuting Sergio, and hung up.

On the Thursday after my second interview with Fabiano, I got a call from a real client, a man in Downers Grove who wanted help stopping drug sales on the premises of his small box factory. Before going to see him I decided to take my curiosity about Monkfish one step farther.

IckPiff’s address, in the 400 block of South Wells, put it close to the Congress Expressway, the least desirable fringe of the Loop. I drove, picking my way past potholes and chunks of masonry, and parked on the street about a block from the building.

Money was not pouring into IckPiff headquarters. Their building was one of a handful of forlorn survivors of urban removal, standing on the street like uneasy pins left after the efforts of a bush-league bowler. A few winos were sitting in the doorways, blinking unsteadily in the late August sun. I stepped over the outstretched legs of one who couldn’t rouse himself enough to panhandle and went into a fetid hallway.

A handwritten sheet taped to the peeling paint informed me that IckPiff headquarters was on the third floor. Other building tenants included a talent agency, a tourist agency for a tiny African country, and a telemarketing firm. The elevator, a small box set into the wall, was padlocked shut. As I climbed the stairs I didn’t see
anyone, but perhaps it was still too early in the day for talent agencies.

On the third floor, a faint light shone through the half glass of IckPiff’s door. A poster featuring a blown-up photograph of a blob—presumably a fetus—was taped to the door with a screamer headline reading
STOP THE SLAUGHTER.
I pulled the blob toward me and went in.

The interior of the office was a small step up from the squalor of the lobby and stairwell. Cheap metal desks and filing cabinets; a long deal table covered with pamphlets where volunteers could collate mailings; and a battery of telephones for campaigns in the state and national legislatures made up the furnishings. Decoration was provided by wall-to-wall posters depicting the evils of abortion and the virtues of fetus protection.

A heavyset, white-haired woman was watering a scraggly plant in a dirty window when I came in. She wore a beige polyester skirt hiked up in front by her protruding stomach to reveal the scalloped end of a slip. Her legs, badly swollen, were encased in support hose and plastic sandals. I wondered with fleeting sympathy how she negotiated the stairs every day.

She looked at me with dull eyes partly hidden by the flabby creases of her face and asked what I wanted.

“State of Illinois,” I said briskly. “Audit department.” I flashed my private-eye license at her briefly. “You’re registered as a not-for-profit organization, aren’t you?”

“Why, why, yes. We certainly are. Yes.” Her voice had the heavy twang of the South Side.

“I just need to take a look at your list of donors. Some questions have arisen about whether they are sheltering income with IckPiff instead of using it as a genuine tax-exempt charity.” I hoped she wasn’t an accountant—my meaningless jargon wouldn’t fool anyone with a junior-college certificate.

She drew herself up proudly. “We are a genuine organization. If you’ve been sent here by
the murderers
to harass us I’m going to call the police.”

“No, no,” I said soothingly. “I have great admiration for your views and goals. This is totally impersonal—just the machinery of the state division of taxes and audits. We can’t have your donors taking advantage of you, can we?”

She shuffled back to the desk on slow, painful feet. “I just need to call Mr. Monkfish. He doesn’t like me showing our private papers to strangers.”

“I’m not a stranger,” I said brightly. “One of your public servants, you know. It won’t take but a minute.”

She continued dialing. With one hand over the mouthpiece she said, “What did you say your name was?”

“Jiminez,” I said. “Rosemary Jiminez.”

Mr. Monkfish was unfortunately at home, or at the Union League Club, or wherever it was she’d dialed. She explained her predicament in her heavy, panting voice and nodded in relief several times before hanging up.

“If you’ll just wait here, Mrs…. what did you say your name was? He’ll be right over.”

“How long will it take him to get here?”

“Not more than thirty minutes.”

I looked conspicuously at my wrist. “I have a noon meeting with someone from the governor’s office. If Mr. Monkfish isn’t here by a quarter to, I’m going to have to leave. And if I leave without the information, my boss may decide to subpoena the records. You wouldn’t like that, would you? So why not let me look at the files while we’re both waiting for him?”

She hesitated, so I upped the pressure, discoursing gently about police, the FBI, and the subpoenas. At last she pulled out some heavy ledgers and the file cards of donors’ names and addresses and let me sit at the table.

The ledgers were all handwritten and in an appalling mess. I started through them in reverse order in the hopes of finding either Dick’s fee or some incoming amount big enough to pay for it, but it was hopeless. It would take hours, and I had minutes. I flipped through the file of donor cards, which at least was in alphabetical order, but I had no idea of whom to look for among the several thousand names. Out of curiosity I looked in the Y’s for Dick. His name and office number were listed, along with a penciled note saying, “Bills to be mailed directly to donor.” I snapped the lid shut and got up.