Blacklist (5 page)

“The verb `admit’ makes it sound like you think knowing him is a crime.” I sneezed again. “Does that mean you know who he is? Some DuPage County career criminal whom it would be dangerous to admit knowing?”

“Black guy on the land, what else was he but a criminal?” one of the deputies snickered to his fellow.

I reached across the table and ripped a sheet from the state’s attorney’s

legal pad. “Let me just write this last comment down word for word to make sure I have the quote exactly right when I call the Herald-Star tomorrow. `Black guy on the land, what else was he but a criminal: Right?”

“Barney, why don’t you and Teddy go get us some coffee while we wrap this up,” Schorr said to his deputies. When they had left, he pulled the paper away from me and balled it up. “It’s late, we’re all pretty tired and not using our best minds on this problem. Let’s just go over a few last questions and let you get back to Chicago where you belong. Do you, or do you not, know who the dead man is?”

“I never saw him until tonight. I can’t add anything to this discussion. You have any prelimary report from the ME?” I could feel a sore throat rising up my tonsils.

Schorr and the ASA exchanged looks. She pursed her lips but picked up the phone at her end of the table. She had a brisk conversation with one of the ME techs and shook her head. Even under the cold light of the DuPage County morgue, no one had found any clues I’d overlooked.

“You’ll run a photo in the papers and on the news, right?” I said to the ASA. “And a full autopsy, including dental impressions?”

“We know our job out here,” she said stiffly.

“Just asking. I wouldn’t want to think that because he was a black man, you wouldn’t put your best effort into cause of death and so on.”

“You don’t need to worry about that,” Schorr said, the fake good humor in his voice not masking the anger in his face. “You go on home and leave this investigation to us.”

When I told him where I’d left my car, he gave an exaggerated sigh and said he supposed one of the deputies could drive me, but I’d have to wait in the front hall.

My hamstrings had stiffened while we sat. I stumbled on my way out of the room. Larry Yosano, the young lawyer, caught my arm to keep me from falling. When I thanked him, I wondered why he’d joined our happy band tonight.

He yawned. “I’m the junior on call for difficult problems this week. We handle affairs for most of the estates in New Solway; we have keys, so if the lieutenant had wanted to get into the house I could have let him in. In fact, when they called me, I drove over to Larchmont, but your group had already left for here. I took some time to check the alarm; it hadn’t been set off, and it’s still functioning. I had a quick look around the ground floor, but there wasn’t any sign of an intruder.”

He yawned more widely. “I wish Lyons Trust-they’re the titleholders-would find a buyer. It’s not good to have a place like that standing empty. We advised hiring a caretaker, but the bank didn’t want to spend the money”

Deputy Protheroe, the woman who’d given me my dry clothes, appeared: she’d been elected to drive me. Yosano walked out with us. Before climbing into his BMW, he gave me a card. I squinted at it through my swollen eyes: he was an associate with Lebold, Arnoff, offices in Oak Brook and LaSalle Street. I’d never heard of them, but I don’t often have to deal with the property issues of the superrich.

“Give Geraldine Graham my number the next time she calls,” Yosano said. “I’ll try to talk her out of more private surveillance at Larchmont.” My cards were gummed together in my wallet. I wrote my office number on a scrap of paper for him.

“You awake enough to get that car of yours home?” Protheroe asked when we reached the Mustang. “I don’t want to be called out in half an hour to scrape your body off the tollway. There’s a Motel 6 up the road. Maybe you’d better check in for what’s left of the night.”

I knew I was tired enough to be at risk behind the wheel, but I was feeling so rotten that I wanted my own bed. I summoned a travesty of bravado, sketching a two-fingered salute and a smile. The dashboard clock read three-fifteen when I pointed my little Mustang toward the city.

CHAPTER 5

Stochastic Excursion

I was in a cave, looking for Morrell. Someone had handed me a wailing infant; I was hunched over, trying to get out of the way of massive roots that pushed down through the rocks. The air was so bad I couldn’t breathe; the rocks themselves were squeezing the air out of me. The infant howled more loudly. Next to me lay the body of a black man in a brown weave suit, dead from the bad air. A buzzing in the distance meant an air-raid warning. From far away I could hear planes whining overhead.

The howling of the planes, the wailing of the infant, finally forced me awake. The phone and downstairs doorbell were ringing simultaneously, but my head cold left me too groggy to bestir myself. I didn’t even stick out a hand for the phone but rolled over onto my side, hoping to relieve the pressure in my sinuses.

I was startled to see the clock read two-forty: I’d slept the whole day away. I tried to raise a sense of urgency about the man I’d found last night, or about the girl I’d tackled, but I couldn’t manage it.

I was just drifting back to sleep when someone pushed the buzzer right outside my third-floor door. Three insistent hoots, and then I heard a key in the lock. That meant one thing: Mr. Contreras, who has keys to my

place, with strict orders to save them for emergencies-which he and I

define very differently. I couldn’t deal with him while flat on my back. By the time his heavy tread sounded in my hall, I’d pulled on a sweatshirt and the pants I’d borrowed from DuPage County last night.

He started talking before he got to the bedroom door. “Doll, you okay? Your car’s out front and you ain’t been out all day, but Mr. Graham, he just sent over a messenger with a letter for you. When you didn’t even come to the door, I got kinda worried.”

“Yeah, I’m okay.” My voice sounded like Poe’s raven after a night mainlining chloroform.

“You sick, doll? What happened to you? It was on the news, you being out in wherever diving into a pond after a dead guy. You have pneumonia or what?”

The dogs pelted down the hall and circled around me with delighted yips. All was forgiven in the three days since I’d last force-marched them down Lake Michigan to the Loop-they were ready for action. I fondled their ears.

“Just a cold. I didn’t get home until four this morning-been sleeping. ‘Scuse minute.” I snuffled down to the bathroom, blenching at the sight of my face in the mirror. I looked worse than I sounded. My eyes were puffy. I had a bruise across my cheekbone and more on my arms and legs. I hadn’t noticed banging myself up so badly when I was hefting bodies around the Larchmont estate last night.

I turned the hot water on in the shower and steamed myself for a few minutes. When I emerged, clean, and, thankfully, dressed in my own clothes, my neighbor had produced a large mug of tea with lemon and honey. Unlike Geraldine Graham’s gilt eggshells, mine were real mugs, thick, clunkyand cheap.

“When I heard the news, them saying you’d been brought in to DuPage County for questioning about this dead man, I thought maybe you’d been arrested. You been fighting? You got some case that’s gonna kill you and you ain’t said nothing to me?” His brown eyes were bright with hurt. “Nothing like that.”

When I’d croaked out enough explanation to satisfy him, he suddenly remembered Darraugh’s letter. The blistering prose raised welts on my fingers.

I have been trying to reach you all day to find out why you sent the police to my mother without informing me first. Since you aren’t answering your phone or e-mail I am sending this by hand. Call immediately on receipt of this message.

How nice to be the man in charge and bulldoze your way through people as if they were construction sites. I checked in with my answering service. Christie Weddington, the operator I’ve known longest, answered. “Is that really you, Vic? Just to be safe I’d better do our security check. What was your mother’s maiden name?” When I’d spelled “Sestieri” she added severely, “When you’re going to hole up, can you let us know? Now that Mary Louise has left your company, you don’t have any backup person to call for emergencies. We got like eleven calls from Darraugh Graham’s office, and five from Murray Ryerson.”

Darraugh, or his PA, Caroline, had started in at ten and kept it up every half hour. Geraldine Graham had phoned four times herself, the first time at a quarter of ten. So the DuPage sheriff had been to see her by nine. At least they were taking it seriously. Murray had called early, before eight, presumably when he’d looked at the morning wires. I got back to him first, in case he knew something that would help me in my conversation with Darraugh. Murray was indignant that I hadn’t called him when the blood was fresh enough to lick.

“Have they ID’d the guy yet?” I croaked into his barrage of questions. “You sound like a frog in a cheese grater, Warshawski. So far the DuPage sheriff is clueless. I gather they’re running your John Doe’s prints through AFIS. And they’ve put his picture on the wires.”

“They have a cause of death?” I wheezed.

“He drowned. What were you doing, Warshawski, turning up so pat minutes after the guy plunged to his watery death?”

“You should write for the Enquirer, with prose like that. You drive out to Larchmont? No one could plunge to a watery death in five feet of water. Either he did like me, tripped and fell, or-” A coughing fit interrupted me. Mr. Contreras leaped up to pour me more tea, and to mutter that Murray was an inconsiderate jerk, keeping me talking when I was sick.

-or he went in on purpose or he was put there,” Murray finished for me. “What’s your theory? Did it look as though he’d struggled?”

I shut my eyes, trying to remember the body as I’d found it. “I only had my flashlight to augment the moon, so I can’t say whether he had unusual bruises or scratches. But his clothes were tidy-no undone buttons, and his tie was still neatly knotted. I undid it when I was trying CPR.”

“Cross your heart, you never saw him before?” Murray demanded. “Hope to die,” I coughed.

“So you didn’t go out there to meet him?”

“No!” I was getting impatient. “He’s what Professor Wright used to call a `stochastic excursion’ in my physics class.”

“Then what about the `Warshawski excursion’?” Murray asked. “What were you doing in the land of hope and glory?”

“Catching the cold of a lifetime.” I hung up as a cough started racking me again.

“You oughta go back to bed, cookie,” Mr. Contreras fussed over me. “You can’t talk, you won’t have any voice at all you keep at it. That Ryerson, he just uses you.”

“Street runs both ways,” I choked. “I have to call Darraugh.”

Darraugh interrupted a meeting on the fate of his Georgia paper division to take my call. “Mother had the police with her this morning.” “That must have pleased her,” I said.

“Excuse me?” The frost in his voice turned the phone to dry ice against my ear.

“She likes people to attend to her. You don’t visit her enough, the cops didn’t respond when she told them about intruders in your boyhood home. Now she’s gotten the attention she thinks is her due.”

“You should have reported to me at once when you found a dead man at the house. I don’t pay you to leave me in the dark.”

“Darraugh, you’re right.” My words came out with annoying slowness, the way they do when you don’t have a throat. “Hear how I sound? I got this way falling into your pool. After hauling out a dead man, futilely trying CPR, spending two hours with the sheriff’s deputies in Wheaton, it was three-thirty. A.M. I could have called you at home then, but I went to bed instead. Where I regret that I slept through ringing phones, sirens, doorbells and atom bombs. I wish I weren’t so human, but there you have it.” “Who was that man and what was he doing at the house?” Darraugh barked after a moment’s silence-he wasn’t going to agree that I had mitigating circumstances on my side, but he wasn’t going to go for my jugular any more right now, either-from him a concession.

I repeated what little information Murray had given me, then said, “Why didn’t you tell me Larchmont was your boyhood home?” Darraugh paused another moment, before saying abruptly he was in an important meeting, but he wanted me to report to him at once if I learned who had died in the pool, and why he’d been there.

“You want me to investigate?” I asked.

“Give it a few hours. Not until your voice is better: no one’s going to take you seriously when you sound like this.”

“Thanks, Darraugh: chicken soup for the PI’s soul,” I said, but he’d already hung up. Just as well. He has plenty of options among the big security companies that handle most of his heavy-muscle jobs. He stays with me not because he likes to support small businesses, but because he knows there will be no leaks out of my tiny operation-I get the jobs that he wants total confidentiality for, but, if he got fed up enough, he’d take the work elsewhere.

When Mr. Contreras finally left with the dogs, I lay down on the couch. I didn’t go back to sleep-I actually felt better after being on my feet for a bit. I put on an old LP of Leontyne Price singing Mozart and watched the shadows change on the ceiling.

I had one little bit of information that no one else did: the teenage girl. It wasn’t only a wish to keep a hole card, although of course I wanted one, but that her spunk and ardor reminded me of my own youth; I felt protective of her the way you do of your childhood. I wanted to find her on my own before deciding whether the cops or reporters ought to have a crack at her.

I assumed she lived in one of the Coverdale Lane estates. I tried to imagine a strategy for going door-to-door looking for her. I was her scoutmaster coming to collect her Girl Scout cookie sales money. I was looking for my lost Borzoi. I’d found emerald earrings when I was jogging and wanted to restore them to the owner.

Perhaps I could check the area high school, although who knows where people in mansions like those in New Solway send their children. Not only that, I’d only seen the girl briefly, by moonlight. I wasn’t sure I’d recognize her again, let alone be able to describe her.

I shut my eyes and tried to conjure her face, but all I remembered was her long braid and the soft cheeks of youth, the planes or lines that might show character not yet formed. Had she said anything that might lead me to her? I was a pig, she’d bet with some of the other kids, she knew someone was in the attic. What had I said that got her so mad she’d run away? Something about not taking responsibility for And then I remembered the little thing that had come loose in my hand when she jerked free. I had stuffed it into my jeans pocket. And my jeans were in the garbage bag the sheriff’s deputy had given me.

I’d dumped the bag in the front hall when I came in this morning. With a ginger hand, I fished out the damp, mud-caked pants. Rotted leaves and threads of plant roots fell away when I shook them out. I had a feeling I was lucky be too congested to smell them. I had to pry the pocket flap open and pull the whole pocket inside out to get the thing I’d torn from my teenager’s backpack. It was black with mud.

When I ran it under the kitchen tap for a few minutes, the mud washed off to show an ancient teddy bear. The last few years it’s become kind of a fetish with kids, putting the toys of early childhood on their backpacks or binders. A high school senior had told me that the coolest kids use ratty crib toys; wannabes buy them new. So my girl was cool, or aspired to be: this little guy was missing both his eyes, and even without a night in my muddy pocket his fur had been pretty forlorn, worn down to the nub in places.

The distinguishing feature of the bear was a tiny green sweatshirt with gold letters on it. At first I thought it was a Green Bay Packers shirt, which would only narrow my search to the million Packer fans in the ChicagoMilwaukee corridor, but then I saw the tiny V and F monogrammed around a minuscule stick. The Vina Fields Academy.

Vina Fields Academy used to be a girls’ school when Geraldine Graham had gone there, where they’d learned French, dancing and flirting. Since turning coed in the seventies, it’s not only become the most expensive

private school in the city but an important academic one. The stick on the teddy bear’s little shirt was supposed to be the candle or lighthouse or whatever the school uses to illustrate that it’s a beacon of light.

I only know all this because I see a life-sized version of the sweatshirt every time I go into La Llorona on Milwaukee Avenue. The owner, Mrs. Aguilar, wasn’t noticeably proud of her daughter, Celine, getting a scholarship to attend Vina Fields: she only had one entire wall papered with her yearbook photos from sixth grade on, along with pictures of Celine with the school field hockey team, Celine accepting the top prize in mathematics for her class three years running, and the sweatshirt.

I hadn’t eaten for almost twenty-four hours. I might as well drive down there for some of Mrs. Aguilar’s chicken soup with tortillas.