Blood Shot

Blood Shot

V.I. Warshawski – Book 5

By Sara Paretsky

1

Highway 41 Revisited

I had forgotten the smell. Even with the South Works on strike and Wisconsin Steel padlocked and rusting away, a pungent mix of chemicals streamed in through the engine vents. I turned off the car heater, but the stench—you couldn’t call it air—slid through minute cracks in the Chevy’s windows, burning my eyes and sinuses.

I followed Route 41 south. A couple of miles back it had been Lake Shore Drive, with Lake Michigan spewing foam against the rocks on my left, expensive high rises haughtily looking on from the right. At Seventy-ninth Street the lake disappeared abruptly. The weed-choked yards surrounding the giant USX South Works stretched away to the east, filling the mile or so of land between road and water. In the distance, pylons, gantries, and towers loomed through the smoke-hung February air. Not the land of high rises and beaches anymore, but landfill and worn-out factories.

Decaying bungalows looked on the South Works from the right side of the street. Some were missing pieces of siding, or shamefacedly showing stretches of peeling paint. In others the concrete in the front steps cracked and sagged. But the windows were all whole, tightly sealed, and not a scrap of debris lay in the yards. Poverty might have overtaken the area, but my old neighbors gallantly refused to give in to it.

I could remember when eighteen thousand men poured from those tidy little homes every day into the South Works, Wisconsin Steel, the Ford assembly plant, or the Xerxes solvent factory. I remembered when each piece of trim was painted fresh every second spring and new Buicks or Olds-mobiles were an autumn commonplace. But that was in a different life, for me as well as South Chicago.

At Eighty-ninth Street I turned west, flipping down the sun visor to shield my eyes from the waning winter sun. Beyond the tangle of deadwood, rusty cars, and collapsed houses on my left lay the Calumet River. My friends and I used to flout our parents by swimming there; my stomach turned now at the thought of sticking my face into the filthy water.

The high school stood across from the river. It was an enormous structure, sprawling over several acres, but its dark red brick somehow looked homey, like a nineteenth-century girls’ college. Light pouring from the windows and streams of young people going through the vast double doors on the west end added to the effect of quaintness. I turned off the engine, reached for my gym bag, and joined the crowd.

The high, vaulted ceilings were built when heat was cheap and education respected enough for people to want schools to look like cathedrals. The cavernous hallways served as perfect echo chambers for the laughing, shouting crowd. Noise hurled from the ceiling, the walls, and the metal lockers. I wondered why I never noticed the din when I was a student.

They say you don’t forget the things you learn young. I’d last been here twenty years ago, but at the gym entrance I turned left without thinking to follow the hall down to the women’s locker room. Caroline Djiak was waiting at the door, clipboard in hand.

“Vic! I thought maybe you’d chickened out. Everyone else got here half an hour ago. They’re suited up, at least the ones who can still get into their uniforms. You did bring yours, didn’t you? Joan Lacey’s here from the Herald-Star and she’d like to talk to you. After all, you were tournament MVP, weren’t you?”

Caroline hadn’t changed. The copper pigtails were cut into a curly halo around her freckled face, but that seemed to be the only difference. She was still short, energetic, and tactless.

I followed her into the locker room. The din there rivaled the noise level in the hall outside. Ten young women in various stages of undress were screaming at each other—for a nail file, a tampon, who stole my fucking deodorant. In bras and panties they looked muscular and trim, much fitter than my friends and I had been at that age. Certainly fitter than we were now.

In a corner of the locker room, making almost as much noise, were seven of the ten Lady Tigers with whom I’d won the state Class AA championship twenty years ago. Five of the seven had on their old black-and-gold uniforms. On some the T-shirts stretched tight across their breasts, and the shorts looked as though they might split if the wearer tried a fast breakaway.

The one packed tightest into her uniform might have been Lily Goldring, our leading free-throw shooter, but the permed hair and extra chin made it hard to be sure. I thought Alma Lowell was the black woman who had spread far beyond the capacity of her uniform and had her letter jacket perched uneasily on her massive shoulders.

The only two I recognized for certain were Diane Logan and Nancy Cleghorn. Diane’s strong slender legs could still do for a Vogue cover. She’d been our star forward, co-captain, honors student. Caroline had told me Diane now ran a successful Loop PR agency, specializing in promoting black companies and personalities.

Nancy Cleghorn and I had stayed in touch through college; even so, her strong square face and frizzy blond hair were so unchanged, I would have known her anyplace. She was responsible for my being here tonight. She directed environmental affairs for SCRAP—the South Chicago Reawakening Project where Caroline Djiak was the deputy director. When the two of them realized the Lady Tigers were going into the regional championships for the first time in twenty years, they decided to get the old team together for a pregame ceremony. Publicity for the neighborhood, publicity for SCRAP, support for the team—good for everyone.

Nancy grinned when she saw me. “Yo, Warshawski—get your ass moving. We gotta be on the floor in ten minutes.”

“Hi, Nancy. I ought to have my head examined for letting you get me down here. Don’t you know you can’t go home again?”

I found four square inches of bench to dump my gym bag on and quickly stripped, stuffing my jeans into the bag and putting on my faded uniform. I adjusted the socks and tied the high-lacing shoes.

Diane put an arm around me. “You’re looking good, Whitey, like you still could move around if you had to.”

We looked into the mirror. While some of the current Tigers topped six feet, at five-eight I’d been the tallest one on our team. Diane’s afro was about level with my nose. Black and white, we’d both wanted to play basketball when race fights were a daily disruption in hall and locker room. We hadn’t liked each other, but junior year we’d forced a truce on the rest of the team and the next February we’d taken them to the first statewide girls tournament.

She grinned, sharing the memory. “All that garbage we used to put ourselves through seems mighty trivial now, Warshawski. Come over and meet the reporter. Say something nice about the old neighborhood.”

The Herald-Star’s Joan Lacey was the city’s only woman sports columnist. When I said I read her stuff regularly she smiled with pleasure. “Tell my editor. Better still, write a letter. So how do you feel putting on your uniform after all these years?”

“Like an idiot. I haven’t held a basketball since I left college.” I’d gone to the University of Chicago on an athletic scholarship. The U of C offered them long before the rest of the country knew that women played sports.

We talked for a few minutes, about the past, about aging athletes, about the fifty percent unemployed in the neighborhood, about the current team’s prospects.

“We’re rooting for them, of course,” I said. “I’m anxious to see them on the court. In here they look as though they take conditioning much more seriously than we did twenty years ago.”

“Yeah, they keep hoping the women’s pro league will revive. There’re some top-notch women players in high school and college with no place to go.”

Joan put her notebook away and told a photographer to get us out on the court for some shots. We eight old-timers straggled out to the gym floor, Caroline worrying around us like an overzealous terrier.

Diane picked up a ball and dribbled it behind her, under her legs, then bounced it to me. I turned and shot. The ball caromed from the backboard and I ran in to get it and dunk it. My old teammates gave me a ragged hand.

The photographer took some pictures of us together, then of Diane and me playing one-on-one under the net. The crowd got into it a little, but their real interest was on the current team. When the Lady Tigers took the floor in their warm-up suits, they got a big round. We worked out a little with them, but turned the floor over to them as soon as possible: this was their big night.

When the girls from visiting St. Sophia came out in their red-and-white sweats, I slid back to the locker room and started to change back to my civvies. Caroline found me as I finished tying my neck scarf.

“Vic! Where are you going? You know you promised to come over to see Ma after the game!”

“I said I’d try, if I could stay down here.”

“She’s counting on seeing you. She can hardly get out of bed she’s in such bad shape. This really matters to her.”

In the mirror I could see her face flush and her blue eyes darken with the same hurt look she used to give me when she was five and I wouldn’t let her tag along with my friends. I felt my temper rise with twenty-year-old irritation.

“Did you arrange this basketball farce to manipulate me into visiting Louisa? Or did that only come to you later?”

The flush deepened to scarlet. “What do you mean, farce? I’m trying to do something for this community. I’m not a la-di-da snot going off to the North Side and abandoning people to their fate!”

“What, you think if I’d stayed down here I could’ve saved Wisconsin Steel? Or stopped the assholes at USX from striking one of the last operating plants around here?” I grabbed my peajacket from the bench and angrily thrust my arms into it.

“Vic! Where are you going?”

“Home. I have a dinner date. I want to change clothes.”

“You can’t. I need you,” she wailed loudly. The big eyes were swimming with tears now, a prelude to a squawk to her mother or mine that I was being mean to her. It brought back all the times Gabriella had come to the door—saying “What difference can it make to you, Victoria? Take the child with you”—so forcibly it was all I could do not to slap Caroline’s wide trembling mouth.

“What do you need me for? To make good on a promise you made without consulting me?”

“Ma isn’t going to live much longer,” she shouted. “Isn’t that more important than some stupid-ass date?”

“Certainly. If this were a social occasion, I would call and say excuse me, the little brat next door committed me to something I can’t get out of But this is dinner with a client. He’s temperamental but he pays on time and I like to keep him happy.”

Tears were streaming across the freckles now. “Vic, you never take me seriously. I told you when we were discussing this how important it would be for Ma if you came to visit. And you completely forgot. You still think I’m five years old and nothing I say or think matters.”

That shut me up. She had a point. And if Louisa was that sick, I really ought to see her.

“Oh, all right. I’ll phone and change my plans. One last time.”

The tears disappeared instantly. “Thanks, Vic. I won’t forget it. I knew I could count on you.”

“You mean you knew you could make another end run around me,” I said disagreeably.

She laughed. “Let me show you where the phones are.”

“I’m not senile yet—I can still find them. And no, I won’t sneak off while you’re not looking,” I added, seeing her uneasy look.

She grinned. “As God is your witness?”

It was an old pledge, picked up from her mother’s drunk Uncle Stan, who used it to prove he was sober.

“As God is my witness,” I agreed solemnly. “I just hope Graham’s feelings aren’t so hurt, he decides not to pay his bill.”

I found the pay phones near the front entrance and wasted several quarters before running Darrough Graham down at the Forty-Nine Club. He wasn’t happy—he had made reservations at the Filagree—but I managed to end the conversation on a friendly note. Slinging my bag over my shoulder, I made my way back to the gym.

2

Bringing Up Baby

St. Sophia gave the Lady Tigers a tough ride, leading through much of the second half. The play was intense, much faster paced than in my basketball years. Two starters for the Lady Tigers fouled out with seven minutes left, and things looked bad. Then the toughest Saint guard went out with three minutes left. The Tigers’ star forward, who’d been penned in all evening, came to life, scoring eight unanswered points. The home team won 54-51.

I found myself cheering as eagerly as anyone. I even felt a nostalgic warmth for my own high school team, which surprised me: my adolescent memories are so dominated by my mother’s illness and death, I guess I’ve forgotten having any good times.

Nancy Cleghorn had left to attend a meeting, but Diane Logan and I joined the rest of our old team in the locker room to congratulate our successors and wish them well in the regional semifinals. We didn’t stay long: they clearly thought we were too old to understand basketball, let alone have played it.

Diane came over to say good-bye to me. “You couldn’t pay me enough to relive my adolescence,” she said, brushing my cheek with her own. “I’m going back to the Gold Coast. And I’m definitely staying there. Take it easy, Warshawski.” She was gone in a shimmer of silver fox and Opium.

Caroline hovered anxiously around the locker-room door, worried I would leave without her. She was so tense I began to feel uneasy about what I was going to find at her house. She’d acted just this way when she’d dragged me home from college one weekend, ostensibly because Louisa had hurt her back and needed help replacing a broken window. After I got there I found she expected me to explain why she’d given Louisa’s little pearl ring to the St. Wenceslaus Lenten fund drive.

“Is Louisa really sick?” I demanded as we finally left the locker room.

She looked at me soberly. “Very sick, Vic. You’re not going to like seeing her.”

“What’s the rest of your agenda, then?”

The ready color flooded her cheeks. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She flounced out the school door. I followed slowly, in time to see her get into a battered car parked with its nose well into the street. She rolled down the window as I walked by to yell that she’d see me at the house and took off in a squeal of rubber. My shoulders were sagging a little as I unlocked the Chevy door and slid in.

My gloom increased when I made the turn onto Houston Street. I’d last been on the block in 1976 when my father died and I came back down to sell the house. I’d seen Louisa then, and Caroline, who was fourteen and following determinedly in my steps—she even tried playing basketball, but at five feet even her tireless energy couldn’t get her onto the first squad.

That was the last time I had talked to any of the other neighbors who had known my parents. There was genuine grief for my gentle, good-humored father. Grudging respect for Gabriella, dead ten years at the time. After all, the other women on the block had shared her scraping, saving, cutting each penny five ways to feed and shelter their families.

Now she was dead, they glossed over the eccentricities that used to make them shake their heads—taking the girl to the opera with an extra ten dollars instead of buying her a new winter coat. Not baptizing her or giving her to the sisters at St. Wenceslaus for schooling. That disturbed them enough that they sent the principal, Mother Joseph Something, around one day for a memorable confrontation.

Maybe the biggest folly of all to them was her insisting on college for me, and demanding that it be the University of Chicago. Only the best did for Gabriella, and she’d decided that was Chicago’s best when I was two. Not, perhaps, comparing in her mind with the University of Pisa. Just as the shoes she bought herself at Callabrano’s on Morgan Street didn’t compare to Milan. But one did what one could. So two years after my mother’s death I’d left on a scholarship for what my neighbors called Red University, half scared, half excited to meet the demons up there. And after that, I’d never really gone home again.

Louisa Djiak was the one woman on the block who always stood up for Gabriella, dead or alive. But then, she owed Gabriella. And me, too, I thought with a flash of bitterness that startled me. I realized I was still pissed at spending all those glorious summer days baby-sitting, at doing my homework with Louisa’s baby howling in the background.

Well, the baby was grown up now, but she was still howling exigently in my ear. I pulled up behind her Capri and turned off the engine.

The house was smaller than I remembered, and dingier. Louisa wasn’t well enough to wash and starch the curtains every six months and Caroline belonged to a generation that emphatically avoided such tasks. I should know—I was part of it myself.

Caroline was waiting in the doorway for me, still edgy. She gave a brief, tense smile. “Ma’s really excited you’re here, Vic. She’s waited all day to have her coffee so she could drink it with you.”

She took me through the small, cluttered dining room to the kitchen, saying over her shoulder, “She’s not supposed to drink coffee anymore. But it was too hard for her to give it up—along with everything else that’s changed for her. So we compromise on one cup a day.”

She busied herself at the stove, tackling the coffee with energetic inefficiency. Despite a trail of spilled water and coffee grounds on the stove, she carefully arranged a TV tray with china, cloth napkins, and a geranium cut from a coffee can in the window. Finally she set out a little dish of ice cream with a geranium leaf in it. When she picked up the tray I stood up from my perch on the kitchen stool to follow her.

Louisa’s bedroom lay to the right of the dining room. As soon as Caroline opened the door the smell of sickness hit me like a physical force, bringing back the odor of medicine and decaying flesh that had hung around Gabriella the last year of her life. I dug the nails into the palm of my right hand and willed myself into the room.

My first reaction was shock, even though I thought I’d prepared myself Louisa sat propped in bed, her face gaunt and tinged a queer greenish gray under her wispy hair. Her twisted hands emerged from the loose sleeves of a worn pink cardigan. When she held them out to me with a smile, though, I caught a glimpse of the beautiful young woman who’d rented the house next to ours when she was pregnant with Caroline.

“Good to see you, Victoria. Knew you’d come by. You’re like your ma that way. Look like her, too, even though you have your daddy’s gray eyes.”

I knelt by the bed and hugged her. Underneath the cardigan her bones felt tiny and brittle.

She gave a racking cough that shook her frame. “Excuse me. Too many damned cigarettes for too many years. Little missy here hides ’em from me—as if they could hurt me any worse now.”

Caroline bit her lips and moved over next to the bed. “I brought you your coffee, Ma. Maybe it’ll take your mind off your cigs.”

“Yeah, my one cup. Damned doctors. First they pump you so full of shit you don’t know whether you’re coming or going. Then when they got you tied by the hind legs they take away anything that’d make the time pass easier. I’m telling you, girl, don’t ever get yourself in this spot.”

I took the thick china mug from Caroline and handed it to Louisa. Her hands shook slightly and she pressed the mug against her breast to steady it. I slid off my heels into a straight-backed chair near the bed.

“You want to spend some time alone with Vic, Ma?” Caroline asked.

“Yeah, sure. You go on, girl. I know you got work to do.”

When the door shut behind Caroline I said, “I’m really sorry to see you like this.”

She made a throwaway gesture. “Ah—what the hell. I’m sick of thinking about it, and I talk about it to the damned docs often enough. I want to hear about you. I follow all your cases when they make it to the papers. Your ma’d be real proud of you.”

I laughed. “I’m not so sure. She hoped I’d be a concert singer. Or maybe a high-priced lawyer. I can just imagine her if she saw the way I live.”

Louisa laid a bony hand on my arm. “Don’t you think so, Victoria. Don’t you think so for one minute. You know Gabriella—she’d of gave her last shirt to a beggar. Look how she stood up for me when people came by and threw eggs and shit at my windows. No. Maybe she’d of liked to see you living better than you do. Heck—feel that way about Caroline. Her brains, her education and all, she could do better than hanging around this dump. But I’m real proud of her. She’s honest and hardworking and she sticks up for what she believes in. And you’re just the same. No, sir. Gabriella could see you now she’d be as proud as can be.”

“Well, we couldn’t have managed without your help when she was so sick,” I muttered, uncomfortable.

“Oh, shit, girl. My one chance to pay her back for everything she did? I can still see her when the righteous ladies from St. Wenceslaus were out parading around my front door. Gabriella come out with a head of steam that damn near drove ’em into the Calumet.”

She gave a shout of hoarse laughter that changed to a coughing fit which left her breathless and slightly purple. She lay quietly for a few minutes, panting in short, gasping breaths.

“Hard to believe folks cared so much about one pregnant unmarried teenager, ain’t it,” she said finally. “Here we got half the people outa work in the community—that’s life and death, girl. But back then I guess it seemed like the end of the world to folks. I mean, my own ma and pa, even, throwing me out like they did.” Her face worked for a minute. “Like it was all my fault or something. Your ma was the only one stood up for me. Even when my folks come around and decided to admit Caroline was alive, they never really forgave her for being born or me for doing it.”

Gabriella never did anything by half measures: I helped her look after the baby so Louisa could work the night shift at Xerxes. The days when I had to take Caroline to her grandparents’ were my worst torment. Rigid, humorless, they wouldn’t let me into the house unless I took my shoes off. A couple of times they even bathed Caroline outside before they’d admit her to their pristine portals.

Louisa’s parents were only in their sixties—same age as Gabriella and Tony would be if they were still alive. Because Louisa had a baby and lived by herself, I’d always thought of her as part of my parents’ generation, but she was only five or six years older than me.

“When did you stop working?” I asked. I called Louisa occasionally, when my guilty imagination conjured up Gabriella’s image, but it had been awhile. South Chicago hovered too uneasily at the base of my mind for me to willingly court its return to my life, and it had been over two years since I’d spoken to Louisa. She hadn’t said anything then about feeling bad.

“Oh, it got so I couldn’t stand anymore about—must be just over a year. So they put me on disability then. It’s only been the last six months or so I couldn’t get around at all.”

She flicked the covers back from her legs. They were twigs, thin bones a bird might use but mottled greeny-gray like her face. Livid patches on her feet and ankles showed where her veins had given up carting blood around.

“It’s my kidneys,” she said. “Darned things don’t want me to pee properly. Caroline takes me over two, three times a week and they stick me on that damned machine, supposed to clean me out, but between you and me, girl, I’d just as soon they’d let me go in peace.” She held up a thin hand. “Don’t you go telling Caroline that, now—she’s doing everything to see I get the best. And the company pays for it, so it’s not like I feel she’s digging into her own savings. I don’t want her to think I ain’t grateful.”

“No, no,” I said soothingly, pulling the cover up gently.

She reverted to the old days on the block, to the days when her legs were slim and muscular, when she used to go dancing after getting off work at midnight. To Steve Ferraro, who wanted to marry her, and Joey Pankowski, who didn’t, and how if she had to do it over, she’d do it the same, because she had Caroline, but for Caroline she wanted something different, something better than staying on in South Chicago working herself to an early old age.

At last I took the bony fingers and squeezed them gently. “I’ve got to go, Louisa—it’s twenty miles to my place. But I’ll come back.”

“Well, it’s been real good to see you again, girl.” She cocked her head on one side and gave a naughty smile. “Don’t suppose you could find a way to slip me a pack of cigarettes, do you?”

I laughed. “I’m not touching that with a barge pole, Louisa—you work it out with Caroline.”

I shook out her pillows and turned on the TV for her before going off to find Caroline. Louisa had never been much given to kissing, but she squeezed my hand tightly for a few seconds.