Blood Shot (2 page)

3

My Sister’s Keeper

Caroline was sitting at the dining-room table, eating fried chicken and making notes on a colored graph. Chaotic stacks of paper—reports, magazines, flyers—covered all of the small surface. A large pile near her left elbow teetered uncertainly on the table edge. She put down her pencil when she heard me come into the room.

“I went out for some Kentucky Fried while you were in with Ma. Want some? What did you think—kind of a shock, huh?”

I shook my head in dismay. “It’s terrible to see her like this. How are you holding up?”

She grimaced. “It wasn’t so bad until her legs wouldn’t support her anymore. She show ’em to you? I knew she would. It’s really tough on her not being able to get around. The hard part for me was realizing how long she’d been sick before I noticed anything. You know Ma—she’d never complain in a million years, especially about anything as private as her kidneys.”

She rubbed a greasy hand through her unruly curls. “It was only three years ago, when I suddenly noticed how much weight she’d been losing, that I even knew anything was wrong. Then it came out she’d been feeling off for a long time—dizzy and stuff, her feet numb—but she didn’t want to say anything that might jeopardize her job.”

The story sounded depressingly familiar. People on the hip North Side went to the doctor every time they stubbed their toes, but in South Chicago you expected life to be tough. Dizziness and weight loss happened to lots of people; it was the kind of thing grown-ups kept to themselves.

“You satisfied with the doctors she’s seeing?”

Caroline finished gnawing on the chicken thigh and licked her fingers. “They’re okay. We go to Help of Christians because that’s where Xerxes has their medical plan, and they do as much as anyone could. I mean, her kidneys just aren’t working at all—they call it acute renal failure—and it looks like she may have some bone marrow problems and may be starting with emphysema. That’s our only real problem—she keeps going on about her damned cigarettes. Hell, they may have helped get her into this fix to begin with.”

I said awkwardly, “If she’s in that bad shape, the cigarettes aren’t going to make her any worse, you know.”

“Vic! You didn’t say that to her, did you? I have to fight her about them ten times a day as it is. If she thinks you’re backing her up, I might as well quit on the spot.” She slapped the table emphatically; the teetering pile of papers flew across the floor. “I was sure you of all people would support me on this.”

“You know how I feel about smoking,” I said, annoyed. “I expect Tony would be alive today if he hadn’t had a two-pack-a-day habit—I still hear him wheezing and coughing in my nightmares. But how much time is smoking going to shave from Louisa’s life at this point? She’s in there by herself, got nothing but the tube to keep her company. I’m just saying it’d make her feel better mentally and won’t make her any worse physically.”

Caroline set her mouth in an uncompromising line. “No. I don’t even want to talk about it.”

I sighed and got down on the floor to help her with the loose papers. When we had them all collated again I looked at her suspiciously: she had reverted to her tense abstracted mood.

“Well, I think it’s time for me to push off. I hope the Lady Tigers go all the way again.”

“I—Vic. I need to talk to you. I need your help.”

“Caroline, I came down and pranced around in my basketball uniform for you. I saw Louisa. Not that I grudge the time with her, but how many items you got on your agenda tonight?”

“I want to hire you. Professionally. I need your help as a detective,” she said defiantly.

“What for? You give SCRAP’s money to the church Lenten fund and now you want me to find it for you again?”

“Goddamn you, Vic! Could you stop acting like I’m still five years old and treat me seriously for a minute?”

“If you wanted to hire me, why couldn’t you have said something about it on the phone?” I asked. “Your step-by-step approach to me isn’t exactly designed to make me feel serious about you.”

“I wanted you to see Ma before I talked to you about it,” she muttered, looking at her graph. “I thought if you saw how bad off she is, you’d think it was more important.”

I sat at the end of the table. “Caroline, lay it out for me. I promise I’ll listen as seriously to you as to any other potential client. But tell me the whole story, front, middle, and end. Then we can decide if you really need a detective, if it should be me, and so on.”

She took a breath and said quickly, “I want you to find my father for me.”

I was quiet for a minute.

“Isn’t that a job for a detective?” she demanded.

“Do you know who he is?” I asked gently.

“No, that’s partly what I need you to find out for me. You see how bad Ma is, Vic. She’s going to die soon.” She tried to keep her voice matter-of-fact, but it quavered a little. “Her folks always treated me like—I don’t know—not the same way they are to my cousins. Second-class, I guess. When she dies I’d like to have some kind of family. I mean, maybe my old man will turn out to be an asshole jerk. The kind of guy who lets a girl go through what Ma did when she was pregnant might be. But maybe he’d have folks who’d like me. And if he didn’t, at least I’d know.”

“What does Louisa say? Have you asked her?”

“She practically killed me. Practically killed herself—she got so upset she almost choked to death. Screaming how I was ungrateful, she’d worked herself to the bone for me, I never wanted for anything, why’d I have to go nosing around in something that wasn’t any of my damned business. So I knew I couldn’t go on about it with her. But I have to find out. I know you could do it for me.”

“Caroline, maybe you’re better off not knowing. Even if I knew how to go about it—missing persons aren’t a big part of my business—if it’s that painful to Louisa, you might prefer not to find out.”

“You know who he is, don’t you!” she cried.

I shook my head. “I have no idea, honestly. Why did you think I do?”

She looked down. “I’m sure she told Gabriella. I thought maybe Gabriella told you.”

I moved over to sit down next to her. “Maybe Louisa told my mother, but if so, it wasn’t the kind of thing Gabriella thought I ought to know about. As God is my witness, I don’t know.”

She gave a little smile at that. “So will you find him for me?”

If I hadn’t known her all her life, it would have been easier to say no. I specialize in financial crime. Missing persons takes a certain kind of skill, and certain kinds of contacts I’ve never bothered cultivating. And this guy’d been gone more than a quarter of a century.

But in addition to whining and teasing and tagging along when I didn’t want her, Caroline used to adore me. When I went off to college she’d race to meet my train if I came home for the weekend, copper pigtails flying around her head, plump legs pumping as hard as they could. She even went out for basketball because I did. She almost drowned following me into Lake Michigan when she was four. The memories were endless. Her blue eyes still looked at me with total trust. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t keep from responding.

“You got any idea where to start this search?”

“Well, you know. It had to be someone who lived in East Side. She never went anyplace else. I mean, she’d never even been to the Loop until your mother took us there to look at the Christmas decorations when I was three.”

East Side was an all-white neighborhood to the east of South Chicago. It was cut off from the city by the Calumet River, and its residents tended to lead parochial, inbred lives. Louisa’s parents still lived there in the house she’d grown up in.

“That’s helpful,” I said encouragingly. “What do you figure the population was in 1960? Twenty thousand? And only half of them were men. And many of those were children. You got any other ideas?”

“No,” she said doggedly. “That’s why I need a detective.”

Before I could say anything else the doorbell rang, Caroline looked at her watch. “That might be Aunt Connie. She sometimes comes this late. Be back in a minute.”

She trotted out to the entryway. While she dealt with the caller I flipped through a magazine devoted to the solid-waste-disposal industry, wondering if I was really insane enough to look for Caroline’s father. I was staring at a picture of a giant incinerator when she came back into the room. Nancy Cleghorn, my old basketball pal who now worked for SCRAP, was trailing behind her.

“Hi, Vic. Sorry to barge in, but I wanted to fill Caroline in on a problem.”

Caroline looked at me apologetically and asked if I’d mind waiting a few minutes to finish up.

“Not at all,” I said politely, wondering if I was doomed to spend the night in South Chicago. “Want me to go to the other room?”

Nancy shook her head. “It’s not private. Just annoying.”

She sat down and unbuttoned her coat. She’d changed from her basketball uniform to a tan dress with a red scarf, and she’d put on makeup, but she still managed to appear disheveled.

“I got to the meeting in plenty of time. Ron was waiting for me—Ron Kappelman, our lawyer”—she put in an aside to me—“and we found we weren’t on the agenda. So Ron went up to talk to that fat moron Martin O’Gara, saying we’d filed our material in plenty of time and talked to the secretary this morning to make sure she included us. So O’Gara makes this big show of not knowing what the hell is going on, and calls the board secretary and disappears for a while. Then he comes back and says there were so many legal problems with our submission, they’d decided not to consider it this evening.”

“We want to build a solvent recycling plant here,” Caroline explained to me. “We’ve got funding, we have a site, we have specs that have passed every EPA test we can think of, and we have some customers right on our doorstep—Xerxes and Glow-Rite. It means a good hundred jobs down here, and a chance to make a dent in the crap going into the ground.”

She turned back to Nancy. “So what can the problem be? What did Ron say?”

“I was so mad I couldn’t speak. He was so mad I was afraid he’d break O’Gara’s neck—if he could find it underneath the fat rolls. But he called Dan Zimring, the EPA lawyer, you know. Dan said we could come by his place, so we went over there and he looked through everything and said it couldn’t be in better shape.”

Nancy fluffed out her frizzy hair so that it stood up wildly around her head. She helped herself absently to a piece of chicken.

“I’ll tell you what I think the problem is,” Caroline snapped, cheeks flushed. “They probably showed the submission to Art Jurshak—you know, professional courtesy or some shit. I think he blocked it.”

“Art Jurshak,” I echoed. “Is he still alderman down here? He must be a hundred and fifty by now.”

“No, no,” Caroline said impatiently. “He’s only in his sixties somewhere. Don’t you agree, Nancy?”

“I think he’s sixty-two,” she answered through a mouthful of chicken.

“Not about his age,” Caroline said impatiently. “That Jurshak must be trying to block the plant.”

Nancy licked her fingers. She looked around for a place to put the bone and finally laid it back on the plate with the rest of the chicken. “I don’t see how you figure that, Caroline. There could be a lot of people who don’t want to see a recycling center down here.”

Caroline looked at her through narrowed eyes. “What did O’Gara say? I mean, he must have given some reason for not giving us a hearing.”

Nancy frowned. “He said we shouldn’t try to make proposals like this without community backing. I told him the community was a hundred percent behind us, and got ready to show him copies of petitions and crap, when he gave this jolly laugh and said, not a hundred percent. He’d heard from people who weren’t behind it at all.”

“But why Jurshak?” I asked, interested in spite of myself. “Why not Xerxes, or the Mob, or some rival solvent re-cycler?”

“Just the political tie-in,” Caroline answered. “O’Gara’s chairman of the zoning board because he’s good buddies with all the old hack Dems.”

“But, Caroline—Art’s got no reason to oppose us. Our last meeting he even acted like he would support us.”

“He never put it in so many words,” Caroline said grimly. “And all it would take is someone willing to wave a big enough campaign contribution in front of him for him to change his mind.”

“I suppose,” Nancy agreed reluctantly. “I just don’t like to think it.”

“Why are you so pally with Jurshak all of a sudden?” Caroline demanded.

It was Nancy’s turn to flush. “I’m not. But if he’s against us, it’ll be damned near impossible to get O’Gara to give us a hearing. Unless we could come up with a bribe big enough to make Jurshak respond to us. So how do I find who’s against the plant, Vic? Aren’t you a detective or something these days?”

I frowned at her and said hurriedly, “Or something. Trouble is, you’ve got too many possibilities in a political mess like this. The Mob. They’re into a lot of waste-disposal projects in Chicago. Maybe they figure you’d be cutting into their turf. Or Return to Eden. I know they’re supposed to be foursquare for the environment, but they’ve been raising a lot of money lately based on dramatic gestures they’re making here in South Chicago. Maybe they don’t want something that cuts off their fund-raising tactics. Or the Sanitary District—maybe they’re taking kickbacks to look the other way on local pollution and they don’t want to lose the revenues. Or Xerxes doesn’t—”

“Enough!” she protested. “You’re right, of course. It could be all of them or any of them. But in my place, where would you look first?”

“I don’t know,” I said thoughtfully. “Probably nuzzle up to someone on Jurshak’s staff. See if the pressure came from there to begin with. And if it did, why. It’d save you the trouble of making the rounds of an infinite number of possibilities. Plus you wouldn’t rub against someone who might want to put you in cement booties just for asking.”

“You know some of the people who work for Art, don’t you?” Caroline asked Nancy.

“Yes, yes I do.” She fiddled with another piece of chicken. “It’s just I haven’t wanted … Oh, well. Anything for the cause of right and justice, I guess.”