Blood Shot (25 page)

37

The Shark Puts Out Bait

My brain was in that numbed, feverish state where you sleep as though you are drugged—heavily but without getting any rest. The tragedy of Louisa’s life kept playing itself out in my dreams, with Gabriella scolding me harshly in Italian for not having taken better care of our neighbor.

I woke for good at five and paced restlessly around Lotty’s kitchen, wishing I had the dog with me, wishing I could get some exercise, wishing I could think of a way to force Gustav Humboldt to listen to me. Lotty joined me in the kitchen a little before six. Her drawn face told the tale of her own sleepless night. She put a strong hand on my shoulder and squeezed it gently, then went wordlessly to make coffee.

After Lotty had taken off for her early morning rounds at Beth Israel, I headed south once more to see Louisa. She was glad to see me, as always, but seemed tireder than the previous times I’d been there. I questioned her as gently and subtly as I knew how about the onset of her illness, when she’d first started feeling bad.

“You know those blood tests they used to take—old Chigwell the Chigger?”

She gave a scratchy laugh. “Oh my, yes. I saw where the old chigger tried to kill himself It was on all the TV stations last week. He always was a weak little man, scared of his own shadow. Didn’t surprise me he wasn’t married. No woman wants a little shrimp like that who can’t stand up for himself.”

“What did he tell you when he took your blood?”

“One of our benefits, they called it, getting a physical every year like that with the blood work and everything. Not the kind of thing I would of thought of doing. Didn’t know people went in for that sort of thing. But it was okay with the head of the union and the rest of us didn’t care. Got us off the floor with pay one morning every year, you know.”

“They never gave you any results? Or sent them to a doctor for you?”

“Go on, girl.” Louisa flapped her hand and coughed loudly. “If they’d a gave us results, we wouldn’t of known what they meant anyway. Dr. Chigwell showed me my chart once and I’m telling you, it was like Arab scrawl as far as I was concerned—you know those wiggly lines they put on their banners and all? That’s about what medical tests look like to me.”

I forced myself to laugh a little with her and sat talking awhile. She wore out quickly, though, and fell asleep in the middle of a sentence. I stayed with her while she slept, haunted by Gabriella’s accusations in my dreams.

What a life. Growing up in that soul-killing house, raped by her own uncle, poisoned by her employer, and dying slowly and painfully. Yet she wasn’t an unhappy person. When she’d moved next door she was frightened but not angry. She’d raised Caroline with joy and had taken pleasure in the freedom to lead her own life away from her parents. So maybe my pity was not only misplaced but condescending.

While I watched Louisa’s chest rise and fall with her stertorous breath, I wondered what I should tell Caroline about her father. Not telling her was a form of control, a seizing of power in her life I had no right to. But telling her seemed unreasonably cruel. Did she deserve so heavy a knowledge?

I was still chewing it over in my mind when she dashed in at noon to fix Louisa’s lunch, a light little meal with no salt and precious little food. Caroline was glad to see me but in a hurry, racing between meetings.

“Did you find the flyer? I left it by the coffeepot. I wish you’d tell me why you’re so excited about it—if it concerns Ma I have a right to know.”

“If I knew exactly how it concerned her, I’d tell you in a flash—I’m just picking my way through the forest right now.”

I found the flyer and studied it while she took Louisa’s lunch in to her. It left me more baffled than I’d been originally: all kinds of benefits Louisa got regularly were excluded. Outpatient care, dialysis, home oxygen. When Caroline came in I asked her who paid for all those things, wondering if she was somehow scraping the money together.

She shook her head. “Xerxes has been real good to Ma. They pay all these bills without asking. If you can’t tell me what’s going on with my own mother, I’m heading back to the office. And maybe I can find someone there who’ll tell me. Maybe I’ll hire my own investigator.” She stuck out her tongue at me.

“Try it, brat—all the PI’s in town have been informed that you’re a bad risk.”

She laughed and left. I stayed until Louisa had eaten her meager lunch and fallen asleep once more. Leaving the television on as white noise, I tiptoed out and returned the spare key to the ledge over the back porch.

I wished I understood the point of doing all that blood work years before anyone was interested in suing the company. Presumably it tied in with the insurance fiddle, but I couldn’t see the exact connection. I didn’t know anyone at Xerxes who might talk to me. Ms. Chigwell might, but her connection had been tenuous and not exactly sympathetic. She was all I had, though, so I made the long drive to Hinsdale.

Ms. Chigwell was in the garage painting her dinghy. She greeted me with her usual abrupt gruffness, but since she invited me in for tea I presumed she was glad to see me.

She had no idea why they had started doing the blood work down at the Xerxes plant. “I just remember that Curtis was in a flurry about it because they had to send all those specimens to some lab and then keep separate records of them, giving the employees numbers and so on. That’s why he kept his own notebooks, so he could follow them by name and not have to worry about the numbering scheme.”

I sat in the chintz armchair for over an hour, eating a large pile of cookies, while she discussed what she would do if she couldn’t find her brother.

“I always wanted to go to Florence,” she said. “But I’m too old now, I guess. I’ve never been able to get Curtis to agree to travel outside the country. He always suspects he’ll get some terrible disease from the food or the water, or that foreigners will cheat him.”

“I’ve always wanted to go to Florence, too—my mother came from a little town in southeastern Tuscany. My excuse is, I never have enough money together to pay for the airfare.” I leaned forward and added persuasively, “You gave your brother most of your life. You don’t have to spend the rest of it waiting at the window with a candle burning. If I was seventy-nine and in good health and had some money, I’d be at O’Hare with a suitcase and a passport in time for tonight’s flight.”

“You probably would,” she agreed. “You’re a brave girl.”

I left soon after and headed back to Chicago, my shoulders aching again. Talking to Ms. Chigwell had been a long shot. I could’ve done it by phone if I didn’t enjoy seeing her, but the fruitless errand at the end of a long week left me worn out. Maybe it was time to give the police what I had. I tried imagining how I’d tell Bobby my story:

“You see, they’d been doing all these blood tests on their employees and now they’re afraid someone will find out and sue them for suppressing evidence of how toxic Xerxine really was.”

And Bobby smiling indulgently and saying, “I know you took a liking to the old lady, but it’s obvious she had a grudge against her brother all these years. I wouldn’t take her reports at face value. How do you even know those notebooks were his? She has some medical training—she might have faked them just to get him in hot water. Then he disappears and she wants to unload them. Hell”—no, Bobby wouldn’t use bad language in front of me—“Heck, Vicki, maybe they had one fight too many and she popped him on the head and then panicked and buried his body in Salt Creek. Then she calls you to say he’s disappeared. You’re high on the lady; you’ll believe the story the way she wants to tell it.”

And who was to say it hadn’t happened that way? At any rate I was pretty sure that Bobby would look at it like that before he’d go after someone as important in Chicago as Gustav Humboldt. I could give Murray the whole story, but far from sharing Bobby’s reluctance to go after Humboldt, Murray would leave a swath like General Sherman’s through the lives of the people involved. I just didn’t want to give him anything that would make him go after Louisa.

I stopped at my own apartment to cheer Mr. Contreras up over the loss of young Art and to see the dog. It was too dark for me to feel comfortable about going out with her, but she was clearly developing the restlessness an active animal feels when she doesn’t get enough exercise. Another reason to get Humboldt off my back—so I could run the dog.

Once more I checked the roads around me, but my tail still seemed clear. In a way this made me less cheerful rather than more. Maybe my pals were just waiting for Troy and Wally to make bail. But maybe they’d decided that an ordinary hit wouldn’t do and were looking for something more decisively spectacular, like a bomb in my car or at Lotty’s apartment. Just in case, I parked some distance from her building and rode the bus back down Irving Park.

I made a frittata for dinner, a greater success than the chicken, since it wasn’t scorched, but whether it had any taste I couldn’t have said. I told Lotty my various dilemmas, about how to bring matters home to Jurshak and Humboldt, and about whether to tell Caroline I’d found her father.

She pursed her lips. “I can’t advise you about Mr. Humboldt. You will have to think of a plan. But about Caroline’s father, I must tell you that in my experience it is always better for people to know. You say it is horrible news, and it is. But she is not a weakling. And you cannot decide for her what she can know, what she is better off not learning. For one thing, she may discover it in a more terrible way from someone else. And for another, she can easily imagine things that seem more hideous to her. So in your place I would tell her.”

It was a more articulate way of stating my own thoughts. I nodded. “Thanks, Lotty.”

We spent the rest of the evening silently. Lotty was going through the morning’s papers, the light making little prisms on the half-glasses she wore for reading. I did nothing. I felt as though my mind were encased in lead shielding—protective covering to keep any ideas from entering. The residue of my fear. I kept nipping at the big shark but I was afraid to find a harpoon and attack him directly. I hated knowing he’d been able to intimidate me, but knowing it didn’t make a stream of ideas gush forth.

The phone startled me from my somber reverie around nine. One of the house staff at Beth Israel wasn’t sure what to do with a patient of Lotty’s. She talked to him for a while, then decided she’d better handle the delivery herself and left.

I’d bought a bottle of whiskey yesterday along with the groceries. After Lotty had been gone half an hour or so, I poured myself a drink and tried to get interested in John Wayne’s televised antics. When the phone rang again around ten I turned off the set, thinking the caller might be one of Lotty’s patients.

“Dr. Herschel’s residence.”

“I’m looking for a woman named Warshawski.” It was a man’s voice, cold, uninterested. The last time I’d heard it it had told me that the person hadn’t been born who could swim in a swamp.

“If I see her, I’ll be glad to give her a message,” I said with what coolness I could muster.

“You can ask her if she knows Louisa Djiak,” the cold voice went on flatly.

“And if she does?” My voice wobbled despite every effort I put into controlling it.

“Louisa Djiak doesn’t have much longer to live. She could die at home in her bed. Or she could disappear in the lagoons behind the Xerxes plant. Your friend Warshawski can make the choice. Louisa is down at Xerxes now. She’s well sedated. All you have to do—all you have to tell your friend Warshawski to do is go down and take a look at her. If she does, the Djiak woman will wake up in her bed tomorrow without knowing she ever left it. But if any police come along with Warshawski, they’ll have to find some frogmen who like diving in Xerxine before they can give the Djiak woman a Christian burial.” The line went dead.

I wasted a few minutes on useless self-recrimination. I’d been so focused on myself, on my closeness to Lotty, I’d never imagined Louisa’s being in danger. Despite the fact that I’d told Jurshak I knew her secret. If she and I were gone, no one would remain to speak about it and he would be safe.

I forced myself to think calmly—cursing myself not only wasted time, it would cloud my judgment. The first thing to do was get moving—I could wait for the long drive south to develop some brilliant strategy. I loaded a second clip and stuck it in my jacket pocket, then scribbled a note for Lotty. I was amazed to see my handwriting flow in the same large dark strokes as always.

I was just locking Lotty’s door when I remembered the ruse that had gotten Mr. Contreras away from our building a few nights ago. I didn’t want to walk into a trap here. I went back inside to make sure that Louisa really was missing from the bungalow on Houston. No one answered the phone. After a few frantic calls—first to Mrs. Cleghorn to get the names and numbers of some other people at SCRAP —I learned Caroline had come back to the office around four. She was closeted now with some EPA lawyers downtown in what was likely to be an all-night session.

The woman I talked to had the number of the people living in my parents’ old house, a couple named Santiago. Caroline had given their home phone number to everyone she worked with in case of some emergency. When I called Mrs. Santiago she obligingly told me that Louisa had been taken away in an ambulance around eight-thirty. I thanked her mechanically and hung up.

It had been almost half an hour since I’d gotten the call. It was time to move. I wanted company for the trip but it would be wanton to bring Mr. Contreras along—for him and Louisa both. I thought of friends, of police, of Murray, but of no one whom I could ask to go with me into such extreme danger.

I looked carefully around the hallway when I left Lotty’s. Someone had known to phone me here—they might take the easy route and just shoot me as I walked down the stairs. I kept my back pressed against the stairwell wall, crouching low. Instead of going out the front door, I went on down to the basement. Carefully picked my way across the dark floor, fumbling cautiously with Lotty’s keys for the one that undid the double lock on the basement door. Made my way down the alley to Irving Park Road.