Blood Shot (27 page)

I ran to him and jumped on his gun arm with all my force. His fingers loosened on the revolver. Jurshak was moving up on me, hoping to wrestle Dresberg’s gun away before I could get to it. Fury was riding me, though, choking the breath from me, covering my eyes with a hazy film. I shot Jurshak in the chest. He gave an enraged cry and fell in front of me.

Chigwell had stood next to Louisa’s stretcher throughout the fracas, his hands flaccidly at his side, his head hunched into his coat. I went over to him and slapped his face. I meant at first just to rouse him from his stupor, but my rage was consuming me so that I found myself pounding him over and over, screaming at him that he was a traitor to his oath, a miserable worm of a man, on and on, over and over. I might have kept at him until his body joined Jurshak and Dresberg on the floor, but through the haze I felt a tug on my arm.

Ms. Chigwell had staggered over, trailing blood on the dirty concrete. “He’s all of that, Miss Warshawski. All that and more. But let him be. He’s an old man and not likely to change at this time of life.”

I shook my head, exhausted and sick. Sick of the stench in the plant, of the foulness of the three men, of my own destructive rage. My gorge rose; I skipped behind a vat to throw up. Wiping my face with a Kleenex, I returned to Ms. Chigwell. The bullet had grazed her upper arm, leaving a bloody furrow of singed flesh but no deep wound. I felt a small measure of relief

“We’ve got to get into an office, someplace we can secure, and call the police. There’re at least three more men outside and you and I are not taking on any more thugs tonight. We’ve got to move fast before they start worrying about Dresberg and come looking for him. Can you hold out awhile longer?”

She nodded gamely and helped me bully her brother into showing us the way to his old office. I pushed Louisa’s stretcher behind them. She was still alive, her breath coming in short shallow gasps.

When we were inside with the door locked I moved Louisa into the tiny examining room to one side of the office. With the remaining shreds of my strength, I pushed the heavy metal desk athwart the door. I sank to the floor and pulled the phone down next to me.

“Bobby? It’s me. Sorry to wake you, but I need your help. Lots of help and fast.” I explained what had happened as clearly as I could. It took a few tries to get him to understand me and even then he was skeptical.

“Bobby!” My voice cracked. “You’ve got to come. I have an old woman with a bullet wound and Louisa Djiak with some awful drug in her and three thugs prowling outside. I need you.” The anguish got through to him. He took directions to the plant and hung up before I could say anything else.

I sat for a moment with my head in my hands, wanting nothing more than to lie down on the floor and cry. Instead I forced myself to stand up, to release the half-empty clip and slip in a full one.

Chigwell had taken his sister into the little examining room to patch up her arm. I wandered in to look at Louisa. While I stood there her eyelids fluttered open.

“Gabriella?” she said scratchily. “Gabriella, I might’ve known you wouldn’t forget me in my troubles.”

39

Plant Clean-Up

Louisa went back to sleep while I held her hand. When her weak grasp had relaxed I turned to Chigwell and demanded fiercely what he had given her.

“Just—just a sedative,” he said, licking his lips nervously. “Just morphine. She’ll sleep a lot for the next day, that’s all.”

From her seat at the desk Ms. Chigwell gave him a look of scalding contempt, but seemed too exhausted to put her feelings into words. I fixed a pallet for her in the examining room, but she came from a generation too modest to lie down in public. Instead she sat upright in the old office chair, her eyelids drooping in her white face.

Fatigue was combining with the tension of waiting to drive me into a frenzy of nervous irritation. I kept checking my barricades, moving into the examining room to listen to Louisa’s shallow, gasping breaths, back to the office to look at Ms. Chigwell.

Finally I turned on the doctor, putting all my feverish energy into prying his story from him. It made a short, unedifying tale. He had worked so many years with the Xerxes blood tests that he’d managed to forget one niggling little detail: He wasn’t letting people know he thought they might be getting sick. When I showed up asking questions about Pankowski and Ferraro, he’d gotten scared. And when Murray’s reporters had shown up he’d become downright terrified. What if the truth came out? It would mean not just malpractice suits but terrible humiliation at Clio’s hands—she’d never let him forget that he hadn’t lived up to their father’s standard. That comment brought him the only fleeting sympathy he had from me—his sister’s fierce ethics must be hell to live with.

When the doctor’s suicide attempt failed he didn’t know what to do. Then Jurshak had called—Chigwell knew him from his workdays in South Chicago. If Chigwell would give them a little simple help, they would arrange for any evidence against him to be suppressed.

He’d had no choice, he muttered—to me, not his sister. When he learned all they wanted was for him to give Louisa Djiak a strong sedative and look after her down at the plant for a few hours, he was happy to comply. I didn’t ask him how he felt about going one step further and giving her a fatal injection.

“But why?” I demanded. “Why go through that charade to begin with if you weren’t going to give employees their results?”

“Humboldt told me to,” he mumbled, looking at his hands.

“I could have guessed that part!” I snapped. “But why in God’s name did he tell you to?”

“It—uh—it had to do with the insurance,” he muttered in the back of his throat.

“Spit it out, Curtis. You’re not leaving until I know, so say it and get it over with.”

He stole a look at his sister, but she sat white and still, lost in her own cloud of exhaustion.

“The insurance,” I prompted.

“We could see—Humboldt knew—we had too many health claims, too many people were losing work time. First our health insurance began going up, way up, then we were dropped by Ajax Assurance and had to find another company. They’d done a study, they told us our claims were too high.”

My jaw dropped. “So you got Jurshak to act as your fiduciary and screw up the data so you could prove you were insurable to another carrier?”

“It was just a way of buying time until we could figure out what the problem was and fix it. That was when we started doing the blood studies.”

“What was happening on the workers’ comp side?”

“Nothing. None of the illnesses were compensable.”

“Because they weren’t work related?” My temples ached with the effort of following his convoluted tale. “But they were. You were proving they were with all that blood data.”

“Not at all, young lady.” For a moment his pompous side reasserted itself “That data did not establish causality. It merely enabled us to project medical expenses and the probable turnover of the work force.”

I was too appalled to speak. His words came out so glibly that they must have been spoken hundreds of times at committee meetings or before the board of directors. Let’s just see what our work-force costs will be if we know that X percent of our employees will be sick Y fraction of the time. Run different cost projections tediously by hand in the days before computers. Then someone has the bright idea—get hard data and we’ll know for sure.

The enormity of the whole scheme made me murderous with rage. Louisa’s harsh breath in the background added fuel to my fury. I wanted to shoot Chigwell where he sat, then ride off to the Gold Coast and plug Humboldt. That bastard. That cynical, inhuman murderer. Anger swept through me in waves, making me weep.

“So no one got their proper life or health coverage just to save you guys a few miserable stupid dollars.”

“Some of them did,” Chigwell muttered. “Enough to keep the wrong people from asking questions. This woman here did. Jurshak said he knew her family so he was obligated to look after her.”

At that I thought I really would commit murder, but a movement from Ms. Chigwell caught my attention. Her gaunt face was unchanged, but she’d apparently been listening despite her seeming remoteness. She tried holding out a hand to me, but her strength wasn’t up to the task. Instead she said in the thread of a voice:

“What you’re describing is too heinous to discuss, Curtis. We’ll talk tomorrow about our arrangements. We can’t go on living together after this.”

He deflated again, shrinking inside himself without speaking. He probably couldn’t think beyond tonight, with its threat of arrest and prison. Perhaps other horrors were adding to the gray pallor around his mouth, but I didn’t think so—I didn’t think he had enough imagination to picture what he’d really been doing as the Xerxes doctor. Maybe being booted into the cold by the sister who had always protected him was punishment enough—maybe it would hurt him worse than anything I could do.

Exhausted, I returned to the examining room to look at Louisa again. Her shallow breathing seemed unchanged. She muttered in her sleep—something about Caroline, I couldn’t make out what.

It was then that the shots started. I looked at my watch: thirty-eight minutes since I’d called Bobby. It had to be the police. Had to be. I forced my weary shoulders into action, moving the desk back from the door. Telling my charges to stay put, I turned out the room lights and crept back to the plant. Another five minutes passed, and then the place was filled with boys in blue. I moved out from the cover of one of the vats to talk to them.

It took awhile to get things sorted out—who I was, why an alderman was lying in his own blood next to Steve Dresberg on a factory floor, what Louisa Djiak and the Chigwells were doing there. You know—all the usual stuff.

When Bobby Mallory showed up at three we started moving faster. He listened to my worries about Louisa for about thirty seconds, then had one of the men send for a fire department ambulance to take her to Help of Christians. Another ambulance had already carted Dresberg and Jurshak to County Hospital. Both were still alive, their futures uncertain.

I snatched a minute in the confusion to call Lotty, let her know the bare bones of what had happened and that I was unhurt. I told her not to wait up, but in my secret heart I begged her to.

When the state police arrived they assigned a car to ferry the Chigwells home. They’d wanted to send Ms. Chigwell to a hospital for observation, but she was adamant about returning to her own home.

Before Mallory came I’d been telling everyone that Jurshak had lured Chigwell down to the plant with a tale about finding a half-dead employee on the premises. Ms. Chigwell hadn’t let him go alone this late at night and the two found themselves caught in the cross fire. Bobby looked narrowly at me, but finally agreed to my version when it was clear he wasn’t going to get anything else from the doctor or his sister.

Bobby left me squatting wearily against a pillar on the plant floor while he conferred with the Fifth District commander. The light winking from uniform jackets and hardware made me dizzy; I shut my eyes, but I couldn’t keep out the clamor, or the murky Xerxine smell. What would my creatine level be after tonight? I pictured my kidneys filled with lesions—blood-red with black holes in them, oozing Xerxine. Someone shook me roughly. I opened my eyes. Sergeant McGonnigal was standing over me, his square face displaying unusual concern.

“Let’s get you outside—you need some fresh air, Vic.”

I let him help me to my feet and stumbled after him to the loading bay, where the police had rolled back the steel doors leading to the river. The fog had lifted; stars showed little yellow pricks in the polluted heavens. The air was still pungent with the scent of many chemicals but the cold made it fresher than it was inside the plant. I looked down at the water glinting black in the moonlight and shivered.

“You’ve had a pretty rough night.”

McGonnigal’s voice held just the right level of concern. I tried not to imagine him learning how to talk to difficult witnesses like that at a seminar in Springfield—I tried to think he really cared about the horrors I’d been through. After all, we’d known each other six or seven years.

“A little exhausting,” I admitted.

“You want to tell me about it, or do you want to wait to talk to the lieutenant?”

So it was role-playing from a seminar. My shoulders sagged a bit farther. “If I tell you, will I have to repeat it to Mallory? It’s not a story I feel like going over more than once.”

“You know the cops, Warshawski—we never take any story just once. But if you’ll give me the outline tonight, I’ll make sure that does for now—get you home while there’s still a little left of the night to sleep in.”

Maybe there was a little personal concern mixed in. Not enough to make me tell the whole truth and nothing but—I mean, I wasn’t going to explain about the doctor’s medical texts. And certainly not Jurshak’s relations with Louisa. But after I’d pulled a crate over to the water’s edge and sat on it, I gave him more details than I’d originally planned to.

I started with the call from Dresberg. “He knew Louisa was important to me—my mother had looked after her when she was pregnant and they’d been pretty good friends. So they must have realized she was one person I’d come out here to help.”

“Why didn’t you call us then?” McGonnigal asked impatiently.

“I didn’t know how you’d manage a quiet assault. They had her in the back of the plant here—they’d simply have murdered her if they figured they were under attack. I wanted to sneak in here myself.”

“And just how did you manage that? They had a lookout where the road turns off to here and another guy at the gates. Don’t tell me you sprayed some amnesiac in the air and slid by them.”

I shook my head and pointed at the dinghy floating below us. The floodlights overhead picked up the incredulity in McGonnigal’s face.

“You rowed up the river in that? Come on, Warshawski. Get real.”

“It’s the truth,” I said stubbornly. “Believe it or not. Ms. Chigwell was with me—it’s her boat.”

“I thought you said they’d come here together.”

I nodded. “I knew if I told you the truth, you’d keep her and her brother here all night and they’re too old for that. Besides, she got shot in the arm, even if it did just graze her —she should have been in bed hours ago.”

McGonnigal pounded the crate with the flat of his hand. “You don’t have an armlock on empathy, Warshawski. Even the police are capable of showing concern for a couple as old as the Chigwells. Can’t you drop your sixties ‘Off the Pigs’ mentality for five minutes and let us do our job? You could have been killed and gotten the Djiak woman and your elderly friends knocked off in the bargain.”

“For your information,” I said coldly, “my father was a beat cop and I never in my life referred to the police as pigs. Anyway, no one got killed, not even those two pieces of shit who deserved it. Do you want to hear the rest of my story or would you rather get up in your pulpit and preach at me some more?”

He sat stiffly for a moment. “I guess I can see why Bobby Mallory shows up at his worst around you. I was bragging to myself that I was going to show the lieutenant what a younger officer with sensitivity training could do with a witness like you, and I blew it in five minutes. Finish your story —I won’t criticize your methods.”

I finished my story. I told him I didn’t know how Chigwell had gotten hooked up with Jurshak and Dresberg, but that they’d forced him to come along tonight to look after Louisa. And that Ms. Chigwell was worried about him, so when I showed up with my crazy suggestion that we row up the Calumet and sneak up on the plant from the rear, she jumped at the chance.

“I know she’s seventy-nine, but sailing’s been her hobby since she was a kid and she sure handled her oar splendidly. So then we got here, and we had a lucky break—Jurshak went into the plant and Dresberg walked off to check on the people in the ambulance. Who was in it? Is that who shot at you guys when you showed up?”

“No, that was the sentry,” McGonnigal explained. “He tried making a run for it. Someone got him in the abdomen.”

I suddenly realized that Caroline Djiak didn’t know where her own mother was. I explained the problem to McGonnigal. “She’s probably roused the mayor by now. I should call her if I can get back into one of the offices.”

He shook his head. “I think you’ve done enough running around for one evening. I’ll send a uniformed man over to her house—then she can get an escort down to the hospital if she wants. I’ll run you home.”

I thought it over. Maybe I’d just as soon not include a close encounter with Caroline in the night’s strains.

“Could we go pick up my car? It’s down on Stony a half mile or so.”

He pulled out his walkie-talkie and summoned a uniformed officer—my pal Mary Louise Neely. She saluted him smartly, but I could see she was eyeing me curiously. So maybe she was human after all.

“Neely, I want you to drive Ms. Warshawski and me down the road to pick up her car. Then go to the address she gives you on Houston.” He sketched the situation with Caroline and Louisa.

Officer Neely nodded enthusiastically—it’s a break to be signaled out for a special assignment from among so many. Even though it was just chauffeuring duty, it gave her a chance to make an impression on a senior man. She trailed behind us as McGonnigal went to tell Bobby what we were doing.