Brush Back (21 page)

LOL,
I wrote back, and turned to client e-mails.

When we finally reached the station—a long trek on the Dan Ryan at rush hour—my escort left me in the public area while they checked in with Conrad.

The building was new since I’d moved away, but the sergeant behind the desk was old, with deep grooves in his cheeks, his slate-gray hair overdue for a trim. He was telling me where I could sit in the hoarse baritone of a drinking smoker, but I was squinting at his badge.

“Sid?” I said. “Sid Gerber?”

“Yeah. Who are you when you’re at home?”

“I’m V.I.—Vic Warshawski. Tony’s daughter.”

He stared at me, then smiled, pushing the grooves in his face toward his ears. “You’re never. You’re never Tony’s girl. How about that?”

A young officer filling out a form at the end of the counter turned to look at me, decided whoever Tony was, his girl held no interest, and went back to his clipboard. A woman waiting on the visitors’ bench loudly demanded when she was going to get to talk to someone about the police
totally illegally
impounding her car.

“Ma’am, your car was holding eight kilos of uncut cocaine. As soon as—”

“Put there by some street scum who you ain’t even
trying
to find, while you got my son locked up.”

“That could be, ma’am, but the car is still evidence.” He turned sideways, his back to her. “Vic, how long’s it been?”

“How’d you end up down here, Sid?” I asked. “I thought you knew better than to put yourself in the crosshairs.”

“Nobody asks me to go out on the street anymore and I got me a weekend place down near Schererville.” He winked, meaning, I suppose, that he was actually living down in Indiana—a no-no for someone on Chicago’s payroll.

Sid had been one of my dad’s last partners, after Tony had been redeemed from cop hell: my dad had been sent to West Englewood for reasons he’d never talked about.

Near the end of my dad’s active duty life, his former protégé Bobby Mallory started becoming a power in the department. Bobby plucked Tony from Sixty-third and Throop and sent him to one of the soft districts, out near O’Hare, where he’d met Sid. Sid was one of those guys who was born knowing how to avoid hard work, but Tony let it ride in a way he wouldn’t have earlier. He said Sid was a born storyteller, and a good story got you through a dull shift better than station coffee. When Tony had to go on disability, Sid was one of his most faithful visitors.

Sid gossiped with me now about the good old days, while the phone rang, the woman on the bench ranted, and officers checked in and out. I asked what he knew about the body in the pet coke mountain.

“Looks ugly.” He lowered his voice. “They think he was still alive when he was put in.”

“Who was it? They didn’t have an ID on the news yet.”

Sid gave an elaborate shrug. “My grandkids will see it on Facebook before I know.”

His cell phone rang; Conrad was ready for me. I was to make a right turn, ID myself to a woman at the entrance to the holding cells, and she’d take me to the looey.

As I went into the back, a patrolman was pleading with Sid to book his captive and the woman with the impounded car had come up to the counter to scream in Sid’s face.

THE UMPIRE STRIKES BACK

My escort took me around
a partition where a minute office had been carved out for the watch commander. Most of the space was taken up with a dry-erase board that held the week’s duty roster. The watch commander’s desk was wedged against the facing wall. There were a couple of chairs in front of it, both of them covered with reports.

Conrad Rawlings had his cell phone to his ear with his left hand and was hunting and pecking on his computer keyboard with the right. When he saw me, he gestured toward one of the chairs with his typing hand.

“Put those on the floor. I’ll be with you in a sec.”

By the time I’d shifted everything, he’d finished his conversation.

“You wobble on the line, Warshawski. I’m wondering if you’ve crossed it.”

“What line are we talking about, Lieutenant?”

When Conrad is feeling mellow toward me, he calls me “Ms. W.” He was not feeling mellow. I took my sandwich out of my briefcase and started eating, which made him even less mellow.

“Put that away. This isn’t a restaurant.”

“Your guys woke me, not to mention my entire building, at seven this morning. I need to eat. You implied I crossed a line. What are you talking about?” I wondered if word had drifted to him of my poking into Stella Guzzo’s bank account.

“You don’t think you’re bound by the same rules of law the rest of the country runs on. You think you can make up the rules to suit your own needs. I’ve seen you do it time and again.”

I put down my sandwich. “Are we recording this conversation, Lieutenant? Because that is slander, and it is actionable.”

Conrad glowered at his desktop. He’d gotten off on the wrong foot and knew it.

“Come over here: I want to show you some pictures.”

I went around to his side of the desk. He turned and typed a few lines on his computer and brought up a slideshow of the pet coke mountain at the Guisar slip. It wasn’t really a mountain, but a lopsided pile of coal dust perhaps five hundred feet long. It came to an off-center peak about fifty feet high and sloped from there to a plateau around fifteen feet from the ground.

The first frame was shot from some distance back, giving a panorama of the mountain, with bulldozers around the far end and men in hard hats gawking up at the higher peak. Conrad flipped through the slides, stopping every few frames to take phone calls. We got closer to the mountain, watched a team in hazmat suits standing in the bucket of a cherry picker on the deck of a police boat. The boat pulled up alongside the coke mountain and swung the bucket over so the guys in the hazmat suits could start excavating.

Conrad had brought me here because he knew I was connected to his dead body. He kept glancing up at me, his expression hostile, to see how I was reacting. It took conscious work to keep breathing naturally, those diaphragm breaths I was relearning as I practiced my singing with Jake.

The crew carried the body to the ground and laid it on the concrete lip of the dock. A scene-of-the-crime expert used a fine brush to clean the face.

I was expecting Frank Guzzo. Instead, it was Uncle Jerry. My first foolish thought was that in death his soot-blackened, flaccid face didn’t look much like Danny DeVito.

“You know him.” Conrad made a statement, not a question.

“I know his name,” I said. “I don’t—didn’t—know him.”

“Okay. His name, what’s his name?”

“Jerry Fugher. Or so I was told—we were never introduced.”

“Then how come you know his name?”

I went back to my chair and finished my sandwich.

“I asked you a question,” Conrad snapped.

“I’m in a police station without a witness or legal representation,” I said. “I don’t answer questions that have bombs and barbs tucked into them.”

“It’s a simple question.” Conrad spread his arms wide. “The only reason you’d expect bombs or barbs is because you know they’re there.”

I brushed the crumbs from my jeans and got to my feet. “You can get your guys to drive me home.”

“We’re not done.”

“We’re not starting,” I said. “You hauled me down here on no excuse whatsoever to ask me questions about a dead man. All I know about him is his name, and I’m not even sure it’s his real name or how to spell it. You have no further need to talk to me because I know nothing else.”

“I can get a warrant to hold you as a material witness.”

“In that case, I’m calling my lawyer.” I pulled my cell phone out of my jeans pocket and touched Freeman Carter’s speed-dial button.

I got his secretary and gave her my location and situation while Conrad was telling me to calm down, we didn’t need lawyers muddying the waters.

“If I don’t call back in half an hour, you should assume I’ve been charged and don’t have access to a phone,” I said to Freeman’s secretary.

When I’d hung up, I added to Conrad, “We like to take potshots at lawyers in America. They muddy the waters, you say. I say they’re all that stands between an ordinary citizen and a forced confession. My least favorite line on cop shows is when they sneer at suspects for ‘lawyering up.’ The sneer is a protective cover over their annoyance at not being able to ride roughshod over the person in custody.”

“You’re not in custody,” Conrad said, “although at the moment I’d like to see you there. Tell me how you know the dead man.”

“Back to square one, Lieutenant. I didn’t know—”

“All right. But you know his name, which we didn’t. The police appreciate your helping them move this inquiry forward. Could you please tell this sleep-deprived public servant how you came to know the dead man’s name?”

We were friends now, I guess. “I saw him twice in the last two weeks, both times by accident. The first was in Saint Eloy’s church, when I was talking to the priest, and the second time was outside Wrigley Field last Friday.”

“You were never introduced, you said. How did you learn his name?”

“In the church he was in the middle of a heated conversation with a young woman who called him ‘Uncle Jerry.’” I looked broodingly at Conrad, trying to decide if it was a mistake to be forthcoming.

“I have a friend down here whose high school kid has been described as a baseball phenom in the making. I stopped at Saint Eloy’s the other day to watch the kid play. The priest—Father Cardenal—came over to me and told me Uncle Jerry had asked for my name. The priest had given it to him. I thought it was only fair to get the guy’s name in turn. Cardenal didn’t like it but he coughed it up.”

“Why were you in church to begin with?” Conrad asked. “I mean, when you saw the dead guy arguing with a woman?”

“This is why it’s a mistake to say anything to a cop,” I said. “You always assume that you have license to ask any question you want. You don’t. I helped you as a citizen doing my duty. End of chapter.”

“You’re not a Christian,” Conrad said. “Why would you go to church?”

I took out my phone and started scrolling through my mail.

“If you’re trying to ride me, you’re doing a great job,” Conrad said. “I got yanked out of bed at five to look at Uncle Jerry. I need help, I need sleep, I don’t need lip.”

I finished typing an e-mail and looked at the time. “In five minutes, if I don’t call Freeman Carter, they’re going to put wheels in motion to find me, get me bail, all those things.”

“You’re not being charged, or held,” Conrad said, his lips a thin tight line. “Now will you please tell me why you were in church?”

“I was there on family business. Tell me how you knew to connect me to Jerry Fugher.”

Conrad is like all cops: he hates to share information, but he finally said, “He had your name in his pants pocket. Wadded up in a Kleenex. He’d been stripped of IDs, even the brand names of his clothes, which aren’t rare high-fashion items. We figure his killers overlooked the dirty Kleenex, but maybe they wanted to send us to you.”

“He had my name? Written down?”

“One of your business cards.”

“I never gave him one.” I thought it over. “I gave one to his niece. I suppose she could have given it to Fugher.”

“What’s your theory on who killed him, or why?”

“I have no theory because I know nothing about him. Also, I only just learned he’s dead. I’m guessing that whoever killed him had access to the Guisar slip. Fugher was at the top of the mountain. He’d have to have been driven up in a bulldozer, or maybe someone came from the water side with a cherry picker. He wasn’t a lightweight and anyway, I’m guessing you don’t climb up a pile of coal dust very easily.”

“Yeah, Sherlock, we figured that out.”

“Father Cardenal said he did odd jobs in the neighborhood,” I offered. “Fugher did freelance work on the church’s electrics; maybe he mis-wired the Guisar brothers’ Palm Springs mansion and they buried him in coke as a warning to other electricians.”

My phone rang: Freeman’s secretary, checking on me. “I think the lieutenant has decided I’m not a person of interest in the murder of Jerry Fugher, but if that changes I’ll text you.”

Conrad glared at me, but didn’t pick up the bait. “What about the woman in the church, the one Fugher was arguing with the first time you saw him?”

I shook my head. “No idea. I didn’t get a good look at her because the lighting in there was poor, but I’m guessing she was around thirty. White woman, maybe five-six, her hair might have been dark blond. You could ask Cardenal.”

“We’ll both ask Cardenal.”

“You know I have a life, a job, things that don’t revolve around you and your needs.”

Conrad grinned, showing his gold incisor. “You’ve been down on my turf lately, Warshawski. I don’t believe in the Easter bunny and I don’t believe you’d travel all the way from Cubs country just to look at a high school kid play baseball. You’re up to something down here, and that means you get to come with me so I can watch you and the good father interact.”