It was a bonanza for the TV news crews, of course. Many mournful reporters remarked on the "irony" of such a crime happening in a setting where little children were supposed to caper and have fun. The reports from the scene showed the general area where the two had been killed. But the police, wisely, had not allowed the reporters in until the bodies were gone and had never showed them the exact location of the bodies. They were reduced to having vendors point to the "death scenes" and the vendors, when I saw them onscreen, were not terribly accurate.
So far, the focus on Barry as a possible suspect hadn't made the news. Lieutenant Hightower said to the reporters, "We're looking into several possibilities. We've got strong leads." I would have been grateful to him if I'd thought he was being kind or even judicious. But experienced detectives usually are pretty careful about sticking their necks out, in case they're wrong. Not for the suspects' sake, for their own. My mother, of course, would know by now the extent of the problems at the festival, but not my involvement. And since Barry wasn't mentioned, nor was Jeremy's and my run through the tunnels, Maud wouldn't yet be overly worried. Still, I hoped Barry had told her everything. She would know Jeremy was safe, which was the most important thing. The whole business of keeping information from other people for their own good makes me uncomfortable, as I've said before. If it were up to me, I'd have told her everything in the first place. But it wasn't up to me.
As I headed out the door, the phone rang. The readout showed my mother's number. Thank goodness for gadgets. I let the machine kick in, but waited next to the recorder. If there was any trouble with Jeremy, I'd pick up.
"Catherine! Barry told me what you did. I absolutely
could not believe it!
Your own flesh and blood! I always knew you resented being the only girl and the second youngest child besides, but I never thought you'd take it out on your perfectly innocent brother! Are you just doing this to annoy me? You call me back the minute you get in, and I certainly hope you have a good explanation, although what good explanation there could be I'm telling you I just don't know!"
She hung up.
Going to the doctor was looking better and better.
* * *
"Yipe!" I said when the doctor checked the shoulder. He claimed he had to "manipulate" it a little to find out what was going on. He asked how this felt and how that felt and everything he did felt hideous. Then he ordered an X ray in case of a fracture, which he doubted I had.
"Let me guess," he said. "You fell and landed on your shoulder."
"Yup. Off a ladder, sort of."
"What you have is not quite an acromioclavicular joint separation."
"Oh, one of
those
. I've always wondered about them."
"All that means is that you've pulled the collarbone away from where it joins the shoulder blade. The shoulder joint is very complicated. Three bones come together, the upper arm bone, the shoulder blade, and the collarbone, and the whole thing is held together by a bewildering network of ligaments. You can screw it up pretty easily. You've stretched but not torn some of the ligaments that hold your shoulder blade up against your collarbone."
"This is good?"
"It certainly could be worse. You could have had a complete separation. We might be talking surgery. Arthroscopic surgery or open surgery."
"And as it is?"
"You'll have to wear an elastic support. And don't fall again, even a little slip-and-fall. Don't let anybody pull on your arm. Don't climb trees or ropes."
"You're kidding. Climb trees? I'm having trouble lifting a frappemochaccino."
"Good. Baby it. Come back in a week. And call right away if it seems to be getting worse. Sometimes there's hidden damage."
* * *
"Frankly," said Larry Mazzanovich, "I don't give a rat's ass for Oz."
We were in his site office, a trailer in a sea of mud at a construction area on West Randolph. The whole block was a maze of wood forms, stacks of equipment, and very deep footing holes into which a pile driver was driving pilings. Some of the pilings were surrounded by lattices of rusty iron rebar. The rebar looked big enough to have been designed for the Space Shuttle launch site.
"Why not?"
"It's just bullshit stuff for kids."
"So why did you get involved with it?"
"The Oz Festival? Hey, if the city likes it, I like it. All I'm saying is I don't like it."
"Uh-huh. So what kinds of festivals do you like?"
"Taste of Chicago. Food from one end of the park to the other. Now that's okay. The BluesFest isn't bad, either."
This was getting me less than nowhere, so I said, "You're a contractor? And an alderman?"
"Well, alderman isn't a full-time job. Plus, suppose you're voted out? Gotta have something to fall back on." He shrugged. Mazzanovich was a shar-pei kind of man, all wrinkles. Not the dry, fine wrinkles of old age, but big rounded folds. His eyes hid behind folds, and plump cheek folds bracketed his mouth. His hair was coarse, medium long, and spiky. There was a thin layer of gray dust over his skin and hair, as if cement powder settled on him all day. He wore chinos and muddy boots.
"And you're building this place? A new hotel?"
"A major luxury hotel. I'm a contractor but I'm not a general contractor. I'm a cement contractor."
"Oh. Did you do cement contracting for the Oz Festival?"
"Don't be stupid. You don't pour cement for a Grant Park event. The city's real careful you don't do anything that would change the park. You can't so much as trim a tree. Can't trim the
grass
, for God's sake. Jeez, you have to get a permit to walk on it, practically. What they went through to get an okay to paint the walkways into Yellow Brick Roads, you wouldn't believe. It's
removable
goddamn paint, see? They're gonna run a solvent and a scrubber over it later! Like a vacuum Zamboni! All the world out there's trying to make paint more permanent, and we're lookin' for stuff that don't last. Shouldn't wash away in the first rain, but shouldn't last, either."
"So what
was
your role?"
"Advise the city board that advises the Park District."
"I see."
"Whattaya want, anyway? I don't wanta be rude, here, but I got a job to do. And the cops already wasted half my morning."
"I'm sure you realize that Barry Marsala is my brother—"
"Hadn't thought about it. I probably woulda guessed he was some kind of relative."
"And because you and he and Taubman and Pottle were all in the area when Tom Plumly was stabbed, I thought you could tell me something about what happened."
"Very good! Cute! Subtle! You wanta ask me if I stabbed him, ask me if I stabbed him. Listen, I don't have any objection to a girl being loyal to her brother, but you're not gonna start some rumor that I murdered the guy. Because I didn't, and I would take it very, very amiss if any slander got going. See what I mean?"
"I only want to understand what happened."
"And you think I'm gonna tell you?"
"Why not? You talked with the cops, didn't you? And it's not a secret, whatever you told them, is it? If it's the truth, why not tell me, too?" He didn't look impressed. "Get me off your back."
He smiled unpleasantly. "You're not on my back, kid. You're not powerful enough. This is Chicago, remember, and there's people in this city who can
really
get on your back."
Still, he hadn't said no, so I asked, "Was Plumly okay when he left you and the other two men?"
He looked at me with just a whiff of respect. "Persistent, aren't you? Yeah. He was just fine. When he left us, he was just fine and dandy. He was walkin', wasn't he? He went over to your brother."
"You're right. He ran over to my brother. Had you said anything to make him run away?"
"Nope. Musta needed to talk to him real bad."
"What had you been talking about?"
"The festival, of course. Two of the food stands hadn't done what we told 'em. One was using hazardous cooking fuel. There's rules about that kind of thing. One had dancing girls on the banner. Unclothed dancing girls. Not right in a kids' festival."
"I see. The cops told me last night they couldn't find you after Plumly died."
"Musta not looked very hard. The traffic getting out of there was a goddamn bitch. I mean, everybody musta charged outta there at the same time."
"When they heard the shots."
"Can't exactly blame 'em, can you? It took me half an hour to get outta Grant Park Underground and an hour and a half to get from there to my house."
"You parked in the Grant Park Underground?"
"What did I just tell you? Sure. It's the closest place." He didn't show any sign of guilt, but then he'd brought up the subject. Maybe he'd done it intentionally in order to act as if the underground brought back no special memories for him.
I said, "Why didn't you stay around after Plumly was killed?"
"Why would I? Didn't know anything helpful. Also, didn't want to get involved."
"So it took you two hours to get home? Where do you live?"
"Northbr— uh, North Side," he said.
"An hour and a half to the North Side! It ought to take you twenty minutes."
"No shit. Talk to IDOT."
IDOT is not idiot, although people have been known to make the mistake intentionally. It stands for Illinois Department of Transportation.
Underneath the trailer the earth began to tremble. I had to stop myself from grabbing the edge of the desk. Mazzanovich perked right up. "Hey, kid," he said. "Gotta go. Here comes the mud truck." A gigantic bright red cement mixer lumbered down the dirt ramp, looking like a pregnant fire extinguisher. "See, when you're doing footings, the batch of cement has to be poured while the batch underneath is still wet, or it won't bond. You get a truck caught in a traffic jam and you maybe have to dig out a whole piling. So you basically don't hang around with your thumb up your ass."
Mazzanovich was out of the trailer, down the wood steps, and on the ground in seconds, shoving his hard hat onto his head.
* * *
I walked away from the construction site. Looking back, I saw Mazzanovich waving his arms at the cement truck driver, and a second man standing near one of the pilings, also gesturing.
I wondered what it was that was so different about Mazzanovich now. It was the hat. The hard hat had covered that crest of spiky hair. The hair that stood up on top of his head. If he'd been running his hands through it, would it stand up straighter? And if he had, would it, in the right light, remind a person of the funnel on top of the Tin Woodman's head?
10
A WHIZ OF A WIZ
"I expected to see models and mock-ups," I said to E. T. Taubman, the lighting designer who had lit the Oz Festival so magically.
His studio covered the entire fifth floor of a converted warehouse building on Chestnut west of State. Actually the studio was only half a dozen blocks from my apartment, which was in an old warehouse building near the El. Six blocks and maybe 2.5 million dollars away. This was a primo postgentrification zone.
The studio's floor was that very, very heavily varnished original wood with all the grooves, chinks, scars, and stains preserved as if set in amber. It fairly screamed "artist." The area was divided into two large rooms and one huge one. I had entered directly off the elevator, although there was a sliding metal door that could be bolted to keep people from just jumping off the elevator at the fifth floor and walking in uninvited.
Taubman said, "Yeah, I used to have analog models of the sets, but I couldn't stand dealing with them anymore. Nobody does it that way now. It's all CAD."
By which he meant computer-assisted design. If I'd thought about it, I would have realized that cybertech had eaten lighting design the same way it had overwhelmed architecture or animation or basically anything. By "analog" I guessed he meant "real."
Taubman walked into the farther room, the huge one. I assumed I was to follow. Taubman was a tall, very thin man, who walked with a kind of rambling awkwardness. "Thin as a one-sided board," my grandfather would have said. He had reddish-blond hair, so short that his pale scalp showed through, and an angular, bony face. He wore a white silk shirt, beautifully cut navy pants, and black shoes.
"Here," he said. "Models."
One corner of the room was filled with a sort of shoal of computer tables, the kind with swing arms for monitors and slide-out low trays for keyboards. There were several printers, including two color printers and one extrawide. Also, of course, he had a fax machine, and a little monitor and keyboard that looked as if they continuously ran his e-mail. A twist of fat cables led out of the clutter to a trio of big Pioneer plasma screens hung like paintings in a row on the plain brick wall. Taubman folded his long bones into a complicated-looking desk chair. Everything on the chair that could possibly adjust adjusted. It didn't just go up and down. From the levers on the side I could see that the seat tilted, plus you could tilt the back separately from the seat, and after Taubman sat, he nudged the arms with his elbows, clicking them into an apparently favorite position. The chair had wheels, of course, a lever to control the seat height, a back-tilt lever, gears that locked the arms in place, and an adjustable lumbar pad. There was a half-keyboard attached to rods protruding out of each arm, like the sort of thing you might have if you were a very rich paraplegic. You could work lying way back if you wished.
