V.I. Warshawski 04 - Bitter Medicine (18 page)

I ran the bath as hot as I could bear it and lay back in the tub, slowly flexing cramped muscles. The steam softened the stiff left side of my face and I could smile and frown without worrying that the stitches were pulling apart.

I dozed off in the soothing water and lay half sleeping when the ringing phone roused me. I climbed slowly from the tub, wrapping myself in a bath towel, and picked up the extension next to my bed. It was Burgoyne. He’d seen the protest on the news and was anxious about Lotty’s and my welfare.

“We’re okay,” I assured him. “The clinic is a royal mess, though. And poor old Mr. Contreras got his head beaten in and was hauled off in a paddy wagon. I’m on my way now to find him and rescue him.”

“Would you be willing to drive out to Barrington tomorrow night? Have dinner in suburbia?”

“I’ll have to call you,” I said. “After what I’ve been through today I’m not up to thinking past the next task.”

“Want me to come in and spend some time with you?” he asked anxiously.

“Thanks. But I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to manage the legal mess at this end. I’ll try to call you during the day tomorrow-want to give me your office number?”

I took it down and hung up. Putting on a gold cotton dress that looked professional enough for night court, I started on an array of phone calls. First to the local precinct, then the district command, where I was switched around five or six times. Mr. Contreras had been taken to Cook County to have his head stitched up, I finally learned, and would be brought over to night court from the hospital. After hanging up I phoned an old friend who was still hanging on in Legal Aid. Fortunately, she was at home.

“Cleo-V.I. Warshawski.”

We exchanged news of the ten months or so it’d been since we last talked, then I explained my problem.

They threw everyone into the holding cells at the district, and they’re taking them down to bond court later on this evening. Can you find out who’s on duty for Legal Aid? I’m going to come down and appear as a character witness.“

“Oh, jeez, Vic. I mightVe known you’d been involved in that clinic assault this afternoon. What a horror-I thought Chicago was being spared the violent wing of the lunatic fringe.”

“I did, too. I hope this isn’t the signal for a concentrated attack on the city’s abortion clinics. Lotty Herschel is pretty upset-for her it’s a replay of what the Nazis did to her childhood home in Vienna.”

Cleo promised to call back in a few minutes with a name. My bath had taken the edge from my fatigue, but I still felt dopey. Breakfast had been many hours ago; I needed protein to restore myself. I scrounged dubiously in the refrigerator. It had been almost a week since I’d been to the store and there wasn’t much that looked appetizing. In fact, there were a number of items of uncertain provenance, but I didn’t feel like a cleanup job this evening. I finally settled for eggs, making a quick frittata with onions, one of Mr, Contreras’s tomatoes, and the remains of a green pepper.

The phone rang as I was swallowing the last few bites- Cleo calling back with Legal Aid’s man at bond court tonight: Manuel Diaz. I thanked her and headed down to Eleventh and State.

Parking presents no problems beyond the deserted south end of the Loop in the evening. By day it’s an area filled with ramshackle businesses run out of warehouses and the antiquated coffee shops that serve them. At night, the Central District Headquarters is the sole source of life in the area; most of the visitors aren’t driving their own cars.

I parked the Chevy close to the building and walked inside. The halls with their peeling paint and strong smell of disinfectant brought nostalgic memories of visits to my father, a sergeant until his death fourteen years ago.

I found Manuel Diaz smoking a cigarette in one of the conference rooms next to the courtroom. He was a stockily built Mexican. Although I didn’t remember him, he looked old enough to have been with Legal Aid when I was there. His heavy face was scored with deep lines. A smattering of pockmarks gave his cheeks the appearance of freckles. I explained who I was and what I wanted.

“Mr. Contreras is in his seventies. He’s a machinist who used to mix it up in his union days and he decided to relive his youth this afternoon. I don’t know what they’re going to charge him with. I saw him go after someone with a pipe wrench, but he was mauled pretty well, too.”

They haven’t brought the charges over to us yet, but they probably just booked him for disturbing the peace,“ Diaz responded. ‘They arrested eighty people this afternoon, so they weren’t being too particular what they charged them with.”

We chatted for a while. He had been a public defender for twenty years, first out in Lake County, now in the city. He lived on the South Side, he explained, and the commute to the North Shore got to be too much for him.

“Although I miss our quiet old times out there. You get pretty jaded here-I suppose you know that.”

I grimaced. “I only stayed with it for five years. I guess

I’m too impatient, or too egotistical-I want to see some results from my hard labor, and as a trial lawyer I always felt somehow that the situation was no different when I finished with a client than before-or sometimes maybe things were a little worse.“

“So you went into business for yourself, huh? That how you got your face cut open? Well, at least you’re getting some results. I’ve had some pretty wild clients, but they’ve never attacked me with a knife.”

I was spared answering by the arrival of a clerk with the charge slips. Manuel went through them with the speed of long experience, segregating the simple ones-disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct, vagrancy-from the more serious. He asked a bailiff to bring all the disturbing-the-peace and disorderly cases in as a group.

Nine men came in, including Mr. Contreras and his friend Jake Sokolowski. They were by far the oldest in the group. The others, young middle-class men in various stages of disarray, looked both scared and pugnacious. Mitch Kruger, the third machinist, had disappeared-hadn’t been arrested, Mr. Contreras told me later. With the bandage around his head and his work clothes torn, the old man looked like a skid-row derelict, but the fight seemed to have added new fuel to his abundant store of energy and he smiled jauntily at me.

“You come to rescue me, cookie? Knew I could count on you-that’s why I didn’t bother calling Ruthie. You think I look bad, you shoulda seen the other guy.”

“Listen,” Manuel interrupted him. “The last thing I want any of you to do is boast about your accomplishments. Just keep your mouths shut for the next couple of hours and with luck you’ll all sleep in your own beds tonight.”

“Sure, chief, whatever you say,” Mr. Contreras agreed cheerfully. He nudged Sokolowski in his large stomach and the two of them winked and grinned like a pair of teenagers eyeing a girl for the first time.

Six of the other seven defendants had also been arrested at the clinic, fighting the good fight to protect fetuses. The remaining man had been found singing in the middle of the executive offices of the Fort Dearborn Trust earlier in the evening. No one knew how he had gotten past the security guards, and when Manuel asked him he smiled happily and announced that he had flown there.

Manuel interrogated Sokolowski and Mr. Contreras together. He decided they would argue self-defense, that they were trying to help Lotty keep her clinic open and had been attacked by the mob. When Mr. Contreras protested indignantly against so passive a role, I backed up Manuel’s pleas that he remain silent.

“You were hero enough this afternoon,” I told him. “You’re not going to do anyone any good by mouthing off to the judge and getting thirty days or a big fine. It’s not going to diminish your manhood if the judge doesn’t know every single detail of your antics.”

He finally agreed, reluctantly, but with a mulish expression mat made me feel sorry for his long-dead wife. Sokolowski, while not as fit as his friend, was just as eager to figure as the baddest, biggest man on Damen Avenue. But when Mr. Contreras finally agreed to plead self-defense, he followed suit.

I wasn’t allowed to stay for the interrogation of the six clinic invaders. After the bailiff took Mr. Contreras and Sokolowski back to the holding cell I wandered into the interior of the station to see if Lieutenant Mallory was in. I talked my way past the desk sergeant and went down the hall to the homicide detectives’ area.

Mallory wasn’t there, but Rawlings’s pal Detective

Finchley was. A lean, quiet black man, he got up politely when I came in.

“Good to see you, Ms. Warshawski. What happened to your face?”

“I cut myself shaving,” I said, weary of the subject. “I thought your pal Conrad Rawlings told you all about it; thanks for the read you gave him on my character.” It was Finchley who told Rawlings that I was a pain in the ass who got results. “Lieutenant Mallory gone home for the day? Would you tell him I was in? That I hoped to have a chance to discuss what happened at Dr. Herschel’s clinic this afternoon?”

Finchley promised to give him the message. He looked at me straight-faced. “You are a pain in the ass, Ms. Warshawski-cut yourself shaving, my Aunt Fanny. But you care about your friends and I like that in you.”

Surprised and touched by the compliment, I made my way back to the courtroom with a bit more energy. I needed it to muscle my way to a seat. While the daytime courts scattered around the city attract a cetain number of observers who want to pass the time of day, the night bond courts don’t meet at a convenient time-they’re usually empty. But tonight a large force of anti-abortionists, all carrying roses, sat waiting for the judge.

Because so many people had been arrested for destroying the clinic, a large crowd of lawyers was seated up front waiting for their clients. A good ten or so uniformed cops were seated there, too, and a couple of the newspapers also had people in the room. I knew one of them, a junior crime reporter for the Herald-Star, who came over when she saw me sit down. I told her Mr. Contreras’s story. It had a nice human-interest touch, which might help crowd anti-abortion coverage off the front page. Chicago’s papers and

TV stations are blatantly anti-choice in their news coverage.

At length the bailiff mumbled something, we all stood up, and the court was in session. As docket after docket was called, various lawyers came forward, sometimes Manuel Diaz, more often one of the private attorneys-this was an unusual session for the judge, who wasn’t used to so many paying patients.

My attention wandered, but my eyes kept returning to the back of one of the lawyers’ heads. He looked elusively familiar. I was wishing he would turn so I could glimpse his face, when he twitched his shoulders in an irritated gesture. It brought his name back to me immediately: Richard Yarborough, senior partner at Crawford, Meade, one of the city’s largest law firms. I’d gotten used to that impatient twitch of the shoulders in the eighteen months we’d been married.

I let out a soundless whistle. Dick’s time was billed at two hundred dollars an hour. Someone mighty important had been arrested today. I was speculating on it fruitlessly when I realized with a start that my name had been called. I made my way to the front of the room, said my piece to the judge, and was pleased to hear my unrepentant neighbor dismissed with a warning.

“If you are seen on the street in the future carrying a pipe wrench or any other tool of similar size, it will be construed as violent intent and will constitute violation of your bond. Do you understand me, Mr. Contreras?”

The old man ground his teeth, but Manuel and I both looked at him gravely and he said, “Yes. Yes, sir.” He dearly wanted to speak further, so I took his arm, barely waiting for the judge’s “Dismissed” and gavel tap before hustling him away from the bench.