V.I. Warshawski 04 - Bitter Medicine (24 page)

I lay back down, trying to relax, but I couldn’t do it. I got up and took a long shower. I cracked open Lotty’s door. She was still asleep, a frown drawing her heavy brows together. I closed the door softly behind me and left her apartment.

I knew something was wrong as soon as I started up the stairs in my building. Papers were strewn on the steps, and when I reached the second-floor landing I saw a spot of something that looked like dried blood. I had my gun out without thinking, running up the last sixteen stairs.

Mr. Contreras lay in front of my apartment. The door itself had been taken out with an ax. I wasted a minute making sure the place was empty, then knelt down next to the old man. His head had bled fiercely from a scalp wound, but the blood had clotted. He was breathing, short stertorous breaths, but he was alive. I left him for a minute to crawl through the ax hole. Called for the paramedics, called the police, dragged a blanket from my bedroom to wrap him in. While I waited, I felt him gently. The wound to his head seemed to be the only injury. A pipe wrench lay about a yard from his crumpled body.

The fire department arrived first-a young man and a middle-aged woman in dark-blue uniforms, both muscular and short on words. They listened to what I knew while hustling Mr. Contreras onto a stretcher; they got him down the stairs in less than a minute. I held the doors for them and watched them slide him into the ambulance and head for Beth Israel.

A few minutes later, a couple of blue-and-whites squealed to a halt in front of the building. Three uniformed men leaped out; one stayed in the car manning the radio or calling in reports or something.

I went out to greet them. “I’m V. I. Warshawski. It was my apartment that got broken into.”

One of them, an older black man with a potbelly, wrote my name down slowly while they followed me up the stairs.

I went through the routine: what time I’d come home, where I’d spent the night, was anything missing.

“I don’t know. I just got back here. My neighbor was lying comatose in front of the door-I was a lot more concerned about him than I was about a few stinking belongings.” My voice was unsteady. Anger, shock, the goddamned fucking last straw. I could not cope with this break-in or the injury to Mr. Contreras.

The youngest of the trio wanted to know about Mr. Contreras. “Boyfriend?”

“Use your head,” I snapped. “He’s in his seventies. He’s a retired machinist who thinks he’s still the muscleman he was forty years ago and he’s set himself up as my foster father. He lives on the ground floor and every time I come or go in the building he pops out to make sure I’m okay. He must have followed whoever did this up the stairs and tried to take them out with the pipe wrench. Goddamned old fool.” To my horror I felt tears springing to the corners of my eyes. I took a deep, steadying breath and waited for the next question.

“He expecting someone?”

“Oh, a couple of weeks ago I had an encounter with Sergio Rodriguez from the Lions-Detective Rawlings knows all about it-over at the Sixth Area. Mr. Contreras thought he ought to keep a lookout to see if they’d try to come in the night for me. I told him if he heard anyone he should send for you guys at once, but I guess he still thinks he ought to be a hero.”

They all chimed in at once, wanting to know about Sergio. I gave them my standard Sergio story, about how he bore this long grudge against me for his prison sentence. One of them called on his radio down to the relay man in the car asking him to phone Rawlings. While they wrote up notes and waited for the detective, I wandered through my apart-ment, looking at mess. Something was wrong in the living room, but I wasn’t sure what. My television was still there; so was the stereo, but all my books and records had been heaved onto the floor in a vast, sprawled mountain.

A few minor, portable items seemed to be missing, but the only things I really care about-my mother’s wineglasses-were still standing in the dining-room cupboard. The little safe in the hall closet hadn’t been touched; it held her diamond pendant and earrings. I couldn’t imagine wearing such delicate jewelry myself, but I would never dispose of them. Who knows-I might have a daughter of my own some day. Stranger things have happened.

“Don’t touch anything,” the young white cop warned me.

“No, no. I won’t.” Not that it mattered. With nine hundred or so murders a year to solve, and aggravated batteries and rapes by the yard, a burglary wasn’t going to get high priority. But we would all pretend that the burglary squad’s fingerprinting and searching would really accomplish something.

The only thing I would just as soon they didn’t look at too closely was the IckPiff ledgers. I went back into the living room to take a surreptitious look for them and realized what was wrong.

My coffee table is usually piled high with old copies of The Wall Street Journal, mail that I haven’t got around to answering, and miscellaneous personal items. Peter had stacked the ledgers and the membership file on the newspapers. When I left this morning I had perched the name files precariously back on top. Now, not only were they gone, all the papers were missing. Someone had bundled up everything, newspapers, letters, magazines, an old pair of running socks I should have put away, and made off with them.

“What’s wrong?” the potbellied black cop asked. “Something missing in here?”

I couldn’t afford to talk about it. Not even to say my old newspapers were gone. Because if someone stole your old newspapers, it had to be because they thought you were hiding something in them.

“Not that I know of, Officer. I guess it’s just starting to really hit me.”

Rawlings showed up around nine with an evidence team. He questioned the uniformed men, then sent them away and came into the living room. I had moved from the floor to the couch.

“Well, well, Ms. W. Didn’t think housekeeping was your strong suit when I was here before, but this mess is pretty special.”

“Thanks, Detective. I did it just for you.”

That so.“ He wandered over to the south wall, the one opposite the windows where I’d installed a wall unit for records and books. These were scattered on the floor, records partly out of jackets, books heaved every which way. He picked up a couple of volumes at random.

“Primo Levi? What kind of a name is that? Italian? You read Italian?”

“Yeah. The uniformed men told me not to touch anything until the evidence team came through.”

“And then you’d have a sudden housekeeping fit and clean it all up. I hear you. Well, they have my prints on file. And I presume they have yours. They get a brainstorm or run out of work and take to dusting all these books and records, they can sort ours out from the burglars‘. What were they looking for?”

I shook my head. “Damned if I know. I’m not employed right now. I’m not working on anything. There’s nothing for anybody to look for.”

“Yeah, and I’m the King of Sweden. Anything missing?”

“Well, I haven’t been through all the books. So I don’t know if my copies of Little Women and Black Beauty are still here. My mother gave them to me for my ninth birthday and it’d break my heart if someone stole them. And my old Doors album-the one with ‘Light My Fire’ on it, or Abbey Road-I’d sure hate to find they were gone.”

“So what would someone think you have, babe?”

I looked around me. “Who you talking to?”

“You, Ms. W.”

“Not when you call me ‘babe,’ you ain’t.”

He made a little bow. “Excuse me, Ms. Warshawski. Ma’am. Let me rephrase the question. What would someone think you have, Ms. Warshawski?”

I shrugged. “I’ve been going round on that one ever since I got home. All I can think is that it was Sergio. I went to see little Fabiano a couple of days ago. That boy knows something he isn’t saying; he got upset at my questions and started to cry. Yesterday he found some sleazebag to sue Dr. Herschel for malpractice. So I was with her last night, trying to cheer her up a little. Maybe the Lions decided to avenge Fabiano’s alleged manhood by coming through here.”

Rawlings pulled a cigar from his inside jacket pocket.

“Yes, I mind if you smoke that in here. Besides, it’ll screw up the evidence team.”

He looked at it longingly and put it away. “You didn’t beat the boy up, by any chance?”

“Not so’s it’d show. He telling people I did?”

“He isn’t telling anyone anything. But we saw him all black-and-blue after his wife’s funeral. What we heard was he was in a car accident, but unless it fell over on top of his head, I don’t see it.”

“Honest and truly, Detective-that wasn’t me. I wondered, too, but all I heard was he hit his head on the Eldorado windshield.”

“Well, sister-excuse me, Ms. Warshawski-let’s all pray for the recovery of your neighbor. If it was Sergio, that’s the only way we’re going to nail him.”

I agreed with him soberly and not just because I wanted to nail Sergio. Poor Mr. Contreras. It was only two days since they’d taken out the stitches where the fetus worshipers had hit him. Now this. I hoped to God his head was as hard as he always claimed it was.

After the evidence team finished their ministrations and I signed a zillion or so forms and statements, I called our building super and got him to board up the front door. I’d go in and out the back way until I had a new door installed. I’d have called Lotty, but she had too many troubles of her own right now. She didn’t need mine, too. Instead, I wandered aimlessly through my place. It wasn’t that the damage was eradicable. Some of the piano strings had been cut, but the instrument wasn’t harmed. The things on the floor could all be put back. It wasn’t like Malcolm’s place, where everything was smashed to bits. But it was still a violent assault, and that is numbing. If I had been here… The noise of the door being smashed open would have woken me up. I probably could have shot them. Too bad I hadn’t been home.

I went back to bed, too depressed to try to clean up. Too worn out by the combined assaults of the last few weeks to do anything. I lay down, but I couldn’t get back to sleep for the thrashing in my head.

Say old Dieter discovered in the general mayhem of his office that the card catalog of members was gone. And he figured, as he’d said to the Herald-Star, that it was the evil abortionists who’d done it. And he hired someone-say the cute college kids I’d seen throwing rocks at Lotty’s-to smash in my door and create havoc so as to get the ledgers and card catalog back but make it look like burglary. Or just to get even.

It was plausible. Even possible. But he’d have to guess I had the files; he didn’t know for certain. The one person who definitely knew I had them was Peter Burgoyne.

Who had he really been phoning from the restaurant? He’d said it was personal-maybe he had an ex-wife stashed in an attic someplace. And he’d gotten me out of the city for the day. But if he was behind the break-in, why? And who could he get on a moment’s notice to do something like this?

Round and round I went, my brain exhausted, my body worn out, the little slashes on my face and neck aching with tension. I could call him, of course. Better to see him. On the phone he might deny it, but he had such an expressive face that I thought I’d know he was lying by looking at him.

I could call Dick. See if there was some reason why Friendship or Peter Burgoyne didn’t want me having the IckPiff files. Dick might well represent Friendship. But why would they care about a poor old lunatic like Dieter Monkfish? I could imagine the reception I’d get from Dick, too.