V.I. Warshawski 04 - Bitter Medicine (8 page)

This time the wait was shorter. “You want to see him, be at Sixteen-sixty-two Washtenaw tonight at ten-thirty. You be alone, no heat, and you be clean.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” I said.

“Say what, man?” The voice was suspicious again.

“Gringo for ‘I hear you, man.’” I broke the connection.

I lay on the floor awhile longer, staring at the neatly sworled plaster on the ceiling. Washtenaw, heart of Lion country. I wished I could go with a police battalion behind me. Better yet, in front of me. But the only thing that would accomplish would be to get me shot-if not tonight, then later, Warshawski would start appearing spray-painted upside down on garage doors in Humboldt Park. Or maybe that was too hard a name to spell. Maybe it would be just my initials.

Perhaps they’d do it even if I followed their orders. I’d be gunned down as I left the building. Lotty would be sorry then that she’d forced me into this. She’d be sorry but it would be too late. Much moved, I pictured my funeral. Lotty was stoic, Carol sobbing openly. My ex-husband came with his suburban-chic second wife. “You were really married to her, darling? So messy and irresponsible-and hanging around with gangsters, too? I can’t believe it.”

The thought of plastic Terri made me laugh a little. I got up from the floor and changed from my running clothes into jeans and a bright-red knit top. I scribbled a note detailing where I was going and why and took it down to the backyard where Mr. Contreras was hovering anxiously over his tomato plants. They were heavy with ripening fruit.

“How’d they do last night?” I asked sympathetically.

“Oh, they’re fine. Really fine. You want some? I got too many here, don’t know what to do with them all. Ruthie, she don’t really want them.”

Ruthie was his daughter. She came by periodically with two subdued children to harangue her father into moving in with her.

“Sure. Give me what you don’t want-I’ll make you some real old-world tomato sauce. We can have pasta together this winter, I have a favor to ask of you.”

“Sure, cookie. Whatever you want.” He sat back on his heels and carefully wiped his face with a handkerchief.

“I have to go see some punks tonight. I don’t think I’m going to be in any danger. But just in case-I’ve written down the address and why I’m going there. If I’m not back home tomorrow morning, can you see that Lieutenant Mallory gets this? He’s in Homicide at Eleventh Street.”

He took the envelope from me and looked at it. Bobby Mallory had been in the police with my dad, maybe’d been his closest friend. Even though he hated my working in the detective business, if I died he’d make sure the relevant punks got nailed.

“You want me to come with you, cookie?”

Mr. Contreras was in his late seventies. Tanned, healthy, and strong for a man his age, he still wouldn’t last too long in a fight. I shook my head.

“The terms were I have to come alone. I bring someone with me, they’ll start shooting.”

He sighed regretfully. “Such an exciting life you have. If only I was twenty years younger… You’re looking real pretty today, cookie. My advice, if you’re going to visit some real punks, tone it down some.”

I thanked him gravely and stayed talking to him until lunch. Mr. Contreras had been a machinist for a small tool-and-the operation until he retired five years ago. He thought listening to my cases was better than watching Cagney & Lacey. In turn he regaled me with tales of Ruthie and her husband.

In the afternoon I drove over to Washtenaw Avenue and slowly cruised past the meeting place. The street was in one of the more run-down sections of Humboldt Park, near where it borders on Pilsen. Most of the buildings were burned out. Even those still occupied were covered with spray-painted graffiti. Tin cans and broken glass took the place of lawns and trees. Cars were hoisted up on crates, their wheels removed. One was parked about two yards from the curb, partially blocking the street. Its rear window was missing.

The address where I was to meet Sergio belonged to a thickly curtained storefront. It was flanked on one side by a partially demolished three-flat, and on the left by a bedraggled liquor store. When I arrived tonight, Lions would be hidden in the ruined building, probably lounging in front of the liquor store, and signaling each other from lookouts at both ends of the block.

I turned left at the corner and found the alley that ran behind the buildings. The three ten-year-old boys playing stickball at its entrance were in all probability gang members. If I drove down the alley or talked to them, word would inevitably get back to Sergio.

I could see no way to make a reasonably protected approach to the meeting place. Not unless I crawled along the city sewers and popped up from the manhole in the middle of the street.

I still had eight hours before the rendezvous. I figured if I made every golden minute count today, I could go to Lotty, Tessa, and the Alvarados on Monday and tell them, scout’s honor, I’d done my best-now leave it to Detective Rawlings.

I swung up Western to Armitage, over to Milwaukee, where the expressway looms menacingly over the neighborhood on high concrete stilts. In a corner underneath it was Holy Sepulchre High School, where Consuelo had studied.

She had played tennis on the uneven asphalt courts there, looking adorable in her white shorts and shirt, breathing in the asbestos from the auto brakes overhead. I know-I’d watched her at a match one afternoon. So I could understand how Fabiano had found her enticing. He used to hang out in a bar up the street and wait for his sister while she was at tennis practice. After Consuelo joined the team, he hung out at the school watching the girls, then took to ferrying the whole team to matches. And so it went on from there. I’d heard the whole story from Paul when the news of Consuelo’s pregnancy first broke.

The city has certain standards concerning bars and schools-they can’t exist side by side. I made a sweep of the area and found a couple close enough to Holy Sepulchre to be likely haunts of Fabiano’s. I was in luck at the first one. Fabiano was drinking beer at El Gallo, a dingy storefront with a hand-painted, gaudy rooster on the front door. He was watching the Sox on a tiny set attached high up on the wall out of the reach of the casual burglar. About fifteen men were also in the bar, their attention held by the game. Would Ron Kittle drop yet another routine fly ball? I could see how they’d be breathless.

I pulled a stool from the end of the bar and moved it up behind Fabiano. The bartender, talking happily at the other end of the counter, paid no attention to me. I waited courteously for the inning to end, then leaned over Fabiano’s shoulder.

“We need to have a little chat, Senor Hernandez.”

He jerked his arm, spilling his beer and turned around, startled. He flushed angrily when he saw me. “Shit! Get out of my face!‘5

“Now, now, Fabiano, that’s no way to talk to your aunt.”

The men on either side of him were looking at me. “I’m his mother’s sister,” I explained, shrugging my shoulders in embarrassment. “She hasn’t seen him for days. He won’t talk to her. So she asked me to find him, try to talk sense to him.”

He struggled to his feet in the narrow space between my stool and his. ‘That’s a lie, you bitch! You’re no aunt of mine!“

A man farther up the bar gave an unsteady smile. “You be my aunt if he don’t want you, honey.”

This got a round of cheers from several others, but the man to Fabiano’s left said, “Maybe she’s not his aunt. Maybe she’s from the collection agency, come to repo the car, huh?”

This drew louder laughter from the group. “Yeah, or the cops come to take it back to its rightful owner.”

“I own it, man,” Fabiano said furiously. “I have the papers right here in my pocket.” He stuck a hand into his right pocket dramatically and pulled out a piece of paper.

“So maybe he stole that, too,” the man to his left said.

“New car, sobrino?” I asked, impressed.

“I am not your nephew,” he screamed, spitting at me. A man of limited imagination.

“Now that’s enough.” The bartender moved up. “Whether she is your aunt or not, you must not treat the lady this way, Fabiano. Not if you want to drink in my bar. And frankly, I believe she is your aunt-because no one would embarrass themselves by pretending to be related to you if they were not. So you go outside and talk to her. Your seat will be here when you get back and the rest of us can watch the game in peace for a while.”

Fabiano followed me sullenly outside, pursued by cheers and catcalls from the rest of the bar. “Now you humiliate me in front of my friends. I won’t take it from you, Warshawski-bitch.”

“What’re you going to do-have me beaten to death the way you did Malcolm Tregiere?” I asked nastily.

His face changed from sullen to alarmed. “Hey! You ain’t hanging that on me. No way. I didn’t touch him. I swear I didn’t touch him.”

A baby-blue late-model Eldorado stood a few feet from the bar entrance. It couldn’t have been more than two or three years old and the body was in great condition. Since the rest of the cars on the block were a step away from the junkyard, I deduced it had to be the one the men had been ribbing him about.

“That your car, Fabiano? Pretty nice wheels for a guy who couldn’t even buy his wife a ring two months ago.”

I saw another movement of his mouth, and smacked it hard before he could get any saliva out. “Enough of that. I don’t want to catch anything from you… Tell me about the car.”

“I don’t have to tell you nothing,” he muttered.

“No, that’s right, you don’t. You can tell the police. I’m going to call them now and tell them you’ve got yourself a new car, easily worth five-ten thousand. And I’m going to suggest to them that you collected a chunk of change from the Lions for bludgeoning Dr. Tregiere. Then thefre going to talk to you. And while the cops are shaking you upside down, I’m going to talk to Sergio Rodriguez. And I’m going to tell him that you’re driving these beautiful wheels because you’re dealing dope for the Garbanzos. And then I’m going to start reading the obit pages. Because you gonna be dead meat, Fabiano.”

I turned on my heel and headed toward my car. Fabiano caught up with me as I unlocked the door. “You can’t do that to me!”

I laughed a little. “Sure I can. What do I owe you, anyway? Tell you the truth, I’d love to read your obituary.”

“But it’s a lie, man! It’s a lie! I got that car legal. I can prove it.”

I shut the door and leaned against it. “So prove it.”

He licked his lips. “They-that man at the hospital-he gave me five thousand dollars for Consuelo. To-to say how sorry they were that the baby died and that she died, too.”

“Wait a minute while I find a Kleenex. This story is breaking my heart-five thousand? That’s a hell of a price tag for your lady and her baby. WhatM they ask you to do in return?”

He licked his lips again. “Nothing. I didn’t have to do nothing. Just sign a paper. Sign a paper about her and the baby.”

I nodded. A release. Just as I’d suggested to Paul. They bought him off. “You must have told them a wonderful story. Impressed the shit out of them. No one here would figure you’d need more than five hundred to keep your mouth shut. What’d you do?-dangle threats of the Lions in front of their white suburban faces and scare ‘em to death?”