Текст книги "Brush Back"

Автор книги: Sara Paretsky

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

“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.”

THE TOO-REAL THING

Conrad dropped me at the commuter train station when we’d finished talking to Father Cardenal. I was furious: he’d had his men bring me the length of the city, but he refused to drive me back, even though the commute on public transport would take close to two hours. But Conrad, who waxes hot and cold with me, or maybe cold and lukewarm, felt I’d been obstructing his investigation. Leaving me to find my way home was punitive in a petty way. Police don’t get paid much, but power is a job benefit most of the rest of us don’t have.

If he hadn’t been so abrasive, I might not have left the station—or if there’d been a train due soon, but they only run once an hour this time of day and I’d just missed one.

The station wasn’t all that far from the Guisar slip. As soon as Conrad’s car turned south, I climbed down from the platform and walked along Ninety-third Street toward the docks. It was hard to keep my sense of direction on the roads that twisted around the Calumet River. My phone’s map app was also baffled. There are a lot of warehouses, scrap metal yards, loading docks, abandoned steel plants and so on along the river and I made a couple of time-wasting detours.

The confusing trail was kind of a metaphor for my conversations this morning, first with Conrad, then with Father Cardenal.

We’d talked to the priest under the crumbling ceiling to his office. The patch I’d watched him install two weeks ago was still in place, but another hole had appeared over the photo of Father Gielczowski.

Cardenal had expressed shock at Jerry Fugher’s death, and had asked if I was involved in it. Of course, that made Conrad jump on me like Mitch on a shinbone, so the conversation, which had not been cordial from the outset, deteriorated further.

When I’d finally persuaded the two men that accusing me of all the crimes in South Chicago wasn’t a recipe for my cooperation, Conrad remembered the woman I’d seen talking to Fugher, or as he put it, that I “claimed” I’d seen talking to Fugher.

I gave Cardenal the same description I’d given Conrad.

“She could be anyone,” the priest said, looking at me suspiciously.

“She could be any white woman with dark blond shoulder-length hair, about thirty years old,” I said. “She called him ‘Uncle Jerry.’ Who was his family?”

“He wasn’t an employee, so he didn’t fill out the forms that people on the payroll do. We paid cash; I don’t even have a home address for him,” Cardenal said.

In South Chicago, this didn’t sound as strange as it might on the Gold Coast: this was a neighborhood where people bartered services or got paid under the table. “How much work did he do for you?”

“It wasn’t like that, I mean not like he’d come every Monday,” Cardenal said. “I kept a punch list that I’d give him when he came around. He knew how to handle wiring in an old building, but he only showed up when he needed money.”

“The day I saw him, two weeks ago, had he been working in the church?”

Cardenal threw up his hands. “I can’t remember after all this time. He might have been.”

He rummaged through the papers on his desk and picked up a sheet. “The light on the lectern, they reported that three weeks ago and it’s still flickering, the circuit breaker on the organ, that keeps blowing. We can’t afford a new panel, so Jerry would reroute wires for us, but he didn’t do either of these projects.”

“So the day I saw him here, he likely chose the church as a meeting place,” I said. “Or the woman chose it. You don’t have any ‘Fughers’ on your parish rolls or teaching at the school?”

Cardenal shook his head. “It’s an unusual name; I’d remember it.”

“You say Fugher came around when he needed money,” Conrad said. “Drugs? Booze?”

“Not that I ever noticed,” the priest said, “but maybe he had other habits, like gambling, or didn’t know how to manage money. Or maybe he was supporting a family, like this woman Ms. Warshawski says she saw, although he didn’t seem like a family man. You could check with the shops on Ninety-first Street; he told me he did some odd jobs for them. Talk to Mr. Bagby, since Ms. Warshawski saw him in a Bagby truck.”

“You what?” Conrad’s voice was a whip-crack. “You saw him with Bagby and didn’t think it was worth mentioning?”

“Is this a big deal? Is Bagby connected?” Trucking is a good Mob cover—you can go anywhere and carry anything, including dead bodies to coal dust mountains.

“As far as I know, Bagby is a model citizen. Unlike you,” Conrad said.

I’d pulled out my iPhone to show him the picture I’d taken of Fugher and the gravel-faced man, but that needless bit of sarcasm made me keep it to myself. Probably a mistake, since if anyone had hitman written all over their scarred and pitted faces, it was the gravel guy.

“You could still ask him whether Fugher did any work for them. Although the dispatcher told me he didn’t recognize him.”

Conrad became even more incensed. “You went to Bagby?”

“I have yet to meet Vince Bagby, but I did stop at the yard to ask about Fugher. I couldn’t figure out why he was so nervous around me, but the dispatcher claimed not to know him.”

“And you say you were only on my turf on family business?” Conrad demanded. “This is crossing a line, even for you.”

“Excuse me, Lieutenant, but at what point did we morph into Russia or Iran, where a citizen has to get police permission to walk into a business and ask questions? The dispatcher might have lied to me; you could probably charm him into telling you the truth, flashing your badge and your gun and maybe a bullwhip.”

“Vince Bagby has been very generous to our youth scholarship fund,” Father Cardenal interjected. “Please don’t say anything that would make him think we don’t appreciate what he does.”

“What about Rory Scanlon?” I asked. “I know he’s offered to help young Frank Guzzo go to baseball camp. Does he support your youth programs?”

“Mr. Scanlon also does a lot for us. Betty Guzzo talked to me after you left. She’s frightened of you. She thinks you came to the game the other day to ruin Frankie’s chances with Scanlon,” Cardenal said.

“The whole Guzzo family seems to have been sniffing glue or something that rots the brain,” I said. “All I want is for Stella to stop slandering Boom-Boom. I hope Frankie gets his big chance, but he’s only fifteen; you don’t know what he’ll be like at nineteen.”

“Is that a threat?” Cardenal asked.

“You mean you’re taking Betty’s rantings seriously? Of course it’s not a threat. When my cousin was fifteen, there were other kids his age who looked as good as him. They worked just as hard as he did or maybe even harder, but they were as good as they were ever going to be when they were fifteen. I don’t know what Scanlon’s quid pro quo is, unless community goodwill helps turn out the vote in the Tenth Ward, but if he gets young Frank into a quality baseball camp, that will be a big help in the kid’s development.”

“Why can’t community goodwill come because someone cares about the community?” Conrad demanded. “Why does it always have to be something ulterior with you?”

“Conrad. Dear, kind, naive Lieutenant Rawlings: this is Chicago, Scanlon’s a fixture in the Democratic machine, Tenth Ward committeeman for starters—”

“Scanlon’s a fixture down here,” Conrad interrupted. “Gives to our widows and orphans funds, takes part in our programs against gang violence. The quid he wants personally is a piece of the insurance action. We let him sell life insurance to any of our cops who want more coverage than the union offers. It’s a fair deal in exchange for all he does for the community.”

“Frank Guzzo told me he takes boys off on solo trips if they need special counseling. Do you ever see any change in them when they come back?” I asked.

Conrad and Cardenal both blew up at that suggestion, which left me uneasy, not reassured. It sounded as though they were hearing the same warning bells I had, only they didn’t want to acknowledge them because they needed Scanlon’s support. When I said as much, it only made them angrier. Conrad and I left soon after that, with Conrad giving me a biting lecture on outside agitators coming into a community and getting everyone hot and bothered.

“I remember that language directed at civil rights workers,” I said.

“No one’s confusing you with Ella Baker, so don’t get a swelled head. What are you really doing down here? Don’t ask me to believe crap about your family. You don’t have relatives here anymore.”

“Where families are concerned, it doesn’t matter if they’re alive or dead, you’re always carrying them with you. Frank Guzzo brought me down here to talk to his mother. Who responded by digging up this alleged diary. You followed the story, I assume.”

“I called up the old case files on Anne Guzzo’s murder after I saw your cousin’s name in the papers. The crime scene photos were eye-popping. Stella must have gone completely off the rails. I don’t know what you think you’re doing digging through it after all this time.”

I made a face. “Me either, but after watching the kaleidoscope spin for a while, I’m beginning to think Frank was trying to divert my attention. Something about him or his wife or even his mother is going to come to light because of Stella’s determination to get an exoneration. He’s afraid I’ll get wind of it, so he was trying to preempt me.”

“What was going to come to light?” Conrad asked.

“I don’t know. Betty, Frank’s wife, said something odd when I was down here on Friday to watch her kid play—it almost sounded as though she was admitting she played a role in Annie Guzzo’s death.”

“I’ve got enough active gang murders down here to keep me busy until I retire and even then I won’t have made a dent. I can’t care much about an old woman who’s done her dime. I talked to a guy I know at Logan, and Stella Guzzo was one of the wilder inmates. She’s not a noble soul. Highly unlikely she covered for a daughter-in-law. Unless you think they were lovers?”

I stared at him, astounded. “With your imagination, you should be writing lurid romances, Conrad.”

“You tried to smear Rory Scanlon with a pedophile rap just now, and you’re offended? You can dish it out, but you sure can’t take it.” He put the car in gear and drove four blocks to the Metra Electric train station. “End of the ride for you, Warshawski. I’m sorry Stella Guzzo is trying to offload her guilt onto your cousin, but why don’t you let that dog sleep in the dirt with her own fleas instead of dragging a priest and a good community figure into the mess?”

“Oh, to hell with you, Conrad. I’m not dragging anyone anywhere. You’re the one who dragged me down here without a car, so you can drive me to the Loop.”

“You can find your way, Warshawski, you’re a big girl.”

I tried not to keep replaying the conversation as I slogged along—anger is a terrible way to make decisions. On the other hand, anger kept me moving around the mud holes and broken bottles at a good clip.

At one point I remembered Murray. I was still annoyed with him over Boom-Boom, but we have been colleagues of a sort over the years and it’s better to have a friend than an enemy in the media. While I was texting him Fugher’s name, I stumbled over a piece of rebar and grazed my forearms in the gravel. I put my phone in my hip pocket—definitely not the place to walk distracted.

I started coughing and sneezing before I actually saw the pet coke mound. When I turned at the next bend, I found myself at the locked gates leading to the Guisar slip. A guard station was at the entrance but the guard wouldn’t talk to me, just waved a hand at me to go away.

I backed away from his sight lines and followed the fence where it skirted the river and the train tracks. Signs along the fence warned that the area was under high security, but not all the slips had guardhouses. I found a set of gates with just enough leeway in the chains that I could wriggle through. I now had rust stains on my red knit shirt, but there is no gain without some pain, at least not in my life.

The potholes were filled with water from last night’s rain. The surface was that purple-greeny color you get when your transmission fluid leaks all over the street. As I squelched through the oily mud, I cursed my impulsiveness. I could have watched this on Murray’s cable show. I also could be downtown by now—the next train to the Loop had taken off while I was being waved away from the Guisar slip’s gate.

I came at the coke mound from the back. A police van for the forensic techs was parked on the lip and a crew in hazmat suits seemed to be taking the top of the mountain apart. I moved around to the water side of the mountain. I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to find, since the techs were going over the area, but I was trying to imagine how Fugher’s body got to where it had ended up.

I peered over the edge of the dock. Besides the usual waterfront garbage—bottles and cans, remains of McDonald’s and Popeye’s, tampons and Pampers—pieces of drywall, two-by-fours, a car fender, Styrofoam cups, swirled around. The Cubs would be in the World Series before anyone sorted through this muck for clues about Fugher’s death.

I edged my way along the narrow strip between the coke mound and the water, pulling my knit top up to cover my nose and mouth. Even so, the dust made my eyes water. I was sneezing violently when a hand grabbed me roughly by the shoulder.

“Who the hell are you and how did you get out here? You some goddam reporter?” A man in a hard hat and orange safety vest, his skin like tanned leather from life in the great outdoors, had appeared behind me.

“Nope. I’m a goddam detective. You with the police?”

“I’m with Guisar and I’m tired of strangers on my slip. I want to see your badge.”

I pulled out the laminated copy of my license. “I’m private.”

“Then you sure as hell have no business out here. How’d you get past the front gate without a pass or a hard hat?”

“Just lucky, I guess.”

He frog-marched me around to the front of the mound, where his crew were sitting on overturned barrels or leaning against their earthmoving machines, watching the forensic teams at work.

A silver Jeep Patriot pulled up, splashing mud on my jeans. The driver, a guy around fifty with a marine haircut, lowered his window.

“Jarvis, what the hell you doing sticking dead bodies out here on the dock? You let a game of hide-and-seek get out of hand?”

He was grinning widely and the Guisar man smiled in turn, but perfunctorily. “Bagby—you saw the news?—it was—”

“Awful. I know,” Bagby cut him off. “Shouldn’t make a joke out of it. Did you find out who the dead man was?”

“The cops just learned. Guy named Jerry Fugher. They say he did odd jobs around the neighborhood, but what he was doing here on the docks, no one knows.”

“Who’s the talent?” Bagby asked, jerking his head at me.

“I’m trying to find out. The lady got in here without a pass. I don’t know how she got past Kipple at the main gate, but I’ll have a talk—”

“You look like you walked up the tracks,” Bagby said to me, taking in my mud-spattered clothes. “Whatever you want must be pretty important. What can we do for you, Ms.– Uh?”

“Warshawski,” I said.

“The hockey player?” Bagby asked.

“I’m retired. These days I’m an investigator.”

Bagby looked startled, then threw back his head and guffawed. “I earned that. You’re related to Boom-Boom Warshawski?”

“Cousin.” I smiled: two can play nice. “I’m the person who ID’d Jerry Fugher for the police. I understand he worked for you?”

Bagby shook his head. “If you told the cops that, they knew before I did. Never heard of the guy.”

I pulled out my cell phone and showed him the picture of Fugher getting into one of his trucks with Gravel.

Bagby took the phone from me and frowned over the picture. “The shot’s too blurry to make out their faces that well, but the short fat guy looks a hell of a lot like Danny DeVito. I recognize the truck, though, damn it. Some SOB is going to be collecting unemployment before the day is over, letting a stranger drive one of our trucks. Huge legal exposure to that. Forward that photo to me, okay? I can read the plate; that’ll tell me who was supposed to be driving that morning.”

“I gave the photo to your daughter on Friday. I’m surprised she hasn’t shown it to you.”

He shook his head, mock sadness. “Delphina! If the guy had looked like Johnny Depp instead of Danny DeVito, she’d have tracked him down by now instead of letting it go completely out of her head.”

I smiled, mock understanding. “She must have your dispatcher wrapped around her finger for him to forget, as well.”

He gave me another appraising look, but dropped the subject, saying he’d give me a ride out to the road. “Save you schlepping all the way back on foot.”

“I’ll stay out here, see what the cops turn up.”

“She can’t stay here,” the Guisar man said to Bagby. “She doesn’t have a pass or a hard hat, she’s not with the city. Drive her out.”

Drive me out. It sounded as though I was a demon possessing a pig.

“Yeah, sorry about that, Ms. Warshawski, but Jarvis is right. No pass, no hard hat, no visit.”

I gave in with as much grace as I could muster, stopping at the squad cars to see if I knew anyone on duty. No luck. Jarvis, who’d followed me, lecturing me on how I was trespassing, started sneezing mid-sentence. I kept my top pulled over my nose.

Bagby honked. “Warshawski! Train’s leaving the station.”

I climbed into his front seat and looked mournfully at my clothes. My running shoes were caked with mud, my socks were soaked through, and my almost-new jeans had a long tear up one leg—I must have caught it on a piece of wire when I was sliding through the fence.

“This guy Fugher must be something special if you wrecked your wardrobe to look at his burial plot. How’d you know him? He part of one of your private investigations?” Bagby asked.

“And that would be your business because . . . ?”

Bagby grinned, but he kept his eyes on the road, swerving around the biggest potholes. “Just making conversation. Although if he was driving one of my trucks, I guess I’d better find out what he was up to. Every now and then a cargo does go missing.”

“You know Frank Guzzo?” I asked.

“Is this a trick question? Of course I know Guzzo. He’s been with the company forever. Don’t tell me you thought he’d be on Guisar’s dock back there.”

“Just making conversation,” I said primly. “When Frank tried out for the Cubs, Bagby’s gave him time off to get in shape.”

“That was my old man, may he rest in peace. Heart attack seven years ago.” We were at the outer gate, which swung open for the Patriot. Bagby stuck his head out the window to hallo at the guard.