Текст книги "Brush Back"
Автор книги: Sara Paretsky
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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 28 страниц)
SOUND CHECK
Aliana met me at the entrance to the hoist. She’d refused to answer any questions on the phone, just saying that I had to be at the computer to understand it. While we waited for the hoist, she fiddled nervously with the ends of her braids, looking aslant at my bruised face.
The hoist operator remembered me. “You go ten rounds with Nabiyev?” he asked jovially. “He was in early this morning looking same as always, so you must not have landed any of your punches.”
“I hit the kidneys,” I said. “My face looks spectacular but it’s blows to the kidneys that leave the other person limping for a week or two.”
The operator laughed more heartily than the comment merited, expanding on the fight theme all the way up.
They’d poured three more floors since I was last here. When we got off at twelve, the rough work on the walls was done and carpenters were marking off spots to start building interior walls. As she led me across the floor to the engineers’ room, Aliana asked if I’d really been in a fight with Nabiyev.
“No. Your hoist operator seems to have a one-string guitar that he likes to keep plucking. I was jumped by some street punks and fortunately the cops drove up before they murdered me. You know Nabiyev?”
“Not personally, but when he’s on the job site everyone gets tense.” She knocked on the door to the architects’ and engineers’ room, which had a sign on it that read “Temporarily Off-Limits to All Personnel.”
A couple of the engineers I’d seen the first time I was here were hovering nearby and were infuriated when Tyler, the senior man, unlocked the door for Aliana.
“Hey, man, what gives?” one of them demanded, trying to muscle past us into the room. “I need to get to my machine. There’s an array whose specs I have to check—”
“The room will be open in fifteen minutes, Clay. I’m sure you can do the calculations on your tablet, right?” Tyler pulled the door shut behind Aliana and me, and slid the dead bolt home.
“Aliana brief you on what she found?” he said.
“I didn’t think I could explain it on the phone,” Aliana said.
She took me to one of the computers set up on a work counter that ran the length of the far wall. “We each have our own laptops, of course, but these are machines we can all access during the project to see what everyone is doing—the files are shared pretty much among the design and structural people. The computers aren’t assigned—anyone can use any machine—but we all get in the habit of sitting at one particular spot, set up our coffee mugs there, that kind of thing.”
The cloth board that lined the wall behind the computers was filled with photos and cartoons. Personal items—coffee mugs, pencil cups, action figures—sat on the shelf that ran the length of the counter. A faded photo of Cubs legend Ryne Sandberg, signed to Sebastian, was pinned behind the computer where Aliana was standing.
“So this was the machine that Sebastian mostly used. And this morning Tyler asked me to go through the files, make sure anything Sebastian worked on was, well, was correct and to get it uploaded to the project database if Sebastian hadn’t already taken care of it.”
She tapped the keyboard and the monitor came to life. “It all looked straightforward, and then I found this audio file in a hidden sector. When I heard it, I got Tyler and he said I should get you.”
She clicked on the play icon. The recording was scratchy; two men were talking, but the mike had been fairly far from their mouths. The recording was too muffled to follow well; I had Aliana replay it several times but still couldn’t get it all.
“All we want is a chance to bid [words unclear],” the first one said.
“We’re not talking to new [players?] now,” the second man said.
“[Unclear] permits are [unclear] and even for this job there can be [unclear] obstacles. We can [unclear] for you.”
“Is this a threat?”
“Of course not, but everyone has to pay to play. No one gets something for nothing.”
A pause, then the second man said, “I don’t make these decisions. I’ll have to get back to you.”
Another pause, longer, then the first speaker said, so quickly that he was even harder to understand, “You work with us and we work with you. You don’t want to work with us, just remember we gave you [unclear—maybe ‘a chance’].”
That was the end of the file.
I looked at Aliana. “Was that Sebastian?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know who either of them was.”
“Would you know Nabiyev’s voice?” I asked.
“He has a very heavy accent, Russian, Uzbeki, whatever,” Tyler said. “And his voice is deeper.”
“Where could this have taken place? Is there some project your engineering firm is trying to bid on?”
“I don’t know either of those guys,” Tyler said sharply. “And my firm doesn’t do business that way, not with threats. There’s plenty of work for construction engineers in this city. We don’t get one project, we go after a different one.”
“Any idea where the original of the recording is?” I asked.
“It’s not in this room—it would be on a thumb drive, likely, not in the Cloud,” Tyler said. “Otherwise, Sebastian wouldn’t have been in here early to upload it. But after I heard it, I shut this office. Aliana and I scoured the place. While she was waiting for you, I checked the contents of all the drives we found.”
He pointed at a carton that held a good thirty or more USB drives. “I discovered that some of our architects and engineers are too bored—I saw a staggering amount of porn as well as video games—but not the audio file.”
It hadn’t been in the gym bag he’d left in his locker, so either someone had taken it from the room, or Sebastian had been carrying it when he disappeared. Or it had been taken by the person who ransacked his and Viola’s apartment last week.
Uncle Jerry had promised if Sebastian did something difficult for him, he’d make sure the debt was forgiven. Fugher and his handlers hadn’t asked Sebastian to deliver the threat, but they must have had some assignment connected with the threat, otherwise why had he recorded it? Or had the assignment been to record the conversation so that someone—Fugher? Nabiyev?—could use it for blackmail?
“I can’t figure out background noise on this,” I said, listening to the recording again. “Was Sebastian in the room with a device, or did he plant a bug, or was he eavesdropping?”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass if he was standing on his head juggling beer bottles while he recorded it.” Tyler’s expression was fierce. “He’s a punk. As of this morning, he is barred from this job site. If he’s smart, he will find a new line of work, because I will make sure no one hires him again as an engineer.”
I had an uneasy feeling that Sebastian wasn’t ever going to work at anything again, but I only said, “It would help to know what project they’re talking about, even if it isn’t one that your firm, or the contract firm Sebastian works for, cares about.”
Tyler said, “This is a needle in a haystack, Warshawski. Too many projects, too many building and zoning permits in play all over the Metro area.”
He turned to Aliana. “Make a copy of the file for Warshawski. Put another on a thumb drive for me and then delete it from the hard drive. And then we’d better stop wasting the Virejas project’s money and get back to work.”
While Aliana uploaded the recording to a couple of clean drives, Tyler unlocked the door. Angry—and vocal—young architects and engineers crowded into the room.
“Easy, boys and girls,” Tyler said. “Aliana discovered a security breach in one of our machines this morning. We called in this woman here to try to sort it out. We’re good to go now, so let’s get going.”
I put the drive into my hip pocket. All the way down to the ground, all the way across the pockmarked dusty ground, I felt as though the device were burning through my jeans into my butt. I drove quickly to my office, keeping a jittery eye out for tails, and got the file uploaded to the Mac as soon as I was in the door. It wasn’t until I’d stored it both in my backup drives and in the Cloud that I finally stopped to think.
Pay to play. That is the phrase that defines Illinois politics. The speaker was threatening to block permits for some kind of project. The recording was unclear, but the word might have been “zoning” or “building.”
Zoning permits are the fiefdoms of Chicago’s aldermen. Pay isn’t great for service in City Hall, but contractors put campaign donations into the pockets of their alderman in exchange for zoning permits and zoning exceptions. Rory Scanlon was the Tenth Ward committeeman, which meant he played a role in routing those donations to the Tenth Ward alderman’s nest egg.
Uncle Jerry, down there on the South Side, he could have been doing dirty work for Rory Scanlon. I tried to imagine a big project in South Chicago that some crony of Rory’s needed to bid on, something big enough that it was worth threatening the project owner. There was a lot of talk of putting housing, offices and even a theme park on the two thousand acres where the old USX Works had stood, but if Scanlon wanted friends of his considered for those jobs, he’d go directly to the project owners himself. No threats necessary, just his friendly offers to make people feel at home in the Tenth Ward.
And if a project was outside the Tenth Ward, Scanlon wouldn’t have any power to block permits, not unless he was involved in a conspiracy with the city or with the other ward’s officers. I didn’t know if Scanlon was a crook, or a pedophile or neither or both, but whatever he was, he was too savvy a player to put himself at the mercy of a lot of weak links—the other aldermen, or Sebastian Mesaline himself.
Pay to play. Spike Hurlihey, Speaker of the House, was the consummate paymaster. He couldn’t help or hinder a Chicago building project, unless it was through the shenanigans he’d pulled on Virejas Tower—getting a special law passed exempting the project from an environmental assessment. But he wouldn’t have needed intermediaries to threaten the Virejas project. He was an owner himself, for one thing, so he had a say in who bid on the work, and besides, work was too far along to add new players. It had to be a project where work hadn’t started yet.
Looking for a big project not yet underway seemed like a really good way to waste a couple of months. It might be easier to start at the other end: Uncle Jerry had promised Sebastian he’d clear the debt forever if Sebastian did something connected to this meeting.
It was frustrating not to know whether Sebastian had been in the room, secretly recording the conversation on behalf of one of the threateners—or the threatened—or hovering outside, trying to get a version of events he could use for his own purpose.
I took out one of my burn phones to call Viola. She didn’t want to come see me: it was the middle of a workday, she couldn’t keep taking off, she was a clerk, not a manager, she could lose her job.
“Sebastian recorded a meeting and loaded the file onto one of his computers at work; they found it this morning and gave it to me. I’m hoping you can tell me who’s speaking, and what they’re talking about.”
I hooked my speakers up to the computer and played the file through for her, twice. At the end, when she didn’t respond, I realized she’d ended the call. I took that as confirmation she knew who was speaking, although maybe it merely meant her supervisor had walked by. I turned off the speakers with an angry twist—Viola was at least as tiresome to work with as the Guzzo family.
LAND OF THE DEAD
I sat for a while, staring at nothing. My office phone roused me from my stupor some minutes later. Stella Guzzo. This time, I answered the call, instead of sending it to voice mail and alerting my lawyer.
“Is this the whore’s daughter?” she demanded.
“Nope. Wrong number,” I said, and hung up.
An instant later, she phoned again. “I’m looking for Warshawski.”
“Right this time,” I said. “But you have an order of protection against me. You can’t be calling me.”
“I can do whatever I goddam well want. I told you to come down here Saturday and you never showed up.”
“The order of protection,” I repeated. “I come see you, you get me arrested, and then I’m in jail and lose my license.”
“But I needed to see you.”
I knew Freeman would kill me for not hanging up, but instead I said, “You didn’t have anyone left to insult?”
“I can say what I want to whoever I like, and if you and your family—” She cut herself off mid-rant. “Frank came to see me last week.”
“He’s a good son.” I kept my voice neutral.
“Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. You look at him, and he’s the image of my dad and my brothers, but inside, he’s just as soft as his own old man.”
I couldn’t imagine any way to respond to that.
After a moment, Stella went on broodingly. “I could tell he had something on his mind, but it took him all night to spit it out. What’s this you’re saying about Betty?”
“Nothing.” I was astonished.
“Don’t lie to me! All you Warshawskis lie faster than you talk. Frank told me you thought Betty killed Annie while I was at the bingo.”
“No, ma’am. I thought if you hadn’t actually killed your daughter when you punched her in the head, there was only one person you might have taken the fall for, and that was Frank. If you thought his wife had killed your daughter, there was a sliver of possibility you wouldn’t have said anything so that his children’s mother stayed out of prison.”
“Listen, you. You know as well as me that you’re trying to cover up for your old man stealing evidence from the crime scene. You want this to be about my family, but you won’t admit that it’s really about yours.”
She hung up.
Every time I talked to Stella, I felt about a hundred years old. I leaned back in my chair, eyes shut. I was paying an awfully high price for the brief comfort Frank had brought me all those years ago.
I started to call him, then decided to go see him in person. Enough of this idiocy.
Using one of my burner phones, I called Bagby Haulage. Fortunately, not only did Delphina answer the phone, but Bagby’s dispatcher wasn’t at her elbow to guide her away from people like me. She accepted my spurious story, that we’d given the wrong package to the truck Frank Guzzo was driving, and even let me know that he was in the Midway Airport area.
“Great,” I said heartily. “We’re at 5236 Sixty-seventh Street. Sanjitsu Electronics.”
“You’re not in my system,” she said.
“We may be there under a different name; we recycle for a lot of different electronics companies. Tell Guzzo someone from shipping will meet him on the loading bay in thirty.”
I hung up before she could say anything else. As I closed the office door, the burner phone started ringing. At least she was calling back, a good double check. What a pity I hadn’t thought to record voice mail.
The address I’d given Delphina was almost sixteen miles southwest of my office. By pushing my luck with cops and speed limits, I got there within half an hour.
The short runways at Midway bring the planes in low and slow overhead. Driving down Cicero Avenue, I kept wincing as the Southwest wheels skimmed the treetops along the route. They’ve never actually taken out a building, but it’s an unnerving flight path.
The address I’d randomly chosen for its closeness to the airport belonged to a giant cardboard manufacturer. The parking lot was packed, but I found an open space in the middle and walked over to the loading bays.
There wasn’t any sign of a Bagby truck. Maybe Frank had come and gone, maybe Delphina decided the call was a prank and didn’t tell him about it. I walked across the lot to the road and waited twenty minutes. Just as I was deciding my luck was out, Frank turned into the parking lot.
I stood in front of his truck. He leaned on the horn, and then opened the cab door to swear at me.
I walked over. “Hey, Frank.”
“Tori!” He was so startled that his foot slid on the clutch and the truck shuddered. “What the—and what happened to your eye?”
“Vince didn’t tell you?” I said, smiling affably. “He was right there when it happened. You and I have so much catching up to do, and neither of us has much time. I’m going to follow you until you take a break.”
“The lawyer said—”
“Yes, we all know what the lawyer said. Stella violated the order herself this morning, calling to tell me to stay away from your family. Since I’m already hog-tied by the order, it’s hard to know what she’s referring to.”
His sunburnt face turned a richer shade of sienna. “Maybe it was Betty talking to her about you showing up at Frankie’s game. You have to stay away.”
“And I will. She’s not a pleasure to talk to, and nor, at the risk of hurting your feelings, is Betty. Both of them slug first and listen second. I hope Betty doesn’t beat you, but I can give you the number of a domestic—”
A short queue of trucks was trying to get into the lot. They honked loudly. Frank slammed his cab door shut and drove forward. I sprinted to where I’d left the Subaru and wove my way around the lines of parked cars. Frank had to drive all the way into the yard to find a space where he could turn around out of the way of the trucks that were pulling in. I caught up with him easily as he exited onto Lavergne Avenue.
Frank made another pickup at a warehouse a few blocks farther west, saw me in his rearview mirror when he left and pulled into a Wendy’s.
“Make it fast, Tori, I got fifteen minutes, and they monitor every leak we take.”
I climbed into the cab, over his protests—he wanted to shout down at me from his window.
“So your mother thinks I’m doing something to wreck Frankie’s chances?”
Frank’s shoulders slumped. “Nothing in my goddam life ever works out for me. My shot at the show, Frankie’s, whatever it is, it always falls apart.”
“Yes, your shot at the show, that’s something else I wanted to ask you about. The day of your tryout at Wrigley, when Boom-Boom was there and made you so angry you whiffed the curve, Annie was there as well. Why did she come along and why didn’t you tell me?”
His lip curled in disgust. “Are you my fucking parish priest? Am I supposed to confess every detail of my life to you?”
I grinned savagely. “Only the ones relevant to why you involved me in the Guzzo melodrama. Annie had something with her. She lost it, or deliberately hid it, inside Wrigley Field. Was this her diary, for real, and did someone dig it out and put it back in your mother’s house when Stella got out of prison?”
He was bewildered. “I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I mean, the diary, I told you already, Ma says she gave it to someone for safekeeping, so I can’t tell you. Are you saying Annie had it with her at the ballpark?”
“If I knew I wouldn’t be asking you,” I said. “She was holding something about the size of a clutch purse.”
“Yeah, I carry one of those all the time so that tells me a lot.”
“About four by eight inches, say, and maybe an inch thick. I only saw it in an old photo, so I don’t know what it is. It was dark, maybe black or navy, but didn’t seem to have any writing on it.”
“Tori, I had way more important stuff on my mind that day. I didn’t even remember about Annie being there until you told me just now.”
“Why was she there in the first place?” I asked. “I assumed she came to cheer you on.”
“Cheer me on?” he jeered. “You’re thinking of a different family. God, I hope my girls turn out for Frankie when he needs them. And him for them, come to that.”
“Did Annie drive up with you?” I repeated.
“Vince’s old man ordered a limo for the five guys from Bagby’s team who were going to the tryout. I didn’t want Boom-Boom riding with us, everyone would have been all over him.”
I didn’t say anything, out of sympathy, but Frank took it as a criticism. “Okay, I was jealous. Are you happy? I was so fucking jealous of Boom-Boom. He always was so fucking lucky! It was like some old fairy tale Ma told us when we were little, some Irish thing about a boy who got taken up by elves and everywhere he went, the sky opened up and gold fell down. That was your goddam cousin.”
“He got murdered, so not so fucking lucky,” I snapped. “Annie went with Boom-Boom?”
“Yeah, I guess. She was a brat sometimes, you know. She wanted to see the tryouts, or to be with Boom-Boom, I don’t know what. The night before, when Boom-Boom stopped by the house to give me some last-minute advice, she heard us and came in demanding to go along. It was like when she was five years old and wanted to play baseball with me and my friends, Why can’t I, you can’t stop me, Daddy will bring me. Only this time, our father was dead, so I guess she got Boom-Boom to take her.”
“Were they dating?”
“I don’t know! Why does it matter? Maybe she wheedled him into taking her to the park and then charmed him into going to bed. Why do you care?”
“I’m trying to find out what your real reason for coming to see me was. What did you or Stella hope to gain by involving me in your problems—was this some revenge Stella fantasized about all those years in prison—bring the only living member of the Warshawski family back down here so she could humiliate me in public?”
Frank turned on the engine but didn’t put the truck into gear. “Believe me or not, my mother didn’t know I was coming to see you. She had a shit-fit when you showed up the next day. I hadn’t had time to tell her, and afterwards, the fury she was in! It took me back to all those times—she tried to slug me one last time, but she wasn’t strong enough to, anymore.”
“But what did you think I could do? Why involve me at all?”
Frank pounded the steering wheel with his right fist. “The exoneration claim. Scanlon, he’s taking an interest in Frankie’s future. He told me, baseball isn’t like the old days, they look at the family, not just the kid, and if Ma involved the press in this exoneration claim, then Annie’s murder would be on everyone’s minds, and it could hurt Frankie’s chances. I was hoping you could stop Ma, but it’s like so much in my so-called life, nothing works out the way I want it. I call you, Ma goes postal, Scanlon’s annoyed because the press is all over us.”
He covered his face, his voice dropping so low I had to lean over the steering wheel to hear him above the engine. “I—if all this derails Frankie—I don’t know what I’ll do.”
The driver behind us leaned on her horn. Frank saw he’d done the unpardonable—left a big gap in front of him. He drove up to the mike and ordered a double cheeseburger with extra-large fries and a super-sized shake.
“Scanlon told you to stop your mother?” I asked.
“Not like that. He said no one cared about a crime that old anymore, unless she made them care, don’t you see? He came up to me at Saint Eloy’s when I was watching Frankie and said he’d heard through the grapevine what Ma was doing. He was going to get one of his lawyer pals to look after her interests so she wouldn’t feel like we were giving her the brush-off, but if I could talk her into letting it lie it would be better for Frankie. And then, everything got out of control. Like it always does in my life.”
He pulled over to the curb with his order and started eating moodily, shoving a great handful of fries into his mouth.
“What did Scanlon say after all the press brouhaha began?”
“I was sweating bullets. I talked to Vince and asked him what I should do, but he spoke to Scanlon for me, and he told me Scanlon saw I wasn’t to blame; he still is willing to sponsor Frankie.”
I turned sideways in the seat to look at him squarely. “Frank: someone sicced a trio of Insane Dragons on me when I left Scanlon’s office the other night. Do you know anything about that?”
“What the fuck are you trying to say?”
“Bagby or Scanlon or Thelma Kalvin, they were all there when I went up to visit his youth program, and so was Father Cardenal. Did any of them talk to you, tell you that I was bringing too much attention to your family?”
“Crap, Tori.” He set his box of food on top of the dashboard so violently the fries jumped out of the box onto the gearshift. “You cannot go around accusing people of stuff like that. There are so many gangbangers in South Chicago I bet every person you pass on the street has at least one in their family. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Don’t go accusing Scanlon of this: everyone knows your old man couldn’t get along with him, but he’s the person who—”
“I know,” I cut him off. “Believe me, I hear that script every time I cross the border.”
He gaped at me.
“Only making a feeble joke. So many people have told me I don’t know anything about the South Side that it’s starting to seem like you guys think you live in a different country than the rest of the city.”
“We do,” Frank said. “We live in the land of the dead.”
That shut me up for a moment: it was poignant, but also an unexpected image to hear on his lips. I couldn’t let his previous comment rest, though.
“What do you mean, everyone knew Tony couldn’t get along with Scanlon? When I saw Scanlon last week, he passed a comment about my dad—what does the whole neighborhood know that I don’t? Did Rory get Tony shipped off to Englewood?”
“You are like a goddam squirrel trying to get into a birdfeeder, Warshawski. I don’t know who did what to whom, but everyone knows that Tony wouldn’t ride to Boom-Boom’s first game in Scanlon’s buses. Everyone talked about it, back at the time, I mean. Don’t ask me what that was about because I fucking do not know.”
“If Tony didn’t trust Rory Scanlon, then Scanlon was up to something. What was it?”
“Why can’t you grow up? Everyone else learns their parents are human, that they make mistakes. Your father wasn’t a saint. He wasn’t a moral bloodhound, either, who could smell good and evil in people. He was wrong about Scanlon.”
My left eye was starting to throb, fatigue and anger pushing too much blood to my face. I massaged the bruise with my fingertips. What would Scanlon have been up to that Tony didn’t trust? I kept coming back to the sex that swam around this history, Annie with Sol Mandel, the old priest from St. Eloy’s making Frank pull his pants down, no one wanting to rock Scanlon’s boat for fear he’d cut them loose.
I let the atmosphere in the cab calm down for a minute, then went back to the day of the Wrigley Field tryouts.
“Do you remember anything Annie said that day? Anything that might give me a hint about what she was carrying with her? At first I wondered if it was something to do with your baseball career, press clippings or something.”
He curled his lip. “Annie never gave a rat’s ass about my baseball career. So-called. Your ma, music, her college life, that’s all she thought about. Sometimes you or your dad. Anyway, that day she was higher than ten kites—I couldn’t bear to be around her! She had no sympathy for the fact that I’d blown my shot at the big time. No interest. No wonder I blocked it out of my head that she was there.
“I’m doing my best not to burst into tears in front of Warshawski—Boom-Boom, I mean—and Annie keeps saying, ‘No one can touch me now, no one can touch me now.’ It’s a horrible thing to say, knowing what Ma did to her, but I came close to whacking her myself. Only good thing out of it is that I remember that afternoon every time I come close to hitting one of my own kids. Remember where that led with Annie and Ma. Remind myself to act more like my dad, keep it calm.”
“And Boom-Boom? How did he react, to you or your sister?”
“I don’t know! I couldn’t bear to be near him! I didn’t want his fucking sympathy—Chicago’s golden boy, can’t you understand that? He wanted to drive me home, go out for a beer in that damned ’Vette he was hotdogging in at the time. I couldn’t fucking bear it.
“Bagby’s had the car waiting to take all us losers home, but I didn’t want to be with them, either. I snuck off to the L and got myself back to the South Side. Back to the slime where I belonged.”
“Sounds like a day in hell, Frank. Sorry to make you revisit it . . . On a completely different subject, I’d like to play a recording for you. Tell me if you know either of these voices.”
While he ate his way through three thousand calories, I took out my cell phone and downloaded the recording from the Cloud.
“God, who is that scuzzball?” Frank said at the end. “Who’s he trying to threaten?”
“I don’t know. I hoped you would recognize one of the voices.”
“Wish I could help you, Tori, because then maybe you’d let go of that goddam bill your lawyer put through my mailbox.”
I was feeling sorry for Frank, but not sorry enough to say I’d forgive the bill. I jumped down from the cab and walked back to the Subaru.
