Текст книги "Brush Back"

Автор книги: Sara Paretsky

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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

WILD PITCH

Tar was in my nose, my lungs. It sucked me under, I couldn’t move my arms. Someone had been sick in front of me and the smell mixed with the tar was so terrible it made me vomit. I wanted my mother but Stella Guzzo and my aunt Marie appeared.

The tar poured over me and I blacked out. I woke in the modern epoch, into darkness so awful that I thought for a moment I actually was buried in tar. I flung my arms wildly trying to swim to the surface. Hit my hand on metal, heard it clang. Not tar. Tunnel. The smell of sewage and vomit. I’d been sick.

I struggled to sit up. My head knocked into a pipe and the jolt made me throw up again, a trickle of bile that left me panting for water.

Test for concussion: Can you remember the day, the president, the geological epoch? What’s your name? V. I. Warshawski. What’s your occupation? Idiot.

Bernadine Fouchard, she’d been with me. And then—masked men. Sebastian Mesaline. We’d fought, I could still smell the acrid gun smoke through the stench in my nose. Don’t think about what you’ve inhaled, sit up, move, slowly, but move! Phone in pocket, still working, turn on the light.

I’d been in the dark too long, I’d become a mole, couldn’t handle the stabbing shapes, colors. My head ached, my left eye was tearing, but I forced myself to keep blinking, looking, hoping for Bernie.

I was alone except for the rats. They’d gathered where I’d been lying, insolent, unconcerned, eating my vomit. Good thing I’d been sick, they’d have gone for my nose and cheeks first without it. The hard hat I’d borrowed had rolled off. My gun, nearby, I wanted to shoot the rats, but I only had one magazine and I’d already fired twice.

I bent slowly, not wanting to challenge my head, picked up the Smith & Wesson and the hard hat. I must have fallen heavily: the hat had a dent in it. I started to put it on, then looked at the dent. I’d been shot. The hat saved my life. The impact had knocked me out, but the men must have thought I was dead.

Move, V.I. Don’t be feeble, get out of here. I moved up the tunnel, got to the entrance. Locked in, no time for finesse. I shot out the lock, put my shoulder to the door. Damned mops were holding it shut. I backed up, shot at a hinge. The bullet ricocheted, but before I could find a cleverer strategy I heard shouting from the other side.

“What the hell are you doing in there?” Noises, mops scraping back, the door opened. I stood in the shadows, put away my gun when I saw who was on the other side. Five in the morning, game day. The grounds crew was there, getting the field ready for play.

I left through the doors in the outfield wall while the grounds crew were waiting for the cops to pick me up. The crew hadn’t been able to follow my story, or at least they didn’t believe my story—how could someone have been living inside the ballpark without the security detail noticing? They didn’t want to go into the tunnel to see the squalid nest Sebastian had built behind the steel panel, they didn’t have time for this kind of BS. No, the best thing was to have me picked up for trespassing and shooting a weapon inside the park.

I didn’t try to argue, just said I needed to use the washroom. While they stood guard at the entrance they’d unlocked, I picked the lock at the far end and slipped out, back hugging the wall, until I’d rounded a bend in the stadium wall. I went out through the first open aisle door, staggered down the seats and shuffled along the perimeter of the field to the exit. At least it was still so dark that they didn’t see me until I actually opened the door beneath the ivy. I heard them shout, but I hobbled over to Clark without stopping to look.

I didn’t contact Conrad until I was clear of the park, but as soon as I was sure I wasn’t being followed I texted a full report of my night. Terrified, I finished. They have Bernie and I don’t know where they’re taking her. Check Sturlese Cement, check Virejas Tower and Bagby’s truck yard.

Conrad wrote back at once: he’d sent a team into Wrigley as soon as he got my first message—he’d taken an hour off for sleep—but they hadn’t checked the locked doors. And now where was I and what evidence did I have that would allow him to apply for a warrant to any of the three places I’d mentioned?

My phone died as I was dictating a response. Squad cars were passing me, lights flashing, presumably on their way to Wrigley to arrest me. I turned down Racine, my legs quivering, waves of nausea overtaking me. My body wanted to go to bed.

“Permission denied,” I said out loud in my sternest voice. “They have Bernie and you must find her.”

A woman out walking her dog in the early dawn turned to stare, called the dog to heel and scuttled into her building. I sounded as crazy as I smelled and looked.

My legs were two numb trees plodding down the street, untethered from my mind, which floated between Racine Avenue and the tunnel. We’ll get little missy to tell us where she lives. The thug’s words floated back into my memory.

Don’t hold out, Bernie, don’t hold back. I prayed that she had blurted out my address as fast as possible, but what they might be doing to her—I would not think about it. Could not. I couldn’t fix it by taking time for fear. Focus on what you can do, move your damned legs.

The building floated up in front of me, no one casing the front, good or not good? How could I tell? No one in the back, don’t be holding out on them, Bernie.

My front door didn’t show any signs of forcible entry. Maybe I should have checked the back as well, but the thought of going down all those stairs and coming up to the kitchen entrance was more than I could bear.

Once again I stripped before going inside, once again left a heap of foul-smelling clothes outside my door, took just enough time in the bathroom to scrub sewage and asbestos from my hair and skin. Hurry, hurry. Two pairs of jeans destroyed, I had one left, not quite clean, but it would do. I’d sacrificed both pairs of running shoes, time to move on to my work boots. I plugged my phone into the charger. Reloaded the clip for my gun, stuck two spares in my fanny pack. While the coffee machine heated, I went downstairs to rouse my neighbor.

Once Mr. Contreras grasped the crisis, he stopped fussing over my own corpse-like appearance. He sent me out back with the dogs while he dressed, and was huffing up the stairs to my place in pretty quick order. I typed up some talking points for him, which he studied and practiced a few times.

When Mr. Contreras thought he was ready, I dialed Vincent Bagby: I’d captured his number when he’d called yesterday morning to ask me to dinner. Bagby answered his cell phone on the fourth ring.

“You missed me so much you had to get me out of bed, Warshawski?” My ID showed up on his screen as well.

“This ain’t Warshawski,” Mr. Contreras said. “I’m her neighbor and a good friend. Vic’s been in an accident, they ain’t sure she’ll make it.”

“Where is she?” Bagby demanded. “Was she shot?”

I grimaced: Lucky guess or did he know?

“Cops don’t want nobody knowing where she is, case they try to finish her off. But she talked to me before they put her under. Said you was looking for some special papers Annie Guzzo hid underneath Wrigley Field all those years back. I’ll give ’em to you once I see the girl Bernie is safe.”

“I don’t know what papers you’re talking about, or who the girl Bernie is.”

He knows, I quickly wrote. He gave us a ride after we were attacked by the Dragons.

“You got Alzheimer’s already at your age?” Mr. Contreras said. “You forgot you give her a ride when her and Vic was beat up last week? I see Bernie walk into her pa’s arms and I give you the papers.”

“Was that her name? I didn’t know, and I don’t know about the papers. Don’t play games with me, old man; I’m not even sure I believe Vic was hurt last night.”

“Maybe you know what I’m talking about, maybe you don’t. You tell your friend Rory Scanlon what I said, maybe he’ll take it more serious. You know the Coast Guard station out by Calumet Park? You, or him, or the Sturlese boys, they bring Bernadine Fouchard out there in two hours and I’ll get them the papers they’re so hot after.”

“How come you have Warshawski’s phone?” Bagby demanded.

“She gave it to me.”

I made the kill sign and Mr. Contreras hung up.

“Sure hope this works, doll.”

“Sure hope it does, too,” I agreed grimly.

I went into my subscription databases and found a cell phone number for Brian Sturlese, but not for Rory Scanlon or Nabiyev. Mr. Contreras repeated the conversation with Brian Sturlese.

Sturlese was surlier than Bagby, and not as smooth: he paused too long between his lines. “I don’t believe you. Warshawski went on the warpath because she said there never was a diary.”

“Yeah, what she said, and what she knew, they’re two different things,” Mr. Contreras growled. “I’m giving you a chance, but I’m gonna let the cops take over if you don’t show up with Bernie. And if she has so much as a scratch on her, I got the whole machinists’ local gonna make you sorry you ever left your ma’s womb.”

“Now what?” the old man fretted when he’d hung up.

“Now we need to get you out of here in case they think they can break in and beat you up.”

He didn’t like it: he was more than a match for a cement mixer half his age and twice his bulk, he knew tricks that the Sturlese boys never heard of. I let him rattle on, bravado, while we went back down to his place to pack an overnight bag. I also took a large bottle of Coke from his fridge. I don’t normally like sugary drinks, but the Coke would settle my stomach and the sugar might give me an illusion of energy.

Before we left the building, I gathered up copies of Mr. Villard’s Wrigley Field photos, then went to check on Jake. He was deeply asleep, his wide, humorous mouth slack. I wanted to get into bed with him, I wanted to move into the safe world of music and walk away from kidnappers, crimes, fraud, assault, but I went to the kitchen to change the note I’d left him:

Bernie’s been kidnapped. I don’t know when or how I’ll be back and won’t be easily reached, but I’ll try to get you a message before the end of the day. Conrad Rawlings will know where I am if you get worried. I love you.

I wanted to ask him to play the CD of my mother’s singing at my funeral, but he would know to do that. I jotted down Conrad’s cell phone and lumbered back down to collect my neighbor. The Subaru had become a liability; too many of the wrong people knew my Mustang was a total loss and it would have been easy to spot Luke’s car in the parking lot by my office. My neighbor and I took a cab to the nearest rental place, where he got us a beige Taurus, one of a hundred thousand on the roads at any given moment. We got them to supply an in-car charger for my phone—my own car charger had vanished with the Mustang’s wheels last week.

We stopped at the apartment to pick up the dogs and headed south. We were passing the Jackson Park boat harbor when my cell phone rang. Caller ID blocked. I pulled over to the curb and handed the phone to Mr. Contreras.

“How do we know you’re telling the truth?” the caller demanded without preamble. “We need to see a sample before we do a deal.”

Want me to post it on Facebook? I quickly wrote. My neighbor nodded and repeated the question.

“Salvatore Contreras, right?” the caller said. “You’re Warshawski’s neighbor, right? You get a sample up in ten minutes.”

Mr. Contreras looked at me in alarm. I jotted a couple of suggestions.

“Screw that,” my neighbor sputtered. “I gotta dig up the paper and get me to a copy shop to scan it and everything. It’ll take me pretty darn near all day.”

The caller said he’d have two hours and cut Mr. Contreras off mid-protest.

I texted Conrad, told him I was pretty sure the Sturlese brothers were the ones who’d been in the tunnel last night. He wrote back,

The SA doesn’t think your hunches are enough to base a warrant on. Get me something concrete.

Put a trace on my cell, I wrote, they’re calling me with threats.

Where are you right now??

South Shore but I’m on the move.

RIGGING THE GAME

The Previns lived in one of South Shore’s elegant old condos on Sixty-seventh Street, right on the corner. We found a space on the street without any trouble—the hard part was keeping the dogs in the car: they smelled the lake and were desperate for exercise.

Ira and Eunice owned the penthouse, with Joel on the sixth floor. At least he’d been able to put eleven stories between himself and his parents.

It was seven in the morning now, but I didn’t imagine Joel was an early riser. In fact, I had to lean on the buzzer to his apartment for three minutes before I roused him.

“V. I. Warshawski,” I said into the security phone. “We have to talk.”

“Go to hell.” He hung up.

Other residents were walking their dogs or leaving for work; we had a very short wait before someone came out and obligingly held the door for us. Elderly man, white woman, we might not live in the building but we must be harmless.

I put a finger on Joel’s front doorbell and held it down until he opened the door, his face the color and texture of putty. He was wearing silk pajama bottoms and a T-shirt.

“I’m calling the cops. You can’t harass me in my own home.”

“While we wait for the police, I need some answers.” I pushed past him into his apartment, Mr. Contreras on my heels.

The space was unexpectedly clean and tidy, its severe white walls hung with what looked like important art. An antique cabinet clock chimed the quarter hour as we came in. A grand piano stood in a corner.

I pulled the stool out and sat down. “You’ll never guess where I was between one and four this morning.”

Joel swayed on his bare feet. “I’ve always hated playing games with the wiseasses of the planet, and I’m not going to play yours.”

I pulled a photograph from my bag, Annie at the mouth of the tunnel, and held it out. “I spent a chunk of time right inside this tunnel.”

Joel’s skin changed from putty to ash. “Where did you get this?”

“From a man who used to work with the Cubs. Annie hid something in this tunnel, but she’d been so clever, she had to brag about it to someone. Maybe she told Boom-Boom, but I’m betting not. I’m betting she chose you, the person in the office who was in love with her, the one who could appreciate her cleverness. When did you go to Wrigley to take the pages out of the album? Before or after she was killed?”

Joel grabbed the edge of the piano. His forehead was beaded with sweat. He looked around, from me to Mr. Contreras, from me to the door. He couldn’t flee, not in his pajamas and no shoes.

“Before,” I said with certainty. “Annie was crowing at the end of that day in the park, ‘No one can touch me now, no one can touch me now.’ She told you where she’d stashed the book, and you were itching with curiosity. You had to know what she’d hidden at the ballpark.”

Joel didn’t say anything, but his shoulders slumped farther.

“Must have taken a certain amount of courage to go into that tunnel, broad daylight,” I said.

“Don’t patronize me,” he panted. “I’m not the man Ira was, I’m afraid of my own shadow, you can’t believe I could actually go to Wrigley Field and sneak into a tunnel the way you did, or—or Annie.”

Mr. Contreras cleared his throat, but I shook my head at him: waiting was the only useful strategy here. I tried not to listen to the ticking of the clock. Tick, Bernie, tock, grievous bodily—no.

“All right, I was in love with her,” Joel burst out. “Who wouldn’t be, such a beautiful bright girl. And then I heard she was hanging around with Warshawski. I knew I didn’t have a prayer. They laughed at me, Spike and his buddies, telling me she’d been seen with him. ‘Why would she care about an overweight nerd like you? And one who usually likes boys better than girls, anyway.’ Spike. That was his line, but all the others copied him.”

His lips were flecked with white and his breath stank.

“Get him a glass of water,” I said to Mr. Contreras, keeping my eyes on Joel.

“I don’t want water. Get me the hair of the dog. You’ll see it easily enough,” Joel said.

“So you went up to Wrigley,” I prodded.

“Yes, I went up there, she’d told me where she’d put it, inside some loose asbestos tape around one of the pipes, and I found it.”

“What was it?” I asked sharply.

“A photo album that she’d stored papers in. I couldn’t make sense of them: canceled checks, an accounting statement for the Scanlon Agency, a statement for the law firm and also one for Scanlon’s youth club—his obnoxious Say, Yes! program that everyone who worked at Mandel & McClelland had to donate to.”

“What did you do with the documents?” I asked.

“I was flipping through the pages, so bewildered I didn’t leave the damned tunnel, and then I heard somebody coming in, so I taped the book back up against the pipe, only I was so rattled all the pages fell out onto the muddy floor. Ira or Spike or Sol Mandel, any of them could tell you that’s my normative state.”

“Never mind that. Did you take them with you?”

“I was trying to pick them up when this maintenance man came in, wanting to know what the fuck I was doing in there. I said I got lost looking for the men’s room and he marched me out. I only managed to save part of a bank statement. When I got home, I saw another page had stuck to it—someone had torn it in two and taped it back together and the tape stuck to the bank statement.”

He licked his dry lips. “Where’s the old man with my drink?”

Mr. Contreras came out with a glass of water. “You don’t need alcohol to get you through the day, young man. You drink this and start pulling yourself together.”

Joel knocked Mr. Contreras’s hand away. “What, are you another goddam friend of Ira and Eunice’s sent to make me take the pledge?”

Joel left the room. I got up to follow him but collapsed as a wave of dizziness swept through me. I half fell onto the piano. By the time I’d steadied myself, Joel had returned with a half gallon of Grey Goose and a glass.

“The papers,” I said sharply. “What about the torn-up note?”

“It said—never mind, I have it someplace.”

He put the vodka and glass on a side table and went into another room, where we heard him opening drawers and rustling through papers. He came back with a tattered, yellowed page. At the top, someone had written in a tidy hand: FYI, Law and Order Man. The text was also handwritten, by a different person:

Thanks for the $7500 to our Widows & Orphans Fund. You know by now that your boys have been released—the SA agrees that youthful high spirits aren’t grounds for arrest. Our overzealous officer will be moving to the Seventh, where you can count on the unit’s hostility to snitches to keep him from bothering you again.

“Whose writing is this?” My voice came out in a croak: I was sure I knew who the overzealous officer had been.

“Don’t know. Someone in the police, I guess. I asked Annie and she said some of the boys from Say, Yes! had been picked up on assault or extortion. She said she was working late and overheard Scanlon talking to Sol Mandel about how to get the charges dropped. She wasn’t sure what the boys had done, but she guessed it had to do with ‘persuading’ local businesses to buy their insurance from Scanlon.”

“When did you talk to her about this?” I demanded.

“The night she died.” He poured vodka into the glass, but stared at it, not drinking, seeing a past that made him twist his mouth into a grimace of self-loathing.

“I tried figuring out what was so important about the things she’d hidden up at Wrigley. All I had was that one page of a bank statement, but it was from Continental Illinois, not Ferrite, where Mandel and Scanlon’s insurance agency and all of us banked—neighborhood solidarity, you know. It showed the balance from Say, Yes! but it was before the Internet, back when you still got your canceled checks sent to you in the mail. The page I found showed the closing balance, which was big for such a small neighborhood organization, I think it was ninety-three thousand.”

“You didn’t keep it?” I asked.

“No, I left it at Annie’s.”

“What? The night she died?”

He swallowed half the vodka in the glass, winced as the alcohol jolted his body.

“Yes, the night she died,” he mumbled. “I tried to figure out what the deal was with the Say, Yes! bank statement, why she thought it was worth hanging on to, and I thought it had to do with the fact that Scanlon kept the funds downtown, in the biggest bank in the state. I started working late—Ira was so pleased, he thought I was finding a vocation for the law. He didn’t know all I had was a vocation for Annie. One night, Scanlon came over to see Mandel. I don’t know if I’m such a negligible part of the landscape he couldn’t see me, but he told Mandel they had the fund up to where they could flex some serious muscle. ‘Get your boy Hurlihey ready for the front line, Sol,’ Scanlon said. ‘I think we’re going to get us a friend in Springfield.’”

“So they were using the Say, Yes! foundation funds to bankroll elections, or at least Hurlihey’s election?” I asked.

Joel shrugged. “Maybe, I suppose.”

“Why didn’t you turn them in?” Mr. Contreras asked. “They sound like a room full of crooks!”

“Turn them in to who? Rory and Sol’s cronies?” Joel jeered. “They were players, the SA was a player, they probably all played together. Anyway, what evidence did I have? A piece of a bank statement and an ambiguous conversation. I went to Annie, instead.”

Mr. Contreras was watching the clock in agony. He tugged on my arm, but I needed to get as much as I could from Joel if we were going to construct any kind of file that would persuade the thugs to release Bernie.

“I knew what nights her mother played bingo over at Saint Eloy’s. I waited across the street until Stella had taken off, then I went to the door. Stella had beaten her: Annie’s lip was bloody and swollen, she had a black eye and a cut on her forehead.

“I was so upset at seeing her all messed up that I forgot at first why I’d come. She laughed off her injuries, she wouldn’t let me take her to the hospital: she said she was going to be rid of all of us soon. I put my arms around her, I said something stupid, like, you don’t want to be rid of me, I’m the one who understands you, I helped you with your music composition that got you into Bryn Mawr. I even tried to kiss her. She put my face aside. She tried to cover up what she was feeling, but I could see the disgust in her face.” He rubbed his cheek, the spot where he could still feel her hand on him.

“‘You’re sweet, Joel, and I appreciate your help, but I don’t like you, not like that.’” He raised his voice to a savage falsetto in imitation. “No one ever ‘liked me like that,’” he added bitterly, in his own voice.

“I asked her if it was the jock—Warshawski—your cousin. ‘His career will be over by the time you’re thirty, he’ll get fat, too, believe me,’ I told her, but she said she wasn’t interested in love, not with any of us. ‘I’ve got a future of my own, my own life, not slaving for some man, whether he’s a lawyer or a hockey star or just a mill hand like my dad,’ she said.

“I showed her the Continental bank statement page, and the torn-up letter. She was startled, that was one thing—I completely took her off guard. She wanted to know where I’d got them. I said we could make a team, we could take Sol and Scanlon down, I’d start my own law firm, don’t ask me to remember every crazy thing I said, ‘but I need your help,’ I told her. ‘I need to know where they’re getting the money that they’re putting into the foundation account. Is it coming out of client accounts, or is Scanlon shaking people down? Once I know that, we can take them down—I’ll go to the federal prosecutor, we won’t be dependent on some corrupt state’s attorney.’”

He finished what was left in the glass and poured another tumbler full. “Here’s the part that will make you split your side laughing: Annie said she didn’t want to take Mandel down. ‘I won’t tell you what I know, I don’t want you hurting him. He’s my meal ticket, Joel. I didn’t get all those scholarships I bragged about. I got some, but not enough to go east, he’s paying me to go, I told him I have proof in a place so secret no one will ever find it, and he’s giving me the money to get me to Bryn Mawr. If you go snooping around, he’ll think I told on him. You’ll cost me my future.’

“‘What about this?’ I asked her, waving the letter. ‘That’s not from Mandel.’ And she said no, she was over at your house, playing on Mrs. Warshawski’s piano, and she saw your dad take it out of the mail and read it. He looked upset, sick, I think Annie called it, then he tore it in half and threw it out. She picked it out of the trash and took it away because she realized Scanlon had written the line at the top, that ‘FYI, Law and Order Man.’”

He looked at his feet and mumbled, “I hate to say it about her, but I think she thought she could use it to get more money.”

So that was why Tony had been sent to cop hell, all those nights on patrol with no one at the station backing him up. Beneath my fatigue and woozy concussed brain I could feel anger starting to burn, a fury with Rory Scanlon. The stress of that assignment, on top of my mother’s death, had easily taken a decade, maybe more, from my father’s life. That’s why he wouldn’t ride the buses Scanlon hired to take the neighborhood to Boom-Boom’s debut. It’s why Scanlon made that snide remark to me about another Warshawski upholding law and order for the neighborhood.

The clock chimed the three-quarter hour.

“Doll,” Mr. Contreras was frantic. “We gotta get going.”

He was right. I would sort out Scanlon when we had Bernie safe. I got up.

“You didn’t kill Annie, did you?” I asked Joel. “That isn’t why you defended Stella, is it?”

Joel gave a mirthless laugh. “I don’t have that kind of—whatever it is. Initiative? Vanity? Annie didn’t want me, but it didn’t stop my feelings for her. Maybe it would have, if she’d lived. I dropped the bank statement, but I held on to the letter and walked out with it. I walked all the way back to this place. I forgot I’d driven down there. I am a useless fuckup from the beginning of the story to the end. I had to take the bus back down to pick up my car, and when I got there, Stella was walking up the street, coming home from the bingo. I ducked down and fell over onto the curb, but she didn’t see me.

“Then, the next day, I learned Annie had died. And I told myself, all the hateful things she’d said, she hadn’t meant them, she said them because she had a brain injury from Stella beating her.”

I stayed long enough to ask about the bank statement. “Why didn’t Stella say something about it during the trial?”

He shook his head. “She didn’t know anything about it. I asked her, I asked her what she found in Annie’s room, or in the living room, anything that was connected to the law firm, but she didn’t seem to know what I was talking about.”

“Why did you represent Stella? You’d seen Annie’s injuries, you must have known she was guilty.”

Joel shot me a resentful look. “Mandel saw my car outside the Guzzo house. He said they needed someone to represent Stella, and either I would do it, or he’d tell the state’s attorney that I’d been there and had a chance to kill Annie.”

The clock hands seemed to swoop and bend. “Joel.” My voice was so gentle he had to lean his stinking mouth close to hear me. “Joel, don’t you see. Mandel only knew you’d been there because he was there himself.”