Deadly Blessings

by Julie Hyzy

  “I told you to get the research done so that Gonzales here has something to write about. You told me you wanted an extra week. I never agreed. How much you got, Gonzales?”

  David didn’t move from his position of feigned relaxation. “Not enough. I’ve got the stuff that Alex did. All the background. Very thorough, as always, Alex.” He gave me an abbreviated nod. “But a lot has happened on the story since it switched hands. From that point on I got nada.”

  Bass turned to Fenton. “What have you been doing?”

  “You know, she could have given me a little help here. It’s not like she’s working on anything real important or anything. I asked her. She won’t do anything for me.”

  Oooh. A tantrum. This might turn out to be a fun meeting after all.

  Bass let the question of my involvement slide, instead shaking a finger dangerously close to the Nephew’s nose. For a short fellow, Bass had some major cojones. “You are one lucky punk. I got a call this morning from Hank. Just found out we’ve got political specials we need to run.” He addressed his spiel to the rest of us. “Elections are coming up and some of the small, local races are garnering interest. Hank’s got Gabriela set up to do interviews for the next airing.”

  David sat up. He loved political stuff. Really excelled at it.

  As though anticipating the question, Bass raised a hand. “No, not like that. These are going to be all pabulum. Pre-set questions provided by the candidates’ headquarters. Sincere, well-crafted answers to help educate the voting public.” He rolled his eyes. “We’re just the vehicle.”

  David grimaced and reclined again as Fenton shot me an expression of one-upmanship. “I still think that since Alex isn’t doing anything important she ought to pitch in on mine.”

  “What do you say, Alex? You want to show Fenton the ropes on this one?”

  The beauty of Bass’s remark was not lost on me. With a weeklong delay due to the candidate spots, it was going to take some real clever angle to get people engaged in Milla’s story again. Dan’s station had done a small introductory teaser on it, touting it as an “ongoing investigation.” Which meant that they either had some big revelation in the works, or they were scrambling to come up with one.

  Bass wanted help. Badly. I could tell from the politely toned request. But I wasn’t about to fold.

  William had been very quiet. He had all my information-to-date on the hair care story, and as yet, I hadn’t been assigned anything new. I often juggled multiple stories at once. As a matter of fact, I’d grown accustomed to the pressure, and when I had only one story to focus on, I tended to get bored. Which led me to my request.

  “Actually,” I said, “I have another story I’m working on. Entirely new.”

  “What is it?” Bass asked.

  William shifted in his seat, in a way that made me think I might have piqued his interest. Problem was, I didn’t want Fenton to know anything about my private investigation into Milla’s death. Or about the alleged prostitution ring Sophie told me about.

  So, I hedged. “I’m going to ask you to give me a little leeway here, Bass. Trust me on this one.” I had nothing to back my claim, other than a gut-level feel that I’d scratched at the surface of something big. “It’s too early to get into it all. There are lots of variables and I need time to investigate before the story comes clear. This extra week to finish off the hair care story is going to make all the difference for me.”

  He’d acquiesce. I could sense it.

  “Nope.”

  My mouth dropped open. “What?”

  Bass shook his head. “Not good enough. Fenton needs your help on the Milla Voight story. This is the one we’ve been waiting for.”

  Though I kept my eyes on Bass, I could see, in periphery, Fenton’s gloat. I wanted to tell him that he could kiss my ass before I’d jump in to help pull this off. “No way,” I said. “You took me off that one.”

  “Yeah, well I’ve got another story for you in mind if you’re so set on working a different one. You know that homeless story we’ve been batting around for a while … ?”

  He let the sentence hang, but the threat was there. The homeless story. The story that he pulled out of mothballs to hold over our heads every time he needed something done. Nobody wanted the homeless story. It was one of those that could be done any time, fit in any place, but involved traveling down to the depths of Lower Wacker Drive to interview recalcitrant, not to mention smelly, people who would prefer to spit and throw things at you than to answer your questions.

  Not to be baited into an argument, though one was gathering like a storm in my brain, I deflected the tangent of the conversation. “I’ll tell you what. Give me the leeway I’m asking for on this new one, and I’ll make it work. Up Close Issues will be eating their hearts out. But I’m going to need time.”

  Maybe it was my imagination, but I believed Bass maintained a grudging respect for me. I watched indecision work its way through his face, and I sensed his reluctant trust. “Okay,” he said at last.

  I let out the breath I’d been holding and tried not to laugh when Fenton jumped out of his chair to start whining.

  Bass snapped at him, effectively shutting him up with a rebuke. “Cut it out. You do your job, let Alex do hers.” He turned to me then, “But you better come up with something good. Otherwise, I will assign you that homeless story.”

  William cleared his throat. “One thing you might want to consider,” he said. Focusing his attention directly toward Bass, he gave me a nice profile to watch as he talked. The sheer difference in size between the two men was staggering. William was tall, trim—a man who kept himself in great physical condition. Bass was short, pale and though not overweight, he enjoyed the life of middle-class sedentary hedonism, and had just enough flab to prove it.

  “What’s that?”

  William gave a nonchalant shrug. “Homeless stories tend to be the black hole of ratings. We did a couple of them at the paper and nearly sank the ship both times.” His eyes flicked my direction for a split-second before he continued. “I know we’re hungry for ratings here. Thought that might help.”

  “Yes, well, thank you,” Bass said, but I’d bet he was gritting his teeth as he spoke. William had effectively taken the wind out of Bass’s sails of threat. Politely too. I caught William’s glance and smiled. He raised his eyebrows in a gesture of innocence and went back to studying the files on his lap.

  * * * * *

  I visited Sophie again at her apartment right after our staff meeting adjourned. For the first time this season, the air held a bit of a chill. Navigating the narrow gangway that separated one tall three-flat from its neighbor, I was blasted with a twisting breeze that swirled my hair around my head and made crispy brown whirlpools out of the fallen leaves that crunched when I stepped on them.

  Up above, beyond the top of the bricked walls that made up the two structures beside me, I stared at the blue in my narrow view of the sky. Days like this made it hard to believe that such beauty and such sorrow can exist on the same planet. Matthew’s wake was scheduled for the next evening, Tuesday. I’d make it a point to attend.

  Sophie had told me over the phone that she was afraid she didn’t have the funds to give Matthew a proper burial, but that Father Bruno had made arrangements on her behalf with a mortician friend. Except for the relatively minor price of the grave, and the marker, if she chose to purchase one, Matthew’s funeral would cost her nothing.

  We sat at the kitchen table again, with two steaming cups of coffee sitting between us. Behind Sophie, a large, double-hung window offered a view of the next-door brick wall.

  “Her name is Lisa Knowles,” Sophie said in a halting way, writing the name down for me in curlicued foreign script. “But is maybe not her real name. A man call her Vicky one time and she answer. I pretend not to listen. She no know I hear that.”

  Her admission the night before had thrown me off-kilter, and I had to fight off a vague sense of disillusionment. She told me tha
t most of the young women who came to help her—the women I’d met the night before—were her colleagues. Not all of them. But most. And several worked at the north side hair salon as well.

  My best shot at helping her, and at making Bass sit up and take notice, was to withhold judgment. Who was I to decide other peoples’ life choices? Still, the idea of that kind of intimacy with strangers for money made me cringe.

  Sophie’s tentative English was comprehensible, but slow. As she spoke, I could feel her weigh every word, analyze her syntax, and be more concerned about how she phrased things than about what she was saying. I urged her to switch to her native language and I pulled out my small tape recorder. If worse came to worse, I had a whole family of folks I could rely on for translation.

  Sophie’s odyssey had begun two years earlier, when she had come to the United States under Father Bruno’s wing. When he interviewed her, she said, he’d been happy and proud to find out that she had goals and aspirations.

  “Matthew,” she said with a sucking breath that threatened to be let out in a sob, “came to protect me. My parents were afraid to let me come to a new country on my own. We hoped to bring our parents here, someday too. He wanted them to have a good life.” She paused again as tears moved down her pinkened cheeks. “But this is the life that killed him.”

  “You can’t think like that, Sophie. Dangers are everywhere. It isn’t your fault.”

  Her lips tight, she simply shook her head.

  “Do you know what he was doing in the neighborhood where he was found?” I asked.

  “They killed him there.”

  “I mean,” I said, “do you know why he went there? Did he have some business? Friends who live in the area?”

  I watched her struggle for control. “Matthew didn’t go there,” she said at last. “Someone took him there. They were afraid that he was going to go to the police. They had him killed.”

  Afraid that Sophie had lost her grip on reality, I said, in as gentle a voice as possible, “You realize all the evidence at the scene suggests a robbery gone bad.” I’d squeezed in a call to Maria to see what she could come up with. The fact that Matthew had been found in a neighborhood known notoriously for its high-crime and that he had nothing left on his body of value, made it likely Matthew was simply a random victim. The only way they’d been able to discover his identity had been my alert to Maria, earlier. She caught the connection and put two and two together.

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I’m trying to,” I said.

  Sophie’s frustration seemed less aimed at me and more toward an unseen entity near the ceiling. “You remember the girl who was murdered? Milla Voight? Milla worked at the salon, but she would not prostitute herself. She refused, despite a great deal of pressure.” I watched more heavy tears gather, trembling in Sophie’s eyes. “She was going to be fired soon. Miss Knowles was very angry with her.

  “But then Milla found she was pregnant. And only after that did she learn that her beloved Carlos was a priest. A priest! What would Father Bruno say to that?” Sophie hugged her arms around herself and gave a shudder. “Even when she found out, I think she would have kept it quiet, except then she heard he had slept with many of the girls. And paid for it.” She gave me a meaningful look. “He knew what we were. Just as he knew Milla was really, just a girl in love. And he used that. He used her. He was part of Miss Knowles organization.”

  Sophie’s face wrinkled up again.

  “She was never going to get an abortion. I knew that. She would never go through with something like that. She only went there to confront Carlos. I think he would have liked her to get rid of the baby, if you want to know the truth. But he was there, demonstrating, with other clergy, and he had to make a show of stopping her.”

  The story hurt for Sophie to tell, as was obvious from her constant shifting and from the way she bit her nails after nearly every sentence. I wanted to hold her hands down on the table, to keep the poor fingers from losing their nails entirely, but I held tight to my mug and sipped my coffee instead.

  “She discovered later that he had planned all along to lure her into prostitution. I can’t tell you how much that tore her apart. I swear she lost her mind. She’d given him her heart. A woman does not do that lightly.”

  “No,” I agreed, “she doesn’t.”

  “She threatened him, then. She should never have done that. She told him she was going to go to the authorities. To let everyone know what kind of a priest he really was. She was so hurt, herself, she wanted to hurt him.”

  “But that would have exposed all of you.”

  Sophie shook her head. “Milla only wanted to frighten him. She wanted to make him understand the kind of fear she was feeling.”

  “But then she was killed?”

  “Yes,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Matthew disapproved of my involvement. Even though it put food on our table and paid our rent while we tried to make a life here. He believed someone killed Milla before she could reveal the truth about Miss Knowles’ organization. He wanted to find proof and show me so that I would leave.”

  “But you didn’t believe him?”

  “No, of course not. I didn’t want to believe that at all. Miss Knowles and Rodero protect us. They take care of us. They don’t want us hurt.” Her words were coming out fast. She stopped for a moment, shaking her head. “Or, I didn’t think so. I felt safe. And I didn’t want to disappoint Father Bruno. If we left, what would he think?”

  “How did Father Bruno react?”

  “To Milla’s murder? He was saddened. Deeply saddened. He takes care of us like we were his children. He found out about the pregnancy after she died, and he grieved for all the lives that were lost or were broken in this tragedy. He did not know about the prostitution. He only knew that Carlos was the baby’s father. Still, he felt responsible. After all, Carlos was his protégé.”

  I made an unladylike sound.

  Sophie continued, “Milla’s was the most touching funeral I have ever been to. And he is angry at Carlos for leaving the United States. But his hands are tied.”

  I gauged her reaction as I asked, “What’s the story on that fellow, Emil? From the rectory.”

  “Why?”

  “You froze up the minute he walked in. And he either had a good drunk on him, or he’s under some major league medication. Something’s wrong there.”

  Sophie’s gaze dropped to the mug in front of her. It was still full to the brim, untouched. “He works with Miss Knowles to make arrangements. He was my … date … once.”

  I resisted the overwhelming urge to exclaim disgust. “And you’re telling me that Father Bruno isn’t aware of all this going on under his nose?”

  Sophie’s eyes were wide. “I will tell you this. Miss Knowles has made it clear. Very clear. If any of us ever say anything to Father Bruno, she will make sure we are sorry. He brings many girls to her from Poland. She knows that he will stop if he ever finds out the truth.”

  “She’s threatened you?”

  Again, another shrug. “She has shown her displeasure with some of the girls.”

  “How?”

  Sophie shook her head. “We just know better.”

  The coffee had been strong, and hot, exactly the way I like it. I’d sipped as we spoke and had made it about halfway down the mug. Sophie spied the emptiness and jumped up to get the pot for a refill. It gave her something to do and I didn’t mind the extra buzz from the caffeine. I could use it.

  When Sophie returned to the table, I saw that she brought my card along with her. Fingering it, she bit her lip in concentration. I felt an unexpected pang at the look on her face. I remembered how much she and Matthew had resembled each other. And now he was gone.

  Sophie kept her eyes on the card as she spoke. “I know you aren’t the kind of investigator who goes after criminals. I understand that. But I need to find out who killed my Matthew. And I’m not able to go to the police. Not with my …” She took a deep b
reath, then looked up. “… my occupation. But I know you have ways of finding things out. Will you find out who killed Matthew? Please?”

  The request shocked me. But my reaction shocked me even more. Pure temptation; I wanted to do it. “I work for television,” I said, cautioning her. It was only fair to let her know the risks. “If I do look into this, you understand that a lot may come out? And there’s no guarantee that I can do anything.”

  She nodded slowly, once. Then compressed her lips. “If I tell the police, they will only take me and use me to uncover the other girls. Then what? Miss Knowles will disappear and start all over again. Milla is dead. Matthew is dead. I can’t let this happen any more. I want Miss Knowles and Rodero to be uncovered. They are the guilty ones here. And …”

  I looked at her. “And … ?”

  “And now, I am very afraid. Will I be next?”

  Chapter Eleven

  I nearly turned the car around. Twice.

  What the hell was I getting myself into?

  Considerably west of LaGrange Road, I was far enough south to have had cornfields as my companions for the past several miles. A developer’s sign on my right told me it was just ten minutes further to the Noble Ridge subdivision, featuring custom-built homes and Chicago water.

  Houses out this way were bigger than their urban counterparts—sprawling, mansion-like structures, so far apart that their owners probably took the car to visit the next-door neighbors. Some of these homes, with turrets, three chimneys, and walk-out basements were so magnificent that if I didn’t know better, I’d have thought they were small hotels. I thought about my little house with its tiny bedrooms and single bath. What did these people do for a living anyway?

  Gravel kicked up to ping under my car as I pulled over to the side of the road. There were no other cars in any direction. Just miles and miles of brand-new homes dotting the expansive land. It was quiet. So quiet that all I could hear was the steady rumble of my car engine and the wind making soulful sounds as it plucked leaves from the outstretched arms of nearby trees to dance across my windshield.