I was unexpectedly wracked again by sobs, so violent that they banged me against the steering wheel. I tried not to howl out loud, the last vestige of reason warning me not to attract attention.
43
DEATH OF NOT SUCH A GOOD GUY
I FINALLY RETURNED TO MORRELL’S PLACE, TOO WORN BY my emotional storm to do anything but sleep. When I woke again, it was after six. I went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea and found that Max had slid a note through the back door on his way home.
Karen Lennon was looking for you this afternoon. She says your client, Miss Claudia, is slipping out of this life but has asked for you off and on all day. Captain Mallory called on Lotty at her clinic this afternoon. He needs to see you urgently but wouldn’t tell Lotty why. I got the news that you’re safe to Mr. Contreras and Lotty, but felt I shouldn’t let them know where you are.
Max
I drank tea, slowly. I felt like someone convalescing from a devastating illness, that if I moved too quickly the fever would return and carry me away for good.
Bobby wanted to see me. He had gone to the clinic in person, hadn’t sent a minion. He knows Lotty, knows that the sight of a police badge stirs such terrible memories in her that even the best cop in the world receives a hostile reception, but, even so, for a routine inquiry he would have sent Terry Finchley. So he needed me badly and he needed me privately.
But Miss Claudia was slipping out of this life. She might have died while I was weeping in Millennium Park. I finished the tea and carefully washed the mug. Morrell would be quite cross if he came home from Afghanistan to find it dirty in his sink.
I looked wistfully at the phone. The trouble with the Age of Fear is that you don’t know who is listening in on your conversations. You don’t know if you can talk safely or not. Probably I could talk to Karen Lennon without anyone else catching the call, but the possibility that I’d jeopardize my safe house meant I couldn’t work on probabilities.
It was too late in the day to expect to find Karen at Lionsgate Manor. I drove down to Howard Street, the honky-tonk dividing line between Chicago’s Mexican-Pakistani-Russian north border and the very much more staid Evanston, and found a pay phone at the El stop there. Even more amazing, the phone’s cord and handset were both attached, and the phone asked me to deposit a dollar when I listened to it. I put my battery in my cellphone just long enough to look up Karen Lennon’s contact information, then called her cell from the pay phone.
“Vic, thank goodness! I’ve been trying to reach you since last night. I finally called Max this morning, and he told me you’re having to stay underground, so thank you for coming up for air and getting back to me. I’m sorry about your cousin, but Miss Claudia’s been asking for you. I’ve been afraid she’d pass while you were hiding.”
“If I go to Lionsgate Manor now, will I be able to see her?”
“If I’m with you, it should be okay. I’m home, but I can be there in twenty-five minutes. I’ll meet you at the main entrance, okay?”
“Not okay. I don’t know how long I can stay undercover, but I can’t have anyone know where I am. I’ll meet you outside Miss Claudia’s room.”
Karen wanted to know how I’d get into the building; you had to go past the guard station at night. I told her not to worry about that, just to give me the room number. She started to object, but I cut her off.
“Please, I don’t have enough time to do the things I have to do. Let’s not waste the last hours of Miss Claudia’s life arguing about this.”
I drove along Howard until I came to a shop that sold uniforms and business apparel. There are several ways to be invisible in a large institution. The best, in a nursing home, is to be a janitor. If you show up in a nurse’s uniform, all the other nurses think they know you and study your face too closely. A janitor, however, at the low end of the food chain, gets only a cursory look. I found a jumpsuit in gray, which I put on over my jeans, and a square-cut cap. I bought a big mop to complete the outfit. I stuck my gun into a side pocket-not the safest way to carry a firearm, but I wanted it close to hand.
When I reached Lionsgate, I parked on a side street so I could get away fast if I had to. Mop in hand, cap low on my forehead, I walked down the ramp at the manor’s parking garage and entered the building using one of those elevators. On the ground floor, I had to pass the guard station to get to the main elevators. The massive woman behind the counter, wearing a Lionsgate pale blue security blazer, was watching television. But she looked up as I passed and called out to me: Who was I? Where was my security ID?
My Polish is limited to a few stilted phrases garnered unwillingly as a child from Boom-Boom’s mother. Tonight, I didn’t stop walking but shouted over my shoulder in Polish instead that dinner was ready, it was getting cold, come to the table at once, something I’d heard Aunt Marie say four or five hundred times. The guard shook her head with the kind of annoyed incredulity accorded ignorant immigrants, but she returned to the small TV on the counter in front of her.
I rode up in an elevator with a real member of the cleaning crew. She was collecting dirty laundry and rolled her cart off at the eighth floor. When I reached Miss Claudia’s room, Miss Ella was sitting with her sister on the room’s one chair. Karen was on the lookout for me. She hurried over and greeted me in a low voice, taking my arm and escorting me to Miss Claudia’s bed.
Another woman lay in an adjacent bed, her breath coming in short, puffy bursts, a machine next to her beeping every now and then. I pulled a curtain between the two women to create the illusion of privacy.
My client frowned at me. “Our affairs haven’t been very important to you, have they? You took our money, but you didn’t find Lamont. And it seems you’ve stopped looking for him the last month.”
“I think your sister wants to see me,” I said as gently as I could. “How is she?”
“Maybe a little stronger,” Karen said. “She ate some ice cream, Miss Ella says.”
Miss Claudia was sleeping, too, her breath sounding much the same as her neighbor’s, shallow, ragged. I sat on the bed, ignoring the client’s outraged snort, and massaged Miss Claudia’s left hand, her good hand.
“It’s V. I. Warshawski, Miss Claudia,” I said in a deep, clear voice. “I’m the detective. I’m looking for Lamont. You told Pastor Karen you wanted to see me.”
She stirred but didn’t wake. I repeated the information several times, and, after a bit, her eyes fluttered open.
“ ’ Ti ve,” she asked.
“I found Steve,” I said.
“She’s asking, are you the detective,” Miss Ella corrected me.
“I’m the detective, Miss Claudia. I found Steve Sawyer. He’s very ill. He was in prison for forty years.”
“Sad. Hard. ’Mont?”
I clasped her hand more tightly. “Curtis… You remember Curtis Rivers? Curtis says Lamont is dead. But he doesn’t know where he’s resting. He says Johnny knows.”
Her fingers gave mine a weak response. Miss Ella said, “The Anacondas! I knew it was their doing.”
“I don’t think Johnny killed Lamont, but he knows what happened to him. I’ll try my best to get him to tell me.” I was speaking slowly to Miss Claudia, wondering how much sense she could make of my words.
Miss Ella huffed. “You’ll try and you’ll get the same results you’ve come up with all summer. Nothing.”
I didn’t try to answer or even look at her but kept my attention on her sister. Miss Claudia lay silent for a moment, taking conscious, deeper breaths, preparing herself for a major effort. “Bible.” She pronounced both consonants clearly. “Lamont Bible… You take.”
She turned her head on the pillow so I could see what she intended. The red leather Bible was on the nightstand by her head. “Find ’Mont. He dead, bury with him. He ’live, give him.” Another deep breath, another effort. “Promise?”
“I promise, Miss Claudia.”
“Lamont’s Bible?” Miss Ella was outraged. “That’s a family Bible, C
laudia. You can’t-”
“Quiet yourself, Ellie.” But the effort in making clear speech was too hard for Miss Claudia, and she sank back into half-intelligible syllables: “ ’ Hite girl, ’hite ’tive, I want give.”
Miss Claudia watched me until she was sure I had the Bible, sure I was tucking it into the big side pocket of my overalls, not handing it to her sister. She closed her eyes and gasped for air. Miss Ella favored her sister and me both with bitter words. Especially her sister, who had always traded on her looks, never cared how much Ella worked and did, and spoiled Lamont when Ella told her time and again that she had ruined him by sparing the rod. If Miss Claudia heard, she didn’t respond. She had worn herself out speaking to me. I knew she wasn’t asleep because, as she lay there, her eyes fluttered open from time to time, looking from my face to my pocket where the end of the big red Bible was sticking out.
Holding her hand, I sang to her the song of the butterfly, the favorite of the lullabies of my childhood. “Gira qua e gira là, poi si resta supra un fiore; / Gira qua e gira là, poi si resta supra spalla di Papà” (Turning here, turning there, until she rests upon a flower; / Turning here, turning there, until she rests on Papà’s shoulder).
Miss Ella sniffed loudly, but I sang it through several times, calming myself along with Miss Claudia, until she was deeply asleep. When I got up to go, Miss Ella stayed in the chair, I suppose not wanting to dignify her sister’s bequest to me by acknowledging me, but Pastor Karen followed me into the hall.
“I know you’re under a lot of stress right now, and I’m sure your cousin is your biggest worry, so it was a really good thing you did, coming over here to see Miss Claudia.” She put a hand on my arm. “This man you mentioned, Curtis… Do you think he’s telling the truth about Lamont?”
“Oh, I think so. He doesn’t know what happened to Lamont, but it involved Johnny Merton, and it was so terrible that it shocked Merton into silence. And Merton… You’d have to know him to understand that a death he’d find shocking might turn you or me as mad as… as poor Steve Sawyer.”
I gently dislodged Lennon’s hand. “Something about Lamont, or Johnny and Steve Sawyer and the Anacondas, is connected to my cousin. The man who’s running security for the Krumas campaign, where my cousin worked, he was the cop who interrogated Sawyer forty years ago and tortured him into confessing.”
Karen gasped. “Torture? Are you sure?”
Sawyer-Kimathi’s mangled, burned body flashed in my head: “They say I the song-and-dance man… They laugh.” Would I ever be able to forget that? “Yes, oh yes. I wish I wasn’t, but… I know it happened. I don’t understand it, not all of it, but my uncle, and Harvey Krumas, the candidate’s father, they grew up together, and they still watch each other’s backs. The murder that happened in Marquette Park all those years ago, they’re both implicated in it, and that means-”
I couldn’t bear to go on, couldn’t bear to add that that meant my own uncle was implicated in Sister Frankie’s murder because his old buddy Harvey rushed a contracting crew over to her place to bury any evidence I might be able to dig up. I pressed my hands against my temples as if that would push all that knowledge out of my head.
“This is terrible, Vic. Why aren’t you going to the police?”
My smile was twisted. “Because Dornick is an ex-cop with lots of pals on the force, and I don’t know who there I can trust anymore.”
Karen started to ask me how Lamont was tied to Dornick, but my own words reminded me that Bobby Mallory had been trying to reach me. I interrupted her to ask if I could use her office phone to make a few calls.
We rode down to the second floor in silence, Karen shaking her head as if mourning all the sorry souls I’d told her about. While she unlocked her office door, I once again connected my cellphone long enough to look up Bobby’s unlisted home number.
Eileen Mallory answered. “Oh, Vicki, I’m so sorry about Petra. This is a terrible week. We never knew Peter at all well, but please tell him and Rachel that if there’s anything we can do, anything at all-a place to stay, extra help from Bobby’s team-they must let us know.”
I thanked her awkwardly and said Bobby had been trying to reach me. He hadn’t come home yet. She gave me his cellphone number. And another message, a personal one for me, so warm and loving it made my eyelids prick.
Bobby’s response wasn’t nearly so tender. “Where are you?” he demanded as soon as I answered.
“Wandering around the city like a demented ghost,” I said. “I understand you wanted to talk to me.”
“I want to see you at once.”
I looked at Karen Lennon’s scarred desktop. “You know, Bobby, that is not going to happen. I am hiding from George Dornick, hoping I find Petra before he does.”
“If Dornick’s on your ass, I’ll give him a medal for bringing you in.”
“That would be one you would hand him at my funeral, then, and you could congratulate each other on laying me and a lot of ugly department history to rest.”
I wasn’t sure how much time I would have before Bobby’s tech team figured out where I was calling from. I decided I could stay on the phone for three more minutes.
“Victoria, you have crossed an acceptable line. You’ve always imagined that you could do my job and that of thirteen thousand other good, decent cops better than we can. You’ve always imagined when we chew you out, it’s because we’re stupider or more corrupt than you. But now you have gone further than I will allow.”
“By criticizing George Dornick?” I asked.
“By fingering, if not murdering, Larry Alito.”
I had been watching the second hand go round on the institutional clock on Karen Lennon’s wall, but that news jolted me.
“Alito is dead?” I repeated stupidly.
“Get your head out of your butt.” Bobby was truly furious to use such coarse language talking to me. Even though he disapproves of me, he usually sticks to his no-swearing-at-women-and-children code when we’re speaking. “His body was found down by the river near Cortlandt this afternoon. And Hazel says you’d called up there this morning, threatening him.”
44
ESCAPE IN CONTAMINATED LAUNDRY
WHILE I’D BEEN SPEAKING TO BOBBY, KAREN HAD BEEN standing at her window, aimlessly twitching the blind pull. She turned to me as I hung up. “There are a lot of police cars out front. We don’t usually get so many here. Do you think-?”
“I think I don’t want to find out.” I looked wildly around, hoping a hiding place would open up, but all I saw was my mop. The cops wouldn’t be fooled by a generic jumpsuit and an unused mop. They’d be inspecting all the janitors, even the one I’d seen in the elevator.
“Linen carts… They’re taking dirty linen someplace. Where?”
Karen thought a minute, then pressed a speed-dial number on her phone. “It’s Pastor Karen. I’ve been with one of our critically ill patients and have some soiled linens. Where can I find the nearest bin?… I stupidly carried them down to my office… No, I’ll come back up. I want to get them out of here, and I’m going to have to scrub after handling them, anyway… Number eleven, right.”
Her mouth set in a thin, firm line, she opened her door, looked around, and beckoned me. “Elevator eleven. Let’s go.”
I followed her through the maze of corridors, muscles tensing, to a rear service elevator. We could hear the scratchy echoes of police radios, the frightened shouts of Lionsgate residents wanting to know if there was a killer running loose in the halls, but we didn’t actually see any cops. Karen pushed the button on elevator 11. There was a stairwell nearby, and I could hear the pounding of feet. Our elevator arrived, but I stood frozen, watching the stairwell door until Karen shoved me into the elevator and pressed the button to close the doors.
I let out a loud breath. “Thanks. I’m losing my nerve.”
She put a finger over my mouth, jerking her head toward a camera in the ceiling, and began talking excitedly about the need for the janitor
staff to do more for the AIDS cases in the hospital. “I have to scrub now because I’ve been handling infected linens and syringes. Can’t the cleaning crew do more?”
“It’s what happens when you outsource cleaning,” I said, switching on the harsh nasal of the South Side. “They’re paid by the room, not by the hour, and they don’t do the job an in-house service does.”
The elevator was hydraulic, and it seemed to me that in the time it took us to go from the second floor to the sub-basement a crew could have disinfected all fifteen floors of the manor. Karen and I babbled about AIDS and cleaning until my mouth felt like a bell with a very dry clapper hanging in the middle. The hydraulics finally hissed to a halt.
The doors opened onto a holding bay. Two dozen linen-filled carts stood there. Karen muttered that the laundry service would be by at midnight for pickup. The shower rooms for staff stood beyond the bay, and, next to them, a locked dressing room. Karen found a master key on her chain and unlocked the door. Uniforms were inside, hazmat suits, booties, all those things. She tossed me hat, gloves, mask, and a white jumpsuit and told me to get into a cart and get covered. I grabbed my gun and Miss Claudia’s Bible, then stripped out of my gray suit, burying it in the middle of one of the other carts, and pulled on the white jumpsuit. I put on the hat, the gloves, and the mask, and burrowed into the cart. A few minutes later, Karen appeared, and when I peeked at her she looked ominous in her own jumpsuit, hat, gloves, and mask. She flashed a bright red placard at me that read DANGER! HIGHLY INFECTIOUS, then covered me up. She whispered that she was tying the placard over the top of the cart. We’d hope for the best.
She pushed the cart onto the elevator. I lay there as it wheezed up a story to the entrance of the parking garage. The police had placed a guard there. I lay sweating in the linens while he demanded to know who Karen was and what she was doing.
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