“But I believe that is exactly what Trant did. He was at Frenada’s shop on the Tuesday night right before Nicola died. That’s a fact. This next is a guess, but I believe that in some crazy scheme, maybe caused by watching too many of his own movies, Trant stole one of Frenada’s shirts to put on Nicola, so that if any questions were asked about her death he could direct attention away from Coolis, from Global, and toward an innocent bystander.”
The room was in an uproar. I went back through the argument, ticking off the points on the slide that highlighted them.
When they seemed to be caught up with me, I went back to Baladine and his fury with me. How Global first tried to bribe me by hiring me to frame Frenada, and when I wouldn’t play, how Baladine began hounding me, culminating with planting cocaine in my office.
I played the video I’d made in my office. The group was firing so many questions now that I had to play it three times before I could go on.
“I don’t know if Baladine wanted me dead or discredited—” I began, when Murray piped up unexpectedly from the back of the room.
“He was spinning around. I don’t think he could possibly have told anyone he wanted you dead, but when some of us at the Star caught wind of the discussions going on about your involvement in the case, we—uh, made it as clear as we could that if anything—uh—well, a lot of people in Chicago would want to know why you got—uh—hurt. Also, I got the idea that someone high in the Global organization was lobbying for you, although Al—my contacts there—never said who it was. Anyway, I have a feeling—I was not involved in any discussions about you—but I think he—Baladine—thought discrediting you was the viable route. I didn’t know about the drugs. And I was as amazed as everyone else here when you were arrested for kidnapping. And then, why on God’s green earth you didn’t post bail—” He broke off midsentence. “I guess you were being Wonder Woman again. Take us to the limit one more time, Warshawski.”
I blushed but went on with my presentation. “As far as Frenada goes, I think they wanted him dead: he was starting to complain to too many people about Trant taking one of his sample Virginwear shirts. They thought they could discredit him with drugs; they planted some in his shop and planted some data on the Web trying to show he was a high roller. I’m afraid it was something I said that sent him hotfoot out to Oak Brook to try to confront Baladine and Trant the night of June twenty–sixth.”
Morrell ran the footage of Frenada with Baladine and Trant at Baladine’s pool. He stopped it to make sure everyone noticed the date embedded in the film.
“This film doesn’t prove that Baladine and Trant killed Frenada, but it does put the three men together the night Frenada died. Lucian Frenada had told me he couldn’t compete with Global’s current suppliers because his labor costs were too high. He also had other overhead that someone running a factory in a prison doesn’t have to deal with. The state of Illinois paid for the machines that Global gets to use. The state of Illinois pays the rent on the space for the Global factory. You can’t get lower production costs for this kind of operation, even if you go to Burma, because you can’t beat free space and machinery. And you have a labor force that can never go on strike, never balk at the working conditions, never complain to OSHA or the NLRB. It’s a beauty for the bottom line in these days of the global economy.”
There was another barrage of questions about the Global–Carnifice shop. “You’ve been most patient to listen to me for such a long period,” I finally said. “There are only a few more things I want to say. All summer, as Baladine and Trent were boxing me in, I kept wondering what was so important about Nicola Aguinaldo that they needed to find someone to take the blame for her death. It wasn’t she they cared about, but their manufacturing scheme. It had been operating smoothly, no questions asked, for several years; they didn’t want some outsider poking into Nicola’s death to upset it.
“Maybe you’re wondering how they could run that plant as long as they did with no one noticing. For one thing, they were well connected to the Illinois House Speaker, who’s got a lot of power, in and out of Springfield.
“For another, we all assume that whatever goes on behind those iron bars is protecting all us law–abiding citizens—sorry, all you law–abiding citizens; I’m out on bail facing a felony charge.” People laughed more loudly than my little joke merited—they needed some kind of release from the horrors they’d been hearing.
“Some of what goes on may be nasty, but as the corrections officers said to me and my sister inmates many times—like when a woman wasn’t allowed medical care after getting a major burn on her arm in the kitchen”—I nodded and Morrell flipped up a slide of the arm—”Coolis isn’t a resort. Inmates aren’t on vacation. We law–abiding citizens don’t necessarily want prisoners rehabilitated, but we sure do want them punished. And they get punished in carloads full of discipline.”
I finished with the slides I’d taken of CO Polsen assaulting Dolores in the laundry room. The only sound in the room now was Peppy, crying to be allowed to come to me.
“This kind of thing is a daily occurrence. I witnessed it, I was humiliated in similar ways myself. Women have no recourse against this kind of abuse. Illinois law has no serious provision for removing abusive guards or for disciplining them. It can take over a year for a woman prisoner complaining of rape or battery to get a court hearing. During that year she can be put in segregation. She can be repeatedly assaulted. And if her case is found to be without merit, then she is cattle fodder for the corrections officers. That’s daily life at Coolis.
“I understand Robert Baladine sent around an e–mail, offering to resign. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but if it weren’t for the fact that Lucian Frenada was—probably—killed in an effort to cover up the Global manufacturing operation, I’d think Baladine should resign not because of Frenada but because of the degradation of prisoners that goes on hourly in a prison that his company built and runs for the state of Illinois.”
I’d lost my dry composure. I sat down, shivering, my teeth chattering. Morrell was at my side to put a jacket around my shoulders. Murray had stepped forward along with the rest of the team in the room, but when he saw Morrell behind me, he turned on his heel and left.
Lotty and Sal and Mr. Contreras applauded vigorously, and Mr. Contreras finally let Peppy come up to me. I sank my hands gratefully into her gold fur and tried to calm down enough to answer other questions.
What the reporters most wanted to know, besides their fascination with sex in the prison, was how Baladine came to be injured.
“He says he needed to break into the church to get his son back. I believe Father Lou has made a sworn deposition that Baladine never approached him about his son. Indeed, Robbie arrived at the church only a few hours ahead of his father, who could have phoned or come to the door the way most people might. But someone watching my home apparently saw him arrive, tailed him here to St. Remigio’s, and then called Baladine for instructions. He chose to approach his son in this highly unusual way, and a police officer is dead as a result.”
One of the Carnifice Security men who’d been in the church last week had decided to do a deal with the State’s Attorney. No one in the State’s Attorney’s office cared much about Lucian Frenada, or Nicola Aguinaldo—or me. But Father Lou was a local legend. For forty years, any policeman who’d ever boxed grew up knowing him. An assault on him in his church was more than blasphemy. So the guy Father Lou had knocked out, after realizing that the cops were more interested in finding out exactly what punch the priest had used on him than in sympathizing with him, turned on his boss and his partner and told the cops the story of his watch on my building, of seeing Robbie arrive on foot, of calling for instructions.
“Isn’t the dead officer the same man who was in your office with the cocaine?”
I smiled. “You’ll have to ask the department about that one. I never actually saw the man who died at St. Remigio’s: everything took place in the dark.”
; “And what about Baladine?” Beth Blacksin from Channel 8 asked. “I hear he’s undergoing shots for rabies because your dog bit him? Is he suing you?”
“You have it backward,” I said. “I’m giving my dog Mitch a series of rabies shots in case Baladine infected him. No, seriously, he shot the dog and thought he’d killed him, because the dog tried to stop him from chaining Father Lou to my old friend and neighbor Salvatore Contreras. When Baladine was strangling me, Mitch somehow made a supercanine effort, dragged himself up on his weak legs, and dug his teeth into Baladine’s ass. If Baladine chooses to sue me, my lawyer is looking forward to cross–examining him, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”
Regine Mauger, the Herald–Star’s gossip columnist, got up to demand what right I had to vilify the Trant family. Abigail Trant was a lovely woman who was doing an enormous amount of good for needy Chicagoans, and Regine thought I should be ashamed for attacking her husband in this way.
I didn’t tell her I had called Abigail Trant myself the day after the fight in the church. After her efforts to help me, she deserved advance notice of what I was going to say about her husband. She asked only if I was sure. And I said, not about everything but about Trant’s being with Baladine and Frenada the night Frenada died. And about the production of Global spin–offs at Coolis.
She didn’t say anything else, but two days later she came to see me—again without warning, leaving the Gelaendewagen double–parked on Racine. She was as exquisite as ever, but the skin on her face was taut with tension.
“Rhiannon and I fell in love with France when we were there this summer. I’m taking her back to Toulouse. I’ve found a wonderful school she can attend there. I don’t know what Teddy will do, because I don’t know what Global will do when they hear your report.”
She hesitated, then added, “I don’t want you to think I blame you in any way for—for—the collapse of my marriage. I think the time will come when I will be grateful that my eyes were opened, but right now I can’t feel much but pain. There’s something else you deserve to know. Teddy came home the night of Global’s television debut with the emblem missing from one of his Ferragamo loafers. Maybe it’s weak of me, but the day you asked about the emblem I went home and threw out the shoes.”
She left abruptly on that line. I didn’t think Regine Mauger needed to report any of that in her coy little phrases.
Mauger and some of the others continued to harangue me. Lotty came forward and announced that as my physician she was declaring an end to my stamina: I was recovering from serious injuries, in case they had forgotten. The group looked suitably abashed and packed up cassette recorders and other equipment. Morrell gave each person a copy of the videotape and slides. The two men sitting with Father Lou grunted and got up to escort the reporters out of the building.
“Now what?” Sal asked when they had gone.
“Now—” I shrugged. “Now I try to patch my business back together. Hope that enough people buy my version of events that some of the misery at Coolis will end, even if no one is ever arrested for Nicola Aguinaldo’s murder.”
“And what is Robbie going to do?” Sal asked.
I grinned. “Eleanor came to pick him up on Wednesday afternoon. He ran into the church screaming that he was claiming sanctuary, that he would chain himself to the altar and go on a hunger strike. That should have thrilled her, but it only made her angrier. She finally worked out a deal with Father Lou that Robbie could stay on as a boarder and go to St. Remigio’s. Father Lou said that for a donation to the St. Remigio scholarship fund and money to repair the damage to the altar, he was willing to tell the state to drop the trespassing charge against Baladine.”
Watching Father Lou blandly extort a fifty–thousand–dollar pledge from Eleanor Baladine had been one of the few joyous moments of the past few months. She had arrived at St. Remigio’s with her lawyer, convinced that she was going to browbeat the priest with threats of additional charges of kidnapping, as well as of assault against Baladine—man coming to claim his son is set on by dogs, rabid detectives, and other scum. She left without her son and with a signed undertaking to support him at the school. The sop to her pride was Father Lou’s grave statement that boxing would make Robbie a truly manly man, and that he, Father Lou, would personally oversee her son’s training.
“The funny thing is, Robbie actually wants to learn to box,” I told Sal. “This boy who couldn’t learn to swim or play tennis to please his parents runs wind sprints every morning after mass.”
I’d moved back home, of course, but for some reason I found myself getting up early every day and driving over to St. Remigio’s for the six o’clock mass. Robbie or one of the other St. Remigio boxers would serve. Father Lou gruffly announced I could read the lesson as long as I was there. All that week, as I made my way through the book of Job, I thought about the women at Coolis. If there was a God, had He delivered the women into the hands of Satan for a wager? And would He appear finally in the whirlwind and rescue them?
49 Scar Tissue
My vindication by the Chicago press was something of a nine–day wonder. Clients who’d left me for Carnifice called to say they’d never doubted me and they would have assignments for me as soon as I got off the disabled list. Old friends in the Chicago Police Department called, demanding to know why I hadn’t complained to them about Douglas Lemour; they would have fixed the problem for me. I didn’t try to argue with them about all the times in the past they’d told me to mind my own business and leave police work to them. And Mary Louise Neely showed up one morning, her face pinched with misery.
“Vic, I won’t blame you if you feel like you can never trust me again, but they called to threaten me. Threaten the children. The man who called knew the exact address of Emily’s camp in France and told me what she’d eaten for dinner the night before. I was terrified and I felt trapped—I couldn’t send the boys back to their father, and I didn’t know what else to do with them. I thought if I told you, you’d go riding off half–cocked and get all of us killed.” She twisted her hands round and round as if she could wash off the memory.
“You could be right.” I tried to smile, but found I couldn’t quite manage it. “I’m not going to sit in judgment on you for being scared, let alone for trying to look after Nate and Josh. What hurt was the way you were judging me. Claiming I was running hotheaded into danger when I was fighting for my life. I had to go into the heart of the furnace to save myself. If you could have trusted me enough to tell me why you were withdrawing from me, it would have made a big difference.”
“You’re right, Vic,” she whispered. “I could have gone to Terry about Lemour; maybe it would have stopped him from trying to plant the coke on you or from beating you when he arrested you. I can only say—I’m sorry. If you’re willing to let me try again, though, I’d like to.”
We left it at that—that she would open the office back up, get the files in order, take preliminary information from clients while I continued to recuperate. We’d give it three months and see how we felt about the relationship then.
I kept trying to go back to work myself, but I felt dull and drained. I had told the psychologist at the Berman Institute I would sleep better if I stopped feeling so humiliated. By rights, taking care of Lemour and Baladine should have solved my problems, but I still was plagued by insomnia. Maybe it was because my month at Coolis sat like a bad taste in my mouth, or maybe it was because I couldn’t stop blaming myself for staying inside when I could have made bail, as if I had deliberately courted what had happened to me. There were still too many nights I dreaded going to sleep because of the dreams that lay on the other side.
The night after my press presentation I’d invited Morrell home with me, but when he started to undress I told him he would have to leave. He took a long look at me and buttoned his jeans back up. The next day he sent me a single rose with the message that he would respect my distance as long as I felt I needed to maintain it but that he enjoyed talk
ing to me and would be glad to see me in public.
The knowledge that I could choose, that Morrell at least would not force himself on me, made sleep come a bit easier to me. I went to a couple of Cubs games with him as the season wound down—thanks to tickets from one of my clients—and saw Sammy Sosa hit his sixty–fourth home run, invited Morrell to my Saturday afternoon pickup game in the park, ate dinner with him, but spent my nights with only the dogs for company.
I kept busy enough. I made endless depositions with attorneys for the state, attorneys for the CO’s I was suing out at Coolis, attorneys for Baladine, attorneys for Global. I even had a meeting with Alex Fisher. She thought it would be a good idea if I toned down some of my statements about Global and Frenada.
“Sandy, the reason I call you Sandy, which you hate, is that it’s the only thing about you I ever liked. You were a pain in the ass in law school. You wanted to be a firebrand and take the message about racism and social justice to the proletariat, and I made you uncomfortable because I was that odd phenomenon in an upscale law school—a genuine blue–collar worker’s genuine daughter. But at least you were who you were—Sandy Fishbein. You didn’t try to pretend you were anything else. Then you went off and found capitalism, and had your nose and your lips done, and cut off your name, too.”
“That’s not what I came to talk to you about,” she said, but her voice had lost its edge.
“And another thing. I have a tape of yours. Baladine made it during his swim meet.”
“How did you get it?” she hissed. “Did he give it to you?”
I smiled blandly. “He doesn’t know I have it. It’s yours, Alex. It’s yours the day I get concrete evidence that Global has fired Wenzel, the man who managed the Coolis shop, and that he is not working elsewhere in your organization. And the day that Carnifice lets CO Polsen and CO Hartigan go. Without placing them elsewhere.”
Hard Time Page 40