Burn Marks

by Sara Paretsky

  “I don’t hate you. I don’t want to live with anyone, but you and I lead especially incompatible lives. You know as well as I that Tony would say the same if he were still around.”

  There’d been a painful episode when Elena announced her independence from my grandmother and moved into her own apartment. Finding solitude not to her liking, she’d shown up at our house in South Chicago one weekend. She’d stayed three days. It wasn’t my fierce mother who’d asked her to leave-Gabriella’s love of the underdog somehow could encompass even Elena. But my easygoing father came home from the graveyard shift on Monday to find Elena passed out at the kitchen table. He put her into a detox unit at County and refused to talk to her for six months after she got out.

  Elena apparently also remembered this episode. The pouty puckering disappeared from her face. She looked stricken, and somehow more real.

  I squeezed her shoulder gently and offered to make her some eggs. She shook her head without speaking, watching me silently while I spread anchovy paste on toast. I ate it quickly and left before pity could overcome my judgment.

  It was well past nine now. The morning rush was ending and I had an easy run across Belmont to the expressway. When I neared the Loop, though, the traffic congealed as we moved through a construction maze. The four miles on the Ryan between the Eisenhower and Thirty-first, supposedly the busiest eight lanes of traffic anywhere in the known universe, had finally crumbled under the stress of the semi’s. The southbound lanes were closed while the feds performed reconstructive surgery.

  My little Cavalier bounced between a couple of sixty-tonners as the slow lines of traffic snaked around the construction barricades. To my right the surface of the old roadbed had been completely removed; lattices of the reinforcing bars were exposed. They looked like tightly packed nests of vipers-here and there a rusty head stood up prepared to strike.

  The turnoff to Lake Shore Drive had been so cleverly disguised that I was parallel with the barrel blocking one of the exit lanes before I realized it. With my sixty-ton pal close on my tail, I couldn’t stand on the brakes and swerve around the barrel. I gnashed my teeth and rode down to Thirty-fifth, then took side streets up to Cermak.

  Elena’s SRO had stood a few doors north of the intersection with Indiana. A niggling doubt I’d had in her story vanished when I pulled up across the street from it. The Indiana Arms Hotel-transients welcome, rates by the day or by the month-had joined the other derelicts on the street in retirement. I parked and went over to look at the skeleton.

  When I walked around to the north side of the building, I discovered a man in a sport jacket and hard hat poking around in the rubble. Every now and then he’d pick up some piece of debris with a pair of tongs and stick it into a plastic bag. He’d mark the bag and mutter into a pocket Dictaphone before continuing his exploration. He spotted me when he turned east to poke through a promising tell. He finished picking up an object and marking its container before coming over to me.

  “You lose something here?” His tone was pleasant but his brown eyes were wary.

  “Just sleep. Someone I know lived here until last night-she showed up at my place early this morning.”

  He pursed his lips, weighing my story. “In that case, what are you doing here now?”

  I hunched a shoulder. “I guess I wanted to see it for myself. See if the place was really gone before I put all my energy into finding her a new home. Come to that, what are you doing here? A suspicious person might think you were making off with valuables.”

  He laughed and some of the wariness left his face. “They’d be right-in a way I am.”

  “Are you with the fire department?”

  He shook his head. “Insurance company.”

  “Was it arson?” I’d been so bogged down in the sludge of family relations, I hadn’t even wondered how the fire started.

  His caution returned. “I’m just collecting things. The lab will give me a diagnosis.”

  I smiled. “You’re right to be careful-you don’t know who might come around in the aftermath of a blaze like this. My name’s V. I. Warshawski. I’m a private investigator when I’m not looking for emergency housing. And I do projects for Ajax Insurance from time to time.” I pulled a card from my bag and handed it to him.

  He wiped a sooty hand on a Kleenex and shook mine. “Robin Bessinger. I’m with Ajax’s arson and fraud division. I’m surprised I haven’t heard your name.”

  It didn’t surprise me. Ajax employed sixty thousand people around the world-no one could possibly keep track of all of them. I explained that my work for them had been in claims or reinsurance and gave him a few names he’d be likely to recognize. He thawed further and confided that the signs of arson were quite clear.

  “I’d show you the places where they poured accelerant but I don’t want you in the building if you don’t have a hard hat. Chunks of plaster keep falling down.”

  I showed suitable regret at being denied this treat. “The owner buy a lot of extra insurance lately?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know-I haven’t seen the policies. They just asked me to get on over before the vandals took too much of the evidence. I hope your friend got all her stuff out-not too much survived this blast.”

  I’d forgotten to ask Elena if anyone had been badly hurt. Robin told me the police Violent Crimes Unit would have joined the Bomb and Arson Squad in force if anyone bad died.

  “You wouldn’t have been allowed to park without showing good reason for being near the premises-it’s a fact of life that torchers like to come back to see if the job got done right. No one was killed, but a good half dozen were ferried to Michael Reese with burns and respiratory problems. Torchers usually like to make sure a building can be cleared-they know an investigation into an old dump like this won’t get too much attention if there aren’t any murder charges to excite the cops.” He looked at his wrist. “I’d like to get back to work. Hope your friend finds a new place okay.”

  I agreed fervently and went off to start my hunt with an easy optimism bred of ignorance. I began at the Emergency Housing Bureau on south Michigan where I joined a long line. There were woman and children of all ages, old men muttering to themselves, rolling their eyes wildly, women anxiously clutching suitcases or small appliances- a seemingly endless sea of people left on the streets from some crisis or other yesterday.

  The high counters and bare walls made us feel as though we were suppliants at the gates of a Soviet labor camp. There weren’t any chairs; I took a number and leaned against the wall to wait my turn.

  Next to me a very pregnant woman of about twenty holding a large infant was struggling with a toddler. I offered to hold the baby or amuse the two-year-old.

  “It’s all right,” she said in a soft slow voice. “Todd just be tired after staying up all night. We couldn’t get into the shelter ′cause the one they sent us to don’t allow babies. I couldn’t get me no bus fare to come back here and get them to find us a different place.”

  “So what did you do?” I didn’t know which was more horrible-her plight or the resigned gentle way she talked about it.

  “Oh, we found us a park bench up at Edgewater by the shelter. The baby sleep but Todd just couldn’t get comfortable.”

  “Don’t you have any friends or relatives to help you out? What about the baby’s father?”

  “Oh, he be trying to find us a place,” she said listlessly. “But he can’t get no job. And my mother, we used to stay with her, but she had to go into the hospital, now it look like she going to be sick a long time and she can’t keep up on her rent.”

  I looked around the room. Dozens of people were waiting ahead of me. Most of them had my neighbor’s dragged-out look, bodies stooped over from too much shame. Those who didn’t were pugnacious, waiting to take on a system they couldn’t possibly beat. Elena’s needs-my needs-could certainly take a far backseat to their demands for emergency shelter. Before I took off I asked if Todd and she would like some breakfast-I was
going over to the Burger King to get something.

  “They don’t let you eat in here, but Todd could maybe go with you and get something.”

  Todd showed a great disinclination to be separated from his mother, even to get some food. Finally I left him whimpering at her side, went to the Burger King, got a dozen breakfast buns with eggs and wrapped the lot in a plastic bag to conceal the fact that it was food. I handed it to the woman and left as fast as I could. My skin was still trembling.

  3

  Not St. Peter

  The kinds of places Elena could afford didn’t seem to advertise in the papers. The only residential hotels listed in the classifieds were in Lincoln Park and started at a hundred a week. Elena had paid seventy-five a month for her little room at the Indiana Arms.

  I spent four hours futilely pounding the pavements. I combed the Near South Side, covering Cermak Road between Indiana and Halsted. A century ago it housed the Fields, the Searses, and the Armours. When they moved to the North Shore the area collapsed rapidly. Today it consists of vacant lots, auto dealers, public housing, and the occasional SRO. A few years ago someone decided to restore a blockful of the original mansions. They stand like a macabre ghost town, empty opulent shells in the midst of the decay that permeates the neighborhood.

  The stilts of the Dan Ryan L running overhead made me feel tiny and useless as I went door to door, asking drunk or indifferent supers about a room for my aunt. I vaguely remembered reading about all the SRO’s that came down when Presidential Towers went up, but somehow the impact this had on the street hadn’t hit me before. There just wasn’t housing available for people with Elena’s limited means. The hotels I did find were all full- and victims of last night’s fire, savvier than me, had been there at dawn renting the few rooms available. I realized that the fourth time a blowsy manager said, “Sorry, if you’d gotten here first thing this morning when we had something…”

  At three I called off the search. Panicked at the prospect of housing Elena for some indefinite future, I drove into my Loop office to call my uncle Peter. It was a decision I could make only while panicked.

  Peter was the first member of my family to make something substantial of his life. Maybe the only member besides my cousin Boom-Boom. Nine years younger than Elena, Peter had gone to work in the stockyards when he returned from Korea. He quickly realized that the people getting rich in meat packing weren’t the Poles hitting cows over the head with hammers. Scraping together a few bucks from friends and relations, he started his own sausage manufacturing firm. The rest was the classic story of the American dream.

  He followed the yards to Kansas City when they moved there in the early seventies. Now he lived in a huge house in the tony Mission Hills district, sent his wife to Paris to buy her spring clothes, shipped my cousins off to expensive private schools and summer camps, and drove late-model Nissans. Only in America. Peter also distanced himself as much as possible from the low-budget end of the family.

  My office in the Pulteney Building was definitely down market. Most of the Loop expansion in recent years has been to the west. The Pulteney is at the southeast fringe where peep shows and pawnshops push the rents down. The Wabash L rattles the fourth-floor windows, disturbing the pigeons and dirt that normally roost there.

  My furnishings are Spartan gleanings from police auctions and resale shops. I used to hang an engraved sketch of the Uffizi over the filing cabinet, but last year I’d decided its intricate black detail looked too drab with all the olive furniture. In its place I’d put up some splashy posters of paintings by Nell Blaine and Georgia O’Keeffe. They gave the room a little color, but no one would mistake it for the hub of an international business.

  Peter had been there once, when he brought his three children to Chicago for a tour several years ago. I had watched him swell visibly as he calculated the gap between our net present values.

  Getting hold of him this afternoon took all my powers of persuasion, mixed in with a little bullying. My first worry, that he might be out of the country, or equally inaccessible on some golf course, proved groundless. But he had a phalanx of assistants convinced it was better to handle my business themselves than to disturb the great man. The most difficult skirmish came when I finally reached his personal secretary.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Warshawski, but Mr. Warshawski has given me a list of family members who he’ll let interrupt him and your name isn’t on it.” The Kansas twang was polite but unyielding.

  I watched the pigeons check themselves for lice. “Could you get a message to him? While I hold? That his sister Elena will be arriving in Kansas City on the six o’clock flight and has cab fare to his house?”

  “Does he know she’s coming?”

  “Nope. That’s why I’m trying to get hold of him. To let him know.”

  Five minutes later-while I paid prime daytime rates to hold-Peter’s deep voice was booming in my ear. What the hell did I mean, sending Elena to him unannounced like this. He wasn’t having his children exposed to a lush like that, they didn’t have guest space, he thought he’d made it clear four years ago that he was never-

  “Yes, yes.” I finally stanched the flow. “I know. A woman like Elena would just not fit into Mission Hills. The drunks there get manicures every week. I understand.”

  It wasn’t the best opening to a plea for financial aid. After he’d finished shouting his outrage I explained the problem. The news that Elena was still in Chicago did not, as I’d hoped, bring him enough relief to agree to bail her out.

  “Absolutely not. I made this totally clear to her the last time I helped her. That was when she foolishly squandered Mother’s house in that cockamamie investment scheme. You may remember that I retained a lawyer for her who saw that she was able to salvage something from the sale. That was it-my last involvement in her affairs. It’s time you learned the same lesson, Vic. An alkie like Elena will just milk you dry. The sooner you realize it, the easier your life will be.”

  Hearing some of my own negative thoughts echoed on his pompous lips made me squirm in my chair. “She paid for that lawyer though, Peter, if I remember rightly. She hasn’t ever asked you for cash, has she? Anyway, I live in four rooms. I can’t have her staying with me. All I want is enough money to make the rent on a decent apartment for a month while I help her find a place she can afford.”

  He gave a nasty laugh. “That’s what your mother said that time Elena showed up at your place in South Chicago. Remember? Not even Tony could stomach having her around. Tony! He could tolerate anything.”

  “Unlike you,” I commented dryly.

  “I know you mean that as an insult but I take it as a compliment. What did Tony leave you when he died? That squalid house on Houston and the remains of his pension.”

  “And a name I’m proud to use,” I snapped, thoroughly roused. “And come to that, you wouldn’t have gotten your little meatball machine off the ground without his help. So do something for Elena in exchange. I’m sure wherever Tony is now he’d consider it a just quid pro quo.”

  “I paid Tony back to the nickel,” Peter huffed. “And I don’t owe him or you shit. And you know damned well it’s sausages, not meatballs.”

  “Yeah, you paid back the nickel. But a share of the profits, even a little interest, wouldn’t have killed you, would it?”

  “Don’t try that sentimental crap on me, Vic. I’ve been around the block too many times to fall for it.”

  “Just like a used car,” I said bitterly.

  The line went dead in my ear. The pleasure of having the exit line didn’t compensate for losing the fight. Why in hell were the survivors in my father’s family Peter and Elena? Why couldn’t Peter have died and Tony been the one to hang around? Although not in the shape he was the last few years of his life. I swallowed bile and tried to shut out the image of my father the last year of his life, his face puffy, his body wrenched by uncontrollable coughing.

  Pressing my lips together bitterly, I looked at the stack of un
answered mail and unfiled papers on my desk. Maybe it was time I got into the twentieth century while I still had a decade left to do it in. Make a big enough success of my work that I could at least afford a secretary to do some of the paperwork for me. An assistant who could take on some of the legwork.

  I shuffled through the papers impatiently until I finally found the numbers I needed for my upcoming presentation. I called Visible Treasures to see how late I could bring them in for overnight processing. They told me if I got them there by eight, they would typeset them and create transparencies for me at only double overtime. When I got the price quote I felt a little better-it wasn’t going to be quite as bad as I’d feared.

  I typed up my drafts on my mother’s old Olivetti. If I couldn’t afford an assistant, maybe at least I should blow a few thousand on a desktop publishing system. On the other hand, the force it took to use the Olivetti’s keyboard kept my wrists strong.

  It was a little after six when I finished typing. I dug through my drawers looking for a manila folder to put the charts in. When I didn’t find a fresh one I dumped the contents of an insurance file onto the desk and stuck my documents into it. Now the desktop looked like the city landfill right after the trucks drop off their loads. I could see Peter looking at it, his face creasing into little rivulets of suppressed smugness. Maybe being committed to truth, justice, and the American Way didn’t have to include working in slum conditions.

  I put the insurance material back into its folder and took it over to the filing cabinets, where I found a section on business expenses that seemed close enough. With a glow of virtue I stuck “insurance” in between “Illinois Bell” and “lease.” Having gotten that far, I went through the two weeks of mail sitting on the desk, writing a few checks, filing documents, and trashing the circulars. Near the bottom of the stack I found a thick white letter the size of a wedding invitation with “Cook County Women for Open Government” in engraved script on the top left.