Burn Marks

by Sara Paretsky

  “So Furey and Bobby stormed the hospital. How come you’re here now?”

  “Miss Warshawski,” Montgomery interrupted frostily, “Detective Finchley is here to help with an investigation. Why the department sent him is none of your business.”

  I wanted to make a grandiose statement about how the police worked for the citizens and how I was one, and therefore one of Montgomery’s bosses, but I felt too sick to fight. I just wrapped the blanket closer about me and continued to shiver. And when Montgomery asked me I went back through all the tired old details. About Elena disappearing, about Furey coming around hunting for her, her early morning phone call, and on and on.

  “So why did someone want to leave the two of you there to die?” Montgomery asked.

  “You’re the bomb-and-arson whiz, Lieutenant. You tell me. All I know is, she called up scared, I found her on a pallet in the basement barely breathing, got knocked out myself, and am lucky to be here enjoying this scintillating conversation with some shred of my wits intact.”

  Finchley started a sentence, then changed his mind and made an industrious note in his pocket diary. In the dim lamplight his closely cut hair merged with the black smoothness of his face.

  Montgomery scowled at me but only said, “The Prairie Shores Hotel is across the street from that fire you were so excited about last week.”

  I gave the thread of a smile. “Amazing.”

  “I’m wondering if you set the fire yourself, to try to get the department to respond to your demands for an investigation into the Indiana Arms.”

  I felt a jolt, the way you do when the earth goes on hurtling through space and you haven’t quite moved with it. Finchley’s jaw dropped. He clearly hadn’t been privy to Montgomery’s theories. “I didn’t know we were considering that possibility, Monty,” he said softly.

  “And I would never have suspected you of so extravagant an imagination,” I put in. “Sounds like you read too much Tom Clancy on your days off.”

  Finchley hid a smile so fast I wasn’t sure I’d seen it. “Monty, what evidence do we have that points to Miss Warshawski?”

  Montgomery ignored him. “You tried to waste police resources last week, claiming there had been a baby in the Indiana Arms that was never there. It’s one of the hallmarks of arsonists that they can’t stand to have their handiwork ignored.”

  “Hunh-unh.” I shook my head. “You go away and do some real work on this problem before you bother me again. You find out about the accelerant and who had access to it, and you come up with a reason for me knocking myself out and then setting the fire and then scrambling to get away. Then we’ll talk some more.”

  “Accomplice,” Montgomery said smugly. “You must have run afoul of your partner in this.”

  I leaned back in the corner of my couch and shut my eyes. “Good-bye, Lieutenant. The door will lock automatically behind you.”

  He started shouting at me. When I didn’t respond he got up and shook my shoulder until my head throbbed in earnest.

  “You’re one step away from a complaint of police brutality,” I said coldly. “Unless you have a warrant with my name on it, you get the hell out of my place now.”

  If Finchley hadn’t been there, I think Montgomery would have slugged me, but he could see whose side the detective was on-he wasn’t nearly as dumb as he looked.

  “Just watch your ass, Warshawski. I’m going to be sticking to you like your underpants. If you’re up to something, next time we’ll catch you red-handed.”

  “Thanks for the warning, Lieutenant. It’s a help to know who your enemies are before you hit the streets.”

  When the door shut behind them I did up all the bolts again and checked the back door for good measure. I was too tired to think about what it all meant, too tired even to call Bobby and chew his ear off about it. I staggered back to my bedroom and fell back into a deep, unrestful sleep.

  28

  A Few Kind Words from a Friend

  Robin phoned later that evening, concerned that he hadn’t been allowed to see me in the hospital and glad I was still in one piece. He was eager to drive down for a convalescent visit. I was too worn out for more company but said he could stop by on Saturday if I felt better.

  Before he hung up I remembered a question. “By the way, did Ajax insure the Prairie Shores Hotel-the place I was in?”

  “No. It was the first thing I looked at, but of course we don’t cover abandoned buildings. And if it’s any comfort to you, it wasn’t owned by your pal Saul Seligman. So it’s either a vendetta against that block of Indiana or someone with a grudge against the Warshawski family.”

  The last comment was meant as a joke, but it reminded me again of Elena, her red-veined face slack and empty. I muttered something to Robin about feeling too feeble for jokes and hung up. I did not have to be a Victorian angel and go sit with her. I didn’t, didn’t, didn’t.

  I stumbled into the dining room and dug around in the cupboards hunting for stationery. It had been so long since I’d written any personal letters that the box had landed behind the fondue set and silver salad servers left over from my brief marriage. I stared at the pieces in bewilderment: Why had I carted those particular items all over Chicago with me for the eleven years since my divorce?

  I wasn’t up to making a decision about them today; I thrust them back into the cupboard and sat down with the yellowed stationery to write my uncle Peter. It was a difficult letter-I had to overcome my dislike of him enough to plead Elena’s case with conviction. I described the accident, made much of my own decrepitude and the fact that I’d saved her life, and concluded with a plea that he either take her in himself or put her up in a convalescent facility. In the morning I’d express it to Mission Hills. It was the best I could do for Elena.

  In the bathroom mirror my face looked sunken, nothing left but cheekbones and eyes, their gray looking almost black against the pallor of my skin. No wonder Mr. Contreras had been eager to fill me with steak. I stepped on the scale. My weight had fallen below a hundred and thirty pounds. I couldn’t afford to be that light if I wanted to have the energy to do my job. I wasn’t hungry but I’d better eat something.

  I wandered moodily to the kitchen. After all this time any resemblance between the stuff in my refrigerator and human food was purely coincidental. I smelled the yogurt. It was still okay, but the vegetables and fruit had passed the point of no return while the orange juice smelled both rotten and fermented.

  I took a bag of fettucini from the freezer and sawed off a hunk with my big butcher knife. While it boiled I ate the yogurt directly from the carton, trying to put some order into the chaos that enveloped me.

  Several people had been annoyed with me the last week or two. Ralph MacDonald had descended from his throne to hint me away from Roz Fuentes’s affairs. Saul Seligman was upset that Ajax wouldn’t honor his claim. Zerlina Ramsay blamed me and Elena for her daughter’s death. It was quite a list, but I didn’t know that any of them would express their annoyance by leaving both Elena and me to die by fire. Of course Lotty was angry with me, too, but she preferred to do her scorching directly.

  Then there was Luis Schmidt. He’d called me a bitch on Tuesday and told me not to ask any more questions about Alma Mejicana or he’d make me sorry. I’d flipped back some good macha retort and he’d hung up on me. So if I was going to go pawing around any of these people, Luis was the place to start.

  The hissing of water on gas startled me back to the present-the fettucini had boiled over, extinguishing the pilot. Of course I couldn’t find a box of matches among the jumble on the stove. I started slamming doors open and shut. I just couldn’t take this life anymore, living alone, no one to pet me when I came home from the wars, nothing to eat, no matches, no money in the bank. I grabbed a handful of spoons and spatulas and flung them as hard as I could at the kitchen door.

  When the clatter died down the grate over the door vibrated in a mournful bass for a few seconds. My shoulders sagged in defeat. I shuf
fled over to the door to collect my utensils. A wooden spoon had landed on the refrigerator. When I reached up for it I knocked a box of matches down. Okay, good. Have fits. They get results. I stuffed the implements back into a drawer and relit the stove.

  Besides Luis and the possible problems of Alma Mejicana, I had to consider my aunt’s affairs. I didn’t want to think about her anymore-and not just because I didn’t want Victoria the Victorian Angel nudging me to look after her. Her tales of woe had sucked me into a series of hideous events lately, starting with my hunt for her new home and culminating in my near death. I couldn’t take much more probing into her life.

  I still wasn’t hungry, but I was starting to feel lightheaded from lack of food. I drained the pasta and grated some rock-hard cheddar onto it. It was slow work with my padded hands. My arm muscles were still sore enough that I gave it up, panting, with only a few teaspoons of cheese for my effort. My right palm stung so violently I was afraid I might have rubbed the scab off through my mitt.

  I carried the plate in my left hand into the living room. After forcing several mouthfuls down I leaned back in my armchair and made myself think about my aunt. Elena ran away when she learned about Cerise’s death. It’s possible something else had frightened her-I didn’t know much about her day-to-day life. With her character she could easily have stubbed more than one toe.

  But I had to start somewhere. Linking her flight to Cerise’s death made sense. It would take a strong compulsion to force her from a secure berth. Since losing the Norwood Park bungalow she’d lived precariously on the small annuity scraped out of the remains of the sale. Even though the Windsor Arms was a desolate place, she’d had too much experience of hand-to-mouth living to turn her back on it lightly.

  She and Cerise had been working some scam together. When I told Elena that Cerise was dead she’d been both crafty and uneasy. So she’d gone to their mark. That made sense too-twenty-four hours had lapsed between my telling her about Cerise and Elena’s disappearance. She’d had time to talk to their target and find out…

  My thought trailed away. She’d found out that Cerise had been murdered? Was that possible? What else could frighten her into running away, though? Someone saying, Look what we did to your friend. The same thing could happen to you. A quart of whiskey inside you and death by exposure on Navy Pier and who’d be the wiser.

  I rubbed my aching head. Romance, Victoria. You need facts. Just say for starters that Cerise and Elena had a tiger by the tail. To find out what it was I needed Elena to start talking. Or Zerlina Ramsay-it was remotely possible that Cerise had confided in her mother.

  My phone books were buried under a stack of music on the piano; I’d been singing more recently than I’d been looking up numbers. No Armbrusters were listed on south Christiana. I called directory assistance to make sure. So I’d have to make another trip to north Lawndale. I gritted my teeth in anticipation of this treat. And after that I should find out where everyone on my list of annoyed patrons had been early Wednesday morning. Although if Ralph MacDonald or Roz’s cousins had tried torching me, they’d probably hired someone else to do it. Still, it would be worth finding out where they’d been. It wasn’t exactly a job for a convalescent. Maybe I could wait until Sunday to start working on it.

  My eyes were too sore for television or reading. My body ached too much for anything else. After I force-fed myself the plateful of fettucini I went back to bed. Lotty capped my wonderful day by phoning at eight-thirty to see if I was still alive.

  “I’m doing okay,” I said cautiously. If I told her I hurt like hell, I’d only get a lecture on my just deserts.

  “Mez told me he’d released you today. He didn’t think you were ready to go home, but I assured him you had an iron constitution and would be ready to do something else life-threatening next week.”

  “Thank you, Lotty.” I lay down in the dark with the phone propped on a pillow next to my mouth. “If I turned my back on people who came to me in need, I can imagine how loudly you’d cheer. And if I avoided all risks-stayed home watching the soaps or something-you’d really be leading the applause meter.”

  “You don’t think you could find some point of balance between doing nothing and putting your head in the noose?” she burst out. “Do you know how I feel every time I see your body come in on a stretcher not knowing if you’re alive or dead, not knowing if this time your brain is ruined, your limbs paralyzed? Do you think you could manage your affairs so that you stopped a few feet short of the point of death, maybe even ask the police to take those risks?”

  “So someone else’s friend or lover can do the worrying, you mean?” I wasn’t angry, only very lonely. “It will happen inevitably, Lotty. I won’t be able to jump through hoops or climb up ropes forever. Someone else will have to take over. But it won’t be the police. Not when I have to fight them every inch of the way to look into arson and they still won’t do it. Or when their only answer to my near death is to accuse me-”

  I broke off. Maybe Cerise and Elena had seen who set fire to the Indiana Arms and were going after him. Or her. Or them. Still, if that was so, it could be the arsonist was disposing of her by his favorite means. And maybe assumed she’d confided in me so I had to go too? And-but had they murdered Cerise? The police said it was an overdose, pure and simple.

  “I know I shouldn’t be losing my temper with you. It’s only my fear of losing you, that’s all,” Lotty said.

  “I know,” I said wearily. “But it just puts that much more pressure on me, Lotty. Some days I have to fight a hundred people just to be able to do my job. When you’re the hundred and first I feel like all I want to do is lie down and die.”

  She didn’t say anything for a long moment. “So to help you I have to support you doing things that are a torment to me? I’ll have to think about that one, Victoria… One thing I don’t support, though. That you dedicate your life to your aunt. Mez mentioned that part of your conversation to me. I suggested that if you were a man, he would never even have raised the topic with you except to ask if you had a wife to do the job.”

  “What did he say?”

  “What could he say? He hemmed and said he still thought it was a good idea. But there’s a limit to how much of yourself you have to immolate for people, Victoria. You almost killed yourself for Elena. You don’t have to sacrifice your mind as well.”

  “Okay, Doctor,” I muttered. I blinked back tears-I was so weak that one little sentence of support made me feel like crying.

  “You’re exhausted,” she said curtly. “You’re in bed? Good. Get some sleep. Good night.”

  When she hung up I switched my phone over to the answering service. I fumbled around with the switch in the dark to turn off the bell. When my thick ungainly hands had managed that I finally fell into a deep clear sleep.

  29

  Heavy Flowers

  When I woke up on Saturday it was past nine-thirty. I’d slept more than thirteen hours and for the first time in a week I felt rested for my time in bed. I let myself come to slowly, not wanting to bring on black spots by jerking my head.

  In the bathroom I unwrapped my hands. The palms had turned an orangey-yellow. I flinched in nausea-their swollen discoloration made a sickening wake-up call. When I gently pushed the blood blisters lining my hands like railroad tracks, they seemed to be healing. I tried to remember that injuries always look their worst when they’re on the mend, but the squishy mass still made my stomach turn. I also wasn’t sure I could wrap them back up again myself. The hospital had given me a salve and some dressing but hadn’t included a manual on how to apply them with my teeth.

  Still, if I kept my hands on the edge of the tub, I could take a proper bath. I turned on the water, threw in some milk bath, and toddled off to the kitchen to make coffee. Since I could use only my fingertips to handle the kettle, it was a slow and tiresome experience. By the time I had a cup poured the bath was close to overflowing. I climbed in carefully, holding the coffee in my fingers. When I
sank down cross-legged and great wave swept over the side of the tub but my hands stayed dry.

  I lay soaking until the water became tepid, thinking of nothing at first, then going back to my painful headwork of the previous night. I still couldn’t understand why Cerise’s death had terrified Elena into flight, unless someone had pumped Cerise full of heroin and left her to die. I couldn’t move on that idea, though. I didn’t have any evidence-it was just the only explanation that I could come up with. And how had Elena known? She’d found it out in the twenty-four hours between my visit to her and her panicky exit in the middle of the night. While she was lying mute behind a protective barricade of doctors and nurses I didn’t have any way of finding out. I’d have to drop it for now.

  What I could do was take a look at Alma Mejicana. I put the coffee cup on the windowsill and looked at my palms again, grimacing. Tomorrow would be the ideal time to slide into their offices, but I didn’t think I’d be much more healed by then than I was this morning.

  I soaped down and pulled myself cautiously from the tub. Drying off presented more difficulties. It’s only when you can’t use them that you realize how much you need your hands. The third time I dropped the towel I left it on the floor and climbed back into bed to finish drying.

  The front doorbell rang just as I was trying to hoist jeans over my still-damp rump. I’d forgotten Robin was coming. I slid my arms through a zip-up jacket and managed to have it closed by the time he got to the third-floor landing.

  “Vic! Good to see you in one piece.” He looked me over critically. “You don’t seem nearly as battered as I figured from the news reports. How you feeling?”