Once the experts had removed the dynamite from the car and whisked it away in a special sealed container, the TV crews departed too. Montgomery’s demeanor changed immediately. He sent Jerry off and informed me we were going downtown for a real talk. A trace of sadism in his expression as he took my arm roughly made my stomach churn. Mr. Contreras pawed anxiously at him, demanding to know what they were doing with me. Montgomery brushed the old man back so roughly, I was afraid he might knock him over.
“Take it easy, Lieutenant, he’s seventy-eight. You don’t need to prove you’re bigger and more powerful.”
“Bobby Mallory puts up with a lot of shit from you I don’t have to take, Warshawski. You button up now and speak when you’re spoken to or I’ll have you in on an assault charge fast enough to make your smug little head spin.”
“Whew, Lieutenant, you been watching too many Dirty Harry movies.”
He yanked my arm hard enough to jar the shoulder socket and hustled me to the car. As he was pushing me inside I turned to scream at Mr. Contreras to call Lotty and get my lawyer’s name from her.
Down at Eleventh Street, Montgomery took me to a small interrogation room and began demanding to know how I’d gotten hold of a supply of dynamite. When it dawned on me that he was trying to accuse me of rigging my own car, I was so furious that the room swam in front of my eyes.
“Get a witness in here, Lieutenant,” I managed to get out in a voice below a scream. “Get a witness in here to what you’re saying.”
He swallowed a triumphant smile so fast I almost missed it. “We’ve got a pretty good case, Warshawski. You’ve been involved in two suspicious fires in the last month. We figure you for a sensationalist. When you couldn’t get the kind of attention you wanted out of those fires, you rigged a bomb up in your car. All I want to know is where you got the dynamite.”
I wanted to jump up from behind the table and seize his long stork neck and pound his head against the wall, but I had just enough reason left to know he was hoping to goad me over the brink. I shut my eyes, panting, trying to force my temper down-the first time I let it go he’d have me in the lockup for assaulting an officer.
“You’ve been hiding behind Bobby Mallory for years, Warshawski. It’s time you learned to fight on your own.”
I felt him moving toward me just in time to back my chair away. The blow he’d aimed for my head got me on the diaphragm.
“I presume this room is wired. Please let the record show that Lieutenant Montgomery just hit a witness in a bombing case,” I shouted.
He aimed another fist at me. I slid from my chair under the legs of the table. Montgomery got down on his hands and knees to pull me out, shouting abuse at me, calling me names out of porn flicks. I scooted away from him. He went flat on his abdomen and grabbed my left ankle. I twisted away and got to my feet on the other side of the table.
Just as I staggered upright Officer Neely walked in. Her professional mask cracked at the sight of a lieutenant on his belly scrabbling around under an interrogation table.
“He lost a contact,” I said helpfully, “We’ve both been down there looking, but he started confusing my ankle with his eyeballs so I thought I’d get out of the way.”
Neely didn’t say anything. By the time Montgomery had climbed awkwardly back to his feet, she had her face composed in its usual rigid lines. She spoke in a monotone. “Lieutenant Mallory heard you were questioning this witness and wanted to talk to her for a few minutes.”
Montgomery glared at her, furious at being caught looking like a fool. I felt sorry for her, her career buffeted by being the wrong person to show up at a bad moment.
“I don’t think the lieutenant here has anything else useful to say to me. He’s got his facts without asking a single question. Let’s go, Officer.” Unfortunately I didn’t feel sorry enough to keep my mouth shut.
I opened the door to the interrogation room and headed down the hall, not waiting to see what Officer Neely would do. She caught up with me on the stairs. I wanted to say something helpful and sisterly to her in support of her law-enforcement career, but I was too badly rattled to think of anything very chipper. She was looking rigidly ahead, making it impossible to know if she was embarrassed, disgusted, or just not very responsive. On the third floor we silently crossed the Violent Crimes area to Bobby’s tiny office along the far wall. Officer Neely knocked and opened the door.
“Miss Warshawski, sir. Did you want me to take notes?”
Bobby was on the phone. He shook his head and motioned me to a chair. Officer Neely shut the door behind her with a sharp snap.
Bobby’s desk and walls were crammed with photographs-pictures of yellow birds in flight, gap-toothed children grinning as they sported his dress uniform cap, Eileen hand in hand with her eldest daughter as a bride. He liked to shift them around every so often so he could see them with a fresh eye. Ordinarily I hunt for the shots of Tony or Gabriella-or even the one of me at five sitting on Tony’s lap. Today I didn’t really care. I sat gripping my hands on the side of the metal chair, waiting for him to finish his conversation. Next to Montgomery, Bobby was the last person I wanted to see today.
“Okay, Vicki, tell me what’s going on and make it fast. I had a call from your lawyer, which is how I knew you were down here, but it doesn’t make me happy to run interference for you with another man on the force.”
I took a deep breath and came out with a tolerably coherent version of the day’s events. Bobby grunted and asked a few questions, like how come I knew it was a bomb and how long it had taken Monty to get there after Jerry called in the report on his car radio.
When I got to the end Bobby made a face. “You’re in an awkward spot, Vicki. I keep telling you not to play around in police business and this just proves my point. You came to me to get you out of hot water you boiled up yourself-”
“What do you mean?” I was so furious, my head seemed to rise a foot from my body. “I did not, repeat not, put that bomb in my car engine. Someone did, but instead of trying to get a description of the men who did it-who may have done it-from a pretty good witness, the police are trying to charge me with attempted suicide.”
“I’m not saying you planted that device, Vicki. I know you well enough to realize you’re not that unbalanced. But if you hadn’t been playing around with arson and a whole lot of things I told you to stay out of, you wouldn’t be in this mess at all.”
He looked at me sternly, daddy to naughty child. “Now I’m going to use a few chips on your behalf, Vicki, with a guy who’s not too easy to work with. In return I want you to promise me that you are not going to touch this business any further. Let alone the trouble you’ve got yourself into, since you started in on that fire three weeks ago you’ve got my whole unit stirred up. You were in last night with some damned piece of jewelry that has the boys in an uproar now. I just can’t have it. Do you understand?”
I pressed my lips together. “I brought in a man’s bracelet I found under my couch because I though Finchley might have dropped it when he and Montgomery were in last week. McGonnigal flipped out when he saw it because he knew it was Furey’s and thought I was flaunting it at him. It was only late last night that I realized it belonged to Furey and came to see what it was doing in my apartment.
“He’d given it to Elena, Bobby, to Elena and the dead junkie you went to see at the Rapelec site two weeks ago. It was just a little extortion, something to keep them from reporting that they’d seen him-”
Bobby slammed his palm hard on the desk. One of the pictures teetered and fell over the side. “I’ve had enough out of you!” he roared. “That’s a loathsome suggestion. You’ve been treated too easy for too long, that’s your problem, so when things don’t go your way you manufacture conspiracy theories. You ought to know better than that, than to come in here and try to lay that kind of sh-something like that on me. Now get out and go home. I told you two weeks ago to stop stirring up my department and I meant it. This had better be the last time
I see you around here.”
I got up and looked steadily at him. “You don’t want to know what I’ve learned? If I’m right, Montgomery and Furey could be involved in one of the ugliest little scandals to hit this department in a long time.”
Bobby scowled ferociously. “Spare me. I hear enough trash in here every day without listening to you fling garbage around about one of my own men, I’ve told you dozens of times that you’re in a line of work that’s bad for you, and this is perfect proof of it. You don’t know how to reason, how to follow a chain of evidence to a conclusion, so you start making up paranoid fantasies. If I tell you I think you need a good man and a family, you get on your high horse, but women your age who don’t marry start getting strange ideas. I don’t want to see you ending up like that crazy aunt of yours, propositioning young men for the price of a bottle.”
I stared down at him not knowing whether to scream or laugh. “Bobby, that psychology was old before you were born, the old repressed-spinster routine, and even if it were true, it sure wouldn’t apply to me. I just hope you aren’t laying that line on Officer Neely, or about the time I hit West Madison you’re going to be facing a harassment suit so big it’ll make your head spin. Anyway, if you have to think of me as a crackpot virgin to keep your faith in the department intact, remember when the pieces come breaking around you that I tried to warn you.”
Bobby was on his feet now, too, panting, his face red. “Get out of my office and don’t come back here. Your parents were two of my best friends, but I’d have broken every bone in your body if you talked to me the way you spoke to them, and look where it’s led-how dare you talk to me like this. Get out!”
The last few words were on a crescendo so loud that they must have heard them on the street, let alone in the adjacent room. I managed to keep my head up and my steps steady and even to shut the door gently behind me. Everyone in the room turned to stare as I made the long walk from his office to the unit-room exit.
“It’s okay, boys and girls. The lieutenant got a little excited, but I don’t think there’ll be any more fireworks this afternoon.”
42
Mourning Becomes Electra
I walked slowly up State Street. Anger dragged at my steps, anger and depression both. Someone laid a bomb in my engine and no one in the police department had tried to get a word from Mr. Contreras about the men he’d seen. Instead, Roland Montgomery assaulted me physically while Bobby did it mentally. Break every bone in my body. Oh, yeah. That’s how you get people to stop asking questions and do as you say, you break every bone in their bodies.
I was angry with myself too-I hadn’t meant to talk to Bobby about Furey until I had some proof. Of course Bobby wouldn’t listen to me spreading stories about his fair-haired boy. It would be hard enough to get him to listen when I could really back them up. And even though I was furious right now with Bobby, I didn’t look forward to bringing him that much pain.
Maybe I’d feel better for food. It had been six hours since I’d eaten and I’d thrown that up. I wandered into the first coffee shop I came to. They had a variety of salads on the menu but I ordered a b.l.t. with fries. Grease is so much more comforting than greens. Anyway, my weight was still down-I needed to pack a few carbs to build myself back up.
Because I’d come during off-hours they made up the fries fresh just for me. I ate them first, while they were still hot and crisp. Halfway through the fries I remembered I was supposed to check in with my answering service every hour to see if the Streeter Brothers could fit me into their schedule soon. I carried the last handful of potatoes to the pay phone at the front of the coffee shop.
I got Tim Streeter this time. “We can start for you first thing in the morning, Vic, but we’ll need you to brief the boys, give them a description, and maybe show them the kind of place your aunt would likely pick.”
My stomach fell. Morning seemed an awfully long time away just now. I couldn’t protest, though-they were doing me a mighty big favor. I told Tim I’d meet him at the corner of Indiana and Cermak at eight and hung up.
Maybe it would still be light enough for me to do some hunting on my own tonight. I could stop at August Cray’s office and then head home to pick up the Tempo. I called my neighborhood car rental. They closed at six but said they’d leave the Tempo out front for me with the keys taped underneath the front bumper. If someone stole it before I got there they weren’t going to be out much.
I paid my bill-under ten dollars, even though I was perilously close to the upscale part of the South Loop- and took the sandwich to eat on my way to Cray’s office.
The address Freeman Carter had given me for Farm-works was on north LaSalle. I took a bus up to Van Buren and then got on the Dan Ryan L-it would take me around the Loop faster than any taxi this time of day. It was just on four-thirty when I got off at Clark and walked the three blocks to Cray’s building. I hoped someone was still in the office, even if Cray himself wasn’t.
I was going against the tide of homebound workers. Inside the lobby I had to move to the wall and scoot crablike around the outgoing throng to the elevators. I rode in splendid isolation to the twenty-eighty floor and made my way on soft gray carpeting to Suite 2839. Its solid wood door was labeled simply “Property Management.” They probably ran so many different little firms out of there that they couldn’t list all their names on the door.
The knob didn’t turn under my hand so I tried a buzzer discreetly imbedded to the right of the panel. After a long pause a tinny voice asked who was there.
“I’m interested in investing in Farmworks,” I said. “I’d like to talk to August Cray.”
The door clicked. I walked into a narrow reception area, a holding pen really, with a couple of stiff chairs but no table or magazines-or even a window for waiting customers to gaze through.
A sliding glass window in the left wall allowed the inmates to look at visitors without exposing their whole bodies. This was shut when I came in. I looked around and saw a little television camera in a corner of the ceiling. I smiled at it and waved and a few seconds later Star Wentzel opened a door next to the glass panel. Her blond hair was combed back and gathered into a jeweled white clip. She wore a long narrow skirt that highlighted her gaunt pelvic bones. She looked like a high school student from the fifties, not a participant in a development scam.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
I smiled. “I might ask you the same question. I came here to find August Cray-Farmworks’s agent of record. And here you are, mourning your mother, but putting a brave front on it by coming into the office.”
“I can’t bring Mother back to life by staying home,” she said pettishly. “I don’t need you to tell me how to behave.”
“Of course you don’t, Star. Can we go inside? I’d still like to talk to August Cray.”
“He’s not here. Why don’t you tell me what you want?”
This was clearly a rote line-she rattled it off without the hostility of her earlier remarks. I smiled.
“I came to invest in Farmworks. It’s such an up-and-coming company. I hear they’re going to get a huge piece of the new stadium project-I want to be a millionaire just like Boots and Ralph.”
She smoothed a hand over a jutting hipbone. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then I’ll explain it to you. Let’s go sit down-this will take awhile-your feet are going to start hurting in those spiky heels if we talk out here.”
I opened the door and shepherded Star into the inner office. It was a small room with a blond wood desk about the color of her hair. A couple of portables covered the top-one seemed identical to the Apollo I’d noticed in the Alma Mejicana offices on Sunday. Wood filing cabinets filled the windowless walls and spilled over into the narrow hallway. It was a working person’s office all right.
I dumped a stack of prospectuses from a chair in the hall and moved it into the office while Star sat in her padded swivel chair behind the desk. Her mouth was set
in a mulish line. I expect I looked about the same.
She lifted a thin wrist to examine a weighty gold timepiece. “I don’t have much time, so make your spiel and let me get home. My sister and I have to entertain some of Mother’s church friends tonight.”
“It’s partly about your mother that I came to see you,” I said.
“You claimed to be a friend of hers but no one at the church had ever heard of you,” she said sharply.
“That’s because I only knew her in the narrow context of her work at Seligman. Since the fire at the Indiana Arms-I’m sure you know about that, don’t you?-I’d been talking to her, hoping to get some idea about who might have set it. She obviously was sitting on some kind of secret. And that secret had to do with you or your sister. After I talked to you at the funeral home on Monday, I was pretty sure that you working here was what she was so pleased about-and so eager to withhold. And that’s what I want you to tell me-why she couldn’t tell people where you worked.”
A ghost of her mother’s smug look flitted across her face. “That’s none of your business, is it?”
She said it in a saucy little singsong, the way young children do. It got under my skin, goading me to act like a child myself. I put both hands on the desk and leaned forward between the two computers. “Star, sugar, I want you to be real brave about this, but you should know your boss killed your mother.”
Little red spots burned in her cheeks. “That’s a lie! Mother was killed by some awful mugger who thought the office was empty and-”
“And broke in and stole only the documents relating to Farmworks’s offer to buy the Indiana Arms,” I cut in. “Come off it, Star. Ralph and Boots are spinning you a line. Your mother learned I’d gotten hold of a picture of you and she was afraid you’d get linked to the fire when I started showing it around. She went to Ralph and told him she was going to have to tell me all about his offer to purchase-she didn’t want you taking the fall in case someone could connect you with that arson. And he killed her. Or he got someone to kill her. How bad do you want to protect those cretins? Bad enough to let them get away with your mama’s death?”
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