It was past three A.M. now, the temperature somewhere in the high twenties and a dark, starless sky threatening snow. But the block in front of me, Lammy’s block, was awash in the cold, eerie glow of floodlights, punctuated by competing emergency lights—blue-and-white police strobes flashing frantically against the slower, perhaps more patient, red-and-white bursts from fire department vehicles. A helicopter hovered low in the windless sky, the beam of its spotlight striped and dancing as it pierced through shifting clouds of rising vapor—vehicle exhaust mingled with white smoke and steam from a dying fire.
Lammy’s block swarmed with people bustling this way and that in apparent chaos, calling and shouting orders in voices barely audible in the cold night air above the rumbling running engines of more than a dozen fire and police vehicles. Two hook and ladders and a snorkel rig, its long arm folded in upon itself, were clustered closest to the center of the block. Nearby, two huge, boxlike red equipment trucks faced each other, nose to nose, banks of portable floodlights mounted on their roofs. There was a red fire-lieutenant’s car and a trauma wagon, with its wide-open rear doors showing activity of some sort within.
Threaded in among the fire equipment were police vehicles of every variety: marked and unmarked squads, patrol wagons, an evidence technician’s car, and another large rectangular truck like the fire department’s equipment trucks, except this one blue and white, but again with floodlights mounted on its top. Two TV vans were parked just outside the police lines, tall towers rising from their roofs. Even the Red Cross truck was there, with coffee and doughnuts for participants with the proper credentials.
In among the jumble of motor vehicles, helmeted firefighters in knee-length coats of black and reflective yellow climbed carefully in heavy boots over hoses and snow-banked curbs. Uniformed police officers of both sexes in bulky black jackets and fur-lined, ear-flapped hats stood silently—almost casually—at my end of the block, and certainly at the other end as well. Their mere presence was intended, and sufficient, to keep the curious neighbors at bay. Beyond them, in the inner circle, detectives in topcoats and fedoras, and aggressive wool-capped tactical officers in their trademark flak jackets, stood in clusters with their white cardboard cups of coffee, chatting and laughing and shaking their heads, occasionally stamping their feet on the frozen ground … and constantly looking around.
Constantly looking around. Pivoting this way and that. Peering at the shifting groups of onlookers around the edges of the scene. Bantering, watching. Gossiping, observing.
I’m told that as hard as any crowd watches any fire, smart cops—especially when they know it’s a torch job—watch the crowd right back. Equal opportunity crime notwithstanding, the cops are looking mostly for males, and specifically for some guy shifting his weight rhythmically from foot to foot, or—better yet—a guy with his hand at his crotch. They’re looking for the man showing more than ordinary curiosity, the one for whom fire offers a special excitement, a singular, sexual, thrill. The perpetrator—pro and amateur alike, I’m told—is often there on the scene, and quite often ejaculating into his pants.
I wasn’t excited in quite that way, but because the smart cops were watching I had to get out of there. I could see that the fire was under control, essentially out. The homes on either side of Lammy’s were both still standing, their fronts and sides coated with thick, roped armors of ice. There were no visible flames, and not even much smoke anymore, although firefighters still shot heavy streams of water into what was left of the two-flat, basically the exterior brick walls about as high as the first floor, with the roof, the upper walls, and everything else nothing but a mass of smoldering, steaming ruins that had fallen in on itself.
Lammy wouldn’t have to worry about going home anymore. Maybe he’d be better off. Maybe it was all for the best—for Lammy.
I’d left Casey tied to his chair and scared to death. Was he still waiting for me to keep my promise when the flames swept over him?
CHAPTER
32
LEAVING THE ILLUSORY SAFETY of the crowd on the corner, I walked down the sidewalk toward the west. Up ahead, the drivers of two one-man squad cars were conferring through their open windows, facing opposite directions in the entrance to the alley that ran first past Steve Connolly’s garage and, farther down, Lammy’s backyard. I was headed for the Voyager, but then the squad car facing north drove off down the alley. In the remaining car the interior lights were on and the driver—overweight and on the far side of middle-age—took off his patrolman’s cap and dropped it onto the seat beside him.
“Say, officer,” I said, hobbling across the street, dragging my left foot in a pronounced limp, “can I ask ya somethin’?”
“Alley’s closed, bud, if that’s what you want.” He shifted a thick toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other.
“Nah, not that.” I stopped well away from the car, breathing hard, as though walking were an effort. My gloves were off and I held a small notebook in my left hand, with a ballpoint poised in my right. “Name’s Max Bodenheim, officer. I’m a new guy with the Sun-Times, and—”
“Yeah? Well, there’s a press liaison officer who—”
“Right, I know the drill,” I said, talking through his objection, “and I won’t quote ya or nothin’. But my damn car broke down and I just got here and I couldn’t find the press guy and I was wondering … was there anybody inside when that place went up? I need to know that right away ’cause I’m supposed to call in if there was, and I heard the first-floor people were outta town but there mighta been a guy living on the second floor and—”
“Jesus, shut up.” He sighed, tired of listening to me. “All I can say is they didn’t pull anybody out. But the place went up like somethin’ in a friggin’ Stallone movie. If there was anybody inside, you could lose what’s left of the poor bastard on the bottom of your toaster.” He rolled the toothpick between his plump thumb and forefinger. “Now why don’t you—”
But I was already limping away.
Once around the corner I abandoned the limp and hurried to the Voyager. I yanked on the door. But it didn’t open, and I remembered I’d locked it so no one would steal my sleeping bag. I dug out the key, but for some reason it wouldn’t fit in the lock. I tried the passenger door. No luck. The locks didn’t seem frozen. The key just didn’t—
The Voyager key was in another pocket. The key I’d been trying was the one to the Intrepid, the car Casey had a key to, also. I U-turned the Voyager, drove two blocks south, then back east again, hoping not to find the white Intrepid where I left it, hoping Casey had gone somewhere in it.
But even before I turned the final corner I could see diagonally across the vacant lot where a building had recently been torn down. The white car was still sitting there in a row of other parked cars, visible in the dim light—and empty.
I didn’t make the turn. Why bother? There was nothing to do but go and get some sleep.
In the middle of the intersection I stopped for a moment and stared down the street, past the parked Intrepid, toward the fire scene two blocks north. There seemed to be fewer emergency vehicles down there now, and cops were in the street waving their arms, helping one of the fire trucks back up so it could leave, too. The crowd of onlookers was scattering. The show was almost over. I squeezed my steering wheel hard and cursed at the Intrepid for still sitting there on the street, just another parked car, except …
Except now there was exhaust puffing out from the rear of the white car, for God’s sake, and—
An angry blast from a monstrous air horn nearly blew me through the windshield. Huge headlights were bearing down fast on my tail and I hit the gas and barely made it off to the side as a long red truck thundered by. Maybe there was another fire somewhere. Or maybe the hook-and-ladder people had cooking duty that week and were hustling back to the station to start breakfast.
I walked over to the Intrepid and yanked open the front passenger door. “Hey,” I said, “never sit with your engine
idling. What if you fell asleep?”
Casey’s head was already up against the ceiling or he’d have banged it there when he jumped. “Thank God almighty!” he said. “I thought you were—”
I got in the car and we congratulated each other on being alive. He had a heavy black cardigan on, over his bloodstained collarless shirt.
“Fact is,” Casey said, “I was sleeping, laying over on the seat there. But a minute ago I got cold and cranked up the car to get warm.”
“But how did you—”
“When you left me tied to that chair I was scared and started throwing myself around, trying to get free, not knowing how close I was to the top of the stairs. Jeez, I flipped over backward down the steps and I thought I was a goner. But when I hit the next landing the chair broke up into pieces and I knew I was gonna get free. So I just kinda kept on rolling, all the way down to the bottom.”
“And you went to the car then?”
“Nah. I went back up to help, but by the time I got all the knots untied, and had my breath back, well … the kitchen door was locked. I’m wondering if I should try to squeeze through the broken window, when the next thing I know the place is a furnace. And I didn’t know if … if…”
“Right.” I interrupted. Neither one of us wanted him to start sobbing. “That’s what I thought about you, too. So then what? Where’d you get that sweater, anyway?”
“It was in the car. Thing is, with Lammy and you both gone, and then that lawyer putting the scare in me, I wasn’t gonna stick around. I stowed my stuff in here.” He jerked his thumb toward the backseat, which was pretty well filled with his lumpy bag. “Then I went back to Lammy’s, thinking I’d stay a little longer in case you called. That’s when those guys broke in and started asking me where Lammy was.”
“Asking? You mean torturing.”
“Wasn’t all that bad. Thing is, I really didn’t know where Lammy was and they wouldn’t believe me. I got a bloody nose and a little rope burn. That’s all.” He grinned.
“John Wayne lives,” I said.
“Was kind of scary, though, I admit.” He paused. “So when the fire started I wanted to stick close by. If you were … you know … alive, I figured you’d look for the car. I was so tired I laid down on the seat. I knew you’d think of this car. And I knew you wouldn’t just drive on by without looking inside, even if you didn’t see me.”
“Yeah, well…”
We drove to an all-night gas station with a little grocery store. I stayed in the car while Casey went inside and washed up a little in the rest room. He came back to the car with two coffees and a plastic-wrapped package of six sweet rolls.
“Probably taste like crap,” he said, “but they’re loaded with sugar and I haven’t eaten since lunch.”
I ate one roll and he was right.
He started inhaling the other rolls while he talked. “I almost forgot. That woman lawyer called again. Not that long after you hung up on me. Said you’d tried to call her but she missed you. She was really upset.”
“Pissed-off at me, I suppose.”
“Well, a little mad, ’cause she thought you’d be calling earlier. But mostly worried. Said she had to get word to you fast. Told me Steve Connolly was … well … enraged was the word I think she used and she was worried him and his brother Dominic might—”
“Brother-in-law,” I said.
“Yeah. Well, anyway, they’re really angry about what happened. I just wish she’d have called me before I talked to you, because—”
“What hap—”
But his words kept rolling out. “… because she said I oughta keep an eye out and she hoped Lammy didn’t come home and that’s what she wanted to tell you, to—”
“What—”
“So she kinda scared the crap outta me and I put my stuff in the car, thinking if everyone was so mad, and wanted to take it out on Lammy, it was a good thing he wasn’t here and it might be good if I wasn’t—”
“Casey!”
“What?”
“Shut up. Eat that last roll and shut up for a minute and calm down.”
“Okay.”
“Now just answer one question.” I paused to let him finish his coffee, then spoke very slowly. “Did Renata say why Steve and Dominic were so angry?”
“Yes,” he said. But that’s all he said. He was following instructions.
“Well?”
“Oh. Okay. She told me they were in court this afternoon … I mean yesterday afternoon. Anyway, there was a whole crowd of people there, she said.” He was speaking slowly now, too. So slowly I wanted to shake him. “Neighbors, I guess. And other people. And afterward they were all very upset—but Steve the most, I guess—because of what happened.”
“Why? Because Lammy didn’t show up?”
“No, not that. I didn’t understand all of what she said, but basically she said the state dropped all the charges against Lammy. The case got dismissed.”
CHAPTER
33
IT WAS TRUE.
Renata was so happy about it she didn’t even gripe about my calling her at four o’clock in the morning. But she still had no kind words for the prosecutor.
“I’ve been telling that damn Heffernan he had no case from the start. He knew it, too, as well as I did, but he was afraid of a hostile reaction from the media.”
“Right, and the neighbors, and especially—”
“Whatever. Anyway, when the little girl disappeared, that gave him a perfect excuse to dump the case. He moved to have it S.O.L.’ed, stricken on leave to reinstate. Told the judge—and the press—he’ll consider reinstating charges when, and if, his witness is located.”
“And will he?”
“Not a chance. Even if the inconsistencies in the girl’s statements weren’t so obvious, everyone knows that whatever happened couldn’t have happened the way she described it, where she described it.”
I knew exactly what Renata meant. Trish had claimed her pants were pulled down and she was pushed backward onto the ground at the bottom of Lammy’s back steps. But the rough, cracking concrete that covered that entire area made the absence of abrasions on her buttocks, or the backs of her legs, simply unexplainable.
Renata obviously hadn’t heard about the fire, which happened too late for the ten o’clock news. “I don’t suppose,” I said, “you have any pictures of—”
“You bet I do. Photos of the back stairs and the whole area, taken the same day Lammy got out on bond. A dozen eight-by-ten color prints, which I showed Heffernan a week ago. Someone may have attacked that child, but not where and how she described it.”
“So Heffernan’s thrilled to have a reason to dump the case.”
“Plus,” Renata said, “although I never discussed this with the state, I’ve received the report on Lammy’s psych tests. No sign of a propensity for sexual attraction to, or behavior with, children. Of course, what they did find is nothing to write home about, the poor soul, and I hope he never has to read it.”
“Hell, I wouldn’t want to see my results, either, from tests like that.”
“Anyway,” she said, “Heffernan gets rid of the case and he doesn’t get eaten alive by the press, or the neighbors, or—”
“Or by Steve Connolly.”
“Yes. Connolly was in court and he obviously thought Lammy would be there. You know, I can understand the feelings of a father, but this man is unusual. He’s overflowing with hostility … hatred even. He’s supposedly mixed up with the mob, of course, and probably psychopathic. The girl’s uncle was there, too.”
“Dominic Fontana.”
“Right. He’s even scarier than Connolly. I’m really frightened for Lammy.”
I told her, then, about the fire. Not much, only that I’d heard it was arson, and that Casey was safe.
“Whoever it was must have thought Lammy was home,” she said. “You have to find him fast, before they do.”
“I already found him. He’s fine. Better you don’t know where.
I’ve sent Casey to stay with him.”
“And what about you?” she asked.
“Me?”
“My advice is to turn yourself in. The longer you hide out, the more it looks like you’ve gone off the deep end. First with Tina Fontana. And now that priest, and getting rid of the grandmother and the little girl, so she couldn’t testify against Lammy.”
“You don’t think I—”
“The media are certainly playing it that way. The cops seem to think so, too.” She paused. “And I must say…”
“Jesus Christ, Renata, you can’t possibly believe that.”
“Of course not. I was only going to say … you do seem to have screwed things up, and—”
“Screwed things up? I can’t believe you said that.”
“Okay, I take that back. But you’d still be better off giving yourself up.”
“Bullshit. You think the cops are gonna protect me from a couple of maniacs like Connolly and Fontana, for chrissake?”
“Well…”
“And that hotshot investigator—Sanchez?—he’s gonna see my ass is well-protected, right? Hell, he’ll tear off my hide himself if he gets the chance.”
“Okay, okay,” Renata said. “Calm down. I’m still your lawyer, and I’m doing my legal duty. Cops ask me, I’ll say you called. Wouldn’t tell me where you were. I suggested you surrender. You’re considering it. Everything else is privileged. Now, when will you—”
I hung up on her. She’d taken it back, maybe, but Renata’s opinion was that I was screwing things up.
Ah well, it’s always nice to have the support of your friends. But when you don’t? You push on anyway, with no one to pat you on the back. Maybe I had screwed a few things up. But if so, at least the screw-up came from doing. The other option—not-doing—was the path I’d chosen when Lammy was in trouble the first time, a path that had led finally into this mess. So I had to push on.
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