Fire Sale

by Sara Paretsky

  April shifted her groggy gaze from Soul Train to her mother, but her face brightened when she saw me. “Coach! This is so cool, you coming to see me. You gonna let me come back to the team, even if I miss next week?”

  “You can rejoin the team as soon as the docs and your mom say you’re ready to play. Great bear-where’d he come from?”

  “Daddy.” She flicked a wary glance at her mother: the bear had probably already been the focus of a quarrel, but I found it heartbreaking, Bron wanting to do something for his daughter and coming up with this outsize toy.

  We talked a little about basketball, about school, what she was missing in her biology class, while Sandra fussed with her pillows, straightened the sheets, pushed April to drink some juice (“You know the doctor said you have to have lots of fluids with this drug you’re taking.”).

  By and by, a young resident came in. He had a chubby, cherubic face, complete with a circlet of soft dark curls, but he had an easy way about him, bantering lightly with April while he checked her pulse and asked her how much she was drinking and eating.

  “You got that big bear there to try to scare me off, huh, but I don’t scare that easy. Keep him away from your boyfriend, though, boys your age can’t stand up to bears.”

  After a few minutes, he left her with a nod and a wink, and ushered Sandra and me down the hall, out of April’s earshot. I introduced myself and explained my role in April’s life.

  “Oh, you’re the heroine who saved her life. That how you got your arm in a sling?”

  I hoped hearing the doctor call me a heroine would soften Sandra’s views of me. I explained briefly about my injury and asked what the story was on April.

  “She has something we call Long QT Syndrome. I could show you the EKG and explain how we know and why we call it that, but what it really means is a kind of arrhythmia in the heart. With proper treatment, she can certainly lead a normal, productive life, but she absolutely has to give up basketball. If she keeps playing, I’m sorry to put it bluntly, Ms. Czernin, but the outcome could be very bad.”

  Sandra nodded bleakly. She’d gone back to twisting her fingers together, thumbs pushing so hard that the backs of her hands were covered in purplish-red welts. I asked the resident what the proper treatment was.

  “We’ve started her on a course of beta-blockers to stabilize her heart.” He went into a long explanation about the buildup of sodium ions in the chamber, and the function of beta-blockers in stabilizing the ion exchange, then added, “She should go to a pacemaker, to an implanted cardioverter defibrillator. Otherwise, I’m afraid, well, it’s a question of time before there’s another serious episode.”

  His pager sounded. “If there’s anything else, please page me. I’ll be glad to talk to you at any time. We’re going to discharge April Monday if her heart is stable, and we’ll keep her on the beta-blockers for the time being.”

  “Like I can afford those,” Sandra muttered. “Even with my employee discount, it’s going to be fifty bucks a week for her medication. What do they think, that only rich people get sick in this country?”

  I tried to say something commiserating, but she turned on me again; our brief moment of rapport was gone. There was a limit to how much time as a punching bag I felt I owed her; I’d passed it some time back. I told her I’d keep in touch and headed down the hall to the stairwell.

  On my way out the hospital’s front door, I almost collided with a tall teenager, who was entering from Maryland Avenue. I was intent on my own thoughts, and didn’t look at her until she gasped, “Coach.”

  I stopped. “Josie Dorrado! This is great that you came to see April. She’s going to need lots of support in the weeks ahead.”

  To my astonishment, instead of answering she turned crimson and dropped the pot of daisies she was holding. She half opened the door and made a flapping gesture with her right arm, signaling to someone outside to take off. I stepped over the plants and dirt and pushed open the door.

  Josie clutched my left, my sore arm, trying to pull me back inside. I gave a squawk loud enough that she let go of me and muscled my way past her roughly to look at the street. A midnight blue Miata was heading up Maryland, but a group of heavyset women, slowly making their way across the street, blocked the license plate.

  I turned back to Josie. “Who brought you here? Who do you know who can afford a sports car like that?”

  “I came on the bus,” she said quickly.

  “Oh? Which one?”

  “The, uh, the, I didn’t notice the number. I just asked the driver-”

  “To drop you at the hospital entrance. Josie, I’m ashamed of you for lying to me. You’re on my team; I need to be able to trust you.”

  “Oh, Coach, you don’t understand. It’s not what you’re thinking, honest!”

  “Excuse us.” The trio of heavyset women who’d been on the street were frowning magisterially at us. “Can you clean up your mess? We’d like to get into this hospital.”

  We knelt down to clean up the flowers. The pot was plastic and had survived the fall. With a little help from the guard at the reception desk, who found me a brush, we got most of the dirt back in the pot and reorganized the flowers; they looked half dead, but I saw from the price sticker that Josie had got them at By-Smart for a dollar ninety-nine: you don’t get fresh, lively flowers for two bucks.

  When we’d finished, I stared up at her thin face. “Josie, I can’t promise not to tell your mother if you’re going out with some older guy she doesn’t know or doesn’t approve of.”

  “She knows him, she likes him, but she can’t-I can’t tell-you gotta promise-”

  “Are you having sex with him?” I asked bluntly, as she floundered through unfinished sentences.

  Red streaked her cheeks again. “No way!”

  I pressed my lips together, thinking about her home, her mother’s second job, which would have to support the family now that Fly the Flag was gone, her sister’s baby, about Pastor Andrés and his strictures against birth control. “Josie, I will promise not to say anything to your mother for the time being if you make a promise to me.”

  “What’s that?” she demanded, suspicious.

  “Before you sleep with him, or with any boy, you must make him wear a condom.”

  She turned an even darker shade of red. “But, Coach, I can’t-how can you-and the abstinence lady, she say they don’t even work.”

  “She gave you bad advice, Josie. They aren’t a hundred percent effective, but they work most of the time. Do you want to end up like your sister Julia, watching telenovelas all day long? Or do you want to try for a life beyond babies, and clerking at By-Smart?”

  Her eyes were wide and frightened, as if I’d offered her the choice between cutting off her head or talking to her mother. She had probably imagined passionate embraces, a wedding, anything but what it meant to lie with a boy. She looked at the door, at the floor, then suddenly bolted up the stairs into the interior of the hospital. I watched as a guard at the entrance stopped her, but when she looked back down at me I couldn’t bear the fear in her face. I turned on my heel and walked into the cold afternoon.

  19 The Hospitable Mr. Contreras

  I let Peppy back out of the car to chase squirrels around the campus again while I sat on the Bond chapel steps, knees up to my chin, sore back resting against the red doors. A few snowflakes were drifting out of the leaden sky; the students had abandoned the quads. I pulled the collar of my navy peacoat up around my ears, but cold seeped in through the gash in the shoulder.

  What warning signs should I have noticed in April before Monday? Was anyone else on my team at risk? I didn’t even know if the school performed physicals on its athletes before letting them compete, although a program too poor to pay for a coach and balls probably didn’t have a budget for group EKGs and X-rays.

  If Sandra decided to sue me-I’d cross that bridge, but I should get a few things on paper now, while they were fresh in my mind-April fainting last summer, Sandra�
��s own history. “Girls faint all the time,” she’d said; she had herself, although I never remembered her doing so. Maybe she’d swooned in Boom-Boom’s arms…Surely he hadn’t slept with her. The idea of it infuriated me. But what was I doing, turning him into a saint? All these years I’d assumed he took her to the dance just to punish me, but that was because I hadn’t ever wanted to think of him having a life apart from mine. Sandra slept around, we all knew that, so why not with Boom-Boom? And he was a sports hero, not exactly leading a celibate life.

  Peppy came up to nuzzle me, worried by my stupor. I stood up and tossed a stick for her as best I could. She was satisfied; she took the stick over to the grass to chew.

  I realized I felt as battered by Bron and Sandra’s furies as by my physical ills. Had there ever been a time when they twined their arms around each other, looked soulfully into each other’s eyes? Sandra had been thirty when April was born, so a high school pregnancy hadn’t forced them to the altar. Something else had, but I didn’t have friends in the neighborhood who could tell me. Did he sleep around because she looked down on him? Did she despise him because he slept around? What was the chicken and what the egg behind such intense hostility?

  I got slowly to my feet and called to Peppy. She came running up, pink tongue hanging, grinning with pleasure. I ran my fingers through her silky gold hair, trying to absorb some of her pure joy in the world before putting my weary body into motion again.

  At my office, I went through my log of calls from yesterday. A couple of clients I should have been attending to. Three messages from Mr. William, wanting his son, two from Murray Ryerson at the Herald-Star wanting to know if there was an important story about Fly the Flag. Fires in South Chicago are a dime a dozen; the story had rated only a paragraph in the metro sections of the city newspapers, and Murray was the only reporter I knew who’d caught my name in the small print (misspelled and misidentified as “Chicago police sergeant I. V. Warshacky,” but Murray had seen through that easily enough).

  I called Morrell first. He and Mr. Contreras had sent out for Thai food for lunch, and had played a little gin. My neighbor had left, but Morrell couldn’t settle down to his writing; maybe he’d done too much the last few days. When I explained that I was going to do a little work at the office, then try to see Lotty, Morrell said he’d be glad to come with me if she was home; he was going a little stir-crazy.

  Lotty was in. Unlike Murray, she didn’t scan crime news in the papers, so she was surprised and concerned to hear I’d been injured on the job. “Of course you can come by, my dear. I’m going to the store, but I plan to be home this afternoon. Around three-thirty, then?”

  After dictating my notes on my encounter with Sandra and Bron, I talked briefly with Murray: there was no big story down at Fly the Flag, unless you counted the disaster in lives like Rose Dorrado’s. He listened to my passionate description of her life for a few minutes, before interrupting me to say he’d see if he could interest the ChicagoBeat editor in a human interest story down there.

  “What about the dead man in the building?” I asked. “Has the ME identified him? Was it Frank Zamar?”

  I heard the click of Murray ’s fingers on his keyboard. “Yeah, uh, Zamar, that’s right. He had an alarm and a sprinkler system down there. The bomb and arson people are guessing the alarm sounded and he went down to see what the problem was. There’s a big drying room at the back of the plant, big propane-fueled blower. The fabric must have been smoldering and set off the propane just as he got down there-it looked as though he was trying to run away but the fire swallowed him.”

  I dropped the phone. I’d been on the outside, playing spy, while Frank Zamar walked into an inferno. I became aware of Murray ’s voice coming tinnily from near my right knee. I picked up the receiver.

  “Sorry, Murray. I was there, you know. I should have been inside, checking the place over. I’d seen someone there a few days earlier, I should have been inside.” My voice was rising in panic, and I kept repeating the same sentence: “I should have been inside.”

  “Hey, Warshawski, easy does it, easy does it. Would the guy have let you in? You said he stiffed you when you were there last week. Where are you? Your office? Need me to come by?”

  I gulped back my hysteria and said shakily, “I think I just need to eat. It’s been a while.”

  When he’d reiterated his offer of help, and urged me on to food and rest, he hung up on the promise of trying to do a story on Rose and some of the other people who’d worked at Fly the Flag.

  I walked down to La Llorona, a Mexican diner that’s hanging on to its lease by its fingernails-my office is in a neighborhood that’s gentrifying so fast rents seem to double every day. After two bowls of Mrs. Aguilar’s chicken-tortilla soup, and a short nap on the cot in my office’s back room, I finished my phone calls.

  I left voice messages with my impatient clients. I didn’t tell them I was late because I’d been injured-it makes you seem unreliable if you go and get shot or stabbed when they’re expecting you to be thinking about their problems. I just said I had preliminary reports for them, which would be true by the end of the day tomorrow, if my shoulder would let me type all afternoon. I didn’t even try to reach Mr. William: whatever was yanking his chain, I couldn’t deal with the Bysen family today.

  Mitch barked from behind Mr. Contreras’s door when I came in, but either my neighbor was busy or he was still miffed with me for disregarding his advice this morning. When he didn’t come out to greet me, I took Peppy up to my place.

  Morrell greeted me with relief-he was sick of his book, sick of my small space, tired of being up three flights that were so hard for him to negotiate that he felt almost like a prisoner. He limped slowly down the stairs with me for the drive over to Lotty’s.

  Lotty used to live in a two-flat near her clinic, but a few years ago she’d moved to one of the tony old buildings on Lake Shore Drive. In the summer, it’s impossible to park near her place, but on a cold November afternoon, with the gray day fading to the black of early night, we found a space without too much trouble.

  She greeted us warmly, but didn’t spend time on chitchat. In a back room overlooking Lake Michigan, she stripped off my bandages with quick, skilled fingers. She clicked her teeth in annoyance, partly with me, for getting it wet in the shower, partly with the surgeon who’d stitched me up. A sloppy job, she announced, adding that we were going to go over to her clinic where she would put me together properly; otherwise, I’d have adhesions that would be hard to work out once the wound healed.

  We had a little argument over who would drive: Lotty didn’t think I could be trusted with only one good arm, and I didn’t think she could be trusted, period. She thinks she’s Stirling Moss, driving the Grand Prix, but the only similarities I can see are the speed she travels, and her belief that no one should be in front of her on the track. Morrell laughed as we argued but voted for Lotty: if I didn’t feel like driving when she finished, we’d be stuck at the clinic without a car.

  In the end, neither the drive nor the restitching was as big an ordeal as I’d feared-the former because the main streets were so thick with Saturday shoppers that even Lotty had to go slowly. At her clinic, a storefront about a mile west of my apartment, in a polyglot neighborhood on the fringes of the North Side’s new construction, she shot Novocain into my shoulder. I felt a faint tugging as she cut the old stitches and put new ones in, but either because of her skill or the anesthetic I could actually move my arm pretty easily when she finished.

  With Lotty lying back in an easy chair in her office, we finally got to April Czernin’s woes. Lotty listened intently, but shook her head with genuine sorrow over the limited help the Czernins could get.

  “The insurance really only covers ten thousand dollars of her care? That’s shocking. But it’s so typical of the problems our patients face these days, being forced to make these choices of life and death because of what the insurance does or doesn’t pay.

  “But as for
your girl, we can’t take her on as a Medicaid patient, because she’s not indigent; as soon as the billing department finds out she has insurance, they’ll do exactly what the university did, call the company and be told the policy won’t cover the defibrillator. The only thing I can suggest is that they try to get her involved in an experimental trial, although the treatment for Long QT is pretty standard at this point, and it may be hard to find a trial group anywhere they can afford to travel to.”

  “I think Sandra Czernin would go anywhere if she thought it gave April a fighting chance. Lotty, I keep worrying that I should have noticed something before she collapsed.”

  She shook her head. “Sometimes there may be a fainting spell-you say the mother reports one last summer-but often these collapses come out of the blue, with no warning.”

  “I’m afraid to go to school Monday,” I confessed. “I’m afraid to ask any of these girls to run up and down the court for me. What if there’s another one with some time bomb ticking in her chest or brain?”

  Morrell squeezed my hand. “Tell the school they have to test the girls before you’ll continue the program. I’m sure the moms would agree, at least enough of them to force the school to take action.”

  “Bring them up to the clinic and I’ll do EKGs on them, or Lucy will,” Lotty offered.

  She was meeting Max Loewenthal for dinner; she invited Morrell and me to join her, which seemed like a welcome change of pace to both of us. We went to one of the little bistros that have sprung up on the North Side, one that had a wine list Max likes, and lingered late over a bottle of Côte du Rhône. Despite my worries and injuries, it was the most pleasant evening I’d spent since Marcena’s arrival.

  In the cab home, I fell asleep against Morrell’s shoulder. When we got to my place, I stood drowsily on the curb, holding his walking stick while he paid off the driver. In the way you don’t really notice things when you’re half asleep, I saw a Bentley across the street, a man in a chauffeur’s uniform at the wheel. I saw the lights in my living room, without thinking about it, but when we’d made our slow way up the stairs, and I saw my apartment door ajar, I woke up in a hurry.