Fire Sale

by Sara Paretsky

  “I’m going inside,” I muttered to Morrell. “If I’m not out in two minutes, call 911.”

  He wanted to argue about which of us got to be the hero, or the fool, but he had to agree that between my injuries and his, I was the one in better shape-and I was the one with street-fighting smarts.

  Before either of us could do anything, heroic or foolhardy, Peppy and Mitch started barking and whining from the far side of my door. I kicked the door all the way open, then flattened myself against the wall. The two dogs bounded out to greet us. My lips compressed now more with annoyance than fear, I followed them in.

  20 Buffalo-and Gal-Won’t You Come Out Tonight?

  Mr. Contreras was sitting in the easy chair in my living room. Facing him, on the couch, were Buffalo Bill Bysen and his personal assistant, Mildred. Even at ten o’clock on a Saturday night, she wore heavy makeup. Mr. Contreras looked up at me with the same guilt-filled defiance that the dogs use when they’ve been digging up the yard.

  “So that’s why there’s a Bentley out there on Belmont: waiting for the head of one of the biggest companies in the world, and he came to visit me.” I rubbed my hands together in a display of fake heartiness. “It’s delightful that you were able to drop in, but I’m afraid I’m going to bed. Help yourself to the liquor cabinet, and keep the music down-the neighbors are picky.”

  I went to the front door to tell Morrell that the coast wasn’t exactly clear but it was okay to come in.

  “I’m sorry, doll,” Mr. Contreras followed me out. “When they showed up and said they needed to see you, well, you’re always telling me not to butt in, so I didn’t like to tell them ‘no,’ case you’d arranged it; you didn’t want me knowing your plans or nothing today.”

  I bared my teeth at him in an evil grin. “How thoughtful of you. How long have they been here?”

  “About an hour, maybe a little longer.”

  “I have a cell phone, you know, and I’ve given you the number.”

  “Do you mind?” Mildred came out to the hall to join us. “Mr. Bysen’s day starts early tomorrow. We need to get this over with so we can return to Barrington.”

  “Of course you do. Morrell, this is Mildred-I’m afraid I don’t know her last name-she’s Buffalo Bill Bysen’s factotum. Mildred, this is Morrell. He doesn’t like to use his first name.”

  Morrell held out a hand, but Mildred only nodded perfunctorily and turned to lead us back into my apartment.

  “Mildred and Buffalo Bill have been sitting in the living room for an hour,” I said to Morrell. “Mr. Contreras let them in, thinking it was an emergency when they showed up uninvited, and now they’re very cross that we didn’t use ESP to drop everything and rush home to look after them.”

  “His name to you is Mr. Bysen,” Mildred said through tight lips. “If you treat all your clients this rudely, I’m surprised you have any.”

  I looked at her thoughtfully. “Are you a client, Mildred? Or is Buffalo Bill? I don’t remember you hiring me. I don’t remember giving you my home address, either.”

  “Mister Bysen,” she said with heavy emphasis, “will explain what he needs you to do.”

  When we were all back inside, I introduced Bysen to Morrell, and offered refreshments.

  “This isn’t a social visit, young woman,” Bysen said. “I want to know where my grandson is.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. If that’s all you wanted, you could have saved yourself the drive from Barrington by letting your fingers do the walking.”

  Mildred sat herself back on the couch next to Bysen and opened her gold leather portfolio, pen poised, ready to take a note or order an execution at a second’s notice.

  “He talked to you on Thursday. You called him, and he talked to you. Now you tell me where he is.”

  “Billy called me, not the other way around. I don’t know where he is, and I don’t have his cell phone number. And I promised him I wouldn’t look for him as long as I believed he was safe and not being held against his will.”

  “Well, that’s just fine, you talk to the boy on the phone, and you know he’s safe and sound, hnnh? You met him two times, and you know him so well you can tell from his voice on the phone that he’s safe? Do you know how much a kidnapper would like to get hold of one of my grandchildren? Do you know what he’s worth? Hnnh? Hnnh?”

  I pressed my right fingers against the bridge of my nose, as if that would push thoughts into my brain. “I don’t know. I’m guessing the company’s worth around four hundred billion, and if you’ve divvied it up evenly-you have six children? So sixty-seven billion a head, and then if young Mr. William is being fair with his own kids, I suppose-”

  “This isn’t a joke,” Buffalo Bill roared, pushing himself to stand. “If you don’t produce him for me by this time tomorrow, I’ll-”

  “You’ll what? Cut off my allowance? It may not be a joke, but you’re turning it into a farce. Your son hired me to look for Billy, and in a thoughtless moment I agreed. When Billy learned about it from someone on the South Side, he called and told me to tell Mr. William to lay off or he, Billy, would start calling shareholders.”

  Buffalo Bill scowled and sat back down. “Hnnh. What did he mean by that?”

  My lips moved into an unpleasant smile. “It seemed to mean something to your son, so I presume it means something to you.”

  “It could mean any of a dozen things. What did it mean to you? Hnnh? You didn’t ask him what he was going to tell the shareholders?”

  Was this the real reason for this absurd trip from the gated splendors of Barrington Hills to my four-room apartment? “If you wanted to discuss this with me, why not just phone me, or ask me to come out to your office? I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a really, really long day and I’d like to go to bed.”

  Bysen’s scowl deepened and his heavy brow contracted so tightly that I couldn’t see his eyes at all. “Grobian called from the warehouse yesterday. He said he’d seen Billy on the street, over on Ninety-second Street, his arm around some Mexican girl.”

  “Then you know he’s safe.”

  “I don’t know that at all. I want to know who that Mexican is. I won’t have my boy taken in by some wetback’s hard-luck story, marrying her, promising her diamonds or whatever she thinks she can squeeze out of his grand-daddy’s fortune. You’ve met Billy, you see what he’s like, he’s a sucker for other people’s troubles. Boy even hands out dollar bills to panhandlers with their Streetwise papers. Can’t do a real job, and they cadge dollar bills from naive boys like Billy.”

  I sucked in a deep breath. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Morrell give his head a tiny shake-a little warning-go easy, V. I., don’t go straight for the guy’s jugular.

  “Unwise marriages are such a regular feature of daily life, if Billy’s taken up with someone unsuitable I don’t think I can stop him, Mr. Bysen. But he seems to share his grandmother’s religious values; if he gets involved with someone, my guess is it will be a churchgoing young woman. Even if she’s poor, she probably won’t be a gold digger.”

  “Don’t you believe that for one second. Look at that creature Gary brought home, claimed to be a Christian. We should never have let him go so far away to school, but Duke seemed like a place with lots of good Christian boys and girls, and she was part of the Campus Fellowship.”

  Mildred murmured something in his ear and he broke off, turning to glare at me again. “I want to know who that girl is, that girl who’s attached herself to Billy.”

  I fought off a yawn. “You have so many resources, you don’t need my help. Look at how easily you tracked me down. My phone’s unlisted; I have all my bills sent to my office so my home address doesn’t show up on Lexis, but here you are. Someone on your payroll knows someone in the phone company, or in the Secretary of State’s office, who’s willing to violate the law to help you out. Get them to find out who Billy’s dating.”

  “But he knows you, he trusts you, you’re at home down there. I send one of
our own security people down to look for him, he’ll know they came from me, and then he’ll, well, it’ll upset him. Whatever terms William agreed to with you, I’ll match them.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Bysen. I told your son I was quitting, I explained the reason, I sent him a certified letter spelling it out. I promised Billy I’d lay off, and I’m laying off.”

  Bysen stood again, leaning on his walking stick. “You’re making a serious mistake, young woman. I offered you a fair arrangement, very fair, William’s terms sight unseen, no bargaining.

  “You don’t want to help me, I can make life difficult for you, very difficult. You think I don’t know how much your mortgage is worth? What would you do if I got all your clients to leave you for a different investigator, hnnh? What if I made things so difficult for you, you had to come crawling to me, begging me to hire you on any terms, hnnh?”

  Mr. Contreras sprang to his feet, and Mitch, alarmed by the tone in Bysen’s voice, began to growl, low and deep in the throat, the one dogs make when they’re serious. I jumped up to put a hand on his collar.

  “Don’t you go threatening her,” Mr. Contreras cried. “She said she don’t want to work for you, take it like a man. It ain’t the end of the world. You don’t need to own her along with everything else in creation.”

  “But he does, he does. It’s the only thing that keeps him going, gobbling all of us up like so many shrimps on the buffet table.” The image made me laugh with genuine amusement, but I looked wonderingly at Bysen. “What is it like to have an appetite like that, so ravenous that nothing will satiate it? Do your sons share it? Will William have the same naked neediness to make your empire grow when you’re dead and gone?”

  “William!” Bysen spat out his son’s name. “Whiny old woman. Why, that sharp little operator Jacqui would do a better-”

  Once again, Mildred cut him off, with a deferential murmur in his ear, adding to me, “Mrs. Bysen is sick with worry over Billy. She’s eighty-two; she doesn’t need this. If you know where Billy is and won’t tell us, it might kill her. We might even be able to charge you as an accessory in kidnapping him.”

  “Oh, go home,” I said. “You’re used to people needing you so desperately that they’ll put up with anything to stay on your good side, whatever that might be. When you meet someone who doesn’t need or want your business, you don’t know how to act: should you cajole me, tell me his granny’s heart is breaking, or threaten to have me up on federal charges? Go back to the suburbs and think of a serious approach before you talk to me again.”

  I didn’t wait for a reaction from my visitors, but pulled on Mitch’s collar to get him to turn around. Calling to Peppy, I led them through my apartment to the kitchen and sent them down the back stairs to the yard to relieve themselves.

  I leaned on the porch railing, eyes shut, trying to relax the tension in my neck and shoulders. My wound was throbbing, but Lotty’s work had lowered the level of pain to something I could live with. The dogs clambered up the stairs to me, making sure I was okay after Bysen’s threats. I ran my fingers through their fur, but stayed on the porch, listening to the faint sounds of the city around me: the rumbling of the El a few blocks away, a distant siren, laughter from a neighboring apartment-my own lullaby.

  By and by, Morrell hobbled out to join me. I leaned against his chest and pulled his arms around me. “Are they gone?”

  He laughed softly. “Your neighbor got into a fight with Buffalo Bill. I think Contreras was so guilt stricken about letting them in, he had to take it out on Bysen. Mildred kept trying to break it up, but when Contreras said Bysen was a coward, picking on a lone young woman like you, Bysen got furious and trotted out his war record, and Contreras had to top it off with his Anzio reminiscences, so I figured the time had come to move everyone out.”

  “Even Mr. Contreras?”

  “He wanted to stay to make sure you weren’t still mad at him, but I promised him you weren’t, only tired, and that you’d talk to him in the morning.”

  “Yessir,” I said meekly.

  We turned and went back inside. As I was undressing, I found the frog-shaped soap dish in my coat pocket. I took it out and looked at it again. “Who are you? What were you doing down there?” I demanded of it.

  Morrell came over to see what it was. He hummed a line or two from Doctor Dolittle, “She walks with the animals, talks with the animals,” but when I explained what it was, and where I’d found it, he suggested I put it in a baggie.

  “It might be evidence. In which case, fondling it might delete any other prints on it.”

  “I should have thought of that. Dang-I’ve had it in my coat all day.” I should give it to Conrad, for his bomb and arson team. But Conrad had been rude to me. On Monday, I’d send it to a private forensics lab I work with.

  As we lay in the dark, Morrell asked if I really knew where Billy was.

  “No-o, but Grobian-he’s the manager at the By-Smart warehouse down on 103rd-if Grobian really saw him with a Mexican girl, I figure it’s someone Billy met at Mt. Ararat -he sings in the choir there. So maybe I’ll go down to church in the morning.”

  21 Loose Buffalo in Church

  A dozen children in white and navy-skirts for the girls, trousers for the boys-were doing a synchronized dance in the aisle when I slipped into Mt. Ararat the next morning. According to the notice board out front, church started officially at ten. It was about eleven now. I’d come late on purpose, hoping things would be nearing an end; instead, the service seemed to be barely under way.

  I’d driven Morrell back to his own place in Evanston before coming down-he said he’d stayed in Chicago with me because he thought I was going to be laid up with my wounded shoulder, not for the pleasure of holing up with Mr. Contreras and the dogs. I understood his point, but I still felt forlorn; I dropped him at his door without going inside. If Marcena was curled up in front of the television, so be it.

  As I drove south, it began to snow. By the time I reached the church, a thin dusting covered the ground. Thanksgiving was two weeks away. The year was drawing to a close, the sky pressing down as if urging me to lie flat and sleep the winter away. I parked on Ninety-first Street and hurried into the church-I’d decided Mt. Ararat deserved a skirt, or expected a skirt, and the cold air whipped through my panty hose and up my thighs.

  I stopped inside the front door to get my bearings. The building was hot, with a bewildering barrage of sound and motion. The dancing children weren’t the only people in the aisles, just the only ones doing something organized-as I watched, people would jump up into the aisles with a hand held up in the air, and stand for a time before returning to the pew.

  The children were wearing long-sleeved T-shirts with red tongues of fire on the fronts, and the legend “Mt. Ararat Troop Marching for Jesus” on the backs. They were doing a routine involving kicking, clapping, and stomping, with more spirit than skill, but the congregation was applauding them and shouting encouragement. An electric band accompanied them, harmonium and guitar with drums.

  The choir director, an imposing woman in a scarlet robe, was singing, moving with an electric energy of her own. She moved between the congregation and the front lip of a raised platform where the choir and the ministers shared space with the band. Both she and the band were miked up so high I couldn’t make out any of her words, let alone what language she was singing in.

  Behind her, wood armchairs were arranged in two semi-circles. In the middle one sat Pastor Andrés, wearing navy robes with a pale blue stole. Five other men were ranged around him, including one very old man whose bald head bobbed uncertainly on a thin neck, like a large sunflower on a stalk too thin to support it.

  The choir stood behind the men in two densely packed rows, singing along with the choir director, slapping tambourines and twirling around as the spirit moved them. There was so much twirling and arm waving, it was hard to pick out individual faces.

  I finally spotted Billy in the back row. He was mostly blocked from vie
w, partly by a tangle of electric cable that snaked between the mikes in front of the minister and the band, partly by a massive woman in front of him who moved with such fervor that he only appeared at intervals-kind of like the moon popping out from behind a heavy cloud. What made him most noticeable was that he was the one chorister to stand still.

  Josie I recognized more easily, since she was at the far end of the front row of the choir. Her thin face was alight, and she shook her tambourine with an abandon she never showed on the basketball court.

  I scanned the choir, and then the congregation, looking for other members of my team. The only one I saw was Sancia, my center, near the back of the church, with her two babies, her mother, and her sisters. Sancia was staring vacantly in front of her-I didn’t think she’d noticed me.

  When I took a seat in a pew partway up the right side, a trim woman in a black suit turned to clasp my hand and welcome me. Another woman bustled up from the back to hand me a program and an offering envelope, and also to say how welcome I was.

  “Your first time here, sister?” she asked in a heavy Spanish accent.

  I nodded, adding my name. “I coach basketball at Bertha Palmer. Some of the girls on the team come here.”

  “Oh, wonderful, wonderful, Sister Warshawski, you are really helping these girls. We are grateful.”

  In a few minutes, a wave ran through the congregation. You couldn’t hear the murmur above the music, but people poked each other, heads turned: “el coche” cared enough about the children to attend their church. Sancia and her family caught the whisper and turned, stunned to see me here, out of context. Sancia managed a weak smile when she saw me looking at her.

  I also caught sight of Rose Dorrado twisting around in a pew on the other side of the aisle to look at me. I smiled and waved; she pressed her lips together and turned to face the front again, hugging her two little boys close to her.