Fire Sale

by Sara Paretsky

  “He don’t need to call me; he sees me every Wednesday at choir rehearsal.”

  The baby began crying more loudly. When her mother and her aunt still ignored her, I picked her up and started patting her back.

  “How about now?” I asked, “Now that he’s not living at home. Does Billy call you now?”

  “Yes, once, to say, can he come over here, but then, he give away, gave away, his cell phone, on account of he said there’s something in the phone, a detective could find him,” Josie muttered, staring at her knees.

  So he’d paid attention to my warning about the GSM signal. “Why doesn’t he want to go home?”

  Julia gave a syrupy smile. “He’s in l-o-v-e with the little wetback here.”

  Josie slapped her sister; Julia started pulling her hair. I put the baby down and yanked the sisters apart. They glared at each other, but when I let them go, they didn’t lunge for each other. I picked the baby up again and sat cross-legged on the floor.

  “Billy’s family, they were rude to Pastor Andrés,” Josie added. “Billy, he really cares about this neighborhood, do people have jobs, do they have enough to eat, like that, and his family, they just want to exploit us.”

  Billy had definitely been preaching to his little wetback, and she was an attentive student. The baby grabbed at my earrings. I unclutched her tiny fist and pulled out my car keys for her to play with. She threw them on the floor with an excited crow of laughter.

  “Who’s Freddy?” I asked.

  The sisters looked at each other, but Julia said, “Just a guy who goes to Mt. Ararat, it’s a small church, we all been knowing each other since we was little.”

  “Since we were little,” Josie corrected.

  “You want to talk Anglo, be my guest. Me, I’m just a teenage mom, I don’t have to know anything.”

  “Your mom and your aunt are such bad liars. I know, that makes you cry to hear it, but it’s true,” I spoke to the baby and blew bubbles on her stomach. “Now, who is Freddy really?”

  “He’s really just a guy who goes to Mount Ararat.” Julia stared at me defiantly. “You ask Pastor Andrés, he’ll tell you.”

  I sighed. “Okay, maybe, maybe. There’s something about him you don’t want me to know, though. It wouldn’t be his DNA, would it?”

  “His what?” Julia said.

  “DNA,” Josie said. “We covered that in biology, which you’d know if you ever went to school, it’s like how people identify-oh.” She looked at me. “Like you think he’s María Inés’s father or something.”

  “Or something,” I said.

  Julia spoke through clenched teeth. “He’s just a guy at church, I hardly know him except to talk at church.”

  “But this casual acquaintance told you he heard old Mr. Bysen call the church and threaten the pastor with deportation?”

  “It-he thought we should know,” Julia stammered.

  Josie was crimson. “Billy been-Billy has been-singing in the church, like, since August, and him and me, we went out for a Coke after rehearsal once, I guess maybe in September, and Mr. Grobian, he’s at the warehouse, he’s Billy’s boss, like, he saw us and he told on us, like, it was a crime, Billy taking me for a Coke, and then Ma, she heard, she said no way can I see him ’less Betto and Sammy are with me. So it’s like I have to babysit if I want to see him, which would be horrible if you was on a date, to have your brothers with you, but, see, his ma, his mom, she don’t-she doesn’t want him going out with me, so we never really was dating. Were dating. Except yesterday, he took me up to the hospital to see April.”

  So Billy had fallen in love with Josie, so much in love he was teaching her English grammar. And she loved him right back, which is why she was changing her speech. And that was also why Billy was fighting the idea of going back to Barrington. Maybe his ideals played a role, too, but mostly it was those pesky stars, crossing lovers once again. I thought of my own jealous worries about Morrell and Marcena Love-you don’t have to be fifteen to live in a soap opera.

  “You won’t tell Ma, will you, Coach?” Josie said.

  “I can’t believe your ma doesn’t already know,” I said. “You’d have to be brain-dead not to know when there was an extra person in this apartment. She’s probably just too depressed about the fire at Fly the Flag to deal with you and Billy right now. And about that fire-what’s the story on this soap dish? Which one of you bought it?”

  “I got it at By-Smart,” Julia said quickly. “Like Josie said, I bought it for Sancia last Christmas. They’re real cute, these frogs, and they don’t cost hardly anything. But they had like a hundred of them, so how can I know if it’s the one I bought or not? Where you find this, anyway?”

  “Outside Fly the Flag. In all the rubble from the building.”

  “Outside Ma’s job? What was it doing there?” Julia’s bewilderment seemed genuine-she and her sister looked at each other, as if seeing whether the other knew something she wasn’t saying.

  “I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t mean a thing, but it’s my only clue. By the way, Betto thought you got it for someone else, Julia.”

  “Yeah, well, he was like six years old last Christmas, so I don’t know how he knows who I bought presents for.” Julia stared at me in hauteur. “All he cared about was, did he get his new Power Ranger?”

  “You two make it sound so plausible, but I have to say I don’t believe you. I’m going to take this to a forensic lab. They’ll test it for fingerprints, they’ll test it for chemicals, they’ll tell me what it was doing at the plant, and who was doing it.”

  “So?” The sisters stared at me sullenly, united on this one matter.

  “So what?” I said. “So you know there won’t be fingerprints, or you don’t care who left them, or what?”

  “So if Sancia gave it to someone else, I can’t help it,” Julia said.

  “Coach McFarlane said you were the best player she had coached in decades, maybe ever,” I said to Julia. “Why don’t you go back to school, use your brains for your own future, instead of for spinning up lies for grown-ups like me. You could go back to the game; Sancia does, with her two little ones.”

  “Yeah, well, her ma and her sisters help her out. Who’s going to help me? No one.”

  “You are so unfair!” Josie cried. “I didn’t get you pregnant, but because you went and had a baby now I have to sneak around like a criminal if I want to see a boy! And I help you with María Inés all the time, so there!”

  I handed María Inés to Julia. “Play with her, talk to her. Give her a chance, even if you don’t want one for yourself. And if you decide, either of you, to start telling the truth, give me a call.”

  I gave them both business cards and stuck the frog back in my bag. When they stared at me, speechless, I got up and went through the dining room, looking for Rose. Betto and Sammy scuttled deeper under the table at my approach: I was the woman who could get them charcoal roasted if they talked to me.

  Rose was lying on Josie’s bed in the girls’ bedroom. I ducked under the clothesline hung with María Inés’s wardrobe and watched her, wondering whether I had anything to ask that justified waking her. Her bright red hair clashed with the red in the American flag pillowcase; the Illinois women’s team smiled down at her.

  “I know you’re standing there,” she said dully, without opening her eyes. “What is it you want?”

  “I only went to Fly the Flag in the first place because you wanted me to look into the sabotage going on there. Then you told me to back off. What made you change your mind?” I kept my voice gentle.

  “It’s all about the job,” she said. “I thought-what I thought, I can’t even remember now. Frank-he told me. He asked me to tell you to go away.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I only know he said it could ruin my job, a detective on the premises. But my job is ruined, anyway-I have no job. And Frank, he was a decent man, he paid good, he did what he could for people, he’s dead. And I wonder, was it because I
brought a detective on the premises?”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you, Rose? It wasn’t because I was there that someone put rats in the heating ducts or glued the doors shut.”

  I went to sit on Julia’s bed. It smelled faintly of María Inés’s diapers. Despite the Dorrados’ Pentecostal religion, a little Virgin of Guadalupe stood on the pasteboard chest of drawers between the two beds. I suppose no matter what you think of God, everyone needs a mother to look after them.

  Rose slowly turned her head on the pillow and looked at me. “But maybe they was scared, I mean, whoever did those things, maybe when they saw a detective asking questions they got scared and burned down the factory.”

  It was possible, I suppose; the thought made me queasy, but I said, anyway, “And you don’t have any idea who this was?”

  She shook her head slowly, as if it weighed a great deal and she could barely move it.

  “The second job you took-is that enough to support the children?”

  “The second job?” she gave a harsh bark that might have been a crow laughing. “That was also for Frank Zamar. His second business that he was starting. Now-oh, Dios, Dios, in the morning I will go down to By-Smart and join all the other ladies in my church lifting heavy boxes onto trucks. What difference does it make? The work will wear me out faster, I will die sooner and be at rest.”

  “Where was the second factory? Why didn’t he just run an extra shift at Fly the Flag?” I asked.

  “It was there, it was a different kind of job, but he did run an extra shift, in the middle of the night. I got there right before the shift started on Tuesday night. And the plant was in ruins. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Me and the other women, we stood there not believing it, until some cop came along and sent us home.”

  Josie appeared in the doorway. “Ma, Sammy and Betto are hungry. What’s for lunch?”

  “Nothing,” Rose said. “There is no food, and no money to buy food. We are not having lunch today.”

  Behind their sister, the boys started to cry again, this time out loud. Rose squeezed her eyes shut tightly. She lay still for a moment, seeming not even to breathe, then she pushed herself upright in the bed.

  “No, mis queridos, of course there is food, of course I will feed you, while I have blood running through my body I will feed you.”

  23 Star-crossed Lovers

  The snow had stopped when I got outside. The snows of November are usually light, merely a warning to the city of what lies ahead, and this one had ended with a scant half inch. It was a fine, dry powder, blowing across the walks, disappointing a group of kids in the vacant lot next to me who were trying to turn it into snowballs.

  I sat in my car, the engine running and the heater on, and tried to make a few notes while the conversation with the Dorrados was still more or less fresh in my mind, although I was hard put to make sense of anything I’d heard just now.

  BILLY, I wrote in block letters in my notebook, and then stared at it, unable to think of anything to add. What was going on with him? When we spoke on Thursday, he told me to tell his father he’d call the company’s shareholders if the family didn’t leave him alone. Was that why Buffalo Bill had come to see me last night? And, if that was the case, what didn’t the Bysens want the shareholders to know? From my perspective, the company did a ton of outrageous things-locking employees in overnight, paying badly, busting unions, leaving families like the Czernins in the lurch when it came to health insurance-but the shareholders must know those things already. What could be so horrible that the shareholders would shy away from it?

  I thought back to the prayer meeting out at By-Smart headquarters. The share price had fallen on the rumor that By-Smart was going to allow union organizers. Maybe Billy was just threatening to call and say that was really going to happen. But what would be the “or else”?

  Just why had Billy run away from home? Was it because he was in love with Josie, or troubled by his family’s business practices, or ardently committed to the South Side? Certainly he admired Pastor Andrés, but what would make him ally himself with the preacher against his family?

  Which brought me to the preacher himself, whom Buffalo Bill had threatened with deportation. Of course, the Buffalo dished out threats like hash at a diner-last night, he’d threatened to get the bank to foreclose on my mortgage and to shut down my business if I didn’t do what he wanted. Maybe it was a form of verbal incontinence-Mildred had kept shutting him up in a nice, deferential way.

  At the same time, the Bysens really did have enormous power, more than I could imagine. If you operated a colossus like By-Smart, with its global reach, with annual sales bigger than the GDP of most of the countries in the world, you could get congressmen and immigration officers to do pretty much anything you wanted. Say, Pastor Andrés was here on a green card-the Bysens could probably get that revoked with one phone call. Who knows-if he was naturalized, they might even be able to get his citizenship stripped from him. Perhaps that would take three calls instead of just the one, but it wouldn’t surprise me to hear they’d done it.

  I printed ANDRÉS on the next page. I didn’t care much about his ties to Billy, but what did he know about the fire at Fly the Flag? He’d met with Frank Zamar ten days ago, the day I’d surprised the punk in the basement.

  That punk. Between April’s heart stopping and watching the factory go up in flames, I’d forgotten the punk. Andrés knew who he was. A chavo banda, whom one saw around stealing from jobsites, Andrés had said, and he’d shooed him away from the street where we’d been talking. Maybe Andrés was just protecting his jobsite, but maybe he knew something more about that chavo.

  FIND THE CHAVO, I added, followed by FREDDY?? Did he matter in the scheme of things? Seeing his name next to “Find the chavo” made me wonder if he was that chavo. But a punk, what would he be doing in Andrés’s office, able to overhear Buffalo Bill threaten the pastor? Or, or, or. My brain wasn’t working. Despite the heater, my feet were starting to freeze, and I was feeling a dull throb in my wound. I stuck the notebook back in my bag.

  I was putting the car into gear when a midnight blue Miata, with a license plate that read “The Kid 1,” pulled up in front of the Dorrado building. I hadn’t suspected Billy of so much whimsy. I hesitated briefly, then shut off the Mustang’s engine and got out to cross the street.

  I leaned over the driver’s door as Billy was starting to extricate himself. “Your car is about a hundred times easier to trace than your phone, Billy, especially with that vanity plate. Even I could track you if I wanted to. It will be child’s play for the big agencies that your dad and your grandfather use. You want them charging in on Josie and her family?”

  He turned white. “Are you following me? For them?”

  “Nope. I came to see Josie and her mom. And realized you’ve been sleeping here. It’s not a great idea, for lots of reasons, one of which is I don’t want Josie having a baby.”

  “I-we wouldn’t, we don’t, I respect her. I belong to True Love Waits.”

  “Yeah, but teenagers in a bedroom all night, respect only carries you so far for so long. Besides that, they don’t have any money. Ms. Dorrado lost her job-it’s a burden for her to have an extra person there.”

  “I wasn’t taking food from them. But you’re right: I should buy some groceries for them.” He flushed. “Only, I’ve never been grocery shopping, I mean for a family, of course I’ve been in a store sometimes. I don’t know what you buy if you want to cook a meal. There are so many ordinary things that I don’t know.”

  He was touching in his earnestness. “Why don’t you want to go home?”

  “I need to figure some things out. Some things about my family.” He shut his mouth tightly.

  “What did you mean by that message to your father, about you calling the shareholders if he kept looking for you? I gather it’s upset both him and your grandfather.”

  “That’s one of the things I need to figure out.”

  “Were you t
hreatening to call your major shareholders to say that By-Smart was going to allow union activity?”

  His soft face hardened in indignation. “That would be a lie: I don’t tell lies, especially not one like that, that would hurt my grandfather.”

  “What, then?” I tried to smile engagingly. “I’d be glad to lend an ear, if it would help to have someone to talk them over with.”

  He shook his head, his mouth shut in a thin line. “You may mean well, Ms. War-sha-sky. But right now, I don’t know. I don’t know who I can trust, besides Pastor Andrés, and he is really helping me, so thank you, but I think I’ll be all right.”

  “If you change your mind, call me; I’ll be glad to talk to you. And I really wouldn’t betray you to your family.” I handed him a card. “But do Josie a favor: find somewhere else to stay. Even if you don’t sleep with her, your grandfather is bound to find you here, especially with a car that stands out like yours. People in this neighborhood notice everything, and plenty of them will be willing to tell your dad or your grandfather they’ve seen you here. Buffalo Bill’s-your grandfather’s-angry; I know you know he threatened the pastor with deportation just because you and Josie had a Coke together. He could cause Rose Dorrado a lot of trouble, and she needs a job right now, not more trouble.”

  “Oh. Now that Fly the Flag is gone-I didn’t even think.” He sighed. “All I thought was, What difference does it make?, and, of course, it makes a terrible difference to the people who worked there. Thank you for reminding me, Ms. War-sha-sky.”

  “All you thought was ‘What difference does it make?’” I repeated sharply. “What do you mean by that?”

  He waved his arms in a vague gesture that seemed to mean the South Side around him, or maybe the world around him, and shook his head unhappily.

  I turned on my heel to cross the street, then remembered the frog soap dish. I pulled out the baggie again from my bag and showed the frog to him.