Fire Sale

by Sara Paretsky

  He shook his head again. “What is it?”

  “To me, it looks like a soap dish in the shape of a frog. Julia Dorrado says she bought it, or one like it, at By-Smart last Christmas.”

  “We carry so much stuff, I don’t know our whole inventory. And I only met Josie this summer, when my church did the exchange. Where did you find it? I hope you aren’t trying to say we sell things that are this dirty.”

  He was so serious all the time that it took me a moment to realize he was trying to make a joke. The license plate, and now a joke: maybe there were depths in the Kid that I was overlooking. I smiled dutifully, and explained where I’d picked it up.

  He hunched a shoulder. “Maybe someone dropped it there. There’s always a lot of garbage around these old buildings.”

  “Maybe,” I agreed. “But judging from where it was lying when I picked it up, I think it came shooting out when the windows in the drying room blew. So I think it was inside the factory.”

  He turned the baggie over in his hands several times. “Maybe someone wanted it, like, as an ornament on a flagpole. Or maybe one of the ladies who worked there used it as a mascot. I see that a lot down here, people have funny things as mascots.”

  “Don’t be a wet blanket,” I said. “It’s my only clue; I have to pursue it enthusiastically.”

  “And then what? What if it leads you to some poor person down here who’s already spent their whole life being harassed by the police?”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Do you know who put this in the factory, or why?”

  “No, but you, you’re treating it like it was a game, like you’re in Crossing Jordan or something. And people down here-”

  “Don’t keep talking to me about ‘people down here,’” I snapped. “I grew up in this neighborhood. For you, maybe this is a game, living among the natives, but for people like me, who never spent a dime we didn’t work like dogs to earn, this is not a romantic neighborhood. Desperation and poverty push people to do mean, spiteful, sordid, and even cruel things. Frank Zamar died in that fire. If someone set it, then I will be happy to lead the police to him. Or her.”

  His soft young face tightened again. “Well, people who are richer than anyone also do mean and spiteful-and-and cruel things. I am not playing a game down here. This is the most serious thing that has ever happened in my life. And if you tell my grandfather where you saw me, it will be-mean and cruel. And spiteful.”

  “Relax, Galahad, I’m not ratting you out. But he found you at the church on his own this morning, and it won’t take much for him to find you here.”

  He nodded again, his anger disappearing into his serious good manners. “You are giving me good advice, Ms. War-sha-sky. I do appreciate it. And if they can trace my car as easily as you say, I guess I shouldn’t hang around here.”

  He looked forlornly at the battered building for a long minute, then climbed back into his little sports car and took off. I looked up at the apartment, wondering if Juliet had been on the lookout for Romeo. I was tempted to go back inside and reassure her-he came to see you, but one of the Capulets was lurking. It was a silly fantasy-with Rose’s economic woes, the Bysen family, Pastor Andrés, and all those young hormones, I definitely shouldn’t meddle.

  I was crossing the street back to my own car when the cabin-cruiser Cadillac turned south onto Escanaba. The driver did a laborious U-turn and pulled up in front of the Dorrados’ building. Young Montague had escaped in the nick of time.

  The chauffeur put on his peaked hat and opened the middle door to help Mr. Bysen from the backseat. Mr. William, who’d been sitting in the third row of seats, climbed down to assist his mother.

  I crossed Escanaba back to the boat. “Hi, Mr. Bysen. Great service, wasn’t it? Pastor Andrés is a truly inspired preacher.”

  Buffalo Bill pulled his cane out of the middle seat, made sure he was standing erect, and puffed air out at me. “What are you doing here?”

  I smiled. “Sunday after church is when we all pay social calls. Isn’t that what you’re doing?”

  I heard a ripple of malicious laughter and peered inside the Caddy. Jacqui was sitting in the front seat. Her husband, who was in the third bank of seats, called out a sharp reprimand to her, but she just laughed again, and said, “I never knew Christian worship could be so dramatic.”

  “Will you make your wife behave?” William snarled at Uncle Gary.

  “Oh, yes,” Jacqui said, “‘as the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands.’ I have heard that verse quoted once or twice, Willie, once or twice. Just because you and your father want it to be true doesn’t make it true.”

  Buffalo Bill put the crook of his cane over my shoulder and jerked me around to face him. “Never mind all that squabbling. I’ve come to find my boy. Is he here?”

  I took the cane from my shoulder and pulled it out of his hand. “There are easier ways to get both my attention and my goodwill, Mr. Bysen.”

  He glared at me. “I asked you a question and I expect an answer.”

  “Oh, Bill, never mind all that.” Mrs. Bysen had come around the back of the Caddy to where we were standing; she spoke to her husband but looked at me. “We haven’t met, but William told me you were the detective he’d hired to find our Billy. Do you know where he is? Is this where that Mexican girl lives? Jacqui thinks she knows something, so she asked one of our people to find their name and address.”

  “I’m V. I. Warshawski, Mrs. Bysen. I’m sorry, but I don’t know where Billy is. The Dorrado family lives here; one of the girls is on my basketball team. They’re in considerable distress right now because the factory where the mother worked burned down last week and she has five children to support. They’ve got a lot more than Billy on their minds, I’m afraid.”

  “Billy doesn’t have good sense,” Bysen growled. “If they’re giving him a sob story he’ll fall for it, hook, line, and sinker.”

  “Billy is a good boy,” his wife reproved him. “If he is helping people in distress, he’s a good Christian, and I’m proud of him.”

  “Oh, enough of this nonsense. I’m going up to see this girl for myself. If she needs to be bought off, well-”

  “We will not be blackmailed by any welfare cheats,” Mr. William interrupted his father. “Billy needs to learn a few things about life. If he has to learn them the hard way, the lessons will stick with him longer.”

  “That’s a good paternal attitude,” I applauded him. “No wonder both your kids ran away from home.”

  Jacqui laughed again, delighted with the rancor. Buffalo Bill snatched his cane from me and stomped up the broken walk to the front door. His wife squeezed my hand before following him, with Mr. William taking her arm again. The chauffeur opened the apartment door for them, then leaned against the building to smoke a cigarette.

  I climbed into the middle row of seats, behind Jacqui. “So you called Patrick Grobian at the warehouse to track down the Dorrados? How does he know them?”

  “Not that it’s any of your business, but you ought to realize that anyone who wants to move ahead in the Bysen operation has to keep track of what’s important to the big buffalo. Pat saw the girl having a Coke with Billy in September; he knew the old man would want that information. He made it his business to find out who she was. So of course he knows where she lives.”

  “No one can expect to move too far up the By-Smart ladder if they’re not part of the family,” I said.

  “You don’t need to be the CEO to have a lot of power and make a lot of money in a company this big. Pat knows that, and he’s a go-getter. If he was a Bysen, he’d be leading the pack. As it is, when the old man goes, he’s likely to get a good position at the home office.”

  “If you’re in charge,” her husband said from the back of the Caddy. “But, my dear Jacqueline, you won’t be. William will be, and he doesn’t like you.”

  “This isn’t medieval England,” Jacqui said. “Just because he’s the oldest doesn�
��t mean Willie gets the throne, although he’s like poor Prince Charles, isn’t he, waiting around for his mum to die, except in this case Willie is waiting for Daddy to die. I’m surprised sometimes he doesn’t-”

  “Jacqui.” Gary ’s voice sounded a warning. “Not everyone has your sense of humor. If you want to keep doing the work you’re doing, you need to learn to get along with William, that’s all I’m going to say.”

  Jacqui turned around in the front seat and fluttered improbably long eyelashes. “Darling, I am doing everything I can to help William. Everything. Just ask him how much he owes me these days and you’ll be surprised by his change in attitude. He finally sees how incredibly useful I can be.”

  “Maybe,” Gary muttered. “Maybe.”

  I looked over at the apartment, thinking I should go up to give Rose a helping hand. She didn’t have the resources to face the Bysens alone. Before I got to the front door, though, the trio reappeared.

  “Did they know anything about Billy?” I asked Mrs. Bysen.

  She shook her head unhappily. “I can’t be sure. I appealed to the woman as a mother and a grandmother-I can see how much she loves those children, and how hard she works to give them a decent life-but she said she only ever sees him at Mount Ararat, and the girls said the same thing. Do you think they’re telling the truth?”

  “People like that don’t know truth from lies, Mother,” Mr. William said. “It’s easy to see where Billy got his gullibility.”

  “You don’t talk to your mother that way while I’m alive, Willie. If Billy got your mother’s sweet disposition, that isn’t a bad thing. The rest of you pack of hyenas, you’re all waiting for me to die so you can eat the company I built.” He glowered at me. “If I find you know where my boy is and you’re not telling me-”

  “I know,” I said wearily. “You’ll break me in your soup like crackers.”

  I stomped across the street again and turned my car around to head for home.

  24 Yet Another Missing Child

  In the morning, I went to my office early and put the metal frog into a box, messengering it out to Cheviot, the forensics engineering lab I use. I told Sanford Rieff, the engineer I usually work with, I didn’t know what I was looking for, so asked him to do a full report on the dish-who made it, whose prints were on it, any chemical residues, anything. When he phoned to ask how big a rush I was in, I hesitated, looking at my month’s accounts. No one was paying me; I didn’t even know if the dish was connected to the fire. It was what I’d said to Billy yesterday-my only clue, so I was being enthusiastic about it.

  “Not a rush job-I can’t afford it.”

  I spent most of the rest of the morning doing work for people who paid me to ask questions for them, but I did take some time to see what information I could get on the Bysen family. I already knew they were rich, but my eyes widened as I went through their history on my law enforcement database. I didn’t have enough fingers and toes to count the zeroes in their holdings. Of course, a lot of it was tied up in various trusts. There was a foundation, which supported a wide array of evangelical programs, gave heavily to antiabortion groups and evangelical missions, but also supported libraries and museums.

  Three of Buffalo Bill’s four sons and one of the daughters lived with him in a gated estate in Barrington Hills. They had separate houses, but all in the same happy patriarchal enclave. The second daughter was living in Santiago with her husband, who headed South American operations; the fourth son was in Singapore managing the Far East. So no one had run away from Papa. That seemed significant, although I didn’t know of what.

  Gary and Jacqui didn’t have any children of their own, but the other five had produced a total of sixteen. The Bysens’ commitment to traditional family values certainly carried through in their distribution of assets: as nearly as I could make out, each of the sons and grandsons had trusts worth about three times what the girls in the family got.

  I wondered if this was what had Billy wondering about his family, although I sort of doubted it. No one cares too much about women’s issues these days, not even young women; I had a feeling that his sister losing out in the will was something Billy would accept unquestioningly. Jacqui was the one family member I’d met who might feel differently-but she was married to one of the men, one of the jackpot hitters, and I didn’t picture her caring about anyone else’s inheritance as long as she got hers.

  Billy’s sister, Candace, was twenty-one now. Whatever she’d done that caused the family to ship her to Korea, she was still in the will, so they were fair up to that point. I searched for more specific news about Candace, but couldn’t find anything. I printed out some of the more interesting reports, then closed up my office: I wanted to stop at the hospital on my way down to Bertha Palmer High. I figured the team would like an update on April Czernin.

  When I got to the hospital, though, I found April had been discharged early this morning. I called Sandra Czernin from my car, but she treated me like a porcupine treats a dog, shooting quills into its mouth.

  She reiterated her accusations that April’s collapse was my fault. “You’ve been waiting all these years to get even with me for Boom-Boom, so you brought that English bitch down to meet him. If not for you, he’d’ve been home where he belonged.”

  “Or out with someone from the neighborhood,” I said. I regretted the words as soon as they hopped out, and even apologized, but it wasn’t too surprising that she wouldn’t let me talk to April.

  “Any idea when she can come back to school?” I persisted. “The girls will want to know.”

  “Then their mothers can call me and ask.”

  “Even if I did bear a grudge after all these years, I wouldn’t take it out on your kid, Sandra,” I yelled, but she slammed the phone in my ear.

  Oh, to hell with her. I put the car into gear, thinking that jealousy of Marcena could have brought Sandra and me together. The image made me snicker inadvertently, and sent me farther south in a better humor.

  I was early enough for practice to stop in the principal’s office to talk to Natalie Gault. When I asked her what kind of physicals the girls were given before signing up for basketball, she rolled her eyes as if I were some sort of idiot.

  “We don’t do health screening here. They have to bring in a parent’s signed permission slip. That says the parent knows there are risks in the sport and that their child is healthy enough to play. We do it for basketball, football, baseball, all our sports. That document says the school is not liable for any illness or injury the child contracts from playing.”

  “Sandra Czernin is angry and scared. She needs a hundred thousand dollars to pay for April’s health care, for starters, anyway. If it occurs to her to sue the school, it won’t be hard for her to find a lawyer to take you to court-a permission slip like that isn’t going to stand up in front of a jury. Why not do EKGs on the rest of the squad, cheer everybody up, act like you’re paying attention?”

  I didn’t mention Lotty’s offer to do the EKGs-let the school sweat a little. Besides, I couldn’t quite get my mind around the logistics of ferrying fifteen teenagers to the clinic. Gault said she would discuss it with the principal and get back to me.

  I went on down to the gym, where I found a skeleton squad. Josie Dorrado was missing, as was Sancia, my center. Celine Jackman, my young gangbanger, was there with her two sidekicks, but even she seemed subdued.

  I told the nine who had shown up what I knew about April. “The hospital sent her home today. She can’t play basketball again-there’s something wrong with her heart, and the kind of workouts you have to do for team sports are too strenuous for her. But she’ll be able to return to school, and you won’t know by looking at her that there’s anything wrong with her. Where are Josie and Sancia?”

  “Josie, she cut school today,” Laetisha volunteered. “We thought, maybe she caught whatever April got, on account of them two is always together.”

  “You can’t catch what April has: it’s a condition,
you’re born with it.” I got out my coach’s erasable board and tried to draw a diagram for them, how you “catch” a disease caused by a virus, like chicken pox or AIDS, versus how you can be born with a condition.

  “So one of us could have the same thing and not know it.” This was Delia, one of the quieter girls, who never put much effort into the game.

  “You wouldn’t,” Celine said. “You so slow, people think you don’t got a working heart anyway.”

  I let the insult go unchecked-I wanted them to feel that life was returning to normal, even if normal included getting slammed. I set them on a short course of stretches, and let them go directly to scrimmage, five on four, with all the weakest players on the smaller squad. I joined the weaker girls at point guard, calling my team up, directing traffic, giving a few tips to the opposition, but putting my all into going one-on-one with Celine. After a short time, everyone, even Delia, forgot that their hearts might give out and started playing. I was hotdogging, bouncing the ball between my legs to someone in the corner, jumping up to block shots, sticking to Celine like her underwear, and the girls were laughing and cheering, and running harder than I’d ever seen them go. Celine took her play up a level and began feinting and nailing her shots as if she were Tamika Williams.

  When I called a halt at four, three of the girls begged to stay to work on their free throws. I told them I could let them have ten minutes, when one of the girls screamed, “Ooh, Coach, your back. Celine, what you do to Coach?”

  I put a hand behind me and realized I was wet with something warmer than sweat: my wound had come open. “I’m fine,” I said. “This is just an injury I got over at the factory, you know, Fly the Flag, when it blew up last week. You guys were great tonight. I have to go to the doctor and get this stitched back together now, but Thursday everyone who played today goes out for pizza with me after practice.”

  When they’d showered and I got the gym locked, I drove up to Lotty’s clinic, feeling a happy glow from the workout-the first time I’d left the high school feeling good since-maybe since ever. Since my team won the state championship all those years ago, although even then-my mother had been dying. I had gotten drunk with Sylvia and the rest of them so I didn’t have to think of Gabriella in her hospital bed, draped with tubes and monitors as if she were a mummified fly in the middle of a spiderweb.