“You went to see Pat Grobian Sunday afternoon after church? He was at work, then?”
“No, but he lives down in Olympia Fields. I drove down after I talked to you. Pat was still in his underwear, watching football on TV, can you believe that? And he had the nerve to call Josie a-well, a name, I won’t repeat it. We had a fight, an argument, I mean; I don’t hit people. I was already worrying about stuff, and I told him I’d have to take some time off.”
“The stuff you were worrying about-you’d seen it in a fax from Nicaragua? That’s what your aunt Jacqui says.”
“She told you about it? When?” His eyes were wide with disbelief.
“I was out at your grandmother’s house last night. Jacqui didn’t say much, just that you’d misinterpreted something about the Matagalpa plant, but she-”
“She said that?” Billy was almost shouting in anger. “She told that lie right in front of my grandmother? Do you know anything about what’s going on down here?”
“Very little,” I said meekly. “I know Pastor Andrés glued shut Fly the Flag to harass Frank Zamar over using sweatshop labor, but that Zamar went ahead and used it anyway. I know that Freddy-”
“You don’t know about Matagalpa,” Billy cut me off. “I found out-I saw this one fax to Aunt Jacqui, actually, it was the day you came to the warehouse to ask about money for the basketball program. They make jeans for By-Smart in Matagalpa, see, our house brand, Red River, and Aunt Jacqui, she wanted to see how fast they could set up to mass-produce sheets and linens and, you know, all that line. So I saw all the wage and hour figures and it was shocking, and I talked to her about it. She spends, like, two or three thousand dollars on every outfit she wears, I know because Uncle Gary keeps yelling about it.
“When I saw that Nicaragua fax, I did the arithmetic. The workers at the Red River plant work forty-four hundred hours a year, and they get not even eight hundred dollars, a year, I mean. So they’d have to work fourteen thousand hours to pay for one of her dresses, only, of course, they couldn’t because they have to feed their children. I told her this, why can’t she pay them something decent?, and she laughed, that way she has, and said their needs were simpler than hers. Simpler! Because she’s depriving them!”
His face was red and he was panting. I could picture the scene, Billy flushed as he was now with righteous rage, Aunt Jacqui smiling maliciously as she always did when one of the Bysens was upset.
“So that’s why you wanted to stay away from your family?”
“Sort of.” He stirred the sugary sludge in his cup round and round. “I talked to them all, Grandpa, Grandma. Of course, Father is hopeless, but Grandpa, he just treated me like I was retarded, they all think I’m retarded, he said it would make sense to me when I knew the business better. So when Pastor Andrés went out to our headquarters, that day you were there, to lead the service, he tried to preach about it, and, well, you saw what happened then!”
Josie put a hand on his, with a sidelong look at me to see if I would try to stop her touching him. He patted her absently, but he was brooding over his family.
“You threatened to call the shareholders. What was that about?”
“Oh, that.” He hunched an impatient shoulder. “That’s so old now. I told my-my father, and Uncle Roger, I’d support a union bid in Nicaragua, that I’d go to the shareholders and tell them I was going to send money to the guys who the Red River manager is locking out in Matagalpa so they could afford to take their case to the World Court. Of course, that has Father and all my uncles freaked. I didn’t really plan on hurting the family, not then, but now, oh, Jesus, now-!”
He broke off, real anguish in his face and voice, and dropped his head in his hands. This time, it was I who leaned over and patted him consolingly.
“What happened? Something about Zamar?”
“Everything was about Zamar.” His hands muffled his voice. “They-Aunt Jacqui and Grobian, I mean-were threatening Zamar, see, threatening to destroy his plant, that was the business with the rats, because he was saying he’d have to break the contract. Pat, Pat Grobian, he and Father said no one could break a By-Smart contract. If Frank Zamar did, then everyone would think they could walk away if they didn’t like the terms. Everyone wants to do business with us because we’re so big, and then we make people agree to prices they can’t afford…”
He stopped.
“So?” I prodded.
“I’ve gotten pretty good at Spanish,” he said, looking up briefly. “I studied it in high school, but because of the warehouse, and worshiping at Mt. Ararat, I understand it really well. So this fax came in from the Matagalpa manager, in Spanish. He was sending Pat the name of one of the local jefes, chiefs, you know, who get bad jobs for illegals and pocket half their pay, and, you know-”
I nodded.
“So the guy in Matagalpa, he was saying they should send Frank Zamar to this one guy, this local jefe here in South Chicago, and he’d see Frank got a stream of Central American illegals desperate for work. And Pat Grobian kind of told Frank, do it or else.”
“But Frank started to run that sweatshop,” I objected. “Josie’s mother was working there. That was two days before the plant burned down.”
“Yeah, but, see, Frank was so bitter and ashamed he didn’t tell Aunt Jacqui or my father that he’d started making these things. He was taking the finished ones to his own home, waiting until he had a full load. Then he was going to deliver it, but he didn’t want to talk about it.” Billy looked at me with his wide, guileless eyes. “If he’d told them! But they thought he was still holding out, so they wanted more sabotage.”
I remembered the cartons I’d seen being loaded into a panel truck the last time I was at the plant before the fire. That must have been the partial load Zamar was taking home.
“Your family sent in Freddy,” I supplied. “How did Bron get involved?”
“Oh, you don’t know anything!” he cried out. “Bron was the person doing it! Only he hired Freddy to do the actual dirty work. They’d just tell Bron, do something to the plant, they wouldn’t spell it out, and he’d get Freddy Pacheco to collect all those dead rats, or-or take that frog dish and put it on the wires.”
My phone rang. Morrell, saying they’d had a look around and hadn’t found anything, meaning Marcena’s recording pen, and he was going to bed.
“Mary Ann okay?”
“I think so,” I said; I remembered in time not to blurt out the news that Billy and Josie were there, just said there were a few things that I needed to take care of since I hadn’t been here for a week.
I turned back to Billy. “How long have you known about the frog? Why didn’t you go to the cops?”
“I couldn’t.” The words came out in a whisper. He was staring fixedly at the tabletop, as if trying to fall into it and disappear, and I had to prod him for some minutes before the rest of the story emerged.
On Monday, he said he’d drive Bron to the warehouse in time for Bron to pick up his rig. Billy was planning to clean out his locker, and he’d leave the Miata in the employee parking area for Bron to drive home at the end of his shift. Bron, in turn, would drop Billy at the South Chicago commuter train station before going to his first delivery point.
On their way to the warehouse, Billy asked Bron what his plan was for getting the money for April’s heart surgery, and Bron said he had an extra insurance policy that Grobian had signed up for, and he showed Billy the frog picture, the same one I’d been carrying around. Billy asked what it was, and Bron said part of his policy, Billy didn’t have to know more than that, he was too nice a kid.
“I get tired of that, all the time being told I’m too innocent, or too nice, or too retarded, or whatever it is, to know what’s going on,” Billy flashed. “Like believing in Jesus, and wanting to do good in the world, automatically makes you an idiot. So-just to show you I’m not all that nice, I decided to find out what Bron was up to with Pat. There’s a closet in Pat’s room that connects to the next room-it
used to be a big office suite or something, with a john or something in between the two rooms, but, anyway, I went in there, in the closet, and I heard the whole thing, Bron saying he needed a hundred grand for April, Pat laughing in this nasty way, ‘You been hanging around the Kid too much if you think his family will part with one red cent for your brat.’
“Then I guess Bron showed him the frog picture, and Pat said, that proved jack shit-” Billy turned crimson as he repeated the phrase; he looked at me fleetingly to see whether I was shocked. “And Bron said, oh, he had a recording of it all, on account of Marcena Love had been with him when Pat asked him to do the dirty work, and she had everything on tape, she recorded everybody’s conversations so she’d have an accurate record. So then Pat told him to wait outside for a minute. And he made a phone call and repeated the conversation, and then he called Bron back in and said, okay, he thought he could help him out after all. He said Bron should bring the truck over to Fly the Flag after he made his Crown Point drop-off-that he wanted to inspect that first load of sheets Zamar had made to see if they could be salvaged, and someone from the family would be there with a check, that it couldn’t be, like, out in public, because the family didn’t want to be involved. So I decided to go to Fly the Flag and see who showed up from the family.”
“Where was Josie while all this was going on?” I asked.
“Oh, I was waiting in the Miata.” It was the first time Josie had spoken-it was almost as though she hadn’t been there.
“In the Miata? It’s a tiny two-seater!”
“We had the top down.” Josie’s eyes were shining with pleasure at the memory. “I crouched behind the seats. It was so fun, I loved it.”
On a cold November afternoon, yes, fifteen, close to death and to love at the same moment-that was fun.
“How did Marcena get into the car, then?” I asked, trying to figure out how all these people had ended up together.
“Bron picked her up in the truck. She was interviewing someone, or looking at something, I don’t know what, but he told me he was going to get her, and he wanted to know was it okay if she drove my car. See, before I heard Grobian and Bron talking, we-Josie and I-were planning to run away to Mexico together, find Josie’s great-aunt in Zacatecas. We were going to take the train downtown to the Greyhound station. Josie doesn’t have an ID, so we couldn’t fly, and, anyway, if we flew my dad’s detectives would find us. We were going to take the Greyhound to El Paso and then hitchhike to Zacatecas.
“But then I decided I had to go back to Fly the Flag first-I had to see who from my family would be there, and I didn’t want Bron to know I was doing that. If I had known what they were going to do, I’d never have brought Josie, you have to believe that, Ms. War-sha-sky, because it was the most awful-” His shoulders started shaking; he was trying not to sob out loud.
“Who came?” I asked in a matter-of-fact voice.
“It was Mr. William,” Josie said softly after a minute, when Billy couldn’t speak. “The English lady, she drove up in Billy’s car. Mr. Czernin dropped us, see, over at the train station on Ninety-first Street. The factory is only, like, six blocks from the station. Billy carried my backpack, and we walked up, we picked up a pizza and stuff, and then we just went into the factory.”
She kept talking in the same soft voice, as if she didn’t want to startle Billy. “The big room where Ma used to sew, it smelled from the fire, but the front was still okay, you know, if you didn’t know the back was gone, you’d think it was still okay. So we waited, it was, like, I don’t know, three hours. It got kind of cold. And then suddenly I heard Mr. Grobian’s voice, and he and Mr. William came in. We hid under one of the worktables-the electricity was off because of the fire, and they had this big, portable work light they turned on, but they couldn’t see us.
“And then April’s dad came in with the English reporter. They talked back and forth, about April’s surgery, and what Mr. Czernin had done for Mrs. Jacqui and Mr. Grobian, and Mr. William, he said to the English lady, Mr. Czernin say you have-I mean, Mr. Czernin, he says you have a recording of all this?
“And the English lady, she said she had a tape recording, but she was just going to read them the-I can’t remember the word, but she’d written it all down, copied it from the tape recording, I mean. Because she said they couldn’t have her tape recorder, she knew what would happen to it if she let them at it.
“So she read this whole thing where Mr. Grobian was telling Mr. Czernin to wreck up the factory, wreck up Fly the Flag, I mean. Billy’s aunt, she was at the meeting, not in the factory, but the one where they told April’s father to wreck up the factory. So the English lady read about what they all said, and how Mr. William himself said this would prove to the old man-he meant Billy’s grandpa-that he knew how to take strong action.
“So when she finished, Mr. William, he gave this kind of phony laugh”-she darted a glance at Billy as if he might be offended-“and said, ‘I see you were telling the truth, Czernin. I thought you were making empty threats. We’ll work it out. You get the truck loaded up, we found the sheets okay, they’re in these boxes here, and I’ll write you out a check.’”
Josie gave a startling imitation of William’s precise and fussy manner. Billy sat, glassy-eyed, as if he were in a drunken stupor. I didn’t know if he was hearing Josie or just reliving the evening in his head.
“Then I don’t know what really happened, because we were under a table, but Mr. Grobian and Mr. Czernin, they loaded up the forklift, and the English lady, she said, oh, she would adore to drive the forklift, she’d done tanks and the semi but never a forklift, and Mr. Grobian said he would back the truck up to the loading bay and Czernin could show her how to handle the forklift. Only somehow the forklift went over and they fell off, the English lady and Mr. Czernin. She screamed, kind of, but Mr. Czernin never made any sound…” Her voice trailed off; suddenly it wasn’t exciting anymore, it was frightening.
“What happened?” I was trying to picture the scene-the forklift driving up to the truck and then over the edge. Or Grobian and William dumping a load of cartons on Bron and Marcena.
“I didn’t see it,” Billy whispered. “But I heard Dad say, I think that’s done it for them, Grobian. Load them into the truck. We’ll take them over to the landfill, and their nearest and dearest can imagine they’ve run off to Acapulco together.”
He started to cry, loud retching sobs that shook his whole body. The outburst terrified Josie, who looked from him to me with scared eyes.
“Get him a glass of water,” I commanded her.
I went around the table to cradle his head against my breast. Poor guy, witnessing his own father commit murder. No wonder he was hiding. No wonder William wanted to find him.
I jumped as a voice spoke behind me. “Oh, it’s you, Victoria. I might have guessed from all the racket that you’d shown up.” Mary Ann McFarlane was standing in the doorway.
44 The Recording Angel…or Devil?
With her bald head atop her scarlet tartan dressing gown, Mary Ann made a startling sight, but all three of us responded at once to her authority. Billy’s ingrained good manners brought him to his feet; he drank the water that Josie had been holding out to him, and apologized to Mary Ann for waking her up. After we’d gone through the bustle of greetings, and how I’d happened on the fugitives, Billy finished the tale, by explaining how they’d ended up at Mary Ann’s.
They’d spent the remainder of Monday night huddled under the worktable, too shocked and frightened to try to leave. They thought they’d heard more voices than just William’s and Grobian’s, but they weren’t sure, and they didn’t know if someone was watching the plant. But by morning, they were cold as well as hungry. They risked getting up to use the bathroom, which was in the intact part of the plant. When no one attacked them, they decided to leave but didn’t know where to go.
“I wanted to call you, Coach Warshawski,” Josie said, “but Billy was afraid you might still be working for Mr. Wi
lliam. So we came here, because Coach McFarlane was the person who helped Julia when she got pregnant.”
I shadow-punched Mary Ann. “What was that you said to me this afternoon-about not knowing the Dorrado girls very well?”
She gave her grim smile. “I wanted them to go to you, Victoria, but I’d promised I’d keep their secret safe until they were ready to tell it. Trouble is, I thought Billy was hiding while he sorted out the ethics of his family’s business-I didn’t know ’til I heard him just now that they’d witnessed Bron’s death. If I’d known that, please believe I’d have called you quam primum famam audieram.”
Mary Ann breaks into Latin when she’s agitated-it calms her down, but makes it hard for people like doctors and nurses to know what she’s saying. I don’t follow her easily myself, and, right now, I was too overwhelmed by Billy’s narrative to make the effort.
“You said Marcena read from a transcript, that she didn’t play the recording,” I said to Billy. “But did you see her recorder at Fly the Flag?”
“We didn’t see anything,” Josie said.
“And Billy’s dad didn’t see you?”
“No one saw us.”
I could see why William was looking so desperately for the recorder. They’d gotten her computer, but they didn’t have the original. But why was he so desperate to find Billy if he didn’t know his son had been there? I asked Billy who else he had told.
“No one, Ms. War-sha-sky, no one.”
“You didn’t instant-message anyone?”
He shook his head.
“What about the blog-April said there’s one you and your sister use to stay in touch.”
“Yeah, but we use nicknames, just in case. Candy’s at a mission in Daegu, that’s in South Korea, my folks-my dad, he sent her there after the-the abortion-to keep her out of temptation and make up for the life she’d taken. I’m not supposed to write her, but we post to this blog, it’s devoted to Oscar Romero, on account of he’s my-my spiritual hero. My dad doesn’t know about it, and when I write her I use my blog name, Gruff, but-”
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