In the meantime, the recording so bolstered my story that it forced the state’s attorney-nervous about going up against Bysen money and power-into motion. Grobian and William had been charged on Friday with assaulting me, but were released almost at once on I-Bonds. On Monday, though, Conrad’s team arrested them again, this time for murdering Bron.
The cops tracked Freddy to earth at his new girlfriend’s place and charged him with second-degree murder in Frank Zamar’s death-since he hadn’t intended to set a fire, just to short out the wires. They arrested Aunt Jacqui as an accessory-which somehow seemed really fitting: if charges stuck, if she ended up in Dwight doing time, she could run a class on how to accessorize your wardrobe with a murder charge. William and Grobian made bail within hours, as did Aunt Jacqui, but poor old Freddy was left to the mercy of the public defender, without money for bail-he would probably spend not just Thanksgiving in Cook County, but Christmas and maybe Easter, given the speed with which the state brings people to trial.
When Freddy realized he was being hung out to dry by Pat Grobian, he started to sing like one of Mt. Ararat ’s choristers. He told Conrad about his meeting with Grobian in the warehouse, the one I’d seen, where Grobian ordered him to break into Bron’s house to look for Marcena’s recorder. He told Conrad about planting the little frog full of nitric acid at Fly the Flag. He even told Conrad about driving the Miata into the undergrowth below the Skyway for Grobian: he was bitter about that, because he thought Grobian should have given him the car in thanks for all his, Freddy’s, hard work, but all he’d gotten out of his night’s labors had been fifty dollars.
Conrad didn’t tell me all this at the hospital, but when he came by Lotty’s to ask me more questions, he filled in gaps in the story. He added that it was a source of pure pleasure to him to listen to Grobian and William turn on each other. “That’s how they got that big old semi over on its side-they were arguing over whether William was really a weasel or Grobian was a thug-I kid you not, Ms. W., the two reenacted their fight for my benefit-and William grabbed the steering wheel, saying he was a big enough man to drive the truck. They fought for control of the wheel and the truck went over. I love it, I really do, when the rich and famous carry on with the same attitude that my street punks do.
“By the way, that truck you rode in was Czernin’s rig, or the one he’d been driving the night he was whacked. Why Grobian didn’t scrap it is beyond me: we found Czernin’s and the Love woman’s blood on that conveyor belt dohingus, along with your own AB negative. Trust you to have the weirdest blood on the planet.”
I ignored that crack. “What about Aunt Jacqui? She was at the factory with them Thursday night; where was she when the truck went over?”
“She’d driven back to Barrington Hills. Now she’s saying that she was acting under Buffalo Bill’s orders. She says when she told him that Zamar was welching on Fly the Flag’s deal with By-Smart, Buffalo Bill told her she needed to teach Zamar a lesson, that he used to do it all the time in his younger days, until word got out on the street that no one messed with By-Smart. If they’re forgetting their lessons, we need to teach them again, she claims the old Buffalo said something like that.”
Conrad said Jacqui insisted that Buffalo Bill told her dealing with Zamar was supposed to prove she was ready to sit at By-Smart’s management table. With that bunch, I could believe anything of any of them. I could hear the old man say it, going “hnnh, hnnh, hnnh,” but if Jacqui thought she was any match for the old buffalo she was either gutsy or delusional.
Tuesday, when Lotty was in surgery, Morrell came by her apartment to visit me. He’d been over at County Hospital to see Marcena, who was recovering from her first skin graft. She was in intensive care, but she was finally conscious, and seemed to be recovering well-she was alert, with no signs of brain damage from her own ordeal in the By-Smart semi.
Having gone through the same harrowing ride as she had, with the semi’s hand conveyor belt rolling over me, I felt a more personal relief at her recovery than I might have before. She couldn’t remember the moments leading up to her accident, let alone the accident itself, but now that he knew where to look Conrad had sent a forensics team into Fly the Flag. They figured that Marcena had jumped clear of the falling forklift, but that Bron hadn’t; the fall broke his neck. Marcena was probably knocked cold when she hit the ground, with the rest of her injuries coming during the ride to the marsh.
Another point that we could only speculate on was Marcena’s scarf, the one Mitch had found that had led him to her. The forensics team guessed it was coming loose from her neck when Grobian tossed her into the trailer; perhaps it got caught in the doors and then was snagged on the fence when the truck left the road to go cross-country to the landfill.
These were just little points, the ones that I worried over. I had a private belief, or wish, that Marcena regained consciousness and left a deliberate trail: the scarf had been torn, with a big piece on the fence, and a smaller piece that Mitch found first. I liked to think she’d taken some kind of active steps to try to save herself, that she hadn’t lain passively in the truck, waiting for death. The idea of anyone’s helplessness terrifies me, my own most of all.
“It’s possible, Victoria,” Lotty said, when I talked it over with her. “The human body is an amazing instrument, the mind more so. I would never discount any possibility of remarkable strength and contriving.”
That same Tuesday, I started picking up the reins of my business again. Among dozens of messages of good wishes from friends and reporters, and a van full of flowers from my most important client (“Delighted to know you’re not dead yet, Darraugh,” the card read), my answering service reported at least twenty calls from Buffalo Bill, demanding a meeting: he wanted to know “what fabrications I was filling his grandson’s head with, and straighten out once and for all what I could and could not say about the family.”
“Boy won’t come home,” the Buffalo said to me when I called him back Tuesday afternoon. “Says you’ve told him all kinds of lies about me, about the business.”
“Careful with the words you toss around, Mr. Bysen. You accuse me of lying, and I could add a slander suit to your family’s legal troubles. And I don’t have any power over Billy-he’s deciding for himself what he will and won’t do. When I talk to him, I’ll see if I can get him to agree to meet with you-and that’s all I’ll do.”
Later that same afternoon, Morrell came by with Billy-and Mr. Contreras and the dogs. Josie had gone back to school-under protest, according to her mother. I myself had canceled basketball practice yesterday, telling the team I’d have to let them know when I was strong enough to return. They’d responded with a get-well card big enough to cover the wall in Lotty’s spare room, filled with encouraging messages in English and Spanish.
Amy Blount had already filled me in on Billy and Josie, because she hadn’t been able to persuade them to leave Mary Ann’s place when she drove down there on Friday. Rose Dorrado had been more forceful, dragging Josie home and compelling her to return to school.
As Amy described it, the reunion between Rose and her daughter was a predictable combination of joy and fury (“You were here, not two miles from me, clean, well fed, safe, and me, I have not slept at night for worry!”).
Billy, shell-shocked by his father’s behavior, stayed on at Mary Ann’s. He’d called his grandmother, and spoken briefly to his mother, but he wouldn’t go home. He didn’t even want to go back to Pastor Andrés: he thought the minister shared the blame in Frank Zamar’s death because of the pressure he’d put on Zamar to back out of his contract with By-Smart.
The main reason Billy wouldn’t leave Mary Ann’s, though, was because he didn’t have the energy to pack up and move one more time. He’d been at the pastor’s, he’d been at Josie’s, and then at Mary Ann’s, all in the last ten days. He was too upset to organize himself mentally into another move-and my coach definitely liked having him living in the apartment with her. Now that he wasn’t hiding,
he walked the dog three or four times a day, and he brought all his intensity to studying Latin with her. Its rules, its complex grammar, seemed to be a haven for him right now, a place of purity, regularity.
On Tuesday, in Lotty’s apartment, he tried to explain some of that to me, and some of his reluctance to see his family again. “I love them all, maybe not Dad, at least, I find it hard to forgive him for killing April’s dad and Mr. Zamar-and even if Freddy and Bron made the plant burn down, I think it was really because of Aunt Jacqui, and-and Dad, that Mr. Zamar is dead. I even love Mom, and, of course, my grandparents, they’re great people, they really are, but-but I think they’re shortsighted.”
He curled his hands in Peppy’s fur and spoke to her, not to me. “It’s funny, they have such a big vision for the company, how to make it an international giant, but the only people they really recognize as-as human-are themselves. They can’t see that Josie is a person, and her family, and all the people who work in South Chicago. If someone wasn’t born a Bysen, they don’t count. If they are Bysens, it doesn’t matter what they do, because they’re part of the family. Like Grandma, she is truly against abortion in every way, she gives tons of money to antiabortion groups, but when Candy, when my sister, got pregnant, Grandma whisked her off to a clinic-they were mad at Candy, but Grandma got her an abortion that they’d never let Josie have, not that Josie’s pregnant.” He turned beet red. “We-we did listen to what you said, about-well, being careful-but it’s just an example of what I mean about how my family sees the world.”
“Your grandfather wants to talk to you. If we did it in my office, would you come?”
He worked furiously on Peppy’s neck. “I guess. I guess.”
So the day before Thanksgiving, much against Lotty’s wishes, I went to my office for a meeting with Bysen and his retinue. For once, I had enough people in my office to make me glad of my huge space. Billy’s mother was there with his grandparents, Uncle Roger, and Linus Rankin, the family lawyer. Jacqui’s husband, Uncle Gary, had also shown up. Of course, Mildred was in attendance, gold portfolio in hand.
My team included Morrell and Amy Blount. Mr. Contreras insisted on being present, with the dogs-“just in case those Bysens try anything on you in broad daylight; I wouldn’t put nothing past them.” Marcena’s parents also attended, curious to see the people who had nearly killed their daughter. I’d had to borrow five chairs from my warehouse mate’s studio so everyone could sit down.
In the middle, stubbornly sitting next to Peppy after giving his grandmother a hug, was Billy. He wore an old flannel work shirt and blue jeans, setting himself apart deliberately from his family’s gray business suits.
When Billy’s grandmother said she was sure Linus could work something out with me, Mr. Contreras bristled at once. “Your son darn near killed my girl here. You think you can come in here and wave your big fat wallet around and ‘work something out’ with her? Like what? Give her back her health? Give the Loves back their daughter’s skin? Give that poor sick girl on Cookie-Vicki-on Ms. Warshawski’s basketball team her daddy back? What’s going through your head?”
Mrs. Bysen frowned at him, sadly, as if at one of her grandchildren who was fighting at mealtime. “I’ve never involved myself in my husband’s business, but I know he works with hundreds of small companies. We both admire Miss Warshawski’s courage and her tenacity; we’re sorry our son was so-well, did what he did. His behavior doesn’t reflect our values, I assure you. I think if my husband started giving some of his investigative work to Miss Warshawski, she’d find herself amply rewarded as her business gained in importance.”
“And in return?” I asked politely.
“Oh, in return you’d get rid of all those copies of that silly tape. We don’t want that out in public, it doesn’t help anyone.”
“And I can probably get it suppressed as evidence, if William ever comes to trial at all,” Linus Rankin added helpfully.
I rolled up my sweater sleeves and looked thoughtfully at my purple flesh. I had let Morrell photograph me, although I’d hated it, hated the sense of exposure. Now I didn’t feel any embarrassment, didn’t say anything, just let Grandma and Rankin look at my swollen, discolored skin.
“She doesn’t need that kind of help,” Billy said. “She isn’t about money, she-Grandma, if you really knew her, you’d know, even though she’s not a Christian, she lives her life by all the values you taught me: she’s honest, she looks after her friends, she-she’s so full of courage-”
“Billy.” I laughed in embarrassment. “That’s a beautiful testimonial. I hope I live long enough to deserve a quarter of it. Mrs. Bysen, here’s the problem: that recording doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to Marcena Love. I can’t speak for her. But I can make a little suggestion to you and your husband. You weren’t involved in William’s exploits. Stay away from them now. Even if Jacqui is right, that Buffalo Bill told her to bring Frank Zamar at Fly the Flag into line-that it was her test to see if she was worthy of the By-Smart management team-he didn’t specifically order anyone to set the plant on fire and kill Mr. Zamar, or to kill Bron Czernin. At least, I don’t think he did, did he?”
I gave Bysen and Linus Rankin my most brilliant smile. “So here’s my modest proposal. Don’t fight Sandra Czernin’s workers’ comp claim for Bron’s death. It should be the full $250,000 payout: that would take care of April Czernin’s medical bills, and maybe give her a nest egg for college. Second, get Rose Dorrado a job in your operation at the same wage she was making with Frank Zamar. She’s an experienced supervisor. Hire her full-time, so she gets whatever measly health benefits your full-time workers get. And, finally, fund the basketball program down at Bertha Palmer High School, that $55,000 I came asking you for a month ago.”
“Oh, yes, cut a dollar bill into forty thousand pieces, or whatever fool idea you had, hnnh?” Bysen said, some of his bluster returning. “And for that truck driver, even though he was stepping out on his marriage vows, I’m supposed to cut another bill into a quarter-million pieces. That’s like saying I should give people money for sins-”
“Now, dear.” May Irene put a reproving hand on her husband’s knee. “And what would you do for us, Miss Warshawski, if we did that for you?”
“I’d support your statement that your son and daughter-in-law acted behind your back, that you weren’t a party to all that bloodshed on the South Side.”
“That’s nothing, young woman!” Linus Rankin said. “That’s ridiculous!”
I leaned back in my chair again. “It’s the deal on the table. Take it or leave it, I don’t care, but I’m not going to dicker over it.”
“It doesn’t matter, Miss War-sha-sky,” Billy burst out, his cheeks flaming. “Because I’ll pay April’s bills if they fight Bron’s work comp claim, and I’ll put the money up for the basketball program. I’d have to sell some stock, and I need my trustees’ permission to do that, but if they won’t allow it, well, I guess a bank would lend me money, because they know I’ll get my shares when I’m twenty-seven. I guess I can pay interest that long.”
“That will make a wonderful headline.” I smiled at him. “‘Bysen Heir Borrows Money to Meet Grandpa’s Moral Obligations.’ You all go home and think it over. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving-you can call me on Monday with your decision, after the long weekend.”
Uncle Gary thought he would prove he was the tough son by arguing with me, but I said, “Good-bye, Gary. I need a rest. You go on now, all of you.”
The Bysen party filed out, muttering to each other. I heard Buffalo Bill snap at Gary, “Jacqui was bad news from day one. Claimed to be a Christian, hnnh, I guess if you’d been in Eden, you’d have listened to the snake, too, because-”
May Irene cut him off. “We have enough worries now, dear, let’s cherish what’s left of our family.”
My team stayed a little longer, hashing over the meeting, trying to guess which way the Bysens would jump. Finally, Morrell and the Loves left to visit Marcena. Amy was driving down to
St. Louis to spend Thanksgiving with her family. I got up on my wobbly legs and hobbled out with Mr. Contreras and the dogs, heading to my own home for the first time in a week. We were going up to Evanston tomorrow, to have Thanksgiving with Lotty at Max Loewenthal’s house, but this afternoon I was glad to fall into my own bed.
48 Dancing Rhino
Morrell and I joined a cast of thousands at Max’s for Thanksgiving dinner. He always has a big crowd-his daughter flies in from New York with her husband and children, his and Lotty’s musician friends show up early and stay late, and Lotty always invites stray interns from her service at Beth Israel. Mr. Contreras came this year, happy to escape his petulant daughter’s house. As soon as Max heard about the Loves, he opened his doors to them, and even suggested I invite Billy and Mary Ann McFarlane-he hated to think of Billy, estranged from his family, spending Thanksgiving alone. But Billy was helping Pastor Andrés serve turkey dinners to the homeless, and Mary Ann said her neighbor was bringing dinner over and she’d be just fine without me.
Marcena was still in the hospital, of course, but she was recovering fast and her spirits were good. I’d gone to visit her before driving up to Max’s. I’d run into her parents in the ICU. The Loves had been silent and anxious since their arrival, but Marcena’s rapid improvement was making them almost effervescent.
We all had to put on protective masks and gowns before going into Marcena’s room, so as to make sure we didn’t spread germs into her vulnerable new skin. Her parents left me alone with her, since she couldn’t have more than two visitors at a time.
I tiptoed into the room. Marcena’s head was shaved and bandaged; she had a fading bruise on her left cheekbone, and her body was hidden in a kind of box with sheets draped over it, to protect her new skin, but her eyes held a hint of their usual spark.
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