“In fact it probably explains why Deirdre did so much for us. Sal suggested she was an abused wife, but I didn’t want to think about it. The trouble is, a job like this—you’re giving all day long. I want support from my board—so I turn a blind eye to the possibility that they have problems.”
“There’s something I’d like you to look at.” I pulled Emily’s poem out of my bag. “Does this tell you anything?”
Marilyn read it. “This Deirdre’s daughter? Sounds like one unhappy girl. ‘A mouse between two cats.’ Ugh. Let’s get Eva to take a look at it.”
Eva Kuhn, Arcadia’s therapist, was conducting a group therapy session, Marilyn’s administrative assistant told us. She’d be free in half an hour. Marilyn took me to her office to wait.
It was a Spartan room, furnished with leftovers from some of Arcadia’s corporate sponsors. Marilyn had done her best to humanize the space with plants. Artwork by the residents gave the room a jolt of eccentric color.
While we drank overboiled coffee women and children darted in for brief moments of recognition. Marilyn greeted each by name, with a personal question—had this child made a crown in artwork that morning? had that mother been to the jobs counselor yesterday?—then picked up the thread of our conversation without missing a nuance. No wonder she needed a board that supported rather than drained her.
“You find anything for that kid you’re trying to help?” she asked.
“Oh, Christ. My bread and butter. I’d forgotten him. And I have until five p.m. Friday. I feel like Gary Cooper in High Noon.” Ken—MacKenzie—Graham and his blasted public service.
“You tried Home Free?” Marilyn asked.
I looked at her approvingly. “What a brilliant idea. Not just for the young Graham. But for Deirdre. She did a lot of work there. Maybe they know something about her we don’t.”
“Something that’ll lead you to Emily?” Marilyn was skeptical.
“That’ll give me a bead on Deirdre’s killer, keep the cops from fingering either Emily or Tamar Hawkings. If Hawkings ever reemerges. Do you think a child of fourteen would have the capacity to pound her mother’s head in?”
“Deirdre’s daughter? You don’t really think—” She cut her remark short with a shake of her head. “I can’t give you some kind of cast-iron assurance about the character of a girl I never met. All I can tell you is I’ve seen people do unbelievable things.”
“We had a woman here for a while, she’s doing ten years now, who poured lye on her old man while he was asleep, then coated him with molasses. He burned to death—he couldn’t wash the stuff off. She was four-foot-eleven. The courts didn’t care that she only had one major limb the guy hadn’t broken. And you’ve got to agree it was a hell of a way to die. So I’m not betting on what some girl on the brink might or might not do to her mother. Although I’m with you—I’d rather the husband got nailed.”
“Only if he’s guilty, of course,” I murmured.
Eva came in on Marilyn’s sardonic snort of laughter. “That’s what we like: a cheerful heart among our happy workers. How’s it going, Vic? You want an hour of therapy? I’m revved up and ready to take on you or anyone else your weight you want to name.”
“Bad session, huh?” Marilyn said. “We want your diagnostic skills. Don’t tell her who wrote it, Vic. Let her read it.”
“And guess?” Eva watched while I cut a piece of masking tape to cover Emily’s name. “In school they give you case studies where you’re supposed to make a diagnosis and recommend treatment, but no one’s ever given me a piece of paper and asked me to construct a case study.”
She had played basketball, first for Tennessee and then professionally in Japan, before deciding on a career in social work. In jeans, with a white shirt rolled up to expose her muscular forearms, she still looked more like a ballplayer than a therapist. I tag along after her in pickup games sometimes. She’s ten years my junior and from a different planet in ability. I’d often wondered whether her fast-breaking physical style carried over to her counseling sessions. Still, I knew the Arcadia staff thought highly of her.
She read the poem carefully, her dark hair hiding her face as she bent over the paper. When she looked up again she was frowning. “You’d better tell me something about the writer. This a woman in trouble?”
“A child in trouble.” I told her what I knew about Emily. “I’m clutching at straws. Is there anything in that poem that would suggest that Fabian had killed her mother? Or where Emily might go to hide?”
A faint smile crinkled Eva’s dark eyes. “I’m a social worker, not a literary critic. If the kid’s the mouse—and we can assume that’s true: she’s not going to write so despairingly about someone else, even her mother—she feels violated by both parents. She’s the one who gets hurt in the poem—the two cats are on the prowl at the end.”
“Then it doesn’t make sense. She wanted to make a special point about the poem: it’s likely that’s why she went to school Monday. But if her mother was dead, would she think of her that way?”
Eva tapped the paper as if it were a ball she was trying to dribble. “It seems likely that she didn’t know her mother was dead when she wrote it.”
“Maybe she wrote it Friday night,” Marilyn suggested, leaning forward in her chair. “Deirdre went out, leaving Emily holding the bag. If what you say about the family is true, Fabian could have blamed Emily for her mother’s defection.. Maybe the girl finally had enough. She can’t confront her parents—they’re out to lunch. She knows she needs help, but not at a conscious level: she can only ask it obliquely of her teachers.”
“Could be.” Eva nodded. “Deirdre’s dead and she needs help more than ever. She goes ahead and reads the poem in class, then is overwhelmed—by having criticized her mother, who’s dead. She might even be imagining her harsh words killed her mother.”
“Then how—” I clipped the words off.
How did the bat get into her room? If Fabian was in all night—no. He was forcing Emily to say he was in all night. It seemed all too likely that one of them had killed Deirdre. I wanted it to be him, not his daughter, but I couldn’t want it so badly I didn’t think the situation through.
I took the paper back from Eva. “I was hoping it would give me some kind of hint—either about Fabian’s guilt, or where she’s fled to.”
“The poem makes it clear that Fabian’s guilty of something,” Eva said. “But just what, you’d have to talk to the girl to find out. She sees herself as small and helpless. I don’t know whether that means she’d flee to someone powerful, or find herself some kind of bolt hole. That’s probably why she came to you, Vic. You seemed like a powerful outsider, big enough to stand up to the cats.”
“And thanks to her wretched father I wasn’t able to respond when she needed me,” I said bitterly, getting up. “But it’s possible she might have turned to one of her teachers instead, someone who’s being quixotic in not turning her in. I’ll go back to the school and dig some more. Thanks, Eva. See you at the next board meeting, Marilyn.”
Hoping Emily might have gone there after all, I went first to my office, where I received a rude shock. A murder in the building had sapped the Culpepper brothers’ remaining patience with their tenants. The Pulteney was boarded shut. A notice pasted to the window directed inquiries to a phone number printed in minute type.
22
Striking the Scent
I went to the coffee shop on the corner to phone and got the boarding company, not the Culpeppers’ management office. They couldn’t help me locate the contents of my office; they didn’t know anything about that. Just that the building had been vacated by the end of the workday yesterday: they’d boarded the doors at ten this morning.
“You’re sure no one was in the building?”
“Look, lady, we’ve been doing this for thirty years. Believe me, we’ve never nailed anyone prematurely into a coffin yet. You got any other problems, take them up with the building’s owners.”
&nbs
p; His receiver slammed in my ear. In other words, they hadn’t searched the building first. I wondered if Terry Finchley even knew the Pulteney was boarded shut. After all, there was still an active crime scene inside.
I didn’t want to call back to the Central District, not after having just given them evidence they wanted to use against Emily, but I needed to know they’d done a thorough search of the building. Finchley was gone, presumably to the Messenger mansion; my call was shunted to Officer Neely.
She hadn’t known the Culpeppers were closing the Pulteney, but assured me a police team had gone through it last night. After leaving my apartment Finchley had detailed a crew—a good crew—she emphasized, to make a floor-by-floor search both for Tamar Hawkings and Emily. They’d found the office Deirdre claimed to have seen, where Tamar had been nesting, but no signs that she or her children had been there within the last few days. And no trace of Emily.
“What about my office, now that the building’s closed?” I asked.
“You have to take that up with the building’s owners,” she said, as stiff as ever.
“Is my computer sitting in it? Terry told me they were going to bring it over and I need it.”
“Oh!” For once she was disconcerted. “I’m afraid we’ve been so chaotic, I forgot—it’s still in the evidence room.”
I sighed. “Then will you put through the paperwork so I can collect it myself?”
She apologized and said I could get it tomorrow. I was ready to hang up, but Neely seemed to be toying with saying something else. I waited, not speaking, and was finally rewarded.
“About the Messenger kids. We canvassed the street, of course. One of the waitresses in your corner coffee shop thought she might have seen the kids. But there’s no way of knowing for sure. Even though you’re at the tag end of the Loop, there’s still plenty of foot traffic.”
“You’re sure they’re not in the building?” If they’d been seen here, in the coffee shop where I was phoning, where else could they be?
“I hope not. If they somehow eluded us ... I don’t know. I’ll see if Terry—if Detective Finchley—will let me open up the building and go through it one more time.” For once Neely’s stiff police mask slipped; she sounded worried, even a bit scared.
When she hung up I went over to the counter to find the woman who’d spotted Emily. The waitresses all know me by sight from the years I’ve been coming in, but we’d never gotten down to names. When I explained my errand, and showed them the snapshot of Emily with her brothers, they treated me with a friendly camaraderie. Business was slack; I was someone new to talk to. After a few minutes’ whispered consultation a solidly built woman of about fifty came over to me. The plastic tag on her massive bosom identified her as Melba.
“That’s the girl, all right, just like I told that girl from the police.” In her slow, strong cadence she emphasized the first syllable, making the police seem much more ominous than usual. “It was about four p.m., just when I’m ready to go off shift, and she come in asking for the Pulteney.
“ ‘That’s right next door,’ I tell her. ‘But ain’t hardly anyone left in it now. What you want there?’ I ask her. I wondered about her, see, since she had these two little boys in tow, and I’m thinking, Lord, they start in younger every day, because she wasn’t more than nineteen, tops, and the bigger boy had to be six. And I’m wondering if she wants to hole up in there on account of she knows it’s coming down. So I give her and the kids some tuna sandwiches and a bag of fries. But I couldn’t honestly tell you if they went inside the Pulteney or not.”
She pronounced the building name majestically, with the weight on the second syllable, evoking a brief image not of the derelict I’d rented all those years, but the stately home for which it was named.
“I’m wondering if there’s a way into the Pulteney basement through yours. Another homeless woman has been living there, but we’ve always kept the only door down there locked.”
Melba looked dubious. “I couldn’t let you look, not without the manager’s okay, and he isn’t here right now. Won’t be back, probably, until tomorrow morning.”
I pulled a ten from my bag and held it casually. She took it with dignity, but indicated I ought to square the other two waitresses as well. Five apiece seemed ample to me for them. Melba led me through to the back, past the kitchen where two cooks were laughing over a game of twenty-one, to the basement door.
The stairs were old but clean. A giant cooler stood at the bottom, the only part of the basement they really used, Melba explained. She turned on the light by the cooler and let me borrow the flashlight hanging there to poke through the rooms behind it. The boiler and heating pipes sat in the first one, a system as old as the Pulteney’s, installed when furnaces were built of cast iron and could handle a century of heating without a belch.
Beyond the boiler lay a series of storerooms, whose contents were a guide to the history of the building. The most recent layer held Formica tables and plastic booths that might have dated from the fifties, when the site was already in use as a diner. Beyond them, I found relics of a barber shop, antique shoe repair equipment, and what looked like the remains of a Linotype machine. I’d never known the old printing district had offshoots this far north.
I couldn’t find any signs of recent use of the premises. And, although I poked and prodded long after Melba lost interest in my activities, I couldn’t see any place where the basement connected to the Pulteney. When I finally gave up on the project it was past four. I put the flashlight back on its hook and went upstairs, coughing from the dust I’d been breathing. The cooks were still playing cards. Business hadn’t improved in my absence.
Melba burst out laughing when she saw me. “You could use a week in a bathtub, that’s for sure. Any luck?”
I shook my head. “Could you get me a BLT while I wash some of this off? And fries.”
French fries are my weakness; I felt I’d earned a plateful after all that futile work. As I went into the bathroom I heard Melba order the grillman to fry up some fresh bacon: “The lady don’t need that heap of grease you been saving all day.”
In the tiny mirror over the sink I could see why Melba had laughed. Grime encased me in a layer so thick, my face and hair had turned gray. I scrubbed off what I could under the tap, but everything I had on would have to go to the cleaners.
When I came out I went back to the phone to call my landlords. I had a hard time running them to earth. I finally reached Freddie Culpepper on his car phone, much to his annoyance. He wasted valuable message units demanding to know how I’d gotten the number.
“Sources, Freddie. You locked me out of my office, and my rent is paid in full. I need you to let me into the building to collect my belongings.”
“We notified tenants who were in place yesterday. We regard you as voluntarily abandoning the premises, which means your office and its contents now belong to us. And don’t even think of trying to break and enter. We know your habits, Warshawski, how you used to break into the basement despite Tom Czarnik’s repeated warnings to you, and we’ll know who to go after if that boarding comes off.”
“Or if one of your own computers disappears. Along with ten years of your records.” I didn’t have time to screw around getting a court order to retrieve my papers.
I hung up as he sputtered something about getting his lawyers if I was resorting to threats. Giving Melba another ten, I took the sandwich outside with me to eat in the car. That left me with three singles and a bit of change, and an unwelcome sense of alarm. It would be a close thing to get more cash out of my account this week.
As a vain hope I talked to the tender of the corner newsstand, an unshaven man with bloodshot eyes and a black hole where his teeth once had been. He glanced at the snapshot, but he hadn’t noticed the children. He hadn’t noticed anyone on the street since a boy beat him up after he’d noticed the boy shoplifting and fingered him to the cops. That had been in ’83, or maybe ’85, but whenever it was it had perm
anently broken him of the noticing habit.
Discouragement made me impatient with everything, including my own appetite. I gave the man my sandwich and fries and drove home.
23
Cop’s Night Out
Conrad had gone back to the day shift yesterday morning. We had agreed to meet for supper and dancing at the Cotton Club to celebrate, but I felt too overwhelmed by the events of the day to feel very celebratory. I called to see if I could beg off.
“I’ve had a tough day, too, Ms. W. I’m not asking you to drink champagne and cheer, just help me put some of the garbage behind. And maybe let me do the same for you.”
Put like that I couldn’t refuse. As I went off to bathe, I realized my reluctance to see him stemmed not from fatigue, but from his friendship with Finchley. Finchley, whom I’d always liked, who seemed like a good and fair cop, was beginning to act like an enemy.
I turned on the bath, pouring in a generous dollop of juniper oil—it’s advertised as lifting the spirits. Conrad had been right last week to call Deirdre’s death the case he’d been dreading. It was starting to feel like a lump of leaden porridge sitting in my stomach when we talked.
I climbed into the green water and inspected my legs. A circle of small broken veins near my left kneecap was an early sign of age. The dark marks on the right one seemed just to be a bruise.
Perhaps a delicate stomach is the luxury of a private citizen. It’s not so much that the police slice everything into dipoles—right/wrong, black/white—but that they rate themselves by how many people they arrest. The pressure to make an arrest means that age or situation doesn’t count. Can’t count. So you inevitably end up across a chasm from them: you for mercy, they for justice. You for justice, they for law. I scrubbed my legs so hard, my skin stung when I lay back in the water.
Over dinner at I Popoli, I eyed Conrad warily. He seemed withdrawn, speaking in half-sentences, not paying much attention to what he was saying. I was sure he and Terry had been discussing the Messenger case, as well as last night’s fiasco at my apartment.
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