Tunnel Vision

by Sara Paretsky

  As soon as he understood what I intended he took her son from my arms. I untied everyone from the rope. He held one end while I sloshed down the tunnel as far as the rope would stretch. Standing on tiptoe I tied it to the bracket and pulled hard. It held. Mr. Contreras rapidly tied Emily to the rope and I started reeling her in, hand over hand. It was relatively easy work: as soon as I started pulling she lost her footing, which meant the water was working for me.

  Ordering her to stay put, I sloshed back to the old man with the end of the rope. We tied up Tamar and I slogged my way back to Emily and the bracket and hauled in Tamar. Mr. Contreras followed behind her.

  We had to repeat the operation three times. By the end I’d given up the fight with my waders, yanking them off so that I could swim between the bracket and the fugitives. By the time we got to the Pulteney stairwell Tamar seemed barely conscious. I myself was in a state beyond exhaustion, where my throbbing head and sore arms seemed as remote from me as the surface of the earth itself. Mr. Contreras’s deep, rasping breaths came from some distant spot, reminding me of life, of the need to keep moving. Only Emily seemed to have some reserve of energy: when we got to the stairwell she gave a little cry of “Josh” and stumbled up the stairs to hug her brother.

  I don’t remember how we climbed the four flights up to the Pulteney basement—some combination of carrying children, shoving children, hoisting children, bullying Tamar and Emily—a routine that began to seem like the regimen of a lifetime. I had forgotten sun and air—they were just dreams handed down from ancient literature. It wasn’t the desire for light that impelled us upward, but the stultifying routine of motion. So numb had I become that when the feeble glimmer of my flashlight showed us the hole behind the Pulteney’s boiler I stared at it a long, stupid moment, trying to understand what it was.

  Once inside the basement I sent Mr. Contreras to the surface for help. I moved our little band past the boiler to the crates where I’d kept my electrical tools. With my last bit of energy I pulled some of the crates into a semicircle and leaned against one of them. I cradled the two youngest children against my breast. Joshua, clinging to Emily, lay against my left side. Near me I could hear Jessie’s labored breathing. The rats were swarming around us but I was too exhausted to try to keep them at bay. I was asleep when Mr. Contreras returned with a cop.

  44

  For Mules,

  There Are No Rules

  Jessie didn’t make it through the night. The pediatric staff at Northwestern, where we’d all been sent, worked heroically, but malnutrition and damp had done too much damage to her lungs. Lotty brought me the news when she stopped to see me before going off to make her own rounds at Beth Israel.

  Despite my incoherent protests the hospital had kept me overnight for observation. When they called Lotty—whom I listed as my physician on the emergency-room form—she infuriated me by telling them about my recent head injury and reinforcing their decision.

  “In fact, give her a complete neurological workup while you’re at it,” she had told them.

  “What about your belief that patients should take an active role in deciding on their care?” I had demanded when I forced the attendant to give me the phone.

  “That doesn’t apply to mules, my dear, only to those with enough sense not to climb Mt. Everest with a broken leg.”

  I knew as soon as she hung up that she was right. I was too exhausted to move, let alone cope with protecting myself from anyone who might be gunning for me. I pulled myself together long enough to leave another message for Conrad, telling the precinct dispatcher to make sure he knew I was at Northwestern’s hospital, before letting the staff load me onto a gurney.

  I came to periodically as people bathed me and took blood from me, but for most of the evening I lay in a sleep so deep that neither the intermittent pages nor the hospital routine of blood pressure and temperature taking could rouse me. Conrad came by around seven in the evening—I found a note from him attached to a bunch of daisies when I woke up—but I hadn’t stirred.

  I finally emerged from my stupor around four in the morning. After some initial confusion about where I was the events of the last few weeks flooded my brain. I thrashed uselessly in the bed, worrying about Mr. Contreras and the children, Deirdre’s death, the immigrant workers, wondering what to do next, until Lotty arrived a little after six.

  “So you were right.” I turned away from her when she told me about Jessie. “I should never have left the Hawkingses in the basement that first night I found them. If I’d called Conrad as you urged me the girl might still be alive.”

  Lotty sat down next to me on the bed, her dark eyes large in her vivid face. “You can’t know that, Vic. I spoke that evening in the heat of the moment, and I shouldn’t have—after all, we didn’t do such a good job hanging on to them when you got them to the hospital the next night. Also, I gathered from Conrad that the passage between the tunnels and the basement was almost impossible to find if you weren’t looking for it.”

  When he couldn’t wake me Conrad had called Lotty to make sure I was all right—since we weren’t married, the hospital refused to give him any information. He told Lotty that he and Finchley had stopped by the Pulteney to figure out why Finchley’s search team had missed the entrance to the tunnels when they went hunting Tamar the morning after Deirdre died. When they found the space behind the boiler they were amazed that Mr. Contreras and I had been able to discover it at all.

  “We lost one child, Vic,” Lotty went on, “but six other people are alive who would be dead now if not for you and your cowboy neighbor. Who seems in fighting fettle this morning, by the way. They want to start a course of rabies shots because of the rat bites, so they’re checking his heart to make sure he’s got the stamina to tolerate the series. I told them it would take a large truck to stop him.”

  I nodded. “I wouldn’t have survived yesterday without him. How’s Tamar Hawkings doing?”

  Lotty knit her brows. “She’s being given IV fluids—all of them are. But there’s some concern about her mental state. And that of the girl, Emily Messenger. Mr. Messenger came by yesterday afternoon as soon as he knew the children had been found. Emily apparently screamed and made them take him away. Now no one can get a straight story out of her. They want a psych resident to talk to her, but first she has to recover her physical strength—her emotional trauma can easily be at least partly from delirium. The little boys, her brothers, will recover soon, at least physically, and the staff are hopeful about the other two Hawkings children.”

  Leon Hawkings had been around to demand custody of the children, she added. He had alternated between threatening the hospital with legal action over Jessie’s death, demanding that his wife be returned to him, and threatening her with jail for endangering the children’s lives. Lotty had called Marilyn Lieberman at Arcadia House. She was sending Eva Kuhn over to see if there was anything that could be done to help Tamar.

  “The city is also squawking about child neglect, so she’s got a lot to cope with when she’s strong enough physically to face all these people,” Lotty added.

  “The police haven’t arrested Emily yet?” I asked.

  Lotty gave a sardonic smile. “For Deirdre’s death? Given Fabian’s standing they’re moving very gingerly. Also, one of your police friends is proving an unexpected ally—the red-haired woman who questioned you in ER on Saturday ... yes, Officer Neely, that was her name. ... Vic, I’ve asked them to give you an NMR scan and check your brain function before they let you out of here.”

  “On the grounds that anyone who went into those tunnels must be out of her mind?”

  Lotty got up from the bed. “On the grounds you’ve sustained your third serious head injury in the past seven years and I want to make sure that thick Polish skull of yours is holding up under the bludgeoning.”

  I sat up, flushing with anger. “I can’t afford that kind of exam. I don’t have insurance, you know. And I’ve debts reaching from here to Skokie. They
did a CAT scan at Beth Israel on Saturday. Besides, I need to get moving. There’s too much unsettled business around me, and finding Emily makes matters more urgent, not less.”

  She put her fingers around my wrist, part caress, part checking my pulse. “Our equipment and our technicians at Beth Israel aren’t as good as the facility here. The radiologist told me yesterday that your CAT scan was not of good enough quality for him to rule out a subtle subdural insult. I’ll work something out with Northwestern about the billing. You can’t afford to be careless with head injuries.”

  When she left I got out of bed, determined to put on my clothes and leave. I couldn’t hang around a hospital waiting on the medical establishment’s pleasure just to have thousands of dollars’ worth of useless tests done.

  My muscles refused to respond with the immediate suppleness I demanded of them. I moved stiffly to the clothes cupboard. Someone had put my things in a plastic bag labeled WARSHAWSKI—402-B. I opened the bag and recoiled—the smell was appalling. Oily water left in a sealed bag overnight should be bottled to use as a self-defense spray. It would take more stomach than I had right now to step into those things.

  When I shut the bag I realized some of the smell was clinging to me: they’d given me a sponge bath yesterday, but my hair remained matted with sweat and dried bilge. The room had a private shower. I stood under it for a glorious half hour, feeling the heat soak into my sore muscles while the muck flowed away from my head.

  A clean gown and hospital robe were hanging in the bathroom. I put them on and went back to the bed to call Conrad.

  “I know Lotty said you were okay, but you had me worried there, girl. I don’t like it when you’re sleeping too deep for a rub on the shoulder to get you even to twitch.”

  “When I was seven a fortune-teller on Maxwell Street assured me I had nine lives. I figure I’ve still got five or six left to me.”

  “Way you’ve been running through ’em lately I’m worried you’re on borrowed time now. Can I come by to see you?”

  “Please.” I asked him to stop at my apartment for some clean clothes. “If you can find any in the mess my attackers created on Saturday. I need everything—shoes, socks—my Nikes are going to have to be fumigated before I can put them on my feet again.”

  Conrad agreed, but said he wouldn’t arrive before noon. Lotty had already been on to him, getting him to promise he wouldn’t help spring me before I’d had my brain scan.

  “And anyway, Ms. W., it’s time you gave that ravaged body of yours a break. Spend the day with a book. Take the dogs over to the lake and hang out. You’ve earned it. Hell, you need it.”

  I temporized, torn between pleasure at his concern and annoyance at his conniving at hog-tying me. Fasting had cured my headache; underneath my worries and sore muscles I felt a surge of euphoria. For the first time in three days I felt clearheaded enough to think. If I couldn’t leave here until noon, at least I could get my body loose enough to move easily when the time came.

  As I stretched I watched the early morning news. City engineers had been unsuccessful in blocking the hole between the river and the tunnels; water continued to pour in. I shuddered as I pulled my neck gently to one side: Mr. Contreras and I had been exceedingly lucky.

  The Board of Trade was still closed—an unprecedented event. Marshall Field was looking at tens, possibly hundreds of millions in damage. Rain was forecast, which would further hamper crews pumping out flooded basements. The Loop el lines were shut because of flooding at Dearborn Street—people were being bused from remote sites.

  “And at Northwestern Hospital doctors were unable to save one of the children heroically rescued by Chicago private detective V. I. Warshawski and her neighbor yesterday.” I watched Beth Blacksin talking to a fatigued pediatrician in front of the very building I was standing in. “Ms. Warshawski, who recently sustained a head injury, is being held for observation. Our reporters were not allowed to talk to her.”

  I switched off the set at the commercial break. Pressing my lips together, I tried to concentrate on my exercises instead of my guilt over failing Jessie Hawkings.

  The solemn-eyed train of interns and residents arrived as I was in the middle of a sequence of leg raises. I had spent five minutes stretching my sore hamstrings by resting one leg on the bed and using the hand controls to raise it. Now I was lying on the floor using a piece of IV-tubing to pull my legs up higher. The doctors thought at first I’d collapsed from my head injuries and raced over to me in great agitation. When I explained what I was doing the neurology resident escorted me back to bed.

  “That can wait until Dr. Herschel says you’re fit enough to work out again. I want to test your reflexes.”

  Breakfast arrived while he was sticking safety pins into my feet. It was an eclectic collection, ranging from a box of cereal to a sweet roll, with something approximating scrambled eggs in between. On an ordinary day I wouldn’t have wanted any of it, but I couldn’t keep my eyes from it while the exam progressed—both yesterday and Sunday I had put in strenuous days on short rations.

  The neurology resident told me the NMR scan was scheduled for ten-thirty; someone would be along with a wheelchair to take me to the facility. When I protested that I could walk there on my own steam he smiled gently.

  “I’m sure you can, Ms. Warshawski. But while you’re a guest here I’m asking you to do us a favor and follow our house rules. It’s just a precaution—probably unnecessary—but we have had people who thought they were fine collapse from blood clots. So why don’t you rest. Someone will be around with a newspaper. Before you know it you’ll be out of here.”

  I tried to smile acquiescently, but I haven’t had much practice—I don’t know how convincing I made it. As soon as they left I dove at the food tray and devoured everything, including the sweet roll, which was quite stale. When I’d finished I strolled down the hall to find Mr. Contreras. Someone at the nursing station waiting for her shift to end was happy to look up his room number for me. She got me Emily Messenger’s as well.

  My neighbor’s pleasure at seeing me was tempered by embarrassment at his skimpy hospital gown. In the years we’d known each other the old man wouldn’t even open his door to me if he’d stripped down to an undershirt and trousers.

  His usual good spirits had been dampened by a phone call from his daughter. Roused to righteous action by last night’s news reports on our heroic rescue work she was coming at noon with a set of clothes and a van to haul him and the dogs back to Elk Grove Village.

  “My only hope is that Mitch will bite her when she tries opening the door to the apartment,” he said gloomily. “Although then she’d have him put to sleep.”

  “Don’t go. No reason you have to.”

  “She’ll have the dogs,” he explained. “I made the mistake of saying I couldn’t go with her on their account. You’ll come pick us up, won’t you, cookie? Although, if I can’t come up with that tax money I may end up staying out there.”

  “First thing Thursday,” I promised rashly, having no idea what tomorrow might bring. I wrote down his daughter’s address and gave him a consoling hug. “And we’ll think of something about the taxes.”

  I wish I felt as optimistic as I made myself sound. If I had to sell my little apartment, where could I afford to live next? I tried not to think about it as I wandered the halls looking for Emily’s room—I had enough on my mind right now without adding tax woes to the general brew.

  I finally discovered that Emily had been put in the children’s wing, perhaps the first time in years anyone had thought of her as a child. I had to cross the street to get to the building. I looked down at my paper hospital slippers and flimsy gown.

  “Who wills the end wills the means,” I muttered, striding outside.

  Under the sullen sky I joined the throng of hospital workers moving among the buildings of Northwestern’s vast complex. As I crossed the street I saw the NMR building. I could get there so easily on my own, assuming I wanted to go. I gr
ound my teeth and entered the pediatric wing.

  When I got to Emily’s room I came upon an altercation. A tall, bearded man was arguing with a nurse outside her door. He broke off at the sight of me.

  “Warshawski! What a break. Explain to this woman why I need to talk to Emily Messenger.”

  “Not a chance, Ryerson. The only thing that surprises me is that I wasn’t expecting to find you here.”

  45

  The Mouse

  Between Two Cats

  “You can help me, Warshawski,” Murray said. “The kid’s the key to the whole Messenger murder, but they won’t let me see her.”

  “You’ve got a hell of a nerve,” I said, my tone light but my eyes murderous. “You told Conrad on Sunday that I talked to you when I hadn’t. You think now I’m going to help you torment a child who’s coming off a stint in hell? No way. And if”—I squinted at the nurse’s badge—“if Ms. Higgins feels squeamish about getting hospital security to boot you, I’ll call the city. Conrad would love an excuse to run you in for a few hours.”

  Murray put an arm around me. “You turn me on when you threaten me with hobnailed boots, Vic. If you’re going in to see the kid I’ll just sit and listen.”

  I twisted away from his grip. “She’s not ‘the kid.’ She’s a person, and one who needs help, not interrogation.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell him,” the nurse said. “Dr. Morrison said no reporters, no distress.”

  “Murray, when women say ”no,’ they mean “no.’ Stop bugging a hard-working nurse and get out of her hair.”

  “Then how about an exclusive with you, Warshawski?After all, you went and pulled the female person and her brothers out of the tunnel. Come with me for a cup of coffee and tell me all about it. I’d love a shot of you in that robe: that V neck recalls some fine evenings.”

  “Great.” I started for the elevator. “Come on, big guy.”