Brush Back (V.I. Warshawski Novels Book 17)

by Sara Paretsky

  As I shut down my computer, Freeman called. “Vic, I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you cannot go near the Guzzo family, or Stella’s house, or her grandchildren.”

  “Freeman, I stopped to watch the kids play baseball. That’s a crime?”

  “It is if you attack one of the mothers.”

  “This is beyond outrageous. She tried to slug me.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Stay away from that family if you want me to continue to represent you.”

  He hung up, sending me home in a thoroughly unpleasant mood.

  DOG DAYS

  The dogs woke me, barking in the upper landing. I bolted out of bed, pulling on jeans and a T-shirt. Jake mumbled something, turned over.

  When I cracked open his front door, I saw Mr. Contreras struggling to hold Mitch, who was lunging at a couple of uniformed cops outside my own apartment. Peppy stood sentinel, barking short urgent warnings. One of the cops had his gun drawn, and maybe he would have used it, except that Rochelle, who lives in the unit underneath mine, was also in the upper hall.

  “Go ahead and shoot them!” she was screaming. “They’re a menace. It’s only fucking seven in the morning and they’ve woken the whole building.”

  “Watch your language,” Mr. Contreras panted, trying to hold the bucking Mitch.

  The police were shouting warnings, the Soong baby started crying on the floor below and the two men who lived across from Mr. Contreras on the ground floor were yelling up the stairwell to make the damned dogs be quiet.

  I took the sash from Mr. Contreras’s magenta dressing gown and used it as a leash to tie Mitch to a baluster. Once Mitch was sitting, Peppy stopped barking, although the hair at the back of her head stood up and she kept growling in the back of her throat.

  “Want to tell me what’s going on?” I asked the cops.

  “Are you Victoria Iphigenia Warshawski?” He pronounced it “Ipp-jin,” but close enough.

  On the other side of the door I heard Bernie call my name, her voice pitched high with fear. “Are you out there, Vic? Someone’s trying to break in! I called nine-one-one.”

  “Yeah, I’m out here, honey. Good job. I’ll hold the fort until the police get here.”

  “We are the police,” one of the uniforms said.

  “My houseguest couldn’t possibly know that.” I peered at his badge. “Officer Burstyn. She assumed you were housebreakers. You can explain it to your friends when they get here.”

  “Lieutenant Rawlings wants to talk to you.”

  “Now I feel really special,” I said, “but he has my phone number, no need to send an armed escort all the way across the city to find me.”

  “Are you arresting her?” Rochelle demanded.

  “We don’t have a warrant,” the second man said. “But—”

  “She’s dangerous,” Rochelle said. “I want her out of this building. Those dogs aren’t safe, and—”

  “You need to talk to your local district, miss,” Officer Burstyn said. “If the dogs are running wild, or biting—”

  “They never bit anyone,” Mr. Contreras said, indignant. “This gal has her undies in a bundle over the dogs, but I hear your music playing at all hours, young lady, and if you want to bring the cops here, well, what are those boys doing when they’re leaving your place at three in the morning? Bet these cops could find all kinds of drugs if I asked them to take a look.”

  Rochelle’s face flamed fuchsia. “You dirty old man, how dare you—”

  Mr. Soong appeared, barefoot, in jeans and a T-shirt. “Please. Please, everyone, be quiet, so the baby can become quiet again. The stairwell is not the place for an argument.”

  “Right you are, Mr. Soong,” I said. “Officer, I can take the dogs inside and reassure my houseguest, but only if you promise not to follow me into my home.”

  “Our orders were—”

  “Yep, I know. I’ll come with you to talk to Conrad, but I need time to put on more clothes, calm a teenager and get these dogs where no one can bite them.”

  This last phrase pushed Rochelle into another stream of invective: the police could see that I treated her fears as a joke, the dogs should be shot or impounded.

  The cops, who’d lost control of the situation as soon as Mr. Contreras appeared with Mitch and Peppy, had started to order me to come right now, with the clothes I had on, but Rochelle made them decide to give me the benefit of the doubt. To show he wasn’t soft on PI’s or dogs, Burstyn phoned the Fourth District for instructions. Conrad, or some henchperson, agreed I could be trusted to get dressed and not to emerge firing a weapon.

  “Bernie, you decent?” I called through the door. “I’m bringing your uncle Sal in.”

  I didn’t exactly trust the cops to keep their promise, so I stood in the doorway with Mitch and Peppy until Mr. Contreras was inside, then backed in, shutting the door as soon as Peppy’s long plume of a tail had cleared the opening.

  The local district’s response team was ringing the downstairs bell as I slid the dead bolts home. I buzzed them into the building, but left them for Officer Burstyn and his pal to sort out.

  Bernie was sitting on the sofa bed, her legs tucked under her, her dark eyes black with fear. “What’s going on, Vic?”

  “No idea, honey. The cops are from South Chicago, though. Turn on the news, see if there’s anything about Stella Guzzo.”

  Mr. Contreras put an arm around Bernie and gave her a reassuring slap on the shoulder. “Don’t you worry about nothing, young Bernie. The dogs and me, we’ll walk down to your job with you and we’ll come get you when the day is over. No one can hurt you with Mitch and me looking after you, okay?”

  Bernie nodded, smiling tremulously, and scooted over to make room for him on the end of the bed. While the two of them flipped through channels looking for local news, I went to the back to get ready. I took my time, heating up my espresso machine, taking a shower, dressing for comfort in case I had a long day in cop-land in front of me. I made a cheese sandwich with cucumbers and spinach, something I could eat in the back of the squad car without worrying about spills or stains.

  Jake came in through the back door in the middle of my routine.

  “You’re up,” I said.

  “They’re probably up and about in Milwaukee with that racket.” He put an arm around me and drank my espresso. “You in trouble?”

  “The police don’t have a warrant, so I don’t think so. Someone I talked to yesterday must have complained—I won’t know until I get to South Chicago if it was Judge Grigsby or Betty Guzzo.”

  “I think we got something, doll,” Mr. Contreras called. “That Ryerson guy is on.”

  Jake came with me into the living room in time to see Murray in front of a mountain of coal dust at the Port of Chicago.

  “Are the pet coke mountains in South Chicago toxic? That question has been hotly debated lately between the residents of the city’s southeast side, who claim that breathing the dust particles is a health hazard, and the state’s Pollution Control Board, which says there’s no proof. However, this mountain of pet coke was definitely a hazard to the health of a man whose body was found here early this morning by tugboat pilot Gino Smerdlow.”

  The cops were pounding on my door again, demanding that I get going.

  “Police have not yet released the identity of the dead man, but we were able to catch up with Gino Smerdlow near the Guisar slip at the Port of Chicago.”

  Murray’s interview of the tugboat pilot was uninteresting and predictable: Murray looking nautical in the wheelhouse, wind whipping a navy scarf around his red hair, getting the grisly details from Smerdlow. Early morning on the Cal, returning from towing the Lucella Wieser out onto the open water, spotting the arm sticking out of the coal mountain.

  “We see float fish here from time to time,” Smerdlow said, “but a body in the
coal? I couldn’t believe it,” and so on.

  Jake, Bernie, Mr. Contreras and the dogs all came to the door to see me off, which made me feel as if I were on my way to the guillotine. Mr. Contreras told the police that he had their badge numbers if anything went wrong. Even so, Burstyn and his pal, a man named Dubcek, didn’t treat me roughly—no grabbing of the arms or snatching away my briefcase.

  When I asked them how they’d handled the officers from the Town Hall District who’d responded to Bernie’s SOS, Dubcek grunted. “We didn’t have to tell them anything. That woman downstairs from you, she stepped up all hot and bothered, demanding they do something about your dogs, so they thought she had called in the complaint. You better be careful there, miss. Make sure they have licenses, don’t let them run through the halls like they did this morning. It’s dangerous, especially with little children living in the building.”

  They were less forthcoming about why I was being dragged to the South Side, even after I said the dead body in the Guisar company’s pet coke mountain had been on the morning news: the lieutenant would explain why he wanted to see me.

  The back of a squad car is an uncomfortable place to sit, especially if you’re taller than about five-three. Your knees are up against a grille and the seat feels like cement blocks. The smell isn’t too appetizing, either—too many bodies covered in who knows what effluvia have been there before you. I lost interest in my sandwich.

  Instead, I looked up news on my phone. Everyone was very excited about the body in the coke, but no one had a name.

  I hated making nice with Murray, but I finally texted him.

  You looked at home on the tugboat. Career change imminent? -VIW

  The Queen is speaking to the commoner? You must want something. -MRyerson

  Love and recognition, as we all do. Wondering if you knew the vic. -VIW

  They had him covered and carted before the 5th Estate arrived. If you can ID him and don’t tell me, our relationship really is over. -MRyerson

  I debated for a minute—I was still feeling pretty stiff toward Murray—but finally texted that I’d been summoned to the Fourth District and was looking for a heads-up. That excited Murray into a frenzy of texting, the upshot of which was he’d take me to dinner at Trefoil if I got him a name ahead of the pack.

  LOL, I wrote back, and turned to client e-mails.

  When we finally reached the station—a long trek on the Dan Ryan at rush hour—my escort left me in the public area while they checked in with Conrad.

  The building was new since I’d moved away, but the sergeant behind the desk was old, with deep grooves in his cheeks, his slate-gray hair overdue for a trim. He was telling me where I could sit in the hoarse baritone of a drinking smoker, but I was squinting at his badge.

  “Sid?” I said. “Sid Gerber?”

  “Yeah. Who are you when you’re at home?”

  “I’m V.I.—Vic Warshawski. Tony’s daughter.”

  He stared at me, then smiled, pushing the grooves in his face toward his ears. “You’re never. You’re never Tony’s girl. How about that?”

  A young officer filling out a form at the end of the counter turned to look at me, decided whoever Tony was, his girl held no interest, and went back to his clipboard. A woman waiting on the visitors’ bench loudly demanded when she was going to get to talk to someone about the police totally illegally impounding her car.

  “Ma’am, your car was holding eight kilos of uncut cocaine. As soon as—”

  “Put there by some street scum who you ain’t even trying to find, while you got my son locked up.”

  “That could be, ma’am, but the car is still evidence.” He turned sideways, his back to her. “Vic, how long’s it been?”

  “How’d you end up down here, Sid?” I asked. “I thought you knew better than to put yourself in the crosshairs.”

  “Nobody asks me to go out on the street anymore and I got me a weekend place down near Schererville.” He winked, meaning, I suppose, that he was actually living down in Indiana—a no-no for someone on Chicago’s payroll.

  Sid had been one of my dad’s last partners, after Tony had been redeemed from cop hell: my dad had been sent to West Englewood for reasons he’d never talked about.

  Near the end of my dad’s active duty life, his former protégé Bobby Mallory started becoming a power in the department. Bobby plucked Tony from Sixty-third and Throop and sent him to one of the soft districts, out near O’Hare, where he’d met Sid. Sid was one of those guys who was born knowing how to avoid hard work, but Tony let it ride in a way he wouldn’t have earlier. He said Sid was a born storyteller, and a good story got you through a dull shift better than station coffee. When Tony had to go on disability, Sid was one of his most faithful visitors.

  Sid gossiped with me now about the good old days, while the phone rang, the woman on the bench ranted, and officers checked in and out. I asked what he knew about the body in the pet coke mountain.

  “Looks ugly.” He lowered his voice. “They think he was still alive when he was put in.”

  “Who was it? They didn’t have an ID on the news yet.”

  Sid gave an elaborate shrug. “My grandkids will see it on Facebook before I know.”

  His cell phone rang; Conrad was ready for me. I was to make a right turn, ID myself to a woman at the entrance to the holding cells, and she’d take me to the looey.

  As I went into the back, a patrolman was pleading with Sid to book his captive and the woman with the impounded car had come up to the counter to scream in Sid’s face.

  THE UMPIRE STRIKES BACK

  My escort took me around a partition where a minute office had been carved out for the watch commander. Most of the space was taken up with a dry-erase board that held the week’s duty roster. The watch commander’s desk was wedged against the facing wall. There were a couple of chairs in front of it, both of them covered with reports.

  Conrad Rawlings had his cell phone to his ear with his left hand and was hunting and pecking on his computer keyboard with the right. When he saw me, he gestured toward one of the chairs with his typing hand.

  “Put those on the floor. I’ll be with you in a sec.”

  By the time I’d shifted everything, he’d finished his conversation.

  “You wobble on the line, Warshawski. I’m wondering if you’ve crossed it.”

  “What line are we talking about, Lieutenant?”

  When Conrad is feeling mellow toward me, he calls me “Ms. W.” He was not feeling mellow. I took my sandwich out of my briefcase and started eating, which made him even less mellow.

  “Put that away. This isn’t a restaurant.”

  “Your guys woke me, not to mention my entire building, at seven this morning. I need to eat. You implied I crossed a line. What are you talking about?” I wondered if word had drifted to him of my poking into Stella Guzzo’s bank account.

  “You don’t think you’re bound by the same rules of law the rest of the country runs on. You think you can make up the rules to suit your own needs. I’ve seen you do it time and again.”

  I put down my sandwich. “Are we recording this conversation, Lieutenant? Because that is slander, and it is actionable.”

  Conrad glowered at his desktop. He’d gotten off on the wrong foot and knew it.

  “Come over here: I want to show you some pictures.”

  I went around to his side of the desk. He turned and typed a few lines on his computer and brought up a slideshow of the pet coke mountain at the Guisar slip. It wasn’t really a mountain, but a lopsided pile of coal dust perhaps five hundred feet long. It came to an off-center peak about fifty feet high and sloped from there to a plateau around fifteen feet from the ground.

  The first frame was shot from some distance back, giving a panorama of the mountain, with bulldozers around the far end and men in hard hats gawking up at the hig
her peak. Conrad flipped through the slides, stopping every few frames to take phone calls. We got closer to the mountain, watched a team in hazmat suits standing in the bucket of a cherry picker on the deck of a police boat. The boat pulled up alongside the coke mountain and swung the bucket over so the guys in the hazmat suits could start excavating.

  Conrad had brought me here because he knew I was connected to his dead body. He kept glancing up at me, his expression hostile, to see how I was reacting. It took conscious work to keep breathing naturally, those diaphragm breaths I was relearning as I practiced my singing with Jake.

  The crew carried the body to the ground and laid it on the concrete lip of the dock. A scene-of-the-crime expert used a fine brush to clean the face.

  I was expecting Frank Guzzo. Instead, it was Uncle Jerry. My first foolish thought was that in death his soot-blackened, flaccid face didn’t look much like Danny DeVito.

  “You know him.” Conrad made a statement, not a question.

  “I know his name,” I said. “I don’t—didn’t—know him.”

  “Okay. His name, what’s his name?”

  “Jerry Fugher. Or so I was told—we were never introduced.”

  “Then how come you know his name?”

  I went back to my chair and finished my sandwich.

  “I asked you a question,” Conrad snapped.

  “I’m in a police station without a witness or legal representation,” I said. “I don’t answer questions that have bombs and barbs tucked into them.”

  “It’s a simple question.” Conrad spread his arms wide. “The only reason you’d expect bombs or barbs is because you know they’re there.”

  I brushed the crumbs from my jeans and got to my feet. “You can get your guys to drive me home.”

  “We’re not done.”

  “We’re not starting,” I said. “You hauled me down here on no excuse whatsoever to ask me questions about a dead man. All I know about him is his name, and I’m not even sure it’s his real name or how to spell it. You have no further need to talk to me because I know nothing else.”