He flashed a grin. “At the time, I was ready to break my cello over their heads. The only thing that stopped me was its age. Now I can shrug them off with good grace. Or’ and I will play her concerto at the Albert Hall this winter. She should get the response she deserves then. We raised a good-sized amount for Chicago Settlement; I keep reminding myself that that’s the only reason we did it anyway.”
“If I’d known my ex-husband was going to be filling the place with lawyers and tycoons, I could have warned you what the audience would be like. At least I can promise you he won’t be in London.”
He laughed and waited by the edge of the drive until I’d backed into the street. He didn’t look much like Max, but he’d inherited his father’s beautiful manners.
I honked at a maroon Honda that had suddenly decided to turn into traffic from a driveway. I turned the radio back on in time to hear Ellen Coleman’s nausea again over finding the bloated body in the Sanitary Canal. I suddenly remembered Mitch Kruger. With the emotion I’d packed into worrying about Harriet Frizell I hadn’t had a thought to spare today for the missing machinist.
Stickney. That was miles west of Kruger’s hangouts around Damen. It couldn’t possibly be he. But the old man could have fallen into the water, wandering around drunk and disoriented. I didn’t know if the canal had a current. How far could a body travel in it in the course of the week since Kruger had last been seen?
I made the turn from Sheridan onto Lake Shore Drive. The traffic around me quickly speeded up to sixty, a good fifteen miles over the limit, but I dawdled along in the right-hand lane, trying to calculate how far away Stickney was and how fast the water would be moving to get a body down there. It wasn’t a straight run, though. A corpse might get caught in the pilings going round a bend and be hung up for a few days.
I realized I didn’t have the data to make any kind of analysis. Checking the traffic I moved the Trans Am into a higher gear. A Honda hovered a sedate two lengths behind me on the left; everyone else was zooming past at a good clip. I watched the Honda for a second to make sure it wasn’t gaining on me, flashed my signal, and gave the car some gas.
It’s stupid to buy a car whose cruising speed is one-twenty when the limit in your area is fifty-five or under. Stupider still to nose it toward its maximum without checking for blue-and-whites. One of them brought me down a few blocks north of Belmont. I pulled over to the verge and got out my license and bond card.
I squinted at his name badge. Officer Karwal, not a name I knew. He was in his fifties, with deep lines around his eyes and the usual slow moves of the traffic detail. He frowned over my license, then looked at me intently.
“Warshawski? Any relation to Tony Warshawski?”
“He was my father. Did you know him?” Tony had been dead thirteen years now, but there were still plenty of men on the force who’d worked with him.
It turned out Officer Karwal was one of the many rookies who’d trained with Tony during the four years my dad spent at the police academy. Karwal spent a good ten minutes reminiscing about my dad with me, patting my arm as he told me how sorry he was Tony had died.
“And you’re all alone, huh? I never knew your ma, but everyone who did was crazy about her. Now, you know what Tony would say if he heard you’d been hot-rodding in that sports car of yours.”
I did indeed. I’d been grounded for speeding when I was eighteen. Tony had pulled too many bodies from mangled cars to tolerate stupid driving.
“So you be careful. I’m not going to write you up this time, but I will if I have to stop you again.”
Promising to be good I meekly put the Trans Am back into gear and drove to the Belmont exit at a placid forty-five. It was when I was stopped at the light on Broadway that I saw the Honda again, two cars behind me. Under the streetlamps I couldn’t be sure it was maroon, but it looked that way.
Of course, Hondas are a dime a dozen and maroon is one of their more popular colors. Could be coincidence. I flashed my right-turn signal and dawdled up Broadway to Addison, then made a quick unsignaled turn onto Sheffield, where I parked next to Wrigley Field.
I walked briskly to the ticket booth, made a show of examining the hours it was open, then swung around to my left. The Honda had pulled over on the far side of Clark. I didn’t stare at it, didn’t want to let the guy know I’d spotted him, but walked briskly back to the Trans Am. He was in trouble, anyway; I could just head up Sheffield into the night and there wasn’t much he could do about it.
I made a quick right onto Waveland, then took Halsted down to Diversey, where I headed for home. With an effort I remembered the name of the man I’d met at Diamond Head on Friday. Chamfers. He’d said he was going to investigate me—it looked like he was doing it.
16
Showdown at the OK Morgue
I needed to talk to Mr. Contreras, but first I wanted to bathe. Just a short bath and a short nap and I’d get back to my appointed rounds, I promised the conscience gods. The whisky I drank while I soaked was a mistake: it was after nine-thirty when the phone woke me again.
I stuck out an arm for it, but when I picked up the receiver the line went dead. I rolled over again on my side, but without fatigue and Johnnie Walker to numb me I remembered Mitch Kruger and the unknown body pulled out of the Sanitary Canal. I sat up in bed and began massaging my neck, stiffened from the anger I’d carried around most of the day.
I moved sluggishly to the kitchen and made coffee. Drinking it in quick, burning gulps I whipped together a frittata out of onions and chopped spinach. I ate it while I dressed, in cotton slacks and a cotton shirt since the evening was still muggy, and left the plate by the front door on my way downstairs. Mr. Contreras was still up; I could hear the faint blare of the TV from the other side of the door when I rang the bell.
“Oh, it’s you, doll.” He was wearing a sleeveless undershirt over old work pants. “Let me just put something on. If I’d known you was coming I never would have got undressed.”
I wanted to tell him I could stand the sight of his armpits, but knew he wouldn’t feel comfortable talking to me without a shirt on. I waited in the doorway until he had covered himself.
“You got some word on Mitch, doll?”
“Can I come in? I don’t. At least, I hope I don’t. I got sidetracked today.” I told him about my abortive efforts to go on the offensive with Todd Pichea.
Mr. Contreras spent several minutes on a highly colored description of both Todd and my ex-husband, ending with a predictable chant that he didn’t know what I’d ever seen in Dick. “And it don’t surprise me to hear Ryerson wouldn’t help you. Guy’s only interested in himself, if I’ve told you that once I’ve told you a hunnert times. I can see why you haven’t had time to worry about Mitch, and anyway, you was down there yesterday, down at his old place. I guess I was jumping off the deep end, worrying about him. He’ll just turn up again one of these days, like the bad penny he is.”
“This is the hard part,” I said awkwardly. “When I was listening to the radio on the way home, they had a report about pulling a man out of the canal. That was over in Stickney, so I don’t see how it could be your friend. But I couldn’t help wondering.”
“In Stickney?” Mr. Contreras repeated. “What would Mitch’ve been doing down in Stickney?”
“I agree. I’m sure I’m wrong. But I thought maybe we should take a look at the guy’s body anyway.”
“Now, you mean?”
“We can wait until morning. If it isn’t Kruger I can’t do anything tonight to find him. And if it is, well, he’ll still be at the morgue in the morning.”
Mr. Contreras rubbed the side of his face. “Well, if you’re up to it, doll, I guess I’d just as soon go now and get it over with.”
I nodded. “I brought my car keys with me just in case. You ready to leave?”
“Yeah, I guess. Maybe I’ll just let the princess out first.”
While I waited for Mr. Contreras to go through the laborious business of securing his front door,
I suddenly thought of the phone call that woke me up. If I’d lost someone I was following that’s what I might do: phone her home base to see if she answered. If my companions were back in business, did it matter if they followed me to the morgue? If they belonged to Diamond Head it couldn’t possibly be of interest to them.
“What did they say that made you think it might be Mitch?” Mr. Contreras asked when we were buckled into the Trans Am.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. It just sounded possible. I’d been down Friday looking at the Sanitary Canal. Diamond Head fronts it; Mrs. Polter’s boardinghouse isn’t that far away. I could just see it happening somehow, his being drunk and going over the side while trying to make his way around the Diamond Head property.”
“I ain’t saying you’re wrong, but Mitch and me worked there forty years, just about. He knows that place.”
“You’re right. I’m sure you’re right.” I forbore reminding him that it had been over a decade since they’d quit. I couldn’t have found my way around the public defender’s office drunk and in the dark after all these years. Probably not sober, either.
I turned right onto Diversey without signaling and looked in the rearview mirror. A couple of seconds later another set of lights followed me around the corner. It wasn’t a Honda. Maybe someone else going down Racine to Diversey, or maybe they realized I’d spotted the Honda and had changed cars. At Ashland the second car let a few people turn onto the street in front of him, but it was still with me four blocks later when I started south on Damen.
Mr. Contreras was rambling on about some of his drunken adventures at Diamond Head, which were meant to prove you wouldn’t fall in the soup even if you were stewed. I debated whether to tell him about the tail; it would take his mind off his worries and get him prepared for battle, if it came to that. Although my friends were following carelessly enough to invite confrontation, I didn’t want to push it. Giving into my angry impulses over the last four days had brought me nothing but misery. I wasn’t going to compound my problems by confronting thugs when I wasn’t at my best physically or mentally. I let Mr. Contreras ramble on, checking periodically to make sure they weren’t going to ram us or start shooting.
The morgue was uncomfortably close to Cook County Hospital, just on the other side of Damen from it. An easy progression from surgery to autopsy. As I pulled into the lot outside the concrete cube housing the dead I glanced up the street, wondering what Mrs. Frizell was doing. Was she still lying like a corpse on her bed? Or was she trying to get well enough to go home to Bruce?
I turned off the ignition, but didn’t get out until the car that had been tailing us continued east on Harrison. In the dark it was impossible to tell what model it was: anything relatively small and modern, from a Toyota to a Dodge.
An ambulance had pulled up outside the big metal doors marked DELIVERIES. Really, it was just like the loading bays at Diamond Head and the neighboring plants I’d seen on Friday. Here it was bodies instead of motors, but the attendants handled their load with the same casual familiarity.
I waited with Mr. Contreras for someone to buzz us in through the main door. The place was kept locked even during the day. I don’t know if the pathologists needed protection from the demented bereaved, or if the county was afraid someone would run off with evidence in a murder case. Finally one of the guards deigned to listen to the doorbell and release the lock.
We went to the high counter immediately inside the entrance. Despite having watched us through the reinforced glass for five minutes, the attendant on duty continued his conversation with two women in lab smocks lounging in a nearby doorway.
I cleared my throat loudly. “I’m here to try to identify a body.”
The attendant finally looked up at us. “Name?”
“I’m V. I. Warshawski. This is Salvatore Contreras.”
“Not yours,” the man said impatiently. “The person you’ve come to ID.”
Mr. Contreras started to say “Mitch Kruger,” but I cut him off.
“The man who was pulled out of the Sanitary Canal this morning. We may know who he is.”
The attendant eyed me suspiciously. Finally he picked up the phone in front of him and carried on a low-key conversation, his palm cupping the mouthpiece.
When he’d finished he gestured to some vinyl chairs chained together against the wall. “Have a seat. Someone will be with you in a minute.”
The minute stretched into twenty while Mr. Contreras fretted at my side. “What’s going on, doll? How come we can’t just go and look? This waiting is getting on my nerves. Reminds me of when Clara was in the hospital having Ruthie, they kept me waiting in a place that looked like a morgue”—he gave a bark of self-conscious laughter—“matter of fact, it did. Looked just like this place here. Waiting to see if it’s good news or bad. You got her pregnant and she doesn’t make it through, you carry that load around the rest of your life.”
He rambled on nervously until the attendant unlocked the door again and a couple of sheriff’s deputies came in. My stomach knotted. Chicago’s finest can be a pain to deal with, but for the most part they’re professional police. Too much of the county law enforcement payroll is double-dipping for the mob to make them easy companions in the search for truth and justice.
The attendant jerked his head at us and the deputies came over. They were both white, young, and had the squared-off, mean faces you get when you have too much unrestrained power. I read their badges: Hendricks and Jaworski. I’d never remember which was which.
“So you two think you know something.” It was the one labeled “Hendricks.” His ugly tone set the scene.
“We don’t know if we know anything or not,” Mr. Contreras said, exasperated. “All we want is a chance to look at a body, ‘stead of sitting around here all night waiting for someone to be good enough to pay attention to us. My old pal, Mitch Kruger, he’s been missing for a week and my neighbor here’s been trying to find him for me. When she heard the story on the radio she thought maybe it was him.”
It was a whole lot more story than I would have given under the circumstances, but I didn’t stop him: The last thing I wanted was to make it look like Mr. Contreras and I had something to hide. I kept my face solemn and earnest: just a good-hearted neighbor helping out the elderly when they misplaced their pals.
The deputies stared at us unblinkingly. “You file a missing persons report on him?”
“We notified the nineteenth district,” I said, before Mr. Contreras could blurt out that we hadn’t.
“When was the last time you saw your friend?” Jaworski asked.
“I just finished telling you, it’s been a week. What do we have to go through to see this body you got here?”
Both deputies’ faces tightened into the same ugly expression. “Don’t try to make trouble for us, old man. We ask the questions. You answer them. If you’re a good enough boy we’ll let you look at the body. That’ll be a real treat for you.”
The morgue attendants were leaning against the walls, waiting to see which way the fight developed. “Mr. Contreras is seventy-seven,” I said. “He’s old, he’s tired, and the guy who’s missing is his last friend from his neighborhood. He doesn’t want trouble, and he’s not trying to make it; he just wants to put his mind at rest. I’m sure you wouldn’t like to see your fathers or grandfathers in this situation.”
“What’s your interest in this, babe?”
Hendricks again. As long as they kept their badges facing us I’d know who was talking. I resisted an impulse to crack his shinbone against my right toe.
“Just helping out my neighbor, sugar. Shall I call Dr. Vishnikov and get his permission to view the body?” Vishnikov was one of the assistant ME’s, whom I knew from my PD days.
“Keep your pants on. We’ll get into the morgue as soon as you answer our questions.”
The outer door opened again. I looked past Jaworski’s left shoulder and relaxed fractionally. It was Terry Finchley, a violent crime
s detective from Area One.
“Terry,” I called.
He’d gone to the counter to check something with the intake man, but he turned at my voice. “Vic!”
He came over. “What are you doing here?”
“Trying to ID a body. These deputies apparently pulled an old man out of the canal near Stickney today. My friend and I want to make sure it’s not someone we know. Deputies Jaworski and Hendricks, this is Detective Finchley with the Chicago police.”
They didn’t like it, not one bit, me being on first-names with a Chicago cop and a black one to boot. They exchanged glares and jutted their chins out some more.
“We need to ask the girl and the old man a few questions, Detective, so why don’t you just butt out.” The two had turned to look at Finchley, so I couldn’t make out which was speaking.
“Can’t do that,” Finchley said easily. “Not if it’s the guy they pulled out at Stickney. I just got asked to come in and take a look at him—seems they think he may belong to Chicago, not the county.”
The deputies started looking meaner. I wondered if they were going to slug me or Finchley first. The hostility in their bodies radiated throughout the room; the man at the counter felt it and came around to the front. The attendants leaning on the wall behind us stopped their light conversation and moved closer to us too.
Hendricks and Jaworski saw them coming and looked angrily at each other. Since all three attendants were black, it was a good guess that they would side with Finchley if it came to a fight.
“Take him, then,” Hendricks spat out. “We got better things to do than look after some dead alkie anyway.”
He and Jaworski turned on their heels in unison and marched to the exit. I thought I heard one of them mutter “jigaboo” on his way out, but I didn’t want to make a federal case of it.
17
Another Chicago Float Fish
“Thanks, Terry,” I said gratefully. “I don’t know if they were throwing their muscle around just to have a good time or if there’s some real problem with the dead man.”
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