Guardian Angel

by Sara Paretsky

  “You boys ever do any work in between bouts of gossip? I would like to remind you that my lawyer was a member of your firm until Friday. And if, not knowing either of his resignation or his dramatic expulsion from Paradise, one of his clients happened onto the premises, a judge would probably consider that an honest mistake. Especially since Leigh Wilton thought it was such a big joke.”

  “But if that judge learned you’d been told about it and then gone snooping through our private premises against our express orders he might think it was something else, even with Leigh on the stand for you.”

  Dick’s voice had tightened to a hiss. I added a snake to the other side of my sketch and drew a couple of arms ending in boxing mitts. “What kind of creepy stuff are you doing that you’re scared I’ll come across?”

  “We don’t have anything to hide.” Dick recovered his voice and reverted to petulance. “But knowing that you’ve got a vendetta against one of our associates, I would just as soon you didn’t have a chance to damage any of his files.”

  “I know the boy’s scared I’ll break his kneecap, but his wife looks pretty fit and she’s ten years younger than me—tell him I’d be afraid of the revenge she’d take.”

  “Vic, I know you like to turn everything I say into a joke just to make me mad. And it works. Every time, or damned near. But I’m calling to warn you to mind your own business. Regard it as a favor, okay?”

  I stared at the phone in amazement. “Dick, what on earth are you talking about? I wanted some help from Freeman. I’m entitled to get it without your permission.”

  “Not when he’s no longer a member of the firm, you’re not. We tracked you down, unfortunately after you’d gone. Catherine Gentry was keeping her lip buttoned—I won’t miss her smart mouth one minute—but the girl she gave your search request to wasn’t afraid to do her duty.”

  “Meaning she was afraid of being fired. And unless you’re breaking the child labor laws I expect it was a woman, not a girl.”

  Dick laughed tolerantly. “Woman, if it’ll make you feel better. Be that as it may, you may not use Crawford, Mead’s resources. Period.”

  “Aye, aye, captain. Just out of curiosity, why did Freeman have to leave so suddenly?”

  “An internal matter of the firm, Vic. None of your damned business. Just keep to the affairs that are your concern. You do a good job with them. Why do you have to mess with mine?”

  “Oh, you know those vows we swore—till death parted us—those old feelings die hard.”

  “If you’d cared about my affairs fourteen years ago, we’d still be married. Keep that in mind while you’re scrambling for your rent.”

  He hung up without giving me a chance at the last word. So it still rankled, my lack of doelike devotion. Old feelings do indeed die hard.

  21

  Throwing a Friend to the Wolves

  I got to the restaurant ahead of Lotty. A light, bright seafood place on Lincoln, I Popoli has a small garden where I like to sit in summer. During the afternoon, though, heavy storm clouds had moved into the city. It looked as though the unnaturally hot weather might be going to break. I took a table inside.

  When I’d waited half an hour I figured Lotty’d been held up by a late-breaking emergency. I ordered a rum-and-tonic to tide me over and settled at the end of the bar, next to the window, where I could watch the street. Rain had started to fall, fat heavy drops that spattered on the pavement like broken eggs. By the time I finished my rum, the drops had built to a heavy curtain of water.

  I started wondering if Lotty had crashed the Trans Am and was too chicken to tell me about it. Of course, that wasn’t in Lotty’s character: she had no fear of confrontation. Besides, she saw herself as a constant victim of other reckless maniacs. When I tried to ask her why my cars never suffered the damage hers did, she would pierce me with a stare and change the subject.

  I went to the phone in the back of the restaurant to try calling her. I didn’t get an answer, either at the clinic or her apartment, but when I left the booth she was standing in the middle of the room, water dripping around her, looking for me. It was only when I came up to her that I saw she was hurt. She had a graze and a purple lump on her forehead and I could see a stream of blood mixing with the rainwater on her left arm.

  “Lotty!” I pulled her to me. “What happened to you?”

  “Someone hit me.” Her voice was dull and she held herself stiffly in my embrace.

  “Hit you? Hit the car, you mean?”

  “You know, Victoria, I think I would like to lie down.”

  The precision of her speech and her frozen posture frightened me as much as her wounds. I wondered if I should get her to a hospital, but decided to take her home and try to find someone to come look at her there. Maybe she needed her head X-rayed, but hospital emergency rooms are cold comfort for someone in shock; I’d rather get her warm before a doctor decided on the next move. I fumbled in my purse for the bills to pay my tab, couldn’t find any and ended up just tossing a twenty on the bar.

  I got an arm around Lotty and half lifted her to get her outside. She’d left the Trans Am parked rakishly against the curb. Despite the rain, which had darkened the sky, I could tell that the windshield was cracked. I couldn’t help inspecting the left fender as I ushered Lotty into her own car. The headlamp had sprung, and the grille and the body had inverted their normal positions. I suppressed a twinge of anger: Lotty was badly hurt. The car was only a chunk of glass and metal, repairable after all.

  My place is just around the corner from the restaurant, but Lotty would be more comfortable in her own home. Cursing the Cressida’s slippery gears I made my way through the downpour to her building on Sheffield. She didn’t say anything during the fifteen-minute drive, just stared in front of her, occasionally pressing her left arm, the arm that had been bleeding.

  As soon as I got her undressed and tucked into bed with a cup of hot milk I called Max. When I described her injuries he demanded to know why I hadn’t taken her to a hospital.

  “Because—I don’t know—I don’t like hospitals. I’ve sat in emergency rooms with bruises and cuts like hers and they only make me feel worse. Can you find someone to look at her here? Let them decide whether she needs to be fed into the machine?”

  Max didn’t like it. As a hospital administrator he sees the places differently than I do. But he agreed that since she was home it would be a mistake to move her again right now. He was coming over himself, but said he would first roust out Arthur Gioia, an internist at Beth Israel.

  “You don’t know what happened?”

  “She hasn’t been talking. I wanted to get her into bed first.”

  When he finally hung up I went back to Lotty. I brought in a sponge and a bowl of warm water to clean the blood from her forehead and left arm. She had finished drinking the milk and was lying with her eyes closed, but I didn’t think she was asleep.

  I sat down next to her and started bathing her wounds. “Max is going to come over—he’s pretty worried. And he’s hunting up a doctor to take a look at you.”

  “I don’t need a doctor. I am a doctor. I can tell there’s nothing serious the matter with me.”

  It was a relief to hear her speak. “Do you remember how the accident happened?”

  She frowned impatiently. “It wasn’t an accident. I told you at the restaurant, someone hit me. Could you bring me some ice for my head, please?”

  I sighed to myself as I went back to the kitchen. The accident was going to go into Lotty’s annals of traffic mishaps—someone had hit her. Just more forcefully than usual.

  I wrapped the ice in a kitchen towel and placed it gently on the purple bump. “Did you report it to the police?”

  “The police came. They tried to make me go to a hospital, but I knew I was late to meet you, and I had to see you, Victoria.”

  I gently squeezed the fingers of her injured arm. She lay silent for a few minutes.

  “I think they wanted you, you see.”
r />   “The police want me?” I asked cautiously.

  “No, Vic. The people who hit me.”

  The ground shifted underfoot. “Lotty, darling Lotty, I know you’re in pain and maybe concussed besides, but can you please tell me what happened? I thought you were in a car accident. I know the Trans Am is bashed in.”

  She nodded, then winced. The towel with the ice fell off her head onto the pillow with her movements. When I’d retrieved the cubes from the bed she marshaled her wits and told me her story. She’d come home from the clinic to shower and change. On her way out, just before she turned from Sheffield onto Addison, another car had come out of nowhere—as they always did with her—and plowed into the front of the Trans Am.

  She frowned. “I must have hit my head on the windshield then, but I don’t think that cracked it—I think they did that when they started hitting the car with their bats. Anyway, I was furious. I can’t stand these reckless drivers. They were never like that in London, and London traffic makes Chicago look like a cow town. So I got out of the car to tell them what I thought of them and to get their insurance information. That’s when they climbed out and started hitting me. I was too stunned to react. Besides, I’m not like you, I didn’t train under Muhammad Ali.

  “I was yelling for help, but the rain was starting; no one was on the street. Any passing drivers were keeping strictly to themselves. The men were pounding on me and telling me to learn the hard way to mind my own business when a police car came by. As soon as they saw the police the men ran down the street. One of the policemen got out and tried chasing them, but of course they had a head start. They just abandoned their car right there. But as we were driving home I thought, they must have been confusing me with you. Because I was driving your car.”

  She was right. I knew she was as soon as she told me the men leaped out of their car to attack her. How many men, and what did they look like, I wanted to ask, but she wasn’t in the mood for interrogation. And it explained why she’d been in such a peculiar state: not from shock, but anger with me for putting her at risk.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  She kept her eyes shut, but her mouth twisted in the parody of a smile. “I am too. More than you, no doubt.”

  “Is that why you came to the restaurant? To twist a knife into my side?”

  She opened her eyes at that and looked at me from under the ice pack. “No, Victoria. I came to you because I’ve never been so scared in my life, at least not since coming to America. And it seemed like your business. Something you might perhaps fix, make right for me, so I’m not frightened every time I step outside my house into my car.”

  I got down on my knees and put my arms around her. “I’ll do my best, chief.”

  She shut her eyes again and lay there, breathing lightly, holding my hand, while we waited for Max and Art. I shivered to myself, picturing her under the assault, wishing I could remake the last few days and have it turn out that I’d kept the Trans Am, that I was the one they stopped. How far would they have gone if the police hadn’t shown up? Left her with some broken bones? Maybe lying unconscious in the street, brain-damaged, or dead?

  I couldn’t keep my mind from its feverish circling. It was a relief when Max rang the bell, even though it was the prelude to a tough encounter with him. He hadn’t found Art Gioia, but he’d brought Audrey Jameson. She was one of Beth Israel’s more promising young house physicians; I knew her because she spent fifteen hours a week helping Lotty at the clinic.

  Max went straight to Lotty, but Audrey stopped to talk to me before going to look at the patient. When I told her what had happened she clicked her tongue impatiently and followed Max into Lotty’s bedroom. I sat under the fire-red painting in Lotty’s living room and thumbed through a back issue of National Geographic. Max joined me a few minutes later.

  “I can’t believe you would do that to Lotty. Put her life at risk in that way.”

  I leaned back in the couch and squeezed my forehead with my left hand. “I don’t want to hear about it, Max, at least not in that angry way. You must know I wouldn’t have traded cars with Lotty if I thought there was a physical risk attached. And if you think I would do such a thing, then there’s no point in talking.”

  “Why’d you do it, then?”

  “I was being tailed. I wanted to move around with some freedom. Lotty agreed to trade cars with me. I see now I shouldn’t have done it—but I couldn’t have known it then.”

  Whoever had been following me didn’t know me by sight or they wouldn’t have jumped Lotty. Would Chamfers have used his own men instead of a detective agency? I thought of the guy I’d met on the loading dock last week. Bruno, I’d called him. What name had Chamfers used? I couldn’t remember—my brain was scraping at the edges, like a needle on a record that wouldn’t lift itself clear.

  “I’ve known Lotty since she was fifteen,” Max said abruptly. “She’s sometimes the most infuriating person in the world. But I can’t imagine the world without her.”

  “I’ve only known her since she was forty, but I can’t imagine it without her either. Anyway, you can’t blame me more than I blame myself.”

  Max finally moved his head, an almost-nod of not-quite assent. He went to the cupboard where Lotty keeps her brandy and poured some out. I took a glass from him, but set it down beside me untasted. We sat without speaking until Audrey came back out.

  “She’ll do. I’d like to send her in for X rays—I think her arm is cracked and should be in a cast, and just to be on the safe side she should have a CAT scan of her brain. But it’ll keep till morning. I wrapped the arm up and gave her something to make her sleep. The only thing is, she wouldn’t take it unless I promised her that Vic would stay here tonight. Okay with you, Warshawski?”

  I nodded. Max, hurt that Lotty hadn’t chosen him, offered to stay with me.

  “Fine with me. You can have the spare bed—I’m going to pull the mattress off the daybed here and sleep on her bedroom floor in case she needs me.”

  Audrey’s teeth showed momentarily, white against her mahogany skin, as she gave a snort of laughter. “No need to be a Victorian damsel, Vic. She’s really going to be all right. You don’t need to sponge her with lavender water or whatever they used to do for fever victims.”

  “It’s not that—it’s just that she was badly frightened. If she wakes up disoriented I want to be there for her.” It was the least I could do, after all.

  “Whatever you want.… How about a snifter of that brandy before I head back into the rain?”

  22

  Bedside Watch

  Before Audrey left she reminded me that she needed to report the assault to the police. She spoke belligerently, as though expecting me to try to conceal it.

  “No, I agree,” I said. “In fact, I want to call the local station and see what they know about it. You want to wait while I do that? They might send someone around.”

  Audrey went to the kitchen to make coffee. Like Lotty, she’s an abstemious drinker—one glass of brandy would tide her over for the rest of the month. Max was on his second snifter, but then Lotty only buys Cordon Bleu for him.

  I was in luck when I called the district station. Conrad Rawlings, a sergeant I know and like, was working the four-to-midnight shift. He promised to look up what they had on the assault and send someone over to talk to Audrey and me. Half an hour later, as Audrey, Max, and I were making laborious conversation, Conrad showed up in person. He had another officer, a young woman whose head barely cleared his armpits, in tow in case Lotty was up to making a statement.

  “Absolutely not,” Audrey said firmly. “She’s sleeping now and I hope she’ll keep on doing it until morning.”

  “Skolnik and Wirtz—the officers who interrupted the attack—got a sketchy statement from her,” Rawlings said. “So I guess it can wait until tomorrow. But she wouldn’t let them take her to a hospital—kept telling them she was a doctor and she would make decisions about
her health care. They thought she was in a pretty good state of shock, maybe concussed besides, but her car was drivable and she could drive it, so they couldn’t force her.”

  He waved an arm at the young woman. “This is Officer Galway. She’ll be keeping some notes as we talk. Since we can’t ask the doc, you tell us what happened, Warshawski, and why.”

  Audrey brought the coffee she’d made from the kitchen. Everyone took a cup except for me. I just couldn’t feel like eating or drinking while Lotty slept off the blows that had been meant for me.

  I told Rawlings everything I knew—my visit to Chamfers five days before, Bruno the dockman, the tail, switching cars with Lotty. “I think the attack was meant for me. Especially because they kept telling her that maybe this would teach her to mind her own business. She said they abandoned the car—whose was it?”

  Rawlings made a disgusted face. “That’s one thing we do know. It belonged to an Eddie Mohr, who reported it stolen this morning. He lives south, near Kedzie.

  “Anyone can report their car stolen,” I said.

  Before Rawlings could answer, Max asked how.

  I shrugged. “You just call up and say it was stolen. It could be anywhere—at the bottom of a gravel pit where you pushed it, or being used by your pals—even by yourself—to attack people.”

  Max smiled sadly, depressed by this view of human nature, and slipped away to take a look at Lotty.

  “Give me a break, Ms. W.,” Rawlings protested. “First thought on my mind. But the guy is seventy-two, retired, looking after his begonias or whatever they do down there, and the car had definitely been hot-wired. No, they must have realized you were wise to the tail. They wanted a car you couldn’t ID when they managed to pick you up again. But they didn’t know you personally. So that lets out this Bruno you talked about.”

  I hunched a shoulder impatiently. “He doesn’t know me—I was just another dumb broad to him. And it’s true I’m eight inches taller than Lotty, but compared to him we both look like shrimp. I wouldn’t discount him.”