“Can you at least take a message? Without bringing the police into it, I mean?” I spelled my name slowly, twice, not that it would make any difference-it would still probably come out as Watchski or some other hideous mutation. The secretary said she’d see Nancy got the message in that tone that tells you they’re trashing the paper as soon as you hang up.
I turned back to the directory. Nancy wasn’t listed, but Ellen Cleghorn was still living on Muskegon. Talking to Nancy’s mother made a welcome change to the way I’d been greeted today. She remembered me perfectly, loved reading about me when my cases made the papers, wished I’d come down and have dinner with them sometime when I was in the neighborhood.
“Nancy bought herself a place in South Shore. One of those huge old mansions that’s falling to bits. She’s fixing it up on her own. Kind of a big place for a single woman, but she likes it.” She gave me the number and hung up with repeated dinner invitations.
Nancy wasn’t home. I gave it up. If she wanted me that badly, she’d call again.
I looked at the dirt on the front of my dress. My suit was still in the car. If I drove home now, I could change into jeans, dump the lot at the cleaners, and spend the rest of the afternoon on myself
It was close to five-as I was happily working my way through the syncope of “In dem Schatten meiner Locken,” without Kathleen Battle’s voice-when the phone rang. I left the piano unwillingly, and was even sorrier as soon as I picked up the receiver: it was Caroline.
“Vic, I need to talk to you.”
“Talk away,” I said resignedly.
“In person, I mean.” Her husky voice was urgent, but it always was.
“You want to drive up to Lake View, be my guest. But I ain’t trekking down to South Chicago this afternoon.”
“Oh, fuck you, Vic. Can you ever talk to me without being a total snot?”
“Can it, Caroline. You want to talk to me, speak. Otherwise I’m going back to what I was doing when you interrupted.”
There was a pause during which I could picture her gentian eyes smoldering. Then she said, so quickly I almost didn’t understand, “I want you to stop.”
I was confused for a minute. “Caroline, if you ever realized how upsetting I find it to have you spin me around in circles, you might understand why I sound like a snot to you.”
“Not that,” she said impatiently. “Stop trying to find my father, I mean.”
“What!” I shouted. “Two days ago you were batting your baby blues and telling me pathetically you counted on me.”
“That was then. I didn’t see then-I didn’t know-anyway, that’s why I need to see you in person. You can’t possibly understand over the phone if you’re going to get so honked off. Just don’t do any more looking until I can talk to you in person, for God’s sake.”
There was no denying the thread of panic in her voice. I pulled a string from the fringe where my left knee was poking through the denim. She knew about Pankowski and the plant sabotage. I pulled another. She didn’t know.
“You’re too late, babe,” I finally said.
“You mean you’ve found him?”
“Nope. I mean the investigation is beyond your power to stop.”
“Vic, I hired you. I can fire you,” she said with terrifying ferocity.
“Nope,” I repeated steadily. “You could have last week. But the investigation has moved into a new phase. You can’t fire me. I don’t mean that. You can fire me, of course. You just have. What I mean is, you may choose not to pay me but you can’t stop my inquiries now. And the top one, first on the list, is why you didn’t tell me about Ferraro and Pankowski.”
“I don’t even know who they are!” she shouted. “Ma never talks about her old lovers to me. She’s like you-she thinks I’m a fucking baby.”
“Not about their being her lovers. About the sabotage and their getting fired. And the lawsuit.”
“I don’t know what in hell you’re talking about, V. I. Know-it-all Warshawski, and I don’t have to listen to it. As far as I’m concerned, V.I. stands for vicious insect, which I would use Raid on if I had any.” She slammed the phone in my ear.
It was the childish insult she ended on that convinced me she really didn’t know about the two men. I also realized suddenly that I had no idea why she was firing me. I scowled and rang up SCRAP, but she refused to come to the phone.
“Ah, screw you, you little brat,” I muttered, slamming down the phone myself
I tried returning to Hugo Wolf, but my enthusiasm was gone. I wandered to the living-room window and watched the nine-to-fivers returning home. Suppose my speculations this morning hadn’t been so far out after all. Suppose Louisa Djiak had been involved in the plant sabotage and Humboldt was protecting her. Maybe he’d called Caroline and pushed her into firing me. Although Caroline was not the kind that pushed easily. If someone Humboldt’s size came for her, she’d be more inclined to sink her teeth into his calf and hang on until he got sick of the pain.
It occurred to me that whatever Nancy wanted to talk to me about might shed some light on the general problem. I tried her number again, but she still didn’t answer.
“Come on, Cleghorn,” I muttered. “You wanted me bad enough to leave two messages. You get run over by a train or something?”
I finally got fed up with my futile churning and called Lotty Herschel. She was free for dinner and glad to have company. We went to the Gypsy and shared a roast duck, then back to her place, where she beat me five times in a row at gin.
11
The Brat’s Tale
I was skimming the paper while I made coffee the next morning when Nancy Cleghorn’s name leapt out at me. The story was on the front page of ChicagoBeat. It explained why she hadn’t been around to answer her phone yesterday. Her body had been found around eight last evening by two young boys who’d ignored both the government and their parents and gone into the posted area around Dead Stick Pond.
A small section of the original marsh remained as Illinois’s last wetland for migratory birds. Dead Stick Pond had once been a great feeding and resting ground, but was now so full of PCBs that little could survive there. Even so, in the middle of the dead mills you could find herons and other unusual birds, and the occasional beaver or muskrat.
The two boys had come on a muskrat there once and hoped to see it again. At the water’s edge they stumbled over a discarded boot. Since there were fifty of those for every animal-and it was dark-it had taken them a few minutes to realize it still had a body connected to it.
Nancy had been hit on the back of the head. The internal injury would have killed her eventually, but she apparently drowned when her body was dumped in the pond. The police knew of no one with a reason to kill her. She was well respected, her work at SCRAP had earned her a lot of kudos in the environmentally troubled community, and so on. She was survived by her mother and four brothers.
I slowly finished making the coffee and took the paper out to the living room, where I reread the story six or seven times. I didn’t learn anything new. Nancy. My snappish thought last night, maybe she’d fallen under a train, made the little hairs prickle on the sides of my face. My thinking hadn’t caused her death. My mind knew that, but my body didn’t.
If only I hadn’t taken that hike to the lake yesterday morning-I broke off the thought when I realized how stupid it was. If I stayed chained to my phone twenty-four hours a day, I’d be at home to needy friends or telemarketers and would have no other life. But Nancy. I’d known her since I was six years old. In my mind I thought we were still young together-that because we’d been young together we would protect each other from ever getting old.
I wandered to the window and stared out. It was raining hard again in thick sheets that made it impossible to see the street. I squinted at the water, moving my head to make patterns with it, wondering what to do. It was only eight-thirty-too early to call my friends at the papers to see if they had news that hadn’t made it to the morning edition. Peo
ple who go to bed at three or four in the morning are more cooperative if you let them sleep in.
She’d been found in the Fourth Police District. I didn’t know anyone there-my dad had worked the Loop and northwest sides, not his own neighborhood. Besides, that’s been over ten years ago.
I was chewing on my fingertip, trying to decide whom to call, when the doorbell rang. I figured it was Mr. Contreras, trying to get me to come down to take the dog out in the downpour, and scowled at the foggy window without moving. The third time the bell clamored I reluctantly left my hideout. Cup in hand, I unbolted the outer door and padded barefoot down the three flights.
Two bulky figures stood in the outer hallway. Rain glistened on their shaved faces and dripped from their navy slickers to form dirty pools on the tiled floor.
When I opened the door the older one said with heavy sarcasm, “Good morning, sunshine. I hope we didn’t interrupt your beauty sleep.”
“Not at all, Bobby,” I said heartily. “I’ve been up for an hour at least. I just hoped it was a wrong number. Hi, Sergeant,” I added to the younger man. “You guys want some coffee?”
As they came past me into the stairwell cold water from their slickers dripped onto my bare toes. If it had just been Bobby Mallory, I would have thought it deliberate. But Sergeant McGonnigal was always scrupulously polite to me, never participating in his lieutenant’s hostility.
The truth of the matter was that Bobby had been my father’s closest friend, both on and off the force. His feelings toward me were compounded of guilt at flourishing when my father had stayed in beat patrol, at living while Tony had died-and frustration at my being grown up and a professional investigator instead of a little girl he could dandle on his knee.
He looked around in the little entryway of my apartment for a place to put his dripping raincoat, finally sticking it on the floor outside the door. His wife was a meticulous housekeeper and he had been well trained. Sergeant McGonnigal followed suit, running his fingers through his thick curly hair to squeeze some of the excess water out.
I solemnly took them into the living room and brought coffee in mugs, remembering extra sugar for Bobby.
“It’s good to see you,” I said politely when they were seated on the couch. “Especially on such a rotten day. How are you?”
Bobby looked at me sternly, quickly glancing away when he saw I didn’t have a bra on under my T-shirt. “I didn’t want to come here. The captain thought someone should talk to you and since I know you he thought it should be me. I didn’t agree, but he’s the captain. If you’ll answer my questions seriously and try not to be a wisenheimer, the whole thing’ll go faster and we’ll both be happy.”
“And I thought you were being social,” I said mournfully. “No, no, sorry, bad start. I’m serious as-as a traffic court judge. Ask me anything.”
“Nancy Cleghorn,” Bobby said flatly.
“That’s not a question, and I don’t have an answer. I just read in this morning’s paper that she was killed yesterday. I expect you know a lot more about it than I do.”
“Oh, yes,” he agreed heavily. “We know a great deal-that she died around six P.M. From the amount of internal bleeding, the M.E. says she was probably hit around four. We know she was thirty-six years old and had been pregnant at least once, that she ate too much high-fat food and broke her right leg as an adult. I know that a man, or a woman, with size thirteen shoes and a forty-inch stride, dragged her in a green blanket to the south end of Dead Stick Pond. The blanket was sold at a Sears store somewhere in the United States sometime between 1978 when they started making them and 1984 when they discontinued that brand. Someone else, presumably also a man, came along for the stroll but didn’t help with the dragging or dumping.”
“The lab worked overtime last night. I didn’t think they did that for your average dead citizen.”
Bobby refused to let me ride him. “There’s also a little bit I don’t know, but it’s the part that counts. I don’t have any idea who wanted her to die. But I understand you two grew up together and used to be pretty good friends.”
“And you want me to find her murderer? I would have thought you guys had the machinery to do that easier than me.”
His look would have made an academy recruit faint. “I want you to tell me.
” “I don’t know.”
“That’s not what I hear.” He glared at a point somewhere over my head.
I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about, then the messages I’d left for Nancy at SCRAP and with her mother came back to me. Those seemed like mighty small straws to build a house from.
“Let me guess,” I said brightly. “It’s not even business hours and you’ve already rounded up everyone at SCRAP and talked to them.”
McGonnigal shifted uneasily and looked at Mallory. The lieutenant nodded briefly. McGonnigal said, “I talked with a Ms. Caroline Djiak late last night. She said you advised Cleghorn on how to investigate a problem they were having with a zoning permit for a recycling plant. She said you would know who the deceased spoke to about it.”
I stared at him speechlessly. Finally I choked out, “Are those her exact words?”
McGonnigal fished in his breast pocket for a notebook. He flipped through the pages, squinting at his notes. “I didn’t take it down word for word, but that’s pretty much it,” he said at last.
“I wouldn’t call Caroline Djiak a pathological liar,” I remarked conversationally. “Just a manipulative little squirt. But even though I’m mad enough at her to go down and personally break in the back of her head, it doesn’t cheer me any you coming at me this way. I mean, we go through this every time you think I’m involved in a crime, don’t we, Lieutenant? You make a frontal assault that takes my guilty knowledge for granted.
“You could’ve started by telling me about Caroline’s never-never-land remarks and asking me if they were true. Then I would’ve told you everything that happened, which was about five minutes of conversation in Caroline’s dining room, and you could have taken off with one loose end tied up.”
I got up from the floor and headed for the kitchen. Bobby came in as I was poking around the refrigerator to see if there was anything edible I might use for breakfast. The yogurt had changed to mold and sour milk. There wasn’t any fruit, and the only bread I had left was hard enough to use for ammo.
Bobby unconsciously wrinkled his nose at the dirty dishes, but heroically refrained from commenting on them. Instead he said, “Seeing you near a murder always gets me in the gut. You know that.”
It was as close as he was going to get to an apology. “I’m not near this one,” I said impatiently. “I don’t know why Caroline wants me there. She dragged me down to South Chicago last week to a basketball-team reunion. Then she manipulated me into helping her with a personal problem. Then she called to tell me to bug out of her life. Now she wants me back. Or maybe she’s just trying to punish me.”
I dug some crackers out of a cupboard and spread them with peanut butter. “While we were eating fried chicken Nancy Cleghorn came by to talk about a zoning problem. This would have been just a week ago. Caroline thought Jurshak-the alderman down there-was blocking the permit. She asked me what I’d do if I were investigating. I said the easiest thing to do was talk to a friend on Jurshak’s staff if she or Nancy had one. Nancy left. The total of my involvement.”
I poured some more coffee, angry enough that my hand shook and I spilled it across the stove. “Despite your little dig, we hadn’t seen each other for more than ten years. I didn’t know who her friends or enemies were. Now Caroline makes it sound as though Jurshak killed Nancy, for which there isn’t an atom of evidence. And she wants to make out that I egged him on to do it. Hell!”
Bobby flinched. “Don’t talk dirty, Vicki. It doesn’t help anything. What are you working on for the Djiak girl?”
“Woman,” I said automatically through a mouthful of peanut butter. “Or maybe brat. I’ll tell you for nothing, even though it’s n
one of your business. Her mother was one of Gabriella’s charities. Now she’s dying. Very unpleasantly. Caroline wanted me to find some people her mother used to work with in the hopes they’d come see her. But as she probably told you, she fired me two days ago.”
Bobby’s blue eyes narrowed to slits in his ruddy face. “There’s some truth there. I just wish I knew how much.”
“I should have known better than to speak frankly with you,” I said bitterly. “Especially when you opened the conversation with an accusation.”
“Oh, keep your shirt on, Vicki,” Bobby said. He blushed suddenly as the image hit home with him. “And clean up your kitchen more than once a year. Place looks like the projects.”
When he had stomped away with McGonnigal I went to my bedroom to change. As I scrambled back into the black dress I looked out the window-the water was forming little rivers on the walk below. I put on running shoes and carried a pair of black pumps in my bag.
Even with an extra-wide umbrella my legs and feet got soaked on my dash to the car. Most Februaries, though, this would be snow a foot or two deep, so I tried not to complain too bitterly.
The little Chevy’s defroster couldn’t make much headway on the fogged windshield, but at least the car hadn’t died, the fate of a number of others I passed. The storm and the stalls made for a slow trek south; it was close to ten by the time I turned from Route 41 onto Ninety-second Street. By the time I found a parking space near the corner of Commercial, the rain was finally lifting-it was clear enough for me to change into my pumps.
SCRAP’S offices were in the second story of a block of little shops. I trotted around the corner to the business entrance-my dentist used to have his office here and the opening on Commercial remained an indelible memory.
I stopped at the top of the uncarpeted stairs, reading the wall directory while combing my hair and straightening my skirt. Dr. Zdunek wasn’t there anymore. Neither were a lot of the other tenants; I passed half a dozen or so empty offices on my way down the hall.
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