Blood Shot

by Sara Paretsky

  20

  White Elephant

  Mr. Contreras finally left around one. I slept fitfully, my mind thrashing over Caroline’s visit. Caroline didn’t fear anything. That’s why she confidently followed me into Lake Michigan’s pounding surf when she was four years old. Even a near-drowning hadn’t scared her-she’d been ready to go right back again when I’d gotten her lungs cleaned out. If someone had told her my life was on the line, it might’ve made her mad, but it wouldn’t terrify her.

  Someone had called to tell her Joey Pankowski was her father. She couldn’t have pulled that out of the blue. But had they added a rider about hurting me, or was that an inspired guess? I hadn’t seen her for a decade, but you don’t forget the mannerisms of the people you grow up with: that sidelong glance when I asked her directly made me think she was lying.

  The only reason I believed her at all-about the threat, that is-was because I’d gotten my own call. Until Caroline showed up I’d been assuming my threat came from Art Jurshak because I’d accosted his son. Or because I’d talked to Ron Kappelman. But what if it came from Humboldt?

  When the orange clock readout glowed three-fifteen I turned on the light and sat up in bed to use the phone. Murray Ryerson had left the paper forty-five minutes earlier. He wasn’t home yet. On the chance, I tried the Golden Glow-Sal shuts down at four. Third time lucky.

  “Vic! I’m overwhelmed. You had insomnia and you thought of me. I can see the headline now-‘Girl Detective Can’t Sleep for Love.’”

  “And I thought it was the onions I had for dinner. Must’ve been what was wrong with me the day I agreed to marry Dick. You know our little conversation yesterday?”

  “What little conversation?” he snorted. “I told you stuff about Nancy Cleghorn and you sat with Velcro on your mouth.”

  “Something came back to me,” I said limpidly.

  “Better make it good, Warshawski.”

  “Curtis Chigwell,” I said. “He’s a doctor who lives in Hinsdale. Used to work at a plant down in South Chicago.”

  “He killed Nancy Cleghorn?”

  “As far as I know he never met Nancy Cleghorn.”

  I felt rather than heard Murray sputter. “It’s been a tough day, V.I. Don’t make me play Twenty Questions with you.”

  I reached down next to the bed for a T-shirt. Somehow the night was making me feel too exposed in my nakedness. As I leaned over the lamplight highlighted dust in the corner of the bedroom. If I lived past next week, I’d vacuum.

  “That’s what I’ve got for you,” I said slowly. “Twenty questions. No answers. Curtis Chigwell knows something that he doesn’t want to tell. Twenty-four hours ago I didn’t think it had the remotest possible connection to Nancy. But I got a threatening phone call tonight telling me to bug out of South Chicago.”

  “From Chigwell?” I could almost feel Murray’s breath through the phone line.

  “No. I thought it had to come from Jurshak or Dresberg. Only thing, a couple of hours later I heard the same thing from someone who knows me only through the Xerxes side -the plant that Chigwell used to work for.”

  I explained the discrepancies I’d gotten between Manheim and Humboldt’s version of Pankowski and Ferraro’s suit-without telling him about hearing it from Gustav Humboldt himself “Chigwell knows what the truth is and why. He just doesn’t want to say. And if the Xerxes people are threatening me, he’ll know why.”

  Murray tried a thousand different ways to get me to tell him more about it. I just couldn’t give him Caroline and Louisa-Louisa didn’t deserve to have her unhappy past spinning around the streets of Chicago. And I didn’t know anything else. Anything about what possible connection there could be between Nancy’s death and Joey Pankowski.

  Murray finally said, “You’re not trying to help me, you’re getting me to do your legwork. I can feel it. But it’s not a bad story-I’ll send someone out to talk to the guy.”

  When he hung up I managed to sleep a little, but I woke again for good around six-thirty. It was another gray February day. Sharp cold with snow would have been preferable to this unending misty chill. I pulled on my sweats, did my stretches, and ruthlessly roused Mr. Contreras by knocking on his door until the dog barked him awake. I took her to the lake and back, stopping now and then to tie my shoes, to blow my nose, to throw her a stick-gestures that let me subtly check my rear. I didn’t think anyone was on it.

  After depositing the dog I went to the comer diner for pancakes. Back home to change, I’d just about made up my mind to visit Louisa, see if she could shed any light on Caroline’s panic, when Ellen Cleghorn called. She was most upset: she’d gone over to Nancy’s house in South Chicago to collect her financial records and found the place ransacked.

  “Ransacked?” I repeated foolishly. “How do you know?”

  “The way you always do, Victoria-the place had been ripped to shreds. Nancy didn’t have much and she’d only been able to fix up a couple of rooms. The furniture was pulled apart and her papers strewn all over the place.”

  I shuddered involuntarily. “Sounds like housebreakers gone mad. Could you tell if anything was missing?”

  “I didn’t try to see.” Her voice caught a little on a nervous sob. “I looked at her bedroom and ran out of there as fast as I could. I-I was hoping you might come down and go through the house with me. I can’t bear to be alone there with this-this ravaging of Nancy.”

  I promised to meet her in front of her house within the hour. I’d wanted to go directly to Nancy’s, but Mrs. Cleghorn was too nervous about the intruders to hang around her daughter’s house, even outside. I finished pulling on jeans and a sweatshirt, and then, not too happily, went to the little wall safe I’d built into the bedroom closet and took out the Smith & Wesson.

  I don’t make a habit of carrying a gun-if you do, you get dependent on them and your wits slow down. But I’d been jumpy enough already between Nancy’s murder and the threat to send me into the swamp after her. Now this housebreaking. I supposed it could have been local punks casing the place and seeing that no one was home. But tearing the furniture apart. It could have been a druggie coked so far out of his mind that he’d torn the furniture apart looking for money. But it could also have been her killers looking for something she had that might incriminate them. So I stuck a second clip into my handbag and pushed the loaded gun into my jeans waistband; my wits were not fast enough to stop a speeding bullet.

  The Cleghorn house looked remote and bedraggled in the gray mist. Even the turret that had been Nancy’s bedroom seemed to be drooping a little. Mrs. Cleghorn was waiting for me on the front walk, her normally pleasant, round face gaunt and strained. She gave a tremulous smile and climbed into my car.

  “I’ll ride with you if you don’t mind. I’m shaking so badly I don’t even know how I got home.”

  “You can just give me her house keys,” I said. “You don’t need to come along if you’d be happier staying here.”

  She shook her head. “If you went by yourself, I’d only spend the time worrying that someone was waiting in ambush for you.”

  While I followed her directions for the quickest way up, along South Chicago to Yates, I asked if she’d called the police.

  “I thought I’d wait. Wait until you saw what happened. Then”-she gave a twisted little smile-“maybe you could do it for me. I think I’ve done all the talking to police that I can stand. Not just for now, but forever.”

  I reached across the gearshift to pat her hand. “It’s okay. Happy to be of service.”

  Nancy’s house was up on Crandon, near Seventy-third Street. I could see why Mrs. Cleghorn called it a white elephant-a big wooden monster, its three full stories filled an outsize lot. But I could also see why Nancy had bought it-the little cupolas at the comers, the stained-glass windows, the carved wooden banister on the stairwell inside, all evoked the comfort and order of Alcott or Thackeray.

  It wasn’t immediately obvious that someone had been in the house. Nancy had appa
rently put everything she had into buying it, so the front hallway had no furniture. It wasn’t until I went up the oak stairs and found the main bedroom that I saw the damage. I sympathized fully with Mrs. Cleghorn’s decision to wait for me in the entryway.

  Nancy had apparently made the main bedroom her first rehab project. The floor was finished, the walls plastered and painted, and a working fireplace, with a tiled mantel and gleaming brass fittings, was set in the wall opposite the bed. The effect would have been charming, except that the furniture and bedding had been thrown about the room.

  I tiptoed gingerly through the rubble. I was violating all possible police rules-not calling to report the destruction, walking through it and disturbing the evidence, adding my detritus to that of the vandals. But it’s only in rule books that every crime gets detailed lab inspection. In real life I didn’t think they’d pay too close attention, even though the homeowner had been murdered.

  Whatever the vandals had been looking for didn’t take up much space. Not only had they ripped the mattress cover away and slashed through the stuffing, but they had taken up the grate in the fireplace and removed several bricks. Either money, if I stayed with the coked-out-addict theory. Or papers. Some kind of evidence Nancy had of something so hideous, people were willing to kill to keep it a secret.

  I went back downstairs, my own hands shaking a little. The destruction of a house is such a personal violation. If you can’t be safe within your home base, you feel you have no security anywhere.

  Mrs. Cleghorn was waiting at the bottom. She put a motherly arm around my waist-seeing me upset helped her gain some composure.

  “The dining room is the only other room Nancy really had fixed up. She was using the built-in cupboards as a little home office until she had the time and the money to fix up the study.”

  I suggested that Mrs. Cleghorn continue to stay in the hall. If the marauders hadn’t found what they were looking for upstairs, I had an unwilling vision of what the cupboards might look like.

  The reality was far worse than anything I had brought myself to imagine. Plates and tableware lay scattered on the floor. The seats had been ripped from the chairs. All the shelves in the walnut cupboards that formed the far wall of the room were splintered. And the papers that made up Nancy’s personal life were strewn about like ticker tape the day after a big parade.

  I compressed my lips tightly, trying to hold my feelings in while I picked through the rubble. By and by Mrs. Cleghorn called to me from the doorway: I’d been away so long she’d gotten worried and braced herself to face the destruction. Together we culled bank statements, picked an address book from the heap, and took anything relating to mortgage or insurance for Mrs. Cleghorn to go through later.

  Before leaving I poked around in the other rooms. Here and there a loose floorboard had been pried up. The fireplaces-there were six altogether-were missing their grates. The old-fashioned kitchen had come in for its share of damage. It probably hadn’t looked too good to begin with, its fixtures dating from the twenties, old sink, old icebox, and badly peeling walls. In typical vandal style the intruders had dumped flour and sugar on the floor and pulled all the food from the refrigerator. If the police ever caught up with them, I’d recommend a year spent fixing up the house as the first part of their sentence.

  They’d come in through the back door. The lock had been jimmied and they hadn’t bothered to shut it properly behind them. The backyard was so overgrown, no one passing in the alley would be able to see that the place was open. Mrs. Cleghorn dug a hammer and nails out of the workshop Nancy had set up next to the pantry; I hammered a board across the back door to keep it shut. There seemed to be nothing further we could do to restore wholeness to the place. We left wordlessly.

  Back at the house on Muskegon, I called Bobby to tell him what happened. He grunted and said he’d refer the matter to the Third District, but for me to stand by in case they wanted to ask me anything.

  “Yeah, sure,” I muttered. “I’ll stick by the phone for the rest of the week if it’ll keep the police happy.” Perhaps it was just as well that Bobby had already hung up.

  Mrs. Cleghorn busied herself with coffee. She brought it to me in the dining room, with leftover cake and salad.

  “What were they looking for, Victoria?” she finally asked after her second cup.

  I picked moodily at some spice cake. “Something small. Flat. Papers of some kind, I suppose. I don’t think they can have found them, or they wouldn’t have been prying up the bricks in the other fireplaces. So where else would Nancy have left something? You’re sure she didn’t drop anything off here?”

  Mrs. Cleghorn shook her head. “She might have come in while I was at work. But-I don’t know. Do you want to look at her old bedroom?”

  She sent me alone up the attic stairs to the old turret where Nancy and I had waited for Sister Anne or battled pirates. It was an unbearably sad room, the remains of childhood sitting forlornly on the worn furniture. I turned over teddy bears and trophies and a worn poster of the early Beatles with studied indifference, but found nothing.

  The police arrived when I got back downstairs and we spent an hour or so talking to them. We told them I’d gone over with Mrs. Cleghorn to help her find Nancy’s papers-that she didn’t want to go alone and I was an old friend and that we’d found the chaos and called them. We talked to a couple of junior grade detectives who wrote everything down in slow longhand but didn’t seem any more concerned about this break-in than that of any other South Side householder. They left eventually without giving us any special instructions or admonitions.

  I got up to leave shortly after they did. “I don’t want to alarm you, but it’s possible that the people who were looking at Nancy’s place will come here. You should consider going to stay with one of your sons, however much you may dislike it.”

  Mrs. Cleghorn nodded reluctantly; the only one of her sons who didn’t have children lived in a trailer with his girlfriend. Not the ideal guesthouse.

  “I suppose I should get Nancy’s car put away safely too. Who knows where these insane creatures will strike next?”

  “Her car?” I stopped in my tracks. “Where is her car?”

  “Out front. She’d left it by the SCRAP offices and one of the women who works there brought it over for me after the funeral. I had a spare set of car keys, so they must…” Her voice trailed off as she caught my expression. “Of course. We ought to look in the car, oughtn’t we? If Nancy really did have something a-a killer wanted. Although I can’t imagine what it could be.”

  She’d said the same thing earlier and I repeated my own meaningless reassurances: that Nancy probably didn’t know she had something someone else wanted so badly. I went out to Nancy’s sky-blue Honda with Mrs. Cleghorn and pulled the heap of papers from the backseat. Nancy had dumped her briefcase there along with a stack of files too big to fit into the case.

  “Why don’t you just take them, dear?” Mrs. Cleghorn smiled tremulously. “If you can look after them, get her work papers back to SCRAP, it would be a big help to me.”

  I hoisted the heap under my left arm and put my right arm around her shoulders. “Yeah, sure. Call me if anything else happens, or if you need help with the cops.” It was more work than I wanted, but it seemed the least I could do under the circumstances.

  21

  Mama’s Boy

  I sat in my car with the heater on, flipping through Nancy’s files. Anything that had to do with routine SCRAP business I put to one side. I wanted to drop the lot at the office on Commercial before leaving South Chicago.

  I was looking for something that would tell me why Alderman Jurshak was opposing the SCRAP recycling plant. That was what Nancy had been trying to find the last time I talked to her. If she’d been killed because of something hot she knew on the South Side, I assumed it was in connection with the plant.

  In the end I did find a document with the Jurshak name on it, but it had nothing to do with the recycling proposal-or
any other environmental issue. It was a photocopy of a letter, dated back in 1963, to the Mariners Rest Life Assurance Company, explaining that Jurshak & Parma were now fiduciaries for Humboldt Chemical’s Xerxes plant. Attached to it was an actuarial study showing that Xerxes losses were in line with those of other comparable companies in the area and asking for the same rate consideration.

  I read the report through three times. It made no sense to me. That is, it made no sense as being the document that could have gotten Nancy killed. Life and health insurance are not my specialty, but this looked like perfectly ordinary, straightforward insurance stuff. It wouldn’t even have seemed out of place to me except that it was so old and so unconnected to anything Nancy worked on.

  There was one person who could explain the significance to me. Well, more than one, but I didn’t feel like going to Big Art with it. Where did you find this, young lady? Oh, blowing around the street, you know how these things happen.

  But young Art might tell me. Even though he was clearly on the periphery of his father’s life, he might know enough about the insurance side to explain the document. Or, if Nancy had found it and it had meant something to her, she might have told him. In fact, she must have: that was why he was so nervous. He knew why she’d been killed and he didn’t want to let on.

  That seemed like a good theory. How to get Art to reveal what he knew was another question altogether. I contorted my face in an effort to concentrate. When that didn’t produce results I tried relaxing all my muscles and hoped that an idea would float to the top of my mind. Instead I found myself thinking about Nancy and our childhood together. The first time I’d gone to her house for dinner, in fourth grade, when her mother had served canned spaghetti. I’d been afraid to tell Gabriella what we’d eaten-I thought she wouldn’t let me go back to a house where they didn’t make their own pasta.