She gave me a quick hug and took off.
32
Flushed Out of the Pocket
I took Art into the living room and poured him a glass of the Barolo. He gulped it down. Water would probably have been just as good under the circumstances.
“Where have you been hiding? Do you know every beat cop in Chicago is carrying your description? Or that your mother’s going crazy?” They weren’t the questions I really wanted to ask, but I couldn’t figure out how to frame those.
His lips stretched in a nervous parody of his usual beautiful smile. “I was at Nancy’s. I figured no one would look there.”
“Hn-unh.” I shook my head. “You’ve been gone since Monday night and I was at Nancy’s on Tuesday with Mrs. Cleghorn.”
“I spent Monday night in my car. Then I figured no one would be bothering with Nancy’s house. I-I could see it had been torn up pretty good. It’s been kind of spooky, but I knew I’d be safe there since they’d already searched it.”
“Who’s ’they’?”
“The people who killed Nancy.”
“And who are they?” I felt as though I was interrogating a jug of molasses.
“I don’t know,” he muttered, looking away.
“But you can guess,” I prodded. “Tell me about the insurance your father manages for Xerxes. What was Nancy’s interest in it?”
“How did you get those papers?” he whispered. “I called my mother this morning, I knew she’d be worried, and she said you had been by. My-my old man-Big Art had found the card you left and really blown sky high, she said. He was screaming that-that if he got his hands on me, he’d see I remembered never to betray him again. That’s why I came here. To see what you know. See if you can help me.”
I looked at him sourly. “I’ve been trying to get you to tell me a few things for the last two weeks and you’ve been acting as though English was your second language and you weren’t too fluent in it.”
He scrunched up his face in misery. “I know. But when Nancy died I was so afraid. Afraid my old man had something to do with it.”
“Why didn’t you run away then? Why wait until I talked to you?”
He flushed an even deeper red. “I thought maybe no one would know-know the connection. But if you saw it, anyone could.”
“Like the police, you mean? Or Big Art?” When he didn’t answer I said with what patience I could muster, “Okay. Why did you come here today?”
“I called my mother this morning. I knew my old man would be at a meeting, that I could count on him not being home. The slate-makers, you know.” He smiled unhappily. “With Washington dead, they were all getting together this morning to plan for the election. Dad-Art-might miss a Council meeting, but he wouldn’t stay away from that.
“Anyway, Mother told me about you. About how you’d been around but then you’d almost ended up the same-the same way as Nancy. I couldn’t stay in her place forever, there was hardly any food anyway and I was scared to turn on the lights at night in case someone saw and came into inspect. And if they were going to go after anyone who knew about Nancy and the insurance, I figured I’d better get help or I’d be dead.”
I curbed my impatience as best I could. It was going to be a long afternoon, getting information from him. The questions that were really burning my tongue-about his family -would have to wait until I could pry his story from him.
The first thing I wanted to clear up was his relationship with Nancy. Since he had let himself into her house he couldn’t very well keep denying they’d been lovers. And the story came out, sweet, sad, and stupid.
He and Nancy had met a year before on a community project. She was representing SCRAP, he the alderman’s office. She’d attracted him immediately-he’d always liked older women who had her kind of looks and warmth and he’d wanted to go out with her right away. But she’d put him off with one excuse or another until a few months ago. Then they’d started dating and had rapidly moved to a full-blown affair. He’d been deliriously happy. She was warm, loving-on and on.
“So why didn’t anyone know about it if you were both so happy?” I asked. I could just see it, barely. When he wasn’t shredding himself with misery his incredible beauty made you want to touch him. Maybe it was enough for Nancy, maybe she thought the aesthetics of it compensated for his immaturity. She might have been cold-blooded enough to want him as a conduit to the alderman’s office, but I didn’t think so.
He shifted uncomfortably. “My dad always raved on so much against SCRAP, I knew he’d hate it if I was dating someone who worked there. He felt they were trying to take over the ward from him, you know, always criticizing things like the broken sidewalks in South Chicago and the unemployment and stuff. It’s not his fault, you know, but when Washington got in charge, you didn’t see a penny going to the white ethnic neighborhoods.”
I opened my mouth to argue the point, then shut it again. South Chicago had begun its demise under the late great Mayor Daley and had been assiduously ignored by Bilandic and Byrne alike. And Art, Sr., had been alderman all that time. But fighting such a war wasn’t going to do me any good this afternoon.
“So you didn’t want him to know. And Nancy didn’t want her friends to know about you, either. Same reason?”
He squirmed again. “I don’t think so. I think-she was a little bit older than me, you know. Only ten years. Well, almost eleven. But I think she was afraid people would laugh at her if they knew she was seeing someone so young.”
“Okay. So it was a big secret. Then she came to you three weeks ago to see if Art was opposed to the recycling plant. What happened then?”
He reached nervously for the wine bottle and poured the last of the Barolo into his glass. When he’d gulped most of it down he started spitting out the story, a bit at a time. He knew Art was against the recycling plant. His dad was working hard to bring new industry to South Chicago, and he was afraid a recycling plant would put some companies off-that they wouldn’t want to operate in a community where they had to go to the extra trouble of putting their wastes in drums for recycling instead of just dumping them into lagoons.
He’d told Nancy that and she had insisted on seeing any files about the project. Apparently, like me, she’d figured it wasn’t worth arguing whether Art, Sr.’s, professed reasons were the real ones.
Young Art hadn’t wanted to do it, but she’d pushed hard. They went back to the insurance office late one night and she went through Art’s desk. It was horrible, the most horrible night he’d ever spent, worrying about his father or his father’s secretary coming in on them, or one of the beat cops seeing a light and surprising them.
“I understand. The first time you break and enter is always the hardest. But why did Nancy choose this insurance file over something about recycling?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. She was looking for anything with the names of any of the companies involved in the recycling plant on it. And then she saw these papers and said she didn’t know we-my dad’s agency-handled Xerxes’s insurance, and then she read through them and said this was hot stuff, she’d better copy it and take it along. So she went down the hall to use the machine. And Big Art came in.”
“Your father saw her?” I gasped.
He nodded miserably. “He had Steve Dresberg with him. Nancy ran, but she scattered the originals all over the floor. So they knew she was copying them.”
“And what did you do?”
His face disappeared into a little ball of such abject shame that I felt almost sorry for him. “They never knew I was there. I hid in my own office with the lights off.”
I didn’t know what to say. That he could have abandoned Nancy to her fate. That he knew Dresberg had been there with his old man. And at the same time the logical part of my mind began worrying about the problem: Was it the insurance papers or was it the fact that Nancy had seen Art with Dresberg? It wasn’t surprising that the alderman had ties to the Garbage King. But it was understandable that he kept
them quiet.
“Don’t you understand?” I finally cried out, my voice close to a howl. “If you’d said something about your father and Dresberg last week, we might have gotten somewhere in investigating Nancy’s death. Don’t you care anything about finding her killers?”
He stared at me through tragic blue eyes. “If it was your father, would you want to know-really know-he was doing that kind of thing? Anyway, he already thinks I’m such a failure. What would he think if I turned him in to the cops? He’d say I was siding with SCRAP and the Washington faction against him.”
I shook my head to see if that would clear my brain, but it didn’t seem to help any. I tried speaking, but every sentence I started ended in a few sputtered words. Finally I asked weakly what he wanted me to do.
“I need help,” he muttered.
“You ain’t kidding, boy. But I don’t know if even a Michigan Avenue analyst could do anything for you, and I’m damned sure I can’t.”
“I know I’m not very tough. Not like you or-or Nancy. But I’m not an imbecile, either. I don’t need you making fun of me. I can’t fix this myself I need help and I thought since you’d been a friend of hers you might…” His voice trailed off.
“Rescue you?” I finished sardonically. “Okay. I’ll help you. In exchange for which I want some information about your family.”
He looked wildly at me. “My family? What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Just tell me. It’s got nothing to do with you. What was your mother’s maiden name?”
“My mother’s maiden name?” he repeated stupidly. “Kludka. Why do you want to know?”
“It wasn’t Djiak? You never heard of that?”
“Djiak? Of course I know the name. My father’s sister married some guy named Ed Djiak. But they moved to Canada before I was born. I’ve never met them-I wouldn’t even have heard of Dad’s sister if I hadn’t seen the name on a letter when I joined the agency-when I asked my father he told me about it-said they’d never gotten along and she’d cut the connection. Why do you want to know about them?”
I didn’t answer him. I felt so nauseated that I leaned my head over onto my knees. When Art had come in with his face all flushed, his auburn hair wildly standing around his head, his resemblance to Caroline had been so strong that they might have been twins. He’d gotten his red hair from his father. Caroline took after Louisa. Of course. How simple. How simple and how horrifying. All the same genes. All in the same family. I just hadn’t wanted to begin thinking such a thing when I saw them side by side. Instead I’d been trying to work out some way Art’s wife could be related to Caroline.
My conversation with Ed and Martha Djiak three weeks earlier came back to me in full force. And with Connie. How her uncle liked to come around and have Louisa dance for him. Mrs. Djiak knew. What had she said? “Men have difficulty controlling themselves.” But that it was Louisa’s fault -that she’d led him on.
My gorge rose so violently, I thought I would choke. Blame her. Blame their fifteen-year-old daughter when it was her own brother who got her pregnant? My one thought was to get out of here, to get down to East Side with my gun and beat the Djiaks until they admitted the truth.
I got up, but the room swam darkly in front of me. I sat back down again, steadying myself, becoming aware of young Art talking frightenedly in the chair across from me.
“I told you what you asked. Now you’ve got to help me.”
“Yeah, right. I’ll help you. Come along with me.”
He started to protest, to demand to know what I was going to do, but I cut him off sharply. “Just come with me. I don’t have any more time right now.”
My tone more than my words stopped him. He watched silently while I got my coat. I tucked my driver’s license and money into my jeans pocket so I wouldn’t be hampered by a purse. He started to stammer some more questions-was I going to shoot his old man?-when he saw me take out the Smith & Wesson and check the clip.
“Shoe’s on the other foot,” I said curtly. “Your father’s buddies have been gunning for me all week.”
He blushed again with shame and lapsed back into silence.
I took him down to Mr. Contreras. “This is Art Jurshak. His papa may have had something to do with Nancy’s death and he isn’t feeling too kindly toward his kid right now. Can you keep him here until I can make some other arrangement for him? Maybe Murray will want to take him.”
The old man preened himself importantly. “Sure thing, doll. I won’t say a word to anybody, and you can count on her highness here to do the same. No need to go asking that Ryerson guy to do anything-I’m perfectly happy to keep him as long as you want.”
I smiled faintly. “After a couple of hours with him you may change your mind-he’s not a lot of fun. Just don’t tell anyone about him. That lawyer-Ron Kappelman-may come around. Say you don’t know where I’ve gone or when I’ll be back. And not a word about your guest.”
“Where are you going, doll?”
I pressed my lips together in a reflex of annoyance, then remembered our truce. I beckoned him into the hall so I could tell him without Art’s hearing. Mr. Contreras came quickly, the dog at his ankles, and nodded gravely to show he remembered both name and address.
“I’ll be here when you come back. I won’t let anyone lure me away tonight. But if you’re not back by midnight, I’m calling Lieutenant Mallory, doll.”
The dog padded after me to the door, but gave a little sigh of resignation when Mr. Contreras called her back. She knew I had my boots on, not my running shoes-she’d just been hoping.
33
A Family Affair
I could hear Mrs. Djiak’s hurried footsteps after I rang the bell. She opened the door, drying her hands on her apron.
“Victoria!” She was horrified. “What are you doing here this late at night? I begged you not to come back again. Mr. Djiak will be furious if he knows you’re here.”
Ed Djiak’s nasal baritone wafted down the hallway, demanding of his wife who was at the door.
“Just-just one of the neighbor children, Ed,” she called back breathlessly. To me she said in a hurried undervoice, “Now go quickly, before he sees you.”
I shook my head. “I’m coming in, Mrs. Djiak. We’re going to talk, all three of us, about the man who got Louisa pregnant.”
Her eyes dilated in her strained face. She grabbed beseechingly at my arm, but I was too angry to feel any compassion for her. I shook her hand from me. Ignoring her piteous cries, I brushed past her into the house and down the hall. I didn’t take my boots off-not to add a deliberate insult to her distress, but because I wanted to be able to leave quickly if I had to.
Ed Djiak was sitting at the table in the immaculate kitchen, a little black-and-white TV in front of him, a beer mug in his hand. He didn’t look up immediately, assuming it was just his wife, but when he saw me his long dark face turned a deep umber.
“You have no business in this house, young woman.”
“I wish I could agree with you,” I said, pulling a chair back from the table to face him. “It nauseates me to be here and I won’t prolong the visit. I just want to talk about Mrs. Djiak’s brother.”
“She doesn’t have a brother,” he said harshly.
“Don’t pretend Art Jurshak isn’t her brother. I don’t think we’d have too much trouble finding Mrs. Djiak’s maiden name-I’d have to wait until Monday, when I could go down to City Hall and check your marriage license, but I expect it’ll say Martha Jurshak. Then I could get copies of Art’s and her birth certificates and that’d probably clinch the matter.”
The umber in his face deepened to mahogany. He turned to his wife. “You damned talkative bitch! Who have you been telling our private affairs to?”
“No one, Ed. Really. I haven’t said a word to anyone. Not once in all these years. Not even to Father Stepanek, when I begged you-”
He cut her off with a slice of his hand. “Who’s been talking to you, Victoria? Who’s
been spreading slander about my family?”
“Slander implies false report,” I responded insolently. “Everything you’ve said since I came into this house confirms that it’s true.”
“That what’s true?” he demanded, recovering himself with a strong effort. “That my wife’s maiden name was Jurshak? What if it was?”
“Just this. That her brother Art got your daughter Louisa pregnant. You told me he wasn’t very strong, Martha. Did he have a history of liking little girls?”
She was wiping her hands over and over in her apron. “He-he promised he would never do it again.”
“Damn you, don’t say anything to her,” Djiak roared, springing from his chair. He shoved past me roughly to where Mrs. Djiak stood and slapped her.
I was on my feet smashing my fist into his face before I realized what I was doing. He was thirty years older than me, but still very strong. It was only because I took him completely by surprise that I managed to hit him full force. He recoiled against the refrigerator and stood for a moment, shaking his head to recover from the blow. Then the ugly anger returned and he came for me.
I was ready. As he charged I slid a chair in his path. He crashed against it, his momentum forcing him and the chair into the table. His fall brought down the TV set and the beer in a jumbled mess of glass and fluid. He lay sprawled under the table, the chair on top of him.
Martha Djiak gave a little moan of horror, whether over the sight of her husband or the mess on the floor I couldn’t know. I stood over him, panting from fury, my gun in my hand barrel-first, ready to smash it into him if he started to get up. His face was glazed-none of his womenfolk had ever fought back against him.
Mrs. Djiak screamed suddenly. I turned to look at her. She couldn’t speak, only point, but I saw a little fire sparkling along the back of the television where something had mixed with the exposed wires. Maybe a jar of solvent that was kept at the ready for oil stains menacing the kitchen. I stuffed the gun back into my jeans waistband and snatched the dish towel from her apron pocket. Carefully skirting the pool of beer, I crawled under the table and unplugged the set.
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