We banked the oars. I looked at my watch. Twelve minutes to cover the half mile or so. It had seemed much longer. I grabbed a steel rung as we slid by and carefully pulled the dinghy up next to it. Ms. Chigwell tied the painter with practiced hands. My heart was beating hard enough to suffocate me, but she seemed utterly calm.
We pulled dark caps down low on our foreheads. We clasped hands for a moment, her compulsive squeeze showing what her impassive face hid. I pointed at my watch in an exaggerated movement and she nodded calmly.
Pulling my gun out and releasing the safety, I scrambled up the ladder, my right hand bare so that I could feel the trigger of the Smith & Wesson. I slowed down at the top, cautiously raising my dark-hatted head so that just my eyes came above the bank. If I cried out, Ms. Chigwell would row as fast as she could back to the car and raise an alarm.
I was at the back of the plant, at the concrete platform where the barge had been tied the last time I’d visited the place. Tonight the steel doors surrounding the loading bay were rolled shut and padlocked. Two spotlights at the corners of the building cut the haze around me. As nearly as I could tell no one was anticipating a river approach.
I slid my gun hand over the top of the bank and kept the Smith & Wesson in front of me as I hoisted myself onto land. I rolled over and lay still for a count of sixty. That was Ms. Chigwell’s signal to start the climb herself I could just make out the change in the darkness as her head popped over the edge of the bank-anyone farther away wouldn’t be able to see her. She waited another count of twenty, then joined me on the loading platform.
The steel doors lay in a shadow cast by the projecting roof We moved close to them, trying not to touch them-the sound of arms or gun brushing on steel would vibrate like a reggae band in the still night.
In front of us the spotlights turned the fog into a heavy curtain. Using its draperies as a shield, we moved slowly around to the north end of the plant where the clay-banked lagoons lay. Ms. Chigwell moved with the practiced silence of a lifelong second-story woman.
As soon as we rounded the comer we moved into thicker fog and danker smells. No lights shone on the lagoons. We sensed their pungent presence to our right but didn’t dare use the flash. Ms. Chigwell stayed close to me, holding my muffler, feeling her way cat-footed behind me in the dark. After an eternity of careful steps, moving slowly through ruts, sidestepping metal scraps, we reached the front end of the plant.
The fog was thinner here. We crouched behind some steel drums and peered cautiously around them. A single light burned at the gate leading into the yard. After looking for a long moment I could make out a man standing near the entrance. A sentry or lookout. An ambulance was in the center of the drive. I wished I knew if Louisa was still in it.
“Is she going to show up or not?”
The unexpected voice near my left startled me so much, I almost knocked myself against the steel drum. I recovered, trembling, trying to control my breathing. Next to me, Ms. Chigwell remained as impassive as ever.
“It’s been a little over two hours. We’ll give her until one. Then we’ll have to decide what to do with the Djiak woman.” The second voice belonged to my anonymous phone caller.
“She’ll have to go into the lagoon. We can’t afford any more traces.”
Now that my heart had settled to a less tumultuous pace, I recognized the first speaker. Art Jurshak, showing a strong family feeling for his niece.
“You can’t.” The second man spoke with his usual uninterested coldness. “The woman’s going to die soon anyway. We’ll just get the doctor to give her a little shot and return her to her bed. Her daughter will find she died in the night.”
At the mention of the doctor it was Ms. Chigwell’s turn to tremble a little.
“You’re losing it,” Art said angrily. “How’re you going to get her back into the house without the daughter seeing you? Anyway, she’ll know her mother’s gone-she’s probably roused the neighborhood by now as it is. Better just dispose of Louisa here and set a trap for Warshawski someplace else. It’d be best if they were both gone.”
“I’ll do it for you,” the cold voice said flatly. “I’ll get rid of them both and the daughter, too, if you want. But I can’t if I don’t know why you’re so desperate to see them put away. It wouldn’t be ethical.” He used the last word without any hint of irony.
“Damn you, I’ll take care of things myself,” Art muttered furiously.
“Fine,” the voice said irritatingly. “Either way it’s fine. You tell me what they know and I’ll have that, or you kill them yourself and I’ll have that. It’s a matter of complete indifference to me.”
Jurshak was silent for a minute. “I’d better see how the doc is making out.”
His footsteps echoed and disappeared. He’d gone inside. So Louisa wasn’t in the ambulance. Presumably one of the flat-voiced man’s sidekicks was waiting in its interior instead of Louisa-they’d left it temptingly in the middle of the yard so I’d head straight to it.
How to get past the cold-voiced man standing at the entrance was a tougher question. If I sent Ms. Chigwell out as a diversion, she’d be a dead diversion. I was wondering if we could jimmy a door or a window around the side when the man solved the problem for us. He strolled out to the center of the yard, where he stopped to knock on the back of the ambulance. The rear door opened a crack. He stood talking through the opening.
I tapped Ms. Chigwell on the shoulder. She stood up with me and we sidled slowly to the shadow of the wall. While we watched, the ambulance door shut again and the cold-voiced man wandered on out to the gate. As soon as he was on the far side of the vehicle, I crouched low and sprinted around the comer to the plant entrance. Ms. Chigwell’s footsteps sounded softly behind me. The ambulance shielded us from the view of the gate sentry and we made it inside without hearing any outcry.
We were on a concrete apron outside the plant floor. The sliding steel curtain that separated the manufacturing area from the main entrance was shut, but a normal-sized door next to it stood ajar. We quickly darted through it, shutting it softly behind us, and found ourselves immediately in the plant.
We walked on tiptoe, although the noises around us would have drowned any sounds we made. The pipes let out their intermittent belches of steam and the cauldrons bubbled ominously under the dull green safety lights. Fritz Lang had invented this room. Presently we would come to the end and find only cameramen and laughing actors. A drop of liquid fell on me and I jumped, convinced I’d been poisoned with a toxic dose of Xerxine.
I glanced at Ms. Chigwell. She was looking straight ahead, ignoring the spitting from above as assiduously as she avoided the obscene graffiti scrawled on the huge “No Smoking” signs. Suddenly, though, she bit back a cry. I followed her eyes to the far comer of the room. Louisa lay there on a stretcher. Dr. Chigwell stood on one side of her, Art Jurshak on the other. The two of them stared at us, slack-jawed.
Dr. Chigwell found his voice first. “Clio! What are you doing here?”
She marched forward fiercely. I held her arm to keep her from getting within Jurshak’s grabbing range.
“I came to find you, Curtis.” Her voice was sharp and carried authoritatively over the hissing pipes. “You’ve gotten yourself involved with some very nasty people. I presume you’ve spent the last week or so with them. I don’t know what Mother would say if she were alive to see you, but I think it’s time you came back home again. Well help Miss Warshawski get this poor sick woman back into the ambulance and then you and I will return to Hinsdale.”
I had my gun leveled at Art. Sweat stood out on his round face, but he said pugnaciously, “You can’t shoot. Chigwell here has a needle ready to inject Louisa. If you shoot me, it’s her death warrant.”
“I’m overcome, Art, by your family feeling. If this is the first time you’ve seen your niece in twenty-seven years or so, your reaction would move even Klaus Barbie to tears.”
Art made a violent gesture. He tried shouting at m
e, but the messages-guilt over his long-forgotten incest, fear of others finding it out, rage at seeing me alive-kept him from getting out anything coherent.
“Is this woman his niece?” Ms. Chigwell demanded of me.
“Yes, indeed,” I said loudly. “And she has closer ties to you than that, doesn’t she, Art?”
“Curtis, I will not tolerate your killing this unfortunate young woman. And if she is your friend’s niece, it is absolutely unthinkable that you do so. It would be unethical and totally unworthy of you as the inheritor of Father’s practice.”
Chigwell looked at his sister dejectedly. He shrank a little inside his overcoat and his hands hung loosely at his sides. If I acted now, he wouldn’t do anything to Louisa.
I was bracing myself to take a flying leap at Art when I saw malice replace the frustration in his face-he was watching someone come up behind us.
Without glancing around, I seized Ms. Chigwell and rolled with her behind the nearest vat. When I looked up I saw a man in a dark overcoat stroll into the area where we’d been standing. I knew his face-I’d seen it on TV or the papers or in court when I’d been a public defender-I just couldn’t place it.
“You took your fucking time, Dresberg,” Jurshak snapped. “Why’d you let that Warshawski bitch in here to begin with?”
Of course. Steve Dresberg. The Garbage King. Majestic slayer of little flies buzzing around his trash empire.
He spoke in the cold, flat voice that made the hairs prickle along my spine. “She must’ve cut her way under the fence and come in when I was out talking to the boys. I’ll get them to go take care of her car when we’re done here.”
“We’re not done here yet, Dresberg,” I announced from my nook. “Too much success has gone to your head, made you careless. You should never have tried to kill me the same way you did Nancy. You’re getting soft, Dresberg. You’re a loser now.”
My taunts didn’t move him. He was a pro, after all. He lifted his left hand from his coat pocket and pointed a large gun-maybe a Colt.358-at Louisa. “Come out now, girlie, or your sick friend here will be dead a few months before her time.” He didn’t look at me-a message that I was too trivial for direct attention.
“I listened to you and Art out front,” I called. “The two of you agreed she’s as good as dead already. But you’d better get me first, because if you shoot at her, you’re dead meat.”
He swung so fast, I didn’t have time to drop before he fired. The bullet went wide as the shot boomed in the cavernous room. Ms. Chigwell crouched, white but stern, on the floor next to me. Unbidden, she took her keys from her sweater pocket. While she moved to one side of our protective vat, I slid to the other. When I nodded she darted around the end of the vat and hurled her keys at Dresberg’s face.
He fired at the movement. From the corner of my eye I saw Ms. Chigwell drop. I couldn’t go to her now. I got behind Dresberg and fired at him. The first shot went by him, but as he turned to face me I got him twice in the chest. Even then he fired two more rounds before collapsing.
I ran to him and jumped on his gun arm with all my force. His fingers loosened on the revolver. Jurshak was moving up on me, hoping to wrestle Dresberg’s gun away before I could get to it. Fury was riding me, though, choking the breath from me, covering my eyes with a hazy film. I shot Jurshak in the chest. He gave an enraged cry and fell in front of me.
Chigwell had stood next to Louisa’s stretcher throughout the fracas, his hands flaccidly at his side, his head hunched into his coat. I went over to him and slapped his face. I meant at first just to rouse him from his stupor, but my rage was consuming me so that I found myself pounding him over and over, screaming at him that he was a traitor to his oath, a miserable worm of a man, on and on, over and over. I might have kept at him until his body joined Jurshak and Dresberg on the floor, but through the haze I felt a tug on my arm.
Ms. Chigwell had staggered over, trailing blood on the dirty concrete. “He’s all of that, Miss Warshawski. All that and more. But let him be. He’s an old man and not likely to change at this time of life.”
I shook my head, exhausted and sick. Sick of the stench in the plant, of the foulness of the three men, of my own destructive rage. My gorge rose; I skipped behind a vat to throw up. Wiping my face with a Kleenex, I returned to Ms. Chigwell. The bullet had grazed her upper arm, leaving a bloody furrow of singed flesh but no deep wound. I felt a small measure of relief
“We’ve got to get into an office, someplace we can secure, and call the police. There’re at least three more men outside and you and I are not taking on any more thugs tonight. We’ve got to move fast before they start worrying about Dresberg and come looking for him. Can you hold out awhile longer?”
She nodded gamely and helped me bully her brother into showing us the way to his old office. I pushed Louisa’s stretcher behind them. She was still alive, her breath coming in short shallow gasps.
When we were inside with the door locked I moved Louisa into the tiny examining room to one side of the office. With the remaining shreds of my strength, I pushed the heavy metal desk athwart the door. I sank to the floor and pulled the phone down next to me.
“Bobby? It’s me. Sorry to wake you, but I need your help. Lots of help and fast.” I explained what had happened as clearly as I could. It took a few tries to get him to understand me and even then he was skeptical.
“Bobby!” My voice cracked. “You’ve got to come. I have an old woman with a bullet wound and Louisa Djiak with some awful drug in her and three thugs prowling outside. I need you.” The anguish got through to him. He took directions to the plant and hung up before I could say anything else.
I sat for a moment with my head in my hands, wanting nothing more than to lie down on the floor and cry. Instead I forced myself to stand up, to release the half-empty clip and slip in a full one.
Chigwell had taken his sister into the little examining room to patch up her arm. I wandered in to look at Louisa. While I stood there her eyelids fluttered open.
“Gabriella?” she said scratchily. “Gabriella, I might’ve known you wouldn’t forget me in my troubles.”
39
Plant Clean-Up
Louisa went back to sleep while I held her hand. When her weak grasp had relaxed I turned to Chigwell and demanded fiercely what he had given her.
“Just-just a sedative,” he said, licking his lips nervously. “Just morphine. She’ll sleep a lot for the next day, that’s all.”
From her seat at the desk Ms. Chigwell gave him a look of scalding contempt, but seemed too exhausted to put her feelings into words. I fixed a pallet for her in the examining room, but she came from a generation too modest to lie down in public. Instead she sat upright in the old office chair, her eyelids drooping in her white face.
Fatigue was combining with the tension of waiting to drive me into a frenzy of nervous irritation. I kept checking my barricades, moving into the examining room to listen to Louisa’s shallow, gasping breaths, back to the office to look at Ms. Chigwell.
Finally I turned on the doctor, putting all my feverish energy into prying his story from him. It made a short, unedifying tale. He had worked so many years with the Xerxes blood tests that he’d managed to forget one niggling little detail: He wasn’t letting people know he thought they might be getting sick. When I showed up asking questions about Pankowski and Ferraro, he’d gotten scared. And when Murray’s reporters had shown up he’d become downright terrified. What if the truth came out? It would mean not just malpractice suits but terrible humiliation at Clio’s hands-she’d never let him forget that he hadn’t lived up to their father’s standard. That comment brought him the only fleeting sympathy he had from me-his sister’s fierce ethics must be hell to live with.
When the doctor’s suicide attempt failed he didn’t know what to do. Then Jurshak had called-Chigwell knew him from his workdays in South Chicago. If Chigwell would give them a little simple help, they would arrange for any evidence against him to be sup
pressed.
He’d had no choice, he muttered-to me, not his sister. When he learned all they wanted was for him to give Louisa Djiak a strong sedative and look after her down at the plant for a few hours, he was happy to comply. I didn’t ask him how he felt about going one step further and giving her a fatal injection.
“But why?” I demanded. “Why go through that charade to begin with if you weren’t going to give employees their results?”
“Humboldt told me to,” he mumbled, looking at his hands.
“I could have guessed that part!” I snapped. “But why in God’s name did he tell you to?”
“It-uh-it had to do with the insurance,” he muttered in the back of his throat.
“Spit it out, Curtis. You’re not leaving until I know, so say it and get it over with.”
He stole a look at his sister, but she sat white and still, lost in her own cloud of exhaustion.
“The insurance,” I prompted.
“We could see-Humboldt knew-we had too many health claims, too many people were losing work time. First our health insurance began going up, way up, then we were dropped by Ajax Assurance and had to find another company. They’d done a study, they told us our claims were too high.”
My jaw dropped. “So you got Jurshak to act as your fiduciary and screw up the data so you could prove you were insurable to another carrier?”
“It was just a way of buying time until we could figure out what the problem was and fix it. That was when we started doing the blood studies.”
“What was happening on the workers’ comp side?”
“Nothing. None of the illnesses were compensable.”
“Because they weren’t work related?” My temples ached with the effort of following his convoluted tale. “But they were. You were proving they were with all that blood data.”
Blood Shot Page 29