“Not at all, young lady.” For a moment his pompous side reasserted itself “That data did not establish causality. It merely enabled us to project medical expenses and the probable turnover of the work force.”
I was too appalled to speak. His words came out so glibly that they must have been spoken hundreds of times at committee meetings or before the board of directors. Let’s just see what our work-force costs will be if we know that X percent of our employees will be sick Y fraction of the time. Run different cost projections tediously by hand in the days before computers. Then someone has the bright idea-get hard data and we’ll know for sure.
The enormity of the whole scheme made me murderous with rage. Louisa’s harsh breath in the background added fuel to my fury. I wanted to shoot Chigwell where he sat, then ride off to the Gold Coast and plug Humboldt. That bastard. That cynical, inhuman murderer. Anger swept through me in waves, making me weep.
“So no one got their proper life or health coverage just to save you guys a few miserable stupid dollars.”
“Some of them did,” Chigwell muttered. “Enough to keep the wrong people from asking questions. This woman here did. Jurshak said he knew her family so he was obligated to look after her.”
At that I thought I really would commit murder, but a movement from Ms. Chigwell caught my attention. Her gaunt face was unchanged, but she’d apparently been listening despite her seeming remoteness. She tried holding out a hand to me, but her strength wasn’t up to the task. Instead she said in the thread of a voice:
“What you’re describing is too heinous to discuss, Curtis. We’ll talk tomorrow about our arrangements. We can’t go on living together after this.”
He deflated again, shrinking inside himself without speaking. He probably couldn’t think beyond tonight, with its threat of arrest and prison. Perhaps other horrors were adding to the gray pallor around his mouth, but I didn’t think so-I didn’t think he had enough imagination to picture what he’d really been doing as the Xerxes doctor. Maybe being booted into the cold by the sister who had always protected him was punishment enough-maybe it would hurt him worse than anything I could do.
Exhausted, I returned to the examining room to look at Louisa again. Her shallow breathing seemed unchanged. She muttered in her sleep-something about Caroline, I couldn’t make out what.
It was then that the shots started. I looked at my watch: thirty-eight minutes since I’d called Bobby. It had to be the police. Had to be. I forced my weary shoulders into action, moving the desk back from the door. Telling my charges to stay put, I turned out the room lights and crept back to the plant. Another five minutes passed, and then the place was filled with boys in blue. I moved out from the cover of one of the vats to talk to them.
It took awhile to get things sorted out-who I was, why an alderman was lying in his own blood next to Steve Dresberg on a factory floor, what Louisa Djiak and the Chigwells were doing there. You know-all the usual stuff.
When Bobby Mallory showed up at three we started moving faster. He listened to my worries about Louisa for about thirty seconds, then had one of the men send for a fire department ambulance to take her to Help of Christians. Another ambulance had already carted Dresberg and Jurshak to County Hospital. Both were still alive, their futures uncertain.
I snatched a minute in the confusion to call Lotty, let her know the bare bones of what had happened and that I was unhurt. I told her not to wait up, but in my secret heart I begged her to.
When the state police arrived they assigned a car to ferry the Chigwells home. They’d wanted to send Ms. Chigwell to a hospital for observation, but she was adamant about returning to her own home.
Before Mallory came I’d been telling everyone that Jurshak had lured Chigwell down to the plant with a tale about finding a half-dead employee on the premises. Ms. Chigwell hadn’t let him go alone this late at night and the two found themselves caught in the cross fire. Bobby looked narrowly at me, but finally agreed to my version when it was clear he wasn’t going to get anything else from the doctor or his sister.
Bobby left me squatting wearily against a pillar on the plant floor while he conferred with the Fifth District commander. The light winking from uniform jackets and hardware made me dizzy; I shut my eyes, but I couldn’t keep out the clamor, or the murky Xerxine smell. What would my creatine level be after tonight? I pictured my kidneys filled with lesions-blood-red with black holes in them, oozing Xerxine. Someone shook me roughly. I opened my eyes. Sergeant McGonnigal was standing over me, his square face displaying unusual concern.
“Let’s get you outside-you need some fresh air, Vic.”
I let him help me to my feet and stumbled after him to the loading bay, where the police had rolled back the steel doors leading to the river. The fog had lifted; stars showed little yellow pricks in the polluted heavens. The air was still pungent with the scent of many chemicals but the cold made it fresher than it was inside the plant. I looked down at the water glinting black in the moonlight and shivered.
“You’ve had a pretty rough night.”
McGonnigal’s voice held just the right level of concern. I tried not to imagine him learning how to talk to difficult witnesses like that at a seminar in Springfield-I tried to think he really cared about the horrors I’d been through. After all, we’d known each other six or seven years.
“A little exhausting,” I admitted.
“You want to tell me about it, or do you want to wait to talk to the lieutenant?”
So it was role-playing from a seminar. My shoulders sagged a bit farther. “If I tell you, will I have to repeat it to Mallory? It’s not a story I feel like going over more than once.”
“You know the cops, Warshawski-we never take any story just once. But if you’ll give me the outline tonight, I’ll make sure that does for now-get you home while there’s still a little left of the night to sleep in.”
Maybe there was a little personal concern mixed in. Not enough to make me tell the whole truth and nothing but-I mean, I wasn’t going to explain about the doctor’s medical texts. And certainly not Jurshak’s relations with Louisa. But after I’d pulled a crate over to the water’s edge and sat on it, I gave him more details than I’d originally planned to.
I started with the call from Dresberg. “He knew Louisa was important to me-my mother had looked after her when she was pregnant and they’d been pretty good friends. So they must have realized she was one person I’d come out here to help.”
“Why didn’t you call us then?” McGonnigal asked impatiently.
“I didn’t know how you’d manage a quiet assault. They had her in the back of the plant here-they’d simply have murdered her if they figured they were under attack. I wanted to sneak in here myself.”
“And just how did you manage that? They had a lookout where the road turns off to here and another guy at the gates. Don’t tell me you sprayed some amnesiac in the air and slid by them.”
I shook my head and pointed at the dinghy floating below us. The floodlights overhead picked up the incredulity in McGonnigal’s face.
“You rowed up the river in that? Come on, Warshawski. Get real.”
“It’s the truth,” I said stubbornly. “Believe it or not. Ms. Chigwell was with me-it’s her boat.”
“I thought you said they’d come here together.”
I nodded. “I knew if I told you the truth, you’d keep her and her brother here all night and they’re too old for that. Besides, she got shot in the arm, even if it did just graze her -she should have been in bed hours ago.”
McGonnigal pounded the crate with the flat of his hand. “You don’t have an armlock on empathy, Warshawski. Even the police are capable of showing concern for a couple as old as the Chigwells. Can’t you drop your sixties ‘Off the Pigs’ mentality for five minutes and let us do our job? You could have been killed and gotten the Djiak woman and your elderly friends knocked off in the bargain.”
“For your information,” I said coldly, “my father was a b
eat cop and I never in my life referred to the police as pigs. Anyway, no one got killed, not even those two pieces of shit who deserved it. Do you want to hear the rest of my story or would you rather get up in your pulpit and preach at me some more?”
He sat stiffly for a moment. “I guess I can see why Bobby Mallory shows up at his worst around you. I was bragging to myself that I was going to show the lieutenant what a younger officer with sensitivity training could do with a witness like you, and I blew it in five minutes. Finish your story -I won’t criticize your methods.”
I finished my story. I told him I didn’t know how Chigwell had gotten hooked up with Jurshak and Dresberg, but that they’d forced him to come along tonight to look after Louisa. And that Ms. Chigwell was worried about him, so when I showed up with my crazy suggestion that we row up the Calumet and sneak up on the plant from the rear, she jumped at the chance.
“I know she’s seventy-nine, but sailing’s been her hobby since she was a kid and she sure handled her oar splendidly. So then we got here, and we had a lucky break-Jurshak went into the plant and Dresberg walked off to check on the people in the ambulance. Who was in it? Is that who shot at you guys when you showed up?”
“No, that was the sentry,” McGonnigal explained. “He tried making a run for it. Someone got him in the abdomen.”
I suddenly realized that Caroline Djiak didn’t know where her own mother was. I explained the problem to McGonnigal. “She’s probably roused the mayor by now. I should call her if I can get back into one of the offices.”
He shook his head. “I think you’ve done enough running around for one evening. I’ll send a uniformed man over to her house-then she can get an escort down to the hospital if she wants. I’ll run you home.”
I thought it over. Maybe I’d just as soon not include a close encounter with Caroline in the night’s strains.
“Could we go pick up my car? It’s down on Stony a half mile or so.”
He pulled out his walkie-talkie and summoned a uniformed officer-my pal Mary Louise Neely. She saluted him smartly, but I could see she was eyeing me curiously. So maybe she was human after all.
“Neely, I want you to drive Ms. Warshawski and me down the road to pick up her car. Then go to the address she gives you on Houston.” He sketched the situation with Caroline and Louisa.
Officer Neely nodded enthusiastically-it’s a break to be signaled out for a special assignment from among so many. Even though it was just chauffeuring duty, it gave her a chance to make an impression on a senior man. She trailed behind us as McGonnigal went to tell Bobby what we were doing.
Bobby agreed reluctantly-he wasn’t going to contradict his sergeant in front of me or a uniformed officer. “But you’re talking to me tomorrow, Vicki, whether you like it or not. You hear?”
“Yeah, Bobby. I hear. Just wait until the afternoon-I’ll be a lot more cooperative if I get some sleep.”
“Yeah, princess. You private operators work when you feel like it and leave the garbage for the cops to sweep up. You’ll talk to me when I’m ready for you.”
The light was dancing in my eyes again. I had moved beyond fatigue to a state where I’d start hallucinating if I wasn’t careful. I followed McGonnigal and Neely into the night without trying to respond.
40
Night Shakes
When Officer Neely had dropped us at my car, I dug the keys from my jeans pocket and handed them wordlessly to McGonnigal. He turned the car in the rutted yard while I leaned back in the passenger seat, releasing it so it was almost horizontal.
I was sure I’d fall asleep as soon as I lay back, but images from the night kept exploding in my head. Not the silent trip up the Calumet-that had already faded to the surreal world of half-remembered dreams. Louisa lying on the cart at the end of the plant, Dresberg’s cold indifference, waiting for the police in Chigwell’s office. I hadn’t been afraid at the time, but the recurring pictures gave me the shakes now. I tried clenching my arms against the sides of the seat to control the shaking.
“It’s aftershock.” McGonnigal’s voice came clinically in the dark. “Don’t be ashamed of it.”
I pulled the seat back to its upright position. “It’s the ugliness,” I said. “The horrible reasons Jurshak had for doing it, and the fact that Dresberg isn’t a man anymore, he’s an unfeeling death machine. If they’d just been a couple of punks jumping me in an alley, I wouldn’t feel this way.”
McGonnigal reached out an arm and groped for my left hand. He squeezed it reassuringly but didn’t speak. After a minute his fingers stiffened; he withdrew them and concentrated on turning onto the Calumet Expressway.
“A good investigator would take advantage of your fatigue and get you to explain what Jurshak’s horrible reasons were.”
I braced myself in the dark, trying to prepare my wits. Never speak without thinking. A cardinal rule to my clients in my public defender days. First the cops wear you out, then they show you some sympathy, then they get you to spill your guts.
McGonnigal tried taking the Chevy up to eighty, but slowed to seventy when it started vibrating. Police privilege.
“I expect you have some cover story ready,” he went on, “and it’d really be police brutality to force you to keep it up when you’re this tired.”
After that the temptation to tell him everything I knew became nearly irresistible. I forced myself to watch what aspect of landscape one could see from the expressway canyons, to push away the picture of Louisa’s disoriented gaze confusing me with Gabriella.
McGonnigal didn’t speak again until we were passing the Loop exits and then it was only to ask for Lotty’s address.
“Would you like to come back to Jefferson Park with me instead?” he asked unexpectedly. “Have a brandy, unwind?”
“Spill all my secrets in bed after the second drink? No-don’t get upset, that was supposed to be a joke. You just couldn’t tell in the dark.” It sounded appealing, but Lotty would be anxiously awaiting me-I couldn’t leave her hanging. I tried explaining this to McGonnigal.
“She’s the one person I never lie to. She’s-not my conscience-the person who helps me see who I really am, I guess.”
He didn’t answer until he’d pulled off the Kennedy at Irving Park. “Yeah, I understand. My grandfather was like that. I was trying to picture myself in your situation with him waiting up for me; I’d have to go back too.”
They didn’t teach that in any seminar in Springfield. I asked about his grandfather. He’d died five years ago.
“The week before my promotion came through. I was so mad I almost resigned-why couldn’t they have given it to me when he was still alive to see it? But then I could hear him saying, ‘What do you think, Johnnie-God runs the universe with you in mind?’” He laughed a little to himself “You know, Warshawski, I’ve never told that to another soul?”
He pulled up in front of Lotty’s place.
“How’re you going to get home?” I asked.
“Umm, I’ll summon a squad car. They’ll be glad to have an excuse to leave the mayhem in Uptown for a chance to drive me.”
He held the keys out to me. Under the sodium light I could see his eyebrows lift in inquiry. I leaned across the seat divider and put my arms around him and kissed him. He smelled of leather and sweat, human smells that made me wriggle closer to him. We sat like that for several minutes, but the ashtray in the divider was digging into my side.
I pulled away. “Thanks for the ride, Sergeant.”
“A pleasure, Warshawski. We serve and protect, you know.”
I invited him to come up and call a squad car from Lotty’s but he said he’d do it from the street, that he needed the night air. He watched while I undid the lobby locks, then sketched a wave and walked off.
Lotty was in her sitting room, still in the dark skirt and sweater she’d put on for the hospital seven hours earlier. She was flicking the pages of The Guardian, making only a pretext of interest in Scottish economic woes. She put the paper
down as soon as she saw me.
It felt like home to nestle in her arms; I was glad I’d decided to come back here instead of going off with McGonnigal. While she bathed my face and fed me hot milk, I told her the night’s tale, the strange ride up the river, my fears, Ms. Chigwell’s indomitable courage. She frowned deeply over Chigwell’s betrayal of his medical vows. Lotty knows there are unethical doctors but she never likes to hear about them.
“The worst part in a way was when Louisa woke up and thought I was Gabriella,” I said as Lotty led me into the spare room. “I don’t want to be back there, you know, back in South Chicago cleaning up behind the Djiaks the way my mother did.”
Lotty slid my clothes off with practiced medical fingers. “A little late to be worrying about that, my dear-it’s all you’ve been doing this last month.”
I made a face-maybe I would have been better off with the sergeant after all.
Lotty pulled the covers over me. I was asleep before she’d turned out the light, falling deep into dreams of mad boat journeys, of scaling cliffs while being attacked by eagles, of Lotty waiting at the top for me saying, “A little late to be worrying, isn’t it, Vic?”
When I woke at one the next afternoon I was unrefreshed. I lay for a bit in a drowsy lethargy, stiff both mentally and physically. I wanted to lie there indefinitely, to drift to sleep until Lotty came home and took care of me. The last few weeks had taken from me any ability to find pleasure in what I did for a living. Or indeed any reason for continuing it.
If I had been able to follow my mother’s dreams, I’d be my generation’s Geraldine Farrar, sharing intimate moments across a concert stage with James Levine. I tried imagining what it would be like, to be talented and pampered and wealthy. If someone like Gustav Humboldt came after me, I’d have my press agent whip up a few paragraphs for the Times and call the police superintendent-who would be my lover-to knock him down a few pegs.
And when I was worn out some other person would stagger to the bathroom on badly swollen feet to try to clear her head under a cold-water tap. She would make my phone calls, run my errands, suffer hideous hardships for me. If I had time, I would thank her graciously.
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