Burn Marks

16

Tender Site

As I stumbled behind him in the dark I persuaded him to tell me his name-Leon Garrison. He was a night security man, head of a team working the Rapelec site. His firm, LockStep, specialized in guarding construction projects. It seemed to me part of his anger toward me was hurt pride that someone had climbed onto the premises to die without his knowing about it. He was further annoyed that I’d managed to come in undetected as well. When I explained I’d shouted a couple of times to try to rouse someone it didn’t cheer him any.

He took me down to the bottom in a hoist that ran along the outside of the building, moving the levers with a morose efficiency. When we got off he shone the flashlight in swift arcs in front of him, uncovering coils of wire, boards, loose chunks of concrete. By staying half a step behind him I could see the obstacles in time to avoid them. I had a feeling that disappointed him.

He stopped abruptly in front of a deep square pit. “You know anything about construction?” he demanded.

“Nope.”

That improved his mood, enough that he explained they put the elevators in last, after the shafts were built up to the height of the building and the machinery installed on top. The cradles they rest in go down a good way- they have to be able to cushion the elevators if the cables break or some other ghastly accident occurs.

This building had four banks of eight elevators each. Garrison moved along to the hole where he’d discovered Cerise’s body, looking in each one to make sure no more unwelcome surprises awaited him. When we got to the right one he pointed the flashlight up so I could see the platform supporting the crane some twenty stories overhead. The crane took up the space that the elevators would fill once the place was finished.

Between the depth of the pit and the crane platform swaying gently overhead, I felt a rush of nausea. As I stepped back from the edge I thought I caught a little smirk on Garrison’s face-he’d been trying to upset me.

“Why did you look in here, anyway?” I tried to sound forceful, not as though I was on the brink of throwing up.

“We had a fire in one of the cradles last week. Guys like to dump trash in here on account of it’s an open hole. Someone flipped a butt in and things started burning. I just check to see what kind of rubbish we’re piling up.”

I asked him to shine the flash down into the pit again. A rough-hewn set of slats had been nailed down the side so that you could climb in and out if you wanted to, but it wasn’t at all easy to get into. It was hard to believe Cerise, or any addict, would go to all that work just to find a private place to shoot up.

“How often do you check them?”

“Just once a night, usually. That was near the start of my shift. Since the fire I look in the pits first.”

“And you saw her and called 911?”

He scratched the back of his head behind the hard hat. “Strictly speaking I called August Cray first. He’s in charge of the site at night. He came down here, took a look, and told me to call the police. Then he called the contractor.”

“Wunsch and Grasso?”

“You’d have to ask Cray-this project’s got a bunch of contractors working on it. They need to know if anything special is happening on the site, and I guess you could call a dead body pretty special.”

He seemed to be smirking again, although it was kind of hard to tell in the dark. I wondered where this Cray person had been when I was calling out on the third floor. Anyway, he phoned someone at Wunsch and Grasso, maybe Ernie himself. Then Ernie buzzed his boyhood pal Furey and told him to make sure the building site was clean, that they didn’t get any adverse publicity or any liability suits. That was plausible, even likely, but it didn’t explain why Bobby had been called in and why he was ticked about it.

Unless the boys had used their connection to Boots to get county heat on the investigation? But that didn’t make any sense-they would want to keep the thing as quiet as possible, and getting Boots and the county involved would have the opposite effect. I prodded Garrison as best I could, but he didn’t know whom Cray had called or why the city had sent the head of their Violent Crimes Unit in.

“You see everything you need?” Garrison asked roughly. “I don’t want another relay coming from the cops tonight telling me they forgot one last diddle-shit question. There’s plenty of work to do here.”

“This should do it,” I said. “I think you can feel safe from the police for at least twelve hours.”

“I’d better be.” He snapped off the flash and headed back toward the hoist. “I guess I’d better tell Cray you’ve been here-he likes to know who’s on the site at night.”

We rode back to the third floor. “You’re dressed kind of funny for a cop, aren’t you?’ he said when we got off.

“I’m dressed funny for a construction site,” I corrected. “Even detectives have private lives. Cerise Ramsay’s death interrupted mine.” The memory of Bobby shining his spotlight on Robin and me popped into my head. It seemed funnier now than it had at the time. I bit back a laugh as Garrison knocked on the door to one of the little cubicles.

Cray turned out to be a heavy white man in his late fifties. He eyed me suspiciously as Garrison outlined the reason for my visit.

“You didn’t hear her when she came up here?” the security man asked.

“I was in the John,” Cray answered briefly. “You get what you need here? Next time, call ahead.”

I smiled brightly. “Next time I sure will. Who did you call-Ernie or Ron?-after Garrison told you about the body?”

Cray’s frown deepened. “Does it matter?”

“It kind of does. A dead junkie shouldn’t bring down a senior cop and I’m trying to figure out why.”

“Why not ask your boss that?” He kept a heavy, unpleasant edge to his voice.

“Lieutenant Mallory? I did ask him-he wasn’t saying. Just for the record, he’s not my boss.”

“Just a minute here.” Cray got to his feet. “Let’s see some ID from you.”

I pulled out my wallet and took out the laminated miniature of my PI license to show him.

“You’re not with the police? We went through all that for you and you’re not a cop? Goddamn you, I ought to get your ass arrested.”

I smiled at him again. “I can give you Lieutenant Mallory’s home number if you want to ask him to do it. But I never said I was with the city. I told Mr. Garrison I was a detective. He could have asked for my ID up front. I know Ernie and Ron-I can phone up tomorrow and see who you called.”

“Then do that. Get off my building. Fast. Before some one has an accident and drops a load of steel on your cute little head.”

He was breathing hard. I didn’t see any reason to be so excited, but it seemed to me that the prudent course was to vacate the premises. There are just so many dead bodies a construction site can absorb in one night.

Back in the Chevy I suddenly felt a wave of exhaustion wash over me. My feet were sore; they throbbed inside my pumps. It had really been stupid to subject the poor things to so much rough terrain. I slipped out of them and drove home in my nylons. The cold accelerator pedal felt good against my hot soles.

At the apartment I resisted the temptation to ring Vinnie’s bell. Not out of any nobility of character-I wanted to sleep in and he’d be bound to retaliate in some awful way if I woke him now.

Peppy whimpered behind Mr. Contreras’s door when she heard me go by but thankfully she didn’t start barking. The old man was just deaf enough that he’d sleep through her crying, but not her barking. Upstairs I started shedding clothes as soon as I got inside. By the time I reached my bedroom I was naked. I climbed into bed and was asleep almost immediately.

I slept deeply, but my dreams were filled with Elena and Cerise chasing me through miles of steel beams. I’d think I was in the clear and then suddenly a giant elevator pit would open in front of me. Just as I was backing away Cerise would be there staring at me, naked as she’d been at the morgue, her braids tangled, stretching her arms out and begging me to save her. In the background Velma Riter’s voice echoed against the steel, saying, Mind you own business, Vic, a lot of people think you’re a pain in the butt.

When the ringing phone woke me at ten I came to heavily. I fumbled with the phone before getting the mouthpiece the right way up. “‘Lo,” I mumbled heavily.

“May I speak to Victoria Warshawski, please.”

It was the efficient voice of a professional secretary. I managed to get the idea across that it was me. When she put me on hold I sat up to grapple with a sweatshirt-in case it was a client I didn’t want to be seen naked.

“Vic? Ernie Wunsch. Hope I’m not disturbing you- my girl said she thought she woke you up.”

When he’d dated LeAnn she’d been his girl; now she was his wife and his secretary had become his girl. It was too confusing a concept to put across with my mind so heavy from sleep so I only grunted.

“I had a message a few minutes ago from the Rapelec site saying you’d stopped by there in the middle of the night.”

I grunted again.

“Something wrong we can help you with, Vic? It gets me kind of pissed to think you were going on my site behind my back.”

“Hang on a minute, Ernie, I’ll be right with you.” I put the phone down and went to the bathroom. I didn’t hurry things and on my way back I stopped in the kitchen for a glass of water. By the time I picked the phone up again Ernie was well and truly pissed but my head felt a bit clearer.

“Sorry, Ernie-I was right in the middle of something when you called. You know a young woman was found dead at the site last night.”

“Some black junkie. What business was it of yours?”

“She was a protégée of mine, Ernie. I promised her mother I would look after her and I failed pretty miserably.” I could see Zerlina Ramsay’s strong, anguished face in my mind’s eye and it didn’t cheer me any.

“So?”

“So when I heard she’d died at the Rapelec site I thought I’d better go check it out, see if I could learn any reason she might have gone there.”

“You ever want to talk to my people again, Vic, you check it out with me first. Cray was damned angry that you came there impersonating a police officer. He was all for having you arrested. If I hadn’t known it would embarrass the hell out of Mickey, I would have done it too. You want to play at detective you go do it someplace else.” He sounded downright ugly.

“While I’m playing at detective, Ernie, there is one thing you can tell me-why was it so important to you that somebody really senior come and investigate? If you’d left it with the beat people, they’d have just reported a dead junkie and I probably never even would have heard about it.”

Even as I asked the question, part of the answer came to me. Ernie called Furey because he was a pal and he was with the cops, Furey got Bobby involved. No, that didn’t make sense-Furey would have wanted Mallory to stay far away, to minimize any fuss at the Rapelec site. Well, maybe he’d botched it and hadn’t been able to keep it from Bobby. But that didn’t make sense, because Bobby was pissed at being called in-someone had ordered him to go there when he hadn’t wanted to.

While all this was spinning through my head Ernie said heavily, “Just learn to mind your own business, Vic. Everyone will like you better.”

I was getting kind of peeved at this message. “Oh, go make ugly faces at someone who’s scared of you, Ernie. You don’t impress me any.”

As he hung up I thought I heard him mutter, “I still don’t see what Mickey sees in you.”

And I couldn’t see what a sweetie like LeAnn saw in him. What did she do when he started rattling his chains at her? Probably giggled and said, “Oh, Ernie, don’t be such a crybaby.”

I stumbled into the kitchen for some coffee, my feet tender and swollen from last night’s escapade. Was Ernie angry because he felt I’d undermined his control of his project site? Or was there something specific about Cerise’s death that was bugging him? I couldn’t imagine what, but I couldn’t come up with any reason why Bobby had been dragged unwillingly into the investigation. My brain was still woolly and remote, though, not churning ideas with any facility.

I resisted the temptation to take my coffee to the bathroom and while away the morning soaking my sore toes in the tub. I know that however unappetizing it seems, running is the best antidote to a thick head. Anyway, a big dog like Peppy depends on running for her mental health-it wasn’t fair to leave her to the sedate walks Mr. Contreras could manage.

I grumbled my way to the living room to do my stretches. They took longer than usual. Even so I didn’t feel fully fit when I pulled on my sweats and stomped down the back stairs.

Peppy heard me coming and raced up to greet me. She was always ready to move from deep sleep to intense action without taking time between to loosen up. Recognizing my sweats, she whipped herself into a frenzy, dancing around me several times, rushing to the bottom of the stairs, then darting back up to check my progress. Mr. Contreras came to his back door as we passed.

“Just taking Her Serene Doggedness out for a spin,” I said.

He nodded without speaking and retreated into the kitchen. Still feeling wounded. I gritted my teeth, but didn’t try calling to him. I wasn’t ready to kiss and make up.

I moved up the alley to Belmont at a slow gait, calling Peppy back to me at the intersections, trying to avoid pulling a muscle. At the harbor I finally felt loose enough to actually run full out for the better part of a mile, but I kept it to a jog again as I started back.

I picked Peppy up at her usual spot by the lagoon. She’d found a family of ducks and was diving after them hopefully. Until they finally took off toward the lake she pretended not to hear me calling-a fit response for ignoring her the last couple of days. Then she came loping up to me, tongue out, grinning wickedly-I knew you were calling me all along, but you’ll never be able to prove it.

My head felt a lot cleaner on the way home. Back at the apartment I even felt good enough to make up with Mr. Contreras. I knocked on his kitchen door, told him I’d been up till four on a case, and asked if he had any coffee ready. That made me feel totally virtuous-his coffee is foul, overcooked stuff, and it would be faster for me to brew a fresh pot than to chew the fat with him.

He allowed as how he had some left over from breakfast and opened the door, looking sternly from the dog to me, “Why’d you let the princess go in the water? Let alone it’s only sixty degrees out, the water in that lagoon hasn’t been clean since 1850.”

Characteristic. In order to be forgiven I had to be scolded. I bared my teeth in the semblance of a smile. “I know, I know. I begged and pleaded with her, but you know how it is-lady wants to do something, she does it without taking advice from anyone.”

He gave me a sharp look. “Seems to me I’ve known ladies like that, uh-huh. And then you got to just ride it out until they’re ready to listen to you again.”

I smiled significantly. “That’s right. That’s it exactly. Now, how about some coffee.”