Burn Marks

17

An Aunt’s House

Is Her Castle

Mr. Contreras gets vicarious pleasure from my thrills. He’d heard the excitement last night when Bobby had accosted Robin and me, but he’d still been on his dignity- “I know you like to keep your own business to yourself, doll” was how he put it-and so he’d kept the slavering Peppy inside. And I hadn’t thought I had blessings to count. By the time I’d stepped him through the morgue and the late-night tour of Rapelec Towers, he was palpably jealous.

“Should have taken me with you, doll. They threaten to dump a load of steel on you, I’d of known how to handle it.”

“Indeed you would,” I agreed, blenching slightly. The time or two he’d come to my defense with a pipe wrench still haunts my nightmares. “Thanks for the coffee. I’ve gotta go now-need to see a man about a dog and all that stuff.”

Or a woman about the hair of the dog, I thought grimly as I ran up the stairs to my own place. Time to nail Elena down to some approximation of the truth. I took a perfunctory shower, patted myself dry while pulling on my jeans, tucked my rose silk shirt into the waistband, and headed for the door.

I was just starting to lock it when the phone rang. I sprinted back inside. It was Robin. Robin. I’d forgotten to call him, but he didn’t seem to be bothered by it.

“Everything go okay last night?”

“Depends on what you mean. They wanted me to ID a kid whose body they’d found at a construction site.”

He made sympathetic sounds. “Did you?”

“Yeah. She was black, poor, and an addict, so the odds were against a happy ending, but it was still a shocker.”

“The cops could’ve acted a bit more human to you under the circumstances.”

“I suppose under the circumstances they were trying to jolt me into telling the truth.”

He hesitated a moment. “I don’t want to be a pest, especially after you’ve had a bad night, but have you thought any more about taking on the Indiana Arms investigation? We need to get going.”

I felt a warm little glow under my rib cage. Someone thought I was a competent human being, not a pain in the butt who should mind her own business. Even though I’d made up my mind last night to do the job, it just felt good to have someone-some man-call up and think first that I should be working, not that I should stay home and play with dolls.

“The only trouble is, I don’t know anything about fires. And I don’t think I can educate myself fast enough to do a technical investigation.”

“We don’t need you doing any of the engineering work-we hire a lab to handle that. What you can do is a financial check on the owner, see if he had any kind of motive to set the fire himself. What I hear, you’re about the best for that kind of work.”

The glow expanded from my ribs to my cheeks. “Fine.” I took the owner’s name and address; Saul Seligman on north Estes. He was in his seventies and semiretired, but he went into his office on Irving Park Road most afternoons. I conscientiously wrote down the phone number there as well.

“Could we try dinner again?” Robin asked. “Someplace near my house so the cops don’t arrest you halfway through the evening?”

I laughed. “How about Friday? I’m pretty beat and I have a lot of work the next few days.”

“Great. I’ll call Friday morning to pick a place. Thanks a lot for taking on the case.”

“Yeah, sure.” I hung up.

It was past noon now. If my aunt was still the woman she used to be, she’d just be getting up. I drove with a reckless nervousness, covering the four miles in under ten minutes, and screeched to a halt across from the Windsor Arms. A couple was sitting on the sidewalk, their backs against the building, deep in an argument over whose fault it was that Biffy disappeared. I paused long enough to figure out that Biffy was a cat. The pair didn’t spare me a glance.

I didn’t get much more attention in the lobby. The chatelaine was watching TV in the lounge, her back to me. The five or six people with her were absorbed by the intensity of feeling pounding out of the high-perched screen. One of them looked up but went back to the show as I started up the stairs.

I took them two at a time and jogged down to Elena’s room at a good trot. The door was shut. I tried the knob, then pounded loudly. No answer. I pounded again but didn’t call out-if she recognized me, she’d play possum for the next twenty-four hours.

Finally she yelled in a sleep-thickened voice, “Go away. I’ve got a right to my beauty sleep same as you, you cloth-headed bitch.”

I pounded some more, keeping it up steadily until she yanked the door open under my hand. She tried shutting it in my face as soon as she saw me but I followed her into the room.

“Sorry to break into your beauty rest, Auntie,” I said, smiling gently. “Isn’t it a little risky to call the manager a cloth-headed bitch?”

“Victoria, sweetie. What are you doing here?”

“I came to see you, Elena. I’ve got some bad news about Cerise.”

The violet nightdress still hadn’t been laundered. The mixture of stale beer and sweat it gave off was overpowering. I moved to the window and tried to open it, but it had been painted shut with a lavish hand. I sat on the bed. The mattress was about an inch thick; the springs underneath creaked and a little tendril of iron poked through into my buttock.

“Cerise, sweetie?” She blinked in the dim light. “What about her?”

I looked at her solemnly. “I’m afraid she’s dead. The police came and got me at midnight last night to identify her body.”

“Dead?” she repeated. Her face changed rapidly as she tried to decide how to react, moving from blankness to outrage. It seemed to me that one of the intermediate phases was cunning. Finally a few tears coursed down her veined cheeks.

“You shouldn’t break news to people like this, it’s really wrong of you. I hope you didn’t go pounding your way into Zerlina’s hospital room, waking her up and telling her terrible things about her daughter. Gabriella would be ashamed if she knew what you’d done. Really ashamed. Anyway, I thought you were keeping an eye on that poor little girl. Why did you let her run off and get herself killed?” She was clearly working hard to build up some anger.

“She kind of did it on her own. By the time I got back to Dr. Herschel’s Monday afternoon she’d taken off. I called the cops and asked them to keep a lookout for her, but there’s a lot of city and not enough boys in blue to patrol it. So she died of an overdose in the bottom of an elevator shaft at a construction site.”

Elena shook her head, lips pursed together. “That’s terrible, sweetie, terrible. I can’t take news like that sprung on me so suddenly. Why don’t you go away and let me digest it on my own? I’ll have to see Zerlina, and what I’ll ever say to her-you go on, now, Vicki. You were a good girl to come and tell me but I need to be alone.”

I kept the gentle smile on my face and looked up at her earnestly. “I will, Elena. I’ll go real soon. But first I need you to tell me what little scam you and Cerise had decided to run.”

She pulled herself up and gave me a look of outraged dignity. “Scam, Victoria? That’s a very ungenteel word.”

“But it describes the process to a tee. What money-making scheme had the two of you fixed on?”

“The poor girl isn’t even cold and you come here sullying her memory. I don’t know what Gabriella would say.” She plucked nervously at her gown.

The thought of my mother brought me a smile of pure amusement. “She’d say ‘Tell the truth, Elena-it will hurt coming up but then you’ll feel healthy again.’” Gabriella had held a firm belief in the value of purging.

“Well, irregardless, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I shook my head. “Not good enough, Auntie. You and Cerise showed up on my doorstep full of fear over the fate of poor Katterina. Somehow overnight that evaporated- Cerise pulled a disappearing act and you were playing mighty coy yourself. If either of you had been that worried, you would have figured out some way to get back in touch with me.”

“Cerise probably didn’t have your phone number. She probably couldn’t even remember your last name.”

I nodded. “That wouldn’t surprise me. But all she had to do was wait at Dr. Herschel’s clinic and there I’d be ready-loyal, conscientious, and industrious, or whatever the Scout motto says. No. The two of you had something in mind. Or else you wouldn’t have been so reluctant to tell me Zerlina’s last name.”

“I just didn’t think you should go badgering her-”

“Un-unh. You told Zerlina last Wednesday she couldn’t keep the baby at the Indiana Arms. What’d you do- blackmail her for the price of a bottle. Ugly stuff, Elena, but it saved the kid’s life. You knew when you saw me on Sunday that Zerlina had sent the baby away, I want to know what the hell you were doing, and why you dragged me into it.” The intensity of my feeling brought me to my feet; I glared down at my aunt.

The ready tears filled her eyes. “You get out of here, Victoria Iphigenia. You just leave. I’m sorry I ever even came to you after the fire. You’re just a damned snot-nosed buttinski who can’t show any respect to her elders. You may think you own Chicago but this is my room and I can call the police if you don’t leave.”

I looked around the room and my anger faded, replaced by shame and a wave of hopelessness. Elena couldn’t back up her threat-she didn’t even have a phone. All she had was her duffel bag and her sweaty filthy nightgown. I blinked back tears of my own and left. As I walked away under the empty light fixtures, I could hear her scrabble the key in the lock.

Out front the couple had stopped arguing and were making up over a bottle of Ripple. I walked slowly to my car and sat hunched over the steering wheel. Sometimes life seems so painful it hurts even to move my arms.