Burn Marks

24

Asleep in a Basement Room

I spent the night at Robin’s. He was a sweet and thoughtful lover, but he couldn’t wipe the decay of north Lawndale from my mind. Falling into a fitful sleep around one, I was jerked awaked by a dream in which I was walking up Christiana while a car trailed me. I woke up just before it ran over me.

I fumbled around on the night table for my watch. Squinting in the dark, I could just make out the hands: four-ten. I lay down again and tried to go back to sleep. In a strange bed, though, with the memory of a bad dream lingering, I couldn’t relax. Finally, a little after five, I gave it up and tiptoed into the bathroom with my clothes.

In the kitchen I found a spiral notebook next to the phone. I tore out a page and scribbled a note to Robin, explaining why I was taking off, and slipped out quietly.

At five-thirty the city was barely coming to life. Lights burned in a number of apartment windows-this was a neighborhood of hard workers who started the day early- but I was alone on the road until I hit a main artery.

When I got to my own place I felt tired enough to go back to bed. This time I managed to sleep until eight. When I got up again I felt groggy and disoriented. I pulled on a sweatshirt and a pair of underpants and sat in the kitchen reading the paper and drinking coffee until past nine when Furey called.

“I thought you were going to phone me last night, Vic.”

I didn’t like the angry impatience in his tone. “I thought so, too, Michael, but it slipped my mind. If I’d had anything to report, I might have remembered, but the woman wouldn’t even let me in the front door.”

“Why don’t you give me her name and I’ll give it a try?” He dropped the anger for indulgent coaxing.

“Why don’t you give it a rest, Furey? Elena isn’t doing anyone any harm out there. You must have a godzillian murders and rapes and stuff to keep you happy. She’ll turn up in due course, drunk and repentant, and in the meantime I don’t think she needs all this city money lavished on her.”

“The only reason we’re doing it is because Uncle Bobby wanted to save you the embarrassment of bailing her out of women’s court,” he said stiffly. “If I had any say in the matter, I wouldn’t be wasting time looking for her.”

“Then I’ll call Bobby and tell him I don’t care.” I caught sight of the clock and suddenly remembered my time lines. Damn it all. I should have been at Daley Center twenty minutes ago to get a jump on Darrough Graham’s project.

“Sorry, Michael-I’ve got to run.”

“Wait, Vic,” he said urgently. “Don’t tell the lieutenant. He’d take a stripe off my butt if he knew I’d been complaining to you.”

“Okay,” I agreed, irritated, “but in that case, stop riding me. The second I see her or hear from her I’ll let you know. Good-bye.”

I slammed down the receiver and ran into my bedroom. As I was zipping my jeans the phone rang again. I let it go at first, thinking it was probably Furey, then gave in to the pressure of the bell.

“I want Victoria Warshawski.” The accented voice belonged to the man I’d spoken to yesterday at Alma Mejicana.

He pronounced it “Warchassy.” After saying it correctly I asked who wanted her.

“This is Luis Schmidt, Warchassy. A little bird told me you been prying into my work crew down at the Ryan. I’m calling to tell you to mind your own business.”

“I think you have the wrong number.” I took the phone from my ear while I pulled a yellow cotton sweater over my head. “There’s no one here named Warchassy.”

“This ain’t Victoria Warchassy? The private dick?” he demanded angrily.

“I’m a private investigator, but my last name is ‘Warshawski.’” I kept my tone affable.

“That’s what I been saying, bitch. I’m talking to you. If you know what’s good for you, keep your damned nose out of other people’s business.”

“Oh, Looey, Looey, you just said the magic word. I purely hate it when strange men call me a bitch. You just bought yourself a whole lot of interest in what Alma Mejicana is doing down at the Ryan.”

“I’m warning you, Warchassy, to butt out of what don’t concern you. Or you could be very, very sorry.” The phone slammed in my ear.

I tied my running shoes and took the stairs two at a time. Behind Mr. Contreras’s door I could hear Peppy whining. She recognized my step and wanted to come with me. It wasn’t fair to make her hang out with Mr. Contreras all day-he couldn’t run her properly. But I just couldn’t stop for her.

I felt close to screaming at the pressure of all the demands on me. The dog. Furey. Elena herself. Graham. My other clients. And now my bravado to Luis Schmidt. Well, damn him anyway for calling up with stupid threats.

If only I could get a few bucks ahead of the game, I’d take some time off, just get clean out of this town for six months. I ground my teeth at the futility of the idea and savagely jerked the Chevy into gear.

By three o’clock I had finished an exhaustive search into the life and loves of Graham’s prospective marketing vice president. In the report I included the fact that the guy had a steady girlfriend along with his wife and infant son-not that Graham would care. It would make me run ten miles in the opposite direction, but Graham didn’t think what happened below the belt had any bearing on job performance.

Not until I had typed up the report and sent it across the Loop by messenger did I break for lunch. By then hunger had given me a nagging headache, although I felt better mentally for being able to cross a major task off my time chart.

I went to a vegetarian café around the corner for soup and a bowl of yogurt. That took care of the hunger, but my headache grew more intense. I tried ignoring it, tried to make myself think about Luis Schmidt and his anger at my visit to the Ryan construction site. My head hurt too much for logic. When I retrieved the Chevy from the underground garage, I wanted just to drive home and go back to bed, but all the time I’d wasted lately was still haunting me. I slogged north to Saul Seligman’s house.

He wasn’t happy to see me. Nor did he want to let me have pictures of his children. It took every ounce of energy I had to keep being gentle and persuasive through the blinding pain thudding in front of my eyes.

“In your place I’d be angry too. You have a right to expect service for the premiums you pay. Unfortunately, there are just too many dishonest people out there and the good guys get stuck as a result.”

We went on like that for forty-five minutes. Finally Seligman made an angry gesture. He moved to a massive secretary in one corner and opened its rollaway top. A pile of papers cascaded to the floor. He ignored those and pawed through a drawer behind the remaining papers until he found a couple of photos.

“I suppose you’d stay here until dawn if I didn’t give you these. I want a receipt. Then go, leave me alone. Don’t come back unless you’re telling me you’ve cleared my name.”

The pictures were both group shots, taken at some kind of family party. His daughters stood in the middle, on either side of his wife, while Rita Donnelly and two other young women flanked them. Those two were presumably her daughters, but I didn’t much care at this point-I was having too much trouble seeing.

I pulled a small memo pad from my bag to write out the date and a description of the pictures for Seligman. The letters danced around the page as I wrote; I wasn’t sure my note made sense. Seligman stuck it in the secretary, rolled the top back down, and hustled me out the door.

I drove home more by luck than skill. By the time I got there I was shivering and sweating. I managed somehow to make it upstairs to my bathroom before being sick. I felt a little better after that, but crept off to bed, putting on a heavy sweatshirt and socks before crawling under the blankets. As I got warm my tense neck and arm muscles relaxed and I drifted into a deep, drugged sleep.

The ringing phone brought me slowly back to life. I was buried so far down in sleep that it took some time to connect the noise with something outside me. After a long spell of weaving the ringing in with my dreams, my mind finally swam lazily back to consciousness. I felt newly born, the way you do when an intense pain has been washed out of your system, but the insistent bell wouldn’t let me enjoy it. Finally I stuck out an arm and picked up the receiver.

“H’lo?” My voice was thick and slurred.

“Vicki? Vicki, is that you?”

It was Elena, crying extravagantly. I looked at the clock readout in resignation: one-ten. Only Elena would rouse me at this godawful time.

“Yes, Auntie, it’s me. Calm down, stop crying, and tell me what the trouble is.”

“I-oh, Vicki, I need you, you’ve got to come and help me.”

She was well and truly panicked. I sat up and started pulling on the jeans I’d left on the foot of the bed. “Tell me where you are and what kind of trouble you’ve got.”

“I-oh…” She started sobbing heavily, then her voice disappeared.

For a moment I thought I’d lost the connection, but then I realized she was covering up the mouthpiece. Or someone else had covered it. She’d been running away and her pursuers had caught up with her? I waited in an agony of indecision, thinking I should hang up and summon Furey, not wanting to hang up until I was sure I’d lost her. Since I had no idea where to send police resources I waited, and after a couple of heart-wrenching minutes she came back.

“I ran away,” she sniffed dolefully. “Poor little Elena got scared and ran.”

So she hadn’t been in mortal terror, just rehearsing her act. I kept my voice light with an effort. “I know you ran away, Auntie. But where did you run to?”

“I’ve been living in one of the old buildings near the Indiana Arms, it’s been abandoned for months but some of the rooms are still in real good shape, you can sleep here and no one will see you. But now they’ve found me. Vicki, they’ll kill me, you’ve got to come help me.”

“Are you in the building now?”

“There’s a phone at the corner,” she hiccoughed. “They’ll kill me if they see me. I couldn’t go outside in the daylight. You’ve got to come, Vicki-they can’t find me here.”

“Who will kill you, Elena?” I wished I could see her face instead of just hearing her-it was impossible to sort out how much truth she was spouting along with the rest of it.

“The people who’ve been after me,” she screamed. “Just come, Vicki, stop asking so many goddamn questions, you’re like a goddamn tax collector.”

“Okay, okay,” I said in the soothing voice one uses with infants. “Tell me where the building is and I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

“Just kitty-corner to the Indiana Arms.” She calmed down to a quavering sob.

“On Indiana or Cermak?” I tied my running shoes.

“In-Indiana. Are you coming?”

“I’m on my way. Just stay where you are by the phone. Call 911 if you think someone really is coming.”

I turned on the bedside lamp. Dialing Furey’s home number, I carried the phone over to my closet. It rang fifteen times before I gave up and tried the station. The night man said Michael wasn’t in. Neither were Bobby, Finchley, or McGonnigal.

I hesitated, undoing the safe in the back of my closet where I keep my Smith & Wesson. Finally I explained that Bobby wanted Elena found and that Michael had been assigned to look for her.

“She just called me from an abandoned building on Indiana. She says she’s in trouble-I don’t know if she is or not, but I’m on my way down there to get her. I’d like Furey and the lieutenant to know.”

He promised to put out a call on the radio to Michael for me with the address. I set the phone on the closet floor while I checked the clip. It was full and the ninth bullet was chambered. I carefully made sure the safety was on, put a shoulder holster over my sweatshirt, and left.

When I got to the bottom Peppy started barking anxiously behind Mr. Contreras’s door. She hadn’t seen me all day, she’d missed her run, and she was determined I wasn’t going to leave without her. Her barking followed me down the walk to the street.

As I was getting into the Chevy, Vinnie stuck his head out his front window. He yelled something, but I was already rolling and didn’t hear him.

I headed for Lake Shore Drive. The Dan Ryan would decant me closer to the site, but I wasn’t up to dealing with the construction and detours in the dark. For the same reason I left the Drive at Congress and went down Michigan Avenue instead of negotiating the spaghetti behind McCormick Place.

The moon was nearly full. Once I’d slid past the street-lamps onto south Michigan its cold light created black-and-white stills: objects highlighted with unnatural clarity, their shadows pitch black. I was feeling a little weak still, from being sick and from having eaten only once in the last twenty-four hours, but my mind was wonderfully clear. I could make out every drunk on the benches in Grant Park, and when I turned onto Cermak and up onto Prairie, I could even see the rats slithering through the vacant lots.

In the moonlight the Near South Side looked like postwar Berlin. The lifeless shells of warehouses and factories were surrounded by mountains of brick-filled rubble. When I got out at Twenty-first and Prairie, I was shivering from the desolation of the scene. I took a flashlight from the trunk and stuck it in my jacket pocket.

I took the Smith & Wesson from my shoulder holster and crept along the shadows on Twenty-first, holding it in my right hand. The cold metal brought me little comfort. I was wound up enough to take aim at a passing alley cat. It snarled at me, its eyes glinting in the moonlight as it passed.

Even as my heart pounded I wondered how much of Elena’s panic to believe in. I remembered all the times she’d gotten Tony out of bed with urgent alarms, only to have them dissolve-revealed as the phantasms of her drinking. This might easily turn into another such evening-maybe I shouldn’t even have roused Furey.

My lingering doubts didn’t make me careless. When I got to Indiana I stayed awhile in the shadow of an abandoned auto parts dealer, straining my eyes and ears for any kind of movement. I’d worried about finding Elena’s hideout from her vague directions, but there was only one hotel on the street besides the Indiana Arms. The moonlight picked out the dead neon lights of the Prairie Shores Hotel, halfway down the block on my side of the road.

I heard a rustling across the street and knelt, the gun cocked again, but it was large plastic bag dragged loose from the rest of the garbage by the ubiquitous rats. Against my will I saw their yellow teeth tearing my exposed hands; they felt tingly and uncontrolled and I hugged them under my armpits, the gun digging into my left breast. I gritted my teeth and headed down Indiana.

Across from me loomed the burned-out hull of the Indiana Arms. The sharp night air carried the acrid scent of its charred beams to me and I fought back a sneeze. When I got to the corner I could see the pay phone but not my aunt. I prowled around the street for a few minutes, tempted to return to my bed. Finally I squared my shoulders and went over to the Prairie Shores Hotel.

Its front was boarded shut; I cautiously circled around to the back. The door there was heavily chained, but on the north side a broken window provided an easy entrance.

I shone my flashlight through the missing panes. I was looking at part of the pantry for the old kitchen. I trained the light around as much as I could see of the interior. No one was there, but a rustling and the sudden darkening of shadows along the top of the broken cabinets told me my yellow-toothed pals were.

I wished I’d worn a cap. I tried not to think of the red eyes watching me as I climbed carefully over the bent metal frame. A glass shard caught in the crotch of my jeans. I stopped to loosen the fabric and listened some more before moving again. Still no human sounds.

Once inside I picked my way carefully from the pantry to the kitchen. The old smells of grease still hung heavily there; no wonder the rats were so interested. I got lost in a maze of service rooms but came at length to a door that opened on a flight of steep stairs.

Before starting down I stopped to listen again. I shone the light on each step, not wanting to tumble through the rotten boards. Every few treads I called out softly to my aunt. I couldn’t hear her.

A hall led from the bottom of the stairs to another rabbit warren. I checked each of the rooms whose door opened but saw nothing except decayed furnishings. At the end of the hall another corridor led to the right. When I stuck my hand out to steady myself as I peered around the corner, I clawed at open air. I gulped and jumped back, but the light showed me nothing more menacing than a dumb waiter.

I called to Elena again but still got no reply. I turned out the light to make my ears work harder. I could hear nothing except the scrabbling and squealing of the rodents.

Tiptoeing, straining my ears, I moved down this side corridor. A series of rooms lined it. I tried each in turn, shining the light around, calling softly to my aunt. Some were empty, but most were stacked with rotting refuse from the old hotel-abandoned sofas with stuffing sticking out at all angles, mattresses, old iron springs. Every now and then I’d catch a movement, but when I stopped to look all I saw was red eyes glaring back.

Finally I reached the far end of the corridor, where a lifeless phone hung. It was an old black model with a dial face lined with letters, not numbers. When I replaced the receiver and lifted it again, no dial tone came. It was as dead as the building.

Anger gripped me. How dare she do this to me, call me out on a bootless errand to a rat-infested shell? I turned and began marching at a good clip back up the corridor. Suddenly I thought I heard my name. I stopped in my tracks and strained to listen.

“Vic!”

It was a hoarse whisper, coming from a room on my left. I thought I’d looked in there but I couldn’t be sure. Flinging the door open, I shone the flash around the heap of old furniture. A large mass lay on a sofa wedged in the corner. I’d missed it on my first cursory scan of the room.

“Elena!” I called sharply. “Are you there?”

I knelt next to the couch. My aunt was lying on her side, wrapped in a filthy blanket. Her duffel bag leaned against the wall, the violet nightdress still poking from one side. Relief and anger swept through me in equal measures. How could she pass out after calling for me in such a way?

I shook her roughly. “Elena! Wake up. We’ve got to go.”

She didn’t respond. Her head lolled lifelessly as I shook her. My stomach churning, I laid her gently down. She was still breathing in short shallow snorts. I felt her head. Along the back was a tender swollen mass. A blow-from a fall or from a person?

I heard someone move behind me. Panicking, I pulled the gun from my holster again. Before I could get to my feet the night around me broke into a thousand points of light and I fell into blackness.