Burn Marks

34

Heat from the Top

I laced up my boots and hiked up the broken on ramp I’d slid across in my street shoes last week. A good set of boots with treads made a big difference; I moved at a good clip to the top. In my hard hat and coveralls I fit in well enough that no one spared me a glance.

As I tramped along the shoulder I realized I shouldn’t have worried about how new my clothes looked- concrete dust soon enveloped them. I pulled my sunglasses out of one of the front pockets to protect my eyes but I didn’t have any way to keep the dust out of my lungs. Still, my hacking cough gave me an added touch of authenticity. The only thing I lacked was a bandanna at the throat-in red or yellow it could be pulled up over the mouth when one was actually bent over an air hammer.

Actually I was missing something else-a union card. Even if I’d wanted to risk recognition by the men in the trailer, I couldn’t go asking for the Alma Mejicana site without showing I belonged to the fraternity. I kept trudging along, looking for the bright red and green Wunsch and Grasso logo.

I was stronger than I’d been two days ago, but the longer the hike became, the less enthusiasm I felt for my project. I realized, too, that the compleat construction worker ought to have strapped a water jar to her belt loops. It was cooler today than it had been for a while, but walking along in heavy overalls, lugging my wrenches, breathing the dust, turned my face hot and my throat scratchy. My shoulders sent up sympathetic warning shouts.

Earplugs would have been a help too-the noise was staggering. Air hammers, giant earth movers, cement trucks, bulldozer-like things with evil-looking spikes attached to a front claw, combined with the shouting of several thousand men to raise a discordant chorus. Few of the genuine workers wore earplugs-it’s better to go deaf than display an unmanly weakness.

I was walking south along the west side of the road. To my untutored eye this was the most complex part of the project, since they were adding a whole new lane for traffic merging south from the Eisenhower. I scanned that part of the construction, then strained to see around the traffic using the middle four lanes to make sure I didn’t miss the Wunsch and Grasso logo on the northbound side.

I was almost at the I-55 turnoff before I found their equipment, mercifully on my side of the expressway. I hoisted myself up onto the guardrail to wait for my second wind while I surveyed the territory. The Alma Mejicana part of the operation involved about a half-dozen machines and perhaps twenty or thirty men.

Their contingent wasn’t pouring concrete. Instead, as nearly as I could figure out, they were readying the roadbed, using giant rollers to mash rock into tiny pieces, then coming along after with another machine to smooth it down. The men not operating the machines were walking alongside them with picks and shovels, correcting flaws at the edges. Several stood by surveying the work.

It was a busy, industrious scene, and despite the modern machinery, one that harked to an earlier era. None of the crew was black, and as far as I could tell none of them was Hispanic, either. Most of their hard hats were decorated with the Wunsch and Grasso logo. It’s one thing to borrow someone’s equipment, but even a small firm ought to be able to spring for their own hard hats.

I hopped down from the fence and went up to one of the men surveying the work. Close to the rock crushers the noise was so intense that it took some effort to get the surveyor’s attention.

When he finally looked up at me I bawled in his ear, “Luis Schmidt here today?”

“Who?” he bellowed back.

“Luis Schmidt!”

“Don’t know him.”

He turned back to the road, signaling to one of the men. I thought he was going to pass my inquiry on, but instead he wanted to point out something that had to be done to the roadbed. I tapped his arm.

He jerked around impatiently. “You still here?”

“Is this the Alma Mejicana site?”

He rolled his eyes-dumb broad. He pointed at the machine nearest him. “What do you think?”

“I think you’re with Alma Mejicana and leasing equipment from Wunsch and Grasso.”

He was beginning a scathing put-down when another one of the surveyors came over. “What’s going on here?” he demanded, silencing the first man with a commanding arm wave.

“I’m looking for the Alma Mejicana crew,” I bawled. “I was told they were using Wunsch and Grasso equipment.”

The second man dragged the first off to the side. They had an animated conversation that I couldn’t hear, but it involved a lot of gesturing-at the roadbed and at me. Finally the first man went on down the road another ten yards while the second came back to me.

“Rudy’s new on the site. The crew are A-M men, but the foremen and the equipment are all from Grasso. He didn’t know that. What do you need here?”

He thrust his weather-beaten face close to mine so I could hear him. Maybe I was being fanciful, but behind the film of white dust his expression seemed cold, almost menacing.

“I’m looking for Luis Schmidt.” It was the only line I had so I stuck to it.

“He’s not on the site. I’ll take a message for him.”

I shook my head. “I don’t mind waiting.”

“He won’t be here today, lady. Or tomorrow. So if you have a message, let me have it. If you don’t, get off the site.”

He looked at a couple of men with picks and jerked his head. When they ambled over he said, “Lady got on the site by mistake. You want to see she gets off and stays off.”

I held up my hands placatingly. “It’s okay, big guy-I can find my own way out. Anyway, I got what I came for.”

I trotted northward at a good clip. The pick bearers trotted along next to me, keeping up a line of small talk that I fortunately couldn’t make out. No one could possibly attack me right here on the Dan Ryan with two thousand men to witness it. Assuming my screams penetrated the sound of the machinery, or they didn’t think I was a scab and join in mauling what was left of my body.

About a half mile up the road, when I thought I might throw up from exertion, they decided they’d fulfilled their mission. One of them poked me playfully in the side with his pick. The other told me he guessed I’d learned my lesson but they could really make it stick-ha, ha-if I came back.

I nodded without speaking and staggered clear of the roadbed to collapse on the slope rising up on its west side. I lay there for half an hour, sucking in great mouthfuls of chalky air. They couldn’t have known who I was. If there was some red alert out on me, they could easily have knocked me accidentally under one of the rock crushers. But they must have some general cautionary warning against anyone prying around about Alma Mejicana.

What if I’d been with the feds? Would the second foreman still have behaved so precipitously? Massive bribe-taking doesn’t seem to have penetrated federal bureaucrats yet, but maybe Roz-through Boots-had some other source of protection for her cousin’s firm.

From where I was lying the Sears Tower dominated the near horizon. The sun was low enough in the sky to turn its windows a fiery copper. It was too late for me to go to the Daley Center to look for any background on Farm-works, Inc. I lay there watching the fire on the tower mute into soft oranges, then darken.

Finally I got to my feet and began the long trek back to my car. My legs were a bit wobbly-too much exertion too soon, I told myself sternly. Nothing to do with the surge of fear over the guys with the pickaxes.

Day crews were starting to pack it in. Night shifts hadn’t started yet. There was a lull in the noise and a general relaxation in the work frenzy. The machines were still moving doggedly, but the ground crews were standing around laughing, drinking longnecks that they somehow spirited onto the site.

It took over half an hour to move the mile to my car. By then most of the other vehicles parked around it had left. Alone among the detritus under the giant stilts of the expressway, I shivered. When I got in the car I carefully locked the doors before starting.

It was after five-thirty. I turned up Halsted instead of joining the packed throngs on the expressway or the drive. No one on the site knew who I was, but I didn’t take the hard hat off until I was north of Congress.

When I got home I dumped the overalls and the hard hat in the hall closet and headed straight for the tub, I longed for sleep but I still had several errands to run. I tried to convince my wobbly legs and sore shoulders that a long bath would do them as much good as twelve hours of sleep. More good. It might have worked when I was twenty, but when you’re closer to forty than thirty there are some myths the body won’t believe.

Carbohydrate packing was my next great idea. Although there was no fruit or meat in the house I still had onions, garlic, and frozen pasta. Just the kind of dish my mother thought adequate for a Saturday dinner, while my father, who could never bring himself to criticize her, longed privately for chicken and dumplings.

I found a can of tomatoes in the back of my cupboard. I couldn’t remember buying this brand and studied the label dubiously, trying to figure out if they were still any good. I opened the can and sniffed. How do you tell if something is full of botulism? I shrugged and dumped them in with the onions. It would be fairly entertaining if I escaped the ravages of mad killers only to die of food poisoning in my own kitchen.

If the tomatoes were poisoned they didn’t affect me immediately. In fact, the bath and the dinner did make me feel better-not as good as if I’d had my sleep, but good enough to go on for a bit. I was even whistling a little under my breath when I went into the bedroom to change.

My only lightweight black dress has big silver buttons down the front. With black stockings and pumps I looked more as though I were on my way to the theater than a funeral, but I thought white stockings wouldn’t be much of an improvement. It would have to do.

While I was looking up the Callahan Funeral Home, the phone rang. It was Terry Finchley from the Violent Climes Unit.

“Miss Warshawski! I’ve been trying to reach you the last few days. Did you get my message?”

I thought of all the ringing phones I’d let go lately and realized I hadn’t checked in with my answering service for some time. “Sorry, Detective. What’s up? Any new evidence linking me to the Prairie Shores or Indiana Arms fires?”

I thought I heard him sigh. “Don’t make my life harder than it is, Vic, okay?”

“Okay, Terry,” I agreed meekly. “To what do I owe the pleasure of hearing from you?”

“I-uh-discussed our interview with the lieutenant. You know, the talk Lieutenant Montgomery and I-”

“Yes, I remember that particular conversation.” I had sat on the piano bench with the phone book in my lap, but I stopped searching the Callahans.

“He, the lieutenant, Lieutenant Mallory, I mean, was- uh-quite astonished that Montgomery would suggest such a thing-linking you with the arson, you know-and he went and had a talk with him. I just thought you’d like to know that you probably won’t be hearing from him again.”

“Thank you.” I was pleased and surprised, both at Bobby’s going to bat for me and at Finchley’s taking the time to phone me about it. That took a little extra courage.

“Well, check in with your service in the future-don’t leave me sweating it out for three days. See you Saturday.”

Saturday. Oh, right. Bobby’s sixtieth birthday. Yet another item on my burgeoning to-do list-a present for him. I rubbed my tired eyes and forced myself back to the phone book. The Callahan Funeral Home was on north Harlem. I dug around in the accumulated papers on the coffee table for my city map. The address put it just north of the expressway there; it should be a pretty easy run across town.

I was packing up my good handbag when the phone rang again. I was going to let it go, but it might be someone else who’d been leaving messages for three days.

“Miss Warshawski. Glad I caught you in.”

“Mr. MacDonald.” I sat back down on the piano bench in astonishment. “What a surprise. I’m sorry I haven’t sent you a note yet for the flowers-I’m moving a little slowly with my convalescence.”

“That’s not what I hear, young lady-I hear you barely rose from your sickbed before you started prancing around town prying into business that’s no concern of yours.”

“And what business is that, old man?” I just cannot stand being called “young lady.”

“I thought we had an agreement that you’d leave Roz Fuentes alone.”

I put the receiver in my lap and stared at it hard. It could only be my invasion of Alma Mejicana that he was referring to. But he couldn’t know about that-my only link to them was a scarf that could scarcely be traced to me-no one had ever seen me wear it because I never did. So it was my trip to the construction site. But what was his connection with Alma Mejicana that he’d know about that so fast?

“Are you there?” His voice came scratchily from my lap.

I put the receiver back to my face. “Yeah, I’m here but I’m not with you. I don’t know what I’ve done that you think is harassing Roz. And I don’t know why you’re so protective of her, anyway.”

He laughed a little. “Come, come, young la-Miss Warshawski. You can’t go blundering all over the Ryan without people hearing about it. Construction’s a small community-word gets around fast. Roz is hurt that you’re looking at her cousin’s business behind her back. She mentioned it to Boots-he asked me to take the time to give you a call.”

“So all this stuff is going on at Boots’s command? You work for him or something, Ralph? Somehow I thought he and the whole county were in your back pocket.”

“All what stuff, young lady?” he demanded sharply.

I waved a vague hand. “Oh, arson, murder, attempted murder, that kind of thing. Boots says-go git me a dead alkie and you say, yessir, Chairman Meagher. And you find you someone to do it? Is that what’s been going on around town lately?”

“That would be offensive if it weren’t so ludicrous. Boots and I go way back. We’re involved in a lot of projects together. Over the years the press has decided on a prolonged smear campaign about our relationship and business methods that you apparently have bought into, I’m disappointed in you, Vic-you seemed like a sharp young lady to me.”

“Gosh, thanks, Ralph, And did you mastermind the fire that almost killed me last week? Was that how you and Boots decided to respond to Roz’s hurt feelings?”

His breath came in a little hiss in my ear, “For your information, not that I owe you a damned thing, the report in the Star was the first I knew about that fire. And I’d go on oath with that. But if you’ve been treating other people around town the way you’ve been behaving toward Roz, it wouldn’t surprise me that one of them tried to put you out.”

“That sounds strangely like a threat to me, Ralph. You’re sure, you’re absolutely positive, that you didn’t order that arson last week?”

“I said ‘on oath,’” he snapped. “But if I were you, I’d watch my step, young lady-you were lucky to get out of that alive, weren’t you?”

“No, I wasn’t, old goat,” I yelled, fear disguising itself as anger. “I was skilled. So go tell Roz or Boots or whoever is yanking your chain that I rely on my wits, not my luck, and that I’m still trucking.”

“‘Bulldozing’ would be a better word, young-Miss Warshawski, You don’t know what you’re doing, and you’re liable to cause a major mess if you don’t stop blundering around in the middle of things that don’t concern you.” He spoke in a crisp, no-nonsense tone that no doubt ended debate with subordinates.

“Is that supposed to make me snap a salute and shriek ‘Yes-sir, Mr. M.’? I’m going to the papers with what I’ve learned so far. If I don’t know what I’m doing, they’ve got the resources to look into it in a lot more detail.” I wasn’t going to tell him I’d noticed a striking absence of any minority workers at the Alma site-they could ship in a few dozen before Murray showed up with a photographer.

MacDonald thought this one over for a few minutes- it obviously hadn’t been in the script when he called. “Maybe we can change your mind on that one. What would it take?”

“Not money, I can assure you.” Or a new car, despite the ominous noises the Chevy was making. “But a complete story on Alma and Roz and what you all are so jumpy about could persuade me that you’re right-that I don’t know what I’m doing there.”

There was another long pause. Then MacDonald said slowly, “We might be able to arrange that. Just don’t go to the papers until we’ve talked again.”

I ground my teeth. “I’ll give you a day, Ralph. After that all bets are off.”

“I don’t like threats any better than you do.” He gave a humorless chuckle. “And I’m not scampering around to meet your timetable. You’ll wait until I have something to say and like it. And if you think you can go off to your friends at the Star or the Tribune in righteous indignation, just remember that both publishers are personal friends. It’s time someone in this town had the guts to stand up to you.”

“And you’re just the man to tame the wild mare, Ralph? Maybe it’s time someone taught you that playing Monopoly on Michigan Avenue doesn’t mean you own the world.” I slammed the receiver down hard enough to make my palm tingle.