Burn Marks

38

Running into a Campaign

When I got into the Chevy, Peppy looked at me expectantly. I’d forgotten I had her. It wasn’t fair to make her sit while I tried to track down Roz, but I was afraid if I took her home I wouldn’t be able to goad myself back into action.

“Sorry, girl,” I said, turning on the ignition. “Terry and John both know who owns that bracelet, wouldn’t you say? So why won’t they tell me?”

Peppy looked at me anxiously-she didn’t know, either. A small procession of cars was moving north up State Street. I waited for them to pass so I could make a U. The tail of the procession was Michael’s silver Corvette. I tried honking and waving, but he either didn’t see me in the fading light or chose to act as though he hadn’t. I could try to catch up with him to ask him about Elena but I didn’t feel like running into McGonnigal again tonight.

I drove north to Congress. The potholes and derelict buildings gradually melted into the convention hotels fringing the south rim of the Loop. After I turned west on the Congress and speeded up, the Chevy gave an ominous whine. My stomach jolted again.

“Not at thirty,” I lectured the car. “You gotta get me around town a few more years. A few more days, anyway.”

The car paid no heed to me but increased its nerve-wrenching noise as I took it up to forty. When I brought it back down to twenty-five, the engine quieted some, but I really couldn’t drive it on the Ryan. I left the Congress at Halsted and plodded my way north and west to Logan Square.

Roz Fuentes’s campaign headquarters were in her old community organization offices on California Avenue. The front window held flags of Mexico, the U.S., and Puerto Rico, with the Mexicans on the left and the U.S. in the middle. Underneath the Mexican flag hung a huge portrait of Roz, beaming her two-hundred-watt smile, with the slogan in Spanish and English: “Roz Fuentes, for Chicago.” Not original, but serviceable.

The office was still brightly lighted. We were five weeks from election and people would be working into the dawn at different headquarters all over the county. On top of that Roz was still functioning as a conduit for community problems with the city on housing and crime. According to the papers, that was a thorn for the alderman-a gent of the old macho school-but Roz was too popular in the neighborhood for him to try going head-to-head with her.

Beyond the plate-glass window people were working with the noisy camaraderie a successful campaign brings in its wake. A dozen or so men and women sat at desks in the big front room talking, answering the wildly ringing phones, shouting questions at each other in Spanish or English. No one paid any attention to me, so I wandered past the campaign workers to the back, where Roz used to have a small private office.

Another small knot of people was sitting in there now, a nice landscape of Roz’s multiracial appeal: a white man of about thirty and two Hispanic women-one plump and fiftyish, the other not long out of high school-were deep in conversation with a wiry black woman in hornrims. I didn’t recognize the white man but I knew the woman in the horn-rims-it was Velma Riter.

The four of them fell silent when I came in. Velma, who was seated behind the beaten-up desk in Roz’s swivel chair, looked up at me fiercely. To call her expression hostile was about as descriptive as calling Niagara Falls wet- it didn’t begin to convey the intensity she was putting out.

After a puzzled glance from Velma to me, the fiftyish woman asked, “Can we help you, miss?” She wasn’t unfriendly, just brisk-they were conducting business and needed to get back to it.

“I’m V. I. Warshawski,” I said. “I was hoping to find Roz.”

The plump woman held out a palm toward the high school grad without speaking; the young woman handed over her typed sheet of paper. She scanned it and said, “Right now she’s finishing a community meeting on gangs in Pilsen. After that she’s going to Schaumburg for a fund-raising dinner. If you tell me what you need I can help you-I’m her chief assistant.”

“You’re not content with trying to stab Roz in the back-you’re coming in here to put poison in her coffee, is that it, Vic?” Velma spoke up venomously.

The young woman looked flustered at Velma’s open anger. She stood up hurriedly and picked up a stack of papers. Murmuring something about getting them typed before she went home, she excused herself.

“Are these people so close to you that you want me to talk in front of them?” I asked Velma.

“They know you’ve been trying to smear Roz.”

I leaned against the door, my shoulders too tired to keep me upright without a prop. “Have you seen some kind of smear story in the papers or on TV that you can trace to me?”

“People are talking.” Velma held herself rigidly. “Everyone on the street knows you want to stab her in the back.”

“That wouldn’t be because you told them that, would it, Velma?” I couldn’t bear to look at her angry face; I turned my gaze to a peeling poster on the wall showcasing a quote from Simón Bolívar that proclaimed liberty for all peoples.

“Why don’t you tell us why you’ve come, Ms, Warshawski? We’re all close to Roz, we don’t have any secrets from each other,” Roz’s chief assistant said.

I moved uninvited onto the metal folding chair the young woman had vacated. “Maybe first you can tell me your names.”

“I’m Camellia Maldonado and this is Loren Richter. He’s managing the finances for Roz’s campaign.”

Richter flashed a perfect Ipana smile. “And I can assure you there’s nothing amiss with them.”

“Splendid.” I put my arms on the desk and propped my chin on my hands. “I’m really exhausted. If Velma’s told you all about me, you know I almost died in a fire in an abandoned hotel last week. I’m still not quite over it, so I’m not going to make any effort to be subtle.

“Two weeks ago at a fund-raiser out at Boots’s place Roz made a special point of taking me to one side and asking me not to sandbag her campaign. Since that was the farthest thing from my mind, I was irked to say the least. And it made me think she must be hiding some secret.”

“If it was secret, then it was none of your business, Warshawski,” Velma interjected.

I sat up at that. “She made it my business. She-or anyway, Marissa Duncan-got me to put my name to a public roster announcing my support. And I backed it up with more money than I gave to all other political candidates this year. If Roz was pulling off something illegal or unethical behind my name, I damned well did have a right to know about it.”

I was panting by the time I finished. I took a minute to calm myself and focus my thoughts. Camellia and Loren were sitting stiffly, willing to hear me out but ready to slam the door on me as soon as I’d finished.

“When I started asking questions a long list of people began telling me I was a pain in the ass and to mind my own business. The first, of course, was Velma here, followed by Roz. And then, interestingly enough, Ralph MacDonald, the big guy himself-Boots’s pal, you know-warned me off. A little more subtly than Velma and Roz, but a warning nonetheless. And after the fire he warned me again, this time not nearly as subtly.”

Ralph’s name took them all by surprise. If Boots had told Roz he was siccing MacDonald on me, she’d kept it to herself.

“Well, when I was at Roz’s fund-raiser she had her cousin with her-Luis Schmidt-and Carl Martinez, his partner in Alma Mejicana. And it seemed to me that it was they who pointed me out to her, suggesting I was up to no good.”

I stopped. Something in that picture, the scene of Wunsch and Grasso huddled with Furey and the two men from Alma Mejicana, was tugging at my brain. If I wasn’t so tired, if Velma wasn’t so hostile, I’d get it. It was because he’d been talking to Wunsch and Grasso that Schmidt warned Roz. They were all connected, Wunsch and Grasso, Alma, Farmworks. And Farmworks was connected to Seligman, through Rita Donnelly’s daughter Star. Did that mean that Wunsch and Grasso were connected to the arson? My brain spun around.

“We’re waiting, Vic.” Velma’s cold voice interrupted my flurried thoughts. “Or are you trying to embellish your story to make it more credible?”

I gave her a bitter smile. “I’ll wrap it up fast. And believe it or not as you please, but worse is going to follow soon. Alma Mejicana was on the fringes of the construction business up until two years ago. They had a couple of suits against the county, claiming discrimination in the matter of bids, but they were strictly small potatoes-parking lots, a few sidewalks, that kind of thing. They really weren’t big enough for the projects they were bidding on.

“Run the cameras forward. Suddenly they’ve dropped their suits and by a remarkable coincidence they pick up a piece of the Dan Ryan action. You’ve got to be a heavy roller to play at that table. Where did they come up with the equipment and the expertise?

“Now Roz is a partner in Alma Mejicana. I’m just guessing this part-” I ignored an explosive interruption from Velma. “I don’t know whether she went to Boots or he came to her. But his support has eroded badly in the Hispanic wards. They’ve been backing Solomon Hayes to oust Meagher as board chairman. As long as they’re going with Hayes and the blacks have a different candidate, Meagher can scrape by. But lately it’s been sounding like the old Washington coalition is perking up again. And if the Hispanics got together with the black coalitions and united on a black candidate, Boots could kiss his forty years of power and patronage good-bye.”

Velma was muttering to my right, but Camellia Maldonado sat with a look of glassy composure, much as an Edwardian lady might have watched a drunk in her living room.

Loren Richter was tapping his pencil rapidly against the chair leg. “That’s not news. It’s not even a crime.”

“Of course not,” I agreed. “Coalitions, changing loyalties, that’s the name of the game. But Boots isn’t ready to turn in his chips yet. So say he went to Roz. If he put her on the ticket, she’d bring in Humboldt Park and Pilsen for him-she’s gold here. In return he’d see that Alma got a big piece of county action. They drop their discrimination suits, tie in with a dummy corporation, the work will really go to Wunsch and Grasso, who will share out the profits and everybody’s happy. Alma doesn’t do a lick of work on the Ryan-I’ve been there and seen it. They got the bid, they pay everything out to a dummy corporation, and let Wunsch and Grasso supply the equipment and the personnel.”

“You don’t have any proof of this, none at all. It’s a total fabrication,” Camellia Maldonado said hotly. “Whatever Velma said of you you’re ten times worse.”

I got up. “I’m not going to stay to fight it. I’m beat. I just wanted to give Roz a chance to answer before I go to the papers. There’s one more thing I don’t understand, though.”

“One?” Velma spat out. “Just one? I thought you understood the whole universe, Warshawski.”

I ignored her. “I don’t know why Roz thought a story like this would hurt her chances on the ticket. It’s just business as usual in this old town. When the story finally breaks the good old boys will breathe a collective sigh that she’s not a flaming radical, that she’s one of them after all.”

I turned on my heel, not listening to the three of them shouting at me. Camellia ran to the door on pencil-heels and grabbed my arm.

“You must tell us what proof you have of this terrible allegation. You can’t come in here and drop such a bomb and then just walk off.”

I rubbed my eyes tiredly. “It’s all there. You just have to go to the Ryan and look at their part of the zone. Although maybe now they know I’ve been there they’ll bring in a few minority or women workers for the photographers. But the real kicker is to visit their offices. They’re a sham. There’re only three desks occupied in the whole place. You don’t run a big business out of a cubbyhole, at least not a contracting business.”

Camellia looked at me with such anger that it made my knees feel wobbly. “I’ve worked for Roz’s success for a long time,” she hissed. “You’re not going to be able to ruin her with your lies.”

“Great,” I said. “Then you don’t have anything to worry about.”

I glanced back at Velma, sitting in the swivel chair. She didn’t say anything, but dropped her gaze to the desktop. Camellia followed me to the big front room. She was too savvy a campaigner to let the hired hands see a crisis was in the works. She shook hands formally with me at the door, gave me a big smile, and said she’d be sure to let Roz know we’d spoken.