Windy City Blues

I

THE GYM WAS DANK-chlorine and sweat combined in a hot, sticky mass. Shouts from the trainers, from the swimmers, from the spectators, bounced from the high metal ceilings and back and forth from the benches lining the pool on two sides. The cacophony set up an unpleasant buzzing in my head.

I was not enjoying myself. My shirt was soaked through with sweat. Anyway, I was too old to sit cheering on a bleacher for two hours. But Alicia had been insistent-I had to be there in person for her to get points on her sponsor card.

Alicia Alonso Dauphine and I went to high school together. Her parents had bestowed a prima ballerina’s name on her, but Alicia showed no aptitude for fine arts. From her earliest years, all she wanted was to muck around with engines. At eighteen, off she went to the University of Illinois to study aeronautics.

Despite her lack of interest in dance, Alicia was very athletic. Next to airplanes, the only thing she really cared about was competitive swimming. I used to cheer her when she was NCAA swimming champ, always with a bit of irritation about being locked in a dank, noisy gym for hours at a time-swimming is not a great spectator sport. But after all, what are friends for?

When Alicia joined Berman Aircraft as an associate engineer, we drifted our separate ways. We met occasionally at weddings, confirmations, bar mitzvahs (my, how our friends were aging! Childlessness seemed to suspend us in time, but each new ceremony in their lives marked a new milestone toward old age for the women we had played with in school).

Then last week I’d gotten a call from Alicia. Berman was mounting a team for a citywide corporate competition-money would be raised through sponsors for the American Cancer Society. Both Alicia’s mother and mine had died of cancer-would I sponsor her for so many meters? Doubling my contribution if she won? It was only after I’d made the pledge that I realized she expected me there in person. One of her sponsors had to show up to testify that she’d done it, and all the others were busy with their homes and children, and come on, V. I., what do you do all day long? I need you.

How can you know you’re being manipulated and still let it happen? I hunched an impatient shoulder and turned back to the starting blocks.

From where I sat, Alicia was just another bathing-suited body with a cap. Her distinctive cheekbones were softened and flattened by the dim fluorescence. Not a wisp of her thick black hair trailed around her face. She was wearing a bright red tank suit-no extra straps or flounces to slow her down in the water.

The swimmers had been wandering around the side of the pool, swinging their arms to stretch out the muscles, not talking much while the timers argued some inaudible point with the referee. Now a police whistle shrilled faintly in the din and the competitors snapped to attention, moving toward the starting blocks at the far end of the pool.

We were about to watch the fifty-meter freestyle. I looked at the hand-scribbled card Alicia had given me before the meet. After the fifty-meter, she was in a 4 × 50 relay. Then I could leave.

The swimmers were mounting the blocks when someone began complaining again. The woman from the Ajax insurance team seemed to be having a problem with the lane marker on the inside of her lane. The referee reshuffled the swimmers, leaving the offending lane empty. The swimmers finally mounted the blocks again. Timers got into position.

Standing to see the start of the race, I was no longer certain which of the women was Alicia. Two of the other six contenders also wore red tank suits; with their features smoothed by caps and dimmed lighting, they all became anonymous. One red suit was in lane two, one in lane three, one in lane six.

The referee raised the starting gun. Swimmers got set. Arms swung back for the dive. Then the gun, and seven bodies flung themselves into the water. Perfect dive in lane six-had to be Alicia, surfacing, pulling away from all but one other swimmer, a fast little woman from the brokerage house of Feldstein, Holtz and Woods.

Problems for the red-suited woman in lane two. I hadn’t seen her dive, but she was having trouble righting herself, couldn’t seem to make headway in the lane. Now everyone was noticing her. Whistles were blowing; the man on the loudspeaker tried ineffectually to call for silence.

I pushed my way through the crowds on the benches and vaulted over the barrier dividing the spectators from the water. Useless over the din to order someone into the pool for her. Useless to point out the growing circle of red. I kicked off running shoes and dove from the side. Swimming underwater to the second lane. Not Alicia. Surely not. Seeing the water turn red around me. Find the woman. Surface. Drag her to the edge where, finally, a few galvanized hands pulled her out.

I scrambled from the pool and picked out someone in a striped referee’s shirt. “Get a fire department ambulance as fast as you can.” He stared at me with a stupid gape to his jaw. “Dial 911, damn it. Do it now!” I pushed him toward the door, hard, and he suddenly broke into a trot.

I knelt beside the woman. She was breathing, but shallowly. I felt her gently. Hard to find the source of bleeding with the wet suit, but I thought it came from the upper back. Demanding help from one of the bystanders, I carefully turned her to her side. Blood was oozing now, not pouring, from a wound below her left shoulder. Pack it with towels, elevate her feet, keep the crowd back. Wait. Wait. Watch the shallow breathing turn to choking. Mouth-to-mouth does no good. Who knows cardiopulmonary resuscitation? A muscular young man in skimpy bikini shorts comes forward and works at her chest. By the time the paramedics hustle in with stretcher and equipment, the shallow, choking breath has stopped. They take her to the hospital, but we all know it’s no good.

As the stretcher-bearers trotted away, the rest of the room came back into focus. Alicia was standing at my side, black hair hanging damply to her shoulders, watching me with fierce concentration. Everyone else seemed to be shrieking in unison; the sound reechoing from the rafters was more unbearable than ever.

I stood up, put my mouth close to Alicia’s ear, and asked her to take me to whoever was in charge. She pointed to a man in an Izod T-shirt standing on the other side of the hole left by the dead swimmer’s body.

I went to him immediately. “I’m V. I. Warshawski. I’m a private detective. That woman was murdered-shot through the back. Whoever shot her probably left during the confusion. But you’d better get the cops here now. And tell everyone over your megaphone that no one leaves until the police have seen them.”

He looked contemptuously at my dripping jeans and shirt. “Do you have anything to back up this preposterous statement?”

I held out my hands. “Blood,” I said briefly, then grabbed the microphone from him. “May I have your attention, please.” My voice bounced around the hollow room. “My name is V. I. Warshawski; I am a detective. There has been a serious accident in the pool. Until the police have been here and talked to us, none of us must leave this area. I am asking the six timers who were at the far end of the pool to come here now.”

There was silence for a minute, then renewed clamor. A handful of people picked their way along the edge of the pool toward me. The man in the Izod shirt was fulminating but lacked the guts to try to grab the mike.

When the timers came up to me, I said, “You six are the only ones who definitely could not have killed the woman. I want you to stand at the exits.” I tapped each in turn and sent them to a post-two to the doors on the second floor at the top of the bleachers, two to the ground-floor exits, and one each to the doors leading to the men’s and women’s dressing rooms.

“Don’t let anyone, regardless of anything he or she says, leave. If they have to use the bathroom, tough-hold it until the cops get here. Anyone tries to leave, keep them here. If they want to fight, let them go but get as complete a description as you can.”

They trotted off to their stations. I gave Izod back his mike, made my way to a pay phone in the corner, and dialed the Eleventh Street homicide number.

II

Sergeant McGonnigal was not fighting sarcasm as hard as he might have. “You sent the guy to guard the upstairs exit and he waltzed away, probably taking the gun with him. He must be on his knees in some church right now thanking God for sending a pushy private investigator to this race.”

I bit my lips. He couldn’t be angrier with me than I was with myself. I sneezed and shivered in my damp, clammy clothes. “You’re right, Sergeant. I wish you’d been at the meet instead of me. You’d probably have had ten uniformed officers with you who could’ve taken charge as soon as the starting gun was fired and avoided this mess. Do any of the timers know who the man was?”

We were in an office that the school athletic department had given the police for their investigation-scene headquarters. McGonnigal had been questioning all the timers, figuring their closeness to the pool gave them the best angle on what had happened. One was missing, the man I’d sent to the upper balcony exit.

The sergeant grudgingly told me he’d been over that ground with the other timers. None of them knew who the missing man was. Each of the companies in the meet had supplied volunteers to do the timing and other odd jobs. Everyone just assumed this man was from someone else’s firm. No one had noticed him that closely; their attention was focused on the action in the pool. My brief glance at him gave the police their best description: medium height, short brown hair, wearing a pale green T-shirt and faded white denim shorts. Yes, baggy enough for a gun to fit in a pocket unnoticed.

“You know, Sergeant, I asked for the six timers at the far end of the pool because they were facing the swimmers, so none of them could have shot the dead woman in the back. This guy came forward. That means there’s a timer missing-either the person actually down at the far end was in collusion, or you’re missing a body.”

McGonnigal made an angry gesture-not at me. Himself for not having thought of it before. He detailed two uniformed cops to round up all the volunteers and find out who the errant timer was.

“Any more information on the dead woman?”

McGonnigal picked up a pad from the paper-littered desk in front of him. “Her name was Louise Carmody. You know that. She was twenty-four. She worked for the Ft. Dearborn Bank and Trust as a junior lending officer. You know that. Her boss is very shocked-you probably could guess that. And she has no enemies. No dead person ever does.”

“Was she working on anything sensitive?”

He gave me a withering glance. “What twenty-four-year-old junior loan officer works on anything sensitive?”

“Lots,” I said firmly. “No senior person ever does the grubby work. A junior officer crunches numbers or gathers basic data for crunching. Was she working on any project that someone might not want her to get data for?”

McGonnigal shrugged wearily but made a note on a second pad-the closest he would come to recognizing that I might have a good suggestion.

I sneezed again. “Do you need me for anything else? I’d like to get home and dry off.”

“No, go. I’d just as soon you weren’t around when Lieutenant Mallory arrives, anyway.”

Bobby Mallory was McGonnigal’s boss. He was also an old friend of my father, who had been a beat sergeant until his death fifteen years earlier. Bobby did not like women on the crime scene in any capacity-victim, perpetrator, or investigator-and he especially did not like his old friend Tony’s daughter on the scene. I appreciated McGonnigal’s unwillingness to witness any acrimony between his boss and me, and was getting up to leave when the uniformed cops came back.

The sixth timer had been found in a supply closet behind the men’s lockers. He was concussed and groggy from a head wound and couldn’t remember how he got to where he was. Couldn’t remember anything past lunchtime. I waited long enough to hear that and slid from the room.

Alicia was waiting for me at the far end of the hall. She had changed from her suit into jeans and a pullover and was squatting on her heels, staring fiercely at nothing. When she saw me coming, she stood up and pushed her black hair out of her eyes.

“You look a mess, V. I.”

“Thanks. I’m glad to get help and support from my friends after they’ve dragged me into a murder investigation.”

“Oh, don’t get angry-I didn’t mean it that way. I’m sorry I dragged you into a murder investigation. No, I’m not, actually. I’m glad you were on hand. Can we talk?”

“After I put some dry clothes on and stop looking a mess.”

She offered me her jacket. Since I’m five eight to her five four, it wasn’t much of a cover, but I draped it gratefully over my shoulders to protect myself from the chilly October evening.

At my apartment Alicia followed me into the bathroom while I turned on the hot water. “Do you know who the dead woman was? The police wouldn’t tell us.”

“Yes,” I responded irritably. “And if you’ll give me time to warm up, I’ll tell you. Bathing is not a group sport in this apartment.”

She trailed back out of the bathroom, her face set in tense lines. When I joined her in the living room some twenty minutes later, a towel around my damp hair, she was sitting in front of the television set changing channels.

“No news yet,” she said briefly. “Who was the dead girl?”

“Louise Carmody. Junior loan officer at the Ft. Dearborn. You know her?”

Alicia shook her head. “Do the police know why she was shot?”

“They’re just starting to investigate. What do you know about it?”

“Nothing. Are they going to put her name on the news?”

“Probably, if the family’s been notified. Why is this important?”

“No reason. It just seems so ghoulish, reporters hovering around her dead body and everything.”

“Could I have the truth, please?”

She sprang to her feet and glared at me. “It is the truth.”

“Screw that. You don’t know her name, you spin the TV dials to see the reports, and now you think it’s ghoulish for the reporters to hover around?… Tell you what I think, Alicia. I think you know who did the shooting. They shuffled the swimmers, nobody knew who was in which lane. You started out in lane two, and you’d be dead if the woman from Ajax hadn’t complained. Who wants to kill you?”

Her black eyes glittered in her white face. “No one. Why don’t you have a little empathy, Vic? I might have been killed. There was a madman out there who shot a woman. Why don’t you give me some sympathy?”

“I jumped into a pool to pull that woman out. I sat around in wet clothes for two hours talking to the cops. I’m beat. You want sympathy, go someplace else. The little I have is reserved for myself tonight.

“I’d really like to know why I had to be at the pool, if it wasn’t to ward off a potential attacker. And if you’d told me the real reason, Louise Carmody might still be alive.”

“Damn you, Vic, stop doubting every word I say. I told you why I needed you there-someone had to sign the card. Millie works during the day. So does Fredda. Katie has a new baby. Elene is becoming a grandmother for the first time. Get off my goddamn back.”

“If you’re not going to tell me the truth, and if you’re going to scream at me about it, I’d just as soon you left.”

She stood silent for a minute. “Sorry, Vic. I’ll get a better grip on myself.”

“Great. You do that. I’m fixing some supper-want any?”

She shook her head. When I returned with a plate of pasta and olives, Joan Druggen was just announcing the top local story. Alicia sat with her hands clenched as they stated the dead woman’s name. After that, she didn’t say much. Just asked if she could crash for the night-she lived in Warrenville, a good hour’s drive from town, near Berman’s aeronautic engineering labs.

I gave her pillows and a blanket for the couch and went to bed. I was pretty angry: I figured she wanted to sleep over because she was scared, and it infuriated me that she wouldn’t talk about it.

When the phone woke me at 2:30, my throat was raw, the start of a cold brought on by sitting around in wet clothes for so long. A heavy voice asked for Alicia.

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” I said hoarsely.

“Be your age, Warshawski. She brought you to the gym. She isn’t at her own place. She’s gotta be with you. You don’t want to wake her up, give her a message. She was lucky tonight. We want the money by noon, or she won’t be so lucky a second time.”

He hung up. I held the receiver a second longer and heard another click. The living room extension. I pulled on a dressing gown and padded down the hallway. The apartment door shut just as I got to the living room. I ran to the top of the stairs; Alicia’s footsteps were echoing up and down the stairwell.

“Alicia! Alicia-you can’t go out there alone. Come back here!”

The slamming of the entryway door was my only answer.

III

I didn’t sleep well, my cold mixing with worry and anger over Alicia. At eight I hoisted my aching body out of bed and sat sneezing over some steaming fruit juice while I tried to focus my brain on possible action. Alicia owed somebody money. That somebody was pissed off enough to kill because he didn’t have it. Bankers do not kill wayward loan customers. Loan sharks do, but what could Alicia have done to rack up so much indebtedness? Berman probably paid her seventy or eighty thousand a year for the special kinds of designs she did on aircraft wings. And she was the kind of client a bank usually values. So what did she need money for that only a shark would provide?

The clock was ticking. I called her office. She’d phoned in sick; the secretary didn’t know where she was calling from but had assumed home. On a dim chance I tried her home phone. No answer. Alicia had one brother, Tom, an insurance agent on the far south side. After a few tries I located his office in Flossmoor. He hadn’t heard from Alicia for weeks. And no, he didn’t know who she might owe money to.

Reluctantly Tom gave me their father’s phone number in Florida. Mr. Dauphine hadn’t heard from his daughter, either.

“If she calls you, or if she shows up, please let me know. She’s in trouble up here, and the only way I can help her is by knowing where she is.” I gave him the number without much expectation of hearing from him again.

I did know someone who might be able to give me a line on her debts. A year or so earlier, I’d done a major favor for Don Pasquale, a local mob leader. If she owed him money, he might listen to my intercession. If not, he might be able to tell me whom she had borrowed from.

Torfino’s, an Elmwood Park restaurant where the don had a part-time office, put me through to his chief assistant, Ernesto. A well-remembered gravel voice told me I sounded awful.

“Thank you, Ernesto,” I snuffled. “Did you hear about the death of Louise Carmody at the University of Illinois gym last night? She was probably shot by mistake, poor thing. The intended victim was a woman named Alicia Dauphine. We grew up together, so I feel a little solicitous on her behalf. She owes a lot of money to someone: I wondered if you know who.”

“Name isn’t familiar, Warshawski. I’ll check around and call you back.”

My cold made me feel as though I was at the bottom of a fish tank. I couldn’t think fast enough or hard enough to imagine where Alicia might have gone to ground. Perhaps at her house, believing if she didn’t answer the phone no one would think she was home? It wasn’t a very clever idea, but it was the best I could do in my muffled, snuffled state.

The old farmhouse in Warrenville that Alicia had modernized lay behind the local high school. The boys were out practicing football. They were wearing light jerseys. I had on my winter coat-even though the day was warm, my cold made me shiver and want to be bundled up. Although we were close enough that I could see their mouthpieces, they didn’t notice me as I walked around the house looking for signs of life.

Alicia’s car was in the garage, but the house looked cold and unoccupied. As I made my way to the back, a black-and-white cat darted out from the bushes and began weaving itself around my ankles, mewing piteously. Alicia had three cats. This one wanted something to eat.

Alicia had installed a sophisticated burglar alarm system-she had an office in her home and often worked on preliminary designs there. An expert had gotten through the system into the pantry-some kind of epoxy had been sprayed on the wires to freeze them. Then, somehow disabling the phone link, the intruder had cut through the wires.

My stomach muscles tightened, and I wished futilely for the Smith & Wesson locked in my safe at home. My cold really had addled my brains for me not to take it on such an errand. Still, where burglars lead shall P.I.s hesitate? I opened the window, slid a leg over, and landed on the pantry floor. My feline friend followed more gracefully. She promptly abandoned me to start sniffing at the pantry walls.

Cautiously opening the door I slid into the kitchen. It was deserted, the refrigerator and clock motors humming gently, a dry dishcloth draped over the sink. In the living room another cat joined me and followed me into the electronic wonderland of Alicia’s study. She had used built-in bookcases to house her computers and other gadgets. The printers were tucked along a side wall, and wires ran everywhere. Whoever had broken in was not interested in merchandise-the street value of her study contents would have brought in a nice return, but they stood unharmed.

By now I was dreading the trek upstairs. The second cat, a tabby, trotted briskly ahead of me, tail waving like a flag. Alicia’s bedroom door was shut. I kicked it open with my right leg and pressed myself against the wall. Nothing. Dropping to my knees I looked in. The bed, tidily covered with an old-fashioned white spread, was empty. So was the bathroom. So was the guest room and an old sun porch glassed in and converted to a solarium.

The person who broke in had not come to steal-everything was preternaturally tidy. So he (she?) had come to attack Alicia. The hair stood up on the nape of my neck. Where was he? Not in the house. Hiding outside?

I started down the stairs again when I heard a noise, a heavy scraping. I froze, trying to locate the source. A movement caught my eye at the line of vision. The hatch to the crawl space had been shoved open; an arm swung down. For a split second only I stared at the arm and the gun in its grip, then leaped down the stairs two at a time.

A heavy thud-the man jumping onto the upper landing. The crack as the gun fired. A jolt in my left shoulder, and I gasped with shock and fell the last few steps to the bottom. Righted myself. Reached for the deadlock on the front door. Heard an outraged squawk, loud swearing, and a crash that sounded like a man falling downstairs. Then I had the door open and was staggering outside while an angry bundle of for poured past me. One of the cats, a heroine, tripping my assailant and saving my life.

IV

I never really lost consciousness. The football players saw me stagger down the sidewalk and came trooping over. In their concern for me they failed to tackle the gunman, but they got me to a hospital, where a young intern eagerly set about removing the slug from my shoulder; the winter coat had protected me from major damage. Between my cold and the gunshot, I was just as happy to let him incarcerate me for a few days.

They tucked me into bed, and I fell into a heavy, uneasy sleep. I had jumped into the black waters of Lake Michigan in search of Alicia, trying to reach her ahead of a shark. She was lurking just out of reach. She didn’t know that her oxygen tank ran out at noon.

When I finally woke, soaked with sweat, it was dark outside. The room was Ht faindy by a fluorescent light over the sink. A lean man in a brown wool business suit was sitting next to the bed. When he saw me looking at him, he reached into his coat.

If he was going to shoot me, there wasn’t a thing I could do about it-I was too limp from my heavy sleep to move. Instead of a gun, though, he pulled out an I.D. case.

“Miss Warshawski? Peter Carlton, Federal Bureau of Investigation. I know you’re not feeling well, but I need to talk to you about Alicia Dauphine.”

“So the shark ate her,” I said.

“What?” he demanded sharply. “What does that mean?”

“Nothing. Where is she?”

“We don’t know. That’s what we want to talk to you about. She went home with you after the swimming meet yesterday. Correct?”

“Gosh, Mr. Carlton. I love watching my tax dollars at work. If you’ve been following her, you must have a better fix on her whereabouts than I do. I last saw her around two-thirty this morning. If it’s still today, that is.”

“What did she talk to you about?”

My mind was starting to unfog. “Why is the bureau interested in Ms. Dauphine?”

He didn’t want to tell me. All he wanted was every word Alicia had said to me. When I wouldn’t budge, he started in on why I was in her house and what I had noticed there.

Finally I said, “Mr. Carlton, if you can’t tell me why you’re interested in Ms. Dauphine, there’s no way I can respond to your questions. I don’t believe the bureau-or the police-or anyone, come to that-has any right to pry into the affairs of citizens in the hopes of turning up some scandal. You tell me why you’re interested, and I’ll tell you if I know anything relevant to that interest.”

With an ill grace he said, “We believe she has been selling Defense Department secrets to the Chinese.”

“No,” I said flatly. “She wouldn’t.”

“Some wing designs she was working on have disappeared. She’s disappeared. And a Chinese functionary in St. Charles has disappeared.”

“Sounds pretty circumstantial to me. The wing designs might be in her home. They could easily be on a disk someplace-she did all her drafting on computer.”

They’d been through her computer files at home and at work and found nothing. Her boss did not have copies of the latest design, only of the early stuff. I thought about the heavy voice on the phone demanding money, but loyalty to Alicia made me keep it to myself-give her a chance to tell her story first.

I did give him everything Alicia had said, her nervousness and her sudden departure. That I was worried about her and went to see if she was in her house. And was shot by an intruder hiding in the crawl space. Who might have taken her designs. Although nothing looked pilfered.

He didn’t believe me. I don’t know if he thought I knew something I wasn’t telling, or if he thought I had joined Alicia in selling secrets to the Chinese. But he kept at me for so long that I finally pushed my call button. When the nurse arrived, I explained that I was worn out and could she please show my visitor out? He left but promised me that he would return.

Cursing my weakness, I fell asleep again. When I next awoke it was morning, and both my cold and my shoulder were much improved. When the doctors came by on their morning visit, I got their agreement to a discharge. Before I bathed and left, the Warrenville police sent out a man who took a detailed statement.

I called my answering service from a phone in the lobby. Ernesto had been in touch. I reached him at Torfino’s.

“Saw about your accident in the papers, Warshawski. How you feeling?… About Dauphine. Apparently she’s signed a note for seven hundred fifty thousand dollars to Art Smollensk. Can’t do anything to help you out. The don sends his best wishes for your recovery.”

Art Smollensk, gambling king. When I worked for the public defender, I’d had to defend some of his small-time employees-people at the level of smashing someone’s fingers in a car door. The ones who did hits and arson usually could afford their own attorneys.

Alicia as a gambler made no sense to me-but we hadn’t been close for over a decade. There were lots of things I didn’t know about her.

At home for a change of clothes I stopped in the basement, where I store useless mementos in a locked stall. After fifteen minutes of shifting boxes around, I was sweating and my left shoulder was throbbing and oozing stickily, but I’d located my high school yearbook. I took it upstairs with me and thumbed through it, trying to gain inspiration on where Alicia might have gone to earth.

None came. I was about to leave again when the phone rang. It was Alicia, talking against a background of noise. “Thank God you’re safe, Vic. I saw about the shooting in the paper. Please don’t worry about me. I’m okay. Stay away and don’t worry.”

She hung up before I could ask her anything. I concentrated, not on what she’d said, but what had been in the background. Metal doors banging open and shut. Lots of loud, wild talking. Not an airport-the talking was too loud for that, and there weren’t any intercom announcements in the background. I knew what it was. If I’d just let my mind relax, it would come to me.

Idly flipping through the yearbook, I looked for faces Alicia might trust. I found my own staring from a group photo of the girls’ basketball team. I’d been a guard-Victoria the protectress from way back. On the next page, Alicia smiled fiercely, holding a swimming trophy. Her coach, who also taught Latin, had desperately wanted Alicia to train for the Olympics, but Alicia had had her heart set on the U of I and engineering.

Suddenly I knew what the clanking was, where Alicia was. No other sound like that exists anywhere on earth.

V

Alicia and I grew up under the shadow of the steel mills in South Chicago. Nowhere else has the deterioration of American industry shown up more clearly. Wisconsin Steel is padlocked shut. The South Works are a fragment of their former monstrous grandeur. Unemployment is over 30 percent, and the number of jobless youths lounging in the bars and on the streets had grown from the days when I hurried past them to the safety of my mother’s house.

The high school was more derelict than I remembered. Many windows were boarded over. The asphalt playground was cracked and covered with litter, and the bleachers around the football field were badly weathered.

The guard at the doorway demanded my business. I showed her my P.I. license and said I needed to talk to the women’s gym teacher on confidential business. After some dickering-hostile on her side, snuffly on mine-she gave me a pass. I didn’t need directions down the scuffed corridors, past the battered lockers, past the smell of rancid oil coming from the cafeteria, to the noise and life of the gym.

Teenage girls in gold shirts and black shorts-the school colors-were shrieking, jumping, wailing in pursuit of Volleyballs. I watched the pandemonium until the buzzer ended the period, then walked up to the instructor.

She was panting and sweating and gave me an incurious glance, looking only briefly at the pass I held out for her. “Yes?”

“You have a new swimming coach, don’t you?”

“Just a volunteer. Are you from the union? She isn’t drawing a paycheck. But Miss Finley, the head coach, is desperately shorthanded-she teaches Latin, you know-and this woman is a big help.”

“I’m not from the union. I’m her trainer. I need to talk to her-find out why she’s dropped out and whether she plans to compete in any of her meets this fill.”

The teacher gave me the hard look of someone used to sizing up fabricated excuses. I didn’t think she believed me, but she told me I could go into the pool area and talk to the swim coach.

The pool dated to the time when this high school served an affluent neighborhood. It was twenty-five yards long, built with skylights along the outer wall. You reached it through the changing rooms, separate ones with showers for girls and boys. It didn’t have an outside hallway entrance.

Alicia was perched alone on the high dive. A few students, boys and girls, were splashing about in the pool, but no organized training was in progress. Alicia was staring at nothing.

I cupped my hands and called up to her, “You’re not working very hard at your new job.”

At that she turned and recognized me. “Vic!” Her cry was enough to stop the splashing in the pool. “How-Are you alone?”

“I’m alone. Come down. I took a slug in the shoulder-I’d rather not climb up after you.”

She shot off the board in a perfect arc, barely rippling the surface of the water. The kids watched with envy. I was pretty jealous, myself-nothing I do is done with that much grace.

She surfaced near me but looked at the students. “I want you guys swimming laps,” she said sharply. “What do you think this is-summer camp?”

They left us reluctantly and began swimming.

“How did you find me?”

“It was easy. I was looking through the yearbook, trying to think of someone you would trust. Miss Finley was the simple answer-I remembered how you practically lived in her house for two years. You liked to read Jane Eyre together, and she adored you.

“You are in deep trouble. Smollensk is after you, and so is the FBI. You can’t hide here forever. You’d better talk to the bureau guys. They won’t love you, but at least they’re not going to shoot you.”

“The FBI? Whatever for?”

“Your designs, sweetie pie. Your designs and the Chinese. The FBI are the people who look into that kind of thing.”

“Vic. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The words were said with such slow deliberateness that I was almost persuaded.

“The seven hundred fifty thousand dollars you owe Art Smollensk.”

She shook her head, then said, “Oh. Yes. That.”

“Yes, that. I guess it seems like more money to me than it does to you. Or had you forgotten Louise Carmody getting shot?… Anyway, a known Chinese spy left Fermilab yesterday or the day before, and you’re gone, and some of your wing designs are gone, and the FBI thinks you’ve sold them overseas and maybe gone East yourself. I didn’t tell them about Art, but they’ll probably get to him before too long.”

“How sure are they that the designs are gone?”

“Your boss can’t find them. Maybe you have a duplicate set at home nobody knows about.”

She shook her head again. “I don’t leave that kind of thing at home. I had them last Saturday, working, but I took the diskettes back…” Her voice trailed off as a look of horror washed across her face. “Oh, no. This is worse than I thought.” She hoisted herself out of the pool. “I’ve got to go. Got to get away before someone else figures out I’m here.”

“Alicia, for Christ’s sake. What has happened?”

She stopped and looked at me, tears swimming in her black eyes. “If I could tell anyone, it would be you, Vic.” Then she was jogging into the girls’ changing room, leaving the students in the pool swimming laps.

I stuck with her. “Where are you going? The Feds have a hook on any place you have friends or relations. Smollensk does, too.”

That stopped her. “Tom, too?”

“Tom first, last, and foremost. He’s the only relative you have in Chicago.” She was starting to shiver in the bare corridor. I grabbed her and shook her. “Tell me the truth, Alicia. I can’t fly blind. I already took a bullet in the shoulder.”

Suddenly she was sobbing on my chest. “Oh, Vic. It’s been so awful. You can’t know… you can’t understand… you won’t believe…” She was hiccuping.

I led her into the shower room and found a towel. Rubbing her down, I got the story in choking bits and pieces.

Tom was the gambler. He’d gotten into it in a small way in high school and college. After he went into business for himself, the habit grew. He’d mortgaged his insurance agency assets, taken out a second mortgage on the house, but couldn’t stop.

“He came to me two weeks ago. Told me he was going to start filing false claims with his companies, collect the money.” She gave a twisted smile. “He didn’t have to put that kind of pressure on-I can’t help helping him.”

“But Alicia, why? And how does Art Smollensk have your name?”

“Is that the man Tom owes money to? I think he uses my name-Alonso, my middle name-I know he does; I just don’t like to think about it. Someone came around threatening me three years ago. I told Tom never to use my name again, and he didn’t for a long time, but now I guess he was desperate-seven hundred fifty thousand dollars, you know…

“As to why I help him… You never had any brothers or sisters, so maybe you can’t understand. When Mom died, I was thirteen, he was six. I looked after him. Got him out of trouble. All kinds of stuff. It gets to be a habit, I guess. Or an obligation. That’s why I’ve never married, you know, never had any children of my own. I don’t want any more responsibilities like this one.”

“And the designs?”

She looked horrified again. “He came over for dinner on Saturday. I’d been working all day on the things, and he came into the study when I was logging off. I didn’t tell him it was Defense Department work, but it’s not too hard to figure out what I do is defense-related-after all, that’s all Berman does; we don’t make commercial aircraft. I haven’t had a chance to look at the designs since-I worked out all day Sunday getting ready for that damned meet Monday. Tom must have taken my diskettes and swapped the labels with some others-I’ve got tons of them lying around.”

She gave a twisted smile. “It was a gamble: a gamble that there’d be something valuable on them and a gamble I wouldn’t discover the switch before he got rid of them. But he’s a gambler.”

“I see… Look, Alicia. You can only be responsible for Tom so far. Even if you could bail him out this time-and I don’t see how you possibly can-there’ll be a next time. And you may not survive this one to help him again. Let’s call the FBI.”

She squeezed her eyes shut. “You don’t understand, Vic. You can’t possibly understand.”

While I was trying to reason her into phoning the bureau, Miss Finley, swim coach-cum-romantic-Latin-teacher, came briskly into the locker room. “Allie! One of the girls came to get me. Are you all-” She did a double take. “ Victoria! Good to see you. Have you come to help Allie? I told her she could count on you.”

“Have you told her what’s going on?” I demanded of Alicia.

Yes, Miss Finley knew most of the story. Agreed that it was very worrying but said Allie could not possibly turn in her own brother. She had given Allie a gym mat and some bedding to sleep on-she could just stay at the gym until the furor died down and they could think of something else to do.

I sat helplessly as Miss Finley led Alicia off to get some dry clothes. At last, when they didn’t rejoin me, I sought them out, poking through half-remembered halls and doors until I found the staff coaching office. Alicia was alone, looking about fifteen in an old cheerleader’s uniform Miss Finley had dug up for her.

“Miss Finley teaching?” I asked sharply.

Alicia looked guilty but defiant. “Yes. Two-thirty class. Look. The critical thing is to get those diskettes back. I called Tom, explained it to him. Told him I’d try to help him raise the money but that we couldn’t let the Chinese have those things. He agreed, so he’s bringing them out here.”

The room rocked slightly around me. “No. I know you don’t have much of a sense of humor, but this is a joke, isn’t it?”

She didn’t understand. Wouldn’t understand that if the Chinese had already left the country, Tom no longer had the material. That if Tom was coming here, she was the scapegoat. At last, despairing, I said, “Where is he meeting you? Here?”

“I told him I’d be at the pool.”

“Will you do one thing my way? Will you go to Miss Finley’s class and conjugate verbs for forty-five minutes and let me meet him at the pool? Please?”

At last, her jaw set stubbornly, she agreed. She still wouldn’t let me call the bureau, though. “Not until I’ve talked to Tom myself. It may all be a mistake, you know.”

We both knew it wasn’t, but I saw her into the Latin class without making the phone call I knew it was my duty to make and returned to the pool. Driving out the two students still splashing around in the water, I put signs on the locker room doors saying the water was contaminated and there would be no swimming until further notice.

I turned out the lights and settled in a corner of the room remote from the outside windows to wait. And go over and over the story in my mind. I believed it. Was I fooling myself? Was that why she wouldn’t call the Feds?

At last Tom came in through the boys’ locker room entrance. “Allie? Allie?” His voice bounced off the high rafters and echoed around me. I was well back in the shadows, my Smith & Wesson in hand; he didn’t see me.

After half a minute or so another man joined him. I didn’t recognize the stranger, but his baggy clothes marked him as part of Smollensk’s group, not the bureau. He talked softly to Tom for a minute. Then they went into the girls’ locker room together.

Whey they returned, I had moved part way up the side of the pool, ready to follow them if they went back into the main part of the high school looking for Alicia.

“Tom!” I called. “It’s V. I. Warshawski. I know the whole story. Give me the diskettes.”

“Warshawski!” he yelled. “What the hell are you doing here?”

I sensed rather than saw the movement his friend made. I shot at him and dived into the water. His bullet zipped as it hit the tiles where I’d been standing. My wet clothes and my sore shoulder made it hard to move. Another bullet hit the water by my head, and I went under again, fumbling with my heavy jacket, getting it free, surfacing, hearing Alicia’s sharp, “Tom, why are you shooting at Vic? Stop it now. Stop it and give me back the diskettes.”

Another flurry of shots, this time away from me, giving me a chance to get to the side of the pool, to climb out. Alicia lay on the floor near the door to the girls’ locker room. Tom stood silently by. The gunman was jamming more bullets into his gun.

As fast as I could in my sodden clothes I lumbered to the hit man, grabbing his arm, squeezing, feeling blood start to seep from my shoulder, stepping on his instep, putting all the force of my body into my leg. Tom, though, Tom was taking the gun from him. Tom was going to shoot me.

“Drop that gun, Tom Dauphine.” It was Miss Finley. Years of teaching in a tough school gave creditable authority to her; Tom dropped the gun.

VI

Alicia lived long enough to tell the truth to the FBI. It was small comfort to me. Small consolation to see Tom’s statement. He hoped he could get Smollensk to kill his sister before she said anything. If that happened, he had a good gamble on her dying a traitor in everyone’s eyes-after all, her designs were gone, and her name was in Smollensk’s files. Maybe the truth never would have come out. Worth a gamble to a betting man.

The Feds arrived about five minutes after the shooting stopped. They’d been watching Tom, just not closely enough. They were sore that they’d let Alicia get shot. So they dumped some charges on me-obstructing federal authorities, not telling them where Alicia was, not calling as soon as I had the truth from her, God knows what else. I spent several days in jail. It seemed like a suitable penance, just not enough of one.