Blood Shot

7

I’d had enough of the city, of pollution and cramped, painful lives. When I got home I changed into jeans, packed an overnight bag, and took off with the dog to spend the weekend in Michigan. Although the water was too cold and wild for swimming, we spent two invigorating days on the beach, running, chasing sticks, or reading, depending on individual temperament. When I got back to Chicago late Sunday I felt as though my head had been thoroughly aired out. I turned the dog over to a jealous Mr. Contreras and headed upstairs to bed.

I’d told the personnel guy at Xerxes I’d call him in the morning, but when I woke up I decided to go visit him in person. If he had addresses for Pankowski and Ferraro, I could go see them and maybe get the whole mess cleared up in one morning. And if he’d forgotten to stop at the Stickney warehouse, a personal visit would make him more responsive than a phone call.

It had rained overnight, turning Xerxes’s gravel yard into an oily mud puddle. I parked as close to the side entrance as I could and picked my way through the sludge. Inside, the cavernous hallway was cold; I was shivering slightly by the time I reached the pebbly glass entrance to the administrative suite.

Joiner wasn’t in his office, but the incurious secretary cheerfully directed me to a loading bay where he was managing a shipment. I followed the hall down to the river end of the long building. Heavy steel doors, difficult to open, led to the bay. Beyond lay a world of dirt and clamor.

Sliding steel doors enclosing the loading bay had been rolled open on two sides. At the far end, facing me, the Calumet lapped against the walls, its brackish waters green and roiling from the downpour. A cement barge lay motionless in the turbulent water. A gang of dockhands was removing large barrels from it, rolling them along the concrete floor with a clatter echoed and intensified by the steel walls.

The other door opened on a truck bay. A phalanx of silver tankers was lined up there, looking like menacing cows attached to a high-tech milking machine as they received solvents from an overhead pipe rack. Their diesels vibrated, filling the air with an urgent racket, making it impossible to understand the shouts of the men who were moving around them.

I spied a group in conference around a man with a clipboard. The light was too dim to make out faces but I assumed the man was Joiner and headed toward him. Someone darted from behind a vat and seized my arm.

“Hard-hat area,” he bellowed in my ear. “What are you doing here?”

“Gary Joiner!” I bawled back at him. “I need to talk to him.”

He escorted me back to the entrance to wait. I watched him go over to the confabbing group and tap one of the figures on the arm. He jerked his head to where I was standing. Joiner stuck his clipboard on a barrel and trotted over to me.

“Oh,” he said. “It’s you.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by instead of phoning. I can tell this is a bad time to talk to you-want me to wait in your office?”

“No, no. I-uh, I couldn’t find anything about those men. I don’t think they ever worked here.”

Even in the dim light I could tell his splotchy skin was flushing.

“I bet that warehouse is a mess,” I said sympathetically. “No one has time to look after records when you’re running a manufacturing plant.”

“Yes,” he agreed eagerly. “Yes, that’s for sure.”

“I’m a trained investigator. If you gave me some kind of authorization, I could have a look through there. You know, see if their records were misplaced or something.”

He flickered his eyes nervously around the room. “No. No. Things aren’t that big a mess. The guys never worked here. I gotta go now.”

He hurried away before I could say anything else. I started after him, but even if I could get past the foreman, I couldn’t think of a way to get Joiner to tell me the truth. I didn’t know him, didn’t know the plant, didn’t have a clue as to why he would lie to me.

I walked slowly back down the long hall to my car, absentmindedly stepping in an oozy patch that plastered sludge firmly to my right shoe. I cursed loudly-I’d paid over a hundred dollars for those pumps. As I sat in the car trying to scrape it clean, I got oily sludge on my skirt. Feeling outraged with the world, I threw the shoe petulantly into the backseat and changed back into my running gear. Even though Caroline hadn’t sent me to the plant, I blamed my problems on her.

As I drove up Torrence, passing rusted-out factories that looked dingier than ever from the rain, I wondered if Louisa had called Joiner, asking him not to help me if I turned up. I didn’t think her mind worked that way, though: she’d told me to mind my own business, and as far as she was concerned, I was doing just that. Maybe the Djiaks had fumed self-righteously to Xerxes, but I thought they were too myopic to analyze how I might conduct an investigation. They could only see how Louisa had hurt them.

On the other hand, if Joiner didn’t want to talk to me about the men because of some problem the company was having with them-say a lawsuit-he would have known when I came in on Friday. But the first time I spoke to him he’d obviously never heard of them.

I couldn’t figure it out, but the thought of lawsuits made me realize another place to look for the men. Neither Pankowski nor Ferraro was in the phone book, but the old ward voter registration records might still be around. I turned right on Ninety-fifth Street and headed into East Side.

The ward offices were still in the tidy brick two-flat on Avenue M. A variety of errands may take you to your committeeman’s office, from help with parking tickets to ways of getting on the city payroll. The local cops are in and out a lot what with one thing and another, and even though my dad’s beat had been North Milwaukee Avenue, I’d come here with him more than once. The sign proclaiming Art Jurshak alderman and Freddy Parma ward committeeman, which covered all of the building’s exposed north wall, hadn’t changed. And the storefront next door still housed the insurance agency that had given Art his toehold in the community.

I knocked most of the sludge from my right shoe and put my pumps back on. Brushing my skirt as best I could with a Kleenex, I went into the building. I didn’t recognize any of the men lounging in the first-floor office, but judging from their age and their air of being as one with the furnishings, I thought they probably went back to my childhood.

There were three of them. One, a graying man smoking the fat little cigar that used to be a Democratic pol’s badge of office, was huddled in the sports pages. The other two, one bald-headed, the other with a white Tip O’Neill-style mop, were talking earnestly. Despite their differing hairdos, they looked remarkably alike, their shaved faces red and jowly, their forty extra pounds hanging casually over the belts of their shiny pants.

They glanced sidelong at me when I came in but didn’t say anything: I was a woman and a stranger. If I was from the mayor’s office, it would do me good to cool my heels. If I was anyone else, I couldn’t do anything for them.

The two speakers were going over the rival merits of their pickup trucks, Chevy versus Ford. No one down here buys foreign-bad form with three quarters of the steel industry unemployed.

“Hi,” I said loudly.

They looked up reluctantly. The newspaper reader didn’t stir, but I saw him move the pages expectantly.

I pulled up a rollaway chair. “I’m a lawyer,” I said, taking a business card from my purse. “I’m looking for two men who used to live down here, maybe twenty years ago.”

“You oughta try the police, cookie-this isn’t the lost-and-found,” the bald-headed one said.

The newspaper rattled appreciatively.

I slapped my forehead. “Damn! You’re so right. When I lived down here Art used to like to help out the community. Shows you how times have changed, I guess.”

“Yeah, ain’t nothing like it used to be.” Baldy seemed to be the designated spokesman.

“Except the money it takes to run a campaign,” I said mournfully. “That’s still pretty expensive, what I hear.”

Baldy and Whitey exchanged wary glances: Was I trying to do the honorable thing and slip them a little cash, or was I part of the latest round of federal entrapment artists hoping to catch Jurshak putting the squeeze on the citizenry? Whitey nodded fractionally.

Baldy spoke. “Why you looking for these guys?”

I shrugged. “The usual. Old car accident they were in in ’80. Finally settled. It’s not a lot of money, twenty-five hundred each is all. Not worth a lot of effort to hunt them down, and if they’re retired, they’ve got pensions anyway.”

I stood up, but I could see the little calculators moving in their brains; the newspaper reader had let Michael Jordan’s exploits drop to his knees to join in the telepathic exercise. If they arranged a meeting, how much could they reasonably skim? Make it six hundred and that’d be two apiece.

The other two nodded and Baldy spoke again. “What did you say their names were?”

“I didn’t. And you’re probably right-I should have taken this to the cops to begin with.” I started slowly for the door.

“Hey, just a minute, sister. Can’t you take a little kidding?”

I turned around and looked uncertain. “Well, if you’re sure… It’s Joey Pankowski and Steve Ferraro.”

Whitey got up and ambled over to a row of filing cabinets. He asked me to spell the names, letter by painful letter. Moving his lips as he read the names on old voter registration forms, he finally brightened.

“Here we are-1985 was the last year Pankowski was registered, ’83 for Ferraro. Why don’t you bring their drafts in here? We can get them cashed through Art’s agency and see that the boys get their money. We should get ’em to reregister and it’d save you another trip down here.”

“Gee, thanks,” I said earnestly. “Trouble is, I have to get them to personally sign a release.” I thought for a minute and smiled. “Tell you what-give me their addresses and I’ll go see them this afternoon, make sure they still live down here. Then next month when the claim drafts are issued I can just mail them both to you here.”

They thought it over slowly. They finally agreed, again silently, that there was nothing wrong with the idea. Whitey wrote Pankowski’s and Ferraro’s addresses down in a large, round hand. I thanked him graciously and headed for the door again.

Just as I was opening it a young man came in, hesitantly, as if unsure of his welcome. He had curly auburn hair and wore a navy wool suit that enhanced the staggering beauty of his pale face. I couldn’t remember ever seeing a man with such perfect good looks-he might have posed for Michelangelo’s David. When he gave a diffident smile it made him look vaguely familiar.

“Hiya, Art,” Baldy said. “Your old man’s downtown.”

Young Art Jurshak. Big Art had never looked this good, but the smile must have made the kid resemble his old man’s campaign posters.

He flushed. “That’s okay. I just wanted to look at some ward files. You don’t mind, do you?”

Baldy hunched an impatient shoulder. “You’re a partner in the old man’s firm. You do what you want, Art. Think I’m going for a bite, anyway. Coming, Fred?”

The white-haired man and the newspaper reader both got up. Food sounded like a swell idea to me. Even a detective looking at a meager fee has to eat some of the time. The four of us left young Art alone in the middle of the room.

Fratesi’s Restaurant was still where I remembered it, on the corner of Ninety-seventh and Ewing. Gabriella had disapproved of them because they cooked southern Italian instead of her familiar dishes of the Piedmont, but the food was good and it used to be a place to go for special occasions.

Today there wasn’t much of a lunchtime crowd. The decorations around the fountain in the middle of the floor, which used to enchant me as a child, had been allowed to decay. I recognized old Mrs. Fratesi behind the counter, but felt the place had grown too sad for me to identify myself to her. I ate a salad made of iceberg lettuce and an old tomato and a frittata that was surprisingly light and carefully seasoned.

In the little ladies’ room at the back I got the most noticeable chunks of dirt off my skirt. I didn’t look fabulous, but maybe that suited the neighborhood better. I paid the tab, a modest four dollars, and left. I didn’t know you could get bread and butter in Chicago for under four dollars anymore.

All during lunch I’d turned over various approaches to Pankowski and Ferraro in my mind. If they were married, wives at home, children, they wouldn’t want to hear about Louisa Djiak. Or maybe they would. Maybe it would bring back the happy days of yore. I finally decided I’d have to play it by ear.

Steve Ferraro’s home was nearer to the restaurant, so I went there first. It was another of the endless array of East Side bungalows, but a little seedier than most of its neighbors. The porch hadn’t been swept recently, my critical housekeeping eye noted, and the glass on the storm door could have done with a washing.

A long interval passed after I rang the bell. I pushed it again and was about to leave when I heard the inner door being unlocked. An old woman stood there, short, wispy-haired, and menacing.

“Yes,” she said in one harsh, heavily accented syllable.

“Scusi,” I said. “Cerco il signor Ferraro.”

Her face lightened marginally and she answered in Italian. What did I want him for? An old lawsuit that might finally be going to pay out? To him only, or to his heirs?

“To him only,” I said firmly in Italian, but my heart sank. Her next words confirmed my misgivings: il signor Ferraro was her son, her only child, and he had died in 1984. No, he had never married. He had talked once about a girl in the place where he worked, but madre de dio, the girl already had a baby; she was relieved when nothing came of it.

I gave her my card, with a request to call me if she thought of anything else, and set out for Green Bay Avenue without any high expectations.

Again a woman answered the door, a younger one this time, perhaps even my age, but too heavy and worn out for me to be certain. She gave me the cold fish eye reserved for life insurance salesmen and Jehovah’s Witnesses and prepared to shut the door on me.

“I’m a lawyer,” I said quickly. “I’m looking for Joey Pankowski.”

“Some lawyer,” she said contemptuously. “You’d better ask in Queen of Angels Cemetery-that’s where he’s spent the last two years. At least, that’s his story. Knowing that bastard, he probably pretended to die so he could go off with his latest little chickadee.”

I blinked a little under her fire. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Pankowski. It’s an old case that’s been settled rather slowly. A matter of some twenty-five hundred dollars, not really worth bothering you about.”

Her blue eyes almost disappeared into her cheeks. “Not so fast, lady. You got twenty-five hundred, I deserve that money. I suffered enough with that bastard, God knows. And then when he died there wasn’t even any insurance.”

“I don’t know,” I said fussily. “His oldest child-”

“Little Joey,” she said promptly. “Born August 1963. In the Army now. I could hold it for him till he gets home next January.”

“I was told there was another child. A girl born in 1962. Know anything about her?”

“That bastard!” she screamed. “That lying, cheating bastard. He screwed me when he was alive and now he’s dead he’s screwing me still!”

“So you know about the girl?” I asked, startled at the thought that my search might be over so easily.

She shook her head. “I know Joey, though. He could of had a dozen kids before he got me pregnant with little Joey. If this girl thinks she’s the first, all I can say is you better run an ad in the Little Calumet Times.”

I took a twenty from my purse and held it casually. “We could probably advance something from the settlement. Do you know anyone who could tell me for certain if he had any children before little Joey? A brother, maybe? Or his priest?”

“Priest?” she cackled. “I had to pay extra just to get his bones into Queen of Angels.”

She was thinking hard, though, trying not to look directly at the money. At last she said, “You know who might know? Doc at the plant. He talked to them every spring, took their blood, their histories. Knew more about them than God, Joey once said.”

She couldn’t tell me his name; if Joey ever mentioned it, she couldn’t be expected to remember it after all this time, could she? But she took the money with dignity and told me to come back if I was in the neighborhood.

“I don’t expect to see any more of it,” she added with unexpected cheerfulness. “Not from what I know of that bastard. If my old man hadn’t made him, he wouldn’t of married me. And between you and me, I’d of been better off.”