Blood Shot

11

I was skimming the paper while I made coffee the next morning when Nancy Cleghorn’s name leapt out at me. The story was on the front page of ChicagoBeat. It explained why she hadn’t been around to answer her phone yesterday. Her body had been found around eight last evening by two young boys who’d ignored both the government and their parents and gone into the posted area around Dead Stick Pond.

A small section of the original marsh remained as Illinois’s last wetland for migratory birds. Dead Stick Pond had once been a great feeding and resting ground, but was now so full of PCBs that little could survive there. Even so, in the middle of the dead mills you could find herons and other unusual birds, and the occasional beaver or muskrat.

The two boys had come on a muskrat there once and hoped to see it again. At the water’s edge they stumbled over a discarded boot. Since there were fifty of those for every animal-and it was dark-it had taken them a few minutes to realize it still had a body connected to it.

Nancy had been hit on the back of the head. The internal injury would have killed her eventually, but she apparently drowned when her body was dumped in the pond. The police knew of no one with a reason to kill her. She was well respected, her work at SCRAP had earned her a lot of kudos in the environmentally troubled community, and so on. She was survived by her mother and four brothers.

I slowly finished making the coffee and took the paper out to the living room, where I reread the story six or seven times. I didn’t learn anything new. Nancy. My snappish thought last night, maybe she’d fallen under a train, made the little hairs prickle on the sides of my face. My thinking hadn’t caused her death. My mind knew that, but my body didn’t.

If only I hadn’t taken that hike to the lake yesterday morning-I broke off the thought when I realized how stupid it was. If I stayed chained to my phone twenty-four hours a day, I’d be at home to needy friends or telemarketers and would have no other life. But Nancy. I’d known her since I was six years old. In my mind I thought we were still young together-that because we’d been young together we would protect each other from ever getting old.

I wandered to the window and stared out. It was raining hard again in thick sheets that made it impossible to see the street. I squinted at the water, moving my head to make patterns with it, wondering what to do. It was only eight-thirty-too early to call my friends at the papers to see if they had news that hadn’t made it to the morning edition. People who go to bed at three or four in the morning are more cooperative if you let them sleep in.

She’d been found in the Fourth Police District. I didn’t know anyone there-my dad had worked the Loop and northwest sides, not his own neighborhood. Besides, that’s been over ten years ago.

I was chewing on my fingertip, trying to decide whom to call, when the doorbell rang. I figured it was Mr. Contreras, trying to get me to come down to take the dog out in the downpour, and scowled at the foggy window without moving. The third time the bell clamored I reluctantly left my hideout. Cup in hand, I unbolted the outer door and padded barefoot down the three flights.

Two bulky figures stood in the outer hallway. Rain glistened on their shaved faces and dripped from their navy slickers to form dirty pools on the tiled floor.

When I opened the door the older one said with heavy sarcasm, “Good morning, sunshine. I hope we didn’t interrupt your beauty sleep.”

“Not at all, Bobby,” I said heartily. “I’ve been up for an hour at least. I just hoped it was a wrong number. Hi, Sergeant,” I added to the younger man. “You guys want some coffee?”

As they came past me into the stairwell cold water from their slickers dripped onto my bare toes. If it had just been Bobby Mallory, I would have thought it deliberate. But Sergeant McGonnigal was always scrupulously polite to me, never participating in his lieutenant’s hostility.

The truth of the matter was that Bobby had been my father’s closest friend, both on and off the force. His feelings toward me were compounded of guilt at flourishing when my father had stayed in beat patrol, at living while Tony had died-and frustration at my being grown up and a professional investigator instead of a little girl he could dandle on his knee.

He looked around in the little entryway of my apartment for a place to put his dripping raincoat, finally sticking it on the floor outside the door. His wife was a meticulous housekeeper and he had been well trained. Sergeant McGonnigal followed suit, running his fingers through his thick curly hair to squeeze some of the excess water out.

I solemnly took them into the living room and brought coffee in mugs, remembering extra sugar for Bobby.

“It’s good to see you,” I said politely when they were seated on the couch. “Especially on such a rotten day. How are you?”

Bobby looked at me sternly, quickly glancing away when he saw I didn’t have a bra on under my T-shirt. “I didn’t want to come here. The captain thought someone should talk to you and since I know you he thought it should be me. I didn’t agree, but he’s the captain. If you’ll answer my questions seriously and try not to be a wisenheimer, the whole thing’ll go faster and we’ll both be happy.”

“And I thought you were being social,” I said mournfully. “No, no, sorry, bad start. I’m serious as-as a traffic court judge. Ask me anything.”

“Nancy Cleghorn,” Bobby said flatly.

“That’s not a question, and I don’t have an answer. I just read in this morning’s paper that she was killed yesterday. I expect you know a lot more about it than I do.”

“Oh, yes,” he agreed heavily. “We know a great deal-that she died around six P.M. From the amount of internal bleeding, the M.E. says she was probably hit around four. We know she was thirty-six years old and had been pregnant at least once, that she ate too much high-fat food and broke her right leg as an adult. I know that a man, or a woman, with size thirteen shoes and a forty-inch stride, dragged her in a green blanket to the south end of Dead Stick Pond. The blanket was sold at a Sears store somewhere in the United States sometime between 1978 when they started making them and 1984 when they discontinued that brand. Someone else, presumably also a man, came along for the stroll but didn’t help with the dragging or dumping.”

“The lab worked overtime last night. I didn’t think they did that for your average dead citizen.”

Bobby refused to let me ride him. “There’s also a little bit I don’t know, but it’s the part that counts. I don’t have any idea who wanted her to die. But I understand you two grew up together and used to be pretty good friends.”

“And you want me to find her murderer? I would have thought you guys had the machinery to do that easier than me.”

His look would have made an academy recruit faint. “I want you to tell me.

” “I don’t know.”

“That’s not what I hear.” He glared at a point somewhere over my head.

I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about, then the messages I’d left for Nancy at SCRAP and with her mother came back to me. Those seemed like mighty small straws to build a house from.

“Let me guess,” I said brightly. “It’s not even business hours and you’ve already rounded up everyone at SCRAP and talked to them.”

McGonnigal shifted uneasily and looked at Mallory. The lieutenant nodded briefly. McGonnigal said, “I talked with a Ms. Caroline Djiak late last night. She said you advised Cleghorn on how to investigate a problem they were having with a zoning permit for a recycling plant. She said you would know who the deceased spoke to about it.”

I stared at him speechlessly. Finally I choked out, “Are those her exact words?”

McGonnigal fished in his breast pocket for a notebook. He flipped through the pages, squinting at his notes. “I didn’t take it down word for word, but that’s pretty much it,” he said at last.

“I wouldn’t call Caroline Djiak a pathological liar,” I remarked conversationally. “Just a manipulative little squirt. But even though I’m mad enough at her to go down and personally break in the back of her head, it doesn’t cheer me any you coming at me this way. I mean, we go through this every time you think I’m involved in a crime, don’t we, Lieutenant? You make a frontal assault that takes my guilty knowledge for granted.

“You could’ve started by telling me about Caroline’s never-never-land remarks and asking me if they were true. Then I would’ve told you everything that happened, which was about five minutes of conversation in Caroline’s dining room, and you could have taken off with one loose end tied up.”

I got up from the floor and headed for the kitchen. Bobby came in as I was poking around the refrigerator to see if there was anything edible I might use for breakfast. The yogurt had changed to mold and sour milk. There wasn’t any fruit, and the only bread I had left was hard enough to use for ammo.

Bobby unconsciously wrinkled his nose at the dirty dishes, but heroically refrained from commenting on them. Instead he said, “Seeing you near a murder always gets me in the gut. You know that.”

It was as close as he was going to get to an apology. “I’m not near this one,” I said impatiently. “I don’t know why Caroline wants me there. She dragged me down to South Chicago last week to a basketball-team reunion. Then she manipulated me into helping her with a personal problem. Then she called to tell me to bug out of her life. Now she wants me back. Or maybe she’s just trying to punish me.”

I dug some crackers out of a cupboard and spread them with peanut butter. “While we were eating fried chicken Nancy Cleghorn came by to talk about a zoning problem. This would have been just a week ago. Caroline thought Jurshak-the alderman down there-was blocking the permit. She asked me what I’d do if I were investigating. I said the easiest thing to do was talk to a friend on Jurshak’s staff if she or Nancy had one. Nancy left. The total of my involvement.”

I poured some more coffee, angry enough that my hand shook and I spilled it across the stove. “Despite your little dig, we hadn’t seen each other for more than ten years. I didn’t know who her friends or enemies were. Now Caroline makes it sound as though Jurshak killed Nancy, for which there isn’t an atom of evidence. And she wants to make out that I egged him on to do it. Hell!”

Bobby flinched. “Don’t talk dirty, Vicki. It doesn’t help anything. What are you working on for the Djiak girl?”

“Woman,” I said automatically through a mouthful of peanut butter. “Or maybe brat. I’ll tell you for nothing, even though it’s none of your business. Her mother was one of Gabriella’s charities. Now she’s dying. Very unpleasantly. Caroline wanted me to find some people her mother used to work with in the hopes they’d come see her. But as she probably told you, she fired me two days ago.”

Bobby’s blue eyes narrowed to slits in his ruddy face. “There’s some truth there. I just wish I knew how much.”

“I should have known better than to speak frankly with you,” I said bitterly. “Especially when you opened the conversation with an accusation.”

“Oh, keep your shirt on, Vicki,” Bobby said. He blushed suddenly as the image hit home with him. “And clean up your kitchen more than once a year. Place looks like the projects.”

When he had stomped away with McGonnigal I went to my bedroom to change. As I scrambled back into the black dress I looked out the window-the water was forming little rivers on the walk below. I put on running shoes and carried a pair of black pumps in my bag.

Even with an extra-wide umbrella my legs and feet got soaked on my dash to the car. Most Februaries, though, this would be snow a foot or two deep, so I tried not to complain too bitterly.

The little Chevy’s defroster couldn’t make much headway on the fogged windshield, but at least the car hadn’t died, the fate of a number of others I passed. The storm and the stalls made for a slow trek south; it was close to ten by the time I turned from Route 41 onto Ninety-second Street. By the time I found a parking space near the corner of Commercial, the rain was finally lifting-it was clear enough for me to change into my pumps.

SCRAP’S offices were in the second story of a block of little shops. I trotted around the corner to the business entrance-my dentist used to have his office here and the opening on Commercial remained an indelible memory.

I stopped at the top of the uncarpeted stairs, reading the wall directory while combing my hair and straightening my skirt. Dr. Zdunek wasn’t there anymore. Neither were a lot of the other tenants; I passed half a dozen or so empty offices on my way down the hall.

At the far end I walked into a room that had the unmistakable air of a poor not-for-profit agency. The scarred metal furniture and newspaper articles taped to the walls wavered under a badly winking fluorescent bulb. Papers and phone books were stacked on the floor and the electric typewriters were models IBM had abandoned when I was still in college.

A young black woman was typing while talking on the phone. She smiled at me, but held up a finger to ask me to wait. I could hear voices from an open conference room; ignoring the receptionist’s urgent hissing, I went to the door to look in.

A group of five, four women and a man, sat at a rickety deal table. Caroline was in the middle, talking heatedly. When she saw me at the door she broke off and flushed to the roots of her coppery hair.

“Vic! I’m in a meeting. Can’t you wait?”

“All day, if it’s for you, my sweet. We need a tête-à-tête about John McGonnigal-he visited me first thing this morning.”

“John McGonnigal?” Her little nose wrinkled questioningly.

“Sergeant McGonnigal. Chicago Police,” I said helpfully.

She turned even redder. “Oh. Him. Maybe we’d better talk now. Will you all excuse me?”

She got up and took me to a cubbyhole next to the conference room. The chaos there, compounded of books, papers, graphs, old newspapers, and candy wrappers, made my office look like a convent cell. Caroline dumped a phone directory from a folding chair for me and seated herself in the rickety swivel chair behind her desk. She gripped her hands together in front of her, but stared at me defiantly.

“Caroline, I’ve known you twenty-six years, and you’ve pulled tricks that would shame Oliver North, but this one has got to head the list. After whining and snuffling you got me to agree to look for your old man. Then you called me off without any reason. Now, to top it all off, you lied to the police about my involvement with Nancy. You want to explain why? Without resorting to Hans Christian Andersen?” I was having trouble keeping my voice below a shout.

“What are you on your high horse about?” she said belligerently. “You did give Nancy advice about-”

“Shut up!” I snapped. “You’re not talking to the cops, sweetie pie. I can just picture you blushing and winking away your tears with Sergeant McGonnigal. But I know what I told Nancy that night as well as you do. So cut the crap and tell me why you lied about me to the police.”

“I didn’t! You try and prove it! Nancy did come by that night. You did tell her to talk to someone in Jurshak’s office. And she’s dead now.”

I shook my head like a wet dog, trying to clear my brain. “Could we start this at the beginning? Why did you tell me to stop hunting for your old man?”

She looked at the desktop. “I decided it wasn’t fair to Ma. Going behind her back when it upset her so much.”

“Whew boy,” I said. “Hold it there. Let me get onto Cardinal Bernardin and the Pope to start beatification proceedings. When did you ever put Louisa, or anyone else, ahead of what you wanted?”

“Stop it!” she shouted, bursting into tears. “Believe me or not, I don’t care. I love my mother and I don’t want anyone hurting her no matter what you may think.”

I looked at her warily. Caroline might bat a few tears around as part of her tragic orphan routine, but she wasn’t prone to sobbing fits.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “I take it back. That was cruel. Is that why you sicced the cops on me? To punish me for saying I was continuing the investigation?”

She blew her nose noisily. “It wasn’t like that!”

“What was it like then?”

She caught her lower lip in her teeth. “Nancy called me Tuesday morning. She said she’d gotten threatening phone calls and she thought someone was following her.”

“What were they threatening her about?”

“The plant, of course.”

“Caroline, I want you to be absolutely clear on this. Did she specifically say the calls were about the plant?”

She opened her mouth, then took a breath. “No,” she finally muttered. “I just assumed they were. Because it was the last thing she and I had been talking about.”

“But you went ahead and told the police that she was killed because of the recycling plant. And that I told her who to talk to. Do you understand how outrageous that is?”

“But, Vic. It’s not just a wild guess. I mean-”

“You mean shit!” My anger returned, making my voice husky. “Can’t you tell the difference between your head games and reality? Nancy was killed. Murdered. Instead of helping the police find the murderer, you slandered me and got them on my butt.”

“They don’t care about Nancy, anyway. They don’t care about any of us down here.” She got to her feet, her eyes flashing. “They respond to political pressure, and as far as Jurshak is concerned, South Chicago might as well be the South Pole. You know that as well as I do. You know the last time he got a street repaired down here-it sure as hell was before you left the neighborhood.”

“Bobby Mallory is a good, honest, thorough cop,” I said doggedly. “Just because Jurshak is twenty kinds of asshole doesn’t change that.”

“Yeah, you don’t care, either. You proved that pretty good when you moved away from here and never came back until I pushed you into it.”

The pulse beside my right temple started throbbing. I pounded the desk hard enough to knock some of the papers to the floor. “I busted my ass for a week trying to find your old man for you. Your grandparents insulted me, Louisa blew up at me, and you! You couldn’t be content with manipulating me into going to look for the guy and then spinning me around a few times. You had to lie to the police about me.”

“And I thought you’d give a fuck,” she yelled. “I thought if you didn’t care about me, you’d at least do something for Nancy because you played on the same team together. I guess that proves how wrong I was.”

She started for the door. I caught her arm and forced her to face me.

“Caroline, I’m mad enough to beat the shit out of you. But I’m not so mad I can’t think. You fingered me to the cops because there’s something you know that you’re scared to talk about. I want to know what that is.”

She looked at me fiercely. “I don’t know anything. Just that someone had started following Nancy around over the weekend.”

“And she called the police and reported it. Or you did.”

“No. She talked to the state’s attorney and they said they’d open a file. I guess they have something to put in it now.”

She gave the smile of a triumphant martyr. I forced myself to speak calmly to her. After a few minutes she reluctantly agreed to sit back down and tell me what she knew. If she was telling the truth-a big if-it wasn’t much. She didn’t know whom Nancy had seen at the state’s attorney’s office, but she thought it could have been Hugh McInerney; he was the person they dealt with on other issues. Under further probing she admitted that McInerney had taken statements from them eighteen months ago about their problems with Steve Dresberg, a local Mob figure involved in garbage disposal.

I vaguely remembered the trial over Dresberg’s PCB incinerator and his alleged sweetheart deal with the Sanitary District but didn’t realize she and Nancy had been involved. When I demanded to know what role the two had played, she scowled but said she and Nancy had testified to receiving death threats for their opposition to the incinerator.

“Obviously Dresberg knew who to pay off at the Sanitary District. It didn’t matter what we said. I guess he figured SCRAP was too puny to listen to so he didn’t have to make good his threats.”

“And you didn’t tell the cops that.” I rubbed my hands tiredly across my face. “Caroline, you need to call McGonnigal and make an amended statement. You need to get them looking at people you know threatened Nancy in the past. I’m going to phone the sergeant myself as soon as I get home to tell him about this conversation. And if you’re thinking of lying to him a second time, think again-he’s known me professionally for years. He may not like me, but he knows he can believe what I tell him.”

She looked at me furiously. “I’m not five years old anymore. I don’t have to do what you say.”

I went to the door. “Just do me a favor, Caroline-the next time you’re in trouble, dial 911 like the rest of the citizenry. Or talk to a shrink. Don’t come hounding me.”