Blood Shot

14

When I got home Mr. Contreras was in front of the building with the dog. She was gnawing on a large stick while he cleaned debris from the little patch of front yard. Peppy jumped up when she saw me, but sank back down when she realized I didn’t have my running clothes on.

Mr. Contreras sketched a wave. “Hiya, doll. You get caught in the rain this morning?” He straightened and looked at me. “My, my, you’re certainly a sight. Look like you’ve been wading through a mud puddle that came up to your waist.”

“Yeah. I’ve been down in the South Chicago swamp. It kind of stays with you.”

“Oh yeah? Didn’t even know there was a South Chicago swamp.”

“Well, there is,” I said shortly, pushing the dog away impatiently.

He looked at me closely. “You need a bath. Hot bath and a drink, doll. You go on up and rest. I’ll look after her royal highness here. She don’t need to go to the lake every day of her life, you know.”

“Yeah, right.” I collected my mail and moved slowly up the stairs to the third floor. When I saw myself in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door, I couldn’t believe I’d gotten McInerney to talk to me without a struggle. I looked as though I belonged with the fishing couple out at Dead Stick Pond. My panty hose were in shreds and my legs were streaked with black where I’d tried washing the mud off down at the county building. The hem of my dress was heavy with caked dirt. Even my black pumps had gotten dusty from the dirt on my legs.

I kicked the shoes off outside the bathroom door and threw out the panty hose while turning on the bath water. I hoped the cleaners could rescue the dress-I didn’t want to sacrifice my entire wardrobe to the old neighborhood.

I took the portable phone from the bedroom into the bath with me. Once I was in the tub with whiskey at close reach I checked in with the answering service. Jonathan Michaels had tried to reach me. He’d left his office number, but the switchboard was closed for the day and I didn’t have his unlisted home number. I stuck the phone up on the sink and leaned back in the tub with my eyes closed.

Steve Dresberg. Also known as the Garbage King. Not because of his character, but because if you wanted to bury, burn, or ship refuse in the Chicago area, you had to cut him in on the action. Some people say that two independent haulers who disappeared after refusing to deal with him are rotting in the CID landfill. Others think the arson in a waste storage shed that caused the evacuation of six square blocks on the South Side last summer could be traced to his door-if you had enough people with paid-up life insurance to do the tracing.

Dresberg was definitely police business, if not FBI. And since the odds were against Caroline’s phoning McGonnigal with an amended statement, that meant I should play Cindy Citizen and tell him myself

Holding my breath, I slid down so that the water covered my head. Suppose Dresberg wasn’t involved at all, though. If I pointed the cops toward him, it would only divert their attention from more promising lines of inquiry.

I sat up and started rubbing shampoo into my hair. The water around me was turning black; I opened the drain and turned on the hot-water tap. All I had to do was find someone on Jurshak’s staff who would talk to me with the same frankness he’d used with Nancy. Then, when sinister figures began following me, I would take out my trusty Smith & Wesson and blow them away. Preferably, before they could bonk me on the head and dump me in the swamp.

I wrapped myself in a terry-cloth robe and went into the kitchen to forage. The maid hadn’t been shopping for some time and pickings were slim. I took the jar of peanut butter and the bottle of Black Label and went back into the living room with them.

I was on my second whiskey and my fourth spoonful of peanut butter when I heard a tentative knock on the door. I groaned in resignation; it was Mr. Contreras with a laden TV tray. The dog was at his heels.

“Hope you don’t mind me barging up like this, doll, but I could see you was all in and I thought you might like some supper. Did me a little barbecue chicken in the kitchen, and even without the charcoal it tastes pretty good, if I say so. I know you try to eat healthy so I made you a big salad. Now, you want to be alone, you just say the word and Peppy and me’ll head back down. Won’t hurt my feelings any. But you can’t live on that stuff you’re drinking. And peanut butter? Scotch and peanut butter? No way, doll. You’re too busy to buy food, you just let me know. No trouble for me to pick up something extra when I’m buying for myself, you know that.”

I thanked him lamely and invited him in. “Just let me put on some clothes.”

I guess I should have sent him back downstairs-I didn’t want it to become a habit with him, thinking he could come up whenever he felt like it. But the chicken smelled good and the salad looked healthy and the peanut butter was lying kind of heavily on my stomach.

I ended up telling him about Nancy’s death and my trek to Dead Stick Pond. He’d never been below the Field Museum and had no inkling of life on the South Side. I got out my city map and showed him Houston Street, where I’d grown up, and then the route down to the Cal Industrial District and the wetlands, where Nancy had been found.

He shook his head. “Dead Stick Pond, huh? Guess the name says it all. It’s rough losing a friend that way, one you played basketball with and all. I never even knew you was on a team, but I mighta guessed it, the way you run. But you want to be careful, doll. If this Dresburg guy is the one behind all this, he’s an awful lot bigger than you. You know me, I’ve never backed away from a fight, but I know better than to go in single-handed against a tank division too.”

He was going into an elaborate illustration based on his experiences at Anzio when Jonathan Michaels phoned. I excused myself and took the call on the bedroom extension.

“I wanted to get you before I leave town in the morning.” Jonathan spoke without preamble. “I had one of my staff people look up your two guys-Pankowski and Ferraro. They did sue Humboldt. Apparently not over wrongful dismissal, but whether they could get workers’ comp. It looks as though they quit due to illness and were trying to prove it was job related. They didn’t get anywhere with the suit-the thing came to trial here and Humboldt didn’t have any trouble winning, and then the two died and the lawyer didn’t seem to want to follow up on appeal. I don’t know how far you want to follow this, but the lawyer who handled it was a Frederick Manheim.”

He cut short my thanks with a crisp “Gotta run.”

I was hanging up when he came back on the line. “You still there? Good. I almost forgot-we didn’t see anything about sabotage, but Humboldt could have kept that quiet-not wanting the idea to get popular, you know.”

After he hung up I sat on the bed looking at the phone. I felt so overloaded with unconnected information that I couldn’t think at all. My professional curiosity had been piqued by the reaction I’d gotten first from the Xerxes personnel manager and then the doctor. I’d wanted to find out what lay behind their jumpy behavior. Then Humboldt seemed to have a glib explanation and Nancy’s death had made me shift my priorities anyway; I couldn’t untangle the whole universe, and finding her killers seemed more urgent than scratching the Xerxes itch.

Now the wheel seemed to turn the other way up again. Why had Humboldt gone out of his way to lie to me? Or had he? Maybe they’d sued for workers’ comp but had lost because they’d been fired for sabotage. Nancy. Humboldt. Caroline. Louisa. Chigwell. The images spun uselessly through my mind.

“You all right in there, doll?” It was Mr. Contreras hovering anxiously in the hall.

“Yeah, I’m okay. I guess.” I got to my feet and went back out to him with what I hoped was a reassuring smile. “I just need to spend some time alone. Okay?”

“Yeah, sure. Fine.” He was a little hurt but worked valiantly to keep it from showing. He collected the dirty dishes, waving off my offers of help, and took the tray and the dog back downstairs.

Once he’d gone I wandered moodily around the apartment. Caroline had asked me to stop looking for her father; there wasn’t any reason to push matters with Humboldt. But when a ten-billion-dollar man undertakes to run me through hoops it gets my hackles up.

I hunted around for the phone book. It had somehow gotten buried under a stack of music on the piano. Naturally enough, Humboldt’s number wasn’t listed. Frederick Manheim, Attorney, had an office at Ninety-fifth and Halsted and a home in neighboring Beverly. Lawyers with large incomes or criminal practices don’t give their home numbers. Nor do they usually hide out on the southwest side, away from the courts and the major action.

I was restless enough to want to move now, call Manheim, get the story from him, and gallop down to Oak Street to confront Humboldt. “Festina lente,” I muttered to myself Get the facts, then shoot. It would be better to wait until morning and make the trek down south to see the guy in person. Which meant yet another day in nylons. Which meant I’d better get my black pumps clean.

I foraged in the hall closet for shoe polish and finally found a tin of black under a sleeping bag. I was carefully cleaning the shoes when Bobby Mallory called.

I cradled the phone under my ear and started buffing the left shoe. “Evening, Lieutenant. What can I do for you?”

“You can give me a good reason for not running you in.” He spoke in the pleasant conversational tone that meant his temper was on a tight rein.

“For what?” I asked.

“It’s considered a crime to impersonate a police officer. By everyone but you, I believe.”

“Not guilty.” I looked at the shoe. It was never going to recover the smooth finish it had when it left Florence, but it wasn’t too bad.

“You aren’t the woman-tall, thirtyish, short curly hair-who told Hugh McInerney you were with the police?”

“I told him I was a detective. And when I spoke of the police, I carefully used third-not first-person pronouns. As far as I know that is not a crime, but maybe the City Council blew one by me.” I picked up the right shoe.

“You don’t think you could leave the investigation of the Cleghorn woman’s death to the police, do you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You think Steve Dresberg killed her?”

“If I told you yes, would you drop out of sight and go do the stuff you’re qualified to work on?”

“If you have a warrant with the guy’s name on it, I might. Without arguing over what I’m qualified to do.” I capped the polish tin and laid it and the rag on a newspaper.

“Vicki, look. You’re a cop’s daughter. You should know better than to go stirring around in a police investigation. When you talk to someone like McInerney without telling us, it just makes our job a hundred times harder. Okay?”

“Yeah, okay, I guess,” I said grudgingly. “I won’t talk to the state’s attorney again without clearing it with you or McGonnigal.”

“Or anyone else?”

“Give me a break, Bobby. If it says POLICE BUSINESS in all caps, I’ll leave it to you. That’s the best you’re going to get from me.”

We hung up in mutual irritation. I spent the rest of the evening in front of the tube watching a badly cut version of Rebel Without a Cause. It did nothing to abate my ill humor.