Blood Shot

29

I hadn’t realized how tired I was until I got into my car. The pain in my shoulders returned in a wave that swept me back limply in the front seat. Little tears of hurt and self-pity pricked my eyelids. Quitters never win and winners never quit, I quoted my old basketball coach grimly. Play through the pain, not against it.

I rolled the car window down, my sore arm moving slowly to the commands of my brain. I sat for a while, watching the Chigwell house and the surrounding street, dozing a bit, finally deciding the indomitable old lady wasn’t under surveillance before putting the car into gear and heading for home.

The Eisenhower is never really clear of traffic-trucks thunder into the city throughout the night, some people are getting off late-night shifts, others heading for the action that begins only after dark. I joined the sweep of anonymous vehicles at Hillside. The steady stream of lights, red from the cars, orange on the sides of the trucks, the rows of street-lamps stretching into the distance as far as the eye could see, made me feel isolated and alone. A little speck in the great universe of lights, an atom of dust who could merge with the mud of Dead Stick Pond without leaving a trace behind.

My fragmented mood stayed with me as I drove slowly along Belmont to my apartment on Racine. I was hoping with the bottom half of my mind that Mr. Contreras and Peppy would be up to greet me-the top half sternly said I didn’t want the old man breathing down my neck all the time.

That secret yearning may have saved my life. I had paused outside Mr. Contreras’s ground-floor apartment, putting down the diaries to tie my shoes, seeing if my presence might rouse the dog so that I’d have a little companionship before going to bed.

The silence on the other side of the door told me the apartment was empty. Peppy certainly would have made herself known when she heard me, and the old man would never leave her outside alone this late at night. I looked up the stairs, foolishly wondering if they might be waiting for me at the top.

My unconscious mind realized something was wrong. I forced myself to stand motionless, pushed my tired brain to thought. The upper stairwell lay in darkness. One landing light might burn out, but both in the same evening stretched coincidence too far. Since the well of the lobby was lighted, anyone coming up the steps to the second or third floor would stand well framed in a pool of light.

From the topmost landing came a faint murmuring, not the sound of Mr. Contreras talking to Peppy. Picking up the notebooks, I eased my way to the lobby floor. I tucked the stack under one arm, pulled the gun out, flipped the safety off. Turned to face the street. Crouching low, I opened the outer door and slid into the night.

No one shot at me. The only person on the street was a moody-looking young man who lived down the block. He didn’t even glance at me as I hurried by him toward Belmont. I didn’t want to take my car-if someone was waiting for me outside the apartment, they might be keeping an eye on my Chevy: let them think I was still hanging around. If someone was waiting. Maybe fear and fatigue were making me jump at fantastic interpretations of light and street sounds.

At Belmont I tucked the Smith & Wesson back into my jeans and flagged a cab to Lotty’s apartment. It was only a mile or so away, but I was in no condition to walk that far tonight. I asked the cabby to wait until I knew whether anyone was going to let me in. In the helpful style of today’s drivers, he snarled at me.

“You don’t own me. I give you ride, not my service for life.”

“Splendid.” I pulled back the five I’d been about to hand him. “Then I’ll pay you after I know whether I’m spending the night here.”

He started shouting at me, but I ignored him and opened the passenger door. That prompted him to get physical; he turned full around in the seat and swung at me. I slammed the stack of journals down on his arm with all the force of the pent-up frustrations from the last few days.

“Bitch!” he snarled. “You leave. You get from my cab. I don’t need your money.”

I slid from the backseat, keeping a wary eye on him until he drove off with a great squealing of rubber. All I needed now was for Lotty to be away at an emergency or sleeping too soundly to hear the bell. But the gods had not ordained me to have a total season of disaster this evening. After a few minutes, while my nervous irritation grew, her voice twanged at me through the intercom.

“It’s me, Vic. Can I come up?”

She met me at the door to her apartment wrapped in a bright red dressing gown, looking like a little Mandarin with her dark eyes blinking away sleep.

“I’m sorry, Lotty-sorry to wake you. I had to go out this evening. When I got home I thought there might be a reception committee waiting for me.”

“If you want me to come with you to blaze away at a few muggers, the answer is emphatically no,” she said sardonically. “But I am glad to see you had a little more care for your skin than to go after them by yourself.”

I couldn’t respond to her breezy mood. “I want to call the police. And I don’t want to go back over to Racine until they’ve had a chance to check the place out.”

“Very good indeed,” Lotty said, amazed. “I begin even to think you might live to be forty.”

“Thanks a bunch,” I muttered at her, going to the phone. I didn’t like turning tail, handing my problems over to someone else to solve. But refusing to get help just because Lotty was being sarcastic seemed stupid.

Bobby Mallory was home. Like Lotty, he was inclined to taunt me a little over going to him for help, but once he’d absorbed the facts his professional persona took over. He asked me a few crisp questions, then assured me he’d have a squad car there without lights before he left his house. Before hanging up, though, he couldn’t keep from rubbing my nose in it.

“You just stay put now, Vicki. I can’t believe you’re letting the police handle police business, but remember-the last thing we want is for you to come bounding up and get in between us and a couple of hoods.”

“Right,” I said sourly. “I’ll look at the morning papers to see how things turn out.”

The line went dead in my ear. I spent the next hour or so moving restlessly around Lotty’s sitting room. She tried at first to talk me into going to sleep in her spare bed, preparing hot milk with brandy for me, but she finally left me to myself

“I need my sleep even if you don’t, Victoria. I’m not going to lecture you on rest after your physical ordeal-if by now you don’t know you should, no words of mine will have any effect. Just remember-your body is an aging organism. It will repair itself more and more slowly as time goes by, and the less help you give it, the less you will be able to rely on it.”

I knew by the tone as much as the words that Lotty was truly angry, but I was too fragmented still to make any kind of response. She loves me; she was afraid I would put myself at such risk I would die and abandon her. I understood that; I just couldn’t fix it tonight.

It was only when she’d shut her door with an angry snap that I remembered the Chigwell notebooks. Not the time to knock at her bedroom and ask for help in deciphering his medical shorthand. I drank some of the milk and lay down on the daybed with my boots off, but I couldn’t relax. All I could think was that I had run scared from my problems, had turned to the police, and now I was waiting like some good old-fashioned damsel in distress for rescue.

It was too much. A little after midnight I pulled my boots back on. Leaving a note on the kitchen table for Lotty, I crept out of the apartment, quietly closing the door behind me. I started walking south, keeping to the main streets, hoping to find a cab. My restless energy held my fatigue at bay; when I got to Belmont I stopped looking for taxis and covered the last half mile at a brisk walk.

I’d been imagining the street filled with flashing blue-and-whites and uniformed men racing around. By the time I got home, however, any police activity had disappeared without a trace. I went cautiously into the lobby, crouching a little, hugging the walls out of range of the stairwell.

The upper-landing lights were on again. As I climbed the first half flight, going sideways with my back sliding along the wall, Mr. Contreras’s apartment door opened. Peppy bounded out, followed by the old man.

When he saw me tears started streaming down his cheeks. “Oh, doll, thank God you’re all right. The cops was here, they wouldn’t tell me nothing, wouldn’t let me into your place or tell me if they knew where you was. What happened to you? Where you been?”

After a few disjointed minutes we got our stories out. Around ten-thirty someone had called him, telling him I was down in my office and in bad shape. It didn’t occur to him to summon help or ask himself who the strange phone caller was. Instead he bundled Peppy up, bullied a passing cab into taking both of them, and hurled himself downtown. He’d never been to my office, so he’d wasted some time finding the place. When he saw that the door was locked and the lights out, he’d been too impatient to find the night watchman: he’d used his trusty pipe wrench to break the lock.

“I’m sorry, doll,” he said dolefully. “I’ll fix it for you in the morning. If I’d been using my head, I guess I would’ve known it was someone trying to get me and the dog out of the way.”

I nodded abstractedly. Someone was keeping close enough tabs on me to know that my downstairs neighbor would be watching if they set up an ambush. Ron Kappelman. Who else had seen Mr. Contreras at such close quarters?

“Did the police find anyone here?” I asked abruptly.

“They took a couple of guys away in a paddy wagon, but I didn’t get any kind of look at them. I couldn’t even do that for you. They came gunning for you and they got me out of the way with a cheap trick that wouldn’t of fooled a six-year-old. And then me not knowing where’d you’d gone off to or nothing. I knew it couldn’t be your aunt, not after what you told me about her and your ma, but I just didn’t have any idea where you could be.”

It took me awhile to get him calmed down enough that he would let me spend the night alone. After a few more rehearsals of worry and self-reproach, he finally saw me up the stairs to my apartment. Someone had tried breaking into my apartment, but the steel-lined door I’d had installed after my last home invasion had held. They couldn’t cut through it, and they hadn’t been able to get by my third dead bolt. Even so, I made a thorough tour of the premises with Mr. Contreras and the dog. He left her with me, waiting outside until he heard the last bolt slide home before going downstairs to his own bed.

I tried calling Bobby at the Central District, but he’d disappeared-or didn’t want to take my call. None of the other officers I knew were in and the ones I didn’t know wouldn’t tell me anything about the men they’d picked up at my place. I had to give it a rest until morning.