Burn Marks

11

Smoking Grandma

I climbed into the Chevy and slumped over the wheel. It was only noon, but I was as tired as though I’d been climbing Mount Everest for a week. A faint odor of vomit still hovered in the car, despite the twenty minutes I’d spent scrubbing the backseat. It slowly came to me that I was smelling my own clothes. My jeans were soiled where I’d been kneeling on the car seat-I’d just been too wound up with Elena to notice it earlier. Shuddering violently, I turned on the engine and drove south at a reckless pace, not even bothering to keep an eye out for the blue-and-whites. All I wanted to do was to get home, get my clothes off, get myself scrubbed as clean as I could manage.

I left the Chevy at a wild angle a yard or so from the curb and took the stairs up two at a time. Barely waiting to get inside to strip, I dumped jeans, T-shirt, and panties in a heap in the doorway and headed straight for the bathroom. I stood under the hot water for almost half an hour, washing my hair twice, scrubbing myself thoroughly. Finally I felt cleansed, that addicts and alcoholics were rinsed from my life.

I dressed slowly, taking time to put on makeup and to style my hair with a little gel. A gold cotton dress with big black buttons made me feel elegant and poised. I even burrowed through the hall closet for a black bag to go with my pumps.

On the way out I gathered my discarded clothes and took them to the basement. The sheets were ready for the dryer, but there are limits to my housekeeping fervor-I stuffed my jeans in with the sheets and started the cycle from the beginning.

It was a little after one by now. I wouldn’t be able to eat lunch if I wanted to see Zerlina before my meeting with Dominic Assuevo. And I guess I wanted to see her, although my enthusiasm for the Ramsay family was at low tide. I headed over to Lake Shore Drive and joined the flow southward.

Michael Reese Hospital dominates the lakefront for a mile or two at Twenty-seventh Street. I circled the complex a few times until I found someone pulling away from a meter-I was damned if I was going to pay lot fees for this visit. A guard was stationed behind a glass cage in the entryway. She didn’t care whether I was a social worker or an ax murderer, so I didn’t have to use Carol’s cover story to get a pass to the fourth floor.

The distinctive hospital smell-some combination of medication, antiseptic, and the sweat of people in pain- made me flinch involuntarily when I got off the elevator. I had spent too much time in hospitals with my parents when I was younger, and the smell always brings back the misery of those years. My mother died of cancer when I was fifteen, my father from emphysema some ten years later. He was a heavy smoker and there are days when I still get angry about it. Especially today, when I was feeling under siege.

Zerlina Ramsay was in a four-pack. Television perched high on facing walls were tuned to conflicting soap operas. Two women glanced indifferently at me when I came in but returned their attention immediately to the screen; the other two didn’t even look up. I stood dubiously in the doorway for a moment trying to decide which of the three black women might be Zerlina. None of them bore any overwhelming resemblance to Cerise. Finally I saw a sign attached to one of the beds warning me not to smoke if oxygen was in use. The woman lying there had gauze covering her left arm. Short, her massive build amply displayed by the skimpy hospital robe, she would have been my last choice, but Zerlina had been brought in suffering from smoke inhalation so I supposed she’d needed oxygen. She was attached to what looked like a heart monitor.

I went over to the bed. She turned her gaze toward me reluctantly, her eyes narrowed suspiciously in her jowly face.

“Mrs. Ramsay?” She didn’t respond, but she didn’t deny it either. “My name is V. I. Warshawski. I think you know my aunt Elena.”

Her dark eyes flickered in surprise; she cautiously inspected me. “You sure about that?” Her voice was husky from disuse and she cleared her throat discreetly.

“She told me you two hung out together at the Indiana Arms. Had a few beers together.”

“So?”

I gritted my teeth and plowed ahead. “So she was waiting on my doorstep last night with Cerise.”

“Cerise! What planet that girl come down from?”

I glanced around the room. As I’d expected, her companions were more interested in live theater than TV. They made no effort to mask their curiosity.

“Can you go out in the hall with that thing?” I gestured at the monitor. “This is kind of private.”

“Those two took money from you, I don’t want to hear about it. I can’t even afford me a new place to sleep, let alone pay back all that girl’s bills.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with money.”

She glowered at me belligerently, but heaved herself to a sitting position. Her substantial frame gave the impression not of fat but of a natural monument, maybe a redwood tree that had grown sideways but not too tall. She brushed away my hand when I tried to take her elbow. Grunting to herself, she slid out of bed, sticking her feet into paper hospital slippers lined up tidily under the edge. The heart monitor was on wheels. Rolling it in front of her, she made her way to the door and down the hall like a tidal wave-nurses and orderlies split to either side when they saw her coming.

She was panting a bit when we got to a small lounge stuck at one end of the hall. She took her time getting her breath before lowering herself onto one of the padded chairs. They were covered in cracked aqua oilcloth that had last been washed when Michael Reese himself was still alive. I perched gingerly on the edge of the chair at right angles to Zerlina.

“So Elena is your aunt, huh? Can’t say you look too much like her.”

“Glad to hear it. She’s thirty years and three thousand bottles ahead of me.” I ignored her crack of laughter to add, “I gotta say you don’t look too much like Cerise, either.”

“That’s those thirty years you spoke of,” Zerlina said. “I wasn’t so bad-looking at her age. And I sure look better than she’s going to when she gets to be as old as me, the rate she’s going. What kind of story she tell you? She and that aunt of yours.”

“Her baby,” I said baldly. “Katterina.”

Zerlina’s face creased in astonishment. For a moment I thought she was going to tell me Cerise didn’t have a baby.

“She’s picking a funny time to care about that baby, being as how she hasn’t paid much attention to it so far to date.”

“Katterina wasn’t with you Wednesday night when the Indiana Arms burned down?” I couldn’t think of a gentle way to ask the question.

“Hm-unh.” She shook her jowly head emphatically. “She left the baby with me on Wednesday, all right, but I couldn’t keep her with me, not in an SRO, you know. They can be mighty strict about who you got with you, which Cerise knew. But that girl!”

She sat with her hands on her knees, looking broodingly at nothing for a moment. The heart monitor beeped insistently, as though in rhythm with her thoughts. She faced me squarely.

“I might as well tell you the whole story. I don’t know why I should. Don’t know I can especially trust you. But you don’t look like Elena. You don’t look like an alkie who’ll do the best she can to make money out of your sad news to buy her another bottle.”

I felt a little queasy at her words. It’s one thing to think of your own aunt turning tricks with the old-age pensioners. It’s quite another to imagine her blackmailing people for the price of a drink.

“Not that I haven’t had a drink or two in my day, too, and I’ll give Elena this, she makes you laugh. You can forget your troubles with her every now and then.” She looked away again for a moment, as though her troubles had come too forcefully to mind.

“Well, Cerise had this baby. Last year it was. And this baby had all kinds of problems on account of Cerise is a junkie. She was using heroin all the time she was pregnant. I told her how it would be. She even pretended to be in a program that time they arrested her. She’d been out stealing, her and the boy she was with at the time, and they arrested her. And on account of it was the first time and she was pregnant, they let her go if she promised to go to the program.”

She glared at me again, as if daring me to condemn her for having a daughter like that. I made what I hoped was a sympathetic sound and tried to look understanding.

“Then the baby was born-and my, what a time we had! Poor little thing was in the hospital, then Maisie- the other grandmother-took her home. I couldn’t, you know. I just live on a little bit of savings I have. I don’t have social security-you don’t get it for cleaning houses, which is what I did all my life, at least until my heart started giving out on me. But I helped Maisie out as much as I could and by and by we got that baby to sleep at night and even laughing.”

“So Cerise never took care of her?”

“Oh, no, she did. Finally she did when she got going with Otis. That was in June. Then suddenly on Wednesday, Cerise comes by saying she can’t take it anymore, being home with the baby morning, noon, and night, and I tell her she should be thinking of that before she spreads her legs, you know, not two years later, but she leaves the baby and goes, saying her and Otis is off to the Dells. So I go to the pay phone but I can’t find a number for his sister, so I call Maisie and she sends her boy over and gets Katterina. And if you think Cerise is worrying about her, think again, on account of she hasn’t come near me here in the hospital,”

Maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed to me the heart monitor was beeping faster by the end of her tale, I didn’t want to ask her anything that might get her more upset, I also didn’t think I had to be the one to let Zerlina know her daughter was pregnant again.

She demanded to know why Cerise had come to see me. When I explained that she was asking me to intervene with the fire department, Zerlina snorted.

“Maybe she does think the baby’s dead. Maybe that’s why she hasn’t been to see me-she’s too ashamed. But if her and Elena come to see you together, girl, I advise you to keep your wallet in the bottom of your purse and count all your money before you say good-bye.”

I felt an uneasy twinge-hadn’t looked in my billfold before putting it into my black bag. Still, Cerise had been pretty sick, maybe too sick to go hunting for money or credit cards. Before I got up to go I asked Zerlina how long they were keeping her.

She gave a little smile that was half crafty, half embarrassed. “When they brought me in I was unconscious on account of the smoke. And they found my heart was kind of acting up. High blood pressure, high fat in my blood- you name it, I got too much of everything. Except money. So I’m kind of dragging it out, you know, until I can get me a place to stay.”

“I see.” I’d come across worse crimes in my time. I stood up. “Well, I’m glad the baby’s okay, anyway. Cerise disappeared around noon today and I’m not going to put a lot of energy into hunting for her. But if I see her again, I’ll let her know her kid is at Maisie’s.”

She grunted and got slowly to her feet. “Yeah, okay, but I got to call Maisie and tell her Katterina don’t go off with Cerise again. You take it easy, girl. What did you say your name was? Vic. And you stay those three thousand bottles behind Elena, you hear me?”

“Got it.” I walked slowly down the hall with her to her room door before I said good-bye. Back in the lobby I checked my wallet. The cash was gone and so was my American Express Card. The only thing left was my PI license and that was because it was stuck behind a flap. They’d even lifted my driver’s license. I ground my teeth. Cerise might have cleaned me out while I was hiding out in my bedroom this morning. But for all I knew Elena had robbed me when I was struggling with Cerise in the kitchen. I felt my shoulders tighten from futile rage.

I found a pay phone in the lobby and called my credit-card companies to report the cards as stolen. At least I’d memorized my phone card number so I didn’t have to stop all my phone calls. I usually keep an emergency twenty in the zip compartment of my purse; when I checked the black bag I found I’d left one in there. On my way out I used it to buy flowers for Zerlina. It wasn’t enough, but it was all I could afford.