Burn Marks

22

Tearing Up the Ryan

I slept badly, my dreams again haunted by Elena. I was searching for her through the barren corridors of midnight Chicago. I could hear her whining “Vicki, sweetie, where are you when I need you?” but I never actually saw her. Michael Furey stood nearby shaking his head: “I can’t help you, Vic, because you wouldn’t let me inside.”

I got up around seven, my neck stiff from my restless sleep. I moved sluggishly through my morning routine, wondering if I should have invited Michael up last night. Would he still question Elena’s hotel mates as thoroughly since I’d sent him packing? Should I try to do it myself? Did I even care where my aunt had gone, let alone why? Even as the last bitter thought went through my head I felt ashamed. Who else did she have to care about her, if not me?

Maybe Zerlina Ramsay. I considered her. Of course relations between the two were a bit peculiar, but she might be someone Elena would consider a friend. I drank a second cup of coffee, then took Peppy on a hurried mini-run to the lake. By the time I showered and changed into a respectable pair of trousers, a cotton-ramie beige sweater and a good jacket, it was still just shy of nine.

The penalty for rising and shining early is lolling in traffic. If I’d had a proper breakfast instead of toast while I dressed, I’d have gotten to the hospital just as fast. As it was I only met with disappointment-Zerlina had checked out on Friday. No, the hospital didn’t know where she’d gone, and even if they did, they really couldn’t tell me.

I stomped back to the Chevy in annoyance. How the hell would I ever find her? All I knew about her was that her granddaughter’s other grandmother was called Maisie. Cerise’s boyfriend’s first name was Otis. That gave me a great starting point-comb every apartment in Chicago asking for Otis or Maisie and when people answered to those names find out if they knew someone named Zerlina.

Zerlina’s knowing anything was a long shot, anyway. I’d only gone zooming down to the hospital because it was something to do. Otherwise I was better off leaving the search for Elena to the police. They had the resources; Michael had broadcast her description. Someone would find her.

I drove back north to the Loop, parking my car in the underground garage. Until Ajax asked me to proceed I couldn’t justify any further work on the Indiana Arms. It was time to do some of my bread-and-butter financial work and to send out query letters to small or midsize firms who could use my expert advice. After going to my office to pick up the client letters with the names of their would-be executives, I headed to the Daley Center.

Somehow, though, instead of looking up John Doe and Jane Roe, I found myself checking on Rosalyn Fuentes and her cousin Luis Schmidt. No one was after Roz, but Luis had started several actions a couple of years back. He’d sued the city for turning down his bid to repave the parking lot at the Humboldt Park Community Service Center, He claimed that they had discriminated against him as a Hispanic in favor of a black contractor who was a crony of the mayor’s. That action went back to 1985. More recently, in 1987, he had sued the county on similar charges, this time for not getting the job to build a new court building in Deerfield. His partner, Carl Martinez, had been a party to both suits. He’d withdrawn the complaints about six months ago without a settlement. That sounded as though someone had slipped him a few bucks to soothe his hurt feelings.

I shrugged. If it had happened that way it wasn’t savory, but it was just too common to be the kind of dynamite that would cost Roz an election. If Chicago has one law that everyone obeys, it’s “Look out for your own.” Still, thinking back over Boots’s party, it seemed to me it was Luis who had warned Roz about me-it was only after he’d been talking to her, pointing at me, that she’d come back and sought me out.

I went upstairs to look at partnership and corporation filings. Roz owned a minority interest in Alma Mejicana, her cousin’s contracting business, but no one could conceivably imagine that as even a venial sin. If Ralph MacDonald had been telling the truth and Roz was hiding a youthful indiscretion, then maybe something had happened in her Mexican childhood. If so, I didn’t give a damn and I didn’t see why she would expect me to.

“None of your business, Vic,” I said aloud. “Remember-some people think you’re a pain in the butt.”

A man using the microfiche reader next to me looked up, affronted. I stared intently at the screen in front of me, pursed my lips, scribbled a note, and pretended I hadn’t heard-or said-anything.

It really was time to get to my clients. Still, I made a genuine note, writing down Schmidt’s name, Alma Mejicana, and the address on south Ashland. Maybe there was a way to get a look at his sales figures. Or I could go over to the county side and see if any contracts had been going to Schmidt recently.

That turned out to be a fruitless idea. They did keep a list of contracts, of course, but I had to know the project name to find out who’d gotten the bid. They were not going to let me go through the myriad files looking for one contractor. I sucked on my teeth. Now it was really time to get to work.

As I turned to leave, the door at the end of the corridor opened and Boots came in, a handful of men listening as he made a forceful point. He caught sight of me and gave the legendary smile and a wave on his way into his office. He hadn’t remembered me personally, but knew he knew me. It was a strange sensation-against my volition I felt myself warmed by his recognition and smiling eagerly in return.

Perhaps to dispel the hold his magic had on me I butted one step further into Roz’s business. I called Alma Mejicana, said I was with OSHA, and wanted to know where they were pouring today. The man who answered the phone, speaking minimal English in a heavy accent, couldn’t understand my question. After a few fruitless exchanges he put the phone down and went to fetch someone else.

I’d met Luis Schmidt only once, but it seemed to me that the suspicion-laden voice belonged to him. Just in case he had an acute aural memory, I sharpened my tone to the nasality of the South Side and repeated my pitch.

He cut me off before I could get my whole spiel out. “We have no problems; we don’t need anybody coming to watch us, especially not OSHA spies.”

“I’m not suggesting you do have problems.” It was hard to be glib and nasal at the same time. “We’ve been told that minority contractors in Chicago are allowed sloppier safety practices than white-owned enterprises. We’re doing a random spot check to make sure that isn’t the case.”

“That is racism,” he said hotly. “I do not allow racists to look at my work. Period. Now disappear before I sue you for slander.”

“I’m trying to help you out-” I started with nasal righteousness, but he hung up before I could finish the sentence.

Okay. Alma Mejicana didn’t want OSHA hanging around their construction sites. Nothing bizarre about that. A lot of businesses don’t want OSHA crews. So leave it alone, Vic. Get back to projects for people who are paying you.

It was that sage advice that took me over to the University of Illinois library to look up Alma Mejicana in the computer index to the Herald-Star. And to my joy they had gotten part of the Dan Ryan reconstruction. In a February 2 story the paper listed all the minority-and women-owned businesses participating in the project. The suits Luis had filed must have made an impression on the feds when they handed out the Ryan contracts. I remembered the protest from black groups over the small number of minority contractors involved; given Chicago’s racio-ethnic isolationism, I didn’t suppose they were appeased to see Alma Mejicana eating part of the pie.

With a certain amount of self-deception I could make myself believe that I would pass the Ryan construction anyway on my way back to the Loop. It wouldn’t really count as an additional detour from my legitimate business to check out Luis.

I went on down Halsted to Cermak, then snaked around underneath the expressway’s legs looking for a way to get at the construction zone. Cars and trucks were parked near the Lake Shore Drive access ramp. I pulled the Chevy off the road into the rutted ground below the main lanes of traffic and left it next to a late-model Buick.

Once again I was badly dressed for a construction site, although my linen-weave slacks weren’t quite as inappropriate as my dress silk pants had been. I picked my way through the deep holes, around pieces of convulsed rebars that had fallen down, past the debris of ten thousand sack lunches, and hiked up the closed southbound ramp.

As I got close to the top the noise of machinery became appalling. Monsters with huge spiked arms were assaulting concrete, driving cracks ten feet long in their wake. Behind them came an array of automated air hammers, smashing the roadway to bits. And in their wake rumbled trucks to haul off the remains. Hundreds of men and even a few women were doing other things by hand.

I surveyed the carnage doubtfully from the edge of the ramp, wondering how I could ever get anyone’s attention, let alone find one small contractor in the melee. Now that I was here I hated to just give up without trying, but I should have worn work boots and earmuffs in addition to a hard hat. Dressed as I was, I couldn’t possibly climb around the machinery and the gaping holes in the expressway floor.

When I moved tentatively toward the lip of the ramp, a small man made rotund by a layer of work clothes detached himself from the nearest crew and came over to me.

“Hard-hat area, miss.” His tone was abrupt and dismissive.

“Are you the foreman?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Dozens of foremen around here. Who you looking for?”

“Someone who can point out the Alma Mejicana crew to me.” I was having to cup my mouth with my hands and yell directly into his ear. As it was he needed me to repeat the request twice.

He gave the look of pained resignation common to men when ignorant women interrupt their specialized work. “There’re hundreds of contractors here. I don’t know them all.”

“That’s why I want the foreman,” I screeched at him.

“Talk to the project manager.” He pointed to a semi trailer rigged with electric lines parked beyond the edge of the road. “And next time don’t come around here without a hard hat.”

Turning on his heel, he marched back to his crew before I could thank him. I staggered across the exposed rebars to the verge. Like the area underneath the expressway, this had become a quag of mud, broken concrete, and trash. My progress to the trailer was necessarily slow and accompanied by a number of catcalls. I grimaced to myself and ignored them.

Inside the trailer I found chaos on a smaller scale. Phone and power lines were coiled over every inch of exposed floor. The rest held tables covered with blueprints, phones, computer screens-all the paraphernalia of a big engineering firm consolidated into a small space.

At least a dozen people were crammed in with the equipment, talking to each other or-based on shouted snatches I caught-to the crews in the field. No one paid any attention to me. I waited until the man nearest me put down his phone and went up to him before he could dial again.

“I need to find the Alma Mejicana crew. Who can tell me where they’re working?”

He was a burly white man close to sixty with a ruddy face and small gray eyes. “You shouldn’t be on the site without a hard hat.”

“I realize that,” I said. “If you can just tell me where they’re working, I’ll get a hard hat before I go out to talk to them.”

“You got any special reason for wanting them?” His small eyes gave away nothing.

“Are you the project manager?”

He hesitated, as if debating whether to claim the title, then said he was an assistant manager. “Who are you?”

It was my turn to hesitate. If I came up with my OSHA story or a similar one I’d have to produce credentials. I didn’t want Luis to know I’d been poking around his business, but it couldn’t be helped.

“V. I. Warshawski,” I said. “I’m a detective. Some questions have come up about Alma Mejicana’s work practices.”

He wasn’t going to field that one on his own. He got up from his table and threaded his way to the back of the trailer where a tiny cubicle had been partitioned off. His bulky body filled the entrance. I could see his shoulders move as he waved his arms beyond my field of sight.

Eventually he returned with a slender black man. “I’m Jeff Collins, one of the project managers. What is it you want?”

“V. I. Warshawski.” I shook his proffered hand and repeated my request.

“Work practices are my responsibility. I haven’t heard anything to make me question what they’re doing. You have a specific allegation I could respond to?” He wasn’t hostile, just asserting his authority.

Since I didn’t know anything about construction practices I could scarcely talk about their equipment. My brain raced in search of an idea. “I do financial investigations,” I said, putting it together as I spoke. “My client thinks Alma’s way overleveraged, that they’ve taken on projects they can’t handle just so they can claim they’re eating at the same table with the big boys. He’s worried about his investment. I wanted to look at their equipment to see if they own it or lease it.”

It wounded woefully thin to me, but at least Collins didn’t seem to find it bizarre. “You can’t go on the site looking for that kind of thing. I’ve got several thousand men out there. Everything they’re doing is carefully coordinated. I just can’t allow unauthorized civilians out there.”

I was going to argue my case, but he frowned in thought. “Chuck,” he said abruptly to the ruddy white man, “call down there and ask about their trucks. Give the lady the report.” To me he added, “That’s the best I can do for you and it’s more than I should.”

“I appreciate it,” I said with what sincerity I could muster. It actually didn’t satisfy me at all-I wanted to see Alma at work, see if anything strange jumped out at me just by looking at them. But I had no choice. The Dan Ryan construction zone was not a location I could infiltrate.

Collins returned to his office and Chuck got on the phone again. After ten or fifteen minutes of shouted conversation with a variety of people, he beckoned me to his table.

“I thought they were in sector fifty-nine but they’d been moved to a hunnert and twenty-one. I don’t think you have to worry about them paying for their trucks-all the stuff they have on site belongs to Wunsch and Grasso.”

When I looked at him blankly he repeated the information in a louder voice. I pulled myself together, gave him my sweetest smile, and thanked him as best I could.