Burn Marks

27

We Serve and Protect

It was Saturday before the pounding in my head receded completely. I’d gone home on Friday, admitting- only to myself-that Mez Homerin had been right: I was better off for the extra day of people waiting on me. As it was, Friday involved so many difficult encounters that by the time I went to bed I was wishing I’d stayed in the hospital. The worst was with the police-Homerin had shielded me from Roland Montgomery of the Bomb and Arson Squad.

Of course the cops were most anxious to speak with me. Montgomery had been in the emergency room with Mallory and Furey early Wednesday morning and he’d sent a subordinate to Reese both Wednesday and Thursday. Since I’d slept through most of Wednesday I only learned about the subordinate’s visit on Thursday. When Mez left me he encountered the detective in the hall. Their altercation led to a big red notice on my chart proclaiming “No visitors” and a lot of excitement among the orderlies and nurses who reported the episode to me in dramatic detail later.

I took a cab from the hospital to my car, which started with a reproachful groan that it kept up all the way to my apartment. Mr. Contreras saw me pull up a bit after noon. While I was sponging myself off as best I could without soaking my gauze mitts, he came to the door laden down with food.

“You shoulda let me know when you was coming home, doll. I could’ve come and got you-you shouldn’t be driving with your hands all wrapped up like that.”

“I just wanted to be by myself for a while. In the hospital you’re a twenty-four-hour-a-day freak show for every medical student in the city.”

“You shouldn’t try to do so much on your own, cookie. No shame in asking for help every now and then. And I know darn well you wouldn’t eat nothing this afternoon if I didn’t bring it to you, so you want to be alone, you say the word and the princess here and I’ll go, but not till we see you eat something.”

I gave up trying to hint him away, but made him wait in the living room while I finished washing and changing. Peppy, feeling no inhibitions, stayed next to me until I was done.

Lotty’d been right about one thing-my clothes stank so badly I could scarcely stand being in the same room with them, let alone the same body. I didn’t even want to wash them. Although it was my newest pair of jeans I stuffed them into a bag and put it outside my back door to cart down to the garbage.

Finally clean from my bra to my socks, I joined the old man. He’d prepared a special feast, much more food than I could deal with in my sickly state, but he was miffed that he’d had to hear all my news secondhand.

“If you was going off into danger like that, you might of notified me,” he grumbled. “‘Stead the first thing I know about it is the morning paper. That oversize teenager Ryerson putting in a story about ‘Chicago’s most troublesome private eye’ and I start reading and of course there you are, rescuing bodies from burning buildings, hit on the head, and not even a phone call to me from the hospital. I says to the princess here, I says, ‘You could be an orphan and you’d be the last to know.’”

Peppy thumped her tail to corroborate his story. Her liquid amber eyes gazed at me with unwavering intensity as I slowly chewed a piece of steak.

“Ever since my aunt came prancing into my life two weeks ago you’ve been riding me for getting you up in the middle of the night. I figured if I woke you up to tell you where I was going, I’d just get another lecture.”

“That’s not fair.” He was hurt and astonished that I could think such a thing. On top of that he was pretty darned tired of me leaving him standing on the sidelines while I went out and had all kinds of fabulous life-threatening adventures.

“It’s not the first time, doll. You forget how I helped you and Dr. Lotty out that time her clinic was attacked. You don’t remember how I took on them guys trying to break into your place. I may be seventy-seven but I’m in good shape, I’m still a good man in a fight.”

It was precisely because I had remembered his assistance that I tried never to involve him in the livelier aspects of my work. If I told him that, though, it would be just too painful for him. I skated around it, saying Elena was so prone to drunken fables, I hadn’t taken her claims of endangerment seriously. By the time I finished he was nodding portentously.

“I know just what you mean, doll. I used to work with a guy like that. Of course he was a danger to the whole shop, showing up drunk most days, and the ones he arrived sober he didn’t stay like that past lunchtime. There was the day he didn’t turn off the surface grinder, and Jake-you remember Jake-lost most of the little finger on his left hand, but Crenshaw-Crenshaw was the drunk- he claimed it was me using the machine when I wasn’t supposed to…”

His good humor restored, Mr. Contreras went on in this vein at some length. The happy drone of his voice, the weight of the meat in my stomach, the warm pleasure I felt at being back in my own home, sent me drowsing in my armchair. I held my hand down and let the dog lick my fingers while I nodded sleepily in tune to the old man’s speech.

The shrill burr of the phone startled me awake. I stretched an arm out to the piano and picked up the receiver.

“Tried to write your obit for you, Warshawski, but you made it through one more time. How many lives you got left, anyway? Three?”

It was Murray, with more vibrant energy than my head could handle. “I hear you called me the most troublesome detective in Chicago.”

“Private eye,” he corrected. “Nothing libelous in that-I checked with the legal department. You can sue me only if it’s not true. What I want to know is, who did it? Did it come out of Roz Fuentes’s camp or your dead junkie, Cerise?”

“Ask the cops-the city pays them to investigate arson and attempted murder.”

“And you’re just going to stay home and watch TV while they sort it out?” He guffawed. “Between us ace investigators, what were you doing down there?”

Black spots were starting to dance in front of me from the resonance of his voice. I moved the earpiece away from my head. “Performing feats of derring-do. I understand it was in all the papers.”

“C’mon, Warshawski,” he said, trying to wheedle. “I do lots of stuff for you. Just a few little words.”

He was right-if I wanted help from him, I had to throw him the occasional quote. I told him everything from the moment Elena called me to my drop from the fire escape.

“Now it’s your turn-what was the fire department doing there so pat?”

Mr. Contreras looked at me as intently as the dog, miffed I was telling my tale to Murray but wanting all the juice. I took the phone over to the couch where I’d dumped my bag and pulled out my memo pad. “Anonymous phone call,” I scribbled on it for Mr. Contreras as Murray boomed the news at me. Someone had called 911 from a pay phone at the corner of Cermak and Michigan. The police didn’t have a clue as to who phoned, except for its having been a man.

“So you think it was someone after your aunt?” Murray asked. “How is she, by the way?”

“I don’t think anything right now. My head hurts like all the cement trucks on the Ryan just ran over it. And my aunt, who has the system of a goat, sat up and took nourishment yesterday. She refused to talk to me, though, when I started asking her pointed questions, and is acting sick enough that the docs are stonewalling the cops for her. You can call Reese and see if the medicine men will let her talk to you, but don’t set your hopes too high. Now you know everything I do. I’m going to bed. Good-bye.”

I hung up before he could say anything else and ignored the phone when it started ringing again. Mr. Contreras solicitously offered to fix me up with pillows and a blanket on the couch, to leave me the dog, to make me tea, to do a thousand things that made the black spots grow into giant spirals.

“I need to be alone in my own bed. I can’t take any more people now. I know you mean well, I know you’re helping like mad, but I’m going to faint or scream or both if you don’t take the dog and leave.”

He was a little hurt but he’d seen concussion cases before, he knew it took time before you really felt yourself, and in the meantime the smallest things got you down-sure, doll, sure, he’d leave me alone, sleep was the best thing for me right now. He gathered up the dishes, clicking over the small amount of steak I’d eaten-gotta get your strength back up, doll, you look like you lost ten pounds the last few days-finally collecting the dog and heading down the stairs. I locked the triple dead bolts and stumbled to my bedroom.

The spirals receded back to spots as I thrashed around in an uneasy doze. The image of Elena, her face sunk into deep canyons, drips in her malnourished arms, kept swarming into my half sleep. She was a pain in the ass but someone had tried to kill her; I couldn’t just abandon her at this point.

I’d tried talking to her before I left this morning but she’d pretended to sleep. “It’s no good playing possum, Auntie-you’re going to have to talk to me sometime,” I’d warned her.

Mez Homerin interrupted my lecture to her, taking me by the arm and hustling me from the room.

“She’s had a severe shock to a system that wasn’t in the best shape to begin with. She needs to be completely free from any kind of stress or harassment if she’s to recover. I’ve forbidden the police to question her. Do you want me to bar you from the room too? She needs your support, not your abuse.”

“Bar me from her life,” I’d snapped at him. “Keep her from calling to demand that I help her one last time- write it on her hospital forms. Make sure she doesn’t put my address in as her own or list me as the guarantor of her bill. Do all those things and you can keep me out of her room with all the righteousness you want.”

Homerin looked at me steadily during my outburst and then said in a gentle voice that he thought I ought to consider bringing her home to convalesce when she was a little stronger. That was when I’d left the hospital-before I gave in to my urge to take his stethoscope and strangle him with it.

Now, though, tossing restlessly, I was tormented wondering how much I owed my aunt. Would my uncle Peter thrash in guilt for saying no? Of course not. I hadn’t even called to ask him-my tired brain wasn’t up to rebutting his smugness. Did I have a duty to Elena that overrode all considerations of myself, my work, my own longing for wholeness?

I’d held glasses of water for Gabriella when her arms were too weak to lift them herself, emptied wheelchair pots for Tony when he could no longer move from chair to toilet. I’ve done enough, I kept repeating, I’ve done enough. But I couldn’t quite convince myself.

Such unquiet sleep as I achieved was broken up for good at four when the police came, represented by Roland Montgomery and Terry Finchley. Montgomery kept a finger on the bell until I couldn’t ignore it, and then said through the intercom that if I didn’t let them up to talk, they’d get a warrant and take me downtown. It was Montgomery who did all the bullying. Terry Finchley, sent by Bobby to represent Violent Crimes, was clearly unhappy with Montgomery’s approach but was too junior to protest very forcefully.

I shuffled into the living room with a blanket wrapped around me. I’d been sweating heavily in my uneasy dozing and felt a chill run through me when I got out of bed. The black spots had gone away but my head was thick, as though someone had stuffed it with wool. I sat on the couch with my legs curled up underneath me.

“Let’s have the whole story, Warshawski. What were you doing in that building? How did it come to catch fire while you were there?”

“The force of my fiery personality,” I mumbled, my tongue thick.

“What was that?” Montgomery demanded angrily. Finchley shook his head slightly, trying to warn me without the arson expert seeing.

“I called Furey,” I said, suddenly remembering. “He wanted to know where my aunt was and I left a message with the night man saying where I was going. Did he get it? Is that why he and Bobby were at the fire?”

“I’m asking the questions,” Montgomery snapped. “Why did you call the station?”

“Get the chip off your shoulder, Lieutenant, and listen to me. I just explained why I called the station. Did Detective Furey get my message?”

Finchley spoke swiftly, before Montgomery could bellow at me. “Furey was at a poker game; he left his beeper in his coat pocket and didn’t get the message until he went over to get a cigar and found the thing vibrating away. Then he called the station, got your message, and went roaring down to the Near South Side. By that time, though, someone had already reported the fire. Lieutenant Mallory gave the night operator a pretty good going-over for not notifying someone else in the unit, but you hadn’t said anything about an emergency.”

“So Furey and Bobby stormed the hospital. How come you’re here now?”

“Miss Warshawski,” Montgomery interrupted frostily, “Detective Finchley is here to help with an investigation. Why the department sent him is none of your business.”

I wanted to make a grandiose statement about how the police worked for the citizens and how I was one, and therefore one of Montgomery’s bosses, but I felt too sick to fight. I just wrapped the blanket closer about me and continued to shiver. And when Montgomery asked me I went back through all the tired old details. About Elena disappearing, about Furey coming around hunting for her, her early morning phone call, and on and on.

“So why did someone want to leave the two of you there to die?” Montgomery asked.

“You’re the bomb-and-arson whiz, Lieutenant. You tell me. All I know is, she called up scared, I found her on a pallet in the basement barely breathing, got knocked out myself, and am lucky to be here enjoying this scintillating conversation with some shred of my wits intact.”

Finchley started a sentence, then changed his mind and made an industrious note in his pocket diary. In the dim lamplight his closely cut hair merged with the black smoothness of his face.

Montgomery scowled at me but only said, “The Prairie Shores Hotel is across the street from that fire you were so excited about last week.”

I gave the thread of a smile. “Amazing.”

“I’m wondering if you set the fire yourself, to try to get the department to respond to your demands for an investigation into the Indiana Arms.”

I felt a jolt, the way you do when the earth goes on hurtling through space and you haven’t quite moved with it. Finchley’s jaw dropped. He clearly hadn’t been privy to Montgomery’s theories. “I didn’t know we were considering that possibility, Monty,” he said softly.

“And I would never have suspected you of so extravagant an imagination,” I put in. “Sounds like you read too much Tom Clancy on your days off.”

Finchley hid a smile so fast I wasn’t sure I’d seen it. “Monty, what evidence do we have that points to Miss Warshawski?”

Montgomery ignored him. “You tried to waste police resources last week, claiming there had been a baby in the Indiana Arms that was never there. It’s one of the hallmarks of arsonists that they can’t stand to have their handiwork ignored.”

“Hunh-unh.” I shook my head. “You go away and do some real work on this problem before you bother me again. You find out about the accelerant and who had access to it, and you come up with a reason for me knocking myself out and then setting the fire and then scrambling to get away. Then we’ll talk some more.”

“Accomplice,” Montgomery said smugly. “You must have run afoul of your partner in this.”

I leaned back in the corner of my couch and shut my eyes. “Good-bye, Lieutenant. The door will lock automatically behind you.”

He started shouting at me. When I didn’t respond he got up and shook my shoulder until my head throbbed in earnest.

“You’re one step away from a complaint of police brutality,” I said coldly. “Unless you have a warrant with my name on it, you get the hell out of my place now.”

If Finchley hadn’t been there, I think Montgomery would have slugged me, but he could see whose side the detective was on-he wasn’t nearly as dumb as he looked.

“Just watch your ass, Warshawski. I’m going to be sticking to you like your underpants. If you’re up to something, next time we’ll catch you red-handed.”

“Thanks for the warning, Lieutenant. It’s a help to know who your enemies are before you hit the streets.”

When the door shut behind them I did up all the bolts again and checked the back door for good measure. I was too tired to think about what it all meant, too tired even to call Bobby and chew his ear off about it. I staggered back to my bedroom and fell back into a deep, unrestful sleep.