Burn Marks

39

Death Rattle

When I got back to the Chevy I was exhausted past the point of feeling or thinking. In some recess of my mind I knew I needed to see August Cray, to try to understand the connection that apparently lay between Farmworks and Seligman. Even if it hadn’t been too late to visit his Loop address I couldn’t have gone-I just didn’t have the stamina left to talk to anyone else today. All I wanted was to get home to a bath and my bed.

Peppy, curled in the front seat, gave me a look of disgust when I got in. She didn’t deign to lift her head- after three hours in the car she didn’t think I was good for much.

“Sorry, girl,” I apologized. “We’ll go home now, General Motors willing.”

The Chevy was grinding horribly even at twenty-five. I forced it forward like a knight with a battle-shy horse. It went about as happily. With the car whining and screaming I couldn’t follow the frantic line of thought I’d started at Roz’s any further. Aside from the noise, I was too nervous that the car might stop altogether to be able to think about anything else.

When I turned onto Racine it went on me, going from a brain-shattering whine to a lurching rattle to a final dead silence. I turned the ignition key. The engine ground horribly but wouldn’t catch. Behind me cars were honking furiously-it’s well known that the best cure for a stalled engine is for a hundred thousand drivers to blow their horns in unison.

I was less than three blocks from home. If I could push the Chevy to the curb, I could leave it there for a tow truck and walk home with Peppy. Peppy had other ideas. When I opened the door she bounded across the set divider and outside so fast I was just able to grab a hind leg before she hurled herself in front of a delivery van. I wrestled her to the ground and dragged her back into the front seat.

“You gotta wait five more minutes,” I told her. She wasn’t buying it. Usually the most docile of dogs, she snarled at me now and I had to wrap her leash around the seat divider to keep her in the car. She stood on the passenger seat barking at me furiously.

My legs had cramped up from tensing them so hard while I drove. When I stood up I almost fell over. I steadied myself against the car door.

“Neither of us is in good shape, are we?” I murmured to the Chevy. “I promise I won’t sell you for scrap if you’ll do the same for me.”

Cars were moving around me now that they saw I was stalled, but the ones farther back kept up their honking. I was too tired to react to the insistent blare. With one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the doorframe, I tried pushing the car to the curb. Too much strain in the last few days had left my shoulders so weak that I couldn’t urge the extra force into them to muscle the car forward.

I leaned my forehead against the roof. Someone across the street was adding to the cacophony on Racine. I ignored him along with the rest until finally over the din of the traffic I heard my name.

“Vic! Vic! You need some help?”

It was Rick York, Vinnie’s friend, at the wheel of a VW. I darted across the traffic to explain my plight to him. Vinnie was sitting in the passenger seat with his head pointedly turned away-he clearly didn’t think Rick should have tried so hard to get my attention.

“Do you think you could push me up the street. If I can get it back to our place, I can leave it for a tow in the morning.”

“Sure, just let me turn around,” Rick said, in the same breath that Vinnie announced they were going to be late if they waited around any longer.

“Aw, don’t be a turdhead, Vinnie, This’ll take us five minutes.”

I sprinted back to the Chevy, feeling refreshed just by an offer of help, and waited for Rick to come up behind me. Peppy didn’t like this new development at all. She left off barking to leap into the backseat and whimper, then plunged back into the front seat. I undid her collar to keep her from choking, but she jumped around so much that I had a hard time keeping an eye on traffic at the intersections.

I coasted into an empty patch across from my building. Rick honked twice and took off without waiting for my thanks. In the morning I’d find out where he lived and order a bottle of champagne for him. His kindness took the edge off my fatigue, enough so that I was able to give Peppy her due and walk her over to the inner harbor and back.

When I finally returned her to Mr. Contreras it was past eight. He was beside himself: “Let alone I don’t know if you’re alive or dead, I don’t even know where you’ve gone to come bail you out. And don’t tell me you don’t need my help. Where would you of been last year if I hadn’t known where to come hunting for you? Even if you don’t want me, you might spare a little thought for the princess here. And then people come calling on you what am I supposed to tell them?”

I ignored the bulk of his diatribe. “Just say I’m a secretive bitch who doesn’t give you a printout of my agenda every day. Who came calling?”

“Couple of guys. They didn’t leave their names-just said they’d be back later.”

His disclaimers to the contrary, my neighbor could identify any man who’d come to visit me in the past three years. If he didn’t know these guys, they were strangers.

“Probably Jehovah’s Witnesses. How’d you come to let them in? They ring your bell?”

“Yeah, they said they got the floor wrong.”

“And the side of the building?” I asked affably. “Did they leave or are they still upstairs?”

His tirade changed rapidly to remorse. “My God, doll, no wonder you don’t want to trust me with any of your secrets. Here I am falling for the oldest game in the world. They left, but what if someone else let them back in, that Vinnie guy across the hall or Miss Gabrielsen upstairs?”

Berit Gabrielsen, who lived across the hall from me, was still at the cottage in northern Michigan where she spent her summers. Mr. Contreras refused to listen to this idea but insisted on bustling me into his living room while he went up with the dog to check out my apartment. He wanted my keys but I resisted.

“You’ll be able to tell if the locks have been tampered with. They’re more likely waiting outside the door if they’re there at all. And if they are, I don’t want you waltzing into their arms-I don’t have the energy to carry you to the hospital. Besides, my car is broken.”

He was too agitated to pay any attention to me. If I’d thought there was really any danger I would have gone with him, but if my visitors had been sent by Ralph MacDonald they wouldn’t come back when they knew they’d be ID’d. I let Mr. Contreras usher me into his badly sprung mustard armchair.

I leaned back in the soft musty cushions, my mind drifting on the verge of sleep. My neighbor’s living room wasn’t that different from Saul Seligman’s-the same soft, overstuffed furniture, the same relics of their dead wives filling every available inch. And except for Seligman’s fire irons, the relics were also remarkably similar, down to the studio photos of their weddings.

I felt a tender kind of pity for the two of them, each struggling in his own way to maintain the intimacy their wives’ deaths had stripped them of. Seligman had accused me of being like everyone else, wanting him to sell his heart for a dollar, but I-

I sat up in the mustard chair. But I hadn’t been paying proper attention to him. That was my problem. Someone had been trying to get him to sell the building. I hadn’t heard that; I’d just been letting his plaints flow over me. Mrs. Donnelly knew, though, because it was Farmworks that wanted to buy it.

Her daughter worked there. To help boost her career she’d let them know the building might be for sale? Or she’d given them access to Mr. Seligman? At any rate, something about the sale, or at least about the fire, had brought that little smirk to her face because it reminded her of some special benefit to her daughter Star. But when she went to the man (woman?) she knew at Farmworks, worried because I had a picture of Star, he (she?) had killed Mrs. Donnelly and torn up the place to find any documents relating to their sale offer.

I got up and started pacing around the room, knocking my shins into a shrouded birdcage. Swearing briefly, I ran into the curio case Mr. Contreras kept in the middle of the room under an old bedspread.

Saul Seligman didn’t have anything to do with the property management company anymore. He told people he went in most afternoons, but he didn’t really leave his home to do much of anything. I’d never seen him with shoes on, only his worn bedroom slippers. Still, he hadn’t given Mrs. Donnelly a powder of attorney or anything. She would have needed his agreement to sell.

Whoever killed her had left him alone because everyone knew he wouldn’t be able to make the necessary connections. He didn’t have any documents-those had all gone to Rita Donnelly. She might even have portrayed him as mentally incompetent to her principals.

But why had they wanted the Indiana Arms? What was it about that building that someone cared so much about? I was just a derelict property in the decayed triangle between McCormick Plance and the Ryan. Of course that was where MacDonald and Meagher wanted to put their stadium; if they got the bid, the value of any property there would skyrocket.

I came to a stop in front of the birdcage before I could bang into it again. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe I could have been so dense for so long.

Old MacDonald had a farm. Of course. He had damned near every other piece of land in Chicago, why not a farm too? He’d have a little holding company that could do deals on the side without drawing the public scrutiny that MacDonald Development inevitably attracted. And why not call it Farmworks? Just the name for someone with a macabre sense of humor. And if the Indiana Arms was the last, or one of the last, bits of property standing in the way of his development, then just burn that sucker down.

Wunsch and Grasso, they did a lot of business for the county. Ernie’s daddy had grown up in Norwood Park alongside Boots and the two of them had just naturally kept in touch. Ernie and Ron had started out doing favors for the Dems-in Chicago that could mean anything from hustling votes to breaking legs of tavern owners who didn’t pay off the right people. So when they took over Ernie’s daddy’s business it expanded along with Boots’s career. So if Boots and his pal Ralph wanted them to supply Alma Mejicana with trucks and compressors and manpower for the Ryan project, they’d be happy to help out.

“What’s wrong with you, doll?” Mr. Contreras’s severe voice behind me made me jump. “You know I ain’t had a bird in there in ten years. I only keep it because Clara loved canaries. You thinking of getting a bird, don’t. You may not think they need a lot of looking after, like the princess here, but you can’t be gone all the time and have any kind of animal.”

“I wasn’t planning on a canary,” I said meekly. “Anybody upstairs?”

“We went up outside your kitchen besides going up inside here, in case you wondered what kept us. Nobody there. Seemed to me someone might have been trying to get past those locks of yours, but they held okay. Maybe you should spend the night down here, though. I’m not going to be real happy wondering what’s happening to you.”

“I’ll be fine upstairs,” I assured him. “They know you saw them. They won’t come back. Even if they could field a different crew, they’d be too worried that the cops would trace them through you. I’ll lock all the bolts and tie a rope across the upstairs landing, okay?”

He didn’t like it and went on at some length to explain why. I couldn’t tell if he was genuinely worried or if he just wanted a bigger role in my affairs. Whichever it was, I preferred the possibility of a break-in to spending a night on his sagging couch under the empty birdcage.

“I’m sleeping in here, then, cookie. The princess’ll bark if anyone comes in and we’ll be upstairs in a wink.”

I wondered briefly if they’d have a jolly confrontation with Rick and Vinnie in the middle of the night. It might be worth getting out of bed for. I thanked him gravely for his concern and made good my escape.