Burn Marks

41

Unlit Fireworks

I felt honor-bound to stop at Mr. Contreras’s and inquire into any dark doings in the night. He was intensely disappointed-nothing had happened. Peppy had wakened him around three barking her head off, but it turned out to be just a couple of guys climbing into a car across the street.

I finished the conversation as quickly as I tactfully could and went up to the third floor. No one was lurking there. I called a small local rental company to arrange for a car. They had an ′84 Tempo, no power steering, fifty thousand miles. It sounded like a clunker but it was only twenty dollars a day, including taxes, usage fees, franchise charges, and all the other items the big chains stiff you for. I told them I’d be by around one.

My long deep sleep had worked wonders on my sore shoulders. They were stiff but the needles of pain had gone. While waiting for Jerry I got out my small hand weights and did a light set of exercises to loosen them further.

The bright yellow tow truck finally honked in front of my building a little before one-I should have remembered the laws of relativity that apply to garage time and multiplied Luke’s estimate of an hour by three.

I couldn’t find my car keys. Finally I remembered stuffing them into the backpack, where they’d clattered against the Smith & Wesson. I picked up the whole pack and fished the keys out on my way down the stairs. Mr. Contreras stuck his head out the door.

“Just turning my car over to the tow service,” I said brightly, waving good-bye. Sometimes it was easier to tell him everything than to fight him.

Jerry was a small, wiry guy in his late twenties. He owned a towing service but had a contract with Luke and did most of the garage’s work. In his spare time he raced slot cars. We chatted a few minutes about an amazing race he’d won in Milwaukee the previous weekend.

“Let me see if she’ll turn over this morning, Vic. Save you the price of a tow.”

“The car’s dead, Jerry. I had to push it the final three blocks home last night.” Why can’t a car jock admit that a woman might at least know whether her own automobile starts or not.

“Well, maybe we can jump it then. Just open the hood a minute, okay, Vic?”

“Oh, all right.” I stomped ungraciously across the street and undid the hood release. It was already loose, which seemed odd. I wondered if I might have pulled it by mistake while I was fumbling around trying to push the car last night.

Jerry turned his truck around and backed up parallel with the Chevy. Whistling between his teeth, he pulled a set of cables from the back of the truck and came over to join me.

It was the looseness of the catch that made me look inside the engine before he hooked up the cables. Still whistling, Jerry was moving to attach one of them to the battery when I yanked his arm down.

“Get that thing away from the engine.”

“Vic-what-” He broke off when he saw the twin explosive sticks laid near the coil.

“Vic, let’s get the fuck out of here.” He spoke with a casualness belied by his white face. He grabbed my arm and shoved me into the truck. Before I’d shut the door he was at the corner of Belmont.

I was trembling so violently, I’m not sure I could have moved without his pulling me. I tried to stop my teeth chattering long enough to tell him to get the police on his truck radio.

“We can’t leave that bomb there for any passerby to touch,” I said through clenched jaws. “We’ve got to get the cops.”

His face was still so white that his brown eyes looked black, but he coasted to a stop in an empty loading zone near a hardware store. “I don’t want to go near that thing again. Dynamite scares the shit out of me. Who you get so pissed off at you, Warshawski?”

While he dialed 911 I opened the truck door and threw up my eggs and toast in a neat little heap on the curb.

It was three-thirty by the time I finished with the cops. After a squad car duo had taken a quick, fearful look at the bomb, Roland Montgomery showed up with young Firehorse Whiskey, whom I’d seen briefly in his office two weeks ago. As the day wore on I never did get the young man’s real name.

Montgomery sent for a bomb-removal team. They arrived after half an hour or so in something that looked like a moon mobile. In the meantime a half dozen more squad cars roared in to seal off the area. For a few hours the street had more excitement than it usually gets in a year, what with police cordons and lots of guys in space suits moving in on my car. The networks all sent their vans, and children who should have been in school appeared miraculously to wave at their playmates on the four o’clock news.

When he saw the TV crews pull up, Montgomery got out of the car where he’d been questioning Jerry and me and went over to talk to them. I ambled over to join in. He liked that so little that he tried grabbing the mike away from me when I started to explain how Jerry and I found the bomb.

“We don’t have anything to report to the media yet on this device,” the lieutenant said roughly.

“You may not”-I smiled limpidly for the camera crews-“but I’m the owner of the car and I have a lot to say about it. I think my downstairs neighbor heard them putting the bomb in around three this morning.”

Of course they lapped that up and wanted more. There wasn’t anything Montgomery could do about it. “It was the dog who really heard them,” I said. “She probably saw them at my car-that’s why she started barking. You can ask him all about it.”

I gestured broadly at Mr. Contreras, who was standing on the periphery of the crowd with Peppy. Peppy bounded over to me while Mr. Contreras made his way to the eager reporters. Montgomery backed away from the dog and demanded I get rid of her.

“Don’t shoot her, Lieutenant,” I said. “It’ll be on three networks all over the country.”

Dogs make a welcome addition to any picture, especially a golden retriever as beautiful and heroic as Peppy. While Montgomery frowned horribly I told the reporters her name and got her to shake paws with a couple of them. They were naturally enchanted.

I fondled the dog’s ears and listened to Mr. Contreras explain at excruciating length exactly what it was he’d heard and seen. He also told them how the dog had saved my life last winter when she found me bound and gagged in the middle of a swamp. I was glad I wasn’t the one who’d have to listen to it all in order to find one usable comment.

Once the experts had removed the dynamite from the car and whisked it away in a special sealed container, the TV crews departed too. Montgomery’s demeanor changed immediately. He sent Jerry off and informed me we were going downtown for a real talk. A trace of sadism in his expression as he took my arm roughly made my stomach churn. Mr. Contreras pawed anxiously at him, demanding to know what they were doing with me. Montgomery brushed the old man back so roughly, I was afraid he might knock him over.

“Take it easy, Lieutenant, he’s seventy-eight. You don’t need to prove you’re bigger and more powerful.”

“Bobby Mallory puts up with a lot of shit from you I don’t have to take, Warshawski. You button up now and speak when you’re spoken to or I’ll have you in on an assault charge fast enough to make your smug little head spin.”

“Whew, Lieutenant, you been watching too many Dirty Harry movies.”

He yanked my arm hard enough to jar the shoulder socket and hustled me to the car. As he was pushing me inside I turned to scream at Mr. Contreras to call Lotty and get my lawyer’s name from her.

Down at Eleventh Street, Montgomery took me to a small interrogation room and began demanding to know how I’d gotten hold of a supply of dynamite. When it dawned on me that he was trying to accuse me of rigging my own car, I was so furious that the room swam in front of my eyes.

“Get a witness in here, Lieutenant,” I managed to get out in a voice below a scream. “Get a witness in here to what you’re saying.”

He swallowed a triumphant smile so fast I almost missed it. “We’ve got a pretty good case, Warshawski. You’ve been involved in two suspicious fires in the last month. We figure you for a sensationalist. When you couldn’t get the kind of attention you wanted out of those fires, you rigged a bomb up in your car. All I want to know is where you got the dynamite.”

I wanted to jump up from behind the table and seize his long stork neck and pound his head against the wall, but I had just enough reason left to know he was hoping to goad me over the brink. I shut my eyes, panting, trying to force my temper down-the first time I let it go he’d have me in the lockup for assaulting an officer.

“You’ve been hiding behind Bobby Mallory for years, Warshawski. It’s time you learned to fight on your own.”

I felt him moving toward me just in time to back my chair away. The blow he’d aimed for my head got me on the diaphragm.

“I presume this room is wired. Please let the record show that Lieutenant Montgomery just hit a witness in a bombing case,” I shouted.

He aimed another fist at me. I slid from my chair under the legs of the table. Montgomery got down on his hands and knees to pull me out, shouting abuse at me, calling me names out of porn flicks. I scooted away from him. He went flat on his abdomen and grabbed my left ankle. I twisted away and got to my feet on the other side of the table.

Just as I staggered upright Officer Neely walked in. Her professional mask cracked at the sight of a lieutenant on his belly scrabbling around under an interrogation table.

“He lost a contact,” I said helpfully, “We’ve both been down there looking, but he started confusing my ankle with his eyeballs so I thought I’d get out of the way.”

Neely didn’t say anything. By the time Montgomery had climbed awkwardly back to his feet, she had her face composed in its usual rigid lines. She spoke in a monotone. “Lieutenant Mallory heard you were questioning this witness and wanted to talk to her for a few minutes.”

Montgomery glared at her, furious at being caught looking like a fool. I felt sorry for her, her career buffeted by being the wrong person to show up at a bad moment.

“I don’t think the lieutenant here has anything else useful to say to me. He’s got his facts without asking a single question. Let’s go, Officer.” Unfortunately I didn’t feel sorry enough to keep my mouth shut.

I opened the door to the interrogation room and headed down the hall, not waiting to see what Officer Neely would do. She caught up with me on the stairs. I wanted to say something helpful and sisterly to her in support of her law-enforcement career, but I was too badly rattled to think of anything very chipper. She was looking rigidly ahead, making it impossible to know if she was embarrassed, disgusted, or just not very responsive. On the third floor we silently crossed the Violent Crimes area to Bobby’s tiny office along the far wall. Officer Neely knocked and opened the door.

“Miss Warshawski, sir. Did you want me to take notes?”

Bobby was on the phone. He shook his head and motioned me to a chair. Officer Neely shut the door behind her with a sharp snap.

Bobby’s desk and walls were crammed with photographs-pictures of yellow birds in flight, gap-toothed children grinning as they sported his dress uniform cap, Eileen hand in hand with her eldest daughter as a bride. He liked to shift them around every so often so he could see them with a fresh eye. Ordinarily I hunt for the shots of Tony or Gabriella-or even the one of me at five sitting on Tony’s lap. Today I didn’t really care. I sat gripping my hands on the side of the metal chair, waiting for him to finish his conversation. Next to Montgomery, Bobby was the last person I wanted to see today.

“Okay, Vicki, tell me what’s going on and make it fast. I had a call from your lawyer, which is how I knew you were down here, but it doesn’t make me happy to run interference for you with another man on the force.”

I took a deep breath and came out with a tolerably coherent version of the day’s events. Bobby grunted and asked a few questions, like how come I knew it was a bomb and how long it had taken Monty to get there after Jerry called in the report on his car radio.

When I got to the end Bobby made a face. “You’re in an awkward spot, Vicki. I keep telling you not to play around in police business and this just proves my point. You came to me to get you out of hot water you boiled up yourself-”

“What do you mean?” I was so furious, my head seemed to rise a foot from my body. “I did not, repeat not, put that bomb in my car engine. Someone did, but instead of trying to get a description of the men who did it-who may have done it-from a pretty good witness, the police are trying to charge me with attempted suicide.”

“I’m not saying you planted that device, Vicki. I know you well enough to realize you’re not that unbalanced. But if you hadn’t been playing around with arson and a whole lot of things I told you to stay out of, you wouldn’t be in this mess at all.”

He looked at me sternly, daddy to naughty child. “Now I’m going to use a few chips on your behalf, Vicki, with a guy who’s not too easy to work with. In return I want you to promise me that you are not going to touch this business any further. Let alone the trouble you’ve got yourself into, since you started in on that fire three weeks ago you’ve got my whole unit stirred up. You were in last night with some damned piece of jewelry that has the boys in an uproar now. I just can’t have it. Do you understand?”

I pressed my lips together. “I brought in a man’s bracelet I found under my couch because I though Finchley might have dropped it when he and Montgomery were in last week. McGonnigal flipped out when he saw it because he knew it was Furey’s and thought I was flaunting it at him. It was only late last night that I realized it belonged to Furey and came to see what it was doing in my apartment.

“He’d given it to Elena, Bobby, to Elena and the dead junkie you went to see at the Rapelec site two weeks ago. It was just a little extortion, something to keep them from reporting that they’d seen him-”

Bobby slammed his palm hard on the desk. One of the pictures teetered and fell over the side. “I’ve had enough out of you!” he roared. “That’s a loathsome suggestion. You’ve been treated too easy for too long, that’s your problem, so when things don’t go your way you manufacture conspiracy theories. You ought to know better than that, than to come in here and try to lay that kind of sh-something like that on me. Now get out and go home. I told you two weeks ago to stop stirring up my department and I meant it. This had better be the last time I see you around here.”

I got up and looked steadily at him. “You don’t want to know what I’ve learned? If I’m right, Montgomery and Furey could be involved in one of the ugliest little scandals to hit this department in a long time.”

Bobby scowled ferociously. “Spare me. I hear enough trash in here every day without listening to you fling garbage around about one of my own men, I’ve told you dozens of times that you’re in a line of work that’s bad for you, and this is perfect proof of it. You don’t know how to reason, how to follow a chain of evidence to a conclusion, so you start making up paranoid fantasies. If I tell you I think you need a good man and a family, you get on your high horse, but women your age who don’t marry start getting strange ideas. I don’t want to see you ending up like that crazy aunt of yours, propositioning young men for the price of a bottle.”

I stared down at him not knowing whether to scream or laugh. “Bobby, that psychology was old before you were born, the old repressed-spinster routine, and even if it were true, it sure wouldn’t apply to me. I just hope you aren’t laying that line on Officer Neely, or about the time I hit West Madison you’re going to be facing a harassment suit so big it’ll make your head spin. Anyway, if you have to think of me as a crackpot virgin to keep your faith in the department intact, remember when the pieces come breaking around you that I tried to warn you.”

Bobby was on his feet now, too, panting, his face red. “Get out of my office and don’t come back here. Your parents were two of my best friends, but I’d have broken every bone in your body if you talked to me the way you spoke to them, and look where it’s led-how dare you talk to me like this. Get out!”

The last few words were on a crescendo so loud that they must have heard them on the street, let alone in the adjacent room. I managed to keep my head up and my steps steady and even to shut the door gently behind me. Everyone in the room turned to stare as I made the long walk from his office to the unit-room exit.

“It’s okay, boys and girls. The lieutenant got a little excited, but I don’t think there’ll be any more fireworks this afternoon.”