Bitter Medicine

by Sara Paretsky

I parked in the south Grant Park garage underneath Michigan Avenue and walked over to my office. The lobby of the Pulteney building on South Wabash gave up its usual fetid smell of moldy tile and stale urine. But the building was old, put up when people built for keeps; its un-air-conditioned halls and stairwells were cool behind thick concrete walls.

  The elevator was broken, a twice-weekly occurrence. I had to pick my way across chicken bones and less-appetizing debris in the stairwell entrance. Nylons and heels are not the ideal footwear for the four-floor climb to my office. I don’t know why I bothered, why I didn’t just work out of my apartment. I couldn’t afford a better building, and having an office close to the financial center because its crime was my specialty didn’t seem reason enough to put up with this dump and its perpetual malfunctions.

  I unlocked my office door and scooped a week’s accumulation of mail from the floor. My rent included a sixty-year-old “mailboy” who picked the mail up in the lobby and delivered it to tenants—no postal employee was going to climb all those stairs every day.

  I flipped on the window air conditioner and called my answering service. Tessa Reynolds wanted to speak to me. As I dialed her number, I noticed that the plant I’d bought to cheer up the room had died of dehydration.

  “V.I.—you heard about Malcolm?” Her deep voice was tight, strained fine through the vocal cords. “I—I’d like to hire you. I’ve got to make sure they find them, get those bastards off the street.”

  I explained as patiently as I could what I’d told Lotty.

  “Vic! This isn’t like you! What do you mean, a job for the police and routine? I want to be dead certain, when that routine says there’s no way to track the murderer down that there is no way! I want to know that. I don’t want to go to my grave with the idea that they could have found the killer, but they didn’t look, that Malcolm, after all, even though he was a great surgeon, was just another dead black man!”

  I tried to pull back into the rationality that made my job possible. Tessa was not pummeling me personally. She was behaving in the way grief takes some people—with rage, and by demanding a reason for her bereavement.

  “I just had this conversation with Lotty, Tessa. I’ll ask what questions I can of the few sources I have. And I’ve already promised the Alvarados I’ll talk to Fabiano. But you must not look to me to solve this crime. If I turn up any leads, they go straight to the officer in charge because he has the machinery to follow them up.”

  “Malcolm had such respect for you, Vic. And you’re turning your back on him.” A sob cracking the deep voice was all that kept me from shouting at her.

  “I’m not turning my back on him,” I said levelly. “I’m just telling you, my going through the motions on this is not going to accomplish what the police can. Do you think I’m made of stone, that a friend of mine is battered to death and I turn up full of detached objectivity like a Sherlock Holmes? Jesus, Tessa, you and Lotty make me feel like the bludgeoned end of a battering ram.”

  “If I had your skill and your contacts, Vic, I’d be glad to be able to act, instead of sitting in my studio with a mallet trying to chisel a statue of grief.”

  The line went dead. I rubbed my head tiredly. My Polish shoulders did not seem wide enough to handle the load on them today. I rotated them gently to undo the knots. In the ordinary run of things, Tessa would be right: I solve my problems better by acting than thinking. That’s what makes me a good detective. So why did this job look so unappetizing?

  The Dan Ryan El rattled by. I got up stiffly and hung my jacket on an old coatrack in the corner. All my office furniture is used. The big oak desk and the coatrack came from a police auction. The manual Olivetti had been my mother’s. Behind the desk was a khaki metal filing cabinet, a gift from a printing company in lieu of a fee they couldn’t afford to pay.

  The cabinet holds every piece of paper I’ve touched since passing the bar over a decade ago. When I left the public defender’s office, my case files stayed with the county. But I’d saved all my notes and receipts, motivated by an obscure fear that the county—a jealous god if ever there was one—might audit my expense reports and demand reimbursement for my car mileage. As time passed, it didn’t seem worth the trouble to sort them out. I put the dead plant and the scattered pages of a report for a case just ending into the corner and dumped the contents of the cabinet’s bottom drawer onto the desktop.

  I found old gasoline receipts, names and addresses of witnesses whose identities now meant nothing to me, a detailed brief defending a woman who had killed the man who raped her after he was released on bond. My hands turned black and grimy from the decade-old dust and my silk shirt changed from pale beige to gray.

  At one o’clock I went to the corner deli for a corned-beef sandwich—not the best choice on a hot muggy day. I brought two cans of diet soda back with me to cut the salt. Finally, toward the end of the afternoon, I found the scrap I was looking for, stuck between two pages listing my bond-court assignments for February 1975.

  Sergio Rodriguez, boy punk. He’d been arrested numerous times in his young life, for progressively more antisocial acts. Finally at eighteen he’d made it into adult court on aggravated assault charges. It had been my happy job to defend him. He was a good-looking youth with a lot of charm and a lot of violence. What I had was his mother’s phone number. She’d believed the charm, not the violence, but felt I’d done the best I could for her poor railroaded baby.

  We’d gotten the sentence down from ten years to two-to-five as a so-called first offense. Sergio came out from Joliet about the time I went into business for myself.

  When I defended him he’d been a lowlife in a Humboldt Park gang called the Venomous Aliens. When he got out of jail, with his graduate prison degree in gangs and violence, he’d moved quickly into a position of power. He’d helped change the Aliens’ name to the Latin Lions, and claimed that they were a private men’s club like the Kiwanis and the non-Latin Lions. I’d seen his picture in the Herald-Star a few months ago entering a courtroom where he was suing the paper for libel in calling the Lions a street gang. He’d been wearing a three-piece suit whose expensive fabric even newsprint couldn’t hide. In the meantime, under his guidance, the Lions had branched out to the Wrigley Field area. Most recently, as Rawlings had said, they’d moved into the Hispanic part of Uptown.

  I put Mrs. Rodriguez’s phone number into my purse and surveyed the mess on my desk. Maybe it was time to ditch it all. On the other hand, I might need another obscure note someday. I swept everything back into the drawer, locked the cabinet, and left.

  During the afternoon the sky had clouded over with heavy, sullen clouds that seemed to shut all oxygen from the city. My beige-gray shirt became a sodden mass of sweat by the time I got home. Never wear silk in the summer, especially not for heavy cleaning jobs. I was tempted to throw it out—it looked beyond salvation.

  After a cold shower, and comfortable in cutoffs and a short-sleeved shirt, I felt up to talking to Mrs. Rodriguez. A young child answered the phone; after a few minutes of my shouted questions she called for her grandmother.

  Mrs. Rodriguez’s heavily accented voice came on the line. “Miss Warshawski? Ah—ah, the lawyer who worked so hard for my Sergio. How are you? How are you after all this time!”

  We chatted for a few minutes. I explained I was no longer with the public defender’s office, but was glad to see in the papers that Sergio was doing so well.

  “Yes, a community leader! You would be proud to know him. Always he speak of you with gratitude.”

  I doubted that, but it provided an opportunity to ask for his phone number. “I need to talk to him about someone in his—uh—men’s club. There’s been some community action lately that he might be able to advise me on.”

  She was glad to oblige. I asked about the rest of her children—“And grandchildren, right?”

  “Yes, my Cecilia’s husband leave her so she come here with her two children. Is very good—good to have young people in th
e house again.”

  We hung up with mutual protestations of goodwill. What did she really think Sergio was doing? Really, deep down? I dialed the number she’d given me and let it ring a long time unanswered.

  The corned-beef sandwich sat too heavily in my stomach for me to think about dinner. I took a glass of wine onto the little landing outside my kitchen door. It overlooked the alley and the small yard where some of the other tenants raised vegetables. Old Mr. Contreras from the first floor was out putting guards around his tomatoes.

  He waved at me. “Big storm tonight,” he called up. “Got to protect these little fellows.”

  I drank Ruffino and watched him work until the light failed. At nine, I tried Sergio’s phone again. It still rang unanswered. The last few days had worn me out. I went to bed and slept soundly.

  As Mr. Contreras had predicted, the weather broke in the night. When I went out for my morning run, the day sparkled, the leaves were deep green, the sky dark blue, birds sang furiously. The storm had ruffled up the lake; waves splashed over the rocks and whitecaps rolled briskly beyond the breakwater.

  I came home the long way, past the Chesterton Hotel where the Dortmunder Restaurant serves cappuccino and croissants for breakfast. The fresh air and my long sleep renewed my confidence. Whatever superstitions had dogged me yesterday seemed irrelevant in the balance against my great skill as a detective.

  Back home, I had proof that my magic powers were restored; Sergio’s phone was answered on the third ring.

  “Yes?” The male voice was heavy with suspicion.

  “Sergio Rodriguez, please.”

  “Who are you?”

  “This is V. I. Warshawski. Sergio knows me.”

  I was put on hold. The minutes ticked by. I lay on the floor on my back and did leg lifts, holding the phone to my right ear. After I’d done thirty with each leg, the heavy voice returned.

  “Sergio says he don’t owe you nothing. He don’t need to talk to you.”

  “What did I say about his owing me anything? I didn’t. As a favor, I would like to speak with Sergio.”

  This time the wait was shorter. “You want to see him, be at Sixteen-sixty-two Washtenaw tonight at ten-thirty. You be alone, no heat, and you be clean.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” I said.

  “Say what, man?” The voice was suspicious again.

  “Gringo for ‘I hear you, man.’” I broke the connection.

  I lay on the floor awhile longer, staring at the neatly swirled plaster on the ceiling. Washtenaw, heart of Lion country. I wished I could go with a police battalion behind me. Better yet, in front of me. But the only thing that would accomplish would be to get me shot—if not tonight, then later. WARSHAWSKI would start appearing spray-painted upside down on garage doors in Humboldt Park. Or maybe that was too hard a name to spell. Maybe it would be just my initials.

  Perhaps they’d do it even if I followed their orders. I’d be gunned down as I left the building. Lotty would be sorry then that she’d forced me into this. She’d be sorry but it would be too late. Much moved, I pictured my funeral. Lotty was stoic, Carol sobbing openly. My ex-husband came with his suburban-chic second wife. “You were really married to her, darling? So messy and irresponsible—and hanging around with gangsters, too? I can’t believe it.”

  The thought of plastic Terri made me laugh a little. I got up from the floor and changed from my running clothes into jeans and a bright red knit top. I scribbled a note detailing where I was going and why and took it down to the backyard where Mr. Contreras was hovering anxiously over his tomato plants. They were heavy with ripening fruit.

  “How’d they do last night?” I asked sympathetically.

  “Oh, they’re fine. Really fine. You want some? I got too many here, don’t know what to do with them all. Ruthie, she don’t really want them.”

  Ruthie was his daughter. She came by periodically with two subdued children to harangue her father into moving in with her.

  “Sure. Give me what you don’t want—I’ll make you some real old-world tomato sauce. We can have pasta together this winter…. I have a favor to ask of you.”

  “Sure, cookie. Whatever you want.” He sat back on his heels and carefully wiped his face with a handkerchief.

  “I have to go see some punks tonight. I don’t think I’m going to be in any danger. But just in case—I’ve written down the address and why I’m going there. If I’m not back home tomorrow morning, can you see that Lieutenant Mallory gets this? He’s in Homicide at Eleventh Street.”

  He took the envelope from me and looked at it. Bobby Mallory had been in the police with my dad, maybe’d been his closest friend. Even though he hated my working in the detective business, if I died he’d make sure the relevant punks got nailed.

  “You want me to come with you, cookie?”

  Mr. Contreras was in his late seventies. Tanned, healthy, and strong for a man his age, he still wouldn’t last too long in a fight. I shook my head.

  “The terms were I have to come alone. I bring someone with me, they’ll start shooting.”

  He sighed regretfully. “Such an exciting life you have. If only I was twenty years younger…. You’re looking real pretty today, cookie. My advice, if you’re going to visit some real punks, tone it down some.”

  I thanked him gravely and stayed talking to him until lunch. Mr. Contreras had been a machinist for a small tool-and-die operation until he retired five years ago. He thought listening to my cases was better than watching Cagney & Lacey. In turn he regaled me with tales of Ruthie and her husband.

  In the afternoon I drove over to Washtenaw Avenue and slowly cruised past the meeting place. The street was in one of the more run-down sections of Humboldt Park, near where it borders on Pilsen. Most of the buildings were burned out. Even those still occupied were covered with spray-painted graffiti. Tin cans and broken glass took the place of lawns and trees. Cars were hoisted up on crates, their wheels removed. One was parked about two yards from the curb, partially blocking the street. Its rear window was missing.

  The address where I was to meet Sergio belonged to a thickly curtained storefront. It was flanked on one side by a partially demolished three-flat, and on the left by a bedraggled liquor store. When I arrived tonight, Lions would be hidden in the ruined building, probably lounging in front of the liquor store, and signaling each other from lookouts at both ends of the block.

  I turned left at the corner and found the alley that ran behind the buildings. The three ten-year-old boys playing stickball at its entrance were in all probability gang members. If I drove down the alley or talked to them, word would inevitably get back to Sergio.

  I could see no way to make a reasonably protected approach to the meeting place. Not unless I crawled along the city sewers and popped up from the manhole in the middle of the street.

  7

  The Lions’ Den

  I still had eight hours before the rendezvous. I figured if I made every golden minute count today, I could go to Lotty, Tessa, and the Alvarados on Monday and tell them, scout’s honor, I’d done my best—now leave it to Detective Rawlings.

  I swung up Western to Armitage, over to Milwaukee, where the expressway looms menacingly over the neighborhood on high concrete stilts. In a corner underneath it was Holy Sepulchre High School, where Consuelo had studied.

  She had played tennis on the uneven asphalt courts there, looking adorable in her white shorts and shirt, breathing in the asbestos from the auto brakes overhead. I know—I’d watched her at a match one afternoon. So I could understand how Fabiano had found her enticing. He used to hang out in a bar up the street and wait for his sister while she was at tennis practice. After Consuelo joined the team, he hung out at the school watching the girls, then took to ferrying the whole team to matches. And so it went on from there. I’d heard the whole story from Paul when the news of Consuelo’s pregnancy first broke.

  The city has certain standards concerning bars and schools—they can’t exi
st side by side. I made a sweep of the area and found a couple close enough to Holy Sepulchre to be likely haunts of Fabiano’s. I was in luck at the first one. Fabiano was drinking beer at El Gallo, a dingy storefront with a hand-painted, gaudy rooster on the front door. He was watching the Sox on a tiny set attached high up on the wall out of the reach of the casual burglar. About fifteen men were also in the bar, their attention held by the game. Would Ron Kittle drop yet another routine fly ball? I could see how they’d be breathless.

  I pulled a stool from the end of the bar and moved it up behind Fabiano. The bartender, talking happily at the other end of the counter, paid no attention to me. I waited courteously for the inning to end, then leaned over Fabiano’s shoulder.

  “We need to have a little chat, Señor Hernandez.”

  He jerked his arm, spilling his beer, and turned around, startled. He flushed angrily when he saw me. “Shit! Get out of my face!”

  “Now, now, Fabiano, that’s no way to talk to your aunt.”

  The men on either side of him were looking at me. “I’m his mother’s sister,” I explained, shrugging my shoulders in embarrassment. “She hasn’t seen him for days. He won’t talk to her. So she asked me to find him, try to talk sense to him.”

  He struggled to his feet in the narrow space between my stool and his. “That’s a lie, you bitch! You’re no aunt of mine!”

  A man farther up the bar gave an unsteady smile. “You be my aunt if he don’t want you, honey.”

  This got a round of cheers from several others, but the man to Fabiano’s left said, “Maybe she’s not his aunt. Maybe she’s from the collection agency, come to repo the car, huh?”

  This drew louder laughter from the group. “Yeah, or the cops come to take it back to its rightful owner.”

  “I own it, man,” Fabiano said furiously. “I have the papers right here in my pocket.” He stuck a hand into his right pocket dramatically and pulled out a piece of paper.

  “So maybe he stole that, too,” the man to his left said.