Bobby nodded. “We’ll see about that. What were you doing at Eleventh Street that rattled Roland Montgomery’s cage so bad?”
The shift in topic was casual and expert, but it didn’t make me jump. “Nothing,” I said earnestly. “I don’t understand it myself.”
“He came to see me with a full head of steam and demanded I run you in if you showed up anywhere near the Indiana Arms.”
Bobby’s tone was neutral-he wasn’t criticizing, just offering me information, telling me he couldn’t protect me if I got powerful people mad at me. At the same time he’d make a stab at it if I gave him the inside track on why the Indiana Arms was a hot topic. Unfortunately I couldn’t help, and in the end he got angry-he couldn’t see that I wasn’t being obstructive, that I was well and truly ignorant. He thinks I take on clients and cases just to thumb my nose at him, that I’m having a late-life adolescent fit. He’s waiting for me to grow out of it the way his six children all did.
It was two when Furey, driving recklessly and wordlessly, dropped me at my apartment. I didn’t make any attempt to be conciliating-I could understand why he was pissed, but at the same time it was just the luck of the draw that he’d seen me with Robin. It was farce, not tragedy-I wasn’t about to pretend to be Desdemona.
I waited inside the front door until his car had screeched its way up Racine to Belmont. My Chevy was parked across the street. I climbed in, made a U, and headed south through the empty streets toward Navy Pier.
The Rapelec complex was a monster. It wasn’t actually on Navy Pier of course-no development has been approved there because the aldermen can’t figure out how to divide up the zoning payoff pie. The site was on the west side of Lake Shore Drive facing the pier, a strip of decaying warehouses and office buildings that has suddenly become development heaven.
The construction site took up the whole section between the river and Illinois Street. The foundations had been poured last May. They were up about twenty stories now in the towers, but the office/retail complex was going more slowly. The sketches in the papers had made it look like a giant high school auditorium. They were taking their time with the support structure.
Bare light bulbs slung around the top of the skeleton outlined its iron bones. I shuddered. I’m not exactly afraid of heights, but the thought of perching up there without walls around-not so much the height, but the nakedness of the building-frightened me. Even at ground level it seemed menacing, with black holes where windows should be and wooden ramps that led only to fathomless pits.
By now my skin was crawling. I had to fight an impulse to run back to the Chevy and head for home. Concentrate on putting one step in front of you, Vic, and curse yourself for a fool for leaving your party clothes on, instead of changing to sneaks and jeans.
I circled the site from the outside. The blue-and-whites had long gone, leaving behind a crime-scene barricade but no guard. There were at least a dozen ways into the grounds in the dark. Looking nervously above me, I selected an entrance lined with lights that didn’t seem to have any steel beams poised to drop on it. My pumps made a soft thwick on the plank.
The boards ended at the third story. I stepped off onto a cement slab. Ahead of me and to the right shadows engulfed the floor and the beams, but the lights continued on the left where more wood had been dropped to make a crude floor cover. My palms were sweating and my toes felt ticklish when I forced myself down the corridor.
The lower floors were enclosed at this point, but no inner walls had been built. The only light came from the naked bulbs strung along the structural beams. I could see dimly into the recesses of the building. Steel beams stuck shadowy fingers upward to support the deck above. Inky splotches might be holes in the floor or maybe just some piece of machinery. I thought of Cerise coming here alone to die and the skin at the base of my neck prickled uncontrollably.
“Hello!” I cupped my hands and yelled.
My voice echoed faintly, bouncing from the steel beams. No one answered. Sweat now dropped from my neck inside my cotton sweater. A faint night breeze dried it, leaving me shivering.
The rough flooring suddenly ended in a nest of plywood cubicles. The door to the one on my right stood open. I went in. The room was dimly lit by the bulbs from the hall outside. I hunted around for a switch, finally finding a likely candidate in a thick cable. I touched it nervously, afraid I might be electrocuting myself, but the room lights came on.
Two large drafting tables were set up against one wall. Cradles holding books that looked like giant wallpaper samples covered the other three. I pulled one out. It was very heavy and didn’t handle easily. Straining, I laid it across the cradle and flipped it open. It held blueprints. They were hard to follow, but it seemed to me I was looking at a corner of the twenty-third floor. In fact, this whole volume seemed to be devoted to the twenty-third floor. I shut it and slid it back into its nest.
A couple of hard hats stood on one of the drafting tables. Underneath them lay a stack of work logs. These documents were much easier to interpret-the leftmost column listed subcontractors. Next to them were slots to fill in billable hours for every day of the week. I studied the log idly, wondering if I’d see any familiar names.
Wunsch and Grasso figured prominently as the lead contractor in the joint venture that was building the complex, Hurlihey and Frain, architects, also had put in a bunch of hours. I didn’t realize architects kept working on a project after construction started.
One name struck me as rather humorous-Farmworks, Inc. I wondered what agricultural needs a building like this had. Farmworks put in a lot of time too-they were submitting over five hundred hours for the week just ending.
A heavy step sounded on the wood flooring outside. I dropped the papers, my heart jumping wildly.
“Hello?” My voice came out in a quaver. Furious with myself for being so nervous, I took a deep breath and went out into the corridor.
A thickset black man in coveralls and a hard hat scowled at me. He held a flashlight. The other hand rested on the butt of a gun strapped to his waist.
“Who are you and what the hell are you doing up here?” His baritone was heavy and uncompromising.
“My name’s Warshawski. I’m a detective and I’m here with some follow-up questions about the dead girl you found.”
“Police left hours ago.” He moved his hand away from the gun, but his hard eyes didn’t relax.
“I just came from the morgue where I met with Sergeant McGonnigal and Lieutenant Mallory. They forgot to ask a couple of things I need to know. Also, since I’m here, I’d like to see where you found her.”
For a tense moment I thought he was going to demand some police identification, but my fluency with the right names apparently satisfied him.
“I can’t take you down to where I found her unless you have a hard hat.”
I picked up one of the Hurlihey and Frain hats from the drafting table. “Why don’t I just borrow this one?”
His cold eyes weighed me some more, not wanting to let me do it, but he seemed to be a man of logic and he couldn’t argue himself into sending me back to Mallory empty. “If you people did your homework you wouldn’t have to waste so much of my time. Come on. I’m not going to wait while you trip around in those ridiculous shoes of yours-our liability policy doesn’t pay for police who don’t dress right for the job.”
I picked up the hard hat and followed him meekly back into the shadowy maze.
16
Tender Site
As I stumbled behind him in the dark I persuaded him to tell me his name-Leon Garrison. He was a night security man, head of a team working the Rapelec site. His firm, LockStep, specialized in guarding construction projects. It seemed to me part of his anger toward me was hurt pride that someone had climbed onto the premises to die without his knowing about it. He was further annoyed that I’d managed to come in undetected as well. When I explained I’d shouted a couple of times to try to rouse someone it didn’t cheer him any.
; He took me down to the bottom in a hoist that ran along the outside of the building, moving the levers with a morose efficiency. When we got off he shone the flashlight in swift arcs in front of him, uncovering coils of wire, boards, loose chunks of concrete. By staying half a step behind him I could see the obstacles in time to avoid them. I had a feeling that disappointed him.
He stopped abruptly in front of a deep square pit. “You know anything about construction?” he demanded.
“Nope.”
That improved his mood, enough that he explained they put the elevators in last, after the shafts were built up to the height of the building and the machinery installed on top. The cradles they rest in go down a good way- they have to be able to cushion the elevators if the cables break or some other ghastly accident occurs.
This building had four banks of eight elevators each. Garrison moved along to the hole where he’d discovered Cerise’s body, looking in each one to make sure no more unwelcome surprises awaited him. When we got to the right one he pointed the flashlight up so I could see the platform supporting the crane some twenty stories overhead. The crane took up the space that the elevators would fill once the place was finished.
Between the depth of the pit and the crane platform swaying gently overhead, I felt a rush of nausea. As I stepped back from the edge I thought I caught a little smirk on Garrison’s face-he’d been trying to upset me.
“Why did you look in here, anyway?” I tried to sound forceful, not as though I was on the brink of throwing up.
“We had a fire in one of the cradles last week. Guys like to dump trash in here on account of it’s an open hole. Someone flipped a butt in and things started burning. I just check to see what kind of rubbish we’re piling up.”
I asked him to shine the flash down into the pit again. A rough-hewn set of slats had been nailed down the side so that you could climb in and out if you wanted to, but it wasn’t at all easy to get into. It was hard to believe Cerise, or any addict, would go to all that work just to find a private place to shoot up.
“How often do you check them?”
“Just once a night, usually. That was near the start of my shift. Since the fire I look in the pits first.”
“And you saw her and called 911?”
He scratched the back of his head behind the hard hat. “Strictly speaking I called August Cray first. He’s in charge of the site at night. He came down here, took a look, and told me to call the police. Then he called the contractor.”
“Wunsch and Grasso?”
“You’d have to ask Cray-this project’s got a bunch of contractors working on it. They need to know if anything special is happening on the site, and I guess you could call a dead body pretty special.”
He seemed to be smirking again, although it was kind of hard to tell in the dark. I wondered where this Cray person had been when I was calling out on the third floor. Anyway, he phoned someone at Wunsch and Grasso, maybe Ernie himself. Then Ernie buzzed his boyhood pal Furey and told him to make sure the building site was clean, that they didn’t get any adverse publicity or any liability suits. That was plausible, even likely, but it didn’t explain why Bobby had been called in and why he was ticked about it.
Unless the boys had used their connection to Boots to get county heat on the investigation? But that didn’t make any sense-they would want to keep the thing as quiet as possible, and getting Boots and the county involved would have the opposite effect. I prodded Garrison as best I could, but he didn’t know whom Cray had called or why the city had sent the head of their Violent Crimes Unit in.
“You see everything you need?” Garrison asked roughly. “I don’t want another relay coming from the cops tonight telling me they forgot one last diddle-shit question. There’s plenty of work to do here.”
“This should do it,” I said. “I think you can feel safe from the police for at least twelve hours.”
“I’d better be.” He snapped off the flash and headed back toward the hoist. “I guess I’d better tell Cray you’ve been here-he likes to know who’s on the site at night.”
We rode back to the third floor. “You’re dressed kind of funny for a cop, aren’t you?’ he said when we got off.
“I’m dressed funny for a construction site,” I corrected. “Even detectives have private lives. Cerise Ramsay’s death interrupted mine.” The memory of Bobby shining his spotlight on Robin and me popped into my head. It seemed funnier now than it had at the time. I bit back a laugh as Garrison knocked on the door to one of the little cubicles.
Cray turned out to be a heavy white man in his late fifties. He eyed me suspiciously as Garrison outlined the reason for my visit.
“You didn’t hear her when she came up here?” the security man asked.
“I was in the John,” Cray answered briefly. “You get what you need here? Next time, call ahead.”
I smiled brightly. “Next time I sure will. Who did you call-Ernie or Ron?-after Garrison told you about the body?”
Cray’s frown deepened. “Does it matter?”
“It kind of does. A dead junkie shouldn’t bring down a senior cop and I’m trying to figure out why.”
“Why not ask your boss that?” He kept a heavy, unpleasant edge to his voice.
“Lieutenant Mallory? I did ask him-he wasn’t saying. Just for the record, he’s not my boss.”
“Just a minute here.” Cray got to his feet. “Let’s see some ID from you.”
I pulled out my wallet and took out the laminated miniature of my PI license to show him.
“You’re not with the police? We went through all that for you and you’re not a cop? Goddamn you, I ought to get your ass arrested.”
I smiled at him again. “I can give you Lieutenant Mallory’s home number if you want to ask him to do it. But I never said I was with the city. I told Mr. Garrison I was a detective. He could have asked for my ID up front. I know Ernie and Ron-I can phone up tomorrow and see who you called.”
“Then do that. Get off my building. Fast. Before some one has an accident and drops a load of steel on your cute little head.”
He was breathing hard. I didn’t see any reason to be so excited, but it seemed to me that the prudent course was to vacate the premises. There are just so many dead bodies a construction site can absorb in one night.
Back in the Chevy I suddenly felt a wave of exhaustion wash over me. My feet were sore; they throbbed inside my pumps. It had really been stupid to subject the poor things to so much rough terrain. I slipped out of them and drove home in my nylons. The cold accelerator pedal felt good against my hot soles.
At the apartment I resisted the temptation to ring Vinnie’s bell. Not out of any nobility of character-I wanted to sleep in and he’d be bound to retaliate in some awful way if I woke him now.
Peppy whimpered behind Mr. Contreras’s door when she heard me go by but thankfully she didn’t start barking. The old man was just deaf enough that he’d sleep through her crying, but not her barking. Upstairs I started shedding clothes as soon as I got inside. By the time I reached my bedroom I was naked. I climbed into bed and was asleep almost immediately.
I slept deeply, but my dreams were filled with Elena and Cerise chasing me through miles of steel beams. I’d think I was in the clear and then suddenly a giant elevator pit would open in front of me. Just as I was backing away Cerise would be there staring at me, naked as she’d been at the morgue, her braids tangled, stretching her arms out and begging me to save her. In the background Velma Riter’s voice echoed against the steel, saying, Mind you own business, Vic, a lot of people think you’re a pain in the butt.
When the ringing phone woke me at ten I came to heavily. I fumbled with the phone before getting the mouthpiece the right way up. “‘Lo,” I mumbled heavily.
“May I speak to Victoria Warshawski, please.”
It was the efficient voice of a professional secretary. I managed to get the idea across that it was me. When she put me on hold I sat up to grapple wi
th a sweatshirt-in case it was a client I didn’t want to be seen naked.
“Vic? Ernie Wunsch. Hope I’m not disturbing you- my girl said she thought she woke you up.”
When he’d dated LeAnn she’d been his girl; now she was his wife and his secretary had become his girl. It was too confusing a concept to put across with my mind so heavy from sleep so I only grunted.
“I had a message a few minutes ago from the Rapelec site saying you’d stopped by there in the middle of the night.”
I grunted again.
“Something wrong we can help you with, Vic? It gets me kind of pissed to think you were going on my site behind my back.”
“Hang on a minute, Ernie, I’ll be right with you.” I put the phone down and went to the bathroom. I didn’t hurry things and on my way back I stopped in the kitchen for a glass of water. By the time I picked the phone up again Ernie was well and truly pissed but my head felt a bit clearer.
“Sorry, Ernie-I was right in the middle of something when you called. You know a young woman was found dead at the site last night.”
“Some black junkie. What business was it of yours?”
“She was a protégée of mine, Ernie. I promised her mother I would look after her and I failed pretty miserably.” I could see Zerlina Ramsay’s strong, anguished face in my mind’s eye and it didn’t cheer me any.
“So?”
“So when I heard she’d died at the Rapelec site I thought I’d better go check it out, see if I could learn any reason she might have gone there.”
“You ever want to talk to my people again, Vic, you check it out with me first. Cray was damned angry that you came there impersonating a police officer. He was all for having you arrested. If I hadn’t known it would embarrass the hell out of Mickey, I would have done it too. You want to play at detective you go do it someplace else.” He sounded downright ugly.
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