Windy City Blues
Sara Paretsky
The teenage tennis star had a frighteningly brutal trainer-her father. So nobody cried when he got strangled in the women's locker room. Now V.I. Warshawski wants to clear the number one suspect-who was showering alone at the time in "Strung Out". And in "Skin Deep", after his trip to the salon the stranger wasn't looking so good. Maybe it was the poison facial. V.I. Warshawski tries a few new creams herself while she looks for somebody, anybody connected to this guy.
Sara Paretsky
Windy City Blues
A book in the V.I. Warshawski series, 1991
For Isabel, always Agnes’s
star pupil
Thanks to: Diana Haskell, Mena de Mario, Sarah Neely, Susan Ritter, and Mary Wylie for technical advice for “Grace Notes.”
Thanks to Betty Nicholas, for essential technical advice and connections for “Strung Out.”
Thanks to Dr. Robert Kirschner, for figuring out the murder method in “Settled Score.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
These stories were written over a period of thirteen years, beginning with “The Takamoku Joseki” (1982) and ending with “Grace Notes” (1995), created especially for this collection. For that reason some details about V. I.’s life will appear inconsistent-sometimes she’s driving an Omega, sometimes her Trans Am. She bought the Trans Am in 1990, at the end of the novel Burn Marks. Her dog, Peppy, became part of her life in 1988, at the conclusion of Bitter Medicine. The story “The Maltese Cat” was originally written in 1990, during the Bush-Quayle administration.
I sometimes write short stories when I am trying to understand a question that doesn’t seem to merit a whole novel. That was true of “Settled Score,” where I was wrestling with the issue of personal responsibility. Unusual settings suggest other stories: I once swam for a corporate competition (where I was so slow the other swimmers were eating dinner by the time I covered two laps); the starting gun and all of us diving at once turned into “At the Old Swimming Hole.” However, in “The Maltese Cat,” I simply wanted to pay my own particular homage to the great master of the hard-boiled detective.
Sara Paretsky
Chicago, June 1995
INTRODUCTION
A Walk on the Wild Side: Touring Chicago with V. I. Warshawski
A lone heron spreads its wings and rises from the marsh. It circles briefly, then heads south, disappearing in the shrouding mist. A handful of purple-necked ducks continues to nibble at delicacies in the fetid water. Their families have come here for millennia, breaking the journey from Canada to the Amazon at what we newcomers think of as the south side of Chicago.
The patch of marsh where they rest is small, about half a square mile. It’s the sole remains of the wetlands which used to cover the twenty-five miles from Whiting, Indiana, north to McCormick Place, the monstrous convention center that squats next to Lake Michigan. Only fifty years ago much of this area, including the eight-lane highway that connects the south side with the Loop, was still under water. The marsh has been filled in with everything from cyanide to slag, with a lot of garbage to give it body.
The locals call the remaining bit of swamp Dead Stick Pond from the eponymous rotting wood which dots it. It appears on no city maps. It is so obscure that Chicago police officers stationed ten blocks away at the Port of Chicago haven’t heard of it. Nor have officials at the local Chicago Park District office. To find it you have to know a native.
I’m not native to this neighborhood, nor even to this city. I first saw Chicago at two on a June morning in 1966. I was coming from a small town in eastern Kansas to do summer service work here for the Presbytery of Chicago-volunteer work in a time of great hope, great excitement, a time when we thought change possible, when we believed that if we poured enough energy, enough goodwill into the terrible problems of our country we could change those problems for good.
The vastness of the city at night was overwhelming. Red flares glowed against a yellow sky, followed by mile on mile of unbending lights: street lamps, neon signs, traffic lights, flashing police blues-lights that didn’t illuminate but threw shadows, and made the city seem a monster, ready to devour the unwary.
The eye with which I see Chicago is always half cocked for alienation and despair, because for me the city is a dangerous place where both states are only just below the surface. When I fly in at night over the sprawl of lights, the feeling of tininess, of one lone unknown being, recurs. I have to scan the landscape trying to pick out the landmarks of the south side that tell me I have a home here, friends, a lover, a life of warmth.
Chicagoans find their own particular warmth where all city dwellers do-in their home neighborhood. My city holds seventy-seven separate neighborhoods, each with its own special ethnic or racial makeup, each with its own shopping area, library, police station, and schools. Adults, even those who’ve migrated to the suburbs, identify themselves with the neighborhoods of their childhood: an Irish-American secretary of mine from South Shore used to spit when she talked about Irish staff from west side communities. She wouldn’t even pass along messages from them.
Northsiders don’t go south; southsiders seldom venture even as far as the Loop, unless their jobs take them there. Chicago has two baseball teams to accommodate these parochial needs. The Cubs play at Wrigley Field five miles north of the Loop; the White Sox are at Comiskey Park, the same distance south of it. (Chicago ’s financial district is called the Loop because of the elevated train tracks that circle it.)
A southsider, I am often sharply criticized at south side events for being a Cubs fan. I have to explain that my allegiance dates from that summer of 1966, when I helped run an inner-city program for children. The Cubs, now sold out even in losing seasons, were then in such desperate need of an audience that they gave free tickets to our kids on Thursdays. The Sox didn’t, so I became a Cubs fan. One thing all Chicagoans understand is loyalty, especially loyalty to someone who has bribed you. For years the definition of an honest Chicago politician has been one who stays bought-so my explanation passes muster.
It was hard to get the kids on the train to go north. Although they lived four blocks from the el most had never ridden it, most had never been downtown, even to look at the fabled Christmas windows at Marshall Field (once a Chicago landmark, now a colonial property of a Minneapolis conglomerate) and none of them had ever been north. When they found that they weren’t going to be killed going to and from Wrigley Field they started looking forward to the games.
Of all Chicago neighborhoods the most interesting to me are those on the far southeast side, where Dead Stick Pond fights for survival beneath the rusting sheds of the old steel mills. The whole history of the city is contained in four small neighborhoods there-South Chicago, South Deering, Pullman, and the East Side.
To see the true south side, drive south on 1-94, the Dan Ryan Expressway, away from the Gold Coast with its pricey restaurants and shops. The route passes first Jackson Street, where members of Chicago’s Greek community operate restaurants, then Cermak Road which which leads to Chinatown, then nods at 59th Street, which borders the world-renowned University of Chicago-my neighborhood-on its way to the very end of the city.
At 95th Street, where the expressway splits, offering the driver the choice between Memphis and Indiana, go east on I-94 toward Indiana. At 103rd Street the air becomes acrid. Even with the windows up and the heater or cooler turned off your nose stings and your eyes tear. Although the steel mills are dead and a third of the south side is out of work, enough heavy industry still exists to produce quite a stench in this old manufacturing corridor.
Out the window to your left a hillock dotted with methane flares stretches the mile from 103rd to 110th streets. This is the City o
f Chicago landfill, where we Chicagoans send our garbage. It’s almost full, and the question of where to dump next is just one of the pressures on Dead Stick Pond. The flares keep the garbage from exploding as the bacteria devouring our refuse produce methane. (When landfill runs under a road, as it does here, exploding methane can destroy large sections of highway.)
You’ll also see grain elevators poking up behind the garbage mountain, and, startlingly, the smokestacks from oceangoing freighters. The landfill and factories hide a network of waterways from the road.
At 130th Street, twenty miles southeast of the Water Tower where tourists and Chicagoans both like to shop, you finally leave the expressway and head east into the heart of the industrial zone. On a weekday yours may be the only car among the semis that compete with barges and trains to supply the factories and haul their finished products.
One Hundred Thirtieth passes Metron, one of Chicago ’s few surviving steel mills, Medusa Cement, and the Scrap Corporation of Chicago -with a mountain of scrap iron to prove it. At Torrence Avenue you run into the giant Ford Assembly Plant, their largest in the world. There you turn north again, crossing the Calumet River on an old counterweight vertical lift bridge. Immediately beyond is 122nd Street, a narrow, badly paved industrial thoroughfare. Turn left under the Welded Tube Company billboard and follow the semis west.
Under a sky purple-pink with smog, marsh grasses and cattails tower above the cars. Despite a century of dumping that has filled the ground water with more carcinogens than the EPA can classify, the grasses flourish. If you are a bird-watcher, and patient, you can find meadowlarks and other prairie natives here.
After a mile 122nd Street intersects with a gravel track, Stony Island. To the right it goes up to the CID landfill. To the left it runs next to Dead Stick Pond until both of them dead-end at Lake Calumet. Medusa Cement is busy digging at the south end of the marsh; on the west the Feralloy Corporation buildings loom; to the east major construction is underway.
Conflicting signs tacked to the trees proclaim the area both a clean-water project and warn trespassers of hazardous wastes. Despite warning signs, on a good day you can find anything from a pair of boots to a bedstead dumped in Dead Stick Pond.
Fish have been returning to the Calumet River and its tributaries since passage of the Clean Water Act in the seventies, but the ones that make their way into the pond show up with massive tumors and rotted fins. The phosphates in the water further cut the amount of oxygen that can penetrate the surface. Even so, wild birds continue to land here on their migratory routes. And Chicagoans so poor they live in shanties without running water catch their dinners in the marsh. Their shacks dot unmarked trails in the swamps. The inhabitants have a high mortality rate from esophageal and stomach cancers because of the pollutants in their well water. The half-feral dogs around their homes make it hard for any social welfare agent to get a clear idea of their living situation.
By this point in your tour you are either cold and tired or hot and thirsty. Either way you would probably like to relax over the native drink-a shot and a beer. The ideal place to do so is Sonny’s Inn a few miles north.
Retrace your route to Torrence Avenue, and go left, or north. From 117th to 103rd Street, almost two miles, you can see the remains of Wisconsin Steel. Once one of the world’s largest producers, it has been bankrupt and gone half a decade now.
At 97th Torrence becomes Colfax. Ride it up to 95th, where you’ll turn right and drive three blocks to Commercial Avenue, the main drag in South Chicago. Two blocks north to 91st Street and you’ll find Sonny’s Inn just across the railroad tracks.
The little bungalows that line the route are well kept up for the most part, although a few look pretty hopeless. Even though almost 50 percent of the population is out of work they still take pride in their homes and yards. And the Steel City and South Chicago banks, which hold most of their home mortgages, refinance them time and again. In themselves these banks make an amazing tourist attraction: what other big city in the world can boast of banks so committed to their community that they carry their customers through a prolonged period of trouble?
It is the gallantry of this old neighborhood that made me take it for the home of my detective, V. I. Warshawski. The gallantry, on the one hand, and the racial and ethnic mix that turned it into a volatile soup on the other. South Chicago was traditionally the first stop for new immigrants in Chicago. The mills, running three shifts a day, provided jobs for the unskilled and illiterate. The neighborhood has been home to Irish, Polish, Bohemian, Yugoslav, African, and most recently Hispanic Americans. As each new wave of immigrants arrived, the previous ones, with a fragile toehold on the American dream of universal prosperity, would fight to keep the newcomers out. The public schools were frequent arenas for real fights. Girls on South Chicago ’s streets either acquired boyfriends to protect them, or were carefully watched day and night by their parents, or learned the basics of street fighting to protect themselves. Even though V. I. grew up under the watchful eye of her mother, her father wanted her to be able to look after herself: as a police officer he knew better than most parents what dangers faced a girl who couldn’t fight for herself.
So V. I. came of age under the shadow of the mills, with weekend treks to Dead Stick Pond to watch the herons feed. She certainly knows Sonny’s Bar. Sonny’s has stood through all the waves of ethnic and racial change. It is a throwback to the days of the late great Mayor Daley. His icons hang on the walls and stand on shelves-signed photos of him with the original Sonny, signed photos of him with President Kennedy, campaign stickers, yellowing newspaper articles. A set of antlers over the bar obscures some of the memorabilia.
If you go at lunchtime on a weekday your dining companions will represent a complete cross section of the south side-every racial and ethnic group the city can boast, and most of the neighborhood occupations. You can get a drink and a sandwich for under five dollars. And if you do decide to go native and ask for a shot and a beer-that’s rye and a draw. Don’t call attention to yourself by asking for brand-name whiskeys.
South Chicago doesn’t top the city’s list of neighborhoods eligible for limited street and sidewalk repair funds. You may notice places where pavements have collapsed. If you look into the holes you’ll see cobblestones five feet down. Because the landfill a century ago didn’t hold back the underlying marshes, the city jacked itself up and built another layer over the top. South Chicago is one of the few places where the original substratum remains.
If you happen to stay at the Palmer House downtown you might like to know that it is the only surviving building from the lower city. Not wanting to dismantle his pride and joy Mr. Palmer raised the whole building up on stilts so that the new, higher State Street could be paved in front.
With your shot and your Polish dog under your belt you’re ready now for more sight-seeing. Driving west two miles to Stony Island and four blocks south to 95th Street you’re now in the Pullman Historic Landmark District. George Pullman, who made his fortune inventing and manufacturing the Pullman car, built almost two thousand houses to form a model village in 1880. The area was supposed to be a show-case for workers, partly to keep union agitation low. The houses were built in the federal style from clay bricks dug out of nearby Lake Calumet. The Pullman Company operated all the village stores and provided all services.
Unfortunately the houses rapidly became too expensive for the working population to own. Discontent with the company over that and other matters came to a head during the depression of the 1890s, when many workers lost their jobs. The scene of violent confrontations, Pullman lost a court battle with its workers over the right to own and operate the town. When the company pulled out the neighborhood went through numerous economic and ethnic upheavals, but in 1970 was designated a national landmark. Since then people have been renovating these beautiful old homes.
Clay from the Calumet made better bricks than any available today. One of the crimes Pullman residents have to guard agains
t is loss of brick garages-people go on vacation and come home to find their garages have been dismantled brick by brick and carted off to become part of some house under construction in a remote neighborhood.
Instead of taking the expressway north, you should slide out of the south side the back way, going east to Buffalo Street, past the National Shrine to St. Jude, the Catholic patron of hopeless or difficult cases. Drive north on Buffalo, and suddenly you find it’s turned into US highway 41. It twists and turns a bit for the next two miles, but the US 41 signs are easy to follow.
At 79th Street you’ll see the last of the USX works on your right, and suddenly you’re out of the industrial zone, back in quiet residential streets. At the corner of 71st Street and South Shore Drive stands the old South Shore Country Club. It was once the meeting place of the wealthy and powerful who lived in the area. One of the late Mayor Daley’s daughters was married here. The private beach and golf course have been taken over by the Chicago Park District, police horses now occupy the stables, and the natives are the ones swinging clubs on the green. The clubhouse is a community center now, a beautiful place, worth a side stop.
Beyond the country club Lake Michigan springs into view. You might pull off at La Rabida children’s hospital half a mile up the road to climb the rocks overlooking the lake. From this vantage point, looking south you can see the industrial quag you just visited. To the north the skyline made famous by Skidmore, Edward Durrel Stone, Bud Goldberg, and their friends is silhouetted against the sky.
Back in your car return to US 41. Soon it becomes an eight-lane highway that takes you the quick way to the Loop. Lake Michigan will be your companion the rest of your journey, spewing foam against the rocks-a barricade put up by men hoping to tame the water. It is not a tame lake, though. Underneath the asphalt lies the marsh, home to herons for twenty-five thousand years. The lake may yet reclaim it.
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