Fire Sale

by Sara Paretsky

  “Yes, I’ve studied your numbers, at least the ones you make public.” I pulled a sheaf of papers out of my briefcase, spilling the flip-flops in their plastic bag onto the floor.

  I handed business cards to Grobian, Billy, and Aunt Jacqui. “I grew up in South Chicago. I’m a lawyer now and an investigator, but I’ve come back as a volunteer to coach the basketball team at Bertha Palmer High.”

  Grobian looked ostentatiously at his watch, but young Billy said, “I know some of the girls there, Pat, through our church exchange. They sing in the choir at-”

  “I know you want money from us,” Jacqui interrupted in her languid voice. “How much and for what?”

  I flashed an upbeat, professional smile and handed her a copy of a report I’d created on By-Smart’s community actions. I gave another set to Grobian and a third to Billy. “I know that By-Smart encourages grassroots giving at its local stores, but only for small projects. The Exchange Avenue store gave out three one-thousand-dollar scholarships to college students whose parents work in the store, and the staff are encouraged to serve in local food pantries and homeless shelters, but your manager over on Exchange told me Mr. Grobian was in charge of larger giving for the South Side.”

  “That’s right: I manage the warehouse, and I’m the South Chicago-Northwest Indiana district manager. We already support the Boys and Girls Clubs, the Firemen’s Survivor Fund, and several others.”

  “Which is great,” I said enthusiastically. “Profits for the Exchange Avenue store last year were a shade under one-point-five million, a little less than the national average because of the bad economy down here. The store, as far as I could tell, gave away nine thousand dollars. For fifty-five thousand-”

  Grobian shoved my report aside. “Who talked to you? Who gave out confidential store information?”

  I shook my head. “It’s all on the Web, Mr. Grobian. You just have to know how to look. For fifty-five thousand, the store could cover the cost of uniforms, weight equipment, balls, and a part-time coach. You’d be real heroes on the South Side, and, of course, you’d get a substantial tax benefit from it as well. Heck, you might even be able to supply weight equipment out of old inventory.”

  All I really wanted from By-Smart was a coach, and I figured for about twelve thousand they could get someone to commit to the job. She (or he) wouldn’t have to be a teacher, just someone who understood the game and knew how to work with young people. A graduate student who had played college ball would be good; someone who was doing a degree in sports management and training even better. I was hoping if I started with four or five times what I wanted, I might at least get a coach.

  Grobian was still mad, though. He tossed my proposal into his wastebasket. Jacqui, with another of her languid movements, slid her papers toward the trash. They fell about a yard short.

  “We never give that kind of money to an individual store,” Grobian said.

  “Not to the store, Pat,” Billy objected, bending over to retrieve Aunt Jacqui’s papers. “To the school. It’s just the kind of thing Grandpa loves, helping kids who show enthusiasm for improving their lives.”

  Ah: he was a Bysen. That was why he could set up meetings with beggars even though he was inexperienced and had a boss who didn’t want to hear about the matter. That meant Aunt Jacqui was a Bysen, too, so I didn’t have to keep playing twenty questions with her.

  I smiled warmly at Billy. “Your grandfather went to this high school seventy years ago. Five of the girls on the team have parents who work for By-Smart, so it would be great synergy for the store and the community.” I winced at hearing corpu-speak fall so effortlessly from my lips.

  “Your grandfather doesn’t believe in giving that kind of money to charity, Billy. If you don’t know that by now, you haven’t been listening to him very hard,” Jacqui said.

  “That’s not fair, Aunt Jacqui. What about the wing he and Grandma built on the hospital in Rolling Meadows, and the mission school they started in Mozambique?”

  “Those were big buildings that have his name on them,” Jacqui said. “A little program down here that he won’t get any glory for-”

  “I’ll talk to him myself,” Billy said hotly. “I’ve met some of these girls, like I said, and when he hears their stories-”

  “Large tears will fill his eyes,” Jacqui interrupted. “He’ll go, ‘Hnnh, hnnh, if they want to succeed they need to work hard, like I did. No one gave me any handouts, and I started out the same place they did, hnnh, hnnh.’”

  Patrick Grobian laughed, but Billy looked flushed and hurt. He believed in his grandfather. To cover his confusion, Billy started sorting out the papers that Aunt Jacqui had dropped, separating my proposal from several sheets of fax paper.

  “Here’s something from Adolpho in Matagalpa,” he said. “I thought we agreed not to work with him, but he’s quoting you-”

  Jacqui took the papers back from him. “I wrote him last week, Billy, but maybe he didn’t get the letter. You’re right to point it out.”

  “But it looks like he has a whole production schedule.”

  Jacqui produced another dazzling smile. “I think you misread it, Billy, but I’ll make extra sure we’re all clear on this.”

  Pat pulled my report out of his trash. “I moved too fast on this one, Billy; I’ll take a closer look at my numbers and get back to your friend. In the meantime, why don’t you go out to the loading bays, make sure that Bron at bay thirty-two has taken off-he has a tendency to linger, wasting time with the girls on the shift. And you, Ms.-uh, we’ll call you in a couple of days.”

  Billy looked again at Aunt Jacqui, a troubled frown creasing his smooth young face, but he obediently got up to go. I followed him from the room.

  “I’d be glad to get you any other information you want that might help your grandfather make a decision about the team. Maybe you’d like to bring him to one of our practices.”

  His face lit up. “I don’t think he’d come, but I could, that is, if I could take off from here, maybe if I came in early. Aren’t Mondays and Thursdays your practice days?”

  I was surprised and asked how he knew.

  He flushed. “I’m in the choir and the youth group at my church, our church, I mean, the one my family goes to, and we do these exchanges with inner-city churches sometimes, like, where we trade ministers, and our choirs sing together and stuff, and my youth group has adopted Mount Ararat down on Ninety-first Street, and some of the kids at the church, they go to Bertha Palmer. Two of them play on the basketball team. Josie Dorrado and Sancia Valdéz. Do you know them?”

  “Oh, yes: there are only sixteen girls on the team, I know them all. So how come you’re working here at the warehouse? Shouldn’t you be in college or high school or something yourself?”

  “I wanted to do a year of service, something like the Peace Corps, after I finished high school, but Grandpa persuaded me to spend a year on the South Side. It’s not like he’s sick or dying or anything, but he wanted me to work for a year in the company while he was still around to, like, answer my questions, and meantime I can do service through the church and stuff. That’s why I know Aunt Jacqui is just being, well, cynical. She is sometimes. A lot of the time. Sometimes I think she only married Uncle Gary because she wanted-” He broke off, blushing even more darkly.

  “I forgot what I was going to say. She is really committed to the company. Grandpa, he doesn’t really like the ladies in the family to work in the store, not even my sister Candace, when she was running-but, anyway, Aunt Jacqui, she has a degree in design, I think it is, or fabric, something like that, and she persuaded Grandpa that she would go crazy staying at home. We beat Wal-Mart in towels and sheets every quarter since she took over the buying for those things, and even Grandpa is impressed with how thorough she is.”

  Aunt Jacqui only married Uncle Gary because she wanted a piece of the Bysen family fortune. I could hear the accusations flying around the Bysen dinner table: Buffalo Bill was a tightwad, Aunt Jacqui was
a gold digger. But the kid was a hardworking idealist. As I followed him along the corridors to the loading bays, I hoped I could get him to blurt out more indiscretions, like where or what Candace had been running, but he only explained how he came to have his nickname. His father was the oldest son-William the Second.

  “It’s sort of a family joke, not that I’m crazy about it. Everyone calls Dad ‘Young Mister William,’ even though he’s fifty-two now. So I got nicknamed Billy the Kid. They think I shoot from the hip, see, and I know that’s what Pat is going to tell Dad about me bringing you in here, but don’t give up, Ms. War-sha-sky, I think it would be really great to help the basketball program. I promise you I’ll talk to Grandpa about it.”

  6 Girls Will Be Girls

  As nearly as I could figure it out, the fight Monday afternoon began over religion and spread to sex, although it might have been the other way around. When I reached the gym, Josie Dorrado and Sancia Valdéz, the center, were sitting on the bleachers with their Bibles. Sancia’s two babies were on the bench, along with a kid of ten or so-Sancia’s younger sister, who was babysitting today. April Czernin stood in front of them, bouncing a ball that some gym teacher had left on the floor. April was a Catholic, but Josie was her best friend; she usually hovered around while Josie did Bible study.

  Celine Jackman came in a minute after me and cast a scornful look at her teammates. “You two be praying for a new baby in your families, or what?”

  “At least we praying,” Sancia said. “All that Catholic mumbo jumbo ain’t going to save you none after you been hanging with the Pentas. The truth is in the Bible.” She thumped the book for emphasis.

  Celine put her hands on her hips. “You think Catholic girls like me are too ignorant to know the Bible, because we go to mass, but you still hang out with April, and last I saw, she was in the same church as me, Saint Michael and All Angels.”

  April bounced the ball hard and told Celine to shut up.

  Celine went on unchecked. “It’s you good girls who read your Bibles every day, you the ones who know right from wrong, like you with your two babies. So me, I’m too damned to know stuff in the Bible, like do it say anything about adultery, for instance.”

  “Ten Commandments,” Josie said. “And if you don’t know that, Celine, you are dumber than you’re trying to pretend.”

  Celine swung her long auburn braid over her shoulder. “You learned that at Mount Ararat on Ninety-first, huh, Josie? You should take April with you some Sunday.”

  I grabbed Celine by the shoulders and pointed her toward the locker room. “Drills start in four minutes. Hustle your heinie straight in there and change. Sancia, Josie, April, you start loosening your hamstrings, not your lips.”

  I made sure Celine had left the gym floor before going into the equipment room to unlock the rest of the balls. When I started the warm-up a little later, I was shy only four players, a sign we were all getting to know each other: my first day, over half the team arrived late. But my rule was that you kept doing floor exercises for the number of minutes you’d missed, even when the rest of the team was running drills with balls. That brought most of the team in on time.

  “Where’s that English lady, the one who’s writing us up?” Laetisha Vettel asked as the girls lay on the floor stretching their hamstrings.

  “Ask April.” Celine snickered.

  “Ask me,” I said at once, but April, who was bending over her left leg, had already sat up straight.

  “Ask me what?” she demanded.

  “Where the English lady be at,” Celine said. “Or you don’t know, ask your daddy.”

  “Least I got a daddy to ask,” April fired back. “Ask your mama does she even know who your daddy is.”

  I blew my whistle. “Only one question you two girls need to answer: how many push-ups will I be doing if I don’t shut up right now and start stretching.”

  I spoke with enough menace in my tone to send the two back to pulling their toes toward their chins, left leg, hold eight, right leg, hold eight. I was tired, and not interested in thinking of empathic ways to reach the adolescent psyche. The ride from South Chicago to Morrell’s home in Evanston was about thirty miles, an hour on those rare days when the traffic gods were kind, ninety minutes when they more frequently weren’t. My own office and apartment lay somewhere near the middle. Keeping on top of my detective agency, running the dogs I share with my downstairs neighbor, doing a little caretaking for Coach McFarlane were all taking a toll on me.

  I’d been handling everything okay until Marcena Love arrived; until then, Morrell’s place had been a haven where I could unwind at day’s end. Even though he was still weak, he was an alert and nurturing presence in my life. Now, though, I felt so jolted by Marcena’s presence there that going to see him had turned into the final tension of the day.

  Morrell keeps open house in Chicago most of the time-in any given month, everyone from fellow journalists to refugees to artists passes through his spare room. Usually, I enjoy meeting his friends-I get a view of the larger world I don’t normally see-but last Friday I’d told him bluntly that I found Marcena Love hard to take.

  “It’s only for another week or two,” he’d said. “I know you two rub each other the wrong way, but honestly, Vic, you shouldn’t worry about her. I’m in love with you. But Marcena and I have known each other twenty years, we’ve been in tight holes together, and when she’s in my city she stays with me.”

  I’m too old to have the kind of fight where you give your lover an ultimatum and break up, but I was glad we’d postponed any decision on living together.

  Marcena had stayed away on Saturday night, but returned the day after, sleek as a well-fed tabby, exuberant about her twenty-four hours with Romeo Czernin. She’d arrived at Morrell’s just as I was putting a bowl of pasta on the table, burbling about what she’d seen and learned on the South Side. When she exclaimed how super it was to drive such an enormous truck, Morrell asked how it compared with the time she managed to get a tank through Vukovar to Cerska in Bosnia.

  “Oh, my God, what a time we had that night, didn’t we?” she laughed, turning to me. “It would have been right up your alley, Vic. We stayed long past our welcome and our driver had disappeared. We thought it might be our last night on Earth until we found one of Milosevic’s tanks, abandoned but still running-fortunately, since I don’t know how you turn one of those things on-and I somehow managed to drive the bloody thing all the way to the border.”

  I smiled back at her-it was indeed the kind of thing I’d have done, with her enthusiasm, too. I felt that twinge of envy, country mouse with city mouse. My home adventures weren’t tame, exactly, but nothing I’d done compared to driving a tank through a war zone.

  Morrell gave an almost invisible sigh of relief at seeing Marcena and me in tune for a change. “So how did the semi compare with the tank?”

  “Oh, an eighteen-wheeler wasn’t nearly as exciting-no one was shooting at us-although Bron tells me it has happened. But it’s tricky to drive; he wouldn’t let me take it out of the parking lot, and, after I’d almost demolished some kind of hut, I had to agree he was right.”

  Bron. That was his real name; I hadn’t been able to come up with it. I asked if the Czernins had put her up for the night; I was wondering how April Czernin’s hero worship of the English journalist would survive if she knew her father were sleeping with Marcena.

  “In a manner of speaking,” she said airily.

  “You spend the night in the semi’s cab?” I asked. “These modern trucks sometimes almost have little apartments built into them.”

  She flashed a provocative smile. “As you guessed, Vic, as you guessed.”

  “You think you have a story there?” Morrell interposed quickly.

  “My God, yes.” She ran her fingers through her thick hair, exclaiming that Bron was the key to an authentic American experience. “I mean, everything comes together, not exactly through him, but around him, anyway: the squalor, the heartache
of these girls imagining that their basketball may get them out of the neighborhood, the school itself, and then Bron Czernin’s story-truck driver trying to support a family on those wages. His wife works, too; she’s a clerk of some kind at By-Smart. My next step is his firm, By-Smart, I mean, the firm he drives for. One knows about them in a vague way, of course: they’ve been making European retailers shake in their boots since they launched their transatlantic offensive three years ago. But I didn’t realize the head office was right here in Chicago, or at least in one of the suburbs. Rolling-something. Fields, I think.”

  “ Rolling Meadows,” I said.

  “That’s right. Bron tells me old Mr. Bysen is incredibly pious, and that at headquarters the day starts with a prayer service. Can you imagine? It’s utterly Victorian. I’m dying to see it, so I’m trying to organize an interview up there.”

  “Maybe I should come with you.” I explained my efforts to enlist the company as a sponsor for the team. “Billy the Kid might get us in to meet his grampa.”

  She flashed her enthusiastic smile at me. “Oh, Vic, super if you can manage it.”

  We’d ended the evening still in relative harmony, which was a mercy, but I still didn’t sleep well. I slipped out of Morrell’s place early this morning, while he was still asleep, so I could drive to my own home and give the dogs a long run before my day started: today would take me down to coach again at Bertha Palmer, and I had promised Josie Dorrado to talk to her mother after practice.

  The dogs and I ran all the way down to Oak Street and back, about seven miles. All of us needed the workout, and I thought I was feeling a lot better until Mr. Contreras, my downstairs neighbor, told me I was looking seedy.

  “Thought with Morrell coming home, you’d perk up, doll, but you’re looking worse than ever. Don’t go tearing off to your office now without eating a proper breakfast.”

  I assured him I was fine, truly fine, now that Morrell was home and mending well, that my current overload was temporary until I found a real coach for the girls at Bertha Palmer.