Fire Sale

by Sara Paretsky

  Baby propped on her shoulder, Rose Dorrado poured some of the water she’d been boiling to heat the bottle into two plastic mugs. I carried those into the living room, where Julia, in jeans, had reestablished herself in front of her telenovela. Josie’s two young brothers had come home, too, and were fighting their sister over the channel she was tuned to, but their mother told them if they wanted to watch soccer they had to mind the baby. The boys quickly fled back down to the street.

  I sipped the thin, bitter coffee while Rose fretted out loud about the future of her boys without a father; her brother tried to help out, playing with them on Sundays, but he had his own family to look after, too.

  I looked at my watch and tried to push Rose Dorrado to the point. The story, when it came out, wasn’t the tale of personal violence I’d been imagining. Rose worked for Fly the Flag, a little company on Eighty-eighth Street that made banners and flags.

  “You know, your church, your school, they want a big banner for parades or to hang in the gym, that’s what we do. And we iron them if you need that done. Like, you keep it rolled up all year and you want it for your graduation march, only our shop has the machines big enough to press one of those banners. I been there nine years. I started even before my husband left me with all these children, and now I’m like a supervisor, although, of course, I still sew, too.”

  I nodded politely and congratulated her, but she brushed that aside and went on with her tale. Although Fly the Flag made American flags, those had just been a sideline to their main business until September 11. They’d always produced the outsize flags that schools and other institutions liked to spread across an upper balcony or wall, but before September 11 such enormous flags had had a limited market.

  “After the Trade Center went down, there was a very big demand for them, you understand, everyone wanted a flag for their business, even some rich apartment buildings wanted to hang them from the roofs, and suddenly we had a lot of orders, almost too much, we couldn’t even keep up with it. Everything we do is by hand, you know, for this kind of banner, but for the flags we use machines, and so we even had to buy a second machine.”

  “Sounds great,” I said. “ South Chicago needs more business success stories.”

  “We do need these businesses. I need this job: I got four children to feed, plus now Julia’s baby. If this business don’t stay in business, I don’t know what I can do.”

  And now she came to the crux of the matter. Since the summer, work had fallen off. Fly the Flag was still running two shifts, but Mr. Zamar had laid off eleven people. Josie’s mom had a lot of seniority but she was afraid for the future.

  “It sounds very worrying,” I agreed, “but I’m not sure what you want me to do about it.”

  She laughed nervously. “Probably it’s all my imagination. I worry too much because of having so many children to feed. I make good money at the plant, thirteen dollars an hour. If they close, if they go to Nicaragua or China, like some people think, or if Mr. Zamar-if some accident happens to the building-where else can I work? Only at By-Smart, and there you start at seven dollars. Who can feed six people on seven dollars an hour? And the rent. And we’re still paying for María Inés, for her birth, I mean. The hospital, they charge so much interest, and then she needs her shots, all the children, they all need shoes…” Her voice trailed off into a sigh.

  All during Rose Dorrado’s rambling remarks, Julia continued to watch the television as if her whole life depended on it, but the tension in her thin shoulders showed she was acutely aware of her mother’s words. I drank my coffee down to the last undissolved crystal: I couldn’t waste anything here.

  “So what’s happening at the plant?” I tried to bring her back to her problem.

  “Probably it’s nothing,” she said. “Maybe it’s nothing; Josie kept saying not to bother you with it.”

  When I pressed her harder, though, she finally blurted out that last month, when she arrived at work-and she always got there early, always anxious that she be thought a good employee-if there were going to be more layoffs she couldn’t let anyone say she had a bad attitude-anyway, she arrived to find she couldn’t get her key in the lock. Someone had filled the keyholes with Krazy Glue, and they lost a whole day’s work while they waited for a locksmith to come and drill them out. Then another time she opened the factory and found it full of a really bad smell, which turned out to be dead rats in the heating ducts.

  “Because I’m there early I got all the windows open, and we could still do some work, it wasn’t too bad, but you can imagine! We were lucky the weather was not so bad-in November, you know, it could be a blizzard, or rain or something.”

  “What does Mr. Zamar say?”

  She bent over the baby. “Nothing. He tells me accidents happen at plants all the time.”

  “Where was he when the locks were glued shut?”

  “What do you mean?” Rose asked.

  “I mean, wasn’t it surprising that you discovered they were glued shut? Why wasn’t he there?”

  “He don’t come in early because he stays late, until seven or eight at night, so he don’t come in usually till eight-thirty in the morning, sometimes even nine.”

  “So he could have glued the doors shut himself when he left the night before,” I said bluntly.

  She looked up startled. “Why would he do that?”

  “To force the plant out of business in a way that let him collect the insurance.”

  “He wouldn’t do that,” she cried, too quickly. “That would be wicked, and, really, he is a good man, he tries hard…”

  “You think maybe one of the people he laid off could be doing it for revenge?”

  “Anything is possible,” she said. “That’s why-I’m wondering-when Josie told me a lady cop is coaching now instead of Mrs. McFarlane-can’t you go in there and find out?”

  “It would be much better if you’d call the police, the real police. They can ask-”

  “No!” the word came out so loudly that the baby hic-cupped and began to cry.

  “No,” she said more quietly, rocking the infant against her shoulder. “Mr. Zamar, he told me no police, he won’t let me call. But you, you grew up here, you could ask some questions, no one would mind questions from the lady who helps the girls play basketball.”

  I shook my head. “I’m just one person working alone, and an investigation like this, it’s time-consuming, it’s expensive.”

  “How much money?” she asked. “I can pay you something, maybe when I finish paying the hospital for Julia.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to tell her my usual fee was $125 an hour, not to someone who thought she was lucky to feed five children on thirteen dollars an hour. Even though I often do pro bono work-too often, my accountant keeps telling me-I didn’t see how I could conduct an investigation at a shop where the owner didn’t want me.

  “But don’t you see, if you don’t find out, if we don’t stop this, the plant will close, and what will happen to me, to my children?” she cried out, tears in her eyes.

  Julia hunched deeper inside her T-shirt at her outburst and the baby squalled more loudly. I rubbed my head. The idea of one more obligation, one more rope tying me to my old neighborhood, made me want to join Julia on the couch with my head buried in an imaginary world.

  With a leaden hand, I pulled my pocket diary out of my bag and looked at my commitments. “I can come down early tomorrow, I guess, but you know I’m going to have to talk to Mr. Zamar, and if he orders me off the premises I won’t be able to do anything else but leave.”

  Rose Dorrado beamed at me in relief. She probably figured once I took the first step, I’d be committed to the whole journey. I hoped very much she was wrong.

  8 Plant Life

  I hugged my windbreaker close to my chest and slipped through a loose piece of the chain-link fence. The pale steel of a late-fall dawn was just beginning to lighten the sky, and the air was cold.

  When I told Rose Dorrado I’d come by
Fly the Flag this morning, I’d originally planned to arrive around eight-thirty to question the crew. Last night, though, when I was talking to Morrell about the situation, I realized I should come early: if someone was sabotaging the plant before the morning shift arrived, I might catch them in the act.

  I’d had another late night last night, between staying at the school with my warring players, calling on Rose, and then, finally, stopping to check on Mary Ann McFarlane on my way north. Although a home care provider came in four times a week and did laundry and other difficult jobs, I’d gotten in the habit of bringing her food, sometimes dinner, sometimes just extra treats she enjoyed that no one else thought worth shopping for.

  Mary Ann lived just north of my old neighborhood in an apartment like my own, four rooms built railway style in an old brick eight-flat. She had been in bed when I reached her last night, but she called out to me in a voice still strong enough to reach the hall. I shouted back a greeting as I bent to pet Scurry, her dachshund, who was turning inside out in his eagerness at seeing me.

  What I would do with the dog when-if-he needed a new home was one of my ongoing concerns. I already had a golden retriever and her gigantic half-Lab son. A third dog would bring the health department down on me-not on account of the dogs, but to put me into a locked ward.

  By the time I got to the bedroom, my old coach had hoisted herself out of bed and made it to the doorway. She was clutching the edge of the dresser, but she waved off my offered arm and stood panting until she got her breath back. In the bedroom’s dim light she looked ghastly, her cheeks sunken, the skin around her neck hanging in folds. She used to be a stocky woman; now cancer and chemicals had sucked the life out from under her flesh. The chemo had also turned her bald. The hair was growing back, covering her head with a coarse, gray-streaked red stubble, but even when she was as bald as Michael Jordan she had refused to wear a wig.

  When I first saw her like this, it had been a shock: I was so used to her muscular energy that I couldn’t think of her as ill, or old. Not that she was old-she was only sixty-six, I’d learned to my surprise. Somehow, when she was coaching me, and teaching me Latin, she’d looked as formidably ancient as her bust of Caesar Augustus.

  She waited to talk until she’d walked to the kitchen and was sitting at the old enamel table there. Scurry jumped up onto her lap. I put the kettle on for tea and unpacked the groceries I’d picked up for her.

  “How did practice go today?” she asked.

  I told her about the fight; she nodded approvingly of the way I’d handled it. “The school doesn’t care if those girls play or not. Or even if they attend-under No Child Left Behind, Celine Jackman is dragging the test scores down, so they’d have been just as happy if you kicked her out, but basketball’s her lifeline. Don’t let her get suspended if you can help it.”

  She stopped to catch her breath, then added, “You’re not making any of that tofu slop, are you?”

  “No, ma’am.” When I first started cooking for her, I’d tried making her miso soup with tofu, thinking it would be easier for her to digest, and maybe help her get some strength back, but she’d hated it. She was a meat-and-potatoes woman through and through, and if she couldn’t eat much of her pot roast these days she still enjoyed it more than tofu slop.

  While she slowly ate as much of the meal as she could manage, I went to the bedroom to change her sheets. She hated my seeing the blood and pus in her bed, so we both pretended I didn’t know it was there. On days when she was too weak to get out of bed, her embarrassment at the condition of the linens was more painful than the tumors themselves.

  While I bundled everything into a bag for the laundry service, I glanced at the books she’d been reading. One of Lindsay Davis’s Roman mysteries. The most recent volume of LBJ’s biography. A collection of Latin crossword puzzles-all the clues were in Latin, no English hints at all. It was only her body that was failing.

  When I got back to the kitchen, I told her Rose Dorrado’s story. “You know everyone in South Chicago. You know Zamar? Is he likely to sabotage his own factory?”

  “Frank Zamar?” She shook her head. “I don’t know that kind of thing about anyone, Victoria. People down here get desperate, and they do the things desperate people do. I don’t think he’d hurt anyone, though: if he’s trying to destroy his own plant, he won’t do it while any of his employees are on the premises.”

  “He have kids in the school?”

  “He doesn’t have a family, as far as I know. Lives on the East Side, used to be with his mother, but she’s been gone three, four years now. Quiet man, fifty-something. Last year he donated uniforms to our program. Josie’s mom probably put him up to it. That’s how I met him at all-Rose Dorrado got him to come watch Julia play. That’s Josie’s sister, you know. She was my best player, maybe since you were in school, until she had the kid. Now her life’s unraveled, she doesn’t even come to school.”

  I slapped the sponge against the counter hard enough to bounce it across the room. “These girls and their babies! I grew up in that neighborhood, I went to that high school. There were always some girls who got pregnant, but nothing like what I’m seeing down here now.”

  Mary Ann sighed. “I know. If I knew how to stop them I would. Girls in your generation weren’t so sexually active so young, for one thing, and you had more possibilities in front of you.”

  “I don’t remember too many kids in my class going to college,” I said.

  She paused, catching her breath. “Not what I mean. Even the ones who only wanted to get married and raise a family down there, they knew their husbands would work, there were good jobs. Heck, there were jobs. Now no one feels they have a future. Men who used to make thirty dollars an hour at U.S. Steel are lucky to work for a quarter of that at By-Smart.”

  “I tried to talk to your center, Sancia, about birth control-I mean, she already has the two babies. Her boyfriend hangs around during practice; he looks like he’s at least twenty-five, but if the word work has ever crossed his mind he’s dismissed it as something in a foreign language, probably obsolete. Anyway, I suggested if Sancia was going to stay sexually active it would help her chances in school and in life if she didn’t have any more children, but her mother came over to me the next day and told me she would yank her daughter out of basketball if I talked any more about birth control to the team, but-I can’t leave them lurching around in ignorance, can I?”

  “I’d be glad if every kid in that school practiced abstinence, believe me,” Mary Ann said bluntly, “but since that’s as likely as the dinosaurs reviving, they should have reliable information about contraception. But you can’t go giving it to them unsolicited. Trouble is, Sancia’s mother goes to a Pentecostal church that believes if you use birth control you go to hell.”

  “But-”

  “Don’t argue with me about it, and don’t, for heaven’s sake, argue with the kids. They take their faith very seriously in those storefront churches. You see them reading their Bibles before practice?”

  “Another change from my youth,” I said wryly, “the mass defection of Latinos from mass. I’ve read about it, of course, but hadn’t experienced it before. And they don’t seem to have a problem proselytizing among some of the other girls on the team-I’ve had to break that up once or twice.”

  Mary Ann showed her strong teeth in a grin. “It’s hard work being a teacher these days-what you can talk about, what you can’t, what can get you and the school sucked into a lawsuit. Still, Rose Dorrado is a more practical mom than Sancia’s mother. Since Julia’s baby, she’s been on Josie like a hawk, checking who she sees after school, not letting her go out alone with any of the boys. Rose wants that kid in college. April’s folks are pushing her, too.”

  “Come on!” I protested. “If Romeo-Bron-Czernin has one thought above his zipper, it’s about himself.”

  “Her mother, then,” Mary Ann conceded. “She’s determined that her kid is going to get out of South Chicago. She tolerates the baske
tball in case it gets April a scholarship, but she’s probably one of a dozen parents in that school sitting on the kid’s head and making her do homework every night.”

  The long conversation had worn out my coach. I helped her back into bed, took Scurry for a walk around the block, and then went north to deal with my own dogs. My downstairs neighbor had let them out, but I drove to the lake so they could run. I took Mitch and Peppy up with me to Morrell’s, where I left them when I got up the next morning at five to return to the South Side.

  Even though the city was still shrouded in the mantle of night, the expressway was already busy-although, when is it ever not? Trucks, anxious people getting to the early shift, detectives looking for who knows what, filled the ten lanes. It was only when I exited at Eighty-seventh Street and headed east that the streets became quiet.

  Fly the Flag stood against the embankment of the Skyway on South Chicago Avenue. I suppose there was a time when the avenue was full of active, prospering factories and shops, but I couldn’t remember it. Unlike the Skyway overhead, where traffic was thick with commuters from northwest Indiana, the avenue was deserted. A few cars were not so much parked as abandoned along the curbs, hoods sprung or axles reeling at odd angles. I left my Mustang on a side street so it wouldn’t stand out among the wrecks, and walked two blocks south to Fly the Flag. Only a CTA bus, grinding slowly north like a bear lumbering into the wind, passed me.

  Except for an iron works, whose locked yard protected a modern sprawling plant, most of the buildings I passed looked as though only some defiant opposition to gravity kept them upright. Windows were missing or were boarded over; strips of aluminum waved in the wind. It’s a sign of the neighborhood’s desperate job shortage that people will work in these collapsing structures.