Fire Sale

by Sara Paretsky

  When I got to the jobsite, I drove on without slowing and parked two blocks away. The deserted streets would make tailing hard if someone was tailing me. By the time I got to the little houses, I was confident I was alone.

  I put on my hard hat and walked through the red door without knocking. The familiar sounds of saws, hammers, and shouted Spanish echoed around the empty rooms. Drywall was complete in the entryway, but the stairwell was still naked. I asked the first man I saw for Andrés; he jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

  I went down a minute hall and found Andrés in what was going to be the kitchen. He was trying to work wires through a large section of flex pipe, shouting in Spanish through an opening in the floor to a man feeding wiring in from below. He didn’t look up when I came into the room.

  I waited until he was finished wrestling before I spoke. “Pastor Andrés, we need to talk.”

  “You came to Sunday’s service, Miss Detective. Have you come here today to make a commitment to Jesus? I am happy to stop for such an event.”

  I squatted next to him on the raw floorboards. “Bron Czernin was killed late Monday night.”

  “I am always sad at the needless death of one of God’s children.” Andrés’s voice was calm, but his eyes were wary. “Especially when he has died without turning to Jesus.”

  “I don’t think his priest will deny him a Christian burial.”

  “A Catholic burial,” Pastor Andrés corrected me. “Not a Christian one: Bron Czernin died in the company of the woman who had been driving a wedge into his marriage.”

  “Bron was a passive bystander, by-layer, maybe I should say, while Ms. Love drove her wedge into his marriage?”

  He frowned. “He was responsible, too, of course, but a woman has greater-”

  “Powerlessness, usually,” I cut in, “although I grant probably not in this particular instance. But speaking of powerless women, let’s talk about Josie Dorrado. She disappeared Monday night, I think with Billy the Kid, Billy Bysen. Where are they?”

  “I don’t know. And if I did, I do not understand why you are interested.”

  “Because Rose asked me to find her. And, since you know Bron died in a pit lying next to Marcena Love, you must know that Ms. Love was in Billy’s car when it plowed into the undergirders of the Skyway. I’d like to know where Billy and Josie were when that happened.”

  All the time I was speaking, he was shaking his head. “I do not know. Billy came to me on Sunday night, pleading with me to take him in again. He had gone to stay with Rose but now thought that was unsafe, for him or for Rose, I was not sure, but he wanted me to shelter Josie as well as himself. I said I could not, that his father’s detectives would look for him at my home first. They have already been to see me twice, and when I look out my window at night I see a car in the street now, always. I also pointed out that he and Josie must be married, anyway, before I will give them a bed together.”

  “I don’t know a state in the union where it’s legal to get married that young,” I said sharply. “Fortunately. Where did you send him?”

  “If you are going to judge what you have no business judging, we cannot have this conversation.”

  I could feel hot spots in my eyes. I swallowed my anger as best I could: arguing with Andrés over morality would not get me any of the information I needed.

  “Was the car watching your house Sunday night when he came to plead with you?”

  He thought about it. “I don’t think so. I first became aware only on Monday, when I went home for lunch. But if they were there Sunday night and looking for Billy, they would take him then, and you say he was with Josie on Monday.”

  “So where did you suggest he go?” I said.

  “I suggested he go home to his family and take Josie with him, so that they can see her for themselves, instead of judging her by rumors. But he would not go.”

  “That’s the real question,” I said. “What is going on with him that he won’t go home? He told me he had questions about his family, and that you were the only person he trusted. What happened to make him so untrusting of his family?”

  “Any confidences he made to me were to me alone, not to share with any other person. Which includes you, Miss Detective.”

  “But the problem is connected to his work at the warehouse, isn’t it?”

  “That is always possible, since he was working there.”

  “And to Fly the Flag.”

  That was a random guess, but Andrés looked nervously over his shoulder. The man he’d been handling pipe with was watching him with a worried expression.

  “I will not be tricked into disclosing confidences. What do you know about Fly the Flag?”

  “Frank Zamar had just signed a big contract to deliver sheets and towels to By-Smart, not long before his plant burned down. That sounds like good news, not the desperation that would make a man blow up his own plant with himself inside it. So someone was annoyed with him.”

  I slapped my head, the caricature of someone struck by a hot idea. “Come to think of it, you yourself were at Fly the Flag a couple of days before the fire. You had some kind of issue with Frank Zamar. You’re an electrician. You’d know just how to set up something that could start a fire while you were long gone. Maybe you put it in place that Tuesday when I saw you at the factory.”

  “You should be careful about making such accusations.” He tried to speak angrily but his lips were stiff; I had the feeling that if he relaxed they might start trembling. “I would do nothing to risk the life of a man, especially not Frank Zamar, who was not wicked, just troubled.”

  “But, Roberto,” his coworker said, “we all know-”

  Andrés interrupted him to tell him in Spanish to be careful with what he said-I was not a friend.

  “I’m not your enemy,” I said in English. “What do we all know?”

  With another reproving look at his coworker, Andrés said stiffly, “As you said, Zamar signed a new deal, to make sheets for the Bysens, sheets and towels with the American flag. Only-he signs in a panic, because he has lost so much business, and the bills for the new machines don’t stop just because the machines have stopped. And Zamar says he will make these sheets, but for so little money he cannot pay his workers in Chicago. So he has to do it in Nicaragua, or China, or someplace where people will work for a dollar a day, not thirteen dollars an hour. And I went to warn him, he could lose everything if he takes his jobs out of the neighborhood, and not only takes them out but pays people so bad they are no better than slaves.”

  “And he wouldn’t listen?” I said. “So you put rats in his heating ducts, and he still didn’t agree so you torched the factory?”

  “No!” Andrés roared, then said in a more level voice, “He promised me he would go back to By-Smart, tell them he changed his mind, and I even told him I would help him if he did go. And young Billy said Frank did go, he did see the woman in charge of sheets, and also Patrick Grobian, whom we all know, but-then I think he changed his mind.”

  “Did he tell you he had opened his second plant? Did Rose Dorrado tell you she was supervising the night shift for him in it?”

  “What?” He was thunderstruck. “She was doing that and she said nothing to me, to her pastor, about this important thing in the life of the neighborhood?”

  “But wasn’t that good?” I was genuinely bewildered now. “That meant he was keeping jobs in the community.”

  “He lied to me!” Andrés’s color rose. “And so did she. Or worse, she did not look me in the face and tell me the truth!”

  “About what?”

  “About-Frank Zamar’s financial situation.”

  I didn’t think that was what he meant, and from the look on the other electrician’s face he didn’t think so, either, but I couldn’t get Andrés to budge, and I couldn’t get his coworker to talk. We’d been at it for about ten minutes when a man came in and spoke to Andrés in Spanish-they needed the work in the kitchen finished so that the floor could be something
-closed up, I think. Andrés told me I had to leave, he had nothing further to say to me.

  I pushed myself to my feet. My hamstrings were stiff from squatting so long. “Okay. Just so you know, though, this morning people broke into the apartment where Ms. Love has been staying. They took her computer: they don’t want whatever she knows about the South Side to be made public. Bron Czernin was killed in a very ugly way. If she survives, Ms. Love will face many surgeries before she recovers. Whoever attacked them is ruthless. If they think you know whatever secrets she and Bron shared, you could be the next target.”

  Andrés straightened himself; his face took on a rapt expression. “Jesús se humillo así mismo, haciendose obediente, hasta la muerte. Jesus became obedient to death upon the cross. I will not show fear to go where my Master went before me.”

  “And it’s okay with you if they attack Billy and Josie as well?”

  Andrés frowned. “You have given me no reason to believe that the death of Bron Czernin has anything to do with Billy Bysen and his family. Perhaps even Mrs. Czernin organized this attack herself. Have you spoken with her? A woman who is betrayed, who feels angry, she can well commit murder, especially a woman like Mrs. Czernin, who now has a daughter gravely ill, she will not be the most reasoning person. She can well do something terrible to her husband and his lover in her anger and her grief.”

  “It’s not impossible,” I conceded. “It took a lot of strength to heft those bodies around. If Ms. Czernin had knocked them out, she could have moved them with a forklift, if she had one, into whatever truck that took them to the pit. It’s all possible, but not very believable.”

  The man who’d told Andrés to finish the kitchen made a great show of looking at his watch.

  “I’m leaving,” I said. “But, Pastor, if Billy calls you again, tell him to talk to me, or to Conrad Rawlings in the Fourth District, if his worries about his family include knowledge of some kind of crime. There’s an awfully big tiger out there for a nineteen-year-old to grab by his tail. Thanks, by the way, for the information about Fly the Flag.”

  That startled him out of his detached demeanor. “I told you nothing! And if you say otherwise, you are committing a terrible sin by bearing false witness.”

  “So long.” I smiled and turned on my heel.

  I left the house slowly, hoping he might change his mind and come after me with more information. A couple of men taking a cigarette break out front gave me a cheerful greeting as I passed, but Andrés remained in the kitchen.

  I walked to the Czernins’ house from the jobsite, since it was only three blocks away. The day continued cold, the sky filled with clouds that rolled and twisted over the lake. Despite the bitter weather, I went slowly, not eager to face Sandra Czernin and her unpredictable rages. And wondering, too, about Andrés.

  I wanted to hang him upside down from the roof joists and shake him until whatever he knew about Billy and his family and Fly the Flag came tumbling out of his head. I found it impossible to believe Andrés had set the fire at the factory, but he was an electrician. He would know where the wiring came into the plant and how to use it to cause maximum devastation. But I didn’t think he would engineer a man’s death, and I couldn’t imagine any reason he’d shut down a business that provided good jobs to the community.

  Since I couldn’t get Andrés to talk, it was even more important that I find Billy. The Kid had run away right after his grandfather insulted Pastor Andrés at the church service, so it didn’t seem as though his quarrel with his family had anything to do with Bron and Marcena. The next day, he’d gone to work in the usual way: it wasn’t until he got to work that something happened to make him disappear altogether. That sounded like Billy’s problems lay in the warehouse, not around Fly the Flag. That meant, presumably, something his Aunt Jacqui was doing, since she was the one family member who showed up regularly at the warehouse. So the warehouse had to be my next port of call, once I’d gotten past Sandy Zoltak. Sandra Czernin.

  Despite my foot-dragging, I’d reached the Czernin house, a bungalow near the corner of Ninety-first and Green Bay Avenue, catty-corner to the six-hundred-acre wasteland that used to be the USX South Works.

  I stared at the rubble. When I was a child and we had to wash the windows every day because of the thick smears of smoke that settled on them, I would long for twenty-four hours without the mills, but I could not have imagined them gone, those giant sheds, the miles of conveyor belts ferrying coal and iron ore, the orange sparks filling the night sky that told you they were pouring. How could something so big disappear into a pile of rubble and weeds? I couldn’t fathom it.

  My mother insisted on facing unpleasant chores head-on, whether washing windows, or talking to people like Sandra Czernin. I always thought it would be better to play first and see whether there was time left in the day to do the dirty work, but I could hear Gabriella’s voice: the longer you indulge yourself over that steel mill, the harder it will be in the end to do the job you came here for.

  I squared my shoulders and walked up to the front door. On a street of sad and sagging houses, the Czernins’ place was neatly painted, all the siding intact, the small yard tidy, with a lawn that had been trimmed for the winter and some chrysanthemums lining the short walk. Sandra’s anger at least took a constructive turn, if it drove her to maintain her home like this, or to push Bron into doing it.

  Sandra came to the door within seconds of my ringing the bell. She stared as if she didn’t recognize me. Her stiff bleached hair hadn’t been washed or combed recently and stood out from her head at wild angles. Her blue eyes were bloodshot, and the shape of her face indistinct, as if the bones had dissolved behind the skin.

  “Sandra, hi. I’m sorry about Bron.”

  “Tori Warshawski! You have one hell of a nerve coming around here now, two days late. Your sympathy doesn’t mean shit to me. You found him, that’s what that cop told me. And you didn’t think you owed me even a phone call? I found your husband, Sandra, go order a coffin, because you’re a widow now?”

  Her anger sounded forced, as though she were trying to whip herself into feeling something, anything, and anger were the only emotion she could come up with when she couldn’t muster grief. I almost started justifying myself-my night in the swamp, my day in the hospital-but I swallowed it all.

  “You’re right. I should have called you right away. If you let me in, I’ll tell you what I know.” I pushed forward, not waiting for her to decide if she could stand for me to be in her house, and she backed up automatically, the way people do.

  “He was with that English whore, wasn’t he?” she said when we were in her entryway. “Is she dead, too?”

  “No. Very badly injured, too much to talk and tell the cops who attacked them.”

  “Yeah, dry your eyes while I start playing ‘My Heart Cries for You’ on the violin.” To my dismay, she rubbed the tip of her middle finger against the top of her index finger, the way we did as kids when we were being sarcastic-a flea playing “My Heart Cries for You” on the world’s smallest violin, we used to say.

  “How’s April holding up?” I asked.

  “Oh, she was Daddy’s little angel, she can’t believe he’s dead, can’t believe he was with this English reporter, even though all the kids at school knew about it and told her.”

  “Bron thought he’d be able to find money for her defibrillator. Do you know if he’d come up with anything?”

  “Bron and his ideas.” She contorted her face into a horrible sneer. “He probably thought he could steal a load of TVs from By-Smart. If he ever had a good idea above his waistline, I never heard about it. There’s only one thing that could help and that’s if he died working for the company.”

  Her bitterness was so hard to listen to that it took me a minute to understand what she meant. “Oh. So you could collect his workers’ comp indemnity. He didn’t have life insurance?”

  “Ten thousand dollars. By the time I’ve buried him, there’ll be about seven left
.” Tears spurted from her eyes. “Oh, damn him, what am I going to do without him? He cheated on me every five seconds, but what am I going to do? I can’t keep the house, I can’t look after April, damn him, damn him, damn him.”

  She started sobbing in a rasping, dry way that shook her thin body so hard she had to lean against the wall. I took her arm and gently moved her into the living room, where the prim furniture was encased in plastic. I took the cover off the couch and sat her down.

  33 Happy Families Are All Alike, Unhappy Families…

  The Czernin house was laid out like every other bungalow on the South Side, including the one where I grew up. I moved by instinct through the dining room to the kitchen. I put water on for tea, but, while waiting for it to boil, I couldn’t resist opening the back door to see if they had a little lean-to like ours. My dad had stored his tools there; he could repair most things around the house. He’d even replaced a broken wheel on my roller skates. It seemed satisfying to find an identical one behind Sandra’s kitchen, although it wasn’t as tidy as my dad’s. My dad would never have left cut-up pieces of rubber lying around the work surface like that, or the frayed ends of old lengths of wiring.

  I was turning back to the kitchen to hunt for tea when April appeared in the doorway. She was clutching the giant bear Bron had given her in the hospital; her face was still puffy from the heart meds she was taking.

  “Coach! I didn’t know-didn’t expect-”

  “Hi, honey. I’m sorry about your dad. You know I’m the person who found him.”

  She nodded bleakly. “Were you looking at his shop? He taught me how to use a soldering iron. I even worked on a project with him last week, but I don’t think Ma will let me use his tools now. Does she know you’re here?”

  “She’s in the living room, pretty upset; I’m trying to find tea.”

  April opened a canister on the counter and pulled out a tea bag. While she got mugs down from a shelf, I asked how she was feeling.