“Okay, I guess. They’re giving me these drugs that make me sleepy, that’s all. You know, they’re saying I can’t play anymore, can’t play basketball.”
“I know: it’s a shame; you’re a good player, and we’ll miss you, but you can’t risk your health running around the court. You can still be part of the team if you want, come to the practices and help chart plays.”
Her face brightened a little. “But how am I going to get to college if I can’t get a scholarship?”
“Academics,” I said dryly. “Not as glamorous as a sports scholarship, but they’ll carry you further in the long run. Let’s not worry about it today, though-you’ve got enough going on, and it’s a year before you have to start applying.”
The kettle started boiling, and I poured water into the mugs. “April, have you talked to Josie since she came to the hospital?”
She turned away from me and became very busy at the counter, moving the tea bag from one cup to the next until all three had turned a pale yellow.
“Josie disappeared the same night your father died, and I’m very worried about her. Did she run away with Billy?”
She scrunched her face unhappily. “I promised not to say anything.”
“I found Billy’s sports car wrecked under the Skyway around one in the morning. I think the English reporter had been in it, but where were Billy and Josie?”
“Billy gave Daddy his car,” she whispered softly. “He said he couldn’t use it anymore, and he knew Daddy didn’t have a car, if we wanted to go out he had to borrow a car from a buddy, or sometimes he drove us in the semi if he thought Mr. Grobian wouldn’t find out, you know, it was By-Smart property.”
“When did he give your dad the car?” I tried to keep my voice low and level, not to make her more nervous than she already was.
“Monday. He came to the house Monday morning, after they brought me home from the hospital. Ma had to be at work; they only gave her one hour off to bring me home, but Daddy was working a late shift so he didn’t leave until three. And then, then Josie came. I called her and told her to come here before she went to school. She and Billy used to meet here, see, it was a place she could come and be doing her homework so her ma didn’t mind, and my ma, she just thought Billy was a boy from school, we didn’t tell her he was one of the Bysens, she would, like, totally lose it if she knew that.”
Those school projects that Josie was so intent on, her science and health studies homework she had to do with April. Maybe I should have guessed that they were a cover story, but it didn’t matter now.
“Why was Billy so angry with his family?” I asked.
“He wasn’t angry with them,” April said earnestly. “Worried, he was worried by what he saw at the plant.”
“And what was that?”
She hunched a shoulder. “You know, everybody works hard for not enough money. Like Ma. Even Daddy, he made more driving a truck, but Billy said it wasn’t right, people’s lives being so hard.”
“Nothing more specific than that?” I was disappointed.
She shook her head. “I never listened that hard, mostly he would be talking to Josie, you know, off in one corner, but Nicaragua came in somehow, and Fly the Flag, I think-”
“What are you doing in here, bothering my girl?” Sandra appeared in the doorway, her tears gone, her face set in its usual hard lines.
“We’re making you a cup of tea, Ma. Coach says I can still suit up and be with the team, chart plays maybe.” April handed her mother and me each one of the mugs. “And maybe my academics will get me into college.”
“But they won’t pay your medical bills. You want to do something for April, don’t go putting ideas in her head about academics. Prove Bron was driving for the company when he died.”
I was startled. “Is By-Smart saying he wasn’t? Do they know where he was when he was jumped?”
“They won’t tell me anything. I went to see Mr. Grobian this morning over at the warehouse, I told him I was filing a claim, and he said, ‘Lots of luck.’ He said Bron was violating company rules when he was working, having that bitch in his cab, and they’d fight the claim.”
“You need a lawyer,” I said. “Someone who can take them to court for you.”
“You are so-so ignorant,” Sandra shrilled. “If I could afford a lawyer, Miss Iffy-genius, I wouldn’t need the money to begin with. I need proof. You’re a detective, go get me proof he was working for the company, and that the English whore wasn’t in his truck. It’s your fault she was there. Now you go make it up to me.”
“Bron’s behavior was not my fault, Sandra. And screaming about it won’t solve any of your problems now. I’ve got way more to do than take abuse from you. If you can’t calm down enough to talk sensibly, then I’m taking off.”
Sandra wavered, torn between the anger that consumed her and the wish to know about Bron’s death. In the end, the three of us sat at the kitchen table, drinking the weak tea, while I told them about Mitch leading me across the swamp to Bron and Marcena.
Sandra knew that Billy had lent his cell phone to Bron (“He told me he took it so he could stay in touch with April”), but she didn’t know about the Miata. This led to a little skirmish between her and April (“Ma, I didn’t tell you because you’d just do like you’re doing now, yelling about him, and I can’t take it.”).
Their priest had warned them that Bron was so badly disfigured that Sandra shouldn’t look at his body; did I think that was true?
“He looks terrible,” I agreed. “But if it was me, my husband, I mean, I would want to see him. Otherwise, it would always haunt me that I hadn’t said that last good-bye.”
“If you’d been married to that prick, you wouldn’t be so sappy, ‘that last good-bye’ and all that movie crap,” Sandra snapped.
She stopped at an outcry from her daughter, but the two began quarreling again over whether Bron really had a plan to find the money they needed for April’s health care.
“He called Mr. Grobian, and Mr. Grobian said he could come in and discuss it, Daddy told me that himself,” April said to her mother, scarlet-faced.
“You never understood that your father told people what they wanted to hear, not what the truth was. How do you think I ended up marrying him, anyway?” She bit the words off angrily.
“When did your dad tell you about Grobian?” I asked April. “Monday morning?”
“He was making me lunch when we got back from the hospital.” April blinked back tears. “Tuna fish sandwiches. He cut the crust off the bread like he used to when I was a baby. He wrapped me in a blanket and tucked me in his recliner and fed me, me and Big Bear. He said not to worry, he was going to talk to Mr. Grobian, it would be all right. Then Billy came, and he said if I could wait eight years until he got his trust fund he’d pay for the surgery, but Daddy said we couldn’t take charity, even if we could wait so long, and he was going to see Mr. Grobian.”
Sandra slapped the tabletop so hard her weak tea slopped out of the mug. “That is so damn typical! Him talking to you and not his own wife!”
April’s lower lip quivered, and she hugged Big Bear tightly to herself. Patrick Grobian hadn’t exactly struck me as the warmhearted Santa of the South Side. If Bron had been going to see him, it must have been to put the bite on him in some way, but when I suggested this April sat up again.
“No! Why are you taking her side against Daddy? He said he had a document from Mr. Grobian, it was all businesslike, shipshape.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Sandra cried. “I could have asked Grobian when I saw him this morning.”
“Because you kept saying like you’re saying now, how his ideas were dumb and wouldn’t work.”
“So neither of you know whether he actually did talk to Grobian, or what this document might be? Sandra, when did you actually talk to Bron for the last time?”
Her response, stripped of all its emotional outbursts, boiled down to Monday morning, when they brought April home from
the hospital. They’d borrowed a car from a neighbor-their own car had been totaled in a hit-and-run last month and they hadn’t had the money to get another yet (because, of course, Bron had let the insurance payments lapse, and the other driver hadn’t been insured, either). Bron had dropped Sandra off at work in the borrowed car and then gone home to stay with April until he had to leave for work.
“He’s on the four-to-midnight shift this week. I have to be at the store at eight-fifteen, so lots of weeks we don’t see each other much. He gets up, has a cup of coffee with me in the morning. When April leaves for school, he goes back to bed and I catch the bus, and that’s the story for the week. Only when we brought April home, we didn’t want her climbing those stairs, they’re so steep, the doctor said no major exertion right now, so she’s sleeping with me down here in the big bed. Bron, he’s upstairs, or he was, when he got off shift Monday night he was going to go up and sleep in her bed.
“Tuesday, I made April her breakfast, even if I don’t cut the crust off the bread I make her breakfast every morning, but I had to go to work; you never know how long you have to wait for the bus, I couldn’t hang around for Mr. High-and-” She broke off, remembering the object of her bitterness was dead. “I just thought he was sleeping late,” she finished quietly. “I didn’t think anything about it at all.”
What document could Grobian possibly have signed that would make Bron think that By-Smart would ante up a hundred thousand dollars for April’s medical care? Nothing made any sense to me, but when I tried to push April to see if she could remember anything else, any hint Bron might have dropped, Sandra erupted. Didn’t I see April was tired? What was I trying to do, kill her daughter? The doctors said April couldn’t have any stress and me barging in and harassing her was stress, stress, stress.
“Ma,” April shrieked. “Don’t talk to Coach like that. That’s way more stress than I want.”
I could see fertile new ground for mother and daughter to fight on here, but I left without trying to say anything else. Sandra stayed in the kitchen, staring at the kitchen table, but April followed me back to the living room where I’d left my parka. She was gray around the mouth, and I urged her to go to bed, but she lingered, nuzzling her head against Big Bear, until I asked her what she wanted.
“Coach, I’m sorry Ma is upset and everything, but-can I still come to practice, like you said earlier?”
I put my hands on her shoulders. “Your mom is mad at me, and maybe for good reason, but that has nothing to do with my relations with you. Of course you can still come to practice. Now let’s get you to bed. Upstairs or down?”
“I’d like to go to my own bed,” she said, “only Ma thinks stairs will kill me. Is that right?”
I made a helpless gesture. “I don’t know, honey, but maybe if we took them superslow you’ll be okay.”
I helped her up the steps one at a time to her attic room. The stairs were in exactly the same place as they had been in my childhood home on Houston, and they were the same steep risers, decanting you through a square opening onto the attic floor. The little dormer room had been fixed up with the same care as my parents had put into my space. Where I had had Ron Santo and Maria Callas over my bed-a strange juxtaposition of my parents’ unconnected passions-April had the same poster of the University of Illinois women’s team that Josie did. I wondered how painful it would be for her to wake up every morning to the active life she no longer could take part in.
“Do you know who Marie Curie was?” I asked abruptly. “You don’t? I’ll bring you her biography. She was a Polish woman who became a really important scientist. A different life than basketball, but her work has lasted over a hundred years now.”
I pulled the bedspread down for her and saw underneath the same red-white-and-blue sheets that Josie and Julia had on their bed. Was this solidarity with Team USA, or what?
“You and Josie buy your sheets together?” I asked as I tucked her bear into the bed.
“Oh, these flag sheets, you mean? We bought them at church. My church was selling them, and so was Josie’s, and a bunch of the others. Most of us girls on the team bought them-it was for something to do with the neighborhood, cleaning it up or something, I don’t know, but even Celine bought a set; it was a team thing, we did it together as a team.”
I looked for a label, but all it said was “Made with pride in the USA.” I made sure she had everything she needed-water, a whistle to summon her mother if she needed her in the night, her CD player. Even her schoolbooks, if she felt like doing homework.
I was halfway down the steep stairs when I remembered Billy’s phone. I’d taken it out of my peacoat when I left it at the cleaners and put it in my bag, wondering what to do with it.
I took it out and handed it over to April. “It’s still pretty well charged up. I don’t know if his family will disconnect the service, but he did give it to your dad to use, so I don’t think he’ll mind if you use it. I’ll bring you over a charger.” I handed her one of my cards. “And call me if you need me. This is a tough time for you to be going through.”
Her face lit up with delight over the phone. “Josie was so lucky going around with Billy because he had all this stuff that we only can use at school. He went online from this phone, plus he let her use his laptop. He helped us find blogs to write on, and gave us nicknames. Like, he kept in touch with his sister through their private nicknames on this one blog, and Josie met his sister through the blog, even though his folks don’t want them to be in touch with each other. So if Josie and me, like, get to college, we’ll know how to do what the other kids do.”
Before basketball practice, I’d have to talk to the assistant principal about April’s academics. Surely with this much eagerness on April’s part, the school could help her find a way.
Almost before I’d started back down the stairs, I heard April saying into the phone, “Yeah, Billy Bysen, he’s, like, letting me use his phone until he needs it again. You going to practice?”
When I got back downstairs, I called out to Sandra that I’d put April to bed upstairs, and let myself out.
34 And the Rich Ain’t Happy, Either
As I walked down the neatly planted walk into the wind, I wondered if Sandra was right. Had Bron died because he was with Marcena, or had Marcena been attacked because she was with Bron? The theft of Marcena’s computer made it seem as though Marcena were the key player here. In which case, Bron would still be alive if not for me bringing the English reporter into his life. And if not for Marcena, who was always ready for new excitement, and if not for Bron himself, strutting his stuff for the exotic outsider.
I refused to feel responsible for those two falling into bed together, but I did want to know what they were doing in Billy’s car when it plowed into the Skyway Monday night.
I also wanted to know how Nicaragua and Fly the Flag were connected, since those were the only two things April could remember Billy talking about. Perhaps Frank Zamar had planned to move his plant to Nicaragua so he could meet By-Smart’s price demands for the contract he’d just signed with them. That would certainly annoy Pastor Andrés, who was struggling to keep jobs in the neighborhood. But Rose was supervising a night shift at Zamar’s second plant; if he’d opened a new plant for his By-Smart order, he couldn’t have been planning a move to Central America.
The wind was blowing more steadily from the northeast as the sun went down, but the cold air felt cleansing after the heated emotions in the Czernin house. I held my head up so the air could blow right through me.
It was only a little after three when I got to my car. Pat Grobian should still be at his station at the warehouse. Maybe he’d tell me what document he’d given Bron that proved the company would pay April’s medical bills. I drove across Lake Calumet and turned south to 103rd and the By-Smart warehouse.
When I’d come here the first time, I’d needed to prove to a guard that I had permission to be on the property. And when I’d reached the warehouse, another guard had cate
chized me. I didn’t think Grobian would welcome me with open arms, so I bypassed the whole process, parking on Crandon and crossing to the back of the vast complex, my hard hat under my arm.
Razor wire enclosed the whole area. I stumbled around the perimeter: the leather half boots I was wearing were not ideal for cross-country hiking. Eventually, I came on a secondary drive, a narrow track that was probably used for service crews if they had to get to the power plant behind the warehouse. The gate was padlocked, but the rutted road left a gap plenty wide enough for me to slide under.
I was now behind both the warehouse and the employee parking lot. I put my hard hat on, and tried to remember the geography of the place from my first visit, but I still made a couple of wrong turns before I found the open door where smokers were huddling in the cold. They barely looked at me as I sidled past them and went up the corridor to Grobian’s office.
A number of truckers were standing in the corridor waiting to see Grobian, whose door was shut. One had a handlebar mustache that seemed almost repulsive, so full and luxurious was the hair. Nolan, the man in the Harley jacket who’d been here on my previous visit, was here; he clearly remembered me, too.
“Hope the other guy looks as bad as you do, sis,” he said with a grin.
I answered in kind, but when I looked at my trousers I saw to my annoyance that I’d torn them sliding under the back gate. For a month that wasn’t generating much income, I was sure racking up a lot of overhead.
“You knew Bron Czernin, didn’t you?” I changed the subject, not very skillfully, but I wanted to get in a talk before Grobian came out. “I’m afraid I’m the person who found him yesterday morning.”
“Hell of a thing,” the handlebar mustache said, “although Bron shaved close to the skin. I’m kind of surprised no one went after him before.”
“How so?” I asked.
“I heard that English woman was with him, the one he was driving around town with.”
I nodded assent. I shouldn’t have felt surprised that the men knew about Marcena-theirs was a small community in its own way. If Bron had been showing Marcena his routes and showing her off to his accounts, everyone who knew him would know about her. I could picture them alone in their cabs needing to pass the time, calling each other and spreading all the gossip.
Fire Sale Page 29
