Ghost Country

by Sara Paretsky

  Madeleine had committed suicide: there was no doubt about it, the paramedic said so to the cop, although final judgment was reserved for the medical examiner.

  “But the garage manager threatened her last night. I heard him. He said if she didn’t leave the wall the street cleaners would be picking up her dead body.” Mara was trying to break in on the policeman and the medic, but they brushed her off, a buzzing mosquito that they couldn’t see. “He hit her, too, and threw her to the ground. I was watching.”

  Jacqui took her arm and steered her gently away. “He’s not going to listen to you, baby. You’re homeless—no one cares what you think. Poor Madeleine. Those voices of hers did her in.”

  Madeleine lay one more time, one final time, on a stretcher alongside the curb. Jacqui knelt next to her. Her rough hands smoothed the thin cheeks, now blood-swollen, death-mottled. County morgue Madeleine’s penultimate destination. A perfunctory autopsy. A waiting for someone to claim the body; if no one came, the unmarked grave of Cook County’s unwanted poor.

  “Nanette, she’s gone off to phone the doctor. Maybe he can get them to bring her to him.” As though Hector Tammuz, powerless in his own department, could move Midwest Hospital’s pathologists to act.

  Anger swelled up inside Mara, like yeast blowing up flour. This was Harriet’s doing, this death of Madeleine, Harriet egging on Brian Cassidy. For once, Harriet and Brian, Grandfather and Mephers, weren’t going to step on someone and pay no consequences.

  Mara stumbled up the stairs to the upper world as the paramedics lifted the stretcher: a featherweight, the load barely noticeable. She didn’t see Starr watching from the shadows, black eyes wet with tears as if she’d known the dead woman personally, Luisa, at her shoulder, shaking with thirst.

  Mara found a phone in the lobby of one of the office buildings and started calling reporters. She didn’t worry about finding change—she billed the calls to Grandfather’s credit card. Don Sandstrom at Channel 13, Ray Gibson at the Tribune, Murray Ryerson at the Herald-Star: This is Mara Stonds. You may know my grandfather, the neurosurgeon, or my sister, the lawyer. I’m afraid there’s been a terrible accident to a homeless woman on the premises of one of my sister’s clients.

  Conversations within news rooms: Is this a story? The Stonds girl is saying dead homeless woman, visions of the Virgin, threats from the garage manager. Phone calls to the First Freedoms Forum, Maurice Pekiel conferring with Judith Ohana: Is this something to do with that kid who called you yesterday? The niece of that alcoholic singer, Luisa Montcrief? Harriet Stonds very able lawyer, very able. Abraham Stonds, prominent in this community, very prominent, can’t tread on toes. Send Judith to the hotel to make a few discreet inquiries.

  At the hotel a belligerent Mara, pacing up and down in front of the scaffolding with a sign: ask me why this hotel murdered Madeleine. The garage attendants looking on, Brian Cassidy inside because Don Sandstrom there with a camera (earlier Cassidy came outside to threaten Mara, but her anger, her accusations—I saw you, I heard you—made him uneasy, kept him from dragging her away as he had first intended).

  What do you think happened here, Ms. Stonds? the reporter asks.

  Mara trying hard not to sound like a fanatic. (Jacqui’s advice: If you’re going to do this thing, girl, don’t sound crazy. Bad enough you look crazy. Clean clothes from a thrift shop, hair trimmed by Jacqui: I’m not going to march, but I’ll help you look decent.)

  “Madeleine Carter believed the Virgin was bleeding through a crack in this wall,” Mara tells the reporter. “She never hassled anyone, she never panhandled, but she frightened Brian Cassidy—he’s the garage manager—he got so scared he hosed her down every night, poured water on her Bible, and when that didn’t stop her beliefs, he put all this scaffolding over the wall to keep her away. My sister, the lawyer Harriet Stonds, was actually the person to tell him to put up all the scaffolding. I guess this one skinny little homeless woman seemed too scary to all of them. Last night I was standing by that girder there, Cassidy didn’t see me, but he hit her so hard it knocked her to the ground. He’s huge you can see him cowering inside there, and she was a tiny bit of a thing.”

  Judith Ohana, not ready to speak to a camera, watched near the entrance to the garage. Watched the Channel 13 crew try to interview Brian Cassidy. Saw him take the private elevator up to the lobby. It’s not a sign of guilt to be wary of speaking on a camera, but the hotel wasn’t going to look very good on the screen.

  When the cameras were gone, Ohana talked to Mara. Ohana didn’t much like the girl—sulky adolescent with a chip on her shoulder about her family, she told Maurice Pekiel back at the Triple-F office. Possibly a First Amendment case. Not something she wanted to make a priority right now, but keep track of the situation in case it developed. A file with a green tab set up to hold Becca Minsky’s and Mara Stonds’s phone messages, Judith’s dictated notes.

  When the four o’clock news showed Mara’s speech and Brian Cassidy hiding from the cameras, Harriet was in a meeting. It was a tricky consultation with her long-haul trucker who’d run afoul of the EPA for toxic dumping in Mississippi. Harriet, performing her old legerdemain with a skill that exhilarated her, wasn’t pleased when her secretary summoned her to talk to Gian Palmetto.

  “He’ll have to take his turn like a big boy, Lauren. I can’t believe you don’t understand how to tell him that.”

  “I know how to do my job, Ms. Stonds. A homeless woman died this morning over by the Pleiades. When Channel 13 called at one-thirty to ask for your version of the story I didn’t think it was important enough to disturb you. But your sister was on the four o’clock news making charges against the hotel, accusing them of murder. If you don’t think that’s important I apologize for interrupting.”

  Harriet saw Lauren dimly, knew her to be angry, knew the secretary should be placated. But more present to her was Mara. An anger just as boiling as her sister’s possessed her. Ever since Mara was old enough to walk, the damned brat had been a menace to Harriet’s work, her possessions, her aloof private self. At three she’d taken a red Magic Marker and drawn all over Harriet’s social studies term paper. I’m helping, Hehwie, look, I’m helping you. That was before computers were everywhere; she’d had to retype the whole damned thing from the beginning by hand. And not even Grandfather’s warnings or a swatting by Mephers could stop Mara from ruining Harriet’s makeup or playing her records and tapes, scratching a Taj Mahal release beyond use, breaking tapes and sitting with the pieces around her, sobbing, as she ineffectually tried to glue them back together. And now she wanted to destroy Harriet’s career, make her look like a useless fool in front of Leigh Wilton just when she was about to be made partner.

  “Get me the details,” Harriet said to her secretary. “I can’t leave this meeting. These guys have a hearing in the morning before a federal magistrate and the strategy is tricky. Tell Gian … I don’t know. Send in—no, let me talk to Leigh Wilton, see if one of the partners can get up to speed on my truckers, in case there’s a real crisis over at the hotel. And find out what the accusations are … Oh, you’ve got them? Of course. I know no one is more reliable than you, Lauren, really I do. Or more unreliable than my sister. She belongs in a mental hospital. In fact”—scanning the secretary’s typed notes—“she’s picketing outside the Pleiades garage? Get me Dr. Stonds, see if he can find a way to bring her into the hospital.” Imagining Mara a cumbersome moth, Grandfather with a large net to catch and dispose of her. “And get someone to tape the newscasts for the rest of the afternoon.”

  Back to her meeting, her head fragmenting again, the exaltation of the last two days evaporating as though it had never been. She had to ask her clients to repeat statements, and still couldn’t absorb them on the second or third try.

  At seven-thirty Harriet finally finished the session with the truckers. Back in her office she went over her messages. A message from Grandfather: please call him at home to discuss her sister.

  He was drinking sherr
y when she phoned, and feeling sorry for himself because of the horrible women and useless residents fate doled out to him.

  He sent that prize loser Tammuz down to find Mara, he told Harriet; Tammuz, a half-wit, never returned to the hospital, Grandfather waited for him until seven. They could bring the police into it, say Mara posed an imminent danger to herself or those around her, have her brought in by force, but there might be too much publicity if he did that.

  Harriet agreed: leave the police out of it for now, although personally she felt like strangling the brat with her bare hands. Grandfather clucked in sympathy, hoped Leigh Wilton wasn’t going to blame Harriet for a situation she couldn’t control, and when would she be home?

  Harriet had seven messages from Gian Palmetto: very upset, Lauren noted on the first. Even more upset. Screaming—demanded to talk to Leigh Wilton, who calmed him down (a duty of the senior partner).

  Various partners were waiting around to talk to her. Some offered support, but Leigh Wilton frowned as though Harriet had deliberately sought such notoriety: had it really been in the client’s best interest to put those spikes up on the wall?

  Harriet tried not to snap at her boss. “The flood Monday night might have caused structural damage. We had to brace the wall. If we hadn’t put the spikes there, to keep those homeless women out, and the wall had fallen over on them, what would our exposure have been then?”

  Various partners had various ideas, and, lawyer-like, each wanted a half hour of undivided attention in which to expound them. She finally managed to sit down with a video of the news. One of her paralegals had taped all the channels and edited their coverage of the hotel into one master tape. Harriet watched it four times. As First Freedoms’ Judith Ohana had predicted, Brian Cassidy looked bad, like a mob heavy fleeing justice.

  At least the hotel’s vice-president for operations had agreed to be interviewed. He did a good job: “Mara Stonds worked here for three months. We had to fire her because she drank on the job, so I’m not surprised to learn that she’s making accusations against the hotel. Fired workers often hold a grudge, although they don’t usually get a chance to flaunt it on television.”

  “But the dead woman, Madeleine Carter,” Channel 13’s Don Sandstrom persisted, “is it true that the hotel harassed her because she had a vision of the Virgin Mary near your garage?”

  The vice-president smiled easily. “I don’t think it’s harassment to try to keep someone from bothering our guests.”

  “So you didn’t spray her with a high-pressure hose?”

  “We use a hose to clean the sidewalks down there. If she refused to move, it’s possible she got a soaking.”

  That didn’t sound so good. Worse, Harriet thought, the notion that the Virgin was bleeding through a crack in the wall would bring hysterical women down there, and that would generate more media. Mara had been picketing alone this afternoon. Harriet stopped the tape on a close-up of her sister’s face. Mara’s cheeks were swollen in her pugnacious look; her broken front tooth made her look not only raffish, but older. The revulsion Harriet felt against her sister on Monday night intensified.

  Harriet phoned the hotel. Gian Palmetto had canceled dinner with the mayor to stay at his desk. Harriet told him she needed to speak to Brian Cassidy.

  “He had to go to the hospital.”

  “Whose idea was that? He can’t hide, Gian: he looked bad on the news. Faking an illness is a really stupid thing to do right now.”

  “He’s not faking, Harriet. Guy broke out in hives all over his body, even on the soles of his feet. I saw him—they came on in my office. He was in agony, couldn’t stand, couldn’t sit, was having trouble breathing. They shot him full of something to calm down the itching, but he’s really sick.”

  Harriet sucked in her breath in exasperation: the most macho men always seemed to collapse first. “He needs to make some kind of statement. Mara is claiming that he threatened the dead woman. What does he say about it?”

  “Come on, Harriet—bunch of homeless people, crackpots, and your sister, frankly—sorry to say it, she’s ninety watts short of a bulb. Do you really take her accusation against Brian seriously?”

  “It’s not what I take seriously that matters. Don’t you realize this will be picked up by the wires? What are you going to tell your corporate masters when they call tomorrow to ask if your garage manager murdered a homeless woman? Brian needs to make a statement. I’ll go to the hospital as soon as we get through with this conversation.”

  Harriet’s cool voice infuriated her client: he might lose his job and she sounded like frozen snot on a polar bear’s nose. “Get off the rag, Harriet. Guy can’t talk. His lungs are blistered, they’re filled with fluid, he’s on a respirator. Get it? Not everyone has your balls, okay?”

  She flushed, but her voice became even more remote. “Gian, what are you going to do tomorrow if a crowd of hyperthyroid women swarm to that wall wanting the Virgin’s blood?”

  He hadn’t considered it and ranted for some time about how he’d have a cop on every square of concrete to bar access, he’d have squadrols ready to haul off the bodies, he’d have fire hoses, guns, dogs.

  Harriet timed him for four minutes, which she added to his billing sheet. “You want to do all that on camera? That would be totally stupid if this turns into a big story…. My advice? First, you should post the area. Get signs out there ASAP saying ‘Danger: Wall Unstable, May Collapse.’ Rope off the sidewalk, so access to the garage isn’t affected if you do get a mob, and station some respectful young men in hotel uniforms down there to explain that it’s too dangerous to get close to the wall, but people can take pictures, or whatever they want. They can’t touch it because of the risk of injury. You might even bring down some chairs and a coffee cart, so that visitors see you are doing your utmost to be helpful.”

  “Just the thing for gawking tourists, but not my clientele,” Palmetto grumbled. “They’re used to discretion, quiet and—”

  “I’ve read the marketing brochures. How much quiet are they going to get if we have an armed confrontation at the garage?”

  Palmetto was angry with Harriet: damned broad cost him three hundred dollars an hour. Between her and her stupid loser sister they’d gotten the hotel neck-deep in shit. He was fucked if he was going to jump again just because she was holding up a hoop.

  “I’ll run it by our in-house people, see what they say.” He slammed the receiver in her ear.

  Massaging her stiff shoulders, Harriet slowly collected the documents she would need for her morning hearing before the magistrate. She didn’t want a long discussion of Mara’s iniquities with Grandfather—that clearly lay ahead—so she took her time, fussing with federal statutes, touching up her makeup, ambling to the elevators.

  Damn Gian Palmetto anyway. He was more trouble than all her other clients put together. Let him get the advice of in-house counsel. Let the Olympus group handle the whole wretched mess. She’d be glad never to think about it again.

  Long before Gian Palmetto could get his corporate review process under way, Harriet’s more dire predictions were realized. By midnight the wall was besieged.

  33

  The Great White Chief’s Errand Boy

  ALL THAT DAY in the hospital Hector kept looking for Starr. On rounds he would glimpse her out of the corner of his eye, but when he turned he saw only a nurse with a medication cart, or no one at all. At one point he infuriated Hanaper by leaving a patient’s bed and running down the hall, so sure he was that Starr had passed the door, In the cafeteria he thought he saw her sitting at a far table. He shoved his way through the line, knocking the tray from the hands of one of the senior neurologists, bumping a little girl carrying a glass of milk so that it spilled down her dress, ignoring all the outraged cries behind him in his haste to get to the corner of the room. The woman sitting there, her black hair piled high on her head, scalloped around her ears, was a janitor. He felt so let down that he retreated to the residents bunkroom, emerging onl
y when he heard himself paged to the outpatient clinic. He had forgotten it was Wednesday: his usual roster of therapy patients was waiting for their fifteen minutes of succor.

  Hector was just finishing with his last patient when Dr. Stonds summoned him. Gretchen came to get him, disappointed that she didn’t have to interrupt a therapy session, but hoping the neurosurgeon was going to tear into Tammuz for his unprofessional conduct in the emergency room Monday night.

  The hospital gossip network had overheated from the load of stories about Hector and Starr. Gretchen and Charmaine believed the most lurid: Hector had tried to rape someone in the ER, and then beat up Millie Regier, the night charge nurse, when she tried to stop him. Millie was suing; he’d be lucky if he didn’t lose his license, Gretchen and Charmaine watched with anticipatory glee as he rushed from the clinic.

  Hector thought Stonds was summoning him because they’d found Starr. He didn’t wonder why Stonds was bothering to let him know, but he was so afraid Hanaper might be there—Hanaper with his lascivious lips drooling with desire—that he ran all the way from the clinics to the surgery office wing.

  “Yes, sir,” he gasped for breath. “Is she here?”

  Dr. Stonds was too absorbed in his own concerns to find Hector’s eagerness odd. Indeed, the surgeon was accustomed to people treating his affairs as more important than their own.

  “No, Tammuz. She’s down at that damned garage she seems to think is home these days. She’s a menace, to herself if not to others, and I want you to get her to come in for a thorough examination.”

  “Yes, sir, of course. What has she done? She isn’t carrying a gun or a knife, is she?”

  Stonds fiddled self-consciously with his desk set. “Not that I know of. But she’s physically very strong: she almost killed my housekeeper.”