Guardian Angel

by Sara Paretsky

  She checked Mrs. Frizell’s bedding. “It’s good that you got her to say something else, another word. You should come more often: it might help her recovery.”

  I rubbed the back of my neck. That sounded like one of those good deeds that make the angels in heaven cheer but prove a burden to the doer.

  “Yeah, I could try to get over more.”

  I explained the information I was after and why. “I don’t suppose you could think of a way to get her to talk about her bank.”

  Carol looked cautiously down the hall to make sure no one was in earshot. “I might, Vic. Don’t get your hopes up, but I might come up with something. Now I’ve got to get back to the trauma unit. Walk you to the stairs?”

  Once again the elevators were out of service. It was too much like my own office for me to complain. On the way downstairs I asked Carol whether she had a concrete plan in mind. “I’d like to find out about her money while she still has some.”

  “What—you think those neighbors of yours are defrauding her? You got proof of it? Or you just don’t like them?” Carol’s tone was derisive.

  I forgot that Carol had seen me showing my hackles at Todd Pichea and Vinnie. I flushed and stammered a bit as I tried to explain myself. “Maybe I am mounting a vendetta. It’s because of the dogs—it seemed to me the Picheas raced around to get guardianship rights just to put the dogs to sleep so that they could safeguard their property values. Maybe they were being altruistic. But I still don’t understand why they had to muscle in like that, kill the dogs before she’d even been away from home a week.”

  My voice trailed away uncertainly. I should be spending my energies on Jason Felitti and Diamond Head; it looked as though I might have stumbled onto something hot there. I should stop being a pest in the neighborhood and just let Todd and Chrissie work things out however they chose. After all, Mrs. Frizell wasn’t the most wonderful specimen to be spending time on. But all my hectoring myself on the subject could not stop the nagging in my brain that I should have done something more to protect the old woman and that I should be looking after her now.

  Carol squeezed my arm. “You’re too intense, Vic. You take everything too hard. The world won’t stop spinning its way around the sun if you don’t rescue every wounded animal in your path.”

  I grinned at her. “You’re a fine one to lecture me, Carol, after leaving the intensity of Lotty for the laid-back leisure of the Cook County trauma unit.”

  She laughed, her teeth gleaming white in the dim stairwell. “And on those words I’d better get back there. It was quiet when I left, but now the sun is setting the bodies will start streaming in.”

  We hugged each other and went our separate directions. I’d parked the Impala on the street, a few blocks west of the hospital. One thing about driving an old car with a rusty body, you don’t worry so much about strangers helping themselves to it. As I started the engine I could hear sirens in the distance. Ambulances bringing in their first loads of the night.

  It was dinnertime and naptime, but I didn’t want to go home just now. I figured I could get one more free pass into the building through the alley before the guys in the Subaru realized how I was coming and going. I didn’t want to waste it on supper.

  I parked the car on a side street near Belmont and Sheridan and climbed into the backseat for a brief rest. My late-night visit to Jonas Carver’s Loop office had left me tired and gritty all day. And onto that I’d added treks to the north and west suburbs. Not to mention fleeing flat out from some ugly muscle.

  Another good thing about the Impala, I thought as I squirmed around to find a comfortable position—my Trans Am would never accommodate my five-eight frame across its minute backseat.

  I actually slept for an hour. Bright lights shone in my eyes and woke me with heart-jolting speed. I reached for my gun and sat up, fearing my pursuers had found me. It turned out just to be a car trying to parallel park across the narrow street from me; it had managed to get turned at right angles to the roadway. Its headlights pointed directly into the backseat.

  Feeling rather foolish I put the gun back inside my armpit. I dug in my bag for a comb and did the best I could to style my hair in the dark. The people across from me were still having trouble maneuvering their car when I climbed from the Impala. Proving that Carol was wrong, that I could overlook someone in trouble, I left them to it.

  The Dortmunder restaurant, one of Lotty’s and my favorite hangouts, was only a few blocks away. In the basement of the Chesterton Hotel, it serves sandwiches and hearty dinners surrounded by a fabulous wine cellar. Normally I like to get a bottle of something rich, a Saint-Emilion or the like, but this was strictly a refueling stop before getting back to work.

  I stopped in the hotel lobby’s rest room to wash up. I was wearing jeans and a cotton knit top, not elegant dining apparel, but also not ruined by sleeping in a car. They were smelling a little ripe.

  The staff at the Dortmunder greeted me enthusiastically, wanting to know if the doctor was joining me. When I explained that the doctor had been injured in a car accident the other day, they were appropriately concerned: How had it happened? How was she? My conscience rubbed me as I explained the bare outlines of the situation.

  Lisa Vetec, granddaughter of the owner, ushered me to a table in a corner and took my order. While they made me a sandwich from their famed Hungarian salami I called Mr. Contreras. He was relieved to hear from me.

  “Someone came around looking for you an hour or so ago. I told him you wasn’t in, but I didn’t like his looks.”

  I asked Mr. Contreras what the visitor looked like. His description was sketchy, but I thought it might have been the man who followed me into the Belmont Diner this morning. If he wanted to see me urgently, our confrontation was only a matter of time. But if possible I’d be the one to choose both the time and the place.

  I tapped my front teeth with a knuckle while I considered the situation. “I think I’m going to move out for a day or two. I’ll be over in about an hour to pick up a few things. I want to come in through the alley. I’ll call right before I get there—if you let me in maybe they won’t know I’ve come.”

  “But where can you go, doll? I know you usually hang out with the doc, but …” He broke off with unusual delicacy.

  “Yeah, I can’t involve Lotty in this anymore, even if she’d let me. It just dawned on me that I might be able to get a room down where Jake Sokolowski lives.”

  He didn’t like it, not for any special reason, just because he didn’t like me moving so far from his orbit. It’s not so much that he wants to control me, I’ve realized recently, but because he needs the reassurance of being able to touch me. He finally agreed to my program, on the grounds that I call him—“Regularly, doll, not just once a week when the spirit moves you”—and only hung up when I promised.

  My sandwich and coffee were waiting for me, but I looked up Tonia Coriolano in the directory. While my coffee cooled she apologized profusely, but she had no vacancy. Normally to oblige a friend of a lodger she might allow them to sleep a night on the living room couch, but even that was occupied right now.

  Lisa waved an arm at me and gestured at my table. I nodded. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I looked up Mrs. Polter and didn’t know if I was relieved or disappointed to find her listed.

  She answered on the ninth ring. “Yes? What do you want?”

  “A room, Mrs. Polter. I’m V. I. Warshawski, the detective who’s been around lately. I need a place to sleep for a few nights.”

  She gave a rasping laugh. “Men only in my house, honey. Except for me, of course, but I can take care of myself.”

  “I can take care of myself, too, Mrs. Polter. I’d bring my own towels. It’d be for three nights at the most. And believe me, none of your lodgers will bother me.”

  “Yeah, but what about—ah, what the hell. You paid for the old guy’s room and he never used it. I guess you can sleep there if you want. No more than two nights, though, you h
ear? I got my reputation to think about.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said smartly. “I’ll be by around ten-thirty to leave my things and get a key.”

  “Ten-thirty? What do you think this is, the Ritz? I close up shop—” Again she cut herself off. “Oh, what difference does it make? I usually stay up until one in the morning looking at the damned tube, anyway. Come on by.”

  When I got back to my table, Lisa brought me fresh coffee. It pays to be a regular.

  31

  Creeping Up on a Plant

  I walked up the dark, narrow staircase behind Mrs. Polter, my feet tripping on the torn linoleum. In deference to the remembered smell I’d brought my own sheets as well as towels, but memory couldn’t compete with the reality of grease and stale sweat. A cheap motel would have been ten times cleaner and more private.

  Mrs. Polter’s arms brushed the walls of the stairwell. She stopped frequently to catch her breath. After bumping into her bulk on her first rest I kept a good three steps between us.

  “Okay, honey, this is it. Like I said, no cooking in the rooms; the wiring won’t stand it. No smoking in the rooms either. No loud radios or TVs. None of that kind of stuff. You can help yourself to breakfast anytime between seven A.M. and noon. You’ll find the kitchen easy enough—it’s at the end of the hall downstairs. Try not to hog the bathroom in the morning—guys gotta shave before they go to work. Here’s a key to the front door—you go and lose it, you pay to put in a new lock.”

  I nodded solemnly and made an ostentatious show of tying it to one of my belt loops. She had put up quite a fight about letting me have a key. When I told her the choice was between that and my rousing her in the middle of the night, she started to demand that I stay elsewhere. In mid-fight she’d broken off and glared at me, then abruptly agreed to the key. It was the third time she’d voluntarily overridden a major objection to my presence. I was here against both our better judgments—that certainly gave us a common ground for conversation.

  She turned on the naked forty-watt bulb with obvious reluctance. To save money on electricity she moved as much as possible in the dark. She hovered in the doorway, eyeing my suitcase, which had a number lock.

  “You want me to tell you the combination?” I asked brightly. “Or would you like to figure it out for yourself?”

  At that she muttered darkly and heaved her bulk out of the entrance. When I heard her slow tread back down the stairs, I undid the lock and surveyed the contents. Except for refill cartridges for my gun there was nothing in there she couldn’t see, nothing that revealed my address or my income. My change of underwear was sober white cotton, not my prized silks. I’d also brought a can of bathroom cleanser and a rag so I could scrub down the sink enough to stand to brush my teeth in it. Let her make of that what she would.

  I scooped up the cartridges and stuffed them in my jacket pockets. They could stay in the Impala’s glove compartment for the time being. Whipping the rank sheets from the thin mattress, I stuffed them under the bed and put my own on in their place. It seemed faintly amusing to me that someone of my slovenly habits should have invested so much energy lately in cleaning other women’s houses.

  The room sported an ancient plywood bureau lined with papers that dated to 1966. Fascinated, I read part of an article on Martin Luther King’s speech at Soldier Field. I remembered that speech: I’d been one of the one hundred thousand people who came to hear him.

  Tonight wasn’t the right time for nostalgia. I pulled my eyes from the grimy page and slid a hand around the drawers to see if Mitch might have left some revealing document behind. All I came away with was a black smudge from the accumulated grit. I decided to leave my clothes—really just a clean T-shirt to go with the underwear—in the suitcase.

  I scrutinized the room for possible hiding places, pulling back pieces of loose linoleum, peering in the hems of the frail window shades. None of them seemed suitable for concealing anything bigger than a Kleenex. The small stack of papers Mitch had considered important enough to take around with him must have been the limit of his sacred possessions. And those were gone. To his son, or a facsimile thereof.

  When I finished my survey I left the suitcase unlocked. I knew Mrs. Polter would be up here pawing through it as soon as I was gone; I didn’t want her to spring the lock to get at the inside. The can of Comet and the rag I left on the floor.

  There were four guest rooms on the floor. Pale light poked feebly underneath one door and a radio, tuned to a Spanish station, played softly. Someone was snoring loudly behind the door of a second, but the third seemed empty. Maybe it was just desperation for cash that prompted Mrs. Polter to let me stay—she’d demanded another twenty on top of what I’d paid her for Mitch as soon as I came up the front steps.

  My landlady was watching television in the living room when I came down the stairs. The big color console was tuned to pro wrestling. The light coming from the screen far outdid the miserable efforts of the only lamp in the room.

  Mrs. Polter sensed my approach over the screaming fans on the screen and turned to look at me. “You taking off, honey?” She didn’t bother to lower the volume.

  “Yup.”

  “Where you going?”

  I brought out the first thing that came to mind. “To a wake.”

  She eyed me narrowly. “Kind of strange hour for it, isn’t it, honey?”

  “He was kind of a strange guy. Expect me when you see me.” I turned to go.

  She tried heaving herself from the armchair. “If someone comes looking for you, what am I supposed to tell them?”

  I felt a prickle down my scalp and turned back to the living room. “Now, just why would anyone come around looking for me, Mrs. Polter?”

  “I … your friends, I mean. Young girl like you must have lots of friends.”

  I leaned against the wall and crossed my arms. “My friends know better than to bother me when I’m working. Who might come around?”

  “Anyone. How should I know who you know?”

  “Why did you decide to let me come here, when it’s against your rules?” I’d been shouting to be heard over the television; now my voice rose another decibel.

  Her snuff-colored cheeks quivered—with anger? fear? It was impossible to tell. “I have a good heart. Maybe you’re not used to seeing someone with a good heart in your line of work, so you don’t know it when you see it.”

  “But I do hear an awful lot of lies, Mrs. Polter, and I sure know them when I hear them.”

  A door opened somewhere beyond the television and a man yelled quaveringly, “You okay out there, Lily?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. But I could use a beer.” She flicked her eyes in the direction of the voice and back to me. “Sam. He’s my oldest lodger and kind of takes an interest. You’re going to be late for your friend’s wake if you hang around here talking all night. And don’t go banging the front door when you come in; I’m a light sleeper.”

  She turned determinedly back to the television, using the remote device to crank up the volume. I looked at the heavy folds of her shoulders, trying to think of something to say that might force her to tell the truth.

  Before anything occurred to me Sam came shuffling in with the beer. He was wearing pajama bottoms and a faded, patched bathrobe. His face was totally incurious; he gave me a brief glance, handed Lily her beer, and shuffled back to whatever netherland he inhabited. Mrs. Polter swallowed the can in one long mouthful, then crushed it in her palm. I know they’re making them out of flimsier stuff these days, but I felt I was being given a message.

  I’d left the Impala at the end of the street. Before getting into it I turned and walked back to the house. The curtain in the tiny front window moved suddenly. Mrs. Polter was watching me. For whom, though?

  Maybe Mitch’s son really had come back to town. I pictured someone growing to resentful adulthood, not forgiving the insult of abandonment, obsessed with a desire for revenge. Trying to talk to Mitch, becoming furious with his drunken self-abso
rption. Hitting Mitch on the head and flinging him into the canal.

  I turned onto Damen. If that was true, why was Chamfers so unwilling to talk to me? Who had beaten up Lotty, and why? And who was on my ass this morning? An obsessed son didn’t seem to fit that profile.

  The streets were almost empty this time of night, although traffic continued to roar on the Stevenson Expressway overhead. Once I turned off Damen I had the roads to myself. Thirty-first Place had enough room to park even a big old Impala without power steering.

  After maneuvering it to the curb I pulled an equipment belt from the trunk. I double-checked the flashlight, made sure the picklocks were secure on the belt, then stuffed a Cubs cap low on my forehead to keep light from reflecting off my face.

  My heart pounding, I slipped from the glare of the street-lamps beating down on Damen to the weed-infested ground lining the canal. The rank grass and black water made my hackles rise with a greater nervousness than the errand itself called for—although the moment of entering, when you’re moving from contemplation of the deed to the deed itself, always makes my stomach turn over.

  Using the flash as little as possible, I picked my way along the broken fence separating me from the canal. Really, Diamond Head was so close to Mrs. Polter’s I could have walked. That might have been in Mitch’s mind as well when he’d landed on her doorstep.

  The Stevenson stood behind me. The concrete stilts seemed to amplify the noise of the trucks, making the air thick with their roaring, masking the sound of my heart crashing in my chest and my feet, clumsy from nerves, kicking cans or bottles. I kept the Smith & Wesson in my hand. I hadn’t forgotten Detective Finchley’s words, that this area was thick with drug users.

  I didn’t stumble on any dopers. The only signs of life beyond the expressway traffic were the frogs I disturbed in the rank grass and the occasional glow from a passing barge. I slipped behind Gammidge Wire, Diamond Head Motor’s nearest neighbor, to where a narrow lip of cement abutted the canal.