Guardian Angel

by Sara Paretsky

Cindy came back in and bent over her mother. “There’s a nigger out front now, Mother. He says he’s a detective and he has a badge and everything, but he’s not wearing a uniform. Do you want to talk to him? Or do you want me to call the precinct and make sure?”

  Mrs. Mohr shook her head. “What’s he coming to do? Apologize?”

  I felt my face turning hot. “He probably has some questions, Mrs. Mohr. It’s probably the same detective who answered the call the night your husband’s car was stolen and used to attack a doctor on the North Side.”

  I got up and went to the front door. As I’d thought, it was Conrad Rawlings. He did not look overwhelmed with delight at seeing me, and I felt my face grow hotter still.

  “Well, well, Ms. W. I might have guessed you’d beat me here.”

  “It’s not what you think,” I stammered. “I didn’t know he was dead. I came to talk to him to try to get a lead on Mitch Kruger.”

  “That a fact?”

  Mr. Contreras, glad to make an escape, had come down the hall behind me. The nerve-wracking experiences of the last half hour made him more belligerent than usual.

  “It sure is a fact. I’m tired of watching you cops harass Vic here instead of trying to catch murderers. You never listen to her, so she gets soaked in the canal and then you come around blaming her. Matter of fact, I talked to Eddie Mohr this morning. He was fine then. I told him we was coming down this afternoon and next thing I know he’s been shot dead on the street.”

  “Okay, okay,” Rawlings said. “You didn’t try to finesse me. What did you want to talk to him about?”

  “Money. What about you?”

  “Oh, I heard about the shooting and I kind of connected his name with the car that hit the doc. So I thought maybe I’d nose around a little. I’m not as fast as you, Ms. W., but I do try to get there. Tonight was your night for working late; I do remember you telling me that yesterday.”

  Cindy joined us in the hallway before I could think of something to say that might ease some of the bitterness in his voice. I could kiss him in front of Mr. Contreras, but not in front of Cindy. It would seem patronizing, and make his interview with them too difficult.

  “Do you know him?” she asked.

  “Yes. He’s a friend of mine. A good friend, even if he’s a little quick to judge me sometimes.”

  “I guess you can talk to my mother. But keep it brief. She’s had a bad shock today.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Rawlings said. “I’ll keep that in mind.… Drive that heap of yours carefully on the way home, Vic. I don’t want to hear any of the boys had to pull you over.”

  45

  A New Profession Beckons

  “Do you think I killed him, doll?” Mr. Contreras asked when we were back in the car.

  His anxiety robbed me of any desire to upbraid him for warning Eddie Mohr this morning. “Of course not. If either of us did, it was me, pushing on the investigation.”

  “You don’t think he was shot by gangs, do you?”

  “Nope. Someone got him to go out to Barney’s and shot him as he walked home. I just wish …” I cut myself off.

  “What, doll? What do you wish?”

  “I wish I hadn’t found Mitch’s picture. Of Eddie with Hector Beauregard. And at the same time I wish I knew who he called this morning. Maybe Conrad can find out more than we could, although it’s not too likely with Cindy and Gladys thinking of him as a barely articulate lesser ape.”

  “Conrad, huh? You getting kind of friendly with a cop if you’re starting to talk about him by his first name.”

  I felt myself blushing. “Let’s see if Barney will tell us anything.”

  During the short drive to the tavern I suggested a strategy to Mr. Contreras. He agreed readily, anxious to make what amends he could for his disastrous phone call.

  Barney’s was a small place, with one room for the pool table and one room for the bar. A handful of old men sat at two of the scarred tables in the bar. Some had drinks, but most seemed to be there for companionship. When they caught sight of strangers in their midst, they stopped talking and stared straight ahead.

  A solidly built man in his early seventies got up from one of the tables and went back to the bar. “Can I help you folks?”

  We walked up to him, Mr. Contreras taking the lead. He asked for a beer and drank a little, then offered a comment on the weather, which Barney greeted in silence. Mr. Contreras surveyed the room, studying the men one at a time, while they sat stonily, occasionally directing glances of outright hostility in my direction. It was a men’s bar, and whatever the libbers might do downtown to places like Berghoff’s, Barney’s was going to stay pure.

  Finally Mr. Contreras gave a little grunt of recognition and turned to Barney. “I’m Sal Contreras. Me and Eddie Mohr worked together at Diamond Head for more than thirty-five years.”

  Barney drew back slightly, but Mr. Contreras pointed at one of the tables and said, “Ain’t that right, Greg?”

  A man with an enormous beer belly shook his head slowly. “Maybe so, but … well, light ain’t so good in here. Shine some on him, Barney.”

  The owner leaned behind the counter for a switch and turned on an overhead bulb. Greg looked at my neighbor for a long, doubtful minute. His face cleared suddenly into a big grin.

  “That’s right, Sal. Ain’t seen you since you retired. We’ve all been getting older, though you look pretty good. You moved north, what I heard.”

  The other men started moving in their chairs, finishing drinks, murmuring to each other. We belonged, after all. They didn’t have to form a posse.

  “Yeah,” Mr. Contreras said. “After Clara died I just couldn’t stay in the old neighborhood. I got me a nice little place up on Racine.”

  “That your daughter? She turned out mighty nice. I thought your kid was older, though.”

  “Nah. This here’s my neighbor. Vic Warshawski. She was driving me down to visit Eddie this afternoon, so I wouldn’t have to take the el. Then we found out he was dead. I guess you probably heard all about that.”

  “Yup.” Barney intervened, anxious to regain control of his bar. “He was just in here not five minutes before. Then they shot him on his way home. Clarence here, his wife saw Eddie die. When the cops and all finished talking to her she came and got him.”

  A bald man next to Greg nodded portentously. Either Mr. Yuall or Mr. Joyce. Having comforted his wife in her shock, he had hastened back to Barney’s to share it with his friends.

  “Mrs. Mohr thought he’d come here to meet someone,” I ventured, hoping our bona fides were now well enough established for me to speak.

  “That’s what Eddie said,” Barney agreed. “He was expecting to meet some man here for lunch. He waited for an hour and finally decided he’d had enough. He ate a hamburger by himself and left for home.”

  “Did he leave a message—in case the man he was waiting for showed up after all?” I asked.

  “Yeah, he did, Barney,” Greg said. “Remember? He said it was some management squirt and he was tired of waiting on management squirts, so if the guy showed up to tell him to call when he really wanted to have a meeting.”

  “That’s right. Him getting shot like that, it went out of my mind.” Barney scratched his thin gray hair. “But what name did he say?”

  I waited while he pondered. “Milt Chamfers? Or Ben Lo-ring?” I finally offered.

  Barney nodded slowly. “I believe it was one of them. Chamfers. I believe that’s the name all right.”

  Greg agreed that Chamfers was the name Eddie had given, but it didn’t mean anything to him. He’d apparently left Diamond Head before the new owners took over. No, Eddie had never mentioned Milt Chamfers to him or to any of them.

  “That’s quite a nice addition Eddie put on his house,” Mr. Contreras said, remembering the script we were trying to follow. “I wish I could afford me a swimming pool and a Buick and all. I was at Diamond Head thirty-eight years, not counting the war, but I sure never got me a retir
ement deal like that.”

  There was a murmur of agreement around the tables, but Clarence explained that Eddie had come into some money. No, he hadn’t known Eddie had rich relatives. Must have been some distant cousin back in Germany remembering his poor American relations.

  “Used to be the other way around,” one of the other men said bitterly. “Didn’t used to be Americans had to be someone else’s poor cousins.”

  The conversation turned to the usual complaints of the helpless, over the niggers and lesbians and Japs and everyone else who was ruining the country. Mr. Contreras had a shot and a beer to be sociable. We left under cover of a flurry of newcomers eager to discuss Eddie’s death. I was just as glad to get out before Conrad Rawlings showed up, anyway. Assuming Mrs. Mohr made him privy to the news that Eddie had been here right before his death.

  When we were back outside I stood on the walk, not moving for a minute.

  “What is it, doll?”

  “What exactly did you say to Eddie when you called?”

  The old man turned a dull mahogany. “I said I was sorry. I know it sounds like I sent him out to be shot. You can’t be more worried about it than me, doll, so give me—”

  “That’s not what I meant. After you talked to him he felt upset enough to call—apparently—Milt Chamfers, who agreed to meet him, just as a pretext to get him out on the street so someone could shoot at him. What did you say?”

  Mr. Contreras scratched his head. “I told him who you was—a detective, I mean. And that that photo of him that Mitch had, the one from the charity, had you all excited. And that we was on our way down to ask him where he got enough money to support a big downtown charity like that, when I knew he was a Knights of Columbus man from the word go. And I just wanted to give him time to think about it first. I just wish—”

  I saw a cab coming, a rarity on this stretch of Kedzie, and grabbed Mr. Contreras’s arm to hustle him to the curb.

  “Hey, doll, what’re you up to?”

  “Get in.… We can talk when we get someplace a little less exposed.”

  I asked the cabbie to go along Kedzie until we came to a public phone, and then to wait for me while I made a call. A few blocks down he pulled over to the curb.

  I phoned a car rental company I know on the North Side called Rent-A-Wreck. I got their machine, and told it I was desperate for some wheels, that I’d be there in half an hour and hoped they’d be picking up their messages in the meantime. Rent-A-Wreck is a shoestring operation that a couple of women run out of their house, with the cars parked in the backyard. I hoped they were just sitting over dinner, not answering their phone but listening to their calls.

  Back in the cab Mr. Contreras and the driver seemed to have come to a happy understanding. Both were Sox fans with the delusions common to all Chicago baseball lovers: while mourning the loss of Ivan Calderon they really thought this was the year the Sox could do it. I gave the cabbie Rent-A-Wreck’s address and leaned back against the seat, leaving them to a heated discussion of whether Fisk should step aside for a younger man.

  It seemed to me a minor miracle that I was still alive. If Milt Chamfers was going to shoot Eddie Mohr just because he was afraid of what Eddie might say to me, why wasn’t he shooting at me? What had Eddie done for Diamond Head that they funded him on such a lavish scale—but that they didn’t want him talking about? I didn’t think Chamfers was the mastermind, either in paying off Eddie Mohr or in getting him shot. But who stood behind Chamfers—Ben Loring from Paragon Steel? Or Dick’s father-in-law and his brother? Or both, maybe.

  By the time we got to Rent-A-Wreck on Cornelia, I was fretting with impatience to be moving, to be doing something, although I wasn’t sure what. I paid off the cabbie, giving him an extra few bucks with the tip to wait in case no one answered our ring. When Bev Cullerton came to the door I waved to the cab. He honked and drove off.

  “Hiya, Vic. You’re lucky we were home. Callie and I were heading over to the coffeehouse when we got your message. You trash those fancy wheels of yours? Maybe we could rehab ’em out back.”

  I grinned. “That’s last week’s story. I just need to get around town tonight without anyone on my butt. You got something for me?”

  “This hot weather everyone wants a car to get to Door County. We only have one left and she ain’t much.”

  Given the condition of most of Bev and Callie’s cars, one that wasn’t much was going to be a real clunker. Beggars can’t be choosers though. I gave her a twenty as a down payment and took the keys to an old Nova. The odometer was on its second lap and the steering had been devised to train the Bulgarian weight-lifting team, but Bev assured me it would still do eighty if it had to. She gave us cushions to cover the lumpy seats and held the back gate open until we had cleared the alley.

  “You want to go home?” I asked Mr. Contreras.

  “Now, look here, Vic Warshawski: you are not going to drag me all over Chicago and then dump me at home like you think I was senile and couldn’t understand a few English sentences. I want to know why you left that Impala down by Barney’s and what all the fuss is. And if you’re up to something else tonight you’d better either plan on me coming with you or just sitting in the car till the sun comes up, ’cause you ain’t pushing me out of here. Unless you’re planning on hooking up with Conrad.” The last word was laced with an adolescent ugliness.

  “As a matter of fact, I’d be just as happy for Conrad not to catch up with me again tonight.” I wrenched the steering wheel hard to the right and pulled over to the curb, where I gave him a thumbnail sketch of the problems I’d been pondering during the cab ride north. On top of those I was wondering what Vinnie or the Picheas might do now that I’d discovered their slick pitch to the old people in the neighborhood. This was the first chance I’d had to tell Mr. Contreras about it. He was shocked and angry and we got diverted for a bit by a sermon against those who prey on the elderly.

  “Vinnie’s a spiteful kind of guy,” I said when he’d wound down. “Who knows what he might think up to get even. Anyway, I don’t know why I’m still walking around if Milt Chamfers would shoot Eddie just so as to keep him from talking to me. I’m worried that you could be in danger, too, just because you’ve been hanging out with me—calling Eddie Mohr, going with me to see him, all those things.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about me, doll,” he said roughly. “Not that I want to die, but if someone shoots me it’s not like I didn’t have a good life. What are you going to do tonight?”

  “I need to find a place with a phone. But what I really need is to get into Dick’s office.”

  “ ‘The first Mr. Warshawski,’ ” the old man repeated with relish. “But what for?”

  “That’s where it all comes together: the Diamond Head bonds Mrs. Frizell bought from Chrissie Pichea; Chicago Settlement; and Diamond Head itself—Dick did the legal work. I just don’t see how else to get it without looking at his files. And I don’t know how to get in there.”

  “You can’t pick the lock?”

  “I lost my picklocks in the San the other night, but that’s not really the problem. A big law firm like that, the juniors are working until all hours. I don’t know how to get in without being caught. And I don’t know how else to get what I need to know.”

  He thought it over for some time. “You know, doll, I’ve got an idea. I’m not saying it’s a great idea, and it’d need some work, but you know who gets into places like that without anybody paying any mind to them?”

  “Cleaning crews, but—”

  “And workmen,” he interrupted triumphantly. “They’re just part of the furniture to management squirts.”

  46

  New Duds—But Not from Saks

  Mr. Contreras had to go home to feed Peppy and let her out. We decided that I would drop him on Diversey and pick him up on Barry, at the top of our alley. I wasn’t very happy with the plan, but had to agree that anyone staking out the place was more likely to be gunning for me than for him.
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br />   I spent the next half hour in misery. I couldn’t take the car up Racine in case they had someone smart enough to be looking for me regardless of what I was driving. I went the long way around to Barry and sat hunched down in the driver’s seat, my gun out, straining my ears for any sounds of violence so that I might race to Mr. Contreras’s rescue. When he appeared at the mouth of the alley my stomach heaved uncontrollably; I retched up a mouthful of bile, just getting my head out of the car in time.

  Mr. Contreras, torn between excitement and worry, offered me his giant handkerchief to clean my mouth. I used it a little ruefully. Marlowe never let his nerves get the better of him.

  My neighbor had brought a couple of faded boilersuits with him, along with an outsize tool box. We dumped the load in the back. I wrenched at the steering wheel and moved out of the neighborhood. Before we did anything else I needed a glass of water and something to eat—other bodily needs that never seemed to afflict the great detectives.

  We found an all-night diner on Clark and stopped for sandwiches. As the Near North Side grew ever more yuppi-fied this was one of the few remaining places for cops, delivery drivers, and others on the graveyard shift.

  Mr. Contreras excused himself after he’d eaten half his ham sandwich. “I just thought of something, doll. You stay here and act natural.”

  He was gone before I could protest, leaving me in mixed astonishment and anger. I am definitely not the waiting type. This was my second chance this evening to reflect on how evil I’d been all those times I’d left my neighbor pacing the floor unhappily at night while I jumped from gantries. I’m not sure either my character or my disposition was improved by the reflections.

  After he’d been gone five minutes I took the bill to the cashier. I was on my way out to look for him when he came in, a look of such self-satisfied mischief on his face that my ill humor died down.

  “Oh, there you are, doll. I thought you was going to wait for me.”

  “I paid the bill. Someone’s just about to pick up the rest of your sandwich. You want to rescue it?”