YOU’RE THE PI Conrad Rawlings trusts? One of you is going to have to explain why that makes sense.”
Ferret Downey was talking to me in an empty apartment across the hall from Freddie’s drug shop. As soon as he’d come up the front walk, with two patrol officers in his wake, I’d known who it was: with his long nose and drooping mustache, he looked exactly like a ferret. He only showed after I’d been cuffed to Vire for over half an hour.
Vire turned out to be short for Virus, which turned out to be a nickname for Erwin Jameson. Erwin. Such a weeny name for a bodyguard.
My legs were wobbly: shock, too much exertion. All the gunfire in the hall had left me with a loud whining in the ears; I had a hard time hearing what any of them, cops or robbers, was saying.
“We wasn’t doing nothing,” Freddie said to the first responders. “This bitch comes and starts picking my locks, can you believe that? In broad daylight?”
“You a user or a dealer?” one of the officers asked me.
“My name is V. I. Warshawski; I’m a licensed investigator. You can see my ID in my wallet. A woman who disappeared two days ago is in this building. These goons threatened to shoot her. We need to look for her now: she may still be alive.”
The officers were not interested. They were so sure I was in the drug business that they only made a pretense of looking at my license. When it became clear they weren’t going to ask the crime scene crew to look for Judy, I stopped contributing to the conversation—even after Freddie claimed I had broken in, killed his main man, Bullet, trashed his building by shooting it up. Basically, he added, he was just a man trying to live a peaceful life; he only started firing a semiautomatic in self-defense.
Various officers wanted to know if someone sent me to take out Freddie. Who was my Mexican contact? Where was I standing when I shot Bullet?
I didn’t say anything, just stared at the street, silently cursing myself for not following Conrad’s advice. At one point an ambulance arrived; a stretcher crew brought Bullet down. His face was uncovered; they had him strapped in a neck restraint, which made me believe he wasn’t actually dead.
“He’s still breathing,” I said to Freddie. “If you’ve got good health insurance for your playmates he should be back in the lineup before long.”
Freddie spat in my face. What a prince.
When Lt. Downey finally arrived and learned who I was claiming to be, his face did not light up in ecstasy. “Yeah, we got a heads-up she’d be coming out here. What’s been going on?”
The first responders said they’d been alerted to gunfire on Lorel, found the three of us shooting at each other. Freddie started his pitch about self-defense, that I’d broken in, blah, blah.
“You a deaf-mute, Warshawski, or you going to give your version?” Downey asked.
I twisted my neck to look at my cuffed hands, but didn’t speak.
“Oh, release her,” Downey said to one of the officers in a voice of long suffering. “Rawlings over in the Fourth vouches for her, although damned if I can see why.”
When my hands were free I rubbed them slowly, massaged my shoulders, did some neck rolls. “Judy Binder is or was on the third floor.” I still was having trouble hearing and wondered if I was actually speaking. “I came to see if she was hiding here, which I told your team; so far I don’t think they’ve bothered to look for her. When I got here, Freddie and his buddies didn’t answer the bell.”
“That why you were picking the lock?” Downey’s sergeant asked me.
Bullet had taken my picks before shoving me into the building; the techs had found them on their way in.
“Man, we saw her breaking in, watched it on the monitor,” Vire blurted. “Bullet went down to stop her!”
“That why you broke Bullet Bultman’s neck?” the sergeant asked me.
“He had a gun stuck in my spine. I didn’t like my odds if we got all the way to the top of the stairs, so I ducked and gave him a hard shove. I didn’t shoot him. If there’s a bullet in him, it came from Erwin. Erwin was pretty hysterical. He flew down the stairs, shooting like a maniac. I don’t know how he missed me.”
“It’s ‘Virus,’” Erwin hissed.
“Is there a bullet in the Bullet?” Ferret Downey turned to survey his squad.
“Don’t think so, Looey.” One of the SCI team stepped forward. “They’ll be able to tell at the hospital.”
“Take me inside; we’ll have a look-see. Warchosi, or whatever your name is, you come along. We’ll find you a place to sit that doesn’t contaminate the evidence.”
“Erwin here said Judy Binder was in the building,” I repeated. “He offered to kill her if Freddie wanted, but Freddie told him to shoot me first. I want to find her before another of Freddie’s punks tries to kill her.”
Downey blew on the ends of his droopy mustache. “I know you’re God’s gift to Conrad Rawlings, but I’ve managed to stagger my way through crime scenes without your help for twenty years. It’s hard to believe anyone would waste time and money looking for a junkie, but if we find one hiding on the premises, I’ll be sure to let you know.”
His sergeant snickered appreciatively. I took a deep breath: I reminded myself that a clever response would bring me only a brief reward. What I really wanted most was not to have the last word, but to leave soon. With my gun and without being charged.
A tech came along with shoe covers and gloves for Downey, his two acolytes, and me. There were six apartments in the building, but no signs of any inhabitants, unless you counted the bicycle in the lobby that Virus-Erwin and I both had fought with.
The drugstore was open on the third floor. A TV was on: Sox up by three in the eighth. The feed from the camera watching the street showed only streaky lines: no one had taken off the strip of duct tape. A grinding rap beat came from a room somewhere in the back. It grated on my ear, but I was pleased that I could hear it. The ringing from the gun battle was beginning to fade.
Downey told his sergeant to try the apartment across the landing. The door wasn’t locked, another sign, if one needed it, that Freddie controlled the whole building.
“You go in there,” Downey told me. “We’ll get to you when we get to you.”
The sergeant pushed me into the room. I stumbled again and couldn’t avoid landing on his left foot.
“Sorry, Sarge,” I said. “Gunfight and standing cuffed for so long, my coordination isn’t too good right now.”
He eyed me measuringly, fingering his revolver. “You want me to stay in here with her, Looey?” he asked Downey.
“She won’t go anywhere as long as we’re holding her gun,” Downey said.
Sad, but true. The sergeant shut the door and left me alone with a dirty beige armchair and a portable TV on a metal TV table. My legs were genuinely unsteady as I lurched over to look at the chair. It was filled with cigarette burns and ash and had stains whose origin I didn’t want to contemplate. Discarded butts and roaches had fallen into the crevice between cushion and armrest.
I would have welcomed a rest, but not in an armchair that held an arsenal of lethal bacteria. I wandered into the back of the apartment and found a room with a narrow bed, the sheets smelling sweet-and-sour, a faint smear of blood on the pillow. On the floor, a bra, once white, now gray and stretched out of shape; some wadded-up tissues with dried blood on them. Under the bed, a thick layer of dust that made me sneeze.
I squatted on my haunches, unwilling to sit on floor or bed. The bra belonged to some woman who had no money or no interest in her appearance. A junkie most likely. Judy Binder, for instance. The motto on the T-shirt Jari Liu had been wearing yesterday at Metargon popped into my mind: In God We Trust, All Others Show Data.
I had limited data: just Vire’s asking Freddie if he should kill the “bitch” now or later, but I guessed Judy had been sleeping here.
I got to my feet and went into the kitchen. A couple of used dishes stood in the sink, where a bunch of cockroaches was enjoying a pre-dinner snack. Another party scurried away when I opened a cupboard. All it held were high-sugar cereals, a box of microwavable popcorn, and a couple of greasy glasses.
There were two doors, a new one that must have been put in to connect this place with the temple of doom, another that stood ajar. I pulled it all the way open and saw a back staircase. I tried the temple of doom door, but it was locked.
I picked up one of the glasses to use as a crude amplifier. When I put my ear to it, I gagged, imagining what was on the hands of the last person to touch it.
Real detectives do not suffer from germ phobia, I lectured myself. Think of Mickey Spillane. Think of Amelia Butterworth. Neither of them ever shied away from a dirty job. With the glass pressed against the keyhole, I could hear the cops in the other apartment, but couldn’t make out individual words. Judging by the commotion, more units had arrived.
If Judy Binder had been here, she would have heard the shoot-out between Vire and Freddie and me. She would have scampered, just as she did when someone shot Derrick Schlafly in the cornfield two days ago.
I handed the greasy glass over to the cockroaches in the sink and went to the back staircase. There was a light switch on the wall, but no bulbs in the overhead fitting. I pulled out my phone and tapped the flashlight app.
Halfway down, I found a beat-up loafer, probably a size six. Someone had been racing so fast, with so much fear, that she couldn’t stop for a shoe. At the bottom, a door opened onto a weed-filled yard. The door didn’t have a handle or a lock on the outside. I shone my phone around the area floor and found a broken chair to use as a doorstop.
The yard seemed to be where Freddie dumped his old beer cans and tequila bottles. The nettles and sow thistle were tall enough that I kept tripping on bottles on my way to the high metal fence that surrounded the yard. A gate was heavily crossed with chains. I worked my way around the perimeter. At the south edge, soil had eroded enough that a slim or desperate person could slide underneath. The second worn-out loafer was here. Judy, or whoever had been in the fetid bed upstairs, had gone out this way. Barefoot across the broken rocks and glass.
Where had Judy scampered next? If drug dealers got killed or broke their heads wherever she appeared, none of her old associates would welcome her.
It would have been a squeeze for me to follow her, but I could have done it. Unfortunately, as the ferret had said, I wanted my gun. I went back inside and slowly climbed the stairs, massaging my calves every few steps. When I reached the kitchen again, one of Downey’s crew was waiting for me. He didn’t comment on my side trip, just told me that the lieutenant was ready for me.
Downey was in a room that Freddie apparently used as an office. Computers, ledgers, locked cabinets—now opened to display an impressive amount of heroin, unless it was cocaine, as well as old-fashioned apothecary bottles filled with pills—a fifty-inch TV screen, a stack of license plates, a Bose iPod player, and an armchair covered in a black-and-red upholstery that made my eyes hurt.
Downey was sitting in the chair. Easier than looking at it, I guess. I rolled a desk chair over to face him.
He stared at me for a long moment. “I’m going to believe your story. For now. Looking at the video footage, we saw you ringing the bell, then Freddie and his doofuses filmed themselves laughing at you and calling you names. Then the screen went blank, so if you were picking the lock, there’s no way of knowing.”
It seemed prudent not to respond.
“What about the junkie you came looking for?” he asked.
“Judy Binder. I’m thinking she might have been a guest in the apartment next door. I found where she, or some woman, anyway, slid out the back door and under the fence. She fled another drug murder downstate two days ago.”
That got Downey’s attention. We spent a good ten minutes going over the Palfry murder, the connection between Freddie Walker and Derrick Schlafly, between Judy Binder and both men. I gave him Sheriff Kossel’s cell phone number down in Palfry, but added that I knew very little, that I was looking for Judy as a favor for her elderly mother.
“Thought you said a doctor was involved, Warchosi.”
So he’d been listening all along. “Warshawski,” I corrected.
He stared at me. “You related to the auto-parts people?”
“No.” I sighed, repeating my standard line, including the Yiddish writer. “Going back to Judy Binder, she called her doctor. I heard the message on the answering machine. Judy was terrified. The doctor sent me to Judy’s mother. Sheriff Kossel down in Palfry asked me to check on Freddie Walker.”
I paused, but Downey only fingered his mustache. I added, “Judy Binder has a son, kid of about twenty, who’s also gone missing. I didn’t see any sign of him next door. Did you find anything to say he might have been around?”
“Warshawski the Yiddish-Writing PI, you know what it’s like in a drug house: guys and the occasional gal have been camping out in some of the empty apartments downstairs, shooting, smoking, snorting, leaving crap behind that I don’t want to touch with six pairs of gloves on. If the three Wise Men had been here we wouldn’t be able to tell except by the camel droppings. If you have prints from the kid, or a DNA sample, we’ll sort them out when the techs finish with the scene. I can tell you this much for nothing: someone broke into one of these drawers”—he gestured at the desk—“and helped themselves to a fistful of dollars. We found twenties and hundreds floating around. The sarge and I were sorely tempted, weren’t we, Rodman?”
Sergeant Rodman grunted, but didn’t smile. You don’t joke about tens of thousands of dollars in drug loot, I guess.
Downey kept me for another fifteen minutes, just because he was frustrated, but in the end he told Rodman to give me back my Smith & Wesson.
When the sergeant pulled my pistol out of his pocket, my picklocks came with it, jangling to the floor.
“If we keep these, you going to buy another set?” Downey asked me.
“More than likely.”
“Give ’em back,” Downey told Rodman.
“Looey—they’re crime scene evidence,” his sergeant protested.
“Nah, they’re evidence of some Yiddish-writing detective’s stupidity. I still don’t know what Rawlings sees in you,” Downey added as I stuck my picks into a vest pocket.
“I look better in the fresh air,” I said.
“I’ll take your word for it.” His phone was ringing; he pressed the talk button and forgot about me.
It was past five now, glue-time on the expressway. I stuck to the side streets. They took just as long, but weren’t as hard on the nerves. Kids were out playing, people were sitting on their porches talking. I passed boys shooting hoops and prayed that none of them would ever go through the door of a place like Freddie Walker’s apartment.
I swung by the emergency clinic to check on my waif and learned that Mr. Contreras had already been in. They’d let him visit the dog; he’d shelled out the seven hundred dollars they needed for her continuing care. The vet thought if all went well, we could take her home in another week, which made me realize life can always become more complicated.
Back in my own place, I took another fumigating shower, washing off the greasy glass, the cockroach eggs, the sight of all that spattered blood and bone, the sound of Ladonna’s racking cough. I was hoping to slip out for the evening, but I’d forgotten texting a reporter friend when I decided to go into Walker’s building.
Murray Ryerson arrived as I was putting on a black sundress and sandals.
“I thought your boyfriend was on the West Coast. You getting some action on the side?” Murray asked.
“Just when I’m feeling sorry for you, you remind me of why I shouldn’t,” I said, pushing past him to the door.
“Sorry, Warshawski, sorry!” He held up his hands, traffic cop style, to stop me. “Let me have the highs or lows or whatever of the shoot-out in Austin. I picked up the main points on the TV feeds, but you had a front-row seat.”
By the time I’d finished describing Palfry, my search for Judy, the gunfight I’d been in this afternoon, Mr. Contreras had shown up. He’d heard about the shoot-out on the six-o’clock news, so I had to go through the story all over again. Mr. Contreras doesn’t like Murray, so he was annoyed that I hadn’t told him first. He spent ten minutes chewing me out for not taking him out to Austin with me. That was a good reality check: I hadn’t believed things could have been worse, but at least I’d been spared Mr. Contreras trying to intercept Freddie’s and Vire’s bullets.
The three of us went out, not for the lovely dinner at a slow-food trattoria I’d been imagining, but to the local cafe where Mr. Contreras and Murray could have the big burgers they were craving. After a day of guns and blood, hamburgers dripping red turned my stomach. I left the two men eating in uneasy silence and went home to cook up a pot of pasta. I had some good cheese, a half-drunk bottle of wine. I sat on the back porch with the dogs, listening to a CD of Jake’s High Plainsong group, and slowly felt some peace return to my spirit.
Jake himself called a little later. He hadn’t caught anything in his deep-sea expedition, but he’d had a lot of fun. I’d caught someone, but had had no fun at all. Which proves something, I’m not sure what. Still, while I sat on the porch, he played me a lullaby on his bass. I went into bed a happier detective than I’d been an hour earlier.