Sara Paretsky - Burn Marks

“Hi,” I said brightly as we passed. “Just getting off the night shift. Have a good day.”

He pretended not to hear me, crossing to the east side of the street as I spoke. Try to be neighborly and you only get stiffed for your pains.

Like LBJ or the Duke of Wellington, Elena could sleep anywhere, anytime. When I opened the kitchen door I could hear her snores oozing from the living room. I also caught my favorite smell, cigarette smoke. Cerise was at the dining-room table, staring moodily at nothing, chain-smoking.

“Good morning,” I said as politely as I could. “I know you’re really upset about your baby, but please don’t smoke in here.”

She shot me a hostile look but stubbed her cigarette out in the saucer she’d been using. I took it to the kitchen and tried to scrub the tobacco stains from it. After a few minutes she followed me in and slumped herself at the table. I offered her breakfast but she wanted only coffee. I put water on to boil and got the beans out of the freezer.

“What floor did your mother live on?”

She looked at me blankly and rubbed her bare arms.

“At the Indiana Arms. I’ll probably need that information if someone is going to search for Katterina.”

“Fifth floor,” she answered after another long pause. “Five twenty-two. It was hard on her on account of the elevator didn’t work, but she couldn’t get nothing lower down.”

“When did you leave the baby with your mother?”

Again she stared at me, but this time I thought there was an element of calculation in her gaze. “We did it Wednesday. Before we left town.” She rubbed her arms some more. “It’s too cold in here. I need to smoke.”

It felt warm to me, but I was dressed; she was still in the outsized T-shirt I’d lent her. I went into my bedroom and got a jacket. She put it on but continued to rub her arms.

I ground the beans and poured boiling water through them. “What time Wednesday?”

“You trying to say I saw the fire and shouldn’ta left my baby?” Her tone was sullen but her eyes were still watchful.

I poured more water into the beans and tried to muster some empathy. Her baby was almost certainly dead. She was with a stranger and a white woman at that. She was terrified of the institutions of law and society and I was conversant with them, so to her I was part of them. She wanted to smoke and I wouldn’t let her.

Thinking about all this didn’t make me feel like running over to embrace her, but it did help me stifle the more extreme expressions of impatience. “Someone set that fire,” I said carefully. “Someone hurt your mother and may have hurt your baby. If you were there Wednesday night, you might have seen the arsonist. Maybe he-or she-or they-were hanging around. If you saw someone, we could give the police a description, something to start an investigation with.”

She shook her head violently. “I didn’t see no one. We go there at three in the afternoon. We give Katterina to my mama. We leave for Wisconsin. Okay?”

“Okay.” I poured out coffee for her. “Why are these questions upsetting you so much?”

She was trembling. She took the mug with both hands to steady it. “You acting like I did something bad, like it be my fault my baby’s hurt.”

“No, Cerise, not at all. I’m really sorry if that’s how I sounded. I don’t mean that at all.” I tried to smile. “I’m a detective, you know. I ask questions for a living. It’s a hard habit to break.”

She buried her face in the mug and didn’t answer me. I gave it up and went into my bedroom. The bed was still unmade. My running clothes had fallen on the floor at the end when I’d kicked the covers off in the night. Untangling my sweats from the bedclothes, I stuffed them into the closet and pulled the covers back up onto the bed. The room wasn’t exactly ready for House Beautiful , but it was all the housekeeping I was in the humor for.

I lay on the bed and tried to remember the name of the insurance man I’d met at the Indiana Arms on Thursday. It was a bird; that had struck me particularly at the time because his bright-eyed curiosity had made him seem birdlike. I shut my eyes and let my mind drift. Robin. That was it. I couldn’t delve the last name from my memory hole, but Robin would get me to him.

I pulled the phone from the bedside table and put it on my stomach to dial. When the Ajax operator connected me with the arson and fraud division, I asked the cheery receptionist for Robin.

“He’s right here-I’ll put him on for you.”

The phone banged in my ear-she must have dropped the receiver-then I got a tenor. “Robin Bessinger here.”

Bessinger. Of course. “Robin, it’s V. I. Warshawski. I met you at the Indiana Arms last week when you were digging through the rubble there.”

“V.I. You the detective?”

“Uh-huh.” I sat up and put the phone back on the bedside table. “You said if anybody’s been killed, the police would have had a homicide investigation set up. So I assume everybody was rescued?”

“As far as I know.” I’d forgotten how cautious he was. A bird making sure the worm wasn’t really a rifle barrel. “You know anything to the contrary?”

“A baby was staying there Wednesday night. Staying with its grandmother on the fifth floor.” He started to interrupt and I said hastily, “I know, I know. Against the rules. The grandmother has disappeared-maybe one of the smoke victims-so I don’t know if they found the baby or not.”

“A baby in there. Sweet Jesus, no… I don’t know anything about it, but I’ll call someone at the police and get back to you. Was it your friend? The one you said had been burned out?”

I’d forgotten referring to Elena as my friend. “No, not her. The grandmother was sort of a friend of hers, though, and the mother just got back into town and found her little girl and her own mama both missing. She’s pretty distraught.” Or hostile. Or fried.

“Okay.” He fumbled around for a moment. “I’m just real sorry. I’ll call you back in a couple of minutes.”

I gave him my phone number and hung up. I looked distastefully at my bedroom. Because I’m there only to sleep I don’t usually pay much attention to it. The queen-size bed takes up a good deal of the available space. Since the closet is large I keep the dresser in there to have enough room to walk around, but it still makes me feel hemmed in to spend much time there during the day. More than ever I resented Elena’s snoring presence down the hall, pinning me to one room in my own home.

I paced the short distance from the door to the head of the bed a few times but I kept banging my shin on the bedstead, I couldn’t possibly practice my singing in these quarters, especially not with Cerise in the kitchen. Finally I lay on the floor between the window and the bed and did leg lifts. After forty or so with each leg Robin called back. He sounded subdued.

“V. I. Warshawski?” He stumbled a bit on my last name. “I-uh, I’ve been talking with the police. They say the fire department didn’t bring out any children from that place last week. Are you sure the baby was in there?”

I hesitated. “Reasonably sure. I can’t swear to it, though, because I don’t know any of the people involved.”

“They’re going to send a team out to comb the rubble, to see if they can find any, well, any remains. They’d like you to be available to come downtown to meet with them, though.”

I promised to check in with my answering service every hour if I left my apartment. Slowly hanging up the phone, I wondered what to say to Cerise. As I walked to the door Elena pounded on the other side.

“Yoo-hoo! Vicki! Victoria, I mean. Poor little Cerise isn’t feeling too hot. Can you come out and help me settle her upset tummy?”