Sara Paretsky - Burn Marks

“Good point. I’ll check the reports when I get back to the station.” He swooped around a car in an intersection and speeded into the southbound Broadway traffic. It’s that kind of maneuver I’ve always liked least in him.

“You don’t have any idea why she would have taken off like that, do you?” he asked.

“No. Something must have scared her, but I don’t know what. She was kind of friendly with the young woman who died at the Rapelec site. I know she was shaken when I told her about it, but she didn’t take off until late the night after I told her. I don’t have a clue. I suppose I will have to talk to some of the residents.”

He pulled up in front of my building and gunned the engine a bit. “Despite what that guy Cameron said, Vic, I think people will talk to me. Why don’t you let me handle it-you’re too close to the situation and that always makes for a bad interrogation.”

I agreed readily, even willingly. After a pause I asked if they’d turned up anything on Cerise to explain why she’d chosen the Rapelec site to shoot up.

“Nope. We only came out because Boots has some money in the project and he wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything funny about a dead body there. He’s sensitive to scandals around election time. Uncle Bobby was plenty mad about being dragged into it, I can tell you. And Ernie was pissed that you came around afterwards.”

“I know-he called and told me.”

Michael fiddled with the ignition key, “Look, Vic-I’m sorry I acted so dumb that night. It was just jealousy seeing you with another guy when you told me you were too busy to go out last week.”

“He was a potential client. One thing kind of led to another.”

Vinnie’s Mazda pulled up in front of us. He got out with another man, a tall, loosely knit fellow who seemed to be on pretty friendly terms with him. Well, well. Who would have thought it.

“I was wondering if I could come in with you, sort of patch things up.”

“No,” I said as gently as possible. “We’ve been spinning around too much this last week, Michael. I can’t put it all back together right now.”

“So you’ll be off screwing this other guy, this client,” he said bitterly.

“None of your business, Michael-you know that.”

He slapped the steering wheel but didn’t say anything. “Ah, hell, Vic. If I make another scene now, you’ll never give me the time of day again. I’ll let you know when we run your aunt to earth.”

I got out of the car. I’d barely shut the door when he was off down Racine with a great roar from the engine.

Tearing Up the Ryan

I slept badly, my dreams again haunted by Elena. I was searching for her through the barren corridors of midnight Chicago. I could hear her whining “Vicki, sweetie, where are you when I need you?” but I never actually saw her. Michael Furey stood nearby shaking his head: “I can’t help you, Vic, because you wouldn’t let me inside.”

I got up around seven, my neck stiff from my restless sleep. I moved sluggishly through my morning routine, wondering if I should have invited Michael up last night. Would he still question Elena’s hotel mates as thoroughly since I’d sent him packing? Should I try to do it myself? Did I even care where my aunt had gone, let alone why? Even as the last bitter thought went through my head I felt ashamed. Who else did she have to care about her, if not me?

Maybe Zerlina Ramsay. I considered her. Of course relations between the two were a bit peculiar, but she might be someone Elena would consider a friend. I drank a second cup of coffee, then took Peppy on a hurried mini-run to the lake. By the time I showered and changed into a respectable pair of trousers, a cotton-ramie beige sweater and a good jacket, it was still just shy of nine.

The penalty for rising and shining early is lolling in traffic. If I’d had a proper breakfast instead of toast while I dressed, I’d have gotten to the hospital just as fast. As it was I only met with disappointment-Zerlina had checked out on Friday. No, the hospital didn’t know where she’d gone, and even if they did, they really couldn’t tell me.

I stomped back to the Chevy in annoyance. How the hell would I ever find her? All I knew about her was that her granddaughter’s other grandmother was called Maisie. Cerise’s boyfriend’s first name was Otis. That gave me a great starting point-comb every apartment in Chicago asking for Otis or Maisie and when people answered to those names find out if they knew someone named Zerlina.

Zerlina’s knowing anything was a long shot, anyway. I’d only gone zooming down to the hospital because it was something to do. Otherwise I was better off leaving the search for Elena to the police. They had the resources; Michael had broadcast her description. Someone would find her.

I drove back north to the Loop, parking my car in the underground garage. Until Ajax asked me to proceed I couldn’t justify any further work on the Indiana Arms. It was time to do some of my bread-and-butter financial work and to send out query letters to small or midsize firms who could use my expert advice. After going to my office to pick up the client letters with the names of their would-be executives, I headed to the Daley Center.

Somehow, though, instead of looking up John Doe and Jane Roe, I found myself checking on Rosalyn Fuentes and her cousin Luis Schmidt. No one was after Roz, but Luis had started several actions a couple of years back. He’d sued the city for turning down his bid to repave the parking lot at the Humboldt Park Community Service Center, He claimed that they had discriminated against him as a Hispanic in favor of a black contractor who was a crony of the mayor’s. That action went back to 1985. More recently, in 1987, he had sued the county on similar charges, this time for not getting the job to build a new court building in Deerfield. His partner, Carl Martinez, had been a party to both suits. He’d withdrawn the complaints about six months ago without a settlement. That sounded as though someone had slipped him a few bucks to soothe his hurt feelings.

I shrugged. If it had happened that way it wasn’t savory, but it was just too common to be the kind of dynamite that would cost Roz an election. If Chicago has one law that everyone obeys, it’s “Look out for your own.” Still, thinking back over Boots’s party, it seemed to me it was Luis who had warned Roz about me-it was only after he’d been talking to her, pointing at me, that she’d come back and sought me out.

I went upstairs to look at partnership and corporation filings. Roz owned a minority interest in Alma Mejicana, her cousin’s contracting business, but no one could conceivably imagine that as even a venial sin. If Ralph MacDonald had been telling the truth and Roz was hiding a youthful indiscretion, then maybe something had happened in her Mexican childhood. If so, I didn’t give a damn and I didn’t see why she would expect me to.

“None of your business, Vic,” I said aloud. “Remember-some people think you’re a pain in the butt.”

A man using the microfiche reader next to me looked up, affronted. I stared intently at the screen in front of me, pursed my lips, scribbled a note, and pretended I hadn’t heard-or said-anything.

It really was time to get to my clients. Still, I made a genuine note, writing down Schmidt’s name, Alma Mejicana, and the address on south Ashland. Maybe there was a way to get a look at his sales figures. Or I could go over to the county side and see if any contracts had been going to Schmidt recently.

That turned out to be a fruitless idea. They did keep a list of contracts, of course, but I had to know the project name to find out who’d gotten the bid. They were not going to let me go through the myriad files looking for one contractor. I sucked on my teeth. Now it was really time to get to work.