Sara Paretsky - Burn Marks

Homerin waited patiently for me to dry my eyes and blow my nose. He asked if there was something specific I wanted to talk about, but the memories of my dying parents were too painful to mention to a stranger.

Instead I blurted out, “Is Lotty right? Am I going to get Alzheimer’s disease?”

A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. “She’s worried about you-that’s why she dragged me down here and got the house staff to agree to let me see you. I’m not a prophet, but three blows in seven years-it’s more than you need, but you’re not taking the regular pounding that a boxer does. I’d worry more about feeling better now. And give me a call if you have any unusual symptoms.”

He fished a card from his wallet and handed it to me: Mez Homerin, boy neurologist, with an address on north Michigan and another in Edgewater. “What kind of symptoms?” I asked suspiciously.

“Oh, blurred vision, trouble with your memory, any tingling in your fingers or toes. Don’t lie around worrying about them-I’ll be startled if you have any. Concentrate on getting your strength back. But please call me if you want to talk about any concerns.”

He put a gentle stress on “any” and I stupidly felt like crying again. “There is my aunt,” I said as assertively as I could. “Do you know how she’s doing?”

“Your aunt? Oh, the woman you rescued… She’d been hit on the head, right? Do you know if she’s here?”

I didn’t, but he said he’d find out and get a progress report for me. I’d been planning on getting up and dressing as soon as he left, but my crying bout had put the finishing touches to my fatigue. I was asleep almost before his hospital coat disappeared behind the curtain.

We Serve and Protect

It was Saturday before the pounding in my head receded completely. I’d gone home on Friday, admitting- only to myself-that Mez Homerin had been right: I was better off for the extra day of people waiting on me. As it was, Friday involved so many difficult encounters that by the time I went to bed I was wishing I’d stayed in the hospital. The worst was with the police-Homerin had shielded me from Roland Montgomery of the Bomb and Arson Squad.

Of course the cops were most anxious to speak with me. Montgomery had been in the emergency room with Mallory and Furey early Wednesday morning and he’d sent a subordinate to Reese both Wednesday and Thursday. Since I’d slept through most of Wednesday I only learned about the subordinate’s visit on Thursday. When Mez left me he encountered the detective in the hall. Their altercation led to a big red notice on my chart proclaiming “No visitors” and a lot of excitement among the orderlies and nurses who reported the episode to me in dramatic detail later.

I took a cab from the hospital to my car, which started with a reproachful groan that it kept up all the way to my apartment. Mr. Contreras saw me pull up a bit after noon. While I was sponging myself off as best I could without soaking my gauze mitts, he came to the door laden down with food.

“You shoulda let me know when you was coming home, doll. I could’ve come and got you-you shouldn’t be driving with your hands all wrapped up like that.”

“I just wanted to be by myself for a while. In the hospital you’re a twenty-four-hour-a-day freak show for every medical student in the city.”

“You shouldn’t try to do so much on your own, cookie. No shame in asking for help every now and then. And I know darn well you wouldn’t eat nothing this afternoon if I didn’t bring it to you, so you want to be alone, you say the word and the princess here and I’ll go, but not till we see you eat something.”

I gave up trying to hint him away, but made him wait in the living room while I finished washing and changing. Peppy, feeling no inhibitions, stayed next to me until I was done.

Lotty’d been right about one thing-my clothes stank so badly I could scarcely stand being in the same room with them, let alone the same body. I didn’t even want to wash them. Although it was my newest pair of jeans I stuffed them into a bag and put it outside my back door to cart down to the garbage.

Finally clean from my bra to my socks, I joined the old man. He’d prepared a special feast, much more food than I could deal with in my sickly state, but he was miffed that he’d had to hear all my news secondhand.

“If you was going off into danger like that, you might of notified me,” he grumbled. “‘Stead the first thing I know about it is the morning paper. That oversize teenager Ryerson putting in a story about ‘Chicago’s most troublesome private eye’ and I start reading and of course there you are, rescuing bodies from burning buildings, hit on the head, and not even a phone call to me from the hospital. I says to the princess here, I says, ‘You could be an orphan and you’d be the last to know.’”

Peppy thumped her tail to corroborate his story. Her liquid amber eyes gazed at me with unwavering intensity as I slowly chewed a piece of steak.

“Ever since my aunt came prancing into my life two weeks ago you’ve been riding me for getting you up in the middle of the night. I figured if I woke you up to tell you where I was going, I’d just get another lecture.”

“That’s not fair.” He was hurt and astonished that I could think such a thing. On top of that he was pretty darned tired of me leaving him standing on the sidelines while I went out and had all kinds of fabulous life-threatening adventures.

“It’s not the first time, doll. You forget how I helped you and Dr. Lotty out that time her clinic was attacked. You don’t remember how I took on them guys trying to break into your place. I may be seventy-seven but I’m in good shape, I’m still a good man in a fight.”

It was precisely because I had remembered his assistance that I tried never to involve him in the livelier aspects of my work. If I told him that, though, it would be just too painful for him. I skated around it, saying Elena was so prone to drunken fables, I hadn’t taken her claims of endangerment seriously. By the time I finished he was nodding portentously.

“I know just what you mean, doll. I used to work with a guy like that. Of course he was a danger to the whole shop, showing up drunk most days, and the ones he arrived sober he didn’t stay like that past lunchtime. There was the day he didn’t turn off the surface grinder, and Jake-you remember Jake-lost most of the little finger on his left hand, but Crenshaw-Crenshaw was the drunk- he claimed it was me using the machine when I wasn’t supposed to…”

His good humor restored, Mr. Contreras went on in this vein at some length. The happy drone of his voice, the weight of the meat in my stomach, the warm pleasure I felt at being back in my own home, sent me drowsing in my armchair. I held my hand down and let the dog lick my fingers while I nodded sleepily in tune to the old man’s speech.

The shrill burr of the phone startled me awake. I stretched an arm out to the piano and picked up the receiver.

“Tried to write your obit for you, Warshawski, but you made it through one more time. How many lives you got left, anyway? Three?”

It was Murray, with more vibrant energy than my head could handle. “I hear you called me the most troublesome detective in Chicago.”

“Private eye,” he corrected. “Nothing libelous in that-I checked with the legal department. You can sue me only if it’s not true. What I want to know is, who did it? Did it come out of Roz Fuentes’s camp or your dead junkie, Cerise?”

“Ask the cops-the city pays them to investigate arson and attempted murder.”