Sara Paretsky - Burn Marks

Still, if I kept my hands on the edge of the tub, I could take a proper bath. I turned on the water, threw in some milk bath, and toddled off to the kitchen to make coffee. Since I could use only my fingertips to handle the kettle, it was a slow and tiresome experience. By the time I had a cup poured the bath was close to overflowing. I climbed in carefully, holding the coffee in my fingers. When I sank down cross-legged and great wave swept over the side of the tub but my hands stayed dry.

I lay soaking until the water became tepid, thinking of nothing at first, then going back to my painful headwork of the previous night. I still couldn’t understand why Cerise’s death had terrified Elena into flight, unless someone had pumped Cerise full of heroin and left her to die. I couldn’t move on that idea, though. I didn’t have any evidence-it was just the only explanation that I could come up with. And how had Elena known? She’d found it out in the twenty-four hours between my visit to her and her panicky exit in the middle of the night. While she was lying mute behind a protective barricade of doctors and nurses I didn’t have any way of finding out. I’d have to drop it for now.

What I could do was take a look at Alma Mejicana. I put the coffee cup on the windowsill and looked at my palms again, grimacing. Tomorrow would be the ideal time to slide into their offices, but I didn’t think I’d be much more healed by then than I was this morning.

I soaped down and pulled myself cautiously from the tub. Drying off presented more difficulties. It’s only when you can’t use them that you realize how much you need your hands. The third time I dropped the towel I left it on the floor and climbed back into bed to finish drying.

The front doorbell rang just as I was trying to hoist jeans over my still-damp rump. I’d forgotten Robin was coming. I slid my arms through a zip-up jacket and managed to have it closed by the time he got to the third-floor landing.

“Vic! Good to see you in one piece.” He looked me over critically. “You don’t seem nearly as battered as I figured from the news reports. How you feeling?”

“Better than I did a few days ago. My head’s clear, that’s the main thing.”

He held out a bunch of late-summer flowers picked from his own tiny, carefully tended plot. I got him to carry them into the kitchen and fill a pitcher for me. Something about the bright gold daisies on the table suddenly gave me an enormous appetite. I wanted pancakes, eggs, bacon, a whole farmer’s breakfast.

Even though he’d eaten several hours ago, Robin obligingly agreed to go to the corner diner with me. He even overcame his own nausea to dress my hands for me. I thought with my palms padded I could manage a bra, but the hooks still were too much for me. It was one thing to get my hands dressed, another to need help with a bra. I put on an outsize sweatshirt and headed downstairs without one.

Mr. Contreras and the dog were coming in the front door as we left. He looked Robin over with critical jealousy. Peppy jumped up on me and started licking my face. I played with her ears and introduced the two of them to Robin.

“Where you off to, doll?”

“Breakfast. I haven’t had a proper meal since Monday night.”

“I told you yesterday you was looking peaked. The princess and me would have brought you breakfast if you’d asked, saved you a trip out. I only didn’t come up because I figured you was still asleep.”

“I need the exercise,” I said. “Robin here will make sure I don’t overdo it.”

“Well, you call me if you need help. You be sure and give him my number, doll. You pass out or something in the restaurant, I don’t want to see it in the papers first.”

I gave him my solemn word that he would have the honor of providing me smelling salts if needed. He scowled at us but went on inside with Peppy.

“Who is he?” Robin demanded when we were out of earshot. “Your grandfather?”

“He’s just my downstairs neighbor. He’s retired and I’m his hobby.”

“Why’s he so rattled about you going out to eat?”

“It’s not breakfast-it’s breakfast with you. If he was twenty years younger, he’d be beating up any guy who came visiting me. It’s tiresome, but he’s essentially so good-hearted I can’t bring myself to punch him down.”

The four blocks to the Belmont Diner wore me out. I’ve been through convalescence before. I know the early part is slow and then your strength comes back pretty fast, but it still was frustrating. I had to work to get the tension in my stomach to subside.

Most of the waitresses at the diner know me-I probably catch at least one meal a week there and sometimes more. They’d all read about my misadventures and crowded around the table to find out how I was doing and who the talent I’d come in with was. Barbara, whose section I was in, shooed the others away when they started offering juice and rolls. When I ordered a cheese omelet, potatoes, bacon, toast, and a side of fruit with yogurt, she shook her head.

“You’re not going to eat all that, Vic-it’s twice what you get when you’ve just run five miles.”

I insisted, but she was right. I got through half the omelet and the potatoes but couldn’t even make a pro forma effort with the fruit. My stomach strained uncomfortably; all I felt up to was napping, but I forced myself to talk a little shop with Robin.

“You know anything about the fire at the Prairie Shores? What kind of accelerant they used, whether things looked the same as at the Indiana Arms?”

He shook his head. “The Indiana Arms job was more sophisticated because there were people on the premises. It looks as though they put a fuse in the wires in the night man’s quarters when they’d gotten him off to the track. They had a trailer going down to a stock of paraffin in the basement and a timer so they didn’t have to be anywhere near the place. The fire you were in they didn’t have to be that careful-they just dumped gasoline in the kitchen and at the doors to the basement, set the thing off, and took off.” He looked at me soberly. “You were lucky, V.I. Damned lucky.”

“That’s what gets the job done. Napoleon wanted lucky generals, not theoretical whizzes.” It gets me edgy when people lecture me on a narrow escape. I had been lucky, but all the luck in the world wouldn’t have helped if I didn’t also keep myself in top physical and mental shape. Why didn’t my skill count for anything?

“Yeah, but he was beaten in a big way in the end… Do you have any idea who did this to you? My management is concerned that it came out of your investigation into the Indiana Arms-that you’re sitting on information you haven’t shared with us.”

I tried to keep my temper even. “I don’t know who did it. It’s possible it’s connected to your claim, but the only person who can tell me is lying doggo. If I had that kind of information, I wouldn’t be so unprofessional as to keep it to myself.”

He hesitated, toying with the salt shaker. “I’m just wondering-my boss and I were talking yesterday-we work with a lot of investigators. Maybe we should bring someone else in on the Seligman case.”

I sat stiffly in my booth. “I realize I don’t have the results you want, but I’ve done the financial checks and a pretty good rundown on the organization. If you want someone else to talk to the night watchman or explore what Seligman’s children may have been doing, that’s your call, of course.”

“It’s not your competence, Vic, but-well, this assault on you just has people questioning your judgment.”

I tried to relax. “I went down there because I got an SOS from my aunt. Since she has a strong proclivity for alcoholic histrionics I wanted to see her myself first rather than share that part of my family life with outsiders. If I’d had any serious inkling of danger, I would have handled things differently. But I am really, really fed up with being chewed out by everyone from doctors to the police to you for saving her and escaping from danger with my own life intact.”