Sara Paretsky - Burn Marks

When I got into the Chevy, Peppy looked at me expectantly. I’d forgotten I had her. It wasn’t fair to make her sit while I tried to track down Roz, but I was afraid if I took her home I wouldn’t be able to goad myself back into action.

“Sorry, girl,” I said, turning on the ignition. “Terry and John both know who owns that bracelet, wouldn’t you say? So why won’t they tell me?”

Peppy looked at me anxiously-she didn’t know, either. A small procession of cars was moving north up State Street. I waited for them to pass so I could make a U. The tail of the procession was Michael’s silver Corvette. I tried honking and waving, but he either didn’t see me in the fading light or chose to act as though he hadn’t. I could try to catch up with him to ask him about Elena but I didn’t feel like running into McGonnigal again tonight.

I drove north to Congress. The potholes and derelict buildings gradually melted into the convention hotels fringing the south rim of the Loop. After I turned west on the Congress and speeded up, the Chevy gave an ominous whine. My stomach jolted again.

“Not at thirty,” I lectured the car. “You gotta get me around town a few more years. A few more days, anyway.”

The car paid no heed to me but increased its nerve-wrenching noise as I took it up to forty. When I brought it back down to twenty-five, the engine quieted some, but I really couldn’t drive it on the Ryan. I left the Congress at Halsted and plodded my way north and west to Logan Square.

Roz Fuentes’s campaign headquarters were in her old community organization offices on California Avenue. The front window held flags of Mexico, the U.S., and Puerto Rico, with the Mexicans on the left and the U.S. in the middle. Underneath the Mexican flag hung a huge portrait of Roz, beaming her two-hundred-watt smile, with the slogan in Spanish and English: “Roz Fuentes, for Chicago.” Not original, but serviceable.

The office was still brightly lighted. We were five weeks from election and people would be working into the dawn at different headquarters all over the county. On top of that Roz was still functioning as a conduit for community problems with the city on housing and crime. According to the papers, that was a thorn for the alderman-a gent of the old macho school-but Roz was too popular in the neighborhood for him to try going head-to-head with her.

Beyond the plate-glass window people were working with the noisy camaraderie a successful campaign brings in its wake. A dozen or so men and women sat at desks in the big front room talking, answering the wildly ringing phones, shouting questions at each other in Spanish or English. No one paid any attention to me, so I wandered past the campaign workers to the back, where Roz used to have a small private office.

Another small knot of people was sitting in there now, a nice landscape of Roz’s multiracial appeal: a white man of about thirty and two Hispanic women-one plump and fiftyish, the other not long out of high school-were deep in conversation with a wiry black woman in hornrims. I didn’t recognize the white man but I knew the woman in the horn-rims-it was Velma Riter.

The four of them fell silent when I came in. Velma, who was seated behind the beaten-up desk in Roz’s swivel chair, looked up at me fiercely. To call her expression hostile was about as descriptive as calling Niagara Falls wet- it didn’t begin to convey the intensity she was putting out.

After a puzzled glance from Velma to me, the fiftyish woman asked, “Can we help you, miss?” She wasn’t unfriendly, just brisk-they were conducting business and needed to get back to it.

“I’m V. I. Warshawski,” I said. “I was hoping to find Roz.”

The plump woman held out a palm toward the high school grad without speaking; the young woman handed over her typed sheet of paper. She scanned it and said, “Right now she’s finishing a community meeting on gangs in Pilsen. After that she’s going to Schaumburg for a fund-raising dinner. If you tell me what you need I can help you-I’m her chief assistant.”

“You’re not content with trying to stab Roz in the back-you’re coming in here to put poison in her coffee, is that it, Vic?” Velma spoke up venomously.

The young woman looked flustered at Velma’s open anger. She stood up hurriedly and picked up a stack of papers. Murmuring something about getting them typed before she went home, she excused herself.

“Are these people so close to you that you want me to talk in front of them?” I asked Velma.

“They know you’ve been trying to smear Roz.”

I leaned against the door, my shoulders too tired to keep me upright without a prop. “Have you seen some kind of smear story in the papers or on TV that you can trace to me?”

“People are talking.” Velma held herself rigidly. “Everyone on the street knows you want to stab her in the back.”

“That wouldn’t be because you told them that, would it, Velma?” I couldn’t bear to look at her angry face; I turned my gaze to a peeling poster on the wall showcasing a quote from Simón Bolívar that proclaimed liberty for all peoples.

“Why don’t you tell us why you’ve come, Ms, Warshawski? We’re all close to Roz, we don’t have any secrets from each other,” Roz’s chief assistant said.

I moved uninvited onto the metal folding chair the young woman had vacated. “Maybe first you can tell me your names.”

“I’m Camellia Maldonado and this is Loren Richter. He’s managing the finances for Roz’s campaign.”

Richter flashed a perfect Ipana smile. “And I can assure you there’s nothing amiss with them.”

“Splendid.” I put my arms on the desk and propped my chin on my hands. “I’m really exhausted. If Velma’s told you all about me, you know I almost died in a fire in an abandoned hotel last week. I’m still not quite over it, so I’m not going to make any effort to be subtle.

“Two weeks ago at a fund-raiser out at Boots’s place Roz made a special point of taking me to one side and asking me not to sandbag her campaign. Since that was the farthest thing from my mind, I was irked to say the least. And it made me think she must be hiding some secret.”

“If it was secret, then it was none of your business, Warshawski,” Velma interjected.

I sat up at that. “She made it my business. She-or anyway, Marissa Duncan-got me to put my name to a public roster announcing my support. And I backed it up with more money than I gave to all other political candidates this year. If Roz was pulling off something illegal or unethical behind my name, I damned well did have a right to know about it.”

I was panting by the time I finished. I took a minute to calm myself and focus my thoughts. Camellia and Loren were sitting stiffly, willing to hear me out but ready to slam the door on me as soon as I’d finished.

“When I started asking questions a long list of people began telling me I was a pain in the ass and to mind my own business. The first, of course, was Velma here, followed by Roz. And then, interestingly enough, Ralph MacDonald, the big guy himself-Boots’s pal, you know-warned me off. A little more subtly than Velma and Roz, but a warning nonetheless. And after the fire he warned me again, this time not nearly as subtly.”

Ralph’s name took them all by surprise. If Boots had told Roz he was siccing MacDonald on me, she’d kept it to herself.

“Well, when I was at Roz’s fund-raiser she had her cousin with her-Luis Schmidt-and Carl Martinez, his partner in Alma Mejicana. And it seemed to me that it was they who pointed me out to her, suggesting I was up to no good.”

I stopped. Something in that picture, the scene of Wunsch and Grasso huddled with Furey and the two men from Alma Mejicana, was tugging at my brain. If I wasn’t so tired, if Velma wasn’t so hostile, I’d get it. It was because he’d been talking to Wunsch and Grasso that Schmidt warned Roz. They were all connected, Wunsch and Grasso, Alma, Farmworks. And Farmworks was connected to Seligman, through Rita Donnelly’s daughter Star. Did that mean that Wunsch and Grasso were connected to the arson? My brain spun around.