Sara Paretsky - Burn Marks

“You’ve been hiding behind Bobby Mallory for years, Warshawski. It’s time you learned to fight on your own.”

I felt him moving toward me just in time to back my chair away. The blow he’d aimed for my head got me on the diaphragm.

“I presume this room is wired. Please let the record show that Lieutenant Montgomery just hit a witness in a bombing case,” I shouted.

He aimed another fist at me. I slid from my chair under the legs of the table. Montgomery got down on his hands and knees to pull me out, shouting abuse at me, calling me names out of porn flicks. I scooted away from him. He went flat on his abdomen and grabbed my left ankle. I twisted away and got to my feet on the other side of the table.

Just as I staggered upright Officer Neely walked in. Her professional mask cracked at the sight of a lieutenant on his belly scrabbling around under an interrogation table.

“He lost a contact,” I said helpfully, “We’ve both been down there looking, but he started confusing my ankle with his eyeballs so I thought I’d get out of the way.”

Neely didn’t say anything. By the time Montgomery had climbed awkwardly back to his feet, she had her face composed in its usual rigid lines. She spoke in a monotone. “Lieutenant Mallory heard you were questioning this witness and wanted to talk to her for a few minutes.”

Montgomery glared at her, furious at being caught looking like a fool. I felt sorry for her, her career buffeted by being the wrong person to show up at a bad moment.

“I don’t think the lieutenant here has anything else useful to say to me. He’s got his facts without asking a single question. Let’s go, Officer.” Unfortunately I didn’t feel sorry enough to keep my mouth shut.

I opened the door to the interrogation room and headed down the hall, not waiting to see what Officer Neely would do. She caught up with me on the stairs. I wanted to say something helpful and sisterly to her in support of her law-enforcement career, but I was too badly rattled to think of anything very chipper. She was looking rigidly ahead, making it impossible to know if she was embarrassed, disgusted, or just not very responsive. On the third floor we silently crossed the Violent Crimes area to Bobby’s tiny office along the far wall. Officer Neely knocked and opened the door.

“Miss Warshawski, sir. Did you want me to take notes?”

Bobby was on the phone. He shook his head and motioned me to a chair. Officer Neely shut the door behind her with a sharp snap.

Bobby’s desk and walls were crammed with photographs-pictures of yellow birds in flight, gap-toothed children grinning as they sported his dress uniform cap, Eileen hand in hand with her eldest daughter as a bride. He liked to shift them around every so often so he could see them with a fresh eye. Ordinarily I hunt for the shots of Tony or Gabriella-or even the one of me at five sitting on Tony’s lap. Today I didn’t really care. I sat gripping my hands on the side of the metal chair, waiting for him to finish his conversation. Next to Montgomery, Bobby was the last person I wanted to see today.

“Okay, Vicki, tell me what’s going on and make it fast. I had a call from your lawyer, which is how I knew you were down here, but it doesn’t make me happy to run interference for you with another man on the force.”

I took a deep breath and came out with a tolerably coherent version of the day’s events. Bobby grunted and asked a few questions, like how come I knew it was a bomb and how long it had taken Monty to get there after Jerry called in the report on his car radio.

When I got to the end Bobby made a face. “You’re in an awkward spot, Vicki. I keep telling you not to play around in police business and this just proves my point. You came to me to get you out of hot water you boiled up yourself-”

“What do you mean?” I was so furious, my head seemed to rise a foot from my body. “I did not , repeat not , put that bomb in my car engine. Someone did, but instead of trying to get a description of the men who did it-who may have done it-from a pretty good witness, the police are trying to charge me with attempted suicide.”

“I’m not saying you planted that device, Vicki. I know you well enough to realize you’re not that unbalanced. But if you hadn’t been playing around with arson and a whole lot of things I told you to stay out of, you wouldn’t be in this mess at all.”

He looked at me sternly, daddy to naughty child. “Now I’m going to use a few chips on your behalf, Vicki, with a guy who’s not too easy to work with. In return I want you to promise me that you are not going to touch this business any further. Let alone the trouble you’ve got yourself into, since you started in on that fire three weeks ago you’ve got my whole unit stirred up. You were in last night with some damned piece of jewelry that has the boys in an uproar now. I just can’t have it. Do you understand?”

I pressed my lips together. “I brought in a man’s bracelet I found under my couch because I though Finchley might have dropped it when he and Montgomery were in last week. McGonnigal flipped out when he saw it because he knew it was Furey’s and thought I was flaunting it at him. It was only late last night that I realized it belonged to Furey and came to see what it was doing in my apartment.

“He’d given it to Elena, Bobby, to Elena and the dead junkie you went to see at the Rapelec site two weeks ago. It was just a little extortion, something to keep them from reporting that they’d seen him-”

Bobby slammed his palm hard on the desk. One of the pictures teetered and fell over the side. “I’ve had enough out of you!” he roared. “That’s a loathsome suggestion. You’ve been treated too easy for too long, that’s your problem, so when things don’t go your way you manufacture conspiracy theories. You ought to know better than that, than to come in here and try to lay that kind of sh-something like that on me. Now get out and go home. I told you two weeks ago to stop stirring up my department and I meant it. This had better be the last time I see you around here.”

I got up and looked steadily at him. “You don’t want to know what I’ve learned? If I’m right, Montgomery and Furey could be involved in one of the ugliest little scandals to hit this department in a long time.”

Bobby scowled ferociously. “Spare me. I hear enough trash in here every day without listening to you fling garbage around about one of my own men, I’ve told you dozens of times that you’re in a line of work that’s bad for you, and this is perfect proof of it. You don’t know how to reason, how to follow a chain of evidence to a conclusion, so you start making up paranoid fantasies. If I tell you I think you need a good man and a family, you get on your high horse, but women your age who don’t marry start getting strange ideas. I don’t want to see you ending up like that crazy aunt of yours, propositioning young men for the price of a bottle.”

I stared down at him not knowing whether to scream or laugh. “Bobby, that psychology was old before you were born, the old repressed-spinster routine, and even if it were true, it sure wouldn’t apply to me. I just hope you aren’t laying that line on Officer Neely, or about the time I hit West Madison you’re going to be facing a harassment suit so big it’ll make your head spin. Anyway, if you have to think of me as a crackpot virgin to keep your faith in the department intact, remember when the pieces come breaking around you that I tried to warn you.”

Bobby was on his feet now, too, panting, his face red. “Get out of my office and don’t come back here. Your parents were two of my best friends, but I’d have broken every bone in your body if you talked to me the way you spoke to them, and look where it’s led-how dare you talk to me like this. Get out!”