Sara Paretsky - Burn Marks

The last few words were on a crescendo so loud that they must have heard them on the street, let alone in the adjacent room. I managed to keep my head up and my steps steady and even to shut the door gently behind me. Everyone in the room turned to stare as I made the long walk from his office to the unit-room exit.

“It’s okay, boys and girls. The lieutenant got a little excited, but I don’t think there’ll be any more fireworks this afternoon.”

Mourning Becomes Electra

I walked slowly up State Street. Anger dragged at my steps, anger and depression both. Someone laid a bomb in my engine and no one in the police department had tried to get a word from Mr. Contreras about the men he’d seen. Instead, Roland Montgomery assaulted me physically while Bobby did it mentally. Break every bone in my body. Oh, yeah. That’s how you get people to stop asking questions and do as you say, you break every bone in their bodies.

I was angry with myself too-I hadn’t meant to talk to Bobby about Furey until I had some proof. Of course Bobby wouldn’t listen to me spreading stories about his fair-haired boy. It would be hard enough to get him to listen when I could really back them up. And even though I was furious right now with Bobby, I didn’t look forward to bringing him that much pain.

Maybe I’d feel better for food. It had been six hours since I’d eaten and I’d thrown that up. I wandered into the first coffee shop I came to. They had a variety of salads on the menu but I ordered a b.l.t. with fries. Grease is so much more comforting than greens. Anyway, my weight was still down-I needed to pack a few carbs to build myself back up.

Because I’d come during off-hours they made up the fries fresh just for me. I ate them first, while they were still hot and crisp. Halfway through the fries I remembered I was supposed to check in with my answering service every hour to see if the Streeter Brothers could fit me into their schedule soon. I carried the last handful of potatoes to the pay phone at the front of the coffee shop.

I got Tim Streeter this time. “We can start for you first thing in the morning, Vic, but we’ll need you to brief the boys, give them a description, and maybe show them the kind of place your aunt would likely pick.”

My stomach fell. Morning seemed an awfully long time away just now. I couldn’t protest, though-they were doing me a mighty big favor. I told Tim I’d meet him at the corner of Indiana and Cermak at eight and hung up.

Maybe it would still be light enough for me to do some hunting on my own tonight. I could stop at August Cray’s office and then head home to pick up the Tempo. I called my neighborhood car rental. They closed at six but said they’d leave the Tempo out front for me with the keys taped underneath the front bumper. If someone stole it before I got there they weren’t going to be out much.

I paid my bill-under ten dollars, even though I was perilously close to the upscale part of the South Loop- and took the sandwich to eat on my way to Cray’s office.

The address Freeman Carter had given me for Farm-works was on north LaSalle. I took a bus up to Van Buren and then got on the Dan Ryan L-it would take me around the Loop faster than any taxi this time of day. It was just on four-thirty when I got off at Clark and walked the three blocks to Cray’s building. I hoped someone was still in the office, even if Cray himself wasn’t.

I was going against the tide of homebound workers. Inside the lobby I had to move to the wall and scoot crablike around the outgoing throng to the elevators. I rode in splendid isolation to the twenty-eighty floor and made my way on soft gray carpeting to Suite 2839. Its solid wood door was labeled simply “Property Management.” They probably ran so many different little firms out of there that they couldn’t list all their names on the door.

The knob didn’t turn under my hand so I tried a buzzer discreetly imbedded to the right of the panel. After a long pause a tinny voice asked who was there.

“I’m interested in investing in Farmworks,” I said. “I’d like to talk to August Cray.”

The door clicked. I walked into a narrow reception area, a holding pen really, with a couple of stiff chairs but no table or magazines-or even a window for waiting customers to gaze through.

A sliding glass window in the left wall allowed the inmates to look at visitors without exposing their whole bodies. This was shut when I came in. I looked around and saw a little television camera in a corner of the ceiling. I smiled at it and waved and a few seconds later Star Wentzel opened a door next to the glass panel. Her blond hair was combed back and gathered into a jeweled white clip. She wore a long narrow skirt that highlighted her gaunt pelvic bones. She looked like a high school student from the fifties, not a participant in a development scam.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

I smiled. “I might ask you the same question. I came here to find August Cray-Farmworks’s agent of record. And here you are, mourning your mother, but putting a brave front on it by coming into the office.”

“I can’t bring Mother back to life by staying home,” she said pettishly. “I don’t need you to tell me how to behave.”

“Of course you don’t, Star. Can we go inside? I’d still like to talk to August Cray.”

“He’s not here. Why don’t you tell me what you want?”

This was clearly a rote line-she rattled it off without the hostility of her earlier remarks. I smiled.

“I came to invest in Farmworks. It’s such an up-and-coming company. I hear they’re going to get a huge piece of the new stadium project-I want to be a millionaire just like Boots and Ralph.”

She smoothed a hand over a jutting hipbone. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then I’ll explain it to you. Let’s go sit down-this will take awhile-your feet are going to start hurting in those spiky heels if we talk out here.”

I opened the door and shepherded Star into the inner office. It was a small room with a blond wood desk about the color of her hair. A couple of portables covered the top-one seemed identical to the Apollo I’d noticed in the Alma Mejicana offices on Sunday. Wood filing cabinets filled the windowless walls and spilled over into the narrow hallway. It was a working person’s office all right.

I dumped a stack of prospectuses from a chair in the hall and moved it into the office while Star sat in her padded swivel chair behind the desk. Her mouth was set in a mulish line. I expect I looked about the same.

She lifted a thin wrist to examine a weighty gold timepiece. “I don’t have much time, so make your spiel and let me get home. My sister and I have to entertain some of Mother’s church friends tonight.”

“It’s partly about your mother that I came to see you,” I said.

“You claimed to be a friend of hers but no one at the church had ever heard of you,” she said sharply.

“That’s because I only knew her in the narrow context of her work at Seligman. Since the fire at the Indiana Arms-I’m sure you know about that, don’t you?-I’d been talking to her, hoping to get some idea about who might have set it. She obviously was sitting on some kind of secret. And that secret had to do with you or your sister. After I talked to you at the funeral home on Monday, I was pretty sure that you working here was what she was so pleased about-and so eager to withhold. And that’s what I want you to tell me-why she couldn’t tell people where you worked.”

A ghost of her mother’s smug look flitted across her face. “That’s none of your business, is it?”