Sara Paretsky - Windy City Blues

“Where are you now?” I swung my legs over the bed and began pulling on longjohns. He was at their apartment, four buildings up the street from me, on his way downtown for booking and then to Cook County jail. The arresting officer, not inhuman on Christmas Day, would let him wait for me if I could get there fast.

I was half dressed by the time I hung up and quickly finished pulling on jeans, boots, and a heavy sweater. Jonathan and two policemen were standing in the entryway of his building when I ran up. He handed me his apartment keys. In the distance I could hear Po ’s muffled barking.

“Do you have a lawyer?” I demanded.

Ordinarily a cheerful, bearded young man with long golden hair, Jonathan now looked rather bedraggled. He shook his head dismally.

“You need one. I can find someone for you, or I can represent you myself until we come up with someone better. I don’t practice anymore, so you need someone who’s active, but I can get you through the formalities.”

He accepted gratefully, and I followed him into the waiting police car. The arresting officers wouldn’t answer any of my questions. When we got down to the Eleventh Street police headquarters, I insisted on seeing the officer in charge, and was taken in to Sergeant John McGonnigal.

McGonnigal and I had met frequently. He was a stocky young man, very able, and I had a lot of respect for him. I’m not sure he reciprocated it. “Merry Christmas, Sergeant. It’s a terrible day to be working, isn’t it?”

“Merry Christmas, Miss Warshawski. What are you doing here?”

“I represent Jonathan Michaels. Seems someone got a little confused and thinks he pushed Ms. Goodrich into Lake Michigan this morning.”

“We’re not confused. She was strangled and pushed into the lake. She was dead before she went into the water. He has no alibi for the relevant time.”

“No alibi! Who in this city does have an alibi?”

There was more to it than that, he explained stiffly. Michaels and Cinda had been heard quarreling late at night by their neighbors across the hall and underneath. They had resumed their fight in the morning. Cinda had finally slammed out of the house with the dog around nine-thirty.

“He didn’t follow her, Sergeant.”

“How do you know?”

I explained that I had watched Cinda from my living room. “And I didn’t run into Mr. Michaels out on the point. I only met one person.”

He pounced on that. How could I be sure it wasn’t Jonathan? Finally agreeing to get a description of his clothes to see if he owned a navy ski mask or a khaki jacket, McGonnigal also pointed out that there were two ways to leave the lakefront-Jonathan could have gone north instead of south.

“Maybe. But you’re spinning a very thin thread, Sergeant. It’s not going to hold up. Now I need some time alone with my client.”

He was most unhappy to let me represent Michael, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. He left us alone in a small interrogation room.

“I’m taking it on faith that you didn’t kill Cinda,” I said briskly. “But for the record, did you?”

He shook his head. “No way. Even if I had stopped loving her, which I hadn’t, I don’t solve my problems that Way.” He ran a hand through his long hair. “I can’t believe this. I can’t even really believe Cinda is dead. It’s all happened too fast. And now they’re arresting me.” His hands were beautiful, with long, strong fingers. Strong enough to strangle someone, certainly.

“What were you fighting about this morning?”

“Fighting?”

“Don’t play dumb with me, Jonathan; I’m the only help you’ve got. Your neighbors heard you-that’s why the police arrested you.”

He smiled a little foolishly. “It all seems so stupid now. I keep thinking, if I hadn’t gotten her mad, she wouldn’t have gone out there. She’d be alive now.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. What were you fighting about?”

He hesitated. “Those damned Santa Claus pictures she took. I never wanted her to do it, anyway. She’s too good-she was too good a photographer to be wasting her time on that kind of stuff Then she got mad and started accusing me of being Lawrence Welk, and who was I to talk. It all started because someone phoned her at one this morning. I’d just gotten back from a gig-” he grinned suddenly, painfully “-a Lawrence Welk gig, and this call came in. Someone who had been in one of her Santa shots. Said he was very shy, and wanted to make sure he wasn’t in the picture with his kid, so would she bring him the negatives?”

“She had the negatives? Not Burton ’s?”

“Yeah. Stupid idiot. She was developing the film herself. Apparently this guy called Burton ’s first. Anyway, to make a long story short, she agreed to meet him today and give him the negatives, and I was furious. First of all, why should she go out on Christmas to satisfy some moron’s whim? And why was she taking those dumb-assed pictures anyway?”

Suddenly his face cracked and he started sobbing. “She was so beautiful and I loved her so much. Why did I have to fight with her?”

I patted his shoulder and held his hand until the tears stopped. “You know, if that was her caller she was going to meet, that’s probably the person who killed her.”

“I thought of that. And that’s what I told the police. But they say it’s the kind of thing I’d be bound to make up under the circumstances.”

I pushed him through another half hour of questions. What had she said about her caller? Had he given his name? She didn’t know his name. Then how had she known which negatives were his? She didn’t-just the day and the time he’d been there, so she was taking over the negatives for that morning. That’s all he knew; she’d been too angry to tell him what she was taking with her. Yes, she had taken negatives with her.

He gave me detailed instructions on how to look after Po. Just dry dog food. No table scraps. As many walks as I felt like giving her-she was an outdoor dog and loved snow and water. She was very well trained; they never walked her with a leash. Before I left, I talked to McGonnigal. He told me he was going to follow up on the story about the man in the photograph at Burton ’s the next day but he wasn’t taking it too seriously. He told me they hadn’t found any film on Cinda’s body, but that was because she hadn’t taken any with her-Jonathan was making up that, too. He did agree, though, to hold Jonathan at Eleventh Street overnight. He could get a bail hearing in the morning and maybe not have to put his life at risk among the gang members who run Cook County jail disguised as prisoners.

I took a taxi back to the north side. The streets were clear and we moved quickly. Every mile or so we passed a car abandoned on the roadside, making the Arctic landscape appear more desolate than ever.

Once at Jonathan’s apartment it took a major effort of will to get back outside with the dog. Po went with me eagerly enough, but kept turning around, looking at me searchingly as though hoping I might be transformed into Cinda.

Back in the apartment, I had no strength left to go home. I found the bedroom, let my clothes drop where they would on the floor and tumbled into bed.

Holy Innocents’ Day, lavishly celebrated by my Polish Catholic relatives, was well advanced before I woke up again. I found Po staring at me with reproachful brown eyes, panting slightly. “All right, all right,” I grumbled, pulling the covers back and staggering to my feet.

I’d been too tired the night before even to locate the bathroom. Now I found it, part of a large darkroom. Cinda apparently had knocked down a wall connecting it to the dining room; she had a sink and built-in shelves all in one handy location. Prints were strung around the room, and chemicals and lingerie jostled one another incongruously. I borrowed a toothbrush, cautiously smelling the toothpaste tube to make sure it really held Crest, not developing chemicals.