Sara Paretsky - Fire Sale

When Freddy realized he was being hung out to dry by Pat Grobian, he started to sing like one of Mt. Ararat ’s choristers. He told Conrad about his meeting with Grobian in the warehouse, the one I’d seen, where Grobian ordered him to break into Bron’s house to look for Marcena’s recorder. He told Conrad about planting the little frog full of nitric acid at Fly the Flag. He even told Conrad about driving the Miata into the undergrowth below the Skyway for Grobian: he was bitter about that, because he thought Grobian should have given him the car in thanks for all his, Freddy’s, hard work, but all he’d gotten out of his night’s labors had been fifty dollars.

Conrad didn’t tell me all this at the hospital, but when he came by Lotty’s to ask me more questions, he filled in gaps in the story. He added that it was a source of pure pleasure to him to listen to Grobian and William turn on each other. “That’s how they got that big old semi over on its side-they were arguing over whether William was really a weasel or Grobian was a thug-I kid you not, Ms. W., the two reenacted their fight for my benefit-and William grabbed the steering wheel, saying he was a big enough man to drive the truck. They fought for control of the wheel and the truck went over. I love it, I really do, when the rich and famous carry on with the same attitude that my street punks do.

“By the way, that truck you rode in was Czernin’s rig, or the one he’d been driving the night he was whacked. Why Grobian didn’t scrap it is beyond me: we found Czernin’s and the Love woman’s blood on that conveyor belt dohingus, along with your own AB negative. Trust you to have the weirdest blood on the planet.”

I ignored that crack. “What about Aunt Jacqui? She was at the factory with them Thursday night; where was she when the truck went over?”

“She’d driven back to Barrington Hills. Now she’s saying that she was acting under Buffalo Bill’s orders. She says when she told him that Zamar was welching on Fly the Flag’s deal with By-Smart, Buffalo Bill told her she needed to teach Zamar a lesson, that he used to do it all the time in his younger days, until word got out on the street that no one messed with By-Smart. If they’re forgetting their lessons, we need to teach them again, she claims the old Buffalo said something like that.”

Conrad said Jacqui insisted that Buffalo Bill told her dealing with Zamar was supposed to prove she was ready to sit at By-Smart’s management table. With that bunch, I could believe anything of any of them. I could hear the old man say it, going “hnnh, hnnh, hnnh,” but if Jacqui thought she was any match for the old buffalo she was either gutsy or delusional.

Tuesday, when Lotty was in surgery, Morrell came by her apartment to visit me. He’d been over at County Hospital to see Marcena, who was recovering from her first skin graft. She was in intensive care, but she was finally conscious, and seemed to be recovering well-she was alert, with no signs of brain damage from her own ordeal in the By-Smart semi.

Having gone through the same harrowing ride as she had, with the semi’s hand conveyor belt rolling over me, I felt a more personal relief at her recovery than I might have before. She couldn’t remember the moments leading up to her accident, let alone the accident itself, but now that he knew where to look Conrad had sent a forensics team into Fly the Flag. They figured that Marcena had jumped clear of the falling forklift, but that Bron hadn’t; the fall broke his neck. Marcena was probably knocked cold when she hit the ground, with the rest of her injuries coming during the ride to the marsh.

Another point that we could only speculate on was Marcena’s scarf, the one Mitch had found that had led him to her. The forensics team guessed it was coming loose from her neck when Grobian tossed her into the trailer; perhaps it got caught in the doors and then was snagged on the fence when the truck left the road to go cross-country to the landfill.

These were just little points, the ones that I worried over. I had a private belief, or wish, that Marcena regained consciousness and left a deliberate trail: the scarf had been torn, with a big piece on the fence, and a smaller piece that Mitch found first. I liked to think she’d taken some kind of active steps to try to save herself, that she hadn’t lain passively in the truck, waiting for death. The idea of anyone’s helplessness terrifies me, my own most of all.

“It’s possible, Victoria,” Lotty said, when I talked it over with her. “The human body is an amazing instrument, the mind more so. I would never discount any possibility of remarkable strength and contriving.”

That same Tuesday, I started picking up the reins of my business again. Among dozens of messages of good wishes from friends and reporters, and a van full of flowers from my most important client (“Delighted to know you’re not dead yet, Darraugh,” the card read), my answering service reported at least twenty calls from Buffalo Bill, demanding a meeting: he wanted to know “what fabrications I was filling his grandson’s head with, and straighten out once and for all what I could and could not say about the family.”

“Boy won’t come home,” the Buffalo said to me when I called him back Tuesday afternoon. “Says you’ve told him all kinds of lies about me, about the business.”

“Careful with the words you toss around, Mr. Bysen. You accuse me of lying, and I could add a slander suit to your family’s legal troubles. And I don’t have any power over Billy-he’s deciding for himself what he will and won’t do. When I talk to him, I’ll see if I can get him to agree to meet with you-and that’s all I’ll do.”

Later that same afternoon, Morrell came by with Billy-and Mr. Contreras and the dogs. Josie had gone back to school-under protest, according to her mother. I myself had canceled basketball practice yesterday, telling the team I’d have to let them know when I was strong enough to return. They’d responded with a get-well card big enough to cover the wall in Lotty’s spare room, filled with encouraging messages in English and Spanish.

Amy Blount had already filled me in on Billy and Josie, because she hadn’t been able to persuade them to leave Mary Ann’s place when she drove down there on Friday. Rose Dorrado had been more forceful, dragging Josie home and compelling her to return to school.

As Amy described it, the reunion between Rose and her daughter was a predictable combination of joy and fury (“You were here, not two miles from me, clean, well fed, safe, and me, I have not slept at night for worry!”).

Billy, shell-shocked by his father’s behavior, stayed on at Mary Ann’s. He’d called his grandmother, and spoken briefly to his mother, but he wouldn’t go home. He didn’t even want to go back to Pastor Andrés: he thought the minister shared the blame in Frank Zamar’s death because of the pressure he’d put on Zamar to back out of his contract with By-Smart.

The main reason Billy wouldn’t leave Mary Ann’s, though, was because he didn’t have the energy to pack up and move one more time. He’d been at the pastor’s, he’d been at Josie’s, and then at Mary Ann’s, all in the last ten days. He was too upset to organize himself mentally into another move-and my coach definitely liked having him living in the apartment with her. Now that he wasn’t hiding, he walked the dog three or four times a day, and he brought all his intensity to studying Latin with her. Its rules, its complex grammar, seemed to be a haven for him right now, a place of purity, regularity.

On Tuesday, in Lotty’s apartment, he tried to explain some of that to me, and some of his reluctance to see his family again. “I love them all, maybe not Dad, at least, I find it hard to forgive him for killing April’s dad and Mr. Zamar-and even if Freddy and Bron made the plant burn down, I think it was really because of Aunt Jacqui, and-and Dad, that Mr. Zamar is dead. I even love Mom, and, of course, my grandparents, they’re great people, they really are, but-but I think they’re shortsighted.”