Sara Paretsky - Fire Sale

Morrell and I joined a cast of thousands at Max’s for Thanksgiving dinner. He always has a big crowd-his daughter flies in from New York with her husband and children, his and Lotty’s musician friends show up early and stay late, and Lotty always invites stray interns from her service at Beth Israel. Mr. Contreras came this year, happy to escape his petulant daughter’s house. As soon as Max heard about the Loves, he opened his doors to them, and even suggested I invite Billy and Mary Ann McFarlane-he hated to think of Billy, estranged from his family, spending Thanksgiving alone. But Billy was helping Pastor Andrés serve turkey dinners to the homeless, and Mary Ann said her neighbor was bringing dinner over and she’d be just fine without me.

Marcena was still in the hospital, of course, but she was recovering fast and her spirits were good. I’d gone to visit her before driving up to Max’s. I’d run into her parents in the ICU. The Loves had been silent and anxious since their arrival, but Marcena’s rapid improvement was making them almost effervescent.

We all had to put on protective masks and gowns before going into Marcena’s room, so as to make sure we didn’t spread germs into her vulnerable new skin. Her parents left me alone with her, since she couldn’t have more than two visitors at a time.

I tiptoed into the room. Marcena’s head was shaved and bandaged; she had a fading bruise on her left cheekbone, and her body was hidden in a kind of box with sheets draped over it, to protect her new skin, but her eyes held a hint of their usual spark.

Marcena pointed out that we were matching ghouls, with our shaved heads and bruises. “We should have done this for Halloween, not for your Thanksgiving Day dinner. What was that thing that skinned me?”

“A hand-operated conveyor belt,” I said. “Didn’t you ever see it in Bron’s trailer? They use them for getting big loads on and off; it should have been tied up, but they were either careless or hoping it would do serious damage. Although they planned for you to be dumped at the landfill, as they did me-it was just Mr. William, ineffectual idiot, who took you to the golf course by mistake.”

“And Mitch was my hero, leading you to the rescue, Morrell says. The hospital is rotten not to let dogs in. I’d like to give him a big, slurpy kiss. How come you got away with less damage than me?” Her eyes might sparkle, but her speech was labored; among the paraphernalia around her bed was a morphine pump.

I shrugged awkwardly. “Luck of the draw. You took a horrible knock on the head when the forklift went over; you couldn’t maneuver the way I was able to.”

I asked if she remembered anything about her time at the factory, such as how she got clear of the falling forklift, but she said her last coherent memory was driving up behind Fly the Flag in Billy’s Miata-she couldn’t even remember who all had been present-if Aunt Jacqui had been there, or Buffalo Bill himself.

I told her I had her recording pen, but wanted to hang onto it, at least until we saw how the endless legal battles were going to shape up. “The state may try to impound it. I’ve actually put it in a bank vault to keep the Bysen mafia from stealing it out of my office, but, of course, their legal team is trying to suppress the recordings altogether.”

“You can keep it if you let me have a copy of the contents. Morrell says that William and Pat Grobian were arrested for Bron’s death. Is there any chance they’ll be found guilty?”

I made an impatient gesture. “The whole legal process is going to be a long and dreary battle; I’ll be amazed if it even comes to trial before Billy is married with grown grandchildren of his own…Marcena, how much of this business did you know, before Bron’s death. Did you know he was sabotaging the factory?”

Underneath her shroud of bandages she blushed faintly. “I got too caught up in it-it’s why I always get the best in-depth stories wherever I go, because I do get caught up in my subjects’ lives. Morrell says I manipulate the news I’m covering, but I don’t. If I take part, I don’t make suggestions or pass judgment, I just watch-it’s no different than Morrell going on a raid with a tribal chief in Afghanistan.”

She stopped to catch her breath, then continued in a more muted voice, “That factory owner-what was his name, Zabar? Oh, right, Zamar-he wasn’t supposed to die. And when Bron decided to use that bloke, that gang member, Freddy, I did say Freddy wasn’t the strongest filament in the bulb, but Bron said he couldn’t go into the factory himself, because his kid’s best friend’s mum worked there, and she’d recognize him if she happened to see him. But I did help make the little gadget over at his house-his kid was at school, his wife was at work.”

Her eyes sparkled again at the memory; it didn’t take much imagination to follow her mind down its track, to sex in Sandra’s bed while the wife was standing in front of the By-Smart cash register. She’d helped construct a murder weapon, but what she remembered was the sexual excitement. Maybe she’d feel something else when she recovered: she faced two more major surgeries before she could go home.

She saw some of what I was thinking in my face. “You are a bit of a prude, aren’t you, Vic? You take a lot of chances yourself-don’t tell me you don’t know that adrenaline kick from skating close to the edge.”

I fingered my own head bandage reflexively. “Adrenaline thrills? Maybe that’s my shortcoming: I take risks so I can get the job done-I don’t take jobs so I can run risks.”

She turned her head aside, impatient with me, or abashed-I’d never understand how she thought.

“What about those extra meetings with Buffalo Bill?” I asked. “He confess to all his dirty business practices?”

“Not in so many words. But a few admiring comments and he talked more than he realized. I’d say a streak of paranoia runs through the man, not enough to derail him, but the fact that he sees the world as his enemy means he’s always on the attack, which I guess has fueled his success. We had a lot of ‘hnnh, hnnhing’ over the necessity to do things like pile garbage in the parking lots of smaller shops to get customers to agree that they’d be smart to ‘By-Smart.’”

“So you’ve got yourself quite a nice story,” I said politely.

She grinned weakly. “Even though I don’t remember the climax, it didn’t come out too badly. Except for poor Bron. He was so greedy he couldn’t imagine there’d be a big fat stick of dynamite inside that carrot they were dangling in front of him.”

“Greedy isn’t the word I’d use,” I objected. “He was desperate for a way to help his daughter, so he was going to shut a blind eye to the risk he might be running.”

“Maybe, maybe.” Her color was fading; she lowered the hospital bed and shut her eyes. “Sorry, I’m weak as a cat, I keep dropping off.”

“You’ll recover fast when you’re out,” I said. “You’ll be back in Fallujah or Kigali, or whatever the next war zone is, in no time.”

“Hnnh,” she murmured. “Hnnh, hnnh.”

Back in my car, I could hardly summon the energy to drive. Prude, she’d called me. Was that really me? Next to Marcena, I felt like some large slow object, maybe a rhinoceros, trying to do a pirouette around a greyhound. I had an impulse to go home and spend the day in bed, watching football and feeling seriously sorry for myself and my beat-up body, but when I got home the old man was packed up and ready to go to Max’s. He had a large casserole filled with his wife’s recipe for sweet-potato pudding. He had brushed the dogs until their coats shone, and tied orange bows around their necks-Max had said the dogs could come as long as they behaved and as long as I repaired any damage Mitch did to his garden.