Sara Paretsky - Killing Orders

The third book in the V.I. Warshawski series, 1985

MY STOMACH MUSCLES contracted as I locked the car door. I hadn’t been to Melrose Park for ten years, but, as I walked up the narrow pavement to the house’s side entrance, I felt a decade of maturity slipping from me, felt the familiar sickening, my heart thudding.

The January wind scattered dead leaves around my feet. Little snow had fallen this winter, but the air blew cold. After ringing the bell I jammed my hands deep into the pockets of my navy car coat to keep them warm. I tried to argue my nervousness away. After all, they had called me… begged me for help… The words meant nothing. I had lost an important battle by responding to the plea.

I stamped my feet to loosen the toes frozen inside thin-soled loafers and heard, at last, a rattling behind the painted blue door. It swung inward into a dimly lit vestibule. Through the screen I could just make out my cousin Albert, much heavier than he’d been ten years ago. The screen and the dark behind him softened his pout.

“Come in, Victoria. Mother is waiting for you.”

I bit back an excuse for being a quarter hour late and turned it into a neutral comment on the weather. Albert was almost bald, I noted with pleasure. He took my coat ungraciously and draped it over the banister at the foot of the narrow, uncarpeted stairs.

A deep, harsh voice called to us. “Albert! Is that Victoria?”

“Yes, Mama,” Albert muttered.

The only light in the entryway came from a tiny round window facing the stairs. The dimness obscured the pattern in the wallpaper, but as I followed Albert down the close corridor I could see it hadn’t changed: gray paper with white loops, ugly, cold. As a child, I thought the paper oozed hate. Behind Albert’s wobbling thighs the old chill stuck out tendrils at me and I shivered.

I used to beg my mother, Gabriella, not to bring me to this house. Why should we go? Rosa hated her, hated me, and

Gabriella always cried after the long L ride home. But she would only set her lips in a tight smile and say, “I am obligated, cara. I must go.”

Albert led me into the formal parlor at the back of the house. The horsehair furniture was as familiar to me as my own apartment. In my nightmares I dreamed of being trapped in this room with its stiff furniture, the ice-blue drapes, the sad picture of Uncle Carl over the fake fireplace, and Rosa. thin, hawk-nosed, frowning, seated poker-backed in a spindle-legged chair.

Her black hair was iron-colored now, but the severe, disapproving stare was unaltered. I tried taking diaphragm breaths to calm the churning in my stomach. You’re here because she begged you, I reminded myself.

She didn’t stand up, didn’t smile-I couldn’t remember ever seeing her smile. “It was good of you to come, Victoria.” Her tone implied it would have been better if I’d come on time. “When one is old, one doesn’t travel easily. And the last few days have made me old indeed.”

I sat down in what I hoped was the least uncomfortable chair. “Yes,” I said noncommittally. Rosa was about seventy-five. When they performed her autopsy, they would find her bones were made of cast iron. She did not look old to me: She hadn’t begun to rust yet.

“Albert. Pour some coffee for Victoria.”

Rosa ’s single virtue was her cooking. I took a cup of the rich Italian coffee gratefully, but ignored the tray of pastries Albert proffered-I’d get pastry cream on my black wool skirt and feel foolish as well as tense.

Albert sat uneasily on the narrow settee, eating a piece of torta del re, glancing surreptitiously at the floor when a crumb dropped, then at Rosa to see if she’d noticed.

“You are well, Victoria? You are happy?”

“Yes,” I said firmly. “Both well and happy.”

“But you have not remarried?”

The last time I’d been here was with my brief husband for a strained bridal visit. “It is possible to be happy and not married, as Albert doubtless can tell you, or as you know yourself.” The last was a cruel remark: Uncle Carl had killed himself shortly after Albert was born. I felt vindictively pleased, then guilty. Surely I was mature enough not to need that kind of satisfaction. Somehow Rosa always made me feel eight years old.

Rosa shrugged her thin shoulders disdainfully. “No doubt you are right. Yet for me-I am to die without the joy of grandchildren.”

Albert shifted uncomfortably on the settee. It was clearly not a new complaint.

“A pity,” I said. “I know grandchildren would be the crowning joy of a happy and virtuous life.”

Albert choked but recovered. Rosa narrowed her eyes angrily. “You, of all people, should know why my life has not been happy.”

Despite my efforts at control, anger spilled over. “ Rosa, for some reason you think Gabriella destroyed your happiness. What mysterious grievance a girl of eighteen could have caused you I don’t know. But you threw her out into the city on her own. She didn’t speak English. She might have been killed. Whatever she did to you, it couldn’t have been as bad as what you did to her.

“You know the only reason I’m here: Gabriella made me promise that I would help you if you needed it. It stuck in my gut and it still does. But I promised her, and here I am. So let’s leave the past in peace: I won’t be sarcastic if you’ll stop throwing around insults about my mother. Why not just tell me what the problem is.”

Rosa tightened her lips until they almost disappeared. “The most difficult thing I ever did in my life was to call you. And now I see I should not have done it.” She rose in one movement like a steel crane, and left the room. I could hear the angry clip of her shoes on the uncarpeted hail and up the bare stairs. In the distance a door slammed.

I put down my coffee and looked at Albert. He had turned red with discomfort, but he seemed less amorphous with Rosa out of the room.

“How bad is her trouble?”

He wiped his fingers on a napkin and folded it tidily. “Pretty bad,” he muttered. “Why’d you have to make her mad?”

“It makes her mad to see me here instead of at the bottom of Lake Michigan. Every time I’ve talked to her since Gabriella died she’s been hostile to me. If she needs help, all I want is the facts. She can save the rest for her psychiatrist. I don’t get paid enough to deal with it.” I picked up my shoulder bag and stood up. At the doorway I stopped and looked at him.

“I’m not coming back to Melrose Park for another round. Albert. If you want to tell me the story I’ll listen. But if I leave now, that’s it; I won’t respond to any more pleas for farm!, unity from Rosa. And by the way, if you do want to hire me. I’m not working out of love for your mother.”

He stared at the ceiling, listening perhaps for guidance from above. Not heaven-just the back bedroom. We couldn’t hear anything. Rosa was probably jabbing pins into a piece of clay with a lock of my hair stuck to it. I rubbed my arms involuntarily, searching for damage.

Albert shifted uneasily and stood up. “Uh, look, uh, maybe I’d better tell you.”

“Fine. Can we go to a more comfortable room?”

“Sure. Sure.” He gave a half smile, the first I’d seen that afternoon. I followed him back down the hail to a room on the left. It was tiny, but clearly his private spot. A giant set of stereo speakers loomed from one wall; below them were some built-in shelves holding an amplifier and a large collection of tapes and records. No books except a few accounting texts. His high-school trophies. A tiny cache of bottles.