Fire Sale (31 page)

“They tried,” Aunt Jacqui started to say at the same time William demanded how I knew Carnifice was watching Andrés.

“Now, that’s easy. Strangers stand out down here. Too many vacant lots, so you know when someone is lurking, and too many people who don’t have jobs, so they spend their days chilling on the streets. What did your guys find out about Billy’s car?”

“By the time we got to it, it had been stripped,” William said shortly. “Tires, radio, even the front seat. Why didn’t you let me know right away you’d found it? I had to learn about that from that black policeman who acts like he’s in charge down there.”

“That would be
Commander
Rawlings, and he acts like he’s in charge because he is. As for why I didn’t call you, too much was going on for me to think about you—like hiking two miles across the marsh to find your dead driver. Events happened too fast for me to think of calling you.”

“What did you find in the car?” Jacqui asked.

“You wondering if I ran off with Billy’s stock portfolio?” I asked. “He left a couple of books in the trunk.
Violence of Love
, the one by the murdered archbishop, and”—I shut my eyes, conjuring the titles I’d seen in the dark—“
Rich Christians and Poverty
, something like that.”

“Oh, yes.” Jacqui rolled her eyes. “
Rich Christians in the Age of Hunger.
Billy read us so many passages at dinner I had to become anorexic—no decent person could keep eating, according to him, with children dying all over the place. Did you pick up any papers, thinking they might be a stock portfolio?”

I looked at her through narrowed eyes. “Rose Dorrado told me you’d gone through her books, even shaking her Bible so that all her page markers fell out. What did Billy run off with?”

“Nothing that I know of,” William said, looking with annoyance at his sister-in-law. “We were hoping he might have left some kind of clue about his plans. He’d given away his cell phone and his car, which makes him hard to trace. If you know anything about him, Ms.—uh—you would do well to tell me.”

“I know,” I said, bored. “Or I’ll never eat lunch in this town again.”

“Don’t treat it like a joke,” he warned me. “My family has a lot of power in Chicago.”

“And Congress and everywhere else,” I agreed.

He glared at me, but strode down the corridor without answering. Jacqui clicked along next to him in her high heels, her bias-cut skirt swirling around her knees in a very feminine way. I felt acutely aware of my torn trousers and dirty parka.

35

Why, Freddy, What a Surprise!

T
he truckers didn’t take long with Grobian. When they came back out, the Harley driver gave me a wink and a thumbs-up, which sent me in to see the manager with a lighter heart. Is it such a bad thing to depend on the kindness of strangers?

Grobian was talking on the phone while signing papers. His buzz cut was still at a military length—to keep it like that he had to get it mowed every couple of days, although it was hard to know how the manager of a domain like his found time to fit it in. He was in his shirtsleeves, and I couldn’t help noticing how big his forearms were: a tattoo with the marine logo covered about four hairy inches.

He didn’t really look at me, just waved me to a folding chair while he finished his conversation. My hard hat and torn trousers weren’t as feminine as Jacqui’s fluttering skirt, but they did help me blend in. As I sat, I noticed mud caked on my leather half boots. Not surprising, considering how I had crawled under the fence to get into the warehouse, but annoying all the same.

When Grobian hung up, it was clear I wasn’t who he was expecting, but equally clear that he didn’t remember me.

“V. I. Warshawski,” I said heartily. “I was here two weeks ago, with young Billy.”

His lips tightened: he would have shown me the door, not a chair, if he’d looked at me when I came in. “Oh. The do-gooder. Whatever Billy may tell you, the company doesn’t care about your school day care program.”

“Basketball.”

“What?”

“It’s basketball, not day care, which shows you haven’t really studied the proposal. I’ll send you a new set of numbers.” I clasped my hands on his desk with the saintly smile of a confirmed do-gooder.

“Whatever it is, we’re not supporting it.” He looked at his watch. “You don’t have an appointment. In fact, how did you get in? No one at the front gate phoned—”

“I know. It must be hard for you to stay on top of your schedule with Billy gone. Why did he run away, anyway? He came down here, after—” I suddenly remembered the conversation I’d had with Billy after church on Sunday.

“Oh, of course. You squealed on him to his dad—you reported seeing him with Josie Dorrado, and Billy came here to confront you. You said a few minutes ago that you didn’t see Billy on Monday, so did he confront you on Sunday? You come into the office on Sunday afternoons? Have you told Mr. William about that?”

Grobian shifted in his chair. “I don’t see what that has to do with you.”

“Besides being a do-gooding basketball coach, I’m one of the detectives the family hired to look for Billy. If your conversation with him was the immediate cause of his disappearance, then the family will want to know about it.”

He looked at me narrowly: I might have Mr. William’s ear, or even Buffalo Bill’s—or I might be a con artist. Before he could challenge me, I added, “Mr. William and I just had a little conversation in the hall right now. I’m the detective who found Billy’s Miata the other night, where it had burrowed into the shrubbery underneath the Skyway.”

“Yeah, but Billy wasn’t at the wheel when it went off the road.”

“Is that a fact, Mr. Grobian.” I leaned back in the chair so I could see his face better. “Just how do you know that?”

“Cops told me.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I’ll call Commander Rawlings at the Fourth District to check, but when I saw him yesterday they didn’t know who was driving it.”

“Must have been chatter on the floor, then.” His pale eyes shifted to the door and back. “The truckers all gossip about each other. Would have been better if they’d talked to me about Czernin before he died instead of after.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, this English lady Czernin was balling.” He watched to see if vulgarity would make a do-gooder detective wince, but I kept a look of polite interest on my face. “I hear she was in the car, not Billy, and no one knows how she got hold of it.”

“I see,” I said slowly. “So you didn’t know about her until she showed up next to Bron on the golf course yesterday morning?”

“If I had, Bron would have been at the unemployment office on Monday. We don’t tolerate rules violations, and having outsiders in the cab is a big By-Smart no-no.”

“But if she was in Billy’s Miata, she wasn’t in the cab with Czernin.”

“Czernin was—” He cut himself off. “He’d been driving her around the neighborhood the last two weeks, that’s what I learned on the floor when I told the men what had happened to him.”

“You tell me Marcena Love was in Billy’s Miata and also that she was in Bron’s cab,” I said. “But the truck and the car weren’t together, so Bron was driving for By-Smart that night, right?”

He looked at me, stone-faced. “He signed out a load at four twenty-two. He reached his first delivery in Hammond at five-seventeen. He was thirteen minutes late to his next delivery, in Merrill, and twenty-two minutes late to the third, in Crown Point. After that, which was ten-oh-eight, we didn’t hear from him again. Now, if that’s it—”

“That isn’t ‘it,’ although it’s interesting that you have those times down so exactly. What did you and Bron fight about Monday afternoon?”

“We didn’t.”

“Everyone heard you shouting,” I said. “He thought you’d help with his kid’s medical bills.”

“If you knew that, why’d you ask?” His tone was belligerent, but his eyes were wary.

“I’d like your version.”

He studied me for a long moment, then said, “I don’t have a version. Truckers are a rough bunch. You can’t manage them if you’re not ready to go head-to-head with them, and Czernin was the worst in that regard. Everything was a fight with him, his hours, his routes, his overtime. He thought the world owed him a living, and fights were a regular part of life with him.”

“I always saw Bron as a lover, not a fighter, and I’ve known him since high school,” I objected. “If he was so obnoxious, why’d you keep him on for twenty-seven years?”

Grobian distorted his mouth into an ugly leer. “Yeah, you broads all saw his loving side, but in the shop we saw his fighting side. Behind the wheel, we didn’t have a better driver—when he kept his mind on the job. Never had an accident in all those years.”

“So going back to his pitch for By-Smart’s help with his daughter’s medical bills—”

“It didn’t come up,” he snapped.

“Hnnh. I have a witness who heard you promise Czernin you’d discuss—”

“Who’s that?” Grobian demanded.

“Someone in the witness protection program.” I smiled nastily. “This person said Bron had a document, businesslike, shipshape, that showed you promised to help with April’s medical care.”

He sat very still for a minute. The light reflected on his glasses, so I couldn’t read his expression. Was he alarmed or just thinking things over?

“Your witness showed you the document, right?” he finally said. “So you know I never signed anything.”

“So you agree that there was a document? Just not one you signed?”

“I agree with nothing! If you have it, I want to see it—I need to know who’s making stuff up about me.”

“No one’s making anything up, Grobian. Unless you are, with your stories about how you knew Billy wasn’t driving his car, or how you and Bron weren’t really fighting. Bron died right after he had his fight with you. Is that a coincidence?”

A pulse jumped over his right eye. “You say that again and you’ll say it in court in front of a judge. You have nothing on me, not one goddamn thing. You’re fishing without worms.”

His phone rang and he jumped on it. “Yeah?” He looked at his watch again. “Damn spic is twenty-six minutes late. He can cool his heels for another five…And you.” He hung up and looked at me. “We’re done here.”

“No wonder you’re the ideal manager for trucking routes—you’re like a talking clock. Your so-called spic is twenty-six minutes late, not half an hour, Bron was twenty-two minutes behind schedule. The family will never promote you—you’re the perfect clerk-manager for them.”

He jumped up from his chair and stood over me, looking furious, but somehow also scared—I had put his worst fears into words. “The family trusts me,” he cried. “I don’t believe they ever even hired you. Prove it to me.”

I laughed. “We’ll call Mr. William, shall we? Or would you like to put some money on it first—say, a hundred dollars?”

He was so caught up in his swirl of emotion that he almost bit; I was picturing dinner at the Filigree or paying a third of my phone bill. At the last second, he recovered his poise enough to tell me he didn’t have time for crap like this and that I needed to leave. At once.

I got up. “By the way, where did you find Bron’s truck? It wasn’t near the Miata at the Skyway, and it sure wasn’t where I found Bron’s body.”

“What business is it of yours?”

“Bron was driving his truck; Marcena, according to you, was alone in the Miata. That means there is probably evidence in the truck showing who attacked him, or how he was attacked, or some darn thing or other. I think it’s kind of hard to misplace a semi, although not really impossible.”

“When we find it, Polack, you’ll be the first to know—I don’t think. Time for you to move on.”

He thrust the arm with the bulging marine tattoo under my elbow and hoisted me to my feet. It was unsettling that he could shift me so easily, but I didn’t try to fight him—I needed my strength for more important battles.

When we were facing the aisles of merchandise with the conveyor belts clacking overhead, he spoke into a lapel mike. “Jordan? I got a girl here who made it into the warehouse unannounced. She’s heading for the front now—make sure she gets out of the shop, will you? Red parka, tan hard hat.”

I decided telling him I was a woman, not a girl, would just get me into a tiresome exchange that wouldn’t help any more than a physical fight. As he stood with his hands on his hips, snapping at me to get a move on, I started singing the old Jerry Williams song, “I’m a woman, not a girl—I want a real man,” but I did get a move on.

I refused to turn my head to see if Grobian were still watching me and marched down the first aisle with my head held high. I wondered how he would know if I really left, but as I moved through aisles crammed with stuff, beneath the conveyor belts ferrying it around, past the crew in red smocks that read “Be Smart, By-Smart,” stacking everything from crates of By-Smart’s private-label wine to vast boxes of Christmas decorations, I saw the video cams at every corner. Woman in red parka and tan hard hat, visible to all and sundry. As I worked my way through the maze of aisles and forklifts and boxes, the loudspeakers kept booming—“Forklift needed at A42N”; “Bad spill at B33E”; “Runner to truck bay 213.” If I turned back, I imagined they’d start booming, “Woman in red parka on the loose, search and destroy.”

In between the wine and the Christmas decorations, I abruptly squatted behind a forklift laden ten feet high with cartons and took off my parka. I turned it inside out and folded it over my arm, hiding my hard hat underneath it. On the back of the forklift was a By-Smart hat that the driver had chosen not to wear, despite all the signs urging him to “Make the Workplace a Safe Place.”

I put it on, left the parka tucked behind a crate of sunlamps, and doubled back to the hall where the offices were. Grobian was meeting with a Mexican and he didn’t want me to know who it was. That meant—I was going to find out.

Grobian’s door was shut, and someone with the By-Smart guard paraphernalia—stun gun, reflective vest, and all—was standing outside. I backed into the paper room, where the printers and fax machines were. I couldn’t hear what was going on over the noise of the machines, so after a couple of minutes I looked outside again. Grobian’s door was just opening. I ducked my head and moved down the hall to the canteen. In the shadow of the doorway, I watched Grobian summon a guard to escort his visitor back into the warehouse.

I didn’t need to stand too close to recognize the
chavo
whom I’d seen at Fly the Flag two weeks ago. The same thick dark hair, the slim hips, the army camouflage jacket. Freddy. He’d been talking to Pastor Andrés, then to Bron, and now to Grobian. They kept talking while they waited for the guard. I could hear enough to tell that they were speaking Spanish, Grobian as fast and fluently as Freddy. Just what were they discussing?