Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 07 (17 page)

Mr.
Contreras started to say “Mitch Kruger,” but I cut him off.

“The
man who was pulled out of the Sanitary Canal this morning. We may know who he
is.”

The
attendant eyed me suspiciously. Finally he picked up the phone in front of him
and carried on a low-key conversation, his palm cupping the mouthpiece.

When
he’d finished he gestured to some vinyl chairs chained together against the
wall. “Have a seat. Someone will be with you in a minute.”

The
minute stretched into twenty while Mr. Contreras fretted at my side. “What’s
going on, doll? How come we can’t just go and look? This waiting is getting on
my nerves. Reminds me of when Clara was in the hospital having Ruthie, they
kept me waiting in a place that looked like a morgue”—he gave a bark of
self-conscious laughter—“matter of fact, it did. Looked just like this place
here. Waiting to see if it’s good news or bad. You got her pregnant and she
doesn’t make it through, you carry that load around the rest of your life.”

He
rambled on nervously until the attendant unlocked the door again and a couple
of sheriff’s deputies came in. My stomach knotted. Chicago’s finest can be a
pain to deal with, but for the most part they’re professional police. Too much
of the county law enforcement payroll is double-dipping for the mob to make
them easy companions in the search for truth and justice.

The
attendant jerked his head at us and the deputies came over. They were both
white, young, and had the squared-off, mean faces you get when you have too
much unrestrained power. I read their badges: Hendricks and Jaworski. I’d never
remember which was which.

“So
you two think you know something.” It was the one labeled “Hendricks.” His ugly
tone set the scene.

“We
don’t know if we know anything or not,” Mr. Contreras said, exasperated. “All
we want is a chance to look at a body, ‘stead of sitting around here all night
waiting for someone to be good enough to pay attention to us. My old pal, Mitch
Kruger, he’s been missing for a week and my neighbor here’s been trying to find
him for me. When she heard the story on the radio she thought maybe it was
him.”

It
was a whole lot more story than I would have given under the circumstances, but
I didn’t stop him: the last thing I wanted was to make it look like Mr.
Contreras and I had something to hide. I kept my face solemn and earnest: just
a good-hearted neighbor helping out the elderly when they misplaced their pals.

The
deputies stared at us unblinkingly. “You file a missing persons report on him?”

“We
notified the nineteenth district,” I said, before Mr. Contreras could blurt out
that we hadn’t.

“When
was the last time you saw your friend?” Jaworski asked.

“I
just finished telling you, it’s been a week. What do we have to go through to
see this body you got here?”

Both
deputies’ faces tightened into the same ugly expression. “Don’t try to make
trouble for us, old man. We ask the questions. You answer them. If you’re a
good enough boy we’ll let you look at the body. That’ll be a real treat for
you.”

The
morgue attendants were leaning against the walls, waiting to see which way the
fight developed. “Mr. Contreras is seventy-seven,” I said. “He’s old, he’s
tired, and the guy who’s missing is his last friend from his neighborhood. He
doesn’t want trouble, and he’s not trying to make it; he just wants to put his
mind at rest. I’m sure you wouldn’t like to see your fathers or grandfathers in
this situation.”

“What’s
your interest in this, babe?”

Hendricks
again. As long as they kept their badges facing us I’d know who was talking. I
resisted an impulse to crack his shinbone against my right toe.

“Just
helping out my neighbor, sugar. Shall I call Dr. Vishnikov and get his
permission to view the body?” Vishnikov was one of the assistant MEs, whom I
knew from my PD days.

“Keep
your pants on. We’ll get into the morgue as soon as you answer our questions.”

The
outer door opened again. I looked past Jaworski’s left shoulder and relaxed
fractionally. It was Terry Finchley, a violent crimes detective from Area One.

“Terry,”
I called.

He’d
gone to the counter to check something with the intake man, but he turned at my
voice. “Vic!”

He
came over. “What are you doing here?”

“Trying
to ID a body. These deputies apparently pulled an old man out of the canal near
Stickney today. My friend and I want to make sure it’s not someone we know.
Deputies Jaworski and Hendricks, this is Detective Finchley with the Chicago
police.”

They
didn’t like it, not one bit, me being on first-names with a Chicago cop and a
black one to boot. They exchanged glares and jutted their chins out some more.

“We
need to ask the girl and the old man a few questions, Detective, so why don’t
you just butt out.” The two had turned to look at Finchley, so I couldn’t make
out which was speaking.

“Can’t
do that,” Finchley said easily. “Not if it’s the guy they pulled out at
Stickney. I just got asked to come in and take a look at him—seems they think
he may belong to Chicago, not the county.”

The
deputies started looking meaner. I wondered if they were going to slug me or
Finchley first. The hostility in their bodies radiated throughout the room; the
man at the counter felt it and came around to the front. The attendants leaning
on the wall behind us stopped their light conversation and moved closer to us
too.

Hendricks
and Jaworski saw them coming and looked angrily at each other. Since all three
attendants were black, it was a good guess that they would side with Finchley
if it came to a fight.

“Take
him, then,” Hendricks spat out. “We got better things to do than look after
some dead alkie anyway.”

He
and Jaworski turned on their heels in unison and marched to the exit. I thought
I heard one of them mutter “jigaboo” on his way out, but I didn’t want to make
a federal case of it.

Another
Chicago Float Fish

“Thanks,
Terry,” I said gratefully. “I don’t know if they were throwing their muscle
around just to have a good time or if there’s some real problem with the dead
man.”

“Both,”
Finchley said. “They like sticking out their chests and looking like storm
troopers. And the guy they pulled out was dead before he went in the water. You
think you know him?”

“We
didn’t get that far. We’d like to be able to look at the body.” I tried to keep
from sounding acerbic—Finchley had saved us from grief that might have taken
the form of a blow to the jaw or an arrest.

“Who’s
your friend?”

“Salvatore
Contreras. The closest thing to family the guy we’re looking for has.”

Mr.
Contreras held out a hand to Finchley automatically, but said, “Strictly
speaking, you know that ain’t so, doll. He’s got a wife and a kid out in
Arizona, at least they was last I heard about them. She walked out on him
thirty-five years ago, same as any sensible woman would do if her husband was
drinking away his paycheck every Friday and leaving her and the kid in rags.
But Mitch and I go way back, and he really doesn’t have anyone else, Officer,
Detective, I mean.”

Finchley
blinked under the barrage. “I don’t think we need to send to Arizona for a next
of kin. Let’s just take a look at him.”

He
headed toward the dissecting room that lay to the right of the entrance. I put
a hand on his arm.

“Maybe
Mr. Contreras would rather look at the video screen. He’s not as case-hardened
as you are.”

If
you’re too squeamish for a direct look at a body, the county will run a video
camera over it; you can watch a screen in a small viewing room outside the
cooler. That way it can seem like one more TV show where the dead all rise to
walk again.

“Don’t
worry about me, cookie,” Mr. Contreras assured me when I explained the
procedure. “I was at Anzio, in case you forgot.”

One
of the attendants wheeled the body out of the cooler for us. A black plastic
bag covered it up to the throat, but we got a good look at the head.

It
had been in the Sanitary Canal for some days and the last week had been warm.
The face was swollen and purple. I wouldn’t have sworn to my own father in that
shape, let alone a man I’d only met three or four times. The hair looked like
Kruger’s and the general shape of the head, beneath its bruised distension,
seemed the same.

I
felt a little queasy. I’m not as used to looking at dead bodies as I got to be
in my days on the county defender’s homicide task force. Mr. Contreras, by the
greenish cast to his face, had likewise lost the immunity he’d acquired on the
battlefields of Italy fifty years ago.

He
cleared his throat and spoke in a husky voice. “It kinda looks like Mitch. I
just can’t be sure. The face—the face…” He waved a hand and his legs buckled.

The
attendant caught him before he fell. I found a chair against one wall and
pushed it over. The attendant sat him down and pushed his head into his lap. In
the bustle of looking after him, finding a glass of water, and getting him to
drink it, my own nausea passed.

After
a few minutes Mr. Contreras sat up. “I’m sorry.

Can’t
think what came over me. I don’t know if that’s Mitch or not. It’s kind of hard
to tell. Could you look at his left hand, cookie? He sliced off the top of his
middle finger maybe thirty years ago, working drunk like he did too many
afternoons. I was there and I shoulda seen what was coming, got him off the
mill, but I just didn’t think it was dangerous.“ Tears that had nothing to do
with the old injury were flowing down his cheeks.

I
forced myself back to the distended body. The attendant pulled the plastic down
so that the left hand was visible. The fingers, too, were swollen and
discolored, but it was clear that the middle one was missing most of its first
joint.

Finchley
nodded at me across the gurney. “That’s good enough for me to go on. I need to
ask the two of you some questions. Think your friend can keep going for another
few minutes?”

Mr.
Contreras joined in my assurances about his toughness. Finchley led the way to
a barren lounge around the corner from the cooler. Mr. Contreras didn’t move
with his usual bounce, but he’d recovered some of his color by the time we sat
down.

“Not
my lucky day,” Finchley said, “finding you on top of a stiff I’m sent to look
at.”

“You
mean it is your lucky day,” I corrected. “For one thing, you wouldn’t have an
ID without me. For another, you’ll be glad to have my help. I can work
full-time on this, and you have dozens of other cases on your plate… That is,
was he killed? Or did he hit his head on something and fall in?”

Finchley
pulled a scribbled note from his jacket pocket. “He had a pretty hefty blow to
the back of the head, Vishnikov says. If he fell and hurt himself, he fell
backward. And since he was dead before he went into the water, it would have
had to’ve happened on the way in. It’s possible some lowlife found him dead and
rolled him in—lots of drugs get done along the water there. The punks wouldn’t
want to be burdened with calling the cops on a dead body. It wouldn’t surprise
me if it happened that way.”

I
agreed. “Or Mitch was lurching around down there and interrupted a buy and some
guy knocked him cold for his pains. And then panicked when he realized he was
dead. I can see that.”

“But
why was he at the canal?” Finchley asked. “It’s all industry down there—not the
kind of place you go for a midnight stroll, no matter how drunk you are.”

I
looked over at Mr. Contreras. He didn’t seem to be listening to our
conversation.

“He
used to work for Diamond Head Motors, down at Thirty-first and Damen. He might
have been over there to see about work—he was pretty hard up by all reports.”

Finchley
jotted Diamond Head on the crumpled paper on his knee. “And what are you doing
down here, Warshawski? You know that’s the first question the lieutenant’s
going to ask me.”

The
lieutenant being Bobby Mallory, less hostile to me than he used to be, but
still not a big fan of my life’s work. “Just pure dumb luck, Detective. Mr.
Contreras and I are neighbors. He hired me to find his friend. This is not my
favorite way of meeting my professional obligations… How long does Vishnikov
think he was in the water?”

“About
a week. When did either of you see him last?” I shook my neighbor’s arm gently
and repeated the question to him. That jerked him back to the present, and he
gave a stumbling account of his final weekend with Mitch, filled with
self-reproach for kicking his friend out. Finchley asked him a few gentle
questions and let us go.

“Just
don’t go charging around the South Side on this without talking to me first,
okay, Vic?”

“If
Mitch interrupted some druggies, they’re all yours. I don’t have the resources
to go hunting out dopeheads, even if I had the desire. But something tells me
that a dead old man without much family or connections isn’t going to demand
round-the-clock resources at Area One, either.“