Blood Shot Page 3

  Nancy shook her head. “It’s not private. Just annoying.”

  She sat down and unbuttoned her coat. She’d changed from her basketball uniform to a tan dress with a red scarf, and she’d put on makeup, but she still managed to appear disheveled.

  “I got to the meeting in plenty of time. Ron was waiting for me-Ron Kappelman, our lawyer”-she put in an aside to me-“and we found we weren’t on the agenda. So Ron went up to talk to that fat moron Martin O’Gara, saying we’d filed our material in plenty of time and talked to the secretary this morning to make sure she included us. So O’Gara makes this big show of not knowing what the hell is going on, and calls the board secretary and disappears for a while. Then he comes back and says there were so many legal problems with our submission, they’d decided not to consider it this evening.”

  “We want to build a solvent recycling plant here,” Caroline explained to me. “We’ve got funding, we have a site, we have specs that have passed every EPA test we can think of, and we have some customers right on our doorstep-Xerxes and Glow-Rite. It means a good hundred jobs down here, and a chance to make a dent in the crap going into the ground.”

  She turned back to Nancy. “So what can the problem be? What did Ron say?”

  “I was so mad I couldn’t speak. He was so mad I was afraid he’d break O’Gara’s neck-if he could find it underneath the fat rolls. But he called Dan Zimring, the EPA lawyer, you know. Dan said we could come by his place, so we went over there and he looked through everything and said it couldn’t be in better shape.”

  Nancy fluffed out her frizzy hair so that it stood up wildly around her head. She helped herself absently to a piece of chicken.

  “I’ll tell you what I think the problem is,” Caroline snapped, cheeks flushed. “They probably showed the submission to Art Jurshak-you know, professional courtesy or some shit. I think he blocked it.”

  “Art Jurshak,” I echoed. “Is he still alderman down here? He must be a hundred and fifty by now.”

  “No, no,” Caroline said impatiently. “He’s only in his sixties somewhere. Don’t you agree, Nancy?”

  “I think he’s sixty-two,” she answered through a mouthful of chicken.

  “Not about his age,” Caroline said impatiently. “That Jurshak must be trying to block the plant.”

  Nancy licked her fingers. She looked around for a place to put the bone and finally laid it back on the plate with the rest of the chicken. “I don’t see how you figure that, Caroline. There could be a lot of people who don’t want to see a recycling center down here.”

  Caroline looked at her through narrowed eyes. “What did O’Gara say? I mean, he must have given some reason for not giving us a hearing.”

  Nancy frowned. “He said we shouldn’t try to make proposals like this without community backing. I told him the community was a hundred percent behind us, and got ready to show him copies of petitions and crap, when he gave this jolly laugh and said, not a hundred percent. He’d heard from people who weren’t behind it at all.”

  “But why Jurshak?” I asked, interested in spite of myself. “Why not Xerxes, or the Mob, or some rival solvent re-cycler?”

  “Just the political tie-in,” Caroline answered. “O’Gara’s chairman of the zoning board because he’s good buddies with all the old hack Dems.”

  “But, Caroline-Art’s got no reason to oppose us. Our last meeting he even acted like he would support us.”

  “He never put it in so many words,” Caroline said grimly. “And all it would take is someone willing to wave a big enough campaign contribution in front of him for him to change his mind.”

  “I suppose,” Nancy agreed reluctantly. “I just don’t like to think it.”

  “Why are you so pally with Jurshak all of a sudden?” Caroline demanded.

  It was Nancy’s turn to flush. “I’m not. But if he’s against us, it’ll be damned near impossible to get O’Gara to give us a hearing. Unless we could come up with a bribe big enough to make Jurshak respond to us. So how do I find who’s against the plant, Vic? Aren’t you a detective or something these days?”

  I frowned at her and said hurriedly, “Or something. Trouble is, you’ve got too many possibilities in a political mess like this. The Mob. They’re into a lot of waste-disposal projects in Chicago. Maybe they figure you’d be cutting into their turf. Or Return to Eden. I know they’re supposed to be foursquare for the environment, but they’ve been raising a lot of money lately based on dramatic gestures they’re making here in South Chicago. Maybe they don’t want something that cuts off their fund-raising tactics. Or the Sanitary District-maybe they’re taking kickbacks to look the other way on local pollution and they don’t want to lose the revenues. Or Xerxes doesn’t-”

  “Enough!” she protested. “You’re right, of course. It could be all of them or any of them. But in my place, where would you look first?”

  “I don’t know,” I said thoughtfully. “Probably nuzzle up to someone on Jurshak’s staff. See if the pressure came from there to begin with. And if it did, why. It’d save you the trouble of making the rounds of an infinite number of possibilities. Plus you wouldn’t rub against someone who might want to put you in cement booties just for asking.”

  “You know some of the people who work for Art, don’t you?” Caroline asked Nancy.

  “Yes, yes I do.” She fiddled with another piece of chicken. “It’s just I haven’t wanted… Oh, well. Anything for the cause of right and justice, I guess.”

  She picked up her coat and headed for the door. She stood looking at us for a moment, then set her lips firmly and left.

  “I thought you might want to help her find out who’s against the plant,” Caroline said.

  “I know you did, sweet pea. And even though it would be lots of fun, working for one poor customer in South Chicago is about all my budget can take at a time.”

  “You mean you’ll help me? You’ll find my father?” The blue eyes turned dark with excitement. “I can pay you, Vic. Really. I’m not asking you to do it for nothing. I’ve got a thousand dollars saved.”

  My usual rate is two-fifty a day, plus expenses. Even with a twenty percent family discount, I had a feeling she was going to run out of money before I ran out of detecting. But no one had forced me to agree. I was a free agent, governed only by my own whims, and guilt.

  “I’ll send you a contract to sign tomorrow,” I told her.

  “And you can’t be on the phone to me every half hour demanding results. This is going to take a long time.”

  “No, Vic. I won’t.” She smiled tremulously. “I can’t tell you how much it means to me to know you’re helping me out.”

  4

  The Old Folks at Home

  In my sleep that night I saw Caroline again as a baby, her face pink and blotchy from crying. My mother stood behind me telling me to look after the child. When I woke at nine the dream lay heavy in my head, cloaking me in lethargy. The job I’d agreed to do filled me with distaste.

  Find Caroline’s father for a thousand dollars. Find Caroline’s father against Louisa’s strongly voiced opposition. If she felt that violently about the guy after all this time, he was probably better left unfound. Assuming he was still alive. Assuming he’d lived in Chicago and hadn’t been an itinerant journeyman amusing himself on his way through town.

  At last I stuck a leaden foot out from under the bedclothes. The room was cold. We’d had such a mild winter I’d turned off the radiator to keep the place from becoming stuffy, but the temperature had apparently dropped during the night. I pulled my leg back under the blanket for a minute, but moving cracked my shell of indolence. I swung the covers back and got up.

  Grabbing a sweatshirt from a pile on a chair, I trotted into the kitchen to start coffee. Maybe it was too cold out to go running. I parted the curtain overlooking the backyard. The sky was gray and an east wind was blowing debris against the back fence. I was dropping the curtain when a black nose and two paws appeared against the
window, followed by a sharp bark. It was Peppy, the golden retriever I shared with my downstairs neighbor.

  I opened the door, but she wouldn’t come in. Instead she danced around on the little porch, indicating that the weather was perfect for running and would I please get a move on?

  “Oh, all right,” I grumbled. I turned off the water and went into the living room to do my stretches. Peppy didn’t understand why I wasn’t limber and ready to go as soon as I got out of bed. Every few minutes she’d give a minatory bark from the back. When I finally appeared in my sweats and running shoes, she raced down the stairs, turning at every half landing to make sure I was still coming. She gave little grunts of ecstasy when I opened the gate to the alley, even though we make the trip together three or four times a week.

  I like to run about five miles. Since that’s beyond Peppy’s range, she stops at the lagoon when we get to the lake. She spends the time nosing out ducks and muskrats, rolling in mud or rotted fish when she can find them, and bounds out at me with her tongue hanging out in a self-satisfied grin when I make my way back west. We do the last mile home at a mild jog and I hand her over to my downstairs neighbor. Mr. Contreras shakes his head, chews us both out for letting her get dirty, then spends a pleasurable half hour grooming her coat back to its gleaming golden-red.

  He was waiting as usual this morning when we got back. “You two have a good run, doll? You keep the dog out of the water, I hope? This cold weather it isn’t good for her to get wet, you know.”

  He hung in the doorway prepared to talk indefinitely. He’s a retired machinist, and the dog, his cooking, and I make up the bulk of his entertainment. I extricated myself as quickly as I could, but it was still close to eleven by the time I’d showered. I ate breakfast in my bedroom while I dressed, knowing if I sat down with coffee and the paper I would keep making excuses for lingering. Leaving the dishes on the dresser, I wrapped a wool scarf around my neck, picked up my bag and car coat from the hall where I’d dumped them the night before, and headed south.

  The wind was whipping up the lake. Ten-foot waves crashed against the rocky barrier and spewed fingers of water onto the road. The display of nature, angry, contemptuous, made me feel small.

  Every detail of decay struck me as the road wound southward. The white paint was peeling and the gates sagging at the old South Shore Country Club, once a symbol of that area’s wealth and exclusivity. As a child I used to imagine I would grow up to ride a horse along its private bridle paths. The memory of such fantasies embarrasses me slightly now -the trappings of caste don’t sit well on my adult conscience. But I would have wished a better fate for the club than to rot slowly under the hands of the Park District, its indifferent current masters.

  South Chicago itself looked moribund, its life frozen somewhere around the time of World War II When I drove past the main business area I saw that most of the stores had Spanish names now. Other than that they looked much as they had when I was a little girl. Their grimy concrete walls still framed tawdry window displays of white nylon communion dresses, vinyl shoes, plastic furniture. Women wrapped in threadbare wool coats still wore cotton babushkas as they bent their heads into the wind. On the corners, near the ubiquitous storefront taverns, stood vacant-eyed, shabbily clad men. They had always been a presence, but the massive unemployment in the mills swelled their numbers now.

  I had forgotten the trick to getting into East Side and had to double back to Ninety-fifth Street, where an old-fashioned drawbridge crosses the Calumet River. If South Chicago hadn’t changed since 1945, East Side stuck itself in formaldehyde when Woodrow Wilson was President. Five bridges form the neighborhood’s only link to the rest of the city. Its members live in a stubborn isolation, trying to recreate the Eastern European villages of their grandparents. They don’t like people from across the river, and anyone north of Seventy-first Street might as well have rolled in on a Soviet tank for the reception they get.

  I drove under the massive concrete legs of the interstate to 106th Street. Louisa’s parents lived south of 106th on Ewing. I thought her mother would be home and hoped her father wouldn’t be. He’d retired some years ago from the little printshop he’d managed, but he was active in the Knights of Columbus and his VFW lodge and he might be out having lunch with the boys.

  The street was crammed with well-kept bungalows set on obsessively tidy lots. Not a scrap of paper lay on the street. Art Jurshak tended this part of his ward with loving hands. Street-cleaning and repair crews came through regularly. All along the southeast side, sidewalks had been built three or four feet above the original ground level. South Chicago held numerous gaping pits where the newer paving had collapsed, but in East Side not a crack showed between sidewalk and house. As I got out of my car I felt as though I should have undergone a surgical scrubdown before visiting the neighborhood.

  The Djiak house lay halfway down the block. Its curtained front windows gleamed in the dull air, and the stoop shone from much scouring. I rang the bell, trying to build up enough mental energy to talk to Louisa’s parents.

  Martha Djiak came to the door. Her square, lined face was set in a frown suitable for dismissing door-to-door salesmen. After a moment she recognized me and the frown lightened a little. She opened the inner door. I could see she had an apron covering the crisply ironed front of her dress: I’d never seen her at home without an apron on.

  “Well, Victoria. It’s been a long time since you brought little Caroline over for a visit, hasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it has,” I agreed unenthusiastically.

  Louisa would not let Caroline go to her grandparents’ alone. If she or Gabriella couldn’t take her, they gave me two quarters for the bus and careful instructions to stay with Caroline until it was time to return home again. I never understood why Mrs. Djiak couldn’t come and fetch Caroline herself. Maybe Louisa was afraid her mother would try to keep the baby so she wouldn’t grow up with an unwed single parent.

  “Since you’re down here, maybe you’d like a cup of coffee.”

  It wasn’t effusive, but she’d never been demonstrative. I accepted with as much good cheer as I could muster and she opened the storm door for me. She was careful not to touch the glass panel with her hands. I slid through as unobtrusively as I could, remembering to take my shoes off in the tiny entryway before following her to the kitchen.

  As I’d hoped, she was alone. The ironing board stood open in front of the stove, a shirt draped across it. She folded the shirt, laid it on the clothes basket, and collapsed the ironing board with quick silent motions. When everything was stowed in the tiny pantry behind the refrigerator, she put on water to boil.

  “I talked to Louisa this morning. She said you’d been down there yesterday.”

  “Yes,” I acknowledged. “It’s tough to see someone that lively laid up the way she is.”

  Mrs. Djiak spooned coffee into the pot. “Lots of people suffer more with less cause.”

  “And lots of people carry on like Attila the Hun and never get a pimple. It just goes to show, doesn’t it?”

  She took two cups from a shelf and stood them primly on the table. “I hear you’re a detective now. Doesn’t really seem like a woman’s job, does it? Kind of like Caroline, working on community development, or whatever she calls it. I don’t know why you two girls couldn’t get married, settle down, raise a family.”

  “I guess we’re waiting for men as good as Mr. Djiak to come along,” I said.

  She looked at me seriously. “That’s the trouble with you girls. You think life is romantic, like they show in the movies. A good steady man who brings his pay home every Friday is worth a lot more than fancy dinners and flowers.”

  “Was that Louisa’s problem too?” I asked gently.

  She set her lips in a thin line and turned back to the coffee. “Louisa had other problems,” she said shortly.

  “Like what?”

  She carefully took a covered sugar bowl down from the cupboard over the stove and placed it w
ith a little pitcher of cream in the middle of the table. She didn’t say anything until she’d finished pouring the coffee.

  “Louisa’s problems are old now. And they never were any of your business.”

  “And what about Caroline? Are they any concern of hers?” I sipped the rich coffee, which Louisa still infused in the old European style.

  “They don’t have anything to do with her. She’d be a good deal better off if she learned not to poke around in other people’s closets.”

  “Louisa’s past matters a lot to Caroline. Louisa is dying and Caroline is feeling very lonely. She’d like to know who her father was.”

  “And that’s why you came down here? To help her dig up all that trash? She should be ashamed she doesn’t have any father, instead of talking about it with everyone she knows.”

  “What’s she supposed to do?” I asked impatiently. “Kill herself because Louisa never married the man who got her pregnant? You act like it was all Louisa and Caroline’s fault. Louisa was sixteen years old-fifteen when she got pregnant. Don’t you think the man had any responsibility in this?”

  She clenched the coffee cup so tightly, I was afraid the ceramic might shatter. “Men-have difficulty controlling themselves. We all know that,” she said thickly. “Louisa must have led him on. But she would never admit it.”

  “All I want to know is his name,” I said as quietly as I could. “I think Caroline has a right to know if she really wants to. And a right to see if her father’s family would give her a little warmth.”

  “Rights!” she said bitterly. “Caroline’s rights. Louisa’s! What about my right to a life of peace and decency? You’re as bad as your mother was.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “In my book that’s a compliment.”

  Behind me someone turned a key in the back door. Martha paled slightly and set down her coffee cup.

  “You must not mention any of this in front of him,” she said urgently. “Tell him you were just visiting Louisa and stopped by. Promise, Victoria.”