Blood Shot Page 5

  Tears smarted in her eyes. “I love that girl. You’d think I was trying to beat her, or kick her out on the street instead of protecting her. I did my best to see she got a different shot at life than I did and I’m not watching that go down a sewer now.”

  “You did a great job, Louisa. But she’s grown up now. She doesn’t need protecting. Can’t you let her make her own decision on this?”

  “Goddamn you, no, Victoria! And if you’re going to keep on about it, get your ass out of here and don’t come back!”

  Her face turned red under its greenish sheen and she started coughing. I was batting a thousand with the Djiak women today, getting them furious in descending order of age. All I needed to do was tell Caroline I was quitting and I could make it four for four.

  I waited for the paroxysm to subside, then led the conversation gently back to topics Louisa enjoyed, to her young days after Caroline was born. After talking to Connie I could see why Louisa had relished that time as one of freedom and gaiety.

  I finally left around four. All during the long drive home through the evening rush hour I listened to Caroline’s and Louisa’s voices debating in my head. I could understand Louisa’s strong wish to protect her privacy. She was dying, too, which gave her desires more weight.

  At the same time I could empathize with Caroline’s fear of isolation and loneliness. And after seeing the Djiaks close up, I understood why she’d like to find other relatives. Even if her father turned out to be a real jerk, he couldn’t have a crazier family than the one she already knew about.

  In the end I decided to look for the two men Louisa had talked about last night and this afternoon-Steve Ferraro and Joey Pankowski. They’d worked together at the Xerxes plant, and it was possible she’d gotten the job through her lover. I’d also try to track down the grocery clerk Connie had mentioned-Ron Sowling or whoever. East Side was such a stable, unchanging neighborhood, it was possible that the same people still owned the store and that they would remember Ron and Louisa. If Ed Djiak had come around playing the heavy father, it might have made an indelible memory.

  Making a decision, even one to compromise, brings a certain amount of relief I called up an old friend and spent a pleasant evening on Lincoln Avenue. The blister on my left heel didn’t stop my dancing until past midnight.

  6

  The Mill on the Calumet

  In the morning I was ready early, at least early for me. By nine I had done my exercises. Skipping a run, I dressed for the corporate world in a tailored navy suit that was supposed to make me look imposing and competent. I steeled my heart against Peppy’s importunate cries and headed for the South Side for the third day in a row. Instead of following the lake down, this morning I went west to an expressway that would spew me into the heart of the Calumet Industrial District.

  It’s been over a century since the Army Corps of Engineers and George Pullman decided to turn the sprawling marshes between Lake Calumet and Lake Michigan into an industrial center. It wasn’t just Pullman, of course-Andrew Carnegie, Judge Gary, and a host of lesser barons all played a part, working on it for sixty or seventy years. They took an area about four miles square and filled it with dirt, with clay dredged from Lake Calumet, with phenols, oils, ferrous sulfide, and thousands of other substances you not only never heard of, you never want to.

  When I got off the expressway at a 103rd Street, I had the familiar sensation of landing on the moon, or returning to earth after a nuclear decimation. Life probably exists in the oily mud around Lake Calumet. It’s just not anything you’d recognize outside a microscope or a Steven Spielberg movie. You don’t see trees or grass or birds. Only the occasional feral dog, ribs protruding, eyes red with madness and hunger.

  The Xerxes plant lay in the heart of the ex-swamp, at 110th Street east of Torrence. The building was an old one, put up in the early fifties. From the road I could see their sign, “Xerxes, King of Solvents.” The royal purple had faded to an indeterminate pink, while the logo, a crown with double X’s in it, had almost disappeared.

  Made of concrete blocks, the plant was shaped like a giant U whose arms backed onto the Calumet River. That way the solvents manufactured there could flow easily onto barges and the waste products into the river. They don’t dump into the river anymore, of course-when the Clean Water Act was passed Xerxes built giant lagoons to hold their wastes, with clay walls providing a precarious barrier between the river and the toxins.

  I parked my car in the gravel yard and gingerly picked my way through the oily ruts to a side entrance. The strong smell, reminiscent of a darkroom, hadn’t changed from the times I used to drive down with my dad to drop off Louisa if she’d missed her bus.

  I had never been inside the plant. Instead of the crowded noisy cauldron of my imagination, I found myself in an empty hall. It was long and dimly lit, with a concrete floor and cinder-block walls that went the height of the building, making me feel as though I were at the bottom of a mine shaft.

  Following the arm of the U in the direction of the river, I came at length to a series of cubbyholes cut into the interior wall. Their walls were made of that grainy glass used for shower doors; I could see light and movement through them but couldn’t distinguish shapes. I knocked at the middle door. When no one answered I turned the knob and went in.

  I entered a time warp, a long narrow room whose furnishings apparently hadn’t changed since the building had gone up thirty-five years ago. Olive-drab filing cabinets and gun-metal desks lined the wall across from the doors. Fluorescent lights hung from an old acoustic-tile ceiling. The outer doors all opened into the room, but two had been blocked shut by filing cabinets.

  Four middle-aged women in purple smocks sat at the row of desks. They were working on vast bales of paper with Sisyphus-like doggedness, making entries, shifting invoices, using old-fashioned adding machines with experienced stubby fingers. Two were smoking. The smell of cigarettes mingled with the darkroom chemical scent in acrid harmony.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” I said. “I was trying to find the personnel office.”

  The woman nearest the door turned heavy, uninterested eyes to me. “They’re not hiring.” She went back to her papers.

  “I’m not looking for a job,” I said patiently, “I just want to talk to the personnel manager.”

  All four of them looked up at that, weighing my suit, my relative youth, trying to decide if I was OSHA or EPA, state or federal. The woman who’d spoken jerked her faded brown hair toward a door facing the one I’d entered by.

  “Across the plant,” she said laconically.

  “Can I get there from inside or should I go around?”

  One of the smokers reluctantly put down her cigarette and got up. “I’ll take her,” she said hoarsely.

  The others looked at the old-fashioned electric clock over their desks. “You going on break then?” a flabby woman in the back asked.

  My guide shrugged. “Might as well.”

  The others looked chagrined: she’d been faster than they to think how to squeeze five extra minutes from the system. One of them pushed her chair back in a hopeful way, but the first speaker said sternly, “One’s enough to go,” and the would-be rebel scooted back to her station.

  My guide took me out the far door. Beyond it lay the inferno I’d been expecting when I first entered the plant. We were in a dimly lit room that stretched the length of the building. Stainless-steel pipes ran along the ceiling and at intervals below, so that you felt suspended in a steel maze that had flipped up on its side. Steam hissed from the overhead pipes in little puffs, filling the maze with vapor. Large red “No Smoking” signs hung every thirty feet along the walls. Enormous cauldrons were hooked to the pipes at intervals, huge vats designed for a coven of giant witches. The white-suited figures tending the place might have been their familiars.

  Although the air in here actually smelled better than it did outside, a number of the workers wore respirators. I wondered about the majority who didn’t, as we
ll as how smart it was for my guide and me to be taking the shortcut through the plant. I tried asking her over the hissing and clatter of the pipes, but she apparently had decided I must be an OSHA spy or something and refused to answer. When an overhead valve let out a belch so loud that I jumped, she gave a small smile but said nothing.

  Skirting the maze expertly, she led me to a door diagonally across the plant from the one we’d entered by. We were in another narrow cinder-block hallway, this one forming the base of the U. She took me down it, turning left to follow the second arm toward the river. Halfway along, she stopped at a door labeled “Canteen-Employees Only.”

  “Mr. Joiner’s on down there-third door on your right. Door marked ‘Administration.’”

  “Well, thanks for your help,” I said, but she had already disappeared into the canteen.

  The door marked “Administration” was also made of grainy glass but the rooms beyond it looked a little classier than the Tartarus where I’d visited the four clerks. Carpeting, not linoleum, covered the concrete floor. Wallboard ceiling and wall covering created an illusion of an intimate space within the cinder-block tunnel.

  A woman in street clothes sat behind a desk with a modern phone bank and a not-so-modern electric typewriter. Like the clerks I’d stumbled on, she was middle-aged. But her skin was firm under a generous layer of makeup, and she’d dressed with care, if not style, in a crisp pink shirtwaist with large plastic pearls at her neck and clipped to her ears.

  “You need something, honey?” she asked.

  “I’d like to see Mr. Joiner. I don’t have an appointment, but it shouldn’t take more than five minutes.” I dug in my handbag for a business card and handed it to her.

  She gave a little laugh, “Ooh, honey, don’t expect me to pronounce that one.”

  This wasn’t a Loop office where receptionists give you a KGB-style interrogation before grudgingly agreeing to find out if Mr. So-and-so can see you. She picked up a phone and told Mr. Joiner there was a girl out here asking for him. She gave another little laugh and said she didn’t know and hung up.

  “He’s back there,” she said brightly, pointing over her shoulder. “Middle door.”

  Three little offices were carved into the wall behind her, each about eight feet square. The door to the first one was open and I glanced in curiously. No one was there, but an array of papers and a wall covered with production charts showed it was a working office. A little sign next to the open middle door announced it was home to “Gary Joiner, Accounting, Safety, and Personnel.” I knocked briefly and went in.

  Joiner was a young man, maybe thirty years old, with sandy hair cut so short it merged with his pink skin. He was frowning over a stack of ledger printouts but looked up when I came in. His face was blotchy and he smiled at me with worried, innocent eyes.

  “Thanks for taking the time to see me,” I said briskly, shaking his hand. I explained who I was. “For personal reasons-nothing to do with Xerxes-I’m trying to find two men who worked here in the early sixties.”

  I pulled a slip of paper with Joey Pankowski and Steve Ferraro’s names on it from my purse and handed it to him. I had a story about why I wanted to find them, something dull about being witnesses to an accident, but I didn’t want to volunteer a reason unless he asked for it. Unlike Goebbels’s belief in the big lie, I believe in the dull lie-make your story boring enough and no one will question it.

  Joiner studied the paper. “I don’t think those guys work here. We only employ a hundred and twenty people, so I’d know their names. But I’ve only been here two years, so if they go back to the sixties…”

  He turned to a filing cabinet and riffled through some files. I was struck suddenly by the absence of any computer terminals, either here or elsewhere in the plant. Most personnel or accounting officers would be able to look up employees on a screen.

  “Nope. Of course, you can see we barely have room for current files.” He swept an arm in an arc that knocked part of the ledger sheets to the floor. He blushed vividly as he bent to pick them up. “If someone leaves or retires or whatever and we don’t have activity on them-you know, like an ongoing comp claim-we ship the files out to our warehouse in Stickney. Want me to check for you?”

  “That’d be great.” I got up. “When can I call back? Monday too soon?”

  He assured me Monday would be fine-he lived out west and could stop off at the warehouse on his way home tonight. He conscientiously scribbled a note in his pocket diary, inserting the scrap of paper with the names on it. By the time I left the room he had already returned to his printouts.

  7

  The Boys in the Back Room

  I’d had enough of the city, of pollution and cramped, painful lives. When I got home I changed into jeans, packed an overnight bag, and took off with the dog to spend the weekend in Michigan. Although the water was too cold and wild for swimming, we spent two invigorating days on the beach, running, chasing sticks, or reading, depending on individual temperament. When I got back to Chicago late Sunday I felt as though my head had been thoroughly aired out. I turned the dog over to a jealous Mr. Contreras and headed upstairs to bed.

  I’d told the personnel guy at Xerxes I’d call him in the morning, but when I woke up I decided to go visit him in person. If he had addresses for Pankowski and Ferraro, I could go see them and maybe get the whole mess cleared up in one morning. And if he’d forgotten to stop at the Stickney warehouse, a personal visit would make him more responsive than a phone call.

  It had rained overnight, turning Xerxes’s gravel yard into an oily mud puddle. I parked as close to the side entrance as I could and picked my way through the sludge. Inside, the cavernous hallway was cold; I was shivering slightly by the time I reached the pebbly glass entrance to the administrative suite.

  Joiner wasn’t in his office, but the incurious secretary cheerfully directed me to a loading bay where he was managing a shipment. I followed the hall down to the river end of the long building. Heavy steel doors, difficult to open, led to the bay. Beyond lay a world of dirt and clamor.

  Sliding steel doors enclosing the loading bay had been rolled open on two sides. At the far end, facing me, the Calumet lapped against the walls, its brackish waters green and roiling from the downpour. A cement barge lay motionless in the turbulent water. A gang of dockhands was removing large barrels from it, rolling them along the concrete floor with a clatter echoed and intensified by the steel walls.

  The other door opened on a truck bay. A phalanx of silver tankers was lined up there, looking like menacing cows attached to a high-tech milking machine as they received solvents from an overhead pipe rack. Their diesels vibrated, filling the air with an urgent racket, making it impossible to understand the shouts of the men who were moving around them.

  I spied a group in conference around a man with a clipboard. The light was too dim to make out faces but I assumed the man was Joiner and headed toward him. Someone darted from behind a vat and seized my arm.

  “Hard-hat area,” he bellowed in my ear. “What are you doing here?”

  “Gary Joiner!” I bawled back at him. “I need to talk to him.”

  He escorted me back to the entrance to wait. I watched him go over to the confabbing group and tap one of the figures on the arm. He jerked his head to where I was standing. Joiner stuck his clipboard on a barrel and trotted over to me.

  “Oh,” he said. “It’s you.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by instead of phoning. I can tell this is a bad time to talk to you-want me to wait in your office?”

  “No, no. I-uh, I couldn’t find anything about those men. I don’t think they ever worked here.”

  Even in the dim light I could tell his splotchy skin was flushing.

  “I bet that warehouse is a mess,” I said sympathetically. “No one has time to look after records when you’re running a manufacturing plant.”

  “Yes,” he agreed eagerly. “Yes, that’s for su
re.”

  “I’m a trained investigator. If you gave me some kind of authorization, I could have a look through there. You know, see if their records were misplaced or something.”

  He flickered his eyes nervously around the room. “No. No. Things aren’t that big a mess. The guys never worked here. I gotta go now.”

  He hurried away before I could say anything else. I started after him, but even if I could get past the foreman, I couldn’t think of a way to get Joiner to tell me the truth. I didn’t know him, didn’t know the plant, didn’t have a clue as to why he would lie to me.

  I walked slowly back down the long hall to my car, absentmindedly stepping in an oozy patch that plastered sludge firmly to my right shoe. I cursed loudly-I’d paid over a hundred dollars for those pumps. As I sat in the car trying to scrape it clean, I got oily sludge on my skirt. Feeling outraged with the world, I threw the shoe petulantly into the backseat and changed back into my running gear. Even though Caroline hadn’t sent me to the plant, I blamed my problems on her.

  As I drove up Torrence, passing rusted-out factories that looked dingier than ever from the rain, I wondered if Louisa had called Joiner, asking him not to help me if I turned up. I didn’t think her mind worked that way, though: she’d told me to mind my own business, and as far as she was concerned, I was doing just that. Maybe the Djiaks had fumed self-righteously to Xerxes, but I thought they were too myopic to analyze how I might conduct an investigation. They could only see how Louisa had hurt them.

  On the other hand, if Joiner didn’t want to talk to me about the men because of some problem the company was having with them-say a lawsuit-he would have known when I came in on Friday. But the first time I spoke to him he’d obviously never heard of them.

  I couldn’t figure it out, but the thought of lawsuits made me realize another place to look for the men. Neither Pankowski nor Ferraro was in the phone book, but the old ward voter registration records might still be around. I turned right on Ninety-fifth Street and headed into East Side.