CHAPTER 5
I was in a cave, looking for Morrell. Someone had handed me a wailing infant; I was hunched over, trying to get out of the way of massive roots that pushed down through the rocks. The air was so bad I couldn’t breathe; the rocks themselves were squeezing the air out of me. The infant howled more loudly. Next to me lay the body of a black man in a brown weave suit, dead from the bad air. A buzzing in the distance meant an air-raid warning. From far away I could hear planes whining overhead.
The howling of the planes, the wailing of the infant, finally forced me awake. The phone and downstairs doorbell were ringing simultaneously, but my head cold left me too groggy to bestir myself. I didn’t even stick out a hand for the phone but rolled over onto my side, hoping to relieve the pressure in my sinuses.
I was startled to see the clock read two-forty: I’d slept the whole day away. I tried to raise a sense of urgency about the man I’d found last night, or about the girl I’d tackled, but I couldn’t manage it.
I was just drifting back to sleep when someone pushed the buzzer right outside my third-floor door. Three insistent hoots, and then I heard a key in the lock. That meant one thing: Mr. Contreras, who has keys to my
place, with strict orders to save them for emergencies-which he and I
define very differently. I couldn’t deal with him while flat on my back. By the time his heavy tread sounded in my hall, I’d pulled on a sweatshirt and the pants I’d borrowed from DuPage County last night.
He started talking before he got to the bedroom door. “Doll, you okay? Your car’s out front and you ain’t been out all day, but Mr. Graham, he just sent over a messenger with a letter for you. When you didn’t even come to the door, I got kinda worried.”
“Yeah, I’m okay.” My voice sounded like Poe’s raven after a night mainlining chloroform.
“You sick, doll? What happened to you? It was on the news, you being out in wherever diving into a pond after a dead guy. You have pneumonia or what?”
The dogs pelted down the hall and circled around me with delighted yips. All was forgiven in the three days since I’d last force-marched them down Lake Michigan to the Loop-they were ready for action. I fondled their ears.
“Just a cold. I didn’t get home until four this morning-been sleeping. ‘Scuse minute.” I snuffled down to the bathroom, blenching at the sight of my face in the mirror. I looked worse than I sounded. My eyes were puffy. I had a bruise across my cheekbone and more on my arms and legs. I hadn’t noticed banging myself up so badly when I was hefting bodies around the Larchmont estate last night.
I turned the hot water on in the shower and steamed myself for a few minutes. When I emerged, clean, and, thankfully, dressed in my own clothes, my neighbor had produced a large mug of tea with lemon and honey. Unlike Geraldine Graham’s gilt eggshells, mine were real mugs, thick, clunkyand cheap.
“When I heard the news, them saying you’d been brought in to DuPage County for questioning about this dead man, I thought maybe you’d been arrested. You been fighting? You got some case that’s gonna kill you and you ain’t said nothing to me?” His brown eyes were bright with hurt. “Nothing like that.”
When I’d croaked out enough explanation to satisfy him, he suddenly remembered Darraugh’s letter. The blistering prose raised welts on my fingers.
I have been trying to reach you all day to find out why you sent the police to my mother without informing me first. Since you aren’t answering your phone or e-mail I am sending this by hand. Call immediately on receipt of this message.
How nice to be the man in charge and bulldoze your way through people as if they were construction sites. I checked in with my answering service. Christie Weddington, the operator I’ve known longest, answered. “Is that really you, Vic? Just to be safe I’d better do our security check. What was your mother’s maiden name?” When I’d spelled “Sestieri” she added severely, “When you’re going to hole up, can you let us know? Now that Mary Louise has left your company, you don’t have any backup person to call for emergencies. We got like eleven calls from Darraugh Graham’s office, and five from Murray Ryerson.”
Darraugh, or his PA, Caroline, had started in at ten and kept it up every half hour. Geraldine Graham had phoned four times herself, the first time at a quarter of ten. So the DuPage sheriff had been to see her by nine. At least they were taking it seriously. Murray had called early, before eight, presumably when he’d looked at the morning wires. I got back to him first, in case he knew something that would help me in my conversation with Darraugh. Murray was indignant that I hadn’t called him when the blood was fresh enough to lick.
“Have they ID’d the guy yet?” I croaked into his barrage of questions. “You sound like a frog in a cheese grater, Warshawski. So far the DuPage sheriff is clueless. I gather they’re running your John Doe’s prints through AFIS. And they’ve put his picture on the wires.”
“They have a cause of death?” I wheezed.
“He drowned. What were you doing, Warshawski, turning up so pat minutes after the guy plunged to his watery death?”
“You should write for the Enquirer, with prose like that. You drive out to Larchmont? No one could plunge to a watery death in five feet of water. Either he did like me, tripped and fell, or-” A coughing fit interrupted me. Mr. Contreras leaped up to pour me more tea, and to mutter that Murray was an inconsiderate jerk, keeping me talking when I was sick.
– or he went in on purpose or he was put there,” Murray finished for me. “What’s your theory? Did it look as though he’d struggled?”
I shut my eyes, trying to remember the body as I’d found it. “I only had my flashlight to augment the moon, so I can’t say whether he had unusual bruises or scratches. But his clothes were tidy-no undone buttons, and his tie was still neatly knotted. I undid it when I was trying CPR.”
“Cross your heart, you never saw him before?” Murray demanded. “Hope to die,” I coughed.
“So you didn’t go out there to meet him?”
“No!” I was getting impatient. “He’s what Professor Wright used to call a `stochastic excursion’ in my physics class.”
“Then what about the `Warshawski excursion’?” Murray asked. “What were you doing in the land of hope and glory?”
“Catching the cold of a lifetime.” I hung up as a cough started racking me again.
“You oughta go back to bed, cookie,” Mr. Contreras fussed over me. “You can’t talk, you won’t have any voice at all you keep at it. That Ryerson, he just uses you.”
“Street runs both ways,” I choked. “I have to call Darraugh.”
Darraugh interrupted a meeting on the fate of his Georgia paper division to take my call. “Mother had the police with her this morning.” “That must have pleased her,” I said.
“Excuse me?” The frost in his voice turned the phone to dry ice against my ear.
“She likes people to attend to her. You don’t visit her enough, the cops didn’t respond when she told them about intruders in your boyhood home. Now she’s gotten the attention she thinks is her due.”
“You should have reported to me at once when you found a dead man at the house. I don’t pay you to leave me in the dark.”
“Darraugh, you’re right.” My words came out with annoying slowness, the way they do when you don’t have a throat. “Hear how I sound? I got this way falling into your pool. After hauling out a dead man, futilely trying CPR, spending two hours with the sheriff’s deputies in Wheaton, it was three-thirty. A.M. I could have called you at home then, but I went to bed instead. Where I regret that I slept through ringing phones, sirens, doorbells and atom bombs. I wish I weren’t so human, but there you have it.” “Who was that man and what was he doing at the house?” Darraugh barked after a moment’s silence-he wasn’t going to agree that I had mitigating circumstances on my side, but he wasn’t going to go for my jugular any more right now, either-from him a concession.
I repeated what little information Murray had given me, then said, “Why didn’t you tell me Larchmont was your boyhood home?” Darraugh paused another moment, before saying abruptly he was in an important meeting, but he wanted me to report to him at once if I learned who had died in the pool, and why he’d been there.
“You want me to investigate?” I asked.
“Give it a few hours. Not until your voice is better: no one’s going to take you seriously when you sound like
