The good part, anyway, was that she was still alive and she had a chance. She’d been shot in nonvital spots by a smaller caliber weapon and I’d found her fast. Unfortunately, she’d also lost a lot of blood. So, if they got her on plasma quickly, I thought, and if the exit wounds were clean, and if the ambulance didn’t break down, and if the paramedics weren’t Stan and Ollie...
“Someone trailed her to the washroom,” I said half out loud to get my mind in focus. Trailed her, stepped inside, fired twice, and left quickly. That was how it must have happened, because otherwise Judy would already have died from a third wound fired from closer up. But why did the assailant leave? I hunted around for another clue, one of those essential details that shows up later full of meaning, but I didn’t find anything, and just as I started to go back outside, the ambulance crew and the police arrived together in a rush.
It had been a long seven minutes.
Part II
Two hours later I was finally sitting down at Judy’s desk to try to figure out why she’d called me in the first place. In the intervening time I’d conferred with Jim Sammons, the detective sergeant in charge of the case, and we’d agreed that, if Judy pulled through, she was going to need guarding until we found out what was happening at Speedway and who her assailant was. Then I’d called a vice president of the Speedway Corporation to verify my authority to investigate the whole business. It was in my contract, but sometimes people have to be reminded. I’d also called home and talked to Ginny. She was back from Niles and had just tucked the kids in.
“R. J.,” she’d said, “please promise me you’ll be careful when you leave there. I think — that is, it makes sense to think — that Judy Pilske might have been shot because she got in touch with you. You have to consider that.”
“Yeah,” I’d replied, “I have. So the sooner we get an answer, the sooner the danger’s going to be past.”
“Maybe I can help.”
“Right. Tomorrow morning, first thing.”
“Then please be careful tonight.”
Judy’s copy of the Mall Security Log, when I found it, was uninspiring — the usual catalog of petty crime, frailty, stupidity, and craziness it always was. In December to that point it tallied two muggings, a stolen vehicle, four vehicle break-ins, a handful of stolen purses, some suspected pickpocket activity, a variety of disturbances by the obnoxious or irate, two episodes of vandalism, a hit-and-run in the parking lot, vagrancy, panhandling, et cetera, et cetera, and a two-part list six pages long of suspected or confirmed shoplifting and stolen or missing merchandise.
When I asked the on-duty security supervisor if he knew of any particular problems requiring my being called in, he’d only grunted. Frank Malin, his superior, was incommunicado at his bowling league that night.
I prowled around Judy’s office for a few minutes, looking into this file drawer or that cabinet, before I suddenly remembered an occasion in which I’d seen her slip a half-finished report under the blotter pad on her desk. On this particular night, I discovered, the blotter pad concealed two things, a bill for repairing the office copy machine and an incomplete insurance form relating to the victim of the hit-and-run accident in the mall parking lot. There was nothing unusual in this pair of documents, except for the fact that Florence Siwinski, the victim of the hit-and-run, apparently had died after three days at Northwest Hospital without regaining consciousness.
This fact, though, was enough to make me decide to take the form and the security log home with me, and while I was driving along — carefully, per Ginny’s instructions — I had the not-so-funny thought that Judy Pilske was at that moment lying unconscious at Northwest Hospital after a hit-and-run shooting at Speedway. This parallel circumstance inspired me to call Jim Sammons before I went to bed and ask him if he could dig out the police file on Florence Siwinski for me. Then I crawled in beside Ginny, but I didn’t sleep well.
The next morning, after our children — ages four and eight that year — were off to pre- and grade school respectively, I gave Ginny a pretty thorough summary of the problem, then I handed her the security log and the accident report and said, “You tell me if there’s something here. I’m going to make some calls from the bedroom.”
First I called another mall out in the southwest suburbs and canceled a security review appointment for that morning. Then I called Northwest Hospital to find out about Judy. She was in critical condition in the intensive care unit, so I was informed. After an additional five-minute hold, the floor nurse came on the line and gave me the answer to my real question: Judy hadn’t regained consciousness and probably wouldn’t for some time, maybe days, a response that sounded fairly hopeful to me, actually, so I didn’t ask for further details that I wouldn’t have been given anyway.
My next call was to Speedway and Frank Malin. Malin was a fifty-year-old former police sergeant from Chicago who had left the force early. He’d been the kind of cop who makes it hard for other cops — gruff and domineering, not corrupt, but a taker of small gifts and unfair advantages. When the Speedway Corporation hired him as a shift supervisor I’d advised against it, and when he’d been made acting security chief while his boss, Hank Arnow, convalesced from a triple bypass operation, I’d protested strongly. The Speedway Corporation paid for my advice — not enough, from my standpoint — but they didn’t always take it.
“Malin here,” he said in a smoker’s baritone.
“Yeah, Frank, this is R. J. Carr. I’ll be over there at eleven to see you about Judy. But I want to know now why she called to get my advice on security. I know she went to you first — she said as much in the message she left on my machine. Only I’m still in the dark because she’d been shot by the time I got there last night.”
“Yeah. That was pretty terrible, all right,” he said. “And the papers are giving it space, which doesn’t sit well with the management either.”
“So?” I said.
“So I don’t know.”
“Look, Frank,” I said, deciding to take a hard line, “you can help me crack this case and be a hero, or you can try to hush it up and get nothing but trouble. You’re not on the force anymore, remember?”
I could almost hear the gears grinding in his brain, trying to figure if that made sense. Finally he said, “You seen the log?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well — it’s all those thefts. The Merchants Association complained, so we tried tighter controls and supervision, but stuff is still going.”
“And Judy thought you should call me?”
“I wanted to give it a couple more days.”
“Anything else?”
“Ah... no.”
“All right, then. I’ll see you about eleven.”
We hung up and I went back to the kitchen where I found Ginny emptying a teapot into a large mug. Ginny stood about a foot shorter than I did, and the similarity between us ended at that point. She was thirty-four and looked twenty-five, for one thing, whereas I was forty in both fact and appearance. She’d inherited classic French features from her mother and classic French curves either from her mother or somebody else — maybe her father, who was Latvian — so we didn’t look alike in that way either. Otherwise she had black hair, a fair complexion, an I.Q. of two hundred or so, and a calm and generally reserved manner with only one notable weakness, an irrational attraction to ugly, oversized detectives.