Even with an extra-wide umbrella my legs and feet got soaked on my dash to the car. Most Februaries, though, this would be snow a foot or two deep, so I tried not to complain too bitterly.
The little Chevy’s defroster couldn’t make much headway on the fogged windshield, but at least the car hadn’t died, the fate of a number of others I passed. The storm and the stalls made for a slow trek south; it was close to ten by the time I turned from Route 41 onto Ninety-second Street. By the time I found a parking space near the corner of Commercial, the rain was finally lifting-it was clear enough for me to change into my pumps.
SCRAP’S offices were in the second story of a block of little shops. I trotted around the corner to the business entrance-my dentist used to have his office here and the opening on Commercial remained an indelible memory.
I stopped at the top of the uncarpeted stairs, reading the wall directory while combing my hair and straightening my skirt. Dr. Zdunek wasn’t there anymore. Neither were a lot of the other tenants; I passed half a dozen or so empty offices on my way down the hall.
At the far end I walked into a room that had the unmistakable air of a poor not-for-profit agency. The scarred metal furniture and newspaper articles taped to the walls wavered under a badly winking fluorescent bulb. Papers and phone books were stacked on the floor and the electric typewriters were models IBM had abandoned when I was still in college.
A young black woman was typing while talking on the phone. She smiled at me, but held up a finger to ask me to wait. I could hear voices from an open conference room; ignoring the receptionist’s urgent hissing, I went to the door to look in.
A group of five, four women and a man, sat at a rickety deal table. Caroline was in the middle, talking heatedly. When she saw me at the door she broke off and flushed to the roots of her coppery hair.
“Vic! I’m in a meeting. Can’t you wait?”
“All day, if it’s for you, my sweet. We need a tête-à-tête about John McGonnigal-he visited me first thing this morning.”
“John McGonnigal?” Her little nose wrinkled questioningly.
“Sergeant McGonnigal. Chicago Police,” I said helpfully.
She turned even redder. “Oh. Him. Maybe we’d better talk now. Will you all excuse me?”
She got up and took me to a cubbyhole next to the conference room. The chaos there, compounded of books, papers, graphs, old newspapers, and candy wrappers, made my office look like a convent cell. Caroline dumped a phone directory from a folding chair for me and seated herself in the rickety swivel chair behind her desk. She gripped her hands together in front of her, but stared at me defiantly.
“Caroline, I’ve known you twenty-six years, and you’ve pulled tricks that would shame Oliver North, but this one has got to head the list. After whining and snuffling you got me to agree to look for your old man. Then you called me off without any reason. Now, to top it all off, you lied to the police about my involvement with Nancy. You want to explain why? Without resorting to Hans Christian Andersen?” I was having trouble keeping my voice below a shout.
“What are you on your high horse about?” she said belligerently. “You did give Nancy advice about-”
“Shut up!” I snapped. “You’re not talking to the cops, sweetie pie. I can just picture you blushing and winking away your tears with Sergeant McGonnigal. But I know what I told Nancy that night as well as you do. So cut the crap and tell me why you lied about me to the police.”
“I didn’t! You try and prove it! Nancy did come by that night. You did tell her to talk to someone in Jurshak’s office. And she’s dead now.”
I shook my head like a wet dog, trying to clear my brain. “Could we start this at the beginning? Why did you tell me to stop hunting for your old man?”
She looked at the desktop. “I decided it wasn’t fair to Ma. Going behind her back when it upset her so much.”
“Whew boy,” I said. “Hold it there. Let me get onto Cardinal Bernardin and the Pope to start beatification proceedings. When did you ever put Louisa, or anyone else, ahead of what you wanted?”
“Stop it!” she shouted, bursting into tears. “Believe me or not, I don’t care. I love my mother and I don’t want anyone hurting her no matter what you may think.”
I looked at her warily. Caroline might bat a few tears around as part of her tragic orphan routine, but she wasn’t prone to sobbing fits.
“Okay,” I said slowly. “I take it back. That was cruel. Is that why you sicced the cops on me? To punish me for saying I was continuing the investigation?”
She blew her nose noisily. “It wasn’t like that!”
“What was it like then?”
She caught her lower lip in her teeth. “Nancy called me Tuesday morning. She said she’d gotten threatening phone calls and she thought someone was following her.”
“What were they threatening her about?”
“The plant, of course.”
“Caroline, I want you to be absolutely clear on this. Did she specifically say the calls were about the plant?”
She opened her mouth, then took a breath. “No,” she finally muttered. “I just assumed they were. Because it was the last thing she and I had been talking about.”
“But you went ahead and told the police that she was killed because of the recycling plant. And that I told her who to talk to. Do you understand how outrageous that is?”
“But, Vic. It’s not just a wild guess. I mean-”
“You mean shit!” My anger returned, making my voice husky. “Can’t you tell the difference between your head games and reality? Nancy was killed. Murdered. Instead of helping the police find the murderer, you slandered me and got them on my butt.”
“They don’t care about Nancy, anyway. They don’t care about any of us down here.” She got to her feet, her eyes flashing. “They respond to political pressure, and as far as Jurshak is concerned, South Chicago might as well be the South Pole. You know that as well as I do. You know the last time he got a street repaired down here-it sure as hell was before you left the neighborhood.”
“Bobby Mallory is a good, honest, thorough cop,” I said doggedly. “Just because Jurshak is twenty kinds of asshole doesn’t change that.”
“Yeah, you don’t care, either. You proved that pretty good when you moved away from here and never came back until I pushed you into it.”
The pulse beside my right temple started throbbing. I pounded the desk hard enough to knock some of the papers to the floor. “I busted my ass for a week trying to find your old man for you. Your grandparents insulted me, Louisa blew up at me, and you! You couldn’t be content with manipulating me into going to look for the guy and then spinning me around a few times. You had to lie to the police about me.”
“And I thought you’d give a fuck,” she yelled. “I thought if you didn’t care about me, you’d at least do something for Nancy because you played on the same team together. I guess that proves how wrong I was.”
She started for the door. I caught her arm and forced her to face me.
“Caroline, I’m mad enough to beat the shit out of you. But I’m not so mad I can’t think. You fingered me to the cops because there’s something you know that you’re scared to talk about. I want to know what that is.”
She looked at me fiercely. “I don’t know anything. Just that someone had started following Nancy around over the weekend.”
“And she called the police and reported it. Or you did.”
“No. She talked to the state’s attorney and they said they’d open a file. I guess they have something to put in it now.”