“We see float fish here from time to time,” Smerdlow said, “but a body in the coal? I couldn’t believe it,” and so on.
Jake, Bernie, Mr. Contreras and the dogs all came to the door to see me off, which made me feel as if I were on my way to the guillotine. Mr. Contreras told the police that he had their badge numbers if anything went wrong. Even so, Burstyn and his pal, a man named Dubcek, didn’t treat me roughly—no grabbing of the arms or snatching away my briefcase.
When I asked them how they’d handled the officers from the Town Hall District who’d responded to Bernie’s SOS, Dubcek grunted. “We didn’t have to tell them anything. That woman downstairs from you, she stepped up all hot and bothered, demanding they do something about your dogs, so they thought she had called in the complaint. You better be careful there, miss. Make sure they have licenses, don’t let them run through the halls like they did this morning. It’s dangerous, especially with little children living in the building.”
They were less forthcoming about why I was being dragged to the South Side, even after I said the dead body in the Guisar company’s pet coke mountain had been on the morning news: the lieutenant would explain why he wanted to see me.
The back of a squad car is an uncomfortable place to sit, especially if you’re taller than about five-three. Your knees are up against a grille and the seat feels like cement blocks. The smell isn’t too appetizing, either—too many bodies covered in who knows what effluvia have been there before you. I lost interest in my sandwich.
Instead, I looked up news on my phone. Everyone was very excited about the body in the coke, but no one had a name.
I hated making nice with Murray, but I finally texted him.
You looked at home on the tugboat. Career change imminent? -
VIW
The Queen is speaking to the commoner? You must want something.
-MRyerson
Love and recognition, as we all do. Wondering if you knew the vic. -
VIW
They had him covered and carted before the 5th Estate arrived. If you can ID him and don’t tell me, our relationship really is over. -
MRyerson
I debated for a minute—I was still feeling pretty stiff toward Murray—but finally texted that I’d been summoned to the Fourth District and was looking for a heads-up. That excited Murray into a frenzy of texting, the upshot of which was he’d take me to dinner at Trefoil if I got him a name ahead of the pack.
LOL, I wrote back, and turned to client e-mails.
When we finally reached the station—a long trek on the Dan Ryan at rush hour—my escort left me in the public area while they checked in with Conrad.
The building was new since I’d moved away, but the sergeant behind the desk was old, with deep grooves in his cheeks, his slate-gray hair overdue for a trim. He was telling me where I could sit in the hoarse baritone of a drinking smoker, but I was squinting at his badge.
“Sid?” I said. “Sid Gerber?”
“Yeah. Who are you when you’re at home?”
“I’m V.I.—Vic Warshawski. Tony’s daughter.”
He stared at me, then smiled, pushing the grooves in his face toward his ears. “You’re never. You’re never Tony’s girl. How about that?”
A young officer filling out a form at the end of the counter turned to look at me, decided whoever Tony was, his girl held no interest, and went back to his clipboard. A woman waiting on the visitors’ bench loudly demanded when she was going to get to talk to someone about the police totally illegally impounding her car.
“Ma’am, your car was holding eight kilos of uncut cocaine. As soon as—”
“Put there by some street scum who you ain’t even trying to find, while you got my son locked up.”
“That could be, ma’am, but the car is still evidence.” He turned sideways, his back to her. “Vic, how long’s it been?”
“How’d you end up down here, Sid?” I asked. “I thought you knew better than to put yourself in the crosshairs.”
“Nobody asks me to go out on the street anymore and I got me a weekend place down near Schererville.” He winked, meaning, I suppose, that he was actually living down in Indiana—a no-no for someone on Chicago’s payroll.
Sid had been one of my dad’s last partners, after Tony had been redeemed from cop helclass="underline" my dad had been sent to West Englewood for reasons he’d never talked about.
Near the end of my dad’s active duty life, his former protégé Bobby Mallory started becoming a power in the department. Bobby plucked Tony from Sixty-third and Throop and sent him to one of the soft districts, out near O’Hare, where he’d met Sid. Sid was one of those guys who was born knowing how to avoid hard work, but Tony let it ride in a way he wouldn’t have earlier. He said Sid was a born storyteller, and a good story got you through a dull shift better than station coffee. When Tony had to go on disability, Sid was one of his most faithful visitors.
Sid gossiped with me now about the good old days, while the phone rang, the woman on the bench ranted, and officers checked in and out. I asked what he knew about the body in the pet coke mountain.
“Looks ugly.” He lowered his voice. “They think he was still alive when he was put in.”
“Who was it? They didn’t have an ID on the news yet.”
Sid gave an elaborate shrug. “My grandkids will see it on Facebook before I know.”
His cell phone rang; Conrad was ready for me. I was to make a right turn, ID myself to a woman at the entrance to the holding cells, and she’d take me to the looey.
As I went into the back, a patrolman was pleading with Sid to book his captive and the woman with the impounded car had come up to the counter to scream in Sid’s face.
THE UMPIRE STRIKES BACK
My escort took me around a partition where a minute office had been carved out for the watch commander. Most of the space was taken up with a dry-erase board that held the week’s duty roster. The watch commander’s desk was wedged against the facing wall. There were a couple of chairs in front of it, both of them covered with reports.
Conrad Rawlings had his cell phone to his ear with his left hand and was hunting and pecking on his computer keyboard with the right. When he saw me, he gestured toward one of the chairs with his typing hand.
“Put those on the floor. I’ll be with you in a sec.”
By the time I’d shifted everything, he’d finished his conversation.
“You wobble on the line, Warshawski. I’m wondering if you’ve crossed it.”
“What line are we talking about, Lieutenant?”
When Conrad is feeling mellow toward me, he calls me “Ms. W.” He was not feeling mellow. I took my sandwich out of my briefcase and started eating, which made him even less mellow.
“Put that away. This isn’t a restaurant.”
“Your guys woke me, not to mention my entire building, at seven this morning. I need to eat. You implied I crossed a line. What are you talking about?” I wondered if word had drifted to him of my poking into Stella Guzzo’s bank account.
“You don’t think you’re bound by the same rules of law the rest of the country runs on. You think you can make up the rules to suit your own needs. I’ve seen you do it time and again.”
I put down my sandwich. “Are we recording this conversation, Lieutenant? Because that is slander, and it is actionable.”
Conrad glowered at his desktop. He’d gotten off on the wrong foot and knew it.
“Come over here: I want to show you some pictures.”
I went around to his side of the desk. He turned and typed a few lines on his computer and brought up a slideshow of the pet coke mountain at the Guisar slip. It wasn’t really a mountain, but a lopsided pile of coal dust perhaps five hundred feet long. It came to an off-center peak about fifty feet high and sloped from there to a plateau around fifteen feet from the ground.