“I’m certainly plenty busy between now and five; I won’t have time to call the family before then.”
He bowed his head in a courtly fashion and started back to the house. I walked with him. “Before you go back inside, can you tell me anything about Fly the Flag? Did Frank Zamar explain to you why he wouldn’t call the police about the sabotage in his plant?”
Andrés shook his head again. “It will be a good thing for you to work with the girls on their basketball, instead of all these other matters.”
It was a pretty stinging slap in the face. “All these other matters are directly connected to the girls and their basketball, Pastor. Rose Dorrado is a member of your church, so you must know how worried she is about losing her job. Her kid Josie plays on my team-she took me home to her mother, who asked me to investigate the sabotage. It really is a simple story, Pastor.”
“South Chicago is full of simple stories, isn’t it, each beginning in poverty and ending in death.”
This time he sounded pompous, not poetic or natural; I ignored the comment. “And now something has gone even more amiss. Rose has taken a second job, one that keeps her away from her children in the evening. It’s not just that her children need her, but I have the feeling she was coerced into taking this job, whatever it is. You’re her pastor; can’t you find out what the problem is?”
“I cannot force anyone to confide in me against their wishes. And she has two daughters who are old enough to look after the house. I know in the ideal world that you live in, girls of fifteen and sixteen should have a mother’s supervision, but down here girls that age are considered grown up.”
I was getting extremely tired of people acting like South Chicago was a different planet, one that I couldn’t possibly comprehend. “Girls of fifteen should not become mothers, whether they are in South Chicago or Barrington Hills. Do you know that every baby a teenage girl has chops her lifetime earning potential by fifty percent? Julia already has a baby. I don’t think it will help her or Rose or even Josie, if Josie starts running around the streets and has one of her own.”
“It is necessary for these girls to put their trust in Jesus, and to keep their lives pure for their husbands.”
“It would be lovely if they did, but they don’t. And since you know that as well as I do, it would be really great if you stopped telling them not to use contraceptives.”
His mouth tightened. “Children are a gift of the Lord. You may think you mean well, but your ideas come from a bad way of thinking. You are a woman, and unmarried, so you don’t know about these matters. You concentrate on teaching these girls to play basketball and do not injure their immortal souls. I think it is better-”
He broke off to look over my shoulder at someone behind me. I turned to see a young man ambling toward us along Ninety-first Street. I didn’t recognize his sullen pretty-boy face, but something about him did seem vaguely familiar. Andrés clearly knew him: the pastor called out something in Spanish, so rapidly I couldn’t follow it, although I did hear him asking “why” and tell him not to come here, to leave. The younger man stared sullenly at Andrés, but finally hunched a shoulder and sauntered back the way he’d come.
“Chavo banda!” Andrés muttered.
That much I understood from my days with the public defender. “Is he a punk? I’ve seen him around, but I can’t think where. What’s his name?”
“His name doesn’t matter, because he is only that: a punk one sees around, taking from jobsites, or even doing little jobs for bigger thugs. I don’t want him at this jobsite. Which I must return to.”
“Tell Billy to call me,” I shouted to his back. “Before the end of the day, so I can pass the word on to his parents.” Although, frankly, in the mood I was in, I’d be happy to see the cops break down the minister’s damn door.
He flung out a hand at me, a wave of some kind-assent, dismissal?-I couldn’t tell, because he continued into the house, an effective brush-off. He knew a lot, Pastor Andrés did, about Billy, about the chavos banda of the neighborhood, about Fly the Flag, most of all about right and wrong: it was better for me to mind my own business, he’d said, not to meddle with any of it, which meant to me that he knew why Frank Zamar didn’t want the police involved in exploring the sabotage at the plant.
I walked back to my own car. Should I leave it alone? I should. I didn’t have the time or the desire to look into it. And maybe if Andrés hadn’t told me an unmarried woman shouldn’t know or talk about sex, I would have left it alone. I tripped on a piece of concrete and did a kind of cartwheel to keep from going over completely.
I wished my Spanish were better. It’s similar to Italian, so I can follow it, but I don’t speak Italian often enough these days for either language to stay fresh in my mind. I had a feeling Andrés knew this chavo banda better than just from seeing him around the neighborhood; I had a feeling Andrés specifically didn’t want me to see him with this chavo. Next week, I’d make it a little project, to try to find out who this particular punk was.
At practice that afternoon, I couldn’t get anyone to pay attention to the game. Josie, in particular, was like a cat on a hot shovel. I figured the load of domestic responsibilities her mother had dumped on her must be getting to her, but it didn’t make working with her easier. I called a halt to scrimmage twenty minutes early and could hardly wait for them to get out of the showers before taking off myself.
Billy the Kid phoned me as I was leaving Coach McFarlane’s house. He wouldn’t tell me where he was; in fact, he would barely talk to me at all.
“I thought I could trust you, Ms. War-sha-sky, but then you go and start working for my father, and on top of that you bothered Pastor Andrés. I’m an adult, I can take care of myself. You have to promise to stop looking for me.”
“I can’t make such a sweeping promise, Billy. If you don’t want your dad to know where you are, I guess that’s a reasonable request, as long as I can assure him you’re not being held somewhere against your will.”
His breath came heavily over the phone to me. “I haven’t been kidnapped or anything like that. Now promise me.”
“I’m tired enough of all the Bysens to be willing to run an ad in the Herald-Star promising never to talk to any of you again about each other or anything else.”
“Is that supposed to be a joke? I don’t think this is very funny. I just want you to tell my dad that I’m staying with friends, and if he sends anyone else looking for me I’m going to start calling shareholders.”
“Calling shareholders?” I repeated blankly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That’s my whole message.”
“Before you hang up, you ought to remember something about your cell phone: it puts out a GSM signal. A bigger, richer detective agency than mine would have equipment to track you. As would the FBI.”
He was silent for a moment. In the background, I could hear sirens, and a baby crying: the sounds of the South Side.
“Thank you for the tip, Ms. War-sha-sky,” he finally said in a careful voice. “Maybe I misjudged you.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Do you want-” but he hung up before I could finish asking him if he wanted to see me.
I pulled over to the curb to relay Billy’s message to his father. Naturally enough, Mr. William wasn’t pleased, but his response took the form of petulant bullying (“That’s all? You think I’m paying your fee for sending me a disrespectful message? I want my son now.”) But when I told him I was going to have to quit the assignment, he stopped complaining about the message and demanded that I get back to work.
“I can’t, Mr. William, not when I promised Billy to stop looking for him.”
“What’s that got to do with it?” He was astonished. “It was a good ploy-he won’t be suspecting you.”