I got slowly to my feet and called to Peppy. She came running up, pink tongue hanging, grinning with pleasure. I ran my fingers through her silky gold hair, trying to absorb some of her pure joy in the world before putting my weary body into motion again.
At my office, I went through my log of calls from yesterday. A couple of clients I should have been attending to. Three messages from Mr. William, wanting his son, two from Murray Ryerson at the Herald-Star wanting to know if there was an important story about Fly the Flag. Fires in South Chicago are a dime a dozen; the story had rated only a paragraph in the metro sections of the city newspapers, and Murray was the only reporter I knew who’d caught my name in the small print (misspelled and misidentified as “Chicago police sergeant I. V. Warshacky,” but Murray had seen through that easily enough).
I called Morrell first. He and Mr. Contreras had sent out for Thai food for lunch, and had played a little gin. My neighbor had left, but Morrell couldn’t settle down to his writing; maybe he’d done too much the last few days. When I explained that I was going to do a little work at the office, then try to see Lotty, Morrell said he’d be glad to come with me if she was home; he was going a little stir-crazy.
Lotty was in. Unlike Murray, she didn’t scan crime news in the papers, so she was surprised and concerned to hear I’d been injured on the job. “Of course you can come by, my dear. I’m going to the store, but I plan to be home this afternoon. Around three-thirty, then?”
After dictating my notes on my encounter with Sandra and Bron, I talked briefly with Murray: there was no big story down at Fly the Flag, unless you counted the disaster in lives like Rose Dorrado’s. He listened to my passionate description of her life for a few minutes, before interrupting me to say he’d see if he could interest the ChicagoBeat editor in a human interest story down there.
“What about the dead man in the building?” I asked. “Has the ME identified him? Was it Frank Zamar?”
I heard the click of Murray ’s fingers on his keyboard. “Yeah, uh, Zamar, that’s right. He had an alarm and a sprinkler system down there. The bomb and arson people are guessing the alarm sounded and he went down to see what the problem was. There’s a big drying room at the back of the plant, big propane-fueled blower. The fabric must have been smoldering and set off the propane just as he got down there-it looked as though he was trying to run away but the fire swallowed him.”
I dropped the phone. I’d been on the outside, playing spy, while Frank Zamar walked into an inferno. I became aware of Murray ’s voice coming tinnily from near my right knee. I picked up the receiver.
“Sorry, Murray. I was there, you know. I should have been inside, checking the place over. I’d seen someone there a few days earlier, I should have been inside.” My voice was rising in panic, and I kept repeating the same sentence: “I should have been inside.”
“Hey, Warshawski, easy does it, easy does it. Would the guy have let you in? You said he stiffed you when you were there last week. Where are you? Your office? Need me to come by?”
I gulped back my hysteria and said shakily, “I think I just need to eat. It’s been a while.”
When he’d reiterated his offer of help, and urged me on to food and rest, he hung up on the promise of trying to do a story on Rose and some of the other people who’d worked at Fly the Flag.
I walked down to La Llorona, a Mexican diner that’s hanging on to its lease by its fingernails-my office is in a neighborhood that’s gentrifying so fast rents seem to double every day. After two bowls of Mrs. Aguilar’s chicken-tortilla soup, and a short nap on the cot in my office’s back room, I finished my phone calls.
I left voice messages with my impatient clients. I didn’t tell them I was late because I’d been injured-it makes you seem unreliable if you go and get shot or stabbed when they’re expecting you to be thinking about their problems. I just said I had preliminary reports for them, which would be true by the end of the day tomorrow, if my shoulder would let me type all afternoon. I didn’t even try to reach Mr. William: whatever was yanking his chain, I couldn’t deal with the Bysen family today.
Mitch barked from behind Mr. Contreras’s door when I came in, but either my neighbor was busy or he was still miffed with me for disregarding his advice this morning. When he didn’t come out to greet me, I took Peppy up to my place.
Morrell greeted me with relief-he was sick of his book, sick of my small space, tired of being up three flights that were so hard for him to negotiate that he felt almost like a prisoner. He limped slowly down the stairs with me for the drive over to Lotty’s.
Lotty used to live in a two-flat near her clinic, but a few years ago she’d moved to one of the tony old buildings on Lake Shore Drive. In the summer, it’s impossible to park near her place, but on a cold November afternoon, with the gray day fading to the black of early night, we found a space without too much trouble.
She greeted us warmly, but didn’t spend time on chitchat. In a back room overlooking Lake Michigan, she stripped off my bandages with quick, skilled fingers. She clicked her teeth in annoyance, partly with me, for getting it wet in the shower, partly with the surgeon who’d stitched me up. A sloppy job, she announced, adding that we were going to go over to her clinic where she would put me together properly; otherwise, I’d have adhesions that would be hard to work out once the wound healed.
We had a little argument over who would drive: Lotty didn’t think I could be trusted with only one good arm, and I didn’t think she could be trusted, period. She thinks she’s Stirling Moss, driving the Grand Prix, but the only similarities I can see are the speed she travels, and her belief that no one should be in front of her on the track. Morrell laughed as we argued but voted for Lotty: if I didn’t feel like driving when she finished, we’d be stuck at the clinic without a car.
In the end, neither the drive nor the restitching was as big an ordeal as I’d feared-the former because the main streets were so thick with Saturday shoppers that even Lotty had to go slowly. At her clinic, a storefront about a mile west of my apartment, in a polyglot neighborhood on the fringes of the North Side’s new construction, she shot Novocain into my shoulder. I felt a faint tugging as she cut the old stitches and put new ones in, but either because of her skill or the anesthetic I could actually move my arm pretty easily when she finished.
With Lotty lying back in an easy chair in her office, we finally got to April Czernin’s woes. Lotty listened intently, but shook her head with genuine sorrow over the limited help the Czernins could get.
“The insurance really only covers ten thousand dollars of her care? That’s shocking. But it’s so typical of the problems our patients face these days, being forced to make these choices of life and death because of what the insurance does or doesn’t pay.
“But as for your girl, we can’t take her on as a Medicaid patient, because she’s not indigent; as soon as the billing department finds out she has insurance, they’ll do exactly what the university did, call the company and be told the policy won’t cover the defibrillator. The only thing I can suggest is that they try to get her involved in an experimental trial, although the treatment for Long QT is pretty standard at this point, and it may be hard to find a trial group anywhere they can afford to travel to.”