Fire Sale

“I’d like to talk to your crew, to see if anyone seems to be hiding something. Or maybe they have an idea about the guy who broke into the plant this morning.”

“No way do you talk to any of my workers! Who told you to mind my business, anyway? You think I’m going to pay you for lurking around my factory?”

He was muttering his complaints, not shouting, which seemed ominous to me: a man afraid of what I would learn. I nodded, though, at his words: no one was going to pay me for spending my time at Fly the Flag.

As I stood to leave, I said casually, “You wouldn’t be doing this yourself, would you?”

“Doing what-you mean, putting dead rats in my own heating system? You are crazy, you, you-nosy bitch! Why would I do such an insane thing?”

“You laid off eleven people this fall. Your business is in trouble. You wouldn’t be the first person to try to sell your plant to the insurance company-solve a lot of problems, wouldn’t it, if sabotage forced you out of business.”

“I laid people off because of the economy. As soon as the economy improves, I’ll hire them back. Now get out of here.”

I took a card out of my bag and laid it on his desk. “Call me when you decide you can tell me who has you so scared you won’t even protect your own business.”

I left the office and walked across the floor to where Rose was stitching an intricate gold logo onto an outsize navy ba

“He claims nothing’s going on, despite the evidence. He’s scared of someone or something, too scared to talk about it, in my opinion. Do you have any idea what that could be?”

She shook her head, her eyes on the work in front of her.

“He says it’s not gang protection. Do you believe that?”

She hunched a shoulder, not breaking the quick movement of her hands as they guided the needle through the appliqué. “You know this neighborhood. You know there are a lot of street gangs down here. The Pentas, the Latin Kings, the Lions, any of them could do anything bad. But usually they’re more-more violent than this-they would break the windows, something like that, not put glue in the locks.”

“And how did the guy get in this morning?” Maybe I’d left the back door open when I undid the lock this morning: I didn’t think so, but I couldn’t swear to it a hundred percent, either. “Who has keys besides Zamar?”

“The foremen-Larry Ballatra, he’s the day man, and Joey Husack, he’s the second shift.”

“And you, right, since you often come in early?”

Her lips moved in a nervous smile. “Yes, but me, I’m not trying to hurt the plant, I’m trying to keep it open.”

“Or trying to get Zamar to think you’re indispensable, so he doesn’t let you go in the next round of job cuts.”

For the first time her hands slowed and she didn’t feed the fabric through fast enough. She hissed a curse at me as it bunched up under the needle. “Now look what you’ve made me do. And how can you say such things? You’re Josie’s coach! She trusts you. I trusted you.”

A hand suddenly gripped my shoulder and yanked me to my feet. The noise from the machines had been so loud I hadn’t heard the foreman come up behind me.

Although he was holding me, he spoke to Rose Dorrado. “Rose, since when do you have the right to have guests at your workstation? You better not be short when the day ends.”

“I won’t be,” Rose said, her face still red with anger. “And she’s not a guest, she’s a detective.”

“Who you invited into the plant! She doesn’t belong in here. The boss told her to get out, so what business you got talking to her?” He shook my shoulder. “The boss told you to leave, now you’re going to leave.”

He frog-marched me to the door and pushed me outside so hard that I stumbled against a man who was crossing the apron to the front door.

“Steady there, steady there.” He caught me and held me upright. “You’re not drinking on the job, are you, my sister?”

“No, my brother, not today, although, at the moment, it doesn’t sound like a bad idea.” I backed away from him and dusted my shoulders where the foreman had gripped them.

He looked startled, then concerned. “You have been fired, perhaps?”

He had a slight Hispanic accent, whether Mexican, Puerto Rican, or even Spanish, I was too ignorant to know. Like much of the work crew, he was a swarthy, thickset man, but his somber suit and tie didn’t belong in a factory.

“I’m an investigator, whom Mr. Zamar doesn’t want to hire, or even talk to. Do you know about the attempts to sabotage the plant?” When the man nodded, I asked what he knew about it.

“Only that some members of the community are concerned. Has there been another episode today?”

I looked at him narrowly, wondering how trustable he was-but, after all, if he knew anything about this morning’s intruder I wasn’t going to give him news by discussing it. When I told him what I’d seen, he only said that Mr. Zamar had many problems, that he couldn’t afford to lose the factory.

“Why won’t he call in the cops?” I demanded.

“If I knew that, I would be a wise man. But I will ask him.”

“And if he answers, do me a favor and let me in on the secret.” I pulled one of my cards from my case and handed it to him.

“V. I. Warshawski.” He read my name carefully. “And I am Robert Andrés. Good day, Sister Warshawski.”

We shook hands on his odd and formal greeting. Even though I spent the rest of the day on work for my paying clients, my mind kept wandering back to Frank Zamar and Fly the Flag. I worried that I had needlessly alienated Rose by suggesting she could be the saboteur. Before I met Zamar it had seemed possible to me, because she was so worried about her job that she might want to prove she was indispensable: there she was, arriving early, finding rats in the air ducts, summoning help-even hiring a detective! Who could fire such a zealous employee?

Now that I’d seen Zamar, I didn’t really believe Rose was involved. Something was worrying him too badly about all these episodes. The man I’d stumbled into at the entrance, Robert Andrés, he might know; I should have gotten his phone number. I’d been too busy feeling angry and humiliated by the foreman tossing me out to take care of fundamentals.

Maybe Zamar was in love with Rose and worried because he thought she was responsible. Or Rose’s daughter with the baby, Julia-he’d donated warm-up jackets, he used to watch her play. Could he be the baby’s father? Was Rose going to destroy Fly the Flag to punish him for that?

“Give it up, Warshawski,” I said out loud. “Any more like that and you’ll be writing scripts for Jerry Springer.”

I was in the western suburbs, looking for a woman who had abandoned a safe-deposit box holding eight million dollars in bearer bonds, and I needed to put all my attention on that project. I located her daughter and son-in-law, who seemed to me to know more than they wanted to say. My client managed the little deli belonging to the woman-she’d gotten worried when the owner suddenly disappeared. A little before three, I finally found the woman in a nursing home where she’d been involuntarily committed. I talked to my client, who rushed out west with a lawyer. I was tired but triumphant as I raced back to South Chicago for my team’s makeup practice.

The girls played well, pleased with their clean gym. For the first time, they actually looked like a team-maybe the fight really had brought them together. We did a short workout, and they left with their heads up, triumphant from my praise-and their pleasure in their own ability.

On my way home, while I sat motionless in the rush hour traffic, I called my answering service to pick up my messages. To my astonishment, I had one from Billy the Kid. When I reached him on his own mobile phone, he stammered that he’d told his grandfather about me and the Bertha Palmer basketball program. If I wanted, I could go to corporate headquarters in the morning to sit in on the prayer meeting that would start the day. “If Grandpa has time, he’ll talk to you afterward. He couldn’t promise me he’d see you, or do anything for you, but he did say you could come out there. The only thing is, you have to be there by around seven-fifteen.”