Fire Sale

42 The Hiding Place

Total confusion followed the arrival of the squad cars.

Men ran through the alley and took up positions around the house, all the time squawking importantly through their walkie-talkies. I kept April in my car-it would be a tragic irony if she survived her heart failure and Freddy’s assault only to get shot by one of these Lone Rangers. It took forever to get the men (and the one woman in the group) to understand that there had been a home invasion, that the perp had fled, and that April and her mother needed medical help.

They finally got an ambulance to come. Even though April was breathing on her own, her pallor was bad, and I was relieved to have professionals take over her care. Sandra was still shaking too badly to make it down the walk on her own, but the crew carried her to the ambulance with a kind of impersonal briskness that seemed to brace her and make her function better.

“Can I call someone to go wait with you and bring you home?” I asked Sandra as they helped her into the back of the ambulance.

“Just leave me alone, Tori Warshawski. Every time you come near me, someone in my family gets hurt.” She spat this out reflexively, because, a second later, she told me to call her folks, who lived over in Pullman. “They only have a pullout bed in the front room, but April and me, we can stay with them for a few days. My dad’s old local, they’ll send someone around to fix the house up for me.”

It was a relief to know she wasn’t completely on her own, but her departure left me to try to explain to the police what had been going on. I decided a bare-bones story would work best: I was the interim basketball coach; April was sick, her father had just died, I was dropping something off for her when a scumbag broke in through the back. He’d grabbed Sandra and threatened her; I took the kid out to my car to try to keep her out of danger. We waited for the posse-which, by the way, only arrived some thirty minutes after Sandra’s first call.

The bare-bones story got bogged down when they saw my Smith & Wesson. I had a gun, yes, I had a license, yes, I was a private investigator, yes, but I wasn’t here as a detective. I told them my history, my co

I was trying hard not to lose my temper-that was a sure recipe for spending the night in a holding cell at the division-when Conrad called me on my cell phone: he’d gotten home, he’d gotten my message, and what the hell was I doing interrogating suspects?

“It took your damned squad twenty minutes by the clock to respond to a 911 call about a home invasion,” I snarled. “Don’t give me word one about staying out of your turf, leaving police business to the Fourth District, giving tea parties, or whatever it was you said last week.”

“Home invasion? What are you talking about, Warshawski? You didn’t say anything about that in the message you left.”

“It hadn’t happened then,” I snapped, “but Freddy Pacheco, the guy I called you about, was breaking into the Czernin house less than an hour later. I did report my encounter with him to one of your detectives, but he wouldn’t work up a sweat over it. Now your boys want to arrest me for saving Sandra and April Czernin.”

“You’re so wound up, I can’t make head nor tail of what you’re saying,” Conrad complained. “Let me talk to the officer in charge.”

I gri

The officer frowned, thinking I was yanking his chain, but when he heard Conrad on the other end of the line he changed comically, sitting up at attention, giving an abbreviated account of their arrival. Judging from the officer’s broken sentences, Conrad kept interrupting with demands to know why it had taken them so long to get to the Czernins’, and what they had found when they searched the house. The officer got up to confer with another man, and reported that the house was empty.

I heard Conrad’s voice scratchily through the mouthpiece; the officer said to me, “He wants to know what you know about the perp.”

“Not much: he hangs out at a bar called Cocodrilo on Ninety-first Street, but I don’t know where he lives. He rides with a cousin whose first name is Diego.” I described Freddy’s sullen, pretty-boy looks.

The officer relayed this information, listened some more to Conrad, then asked if I knew why Pacheco had broken in.

I shrugged elaborately. “He’s a punk-the pastor at Mount Ararat calls him a chavo banda who does petty crime for a fee. In fact, the pastor may know where he lives.”

I wasn’t going to go through all the stuff about the frog, the fire at Fly the Flag, and Freddy’s demand for a recording, not through an interpreter. Finally, Conrad and the officer finished, and the officer turned me back over to his commander.

“So take me through it, Ms. W. This chavo of yours, how do you know he set the fire?”

“He confessed it. In my hearing, while I had him cornered here-before Sandra Czernin acted like a horse’s patootie and got between him and me. Whereupon he seized her and held her as a hostage. But I don’t know what he wanted in her house. Bron Czernin made a device that Freddy used in setting the fire-Freddy had drawn a picture of it for him, and the picture was here in the house. He looked at the picture, but that wasn’t what he wanted-it’s still here.” True, it was in my pocket, but Conrad didn’t need to know that.

“While I was getting the kid out of the house, Freddy tore the house apart. I don’t think he found what he was looking for. He drives around with his cousin in a Dodge pickup. The first letters on the plate are ‘VBC’-I didn’t catch the rest of it. That is my whole story. Can I go home now?”

“Yeah, and try to stay there. Even if we don’t respond as fast as citizens want, we do get there-”

“In time to collect the corpses,” I cut in nastily. “Which is what you’d have found if I hadn’t been here. I coach a basketball team down here. April Czernin is one of my players, as is Josie Dorrado, who is still missing, despite the incredible energy your team is putting into looking for her, so I have to be down here whether you like it or not.”

“All right!” he shouted. “Now you know my secret. I don’t have enough money and enough bodies to do everything that has to happen to keep South Chicago safe. Send a note to the mayor, tell the super, but get off my back.”

So his turf battle with me came partly out of pride: he didn’t want me to know he couldn’t look after the community. “Oh, Conrad, the mess down here is so big that seven cops with seven mops couldn’t get it clear. I’m really, truly not trying to undercut you, but to give you some support.”

“God save me from that, Ms. W.,” he said, trying to recover his temper. “Go on home, go to bed-oh, hang on. I knew there was something else. That car, that Miata you found under the Skyway on Ewing, it was gone when we got there Tuesday afternoon. We called the Bysens, or their lawyers: the car belongs to Billy, they didn’t want ugly cops pawing through it. They took it to a body shop, where it had been thoroughly dismantled and cleaned by yesterday morning. Thought you’d like to know. Try to stay out of trouble, Ms. W.”

I was thankful to hang up while he was feeling more charitable and left the Czernin house while the going was possible. The officers searching the street and alley held me up while they checked to make sure I wasn’t a fleeing suspect, but I finally was able to take off. When I was out of their range, I pulled over to the curb.

I reclined my seat until I could almost lie flat. I turned the CD of David Schrader and Bach back on and tried to think. I could go to Pastor Andrés to try to find out where Freddy lived, but I wasn’t much interested in the chavo anymore. The police would track him down fast enough, and I didn’t think he had anything helpful to tell me now. It was the recording I wanted to know about.