Wildcat
Author: Sara Paretsky
Date: 2017-03-07 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Mystery; Fiction; Short Stories; Mystery Thriller; Thriller; Historical Fiction; Crime; Adult; Detective; Suspense
Description: Sara Paretsky, one of the most legendary crime writers of all time, presents an exclusive and thrilling short story featuring beloved investigator V.I. Warshawski as a ten-year-old girl on her first investigation. V.I. Warshawski developed her strength and sense of justice at a very early age. It’s 1966 and on the south side of Chicago racial tensions are at an all-time high. Dr. Martin Luther King is leading marches at Marquette Park and many in the neighborhood are very angry. With nothing but a bicycle, eighty-two cents in her pocket, and her Brownie camera hanging from her wrist, Victoria
Publisher: Witness Impulse

Contents

1. Cover
2. Title Page
3. Contents
4. Wildcat
5. About V.I.

6. An Excerpt from Fallout

1. Chapter 1: Playing the Sap—Again

2. Chapter 2: Fit for Life

7. About the Author
8. Also by Sara Paretsky
9. Copyright
10. About the Publisher

Wildcat

I

The heat in the attic was so heavy that not even the flies had enough energy to move. The two children lay on the floor. Sweat rose on their skin, gluing their clothes to the linoleum.

Normally on a hot August Friday, they’d be at the beach, but Marie Warshawski had decreed that her son must remain close to home today. Normally the cousins would have disregarded this edict, but today Victoria was nervous, wanting to hear as much of the grown-up gossip as possible.

She and Boom-Boom—Bernard to his mother—often spent afternoons together: that was when Victoria’s mother gave music lessons in the minute front room of her own South Chicago bungalow. If Victoria stayed home, she either had to read quietly in her attic room or sit primly in the front room to watch and learn from her mother’s few good singers.

Just as a student was starting to warm up, Victoria would announce glibly that she would visit Aunt Marie, choosing not to notice her mother’s prohibition against running wild with her cousin.

In the winters, Victoria followed Boom-Boom to the makeshift ice rinks where he played a rough brand of pick-up hockey. No girls allowed, period, which caused some fights between the cousins—away from the other boys, Boom-Boom wanted Victoria to help him perfect the slapshot of his idol, Boom-Boom Geoffrion.

“Tough,” she’d say before skating to the other side of the rink. “Girls can’t play hockey, remember?” He’d skate after her, they’d argue and even wrestle, until he went down on one knee and said, “Victoria, please help me. When I’m a star with the Blackhawks, I’ll get you free tickets to every game.”

In the summers, the cousins spent hours together. With the rest of the neighborhood, they played pick-up baseball in Calumet Park. Or they pooled their coins to take bus and train up to Wrigley Field, where they climbed over the wall behind the bleachers and sneaked into the park. Or they dared each other to jump off the breakwater into Lake Calumet, or rode their bikes past the irate guards at the South Works, playing a complicated hide-and-seek among the mountains of slag.

This Friday, Victoria was too worried about her father to stray from Aunt Marie’s home. Tony Warshawski was a police officer. Along with every other cop on the South Side, Officer Warshawski had been ordered to Marquette Park to help keep the peace.

Martin Luther King had come to Chicago in January 1966. He was living in an apartment, a slum, the newspapers called it. All summer long, there had been marches in different parts of the city, with Negroes and their white supporters demanding open housing, an end to real estate covenants, access to Lake Michigan beaches, access to city jobs.

“What are real estate covenants?” Victoria had asked her mother.

“White people who own apartment buildings or houses made a law that Negro people can only rent apartments in one part of the city,” Gabriella said. “They cannot be our neighbors here in South Chicago, for example.”

“And they don’t want to be!” Aunt Marie exclaimed. “They know their place, or they did, until that commie King showed up here. And we’re supposed to call him a doctor and a reverend? He’s just a trouble-maker who can’t live without seeing his face on TV or his picture in the paper. We don’t need him here in Chicago, stirring people up, causing trouble.”

And trouble there’d been, by the truckload. Everywhere the marchers went—Negroes along with their white supporters—including nuns and priests, to Aunt Marie’s fury—riots had followed. White people, who’d only ever seen Negroes on public transportation or cleaning the bathrooms in their office buildings, were furious at the thought that Negroes might become their next-door neighbors, swim at the same beaches, even become bus drivers. They threw bricks and bottles and cherry bombs while the police tried to keep order. Tony Warshawski had been away from home for three days at a time, working treble shifts along with every other cop in the city.

Today would be worse, Tony had told his wife and daughter Friday morning before he left for work: everyone’s nerves were on edge. Nothing Mayor Daley said could stop the marchers, and nothing Dr. King said could get the real estate board to change their laws against open housing.

Anger in the Lithuanian and Irish and Polish neighborhoods grew when the city’s new archbishop made every priest read a letter to the parish on open housing as part of a Christ-like life.

“They kicked the archbishop out of New Orleans,” Marie fumed. “He made the Catholic schools take in colored children, but the people hated him for doing it and made him leave. I don’t know why the pope thought we need him here! When he left New Orleans, the priests sang a thanksgiving hymn as soon as they saw him get on the plane. He’s been here a year and he thinks he knows better than us what we should be doing? We’re the ones who built the church here! Why doesn’t he listen to his priests?”

Her own parish priest at St. Eloy’s read Archbishop Cody’s letter, since he was a good soldier in Christ’s army, but Father Gribac also preached a thundering sermon, telling his congregation that Christians had a duty to fight Communists and look after their families.

Aunt Marie repeated the gist of Father Gribac’s remarks when she dropped in on Gabriella earlier in the week. “Everybody knows this King person is a Communist.”

“He is a pastor. He cannot be a Communist,” Gabriella objected.

“They chose to make him a preacher as a cover, that’s how the Communists operate,” Marie rebutted. “Father Gribac says he’s tired of the archbishop sitting in his mansion like God on a throne, not caring about white people in this city. We’re the ones who built these churches, but Archbishop Cody wants to let those ni—”

“Not that word in my house, Marie,” Gabriella said sharply.

“Oh, you can be as high-and-mighty as you like, Gabriella, but what about us? What about the lives we worked so hard to make here?”

“Mama Warshawski, she tells me always how hard it is to be Polish in this city in 1925,” Gabriella said. “The Germans have been coming here first, next the Irish. They want no Poles taking their jobs away. Mama tells me how they call Papa Warshawski names when he looks for work. And Anthony, he has to do many hard jobs at the police, they are Irish, they aren’t liking Polish people at first. It is always the way, Marie. It is sad, but it is always the way, the ones that come first want to keep out the ones who come second.”

Marie made a noise like the engine on the truck her brother Tomasz drove for Metzger’s Meats; she pursed her lips and leaned over to ask Gabriella how she would feel if her precious Victoria brought home one of them as a husband.

All Gabriella and Marie had in common was the fact that their husbands were brothers. On politics, on child-rearing, even on religion, they were forever twanging each other’s last nerve. Maybe especially on religion. Marie had a painting or statue of the Virgin in every room in her house. The Sacred Heart of Jesus inside her front door was a sight that shocked and fascinated Victoria, the large red heart, with flames shooting out the top and barbed wire crushed around its throbbing middle (“Those are thorns,” Aunt Marie snapped. “If your mother cared about your immortal soul, you’d go to catechism like Bernard and learn about Jesus and his Crown of Thorns.”).

Gabriella wouldn’t allow such images in her home. She told Victoria it was pagan to worship the heart of your god: “almost a cannibal, to want display the heart—barberica!” Gabriella didn’t think like this because her father was a Jew; after all, her mother and her aunt Rosa, who, like Gabriella, had migrated to Chicago from Italy, were Catholics. It was more that Gabriella despised all religion.

When Father Gribac from St. Eloy’s came to visit Gabriella, to demand that she have Victoria baptized to save her daughter from eternal torment, Gabriella told him, “Religion is responsible for too many torments people suffer here in this life. If there is a God, he won’t demand a few drops of water on my daughter’s head as proof of her character. She should be honest, she should always work her hardest, do her best work, and when she says, ‘I will do this thing,’ she must do that thing. If she cannot live in such a way, no water will change her.”

The priest had been furious. He tried to talk to Tony Warshawski about Gabriella.

Peace-loving Tony put up his big hands and backed away. “I don’t try to come between my wife and my daughter. If you were a married man, Father, you’d know that a mother tiger protecting her young looks tame next to a mother human. No, I’m not lecturing my wife for you.”

After that, Father Gribac glowered at Victoria whenever he saw her on the street. He tried to tell Marie to keep her own son away from the den of unbelievers, but Bernie Warshawski—who was usually as placid as his brother Tony—told the priest not to meddle in his family.

Besides, the sisters-in-law only lived four blocks apart; they needed each other’s help in keeping an eye on two of the most enterprising children in a wild neighborhood. Tony and Bernie suspected, too, that Gabriella and Marie also needed the drama of their arguments. True, Gabriella gave music lessons, Marie worked in the Guild of St. Mary, but both led lives of hard work; they needed excitement, and recounting each other’s monstrous deeds or words gave their lives a running drama.

The summer of 1966, there’d been too much excitement for anyone’s comfort. Although today’s riots were almost ten miles away, on this sticky August Friday, all the mothers had cancelled their children’s lessons with Gabriella: better keep them locked inside than run the risk of a stray cherry bomb flying in. At five o’clock, Gabriella walked to Marie’s house to collect Victoria.

Marie was chopping onions for stew: even on a hot day she made a cooked meal for her husband and son. “Bernie works on the docks, he needs to keep up his strength,” Marie said when Gabriella recoiled from the steaming kitchen.

In the attic, Boom-Boom and Victoria moved to the top of the steep staircase to listen to their mothers.

“Antony needs to keep up his strength, too, but not with roasted pork when it’s ninety degrees outside. They are big men, Bernard and Antony. Oh, if only he does not get hurt today!” The last sentence came out as an anguished plea.

“Our people will protect him,” Marie said. “Father Gribac is going to the park with some of the members of the church, to show solidarity.”

“They are the ones I worry about!” Gabriella cried. “I have seen those faces this summer, the hatred, the words on the signs! I thought I was back in Italy watching the Fascists attack my father, when I saw the photographs in the paper.”

“Oh, the press, the press,” Marie said. “They just want to make good Christians look bad. They try to make the police look bad, too, when they’re just trying to protect property.”

“But in Birmingham, the police, they are going against little black girls. Is that right, to send a large dog onto a small child? Besides, here in Chicago, Antony, he tells me the police have the strictest orders to protect Dr. King and all the marchers.”

“Yes, I heard Tony say that, and I can’t believe it!” Little flecks of spit covered Marie’s mouth. “The police! They’re collaborating with these outside agitators instead of looking after the community. They should know that the community isn’t going to take that betrayal sitting down!”

“Marie!” Gabriella’s voice was quiet with fury. “What happens if this community attacks my husband, who is, after all, your own husband’s brother, what then? What will Bernard do if Anthony is injured in such a way?”

The smell from the kitchen, roast pork and onions, came up the stairwell with their mothers’ voices.

“That smell makes me sick to my stomach,” Victoria said.

She got up from the floor and went to the window, her Brownie camera dangling from her wrist on its leather strap. She had turned ten a week earlier, and the camera was a special present from her parents; she took it with her everywhere.

Boom-Boom started to argue with her about the smell, just to be arguing, but Victoria cut him short.

“Your uncle Tomasz just drove up. Have you seen his car? White convertible, red leather. He’s got the top down.” She opened the screen to stick her head all the way out the window. “What is it? A Thunderbird?”

“Buick Wildcat,” Boom-Boom joined her. “He talked about it last Sunday at dinner.”

Tomasz got out of the car, stroking the steering wheel as if it were a dog or some other living creature. The cousins watched him disappear around the side of the house.

“How could he afford it?” Victoria asked. “Metzger’s fired him last week.”

“That was a crock,” Boom-Boom said. “It never would have happened if Commie King hadn’t come to town.”

“But Uncle Tomasz was stealing from Metzger’s,” Victoria argued. “It’s what Papa said. How could that be Martin Luther King’s fault?”

“He was not stealing!” Boom-Boom fired back. “Uncle Tomasz was framed by the janitor, and he’s a nigger like King and all those other commies. Now that King is in town they think they own everything.”

“Boom-Boom! Mama says that’s the worst word to say, worse than goddamn it, or any other swear word.”

For a moment, the cousins forgot the argument downstairs in their own fight, which degenerated quickly to punches. Although Boom-Boom was a year older and bigger, he was also the one who’d taught Victoria to defend herself, which she was ready to do at a moment’s notice. It was only when he tore her shirt at the collar that they stopped, looking at each other in dismay: what would Gabriella say when she saw the torn shirt, or Marie when she saw the bruise on Boom-Boom’s shoulder?

Over their sudden silence, they heard Uncle Tomasz say to Aunt Marie, “Better enjoy that pork roast, sis. Won’t be more where that came from for a while.”

“See?” Victoria hissed. “What did I tell you?”

“Nothing. You told me nothing! Everyone at Metzger’s got cheap meat for their families; it was a . . . a . . . I can’t think of the word, but Dad told me it was like an extra job benefit. I’m going down to look at the car. Uncle Tomasz will let me drive it around the block, you just watch. But no girls allowed!”

“No girl wants to ride in a stinky stolen car,” Victoria shouted as her cousin thundered down the stairs.

She stayed at the window, watching her cousin jump over the door into the driver’s seat. She wanted to ride in that car so bad, almost bad enough to make up with Boom-Boom. But Mama had explained why the words of hate were wrong and dangerous.

“Carissima, you will never know Nonno and Nonna Sestieri because the Fascists arrest them, send them to prison for no crime, only for being Jews. My mother, your nonna, she was born as a Christian but after my papa was arrested, she started lighting lights on Friday night, as Jews do everywhere. We had no money, no candles, nothing, but she found axel grease and rubbed it on old cardboard circles and set them to light, to say to the neighbors and the Fascists, I will not bend to your hate-filled laws.

“She sent me into hiding the day before they came for her. Both of them, they were sent to Germany to die. And it all started with hateful words and spitting and throwing rocks and making people drink a bottle of oil in the night. It starts with name calling and ends with death, always. That is why we do not use ugly words when we talk about the Negroes, or Dr. King, because our own family was murdered, and it started with ugly names.”

“I will not bend to hate,” Victoria said, loudly enough for her cousin to hear her.

Boom-Boom didn’t look up but honked the horn and turned the steering wheel, twiddling the radio dial, even though the engine wasn’t on and he couldn’t make it play. He pushed a button somewhere on the dashboard and the trunk popped open. Victoria wanted more than ever to go down and see how the magic trunk worked.

Uncle Bernie came up the walk just then and stopped to talk to Boom-Boom. Victoria couldn’t hear what they said, but she thought her uncle looked worried, maybe even a bit angry. He slammed the trunk shut and went around the back and in through the kitchen, which is how they all came and went in the neighborhood.

Victoria heard him greet her mother and her aunt, and then tell Tomasz that they needed to talk. He took his brother-in-law out into the tiny hall that connected kitchen to front room. Victoria went back to the stairwell and lay flat to listen to them.

“That car, Tomasz, that set you back more than a buck, didn’t it? I ran into Lucco on the bus this morning: he said Tony is very unhappy with you.”

I bet he is, Victoria thought. Her father hated people like Uncle Tomasz stealing and acting like they were kings of the mountain instead of working hard and being honest.

“What’s Tony got to do with it?” Tomasz tried to sound brave, but Victoria could tell from his voice that he was nervous.

“He thinks you got rid of more meat than just the roasts you brought home to Marie,” Uncle Bernie said. “He thinks you owe him something. That car is going to be a red flag to him. If I were you, I’d return the car before Boom-Boom gets a scratch on it, and I’d make nice with Tony.”

“Why should I be afraid of Tony?” Tomasz said. “Did he stand up for me when that nigger janitor ratted on me? I’m going over to Marquette Park, which is where he said he’d be, and I’ll teach him a lesson about loyalty he won’t forget in a hurry.”

Tomasz’s feet pounded through the downstairs and out the front door. Victoria heard the door slam and ran back to the window, in time to see Tomasz shove Boom-Boom over to the passenger seat and take off.

“Vittoria! Vieni! Usciamo!” Gabriella called up the stairs. Come, we’re leaving.

If she stayed to argue with her mother, Gabriella would order her point-blank to stay home, in which case, even if Papa was in danger, Victoria would have to stay home. But you didn’t grow up in South Chicago without knowing exactly what a grown man meant when he said he was going to teach another man a lesson. Victoria needed to get to Marquette Park and warn her father.

She slid her legs over the windowsill, lowered herself so that she was hanging over the tiny roof that covered the front doorway, and dropped. She shinnied down the pillar to the ground, ran to the side of the house where she’d left her bike, and took off.

II

Even half a mile from the park, Victoria could hear the screaming: ten thousand throats open in hate. The cops at the intersection, uniforms damp under the hot sun, were so tense that they shouted at everyone—old women asking what the trouble was, even a priest riding up on a bicycle. The cops shouted at them all, including Victoria Warshawski darting under the sawhorses that blocked Seventy-first Street.

She had ridden her bike the three miles to Seventy-first and Stony, where she’d chained it to a streetlight. A number 71 bus was just coming along, and she climbed thankfully on board. Her torn shirt was soaked with sweat; her throat was hoarse and dry. She had eighty-two cents in her pockets. If she used thirty cents on the round-trip fare, she’d have plenty to buy a Coke when she found a vending machine.

Seventy-first Street was blocked off half a mile from Marquette Park. Cops in riot gear were diverting all traffic, even CTA buses, in a wide loop around the park. Traffic was jammed on Western Avenue in both directions. The cops told the bus driver that no one was allowed off the bus until it got to the far side of the park, but while they were stuck in the intersection, Victoria forced open the back door and jumped out.

When the cops at Western Avenue yelled at her, she was afraid one of them was a friend of her dad’s who had recognized her and would make her leave the area before she found him. Still, she couldn’t help turning around, to see if they were calling her by name. When she did, she saw something shocking.

Uncle Tomasz’s white convertible pulled into the intersection. Uncle Tomasz was at the wheel; another man, a stranger to Victoria, sat next to him. She stood on tiptoe, trying to look into the backseat, but her cousin wasn’t in the car.

The stranger was blond, like Tomasz, and riding in the open car had boiled both their faces bright red, as red as the wild shirt the stranger was wearing. At first the officer tried to stop the car, but the stranger pulled out his wallet. The cop looked around, as if checking to see who was watching. He took a bill out of the stranger’s wallet, then moved two sawhorses so the Wildcat could drive through.

The uniformed man was taking a bribe. This was terrible! Tony Warshawski talked about this over and over again, the people who tried to give him money to get out of traffic tickets, and how wrong it was, it gave everyone on the force a bad name.

Victoria took a picture of the cop moving the sawhorses and then of Uncle Tomasz and the stranger. Tomasz must have gotten someone to help him find her father. The two men would gang up on Tony and kill him, and then some evil cop would take a bribe to pretend not to see that it had happened.

Victoria started running. She couldn’t beat the convertible to the park, but she had to get there as fast as she could, to find her father before Tomasz and his partner did. Even before she entered the park, she realized this was going to be nearly impossible. The crowds were so thick that a child, even a girl like Victoria who was tall for her age, couldn’t see around them. She had to fight her way through them.

People were holding up signs with horrible words on them. One said, King would look good with a knife in his back, but the others! They said things that you were never supposed to say about anyone.

Victoria used her elbows the way Boom-Boom had taught her and pushed her way through a massive wedge of people. They were yelling and screaming and waving Confederate flags. Some of them had sewn swastikas to their clothes, or painted them on their faces. This was also very bad: people with swastikas had killed Nonno and Nonna Sestieri.

Even as she looked for her father, Victoria realized she couldn’t tell her mother the things she was seeing—swastikas, people calling Martin Luther King by a name worse than a swear word. She hoped Tony wouldn’t say anything, either. It would upset Gabriella terribly, and Victoria and Tony had a duty to protect Gabriella from any further unhappiness in this life.

As she moved further west into the park, Victoria saw a group of teenagers turn a car over and set fire to it. The people near them cheered. Six policemen in riot helmets ran to the teenagers, who spat at them and started throwing rocks and bottles.

Victoria pushed through the cheering mob to where the policemen were using their billy clubs, trying to arrest the boys who’d set the fire.

She tugged on one officer’s arm. “Please, I’m looking for Officer Warshawski, do you know him, have you seen him?”

“Get back, get out of the way. This is no place for a kid like you, go home to your mommy and daddy.” The man pushed her out of the way.

“Tony Warshawski,” she cried. “He’s my dad, he’s working here, he’s a cop, I need to find him.”

This time the men ignored her completely. They couldn’t pay attention to her—the crowd was protecting the boys, throwing rocks and cans of Coke at the officers. One can hit an officer in the head; the crowd roared with laughter when the soda spilled into his eyes, blinding him.

“The niggers are on Homan,” someone shrieked. The whole mob swerved west, chanting, “Find the niggers, kill the niggers!”

Victoria followed them, her legs aching, a stitch in her side making her gasp for breath. She couldn’t pay attention to her pain, it would only get in her way. She had to find Tony. She elbowed her way past the screaming adults. One of them put out a hand and grabbed her, so hard she couldn’t wriggle free.

“And where are you going?”

It was Father Gribac. With him were half a dozen people she recognized from her own neighborhood, two of them women carrying bags of sugar.

“I’m looking for my dad. Have you seen him?”

“Have you seen him, Father. Doesn’t your Jew mother teach you to respect your elders?”

“You’re not my father!” Victoria kicked him hard on the shin; he let go of her shoulder, swearing at her in Polish.

Victoria slithered away. The crowd was so thick that the priest couldn’t move quickly enough to catch up with her.

“Daddy, where are you, where are you?” She realized tears were running down her cheeks. “Babies cry; you aren’t a baby.”

She came on a drinking fountain and stopped to drink and to run her head under the stream of water. Other people came up and pushed her out of the way, but she was cooler now and could move again.

For over an hour she pushed her way through the mob. It was like swimming in giant waves in Lake Michigan: you worked hard, but you couldn’t move very far. Every time she came to a cop, she tried to ask about Tony Warshawski. Sometimes the man would take time to shake his head, no, he didn’t know Tony. Once, someone knew Tony but hadn’t seen him. More often, the overheated officers brushed her aside.

A cherry bomb exploded near her, filling her eyes with smoke. A rumor swept through the mob: someone had knocked King down with a rock.

“One down, eleven million to go,” a woman cackled.

“King Nigger’s on his feet, they’re treating him like he’s royalty while we have to suffer in the heat,” a man growled.

Victoria saw the golf course on her right. It looked green, refreshing, and almost empty of people. She wrestled her way through the mob and made it onto the course. She climbed the short hill around one of the holes and came on the road that threaded the greens. To her amazement, Uncle Tomasz’s white convertible stood there. Neither Tomasz nor Boom-Boom was in it, only the stranger who’d been with Uncle Tomasz back at Western Avenue. He was driving slowly, looking at the bushes.

Victoria was too exhausted to run; she limped up to the car and started pounding on the door. “What happened to Uncle Tomasz? Where’s Boom-Boom? Where’s my dad?”

“Who are you?” the stranger demanded. “Tomasz doesn’t have any kids!”

“My dad, Officer Warshawski,” she screamed. “Uncle Tomasz said he was going to teach Tony a lesson. Where is he?”

The stranger looked at her and then burst into a manic laugh. “Believe me, little girl, Tomasz is never going to teach anyone a lesson.”

The stranger opened the door. The look on his face was terrifying. For some reason, the girl held up her camera, almost as a protection against his huge, angry face, and took his picture. He yanked at the camera strap, almost choking Victoria; the strap broke and he flung the camera onto the grass. As she bent to pick it up, he grabbed her. She bit him and kicked at him, but she couldn’t make him let go.

III

The battle between the cops and the protestors went on for many hours after Dr. King and his fellow marchers left the park. As sunset approached, every cop felt too limp and too numb to care about the cars that were still burning, or those that were overturned or dumped into the lagoons ringing the park. Firefighters were working on burning cars, but they were moving slowly, too.

Patrolmen returning to their squad cars couldn’t get far: women had poured sugar into the gas tanks. After going a few hundred feet, their fuel filters clogged and the cars died. When a fireman came on a body shoved under a bush, he called over to a cop uselessly fiddling with the carburetor of his dead squad car.

The policeman walked over on heat-swollen legs and knelt, grunting in pain as he bent his hamstrings for the first time in nine hours. The man under the bush was around forty, blond, sunburnt. And dead. The cop grunted again and lifted him by the shoulders. The back of the man’s head was a pulpy mess. Not dead from a heat stroke, as the officer had first assumed, but from a well-placed blunt instrument.

A small crowd of firefighters and police gathered. The cop who’d first examined the body sat heavily on his butt. His eyelids were puffy from the sun.

“You guys know the drill. Keep back, don’t mess the site up any more’n it already is.” His voice, like all his brother officers’, was raspy from heat and strain.

“Guy here says he knows something, Bobby,” a man at the edge of the ragtag group said.

Bobby groaned, but got to his feet when the other cop brought over a civilian in a Hawaiian print shirt. “I’m Sergeant Mallory. You know the dead man, sir?”

The civilian shook his head. “Nope. Just saw one of the niggers hit him. Right after we got King, one of them said he’d do in the first whitey crossed his path, and I saw him take a Coke bottle and wham it into this guy.”

The police looked at each other; Bobby returned to the civilian. “That would have been about when, sir?”

“Maybe three, maybe four hours ago.”

“And you waited this long to come forward?”

“Now just a minute, Officer. Number one, I didn’t know the guy was dead, and number two, I tried getting some cop’s attention and he told me to bug off and mind my own business. Only he didn’t put it that polite, if you get my drift.”

“How far away were you? Close enough to see the man with the Coke bottle clearly?”

The civilian squinted in thought. “Maybe ten feet. Hard to say. People were passing back and forth, everyone doing their own thing, like the kids are saying these days, no one paying much attention, me neither, but I could make a stab at describing the nigger who hit him.”

Bobby sighed. “Okay. We’re waiting for a squad car that works to come for us. We’ll drive you to the Chicago Lawn station, you can make a statement there, give us a description of the Negro you say you saw, and the time and all that good stuff. . . . Boys, you’re as beat as me, but let’s see if we can find that Coke bottle anywhere near here.”

Turning to the man next to him, he muttered, “I hope to Jesus this guy can’t make an ID. The whole town will explode if we arrest some Negro for killing a white guy today.”

As they picked through the litter of cups and bottles and car jacks that the rioters had dropped, looking for anything with hair or blood on it, a squad car drove up near them. The uniformed driver came over, followed by a civilian man.

“Mallory! We’re looking for Tony Warshawski. Seen him?”

Bobby looked up. “We weren’t on the same detail. I think he’s over by Homan—oh—” He suddenly recognized the civilian: Tony’s brother Bernie.

Bobby Mallory had been Tony Warshawski’s protégé when he joined the force. Thirteen years later, he’d moved beyond Tony with promotions the older man no longer applied for, but the two remained faithful friends. Bobby had spent enough time with Tony and Gabriella that he knew Bernie and Marie as well; Bobby was an enthusiastic supporter of Boom-Boom’s ambition to supplant Golden Jet with the Blackhawks. He wished he could also support the freedom Tony and Gabriella gave their own only child, but he hated the way they let Vicki run around with Boom-Boom, like a little hooligan. Thank God Eileen was raising his own girls to be proper young ladies.

“We’re falling down, we’re that tired, Warshawski,” Bobby said. “What’s up?”

“Boom-Boom and Victoria,” Bernie said. “Marie’s brother, Tomasz, he stormed out of the house saying he was heading over here. The kids are missing, and one of the neighbors says Boom-Boom drove off in the car with Tomasz and then Victoria, she followed after them on her bike maybe five minutes later. I—I watched all this on TV, I know it’s World War Three in here—but the kids, Jesus—”

Bobby interrupted him as an ambulance threaded its way through the garbage and the remaining rioters. “Gotta get a body outta here, back in a minute, Warshawski.”

Bernie followed him. As the ambulance crew picked up the dead man, he gave a strangled cry.

“That’s Tomasz. Marie’s brother! What happened to him?”

He shoved past Bobby Mallory to kneel next to Tomasz. “Come on, man, get up. You’ve had your fun, now get on your feet!” He shook Tomasz’s shoulder roughly. “Where the fuck is my son? What kind of asshole are—”

He dropped the shoulder in horror as he saw the battered side of his brother-in-law’s head. “What happened to him, Mallory? Did he crack his head on a rock?”

“Someone cracked his head with a rock, more likely.”

“Boom-Boom. Where’s my boy?” Bernie’s voice was cracking, and he began clawing around the underbrush where Tomasz had been lying. He saw a sneaker with the number 9 painted in red on the back. Bobby Hull’s number: Boom-Boom had painted it on his ice skates, his sneakers, and even his lace-up church shoes.

“This here is his shoe. Find my boy, goddamn you, Mallory, find my boy!”

Bobby didn’t say anything. Even though the sun was setting, the park was still seething. Knots of fifteen or twenty rioters kept passing the area where Tomasz had been killed, screaming abuse at Mallory and the rest of the force. A troop of cops, so exhausted they could barely put one leg in front of the other, arrived to help secure the crime scene.

“Traitors! Traitors to your race and your neighborhood!” a woman screamed. “Tell your precious archbishop we’re never coming back to Mass. All that money he’s spending, he can get it from the niggers!”

Bernie Warshawski stared at her in shock: it was a woman from his own parish, and near her was the St. Eloy priest, Father Gribac. The woman took a rock out of her pocket, but Bernie reached her and held her arm before she could throw it.

“Bertha! Bertha Djiak, what would your children say if they saw you doing this?”

“Out of my way, High-and-mighty Warshawski. Because your brother is a cop, you turn traitor, too?”

Still holding her arm, Bernie turned to the priest. “Father—it’s my boy! He’s disappeared. Someone murdered Marie’s brother, right here in the park, and I can’t find Boom-Boom.”

IV

It was completely black inside the trunk, and very hot. For a few minutes, Victoria screamed and kicked as the car bounced along. When they stopped, the man yelled, “No one will hear you.” His voice was muffled, but he was bending over, close to the edge of the trunk.

He was right. The screams from the mob were so loud, Victoria could barely hear the police and fire sirens above them. She would suffocate in here. No one would ever find her; Mama would be heartbroken. Papa, too, but it was chiefly of her mother that Victoria was thinking.

Now she knew how Mama had felt when she was hiding in a cave in the mountains. Thinking of Gabriella made Victoria stop crying. Mama had been seventeen in 1944. Her papa had been arrested almost a year earlier and sent by the Germans to their death camp in Poland. At three in the morning, a neighbor came into the room where Gabriella and her mother were living. The neighbor’s brother worked for the police in the town of Pitigliano, and he had told the neighbor to warn Gabriella’s mother that she would be arrested for Jewish activities.

Gabriella had a cardboard suitcase under her bed, ready for her to leave at a second’s notice. Underwear, a heavy sweater, and eight red Venetian wineglasses, part of Papa’s family for two hundred years: she had a duty to keep them safe. Gabriella went to the home of another neighbor, who had offered to hide her in the basement, only to learn that this neighbor had been arrested earlier that night. And so Gabriella fled on foot into the mountains.

“How did you live, Mama?” Victoria asked.

“By my wits,” Gabriella said. “There are three laws to survive: keep calm, think, and be lucky. You can’t control luck, but you can stay calm and think.”

In the trunk of Uncle Tomasz’s car, Victoria stopped crying. Stay calm. Think. Pray for luck.

One night at dinner Papa had talked about stopping a car for missing a taillight. “The driver was so nervous, I went to look more closely at the missing light. He had twenty M14 rifles in the trunk, and one of them had broken out the light—the barrel was sticking out.”

If she could find the inside of one of the taillights, Victoria could break it and stick her arm out. Maybe someone would see her. Anyway, she would have air; she wouldn’t choke to death in this horrible hot trunk. She needed to scooch down so she could pull up the carpet that covered the bottom of the trunk.

The car was new, and the carpet was glued down firmly. Victoria couldn’t find any place to stick a finger and start ripping. A sob shuddered through her.

“Stop!” she ordered herself. “Keep calm and think.”

The spare tire was punching into her back. And under the spare tire there would be tools. The jack, the wrench for taking off bolts.

Slowly, sweating so badly in the oven of the trunk that her body was sliding inside her skirt and torn blouse, she turned over. She found the hooks that held the carpet over the tire. Undid them. She was thirsty and sleepy.

Sleep would kill her. Stay alert, that is what Mama did. If she slept, the Fascist patrols might sneak up.

She stuck an arm under the carpet but couldn’t move the tire to get at the jack beneath it. Are you going to start crying again? a voice seemed to come from outside her head. Don’t. I have no use for babies.

She maneuvered her arm and then her shoulders and head under the carpet. Her trembling fingers bumped into a set of wires. She didn’t know what they were for, but she pulled on them, pulled with all her might. They cut into her palms, and she pulled harder.

Suddenly she saw light through the thick carpet, felt cooler air on her bare legs. She was near the end of her strength, had just enough left to move out from under the carpet. The wires she’d pulled were connected to the trunk release. She blinked, blinded by the light of the setting sun, and managed to crawl over the lip of the trunk and roll onto the grass.

V

Boom-Boom had been all over the park, trying to find Uncle Tony. At first, when Uncle Tomasz roared up Route 41 to Seventy-first Street, he was having a great time. He knew his cousin had been watching from the attic. He could picture his mother rushing to the sidewalk, yelling after him, and then trying to get his father to chase after him. In their old Ford—like to see him try to catch the Wildcat.

They stopped at a barbershop at Seventy-first and Euclid, where Uncle Tomasz knew the owner. He made a phone call and fidgeted around, joking with the barbers, but kind of tense underneath. He kept looking out the window. After about fifteen minutes, a man with thinning blond hair came in. He looked around, saw Uncle Tomasz, and jerked his head toward the door.

Boom-Boom was following his uncle to the street, but the man stared at him with the meanest eyes Boom-Boom had ever seen. “You stay in the shop and wait for your uncle there,” he said in a voice so cold Boom-Boom turned around and went back in.

He asked Uncle Tomasz’s friend who the man was, but the barber only shook his head and gave Boom-Boom a dime for the Coke machine. The machine was next to the front door. As Boom-Boom bought his soda, he saw the stranger get behind the steering wheel. Uncle Tomasz was letting this complete stranger drive his car, while he sat stiffly in the passenger seat.

When they took off, Boom-Boom ran after, the Coke bottle still in hand. He almost caught up with the Wildcat at the stoplight on Stony Island, but as soon as the light turned green, the car was gone. A westbound bus lumbered into view and Boom-Boom boarded it by darting in through the back door as passengers were exiting.

When the traffic gummed up near Marquette Park, Boom-Boom jumped off. He jogged along the street and caught a break: he saw the Wildcat make its way around the sawhorses, although he wasn’t close enough to see money change hands. If he’d been looking for her, he would have seen his cousin before she was swept up in the crowds entering the park, but in his imagination, she was still leaning out his attic window.

He hadn’t known how hot and tired he could get, pushing and shoving his way through mobs in the park, looking for the Wildcat. It wasn’t that there were so many cars—almost no one except cops, firefighters, and journalists had been allowed to bring a car in—but the waves of people, yelling, charging in different directions, “Hunting niggers,” as many of them shouted.

In the back of his mind, away from his fatigue and his fear for what the man with the mean face would do to Uncle Tomasz, Boom-Boom thought his cousin and her mother were right: those ugly words were worse than swearing. They turned ordinary faces into something monstrous, not quite human.

At one point he saw people from his own neighborhood. Bertha Djiak, who poked him during Mass if he talked to one of his buddies, there she was, her hair clumped with sweat, her face redder than ketchup from the sun, her lips flecked white. He ducked behind some thick shrubbery. And saw the mean stranger.

Uncle Tomasz lay on the ground, so still he might have been asleep. Boom-Boom looked from his uncle to the stranger, and the stranger lunged for him.

“Oh, yes, the nephew, the up-and-coming Golden Jet. I think you and I need to talk about your hockey future, boy.”

Boom-Boom turned to flee, tripped over a root in the shrubbery, and fell flat. The stranger lunged for him and grabbed his left foot. Boom-Boom kicked, wriggled, and felt his sneaker pop off. He jumped to his feet and ran.

After ducking and weaving through the shifting crowds, Boom-Boom stopped to breathe. The sun was setting, but the air was still thick and hot. His throat was raw from running. He needed water and started looking for a drinking fountain. As he scrambled to the top of a knoll to look for a fountain and check on his pursuer, he saw the Wildcat, its trunk standing open. It was pointing nose-down at one of the lagoons. In fact, it would have gone in except someone had rolled a squad car into the water—the Wildcat’s front left tire had caught on the squad car.

He stumbled down the hill to the car. He began to wonder if he’d died, if he was in heaven seeing visions, because his cousin Victoria was lying in the grass next to the trunk.

VI

It was dark by the time the cousins and their fathers found each other. When Victoria saw Tony, she burst into tears.

“Pepaiola, cara mia, cuore mio,” Tony crooned, the only Italian he’d picked up from Gabriella—my little pepperpot, he called his daughter. “What’s to cry about now, huh?”

“Uncle Tomasz said he would kill you because he lost his job,” she sobbed. “I wanted to warn you, but this man, this friend of Uncle Tomasz’s, he picked me up and put me in the trunk. I was scared, Papa, I’m sorry, but I was scared, I didn’t want you to die and I couldn’t tell you, and I didn’t want me to die, either.”

“No, sweetheart, and neither of us is dead, so it all worked out. Let’s get you home so your mama can stop crying her eyes out and give you a bath.”

“What man, Vicki?” Bobby asked—the only person who ever used a nickname that Gabriella hated.

“The man with Uncle Tomasz. I saw them when they—Papa, they gave money to the cop at the intersection and he let them into the park. I took his picture—Oh! my camera, he broke the strap and threw my camera away, my special camera you gave me, Papa, I’m sorry, I didn’t look after it like you made me promise.”

Victoria started to cry harder, but Bobby told her to dry her eyes and pay attention. “We need you to help us, Vicki. We need to see if your camera is still here, if no one stole it. So you be a big girl and stop crying and show your Uncle Bobby where you were when this man picked you up.”

“It’s dark,” Tony protested. “She’s all in, Bobby.”

Victoria frowned in the dark. “It was where you come into the golf course. One of the hills where the holes are on the Seventy-first Street side of the park. I know, there was a statue near me, I don’t know whose.”

With this much information, Bobby set up searchlights near the statue of the Lithuanian aviators Darius and Girenas, although none of the cops believed they’d find one small Brownie camera in the detritus left in the park.

When Boom-Boom whispered to his cousin the news that Tomasz was dead and the cops needed to find the man who’d been with him, Victoria miraculously found some reserve of energy from childhood’s reservoir. She tried to remember in her body how slowly she’d moved, where she’d twisted and turned on the walking paths, and finally cut across the grass to one of the knolls. Boom-Boom stayed with her; within another five minutes, they found the Brownie.

Bobby took custody of it, promising on his honor as a policeman that he’d give the camera back the instant the pictures were developed. The cousins finally got into their fathers’ cars.

At home, they received varying receptions from their mothers: both women frantic, both doting on their only children, each showing it with tears, and then a slap for being foolhardy and disobedient. Gabriella instantly repented the slap and took her daughter into the bathroom to personally shampoo Victoria’s rough mass of curls.

“When I was locked in the trunk, Mama, I thought I would die. And then I remembered you hiding in the cave in the mountains, and you made me brave. Stay calm and think, you said that, and be lucky. I stayed calm, and I was lucky.”

Victoria showed her mother the welts in her palm from where she’d tugged on the cable that miraculously released the trunk lock.

Gabriella hugged her more tightly. “I’m happy, I’m happy that I can protect you even when I’m not with you, because I cannot always be with you. But, carissima, when will you learn to think first, before you run headlong into danger? This Tomasz, this brother of Marie’s, he was a . . . mafioso—un ladro, a thief—he stole from Metzger’s Meats for the mafia, and sold the meat to supper clubs in Wisconsin. He blamed the janitor, who is a Negro man, for losing his job, because the janitor reported seeing him taking all that meat out of the truck.

“But your papa is telling me, Tomasz also cheated his capo in the mafia, and this was a man also named Antony. It is not such a rare name, Victoria. If you asked me, I would tell you this thing, that your papa is in danger from the calca—the . . . the mob, that is the word—in the park, but not from this brother of Marie, and then you do not get the most biggest frightening of your life. And also, then you are not giving me the same gigantic frightening.”

And of course, as it turned out, when Bobby got the pictures developed, the man who abducted Victoria, who flung her into the trunk of the Wildcat—which he got several spirited youths to push into the lagoon—was the Tony who worked in Don Pasquale’s organization.

Tomasz had been stealing meat from Metzger’s and selling it in Wisconsin for the mob, but he’d taken more than his share of the profits. Don Pasquale sent Tony in his red Hawaiian shirt to Marquette Park to kill Tomasz under cover of the riots. The Don wasn’t happy with his hit man for letting a little girl with a camera get the best of him: he refused to post his bail.

When Tony Warshawski reported the successful arrest of Tony-the-thief, he brought a red rose to his daughter, to thank her for her share in the rescue.

“No, Antony, no,” Gabriella protested. “I do not want her to think she is a heroine, who can go saving people in danger. She will only be in danger herself, she will be injured, she will break my heart. Victoria, you must promise me: you are going to study at a university, no? You can be a doctor, or—I don’t know, anything, you can do anything in your life that you wish, perhaps you can even become a judge or the first woman president, but do not be putting yourself in front of killers and mafiosi. Promise me this!”

Victoria looked up at the dark eyes filled with tears and love. She clung to her mother’s thin body. “Of course, Mama, of course I promise you.”

About V.I.

V.I. Warshawski was born on July 27. The year is under dispute, but she was born with the sun in Leo and Gemini rising. Her chart reads: “Extremely active by nature, you like to get around and meet people. Very restless, you can’t seem to stay put. Because of the high nervous tension you always have, athletic activity would be a good way for you to burn off energy.”

Private detective is a perfect occupation for a woman with that kind of personality. These days, V.I. often complains about how the Internet has changed detective work. She used to be out and about, going through public records or tailing people to get information that now is best found online. For someone with her active nature, sitting in front of a computer is a kind of torment.

V.I. grew up under the shadow of the old steel mills on Chicago’s South Side. Her father was a cop; her mother a refugee from Mussolini’s Italy. Her mother had aspired to an operatic career but ended up giving music lessons to neighbors’ children. She died of ovarian cancer when V.I. was in her teens, a loss that still haunts the detective. The eight red Venetian wineglasses that her mother brought with her from her home town near Orvieto are V.I.’s most prized possession. V.I. keeps cracking or breaking them, which terrifies me as much as it does the fictional character.

V.I., as her horoscope says, is impatient and restless; she doesn’t stay home long enough to keep house. Although she likes good food, she often eats on the run, spilling chili down her favorite silk blouses because she’s eating while driving. She drinks Johnnie Walker Black Label whisky and loves red wine, especially from Torgiano, the hill country where her mother grew up.

V.I. Warshawski attended the University of Chicago on an athletic scholarship. She played basketball for the Division III Maroons. She went to law school there as well, something of an anomaly as a progressive blue-collar young woman in a school that where Antonin Scalia taught. She worked for several years in the Cook County Public Defender’s office before becoming a private investigator in 1982.

V.I. was married once as a young woman. The marriage lasted about eighteen months, when she found her husband only admired independent women from a distance. These days, she’s a serial monogamist. She lives alone, but shares two dogs with her neighbor, Mr. Contreras, a retired machinist whose main hobby is V.I. herself.

V.I.’s chart adds that “you are stubborn about your right to live your life according to your own principles. You appreciate truth and honesty;you practice it yourself and expect it of others.” I couldn’t have put it better.

An Excerpt from Fallout

Chapter 1
Playing the Sap—Again

“The police say it was drug-related, ma’am. They think August was stealing to deal.” Angela Creedy spoke so softly I had to lean forward to hear her.

“That is a bêtise—a . . . a lie, a stupidity.” Bernadine Fouchard stomped her foot for emphasis.

“Bernie, my little volcano, you could be right, but I have no idea what, or even who, you’re talking about. Can you start at the beginning?”

Angela had been looking at her clasped hands, her face tight with worry, but that made her give a brief smile. “You are a little volcano, Bernie. Maybe that’s what we’ll start calling you at the training table. The thing is, August is missing, and when this break-in happened—”

“They had to pick on someone,” Bernie interrupted. “And because he is black—”

Angela put a hand over Bernie’s mouth. “August is my cousin, ma’am. I don’t really know him—I’m from Shreveport, and he grew up in Chicago. We don’t have the kind of family that stages big reunions. I haven’t seen him since he was about eight or nine and came down with his mama to visit. Anyway, when I connected with him, after I moved up here, it turned out he’s trying to be a filmmaker, but he works as a personal trainer to support himself. He also videos parties—weddings, kids’ birthdays, things like that. It just seemed like the perfect combo.”

The southern lilt in her soft voice made it hard for me to understand her. “Perfect for what?” I asked.

Bernie flung up her hands. “But to help us train and video us when we play, naturellement, so we can see where we must improve!”

Bernadine Fouchard was a rising hockey player. Her father had been my cousin Boom-Boom’s closest friend on the Blackhawks, and he’d asked Boom-Boom to be Bernie’s godfather. Now that she was a first-year student and athletic star at Northwestern, I had sort of inherited her.

“Angela is also an athlete?” I asked.

“Can’t you tell? She is like a . . . a giraffe. She plays basketball and plays very well.”

Angela looked at her in annoyance but went back to her narrative. “Anyway, Bernie and I, we’re both freshmen, we have a lot to prove before we can be starters, so we started going to the Six-Points Gym, because that’s where my cousin works and it’s not far from campus.”

“When this gym was broken into two nights ago, the police, at first they thought it was a prank, because of Halloween, but then today they said it must have been August, which is a scandale,” Bernie put in. “So I told Angela about you, and we agreed you are the exact person for proving he never did this thing.”

Bernie favored me with a brilliant smile, as if she were the queen bestowing an important medal on me. I felt more as though the queen’s horse was kicking me in the stomach.

“What does August say about it?”

“He’s disappeared,” Bernie said. “I think he’s hiding—”

“Bernie, I’m going to call you a volcanic kangaroo, you jump around so much.” Angela warned, her voice rising in exasperation. “The gym manager says August told her he was going away for a week but he didn’t say where, just that it was a confidential project. He’s a contract employee, so he doesn’t get vacation time—he takes unpaid leave if he wants to go.”

“He didn’t tell you?” I asked.

Angela shook her head. “We’re not that close, ma’am. I mean, I like him, but, you know how it is when you play college ball—Bernie told me you played basketball for the University of Chicago—you’re training, you’re practicing, you’re fitting in your classes. Girls’ ball isn’t like boys’: we have to graduate, we have to take our courses seriously. Not that I don’t want to—I love everything I’m studying—but there isn’t time left over for family. And August is pretty private anyway. He’s never even invited me to his home.”

“You have his phone number?” I said.

Angela nodded. “He’s not answering it, or texts, or anything. No updates on his Facebook page or Twitter feed.”

“The police must have something to go on,” I objected. “Other than saying that nobody knows where your cousin is.”

“It wasn’t really a break-in.” Angela picked at her cuticles. “Someone with a key opened all the doors, and August is the only person with a key they can’t find.”

“How long has he been out of touch?” I asked, cutting short another harangue by Bernie.

Angela hunched a shoulder. “I can’t even tell you that, ma’am. It wasn’t until today that I knew he was missing, and that’s because the police came to talk to me, to see if I knew where he was.”

I got up to turn on more lights. The only windows in the warehouse where I lease my office are at the top of the fourteen-foot walls. I’ve filled the place with floor and ceiling lamps, and at five on a November day I needed all of them to break the gloom.

Neither of my visitors seemed able to tell her story in a straightforward way, but what it boiled down to was that Six-Points Gym’s medical-supplies closet had been ransacked during the break-in. The gym worked with a lot of athletes, from weekend warriors to some of the city’s pro teams, along with many of the university’s athletes. They had a doctor on call who could hand out drugs. Neither Angela nor Bernie knew what had been in the ransacked closet.

“We don’t take drugs,” Bernie snapped when I asked. “Why would we know?”

I sighed, loudly. “It’s the kind of question you might have asked the police when they talked to you. Or they might have asked you. Six-Points must have controlled substances, or the cops wouldn’t care.”

“They didn’t say.” Angela was talking to her hands again. “They asked me how well I know August and did I know if he took drugs, sold drugs—all those things. I told them no, of course.”

“Even though you don’t know him well?” I prodded.

Angela looked up at that, her eyes hot. “I know when someone is on drugs. Ma’am. It’s true I don’t know him well—I was only two the one time he came to see us—but my mother told me he brought a toy farm with him that I kept messing with. She says August was so cute, how he put the animals to bed for the night, all the little lambs together, all the cows, how the dog got to sleep on the farmer’s bed. A boy like that wouldn’t be stealing drugs.”

I didn’t suggest that every drug dealer had once been a little child who played with toys.

Bernie nodded vigorously. “Exactement! So we need you to find August. Find him before the police do, or they will just arrest him and never listen to the truth.”

“Which is?”

“That someone else did this break-in, this sabotage.” Bernie cried, exasperated with my thickness.

“This is potentially a huge inquiry, Bernie. You need to fingerprint the premises, talk to everyone on the gym’s staff, talk to customers. The police have the manpower and the technical resources for an investigation like this. I don’t have the equipment or the staff to work a crime scene, even if the Evanston cops would let me look at it.”

“But, Vic! You can at least talk to people. When you start asking questions, they will be squirming and saying things they thought they could keep secret. I know you can do this—I have seen you making it happen. Maybe even the manager of the gym, maybe she is doing this crime and trying to blame August.”

I opened and shut my mouth a few times. Whether it was the flattery or the supplication in both their faces, I wrote down the address of Six-Points, the name of the manager, August’s home address. When I asked Angela for August’s mother’s name, though, she said that “Auntie Jacquelyn” had died six years ago.

“I honestly don’t think August has any other family in Chicago. Not on my side anyway. His daddy was killed in Iraq, years ago. If he has other relatives here, I don’t know about them.”

Of course she didn’t know his friends either, or lovers, or whether he had debts he needed to pay off. At least she could provide his last name—Veriden. Even though I knew that neither woman could afford my fees, I still found myself saying I would call at the gym tomorrow and ask some questions.

Bernie leaped up to hug me. “Vic, I knew you would say yes! I knew we could count on you.”

I thought of Sam Spade telling Brigid O’Shaughnessy he wouldn’t play the sap for her. Why wasn’t I as tough as Sam?

Chapter 2
Fit for Life

The next day I had an early meeting in the Loop with my favorite kind of client, the kind who pays bills regularly and has well-focused inquiries, so it wasn’t until late afternoon that I made it up to the Six-Points Gym. Which meant I had about a dozen texts from Bernie, demanding to know what I’d found out, before I even started north.

I’d made an appointment with the day manager, Denise LaPorte, and had phoned to let the Evanston police know I was on the case. The detective in charge didn’t sound as though the break-in was high on his own to-do list. No one had been killed or even injured, and property damage was minimal.

“You want to look for this guy—what’s his name? August Veriden?—knock yourself out. Just let me know when you find him.”

“You’re liking him for the break-in?”

The cop said, “We’d like to talk to him. He’s the only employee with a key that we can’t locate, so we’ve put out a bulletin for him.”

I asked what drugs were missing. I whistled under my breath: the gym’s medical closet had quite a cocktail on hand—Oxy, Toradol, Vicodin, along with stuff I’d never heard of.

“Were the quantities enough to make them worth stealing?”

The detective snorted derisively. “You ever been around a junkie, PI? Street value doesn’t mean shit. Ease of access—you’ll see when you get there. It ain’t exactly Fort Knox.”

Duly chastened, I promised I would let him know if I discovered anything helpful. Neither of us was optimistic when I hung up.

When I got to Six-Points Gym: Fitness for Life, it was just after five. The building was a kind of outsize warehouse. A signboard at the entrance advertised an Olympic-size pool, a dozen basketball courts, yoga rooms, weight rooms, five restaurants, and a separate spa wing. The sign urged me to join and become fit for life. Special rates for college and high-school students, 30 percent off for everyone who joined today. There must have been a lot of cancellations after the break-in.

The sign also explained the Six Points: use your head and heart to power your four limbs to fitness.

A security camera videoed the main entrance, but the eye had been covered with a piece of chewing gum. Inside, a guard the size of a football tackle was dealing with a woman who demanded he let her into the locker room right now! He looked at me humorlessly and asked for my membership card and a photo ID.

“You were here during the break-in?” I said while the woman shouted that she’d been here before me and I couldn’t butt in like I owned the place.

“And you get to ask questions because . . . ?” the guard said.

“Because I’m a detective who’s been hired to help with the investigation. Denise LaPorte is expecting me.”

The guard looked as though he’d like to pick me up and break me in half, just for someone to vent his frustration on, but he picked up the desk phone instead and called for permission to let me in.

“Down the hall to the back staircase and up to the second floor. You’ll find her—just follow the noise.”

“And were you here during the break-in?”

“What kind of asshole question is that? Of course not. We’re closed from midnight to five a.m.—that’s when it happened.”

By the time I left, the angry woman had been joined by a couple of men also demanding answers.

I passed locker rooms. Police tape had been crisscrossed over the entrances, but someone had torn it down.

You know the footage that TV loves to show after a tornado or an earthquake, with homes and furniture flung across the landscape? That’s what I saw when I stepped over the tape: every locker in the women’s room had been pried open. Gym bags and backpacks had been dumped. Bras, tampons, water bottles, swimsuits, candy wrappers, makeup kits—all scattered over the benches and floor. Fingerprint dust had settled on the clothes, making them look like the tired remains of a dust storm.

I backed out and peered into the men’s room. The damage was just as appalling, except for the absence of makeup. No one looking for drugs would have looted the locker rooms, although I suppose a serious addict might have been hunting jewelry or electronics. Could one person have done this on his own in five hours? The dumping maybe, but hundreds of lockers had been opened. It looked like a team effort.

I snapped some pictures and moved on to the back staircase. As I started up, I understood what the guard had meant by following the noise. The manager’s office was a small space, and it was overflowing with screaming clients. A man in a purple Wildcats sweatshirt was pounding the desk demanding a refund, two women were shouting about something stolen, a third, weeping in fury, was waving a silver gym bag whose torn lining was hanging out.

“Two hundred twenty-five dollars! This is a Stella McCartney original. Are you going to reimburse me or not?”

“Take a number,” LaPorte snapped at me when I squeezed through to her desk. “I can only deal with one person at a time.”

“I’m V.I. Warshawski, the detective—we spoke earlier. Let me know when to come back.”

LaPorte pressed her palms against her eyes. “There won’t be a good time. There will never be a good time. This is going to go on all night.”

“Damn right,” the man said. “It’s going to go on until you tell us when you’re going to pay for the damages.”

I climbed onto the desk and the room quieted. I looked down at the crowd. “Did the police take down the crime-scene tape, or was that you heroes?”

There was some grumbling and then another outburst from the Stella McCartney bag, wanting to know what difference that made and insisting it didn’t get me off the hook from replacing her property.

I tried to school my face into a mix of sorrow and pity instead of annoyance and impatience. “If you removed the tape, there’s no way to prove that your property was damaged by the vandals who broke into the locker room. Six-Points values you as a member and doesn’t want a legal hassle, but their insurance carrier will be cranky because there’s no way to prove you aren’t bringing ruined property in from outside, hoping to cash in on the disaster. You can’t file a police report, which you need when you’re making a claim, because you tampered with a crime scene. Fresh prints on top of the fingerprint powder will be pretty easy to ID.”

The people in the room seemed to contract, as if a freezing wind had blown through, except for the Stella McCartney woman. She was too outraged for logic, but a man whom I hadn’t noticed—because he’d been quiet—took her arm and steered her out the door. The rest of the unhappy athletes followed.

Denise LaPorte slumped in her chair. She was young, probably early thirties, and on a normal day probably attractive—her buff arms an advertisement for the gym’s fitness trainers, with that honey-colored hair that takes hours to hand-paint and keep glowing. Today her skin was the color of paste, and she had gray circles under her eyes.

“This is the first time the room has been quiet since I started my shift at noon. Is it true what you said about the insurance claims?”

I hopped off the desk and shut the door. “Depends on how generous your management and your insurers want to be with your customers, but insurance companies are used to train-wreck add-ons.”

She looked at me blankly.

“When trains derail, you get more accident claims than the total number of passengers on board. Your carrier isn’t likely to pay for damaged items people wave around, although the gym may want to take care of them as a goodwill gesture. The claims could turn into a nightmare, so for your own protection make this your legal department’s problem.”

LaPorte gave a wobbly smile. “Thanks. That’s the first decent advice I’ve had for three days.”

“You’re beat and beaten up,” I said, “but I need to ask you about August Veriden.”

LaPorte shook her head. “I can’t tell you much. He’s a quiet guy, qualified trainer—he did a degree at Loyola, which has a great certification program, and he always met or exceeded our standards.”

I blinked. “That sounds like one of those online questionnaires.”

She flushed. “I memorized his employee chart when I was talking to the police and to corporate this morning. Some of the trainers like to chat, so I know about who they’re dating or their dental bills or whatever, but August isn’t a chatter. Everyone—I was going to say likes him, but maybe respects is more to the point. We all know that his dream is to be a filmmaker, and he does private jobs for people here—weddings or graduations. I’ve never worked with him, so I can’t tell you how good his videos are.”

“Any personal details in his file? Partner? Next of kin?”

LaPorte shook her head again. “When the cops asked to talk to him and he wasn’t answering his phone, I looked him up, but he only put in this cousin, who’s a freshman at Northwestern.”

I grimaced. “She’s the person who hired me to find him. She doesn’t know other relatives.”

LaPorte clasped her hands on the desk and looked at me earnestly. “I know his cousin and her friend, the little hockey player—”

“Bernadine Fouchard,” I supplied.

“I know they think I gave the police his name because he’s black, but honestly, three of our other trainers are black, one of them from Kenya. We have seventy-eight people working here, everything from janitors to trainers to PTs and massage therapists, and seven people on the management team, including me. August is the only one we can’t locate. I don’t want to finger him, but it does look suspicious.”

“How long has it been since you last saw him?” I asked.

She made a face. “This morning I had to check that on my computer, but between talking to the police and to corporate, I know all this by heart. He left ten days ago, said he wanted personal time for a private project. That’s all any of us here know.”

I digested that: if he wanted to break in and steal the gym’s drugs, he’d waited an awfully long time. “You have a doctor on staff, right?”

“Oh—you’re thinking of the medical-supplies closet. We have two doctors who oversee any injury treatments that our PTs or exercise trainers do, but they’re not employees.”

I asked to see the medical closet. She got up readily—I’d saved her from assault, she wanted to help. As she opened her door, she even managed to joke that she wished she had a disguise.

A few people tried to stop her on our way down the hall, but she told them I was a detective, that she needed to show me part of the crime scene.

The door to the medical office was open, but the entrance was crisscrossed with more crime-scene tape, this time intact. I ducked underneath to inspect at the drugs cabinet.

“Should you be doing that?” LaPorte glanced around the hall.

“I’m not going to touch anything,” I assured her.

The room held a desk and couple of exam tables. All the drawers—in the desk, under the tables, and in cabinets along the walls—were open. Some had been dumped on the floor with a rough hand, scattering latex gloves, swabs, test tubes across the room. I tiptoed through the detritus to the supply closet at the back, which also stood open. I squatted to shine my flashlight on the lock. It hadn’t been forced, but whether someone had a key or was good with picks, I couldn’t tell.

Floor-to-ceiling shelves had held everything from support tapes to plastic boxes of medicines. I shone my flash on the labels—over-the-counter painkillers along with an eye-popping collection of controlled substances. The rolls of stretchy tape had been unwound, leaving elastic coiled over the lips of shelves onto the floor like a nest of flesh-colored vipers.

I rejoined LaPorte in the hall.

“Do the trainers have keys to the medical supplies?”

“Only the doctors and the nurse who’s on call. What do you think is going on?” LaPorte pulled nervously on her lank hair.

“I think your doctors are seriously overmedicating your clients.”

Her mouth dropped open. “What does that have to do with the break-in?”

“I can’t tell,” I said. “You’d need the cops to look into it—they’ve got the bodies to question everyone the doctors ever treated, or athletes with a grudge, or parents who think their kids were damaged. Or the doctors could have nothing at all to do with it—it could be junkies helping themselves to a stash that’s easy to get at. You have seventy-eight employees with keys, which means—”

“No, only about eighteen people have keys. August does because he opens once a week—the trainers all do because they take turns getting here for the five a.m. shift. And then there’s me and the other—”

“Eighteen is a lot of keys,” I interrupted. “Easy to pass around, even if they’re not easy to duplicate. But unless the front-door key opens the medical closet, I’m voting against a junkie. Someone who’s high or low, desperate for a fix, is more likely to break a lock than finesse it.”

“What should I do?” LaPorte’s voice was cracking with despair.

“Get police permission to go into the locker rooms. Photograph them so you have evidence for your insurance company, then hire a cleanup crew to tidy it up. The police don’t seem excited by the crime, since no one was hurt, and the mess isn’t very serious property damage. I don’t think they’ll object. Pity you don’t know where August is—he could video it all for you.”

About the Author

SARA PARETSKY is the New York Times bestselling author of nineteen previous novels. She is one of only four living writers to receive both the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers’ Association in Great Britain. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

Also by Sara Paretsky

- Brush Back
- Critical Mass
- Breakdown
- Body Work
- Hardball
- Bleeding Kansas
- Fire Sale
- Blacklist
- Total Recall
- Hard Time
- Ghost Country
- Windy City Blues
- Tunnel Vision
- Guardian Angel
- Burn Marks
- Blood Shot
- Bitter Medicine
- Killing Orders
- Deadlock
- Indemnity Only

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Excerpt from Fallout copyright © 2017 by Sara Paretsky.

wildcat. Copyright © 2007 by Sara Paretsky. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

An earlier version of this story appeared in the anthology Sisters on the Case, published by NAL in 2007.

first edition

Digital Edition MARCH 2017 ISBN: 978-0-06-268950-4

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Table of Contents

- Cover
- Title Page
- Contents
- Wildcat
- About V.I.

- An Excerpt from Fallout

- Chapter 1: Playing the Sap—Again

- Chapter 2: Fit for Life

- About the Author
- Also by Sara Paretsky
- Copyright
- About the Publisher