“She could have had help.” Conrad tipped his head toward Morrell, who looked at him in bewilderment.
“Am I supposed to have been jealous of Czernin?” Morrell said. “Marcena and I are old friends, which is why I’m putting her up, but we’re not lovers. She has wide-ranging and eclectic tastes. When we were in Afghanistan last winter, she got involved with one of the orderlies at Humane Medicine, a Pakistani army major, and someone from the Slovenian wire services, and those were the three I knew about. Believe me, if I were a jealous lover who wanted her dead I would have done it up in the Pathan hills where no one would have cared.”
Conrad grunted: maybe he believed it, maybe he didn’t. “What about her work? What was she writing?”
Morrell shook his head. “The series was on the America Europe doesn’t know. After she met Czernin, she decided to focus on South Chicago. She spent time out at By-Smart headquarters-old Mr. Bysen seemed to like her, and she had a couple of private meetings with him. That’s all I can tell you: she played her cards close to her chest.”
“Not that close, if you knew about her Pakistani major and the orderly and so on,” Conrad said. “I want to see her notes.”
“You think the attack had to do with the story she was working on? Not someone who was out to get Bron and hit her because she was there?”
“I don’t have a theory,” Conrad grumbled. “I only have a woman whose daddy is in the British Foreign Office, so the consul has called the super five times and he’s called me ten times. Czernin gave horns to any number of guys in South Chicago, and we’re looking at that. I don’t think it was a routine gangbanging, because whatever happened to them took a lot of work, and even though my punks in South Chicago have way too much time on their hands they don’t go in for elaborate murder. So I’m looking at people Czernin pissed off, and I’m looking at what Love was working on. I can get a warrant to search your place, Morrell, easy, because the mayor is yanking the super’s chain and the super is yanking mine-any judge will be happy to oblige. But it would be real, real nice if you’d save me the trouble.”
Morrell studied him thoughtfully. “Police departments are walking off with people’s files these days under cover of the Patriot Act. I don’t want to invite police into my home so that they can take my machine or someone else’s.”
“So you want me to waste time on a warrant.”
“I don’t think legal protections are a waste of time, Rawlings. But I won’t ask you to go to a judge if you’ll come with me yourself, and go through Marcena’s computer with me file by file. If she has personal material on it, we’ll leave it lay. If she has notes that may suggest a perpetrator, you’ll copy them and take them with you.”
Conrad didn’t like it. He is a cop, after all, and cops don’t like civilian oversight of their work. But he’s a fundamentally decent guy who doesn’t want to harass citizens for the pleasure of it.
“I’m a watch commander. I can’t take that kind of time, but I can give you a good detective and a uniformed officer. With orders not to take anything you haven’t seen.”
“With orders to take copies, not originals,” Morrell said.
“With orders to take anything that looks relevant to the work the Love woman was doing in South Chicago.”
“As long as it’s a copy, and her machine isn’t impounded.”
“This is like watching Lee Van Cleef and Clint Eastwood,” I complained. “The standoff could go on all afternoon. I’ve got to get to my office, so I’m going to leave you two to sort it out; Mr. Contreras will be Eli Wallach. He’ll let me know which one of you gets the gold.”
Conrad gave a grunting little laugh. “Okay, Ms. W., okay. I’ll let your boyfriend monitor the files, but I get to choose what I copy. Or my detective does. Her name is Kathryn Lyndes; she’ll be at your home in ninety minutes.”
The mayor was riding hard on this case, if Conrad could guarantee a detective running all the way from South Chicago to Evanston at a moment’s notice.
“Marcena’s father must be something pretty important if the consul is making the mayor care about a South Chicago mugging. Do you think you could spare a resource for someone who isn’t connected? I told you I was looking for Josie Dorrado when I found Marcena and Bron. She still hasn’t turned up, and I’m out of ideas.”
“Tell the mother to go down to the precinct and file a missing persons report.”
“And someone will jump right on it and start scouring the abandoned buildings and vacant lots?” I was scornful.
“Don’t ride me, Ms. W. You know what resources I have, and how tight I’m stretched.”
“Last week, you told me to butt out of South Chicago. This week, you don’t have the resources to look after the neighborhood.”
“Whenever you and I start to get along, you decide to open a machine gun on me,” Conrad said. “If I put you down last week over that fire, can you blame me?”
I took a breath: a who-said-what fight was a losing battle for everyone. “Okay, Conrad, this isn’t an attempt to put a machine gun on you, but have you found out anything about the fire? Who set it, or even why they were after Frank Zamar?”
“Nope. We don’t even know if Zamar set it and couldn’t get out of the building on time, although I don’t believe it. If the place had burned down last summer, when his business was slumping, it’d be a different story-he’d done a ton of business with By-Smart when everyone had to have an American flag; he’d even added an owl shift, and taken on a debt load with some fancy new cutting machines. Then that contract stopped abruptly and he had to shut down the owl shift. But not long before the fire, he’d signed a new contract with By-Smart to do a line of flag sheets and towels.”
Sleep at night on Old Glory and in the morning dry your bottom with the flag. In its way, it seemed as outrageous as burning, but what did I know? Was that the second job Rose had taken? Running the towel factory for Zamar? Why was she so defensive and secretive about it-it seemed perfectly legitimate.
I shook my head, unable to figure it out, and said to Conrad, “Just so you know, the Carnifice guy looking for Billy the Kid, he does have a lot of resources. I think Josie Dorrado is with Billy. The Bysen family has cast her in the role of blackmailing wetback trying to squeeze money out of Billy. I’d hate for her to get hurt.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, Ms. W., I’ll keep that in mind.” Conrad spoke heavily, but he did scrawl something in his pocket notebook. I’d have to be content with that.
Morrell limped out of Mr. Contreras’s apartment with me. “I’m going to catch a cab home right now so I can look at some things before Rawlings’s detective arrives. You going to be okay?”
I nodded. “Desk work is all I’m good for today. Are Marcena’s parents flying in?”
“The Foreign Office is trying to find them-they’re inveterate trekkers, and right now they’re in a remote part of India.” He smoothed the hair out of my eyes and kissed me. “We had a dinner date last night, darling, but you stood me up. Should I trust you with a second chance?”
Conrad came out at that moment, and, against my will, I felt my cheeks grow hot.
31 The Walking Wounded
My office had a forlorn, abandoned feeling to it, as if no one had been inside it for months. My footsteps echoed off the floor and seemed to bounce around the walls and ceilings. Although I’d stopped by two days ago, I wasn’t really working here these days-I was just dropping in between treks through swamps.
My lease partner, Tessa, who’s a sculptor, was vacationing in Australia. I dropped her mail on her drafting table. Her work space was meticulously tidy, every tool hung on a Peg-Board, drawings put in neatly labeled drawers, her blowtorch and sheets of metal carefully covered with drop cloths. Quite a contrast to my own side of the building, with files on the edges of tables and office supplies that seem to migrate at will.