Bitter Medicine by Sara Paretsky Read Free Book Online Page B

polished mirror surface was streaked with a light and color that would have inspired Monet. It looked at once peaceful and inviting. But its cold depths could kill you with merciless impersonality. Soberly, I put the car into gear and headed slowly into the Loop.

6

In the Archives
    I parked in the south Grant Park garage underneath Michigan Avenue and walked over to my office. The lobby of the Pulteney building on South Wabash gave up its usual fetid smell of moldy tile and stale urine. But the building was old, put up when people built for keeps; its un-air-conditioned halls and stairwells were cool behind thick concrete walls.
    The elevator was broken, a twice-weekly occurrence. I had to pick my way across chicken bones and less-appetizing debris in the stairwell entrance. Nylons and heels are not the ideal footwear for the four-floor climb to my office. I don’t know why I bothered, why I didn’t just work out of my apartment. I couldn’t afford a better building, and having an office close to the financial center because its crime was my specialty didn’t seem reason enough to put up with this dump and its perpetual malfunctions.
    I unlocked my office door and scooped a week’s accumulation of mail from the floor. My rent included a sixty-year-old “mailboy” who picked the mail up in the lobby and delivered it to tenants—no postal employee was going to climb all those stairs every day.
    I flipped on the window air conditioner and called my answering service. Tessa Reynolds wanted to speak to me. As I dialed her number, I noticed that the plant I’d bought to cheer up the room had died of dehydration.
    “V.I.—you heard about Malcolm?” Her deep voice was tight, strained fine through the vocal cords. “I—I’d like to hire you. I’ve got to make sure they find them, get those bastards off the street.”
    I explained as patiently as I could what I’d told Lotty.
    “Vic! This isn’t like you! What do you mean, a job for the police and routine? I want to be dead certain, when that routine says there’s no way to track the murderer down that
there is no way!
I want to
know
that. I don’t want to go to my grave with the idea that they could have found the killer, but they didn’t look, that Malcolm, after all, even though he was a great surgeon, was just another dead black man!”
    I tried to pull back into the rationality that made my job possible. Tessa was not pummeling me personally. She was behaving in the way grief takes some people—with rage, and by demanding a reason for her bereavement.
    “I just had this conversation with Lotty, Tessa. I’llask what questions I can of the few sources I have. And I’ve already promised the Alvarados I’ll talk to Fabiano. But you must not look to me to solve this crime. If I turn up any leads, they go straight to the officer in charge because he has the machinery to follow them up.”
    “Malcolm had such respect for you, Vic. And you’re turning your back on him.” A sob cracking the deep voice was all that kept me from shouting at her.
    “I’m not turning my back on him,” I said levelly. “I’m just telling you, my going through the motions on this is not going to accomplish what the police can. Do you think I’m made of stone, that a friend of mine is battered to death and I turn up full of detached objectivity like a Sherlock Holmes? Jesus, Tessa, you and Lotty make me feel like the bludgeoned end of a battering ram.”
    “If I had your skill and your contacts, Vic, I’d be glad to be able to act, instead of sitting in my studio with a mallet trying to chisel a statue of grief.”
    The line went dead. I rubbed my head tiredly. My Polish shoulders did not seem wide enough to handle the load on them today. I rotated them gently to undo the knots. In the ordinary run of things, Tessa would be right: I solve my problems better by acting than thinking. That’s what makes me a good detective. So why did this job look so unappetizing?
    The Dan