V.I. Warshawski 04 - Bitter Medicine by Sara Paretsky Read Free Book Online Page B

behalf. Maybe you can’t solve the crime, maybe the epidemic of gang violence is too big for anyone, even the state, to solve. But I am asking you, friend to friend, for a friend.”
     
    I felt as if I were choking under my silk collar. The image of the baby, gasping for air, swept across my mind again. “Yeah, okay, Lotty,” I muttered. “I’ll do what I can. Just don’t sit up nights waiting for the fever to break.”
     
    I barely waited for her to shut the passenger door before squealing to the corner and roaring down Irving Park Road. I cut across a madly honking van at the entrance to Lake Shore Drive and accelerated hard in front of a sweep of oncoming cars. A barrage of horns and screaming brakes made me feel momentarily effective. Then the stupidity of venting my frustration in a lethal machine overcame me. I pulled over to one of the little turnouts where you can change a flat tire and waited for my pulse to settle down.
     
    The lake lay to my left. The 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.
     
    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 unairconditioned 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’ll ask 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