I tapped Ms. Chigwell on the shoulder. She stood up with me and we sidled slowly to the shadow of the wall. While we watched, the ambulance door shut again and the cold-voiced man wandered on out to the gate. As soon as he was on the far side of the vehicle, I crouched low and sprinted around the comer to the plant entrance. Ms. Chigwell’s footsteps sounded softly behind me. The ambulance shielded us from the view of the gate sentry and we made it inside without hearing any outcry.
We were on a concrete apron outside the plant floor. The sliding steel curtain that separated the manufacturing area from the main entrance was shut, but a normal-sized door next to it stood ajar. We quickly darted through it, shutting it softly behind us, and found ourselves immediately in the plant.
We walked on tiptoe, although the noises around us would have drowned any sounds we made. The pipes let out their intermittent belches of steam and the cauldrons bubbled ominously under the dull green safety lights. Fritz Lang had invented this room. Presently we would come to the end and find only cameramen and laughing actors. A drop of liquid fell on me and I jumped, convinced I’d been poisoned with a toxic dose of Xerxine.
I glanced at Ms. Chigwell. She was looking straight ahead, ignoring the spitting from above as assiduously as she avoided the obscene graffiti scrawled on the huge “No Smoking” signs. Suddenly, though, she bit back a cry. I followed her eyes to the far comer of the room. Louisa lay there on a stretcher. Dr. Chigwell stood on one side of her, Art Jurshak on the other. The two of them stared at us, slack-jawed.
Dr. Chigwell found his voice first. “Clio! What are you doing here?”
She marched forward fiercely. I held her arm to keep her from getting within Jurshak’s grabbing range.
“I came to find you, Curtis.” Her voice was sharp and carried authoritatively over the hissing pipes. “You’ve gotten yourself involved with some very nasty people. I presume you’ve spent the last week or so with them. I don’t know what Mother would say if she were alive to see you, but I think it’s time you came back home again. Well help Miss Warshawski get this poor sick woman back into the ambulance and then you and I will return to Hinsdale.”
I had my gun leveled at Art. Sweat stood out on his round face, but he said pugnaciously, “You can’t shoot. Chigwell here has a needle ready to inject Louisa. If you shoot me, it’s her death warrant.”
“I’m overcome, Art, by your family feeling. If this is the first time you’ve seen your niece in twenty-seven years or so, your reaction would move even Klaus Barbie to tears.”
Art made a violent gesture. He tried shouting at me, but the messages—guilt over his long-forgotten incest, fear of others finding it out, rage at seeing me alive—kept him from getting out anything coherent.
“Is this woman his niece?” Ms. Chigwell demanded of me.
“Yes, indeed,” I said loudly. “And she has closer ties to you than that, doesn’t she, Art?”
“Curtis, I will not tolerate your killing this unfortunate young woman. And if she is your friend’s niece, it is absolutely unthinkable that you do so. It would be unethical and totally unworthy of you as the inheritor of Father’s practice.”
Chigwell looked at his sister dejectedly. He shrank a little inside his overcoat and his hands hung loosely at his sides. If I acted now, he wouldn’t do anything to Louisa.
I was bracing myself to take a flying leap at Art when I saw malice replace the frustration in his face—he was watching someone come up behind us.
Without glancing around, I seized Ms. Chigwell and rolled with her behind the nearest vat. When I looked up I saw a man in a dark overcoat stroll into the area where we’d been standing. I knew his face—I’d seen it on TV or the papers or in court when I’d been a public defender—I just couldn’t place it.
“You took your fucking time, Dresberg,” Jurshak snapped. “Why’d you let that Warshawski bitch in here to begin with?”
Of course. Steve Dresberg. The Garbage King. Majestic slayer of little flies buzzing around his trash empire.
He spoke in the cold, flat voice that made the hairs prickle along my spine. “She must’ve cut her way under the fence and come in when I was out talking to the boys. I’ll get them to go take care of her car when we’re done here.”
“We’re not done here yet, Dresberg,” I announced from my nook. “Too much success has gone to your head, made you careless. You should never have tried to kill me the same way you did Nancy. You’re getting soft, Dresberg. You’re a loser now.”
My taunts didn’t move him. He was a pro, after all. He lifted his left hand from his coat pocket and pointed a large gun—maybe a Colt.358—at Louisa. “Come out now, girlie, or your sick friend here will be dead a few months before her time.” He didn’t look at me—a message that I was too trivial for direct attention.