When Officer Neely had dropped us at my car, I dug the keys from my jeans pocket and handed them wordlessly to McGonnigal. He turned the car in the rutted yard while I leaned back in the passenger seat, releasing it so it was almost horizontal.
I was sure I’d fall asleep as soon as I lay back, but images from the night kept exploding in my head. Not the silent trip up the Calumet—that had already faded to the surreal world of half-remembered dreams. Louisa lying on the cart at the end of the plant, Dresberg’s cold indifference, waiting for the police in Chigwell’s office. I hadn’t been afraid at the time, but the recurring pictures gave me the shakes now. I tried clenching my arms against the sides of the seat to control the shaking.
“It’s aftershock.” McGonnigal’s voice came clinically in the dark. “Don’t be ashamed of it.”
I pulled the seat back to its upright position. “It’s the ugliness,” I said. “The horrible reasons Jurshak had for doing it, and the fact that Dresberg isn’t a man anymore, he’s an unfeeling death machine. If they’d just been a couple of punks jumping me in an alley, I wouldn’t feel this way.”
McGonnigal reached out an arm and groped for my left hand. He squeezed it reassuringly but didn’t speak. After a minute his fingers stiffened; he withdrew them and concentrated on turning onto the Calumet Expressway.
“A good investigator would take advantage of your fatigue and get you to explain what Jurshak’s horrible reasons were.”
I braced myself in the dark, trying to prepare my wits. Never speak without thinking. A cardinal rule to my clients in my public defender days. First the cops wear you out, then they show you some sympathy, then they get you to spill your guts.
McGonnigal tried taking the Chevy up to eighty, but slowed to seventy when it started vibrating. Police privilege.
“I expect you have some cover story ready,” he went on, “and it’d really be police brutality to force you to keep it up when you’re this tired.”
After that the temptation to tell him everything I knew became nearly irresistible. I forced myself to watch what aspect of landscape one could see from the expressway canyons, to push away the picture of Louisa’s disoriented gaze confusing me with Gabriella.
McGonnigal didn’t speak again until we were passing the Loop exits and then it was only to ask for Lotty’s address.
“Would you like to come back to Jefferson Park with me instead?” he asked unexpectedly. “Have a brandy, unwind?”
“Spill all my secrets in bed after the second drink? No—don’t get upset, that was supposed to be a joke. You just couldn’t tell in the dark.” It sounded appealing, but Lotty would be anxiously awaiting me—I couldn’t leave her hanging. I tried explaining this to McGonnigal.
“She’s the one person I never lie to. She’s—not my conscience—the person who helps me see who I really am, I guess.”
He didn’t answer until he’d pulled off the Kennedy at Irving Park. “Yeah, I understand. My grandfather was like that. I was trying to picture myself in your situation with him waiting up for me; I’d have to go back too.”
They didn’t teach that in any seminar in Springfield. I asked about his grandfather. He’d died five years ago.
“The week before my promotion came through. I was so mad I almost resigned—why couldn’t they have given it to me when he was still alive to see it? But then I could hear him saying, ‘What do you think, Johnnie—God runs the universe with you in mind?’” He laughed a little to himself “You know, Warshawski, I’ve never told that to another soul?”
He pulled up in front of Lotty’s place.
“How’re you going to get home?” I asked.
“Umm, I’ll summon a squad car. They’ll be glad to have an excuse to leave the mayhem in Uptown for a chance to drive me.”
He held the keys out to me. Under the sodium light I could see his eyebrows lift in inquiry. I leaned across the seat divider and put my arms around him and kissed him. He smelled of leather and sweat, human smells that made me wriggle closer to him. We sat like that for several minutes, but the ashtray in the divider was digging into my side.
I pulled away. “Thanks for the ride, Sergeant.”
“A pleasure, Warshawski. We serve and protect, you know.”
I invited him to come up and call a squad car from Lotty’s but he said he’d do it from the street, that he needed the night air. He watched while I undid the lobby locks, then sketched a wave and walked off.