“He told me. After he’d shot me full of haloperidol, so that I couldn’t move, but before he dumped me into Tampier Lake to die. He killed his sister because she was in love with someone besides his own precious self.”
“No!” Lawlor shouted. “That’s a lie, it’s a lie, whoever you are, whatever casting service Ryerson got you from! It was on the news feed, you said it yourself in the huddle, Ryerson! You saw her body, you went with the foreign doctor, you identified it, everyone in Chicago knows V. I. Warshawski is dead.”
Lotty let out a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding. Murray pushed a stool forward, and the detective sat.
“Greatly exaggerated, that news,” she said.
52.
RAISING THE DEAD
I CAME TO WHEN THE BOAT BUMPED INTO THE REEDS. I WAS thirsty, feverish, my arms suspended above me on a metal bar. I thought my parents had wrapped me in a shroud and were burying me alive. Water was seeping into the coffin. I was going to drown before they realized what they’d done. Mama! Papa! I tried to shout, but I couldn’t get out anything except a hoarse cry. The birds were singing, they were covering up any noise I could make.
Someone lifted the coffin away. I couldn’t open my eyes; the sunlight was too sudden, too intense.
“Jesus H. Christ.” It was a stranger’s voice above me.
I tried to cry out again. A jumble of images, of my mother, the Spin Out, a black SUV. I couldn’t make sense of it; my mother was dead, but maybe she had sent for me?
“Oh my God, she’s breathing.” The stranger was talking to himself.
I felt him cutting the shroud away from me. “It’s a hell of a way to try to kill yourself. Next time, steal someone else’s boat!”
“I don’t steal,” I tried to say, but it was too much effort; I drifted back to sleep.
I was being shaken, pulled, the shroud came off a bit at a time, I was wet. Had I peed all over myself? “Sorry,” I slurred.
“Yeah, you should be sorry. You want to drown yourself, don’t involve other people.”
I didn’t want to drown myself; I felt indignant that anyone would think that, but then the shroud was off, I was slung across a man’s back. That had happened before, the man put me on his back and threw me into the lake. But now we were in a forest. Was I at camp in Wisconsin? That wasn’t right somehow, but I couldn’t figure it out and went back to sleep.
When I woke again, I was in the front seat of a pickup. The driver was a sunburned man who I’d never seen before.
“Are we in Wisconsin.” I managed to ask.
“Is that where you’re from? I’m taking you to the nearest hospital, not to goddamn Wisconsin. What got into you, stealing a boat in the middle of the night to do away with yourself?”
My childhood kept blurring into the present, but I knew that I had a photograph I had to protect.
“Lotty will help,” I said, the name coming to me out of the blue. “My phone, my phone too wet, use yours, call Lotty.”
The driver was happy to offload his problem onto someone else. Lotty’s phone number, I’d dialed it so many times it popped into my head before I had time to worry about whether I could remember it.
“Ma’am? You don’t know me, but I got a half-drowned lady in my truck who says you can help her.”
Lotty spoke to me, realized how little able I was to respond, talked to the Good Samaritan, who gave her directions to a motel near Palos Heights. He waited for her to arrive—more because he didn’t want to be stuck with the motel bill than out of kindliness, but I was thankful not to be left on my own.
Lotty probably broke every speed law in the four-state area, racing to the southwest suburbs. As soon as she saw me, she realized how badly drugged I was.
“You need to be hospitalized, at once, to get this junk pumped out of you, get fluids into you. But—the nearest hospital—I wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on you. Can you hold on until we get back to Chicago? Drink this.”
She somehow came up with a glass of orange juice. I was so feeble that most of it went down my damp and smelly T-shirt, but she brought another glass, put a straw in my mouth, held it steady while I swallowed.
“Call the police?” she said to the Samaritan. “I’ll take care of that for you: I’m a physician, they know me.”
He was glad to let Lotty do the rest of the work. “Ma’am, no offense, but—if I hadn’t decided to take the day off to go fishing, no telling what this gal would have got up to. She stole my boat, see, and I went off looking for it. When I come to pick it up and get going, well, there she was, trying to drown herself. If she’s a patient of yours, you’d best get her into a hospital.”
“Yes, don’t worry, you’ve been more than kind. We will of course reimburse you for damage to your boat. And your name, if the police need to talk to you?”