Rochelle’s face flamed fuchsia. “You dirty old man, how dare you—”
Mr. Soong appeared, barefoot, in jeans and a T-shirt. “Please. Please, everyone, be quiet, so the baby can become quiet again. The stairwell is not the place for an argument.”
“Right you are, Mr. Soong,” I said. “Officer, I can take the dogs inside and reassure my houseguest, but only if you promise not to follow me into my home.”
“Our orders were—”
“Yep, I know. I’ll come with you to talk to Conrad, but I need time to put on more clothes, calm a teenager and get these dogs where no one can bite them.”
This last phrase pushed Rochelle into another stream of invective: the police could see that I treated her fears as a joke, the dogs should be shot or impounded.
The cops, who’d lost control of the situation as soon as Mr. Contreras appeared with Mitch and Peppy, had started to order me to come right now, with the clothes I had on, but Rochelle made them decide to give me the benefit of the doubt. To show he wasn’t soft on PI’s or dogs, Burstyn phoned the Fourth District for instructions. Conrad, or some henchperson, agreed I could be trusted to get dressed and not to emerge firing a weapon.
“Bernie, you decent?” I called through the door. “I’m bringing your uncle Sal in.”
I didn’t exactly trust the cops to keep their promise, so I stood in the doorway with Mitch and Peppy until Mr. Contreras was inside, then backed in, shutting the door as soon as Peppy’s long plume of a tail had cleared the opening.
The local district’s response team was ringing the downstairs bell as I slid the dead bolts home. I buzzed them into the building, but left them for Officer Burstyn and his pal to sort out.
Bernie was sitting on the sofa bed, her legs tucked under her, her dark eyes black with fear. “What’s going on, Vic?”
“No idea, honey. The cops are from South Chicago, though. Turn on the news, see if there’s anything about Stella Guzzo.”
Mr. Contreras put an arm around Bernie and gave her a reassuring slap on the shoulder. “Don’t you worry about nothing, young Bernie. The dogs and me, we’ll walk down to your job with you and we’ll come get you when the day is over. No one can hurt you with Mitch and me looking after you, okay?”
Bernie nodded, smiling tremulously, and scooted over to make room for him on the end of the bed. While the two of them flipped through channels looking for local news, I went to the back to get ready. I took my time, heating up my espresso machine, taking a shower, dressing for comfort in case I had a long day in cop-land in front of me. I made a cheese sandwich with cucumbers and spinach, something I could eat in the back of the squad car without worrying about spills or stains.
Jake came in through the back door in the middle of my routine.
“You’re up,” I said.
“They’re probably up and about in Milwaukee with that racket.” He put an arm around me and drank my espresso. “You in trouble?”
“The police don’t have a warrant, so I don’t think so. Someone I talked to yesterday must have complained—I won’t know until I get to South Chicago if it was Judge Grigsby or Betty Guzzo.”
“I think we got something, doll,” Mr. Contreras called. “That Ryerson guy is on.”
Jake came with me into the living room in time to see Murray in front of a mountain of coal dust at the Port of Chicago.
“Are the pet coke mountains in South Chicago toxic? That question has been hotly debated lately between the residents of the city’s southeast side, who claim that breathing the dust particles is a health hazard, and the state’s Pollution Control Board, which says there’s no proof. However, this mountain of pet coke was definitely a hazard to the health of a man whose body was found here early this morning by tugboat pilot Gino Smerdlow.”
The cops were pounding on my door again, demanding that I get going.
“Police have not yet released the identity of the dead man, but we were able to catch up with Gino Smerdlow near the Guisar slip at the Port of Chicago.”
Murray’s interview of the tugboat pilot was uninteresting and predictable: Murray looking nautical in the wheelhouse, wind whipping a navy scarf around his red hair, getting the grisly details from Smerdlow. Early morning on the Cal, returning from towing the Lucella Wieser out onto the open water, spotting the arm sticking out of the coal mountain.
“We see float fish here from time to time,” Smerdlow said, “but a body in the coal? I couldn’t believe it,” and so on.