Sid gave an elaborate shrug. “My grandkids will see it on Facebook before I know.”
His cell phone rang; Conrad was ready for me. I was to make a right turn, ID myself to a woman at the entrance to the holding cells, and she’d take me to the looey.
As I went into the back, a patrolman was pleading with Sid to book his captive and the woman with the impounded car had come up to the counter to scream in Sid’s face.
THE UMPIRE STRIKES BACK
My escort took me around a partition where a minute office had been carved out for the watch commander. Most of the space was taken up with a dry-erase board that held the week’s duty roster. The watch commander’s desk was wedged against the facing wall. There were a couple of chairs in front of it, both of them covered with reports.
Conrad Rawlings had his cell phone to his ear with his left hand and was hunting and pecking on his computer keyboard with the right. When he saw me, he gestured toward one of the chairs with his typing hand.
“Put those on the floor. I’ll be with you in a sec.”
By the time I’d shifted everything, he’d finished his conversation.
“You wobble on the line, Warshawski. I’m wondering if you’ve crossed it.”
“What line are we talking about, Lieutenant?”
When Conrad is feeling mellow toward me, he calls me “Ms. W.” He was not feeling mellow. I took my sandwich out of my briefcase and started eating, which made him even less mellow.
“Put that away. This isn’t a restaurant.”
“Your guys woke me, not to mention my entire building, at seven this morning. I need to eat. You implied I crossed a line. What are you talking about?” I wondered if word had drifted to him of my poking into Stella Guzzo’s bank account.
“You don’t think you’re bound by the same rules of law the rest of the country runs on. You think you can make up the rules to suit your own needs. I’ve seen you do it time and again.”
I put down my sandwich. “Are we recording this conversation, Lieutenant? Because that is slander, and it is actionable.”
Conrad glowered at his desktop. He’d gotten off on the wrong foot and knew it.
“Come over here: I want to show you some pictures.”
I went around to his side of the desk. He turned and typed a few lines on his computer and brought up a slideshow of the pet coke mountain at the Guisar slip. It wasn’t really a mountain, but a lopsided pile of coal dust perhaps five hundred feet long. It came to an off-center peak about fifty feet high and sloped from there to a plateau around fifteen feet from the ground.
The first frame was shot from some distance back, giving a panorama of the mountain, with bulldozers around the far end and men in hard hats gawking up at the higher peak. Conrad flipped through the slides, stopping every few frames to take phone calls. We got closer to the mountain, watched a team in hazmat suits standing in the bucket of a cherry picker on the deck of a police boat. The boat pulled up alongside the coke mountain and swung the bucket over so the guys in the hazmat suits could start excavating.
Conrad had brought me here because he knew I was connected to his dead body. He kept glancing up at me, his expression hostile, to see how I was reacting. It took conscious work to keep breathing naturally, those diaphragm breaths I was relearning as I practiced my singing with Jake.
The crew carried the body to the ground and laid it on the concrete lip of the dock. A scene-of-the-crime expert used a fine brush to clean the face.
I was expecting Frank Guzzo. Instead, it was Uncle Jerry. My first foolish thought was that in death his soot-blackened, flaccid face didn’t look much like Danny DeVito.
“You know him.” Conrad made a statement, not a question.
“I know his name,” I said. “I don’t—didn’t—know him.”
“Okay. His name, what’s his name?”
“Jerry Fugher. Or so I was told—we were never introduced.”
“Then how come you know his name?”
I went back to my chair and finished my sandwich.
“I asked you a question,” Conrad snapped.
“I’m in a police station without a witness or legal representation,” I said. “I don’t answer questions that have bombs and barbs tucked into them.”
“It’s a simple question.” Conrad spread his arms wide. “The only reason you’d expect bombs or barbs is because you know they’re there.”
I brushed the crumbs from my jeans and got to my feet. “You can get your guys to drive me home.”
“We’re not done.”
“We’re not starting,” I said. “You hauled me down here on no excuse whatsoever to ask me questions about a dead man. All I know about him is his name, and I’m not even sure it’s his real name or how to spell it. You have no further need to talk to me because I know nothing else.”
“I can get a warrant to hold you as a material witness.”