Conrad glared at me, but didn’t pick up the bait. “What about the woman in the church, the one Fugher was arguing with the first time you saw him?”
I shook my head. “No idea. I didn’t get a good look at her because the lighting in there was poor, but I’m guessing she was around thirty. White woman, maybe five-six, her hair might have been dark blond. You could ask Cardenal.”
“We’ll both ask Cardenal.”
“You know I have a life, a job, things that don’t revolve around you and your needs.”
Conrad grinned, showing his gold incisor. “You’ve been down on my turf lately, Warshawski. I don’t believe in the Easter bunny and I don’t believe you’d travel all the way from Cubs country just to look at a high school kid play baseball. You’re up to something down here, and that means you get to come with me so I can watch you and the good father interact.”
THE TOO-REAL THING
Conrad dropped me at the commuter train station when we’d finished talking to Father Cardenal. I was furious: he’d had his men bring me the length of the city, but he refused to drive me back, even though the commute on public transport would take close to two hours. But Conrad, who waxes hot and cold with me, or maybe cold and lukewarm, felt I’d been obstructing his investigation. Leaving me to find my way home was punitive in a petty way. Police don’t get paid much, but power is a job benefit most of the rest of us don’t have.
If he hadn’t been so abrasive, I might not have left the station—or if there’d been a train due soon, but they only run once an hour this time of day and I’d just missed one.
The station wasn’t all that far from the Guisar slip. As soon as Conrad’s car turned south, I climbed down from the platform and walked along Ninety-third Street toward the docks. It was hard to keep my sense of direction on the roads that twisted around the Calumet River. My phone’s map app was also baffled. There are a lot of warehouses, scrap metal yards, loading docks, abandoned steel plants and so on along the river and I made a couple of time-wasting detours.
The confusing trail was kind of a metaphor for my conversations this morning, first with Conrad, then with Father Cardenal.
We’d talked to the priest under the crumbling ceiling to his office. The patch I’d watched him install two weeks ago was still in place, but another hole had appeared over the photo of Father Gielczowski.
Cardenal had expressed shock at Jerry Fugher’s death, and had asked if I was involved in it. Of course, that made Conrad jump on me like Mitch on a shinbone, so the conversation, which had not been cordial from the outset, deteriorated further.
When I’d finally persuaded the two men that accusing me of all the crimes in South Chicago wasn’t a recipe for my cooperation, Conrad remembered the woman I’d seen talking to Fugher, or as he put it, that I “claimed” I’d seen talking to Fugher.
I gave Cardenal the same description I’d given Conrad.
“She could be anyone,” the priest said, looking at me suspiciously.
“She could be any white woman with dark blond shoulder-length hair, about thirty years old,” I said. “She called him ‘Uncle Jerry.’ Who was his family?”
“He wasn’t an employee, so he didn’t fill out the forms that people on the payroll do. We paid cash; I don’t even have a home address for him,” Cardenal said.
In South Chicago, this didn’t sound as strange as it might on the Gold Coast: this was a neighborhood where people bartered services or got paid under the table. “How much work did he do for you?”
“It wasn’t like that, I mean not like he’d come every Monday,” Cardenal said. “I kept a punch list that I’d give him when he came around. He knew how to handle wiring in an old building, but he only showed up when he needed money.”
“The day I saw him, two weeks ago, had he been working in the church?”
Cardenal threw up his hands. “I can’t remember after all this time. He might have been.”
He rummaged through the papers on his desk and picked up a sheet. “The light on the lectern, they reported that three weeks ago and it’s still flickering, the circuit breaker on the organ, that keeps blowing. We can’t afford a new panel, so Jerry would reroute wires for us, but he didn’t do either of these projects.”
“So the day I saw him here, he likely chose the church as a meeting place,” I said. “Or the woman chose it. You don’t have any ‘Fughers’ on your parish rolls or teaching at the school?”
Cardenal shook his head. “It’s an unusual name; I’d remember it.”
“You say Fugher came around when he needed money,” Conrad said. “Drugs? Booze?”