Peppy looked at me anxiously—she didn’t know, either. A small procession of cars was moving north up State Street. I waited for them to pass so I could make a U. The tail of the procession was Michael’s silver Corvette. I tried honking and waving, but he either didn’t see me in the fading light or chose to act as though he hadn’t. I could try to catch up with him to ask him about Elena but I didn’t feel like running into McGonnigal again tonight.
I drove north to Congress. The potholes and derelict buildings gradually melted into the convention hotels fringing the south rim of the Loop. After I turned west on the Congress and speeded up, the Chevy gave an ominous whine. My stomach jolted again.
“Not at thirty,” I lectured the car. “You gotta get me around town a few more years. A few more days, anyway.”
The car paid no heed to me but increased its nerve-wrenching noise as I took it up to forty. When I brought it back down to twenty-five, the engine quieted some, but I really couldn’t drive it on the Ryan. I left the Congress at Halsted and plodded my way north and west to Logan Square.
Roz Fuentes’s campaign headquarters were in her old community organization offices on California Avenue. The front window held flags of Mexico, the U.S., and Puerto Rico, with the Mexicans on the left and the U.S. in the middle. Underneath the Mexican flag hung a huge portrait of Roz, beaming her two-hundred-watt smile, with the slogan in Spanish and English: “Roz Fuentes, for Chicago.” Not original, but serviceable.
The office was still brightly lighted. We were five weeks from election and people would be working into the dawn at different headquarters all over the county. On top of that Roz was still functioning as a conduit for community problems with the city on housing and crime. According to the papers, that was a thorn for the alderman—a gent of the old macho school—but Roz was too popular in the neighborhood for him to try going head-to-head with her.
Beyond the plate-glass window people were working with the noisy camaraderie a successful campaign brings in its wake. A dozen or so men and women sat at desks in the big front room talking, answering the wildly ringing phones, shouting questions at each other in Spanish or English. No one paid any attention to me, so I wandered past the campaign workers to the back, where Roz used to have a small private office.
Another small knot of people was sitting in there now, a nice landscape of Roz’s multiracial appeal: a white man of about thirty and two Hispanic women—one plump and fiftyish, the other not long out of high school—were deep in conversation with a wiry black woman in hornrims. I didn’t recognize the white man but I knew the woman in the hornrims—it was Velma Riter.
The four of them fell silent when I came in. Velma, who was seated behind the beaten-up desk in Roz’s swivel chair, looked up at me fiercely. To call her expression hostile was about as descriptive as calling Niagara Falls wet— it didn’t begin to convey the intensity she was putting out.
After a puzzled glance from Velma to me, the fiftyish woman asked, “Can we help you, miss?” She wasn’t unfriendly, just brisk—they were conducting business and needed to get back to it.
“I’m V. I. Warshawski,” I said. “I was hoping to find Roz.”
The plump woman held out a palm toward the high school grad without speaking; the young woman handed over her typed sheet of paper. She scanned it and said, “Right now she’s finishing a community meeting on gangs in Pilsen. After that she’s going to Schaumburg for a fund-raising dinner. If you tell me what you need I can help you—I’m her chief assistant.”
“You’re not content with trying to stab Roz in the back—you’re coming in here to put poison in her coffee, is that it, Vic?” Velma spoke up venomously.
The young woman looked flustered at Velma’s open anger. She stood up hurriedly and picked up a stack of papers. Murmuring something about getting them typed before she went home, she excused herself.
“Are these people so close to you that you want me to talk in front of them?” I asked Velma.
“They know you’ve been trying to smear Roz.”
I leaned against the door, my shoulders too tired to keep me upright without a prop. “Have you seen some kind of smear story in the papers or on TV that you can trace to me?”
“People are talking.” Velma held herself rigidly. “Everyone on the street knows you want to stab her in the back.”
“That wouldn’t be because you told them that, would it, Velma?” I couldn’t bear to look at her angry face; I turned my gaze to a peeling poster on the wall showcasing a quote from Simón Bolívar that proclaimed liberty for all peoples.
“Why don’t you tell us why you’ve come, Ms, Warshawski? We’re all close to Roz, we don’t have any secrets from each other,” Roz’s chief assistant said.
I moved uninvited onto the metal folding chair the young woman had vacated. “Maybe first you can tell me your names.”
“I’m Camellia Maldonado and this is Loren Richter. He’s managing the finances for Roz’s campaign.”