Finchley nodded at me across the gurney. “That’s good enough for me to go on. I need to ask the two of you some questions. Think your friend can keep going for another few minutes?”
Mr. Contreras joined in my assurances about his toughness. Finchley led the way to a barren lounge around the corner from the cooler. Mr. Contreras didn’t move with his usual bounce, but he’d recovered some of his color by the time we sat down.
“Not my lucky day,” Finchley said, “finding you on top of a stiff I’m sent to look at.”
“You mean it is your lucky day,” I corrected. “For one thing, you wouldn’t have an ID without me. For another, you’ll be glad to have my help. I can work full-time on this, and you have dozens of other cases on your plate… That is, was he killed? Or did he hit his head on something and fall in?”
Finchley pulled a scribbled note from his jacket pocket. “He had a pretty hefty blow to the back of the head, Vishnikov says. If he fell and hurt himself, he fell backward. And since he was dead before he went into the water, it would have had to’ve happened on the way in. It’s possible some lowlife found him dead and rolled him in—lots of drugs get done along the water there. The punks wouldn’t want to be burdened with calling the cops on a dead body. It wouldn’t surprise me if it happened that way.”
I agreed. “Or Mitch was lurching around down there and interrupted a buy and some guy knocked him cold for his pains. And then panicked when he realized he was dead. I can see that.”
“But why was he at the canal?” Finchley asked. “It’s all industry down there—not the kind of place you go for a midnight stroll, no matter how drunk you are.”
I looked over at Mr. Contreras. He didn’t seem to be listening to our conversation.
“He used to work for Diamond Head Motors, down at Thirty-first and Damen. He might have been over there to see about work—he was pretty hard up by all reports.”
Finchley jotted Diamond Head on the crumpled paper on his knee. “And what are you doing down here, Warshawski? You know that’s the first question the lieutenant’s going to ask me.”
The lieutenant being Bobby Mallory, less hostile to me than he used to be, but still not a big fan of my life’s work. “Just pure dumb luck, Detective. Mr. Contreras and I are neighbors. He hired me to find his friend. This is not my favorite way of meeting my professional obligations… How long does Vishnikov think he was in the water?”
“About a week. When did either of you see him last?” I shook my neighbor’s arm gently and repeated the question to him. That jerked him back to the present, and he gave a stumbling account of his final weekend with Mitch, filled with self-reproach for kicking his friend out. Finchley asked him a few gentle questions and let us go.
“Just don’t go charging around the South Side on this without talking to me first, okay, Vic?”
“If Mitch interrupted some druggies, they’re all yours. I don’t have the resources to go hunting out dopeheads, even if I had the desire. But something tells me that a dead old man without much family or connections isn’t going to demand round-the-clock resources at Area One, either.“
Finchley’s shoulders sagged. “Don’t lecture me on police and the community, Warshawski. I don’t need it.”
“Just talking about real life, Terry. It wasn’t meant as an insult.” I got up. “Thanks for saving Mr. Contreras and me from a rubber hose at the sheriff’s office.”
Finchley flashed one of his rare smiles. “We serve and protect, Vic; you know that.”
Mr. Contreras didn’t speak during the slow drive home. I was exhausted, so tired I could barely focus on the changing lights as we drifted north. If someone wanted to trail us back again, they were welcome to the job.
The day had begun with Dick’s bellowing and ended with a decomposed corpse, with a trip to Schaumburg thrown in for light relief. I longed for some remote mountainside, for snow and a sense of perfect peace, but tomorrow I would have to rise and be ready to do battle again.
I waited with Mr. Contreras until he managed to undo his front door. “I’m coming in with you. You need hot tea with lots of milk and sugar.”
He put up a half-hearted protest. “I’m going to have some too,” I told him. “Not a night for grappa or whisky.”
The hands on his kitchen clock stood at midnight. It wasn’t that late, not really. Surely it wasn’t age that made my hands shake as I hunted in drawers and cupboards for tea. I finally found an old box of Lipton buried under some greasy potholders. It smelled stale, but tea never really goes bad. I used two bags to make a black potful. Mixed with sugar and milk it was a good restorative.