I felt irrationally bereft when she hung up. She’d offered me a bed—why did I want technical medicine instead of love? Ice, when the left side of my neck was sore to the touch? What did Lotty know about neck injuries, anyway. I stomped into the kitchen, filled a freezer bag with ice, and pressed it against the sore area, as if determined to prove her wrong. Instead, by the time Mr. Contreras phoned up to say the chicken was cooked, I could move my head more easily. Which made thinking more possible as well.
The cassettes that I’d made of Lemour in my office—I needed to do something with those. A copy for my lawyer, and maybe one for Murray. Would he run a story on the break–in? Was I testing him, to see whose orders he was following?
After dinner I went back upstairs and hooked the cassette pack up to my VCR and ran the tape. Knowing I had sat passively while Lemour grew ever more demented made me feel the violations of the afternoon all over again. My stomach clenched. I could hardly bring myself to keep watching. When I heard the call that made Lemour let me go, though, I sat up and played it back several times.
His caller kept cutting him off. Perhaps he didn’t like Lemour’s thin nasal voice. But maybe he didn’t want Lemour revealing too much on an open line. Lemour’s evil grin, and the way he said he’d look forward to that—whatever that was—made it clear they had some more elaborate frame in store. Although what could be more elaborate than drugs planted in my office I didn’t know. Maybe I should go to Lotty’s after all.
I stopped the tape again when Lemour said it was my lucky day, I could go home. He paused before saying his “boss” had ordered my release. A cop does not refer to superiors as bosses; he calls them by title—lieutenants or watch commanders—whatever the highest rank happens to be. So who was on the phone? Baladine? Jean–Claude Poilevy?
Maybe a really sensitive machine could pick up the voice of the person speaking to Lemour. I could talk to the engineer at Cheviot Labs about that, but it would probably have to wait until Monday. Just in case the guy came in on weekends I left a message on his voice mail.
I locked the tape in my closet safe and went back downstairs to collect the dogs. With an aspirin on top of my long day—my long week—I was asleep as soon as I turned out the light.
Two hours later the phone pulled me up and out of a deep well of sleep. “Ms. Warshawski? Is that you?” The hoarse whisper was barely audible. “It’s Frenada. I need you at once. At my plant.”
He hung up before I could say anything. I held the receiver to my ear, listening to the silence at the other end. My mind had that deceptive clarity that the first hours of a sound sleep bring. Frenada didn’t have my home phone number: when he called to scream about Regine Mauger’s blurb in the Herald–Star, he got me through my answering service. Perhaps he used caller ID and had picked up my number when I called his home.
I turned on my bedside light and looked at my own ID pad. Caller unidentifiable. The person had either blocked the call or was using a cell phone. I went into the living room. Mitch and Peppy had been sleeping next to the bed, but they followed me, crossing in front of each other so that I had a hard time moving.
I nudged them out of the way and found my briefcase where I’d left it, next to the television. I dug out the Palm Pilot and looked up Special–T Uniforms. When I phoned the plant, the number rang fifteen times without an answer. His home phone gave me only his bilingual message.
“So what should I do, guys?”
Mitch looked up at me hopefully. Go for a run seemed to be his advice. Peppy lay down and began methodical work on her forelegs, as if to say, Take a bath and go back to sleep.
“It’s a setup, don’t you think? Lemour’s handler made him release me. So that they could trap me at the plant? Leaving me with egg all over my smug face, as Ryerson informed me Wednesday night? Or was this really Frenada, in serious trouble? In which case, why didn’t he call the cops, instead of me?”
The dogs looked at me anxiously, trying to figure out my mood from my voice. Maybe Frenada’s experience with the cops was the same one I’d had this evening, so that he didn’t feel he could rely on them.
A wiser person would have followed Peppy’s advice and stayed home. Maybe I am that wiser person now—experience does change you—but in the middle of the night, with that sensation of looseness that made me think I was still thirty and able to leap tall buildings at a bound, I pulled on my jeans and running shoes, put my gun back together and stuck it in a shoulder holster under a sweatshirt, put my PI and driver’s licenses in my back pocket with a handful of bills, and made my cautious way down the back stairs. To their annoyance, I left the dogs behind—if I got involved in a shooting war I didn’t want them complicating the battle.
Lemour thought he could get me, but I would make a monkey of him. That seemed to be the gist of my thinking, if acting solely on impulse can be called thinking.