I was happier to see him than I would have thought possible a few days earlier. “Have you been transferred up here?”
“Nope. Still down in your old ’hood. You and fire: you can’t leave it alone, can you?” The words were harsh, but his tone was sympathetic enough to take the sting out of them. “Your eyes going to be okay?”
“They tell me,” I said gruffly.
“I read the report. Nasty fire, that, killing a nun and all.”
“Was there any word about the accelerant?” I demanded. “It looked like it had to be rocket or jet fuel, it burned so fiercely and so fast.”
He shook his head. “Early days for forensic results. But fires are tricky. Gasoline could get the job done if the perp was lucky, you know that. So don’t go starting a conspiracy theory, trying to put cops or the FBI in your sights just because some woman from OEM rubbed you the wrong way.”
“Is that why you came up here?” I demanded. “To tell me to pull back from holding the feds accountable? Damn it, Conrad, they’ve been watching the Freedom Center. They could have done something besides watching it all unfold for them on their—”
“Whoa, there, Ms. W.! I’m not here on anybody’s business but my own.”
I looked at him, puzzled. Nothing I’d been working on lately involved South Chicago, but I waited for him to speak. Make the interrogation come to you, don’t race out to meet it. That was advice I’d always given my clients in my public defender days, and it’s the hardest advice to follow.
“You and fire, Ms. W.,” he repeated. “I don’t know if it follows you around or you bring it with you.”
He waited for a while. But when I still didn’t respond, he said, “You were in South Chicago last Saturday.”
In the trauma and drama of the last few days, I’d forgotten taking my cousin around the South Side. “How nice of you to come all the way up here to tell me.”
He smiled briefly, not warmly. “You stopped at a house on Ninety-second and Houston. You wanted to get inside.”
I watched him through my dark glasses.
“Any particular reason?” Conrad asked.
“I am damned tired of cops and feds asking me to justify every step I take. Is this Iran or America? Or isn’t there any difference anymore?”
“They had a fire Sunday night. When we got there, the lady, a Se?ora Andarra, told us two women had been there, and they said they had grown up in the house and wanted to look around. She was afraid they were from a rival gang to her grandson’s. She was afraid they set the fire to punish her for not letting them into the house.”
“That sounds like me, all right, gangbanger torching an old lady’s house.”
Conrad leaned forward. “You showed me the house once, the place where you grew up, your ma’s tree and everything.”
That was true. In the spring, before I left for Italy, I’d been coaching a basketball team in my old high school, and Conrad and I had occasionally had a drink together after the games. One evening, in a fit of nostalgia, I’d shown him my home, along with the place on the breakwater where Boom-Boom and I used to jump into Lake Calumet, and various other high points of my childhood.
I sat up. “I have a young cousin who’s spending the summer in Chicago. She wanted a tour of historic Warshawski family sites. If you go to Back of the Yards and Gage Park, you’ll find we’ve been there, too. If those two places have been torched, I’ll start to get seriously interested in your questions. Was anyone hurt at the Houston Street fire?”
“Nope. Old lady got herself, her daughter, her grandkids out. And, not only that, in a rare moment of civic cooperation the fire department came before things got out of hand. Anyway, there never really was a fire, so the structure is okay.”
“That’s a mercy.” I lay back down again.
“You going to ask me how it started?”
“Faulty wiring? Geraldo doing reefer in bed?”
“Smoke bomb. Someone broke a window and threw it into the living room while they were eating supper. Everyone ran out the back door, and a couple of lowlifes came in through the broken window and helped themselves while the family was waiting for the fire department.”
“Scum,” I agreed. “I’m very sorry to know this, of course, especially if they broke one of those windows with the prisms across the top. Those prisms were what made my mother feel she could tolerate living in South Chicago.”
“You don’t know anything about this, Ms. W.?”