7

I’d had enough of the city, of pollution and cramped, painful lives. When I got home I changed into jeans, packed an overnight bag, and took off with the dog to spend the weekend in Michigan. Although the water was too cold and wild for swimming, we spent two invigorating days on the beach, running, chasing sticks, or reading, depending on individual temperament. When I got back to Chicago late Sunday I felt as though my head had been thoroughly aired out. I turned the dog over to a jealous Mr. Contreras and headed upstairs to bed.

I’d told the personnel guy at Xerxes I’d call him in the morning, but when I woke up I decided to go visit him in person. If he had addresses for Pankowski and Ferraro, I could go see them and maybe get the whole mess cleared up in one morning. And if he’d forgotten to stop at the Stickney warehouse, a personal visit would make him more responsive than a phone call.

It had rained overnight, turning Xerxes’s gravel yard into an oily mud puddle. I parked as close to the side entrance as I could and picked my way through the sludge. Inside, the cavernous hallway was cold; I was shivering slightly by the time I reached the pebbly glass entrance to the administrative suite.

Joiner wasn’t in his office, but the incurious secretary cheerfully directed me to a loading bay where he was managing a shipment. I followed the hall down to the river end of the long building. Heavy steel doors, difficult to open, led to the bay. Beyond lay a world of dirt and clamor.

Sliding steel doors enclosing the loading bay had been rolled open on two sides. At the far end, facing me, the Calumet lapped against the walls, its brackish waters green and roiling from the downpour. A cement barge lay motionless in the turbulent water. A gang of dockhands was removing large barrels from it, rolling them along the concrete floor with a clatter echoed and intensified by the steel walls.

The other door opened on a truck bay. A phalanx of silver tankers was lined up there, looking like menacing cows attached to a high-tech milking machine as they received solvents from an overhead pipe rack. Their diesels vibrated, filling the air with an urgent racket, making it impossible to understand the shouts of the men who were moving around them.

I spied a group in conference around a man with a clipboard. The light was too dim to make out faces but I assumed the man was Joiner and headed toward him. Someone darted from behind a vat and seized my arm.

“Hard-hat area,” he bellowed in my ear. “What are you doing here?”

“Gary Joiner!” I bawled back at him. “I need to talk to him.”

He escorted me back to the entrance to wait. I watched him go over to the confabbing group and tap one of the figures on the arm. He jerked his head to where I was standing. Joiner stuck his clipboard on a barrel and trotted over to me.

“Oh,” he said. “It’s you.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by instead of phoning. I can tell this is a bad time to talk to you-want me to wait in your office?”

“No, no. I-uh, I couldn’t find anything about those men. I don’t think they ever worked here.”

Even in the dim light I could tell his splotchy skin was flushing.

“I bet that warehouse is a mess,” I said sympathetically. “No one has time to look after records when you’re running a manufacturing plant.”

“Yes,” he agreed eagerly. “Yes, that’s for sure.”

“I’m a trained investigator. If you gave me some kind of authorization, I could have a look through there. You know, see if their records were misplaced or something.”

He flickered his eyes nervously around the room. “No. No. Things aren’t that big a mess. The guys never worked here. I gotta go now.”

He hurried away before I could say anything else. I started after him, but even if I could get past the foreman, I couldn’t think of a way to get Joiner to tell me the truth. I didn’t know him, didn’t know the plant, didn’t have a clue as to why he would lie to me.

I walked slowly back down the long hall to my car, absentmindedly stepping in an oozy patch that plastered sludge firmly to my right shoe. I cursed loudly-I’d paid over a hundred dollars for those pumps. As I sat in the car trying to scrape it clean, I got oily sludge on my skirt. Feeling outraged with the world, I threw the shoe petulantly into the backseat and changed back into my running gear. Even though Caroline hadn’t sent me to the plant, I blamed my problems on her.

As I drove up Torrence, passing rusted-out factories that looked dingier than ever from the rain, I wondered if Louisa had called Joiner, asking him not to help me if I turned up. I didn’t think her mind worked that way, though: she’d told me to mind my own business, and as far as she was concerned, I was doing just that. Maybe the Djiaks had fumed self-righteously to Xerxes, but I thought they were too myopic to analyze how I might conduct an investigation. They could only see how Louisa had hurt them.

On the other hand, if Joiner didn’t want to talk to me about the men because of some problem the company was having with them-say a lawsuit-he would have known when I came in on Friday. But the first time I spoke to him he’d obviously never heard of them.

I couldn’t figure it out, but the thought of lawsuits made me realize another place to look for the men. Neither Pankowski nor Ferraro was in the phone book, but the old ward voter registration records might still be around. I turned right on Ninety-fifth Street and headed into East Side.

The ward offices were still in the tidy brick two-flat on Avenue M. A variety of errands may take you to your committeeman’s office, from help with parking tickets to ways of getting on the city payroll. The local cops are in and out a lot what with one thing and another, and even though my dad’s beat had been North Milwaukee Avenue, I’d come here with him more than once. The sign proclaiming Art Jurshak alderman and Freddy Parma ward committeeman, which covered all of the building’s exposed north wall, hadn’t changed. And the storefront next door still housed the insurance agency that had given Art his toehold in the community.

I knocked most of the sludge from my right shoe and put my pumps back on. Brushing my skirt as best I could with a Kleenex, I went into the building. I didn’t recognize any of the men lounging in the first-floor office, but judging from their age and their air of being as one with the furnishings, I thought they probably went back to my childhood.

There were three of them. One, a graying man smoking the fat little cigar that used to be a Democratic pol’s badge of office, was huddled in the sports pages. The other two, one bald-headed, the other with a white Tip O’Neill-style mop, were talking earnestly. Despite their differing hairdos, they looked remarkably alike, their shaved faces red and jowly, their forty extra pounds hanging casually over the belts of their shiny pants.

They glanced sidelong at me when I came in but didn’t say anything: I was a woman and a stranger. If I was from the mayor’s office, it would do me good to cool my heels. If I was anyone else, I couldn’t do anything for them.

The two speakers were going over the rival merits of their pickup trucks, Chevy versus Ford. No one down here buys foreign-bad form with three quarters of the steel industry unemployed.

“Hi,” I said loudly.

They looked up reluctantly. The newspaper reader didn’t stir, but I saw him move the pages expectantly.

I pulled up a rollaway chair. “I’m a lawyer,” I said, taking a business card from my purse. “I’m looking for two men who used to live down here, maybe twenty years ago.”

“You oughta try the police, cookie-this isn’t the lost-and-found,” the bald-headed one said.