A Picture of Guilt by Libby Fischer Hellmann
Authors: Libby Fischer Hellmann
Tags: Fiction, General, Historical, Mystery & Detective, Women Sleuths, Mystery & Detective - Women Sleuths
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gone, and I needed the corporate establishment—at least their largesse—to survive. Damn the suits. Damn Kirk Ryan. And damn Chuck Brashares.
It took six hours of self-pity, a hot bath, and two glasses of wine before I realized that Karen was right. No one had coerced me onto the stand. I’d come forward voluntarily. In a way, I had initiated the chain of events that destroyed my credibility. Karen was right about something else, too: they didn’t care if I ever worked again. They had their interests to protect.
But I had mine.
I pulled back the sheets and climbed into bed. I’d gotten myself into this. I’d just have to get myself out.
C HAPTER S IXTEEN
You hear a lot about the North, South, and West Sides of Chicago, but no one talks much about the East Side, which was where I was going early Monday morning. Hugging Lake Michigan on its southeast side, the area includes working-class neighborhoods like South Chicago, South Deering, and Hegewisch.
A gassy odor filtered through the car as I got off the highway at 130th. If Chicago is the city of big shoulders, this is the meaty part. Farther east are streets with tiny bungalows, a bar on one corner, a church on the other, but 130th and Torrence is the industrial hub. Factories, warehouses, and cranes crowd together, abandoned rail cars line the streets, and smokestacks belch grit and God knows what else into the air.
I’d made a strategic choice. If the objective was to restore my credibility, I had a couple of options. I could try to verify Rhonda Disapio’s story. The problem was, I wasn’t sure how to go about it, short of setting up surveillance at the boat launch. Plus, if the boat men really did kill Mary Jo, I wasn’t anxious to put myself on their turf. The other option was to ferret out Santoro’s background, in an effort to prove he didn’t kill Mary Jo. I already knew his haunts: the bar and the docks.
It wasn’t a tough decision.
The Calumet River flows southwest from Lake Michigan to Calumet Harbor and eventually to the Mississippi River. Through yet another miracle of Chicago engineering, the harbor was dredged and transformed into a deep-water port so it could accommodate freighters from the St. Lawrence Seaway. Leading off the harbor are inlets that make the docks between them look like tines on a giant fork. It’s at these docks that commodities are off-loaded. Years ago they were transferred to rail cars and shipped across the country. Now most of the cargo travels by truck.
I threaded my way around the Ford plant at Torrence and turned on 122nd. Turning again, I drove down a road that had been patched and repatched, and from the groan of my suspension, could stand yet another go-round. A mile down the road, a battered black and white sign said I had reached the Ceres Terminal. I swung into a lot studded with chunks of broken concrete and stopped behind a shabby brick building with a roof of corrugated metal. Two cars were parked at haphazard angles in front.
It was a cool October morning, and condensation coated the cars’ windshields. Pulling on my Sox hat—I knew better than to wear a Cubs hat this far south—I wandered over to a group of longshoremen standing in front of a warehouse. Perched above them on a rusty steel scaffold was a fleshy, graying man with a clipboard. Most of the men looked old. Dressed in canvas coveralls and scuffed, steel-toed boots, several waved union cards in the air.
“Sorry, guys, that’s all I need for today,” the man with the clipboard said. “But I got a barge of steel coils coming in Friday. Be work for about a dozen of youse.”
A collective grumble went up from the men, but it was surprisingly docile, as if they were used to disappointment. I shouldered my way through to the man with the clipboard, but he climbed down off the hiring stand and pretended not to see me. Pulling a tin out of his pocket, he opened it and pinched a wad of Red Man with his thumb and forefinger.
“Excuse
It took six hours of self-pity, a hot bath, and two glasses of wine before I realized that Karen was right. No one had coerced me onto the stand. I’d come forward voluntarily. In a way, I had initiated the chain of events that destroyed my credibility. Karen was right about something else, too: they didn’t care if I ever worked again. They had their interests to protect.
But I had mine.
I pulled back the sheets and climbed into bed. I’d gotten myself into this. I’d just have to get myself out.
C HAPTER S IXTEEN
You hear a lot about the North, South, and West Sides of Chicago, but no one talks much about the East Side, which was where I was going early Monday morning. Hugging Lake Michigan on its southeast side, the area includes working-class neighborhoods like South Chicago, South Deering, and Hegewisch.
A gassy odor filtered through the car as I got off the highway at 130th. If Chicago is the city of big shoulders, this is the meaty part. Farther east are streets with tiny bungalows, a bar on one corner, a church on the other, but 130th and Torrence is the industrial hub. Factories, warehouses, and cranes crowd together, abandoned rail cars line the streets, and smokestacks belch grit and God knows what else into the air.
I’d made a strategic choice. If the objective was to restore my credibility, I had a couple of options. I could try to verify Rhonda Disapio’s story. The problem was, I wasn’t sure how to go about it, short of setting up surveillance at the boat launch. Plus, if the boat men really did kill Mary Jo, I wasn’t anxious to put myself on their turf. The other option was to ferret out Santoro’s background, in an effort to prove he didn’t kill Mary Jo. I already knew his haunts: the bar and the docks.
It wasn’t a tough decision.
The Calumet River flows southwest from Lake Michigan to Calumet Harbor and eventually to the Mississippi River. Through yet another miracle of Chicago engineering, the harbor was dredged and transformed into a deep-water port so it could accommodate freighters from the St. Lawrence Seaway. Leading off the harbor are inlets that make the docks between them look like tines on a giant fork. It’s at these docks that commodities are off-loaded. Years ago they were transferred to rail cars and shipped across the country. Now most of the cargo travels by truck.
I threaded my way around the Ford plant at Torrence and turned on 122nd. Turning again, I drove down a road that had been patched and repatched, and from the groan of my suspension, could stand yet another go-round. A mile down the road, a battered black and white sign said I had reached the Ceres Terminal. I swung into a lot studded with chunks of broken concrete and stopped behind a shabby brick building with a roof of corrugated metal. Two cars were parked at haphazard angles in front.
It was a cool October morning, and condensation coated the cars’ windshields. Pulling on my Sox hat—I knew better than to wear a Cubs hat this far south—I wandered over to a group of longshoremen standing in front of a warehouse. Perched above them on a rusty steel scaffold was a fleshy, graying man with a clipboard. Most of the men looked old. Dressed in canvas coveralls and scuffed, steel-toed boots, several waved union cards in the air.
“Sorry, guys, that’s all I need for today,” the man with the clipboard said. “But I got a barge of steel coils coming in Friday. Be work for about a dozen of youse.”
A collective grumble went up from the men, but it was surprisingly docile, as if they were used to disappointment. I shouldered my way through to the man with the clipboard, but he climbed down off the hiring stand and pretended not to see me. Pulling a tin out of his pocket, he opened it and pinched a wad of Red Man with his thumb and forefinger.
“Excuse
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