Warshawski 09 - Hard Time Read Free

enthusiasm, so he must have been telling the truth about their childhood. But he seemed to be trying to talk to her seriously about something—a mistake in a gathering this public. Even under the soft rainbows of Sal’s Tiffany lamps I could see Lacey’s color rise. She turned away from him in hauteur and he made the mistake of grabbing her shoulders. The off–duty cop who’d gotten Emily her seat muscled his way through the crowd and hustled him out the door. When we followed a few minutes later, the man was standing across the street staring at the Golden Glow. As we came out he hunched his hands down in his pockets and walked away.
    “Vic, you’ve made me
blissfully
happy,” Emily sighed as we walked past the line of Lacey’s fans. “There they are, waiting for hours just to get sight of her, and she actually kissed me and signed my book, maybe I’ll even be on TV. If someone told me two years ago that every girl in Chicago would be jealous of me, I’d never have believed them in a million years. But it’s come true.”

2 The Woman in the Road
    Emily chattered with excitement all the way to the car, then fell deeply asleep in the backseat. Mary Louise leaned back on the passenger side and slipped out of her high heels.
    “I stayed up all night to watch poor Diana marry Prince Creep when I was that age,” she commented. “At least Emily got to touch Lacey.”
    I had wanted to go to O’Hare to join the vigil for Ringo and John, but my mother was desperately ill by then; I wasn’t going to worry her by riding around on buses and L’s after curfew. “Some guy was trying to get next to Lacey as we left. He said they grew up together in Humboldt Park. Is that true?”
    “I’m glad you asked.” In the sodium lights on the Inner Drive I could see Mary Louise’s grin. “I have eaten and drunk Lacey Dowell facts for the last two weeks, ever since you called with the invite, and it’s high time you shared the treat. Lacey’s birth name was Magdalena Lucida Dowell. Her mother was Mexican, her father Irish; she’s an only child who grew up in Humboldt Park and went to St. Remigio’s, where she starred in all the school plays and won a scholarship to Northern Illinois. They have an important theater program. She got her first break in film twelve years ago, when—”
    “All right, all right. I’m sure you know her shoe size and her favorite color, too.”
    “Green, and eight–and–a–half. And she still likes the chorizo from her home neighborhood better than any trendy food in L.A. Ha, ha. Her father died in an industrial accident before she started making real money, but her mother lives with her in Santa Monica in a nice oceanfront mansion. Supposedly Lacey gives money to St. Remigio’s. They say she kept the cardinal from closing the school by shoring up its scholarship fund. If that’s true it’s worth something.”
    “A lot.” The light at Lake Shore Drive turned green, and I swung into the northbound lanes.
    “Come to think of it, you should have picked up some of these gems from Murray’s interview. Didn’t you watch?”
    I grimaced at the dashboard. “I think I was so embarrassed to see him doing it at all that I couldn’t focus on what he was saying.”
    “Don’t be too hard on him,” Mary Louise said. “Guy has to live on something, and you’re the one who told me the Global team axed his biggest stories.”
    She was right. I knew Murray had been having a tough time since Global bought the paper. They hadn’t stopped any of his digging, but they wouldn’t print any stories they considered politically sensitive. “We have to pay attention to the people who do us favors in this state,” Murray quoted to me bitterly when management killed a story he’d been working on for months about the new women’s prison in Coolis. He mimicked his editor one night at dinner last winter:
Americans have grown accustomed to sound bites. Sex, sports, and violence are good sound bites.