Dead Land (V.I. Warshawski #20) - Sara Paretsky Page 0,1

straw!” Lutas cried. “I’m going to the management board in the morning to demand they evict you. Three dogs? When the limit is one?” Lutas represented our building with the board of the company that managed our property.

She was a junior associate at one of the big downtown law firms. She worked ninety-hour weeks, the way all the juniors do. I knew she was sleep deprived. I knew I was not a congenial neighbor: a recent encounter with an assailant had broken one of the stairwell bannisters. I still couldn’t rouse any sympathy for her—she’d gloated as she served me with legal papers demanding that I undertake repairs.

She probably would go to the board to try to evict me; maybe she could, especially with the other residents glaring at me.

I opened the paper bag Coop had left and took out a blanket, Bear’s food bowls, and a few toys. I set everything up in the kitchen and went back to bed, but I felt like a heavily starched shirt, stiff, unbending, listening to Bear’s toenails scratching the floors as he explored the apartment. At the end, he came into my room and sniffed at me for a few minutes, then gave a heavy sigh and plopped to the floor by my bed.

“If only” is a fool’s game. But I couldn’t help thinking, if only I’d followed my first wish, to spend my birthday hiking with Peter Sansen and the dogs in the country, none of the rest of this would have happened.

1

South Side Sisters

July 27, V.I. Warshawski’s Birthday

The girls lined up along the wall, their faces glistening with sweat, still breathing hard.

“We could have won if Lureen had moved her fat ass into place to block—” one girl began, but Bernie silenced her.

“No one who plays for me calls another player a bad name. And there is only one way to lose a competition. What way is that?”

The girl who’d issued the insult turned her head away, but the other seven chanted in unison, “Dishonesty.”

“Right!” Bernie said. “If you don’t do your best, you are dishonest to yourself and to your team. If you do your best, you’ve won, even if the other team outscores you. You learn from mistakes, n’est-ce pas? Losing a match is only a loss if you don’t learn and grow from it.”

“Yes, Coach.”

“Louder. You believe this!”

“Yes, Coach!” they shouted.

The South Side Sisters had lost their match to the Lincoln Park Lions. Bernie—Bernadine Fouchard—had coached them with the ardor she brought to everything in her life. The girls loved her: they’d started sprinkling their conversation with French phrases, they copied her mannerisms—the way she stood with hands on hips; the way she smacked her palm against her forehead and groaned, Mon dieu.

Bernie’s sport was hockey—like her father, Pierre, like her godfather, my cousin Boom-Boom, both former Chicago Blackhawks stars. Unlike them, even though she was a gifted player, there wasn’t any way for her to make a living at the game, so she was doing the next best, majoring in sports management at Northwestern, where she played for their Big Ten hockey team.

This summer she was interning in a Chicago Park District youth camp, coaching soccer. She’d played enough soccer as a child that she knew the basics. She’d jumped into the sport with the energy she brought to everything she did. Even though her kids hadn’t had all the private camps and other opportunities that came to girls in affluent communities, Bernie inspired them to play with something close to her own ferocity.

I’d come down to Forty-seventh Street to watch the eleven-year-old Sisters play their final match of a round-robin tournament. The South Lakefront Improvement Council—SLICK—had helped sponsor the Sisters and wanted them to take a bow following the game. SLICK was holding their monthly meeting; the girls were supposed to wait in the hall until someone came out for them.

A woman whose tightly curled hair was dyed a rusty brown opened the common room door and stuck her head into the hall. “Can you girls keep it down—oh! Are these our soccer players?”

“Yes,” Bernie said. “We are a wonderful team, but we are not wonderful at waiting in the hall. When do we go in?”

“Very soon.” The woman tittered, as if Bernie had made a mildly amusing joke. As she shut the door, we heard a man yelling from inside the room.

“You damned liar! Where’d you come up with this pile of crap? You go to Lying School? Because you sure as hell didn’t