I just had time to get out of the office, skirt the lobby’s security camera, and slide into a chair behind one of the dying palms when the clerk returned. My money had bought her a certain degree of calm: she moved languorously across the lobby without looking around.
The chair gave me a good view of the elevator in the far wall and a sort of view of the parking lot, but not of the front desk. I guessed from the noises that the clerk had reinstalled herself in the office, and I didn’t hear any shrieks that showed I’d left some trace behind.
I put my phone on silent and leaned back in the armchair to minimize my visibility. The chair was upholstered in a frayed and faded fabric steeped in so many decades of dust that I kept having to choke back sneezes.
A trucker pulled his rig into the parking lot and came in to get a room for the night. The clerk was floating in some happy place and only appeared when the trucker had shouted her name several times. Florence. He was a regular, a long-haul driver on his way to Phoenix from Bangor. When he’d gone upstairs, a young woman booked a room. The phone rang twice. And then the elevator doors wheezed open and the man in Cory’s photo emerged.
He walked toward me and I braced myself, but he was merely going to a window behind me to squint at the street. He looked to be in his forties, with thick bronze curls and arms that held enough muscle to pack a serious blow if he tried to hit anyone.
He lowered the blind and went out. I went to the window myself, lifted an edge of the blinds, and saw him cross the street, heading for a pizza place on the far side of the liquor store.
I glanced at the registration counter, but didn’t see Florence. The elevator stood open. I hurried over and slipped inside just as the doors started wheezing shut. Florence appeared, shouting at me in a high querulous voice: “You, PI, get out of there!”
I swore under my breath: I’d forgotten the security cameras.
I didn’t know what Florence’s next move would be but mine involved the agony of a ride in an elevator that had read the tortoise and the hare way too many times. When I finally reached the sixth floor, I saw a pile of discarded pizza boxes in the hall and stuffed those between the doors to keep the elevator from moving. As I knocked hard on the door to room 631, the elevator alarm began jangling.
“Housekeeping,” I called, although I wasn’t sure there was such a thing at the Ditchley. “We have your clean towels.”
I didn’t hear any movement inside the room. Knocked again, then used the card-key. The lock clicked open. I moved quickly, shoulder against door, pushing my way into the room.
Cory Teichel sat on the bed, wearing his Jockeys and a T-shirt. He pulled the sheet over his legs when he saw me, his thin young face registering fear, not relief.
“I’m V.I. Warshawski,” I said. “The detective who was stupid when you asked about sex at my presentation on Tuesday. Do you want to be here, or do you want to leave?”
He blinked, didn’t move—my appearance, my sharp questions, he was having trouble following me.
“Can you get dressed?” I asked.
“He took my clothes,” Cory muttered.
“Okay, we’ll take his.”
The man hadn’t brought a suitcase, but a gym bag on a card table in the corner held a pair of sweatpants and some T-shirts. I tossed the sweats to Cory. They’d be big on him, but they’d get him out of the hotel.
The guy’s passport was in the bag, too: Russian. Igor Palanyuk, written in Cyrillic and Roman. Inside was folded the photograph of a woman of about thirty-five or forty.
“He said if I leave, he’ll call the FBI and they’ll arrest my dad and then kill my mom. That’s my mom, that picture.”
“He’s not going to call the FBI,” I said. “Whoever Igor Palanyuk is, he kidnapped you.”
Cory looked up from fumbling with the sweatpants’ waist-string—his skinny adolescent body would have fit into one leg. “I came here. He didn’t kidnap me. I wanted to find how to get my mom out of Russia.”
“You want to stay with him?”
“No, but—”
“There’s no but. He’s keeping you against your will. We’ll figure out your mother when we’re safe and have room to act.”
We both heard the tread outside the door. Cory froze. I put the chain bolt into place and ran to the room’s only window, above the bed. I wrestled with the lock, but it had been painted into place. Igor began banging the door methodically to and fro against the chain. I picked up a chair and shattered the window. I half-carried Cory to the broken window, wrapped a sheet around him, thrust him outside onto the fire escape.
“Get down that ladder. When you get to the bottom, stay out of sight, do not show yourself for anyone except me.”
He stood on the platform, eyes big with fear.
“Move!” I screamed.
He skittered down the escape just as Palanyuk forced the bolt screws out of the doorframe. The door flew open. Palanyuk’s ferocious forward momentum made him stumble. When I flung the chair at him, he tripped and fell heavily.
I scrambled through the broken glass on the bed and went down the fire escape. I found Cory on the bottom platform, two stories above the ground, huddled against the wall. I grabbed his hand, led him to the edge of the platform, climbed onto the first rung of the ladder. Shut my eyes, prayed. A bullet whined past us. I jumped up and down on the top rung. Igor had emptied a whole magazine when I felt the mechanism slowly release.
I shoved Cory in front of me, forced his terrified body down the ladder. We crossed the parking lot at a shuffle, Cory trying to keep the giant sweats in place.
Blue-and-whites started swarming, but we were out of searchlight range. A few drunks stared at us apathetically from the curbs. They’d seen every possible permutation and combination of men and women along Pulaski to be startled by a half-naked teenager with an older woman.
I led him to my car and drove him to his father’s house.
6
“And that was it?” Murray said.
“‘That’ was far from ‘it,’ but once we got to Teichel’s place, the story unspooled pretty easily. Palanyuk was with the Ukrainian mob; he—”
“You said his passport was Russian.”
“Pay attention to geopolitics, Murray. He’s from Simferopol, Crimea, now part of Russia, but he’s ethnic Ukrainian. Mike Teichel’s wife, Nina, was Crimean.”
Once he had Cory safely home, Mike Teichel had felt able to call a contact at the National Security Agency. In a surprisingly short time, he’d tracked down Nina Lavrentovna, now surnamed Batitsky.
Her current husband was an oligarch wannabe. None of their get-rich quick, or even slow, schemes had worked out, but Nina had kept track of what her ex-husband was up to. When she learned about the game theory he was applying to defense systems, and how well his new generation of software worked, she and Batitsky concocted a strange plan to get hold of it.
Batitsky told Teichel that he was a coworker of Nina, that she had been imprisoned for anti-Russian activities in Crimea. He said Nina realized she had made a terrible mistake in abandoning Cory and Mike. If Mike would get them a flash drive with the Iceni software on it, Batitsky could barter it for Nina’s safety.
In addition to the sob story, Batitsky sent his friend Palanyuk over to Chicago to try to force Teichel into parting with the system.
“Mike was behaving so oddly that Cory started following him, and saw him embracing Palanyuk outside the Ditchley Plaza. That was the first night Palanyuk arrived, when Teichel believed the sob story about Nina. At first, he embraced Palanyuk out of joy—until he found out what the price of her safety was.”
“Meanwhile, Cory thought his father was there to have sex with men. He took the photograph he showed his teacher, but went back to the Ditchley two nights later to see if his father showed up there again. That’s why he followed Palanyuk into the elevator and why he ended up a prisoner in the hotel room.
“Batitsky then offered to trade Teichel Cory’s safety for the flash d
rive—that was when Teichel fired me. He was scared Cory would be killed if I got too close.”
“Why did Cory ask if you ever slept with a suspect?” Sal put in.
“When he first followed his dad to the Ditchley Plaza, he thought Mike and Palanyuk were lovers. He thought maybe he could seduce Palanyuk and find out what his hold was on his dad. That ploy didn’t work well—Palanyuk wasn’t interested, but he realized with Cory, he had a more potent pawn to play with Mike Teichel than a long-absent wife.”
“So why did Teichel fire you?” Murray demanded.
“He’d been in San Francisco when Cory took off. He didn’t connect his son’s disappearance with his own troubles, not until I texted him the picture Cory had taken of him with Palanyuk outside the Ditchley.”
“Which one of them would have made you kick a hole in a stained-glass window?” Sal poured my drink, cocking an eyebrow seductively.
“Cory, of course. I did kick a hole in a window for him.”
“Too bad Erica wasn’t with you,” Murray said. “She could have administered some TLC.”
I didn’t tell him Erica had shown up at the Teichel house, ostensibly to fill Cory in on homework assignments he’d missed. Cory thanked her politely but told her he needed to be alone with his father. I escorted her home, and agreed with all her bright superficial chatter. There is nothing worse than someone telling you “This, too, will pass.” You have to learn your own route out of agony.
“I’ll take another Oban, Sal,” I said.
“Why do you have to drink expensive malts on my tab?” Murray grumbled.
“Oh, Murray, you know—everything tastes twice as good when someone else is paying.”
Note
I wrote this story originally as “A Family Affair” for Bob Randisi’s collection, Fifty Shades of Grey Fedora (Riverdale Avenue, 2015). Our brief was to create a story with a sexual theme that fit in with the craze for Fifty Shades of Grey. I started with Murray and V.I. at the Golden Glow and V.I. using one of Chandler’s notable sexual lines about Velma—a blonde who could get a bishop to kick a hole through a stained-glass window.
I’ve rewritten it for this anthology, adding about a thousand words and hopefully making the storyline easier to follow. The sex is actually nonexistent, but it’s the fear that his father is having an affair that drives young Cory Teichel into action.
Acid Test
1
She hadn’t known her life could unravel so fast. Yesterday morning, her biggest worry had been the phone calls from Ruth Meecham, complaining about the noise:
(“Are you running a hippie commune in there, Karin?”
“Yes, Ruth.”
“I’m complaining to the alderman: you’re renting rooms to people without meeting the building code for separate entrances.”
“Fine, Ruth.”)
Also Clarence Epstein’s threats to sue her for harassment. In fact, when the cops arrived—all thirteen of them, at midnight, with enough cars to run Indy right there on the spot—she’d assumed it was because Clarence had made good on his threats.
Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood was filled with people Karin had known since first grade. Ruth Meecham was one of them—they lived side by side in the same outsize houses where they’d grown up. Clarence was another. In high school, he’d just been another grade-grubbing faculty brat, but when Karin got back from her time in India, he’d turned into a power-grubbing economist.
He and Ruth and Karin had all lost their parents relatively young, and they’d all inherited their childhood homes. Clarence Epstein had donated his family’s brick home to the Spadona Institute. Of course, Spadona’s main offices were in Washington, but so many of their fellows were on the University of Chicago faculty—most in economics or business, some in law—that Spadona needed a home near the university.
Ruth Meecham had inherited a portfolio along with her house. She lived alone in eighteen rooms, and kept them up with a meticulous round of repairs, gutter cleanings, and tuck-pointings. Gardening was her acknowledged hobby, but meddling ran a close second.
Ever since her own parents’ death brought Karin back from India twenty-six years ago, Ruth had been monitoring her. She’d noticed Karin’s pregnancy before Karin admitted it to herself, admitted that the nausea she’d suffered since coming home wasn’t due to changing back to Western food, or even grief at the loss of her elderly, remote parents, but a souvenir of the ashram in Shravasti.
Karin so missed life in the ashram that she turned her parents’ mansion into a kind of co-op. Unlike Ruth, she hadn’t inherited money to keep up the house. The co-op helped pay the bills, besides giving her a chance to practice the nonviolent activism of Shravasti. Karin typically had three or four tenants, usually young activists who stayed a year or two before moving on.
Right now the most intense tenant was a young environmentalist with a toddler. Jessica Martin had shown up at Karin’s door when the baby was only a month old. Remembering her own trials as a young single mother, Karin took her in, adopted baby Titus as an honorary grandchild, and tried to keep peace between Jessica’s volatile moods and the rest of the co-op.
Jessica had made Clarence’s Spadona Institute her particular project, tweeting about it, posting photos on Instagram, and running a podcast. She also staged sit-ins, helped a group of nuns with prayer vigils, and invited a lot of police surveillance of Karin’s home.
After Clarence Epstein’s death two days ago, the surveillance had grown to round-the-clock squad cars in front and in the alley. Every now and then a detective came in to talk to one or another resident, always beginning by cross-examining Karin on what she knew about the person and why she’d rented them a room.
And then—she herself had been arrested for conspiracy to commit murder. Karin sat cross-legged on the jail cell’s steel bed, palms up, thumbs and forefingers forming an O, trying to chant, but despite decades of practice, she couldn’t keep her focus on her breath.
She’d been arrested before, but for demonstrations against wars, or the kind of trespass that Clarence had been so exercised about. She’d never been alone in jail, though—it had always been with friends, and never for a charge like murder. She couldn’t comprehend it, even though she was choking on cigarette smoke and gagging on the other smells—stale urine, vomit, the iron stench of drying blood.
Empty the mind. Swami Rajananpur used to say, “Karin, caught between hope and fear, the spirit is liked a trapped bird frantically beating its wings, and going nowhere. Empty the mind, join yourself to the great Now.”
“Eka leya,” she chanted softly, harmony. A woman rattled the bars of the cage and screamed for a guard. A trapped bird, let it out, let it fly away. “Eka leya, eka leya,” she kept repeating, trying to set free all the birds whirring in her head, but last night’s interview with the young state’s attorney kept flying back in.
“We know you had a major fight with Dr. Epstein two nights before his death.” The state’s attorney had been a young man, wearing navy pinstripes even at two in the morning, and trying to intimidate her by leaning over her and talking in too loud a voice.
“We didn’t fight,” Karin had answered, trying to explain that even if Clarence was angry, she, Karin, was too committed to nonviolence to fight with him. Nor would she add that everyone in the house had been angry, because it was also against her principles to shield herself at someone else’s expense.
Had it only been five days ago? Clarence had come over in person—usually he sent a student or an intern with his complaints—and he’d seemed angrier with young Jessica Martin than with Karin herself. That wasn’t so surprising, given Jessica’s protests at the Spadona Institute. Conversation had been heated but civil until Jessica’s little boy, Titus, toddled in, moving uncertainly on his chubby legs.
Clarence tried picking him up, and Jessica snatched Titus away, shouting, “Don’t touch my child. I won’t have him covered with the blood that’s on your hands.”
Clarence had t
urned white with fury. “At least everyone knows what I stand for. I hate to see a child raised by a hypocrite.”
Titus was usually a sweet and happy baby, but the angry voices made him start to howl.
“You two know how to calm down,” Karin said, taking Titus from Jessica. “Don’t you see, if two smart grown-ups can’t talk calmly, there’s no hope for the world?”
“Karin, don’t tell me what to do, you overgrown hippie,” Clarence growled. “You never had a sense of values and you haven’t got them now, letting anyone and everyone camp out here, and using your father’s house as a base for violating my privacy!”
Jessica started to shout something, but Karin shook her head. “Insofar as I can, I run this house on principles of nonviolence. That means nonviolent verbal reactions, too, Jessica. If someone comes in here who’s out of control, it’s his problem, not ours. I will not allow you to shout at him in here or call him names. You can take it outside if you have to do it, but think how much happier you’ll be if you can stay calm.”
“Be as sanctimonious as you want, Karin,” Clarence snarled, “but keep this in mind while you practice your heavy breathing: if you let this flip-flopping radical stage a protest out of your father’s house one more time, I will be suing you for intent to injure me and my institute. I came over to tell you I’ve been getting legal advice on this matter and my attorney is prepared to act.”
Karin laughed. “It’s my house, Clarence. Are you trying to say my dad would have supported your institute if he were still alive? Maybe so, but I bet your mom would hate to know what you do in there.”
And then she’d felt ashamed, because in one second all her training, all her values, had gone out the window at the chance to score on him. Jessica had given a harsh laugh and yelled, “Right on, Karin,” which made Karin leave the room abruptly, still holding the baby. At least she’d defused the encounter—Clarence had stayed another half hour, and Karin hadn’t heard any shouting coming from the big common room where he and Jessica were talking. That was the last time she’d seen him, and she’d been shocked, even if not grief-stricken, when she learned of his death two days later.
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