Dead Land

by Sara Paretsky

“Farms in western Kansas” was such a specific reference. Why not Nebraska or Iowa? Maybe it was one of those sites that knows where you live when you log on and tailors the message to the address. But in that case, they should have given me a message about Illinois farms.

  I entered the URLs into my Zamir case file, but the content was so foul that I couldn’t bring myself to read any more deeply. Instead I treated myself to an actual sit-down meal at a café up the street. I was a civilized person who knew how to use a knife and fork. I didn’t live in a world of hatred.

  My own lawyer, Freeman Carter, phoned as I was walking back to my office. He’d asked an intellectual property lawyer to look at the contract Global’s Spinning Earth division had offered me.

  “He says it’s not out of line with contracts for reality TV shows. It gives Global ownership of everything you uncover while you are under contract to them. They want to include six investigations, starting with Lydia Zamir, and then five that you will mutually agree on. If you’re thinking about signing, we’ll rework the contract.”

  I assured him I wasn’t thinking about signing. “I just wanted to make sure they weren’t preemptively staking out a legal claim to my work.”

  “It’s a very strange offer, Warshawski,” Freeman said dryly. “I’ll give—what’s his name? Bolton—a call. It won’t hurt for Spinning Earth to know you have serious counsel watching your back.”

  When he hung up, I called Murray, to tell him I was definitely not signing with Global.

  “Not a surprise, Warshawski, just a disappointment. We could make beautiful music together.”

  “Nothing to stop us without deeding our souls to Global,” I said.

  “So you will work with me on Zamir?”

  “There’s nothing to work on, except the ongoing tragedy of gun violence survivors, and Elisa Palurdo has that ground well covered.”

  “Tell me the truth, Warshawski. Do you know where Lydia Zamir is?” he persisted.

  “I have absolutely no idea. Do you?”

  “I’ve been trying to find the guy Coop,” he said. “I’m betting he’s the key.”

  “Any luck?”

  “Shaking the cop tree at the Second,” he said.

  The patrol officers, especially the men, were the kind of source Murray knew how to work. If someone in the district knew Coop’s full name and where he lived, Murray would get it out of them.

  “When I get it, how about a trade—an interview with Palurdo for Coop’s name and address?” Murray said, or wheedled.

  “Why do you and Bolton keep thinking I own access to people? I can’t get you to Palurdo. Or Lydia. And I will try to keep you from Bernie Fouchard.”

  Murray cut the connection.

  25

  Legal Standing

  I unlocked the door to my office in a sober mood. If Global wanted to keep track of what I uncovered, they must have some vested interest in Palurdo’s shooter, or Lydia, or Hector Palurdo himself.

  I tried to see if any of Global’s senior staff were related to Arthur Morton. The closest connector I found was a Global board member who also served on the board of Sea-2-Sea, the big agricultural firm. However, he lived in Los Angeles. It was hard to believe he paid attention to the woes of small farmers like the Morton family. Still, just to be prudent, I added his name to the Zamir case file.

  I looked up Morton’s mother’s and grandmothers’ birth names. They didn’t match any current Global executives. I ran their names against my own current client list and didn’t turn up anything.

  My initial approach to the Devlin law firm hadn’t been very skillful. I’d see if a personal approach got me further. Specifically, I’d see whether Jane Cardozo, head of Devlin’s transcription center, would tell me why she’d needed a restraining order against Lydia Zamir.

  I’d found a photo of Jane Cardozo on a social media site and uploaded it to my phone. She was a woman of about fifty, with dark hair cut short and a humorous look about her eyes. She’d have to have a strong personality to force the partners of a big firm to treat her with respect. Perhaps she’d see me as a kindred spirit, not an invading force. That was my hope, anyway.

  I printed a message to Cardozo. Just the basics—I was an investigator who’d been hired to find Lydia Zamir. I was worried that Zamir might have tried confronting Cardozo or one of the partners and been arrested. I was waiting in the lobby—could Cardozo give me five minutes?

  I walked down to the Polonia Triangle to pick up the L into the Loop. Elton was leaning against the fountain, drinking something from a paper bag. I waved, but he turned away. I hoped that wasn’t an omen.

  Devlin & Wickham leased eight floors in the Ft. Dearborn Bank Building on South LaSalle. It’s one of those buildings that make you feel exalted for worshipping Mammon—gold leaf and marble pillars in the lobby, inlaid stone on the floors, and a guard behind a barrier made of the kind of material you think St. Peter probably chose for the Pearly Gates.

  When I told him I had a message for someone at Devlin, it felt sacrilegious to speak above a whisper. The guard proffered a metal basket; I placed my offering inside; the guard phoned up to the firm.

  I settled down on one of the lobby benches to wait. People came and went at the guard stand. They had appointments and showed IDs, they dropped off packets, they came from inner sancta and picked up packets. Finally a woman took my letter and retreated to the elevators.

  I checked in with Bernie. She’d had a good day with her kids and was going out with Angela and her other roommates; Arlette was staying on for a few days, but she was astute enough to leave the young women on their own. I’d brought my laptop and tried to do some work, but I couldn’t focus. Five, then five-thirty, came and went.

  Donna Lutas, the young woman from my building who constantly complained about me and the dogs, emerged. She didn’t seem to notice me as she passed: she had her phone in one hand and was taking off her ID with the other. She stuck her badge in a pocket of her briefcase. I was tempted to lift it and use it to get in, but I’d save that for an emergency.

  I had just decided I was wasting time I could have spent running, swimming, or eating when Cardozo finally appeared. She was with a man who looked vaguely familiar. I packed up my laptop and followed them from the building. They stood talking at the corner of Jackson and Clark for several minutes before the man got into a black car. I was afraid Cardozo might be waiting for a Lyft or Uber, but she started walking west along Jackson. I caught up with her at the next traffic light.

  “Ms. Cardozo?”

  She turned in surprise, the humorous look not at all visible in her eyes.

  “I’m V.I. Warshawski. Sorry to bother you on your way home, but I’m most anxious to discuss Lydia Zamir with you.”

  “Yes. I saw your message. You know we have a restraining order against Zamir; in the morning we’ll go to the judge and add your name to the order, since you are her agent.”

  “Whoa, there!” I said. “Lawyers, and their agents, cannot afford to jump to conclusions like kangaroos. I am trying to find Ms. Zamir. As my note said, she’s disappeared. Her family is anxious to find her. Since she has a hostile history with you and some of the partners, I wanted to make sure she hadn’t shown up at Devlin’s offices and caused an uproar.”

  Cardozo’s mouth bunched—not anger, indecision. “Oh, very well. But I will record the conversation.”

  West Jackson near the river doesn’t offer a lot of cozy places to talk. We went into a doughnut shop and sat with overboiled coffee at a table as far from the windows as possible. Cardozo didn’t say so, but she probably didn’t want any coworkers to spot her talking to me.

  We both had our phones on the table, ostentatiously recording ourselves.

  “No one can tell me why Zamir targeted you after the trial,” I said.

  “She blamed the firm for the court’s sentence; you must know that.”

  “But surely you didn’t play a role in that,” I said. “Or am I misunderstanding your pos
ition in the firm? Are you one of the partners?”

  “Nope. Not a lawyer. Just a legal secretary with a head for operations management.”

  I lobbed her a few softballs on her career—from setting up the transcription unit while she was PA to old Mr. Devlin—“One of the greatest litigators in the city, but a true gentleman”—to running the unit after he retired.

  “Were you still working for Mr. Devlin at the time of the Morton trial?”

  “He had retired long before Hector Palurdo was shot. And was dead by the time of the trial. Zamir was trying to get me to give her access to internal confidential emails. She got quite ugly in her accusations.”

  “She wanted to know who in the firm decided to take on Morton’s defense? I’m curious about that myself.”

  “It was an internal decision by the partners. Not my business, not Lydia Zamir’s, and certainly not yours,” Cardozo said frostily.

  “It was Zamir’s business,” I objected. “Her lover had been murdered. Everything about Arthur Morton was her business, including the trial.”

  “She had an emotional interest,” Cardozo snapped, “not a legal one.”

  “Is that why she targeted you?” I asked, tone all-innocence. “She thought as a woman you might empathize with her emotional distress?”

  “Nothing to do with that,” Cardozo said. “She claimed Palurdo had written us a few days before the concert or whatever it was and she wanted to know what he’d written.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. If Palurdo had communicated with the firm, it wasn’t handled through my center. And even if I knew anything about it, that’s confidential information. She wasn’t married to him. She didn’t have any legal standing to get access to confidential emails.”

  I drank some coffee, forgetting how bitter it was, and choked. “Arthur Morton’s suicide must have come as a shock.”

  She nodded. “I don’t think anyone was remembering how desperate he was. His father was dead, the farm was gone and his big gesture had done nothing to solve his problems. Maybe we made a mistake trying to keep him from the death penalty—he could have been looking down a tunnel of a lot of lonely years.”

  It was an unexpectedly poetic image, but it made a certain sense. “Had his lawyers brought him those nicotine patches?”

  Her face froze, brief goodwill gone. “Is there some reason that’s your business?”

  “Sorry. Random curiosity is the besetting sin of a detective.” I tried an apologetic smile. “One thing that seems extraordinary is how many of the details you remember. A firm like Devlin handles so much litigation, I’d think it would all blur in your head. I know it would in mine.”

  Cardozo was still stiff. “Word’s been rattling around the firm that you’ve been asking questions—you called last week, right? We all looked at the case files to see if there were any loose ends.”

  “What did you find?”

  “There are always loose ends,” Cardozo said. “But we dotted every i in the trial proceedings. There’s no reason for you or anyone else to raise questions about Devlin’s conduct of the case.”

  “I wasn’t.” I tried to make my face look as innocent as a golden retriever’s. “My only questions were about Lydia Zamir’s history with the firm. Why you needed an order of protection, or at least, felt you needed one. And whether she’d appeared on your doorstep after she vanished.”

  “She’s only been missing, what, less than a week?”

  “Ms. Cardozo, we both know you’re a savvy woman, smart as well. Law firms like Devlin are brutal places for women, and you’ve thrived. So please don’t spin me lines about studying the Morton file to make sure the firm didn’t leave loose ends. Tell me instead about the loose end that you’re afraid this current crisis in Zamir’s life will expose.”

  She squeezed the paper cup so hard that coffee sloshed on the table and onto her clothes. She dabbed her blazer with the paper napkins on the table, but they left pilling on her lapels.

  “That’s my exit cue—get this to the cleaners before the coffee stains set.” She got up briskly, the transcription center chief in charge, but as she scuttled to the door, the look she gave me bordered on alarm.

  When I got home, I looked up the partners at Devlin. Their photos were on the firm’s website. I found the man Cardozo had been talking to as she left work, a Clarence Gorbeck, one of the senior partners. I studied his face, narrow, with dark eyes; a wide, thin mouth that looked ready to snap off heads of opposing witnesses.

  When I got home from running the dogs, I called Murray, to tell him the police had found a gavel that might be the weapon that killed Leo Prinz. He had a barrage of questions, which I told him should be directed at Sergeant Pizzello; all I could say was what she’d told me—that the gavel had been found somewhere near the Forty-seventh Street Metra platform.

  It was at four the next morning that Coop dropped Bear off, rousing the whole building.

  26

  A Vampire in a Cave

  The doorbell rang around nine. It didn’t rouse me, but the noise troubled Bear, who pawed at me, whining anxiously.

  As I forced myself from sleep to semiconsciousness, I heard the bell, held down with an insistent finger. “You think it’s your boy come back for you? I hope and pray.”

  I stumbled to my front door and called down through the speaker. It was Sergeant Pizzello, a sharp disappointment to both me and Bear.

  “With you in a few,” I growled through the speaker.

  I took my time about it, turning on the espresso machine, brushing my teeth, showering. When I got out of the shower, Pizzello was leaning on the doorbell right outside my apartment: someone had let her into the building. The sergeant was also calling my cell phone. A glance through my spyhole showed she’d brought a uniformed man: a formal visit. Or perhaps backup in case I turned on my superpowers.

  “I don’t know how much law you know,” I said to Bear, “but it’s prudent not to let the cops into your place. They can search, you see, even if they don’t have a warrant, if you’ve invited them in.”

  I took him out through the kitchen, let him relieve himself in the yard, and then circled around to the front of my building. Before climbing the three flights to my home, I pushed the buzzer at Donna Lutas’s apartment.

  She came to the door, an eager look replaced by dismay when she saw it was me, not the police.

  “It’s getting on for ten a.m., Lutas,” I said. “Don’t Devlin & Wickham expect junior staff to show up at seven and stay until midnight? I’d hate to think you were oversleeping and missing your chance for promotion.”

  “Thanks to you I hardly got any sleep last night and neither did anyone else in the building. I’m working from home this morning. One of the partners is helping me prepare a formal complaint against you to take to the condo board.” She slammed the door. Just when I was trying to be neighborly, too, and look after her career.

  Behind Mr. Contreras’s door, Mitch and Peppy were raising furious demands to join me. My neighbor let them out and they pelted up the stairs. Bear, scared and abandoned, stayed close to me, whining, while my duo kept trying to nose him out of the way, barking fierce commands. (She’s our property. Go back to your own person.) I clung to the stairwell railing to keep them from knocking me down.

  Sergeant Pizzello met us at the top landing.

  “You knew I was waiting to talk to you, and you left me out here for twenty—” She looked at her watch. “Make that thirty-one minutes. I don’t know how you make a living working these kind of hours, but I’d have you on probation after two days.”

  “Sergeant, if I’d had any idea you couldn’t let a day pass without seeing me, I’d have set my alarm. I was roused in the middle of the night by the arrival of this fellow.” I scratched Bear behind the ears. His skin was tight and his mouth was pulled into a rictus of anxiety.

  “People tell me you’re a cop’s daughter. You should know better than to play games with me. If this wasn’t urge
nt, I’d have sent you a text.”

  “Is it Lydia Zamir?” I demanded, belatedly alarmed: visions of Lydia’s emaciated body under a bush in the Wildlife Corridor danced in my head.

  “It’s the man Coop,” Pizzello said through thin lips. “I understand he showed up here last night. Early this morning.”

  “Right. What I just said—he dropped off his dog. How could you know? I didn’t report it.”

  Pizzello bared her teeth in a parody of a smile. “Information received in our morning reports. The police may not be as clever as a PI, but gathering evidence piece by piece usually gets us where we need to be.”

  I thought it over. “Oh. My neighbor Donna Lutas did her civic duty and phoned the Town Hall District, who are sick of her reports on my dogs, and didn’t send anyone over. However, when you read the city-wide reports, something in the wording made you think of Coop and Zamir.”

  Pizzello nodded slowly. “We put word out through some of our confidential informants that we had a lead on the gavel and would be following up today. My patrol units all know Coop or at least the dog Bear, and so we staked out the hole with the gavel in it, figuring when Coop got the word he’d hustle over to collect it. He never showed, but when I saw the report of a dog arriving in the middle of the night and rousing the residents at what I knew to be your address, I figured it had to be Coop. And now, I want to go inside to talk to him.”

  “He’s not there, Sergeant.” I eyed her steadily. “However, if you have a warrant?”

  She scowled. “How about you doing your civic duty for five minutes, Warshawski? Why are you protecting him?”

  “I’m not. I don’t know where he is. He rang my bell. I came down to find his dog tied up out front with a note asking me to look after him. By the time I’d read it, Coop had vanished.”

  I drummed my fingers on the railing, debating. “My lawyer will flay me when he hears me say this, but here’s the deal: you swear you will not touch any document, electronic device, not so much as my coffeemaker, no piece of furniture, and I will let you look in closets and under my bed to see if you can find a trace of Coop.”