Killing Orders

by Sara Paretsky

  As I was finishing my second cup of espresso, he asked me idly if I followed the stock market at all.

  I shook my head. “I don’t have anything to invest. Why?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve only been here a week, but I noticed in The Wall Street Journal that Ajax’s volume seems quite heavy compared to the other stock-insurance companies, and the price seems to be going up.”

  “Great. Looks like your firm picked a winner.”

  He signaled for the check. “We’re not doing anything spectacular in the way of earnings. Not buying any companies or selling off any properties. What else makes a share price go up?”

  “Sometimes institutional investors take a whimsical fancy to a stock. Insurance companies fared better during the last depression or recession or whatever than most businesses. Ajax is one of the biggest-maybe the funds and the other big investors are just playing it safe.. If you want, I could give you the name of a broker I know; she might have some other information.”

  “Maybe so.”

  We collected our coats and headed back into the wind. It was blowing harder, but fried artichokes and half a bottle of wine made it seem less penetrating. Ferrant invited me up for a brandy.

  He turned the lamp by the bar on a low switch. We could see the bottles but the garish furniture was mercifully muted. I stood at the window looking down at the lake. Ice reflected the streetlights on Lake Shore Drive. By squinting I could make out the promontories farther south, which held Navy Pier and McCormick Place. In the clear winter air the South Works twelve miles away glowed red. I used to live there in an ill-built wooden row house, made distinctive by my mother’s artistry.

  Ferrant put his left arm around me and handed me a snifter of Martell with the right. I leaned back against him, then turned and put both arms around him, carefully holding the snifter away from his sweater. It felt like cashmere and might not take kindly to brandy. He was thin but wiry, not just an opera-loving beanpole. He slid his hand under my silk top and stroked my back, then began fumbling for the bra strap.

  “It opens in front.” I was having a hard time maintaining my balance and the snifter at the same time, so I put the brandy down on the window ledge behind me. Ferrant had found the front hook. I fumbled with the buttons on his pleated trousers. Making love standing up is not as easy as they make it look in the movies. We slid down onto the thick orange carpet together.

  V

  Frustration

  WE FINISHED THE brandy and the rest of the night in a kingsized bed with a blond Scandinavian headboard. When we woke up well after eight the next morning, Ferrant and I smiled at each other with sleepy pleasure. He looked fresh and vulnerable with his dark hair hanging down in his dark blue eyes; I put an arm around him and kissed him.

  He kissed me back enthusiastically, then sat up. “ America is a country of terrible contrasts. They give you these wonderful outsize beds, which I’d give a month’s pay for back home, then they expect you to hop out of them in the middle of the night to be at work. In London I wouldn’t dream of being in the City before nine-thirty at the earliest, but here my whole staff has already been at the office for half an hour. I’d better get going.”

  I lay back in bed and watched him go through the male dressing ritual, which ended when he had encased his neck meekly in a gray-and-burgundy choker. He tossed me a blue paisley robe and I got up to drink a cup of coffee with him, pleased with my foresight in changing my meeting with Hatfield to the afternoon.

  After Ferrant left, muttering curses against the American work ethic, I phoned my answering service. My cousin Albert had called three times, once late last night and twice this morning. The second time he’d left his office number. My pleasure in the morning began to evaporate. I put on last night’s clothes, frowning at myself in the wide mirrors that served as closet doors. An outfit that looks sexy at night tends to appear tawdry in the morning. I was going to have to change for my meeting with Hatfield; I might as well go home and do it before calling Albert.

  I paid dearly for parking the Omega at the Hancock Building for fourteen hours. That did nothing to cheer me up, and I earned a whistle and a yell from the traffic cop at Oak Street for swinging around the turning traffic onto the Lake Shore Drive underpass. I sobered up then. My father had drummed into my head at an early age the stupidity of venting anger with a moving car. He was a policeman and had taken guns and cars very seriously-he spent too much time with the wreckage of those who used such lethal weapons in anger.

  I stopped for a breakfast falafel sandwich at a storefront Lebanese restaurant at Halsted and Wrightwood and ate it at the red lights the rest of the way up Halsted. The decimation of Lebanon was showing up in Chicago as a series of restaurants and little shops, just as the destruction of Vietnam had been visible here a decade earlier. If you never read the news but ate out a lot you should be able to tell who was getting beaten up around the world.

  From North Avenue to Fullerton, Halsted is part of the recently renovated North Side, where young professionals pay two hundred fifty thousand or more for chic brick townhouses. Four blocks farther north, at Diversey, the rich have not yet stuck out rehabilitation tentacles. Most of the buildings, like mine, are comfortably run-down. One advantage is the cheap rents; the other is space to park on the street.

  I stopped the Omega in front of my building and went inside to change back into the navy walking suit for my meeting with Hatfield. By then J had delayed calling Albert long enough. I took a cup of coffee into the living room and sat in the overstuffed armchair while I phoned. I studied my toes through my nylons. Maybe I’d paint the nails red. I can’t stand nail polish on my fingers, but it might be sexy on my toes.

  A woman answered Albert’s work number. His secret lover, I thought: Rosa assumes she’s his secretary, but he secretly buys her perfume and zabiglione. I asked for Albert; she said in a nasal, uneducated voice that “Mr. Vignelli” was in conference and would I leave a message.

  “This is V. I. Warshawski,” I said. “He wants to talk to me. Tell him this is the only time I’ll be available today.”

  She put me on hold. I drank coffee and started an article in Fortune on chicanery at CitiCorp. I was delighted. I’ve never forgiven them for taking two years to answer a billing complaint. I was just getting into illegal currency manipulation when Albert came on the line, sounding more petulant than usual.

  “Where have you been?”

  I raised my eyebrows at the mouthpiece. “At an all-night sex and dope orgy. The sex was terrible but the coke was really great. Want to come next time?”

  “I might have known you’d just laugh instead of taking Mama’s problems seriously.”

  “I’m not laughing, Albert. If you read the paper, you know how hard it is to get good coke these days. But tell me, has Rosa ’s problem taken a turn for the worse? Just to show you I mean well, I won’t even charge you for my time waiting on hold.”

  I could visualize his fat round face puckered up in a full-scale pout as he breathed heavily into my ear. At last he said angrily, “You went to St. Albert ’s Priory yesterday, didn’t you?”

  I assented.

  “What did you find out?”

  “That this is going to be incredibly tough to sort out. Our best hope is that the securities had already been faked before the priory got them. I’m meeting with the FBI this afternoon and I’m going to see if they’re looking into that.”

  “Well, Mama has changed her mind. She doesn’t want you to investigate this after all.”

  I sat frozen for a few seconds while anger came to a focus inside my head. “What the hell do you mean, Albert? I’m not a vacuum cleaner that you switch on and off at will. You don’t start me on an investigation, then call up two days later to say you’ve changed your mind.”

  I could hear paper rustling in the background, then Albert said smugly, “Your contract doesn’t say that. It just says ‘Termination of the case may be requested by either party, whether the requested results
are obtained or not., Regardless of the state of the investigation, and regardless of whether either party disagrees with the results, the fee and expenses incurred to the time of termination shall be paid.’ If you send me a bill, Victoria, I’ll pay promptly.”

  I could smell my brain burning. “Albert. When Rosa called me on Sunday she made it sound as though her suicide would be on my head if I didn’t come out and help her. What’s happened since then? She find a detective she likes better? Or did Carroll call and promise her her job back if she’d get me out of the investigation?”

  He said aloofly, “She told me last night she felt she was acting in a very unchristian way by getting so worried about this. She knows her name will be cleared; if it’s not, she’ll bear it like a Christian.”

  “How noble,” I said sarcastically. “ Rosa as a bitter martyr is a pose I know well. But the woman of sorrows is a new departure.”

  “Really, Victoria. You’re acting like an ambulance chaser. Just send me a bill.”

  At least I had the dubious satisfaction of hanging up first. I sat fuming, cursing Rosa in Italian, then in English. Just like her to jack me around! Get me out to Melrose Park by screaming about Gabriella and my duty to my dead mother, if not to my live aunt, send me off on a wild-goose chase, then call the whole thing off. I was strongly tempted to phone her and tell her once and for all exactly what I thought of her, omitting no detail, however slight. I even looked her number up in my address book and started dialing before I realized the futility of such an act. Rosa was seventy-five. She was not going to change. If I couldn’t accept that, then I was doomed to be a victim of her manipulation forever.

  I sat for a while with Fortune open in my lap, staring across the room at the gray day outside. Last night’s strong wind had blown clouds in front of it across the lake. What was Rosa ’s real reason for wanting the investigation to stop? She was cold, angry, vindictive-a dozen disagreeable adjectives. But not a schemer. She wouldn’t call a hated niece after a ten-year hiatus just to run me through hoops.

  I looked up St. Albert ’s Priory in the phone book and called Carroll. The call went through a switchboard. I could see the ascetic young man at the reception desk reluctantly putting down his Charles Williams to answer the phone on the sixth ring, picking up the book again before switching the call through. I waited several minutes for the prior. At last Carroll’s educated, gentle voice came on the line.

  “This is V. I. Warshawski, Father Carroll.”

  He apologized for keeping me waiting; he’d been going over the household accounts with the head cook and the receptionist had paged the kitchen last.

  “No problem,” I said. “I wondered if you’d spoken with my aunt since I saw you yesterday.”

  “With Mrs. Vignelli? No. Why?”

  “She’s decided suddenly that she doesn’t want any investigation into the counterfeit securities, at least not on her behalf. She seems to think that worrying about them is very unchristian. I wondered if someone at the priory had been counseling her.”

  “Unchristian? What a curious idea. I don’t know; I suppose it would be if she got absorbed by this problem to the exclusion of other more fundamental matters. But it’s very human to worry about a fraud that might harm your reputation. And if you think of being Christian as a way to be more fully human, it would be a mistake to make someone feel guilty for having natural human feelings.”

  I blinked a few times. “So you didn’t tell my aunt to drop the investigation?”

  He gave a soft laugh. “You didn’t want me to build a watch; you just wanted the time. No, I haven’t talked to your aunt. But it sounds as though I should.”

  “And did anyone else at the priory? Talk to her, I mean.”

  Not as far as he knew, but he’d ask around and get back to me. He wanted to know if I had learned anything useful yet. I told him I’d be talking to Hatfield that afternoon, and we hung up with mutual promises to stay in touch.

  I puttered around the apartment, hanging up clothes and putting a week’s accumulation of newspapers into a stack on the back porch where my landlord’s grandson would collect them for recycling. I made myself a salad with cubes of cheddar cheese in it and ate it while flicking aimlessly through yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. At twelve-thirty I went down for the mail.

  When you thought about it seriously, Rosa was an old lady. She probably had imagined she could make her problem disappear by scowling at it, the way she’d made all her problems, including her husband, Carl, disappear. She thought if she called me and ordered me to take care of it, it would go away. When the reality came a little closer after she’d talked with me, she decided it just wasn’t worth the energy it would take to fight it. My problem was that I was so wound up in all the old enmities that I suspected everything she did was motivated by hatred and a need for revenge.

  Ferrant called at one, partly for some light chat, and partly because of questions about Ajax ’s stock. “One of my responsibilities seems to be our investment division. So I got a call today from a chap named Barrett in New York. He called himself the Ajax specialist at the New York Stock Exchange. I know reinsurance, not the U.S. stock market, or even the

  London stock market, so I had some trouble keeping up with him. But you remember I told you last night our stock seemed really active? Barrett called to tell me that. Called to let me know he was getting a lot of orders from a small group of Chicago brokers who had never traded in Ajax before. Nothing wrong with them, you understand, but he thought I should know about it.”

  “And?”

  “Now I know about it. But I’m not sure what, if anything, I should do. So I’d like to meet that friend you mentioned-the one who’s the broker.”

  Agnes Paciorek and I had met at the University of Chicago when I was in law school and she was a math whiz turned

  MBA. We actually met at sessions of University Women

  United. She was a maverick in the gray-tailored world of

  MBAs and we’d remained good friends.

  I gave Roger her number. After hanging up I looked up Ajax in The Wall Street Journal. Their range for the year went from 28¼ to 55½ and they were currently trading at their high. Aetna and Cigna, the two largest stock-insurance carriers, had similar bottom prices, but their highs were about ten points below Ajax. Yesterday they’d each had a volume of about three hundred thousand, compared to Ajax ’s which was almost a million. Interesting.

  I thought about calling Agnes myself, but it was getting close to time for me to leave to meet Hatfield. I wrapped a mohair scarf around my neck, pulled on some driving gloves, and went back out into the wind. Two o’clock is a good time to drive into the Loop. The traffic is light. I made it to the Federal Building on Dearborn and Adams in good time, left the Omega in a self-park garage across the street and walked in under the orange legs of the three-story Calder designed for Chicago ’s Federal Building. We pride ourselves in Chicago on our outdoor sculptures by famous artists. My favorite is the bronze wind chimes in front of the Standard Oil Building, but I have a secret fondness for Chagall’s mosaics in front of the First National Bank. My artist friends tell me they are banal.

  It was exactly two-thirty when I reached the FBI offices on the eighteenth floor. The receptionist phoned my name in to Hatfield, but he had to keep me waiting ten minutes just to impress me with how heavily Chicago ’s crime rested on his shoulders. I busied myself with a report for a client whose brother-in-law had been pilfering supplies, apparently out of bitterness from some longstanding family feud. When Hatfield finally stuck his head around the corner from the hall, I affected not to hear him until the second time he called my name. I looked up then and smiled and said I would be just a minute and carefully finished writing a sentence.

  “Hello, Derek,” I said. “How’s crime?”

  For some reason this jolly greeting always makes him grimace, which is probably why I always use it. His face has the bland handsomeness required by the FBI. He’s around six feet
tall with a square build. I could see him doing a hundred sit-ups and push-ups every morning with methodical uncomplaining discipline, always turning down the second martini, picking up only college girls to make sure someone with a modicum of brains would breathe in his ear how smart and how brave he was. He was dressed today in a gray-plaid suit-muted gray on slightly paler gray with the discreetest of blue stripes woven in-a white shirt whose starch could probably hold up my brassiere for a week, and a blue tie.

  “I don’t have a lot of time, Warshawski.” He shot back a starched cuff and looked at his watch. Probably a Rolex.

  “I’m flattered, then, that you wanted to make some of it available to me.” I followed him down the hail to an office in the southwestern corner. Hatfield was head of white-collar crime for the Chicago Region, obviously a substantial position judging by the furniture-all wood veneer-and the location.

  “That’s a nice view of the metropolitan lockup,” I said, looking out at the triangular building. “It must be a great inspiration for you.”

  “We don’t send anyone there.”

  “Not even for overnight holding? What about Joey Lombardo and Allen Dorfmann? I thought that’s where they were staying while they were on trial.”

  “Could you cut it out? I don’t know anything about Dorfmann or Lombardo. I want to talk to you about the securities at St. Albert ’s.”

  “Great.” I sat down in an uncomfortable chair covered in tan Naugahyde and put a look of bright interest on my face.

  “One of the things that occurred to me yesterday was that the certificates might have been forged before they were passed on to St. Albert ’s. What do you know about the donor and his executors? Also, it is possible some ex-Dominican with a grudge could have been behind it. Do you have a trail on people who left the order in the last ten years?”

  “I’m not interested in discussing the case with you, Warshawski. We’re very well able to think of leads and follow them up. We have an excellent record here in the bureau. This forgery is a federal offense and I must request you to back out of it.”