Killing Orders

by Sara Paretsky

  He pulled a stack of prospectuses from a desk drawer and shuffled through them with the speed of a professional card dealer. I left with two hot prospects tucked into my bag and a promise to call again soon. On my way to number seven, I called my answering service and told them to take messages if anyone phoned asking for Carla Baines.

  At four-thirty, I’d finished with Barrett’s list. Except for Preston Tilford, everyone had recommended buying Ajax. He was also the only one who discounted the takeover rumors. That didn’t prove anything one way or another about him. It might mean only that he was a shrewder broker than the rest-after all, only one man in one brokerage firm had recommended against buying Baldwin when its stock was soaring, and he was the only one out of the entire universe of security analysts who had been correct. Still, Tilford’s recommendation against Ajax was the sole unusual incident of the day. So that was where I had to start.

  Back home I changed out of my business clothes into jeans and a sweater. Pulled on my low-heeled boots. Before charging into action, I called the University of Chicago and undertook the laborious process of tracking down Phil Paciorek. Someone finally referred me to a lab where he was working late.

  “Phil, it’s V.I. There was someone at your house yesterday whose name I’d like to know. Trouble is, I don’t know what he looks like, only how his voice sounds.” I described the voice as best I could.

  “That could be a lot of different people,” he said dubiously.

  “No accent at all,” I repeated. “Probably a tenor. You know, most people have some kind of regional accent. He doesn’t. No midwestern nasal, no drawl, no extra Boston r’s.”

  “Sorry, V.I. Doesn’t ring a bell. If something occurs to me, I’ll call you, but that’s too vague.”

  I gave him my phone number and hung up. Gloves, pea jacket, picklocks and I was set. Cramming a peanut butter sandwich into my coat pocket, I clattered down the stairs into the cold January night. Back at the Stock Exchange, a security guard in the hall asked me to sign in. He didn’t want any identification so I put down the first name that came to me:

  Derek Hatfield. I rode to the fifteenth floor, got off, checked the stairwell doors to see that they weren’t the kind that lock behind you, and settled down there to wait.

  At nine o’clock a security guard came up the stairs from the floor below. I slid back into the hallway and found a ladies’ room before he got to the floor. At eleven, the floor lights went out. The cleaning women, calling to each other in Spanish, were packing up for the night.

  After they left, I waited another half hour in case anyone had forgotten anything. Finally leaving the stairwell, I walked down the hall to the offices of Tilford & Sutton, my boots clopping softly on the marble floor. I’d brought a flashlight, but fire-exit lights gave enough illumination.

  At the outer door I shone my flashlight around the edges to make sure there was no alarm. Offices in a building with internal security guards usually don’t have separate alarms, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Pulling my detective’s vade mecum from my pocket, I tried a series of picklocks until I found one that worked.

  No windows opened onto the outer office. It was completely dark, except for the green cursors flashing urgent messages on blank computer screens. I shivered involuntarily and ran a hand across the burn spot on the back of my neck.

  Using my light as little as possible, I picked my way past desks and mounds of papers to Preston Tilford’s office. I wasn’t sure how often the security guards visited each floor and didn’t want to risk showing a light. Tilford’s door was locked, too, and took a few minutes of fumbling in the dark. I’d learned to pick locks from one of my more endearing clients in the public defender’s office, but had never achieved the quickness of a true professional.

  Tilford’s door was solid wood, so I didn’t have to worry about light shining through a panel as I did with the outer door. Closing it softly, I flipped a switch and took my bearings. One desk, two filing cabinets. Try everything first to see what’s locked and look in the locked drawers.

  I worked as quickly as I could, keeping my gloves on, not really sure what I was trying to find. The locked file cabinet contained files for Tilford’s private customers. I picked a couple at random for close scrutiny. As far as I could tell, they were all in order. Not knowing what should be in a customer statement made it hard to know what to look for-high debit balances, maybe. But Tilford’s customers seemed to keep on top of their accounts. I handled the pages carefully, leaving them in their original order, and refiled them neatly. I looked at the names one by one to see if any of his customers sounded familiar. Other than a handful of well-known Chicago business names I didn’t see any I knew personally until I came to the P’s. Catherine Paciorek, Agnes’s mother, was one of Preston’s clients.

  My heart beating a little faster, I pulled out her file. It, too, was in order. Only a small amount of the fabled Savage fortune amassed by Agnes’s grandfather was handled at Tilford &

  Sutton. I noticed that Mrs… Paciorek had purchased two thousand shares of Ajax on December 2. That made me raise my eyebrows a little. Hers was a blue-chip portfolio with few transactions. In fact, Ajax was the only company she’d traded in 1983. Worth pursuing further?

  I could find no other clients trading in Ajax stock. Yet Tilford had registered many more than Catherine Paciorek’s two thousand shares. I frowned and turned to the desk.

  This was carefully built, of dark mahogany, and the lock in the middle drawer was tough. I ended up scratching the surface as I fumbled with the picklocks. I stared at it in dismay, but it was too late now to worry.

  Tilford kept an unusual collection in his private space:

  Besides a half-empty bottle of Chivas, which wasn’t too surprising, he had a fine collection of hard-core porn. It was the kind of stuff that makes you feel we should work toward Shaw’s idea of a disembodied mind. I grimaced, flipping through the whole stack to make sure nothing more interesting was interleafed.

  After that, I figured Tilford owed me a drink and helped myself to some of the Chivas. In the bottom drawer I uncovered file folders of more clients, perhaps his ultrapersonal, super-secret accounts. There were nine or ten of these, including an organization called Corpus Christi. I dimly remembered reading something about it recently in The Wall Street Journal. It was a Roman Catholic lay group, made up primarily of wealthy people. The current pope liked it because it was conservative on such important points as abortion and the importance of clerical authority, and it supported right-wing governments with close Church ties. The pope liked the group so much, according to the Journal, that he’d appointed some Spanish bishop as its leader and had him-the Spaniard-reporting directly to him-the pope. This miffed the archbishop of Madrid because these lay groups were supposed to report to their local bishops. Only Corpus Christi had a lot of money and the pope’s Polish missions took a lot of money, and no one was saying anything directly, but the Journal did some discreet reading between the ledger lines.

  I flipped through the file, looking at transactions for the Corpus Christi account. It had started in a small way the previous March. Then it began an active trading program, which ran to several million dollars by late December. But no record existed of what it was trading in. I wanted it to be Ajax. Tilford & Sutton was supposed to have taken largish positions in Ajax, according to Barrett. Yet the two thousand shares Mrs. Paciorek bought in December were the only trace of Ajax activity I’d seen in the office. Where were copies of Corpus Christi’s statement showing what it was actually buying and selling? And why wasn’t it in the file, as was the case with the other customers? Tilford’s office didn’t include a safe. Using my flashlight as little as possible, I surveyed the other offices. A large modern safe stood in a supply room, its door to be opened by someone who knew which eighteen numbers to punch on the electronic lock. Not me. If Corpus Christi’s records were in there, they were in there for good.

  The bells at the nearby Methodist Temple chi
med the hour: two o’clock. I took the Corpus Christi and Mrs. Paciorek files out to the main room and hunted around for a photocopier. A large Xerox machine stood in the corner. It took a while to warm up. Using my flashlight surreptitiously, I copied the contents of the two files. To separate the pages I had to take off my gloves. I stuffed them in my back pocket.

  I had just finished when the night watchman came by and looked in through the glass panel. Like a total imbecile, I had left Tilford’s office door ajar. As the watchman fumbled with his keys, I hit the off button and looked around desperately for a hiding place. The machine had a paper cupboard built in underneath. My five-feet-eight frame fit badly, but I squeezed in and pulled the door as nearly shut as I could.

  The watchman turned on the overhead lights. Through a crack in the door I watched him go into Tilford’s office. He spent long enough in there to decide the place had been burglarized. His voice crackled dimly as he used his walkietalkie to call for reinforcements. He made a circuit of the outer room, shining his flashlight in corners and closets. Apparently he thought the Xerox machine held nothing but its own innards:

  He walked past it, stopped directly in front of me, then returned to the inner office.

  Hoping he would stay there until help arrived, I gently shoved the door open. Silently easing my cramped body onto the floor, I crawled on hands and knees to the near wall where a window overlooked a fire escape. I slid the window open as quietly as possible and climbed out into the January night.

  The fire escape was covered with ice. I almost ended my career forever as I skidded across its narrow iron platform, saving myself with a grab at the burning-cold railing. I’d been holding both the originals and photocopies of Tilford’s documents, as well as my flashlight. These flew across the ice as I seized the guardrail. Cursing to myself, I crawled precariously across the platform retrieving documents, stuffing them into my jeans waistband with numbed fingers. I pulled the gloves from my back pocket and put them on while skidding my way down as quickly as possible to the floor below.

  The window was locked. I hesitated only seconds, then kicked it in. Brushing glass fragments away with my sweatshirted arm, I soon had a hole big enough to climb through.

  I landed on top of a desk covered with files. These scattered in my wake. I kept bumping into desks and cabinets as I tried running to the far door. How could people get to their desks in the morning with so much clutter blocking their paths? I cracked the outer door, heard nothing, and made my way down the hall. I was about to open the stairwell door when I heard feet pounding on the other side.

  Turning back down the hail, I tried every door. Miraculously one opened under my hand. I stepped inside onto something squishy and was hit in the nose by someone with a stick. Fighting back, I found myself wrestling a large mop.

  Outside I could hear the voices of two patrolmen agreeing in low murmurs about which parts of the floor to guard. Trying to move quietly, I edged my way to the wall of the supply closet and ran into a coatrack. Clothes were hanging from it: the regulation smocks of the cleaning women. I fumbled in the dark, pulled my jeans off, stuck my documents inside the waistband of my tights, and pulled on the nearest smock. It came barely to my knees, and was miles too large in the shoulders, but it covered me.

  Hoping I was not covered with paper, glass shards, or blood, and praying that these patrolmen had not dandled me on their knees thirty years ago, I swung open the closet door.

  The policemen were about twenty feet from me, their backs turned. “You!” I screamed, donning Gabriella’s thick accent. They swirled around. “What goes on here, eh? I am calling manager!” I started off in righteous indignation to the elevator.

  They were on me in an instant. “Who are you?”

  “Me? I am Gabriella Sforzina. I work here. I belong. But you? What you doing here, anyway?” I started shouting in Italian, trusting none of them knew the words to “Madamina” from Don Giovanni.

  They looked at each other uncertainly. “Take it easy, lady. Take it easy.” The speaker was in his late forties, not far from pension time, not wanting any trouble. “Someone broke into one of the offices upstairs. We think he left by the fire escape. You haven’t seen anyone on this floor, have you?”

  “What?” I shrieked, adding in Italian, “Why do I pay taxes, eh, that’s what I want to know-for bums like you to let burglars in while I’m working? So I can be raped and murdered?” I obligingly translated into English for them.

  The younger one said, “Uh, look, lady. Why don’t you just go on home.” He scribbled a note on a pad and ripped off the sheet for me. “Just give that to the sergeant at the door downstairs and he’ll let you out.”

  It was only then that I realized my gloves were lying with my jeans on the floor of the supply closet.

  XIV

  Fiery Aunts, Mourning Mothers

  LOTTY WAS NOT amused. “You sound just like the CIA,” she snapped, when I stopped by the clinic to tell her my adventure. “Breaking into people’s offices, stealing their files”

  “I’m not stealing the files,” I said virtuously. “I wrapped them up and mailed them back first thing this morning. What troubles me from a moral standpoint is the jacket and gloves I left there-technically their loss is a business expense. Yet will the IRS turn me in if I itemize? I should call my accountant.”

  “Do that,” she retorted. Her Viennese accent was evident, as always when Lotty was angry. “Now leave. I’m busy and have no wish to talk to you in such a mood.”

  The break-in had made the late editions. Police speculated that the watchman interrupted the thief before he took anything of value, since nothing of value was missing. My prints are on file at the Eleventh Street station, so I hoped none showed up that I couldn’t reasonably account for as part of my business visit to Tilford’s office.

  What would they make of Derek Hatfield’s name on the Stock Exchange’s sign-in register, I wondered. I had to figure out some way of finding out if they questioned Hatfield about

  Whistling through my teeth, I started the Omega and headed out to Melrose Park. Despite Lotty’s ill humor I was pleased with myself. Typical criminal failing-you carry off a coup, then have to brag about it. Sooner or later one of your bragees tells the police.

  Snow was beginning to fall as I turned onto Mannheim Road. Small dry spitballs, Arctic snow, no good for snowmen. I was wearing long underwear under my navy pantsuit and hoped that would be enough protection against a minus 28 wind chill. Some time today I’d have to find an Army-Navy Surplus and get another pea jacket.

  The Priory of Albertus Magnus loomed coldly through the driving pellets. I parked the car out of the wind as far as possible and fought my way to the priory entrance. The wind sliced through suit and underwear and left me gasping for air.

  Inside the high-vaulted, stale hallway the sudden silence was palpable. I rubbed my arms and stamped my feet and warmed myself before asking the anemic ascetic at the reception desk to find Father Carroll for me. I hoped I was too early for evening prayers and too late for classes or confessions.

  About five minutes later, as the building’s essential chill began making me shiver, Father Carroll himself came down the hall. He was moving quickly, yet not hurrying, a man in control of his life and so at peace.

  “Miss Warshawski. How nice to see you. Have you come about your aunt? She’s back today, as she probably told you.”

  I blinked a few times. “Back? Back here, you mean? No, she hadn’t told me. I came… I came to see if you could give me any information about a Catholic lay organization called Corpus Christi.”

  “Hmm.” Father Carroll took my arm. “You’re shivering- let’s get to my office and have a cup of tea. You can have a nice chat with your aunt. Father Pelly and Father Jablonski are there, too.”

  I followed him meekly down the hall. Jablonski, Pelly, and Rosa were sitting at a deal table in Pelly’s outer office, drinking tea. Rosa’s steel-colored hair was as stiffly waved as though made, in fact, f
rom cast iron. She wore a plain black dress with a silver cross at the throat. She was listening attentively to Pelly as Carroll and I came in. At the sight of me her face changed. “Victoria! What are you doing here?”

  The hostility was so obvious that Carroll looked astounded. Rosa must have noticed this, but her hatred was too fierce for her to care about externals; she continued to glare at me, her thin bosom heaving. I walked around the table to her and kissed the air by her cheek. “Hello, Rosa. Father Carroll says they’ve brought you back-as the treasurer, I hope? How splendid. I know Albert must be ecstatic, too.”

  She looked at me malevolently. “I know well I cannot make you be quiet, or stop you harassing me. But perhaps in the presence of these holy fathers you will at least not strike me.”

  “I don’t know, Rosa. Depends on what the Holy Spirit prompts you to say to me. Don’t bet on anything, though.”

  I turned to Carroll. “I’m Rosa’s brother’s only surviving granddaughter. When she sees me, it always chokes her up like this… Could I trouble you for that cup of tea?”

  Glad of something to do to cover the tension, Carroll bustled with an electric kettle behind me. When he handed me a cup I asked, “Does this mean you’ve found who was responsible for the forgeries?”

  He shook his head, his pale brown eyes troubled. “No. Father Pelly persuaded me, though, that Mrs. Vignelli really could not have been involved. We know how valuable her work is, and how much it means to her-it seemed unnecessarily cruel to make her sit at home for months or years.”

  Pelly put in, “Actually, we’re not sure they will ever clear the matter up. The FBI seems to have lost interest. Do you know anything about it?” He looked questioningly at me.

  I shrugged. “I get all my news from the daily papers. I haven’t seen anything in there about the FBI dropping the investigation. What has Hatfield said to you?”