Before Robbie hung up I asked, as casually as I could, how he’d gotten my unlisted home number: it wasn’t on the business card I left him last week.
“It was in BB’s briefcase,” Robbie muttered. “Don’t tell me I’m a criminal to go snooping in his case, it’s the only way I know when he’s planning something awful, like that camp for fat kids he sent me to last summer. I checked it out, and he had this whole file on you, your home number and everything.”
My blood ran cold. I knew Baladine had done research on me—he’d made that clear enough on Friday—but it seemed worse, somehow, his carrying the information around with him.
“Doesn’t he keep his case locked?”
“Oh, that. Anyone with half a brain knows all you have to do is plug in his ship’s ID, the biggest number in his life.”
I laughed and told him he was plenty smart enough to keep up with his dad if he could remember not to let BB get under his skin. In case I ever needed to burgle Baladine’s briefcase myself, I got Robbie to give me his father’s ship number. On that note he seemed to feel calm enough to hang up.
I finally went to sleep, but in my dreams Baladine was lugging Nicola Aguinaldo’s body through Frenada’s factory, while Lacey Dowell leaned heavy breasts forward, clutching her crucifix and whispering, “Her hands are dirty. Don’t tell her anything, or the vampire will get you.”
In the morning I had a call from the operations manager at Continental United, asking me to come in to discuss my report. He thanked me for writing so clearly that everyone could understand it: too many firms cloak the obvious in meaningless jargon, he said. Maybe it was my ability to write a clear English sentence that kept Continental coming to me, rather than my superior analytic skills.
They didn’t want to fire the dispatcher without concrete evidence, the operations manager added, or without knowing whether the plant manager was in on the scam.
“If you want to spend the money you’ll have to have someone on the spot doing surveillance,” I said. “It’ll take two people. One to handle the truck, one to operate a camera. And it has to be people who aren’t at the plant, because you don’t know how many employees on the ground are involved, or at least aware.”
As I’d feared, they nominated me as the one to handle the camera. And they figured their fleet manager in Nebraska could pose as a truck driver, as a walk–on for someone out sick. They were losing so much money on that route, not just from replacing tires but from lost delivery time, that they wanted me to “do what it takes, Vic; we know you’re not going to pad a bill for the heck of it.”
I was sort of flattered, although, remembering Alex–Sandy’s scorn for my low fees, I wondered if it was more a description of a low–rent outfit than a compliment. My man made a call to Nebraska; the fleet manager would meet me in Atlanta tomorrow night. A nice bonus for me if we wrapped it up quickly.
From Continental United’s offices I went to the Unblinking Eye. They carry surveillance matériel as well as running a more prosaic film and camera business. I talked to the surveillance specialist about the kind of equipment I ought to use. They had some marvelous gadgets—a still camera that fit in a button, one that was disguised in a wristwatch, even one in the kid’s teddy bear if you wanted to watch the nanny. Too bad Eleanor Baladine hadn’t trained one on Nicola Aguinaldo. Or maybe she had—the Baladines probably had every up–to–the–moment security device you might want.
I settled on a video camera that you wore like a pair of glasses, so that it followed the road as you drove. You needed two people to operate it, since it required a separate battery pack, but that was okay: the Continental fleet manager would wear the glasses while I operated the equipment. I saw no need to plunk down four grand of Continental’s money to own the camera, but took it on a week’s rental.
The Unblinking Eye is on the west edge of the Loop. It didn’t seem that far out of the way to drive the extra fourteen blocks to the morgue to see if Nicola Aguinaldo’s body had turned up. Since Vishnikov starts work at seven I wasn’t sure he’d still be there this late in the afternoon, but he was actually walking to his car when I pulled into the lot. I ran over to intercept him.
When he saw me he stopped. “The girl who died at Beth Israel. Is that why you’re here?”
Her body hadn’t turned up; he had lost track of the inquiry in the press of other problems, but he’d get back to it tomorrow. “As I recall, the release form wasn’t signed. It’s the trouble with these job sinkholes the county runs. Most of our staff is good, but we always have some who are there because their daddies hustle votes or move bodies for the mob. I’ve turned her disappearance over to the sheriff for an investigation, but a dead convict who was illegal to begin with doesn’t rank very high—family isn’t in a position to make a stink, and anyway, if they’ve been able to conduct a funeral they’re not going to want to.”
I don’t think this family has held a funeral. I haven’t seen them myself. In fact, I don’t know where they are, but a guy named Morrell has been interviewing immigrants in Aguinaldo’s old neighborhood. He says you know him, by the way.”
“Morrell? He’s a great guy. I know him from my work on torture victims in the Americas. He pulled me out of one of the worst traps I ever walked into, in Guatemala. Nothing he doesn’t know about the Americas and torture. I didn’t realize he was in town. Tell him to call me. I have to run.” He climbed into his car.
I leaned in before he could shut the door. “But, Bryant—Morrell talked to Aguinaldo’s mother. She didn’t even know her daughter was dead, so she definitely doesn’t have the body.”
He stared at me in bewilderment. “Then who does have it?”
“I was hoping you could help on that one. If the form wasn’t signed, is there a chance the body is still in the morgue? Maybe the tag got taken off or changed. The other possibility is that a Chicago police officer named Lemour got the body. Do you think there’s any way to find out?”
He turned the ignition key. “Why would—never mind. I suppose it could have happened. I’ll ask some more questions tomorrow.” He pulled the door shut and shot past me out of the lot.
I walked back slowly to the Rustmobile. I wished Vishnikov hadn’t turned the investigation over to the sheriff’s office. If anyone was covering up for the disposal of Nicola’s body, the sheriff’s office was probably knee–deep in how it was done. But I had enough going on without trying to run an inquiry at the morgue.
I went home to take the dogs for a swim and to let my neighbor know I’d be in Georgia for a few days. I also called my answering service, telling them to hand any problems over to Mary Louise until Monday.
I drove up to O’Hare with Mary Louise and the boys to help put Emily on the plane to France. She was scared and excited but trying to cover it with a veneer of teen cool. Her father had given her a camcorder, which she used with a studied offhandedness. At the last minute, when he saw she was really leaving, four–year–old Nate began to bawl. As we comforted him and his sniffling brother, I thought again of poor Robbie, unable to express his grief over his dead nanny without his father tormenting him.
We took the boys out for an evening show of Captain Doberman—another Global moneymaker. Over ice cream afterward, Mary Louise and I discussed odds and ends.
“Emily wanted me to promise I wouldn’t let you get Lacey in trouble while she was away.” Mary Louise grinned. “I think it was more like a subtle hint that she wanted every word of any conversation you and Lacey have.”
“I haven’t seen Lacey, only her old childhood friend Frenada. Over at his Special–T—” I broke off. “Mary Louise, you left me a note about the report from Cheviot on that shirtdress they found on Nicola’s body. You wrote down that the label said it was a specialty shirt. Could it have been Special–T?”
I spelled out the difference. Mary Louise looked chagrined and said she would check with the engineer at Cheviot Labs in the morning. She asked if I wanted her to go over to Frenada’s shop and talk to
him while I was away, but we decided that could wait until I got back from Georgia.
It was past ten when I got home, but I wanted to pack my gun before going to bed. It’s a time–consuming business, and in the morning I’d be too rushed to get it done to FAA specs. I laid packing and cleaning materials on the dining room table and took the gun apart, placing two empty magazines in the carton—the cartridges have to be packed separately. I was cleaning the slide when the phone rang.
It was Rachel from my answering service. “I’m sorry to call so late, Vic, but a man named Lucian Frenada is trying to get in touch with you. He says it’s really urgent and he doesn’t care if it’s midnight, if you don’t call him he’s going to get the police to find you and bring you to him.”
I blinked—that was a curious coincidence. When the phone at the factory didn’t answer, I reached him at home.
He was so furious he could hardly get out a coherent sentence. “Did you plant this story? Are you behind this effort to defame me?”
“Do you know that I have no clue what you’re talking about? But I have a question for—”
“Don’t play the innocent with me. You come to my plant with insinuations, and twenty–four hours after I refuse to hire you, this—this slander appears.”
“Which slander? Innocent or not, I don’t know what it is.”
“In the paper, tomorrow’s paper, you thought I wouldn’t see it? Or not so early?”
“Okay, if we have to do it by twenty questions, let me guess. There’s a story about you in tomorrow morning’s paper, is that right? About you and Lacey? You and that Virgin T–shirt? Do you want to tell me, or do you want to hold while I go out and find a newsstand with the early edition in it? I can be back in half an hour, probably.”
I don’t know whether he believed me or not, but he didn’t want to wait for me to call him back. He read me from Regine Mauger’s column in the early edition of the Herald–Star: “A little bird at the State’s Attorney says Lucian Frenada, who’s been hanging around Lacey Dowell all week like a sick pit bull, may be using his T–shirt factory to smuggle cocaine into Chicago from Mexico.”
“Is that it?” I asked.
“Is that it?” he mimicked bitterly. “It is more than enough. She calls me a sick pit bull, which is a racist slur anyway, and then accuses me of being a drug dealer, and you think I shouldn’t be angry? My biggest order of my life, the New Jersey Suburban Soccer League, they can cancel if they think I’m a criminal.”
I tried to stay patient. “I mean, is that the only story on you in the paper? Regine Mauger can print anything as a rumor. A little bird told her. I don’t know if anyone at Global—I mean the Herald–Star—fact–checks her. But if they ran a news story, that means they have actual evidence.”
“No one could have evidence of this, because it isn’t true. Unless they made it up.” He was still angry, but calmer. “And I am thinking you could have been a little bird yourself, out of revenge.”
“Then you aren’t thinking at all,” I snapped. “If I want to stay in business the last thing I’ll do is run smear campaigns on people who spurn my services. That word gets around fast. The next thing I’d know, all my clients would have left me for Carnifice.”
“So if you didn’t plant that story, who did, and why?”
I let out a compressed breath. “You want to hire me to find out, Mr. Frenada, I’ll be glad to talk it over. Otherwise, since I’m leaving town in the morning, I need to get to bed.”
“That would be funny, wouldn’t it—I call to chew you out and end up hiring you. The trouble is, I am so vulnerable, I and my small company.” His voice trailed away.
I knew that feeling. “Do you feel like telling me the odd thing you mentioned last week, or why you had a Lacey Dowell shirt in your plant?”
“I—they came—I made a couple on spec.” He floundered for words. “It didn’t get me anywhere. Global uses offshore labor, it’s much cheaper than anything I can produce.”
“Why didn’t you want to tell me last night?”
He hesitated. “For personal reasons.”
“To do with Lacey?” When he didn’t say anything I added, “You didn’t make the shirtdress Nicola Aguinaldo was wearing when she died, by any chance?”
He became totally quiet, so much so I could hear the tree toads croaking from the back of the house. Frenada gave me a hurried good night and hung up.
So he did know something about Nicola Aguinaldo’s death. That was a sad and startling thought, but it wasn’t as urgent for me at the moment as my own fury with Murray. Was that what he told Alex Fisher–Fishbein I would do—plant evidence of a cocaine ring at Special–T Uniforms? And then, when I didn’t jump at their offer, he and Alex decided to move matters on by putting a rumor in the paper?
I called Murray. He wasn’t at home—or at least he wasn’t answering, and he wasn’t at the office. I tried his cell phone.
“Vic! How in hell did you get this number? I know damned well I never gave it to you.”
“I’m a detective, Ryerson. Getting a cell phone number is child’s play. It’s the grown–up stuff that has me baffled. What was the point of that charade you and Alex Fishbein acted out in my office last week?”
“It was not a charade. It was a serious offer to give you—”
“Some crumbs from Global’s richly spread table. But when I didn’t snatch the bait you took an easier tack and planted a story in that prize bitch Regine Mauger’s ear. The last time she checked a source was probably 1943, but it doesn’t matter if a column devoted to innuendo gets the facts wrong.”
“How do you know they’re wrong? How do you know he isn’t smuggling coke in through his shirt factory?”
“So you did plant the story with her!” I was so furious I was spitting into the receiver.
“No, I didn’t,” he shouted. “But I read my own damned paper to see what they’re printing. And yes, I usually get the early edition as soon as it’s out. If you’ve made yourself the guy’s champion you are going to have egg all over your smug face. And I for one will not be sorry to help plaster it there. My story will run on Friday, and it will sizzle.”
“What are you talking about?” I demanded. “Did going on TV make you feel checking facts was for little people? I looked into Frenada’s finances when you and Sandy Bitchbein came around last week. He’s clean as a whistle.”
“Clean as a whistle? One that’s been in the sewer for a week. I did a priority check on Frenada when I learned Regine was running this little tidbit. Guy’s got money parked all over the globe.”
“Bullshit,” I screamed. “I looked him up on LifeStory on Sunday and he doesn’t have a dime except the pittance that little T–shirt factory makes for him.”
“No.” Murray was suddenly quiet. “You didn’t. You couldn’t have. I just ran a check on him, a priority–one, two thousand bucks to turn it around in ten hours, and it’s not true. He’s got three accounts in Mexico that are worth a million five U.S. dollars each.”
“Murray. I ran the check. I did at the deepest level of numbers. That’s why I turned down Bitchbein’s offer.”
“Her name is Fisher. Why you have a knot in your ass about her—”
“Never mind that. Don’t let her wave so many Golden Globes in front of you that you’re too blinded to see the facts, Murray. And by the way, if you’re planning on leading your story with, “There was egg all over smug V. I. Warshawski’s face,’ don’t, because there won’t be. I’m leaving town in the morning, but as soon as I get back I’ll fax you a copy of that LifeStory report. If I were you, I’d hold off running your sizzle until you’ve seen it.”
I hung up smartly and went back to packing my gun. I’d been feeling irritable about going to rural Georgia, but taking on some punks putting nails under truck tires was beginning to sound downright wholesome compared to what I was looking at here in Chicago.
I was too tired, and too agitated by Murray to figure out what was going on with
all these people. If Frenada manufactured the dress Nicola was wearing when she died, how had she gotten it? Had he given it to someone at Carnifice? Given it to Nicola herself? Or to Alex Fisher?
And then there was Global. They wanted me to expose Frenada, then miraculously came up with a rumor about him and cocaine when I wouldn’t do the job. I wished I’d known that when I saw Trant and Poilevy last night. It could have made the conversation livelier, although I suppose Alex would have kept them from saying much.
My brain swirled uselessly. It was way too much for me to figure out with the minute information I had. I snapped the gun case shut and filled out the forms I needed for the airline. Put jeans and some sweatshirts in an overnight bag with the gun and a small kit of basic toiletries, then packed the surveillance camera, some blank cassettes, and a charger for the unit together with my maps in a briefcase. That should get me through a few nights away. A book for the flight. I was working my way through a history of Jews in Italy, trying to understand something of my mother’s past. Maybe I’d get as far as Napoleon by the time I came home.
21 We Serve and Protect
I spent the next several nights on the back roads of Georgia, sitting in the passenger seat of a fully loaded thirty–ton truck. The fleet manager, who looked authentic with a beer gut hanging over oil–stained jeans, had ambled in as a replacement for a sick driver; I was his girlfriend who hopped on board once the truck left the yard, but with plenty of people to see it happen. To make a long story short, it gave us the right veneer of venality, and we were able to rope in the dispatcher without much trouble. He fingered three buddies and the plant manager. And it was all on film, which made it tidy. Continental United promised an appropriate expression of gratitude—not the kind of bonus I might have snared from Alex Fisher, but enough to pay the Trans Am repairs and cover my mortgage for a couple of months.
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