Shell Game

by Sara Paretsky

  Their father wasn’t part of their story at all, at least as far as I could see. In fact, Fulton Seale was so far below the radar that he hadn’t left any trace of himself. No death certificate had been issued in any of the fifty states, but he could have died as a John Doe or be alive in a cardboard box under the Bay Bridge.

  I looked at my to-do list. I hadn’t yet called my lawyer, to tell him about Felix’s woes. That could go into a text more economically than a phone call—talking to Freeman Carter, however briefly, would automatically add $120 to my outstanding balance, more if we spoke for over ten minutes. “Let me know if your immigration lawyer will talk to him; if not, can you give me some other names?” I finished.

  Time to tackle Rest EZ. Their national headquarters were less than a mile from where I was eating—the walk would do me good. The wind cut through my coat as I crossed the bridge over the Chicago River. I pulled the collar up to my ears and huddled down into the coat as deep as I could. I still felt miserable.

  Rest EZ’s corporate offices were in the junk-filled streets west of Union Station. A bored lobby guard directed me to the seventh floor, where I was greeted by a locked door with a security camera overhead. A disembodied voice asked me to state my business into the grille to the left of the door.

  “Human Resources,” I said. “I’m a detective, looking for one of your employees who’s gone missing.”

  We dickered back and forth through the grille. Finally the voice reluctantly told me to take the elevator to nine; someone would meet me there.

  On nine, as on seven, no one was in the hallway. I walked the corridor on both sides of the elevator lobby, but saw only locked, unsignposted doors. Whatever the owners of Rest EZ spent that 400 percent interest on, it wasn’t their offices—the gray-green drugget on the hallway floor was worn out in front of the doors. I felt as though I were in one of those sci-fi movies where everyone else in the spaceship had died and I was trying to find my way to the control deck without being eaten by an alien.

  Back by the elevators, I started work on my vocal exercises. Singing made the empty space seem less suffocating, and the sound might rouse activity in whoever was monitoring me. In fact, after only three scales on “i,” a heavyset woman appeared from the corridor on my left. She was wearing a shapeless beige sweater over shiny black trousers. A crucifix on a gold chain was partly hidden by a company ID on a lanyard.

  “Who did you say has gone missing?” she said, with the nasal accent of the South Side.

  “I didn’t, but it’s Reno Seale. She’s disappeared, her family is worried, and I’d like to talk to her co-workers, to find out when they last saw her.”

  “You got some ID on you?”

  I showed her my Illinois bar membership and my detective license.

  “Hmmph. One of those things you can send away for, like a minister’s license.”

  “One of those things you get after a three-year internship with a licensed operative,” I said. “Let’s find a place to sit down where you can tell me about Ms. Seale.”

  “You’re the one who came to talk about her,” the woman said.

  “You’re absolutely right. Do you have a name? Are you the HR manager?”

  She grudgingly admitted to being Audrey Yonkers from Human Resources. She seemed embarrassed to admit she wasn’t a manager or a team leader, but she finally revealed she was the HR receptionist.

  Audrey led me down the dreary, underlit hall. When she’d opened the door with a swipe from her ID, the space on the other side wasn’t much cheerier.

  Audrey’s desk, a gunmetal affair with a computer monitor, a drooping plant, and a bowl of candies, was just inside the door. She motioned me to a hard chair on the other side and plunked herself down in a metal mesh desk chair.

  Three cubicles faced her desk, two containing white women, the third an African-American man around thirty, all working at their computers. They paused to stare at me, a detective on the premises, not an employee with an HR issue they had to circumvent.

  Beyond them was an office, door open, where the manager sat. She was a younger woman, with shoulder-length blond hair and careful makeup. She was on the phone. Like the cubiclers, she took note of my arrival, staring at me and nodding a few times to herself, as if something about me confirmed what she’d expected—a middle-aged private eye, nothing to worry about.

  “Reno Seale,” I repeated. “I’d like the address where she’s working. I’d like to know if she’s been coming to work the last week.”

  Audrey double-checked the spelling and typed quickly. “Yeah, here she is. She started a year ago last summer. Did her training, performed well at the For— at her first assignment, so they moved her in September to a tougher location. She was top performer there. They picked her out to go on a trip to St. Matthieu.” Audrey’s face creased in lines of envy. “She’s missing, you say? That explains why they got her marked ‘probable grounds for termination’—second day you don’t call in is probation, fourth is termination. Maybe she fell in love and flew back to St. Matthieu,” she added with a sneer.

  “Always a possibility,” I agreed politely. “I thought her supervisor thought well of her. Ms. Lute, wasn’t it?”

  Audrey peered at the screen. “Not Lute, but—”

  “Audrey, why are we discussing musicians on the job?” The unit manager had finished her call and came over to join us, smoothing her jacket over her narrow hips.

  “I’m V.I. Warshawski.” I got up. “And you are?”

  “Eliza Trosse. Why are you asking about one of our team members?”

  Team members. We’re all team members now, not employees, as if being on the team of a multinational will make us overlook our low salaries and miserable benefits.

  “She’s disappeared,” I said. “I need to talk to her supervisor. Ms. Yonkers here has been a most helpful team player; we were just getting to the point where she was going to put me in touch with Reno Seale’s most recent boss, whose name isn’t ‘Lute.’ Apparently the company labeled Ms. Seale as ready for termination—is she still part of the team?”

  “Discussing internal employment issues is against company policy. Our clientele entrust us with their private financial records; we can’t let every stranger off the street talk to our staff.”

  “Ms. Trosse, Scout’s honor I will not ask about a single client, not how they got in debt to you nor if any of them thinks they will ever stop being indentured. I’m trying to find out what was troubling Ms. Seale since her return from St. Matthieu. She might have talked to her co-workers or her supervisor.”

  Trosse gave me a cool appraising stare. “If you leave me your phone number, I’ll contact the people in Reno’s office and let you know if she confided in any of them. Audrey, I don’t have all the January reports yet. Have you finished entering them?”

  “I’m almost done, Eliza.” Audrey’s cheeks flooded with color; she closed the screen where she’d been looking at Reno’s employment history and opened multiple spreadsheets.

  “I’ll walk you to the elevator,” Trosse said to me.

  6

  Crank Call?

  My lease mate at the warehouse where I have my office is a significant sculptor. Tessa Reynolds was in Argentina for the winter, working on a large installation to commemorate the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo; she’d turned the heat down on her side before she left, which made the whole building feel cold. I turned on all the lights on my side of the floor and flipped on space heaters to create an illusion of a cheery parlor in a room with fourteen-foot-high ceilings and cinder block walls.

  My mother’s etching of the Uffizi faced an outsize acrylic by the Italian painter Antonella Mason—I’d bought it on my trip to Italy a few years back. With a cup of ginger tea in my cold hands, I sat for a minute, pretending I was in a plaza in Pitigliano under the Umbrian sun.

  I’m not good at fantasy. I put the tea down and brought up Rest EZ’s Chicagoland locations on my big monitor.

  The woman in HR ha
d started to say that Reno worked in the branch on “For—” Rest EZ had seven offices on streets between Fortieth and Forty-Ninth, spread between Wabash and Harlem, along with one at Fourteenth and California.

  I began calling them, asking for Reno Seale. I had a backstory ready if anyone asked, but a surprising number of people will answer questions without demanding a reason for them. At the third outlet, on Forty-Third and Aberdeen, the woman who answered the phone said that Reno had left that location months and months ago.

  “They moved her to the West Side, I think, but that was a while ago. I heard they sent her to some big gala in the Caribbean. Sure helps to be skinny and blond. Is there a problem? Is she in trouble?” She seemed eager to think that a skinny blonde could be in trouble.

  “Did she strike you as someone who might get into difficulties when she worked with you on Aberdeen?” I asked.

  “She always seemed like she had some secret she wasn’t going to tell, like she thought she was better than us, or smarter or something,” my informant grumbled. “And her language—like, she said she moved here from out west someplace, but when she dealt with troublemakers in the office, she sounded like she grew up on West Madison.”

  Reno and her sister probably picked up a spectacular vocabulary under those Oakland viaducts. They’d seen drug deals, they’d been violated themselves; that leaves a lot behind linguistically, as well as in mind and body.

  I probed for examples of lying or stealing. The woman couldn’t come up with a specific complaint.

  “She looked liked butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, those prim little outfits, that sweet face, but she had a temper on her.”

  “She ever hit anyone that you saw?”

  “No, but she could make big guys back down, way she looked at them. I guess that made the home office excited, so they moved her to one of the high-volume locations where there’s sometimes trouble.”

  “Did she ever have trouble with anyone stalking her?”

  “How would I know?” the woman said huffily. “Someone that pretty, you can bet they’re beating guys off with a stick. And she had a stick big enough to keep out of trouble, you ask me.”

  Before hanging up, I asked the woman if she knew anyone in the company with a name like “Lute.” I wasn’t surprised when she said no—Rest EZ employed more than five hundred people in the six counties.

  It was dark outside by the time we finished. My ginger infusion was cold, but I drank it anyway—they say ginger is good for the stomach or the brain or ingrown toenails. The day was catching up with me, but I started calling the West Side branches.

  A woman at the second location giggled. “You mean Donna Lutas? She’s the manager here. Who should I say is calling?”

  She put me on hold; after a wait that went on for close to five minutes, a woman with a deeper voice, one raspy from smoke, announced herself as Donna Lutas.

  I introduced myself as Reno Seale’s aunt, but before I could say anything else, Lutas interrupted. “Do you know where she is? If she doesn’t show tomorrow, I will start termination proceedings.”

  “I thought she was doing a great job,” I said.

  “She was, but policy is policy: four unexplained absences. Unless there’s a legitimate reason, you are done.”

  “She’s disappeared,” I said. “I was hoping someone at work might know where she’s gone, like out of town for training or something.”

  “We haven’t heard word one from her. She’s a top employee and all, but she can’t go wandering off into space like she owns the company.”

  “When did you last see her?” I asked.

  “Monday. End of the workday. Today is day three, Friday will be the fourth day. I can hold off over the weekend, but if she doesn’t show on Monday, that’s it.”

  “Could I talk to you, in person I mean? I’ve heard conflicting reports about Reno. Some people tell me she was such a great asset that she earned a trip to the Caribbean. Others think she traded on her looks. I also heard she’s had something on her mind since getting back from her trip. She trusted you; I’m hoping she let something drop that would give me a hint to go on.”

  Lutas didn’t seem to find the questions odd ones, coming from an aunt. “Traded on her looks? Who did you hear that from? If it was Lily Garton, I’ll have her stapling forms in the Stickney warehouse for the next decade—she carried on like Reno was a bigger threat than an ISIS bomber. Reno had only been with the company not even a year, but she was one of our top performers out here in Austin. Some people were jealous, and, of course, she’s drop-dead gorgeous.”

  “That’s why I’d like to see you in person, Ms. Lutas, to find out more about what had been troubling her this last month.”

  “Not tonight, you can’t. We’re closing in forty minutes and I got reports to generate after that. We open at eight tomorrow, though—you come by around eight-thirty, after we get things in shape for the day. I’ll tell you what I can, but it isn’t much.”

  After hanging up, I called Harmony.

  “What are you doing to find her?” Harmony demanded.

  “I’m talking to the people she worked with. You have any other ideas? Did she go to church or sing or anything out of work hours?”

  “Not really,” Harmony said. “We never went to church. Reno really liked scuba diving, but where would she do it here? . . . I hate to go back to Portland with Reno still missing, but I’m not doing anything and it’s getting lonely without her.”

  “I don’t think there’s much you can do in Chicago,” I said, “but Mr. Contreras and I are still happy to put you up if you’re not ready to go home yet.”

  Harmony brightened. She said she’d think about it and let me know in the morning. I shut down my office and drove home. I took the dogs to a nearby park to chase tennis balls before curling up in front of the television with a bowl of soup.

  At nine, I turned on Global Entertainment’s Nightly News Update. Murray Ryerson, who used to cover crime and corruption for the Herald-Star, had been trundled out to present the story of the dead man I’d seen in Cap Sauers Holding.

  When Global bought the Herald-Star, Murray had been sidelined. He did a Sunday cable show on Chicago personalities but no longer had a regular reporting assignment. For tonight’s story, he made the most of the mystery man, describing his beating death in dramatic detail. He included a shot of the crime scene and the toppled tree where the body had been hidden.

  “This is where our dead man lay and where his body would have disintegrated if not for the enterprising acts of some Palos Hills teens.”

  Murray had managed to interview one of the kids who’d found the body, a gap-toothed youth who looked too wholesome to be smoking weed and getting drunk in the woods. The boy’s parents were stationed behind him; from the way his mother’s hands moved, I thought she was wishing she could throttle her child.

  I couldn’t resist texting Murray: excellent way to describe underage weed & alcohol consumption. and great leave it to beaver kid.

  On-screen, Murray finally showed the ME’s reconstructions. Their artist had put together a face that didn’t look convincingly alive, but at least had both eyes in their sockets. The hair in the portrait was thick, with a slight wave and a part so far to the right that it seemed to be on the side of the skull.

  Global flashed their number on the screen along with the ME’s number to call if any viewers recognized him. I was getting ready to turn off the set when I was startled to see my own face appear.

  “Chicago’s crack private investigator V.I. Warshawski was on the scene at Cap Sauers Holding as well. Since her specialty is corporate fraud, we can only guess that the dead man was involved in serious financial crimes. Stay tuned to Global as we follow the story: we cover Chicago and the world.”

  I texted Murray again, this time not so flippantly. we need to talk, ryerson.

  It was half an hour before Murray got back to me, but a dozen other people had called in the meantime, including Lieutenant McGi
vney, wanting to know why I hadn’t talked to him about the dead man and fraud: Murray’s remark meant I, and Felix, really knew the man’s identity and why he’d been killed. My anger with Murray built as I tried unsuccessfully to persuade McGivney I didn’t know the dead man.

  “Guess what, Murray—I’ve heard from reporters at every TV and radio station in town, plus the Cook County sheriff. This should make you happy: everyone in the six counties watches Global. Maybe you’ll get a real job one of these days.”

  “What got you involved with this corpse?” Murray asked.

  “Why didn’t you ask before you went on the air?” I demanded. “You blindsided me. I know nothing about the guy, but you got the sheriff’s police breathing hot and heavy down my neck. And my client’s, for which I absolutely don’t forgive you.”

  Murray was unrepentant. “The assignment editor turned this over to me at five. I had that much time to find the kid, talk to the parents, get a crew out to Cap Sauers, and all the rest. The sheriff’s office mentioned you were representing one of their people of interest. And you know darned well that where you are, there’s almost always a money trail.”

  “There’s no trail anywhere,” I snapped.

  “Tell me who you’re working for,” Murray coaxed. “I can help.”

  “That’s bizarre,” I said.

  “What?” Murray was eager.

  “That you didn’t pry my client’s name out of the sheriff’s department. I thought you had an in with every law-enforcement office in the state.”

  “I used to,” Murray grumbled, “but I’ve been on the sidelines too long. My contacts have retired or been fired.”

  “It’s a terrible secret, Ryerson, so this is completely off the record, but I was protecting Kim Jong-un’s love child with Dennis Rodman.”