“Damn it, Warshawski—”
“Oh, back at you, Murray.”
As soon as I hung up, my phone rang again: another reporter. I turned off the sound and went to bed. A little before two, I was jolted awake by a mosquito dive-bombing my ear. I pulled the covers over my head, but the whine continued. My landline, I finally realized. It rang so seldom these days that I’d forgotten to turn it off.
I growled a greeting.
“This is Fee I Warashawaski?”
Close enough; I agreed it was me.
“Dead man in news. Am knowing. Thinking am knowing. Name Elorenze Fausson.”
He hung up before I could ask anything, such as who he was and how he spelled Elorenze Fausson. I tried calling the number back, but his phone rang twenty times without an answer.
7
Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?
Despite my heavy head, I couldn’t return to sleep, even knowing that another workday was rolling my way. After half an hour, I did what the sleep gurus advise: I got out of bed. And then I did what they tell you not to: went into the dining room and opened my laptop.
The phone that had called me turned out to be one of the last pay phones in North America, at an L stop on Randolph and State. Since that was the busiest corner in Chicago, it wasn’t going to be possible to trace the caller.
Elorenze Fausson. I imagined different ways of spelling it. My caller had pronounced it “Foessahn,” but I finally found a Lawrence Fausson on Facebook. Elorenze/Lawrence. The words merged when I said them out loud.
His most recent post was almost a year old. I would have to friend him to learn where he was from or went to school or to see his profile picture, but his posts were open to the public. How did Facebook handle friend requests for the dead? I sent one on the off chance before scrolling through his last half dozen posts. One included a photograph of a largish group of men and women standing in a ragged semicircle.
The picture had been taken in one of those characterless rooms that you find in poorly financed public buildings—fluorescent lights, metal folding chairs, a number of round tables covered with books and papers. In the background I could see children’s art taped to the wall, alongside posters with Arabic captions.
A community room for a community—where? The photo didn’t have a caption, nor a location marker. It could have been anywhere, especially anywhere in the Arab-speaking world.
The photo hadn’t been well focused. I fiddled with the contrast, studied the faces of all the men under a magnifying glass. There were seven who looked Middle Eastern, three who appeared Western. I held my breath, wondering if one of them was Lotty’s nephew, but when I enlarged the faces, Felix Herschel wasn’t in the group.
However, the ME’s reconstructed face was a good match for a man in a threadbare khaki shirt. While most of the people, women as well as men, were smiling, Fausson seemed almost melancholy. His hands were in his jeans pockets, and he wasn’t looking at the camera.
The group included six women, mostly, again, Middle Eastern. Two of the women were slender, with long braids: either or neither could have been the woman Felix had been embracing that morning. There was also a young Western-looking woman whose freckled face and short reddish hair stood out against her darker friends.
The only text Lawrence Fausson had included was who feels the strangest in a strange land? Had he been in a Middle Eastern country, feeling alone and disaffected? Or was this in America, where he felt more out of place than his foreign-born companions?
If all else failed, I could find an Arabic scholar to decipher the texts in the photo’s background, to see if they shed light on the room’s location. For now, I kept trawling for easier data.
Fausson didn’t have a landline or a traceable cell phone. He didn’t have a credit card, at least not in his own name.
Just as I was giving up, I pried open a back door into the DMV database. Fausson had a current driver’s license, with an address on Higgins, just off Neenah Avenue.
According to the DMV records, Fausson’s first name was Leroy, not Lawrence. The DMV photo was a pretty good match with the reconstruction and with Facebook. Maybe Lawrence had a twin.
My confrontation with Murray had made me forget to text Felix before I went to bed the first time. I wrote him now.
lotty is very worried that you may have been arrested or injured. if we don’t hear from you by the end of the business day, friday, i’m going to check with the police, file a missing persons report, and start contacting area hospitals. if you do get this message tell me whether you know a man named fausson.
I hit send and fell into bed for a few hours, but my alarm roused me at six-thirty for another day of mad scrambling, this time so I could make my eight-thirty appointment with Reno’s boss at Rest EZ.
I carried my breakfast with me in the car and ate in a precarious and unhealthy way, swallowing fruit and yogurt at traffic lights, choking on toast crumbs, spilling coffee on my coat. When I finally parked across the street from the Rest EZ branch, I looked as though I’d been wrestling in a restaurant dumpster. I also hadn’t combed my hair or bothered with makeup. I dealt with my hair, but didn’t try painting my face, just removed as much food as I could from my clothes.
At least I fit into my environment. I was on a sad stretch of Central Avenue, where McDonald’s wrappers and broken bottles filled the sidewalks in front of the boarded-over buildings. The Rest EZ office was one of the few active storefronts, except, of course, for the liquor stores. The facade was covered with flashing neon advertising all the services inside: city stickers, auto loans, payday loans, Western Union office, ATMs.
The centerpiece was a screen showing a couple racked with misery, tossing and turning while their list of unpaid bills spouted from their sleepless brains. You next saw them walking through a Rest EZ door and finally asleep with beatific smiles: financial worries keeping you awake? rest ez with an ez loan from rest ez.
In the ad, the loan office was a clean, well-lit place, with a sleek white woman, blond hair piled in a knot on her head, smiling invitingly at the customers. In Austin, the big picture windows were dusty. When I followed a balding man with a walrus mustache inside, I had to step over the remains of a dinner regurgitated by whoever had spent the previous night in the doorway.
The rich are different from you and me, Fitzgerald supposedly told Hemingway, but the poor are even more so. Their waiting rooms in hospitals or loan offices have plastic chairs bolted to scarred linoleum, harsh overhead lights, and a TV screen high on a wall with the sound up, tuned to Global Entertainment’s recycling of the morning news.
A bank of computer monitors was bolted to a counter on my left; you could apply directly for a loan there. If Rest EZ needed more information, you waited your turn for one of the cashiers behind a layer of bullet-resistant glass.
Changing screens flashed on the monitors that weren’t in use. I stopped to look. Rest EZ’s many services, from insurance to payday loans, were advertised. We got a flash for the Stock of the Day, which Rest EZ’s financial consultant division recommended. Glacier Trove (GTR.PK) was today’s pick. “Last week when its shares were at three cents, nobody knew this company; next week the whole world will. Buy today and wipe out that debt overnight. Talk to your Rest EZ financial adviser when you fill out your loan form.”
Next to the monitors were a couple of Illinois lottery machines. It seemed fitting—gambling on penny stocks or on the lottery. When I went to a door that might lead to the manager’s office, an armed guard moved in on me, demanding my business. I explained that I had an appointment with Donna Lutas and handed him a business card.
He ordered me to take a seat. “You stay away from that door, do you hear?”
I heard. He scowled at me for a few more seconds, then pressed a code on a pad next to the door. Before he went through, he turned around again, to make sure I wasn’t going to jump him and force my way through.
The only good thing about the experience was the e
ntertainment it provided the other people in the room. The guard was black, as was everyone filling out forms or making payments. White woman treated like a wild animal on the loose brought a little pleasure to a dull day. I gave the room a half bow in acknowledgment and picked up a copy of the previous day’s Sun-Times.
The wait stretched from two minutes to seventeen before the guard returned. “Ms. Lutas says to tell you she is sorry for the inconvenience, but she cannot speak with you.”
“I can wait,” I said: my next appointment was at ten-thirty in the Loop, which gave me about an hour to waste in Austin.
“Doesn’t matter. She won’t speak to you. Says you told her you was Reno Seale’s aunt, and you’re not.”
I could feel my eyes glitter. Death Star eyes, an old lover had told me when I’d lost my temper in his presence. “I am Reno Seale’s aunt. And Harmony Seale’s. And neither you nor she can wipe out that relationship.”
The guard glowered at me. “You’re a detective, right?”
“Many aunts work for a living,” I said. “That doesn’t end the relationship to their nieces and nephews.”
The audience, which had been enjoying my discomfiture, began agreeing with me. “What’s this, she can’t be an aunt if she has a job?” one woman said; the bald man with the walrus mustache added, “They try to take everything away from us. Now they want our children?”
The guard sensed the shift in sympathies. “I’ll take you back; you can hear it from her yourself.”
I followed him as he punched the code in once more: 6-1-1-7-8-5, I noted, writing it in the palm of my hand with my finger. You never know.
In cubicles along a short hallway, clients whose situation required more personal attention than a computer screen were meeting with Rest EZ staff whose nameplates identified them as financial counselors. Reno Seale’s name was still attached to an empty cube on the right.
Donna Lutas had an actual office with a door, but it was hard to see how it could be shut, since a chair upholstered with a high stack of documents was pushed against it. A security monitor on the wall provided shifting images of different parts of the public room out front.
Lutas was typing when we came to the entrance; her thick dark hair fell like a curtain, protecting her from the bigger world.
The guard cleared his throat. “Donna, I decided to have you talk to her in person.”
Lutas brushed a wing of hair out of her eyes, still focused on her work. “Jerry, I thought you said you weren’t letting her—”
“He relayed your message, Ms. Lutas. I’m V.I. Warshawski and I need to know what documentation you require to prove that I am Reno Seale’s aunt.” I moved past Jerry into the small space in front of her desk.
She was startled into speaking abruptly. “You have to leave. I can’t talk to you.”
“Not even about Reno Seale, who worked so hard she earned an early promotion? And who has been missing since Monday?”
“Last night I thought you were Reno’s aunt. Now I learn you’re really a detective.”
“It’s true I’m a detective; it’s true I’m Reno Seale’s aunt. Some physicist wrote about how two objects can occupy the same space at the same time, or maybe that they couldn’t, but I can and do. Reno’s younger sister is in town. She flew out because her sister has been acting troubled, ever since her return from St. Matthieu. Did Reno say anything to you, anything at all, that would give you a hint about what was disturbing her?”
Lutas shook her head. “It’s against company policy for me to talk to outsiders about our employees. Even outsiders who claim to be relatives.”
“And you didn’t know that policy last night?”
“I only just found out,” Lutas muttered.
“Ah!” I clapped my hands, inspiration striking. “Eliza Trosse called you from downtown. Did you tell her we already had an appointment?”
Lutas looked past me at Jerry, who was lingering in the doorway.
I moved the papers from the chair that was holding the door open and sat down. “Reno trusted you, according to her sister; I’m hoping she let fall something that would tell us what was on her mind.”
Lutas frowned as I put the papers on the floor, but didn’t protest.
“I didn’t notice anything special. Reno is an ideal employee, or has been. I hate to think of losing her. But she’s not like some of the women here, telling you every time their guy hits them or sleeps with someone else. Maybe she met someone at the resort and she took it more seriously than he did—it happens, especially to girls like Reno.”
“Meaning?”
“You ask anyone about her, first thing they say is ‘What a knockout,’ right, Jerry?”
The guard pressed his lips together—maybe he’d made a pass that Reno had fought off.
“But she’s the kind that hides her insecurity under an ice robe. If someone melted the ice, she might drown.”
It was a poetically inspired insight. I wondered if it were true. I wondered, too, if that was something Reno might hide from her sister—it was a handicap to see only one side of that relationship. Reno was the elder, even if only by a year, and she might not want Harmony to see how vulnerable she could be.
“There’s nothing going on at the company that would have troubled Reno, I take it?”
“That’s a ridiculous suggestion, aunt or no aunt, detective or no detective.” The words were vehement but the tone lacked conviction.
“Tell me more about the St. Matthieu trip. Was this a corporate retreat?”
Lutas fiddled with her rings. “Rest EZ doesn’t hold that kind of event, not at places like St. Matthieu, anyway. Once a year the branch managers get invited downtown for a day to go over problems and strategies, but I can’t imagine them flying us to a resort.”
“So what was it?”
“We were told it was a big shareholders meeting and they wanted Rest EZ staff who could fit in with senior staff.” She was mumbling to her keyboard; I had trouble hearing her.
“Reno had those kinds of skills?” I asked.
“She was beautiful,” Lutas blurted out. “I don’t think she was very sophisticated, but if all you wanted was arm candy—” She cut herself off.
“Did you know that when you picked her to go?”
Lutas reddened underneath her makeup. “I didn’t pick her. They specifically asked for her downtown. There was a lot of jealousy, let me tell you.”
“From you, too?”
“Caribbean in February?” Lutas jeered. “Of course I’d rather be in Chicago freezing my butt.”
“How did Reno feel about going?”
Lutas paused. “I think she was worried. But they told her it was a reward for being, like, rookie of the year in Chicago. Anyway, I think if she’d said no, they might not have been happy downtown.”
“Fire her?” I suggested.
A longer pause this time, which stretched into silence.
“No wonder they don’t want me asking questions about her,” I said.
“They don’t want you asking questions because it’s against company policy to discuss our team with outsiders.” Jerry spoke from behind me, loud and authoritative. “You don’t belong back here. You’re interrupting our workday. Time for you to go.”
He put a meaty hand under my armpit and hoisted me to my feet. I could have ducked and swerved, kicked his kneecaps, all those things, but what would have been the point? I’d still have ended in the same place: on the sidewalk on Central Avenue, not quite missing the pile of vomit that I’d sidestepped on my way in.
8
Best Kind of Tenant
Reno’s apartment lay more or less on the route back into the city. I got off the Ike at Sacramento and drove up to Fairfield. Reno’s intersection was like the place in the lake where two currents slam into each other—the older Hispanic residents, on their way to Laundromats, dragging carts of clothes while pushing a stroller, and hip young men out with their French bulldogs.
I rang Reno’
s doorbell but didn’t get an answer. I texted Harmony; she wrote that she’d decided to go look at a garden center on Chicago’s North Side. At least she wasn’t spending her whole time brooding in her sister’s apartment.
I pushed the button for the building super, Vern Wolferman. After a few minutes’ wait, I pressed again, longer. A thick hoarse voice came through the grille, telling me I could leave packages in the entryway.
“I’m a detective,” I shouted back.
“Hold on, then, hold on.”
Another few minutes passed, and then Wolferman arrived in person, wearing faded green coveralls. He was a big guy, tall and running to fat, as I’d guessed from the sunken cushion in the chair I’d seen the other night.
He opened the door, but kept his bulk in the entrance. “You really a detective? Let me see your badge.”
“I’m private, not public.” I showed him my license, at a distance that pulled him out of the doorway; I slipped around him into the hall.
“I’m investigating Reno Seale’s disappearance. When was the last time you saw her?”
“Who wants to know?” He had turned his bulk around to face me in the lobby, but he kept the door open.
“I do. And Ms. Seale’s sister. And her employers. When did you last see her?”
“She goes to work in the morning, she says hi if I see her in the hall. Same thing coming back at night, but most of the time I’m not in the hall when she’s coming or going. The only reason I know she’s missing is because of the sister showing up.”
“She’s a good tenant?” I asked.
“Best kind. Doesn’t bug me all day long with crap a two-year-old could take care of. When her toilet backed up last month, she went and got her own plumbing snake.”
“Something two-year-olds do routinely,” I agreed.
He glared. “There are a lot of units in this building. And it’s old in the bargain. Owners are waiting for it to fall apart so they can flip it. Reno Seale is quiet, she doesn’t do anything that gives the other residents a beef.”
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