Shell Game

by Sara Paretsky

  “It wasn’t like we really wanted to be there, but we weren’t used to. . . . Life with Clarisse and Henry was so weird to us, we couldn’t believe they weren’t going to put us to work. You know, on the street. So we went back to what we knew, and since we were there, you know, we. . . . Only Henry came and found us every time. We were sure him and Clarisse—he and Clarisse, I mean—would throw us out, but they never did. Took us for ice cream and said we needed more sweetness in our lives.

  “But the last time, Reno got beat up bad, and we went to the cops and that’s what happened. Clarisse was so furious. She sued the Oakland Police Department and the city and everyone, but it was our word and our black mother against all of them. What do you think happened?”

  “I think you’re right to be angry and scared,” I said, stroking her corn silk hair. “I’ll be with you when the police talk to you, but don’t you see, what you’re telling me makes it even more important that we have help finding your sister.”

  I tried to persuade Harmony to come home with me, or at least let Mr. Contreras cook her dinner, but she had made her own little nest in her sister’s apartment; she felt safe there. I checked the window locks and the back door again, again told Harmony to make sure the dead bolts were in place when she was inside. Checked that she had me on speed dial.

  There ought to have been something bigger I could do, like erase her childhood and give her one like mine. I left feeling helpless and close to useless.

  11

  Leroy of Arabia

  When I got back to my car, my legs felt as though I’d been in a stair-climbing marathon. They were swollen and heavy and unwilling to move.

  It was only five o’clock, but I’d been running all day on short sleep. And I’d absorbed enough painful stories to fill a psychiatrist’s notebook for a year. I leaned back in the seat and shut my eyes, just a rest for ten minutes, enough time to recharge.

  My phone woke me half an hour later: Felix Herschel.

  “Have you gone to the police?” he said abruptly.

  Reno and Harmony were weighing so heavily on me that I started to say yes, before remembering that I’d threatened to file a missing persons report on Felix if he didn’t show by the end of the day.

  “Not yet. Where have you been?”

  “I’m fine. I don’t need a babysitter.”

  “Felix, if it weren’t for Lotty and the love I bear her, I’d bid you farewell on the spot. And tell you to turn to someone else the next time the cops pick you up. As it is, to keep her from anxiety, will you please check in with her every day until your involvement with the man in Cap Sauers Holding is cleared up?”

  “I’m sorry, Vic. I’m involved in a, well, the biggest engineering project of my life so far, and I can’t always use my phone.” He was trying to sound casual—big man used to important projects—but an underlying nervousness betrayed him.

  I didn’t try to probe into the nature of the biggest project. I couldn’t take listening to him come up with lies. “Does the name Fausson mean anything to you?” I asked. “Lawrence or Leroy?”

  “No. Why?”

  “How about as Elorenze?”

  “I don’t know him by any name. What’s this about?”

  “The dead man in Cap Sauers Holding. I’m going to verify his identity, but I’ll have to tell Lieutenant McGivney out in Maywood, and the medical examiner as well. I just want to make extra certain that there isn’t a trail leading from him to you.”

  “There can’t be, because I never heard of him.”

  “He knew you, though. Could it have been through a Muslim community meeting?”

  “You Americans and your hang-up about Muslims!” he shouted.

  “You’re working with Middle Eastern students on your water project,” I said. “Fausson hangs out—hung out—in Arab-speaking communities—it’s not anti-Islam to ask if that’s where you met.”

  “Repeat after me: Felix Herschel has never heard of Elorenze, Lawrence, or Leroy Fausson.” He ended the call.

  The biggest engineering project of his young life. It couldn’t be a bomb. It mustn’t be a bomb. But if he couldn’t always use his phone, what was he afraid of? Being tracked, or inadvertently detonating something?

  I entered his phone number into the Find My Friends app. He wasn’t in Rogers Park, but Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He was in motion, heading southeast.

  I stared at the pulsing blue circle on my screen, willing it to give me more information, but it suddenly disappeared. Felix knew I was watching him, or feared someone could watch him, and had shut down his phone.

  Six p.m. on a gray afternoon, a time when dark thoughts could drag you down a hole you couldn’t climb out of. I drove to my office but jogged around the block before going inside, on the theory that exercise lifts the spirits and makes the brain function better.

  I was unlocking my office door when I thought again of Leroy/Lawrence Fausson and Felix. It was only a matter of time before someone besides my anonymous caller recognized Fausson from the reconstructed face on TV. I wanted to go to his apartment to make sure he hadn’t left any obvious connections to Felix.

  I picked up my go-bag—a canvas backpack with picklocks, a flashlight, latex gloves, and a few other odds and ends—locked my briefcase with my laptop in the Mustang’s trunk, and headed north.

  Higgins was a commercial thoroughfare, with apartment buildings and strip malls, but the side streets, filled with Chicago’s signature bungalows, were quiet. I found parking on Neenah. As I walked back to Higgins, I dawdled, enjoying the crocuses springing up in the scrupulously tended front yards.

  Kids were biking in the lavender twilight, while the adults were returning home from work. A woman heading to Fausson’s building was balancing a toddler in one arm while chivvying an older child in front of her. I offered to hold the two sacks of groceries she was also hauling while she dug her keys out of a giant shoulder bag.

  She handed them to me gratefully, hoisted a hip to balance her younger child. Another unrecognized Olympic event: carrying a wriggling toddler, an outsize leather handbag, and twenty pounds of groceries. No Bulgarian weight lifter could manage the load.

  I followed her inside, where she thankfully put the toddler down as well. The little one ran after its brother on unsteady feet, heading toward a rear unit. I carried the bags as far as her front door and left before she could start imagining me as a molester or, worse, a detective about to commit B and E on Leroy Fausson’s apartment.

  Fausson lived on the third floor. The uncarpeted stairs were made out of a stone or concrete that sent echoes of footsteps up and down the stairwell. Even my running shoes sounded loud on the treads.

  The unit was at the top of the stairs. I knocked sharply on the door, waited a full minute, knocked again. A low-watt bulb showed me the door, but not the lock. I held my pocket flash between my teeth and knelt to work the tumblers. It was an old lock; my picks slipped in it a few times before I found the right combination. I was on my feet and inside just as steps sounded in the stairwell behind me. I held my breath, but it was another homebound family, clattering past me to the back of the building.

  I leaned against the door and shone my flashlight around, looking for a light switch. No overheads, but lamps, two on the floor, one on a desk. When I switched them on, I was overwhelmed by the outsize photos that covered the walls and part of the ceiling. Pride of place, the wall facing the door, was an aerial photo of what at first seemed to be a pockmarked moonscape with blobs in it.

  After staring at them for a time, the blobs resolved into a set of small huts built near a series of trenches cut into a desert landscape. In the near ground, a dark streak proved to be a muddy stream with a trickle of water in the middle. A couple of trucks stood at the edge of the compound. As I peered more closely, I could see the foreshortened bodies of people and the toppled remains of pillars, even the broken head of a human figure.

  When I turned to the wall next to the door, I found a framed poster of
a museum exhibit: treasures of ancient syria. The poster centered on the head of a stone figure with a curling beard; arrayed around it were pieces of gold jewelry inlaid with lapis and a couple of small figures.

  On the left wall, another blown-up photo showed the gates of Aleppo before the bombing, the Golan Heights viewed from both the Israeli and Syrian sides, close-ups of more Syrian artifacts. The display gave me vertigo.

  Before exploring the living area, I went into the bedroom. It was just big enough for a double bed and a chest of drawers. Facing the bed, Leroy/Lawrence had hung a large photo of himself with a dozen other people. I studied it, trying to figure out the background, and realized the group was standing in a section of an archaeological dig. The photo in the front room was an aerial overview; this one showed a section with toppled pillars and the giant head of a figure whose hair and beard looked as though they were made of chain mail.

  The man called Lawrence Fausson on Facebook was standing between two solemn-faced Middle Easterners. All three wore dirt-stained tunics over leggings, their heads wrapped in cloth, perhaps more for protection from the dirt than for any religious reason. There were three other Westerners in the group, including the freckled young woman who’d been in the Facebook photo.

  From Syria to a Chicago forest preserve. How had Fausson made that journey? Was he an archaeologist? He surely hadn’t been an investor in the dig—his chest of drawers was made of pressed wood whose varnish was scratched and chipped. The red rug by his bed was worn, not in the way of heirloom Persian carpets, but in the manner of machine-made polyester from Buy-Smart.

  The photos were so big, so overwhelming, I felt as though I were falling into them. I wondered if they’d had that effect on Leroy, or if he was so used to them that they’d lost their impact.

  Fausson had left paper scraps on his bedside table. These were the usual detritus of daily life—receipts for six cartons of yogurt; for carryout from the Damascus Gate, a Middle Eastern restaurant on Austin; for razor blades. No phone numbers, for Felix or anyone else.

  A dozen or so books were scattered on the floor by the bed. One was a grammar of advanced Arabic. I picked up a slim volume whose boards were covered in azure cloth, with a design like a Middle Eastern tile pattern engraved into it in silver. The book was written in Arabic, but copyright information was printed in English: Tarik Kataba, published in Beirut. I flipped through it and a yellowed piece of newsprint fell out.

  Tarik Kataba, recipient of this year’s Nahda prize for Arabic poetry, was unable to accept in person: he has been held in one of Bashar al-Assad’s prisons since January 2009. His daughter Rasima, who is attending boarding school in Lebanon, accepted the prize on his behalf.

  The article included a photograph of Rasima, a diminutive twelve- or thirteen-year-old, with deep-set eyes that looked too old for her narrow face. She was holding up a certificate for the camera while a group of men towered over her. I returned the clipping to the book and tucked it into my backpack.

  One of the books was published by the Oriental Institute. I flipped through Urban Development in the Chalcolithic: Excavation of the Tell al-Sabbah by Candra van Vliet. I had no way of knowing if it related to the dig in Fausson’s photos. There was also a list of the illustrations used in the text; someone had written notes next to a few of those, but they were mostly numbers that didn’t mean anything to me.

  The book belonged to the Oriental Institute library. I knew the place, sort of, since it was on the South Side, on the University of Chicago campus. When I was in sixth grade, we had a class outing there, where the biggest attraction was a mummy—for days after, the boys would drape toilet paper around their heads and chase the girls around the playground.

  It wasn’t until I was a student at the University of Chicago that I realized it was a scholarly institute, creating dictionaries of humans’ earliest written languages, conducting excavations, and trying to preserve cultural heritage in the Middle East from looters. I added the book to my backpack. I could return it, which might never happen if the cops seized the contents of Fausson’s apartment as evidence.

  I made a quick search of the chest of drawers squeezed against the far wall. One drawer held graying briefs and worn socks, all jumbled together; another was stuffed with jeans and T-shirts. Fausson didn’t own a suit, but he had a sports jackets and three of the safari-style shirts he’d worn in the Facebook photo. I turned out the pockets and went through his jeans and shorts pockets, but I didn’t see anything that suggested a connection to Felix, or to the Illinois Institute of Technology. Hiking boots (also well worn), sandals, a set of the kind of leggings and tunic he’d had on in the dig photo, and a couple of black-check kaffiyehs.

  Back in the main room, I plumped myself in Fausson’s desk chair and opened his laptop. His wallpaper showed him sitting on a camel, dressed like Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. The lightbulb went off: Leroy of Arabia would have sounded ludicrous, so he told people his name was Lawrence. Elorenze—the man who’d called me early this morning might have been an Arab speaker. Someone who knew Felix from IIT, or Engineers in a Free State?

  Fausson’s computer was password protected, but my computer consultant would know how to get past a security screen. I closed the computer and tucked it into my canvas pack.

  He didn’t have any personal photos on the desk itself—no lovers or parents, not even a selfie. A small stone figurine was half hidden under a week-old copy of the Herald-Star. It looked like a lion missing part of its front right paw. The stone was smooth to the touch. I stroked its head with my forefinger.

  “What can you tell me about Fausson?” I asked it. The lion stared back at me, solemn, unspeaking. I resisted the temptation to add it to my backpack but returned it to the desk while I searched the drawers.

  Fausson had jumbled his documents together, just as he’d stored his clothes. I found his passport at the back of the top drawer, in the name of Leroy Michael Fausson.

  The pages were full of immigration stamps from many Arabian cities, including Riyadh and Cairo, along with most European airports, but he hadn’t used it since returning to America. I squinted at the date and country stamps. He’d had to leave Syria because of the war, but he’d bummed around the Middle East and North Africa for two years, finally coming to Chicago from Tunis. I photographed several of the pages, but left the passport behind along with the lion.

  Although he had utility bills among the papers, I didn’t find any financial records, no credit card statements, no bank documents, no pay stubs. If he’d done everything online, I’d have to wait until I got into his computer to see anything.

  I’d been in the apartment for over an hour; time to move on. I made a quick survey of the kitchen but tripped as a floorboard popped up. When I tapped it into place with my shoe heel, two adjacent boards came up.

  I knelt to look. The reason Fausson didn’t have any financial documents was that he was part of the cash economy. When I lifted the boards out, I found a cache of hundreds lying in a shallow metal box.

  12

  Free Fall

  I picked up a stack of bills, counted it. Roughly a hundred-fifty. Eyeballing the size of the hoard, I was guessing a quarter of a million. Take it? Leave it in situ?

  I photographed the money, the box, the floorboards. Fausson’s tools for getting at his savings were under the kitchen sink—a hammer and a crowbar. I nailed the floor back into place as well as I could, but he’d been in and out of his hiding place so many times the nails were loose—that’s why the boards had flipped up to begin with.

  I turned off the lamps and had my hand on the doorknob when more footsteps pounded up the stairs. They halted outside Fausson’s door. I heard muffled talk—two men. I squatted, back against the wall next to the door, as one man barked a command.

  They kicked in the door and swarmed past me into the room. I was out, rolling onto the hall floor, and was on my feet at the stairwell before they reacted.

  “You, stop!” they bellowe
d. “Federal agents! Immigration!”

  I belted down the stairs. Got hit from behind, knocked down the second flight. I heard the whine a nanosecond later. Bullet in the back. I lay on the landing, gasping for air. Another shout from above: “Federal agents, halt or be shot.” A second bullet whined. I rolled instinctively—not paralyzed, get down the stairs. I yanked myself upright, catapulted over the railing to the first-floor stairwell, ran a jagged pattern the rest of the way down.

  Doors were opening around the stairwell, people were crying out in terror. “911!” I screamed. “Gunmen on three!”

  I bolted out the front, still screaming, “911! Gunmen!” I raced down Neenah Avenue to my car and floored the accelerator before I’d shut the door. The Mustang skidded, squealed, righted itself. I turned onto Higgins, drove the half mile to the expressway like a lunatic, weaving around traffic, hot-rodding through stoplights as they changed color. It wasn’t until I was on the Kennedy, heading southeast, that I turned on my headlights. I got off at Belmont, but took a roundabout route to my apartment, circling back west, and then south, farther west, farther south. After stopping in an alley two miles from my street, I finally decided I was clean.

  Even so, I parked a long two blocks from my building and came up the alley behind it so I could go in through the back. I seemed to be in the clear. At the bottom step to my own three flights, my arms and legs began to tremble. I sat down abruptly. It was only then, adrenaline depleted, that I felt warm liquid along my spine.

  13

  An Apple a Day . . .

  The dogs roused Mr. Contreras. When my neighbor opened his front door, the dogs almost knocked him over in their rush to me. Peppy shoved her muzzle between my back and the stairs: her maternal instinct told her that she needed to lick up my blood.

  Mr. Contreras hobbled along as quickly as his arthritic knees allowed. “Now what did you go and do, Victoria Warshawski?”