Shell Game

by Sara Paretsky

  “Someone shot at me. I guess they hit me.” Fear made me short of breath.

  He hoisted me to my feet and hustled me into his apartment. He sat me in a hard-backed chair and got me out of my coat before going to his kitchen for peroxide and a box of cotton. The dogs circled around, whining.

  “Lift your shirt or whatever that thing is you got on. Sorry to be a Peeping Tom, doll, but it can’t be helped.”

  He tore off a large piece of cotton and swabbed my back with a rough but thorough hand. He worked his way up from my waist. When he reached my right trap I couldn’t suppress a cry.

  “You got blood and dirt back here, but I don’t see no bullet hole,” he pronounced. “If we was on a battlefield, I’d say a piece of shrapnel went through your clothes and caught you, but I don’t know what caused this. Good news is the wound ain’t deep, but it tore about a square inch of skin off. I’m going to tape it up, but you go see Dr. Lotty in the morning, get yourself a tetanus shot and a proper bandage.”

  While he bustled off to get gauze and tape, I picked up my coat and inspected the back. There was a jagged tear but no sign of any metal. I looked around for my canvas backpack and found it near the door. I sat cross-legged on the floor, pack in my lap.

  Mr. Contreras appeared with his new stash of first aid equipment. When I pushed myself to my feet, the bag’s contents clinked and rattled. I stuck in a cautious hand. Shards, wires, glass—hard to tell.

  He took the pack from me. “It ain’t going anywhere, doll. Just hike up your shirt again and let me get this covered. And now you got dirt in the wound again. You’re more trouble than both dogs put together.”

  He swabbed my shoulder blade a second time, smeared on Neosporin, and laid a piece of gauze over it. When he’d finally wrapped me with enough tape to cover a mummy, we looked at the bag together. On one side, a singed hole in the canvas showed a bullet’s entry. On the other, a big exit hole. The bullet had pushed something through with enough force to penetrate my coat.

  Mr. Contreras took today’s Sun-Times from his armchair and spread a few pages on his dining table so we could empty the canvas bag. The Arabic book and papers I’d taken from Fausson’s desk, my picklocks and flashlight, the Oriental Institute publication, a bagel I’d forgotten. The remains of Lawrence Fausson’s laptop.

  The bullet had flattened and cracked the case lid, shattering the screen. The impact had propelled something—a piece of the metal case?—into my back. The computer had taken the bullet’s full force. Apple had saved my life.

  I sifted through the glass and metal shards. In the midst of the computer’s innards was a piece of copper that looked like a misshapen flower—six metal petals opened on top of a stubby stalk. The petals were twisted and misshapen; one had broken off. The bullet. It would have looked just like this if it had gone through my scapula and torn up my heart. A violent shudder shook me.

  Mr. Contreras put a steadying arm on me. “Who done this, doll?”

  “Some guys who claimed to be with Immigration and Customs.” I told him about going to Leroy/Lawrence Fausson’s apartment. “They yelled the way they do on the cop shows, but I don’t know if they were real agents or perps imitating TV cops. I didn’t think ICE agents went out armed, but maybe they fear some Mexican or Somali mother is going to fling a used diaper in their faces.”

  “Why in God’s name did you go there to begin with?” Mr. Contreras demanded. “You don’t have enough trouble without roaring around town looking for it?”

  “Lotty’s nephew.” I hadn’t told my neighbor about my trek to the sheriff with Felix. When I explained the discovery of Fausson’s body with Felix’s name in the pocket, Mr. Contreras became instantly sympathetic: if I’d been helping out Dr. Lotty, I’d done exactly what I should have done.

  “You go on upstairs, doll, you get yourself a hot bath and clean clothes, and the dogs and me will bring supper up to you.”

  While I waited for the tub to fill, I texted Lotty in case Felix was so angry with us both that he hadn’t let her know he was alive and well.

  he wouldn’t say where he’s been, but his phone showed he was in western wisconsin.

  I gave her an abbreviated version of my adventure at Fausson’s, adding that I’d stop by her clinic in the morning for a tetanus booster. i’m giving fausson’s identity to the police. i didn’t see any link to felix at his apartment and i hope to god i looked in all the possible places, because whoever/whatever fausson was, he had a large stash of cash under his floorboards.

  I climbed into the tub, putting a plastic cleaning bag around my shoulder to hold Mr. Contreras’s bandage in place. I dozed off, trying to imagine what Felix might be doing, when my neighbor shouted my name from my entryway: he didn’t want to risk catching me naked. I climbed out, stiffly, half-asleep, the plastic bag clammy against my breasts.

  Mr. Contreras’s repertoire is small: spaghetti with tomato sauce, steak, or baked chicken. Tonight was spaghetti, the tomatoes ones he’d canned from his own garden last fall. I added Parmesan. I buy it at an old Italian deli where my mother used to shop; it has somehow survived the encroachment of a hundred big-box companies on Harlem Avenue.

  Mr. Contreras and I watched Kojak reruns on one of the nostalgia channels—those were the days, when the bald cop ran over criminals and his own captain and right, if not justice, always triumphed.

  Lotty called, just as Kojak himself was looking at a briefcase filled with money and commenting, “That’s a lot of balloons.”

  Lotty was worried about me, worried about Felix, but we agreed there wasn’t a lot we could do. “Except for you to keep an eye on him,” Lotty said, “as much as you can without getting him completely alienated.”

  “I learned Fausson’s identity from an anonymous caller, but the sheriff will certainly question Felix again. Were you able to speak to Freeman’s immigration specialist?”

  “Martha Simone. Yes, and she’s ready to help if we need her. Hugo phoned, he and Penelope.” She was Hugo’s daughter and Felix’s mother. “They say they’ve tried to get Felix to return home, but he claims his engineers group is doing work that’s too important to abandon. I’ll talk to them again tonight.”

  We spoke for half an hour, Mr. Contreras listening avidly but silently. Lotty had grand rounds in the morning, but she said she’d alert her clinic nurse to change my dressing and give me a tetanus booster.

  My neighbor began gathering dishes together while I switched channels to the local news. The shooting at Fausson’s building hadn’t made the cut, which made me wonder enough to look at the Chicago news feed on my laptop. No report there, either.

  I didn’t like that: no blood had been shed, which made the story only minimally interesting, I guess, but gunshots in a stairwell in one of Chicago’s quietest neighborhoods? It should have been a story. I wondered if the people who fired at me really had been ICE agents, using Homeland Security to put a muzzle on the story.

  All those balloons I’d stumbled on could indicate something like ICE would be interested in. Drug money, for instance. Technically that was DEA or Treasury responsibility, but Homeland was muscling in on a lot of people’s turf. I didn’t remember seeing a Kabul stamp in Fausson’s passport, but I thought about the poppy routes from Afghanistan.

  Mr. Contreras stared at the pictures I’d taken, fascinated, even a bit titillated. “Jeez, doll, where’d this guy come up with all that money?”

  “I have no idea, not even an idea of how to figure out an idea. I’m more worried about how it might tie to Felix,” I said. “And what if the people who shot at me were the ones who killed Fausson? It’s possible his death had something to do with cheating people out of their share of ill-gotten gains. In that case, though, why would ICE come charging in, unless they were crooks pretending to be agents. Or agents gone rogue.”

  “You ain’t going back there, are you? Least, not alone, right?”

  “I’m not going back there,” I agreed. “Whether they’re law or outlaw, the
y’ll be staking the place.”

  When Mr. Contreras had packed up his pots and taken Mitch downstairs—leaving Peppy with me, for comfort and security—I called Lieutenant McGivney in Maywood, to tell him I’d had an anonymous tip on his dead body. That took ten minutes because, of course, he didn’t believe I didn’t know my informant, nor that Felix—or I—really didn’t know Fausson.

  “An anonymous call? We’ll be checking your phone records.”

  “With a subpoena, right, not sitting out there in Maywood with a handy hacker,” I said.

  “You say he called in the middle of the night last night—”

  “Early this morning, Lieutenant.”

  “It’s what, twenty hours later and you’re just getting around to letting me know? What were you doing in the meantime?”

  “My nails,” I said. “When you can’t afford a salon pedicure, it takes forever to buff down the calluses and trim ingrown toenails. Then trying to get off all the old polish—”

  “You’re still not ready for Saturday Night Live. And your detective skills could use some polishing, too, Sherlock.”

  At least he hung up.

  It was getting close to eleven and I was close to comatose, but I figured I owed Murray a heads-up on Fausson’s identity: if he hadn’t put my name out on Global’s newscast, my informant wouldn’t have known who I was.

  Murray, like the sheriff, wanted significantly more details than I was prepared to give. My informant’s address, occupation, list of enemies?

  “Murray, all I know is the vic’s name, which I’m sharing with you because he learned my name from you. And always remember, of course, that this call may be monitored for quality assurance.”

  “You know something you’re not telling,” Murray growled.

  “I know lots of things I’m not telling, mainly because I don’t think they’d interest you. You’re lucky I’m still sharing information with you after you set me up with the sheriff’s department. Do some footwork for a change. Lubricate those reporter muscles.”

  14

  Who Loves Ya, Baby?

  My adventures had worn me down. I fell asleep instantly, but at two I woke and began that restless, useless churning all the sleep gurus warn us against.

  The pain in my shoulder was partly responsible, but most of it had to do with my worries about Felix and all that money under Leroy or Lawrence Fausson’s floorboards. I wondered if it was still there.

  The pair who shot at me could have been the same men who’d kicked in Fausson’s head. Whatever the source of the hundreds under his floorboards, if they thought he’d double-crossed them, they could have killed him and then come looking for the money.

  On the other hand, maybe my shooters really were with Immigration and had come looking for Fausson for ICE-related reasons: we’re breaking in your door because we want to catch you in the act of reading Arabic poetry. They carried guns in case he threw that heavy volume about the Chalcolithic at them.

  Finally, around five o’clock, I fell into an uneasy sleep. I was with Felix in Syria. He’d installed an elaborate water delivery system in one of the bombed-out shells of a city, but when he asked me to turn on the tap, the spigot spat out bits of Leroy Fausson’s brain.

  Around eight, I struggled awake, stuck my head under the shower’s cold water tap, gingerly rotated my right trap. Mr. Contreras had wrapped me so tightly it was hard to tell if I had full mobility in the right arm, but the wound didn’t protest very loudly when I moved. Besides my shoulder, the most significant damage was a purpling swath on my right hip, the shape and nearly the size of Lake Michigan. I smeared it with arnica and pulled on my sweats.

  Saturday mornings in early spring, I usually give the dogs a long workout. I often go to the Y for pickup basketball after, but today we’d all make do with less exercise. I drove the dogs to the park north of Belmont Harbor and limped in their wake as they chased ducks and each other.

  On my way home, Harmony called, distraught: a Sergeant Abreu had asked her to come into the station to discuss her sister. Where was I?

  “On my way,” I said.

  I didn’t bother to stop at home but drove straight to Humboldt Park with the dogs. Harmony was pacing the sidewalk when we arrived. At the station, she sat rigid, not opening the car door.

  “I can’t do this,” she said.

  “Yes, you can. Reno would do it for you, and Clarisse would tell you it’s your job, so out you get. I’ll be with you every minute.”

  Sergeant Abreu turned out to be a woman, and one almost as dark as Clarisse looked in her photos. This helped Harmony relax slightly. Abreu had a patient, quiet manner. It took half an hour, but Harmony finally began to speak in full sentences and to give as much information as she could dredge up.

  When we finished, Abreu consulted with Terry Finchley. The Finch had already applied for a warrant to search Reno’s apartment building. Since it had gone up in the 1920s, with big coal furnaces in a subbasement and long rows of storage lockers, it held a lot of places where someone could have put a body. No one wanted to come right out and say someone murdered Reno on the premises and hid her in an abandoned boiler, but that was the first thought on our minds.

  When Harmony nervously asked what they were looking for, Sergeant Abreu did say, “We don’t want to find that she was in the building all the time needing help which we didn’t give her.”

  They’d canvass the other people in the building, they’d circulate Reno’s photo throughout the CPD, they’d check with the airlines to see if she’d taken a flight somewhere: if Reno had spotted an old abuser when she was in St. Matthieu, it was possible she’d flown off looking for revenge.

  “You want to hang out at my place while the cops search?” I asked Harmony when Abreu had said they had all they needed for the present. “I’ll be gone most of the day, but you’d have the dogs and Mr. Contreras for company.”

  Harmony wanted to stay in her sister’s apartment. “In case, like Sergeant Abreu said, Reno’s sick or unconscious or something. I should be there if they find her. Maybe—could you let me have Mitch, in case, you know—”

  “Sure, but you’ll have to take him outside periodically. And don’t let him off leash.”

  “I can take care of him: I’m not a baby, you know.”

  “Of course not.”

  When I dropped them off, Harmony said, “Do you think they’ll find her?”

  “They’ll do their best,” I said, “but I don’t know.”

  “I mean, in the building? If she’s there, she must be—”

  “Probably,” I said gently, when she stopped.

  “I guess if they don’t find her by Monday I’ll go back to Portland.”

  “You don’t have to decide anything today. Right now I’m getting a tetanus shot and a look at my wound, and then I’m going to do some detecting of my own, but I won’t be farther than half an hour from you.”

  I stopped at home on my way to the clinic to drop Peppy off with Mr. Contreras. Dick called as I was getting back into my car.

  “Did you tell the cops to come out here and frighten Teri?”

  “Hey, Dick. How are you?”

  “Vic, don’t push it.”

  “Just trying to give you time to calm down,” I said. “If you put together that kind of predicate negative during cross, I’m surprised you ever made partner. Did the cops frighten Teri? I doubt it. Did I send them out to your home? Beyond my powers.”

  “Damn it, Vic, they must have gotten my name from you.”

  “Not necessarily. Harmony could have told them, or twenty seconds in a personal history database,” I said. “Reno has been missing for nearly a week. You are her second closest relative, next to her sister. It’s natural for the police to talk to you and to your wife. What did you tell them? That your secretary helped your niece get a job and that’s where your family duty ended?”

  “I didn’t tell them anything,” Dick said stiffly. “Teri and I agreed that we shouldn’t answer
any questions without our lawyer present.”

  “And your lawyer was playing golf, so she couldn’t come out to Oak Brook on Saturday?” I asked.

  “Our personal lawyer does estate planning. She’s getting us someone who’s familiar with criminal law.”

  “Dick, there are a hundred different things I’m tempted to say to you this morning, just to get your goat, but I’m not going to because this is serious. A young woman is missing, and it doesn’t look good. If you know anything, anything—if she called Teri to ask about bus schedules or called you for legal advice, tell the police. I know you don’t want her life on your conscience.”

  I actually wasn’t sure of that. In today’s America, we’ve been brainwashed into thinking we don’t owe each other any help or support. The richer we are, the more inclined we are to leave our neighbors and indigent nieces to die on the side of the road.

  15

  Bodywork

  I needed to run one last errand before going to the clinic: delivering the remnants of Fausson’s computer to my computer wizard.

  Niko Cruickshank is a cheerful, sleepy-eyed guy, but the deconstructed MacBook took away some of his usual bonhomie. “Jeez, V.I., this is a valuable machine. You shouldn’t be using it as a shield in a sword fight. Unless you buried nuclear codes in the rubble, just throw it out.”

  “It was a gunfight, not swords,” I said. “No nuclear codes, but I’m praying for a lead to a killer. Anything—an address, a name or two. This guy was murdered, and all I know about him is that he liked archaeology.”

  “I’m not a miracle worker,” Niko warned.

  “Just a wizard,” I said. “Keep me posted.”

  It was close to two when I finally made it to Lotty’s clinic on Damen.

  Jewel Kim, the senior nurse, unwrapped Mr. Contreras’s dressing. “Halloween is half a year away, Vic, too early to go around looking like a zombie. Your neighbor did a good job on cleaning the wound, though. It’s already started to heal. We’ll put a light cover on it, give you your tetanus, and send you on your way.”