Shell Game

by Sara Paretsky

  She looked at my bruised hip before I dressed and had me do various stretches and bends, as well as stand on my right leg. “I don’t think you need X-rays. You can put weight on it without screaming. Just baby it for a few days. Your body will tell you if you’re overdoing it.”

  She put her own topical ointment on it, gave me a tube to take with me, and called for her next patient.

  I phoned Harmony as I drove to my office. She said that the police were still in the building, searching, but she and Mitch were watching a movie on Harmony’s laptop.

  “First I was going around with them, but it was too upsetting. Every time they went into an apartment or broke the door on an old storeroom I’d start shaking, worrying what would be on the other side. Once they found a whole nest of rats, so I started freaking about them, too.”

  When I said I’d be by for the dog in an hour or so, Harmony diffidently asked if he could stay the night.

  “I promise I’ll walk him: we’ve already been out once and he had a good time in the park. He makes me feel safe.”

  “Sure, of course, just call me if he starts barking or whining to get out and I’ll come over. We don’t want Reno to lose her lease because of him.”

  That also eased a worry at the back of my own mind about Harmony’s safety in the building. If Reno had been abducted, whether by some chance-met old abuser or some current-day bastard, the perp could well be keeping an eye on a search for her. It’s something predators in particular like to do—they think they are smarter than the law, and so they like to gloat nearby as the law tries uselessly to track them down. Someone would have to be well armed and cocky to take on Mitch.

  At my office, I re-anointed my sore hip with Jewel’s prescription unguent. The bruise looked more like Lake Michigan than ever, with the shoreline turning yellow and green while the center remained a dark purple.

  I resolutely turned away from the cot in the back and settled down with my computer.

  I started with the books I’d taken from Fausson’s apartment, beginning with the slender book of poetry by Tarik Kataba.

  International PEN’s website gave me more information about Kataba. In addition to his own poetry, Kataba had translated work from Russian and French into Arabic. It was the Russian that got him into trouble: he had translated a poem by Osip Mandelstam written about Stalin back in the 1930s.

  In “Stalin’s Epigram,” PEN informed me, Mandelstam called Stalin’s mustache a “cockroach” and described his followers as “a mob of thin-necked leaders, half men. . . . Some . . . meowing or whistling or whining . . . [while Stalin] pokes some in the groin or in the brow.”

  The poem got its author sent to his death in the gulags, and the translation didn’t do Kataba much good, either: Bashar al-Assad seemed to take it personally, for reasons the article didn’t make clear. At any rate, Kataba was imprisoned and tortured for twenty-two months. His wife died while he was in prison.

  When he was released, the civil war was heating up. He fled to Beirut, along with millions of other Middle Easterners during the upheavals of the 2010s. After that I couldn’t trace him. Dead, drowned, disappeared? If his daughter had stayed in Beirut, she might be sheltering him.

  I looked at every page in the book, but didn’t see anything except occasional marginal notes in pencil.

  I put Kataba’s book to one side and turned to Urban Development in the Chalcolithic by Candra van Vliet, who was much easier to research than Kataba. Although born and raised in the Netherlands, she lived in Chicago and in fact was on the faculty at the Oriental Institute.

  It was four-thirty now, and the Oriental Institute closed at five. I called Van Vliet’s office and got her voice mail. I tried her home. A man with a lightly accented baritone answered. He was startled, as everyone is when a detective calls out of the blue asking for them by name. He also was Professor Van Vliet, but when we had sorted out that I wanted Candra and he was Gottfried, he summoned his wife to the phone.

  “Lawrence Fausson? Yes, I know him, although it has been several years since I last spoke to him. Why are you calling, detective? Has he committed a crime?”

  “He may have done, but I’m calling because he’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry to hear of this, but how does it involve me?”

  “I’m having trouble finding out much about him; he had a copy of your book on the Chalcolithic and I was hoping you could give me some information about him. I know only two things about him: he was obsessed with Middle Eastern archaeology, and he was murdered.”

  16

  Family Dinner

  Van Vliet didn’t want to discuss Fausson over the phone. “It’s a complex story and I need to see you face-to-face before I decide to tell it to you. I will not be on campus tomorrow, but you may come to my office at ten Monday morning.”

  In her place, I would have been equally cautious, but it didn’t stop my annoyance. I agreed to her terms, though, and turned my attention to finding Donna Lutas’s home address.

  The search was straightforward and quick. Lutas was forty-one, had an associate’s degree in accounting from the College of DuPage, lived with her mother in southwest suburban Oak Lawn. She’d never married. There was one sibling, a brother with three children, who lived farther west.

  If I phoned, Lutas would undoubtedly stiff me. On a drizzly Saturday, there was a good chance she’d be home. I should be able to talk my way past the front door.

  I rubbed my right hip, wondering whether all the flexing involved in driving twenty-five miles would make it heal faster or more slowly. Faster, of course: it would force blood to the area.

  Terry Finchley called as I was getting on the expressway to tell me Sergeant Abreu’s team had come up empty at Reno’s building. “They found a pound of marijuana and an uncut brick of heroin in one apartment, so it wasn’t a total waste of resources, but the only bodies they uncovered belonged to a couple of cats who’d died in the old coal boilers. Abreu had high hopes of the boilers—the seals had been tampered with—but nothing came of it except the cats. We did ask the building department to send a notice to the building manager, ordering their removal, but who knows if that will ever happen.”

  A semi behind me gave a loud goose honk; I’d committed the sin of letting two car lengths open up in front of me on the on-ramp and scooted up to fill the gap.

  “Did you have time to ask the airlines if Reno had booked a ticket?”

  “I did that one myself—I still have enough connections at Thirty-Fifth and Mich that they listen to me faster at O’Hare. There’s no record of the Seale woman flying, or of renting a car, at least from the big agencies. It’s always possible she hitchhiked, or borrowed transport from a friend.”

  The news, or lack of it, was depressing, but I thanked Finchley, both for the CPD effort and for letting me know.

  “I’ve known you a long time, Warshawski: the more you know, the less damage you’re likely to do.”

  I guessed that was a joke, so I laughed. “That reminds me—I had a call from Dick Yarborough this morning, angry that someone had had the temerity to question him about his niece. Was that you?”

  “Ah, yes. The lawyer who can’t talk about his family without a lawyer present. No, that was Francine. Sergeant Abreu. She went there before she started the search at the building on Fairfield. Made me curious, though. I may call on the counselor in his office on Monday. Maybe wear my uniform with all the badges and so on to give the rank and file at the firm something to wonder about. It always helps a little, when the underlings are gossiping. Pushes the higher-ups into acting more recklessly than they might have done.”

  I laughed again, more naturally this time. Mean-spirited, perhaps, but I enjoyed the thought of Dick sweating in his office while Glynis tried to shield him from the Finch.

  “Later, Warshawski.” Finchley hung up.

  By the time I got to the Cicero exit, it was six. Suppertime for a lot of households, maybe for the Lutases as well, but Donna would be annoyed by
my arrival no matter what she was doing.

  Oak Lawn is a blue-collar suburb with quiet streets, except for the jets screaming their way in and out of Midway Airport. Donna and her mother lived on a cul-de-sac in a ranch house whose wood siding had weathered to a soft gray. Two bare rectangles of ground lined the sidewalk, waiting for warmer weather and a chance to turn into a garden.

  The attached garage was closed, so I couldn’t tell if a car was at home, but there was a light on in the back. I rang the bell, and after a moment an older woman in khaki slacks and a faded blue pullover came to the door.

  I smiled politely and introduced myself. “Did your daughter explain that one of her employees has disappeared? The police are not optimistic about whether she’s alive. I’m sorry to intrude on a Saturday evening, but every day counts in looking for a missing person.”

  Donna appeared behind her mother. “You? Why are you here?”

  Mrs. Lutas looked at her daughter in surprise. “Dini, if the girl is missing, and you know something, you should help the detective.”

  “She’s not a real detective.”

  “I’m not with the police,” I corrected her. “But I am a real detective, licensed by the State of Illinois, with over twenty years’ experience. I need to know what Reno told you happened in St. Matthieu.”

  “You busted into the office, and now you’re doing the same thing here, but I have a right to be private in my own home.”

  “I got the feeling you didn’t feel able to talk freely in your office. I thought we could go over details more comfortably in your own home, where there aren’t video cameras recording everything you say.”

  Donna frowned at her mother. “We’re getting ready to eat dinner.”

  “Dinner can wait,” her mother said. “She’s asking about that girl you’ve been talking about. You take her into the front room; I’ll see that the lasagna comes out of the oven on time.”

  Donna took me into the front room on dragging feet, like a teenager whose mother had ordered her to an unwanted household chore. The TV was on, tuned to an animal show—parrots and dogs seemed to be doing tricks together. Donna sat on the edge of a stuffed armchair, hands clenched tight in her lap, oblivious to the television.

  “Well?”

  I found the remote and turned off the set. “It’s not well. There are four main possibilities: Reno Seale is dead, Reno Seale has been in an accident and isn’t able to identify herself, Reno Seale has been abducted by people who didn’t leave a trace that the police can uncover, or Reno Seale has left town on an errand so private she didn’t tell you or her sister, the two people she would be most likely to confide in. Which one do you choose?”

  The tendons in Lutas’s neck moved, as if she were trying to respond but couldn’t.

  “What’s going on, Ms. Lutas?” I tried to speak in an empathic or at least a neutral tone, but I was tense myself. “On Thursday you seemed pleased, even relieved, to hear from me. Yesterday, you’d been shut down by corporate. I get that: no talking to outsiders about company policy, your job’s on the line, and so on. When Jerry took me to your office, I thought he lingered to protect you, but now I’m thinking he was monitoring you to report back to someone, probably Eliza Trosse.”

  Lutas looked at me wide-eyed, as if I’d performed an amazing conjuring trick.

  “Do you know what happened to Reno Seale?” I asked when she still hadn’t spoken.

  Lutas shook her head slowly, as if the tension in her neck made it hard for her to move.

  “I’m pretty sure she isn’t injured, or at least that she hasn’t been admitted to an area hospital, because I’ve checked all those. So is she dead or is she off on a secret errand?”

  “I don’t know where she is or what she’s doing,” Lutas said roughly. “And it wasn’t Eliza Trosse. I don’t know who it was.”

  “Who it was what—oh, who told you to lay off asking about Reno. Someone called you?”

  Even though it was Saturday evening, Donna was wearing makeup, and flakes of red skin came off as she bit her lips. She gave the smallest of nods.

  “What did they say?”

  “They told me I was an employee with a good career and a good track record, but that making a fuss about Reno could hurt my future.”

  “Man? Woman? Jerry?”

  “A man. Not anyone I knew. He sounded like one of those TV announcers, or those preachers with the big TV audiences.”

  “Did he say anything else, I mean, about why it would hurt your career?”

  “He said Reno had left the company under a cloud; that she was lucky they weren’t going to prosecute her, and they didn’t want me to make the mistake of thinking she’d been ill-treated.”

  “Did you ask the guy who called where she is?” I demanded.

  Lutas shrugged but didn’t look at me.

  “Didn’t you want to know? Didn’t you care?”

  She still didn’t speak, but she held her body even more stiffly.

  “There’s something else, isn’t there?” I said sharply. “A carrot or a stick?”

  She turned crimson under her makeup. “Pictures,” she whispered. “Pictures I didn’t know anyone had taken. I—please—”

  The humiliations of the vulnerable are unbearable. “Not my business. I only care about Reno, what inkling she gave about St. Matthieu that would help me start looking for her.”

  Donna twisted her rings so roughly that one tore skin off the inside of her finger. “I don’t know. I could tell something had upset her, but—you keep saying Reno trusted me. That isn’t true. She came back quieter than when she’d gone away, even though she was pretty darn quiet to begin with. We asked her what it was like, what they’d done, and she said some of it was nice, the beaches were gorgeous, but she said the event was like Mad Men on steroids—rich men, young women in bikinis who were expected to lap dance. She was angry. I told her to let it ride, it was just five days out of her life, and she said it seemed like the entire story of her life.

  “Next thing I know, I get a call from Eliza Trosse at corporate HR, telling me Reno filed a complaint and it was my job to stop that where it started. ‘Senior staff will take note and it will reflect badly on you if this gets publicized.’ Meaning I could be demoted or even fired.”

  Mrs. Lutas came back with a couple of mugs of hot water and a box of tea bags, which she put on an end table near the couch where I was sitting. “You girls look like you could use a little refreshment.”

  I smiled gratefully. Drinking tea gives all parties something to do with their hands and eases the throat muscles. I took a packet of ginger-turmeric.

  “So I talked to Reno and said, whatever happened in St. Matthieu, the company wasn’t going to help, and could she let it lie? She went back to work, but when she wasn’t with a customer she seemed to disappear. Into herself, I mean.”

  Lutas drank some of the hot water. “And then I went to look at Reno’s personnel file to see if the complaint to HR had generated a written response and I found someone at corporate had put a note in Reno’s file. Online, I mean.”

  “What did the note say?” I asked.

  “‘What do we know about this girl?’ and no initials. You write in someone’s file, you initial it. I was on the phone with my manager right away.”

  “Eliza Trosse?” I asked.

  “No, she’s corporate. My manager runs the twenty West Side branches—she reports to Eliza. My manager said there wasn’t any note in Reno’s file and what was I talking about? And sure enough, I logged back in and the note was gone.”

  “Someone assaulted Reno when she was a child. She never knew the man’s name. Her sister wondered if she might have encountered him at the resort.”

  “Oh, poor thing!” Lutas’s mother had been in the doorway without my noticing. “Dini—did she ever say anything about that?”

  Donna shook her head. “Maybe she overreacted to what was going on at the resort because of it. Maybe it wasn’t as—as creepy as she made it so
und.”

  “Or it was creepier than it sounded,” I said. “Did anything special happen on Monday, the Monday that was Reno’s last day?”

  Lutas’s mouth twisted in annoyance. “I asked her if there was some secret she was sitting on that I needed to know about. As her manager, you know. It was that note in her file that appeared and disappeared. I asked her point-blank if she’d had a run-in with anyone on senior staff at the resort. She said when she could ID the company’s senior staff she’d be able to answer that question. And then she left the building.

  “When she didn’t come in or answer her phone Tuesday and Wednesday, I got worried, so when you called on Thursday, I was relieved. But then—I got the message . . .” Her voice died away and she wiped her hands on her jeans, as if her palms were sweaty.

  The message threatening to blackmail her if she spoke to me.

  I could smell the beef and tomato sauce from the lasagna and realized I was hungry and twenty-five miles from home.

  “Were you in your office when Reno and you spoke on Monday? Could anyone have overheard you?”

  Lutas gave a wry smile. “You saw that office. Privacy is not exactly our number one priority.”

  17

  Vacation Spots

  I couldn’t figure out what use to make of Donna Lutas’s story. Her last comment was particularly unsettling. Reno was trying to identify Rest EZ’s senior staff. Had one of the company’s owners assaulted her, claiming it was all in a day’s work? “We brought you to this lovely island, now you won’t play along?” And then they’d put a note in her personnel file, but removed it when they realized it would draw more attention to the situation.

  The rain had let up, but the temperature had dropped. By the time I got back to my own place on Racine, my hip and trap were aching. I limped from the car to the front door, limped as I walked Peppy around the block.

  Saturday nights I sometimes go to a club for dancing or music, but tonight I stretched out in front of the television, watching the Blackhawks while I ate pizza and drank half a bottle of Brunello. Partway through the third period, Harmony called me to say that Sergeant Abreu had stopped by to tell her the lack of results in person.