Shell Game

by Sara Paretsky

  “I feel like Reno disappeared, it hurts me, her doing that, like she didn’t love me the way I thought she did.”

  “Harmony, I don’t know what happened to Reno, but I doubt she abandoned you willingly. By now you must surely know that the news about her is not likely to be good.”

  “Maybe she liked the idea of vanishing.” Harmony sniffed. “She left Portland, left me and Clarisse on our own, but I could still reach her. Maybe she wanted to get away from me completely.”

  In some ways, it was a bratty outburst, but it also reflected the sisters’ essential aloneness. I didn’t have a useful response, so I asked instead if Reno had talked about any of the executives from Rest EZ.

  “She was trying to get the names of the company’s senior management,” I said. “Did she say anything to suggest she’d had a run-in with company execs at the resort?”

  “She never said anything except, like I told you, about how these johns all have the same look, vultures but dead. Well, also she said Mama Clarisse would have a fit if she knew how stupid Reno’d been, agreeing to go down there in the first place.”

  She was quiet for a long moment before saying in a small voice, “I know she’s probably dead. I can’t bear thinking about it, because my mind starts remembering every bad thing that can happen when some man is making—”

  She cut herself off. She knew more than most people about every bad thing that can happen when you are in the power of a powerful man.

  “Anyway,” she added after another silence, “I can’t stay in Chicago any longer; it’s making me crazy, since I can’t do anything to find her. At least when I’m working in the garden shop I’m making things come to life, so I’m going to fly back to Portland Monday morning.”

  I assured her that I thought she was making the right decision but promised that I would keep searching. Before we hung up, I insisted that Harmony spend her last day in Chicago as a tourist.

  For once this week, I had a full night’s sleep and woke up full of pep for taking Harmony around the city. Mr. Contreras joined us for a Chicago Architecture Foundation walking tour of the downtown buildings. I’d stopped limping and the map of Lake Michigan had begun turning yellow in the middle, which meant the deep bruise was healing.

  We drove down to South Chicago to look at the house where I’d grown up. Harmony had a fragmented memory of the Christmas she’d spent there when she was five, but we couldn’t go inside: the current owner shut the front door halfway through my request to look at my childhood bedroom. I was lucky the house was still standing—so many homes in my old neighborhood have gone into foreclosure, or fallen down, that many streets have more empty lots than houses.

  My mother’s olive tree was still in the front yard. She’d planted it to try to keep a connection to the Italy she’d fled and never seen again. Harmony tried to inspect it, but the owner appeared again in the doorway, this time with a gun.

  We finished with dinner at Orvieto’s on North Harlem, where my dad used to take my mother for their wedding anniversary every year. It’s an old-fashioned restaurant, serving big portions of creamy pasta—not the kind of food my mother ever liked or cooked—but Gabriella loved Orvieto’s for its murals of the Umbrian hills where she grew up.

  I tried to persuade Harmony to sleep at my place, to make sure we all got up in time to make her flight, but her things were at Reno’s; she needed to go back there.

  Before going to bed myself, I checked in with Lotty to see if she’d heard from Felix.

  “He actually came to dinner this evening. He said he had been camping in northern Minnesota with some of his engineering friends. They were trying to solve a difficult problem and decided that something like a retreat would help them think more clearly.”

  “Did he come alone?” I asked.

  “Yes. I have yet to meet his free state engineers, but he seemed more like his old self than he’s been lately.” She gave a short laugh. “Like every other older woman with an attractive young man in her life, I choose to believe him, even though at the back of my mind I have questions.”

  Such as whether the camping/retreat story was believable. Out of curiosity, I looked up the weather in northern Minnesota. It was almost twenty degrees colder than Chicago, the ski resorts were proclaiming a good foot of snow cover, and the lakes were all frozen. I suppose Felix could be a snow camper, but the story sounded more like something he’d cobbled together after he got home.

  He was working on the biggest engineering project of his young career, he’d said when we spoke on Friday, not “my pals and I went up to the north woods to think things through.”

  “Did he say whether the sheriff’s police had been in touch with him to talk about Lawrence Fausson? Murray Ryerson’s sound bite got the lieutenant all hot and bothered.”

  “Yes. I think that is why Felix came to dinner: the lawyer you got him, Martha Simone, went with him and turned the interrogation into a short formality. We’re both grateful to you. I hope that he also remembers to thank you.”

  As if on cue, Felix phoned me himself as soon as Lotty and I said good night. He told me pretty much the same story Lotty had reported.

  “Camping in northern Minnesota in late March?” I said. “You and your friends are hearty spirits—the place is still covered with snow and ice.”

  “I’m Canadian, Vic, from Montreal. We love winter camping.”

  He added a formal thank-you for Martha Simone’s assistance. “I’m not sure she persuaded the sheriff that I truly never met Fausson, but she did make sure he knew he couldn’t talk to me without her being in the room. She says there’s no evidence to charge me with a crime, and I guess she has a pretty good reputation. Lieutenant McGivney let me go, except he told me not to leave Cook County until everything is cleared up. I guess I’m okay for now, but what if they don’t have things cleared up by the end of May? I’m going to go home after the term ends.”

  I tried to reassure him. It would be surprising if a murder investigation stretched beyond eight weeks, but that only made him more nervous: he was sure McGivney would frame him for Fausson’s death. My well of pep talk dried up. I didn’t know whether Felix was in fact involved with Fausson in some way, and of course Murray Ryerson had goaded the county into deeper suspicions of Felix. That would never have happened if it weren’t for Murray’s and my relationship. Felix and I finally hung up with no satisfaction on either side.

  I went to bed soon after, since I was getting up early to take Harmony to the airport, but I couldn’t sleep. My mind kept ping-ponging between Felix’s camping story and Donna Lutas’s claim that Reno was trying to track down Rest EZ’s senior staff. What company shrouds the names of their senior executives in secrecy?

  I finally got up and went to the dining room, where I poured Armagnac into one of my mother’s red glasses and tried to read a biography of Niccolò Jommelli, who composed the only opera my mother ever performed in. I couldn’t focus.

  I went back to bed, hoping the Armagnac or Jommelli would knock me out, but at one I got up again to look at Rest EZ. I didn’t know anything about their corporate structure, who owned them, whom they owned.

  The company wasn’t publicly traded. After an hour of hunting, that was about all I learned. There were no SEC filings, but they were a wholly owned subsidiary of Trechette Investments, incorporated in Delaware. Trechette Investments was a company that invested in financial instruments for the benefit of its shareholders, which totaled one: Trechette International, whose business was unspecified. They had been incorporated in Havre-des-Anges, the capital of St. Matthieu.

  I’d heard the Trechette name before, but I couldn’t place it. I did a search of all the notes I’d been taking since Harmony first came to me, then tried Felix, and finally my closed cases, but wherever I’d seen it hadn’t been connected to my own investigations.

  And anyway, it was beside the point: no matter where Trechette International was incorporated, if it was an offshore incorporation the owners wouldn�
��t physically be in the same place as the corporate headquarters. They could be in London or New York or right here in Chicago, with a registered agent handling their business from the Caribbean.

  Before shutting everything down, I tried a reverse search: other companies owned by Trechette Investments or Trechette International. I found banks in Latvia and Kiev; an insurance company headquartered in Jersey; a holding company based in Buenos Aires that invested in oil rigs. But nowhere could I find a name of a shareholder other than a parent company. In some cases the parent was Trechette International, in others the Trechette Insurance Group. All of them had been set up in tax havens, and none of them listed any personnel. The registered agent was always a bank or, in some cases, the office of a local law firm.

  When I looked up the island, I saw that St. Matthieu was near Martinique in the French West Indies. Like so many of the islands in the Greater and Lesser Antilles, their chief business seemed to be manufacturing offshore companies for needy investors. Personal, corporate, I myself could get a trust, a foundation, or a company with a few clicks of my mouse and a little money debited from my bank account.

  Could Reno have flown to Havre-des-Anges in an effort to uncover the owners of Trechette in person? If so, she’d used an assumed name, because she hadn’t shown up when Finchley queried the airlines.

  At two, I reminded myself that I had to pick Harmony up at six-fifteen to get her to Midway on time, which meant I needed to get up at five. I went to bed with that grinding feeling in my head you get when you’re trying to shut your brain down but can’t.

  I had barely dropped off when my phone woke me again. I swore, was about to send the caller to voice mail, when I saw it was Harmony.

  “Vic? Vic—I think someone’s trying to break in—I can hear—”

  “I’m on my way.” I was pulling on jeans. “I’m calling 911 and then I’m calling you back. You stay on the phone with me until I get there.”

  By the time I picked up Mitch on my way out of the building, I’d reached 911. I mapped the route in my head, pushing my panic out of my gut. I ran stoplights, swerved around slower traffic, cut in front of trucks. At North and Ashland my luck ran out: a squad car flagged me.

  I jumped out of the Mustang and ran to the squad. “Officer, my niece—she heard someone breaking into her place and now she’s not answering the phone. I’ve called 911 but I need to get there.”

  I was practically weeping with fury, fear, frustration, which got the driver to take me seriously. The girlie reaction. I hated it but I couldn’t control it. The cop checked with 911, then said he’d follow me, siren whining. We did the last mile and a half in two minutes.

  A blue-and-white was already in front of the building when we arrived. They had managed to rouse someone to buzz them in, told me to stay in the lobby while they headed up the stairs. With Mitch at my side, I turned and ran down the corridor to the rear stairwell. The dog raced up the stairs ahead of me, growling, hackles raised.

  Mitch had bounded into the apartment by the time I got there: the lock on the back door had been forced. I hurled myself through the opening, crying Harmony’s name. Police were pounding on the front door, but Mitch had gone back out into the hall. I followed him to the service elevator, where the garbage bins for the floor stood. He was nosing at one, whining and barking.

  My stomach turned cold. I could barely bring myself to open the lid. The corn silk hair, filled with food and paper debris, hung over her doubled-up body. She didn’t move. Mitch jumped up, paws over the edge of the bin, nuzzling her head.

  Harmony, you are not dead, Harmony, you are not dead. I stuck in a trembling hand to feel her neck. A pulse, a flutter.

  An officer appeared next to me, a short woman with a leathery face.

  “My niece,” I whispered. “She’s still alive. I don’t know—she could be wounded—”

  The officer told me to move Mitch and she’d see about my niece. The dog didn’t want to leave Harmony; he growled and snapped at me as I braced my legs against the open stairwell door to hold him.

  “Don’t tase him,” I gasped as the woman put a hand on her tool belt. “He’s protecting her, he’s doing his job.”

  “You’d better have a good grip on him then, honey.”

  She gently tipped the bin onto its side and eased Harmony out. Mitch broke from me then and ran to her side, licking her face. The officer decided to leave him alone. I helped her straighten Harmony’s legs and arms. We lifted the sweatshirt she was wearing and lowered the yoga pants but didn’t see any wounds.

  “Shock is my guess,” the officer said, “but I’m not an EMT. You stay with her; I’ll call an ambulance.”

  I took off my coat and wrapped it around my niece. Her face was waxen and her breath came in slow gasps. I held Harmony’s hand and crooned those meaningless sounds we give each other to show love. Mitch kept working on her face until EMTs arrived and strapped her to a gurney.

  It took every ounce of my strength to hold him then: he was frenzied as they lifted her and carried her to the service elevator. When the elevator doors closed, he began a heartbreaking howl. I tried to calm him, but I was only partially successful. I kept him next to me on a tight leash to look at Reno’s apartment.

  It had been searched with a rough and wild hand—drawers pulled out, Reno’s tidy stacks of clothes on the floor, even the kitchen cupboards swept bare.

  18

  Safe Space

  It was nearly dawn when Sergeant Abreu and Terry Finchley finished talking to me. They met me at the hospital, where the ER staff told me Harmony was suffering from shock, not from bullet wounds. They were giving her fluids and wanted her to rest overnight, but they let me go to her room and sit with her. Someone had cleaned the garbage from her hair and face. She looked heartbreakingly young and vulnerable.

  When I took her hand, her eyes fluttered open. “Clarisse?”

  “It’s Vic, Harmony. Your auntie Vic.”

  Her eyes closed, as if she were retreating from me and the ugly present, but when I gently squeezed her fingers, she said, “I was dreaming about Henry and Clarisse.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “Henry and Clarisse are your safe place. I’m sorry to make you leave it, but I want to ask you a few questions. Can you remember what happened? You called me to say someone was breaking in.”

  “I could hear them at the back door.” The monitors on her started beeping more loudly and a nurse came into the room, frowning at me for agitating the patient.

  “I called you but then the noise and the shouting, I froze, it was like I was eight again in the shelter and me and Reno would hide to get away from Mom and her boyfriends. I—how could I—a grown-up person would have run out the front door and gotten help, but I hid like a chicken.” She was starting to cry.

  “Don’t,” I said. “You saved yourself. You did all the smart things. You called me, you put yourself in a space where your attackers couldn’t get you. I think you were quite resourceful. I wouldn’t even have looked in the garbage bin if Mitch hadn’t sensed you were there.”

  Harmony’s teeth were chattering; her hand in mine was cold again. The nurse told me I needed to go.

  “No,” Harmony whispered. “She’s my auntie, I need her.”

  Finchley and Abreu came into the room at that moment, followed by another nurse who told them they couldn’t disturb the patient.

  “But the private eye can?” Finchley said. “I don’t think so. If Ms. Seale can answer Warshawski’s questions, she can answer mine.”

  Harmony gripped my fingers. “You’re not leaving, are you?”

  “Staying right here,” I assured her.

  “Ms. Seale, we aren’t here to harass you,” Finchley said, “but the more information you can give us right now, while the event is fresh in your mind, the better chance we have of catching whoever broke in. Did you see their faces?”

  “I hid behind the kitchen door when they broke in and then I ran to the hall. I only saw their backs
. They were huge, they were the biggest men I ever saw.”

  Prodded by Abreu, Harmony thought there’d been three men; they all wore black leather jackets and fur hats.

  “Did you hear them talking?” Finchley asked.

  “I was so scared all I heard was my heart, and then I was in the garbage bin and I guess I fainted.”

  “What can you remember, Ms. Seale?” Sergeant Abreu asked. “How did you know someone was trying to break in?”

  “I was in bed, watching People of Earth on my tablet, and first I thought it was the soundtrack, then I realized someone was at the back door. I thought maybe it was Vern Wolferman, the super, you know, because the garbage for our floor, it goes in cans out by the elevator, but then the noise got louder, like something breaking, and I knew they were trying to get in, so I called Auntie Vic and then the rest happened.”

  “The rest?” Finchley said sharply.

  “They broke out the lock or the door, I don’t know which, and I ran into the hall and hid.” Harmony’s grip on my fingers tightened. For the rest of their questions, she kept her eyes on me and her hand tightly wrapped around mine.

  Finchley wondered what the wreckers could have been looking for—drugs? That made Harmony angry: she and Reno never used, she’d told the police that already, and it was hard to keep talking to cops if cops kept accusing you of lying.

  “We don’t think you’re lying, Ms. Seale,” Sergeant Abreu said. “But you haven’t seen your sister for a year. You don’t know what the stress of being alone in this big city could have done to her.”

  “We were alone in Oakland and that was more stress than you’ve ever known, but we never used that stuff. Ever.” Harmony’s mouth set in a stubborn line. “We saw how fast girls fell apart when they used. We saw what happened to our mom.”