Shell Game

by Sara Paretsky

  “His computer took a bullet for me. My tech master is trying to reconstruct the hard drive.”

  Kooi didn’t seem curious about the bullet—or about Lawrence’s cash, for that matter. His personality occupied too much of her mind.

  Mary-Carol wrapped half her sandwich in a napkin: she had to get back to work. “You think he’s guilty of some crime, don’t you?” she said as we left the café.

  “I don’t think anything because I don’t have enough data. A cash hoard is often associated with drug deals, and your friend did spend time in one of the world’s heroin capitals, but I didn’t see any signs of using in his apartment. He could have been holding the money for someone else, though. Maybe his Syrian friends got him to smuggle cash out of the country so they’d have a nest egg when they got here.”

  Kooi brightened. “That sounds much more like him. Especially if Kataba was involved. Lawrence idolizes—idolized poets.”

  My mouth twisted in a wry smile. “We’ve come up with half a dozen theories but no facts. It’s like, I don’t know, imagining a dig but not having a single piece of pottery in your hands. Detecting is like archaeology, I guess—we need facts and we need a context for them before they have any value.”

  We’d reached the museum entrance. I handed her one of my cards. “Call if something else occurs to you. Or if you need my help.”

  22

  Outreach

  As I trudged across campus to the parking garage, I wondered when the Silicon Valley tycoons would decide that sleep deprivation enhanced creativity, especially when combined with starvation.

  I had a long to-do list: I needed to call Mr. Contreras to make sure he and Harmony had made it home safely. I needed to call Sergeant Abreu to see if the cops had turned up any leads on who had broken into Reno’s apartment. I needed to go to my office and do work for my paying clients.

  I also needed to stay awake behind the wheel. When I climbed into my car, I figured if I shut my eyes for five minutes, I’d be able to tackle everything.

  My phone roused me from such a deep sleep that I thrashed around wildly in the car, trying to figure out where I was. I banged my knees into the steering wheel; the pain focused my mind. Car, U of Chicago parking garage, one in the afternoon.

  By the time I’d found my phone and woken up enough to remember where I was, my caller had hung up. It was Glynis Hadden, my ex’s secretary. She hadn’t left a voice message, and I didn’t want to talk to her, anyway—I was sure she only wanted to complain about Finchley arriving at Crawford, Mead’s offices this morning. Still, it was just as well she’d called—I’d been asleep for almost an hour. My mouth felt as though it had been stuffed with cotton, and my knees were like the Tin Man’s without his oil can.

  I extracted myself from the Mustang, stretched until my legs and shoulders agreed that I could drive, and returned to my office. Brushed my teeth. Picked up a couple of cortados from the coffee bar across the street and buckled down.

  Before starting work on Darraugh Graham’s queries, I checked in with Mr. Contreras. He and Harmony had made it home without incident. She was in bed, worn out from last night’s stresses and the fact that no one can sleep in a hospital.

  I talked to Sergeant Abreu. She said they figured someone had buzzed the invaders into the building. “No one will admit doing it, of course, but none of the outside doors had been forced open. We picked up some possible images from a security camera at the bank on the other side of the street. We wanted to show them to Ms. Seale, to see if they strike any kind of chord with her, but she’d left the hospital and we don’t know where to find her.”

  I gave Abreu Mr. Contreras’s phone number.

  I looked at my notes for Darraugh. This was a project that would require close concentration; I’d get up early tomorrow to tackle it with all my wits about me. This afternoon, before rush hour traffic became impenetrable, I was going out to the community center in Palos Park, where Lawrence Fausson had taught Arabic poetry to Syrian teens.

  The Syrian-Lebanese Community Outreach Center, on 124th Street, rented space in the town’s old Carnegie Library. Like other Carnegies, the building looked like a small temple. Carnegie had believed in the power of reading to change lives, so I suppose his libraries were designed to look like temples of learning.

  I climbed a flight of worn stone stairs, passed between the concrete pillars and into the entryway. Flyers in a rack near the door advertised everything from AA meetings to Zumba dance sessions. Signs to the Syrian-Lebanese Community Outreach Center pointed me to the basement, where the community rented a small room for meditation and prayer, and two larger ones for classes and community events.

  A schedule was taped to the events room door. Tonight there would be adult literacy classes with ESL tutors. Tomorrow night was a program on how to find help in the Chicagoland area. Thursday a chance for training on how to apply for jobs and conduct interviews. Arabic movies on Sunday afternoon. Arabic classes for different age levels on Wednesday evenings and Sunday mornings, Qur’an studies on Wednesday evenings.

  Anyone with questions should text or phone Sanjiiya Yaziki, the administrative director of the center; she could help set up a program for groups wishing to use the center. That was the name of the woman Mary-Carol had given me.

  The door was unlocked. No one was at the desk near the entrance, but I could hear banging from the back of the room. I threaded my way through a set of bookstacks and came on the space I’d seen on Lawrence Fausson’s Facebook page. It looked as though they hadn’t changed the posters or the children’s artwork in the intervening year.

  A woman of about forty, wearing an embroidered lavender head scarf over Western clothes, was taking folding chairs from a dolly and setting them up around two deal tables. She was slamming them open with a force that showed she wasn’t happy with the job.

  “Are you Sanjiiya Yaziki?” I asked, taking a chair, and hoping I’d pronounced the name in a recognizable manner. “Can I help you?”

  “Oh!” She straightened up, her cheeks rosy. “You startled me! The teens are supposed to be taking care of setting up, but of course they’d rather be in the mall or kicking a football.”

  I took a chair and opened it. “How many do you need?”

  While I opened another seven chairs and pushed the dolly to rest against a far wall, the woman went to a cupboard for paper and pencils. Another door led from the side of the room to a tiny kitchen, where she filled pitchers with water. I carried those to the tables for her. When we’d finished with the setup, she finally asked who I was and what I wanted.

  I gave her a card. “I’m a private investigator. I’ve come here because of Lawrence Fausson. You know he was murdered, don’t you?”

  “Lawrence,” Yaziki said softly. She pronounced it as my anonymous caller had, as “Elorenze.”

  “I saw the news. It was so strange, so unbelievable that a man that gentle could be murdered. And yet, in Syria every day small children are killed, so I suppose nothing violent in this world is unbelievable.”

  “He taught here, didn’t he?” I asked, sitting in one of the chairs.

  Yaziki nodded. “He loved Arabic deeply, it was as if he tried to make it his first language, not his second. He read so much Arabic literature—” She swept an arm toward the bookshelves. “He even used to buy books for us when he found we didn’t have this poet or that historian. He was impatient with the teenagers for not caring more about their native poetry. They prefer modern music and verse. It’s understandable.

  “The old people loved his classes. They loved hearing him recite in classical Arabic, especially the women, who feel lonely as their children become fluent in English and don’t speak Arabic at home.”

  “Did any of your people have theories about who might have murdered him?” I asked.

  “Some of our members think it was revenge from your immigration authorities because of the work Elorenze did with the Syrian community in Chicago.” Yaziki cast a sidelong glance to s
ee how I’d react to that rumor.

  “It’s possible he enraged ICE agents,” I said, “but they would have shot him, not beaten him so savagely.”

  “And you? Why are you here talking to me?”

  “I’m trying to find someone who can put him into a context for me,” I said. “A job, a girlfriend, anything where I could start talking to people, so I can learn who was angry enough with him to kick him to death.”

  I pulled out another print of the picture in the community events room and tapped Mary-Carol Kooi’s face. “She told me about his coming here to teach Arabic.”

  Yaziki took the print from me, her expression softening. “I took this picture. We were having a small party for two men who had passed their GED exams.”

  “Mary-Carol Kooi told me she thought he was working as a janitor at the same place as some of the men from your center. If you know where they work, could you tell me? Please? Or let me talk to them directly.”

  Yaziki’s face hardened again. “Mary-Carol Kooi has not been here for many months; why is she suddenly sending you here? And why are you caring about Elorenze’s death? Perhaps you yourself are working for the American government, wanting to catch undocumented people?”

  I started to bristle, then I thought of ICE agents descending on 7-Elevens and arresting hundreds of employees. Of the mothers detained in front of their children, of chemistry professors arrested as they buckled their daughters into their car seats. We had become a nation of bullies.

  “A young man, the nephew of a beloved friend, was brought in for questioning by the police. His phone number was found in Mr. Fausson’s pocket and so the police think he was involved in Fausson’s death. They’re not looking any further for a killer.”

  I brought Felix’s picture up on my phone and showed it to Yaziki. “Has he ever come around here?”

  She frowned over it. “Is he Syrian?”

  “He’s Canadian, but his family is from Middle Europe, not the Middle East.”

  She smiled briefly. “He’s a Jew? He could pass for an Arab. Of course, I could pass for a European. We all worry too much about these identities.”

  The inch or so of hair that appeared underneath her head scarf was light brown, and her face had that cream-and-rose-petal coloring beloved of romance novelists.

  “What was your Jewish friend doing here?” Yaziki asked.

  “I don’t know that he was; I’m just trying to find out how his and Fausson’s lives connected.”

  Yaziki shook her head slightly. “He looks vaguely familiar, but if he came it wouldn’t have been for any regular meeting. Maybe a special program?”

  “He’s an engineering student interested in desert water systems,” I said. “Do you hold workshops on topics that would be helpful for people’s families back home?”

  “This is my home, our home,” Yaziki said sharply. “Our workshops help our community adjust and adapt to their new country.”

  “So no engineering workshops,” I said, putting my phone away.

  Yaziki eyed me narrowly, as if trying to fathom my hidden motives in asking the question. “Some of our members are engineers or engineering students themselves; perhaps one of them brought him. My ESL students are arriving soon, so I must ask you to leave; they will be afraid that you are from the government.”

  I got up. “I still want to talk to someone who might know where Lawrence was working.”

  “I will ask,” Yaziki said. “I think it is safer, easier if you don’t speak to anyone directly.”

  “What about Tarik Kataba, the poet?” I said. “Fausson had his collected poems at his bedside and Mary-Carol Kooi said they knew each other from Fausson’s time in Syria.”

  Yaziki’s smile became wooden. “It has been many months since I last saw Sayyid Kataba. I could not tell you how to find him.”

  I tried to think of something to persuade her that I was on the side of truth and justice, not rounding up immigrants for ICE. Before anything occurred to me, the first of the ESL students arrived, two women in black abayas, their heads draped in black, along with a younger woman in skintight blue jeans and an orland park high school sweatshirt. All three were chatting and laughing in Arabic but stopped when they saw me.

  Yaziki greeted them in Arabic; they nodded and sat down, pulling out workbooks and exercise sheets. It was clearly time for me to leave.

  23

  Pay Stub

  I was only a few miles from where Lawrence Fausson’s body had been found, which made me think there had to be a connection between the community center and his murder. Sajiiya Yaziki didn’t trust me—why should she, since she’d never met me or heard of me? But the center was close to Cap Sauers Holding, where Fausson’s body had been discarded. Despite Yaziki’s protests, I couldn’t believe there was no connection between these two places.

  I’d grown up in the world of immigrants, mostly the Poles on the Southeast Side, but also with the Italians who were my mother’s friends. I know how immigrant communities close ranks against authority from the big Angloworld—you protect your own, even when your own are sleazebags.

  That’s why I didn’t have a high expectation that Yaziki would get back to me about where Lawrence Fausson had worked. She was protecting the people in her community who could be deported at any second. I didn’t exactly blame her, but it was maddening that I couldn’t persuade her to help me.

  Because I was nearby and didn’t know what to do next, I drove to Cap Sauers Holding. I wasn’t sure I could find the place where we’d parked, let alone the path through the woods themselves, but it turned out to be easy: the shoulder where the cop cars, ambulances, tech teams, and so on had parked was a mess of mud churned with yellow crime scene tape, cigarette butts, and crumpled chip bags.

  I pulled onto a patch of gravel near the road to keep my own wheels from sinking into the muck. It was close to five, meaning I had about an hour more of daylight, but on a gray afternoon in a forest, that didn’t count for much. My work flash gave better light than my phone, so I took that from the go-bag in my trunk. I’d left my windbreaker in the car when I visited Professor Van Vliet this morning; I put that on.

  The narrow trail that Felix and I had followed with so much difficulty had been widened by the number of people tramping through with equipment. The wider path ended near the giant tree, which was still marked, at least sort of, with crime scene tape—they’d tacked it to stakes in a circle around the tree, but the wind had blown enough of it free that the tape was now one more piece of plastic littering the woods.

  I shone my flash around as I walked the perimeter. All the coming and going had left bare patches in the heavy leaf cover, but a week of drizzle had melted most of the footprints. My fantasy that I might find a clue the crime scene techs had overlooked was just that, a fantasy.

  I crossed the tape to study the tree itself. The trunk had sunk a few inches into leaf mold, making it easy for the killers to shove a body into the hollowed-out core. Roots stuck out at wild angles, like the fingers of an arthritic giant. The trunk base rose higher than my waist, with the core perhaps a yard across. Insects were busy in the rusty outer bark. A detective is never squeamish, so I tried not to mind the mud, the bugs, the squishiness of the whole scene, as I squatted to look inside.

  Tendrils brushed my face as I stuck a tentative arm inside. The light, my arm, stirred an angry outcry. A brown creature hurled itself at me.

  I jumped back. Brushed my face and arms wildly, trying to make sure nothing was clinging to me. A few yards away, a squirrel snapped its tail, chattering loudly.

  “Your home, huh?” I said, trying to calm myself. “You have a right to defend it from giants, I guess.”

  The squirrel darted away, started up a tree, saw I wasn’t following, and raced back to threaten me again. He must have a family inside.

  “I know,” I said to him. “You have a Fourth Amendment right to be secure in your own home. What did you do when the killers brought Lawrence Fausson here? Did yo
u bite any of them? Take selfies?”

  I shone my flash around the rotting leaves at the base of the tree, not wanting to kneel on top of another squirrel or a snake in my good trousers. Even in jeans I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. I wondered if snakes and squirrels cohabited. There were so many things I didn’t know about the world around me. What kind of detective was I, really?

  I spread my windbreaker across the leaves, shone my flash directly in the squirrel’s eyes so that he backed farther away, and lay flat, looking into the heart of the trunk.

  I scooted forward until I could shine the flash around the interior. The hollowed innards extended a good ten feet from the base. The sides were black, pockmarked with insect holes. The squirrel nest was at the far end of the hollow core, about a yard from my outstretched arm. The mother was screeching, darting toward me and away.

  I backed out and found a long stick to use as a prod. When I returned to the log, my Achilles tendons tingled where they were exposed to the male’s sharp teeth.

  “Sorry,” I muttered, pushing the female from her nest.

  It was a disheveled mess of twigs and leaves, unlike the tidy weaving done by birds. Pieces of fabric were twined around some of the twigs. I inched forward, terrified of what else I might find, but no human bodies lay inside the log. No naked squirming squirrel babies, either, thank goodness: the female hadn’t yet given birth.

  Using the stick, I pulled the mess toward me and inched back out of the log. I sifted through the dirty leaves and twigs but didn’t find anything of interest. There were several scraps of fabric, one longish silky strand in a bright blue. The others were khaki canvas, the kind used in backpacks. The light was fading; I shone my flashlight on the biggest scrap, which looked like a corner piece. When I turned it over in my hands, shreds of paper came loose and fluttered to the ground.

  One was torn from a check showing a bit of the payer’s name, “Force 5 Ind.” The other was a receipt fragment headed “mascus Gat” in faded print with a partial date, February 27, the year missing. Someone had ordered $18.37 in carryout food.