Shell Game

by Sara Paretsky

  I stared for a moment. “mascus Gat”—I knew that name. Yes, the Damascus Gate on Austin. Lawrence Fausson had had a receipt from the restaurant next to his bed.

  I moved slowly away from the log, away from the male squirrel (who was holding his ground a few yards distant), shining my flash up and down the underbrush, hoping for more fragments. By now it was dark enough that I could barely make out the yellow crime scene tape; I’d have to come back in daylight if I hoped to find anything else.

  I pocketed the paper and the canvas, bundled the leaves and twigs and the long strand of royal-blue silk back together and poked them into the log with my stick. “Sorry for wrecking your home, ma’am,” I said to the squirrel. “I hope you can rebuild with these.” I felt as though I should give them something to make up for the canvas I’d filched, so I took some tissues from my pocket and stuffed them into the log as well.

  As I walked away, the male flicked his tail repeatedly and read me the riot act in the sternest possible language. He took my departure as a sign of surrender and ran back into his hideout.

  The brambles that tangled me on my trip out here last week with Felix caught in my trousers. I cried out when a thorn pierced me—the woods taking their revenge on me for disturbing the squirrels’ nest.

  It was five-thirty now. No matter what route I took to the city, the traffic would be glue. I drove into Orland Park, a nearby suburb, and found the modern library that had replaced the old Carnegie building. I curled up in an armchair and looked up Force 5 Ind.

  Force 5 Industrial Cleaners, their slogan: “We Chase Dirt with Tornado-like Force.” Their offices were on the northwest side, about two miles from Lawrence Fausson’s apartment. When I called, I got one of those annoying messages: Our menu has changed so that we may drive you to the brink of insanity. If I was looking for a cleaning crew; complaining about breakage or theft; worried about nuclear war . . .

  It was after business hours, but if they were industrial cleaners, they worked at night. I tried different menu options and finally was connected to a live human.

  “This is Detective Warshawski,” I said. “We’re trying to track down some of Lawrence Fausson’s co-workers.”

  The live human couldn’t or wouldn’t help me; she was only there to take messages and call team supervisors if a team member was calling in sick.

  “This particular team member called in dead,” I said. “Put me through to the supervisor for his group, please.”

  In a few minutes I was speaking to Melanie Duarte. She was annoyingly cautious. Yes, she knew who Lawrence Fausson was; she knew he had died. No, she couldn’t tell me where he’d worked. If I had a subpoena and presented it to her boss, her boss would tell her if it was all right to cooperate with me. It was the kind of precaution everyone ought to take to avoid scams, but it made my job harder.

  I got her boss’s name, Pablo Molita, but before she hung up, I asked if she accompanied her crew to the job site.

  “If it’s a big job, yes. If it’s a small job, I come by to inspect it when they’re done.”

  “Was Lawrence Fausson’s assignment at a big or small site?”

  “You talk to Mr. Molita. If you have the right documents, he’ll tell you what you’re trying to find out.”

  She cut the connection. I leaned back in the chair. How much energy did I want to put into this problem? My catnap on the U of C campus had been five hours ago and exhaustion was overwhelming me. The library chair was padded, and I started drifting off to sleep.

  As if she’d timed it, Lotty called me. “Victoria—I just heard from Martha Simone. The police came to the IIT campus this afternoon and took Felix in for more questioning.”

  “The city or the county?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Does it matter?” Her voice had an edge.

  “Only in the bigger scheme of things. Sorry, Lotty. Is Martha with him?”

  “She’s with him, but she says they are close to charging him with this man Fausson’s murder. I thought you were going to be helping him, but you haven’t done anything.” She was fighting panic, which made her angry.

  “I’ll talk to Martha,” I promised. “I’m struggling to get a toehold on Fausson’s life, but I’ll put more energy into it.”

  I texted Martha Simone, who called me almost instantly. “Vic, things are worrying, but not desperate. We’re in Maywood. Lieutenant McGivney and some of his crew are questioning Felix about his trip last week to northern Minnesota. ICE reported that he had multiple border crossings, so the sheriff wants to claim that he was disposing of evidence somewhere in the north woods. Felix is refusing to tell me what he was actually doing there. He says he was camping with friends, but he refuses to name his friends.”

  “Does he have to? Why can’t a person go off to the north woods without the Cook County sheriff and the U.S. Immigration and Customs service getting their noses in a knot?”

  “I agree,” Simone said. “But in the circumstances, it would be helpful if he could say or do something that would keep him out of prison. Even in late March, it’s cold and snowy in the Boundary Waters; everyone, I’m afraid, including me, is having a hard time believing he took a vacation up there. Especially in the middle of term time.”

  “Right now I’m on the trail of some of Fausson’s co-workers,” I said. “It’s been a slow slog, trying to find anyone who knew him well. Can you spin that into something about his last known associates starting to emerge?”

  “Better than nothing,” Simone agreed. “Call as soon as you have a name. Any name.”

  She cut the connection. I felt panicky, not good for an investigator.

  I drove back to the Syrian-Lebanese Community Outreach Center. If the ESL classes were still going on, I’d see if anyone would admit to working for Force 5. It wasn’t a great idea, but it was the only one I had.

  24

  Hitchhiking

  Light streamed from the basement windows at the center when I pulled up across the street. A few people were leaving the building, little knots of women laughing and gesturing to each other, but four men stood at the curb. I was getting out of my car to approach them when a grimy van arrived. Under the dirt and the dents was a drawing of a tornado funnel and the announcement that this was Force 5, with their web address and phone number. An overweight man in a Bears jacket climbed down from the driver’s side and lumbered over to the back of the van to open the doors. The men climbed inside.

  I shut the Mustang door and drove to the end of the street before making a U and following them into traffic. The van made another stop, at a street corner in Oak Lawn, and then turned onto the Stevenson Expressway. Rush hour, poor visibility, I had to stay closer than I liked.

  I kept the radio tuned to the news, in case a report came in about Felix. More shootings on the South and West Sides—hurray for a government that lets every citizen arm themselves with enough weapons to kill us all five or six times over. Nothing about Felix.

  At the bottom of the hour, there was a brief human interest story about the fish-man I’d seen this morning at the Oriental Institute.

  “We can’t add it to our collection,” Institute director Peter Sansen explained. “We don’t know anything about its history, including whether it’s stolen or looted. We’ve sent photographs to Interpol’s art crime division and we’re comparing them to international databases as well, but it’s an intriguing piece. We’re glad to have the opportunity to study it.”

  And then back to somber news—the firing of all scientists from the EPA, nuclear threats, droughts, floods, avalanches. Shooting in progress on East Eighty-Ninth Street, a hop away from my childhood home.

  The van exited at Damen Avenue and went north, into Pilsen, the heart of Chicago’s Mexican community. This was an area I could get to easily by bus. When the van stopped at Eighteenth and Ashland, I was ready; I took my wallet from my handbag, pulled into a parking space, and flung briefcase and handbag into the trunk. I scrambled into the back of the van with the
two other people who were joining it.

  The back was crowded; before the doors slammed shut, I could see perhaps a dozen people on the benches that lined the sides. Another eight or ten of us were jammed into the middle, standing.

  It was dark inside, but everyone noticed the stranger. Voices called to me in Spanish and, I presumed, Arabic.

  “Mi dispiace,” I apologized in Italian. “I don’t speak Spanish or Arabic. My name is Victoria.”

  Two women’s voices answered from the depths of the van, announcing their own names, and then the men chimed in. I could hear a fan whirring in the roof, but with so many of us crammed together it wasn’t easy to breathe. Unwashed clothes and bodies created a challenge all their own. I felt lucky to be standing at the rear. With the three people closest to me, I kept my nose near the seam in the back doors.

  There isn’t a street in Chicago without potholes, and our driver seemed determined to hit all of them. He slammed his brakes at each stop sign. A final halt: the regulars knew by sixth sense we were at our destination; I could feel them gathering jackets and handbags, pushing toward the exit. When the doors opened, I moved aside, not wanting to be the first out, showing a stranger’s face to the man in the Bears jacket. I could see lights and the facade of a high-rise, glass glistening in the rain.

  People tried to move toward the building entrance to get away from the rain, but the Bears jacket pushed them back toward the street. “Youse know the drill, line up while Melanie calls your name.”

  Melanie? It had to be Melanie Duarte, whom I’d spoken to earlier. I waited until most of the people had exited before climbing down. I pulled my windbreaker over my head and huddled near the end of the line. I couldn’t really hide—I was about the tallest person there.

  A woman appeared with a clipboard and an umbrella. The Bears jacket shone a flash on the inside, found someone’s sack lunch, handed it to Melanie, and slammed the doors shut. “See youse at one-thirty,” he growled. A true local. Only on Chicago’s South Side do people call each other “youse.”

  Melanie began reading off names, ticking them on the board. Each person shouted “here” before moving forward to the high-rise. At the end, only I was left.

  “And you are?”

  “Victoria. Victoria Fausson.”

  “You’re not on the—” She did a double take. “What last name?”

  “Fausson,” I repeated, spelling it out. “You recognize the name, I take it?”

  “How did you get on this van?” she demanded.

  “I was told I could pick it up at Eighteenth and Ashland. So that’s what I did.”

  “You can’t work here,” she announced. “You’re not in the system.”

  I didn’t respond. I couldn’t respond. We were in front of the Grommet Building. During the day, the curved glass facade reflected the changing light over the river and the traffic roaring over the Wells Street Bridge. At night, the reflected headlights swooped in and out, the cars and trucks invisible in the night-blackened glass.

  My brain seemed similarly untethered. The Grommet Building is where my ex-husband’s law firm leases seven floors. Richard Yarborough and Lawrence Fausson—they couldn’t be connected. A fluke. Someone had to clean the Grommet Building, but when Mary-Carol Kooi at the Oriental Institute told me Fausson was a janitor, I was picturing a couple of men with mops in the hallway of a rickety building.

  Force 5 still didn’t seem like the kind of operation a high-end office would use, sending a van around town to pick people up at odd locations. This was what construction or landscape companies looking for cheap day labor did. They picked up undocumented—of course. I felt like slapping myself on the head. It was a cheap undocumented crew. The Grommet Building’s management had looked for the lowest bidder.

  “Did you hear me?” the clipboard woman demanded.

  She was almost in my face. Murmurs in Spanish and Arabic rose from the crew, like the humming of a hundred bees.

  “I didn’t hear you,” I apologized. “I didn’t realize Lawrence worked on this site.”

  “He could interpret for the Arabians on the crew. You’re related to him? Do you speak Arabic?”

  “Arabians? That sounds like he was a horse whisperer. Sadly, Italian is my only other language. I understand some Spanish but wouldn’t try to speak it.”

  She realized she was forgetting her position as commandant. “I’ll finish with you in a minute.”

  She clapped her hands and ushered her crew inside. It was seven-thirty and the lobby was essentially deserted, but in a building that housed hedge funds and an international law firm, young lawyers were putting in their mandatory hundred-hour weeks while traders were responding to Far Eastern markets; it was morning in Tokyo and Singapore. A young woman hurried past us, exchanged a bantering comment with the guard and then on to the outside.

  “Hey, Melanie,” the guard called to our leader. “Got an Arab interpreter yet?”

  “Not yet. You find anyone, let me know.” She reached in her handbag for a credential, but the guard waved her through.

  We all streamed toward the elevators in the bay labeled “38–54.” Everyone was wearing jeans and T-shirts, even the women, although two had covered their hair. I still had on my good trousers, but they were stained with rust from the rotted tree trunk, so I fit in, sort of.

  Melanie gathered us in the bay for our assignments, saying them in English, then in Spanish: we were divided into teams of four, each given four floors to cover. Most of the people were apparently regulars—as Melanie started listing what we had to do—toilets, dusting, trash cans, vacuuming, how to handle food spills—people shuffled, looked at their phones, said, “Sí, sí, sí,” impatiently. One woman typed 42 on the elevator keypad. A car arrived almost instantly and her team of four got on board. Another went to 38.

  I was starting to follow, but Melanie grabbed my arm. “You and I are going to have a talk and then you’re going to leave.”

  The other workers stared until their elevators arrived. Two teams had gone to the seven floors that Dick’s law firm occupied. I thought again of the quarter million under Fausson’s floor and the expensive art collection Glynis had bragged that Dick and Teri owned. Had Fausson been stealing from Crawford, Mead to fund the dig he yearned for? Those piles of shiny lava would be hard to smuggle out, but there were plenty of small items—sketches, paintings that could be cut from their frames, figurines—that would be easy to remove.

  As soon as we were alone in the elevator bay, Melanie demanded to know my relationship to Fausson and why I had boarded with her crew.

  “We’re concerned that the sheriff’s police haven’t made any progress in finding Lawrence’s killers, Ms. Duarte. I’ve been asked to learn who his co-workers were and if any of them know anything about why he died.”

  “What? Do you think someone he worked with killed him?”

  “Do you think that’s possible?” I countered. “I thought a co-worker could tell me if anyone had ever threatened him. Perhaps he broke a valuable object and the owner blew up at him. Or—”

  “The customers would report that to me,” Melanie said. “If they have any complaints, they’re supposed to come to the team leader. How else can we know if we’re not doing a good job?”

  “And had anyone ever complained to you about Lawrence?” I asked.

  “His work was always satisfactory.” Her lips were compressed.

  “He was enthusiastic but didn’t like detail,” I suggested.

  “No one is enthusiastic about cleaning offices,” Melanie said, “but you’re right about the detail. He spent too much time talking to the Arabians. If he were up there right now, I wouldn’t be talking to you—I’d be going up to thirty-seven to make sure he was scrubbing toilets instead of taking all the Arabians’ minds off their work.”

  The guard was standing nearby. “This the guy who was found dead out in the woods last week? I thought he’d been involved in some episode at one of the lawyers’ offices.” />
  My heart beat faster. “What episode?”

  “It wasn’t anything.” Melanie was annoyed with the guard. “One of the lawyers went back to his office around eleven o’clock and found Lawrence reading a letter from his trash. I reprimanded him, told him if it happened again he’d be out a job.”

  The guard was laughing. “That was Mr. Pruette. We all knew why he was back in the office at eleven at night.”

  “Could be.” Melanie’s mouth twitched, almost a smile. “But if you clean an office, you can’t be digging through the garbage. It’s none of your business. Of course, most of the people who clean for us can’t read English, so it isn’t a problem.”

  “How did Lawrence end up working for you in the first place?” I asked.

  “He knew the men at an Arabian—” She broke off. “I need your ID. If you’re with ICE, you’d better tell me now.”

  The guard went back to his desk—he wasn’t going to get involved if Force 5 had an immigration problem. Someone might accuse him of collusion in hiding undocumenteds.

  “No, I’m not with ICE,” I said. “Lawrence had been a graduate student in archaeology in Syria when the civil war broke out there. He loved the Middle East, he loved the language and the culture, so he went to the Syrian-Lebanese Community Center to speak Arabic—not Arabian. He even taught an Arabic poetry class there. When he needed work, one of the guys who’s already on your payroll probably brought him along.”

  “You could be right, but I want your ID.” Melanie’s mouth set in an uncompromising line. “Or you can walk back out in the rain.”

  “You demand an ID from everyone you hire?”

  “I’m not hiring you,” she said.

  I’m not sure where our standoff would have taken us, but the elevator doors opened again. A woman got off, followed by a knot of laughing men. Glynis Hadden had been working late, as had her boss, Richard Yarborough, and three other men.