Shell Game

by Sara Paretsky

  25

  A Strong Hand on the Bridle

  “Dick!” I cried enthusiastically. “And Glynis. You two must be the hardest-working couple in Chicago, getting off duty after seven-thirty.”

  “Vic, what are you doing here?” Glynis was elegant in a khaki wool dress and red heels. She’d touched up her makeup recently. I was very aware of my wet shoes and soiled trousers. “You look as though you’ve taken up mud-wrestling.”

  “You know how it is, Glynis: no alimony. I have to find the work I can. I’m trying to persuade Force 5 to hire me.”

  The guard drifted back to our bay to watch the drama.

  Glynis tightened her lips. She knew better than to scowl—it deepens the lines around the eyes and mouth.

  Behind her, Dick looked like a stuffed owl. I remembered that expression—it was the same way he’d looked when I found out he was sleeping with Teri Felitti, before she became Teri Yarborough.

  He surely didn’t mind my catching him working late with Glynis, although he might have a guilty conscience there. I studied their faces, but Dick and Glynis were so tightly bound together it didn’t really matter if they were having a physical affair.

  One of the trio was the man who’d arrived to see Dick last week as I was leaving, but the power center in the group was a man of about sixty, who combed his graying hair back from his forehead in the manner of Leonardo DiCaprio in The Great Gatsby. It must have been deliberate: his pin-striped suit, cut from one of those wools that make you want to stroke it, had the exaggerated lapels and double-breasting of a 1920s garment.

  The fourth man might as well have had bodyguard on his forehead in flashing neon—high-end bodyguard, to be sure, since it was good-quality suiting that strained over his shoulder holster. His gaze flicked around the hall, looking for menace—he didn’t seem to think that included me.

  “This your ex?” DiCaprio asked Dick, looking at me with amused contempt.

  “Vic and I were married in another lifetime.” Dick gave a rueful shrug. “Another planet. I often wonder how I got there.”

  Dick’s visitor from last week laughed obligingly, but the bodyguard remained impassive. The visitor asked what Force 5was.

  “This is perhaps a military client?” He had an accent, French, perhaps.

  Dick held up a palm, signal of ignorance.

  DiCaprio shrugged impatiently. “We’ve wasted enough time. No one is interested in Yarborough’s ex’s job.”

  “We’re the service your building management hired to clean the offices here, Mr. Kettie.” Melanie ignored the Frenchman. She stepped up to DiCaprio, offering a giant grin, the rictus of subservience. “I’m Melanie Duarte, the shift super, but this woman—”

  Kettie, not DiCaprio. Gervase Kettie was a big name in Chicago real estate and construction. He popped up in the news at least once a week—deals in Chicago, New York, Abu Dhabi, along with questions about his income tax—but I’d never actually seen him. And he apparently owned the building where Dick’s firm leased their offices. No wonder Dick was letting him be the power center of the party.

  Kettie deliberately turned his back to Melanie. Giving a great bellow of laughter, he slapped Dick’s shoulder. “That’s the ultimate revenge, Yarborough. Got to hand it to you. Let her clean your office. Do you both good.”

  I knelt to kiss Kettie’s hand. “Thank you, Massa, thank you. And all our chilrens thank you, too, doesn’t they, Massa Dick?”

  “Cut it out, Vic.” Dick grabbed my arms. “Sorry, Kettie: she’s yanking my chain, which means she feels free to pull on yours, too. Unfortunately, with Vic you never know if her bite is worse than her bark or the other way around.”

  My hair got tangled in a ring Kettie was wearing. When Dick jerked me to my feet, the ring’s inlay came out and clattered across the floor.

  I picked up the inlay and turned it over in my hand. It was a heavy piece of lapis, not really a he-man’s stone, except that it looked very old. Inlaid into the lapis was a gold serpent—that’s what I’d caught my hair on.

  “You careless, clumsy bitch!” Kettie snatched the lapis and serpent from me and made to slap my face. I ducked. He swatted air and almost overbalanced. The bodyguard leaped to attention, steadied Kettie and grabbed my own forearm, all in a single smooth movement.

  “Let’s take it down a degree,” Dick said. His face had paled, fear over what Kettie might do and how I might react. “Vic, you owe Kettie an apology.”

  “As soon as Bowser lets go of me,” I said.

  Kettie scowled but finally said, “Let her go, Mitty: she’s not worth wasting time over.”

  Bowser/Mitty released me but continued to hover.

  “I’m sorry, Kettie,” I said. “I’m sorry I became as immature as you.”

  Dick turned whiter, this time with fury, but he knew it was smarter to get out of the building before punches or lawsuits were exchanged. He put an arm across Kettie’s shoulders. “Come on, Gervase—martinis at the Potawatomi will turn this into a bad dream.”

  Over his shoulder, he added, “Vic, you skate so close to the edge that there are times like now where you go completely off the cliff. . . . Glynis, you have the car lined up?”

  She nodded and looked at the guard. “Curtis, can you get us an umbrella?”

  Curtis retrieved an outsize umbrella from his station and went outside so he could protect Dick’s and Kettie’s expensive suiting on their way to their limo.

  Kettie shook off Dick’s arm and glared at me. “You dare cross me again and you will wish you’d never been born.”

  I was too startled by the level of rage in his face to reply. He seemed to think silence meant I was cowed—he rejoined Dick, slapping him again on the back and telling him he was lucky to get out of his marriage to me “before she sliced off your balls. These feminazis, they need a strong hand on the bridle.”

  As the group reached the revolving door, I couldn’t resist calling, “Reno is still missing, Dick! But enjoy your dinner.”

  Dick came to a halt. He turned, as if to shout back at me, then straightened his shoulders and kept walking. Kettie seemed to be asking Dick a question, but I couldn’t hear their murmured comments from this distance. Perhaps it was about Reno, or his golf handicap.

  “I will definitely be crossing you again, Gervase Kettie,” I said.

  “Oh, no you won’t,” Melanie Duarte said. I hadn’t realized I’d spoken my thought out loud. “You can’t come in with my crew and piss off Mr. Kettie. He’ll have me fired if he thinks I brought you. One of the girls at the guard desk teased him one night and she was out of work next day and couldn’t find another job.”

  “Kettie didn’t notice you,” I said wearily. “He’s a miniature Stalin who can’t stand it if the serfs don’t quiver in his presence. It’s my details he’ll get Dick—Richard Yarborough—to give him, not yours.”

  “Is that what this was about?” Melanie’s voice went up half a register. “Getting revenge on your ex? I have a good mind to call the cops.”

  My fatigue suddenly seemed ready to swallow me. My lies and subterfuge, which I’d thought would be clever, seemed merely dreary. I leaned against the wall between two sets of doors.

  “And tell them what? That I was looking for work?”

  “Why did you come here, anyway?” Melanie demanded. “You’re not looking for a job, that’s for sure.”

  “I joined your crew because I need to learn about Lawrence Fausson. He doesn’t have a next of kin; he’d cut his ties to the archaeologists with whom he’d gone to Syria, so they don’t know anything about his current life. He spent his spare time at the cultural center where you picked up three of your team. I’m hoping one of the men can tell me what Fausson was doing lately. Besides working for Force 5. And getting murdered.”

  Melanie bit her lip. “You said your name was Victoria Fausson, but then you said Lawrence had no next of kin.”

  The keypad for calling elevators was next to me. Keeping my eye on Melanie, I pr
essed 38. Car E, the keypad replied.

  “Yeah, that wasn’t skillful. My name is V.I. Warshawski.”

  “Is Mr. Yarborough really your ex?”

  “Really. A very ex ex. He married again, has two kids in their teens. Our decree did not include alimony—what I said just now was a joke.” Sort of. I hadn’t wanted alimony—I hadn’t wanted my fate linked to Dick’s decisions to pay or withhold payment. Dick had been taken aback at the time—I think he’d looked forward to tying me in knots for weeks or months with court battles over payment schedules.

  “It doesn’t sound funny.” Melanie’s face puckered in confusion. “Who is Reno? One of your kids?”

  I’d hopped on the Force 5 van hoping to ask questions, but I was the one being interrogated. Reno would be a good name for a pet, better than as a name for a child. Poor Reno, carrying an unmanageable burden from the day she was born. And here I was, looking for answers about Lawrence Fausson, while Dick’s and my niece was still missing.

  Car E, my car, arrived across from me. I let it sit until the doors started to close, then rushed past Melanie and climbed on board.

  She would have no trouble finding me—Curtis, the guard, would be able to track Car E on his computer. This meant I had only a few minutes to find any of the men who’d gotten on the van in front of the outreach center.

  When I got off on 38, I was momentarily paralyzed, staring at the elevator doors. As a pair opened next to me, I braced myself to duck and roll into the car, but a strange man emerged and headed for a corner office.

  Somehow that pushed me back into motion. I typed in five different floors on the keypad, then darted down the hall, looking for anything like a hiding place. One of the Force 5 crew had parked a supply cart outside a women’s bathroom, leaving the door propped open.

  The woman cleaning inside apologized to me in Spanish, apparently assuming I worked in the building, even though the long mirror showed a sleep-deprived figure who’d spent too much time crawling on muddy ground.

  I washed my face and hung the windbreaker on a hook inside one of the stalls. When the woman saw me trying to brush the dirt away from my trouser legs with my fingers, she went into the hall to her cart and came back with a sponge; she wet it slightly and worked the worst of the rust and leaf mold away.

  “Better,” she said.

  I mimed lipstick and brushing my hair. She shook her head, but took my arm and led me to a locker room a few doors away from the cart.

  I heard Curtis and Melanie barking questions at someone in an office down the hall. My savior shook her head again, but opened her locker and motioned me inside. She had shut the door and was on her way out when Melanie spoke close by, questioning the woman in rapid Spanish. “¿Has visto una mujer sospechosa con ropa sucia?”—Had she seen a suspicious-looking woman in dirty clothes? As far as I could tell, my acquaintance responded that she was too busy with her work to examine people’s wardrobes.

  Their voices faded. I was hunched over in the locker. My calves were cramping, my neck hurt, and the three slits in the door didn’t let in much air. Just when I was sure I couldn’t last another second, the woman returned and opened the door.

  She motioned me out into the hall and returned to her work without stopping for my thanks.

  “¿Los hombres della Siria?” I asked, hoping the Spanish was close to Italian.

  “¿De Siria?” she corrected me, scrubbing one of the sinks more vigorously. “No lo sé. ¿Eres un agente de inmigración?”

  Of course she was worried that I might be from immigration. “I am an aunt,” I said slowly, first in English, then Italian. “The police are arresting my nephew for the murder of Lawrence Fausson. The Syrian men were friends of Fausson. I want to talk to them to see if they know anything that could help my nephew.”

  She shook her head, not understanding. Italian and Spanish are somewhat alike, but their vocabularies are different. I took out my phone and showed the woman Felix’s photo. “Grandson of my sister,” I said. It was close enough to the truth; Lotty has been a mother, a sister, a nurturer, and a critic in my life for many years.

  “¡Ah! Entiendo. ¡Su sobrino!”

  She started on the mirrors but simultaneously phoned someone. The Spanish conversation was too rapid for me to follow, but at the end she said, “Piso sesenta y uno.” In case I didn’t understand, she traced “61” in the mirror with a finger and then quickly wiped it clean.

  As I turned to go, she grabbed my shoulder. “No phones. Hay guardias. Tomaron una huella dactilar.” I shook my head, not understanding. Finally, exasperated, she pulled my cell phone from my hip pocket, made to throw it away, then took my hand, dipped it in her cleaning solution, and pressed my fingertips onto a paper towel. No cell phones, but they took fingerprints. You needed a fingerprint to get into the sixty-first floor, the top of the building.

  26

  Housework

  I was printed years ago, when I joined the public defender’s office out of law school. I didn’t want Kettie’s security team to get at my identity, not tonight when I wanted a sneak conversation with the Syrian cleaners. I couldn’t take a chance on catching up with them after work—they wouldn’t necessarily ride the van back to Palos, and even if they did, I’d be stuck out there, miles from my car.

  I needed a different strategy. I went down the hall to the locker room where my acquaintance had hidden me from Melanie and Curtis. I hung my windbreaker in an unused locker, with my cell phone zipped into one pocket, my wallet in the other. I hated to leave them in an open locker, but if there was any kind of pat-down for phones on 61, the guards would find not only the phone but also my wallet, with all my IDs inside.

  I took a piece of paper from an open office and carefully printed, “I am the aunt of Felix Herschel. Felix has been arrested for Lawrence Fausson’s murder. Please talk to me about Lawrence.” Added my name, phone number, and e-mail and tucked it into my pants pocket.

  A spare cart loaded with cleaning supplies was parked against the far wall. Clean smocks in pale green, with the Force 5 logo—a tornado sucking dirt from a computer screen—on the back, were piled on a shelf. I put one on, added a stack of green cleaning cloths to the cart, and rolled it down the hall to the elevators, where I pressed “61” into the keypad. The pad told me to ride to 48 and change cars.

  On 48, while I was waiting for my second elevator, I took one of the green cloths and tied it around my head, babushka style, then sprayed something labeled stain remover onto the others. My car had arrived; the stain remover had a musty, acrid smell that made me queasy in the small space; I was glad that the ride to 61 was short and swift.

  When I got off, I saw that the elevator bay was sealed at both ends by doors made of heavy red wood. Enormous brass letters spelled out kettie enterprises on the doors at the east end. So all Kettie had to do to meet with Dick was take the elevator down eleven stories.

  Security cameras were placed above both sets of doors and all six elevator cars. A guard stepped from behind a console made out of the same deep-red wood as the doors.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I have supplies for the workers,” I said in Italian. “Guarda!—look!” I pushed the cart up against him and held up a bucket labeled high-acid cleaner.

  “No one said anything to me,” the man said.

  I kept my face blank—I didn’t understand English.

  “Adesso,” I insisted, adding that I was working on 42, that I would be docked if I didn’t get back to my own duties fast. I tapped my watch, pantomimed agitation.

  The guard phoned someone on the other side of the doors, explaining the situation. He was apparently told to admit me—he held out an iPad with a square for putting a fingerprint. I made a show of wiping my fingers on the cleaning cloths, rubbing the stain remover into my fingertips. When I pressed on the iPad, a message appeared announcing the print was unreadable, try again. I tried three times without getting a clear read. The guard was annoyed but couldn’t deci
de whether to send me away or let me in.

  The smell of the stain remover in the windowless hallway did me in. I pulled a bucket from the cart just in time to catch the trickle of bile I vomited up.

  “Goddamn it to hell—get your supplies in there and get the fuck out of the way.”

  He pushed a button to release the lock on one of the doors. They opened into something like an airlock—on the far side was a set of glass doors. After a moment, another guard arrived and opened the glass doors. He asked his outside buddy if he’d taken my cell phone. The first guard swore—I’d thrown up, he hadn’t wanted to touch me in a pat-down. They compromised by having me open my smock and turn around. No bulges in pockets or waistband; I was good to go.

  Hand on his gun belt, the inside guard led me past the antechamber to a conference room, where one of the Syrians was polishing a table big enough for fifty or so made out of the same red wood as the outer doors. Speakerphones were hooked up at intervals down the middle of the table, and there were outsize video monitors at either end. Art objects were placed behind glass niches along the walls. I glimpsed a gold bowl with embossed figures and a stone figure of a ram with red stones around the mouth and hooves. The guard moved between me and the display cases, ostentatiously fingering the handle of his SIG.

  I turned to the man who was polishing the table, who squinted at me, puzzled. “Not needing,” he said, pointing at the cart.

  The guard was watching me, but I had to take a chance—under cover of knocking one of the spray bottles from the cart, I pulled the note I’d written out of my smock pocket and slipped it into the Syrian’s pocket. I gestured wildly, reciting the lyrics to “Vissi d’arte.”

  As Tosca mourned her unhappy choices, the guard grabbed my forearm and dragged me to the exit. I kept reminding myself that I was an immigrant who needed a job, not a street fighter who didn’t like being manhandled.

  The hall guard asked his colleague what I’d been up to in there.

  “Who knows what these camel jockeys say. I don’t know why we can’t have people who speak the language working here.”