Shell Game

by Sara Paretsky

  I made my arms and torso go limp. Hooked both feet around one massive calf and forced the leg back. The attacker flung out a hand to steady himself and I dropped, rolling toward the stairs, roaring for help.

  The pair recovered fast, loomed over me. “Locked up. Need locked up, give.”

  Light glinted on steel, the knife that had cut Mitch. I didn’t try to fight but plunged down the stairs, shouting to my neighbors to call 911.

  The two jumped after me, landed in front of me.

  “Locked up now, bitch. No more games.”

  “You are locking me nowhere,” I spat. Grabbed the railing at the second-floor landing and swung my legs high, missed the knife but connected with chin.

  Mr. Contreras’s thin voice floated up. “Hold on, doll. Cops coming. I got you covered.”

  Behind him the dogs were baying, and then a loud protest from the woman across from him in 1B.

  “Get those damned dogs under control. Do you think this is an animal shelter? You let those dogs race around, barking their heads off, while you scream up and down the stairwell. The condo board—”

  I clung to the stair rail.

  “Bitch! Bitch, you not attacking, you giving locked up.” They each had a leg, yanking on me. I finally had to let go of the rail, fell heavily. The pair was rocked off balance just long enough for me to pull my legs free and slide down the stairs on my butt.

  They followed me, but Mr. Contreras was at the bottom, swinging his pipe wrench. The man with the knife lunged at my neighbor. I chopped Knifer behind his ear. He grunted and staggered back. His partner growled, tried to grab me, but my neighbor’s wrench connected with his kneecap.

  Blue strobes lit the front walk. The hulks said something, harsh, Slavic, and lumbered down the hallway to the back of the building. I heard the areaway door slam.

  The woman in 1B opened the building door for the cops. “High time you got here. These dogs are a menace to—”

  “Easy. Easy does it. This an animal complaint?” The speaker was an older white guy, the lines in his heavy face showing he’d seen every strange or horrible thing humans could do to each other—including calling him in to complain about dogs.

  “Home invasion,” I gasped.

  My legs had given way; I was sitting on the bottom stair. Peppy, who’d followed Mr. Contreras into the hall, was licking my face and hands.

  “Two guys,” my neighbor said. “They was upstairs and come after Cookie—after Vic—here. They was huge, I hit ’em with this”—he brandished the pipe wrench—“and it was like hittin’ a big rock.”

  The senior cop and his partner, a younger black man, came over to me.

  “This the dog that’s menacing the building?” the older man said. “She going to bite if we ask you questions?”

  I managed a smile. “No, officers. Not unless you have a steak concealed under your vest.”

  1B stormed over. “I have a report due tomorrow morning for an important client and these dogs—ten-thirty at night, you’d think—”

  “You got no consideration,” Mr. Contreras interrupted her roughly. “You got a neighbor attacked by dirtbags the size of Mount Rushmore and all you can think of is some stupid report for a company that probably don’t care if you live or die.”

  His neighbor began an inflamed response, but the young black officer took her to one side, speaking to her in a soothing undervoice while his partner ushered Mr. Contreras and me into my neighbor’s apartment.

  We spent over an hour with the cops. They urged me to go to the emergency room to check me over, but the adrenaline boost that had carried me through the fight was gone. I didn’t have the stamina to spend the night in the ER waiting for my turn in the triage queue.

  I summoned the energy to say, “Same men attacked my niece. Lakefront. Yesterday.”

  That startled them. The officers took me through the attack on Harmony. I stressed the vicious way the man had yanked the necklace from her.

  “It left a deep cut. A miracle it didn’t sever her windpipe, but she’s grieving for the necklace, not the injury.”

  The officers called over to the Town Hall station for a copy of the incident report.

  “What makes you think they were the same men?” the black cop asked in his low, soothing voice.

  “Their accents were Slavic. Said the same thing to her—locked up. I thought her sister, thought they’d locked up Reno, and wanted to lock up—”

  I gave a spurt of laughter that bordered on hysteria. “Locket. Their accents, my mind on Reno’s disappearance, I heard ‘locked up,’ but they wanted Harmony’s locket. No, they took her locket. Special present from Henry and Clarisse. They’re looking for Reno’s locket. That’s why they tore the apartment apart. Oh, my God. What time is it?”

  The cops stared at me. “Who is Reno?”

  “What about the locket?” Mr. Contreras asked.

  I tried explaining—the identical lockets the sisters had received when they graduated, how Harmony, at least, never took hers off.

  “Someone wants those lockets, but they could only know about them if one of the sisters said something. I need to talk to Harmony.”

  I didn’t say it out loud, didn’t want to jinx my tiny flame of hope, but if the thugs knew about the locket, there was the smallest chance that Reno was still alive. Locked up but without her locket. Because how would the creeps know about it if Reno hadn’t told them?

  “You got to go to bed, doll,” Mr. Contreras said. “You been working way too hard lately. You need a good night’s sleep, you need to go to Dr. Lotty in the morning. You officers, we appreciate you coming so fast and all, but you got to let Cookie here go to bed.”

  The cops had more questions, which I tried to answer coherently. They made a note of Lieutenant Finchley’s and Sergeant Abreu’s names as the cops with the most knowledge about Reno Seale’s disappearance.

  Before they left, I asked the pair to inspect the back of the building with me, to make sure the creeps weren’t lurking in the basement or on the rear staircases.

  They also climbed up to the third floor with me to check out the upper hallway. I was alone on the floor these days—Jake Thibaut, who owned one of the units, was in Switzerland. When he left Chicago—and me—he’d sublet the place to a drummer, who caused even more disruption than the dogs and me. All the tenants, not just 1B, had risen in fury, and the drummer had left. Jake hadn’t bothered to find another renter.

  The third unit on my floor had stood empty for some months now, too. I hadn’t thought before how lonely it was with no one living behind the doors, but it struck me forcibly now.

  My keys were still in the lock on my outer door—the creep who’d grabbed them from me hadn’t had time to take them before he joined the battle. That was a bit of good news; I’d been worried that I’d have to spend part of the next day waiting on a locksmith.

  “You going to be okay here?” the older cop asked. “You sure you don’t need a doctor? You got that bruise on your hand and a welt on your face.”

  The bruise was where I’d been bitten, but I’d be answering questions for another hour if I mentioned that. “Ibuprofen and ice and I’ll be fit as a fiddle and right as rain.”

  The words came from a deep place in my memory, a Golden Book from my childhood. My mother used to read it to me, laughing over the English idioms, which were funny to her Italian ear. When she became ill with the cancer that killed her, she used to reassure me, “Soon I will be fit as a fiddle,” but when she was dying and English deserted her, she would say it in a strange Italian translation, Sono sana come un violino—I’m as healthy as a violin.

  Sixteen years old and frantic as I watched her retreating from life, I used to argued over language with her, telling her it was just an expression; in Italian she’d say “Sono in gamba,” which would sound just as silly in English. “Non sono, carissima,” she murmured. What a painful mess that year had been.

  Tonight, my sleep, when it came, seemed filled with d
reams of absolution. I was standing at an ancient temple in Syria, looking at the Dagon in front of the altar—not the small figure I’d seen in Candra van Vliet’s office, but a golden man with a live fish wrapped around his head and shoulders. My mother appeared next to him, radiant with health. When I ran to the altar to embrace her, the fish-man took the form of Peter Sansen. He said, Your mother is as healthy as a beautiful violin. Soon you, too, will be as fit as a fiddle and right as rain.

  40

  A Patch of Blue

  I met with Harmony in a back room at Arcadia House. I’d slept in, but my second plunge down the stairs in a week had left me uncomfortably stiff; I did an extra half hour of stretches before taking the dogs on the short walk Mitch could handle.

  I’d parked at my office and ridden the L to a stop beyond the shelter, walking a half mile around side streets to make sure I wasn’t being followed. Of course if last night’s invaders had been on my tail I would have seen them at once, but I couldn’t believe they were working on their own. Someone wanted Reno’s locket badly enough to hire foreign vermin and sic them on my niece and then on me; they could easily hire a harmless-looking op to follow me.

  When I was sure I was clean, I went to the nondescript double graystone that housed the shelter. Once inside I heard the usual clamor—babies wailing, toddlers screaming or banging on noisy toys—but Marilyn Lieberman greeted me with her professional cheerful calm and sent me to talk to Harmony.

  The room was small, used for private conversations. Like the rest of Arcadia House, it was furnished with thrift store finds along with castoffs from the affluent members of the board. A small round table with four chairs upholstered in faded maroon took up most of the space, but there was also an easy chair with a footstool, a scarred bookshelf holding children’s books and toys, and two high-backed chairs that sternly faced each other in front of a disused fireplace.

  Harmony came into the room a few minutes after me. At Lotty’s clinic two days ago, her vacant eyes had frightened me. Today, although her expression was pinched and anxious, I could see she’d returned to the world around her.

  I walked to the window, which overlooked the garden where she’d been working yesterday, and asked her what she’d found.

  “Not much,” she muttered. “A few bulbs may come up. They have some coreopsis that I may be able to rescue.”

  The ugly line across her throat where her assailant had torn the chain away stood out under the pale light from the windows.

  I moved over to the round table and sat in one of the maroon chairs. After a moment, Harmony joined me, sitting as far from me as possible.

  “I searched the paths where we were hit on Tuesday,” I said. “I also checked in with the Park District and the cops, but I’m sorry to say that I think the men who jumped you did it specifically to steal your locket. They were waiting for me in the hall outside my door last night and attacked me—they were demanding the locket. I can only guess they wanted your sister’s.”

  Harmony’s face seemed to collapse. “Oh, no! Why can’t they leave us alone! What is wrong with us that people want to hurt us?”

  “Nothing wrong with you, sweetheart. It’s something wrong with them. We can’t fix them, but we can change the situation so they leave you alone.”

  When she was calmer, I asked her to tell me more about the lockets.

  “When Reno and me graduated from junior college,” Harmony whispered. She fingered the place where the chain used to hang, forgetting it wasn’t there.

  “They were so proud of us, they gave a party and we invited all our friends; there were like a hundred people in the backyard. Clarisse had made this incredible cake, shaped like a book, with me and Reno’s diploma on it, done in frosting, you know. And before we cut it, they gave us our special presents. The lockets were from Clarisse, real gold, and the chains are real gold, too. We both had the same picture of Clarisse and Henry in them and mine had one of Reno; hers had one of me. We both wore them always.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. The only words that came to me were so banal I kept them to myself, just patted her hand.

  “Would you ever keep something secret in them?”

  “Honestly, Auntie Vic, they were lockets, not treasure chests.”

  “I’m trying to understand why someone would want them,” I said meekly.

  Harmony hunched a shoulder. “I don’t know. The pictures were just us, just family. The lockets were real gold, but it’s not like they had diamonds or emeralds in them to make them super valuable. Just to us, because they were from Clarisse. She had our names and the date engraved on them.

  “Henry, he gave us these special scarves from China. His aunt who lives in Shanghai sent them, royal blue for Reno, rose silk for me. They were so beautiful we agreed we could only wear them for special times.”

  She took out her phone and opened her photo album. “This was at Henry’s funeral. Clarisse was okay enough then to go.”

  The sisters stood solemn faced in front of Clarisse, whose face had already started to lose its definition as the early stages of her disease set in. All three women were dressed in white, but each wore a long scarf looped around her neck, Harmony’s in rose, Reno’s in blue, Clarisse’s in gold. Under the sisters’ scarves I could see the gold chains that held their lockets.

  “In China, you wear white to the funeral. People shouldn’t wear colors, especially not red, but we wanted to respect Henry with the gifts he had given us.”

  Blue silk: I stared at the photo and enlarged it with my fingers. I’d recently seen a strand of fabric that matched that color. In the squirrels’ nest in Cap Sauers Holding. That couldn’t possibly have been from Reno’s scarf. If it was, she’d been in the same place where Lawrence Fausson had died. Which meant—a coincidence so gigantic I couldn’t get my mind around it.

  “Vic? Auntie Vic!” Harmony cried out. “What’s wrong? Did I say something wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong; you didn’t say anything wrong.” My voice was hoarse. “I just need some water.”

  I found a drinking fountain up the hall, Harmony hovering close behind me. A staff member appeared, checking that we were okay—Harmony’s outcry had been loud enough to alert someone.

  “I’m okay,” Harmony said, her voice back at a whisper. “Vic, my auntie Vic, looked like she was fainting and I got scared.”

  The staff member eyed me narrowly: I was on the Arcadia board, but that didn’t make me sacrosanct. “I’m close by,” she assured Harmony. “Holler if you need anything.”

  I didn’t go back into the small meeting room but spoke to my niece near the drinking fountain. “Harmony, if I brought you a piece of fabric, would you be able to tell if it was from Reno’s scarf?”

  “Maybe. I guess, if I compared it to mine, but mine is in Portland.” She wrinkled her nose in doubt.

  “I may know where a piece of it is, but it’s just a guess, not a certainty. I want to go back to the place where I saw it—if it’s still there, I’ll bring it to you.”

  Harmony tried to get me to take her with me, but I was firm on that. She was staying put until I was sure she wasn’t in danger.

  “The scum who jumped you in the park are sniffing around for you. You stay here where it’s safe.”

  “How about you?” she demanded. “I have to follow ‘women and children first,’ but you don’t? If you think you know where Reno is, I have a right—”

  “You do.” Her words had pulled me up short—the first sign of real fight I’d seen in her and she hit me in my feminist solar plexus. “You have a right to help find and save your sister. But not at the expense of your own life and safety, which have been severely compromised the last few days. Please stay here to build up your strength for another day or two, okay?”

  “Oh, all right,” she said. “I know you’re trying to help. I just don’t like being left on the outside of my own life.”

  I squeezed her shoulder. “I know that feeling. So go dig up the garden and g
et your muscles back in shape.”

  She gave me an awkward hug before disappearing into the kitchen. When I went back to the room where we’d been meeting to collect my things, I saw her appear in a jacket and Wellington boots with a handful of gardening tools.

  Three preschoolers were also out there, bundled against the wind. The cusp of April, and it was still cold. Harmony began clipping branches from an evergreen, throwing them into a heap with almost savage energy. The biggest of the children went to the pile of evergreens and pulled one out. He began waving it around. In a moment, the other two joined him. Soon they were fighting one another with the branches.

  I stopped in Marilyn Lieberman’s office to tell her about my conversation with Harmony. My niece’s riposte made Marilyn hoot with laughter.

  “V.I. Warshawski as part of the patriarchy—I wish I’d been there to see your face.”

  “Hysterically funny,” I agreed drily. “I didn’t tell her where I’d seen this bit of silk, so I’m not worried she’ll try to dog me to a forest preserve, but I don’t want her to bolt. She doesn’t have any place to run to that the creeps who are dogging her can’t find. I hope the garden keeps her grounded here—so to speak.”

  Marilyn nodded, but said, “This isn’t a locked ward, as you know damned well. We have no power to stop people from leaving, only to keep others from coming in. I’ll ask a counselor to talk to her, but I’m afraid that’s the only thing I can do.”

  I knew she was right, which only added to my worries. As I rode the L back to my office, I fretted over what Harmony might do, whether the volatile mix of hurt feelings, fear, and loneliness would send her away from Arcadia.

  Everyone, from the Buddha to my own mother, reminds us not to worry about hypothetical outcomes. Breathe, Gabriella used to lecture me: deep breath in, feel it under your diaphragm. Do that ten times and you won’t be able to worry about—what a girl had said to me on the playground, or my upcoming chemistry test, or . . . whether she was dying.