He nodded—a courtesy, a truncated bow—Darraugh doesn’t usually shake hands.
I drove from Darraugh’s office out to Austin. I knew that if Jerry was on duty there would be a confrontation, perhaps even a physical one, but when he grabbed my left shoulder I ignored him: my attention had been caught by the big TV monitor on the west wall. I’d been vaguely aware of grinning people hawking Rest EZ financial products, but suddenly a man in a tie and starched white shirt was proclaiming the “Stock of the Day.”
“Folks, the one percent got to be the one percent by paying attention to little companies that no one else cared about. Green Grow Therapeutics is a company that’s going to create new billionaires. It’s going to turn old billionaires green with envy when they find out what they’ve been missing. Last week when it was selling for seven cents a share, nobody had heard of Green Grow, but believe me, this time next week, the whole world will know them. Buy today and wipe out that debt overnight.”
“Yes!” I cried. “That’s it, isn’t it? The Stock of the Day will turn the one percent into the point one percent. Jerry, have you bought any of the stocks of the day? Have they performed well for you? You get a special rate on the debt?”
My outburst bewildered Jerry so much that he relaxed the grip on my shoulder. The audience, which had been keeping their distance from the crazy woman, moved closer. One man, with sagging bloodhound cheeks and a gray three-day growth, growled, “Yeah, Jerry. You buy these stocks?”
Jerry fingered his holster. “Company policy—employees aren’t allowed to buy recommended stocks. Risk of insider trading.”
“I bought me one of those stocks,” a heavyset woman of about fifty said. “Three cents and something a share, how can you afford not to, the ad said. Lost every dime I put into it and then lost the rest of my dimes on the interest on the loan they gave me to buy the damn things. They’s poison, those stocks.”
“Stock market? Hell. Even the lottery is a better deal than the stock market,” someone else said while the man with the bloodhound cheeks rumbled, “Better off playing the numbers if you can find a policy shop. Lottery put most of these out of business, of course.”
While Jerry dealt with an increasingly belligerent group of customers I faded to the rear. When I was here the other week, I’d noted the number Jerry typed on the keypad to the back of the office. I shut my eyes, opened my left hand where I’d traced the numbers onto my palm. 611785. Poor security—they hadn’t changed the code. I’d have to speak to Donna about that. When I finished speaking to her about other things.
The people who worked in the cubicles along the narrow hallway had all left their stations and were crowded into Donna’s office, raising the alarm about what was going on in the front of the store.
“People are upset about the stocks, Donna, we have to do something.” “They could riot.” “It all started with that lady who says she’s a detective—”
“Yes,” I cut in. “The detective has a few questions about the stocks. Does every Rest EZ outlet in the country advertise the same ones on the same day?”
The loan counselors became quiet so fast that for a moment I could hear the hum of Donna’s computer, and then Donna said, “Oh. It’s you.”
“Yep, it’s me.”
“How’d you get back here?” one of the counselors demanded.
“Jerry helped.” I smiled blandly. “Back to the stock questions. Do you want to talk privately, Donna? Or shall I share my concerns with your whole staff?”
“Back to work, ladies.” The words were authoritative, but Donna’s tone was weary.
The women eyed one another, looked at me to see how dangerous I might be, but finally sidled past the chair full of documents that was keeping the door open. There were mutters of We should stay. What’s she know? She gonna hurt Donna? Someone should tell Jerry.
I moved the chair, spilling some of the binders as I did. The woman who thought they should call Jerry ordered me to clean up the mess I was making: we all want some authority, even those of us who have none. I shut the door and leaned against it.
“Tell me about the stocks.”
“Why do you want to know?” Donna’s voice was still weary, but her eyes were watchful.
“I’m like the other Rest EZ marks—I want to get out of debt and join the point one percent. Does every Rest EZ store advertise the same stocks?”
She didn’t say anything but started to fumble with her desk drawer.
“Panic button?” I said. “I’d rather you didn’t, because if you call the cops, I’ll file a lawsuit, which will mean you and your staff will get subpoenas to appear in court and answer these questions, which will probably end your career.”
She gave an angry sigh but took her hand away from the drawer. “In Chicago, we all get the same e-mail telling us what will be advertised on a particular day. I don’t know about the rest of the country.”
“And do the stocks change every day?”
She shook her head. “They call it the Stock of the Day, but a lot of times there’s no stock or sometimes the same one gets shown for a week or two at a time.”
“So the message comes from corporate? From Eliza Trosse?”
“It’s one of those corporate e-mails, you know, the kind that comes to a blind distribution list from a blind sender.”
“And now the sixty-four-billion-dollar question. Answer this and you could be as rich as Gervase Kettie or the Koch brothers.”
I walked over to the desk and leaned over her, my hands on two unstable stacks of documents. She clenched her hands together but didn’t look at me.
“Did Reno Seale talk to you about the stocks when she got back from St. Matthieu? Or about an assault?”
Donna gave a tired smile. “Both. She wanted to call corporate, she wanted to know who was setting up the stocks, but she wanted to know who organized the gala, too. I tried to get her to leave it alone. I liked her, but she was getting people in corporate stirred up. In fact, after she left on Monday, Eliza called me to say Reno needed to calm down and cool off. So when she didn’t come in on Tuesday, I thought maybe Eliza had called her at home to warn her. And when I couldn’t reach Reno myself I thought maybe she was making up her mind about whether even to come back.”
I stood up and one of the stacks teetered to the floor. I knelt to start gathering up the papers, but Lutas got out of her chair and pushed me away.
“Get up, get out. Don’t come back.”
51
Making Grandpa Tony Proud
Jerry was waiting at the door when I came back to the front of the store. Once again he grabbed me with more force than he needed; once again I let him shove me outside without fighting back.
“Hey, brother, there’s no call for that.” It was the man with the bloodhound cheeks. “She try to attack you? She threaten you?”
Jerry said, “Hey, brother, yourself. She comes around here threatening the managers.”
The bloodhound followed me to the street. “That right about the stocks? You think they’re a scam?”
“I know they’re a scam. Just trying to get the proof.”
He hesitated. “You with the government?”
“Nope. Private investigator.” I handed him a card.
“V I—how do you say that last name?”
I pronounced it for him.
“My sister lost a lot on those stocks, Ms. V.I. People get addicted to trading ’em, like they do to playing the lottery. Worries me to see Rest EZ push them so hard. You need help out here, you call me, okay? Name’s Andy Green. Don’t have a card like yours, but here’s my phone number.” He pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket and wrote the number with a faulty ballpoint before heading up the street.
I stood next to my car, staring at the street but not seeing it, trying to figure out how the Rest EZ owners could make money from their Stock of the Day program. I wanted to look again at the companies whose tear sheets Reno had brought back with her. What made them so explosive tha
t my niece had nearly died protecting the lockbox where she’d hidden them?
Trying to follow stock prices on a phone screen would be maddening. I’d have to crawl through the rush hour traffic to get back to my computer. I looked at the Rest EZ window and laughed to myself—I could rent time on one of their machines.
As I stood there, a call came in on my burner: Tim Streeter, calling from the hospital pay phone.
“Your niece Harmony was just here. She came with a guy she said was her and Reno’s uncle. We had to let them in—Harmony’s the next of kin, after all, but when the guy tried to talk to her, Reno began to scream. Security came and hustled them away, but I thought I’d better let you know.”
“Harmony went to Dick?” I cried. “Oh, no! She’s been angry with me, angry with the world and taking it out on me—but to go to Dick—” I stopped myself—this was beside the point.
“I’m in Austin, but I’m on my way—as fast as I can get to you.”
This time of day, side streets were ten times faster than the expressways. I took Lake Street, cruising under the L tracks, turning north on Kedzie, and pulling into the visitors’ lot at Beth Israel in just under thirty minutes.
I ran around to the rear entrance and up the stairs to the intensive care unit. The charge nurse came over to me at the entrance.
“Your niece has been very agitated. I don’t want her more upset, so be careful how you speak to her.”
“But she’s conscious now?” I asked.
“In and out. She won’t answer questions about the day or the president or anything, so we don’t know how well she’s understanding what’s said to her.”
I didn’t waste time arguing with the nurse, but of course Reno wouldn’t answer questions: she’d been interrogated under torture for more than a week.
Tim Streeter was waiting outside the door to Reno’s room. I asked if he’d heard Dick talking to her.
“It all happened pretty fast. The sister ran to her and put her arms around her. She was crying and saying she was grateful that you’d found her—‘Vic found you, Reno, she saved you, I’m so grateful, but now she’s acting like a tyrant’—that’s pretty much what the sis said. And then she said the uncle was there and he could help.
“Dude walks over to her and says he’s her uncle and all she has to do is give him the papers and he can make sure she’s safe, and Reno began to scream no! over and over. You’d better believe I had the asshole out of there faster than you could spit.
“Reno was thrashing around—the doctor came in to put something in her IV line to calm her down. He said it was good she was responsive, he wasn’t going to knock her out, just get her to relax. And then he—the doc—tried asking her did she know who was president or mayor or those things and she lay there doggo.”
When I went into the room, Reno’s breath was coming in short stabs. Her eyes were closed, but she was holding herself rigid: she wasn’t asleep, she wasn’t unconscious; she was hyperalert.
I knelt next to her head. “This is Vic, Reno. Your auntie Vic. You’re in Chicago, in a hospital. I found you in the woods and brought you here.”
I didn’t try to touch her: she’d had too many people pawing at her to enjoy the hands of someone she didn’t really know. I saw that the nurses had left her locket around her neck.
“You were brave and smart, just like Grandpa Tony told you. You hid your locket, and the bad men didn’t get it, they didn’t see it. Now you have it back. I found your key and I got your papers. I have them safe; you don’t need to worry about them. I’m trying to make sense out of them but I can’t.”
I sat cross-legged on the floor. I didn’t want to use a chair, which would put my head a few feet above Reno’s head, but the floor put me below her and I had to speak more loudly than I wanted. I waited several minutes in silence and then repeated what I’d said. I added a few details: I was a detective. I wished I’d known Reno was in Chicago all these months. I wished she’d come to me with her troubles.
Another patient silence and then I went through my litany again, voice always calm, pitched low. Her thin face, ravaged by hunger and pain, made me long to stroke her skin, give a physical comfort, but I restrained myself. At one point, Tim Streeter appeared with a stool for me—Goldilocks: it was just the right height.
“Papers,” Reno muttered. “I was hiding. Warehouse. Free port. Statues, paintings.”
She shuddered, eyes still closed. “Nightmare museum. Real, not real?”
“Real,” I said. “Real and a nightmare. The papers were in there?”
She opened her eyes briefly. “Who are you?”
I repeated my name, that I was Grandpa Tony’s daughter and I’d brought her out of the woods.
“Grandpa Tony. I want him, I want Henry.” She said something in Chinese, and tears oozed from the edges of her eyes.
“I want them, too,” I said. “They gave us the gift of courage and we will be brave because of that gift.”
She might have drifted into sleep, but I sat still. Perhaps twenty minutes passed and then her eyes fluttered open.
“Auntie Vic? You are Auntie Vic?”
I pulled my wallet out of my briefcase and showed her my PI license.
“Uncle Dick is afraid of you.”
“Good,” I said. “He should be. Can you tell me about the papers? You brought them back from St. Matthieu, didn’t you?”
“St. Matthieu,” she whispered. “Men looking at us like fish in the market. I should have known. Mama Clarisse—don’t tell her. She—she stopped me and Harmony, she saved me and Harmony, and if she knows—knows I went straight back to those men—”
“You knew the men from Oakland?” I ventured.
“No. New men, old look. Why Rest EZ sent me there. Uncle Dick said they want women who can get along with important clients. Should have known, should have known, should have known.”
She was pounding the sheets with a feeble energy. This time I took her hands, easy clasp, easy to break away from.
“Hey, hey, baby. Clarisse loves you. She forgives you everything, she understands everything. And I love you, too. Your auntie Vic, sitting here, loving you. The company gave you a chance to take a fancy vacation—it sounded exciting. We all would go. We all would love a chance to be on a white sand beach when Chicago is freezing.”
After a time, when nurses and doctors had come and checked on her and decided I could stay, Reno gave me the whole story, in little bits and pieces. I filled in the fragments as best I could and perhaps got some of the details wrong, but what it boiled down to was that Trechette was celebrating Carnival in a big way on St. Matthieu. Executives and clients had come from operations around the world, about three hundred men, and the company had brought in about a hundred young women who all looked good in bathing suits.
“Didn’t understand until dinner the first night. They put me at a Chinese table.”
Reno understood Cantonese from her years with Papa Henry. “One of the men said if they had a chance to bid on the women—whores, he called us—he would choose me. Pretended I didn’t understand. He stroked my neck and I smiled. He laughed.”
Another man at her table said he wouldn’t give more money to the Russians. He had paid enough to attend the Carnival, and he knew all their money was going straight to pay off Russian loans. He said, “If the girls aren’t free, I’m not interested in them. Plenty more in the town just as pretty.”
The women had been divided into groups, and each group had a leader, who was essentially a minder, to keep the young women in the party rooms with the men, so Reno pretended she needed a bathroom. She found a back staircase, went to her room, and gathered a few essentials—passport, toothbrush, credit cards. Changed into jeans and sneakers and spent the night in a vacant cabana on the beach.
The next morning she tried to get on a flight out, but the airline said she could only use the ticket that her group leader was holding in her name. Reno left the airport while the ticket agent was calling the
leader for Reno’s group.
“Came to meals and parties long enough the leader saw me. Harmony and me, always learned secret ways in and out. Safety. The parties—” Reno shivered. “Bowls filled with Ecstasy tabs. Five-hundred-dollar bottles everywhere. Alcoves with couches and no one closing curtains. Men slapping my ass. ‘Can’t wait for the talent show, you got big . . . talents there.’”
She shuddered and fell silent. I let go of her hands, but she grabbed mine convulsively. “Don’t leave, don’t leave.”
“I’m not going anywhere. I’m here with you. Right here, baby. I have you safe. No one will hurt you.”
The last part of her story was the hardest. On the final afternoon of the trip, Mardi Gras, hotel security guards trapped her and took her to an enormous complex on the water’s edge. She made out the sign over the entrance, free port of st. matthieu, as they shoved her into a building with dozens of rooms, most filled with art as far as she could tell as they muscled her along a corridor.
They took her to a room lined with mirrors and a giant round bed in the middle. The Chinese man who wanted to bid on her was there.
“Screamed and ran. Down hallways, in and out of rooms, saw ‘Rest EZ’ over one door. Snatched papers from a shelf, kept running.”
She somehow ended up at an emergency exit and ran down the beach into a bodega, where the woman behind the counter hid her in a supply closet. She gave Reno a mattress for the night. In the morning, she roused her son to take Reno to the airport on his pedicab.
“Group leader furious. ‘We brought you here and you disappointed us. Your career is over.’”
Reno didn’t answer back; she wanted to get her papers home safely and wouldn’t risk fighting with the person who had power in the situation. She’d grabbed papers at random but recognized the names on the stock sheets as Stock of the Day promotions at Rest EZ. She wasn’t sure what the documents meant, but was sure they showed something fishy, if not illegal—why else would they have been hidden in a free port building, where no government could get access to them? The loan agreement didn’t mean anything to her, so she’d approached Dick.
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