Shell Game

by Sara Paretsky

  “Thought he could help, get me Rest EZ CEO. Wanted CEO. Needed to show how wrong sex games were. Needed to learn why the stock pick. Uncle Dick said he didn’t know Rest EZ bosses. He wanted the papers, but I didn’t trust.”

  After that final burst of confidences, Reno fell heavily asleep.

  I stayed another half hour, holding her hand. “You are the bravest girl in Chicago,” I said when I finally got up to leave. “The bravest, the smartest. Grandpa Tony would be so proud of you. As I am myself.”

  52

  A Nod Is as Good as a Wink

  By the time I left the hospital, the nursing staff had changed shifts and so had the Streeter brothers, with Jim taking Tim’s spot outside Reno’s door. The sun had gone down.

  I expected bigger changes—I thought a century might have passed. I expected my hair to be white and my face deeply scored with wrinkles. It seemed strange to look at myself in the bathroom mirror and not to detect any difference. Reno’s story made my whole body rise in revolt, not simple nausea, but as if everything inside me needed to come out, bones, blood, nerves, in a paroxysm of revolt.

  Dick—we hadn’t slept together for over twenty years, but the thought of his skin next to my naked body made me feel filthy. What were you thinking, Richard, when you came into this hospital to try to get those documents from your niece?

  And Harmony—had you gone to Dick? Had Dick come to you? I called Arcadia House, but Harmony hadn’t returned. The night director told me that she’d left without telling anyone where she was going.

  Lotty and Max had both left for the day. The whole administrative wing had shut down except for an emergency night clerk. I’d hoped to find a place where I could rest, restore some semblance of balance to my tormented brain.

  The cafeteria was almost deserted. I slumped on a chair against a wall, one of a handful of numb, dumb animals waiting for news on the direly ill. My whole body ached, as though the Russian enforcers had been pounding on me with their massive fists.

  Even in the #MeToo era, it was hard for women to get their stories taken seriously. Whatever was going on at Rest EZ, they weren’t as worried about their Caribbean debauch being revealed as they were about the papers Reno had taken. They hadn’t tried to silence Reno’s description of the orgies, with their bowls of Ecstasy tabs and high-priced alcohol, but they’d sent Dick to get the papers from her. The papers whose location she’d very nearly given her life to safeguard.

  The hyperwealthy aren’t like you and me. Not, as Hemingway supposedly told Fitzgerald, because they have more money, but because the money makes them think their needs, however debased, should be met on the instant. A billionaire’s bacchanal in the Caribbean where members brought beautiful women as party favors for their friends seemed vile; the idea that the billionaires entertained themselves by bidding on the women was beyond vile.

  My vocabulary was too limited for me to come up with a word for the disgust and rage I felt.

  What Reno’s story told me was that attacking Rest EZ and Trechette by exposing their debauchery wouldn’t have any effect on them. The scumbags who’d gone to St. Matthieu cared only about money; they collected it along with their stolen paintings and statues.

  My anger seemed to make my brain come to a point; I suddenly realized how the loan agreement Reno had brought home connected with the Stock of the Day.

  The Trechette subsidiary Legko lent money to Trechette holdings. That meant that Trechette had a large debt, which it could use to offset income, including capital gains. If they pumped up the price of penny stocks and sold at the top of the artificial market, they’d make a profit—offset by the debt to their other wholly owned subsidiary.

  The high rollers had paid to go to the Caribbean. How much, I wondered, and how had they paid it? Direct deposit to a Trechette bank account? No, into a Russian offshore account: Reno’s Chinese men had said that their money had gone to the Russians, because the person who organized the fête was in debt to them.

  I’d been shot at, bitten, beaten, kicked—I was tired of being a punching bag for these monstrosities. Quadruple that for Reno. Time to dish it out. I called Niko Cruickshank, my computer wizard.

  “Vic! I don’t have anything else for you, I’m afraid.”

  I told him I didn’t need anything else out of Fausson’s computer, at least for the time being. “This is a new project, but there’s risk attached.”

  “You know my hobby is skydiving, don’t you?” he said.

  “Joke?” I asked.

  “I spend my days digging in the bowels of computers. I need to do something in the open air. And I get squirrelly in the winter—can’t afford to get away to Arizona or Mexico more than twice before it gets warm enough in the Midwest to go up. You got something high-risk, it’ll get the jitters out of my system.”

  I didn’t want to discuss it over the phone, at least not over my phone, but Niko assured me he was encrypted and impenetrable. “As much as anyone can be, of course.”

  I looked around the cafeteria: no one was in earshot, but I still lowered my voice. “There’s a computer system I need to break into. It’s for a countywide system, maybe a nationwide system. Do you need to be in the IT department’s machine to insert code?”

  “I need access to a machine that connects with the IT department, but I don’t need to be there physically. You’re out-of-date, V.I. Go to a community college and take an intro to computer security.”

  I agreed, humbly. With every year that passes, I move further from understanding contemporary technology. I was at my peak when tracking meant a real person had to follow you. Listening in on someone’s phone meant sweating bullets to get a bug into a handset, or shinnying up a phone pole to a junction box. Modern electronics make detectives lazy.

  However, Niko was free tonight. He’d meet me in my office in an hour unless I aborted the mission.

  I dug in my pockets for the scrap of paper with Andy Green’s phone number on it. He was the man with the bloodhound cheeks who was angry about Rest EZ’s stock program because it increased their customers’ debt load.

  I went out to my car so I could dig one of my burner phones from the trunk. Maybe I was only partly divorced from modern technology.

  “Hey, detective. I wasn’t expecting to hear from you again,” Green said when I called.

  I asked if he worked for Rest EZ.

  “No, ma’am. I run a few errands for one of the gals there, that’s all. You don’t need a loan, do you?”

  I thought of my accounts payable list. I could use a windfall. “Probably, but not from Rest EZ. I want to get in after the place closes and look over their computer system.”

  “You planning on stealing from them?”

  “I’m hoping to shut down the stock trades. Don’t know if I can.”

  He was silent for a beat, as if trying to assess my reliability. “There’s a cleaning crew empties the garbage, runs a mop over the worst of the dirt, and so on, between ten and eleven. If they’re shorthanded I sometimes help out. Come around the alley about eleven-fifteen in case the back door doesn’t shut all the way.”

  I texted Niko that we were on. I had time to go home for an hour. And to check in with Dick, which I did from the hospital parking garage.

  “Dick!” I cried heartily, although he’d answered his phone with a biting “Now what?”

  “I’m just calling to say how pleased I am that you’re reaching out to Becky’s daughters. I heard from the hospital that you went with Harmony to visit Reno.”

  “I didn’t do it to win your approval, Vic.”

  “That’s what makes it so special,” I said earnestly. “You were doing good for its own sake. Are you and Teri putting Harmony up now? I’m guessing she won’t want to go to Portland until she sees Reno has really turned a corner.”

  “I don’t know her plans, Vic. She’s not staying with us; she didn’t want to be that far out of Chicago without a car.”

  “Where did you drop her off, then?” />
  “I know you made these girls your business for the last two weeks, Vic, but Harmony doesn’t want you breathing down her neck.”

  My mouth twisted bitterly. I couldn’t tell if he was lying or not—my last conversation with Harmony had been unharmonious in the extreme, after all.

  “Richard, this is going to be a very difficult thing for you, but start thinking of them as ‘women,’ not ‘girls.’ Where did you leave her?”

  “That’s privileged, Warshawski. She asked me not to tell you and I’m respecting her wishes.”

  The patronizing sneer in his voice was almost more than I could bear. “I hear you caused a major crisis in Reno’s health by asking about some papers she brought back from St. Matthieu. The hospital isn’t going to let you near her again.”

  He cut the connection a second before I could. How satisfying was that? Not at all.

  When I got home Mr. Contreras was distressed by the news, but he had to agree that I couldn’t take the time to scour Chicago for Harmony. “You got a plan to bring this whole shebang to a halt, you get on with it, doll. I’ll leave a light on and stay up, in case our gal remembers she’s got a bed here.”

  53

  Payday

  Rest EZ is a payday loan company whose headquarters are in Chicago’s West Loop.

  I was sitting on Mr. Contreras’s couch, watching Beth Blacksin present the noon news on Channel 13. The television showed Blacksin in front of the dreary building on Adams where Rest EZ leased their offices. Blacksin had a wool scarf wrapped around her neck: we were in the first week of April and the wind from the lake and river was still biting.

  Blacksin gave a thirty-second précis of Rest EZ’s business model and then told her viewers about the Stock of the Day, and the way in which consumers were enticed into buying the shares, driving up the price every time they made a trade.

  “We made a quick search of a number of recent stock shares that were heavily promoted by Rest EZ. During the week Rest EZ was pushing customers to buy the stocks, prices rose dramatically. One company, Green Grow, saw its share price rise from pennies a share to five dollars. Climate Repair looked even more impressive, its share price rising to nine dollars. At the end of the week, a mysterious owner dumped five hundred thousand shares of both companies, and the customers who’d bought their shares on Rest EZ credit saw their holdings wiped out and their debt to the company notched up.”

  In the short time she’d had to prepare her story, Blacksin had come up with an elderly white woman who’d lost her home because of her debt to Rest EZ. The woman said they kept pushing her to buy the stocks as a way to get out of debt, “and then I suddenly was owing them fifty thousand dollars. They took my house.” She was trembling and crying.

  Next to me, Mr. Contreras reacted with exclamations of grief and outrage. “These the people your niece got involved with? Oh, Cookie, you got to get those girls safe.”

  He’d been up until one, hoping that Harmony might show up, and had gone to bed feeling wretched. There wasn’t much I could do to comfort him, except to assure him I was working hard.

  I myself had been up until four with Niko. We’d spent the first two hours at the Rest EZ store, so he could see how to get into the corporate system.

  He had typed for a few minutes and clicked his tongue disapprovingly. “They deserve to be hacked: their security is so pathetic that you could probably break into it. Not really a challenge, V.I.”

  He next did something fancy with the security cameras, putting them on a loop that made them think they were looking at empty offices. Finally, he hunted out the programs that dealt with stock advertisements.

  When he had the code he needed to put the stock information out on the video network for the company’s three thousand North American loan stores, we left: no point tempting the fates.

  We went back to my office—if Niko made a misstep and someone traced the hack, it was on me, not him. He made sure all my files were backed up on two separate 8-terabyte disks and dismounted those from my Mac Pro. He disconnected the machine from the cloud and went to work. When he finished, he cleaned the Mac Pro disk, zeroing it out, which took an extra hour. Finally, he reinstalled my files, so that the machine looked the way it had when we arrived that night.

  “If it weren’t so immoral, I’d be tempted to short some Green Grow myself before the markets open,” he said when he finally finished. “It’s a wicked scheme, and horrible that they got away with it for so long. I’m also tempted to forgive everyone’s debts. I’ll think about that one. See you in Leavenworth, V.I.”

  I’d slept for five hours on the daybed in my office: I didn’t want the dogs to record my return home. If Kettie or Trechette or even Dick suspected me of jimmying Rest EZ’s system and sicced the FBI on me, I could imagine the woman from 1B chirping, “Oh, yes, she came home at four that morning. Ask what she was doing out all night if she wasn’t breaking into Rest EZ.”

  Niko and I couldn’t come up with a real actor, of course, so he’d taken the authoritative-looking man already shilling stocks for the company and given him new dialogue. Niko had been sad that there wasn’t enough time to change his jaw movements to fit the words more closely, but I read the script while Niko ran a program to turn my alto into a convincing baritone.

  “Did you buy Green Grow or Climate Repair stocks? Did you lose your shirt? You’re not alone. Those stocks made Rest EZ’s rich owners even richer, but the owners rigged the system to make sure you lost money. Want to know how they worked the scam? Go to ShortStock.com for complete details.”

  ShortStock was a rudimentary website Niko had set up to step people through the details of the scam—including the loop of debt and profit cycled through the Trechette holdings.

  “The simple version is—every time you buy a stock through Rest EZ, the owners are roaring with laughter over you for being a chump.

  “Who are those owners? That’s the pea under the walnut. We found a company called Trechette in the French West Indies but there’s no one there we can talk to.

  “By the way, don’t ever buy insurance from a company called Legko. Legko has never yet paid a claim. They say they don’t have any money, which makes it hard to understand how the Illinois and Minnesota and other state insurance commissioners let them get away with doing business.”

  Within twenty minutes of opening for business, Rest EZ had shut down their in-store TV program, Beth Blacksin told us. Every time they tried to override Niko’s and my program, their whole computer network crashed. I was impressed—that was an extra step Niko hadn’t told me he’d inserted.

  “We’ve tried talking to Rest EZ’s Chicago management team, but so far, no one is returning our calls. This is Beth Blacksin, live in front of Rest EZ’s Chicago headquarters.”

  “That’s where Harmony’s sis worked, huh?” Mr. Contreras said. “And they was doing this to the people borrowing money from them? I thought I got taken to the cleaners, but the interest they charged me wasn’t nothing compared to this stock mess. Hard to think a nice gal like your niece could be caught up in something like that.”

  He’d never met Reno, of course, but he couldn’t imagine Harmony and her sister as anything other than “nice gals.”

  “She wasn’t,” I said soberly. I told him what I thought had happened, which left him horribly shaken.

  Murray called while Mr. Contreras was digesting this. “Warshawski, they’ve got Blacksin out trying to corner someone from Rest EZ, but I’m looking for Trechette. What have you learned about them?”

  “No more than what I saw on Channel Thirteen just now—they’re the putative owners of Rest EZ, right? You on that part of the story?”

  “Don’t play naive with me,” Murray snapped. “I can still count to ten without losing track of my fingers. Three days ago, you mentioned ‘Trechette’ to me. You were taunting me, as we both knew at the time. You tried to tap-dance over whether you’d found your niece in the Cap Sauers Holding last week. I looked up Yarborough’s f
amily, and his sister’s married name was ‘Seale.’ Her daughter Reno has been on the Rest EZ payroll for about a year. Now talk to me about Trechette, and this bizarre hacking of the Rest EZ internal TV feed.”

  “You just summed up everything I know; I can’t tell you anything else.”

  “Like, was it your niece who hacked the feed?”

  “You apparently can’t keep track of your fingers,” I said, “or you’d know my niece is lying unconscious in a hospital bed.”

  “You? Was it you who hacked the feed?”

  “If I had that kind of skill I’d be sitting on a fortune in Bitcoins, not racing around town trying to stay a half step away from some terrifying Russians. Did I tell you one of them bit me?”

  “Don’t try to sidetrack me,” Murray snapped. “Unless it happened within the last twenty-four hours, it’s not news.”

  “Share that definition with the president,” I suggested, and cut the connection.

  I was uneasy: Murray had put the pieces together very fast. He was a better investigator than Rest EZ might have on tap, but Dick or Glynis would think of my name pretty quickly. Niko and I hadn’t left a trail that the FBI could follow, but the person behind the Russian mobsters wouldn’t care about evidence. He’d care about things like tearing out fingernails to force an answer.

  “Things are about to get even uglier than they’ve been the last few weeks,” I said to Mr. Contreras. “I’d like to drive you and the dogs out to your daughter’s place.”

  “First of all, I ain’t going,” my neighbor said. “Second, Ruthie don’t want dogs in her precious ranch house. Third, I ain’t being driven from my own bed by some foreign lunks.”

  “But—”

  “Where will you spend the night? With that bald guy who was here the other night?”

  I couldn’t keep from blushing. I’d had a brief phone call with Peter while I was with Niko last night, enough to learn that his donor meeting had gone well Saturday; neither of us could fit in dinner before Thursday, when he was leaving for Jordan, but we set a date for the week he got home.