Shell Game

by Sara Paretsky

  “I don’t want to put anyone else in danger,” I said to Mr. Contreras, “you, the dogs, Peter Sansen—not even that pest across the hall. If I could get you to move out, I’d sleep in my office. The place is fire resistant.” That wasn’t because of my work, but because my lease mate’s sculptures involve high-powered blowtorches.

  “Well, I ain’t budging. What if little Harmony comes around and finds the place empty?”

  54

  In the Cleanup Spot

  I went to my office after taking care of the dogs, but I couldn’t focus on work for my paying clients. I wished I had some way of finding out whether the two Russians were still in Chicago. Or who had hired them or what he or she might want them to do next.

  I called Martha Simone to see what progress she’d made. The lawyer was happy: she’d found an immigration judge willing to order Rasima Kataba’s release.

  “She should be out tomorrow, maybe tonight if we’re lucky. After that, it would be best if Dr. Herschel persuaded Felix to go to Montreal until you get the state’s attorney to arrest Fausson’s actual killer,” Simone said.

  “Right,” I said brightly. “They’re eagerly waiting for my opinion.” The call reminded me that I wanted to talk to Mary-Carol Kooi from the Oriental Institute, to see what she knew about the Dagon’s mysterious appearance and disappearance. Kooi’s phone rolled over to voice mail.

  I spun a coin around on my desktop. Should I drive down to Hyde Park and see if I could find Kooi? Or was it time to rejoin the Force 5 cleaning crew? If Kettie had been upset by the hijacking of Rest EZ’s internal TV network, he would doubtless have been on the phone to his lawyers. Dick might have left notes lying around.

  I’d rather be at the OI, with a chance to say hello to Sansen, but we learned in first-year English that duty is the stern daughter of something or other: Crawford, Mead took priority here. I sent a text to Peter Sansen, telling him I’d tried unsuccessfully to reach Mary-Carol Kooi. He said he’d try her himself and get back to me. That meager crumb would have to suffice.

  As I drove home, I listened to news updates. Both local and national feeds gave a lot of airtime to Rest EZ’s problems:

  “The number two player in payday, or cash advance loans, in the nation, Rest EZ offices all over the country are reeling from efforts to discredit their stock-selling scheme. Someone hacked into the company’s internal TV network to claim the company’s stock-buying program was at best a sham and at worst a successful effort to defraud customers.

  “Eliza Trosse from the Chicago headquarters said today that Rest EZ ‘is trying to help ordinary people who can’t afford a big portfolio take part in America’s success story. We have no tolerance for anyone who would make our customers question the financial advice we provide and we are working with the FBI to find the perpetrators and prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law.’

  “Meanwhile, business in some locations had dropped by fifty percent.”

  Prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law; that was a threat that should make the perpetrator shake in her running shoes. Instead, she ran her dog Peppy to the lake and back. Then changed into a white-collar outfit: tailored suit, silk shirt, light makeup. Put the purloined Force 5 smock into a briefcase, along with running shoes, jeans, and a T-shirt.

  I walked over to the L stop on Sheffield and rode the train downtown. I hustled to the Grommet Building and got there just as the Force 5 van was pulling up. While Melanie Duarte—the crew chief I’d sparred with last week—conducted her roll call, I strode past them into the lobby. I was management: cleaning crews didn’t exist on my radar.

  I sat on a banquette, frowning over a document and texting. When the Force 5 crew came in, the security guard took a look at me, decided I belonged there, and went to chat with Melanie while he checked in the crew.

  I sat until a pair of late-working women came in, heads together, laughing over some story. I held my phone down as if it were my ID and slipped through the security gates in their wake.

  I took an elevator to 38. The changing room for the Force 5 women was there, and a security guard had just unlocked the door as I walked down the hall. I nodded to him—still regal, still management—but stopped to handle more texts until he’d taken off. Several other cleaners arrived while I waited. They stared at me when I came into the room, but I pretended not to notice, just hung my jacket and good blouse in an empty locker, put on my T-shirt, jeans, and the smock, then wrapped a paisley bandanna around my head.

  Finally one of the women asked me in halting English if I was new to Force 5.

  “I’m here as a temp,” I said in English. “Usually I work at a hospital in Edgewater.”

  They shook their heads, not understanding, but two more women arrived; one of them translated my answer. “I’m supposed to go to fifty,” I said. “Melanie didn’t tell me who the team leader is for fifty.”

  At that moment, the woman who’d rescued me on my first visit arrived. When she noticed me, she snapped out a sharp query that even my feeble Spanish could follow: Who was I and what was my real business here?

  The woman who’d translated for me started to explain, but my erstwhile rescuer cut her short, apparently recounting the story I’d told her last week about my nephew. A cluster of eight or nine women gathered around me.

  The English speaker said, “We know you were here last week, hiding, telling Lidia a story about a nephew. Now you are here this week, telling a story about being assigned temporarily. In eight minutes we start work, so in seven minutes, you tell the truth or we call security.”

  I nodded: fair enough. “There are two stories, one about a nephew and one about a niece. The story about the nephew involves Lawrence Fausson, who worked for Force 5 until he was murdered two weeks ago.”

  I paused while the interpreter put it into Spanish. More women were arriving, but one of our group shushed their excited questions—time was short. Two women in hijab stood at the back, puzzled by what was going on but trying to follow what we were saying.

  I cast about for a word to describe Lotty’s relationship to me. “My godmother has a nephew named Felix who came to Chicago to go to college. The police think Felix murdered Fausson. When I came here last week, I hoped to talk to men who had worked with Fausson. Fausson spoke Arabic.”

  I was working hard, keeping verb tenses simple, sentences short.

  “Oh! Elorenze Foessahn!” one of the women in hijab cried. “Elorenze speak Arabic very good.”

  I smiled at her but plowed on. “I was trying to find out how Fausson knew Felix. I didn’t learn much. I came back today because of the second story. This story is about my own niece, a young woman named Reno. Reno was kidnapped and almost murdered. She is still very close to death.”

  I stopped again for the interpreter. A number of women made sharp comments. The interpreter said, “They say you could say anything; how can we believe any story you tell us?”

  “I found my niece two days ago in a forest preserve west of town. The men who kidnapped her attacked me.” I pulled my smock down my back and showed them the bruises, then showed them my hand, where the bite marks had faded to yellowing greens.

  There were little murmurs of shock and sympathy in the group. I pulled out my phone and opened the photos I’d taken of Reno in the shed in the woods. The murmurs turned to horrified gasps.

  “In this building many powerful people have their offices. One of these men is Gervase Kettie. I think Kettie hired—paid—the criminals who kidnapped my niece. The lawyers who work on the fiftieth floor are helping Kettie—”

  “Kettie!” There was another outcry about Kettie and what he might have done.

  “I have no time,” I said to the interpreter.

  She clapped her hands together and spoke to the others sharply in Spanish.

  “I want to go into the lawyers’ offices, to see if there is any proof about the kidnapping or how the criminals were paid.”

  I couldn’t begin to try to explain the p
ink stocks, not in one or two minutes. I was hoping shock over my niece’s damaged body would sway the group.

  “¿Policía?” “¿Inmigración?” they demanded.

  I said no, but the interpreter said, “Not good enough. Why do you have the authority to be here?”

  “No authority,” I said. “I have experience in this kind of inquiry. That is why my godmother asked me to help her nephew—her brother’s grandson—and why I am trying to help my niece.” I showed them my PI license.

  This sparked a ferocious outpouring, but it was stopped when a bell dinged on everyone’s phones: time to go to work. They began pushing supply carts into the hall. The interpreter nodded at me to follow her.

  “Callista is in charge of the fiftieth floor; says she will take you to fifty. If you steal anything she will report you, but you may go with her.”

  She pointed me toward a woman with a dark, disapproving face, who nodded at me with a jailor’s sternness. The wiry curls emerging from her kerchief were mostly gray and her fingers on the supply cart handles were starting to twist and thicken with arthritis. A hard job for someone no longer young. Two other women followed in her wake, whispering in Spanish.

  On fifty, Callista used a special key card to open the locked doors. She stayed in the reception area, dusting the high counter and using cleaning fluid on the glass and metal surfaces, but the other two headed toward the offices on the west side of the reception area. Callista was limping—the arthritis might be in her knees as well as her hands—but she brushed off my attempt to help, pointing toward the corridor. I grabbed a garbage bag and plastic gloves from the cart—I could make myself semi-useful while I snooped.

  I entered Dick’s suite cautiously, head bent in case Glynis was working late, but the two rooms were empty. I turned on the desk lamps and went first for the trash, since that’s where I’d struck pay dirt last time, but either my taunting had made Dick cautious or today’s sensitive communications had been by phone or text. He had eaten another Snickers, but there were no meeting notes, nor any printed e-mails from Gervase Kettie demanding action against the felons who’d hacked Rest EZ’s TV system. The only thing mildly interesting was a handwritten note from Glynis: “Tonight’s showing is canceled,” but since it didn’t say what was being shown or where, it wasn’t very helpful.

  In the outer office, I looked over Glynis’s work area. She had brought in a salad from a place across the street and thrown the remains away less tidily than I would have expected. I emptied the remains into my garbage bag along with Dick’s Snickers bar wrapper.

  Her desk was a handsome piece of oak with two shallow drawers. The surface was severely tidy: a landline, her computer monitor, and empty in-and-out trays in a leather just darker than the desk. One regulation green plant and family photo.

  The computer keyboard was tucked on a sliding tray under her desk, but as I’d learned on my previous visit, her machine was password protected. I tried opening the drawers to see if she helpfully kept her password where she—or I—could see it, but they were locked. It wouldn’t be prudent to jimmy them.

  Dick’s desk wasn’t quite as tidy as hers; he’d left a brief open to a page marked with yellow highlighter. The brief dealt with an agriculture conglomerate’s response to a lawsuit about improperly sealed waste tanks. After our summer together dealing with hog waste, Dick had developed a specialty in litigating for agribusiness, but unless Kettie was a stakeholder in Sea-2-Sea’s Animal and Animal By-products Division, this suit had nothing to do with Rest EZ.

  I sat down and tried Dick’s computer. Also shut down for the day, also password protected. However, he hadn’t locked his desk. I was going to rummage for his password, but when I opened the top right drawer, the first thing I saw was a figurine of a naked woman.

  She was about four inches high, but the detail was intricate. Her short hair had a gold band restraining it; her eyes were wide, rimmed in white, all-knowing. A pair of stubby horns sprouted from her head. The figure was copper, with a green sheen across the hips and face where the metal had tarnished. She looked modern. I would have thought she had come from current-day Africa, if I hadn’t seen her photo among the pictures of the treasures of Saraqib.

  In the photo, though, she was holding snakes in her outstretched arms. This figure’s arms had been broken off. Could there be two goddess figurines, identical but for the arms, one in Saraqib, one in Dick’s desk drawer?

  I picked her up with the hem of my smock and looked at her closely. The left arm had been torn or cut above the elbow; the right had been yanked out of the armpit. The dismemberment had been recent: the metal shone bright copper there, not the dull brownish-green patina of the rest of the figure.

  “Who did this to you, goddess?” I asked her. “Was it Gervase Kettie? Did he want those snakes so bad—”

  I stopped midsentence. When I was mock-groveling to Gervase Kettie outside the elevator ten days ago, my hair had caught in his ring and dislodged an inlay of a serpent set in lapis.

  “You take?”

  Bad detective. I hadn’t noticed Callista coming into the office. If it had been Dick or Glynis, I’d be in serious trouble.

  “Nope. I’m studying it.” I was laying it back in the drawer when I saw there was a card underneath it, a thick cream stock with an ornate K done in gold with lapis flourishes. “Thanks, Yarborough.”

  For—what? The card didn’t say, but I could come up with a pretty good short list.

  I photographed the card and took a dozen shots of the goddess, with Callista watching me, tight-lipped. My brain was frozen. Kettie had given Dick the statue, which had come from Saraqib. The Dagon from Saraqib had arrived at the Oriental Institute and just as quickly vanished. Kettie must have played a role there.

  “You finish!” Callista demanded.

  “He does two things,” I said. “He works the accounts with his right hand and steals artifacts with his left. Or he acquires artifacts other people have stolen.”

  “You finish!” It was a command, not a question. “Porque Melanie—” She fumbled for English but, frustrated, finished in Spanish. “Melanie vendra a inspeccionar el trabajo.”

  Melanie was coming to inspect the work. I thanked Callista and hastily laid the figurine back in the drawer. I longed to take it with me, to cherish the poor armless goddess, or at least give her to Peter Sansen, but best not.

  I fled down the hall toward the reception area, but saw Melanie getting off the elevator. I turned and ran back up the hall to an interior staircase that connected Crawford, Mead’s six floors and left their offices through the forty-ninth floor.

  55

  Transgressions

  After changing back to my corporate clothes I stood at the far windows on the thirty-eighth floor, watching the city below. Inky water to the east, but mile on mile of sodium-lit grids in front of me and to the west.

  My phone dinged; incoming text. It was from Sansen.

  i’m at transgressions in logan square with mary-carol kooi. can you join us? important.

  I went to the elevators, looking up Transgressions’s address while I rode. I flagged a cab. Logan Square was becoming one of Chicago’s happening neighborhoods; the cabbie knew Transgressions and didn’t need the address.

  It was a converted storefront, with old-fashioned streetlamps outside the entrance. Inside, it was so dark that the waitstaff had LEDs on their trays. The only real lighting was at the end of the bar, where I saw a small stage for live music—fortunately not happening tonight. However, the canned music was well amped, a trying backdrop for conversation.

  I squinted, trying to make out Sansen, and finally spotted him waving the flashlight on his iPhone. I stumbled my way to him, trying to avoid the waitstaff, but knocking into knots of happy drinkers. He and Mary-Carol Kooi were sitting at one of a row of spindly wrought-iron tables and chairs perched on a wooden ledge next to the glass storefront.

  Sansen got to his feet and kissed my cheek, murmuring in my ear, “Mary-Caro
l lives nearby; this is where she likes to drink, and I wanted her to feel at ease.” He squeezed my hand briefly.

  Mary-Carol remained seated but looked up at me anxiously. The ledge was just wide enough for the table and two chairs.

  “I’ll stand,” Sansen said. “I’ve already heard Mary-Carol’s story.”

  I sat gingerly in the chair; the iron poked the bruise in my back where the computer had taken a bullet for me almost two weeks ago. It was mostly healed but the iron reminded me it had happened. “What’s up?”

  Mary-Carol flashed another anxious look at Sansen, who smiled reassuringly. She spoke, but so softly I couldn’t hear her over the noise in the room. I leaned over the spindly table so that my head almost touched hers.

  “The Dagon,” she repeated. “When it came, I was surprised, I didn’t know anything about it. But—how it got stolen. From the OI, I mean, that’s what—that’s why—I had to talk to Peter. And he said we need to talk to you.”

  I nodded—a “with you so far” gesture.

  “Rasima Kataba, you know, Tarik Kataba’s daughter.”

  My neck was starting to ache from leaning over the table, but I tried to be patient. “Yes.”

  “I met her a few times at the Syrian-Lebanese center. She’s being held by ICE right now.”

  Another pause and then the story finally tumbled out. “She’s dating this guy named Felix; they’re in engineering school together. And Felix called me Monday afternoon and asked me if I knew where the Dagon was being stored.”

  A waitperson was holding a menu under my nose. Mixed drinks with fanciful names and dozens of micro-beers. They didn’t have anything as pedestrian as Johnnie Walker Black. I ordered house-made tonic water with a twist of lime. As pricey as a whiskey at my usual bar.

  “You’re sure it was Felix?” I asked.