Women on the Case

by Sara Paretsky

  “That’s understandable, Mrs. Love,” Ariel assured, elated that Mrs. Love hadn’t touched anything. That boosted her chances of finding something that would tell her why Chloe had to die. Mrs. Love left Ariel to her rubber-gloved search of the room. Chloe had the typical college wardrobe. Jeans, jeans, and more jeans. Wore an imitation of Fred Hayman’s 273 perfume and listened to En Vogue and Salt-N-Pepa.

  And she was organized. Her books and notes arranged by class in a steel bookcase that had three shelves. Ariel went through each one carefully, checking between pages for notes that might have gotten stuck. Then she searched her dresser drawers. Maybe Chloe kept a diary on her personal life. But there was nothing, and after three hours Ariel gave up.

  Her only hope was the evidence. Ariel went back to the station about seven-thirty; Donnelly wouldn’t be around that late. Wilson was on duty, and he was extremely cooperative. Ariel took the evidence package to an interview room.

  Chloe had been wearing blue jeans, white sweatshirt, and pale blue starter jacket. The jacket and shirt were ripped by the bullets and hardened with Chloe’s blood. Ariel went through Chloe’s cloth briefcase. There was the lesson book she had used for tutoring Sean that evening. Her political science textbook.

  Ariel went through Chloe’s black sack purse next. Makeup. Comb and brush. Wallet with ten dollars and some change. And …

  A calendar and address book.

  The girl would have made a first-rate detective; she had filled in every day of her life like clockwork. Right down to the Wednesday that she’d cut her tutoring session short. In fancy, curly script she had written: Meet Anthony. 6:30 p.m. 7723 West 22nd Street Berwyn.

  Anthony? Berwyn?

  Chloe wouldn’t go near Forty-seventh Street, Mrs. Love had said. So what was this young black woman doing meeting some guy all the way out in a suburb that Donnelly would call home if the department didn’t require him to live in the city?

  Ariel tucked the black book in a plastic bag and put it in her purse. Then she went back to Wilson and gave him the rest.

  The next morning Ariel cross-checked the address for a phone number and when she called, she got “Riley’s Gun Shop.”

  “Gun shop? This is a gun shop?” She felt stupid repeating what he’d said.

  “Yeah, can I help you?”

  “No. Think I misdialed.” She hung up.

  Confused? Ariel was baffled now.

  Behind the counter was a scrawny white man wearing a plaid shirt and blue jeans so faded the color was just about gone. A good ol’ boy. Probably had animal skins and deer heads on the walls in his den.

  Cold gray eyes pierced Ariel.

  “How’re you doing?” Ariel asked, smiling big enough to show off the dimple in her left cheek.

  Didn’t impress good ol’ boy. He just looked at her. Didn’t say a word.

  “Chicago Police Department,” Ariel said, displaying her identification. “What’s your name, sir?”

  He didn’t deserve the courtesy, but maybe it would get her what she needed.

  “Riley,” he said. Not quite a snarl, but almost.

  “You own this establishment?”

  “It’s my place.”

  Ariel took the eight-by-ten portrait she had of Chloe out of the large manila envelope and laid it on the glass counter. Beneath the glass, small handguns were displayed. The kind you could strap around your calf.

  “Mr. Riley, have you ever seen this young woman?”

  Riley was still hard-faced.

  “Have you?”

  His eyes flicked down.

  “I don’t do business with that kind,” he said, his gray eyes glinting.

  “Excuse me?”

  He took in enough air to make his scrawny chest expand and give him the courage to say, “Niggers know not to come in my place.”

  Once upon a time a comment like that would have brought Ariel’s blood to a boil instantly. But she’d learned to deflect and ignore the worst in her years with the department. So Ariel gave Riley her smile again. “Oh, that’s a good one. Real intelligent response.”

  Riley balled his fists on the counter.

  Ariel picked up the photo of Chloe and put it back in the envelope. “Well, I’ve got some time before I head back to the city so I think I’ll drop in on some friends of mine in the county sheriff’s office and tip them off about all the violations I’ve discovered in this place.”

  Riley’s gray eyes flashed with anger.

  Ariel showed her dimple again.

  “See you soon,” she said.

  Jack Meyers was in a wonderful mood. “You ain’t the only one in a hurry, Lawrence,” he blustered into the phone. I got—”

  “Come on, Meyers. You can get this information with a snap of your fingers.” He’d been in the gang crime unit for ten years, and knew all the ins and outs.

  “Don’t try to use flattery. That won’t get you nowhere.” She could hear him chomping on one of his nasty cigars.

  “For God’s sake, Meyers, it’s a homicide. I don’t have time to argue with you.”

  His sigh was loud and drawn out. “I’m just a pushover. You know that? Just what is it that you need?”

  Ariel told him. “Any reports of gunfire in the area on that night? And I need you to tell me whose turf that is—”

  “Disciples territory,” Meyers interrupted.

  “Yes, well, I think Chloe had a boyfriend that she didn’t want her mother to know about. Think he was in a gang and that she may have been with him that night. His rivals opened fire on him and she got it.”

  “Happens all the time,” Meyers said. “Young girls get mixed up with the wrong type and it costs ’em big time. I’ll call ya back.”

  Ten minutes later, he did just that. “Like I said, Forty-seventh Street was Disciple territory. But six months ago, the Black Vice decided to take it. Easier thought than done. Disciples been battling; knocked off five Black Vice this month. None of ’em were drive-bys though. They’ve been hits on their headquarters and some of their houses.

  “What we haven’t been able to trace is where they got the guns. Before these hits, they were using handguns. Now they got a lot of sophisticated weapons. Like the one that did your victim.”

  Mrs. Love’s anger sizzled through the line. “My daughter wasn’t dating no gang-banger. I raised her better than that.”

  “It’s not your fault if she was, Mrs. Love. Sometimes girls just fall for the wrong guy. Maybe that’s what Chloe did.”

  “You have to prove it to me. I’ll never believe that about my baby.” Ariel could see the woman shaking her salt-and-pepper head. “No. Not my Chloe.”

  A mother’s love and faith, or did Mrs. Love know what she was talking about? Or was Chloe everything her mother said she wasn’t?

  Eva Phillips was preparing to leave when Ariel got to the newspaper office. “Good news?”

  “I wish. Want to ask you about Chloe’s articles again. What had she covered this year, and what was she working on just before she was killed?”

  Eva went over to a file cabinet and pulled out a binder. “I keep my copies of back issues in this.”

  She opened it and flipped back to January. “Chloe’s beat was criminal justice and black studies. Criminal justice was pretty dry. She always had to dig to find something there.”

  Eva flipped Ariel through the back issues, pointing out stories on new members of the criminal justice faculty. A story on a new curriculum that the department was going to implement in the fall. What the black studies department planned for Black History Month. Nothing worth anybody getting killed over. Eva’s assignment log didn’t turn up anything controversial either.

  “You know, Eva. I went through Chloe’s things at her home. The girl was so organized she could have been a consultant on the subject. I found information on everything. But there were no notes from her work here at the paper. Where would she have kept that stuff?”

  Eva nodded. “Yeah, that was Chloe. Me I’m scatter
ed as paper on a windy day. But Chloe could go right to anything you asked her for.”

  Ariel was silent.

  “What about her computer files? That’s where I keep a lot of my notes.”

  Eva nodded again. “Let’s check.”

  She led Ariel over to a desk in the corner of the room and turned on Chloe’s computer. The system beeped as it booted up. She entered a few key strokes, watched the cursor blink and then stopped.

  “Heck, I forgot about her password. I don’t know it.”

  Ariel sighed. “Anybody around who would?”

  Eva looked at her watch. “There’s a slight chance somebody in Info Service might be working late.”

  Eva grabbed the phone and punched out a number.

  “Phillips at the Weekly. I need the password of one of our former reporters. Chloe Love. Yeah, the woman who was killed.”

  Eva listened. “Yeah it was a tragedy. Look, I’m on deadline and … yeah.” She listened again. “Mama? Okay. Thanks a lot.”

  “That’s appropriate,” Ariel said when Eva hung up.

  Eva typed in the four letters, and she and Ariel watched the message Password accepted flow across the screen, watched the system scan for viruses and then a blank screen appear.

  “Okay. List files.”

  Ariel said, “Let’s start with the ones close to the date of her death.”

  They did that. All they got were the dry stories that had already been printed.

  “Go back to the month before,” Ariel said.

  Eva brought up the files again and scrolled the cursor down each one.

  “What’s this?” Ariel said. Pointed her finger at a document called “Guns.”

  “Got me. We never did a story on guns,” Eva said, and opened the file. Chloe’s notes were short:

  I’m going to make Tony give me all the details on the guns. When this story breaks, I’ll be able to get a job on one of the dailies right after graduation.

  Eva laid a puzzled look on Ariel and said, “Tony?”

  The guy who got the call to open the records office and help Ariel identify Tony didn’t appreciate it.

  “Anthony is a common name,” he snarled.

  “Check only Chloe’s classes first,” Ariel instructed, ignoring his attitude. “There can’t have been that many Anthonys in them.”

  There were five. One had transferred to a school on the West Coast. Another was from Boston; chances of his being in the Disciples were slim. Anthony No. 3 was a white student who lived on the North Side. No. 4 was a Hispanic whose name was actually Antonio, but records had made a mistake. But No. 5 was Anthony Stevens. He was in Chloe’s criminal justice class and attendance records showed him AWOL in the three weeks since her murder. He lived at 6129 S. Cottage Grove. Disciples territory.

  “I know my boy didn’t do nothing,” Anthony Stevens’s father stated from the small living room of his third-floor apartment. He was dressed in a laborer’s uniform of green overalls, and reminded Ariel of her own dad, who had worked day and night to support his family.

  “He go to school every day and he’s doing real good. Gonna be the first in our family to finish college,” he announced proudly. “My wife and me gonna see to that.”

  “I need to ask him a few questions,” Ariel said.

  “He ain’t here. He takes classes in the evening too. Sometimes he studies so late, he just stays at a friend’s house and go to school from there.”

  Poor man really believes that, Ariel thought. Probably doesn’t know about Anthony’s sidelines. She was about to ask if she could wait, but at that moment the front door opened and a tall, gangly guy about twenty years old walked through it.

  “Hey, Pops,” he called. He threw a puzzled glance at Ariel, who couldn’t believe her luck. Couldn’t believe that he’d just walked right into her hands.

  “Tony, this lady’s from the police. She say—”

  The elder Stevens didn’t have a chance to finish. Anthony’s eyes popped in surprise, he backed out the door and took off.

  Ariel was right behind him, taking the stairs in chunks.

  “I just want to talk to you, Anthony,” she called.

  Anthony kept running. Out the door and onto the sidewalk that was slick with hardened snow. “Knew slacks were a wise wardrobe choice today,” Ariel muttered.

  Anthony’s legs were long, but Tai Chi training made Ariel fast and agile. She was about six steps behind him when she left her feet and flew into his thighs. He slid face first into the dirty snow the way Pete Rose used to slide into the bases.

  The fact that she caught him must have shocked Anthony because he didn’t immediately try to get up, which gave Ariel the few seconds she needed to whip out her handcuffs and lock his hands behind his back.

  “You get off me, lady. I ain’t done nothing.”

  “Ain’t? What are they teaching you at that snotty university?” She stood him up. “I just want to talk to you. I need to ask you some questions about Chloe Love.”

  Anthonys stare was defiant, but Ariel thought she also saw something else in his black eyes. Sadness maybe?

  “Don’t know no Chloe Love.”

  “Well, why don’t we talk about it at police headquarters.”

  Fifteen minutes later he was cuffed to the wall in an interview room and still denying he knew Chloe Love.

  “Come on, Anthony. This is tiresome. Chloe Love was in your criminal justice class so don’t tell me you didn’t know her. I know for a fact that you were supposed to meet her the night she was killed. What was that about?”

  Anthony didn’t say anything. Just stared at the dark window in the room.

  “Were you two dating? You fit the description of the guy people say she was seeing.”

  That got a loud groan. “How many times do I have to tell you, lady? I didn’t know the girl.”

  This time Ariel groaned. “You know, Anthony. You better get your father’s hard-earned money back because you’re not learning a darn thing at that university.”

  With nothing to hold Anthony Stevens on, Ariel let him go and went home to leftover pizza and her thoughts.

  Plopped on the sofa with a pad and pencil, Ariel went back to the beginning. She had a crime scene that had no evidence of a crime having been committed. She had two rival gangs fighting over turf with illegally purchased guns. That same type of gun had killed her victim. She had the victim’s classmate who happened to belong to one of those gangs run like a jackrabbit when he got a visit from the police and lie about knowing her.

  Pretty pat.

  She chewed on her pencil.

  Too pat.

  Chloe’s notes hadn’t pointed to Anthony Stevens as the buyer. He was going to give her the details, she had written. The details. Chloe had been good about details.

  Ariel picked up the notebooks she’d borrowed from Mrs. Love. Went over them again and again. English literature, political science, advanced reporting … all these notes from her classes, yet something seemed to be missing. She pored over them again. One more time before it hit her.

  Of course. Why hadn’t she seen it before?

  She dialed Meyers at home and after letting him complain for five minutes, explained what she wanted him to do.

  “Hate stakeouts,” Meyers grumbled. He ran an impatient hand through what was left of his sandy hair.

  “Just think about the big bust you’re getting ready to make,” Ariel told him.

  They had been sitting in their regulation Chevy across the street from Berwyn’s friendly neighborhood gunshop for two hours, since seven-thirty that morning, and Meyers had been moaning the whole time.

  “You know—”

  “Shush!”

  A beat-up Ford pulled into the parking lot, and Anthony Stevens and a guy who looked like he could snap a neck with one hand got out.

  “Well, your undercover buyer got them here,” Ariel said.

  “Of course,” Meyers said matter-of-factly.

  They let them go in an
d waited for their other guest. Not five minutes later, a red Corvette drove up and Michael Trenton got out.

  “Police. Everybody freeze,” Ariel announced.

  They did, but not before Anthony’s friend grabbed Riley by the collar and put a semiautomatic to his temple. Anthony pointed his at Trenton.

  “Guess these gentlemen don’t know about your business rule, huh, Riley,” Ariel said.

  Riley had panic in his eyes. “A-a-rrest these punks. They—they trying to rob my place,” he stammered to Meyers.

  Ariel looked at Trenton. “Good to see you again, Professor. Though I wouldn’t have expected it to be under these circumstances.”

  Trenton smiled crookedly. “Man, are we glad you folks showed up. I came out here just to browse. I’m starting to get into hunting. And here I walk into a robbery.”

  “Is that right?” Ariel said. “And here I thought you were here because you got a call saying the Disciples wanted to do some more business.”

  Trenton’s face flushed just a bit. “What? What business are you talking about?”

  “Illegal sale of firearms. You and Riley have quite an operation going. And Chloe, poor idealist that she was, had her sights set on getting a story in the school press. Now you and I know that the university would never have allowed itself to be tainted like that. But you figured you couldn’t risk it.”

  “That’s absurd,” Trenton said.

  “Is it, Professor?” Ariel stepped closer to him, holding her gun straight out. “You said it yourself. Chloe was like a sponge, soaking up all she could about the law. She watched your every move so she could learn. And she was very detailed, took copious notes on everything she did. Except for your class and the work she did for you. Now doesn’t that seem strange to you? It did to me.”

  Trenton’s chin went up. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Studying you she found out about your little sideline. You bought the guns from good ol’ Riley here and sold them illegally in the city to street gangs. Having a Disciple in your class made it work smooth as silk. Made you quite a bundle. Lot more than you earn as an associate professor. You have the priciest set of wheels in the teachers’ lot.”