Tunnel Vision

by Sara Paretsky

  Some of Conrad’s depression might have stemmed from his dinner. He’d been warned at his last physical to cut down drastically on fat; in an act of self-pity tonight he had ordered poached turbot without sauce. Now he picked at it morosely. After his third random remark I couldn’t take the strain, and asked him point-blank if he had been talking to Finchley.

  “He caught up with me this evening. Just before I set out to meet you.”

  “And told you how he tried to arrest me last night?”

  “Sounds like an ugly scene all the way around. He says you impersonated a cop to go into the Messenger mansion today.”

  “Technically, no. I showed my PI license to the housekeeper, but I didn’t know the Polish word for it. She thought I was a cop. I’m sorry in a way that I did it. As long as Terry didn’t take Messenger seriously as a suspect he wasn’t going to search the house, and that bat could have lain there for decades.” I tried to keep my tone reasonable, conversational, not threatening.

  “You’re wrong about that, Vic: Terry has wondered about Fabian. But there didn’t seem to be any evidence hard enough for the state’s attorney to agree to a search warrant.”

  He took another bite of fish and held his breath while he swallowed it. I scooped some of my calamari alla marinara onto a bread plate and handed it across to him.

  “Eat some of this. It doesn’t have any fat in it, and it’s got some flavor. ... But as far as evidence goes, no one wanted to pay serious attention to my saying that Deirdre was expecting someone to meet her at my office.”

  “It’s not that, Ms. W. Everyone knew you were protecting that homeless woman, so no one knew whether to believe you or not.”

  I set my fork down with a bang. “Outrageous, Conrad. To think I would manufacture evidence in order to shield someone I believe in. Do you think I didn’t want to take that baseball bat today and burn it? No one ever would have known. Except Emily or Fabian.” Or Emily and Fabian, I silently amended.

  “Cool your engines, babe: it’s a tribute to your passion for people in trouble, not a swipe at your integrity.”

  I tried to ease the taut muscles in my face. “What happens now?”

  “Now the Finch will talk to Fabian. To the kid if he can find her.”

  “And what if Fabian makes Finchley believe it’s the kid when it’s not, when it’s really him?”

  “Give Terry some credit, Vic.” He took my right hand and massaged it between his own. “He can sort out the truth. Pressure won’t make him believe a lie.”

  I held my fingers rigidly, unable to respond to his touch. “Four days ago both you and he told me Tamar Hawkings was the likeliest person to suspect, not Fabian. You even seemed to think I would have manufactured evidence to shield her.”

  “Take it easy, Vic. We go with what we have. Four days ago we—he—didn’t know the murder weapon was in a missing teenager’s bedroom. An unstable homeless woman was not an unlikely suspect. She was a likely suspect: the one person on the scene.”

  He hesitated, then spoke in a rush. “As a favor to Terry, I went out to interview her husband, Leon Hawkings. There’s a history of violence in that household, but I’m not sure who’s beating on whom. The woman has a sister who tried to kill her own husband, alleging violence, but she stabbed him when he was asleep, not provoked, so she did five years at Dwight. Leon seemed to think—”

  “That’s a real problem for women in violent households,” I interrupted. “They know if they fight back when the man’s assaulting them they’re going to be hurt really badly. So they withdraw—emotionally—from the scene. It’s only later that they can feel the anger you or another man might experience at the moment of attack.”

  “You can’t stab a guy while he’s sleeping. Not and claim self-defense, anyway.”

  “But it’s okay to hit her while she’s wide awake?” I spoke bitterly.

  His grip on my fingers tightened. “You know I don’t believe that, Vic. Don’t put that kind of twist on my words. ... According to Hawkings, when Tamar’s sister came out, her old man murdered her. Tamar went off the deep end, started accusing Leon of being an abuser, and went to a shelter. When she left the shelter she stayed home for a week and then split with the kids.”

  I pulled my hand away to cover my head. Whose story did I believe—the husband’s or the wife’s? Finchley’s or mine? Emily’s or Fabian’s—assuming they had separate stories.

  “You hiding under there, girl?” Conrad asked.

  I attempted a smile and looked up. “So Finchley thinks Hawkings was demented, and might have killed Deirdre just because Deirdre frowned when she should have smiled? Or vice versa?”

  “We’d just like a chance to talk to her. And now to the Messenger girl. Those are the only two people we know for sure were hovering around the crime scene Friday night.”

  “I’d like to talk to them, too, but maybe ask slightly different questions. ... How many people are in Joliet who never committed the crime they were convicted of? One? Five? Five hundred?”

  “All of them, if you ask them,” Conrad said. “What’s your point? That we sometimes get the wrong person? I agree. I don’t like it, but I won’t try to pretend it doesn’t happen.”

  “But we execute people, including teenaged girls. We sometimes do it when we’re not a hundred percent sure they’re guilty. Maybe they’ve exhausted their appeals, or the evidence comes up in such a way it can’t be used on appeal. We know it happens. So when I hear about evidence, even when I find evidence that I send the police to, I need a lot more. Story. Context. It’s the only way to decide if someone’s story is ... I won’t say true—but more consistent, more authentic. I’m afraid Terry’s going to take this bat and, because he’s under pressure from the state’s attorney, bludgeon Emily with it.”

  Conrad frowned at his turbot, now cold and flaking into pieces, and pushed it to one side. With a glance at me, as if to see whether he could eat my food without reprisals, he finished the share of calamari I’d given him and stuck his fork across the table into my pasta. It was meant as a gesture of reconciliation, the sharing of food.

  “Why do you think she ran away?” he asked. “Do you think it’s impossible she killed her mother and is racked by guilt?”

  “I don’t think anything’s impossible. What I want to believe and what I’m able to accept are two very different things. But can’t you imagine a scenario, Conrad, where she’s had to swallow an enormous amount of unpalatable stuff, and the last thing to go down is her father forcing her to give him an alibi? I can see where that could push her past the brink, as much as if she’d killed her mother herself.”

  Conrad coughed, his sign of distress, and started shredding a roll into tiny pieces. The waiter hove into view.

  “Is everything to your liking, sir?”

  “That fish wasn’t too hot,” Conrad said. “Reminded me of the overcooked mush I had to eat in the hospital when I was recovering from a knife in the abdomen.”

  The waiter blinked, as did I: Conrad usually didn’t let things like restaurant meals bother him. The waiter offered to bring him another entree, his choice on the house.

  Conrad coughed again. “I’d like some apple pie. With ice cream. And don’t go telling me how much fat or cholesterol or what have you it’s got in it, because I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “Certainly not,” the waiter said. “None of our desserts have any fat in them. For you, ma’am?”

  Sweets have never been my weakness. I could have eaten a second plate of linguine, but that seemed unnecessarily piggish. I ordered a double espresso.

  “You’re at odds with two of the people I’m closest to,” Conrad said. “If Zu-Zu and Jasmine didn’t like you so much I’d start wondering about you. Or at least you and me. As it is, the pressure is hard to take some days.”

  “Conrad, really, I try to be polite to your mother, but she treats me so glacially that I start to feel like a frozen mammoth when I’m around her.”

  We
stopped talking while the waiter delivered both his pie and an intrusive comment about its low-calorie, healthful properties. Conrad’s remark about his stab wound seemed to have stimulated the waiter—he hovered within earshot, hoping for more juice.

  “You gotta put Mama in context,” Conrad said, shooting a dirty look at the waiter. “We lived in Hyde Park for a time after my dad died. Mama thought the schools would be better and that it would be a safer neighborhood for the girls, and it always has this rap as a liberal, integrated place. I was stopped and frisked on the street three different times, just walking back to the crib. Once when I was alone and twice with my buddies. I didn’t want her to know: she was working two shifts, doing scut work, but they made her come pick me up from the precinct. It was just one more insult, and not the first she’d ever faced, but she started getting bitter. Life was too hard for her after my father died.”

  I swallowed some coffee. “After that history I’m surprised you even wanted to join the police.”

  He grinned, his gold front tooth glinting. “Maybe I wanted to even the score. No, things had changed. Some. When I got home from Vietnam I tried college, but I felt too old, too out-of-place. I had to do something and the options didn’t look that great—drive a bus, be a busboy—so I took the test and went to the academy. The Finch was in my class. He was a college boy. University of Illinois criminal justice major. They thought he was too big for his britches. A couple of the guys jumped him one night when I happened to be passing by. After that we got to be buddies.”

  His beeper went off. “This had better not be some triple homicide calling me back to work.”

  He got up to find a phone but came back a minute later. “Speak of the devil. It’s Terry, looking for you.”

  I went to the pay phone in the back of the restaurant. Terry was stiff, a bit formal, but straightforward. He wanted to share the lab results with me. The bat did have Deirdre’s brains on it. Besides my own prints, the only ones they’d found were Emily’s.

  “Doesn’t look good, Vic. I just wanted you to know.”

  “Isn’t it strange, Terry? Wouldn’t you think you’d find her brothers’ or her parents’ prints? Even visitors’? The thing sat in the hall where anyone could see it—I noticed it when I went to dinner down there. And a star like Nellie Fox—it makes you want to pick it up and hold his signed bat. I did it myself at the time.”

  “Maybe.” Terry was dubious but polite: perhaps Conrad had been lecturing him too. “I’ll put it to the lieutenant.”

  I thanked him for letting me know right away. On my way back to the table I felt curiously optimistic. Unlike some of the stories I try out in the hopes they’ll work, I believed what I’d said to Terry. I didn’t know where Emily was, or what the bat was doing under her radiator, but I felt sure she hadn’t killed her mother.

  Conrad and I finished the evening at the Cotton Club after all. While I leaned against his shoulder, lazily moving to the band, I wondered what part of my story he might have told Terry Finchley to make me seem more human.

  24

  In the (Electronic) Eye

  of the Beholder

  Before leaving my apartment I called Alice Cottingham at Emily’s high school. It had occurred to me last night that the girl could have confided in some of her other teachers, and that Cottingham might be able to find that out. I caught her just as she was about to start a class, so she was curt. She didn’t think her colleagues would shelter a student without telling the parents, but—to get me off the line—she agreed to get Emily’s class schedule and see whether any of the teachers felt the girl had singled them out for special confidences.

  This morning I found a meter available right in front of Home Free. When I went inside, Tish was at her desk, her thin body shrouded in a giant khaki sweater and shapeless granny skirt. Her heavy brows furrowed when she saw me. The usual warm Home Free welcome.

  “Hi, Tish. V. I. Warshawski. I was in here last week.”

  “I remember.” Nothing in her deep voice made it sound as though she’d been lying awake at night savoring the recollection.

  “You were going to set up a tour of some of your projects for me so I could see what they look like. Remember that too?” Her churlishness made me speak brightly, as one does to a peevish toddler.

  Tish gestured at the stacks of paper on the desk. “I’ve got all this work to do and no one to help me with it. I don’t have time to respond to frivolous requests.”

  “Nothing frivolous in it. But I’ll tell you what—I’ll get you some first-class volunteer help if you’ll take five minutes to answer a few questions.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “About Deirdre Messenger.”

  She looked away from me to the computer in front of her. She was working with some graphs. I couldn’t make out the details. As we both watched, goldfish began to swim across the screen in a random pattern.

  “I can’t talk to you about Deirdre.”

  “Is she considered classified information, high-level, for your board only? Should I ask Jasper?”

  “He doesn’t want to be bothered right now.” She glared at me.

  “It’s a choice between you or him, Tish. If you can’t talk to me I don’t mind it being him.”

  I started toward the rear of the room, where Jasper’s door was. Tish moved out of her chair and across the small space between us so fast that she had her arms around me before I could touch the doorknob. I disengaged myself without much difficulty—not only was I stronger and used to fighting, but her own action startled her.

  “What’s he doing in there?” I asked mildly. “Holding an orgy?”

  Her face flooded with color. “How can you say things like that?”

  My pity at her gaucherie warred with impatience at it. “Come on, Tish. You’re making such a big deal out of this that you’re rousing my curiosity. I only wanted to ask some questions about Deirdre Messenger’s role on your board. And see if in exchange you’d like a volunteer. You’re acting as though I’ve stumbled onto the secret of the century.”

  She drew herself up straight. I was surprised to see she was taller than me—she took a good five inches from her height by hunching down into her clothes.

  “If you don’t leave these private premises I will call the police.”

  “Fine. I don’t mind the police.”

  “Oh ... oh ... fuck you anyway.”

  When she stormed back to her desk I tried the door. It was locked. Tish picked up her phone and spoke into it. She tried to shield the mouthpiece with her hand, but the room was too small for secret conversation.

  “I’m sorry, Jasper. I know you didn’t want to be disturbed, but that detective who was here last week came in and she won’t leave. I threatened to call the police. ... Deirdre Messenger ... Okay.”

  She hung up and turned back to her computer. A few seconds later Jasper came out of the inner room, shutting the door carefully behind him.

  “Vic. Good to see you. Tish says you have some questions about Deirdre Messenger? She was murdered in your office, wasn’t she? That must have been a shock. I hope the police don’t suspect you.” He smiled at me with a friendly sympathy.

  “Until the police make an arrest they suspect everyone. I’m helping out by trying to learn who Deirdre met with that night.”

  “It wasn’t me,” Jasper said. “How about you, Tish?”

  Her lips pressed together, she typed furiously, refusing to share in his banter.

  “If that’s all, Vic ... I hate to be rude, but when you come by unannounced you can’t expect people to meet with you.” He looked at the heavy metal weighting his wrist.

  “You guys don’t have a good track record returning my calls. All I want to know is what Deirdre did for you. Who she worked with. I’m trying to generate some names of people to talk to—new leads, you might say. So I can find out whom she was meeting last Friday night.”

  Jasper looked reproachfully at his aide. “We can’t dismiss qu
estions like this, Tish. Not when one of our own volunteers has been murdered.”

  Tish sat rigidly in front of her machine, not looking at us. “I’m sorry, Jasper. I shouldn’t have lost my temper. It’s just ... I’m swamped.”

  “I know that, Tish. You work far too hard as it is. It’s difficult balancing so many demands.” His smile was still beguiling; I found myself feeling I’d been the source of unfair demands on Tish.

  “I don’t think Deirdre was close to anyone at Home Free,” he continued, to me. “Of course, the day-to-day work she did for us Tish knows more about than I do. What’s your afternoon like, Tish? Got any time later on?”

  “I can make time. You tell me which is more important, talking to her or finishing this report.”

  He went over to her and put a hand on her shoulder. She sat still under his touch, like a timid rabbit, trying not to show the pleasure she found in it.

  “Tish, darling, if you will make time to meet with Vic, and if you will be an absolute angel and stay late to finish the project, I will come back here after my afternoon meeting and whisk you off to the fleshpot of your choice.”

  She kept her eyes fixed on the computer screen. “All right, Jasper. If you want it bad enough to spring for dinner. You can come back at three-thirty,” she added to me.

  He squeezed her shoulder and let her go. “Atta girl. Tish makes this office work. If I had to pay her what she’s worth, we’d need to double our revenues.”

  You’re used to people working hard for love, I wanted to say, but couldn’t be so cruel to Tish. Instead I grunted noncommittally and thanked both of them.

  “There is one other thing, Jasper, which Tish tells me only you can decide but which could make a big difference in her horrendous work load. Do you know Darraugh Graham?”

  “You mean the CEO? Don’t tell me the cops suspect him of killing Deirdre.”

  I gave a thin smile. “He has a son who needs to do some community service work. How about letting him do it here?”