“You’re so damned greedy, Ryerson,” I grumped, packing up my bag. “One of these days you’ll get indigestion.”
Before going into Home Free I dashed into the Laundromat to check on my towels. The place was noisier than it had been in the morning, as mothers brought along children they’d picked up from school. Someone had put my wet laundry into a wire cart. Dumping the towels into a dryer, I went across the street.
Tish was still planted at her computer when I came in. She shot me a resentful glance but closed her file and folded her hands with the exaggerated patience of one who has little.
“It must be hard to work in here with the blinds shut so tightly,” I commented.
“It doesn’t bother me—I’m used to it.”
“And worse for Jasper, in the back there without any windows at all. You at least could pull open a slat to look out. Of course, he can watch the street on his TV monitor, so no one could sneak up on him unawares.”
She scowled. “This isn’t a very safe neighborhood. We can’t afford to have our computers ripped off. Do you want to talk about Deirdre or can I get back to work?”
Before we talked about Deirdre I prodded Tish to give me her own background. She disgorged information in small, hostile pellets, but I finally learned she had been at Home Free for five years, first as a summer intern while she completed a masters in urban planning at IIT, and then full-time as the office manager. Deirdre had started doing volunteer work for them a few months after Tish began her internship. In those days they still did direct placement of homeless people and they needed help in interviewing them.
“When did you stop that?”
“When Jasper came,” she said shortly. “He took over as executive director three years ago. He saw at once we were duplicating services the city and other charities provided. He decided we’d be more effective building housing.”
“Your board had no problem with that?”
She stared at her computer. “It took a while—almost a year. We had to wait for some of the old people to leave.”
“And for Alec Gantner and Donald Blakely to join?” I suggested.
She shot me an angry glance. “Does this have anything to do with Deirdre?”
“How did she feel about the change? Did it affect her as a volunteer?” Was that what had lain behind her comments to Gantner at her dinner party? Had she fought for Home Free to remain a direct provider and resented the change?
“For a year or so she only was here for board meetings, because our work load changed so much. But six months ago we had to lay off our secretary, so Deirdre filled in when she could get up here.”
Pressed for specifics, Tish would only say Deirdre helped keep their computer files up-to-date. Work logs from construction projects had to be entered, bills generated, key money people kept happy.
“Didn’t you think it was strange for a woman in her position to do clerical work for you?”
“Not really. Jasper said she was at loose ends, to humor her because her husband’s friends could bring us a lot of money. We’d lost some of our donors. People who couldn’t keep up with the times left over the placement issue. Jasper thought Deirdre could help bring them back.”
“Was she hard to get along with?” I pictured Deirdre and Tish in a scowling contest.
“She came to work, same as me.”
“She have a crush on Jasper?”
Tish flushed. “She was married. I suppose she liked him to tease her. Sometimes she could be pretty childish ... ” Her voice trailed off.
“I had lunch today with a reporter who said there are rumors she and Jasper were having an affair.”
Tish’s flush turned to crimson. She picked at her sweater, shaking her head, but unable to speak. I let it drop and asked her to step me through some of Deirdre’s work. “Just show me the stuff she did the last day she was here.”
“Absolutely not. Our files are confidential. Jasper said to talk to you about Deirdre. He didn’t say anything about showing you our books.”
I raised my brows. “Won’t they stand the scrutiny?”
She turned a darker red but was spared answering me by the phone. “Home Free, Tish speaking ... Oh, hi, Gary ... No, he’s not in. ... He told you not to worry about it, that he’d take care of it. ... ”
Gary, the beefy man in the sheepskin jacket who’d been here when I came last week. He apparently was still unhappy—I could hear him barking at Tish, but I couldn’t make out the words.
“I can’t tell you anything else, I’ve got someone in the office with me.” She laughed suddenly, lightening her face and revealing its underlying beauty. “No, definitely not a friend ... I’ll let him know you called.”
“But why am I not a friend?” I asked when she hung up. “Why are you so set against me?”
“Because you come snooping around into things that aren’t any of your business. Like just now: that was a private phone call. Now I’ve got to get back to work.”
“So you can be ready for dinner with Jasper when he comes back. I’m not competing with you for his attention, you know. Perhaps Deirdre did, but I’m not interested in spending the night with him.”
“That’s good, because he wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole.” Anger and jealousy made her voice quaver as she tossed off the childish insult.
I found myself patting the top of my head where my white hairs had appeared, but I only said, “Mutual, Tish, mutual. He’s too smooth for my taste. Now let’s line up some construction sites for me to visit.”
“Construction sites? No way. You can see some of our finished projects, but we don’t let anyone go on site unless they have official business there.”
“So you do have projects under construction? Jasper told me last week you didn’t have much going on.”
Her jaw dropped, and she looked sickly, but she made a quick enough recovery, saying Jasper knew more about construction than she—that she was just speaking generally.
We argued it back and forth, but she was enjoying the chance to put me in my place. After that I couldn’t get any information from her. Finally, not intending to, I brought up Lamia.
“How did they get the rehab project? Did you put it out to bid?”
“How do you know about them?” she demanded.
“I’m connected to them professionally. Is there a problem with their bid?”
She looked impulsively at the phone, as if hoping Jasper might call to advise her. After a long pause she muttered that she didn’t know anything about their bids, that Jasper did all that work.
“So if I told you they’d never submitted a bid, but that they got work on a publicly funded project, and that that’s against the law, you wouldn’t know anything about it.”
“I’ve told you,” she shouted. “I don’t know anything about it. Are you happy now? Go away and let me get to work.”
As I slowly shut the door she was already punching a number into the phone. I longed to be able to eavesdrop, but couldn’t think of any discreet way to do so. Across the street I collected my dry laundry. My towels were in another wire basket, and some kind woman had folded them. The day hadn’t been a total loss: I had clean towels now.
27
Gentleman Caller
Mr. Contreras bounded from his apartment as soon as I had my key in the front door. “Hi, doll. You’ve got a visitor. I let him in after he’d been waiting an hour. I didn’t think he was someone who’d hurt you.”
The dogs joined him, greeting me as though we’d been separated for months instead of the ten hours since our run. Over their delighted yips and squeaks it was difficult to convey my annoyance with my neighbor for involving himself in my business.
Catching my mood if not my words, Mr. Contreras’s brown eyes clouded reproachfully. “I’m just trying to help out, doll, not to interfere. There’s no place for people to wait for you now that you’re having to work in your home. What do you want me to do—leave potential customers wandering around in
the rain, where they’ll go off to one of those big suburban outfits you’re always worrying about, just because I didn’t think to offer them a cup of coffee and a place to sit? Now, that really would be cause for you to get upset.”
I threw up my hands in resignation. “All right, all right. You did the best you could under the circumstances. Who is it and where is he?”
As if on rehearsed cue Ken Graham came to Mr. Contreras’s doorway. I’d noticed an Alfa Spider, a car I love, when I came up the walk. It must belong to the hacker, who was still in jeans and a mangy sport coat. Still, he’d trimmed his hair and shaved.
“Great dogs,” he greeted me.
“Thank you for coming by to inspect them.” I hustled them inside before Mitch could make good on an escape attempt.
Ken grinned involuntarily, stripping some of the loutish cynicism from his face. “I went to your office and saw it was all boarded over. Your answering service didn’t have a new office address for you, so I came here.”
“Very enterprising. Was there some special reason?”
“Don’t get so huffy. Dad is riding my butt pretty hard and I wanted to see if you’d turned up any leads for me. For community service, you know.”
“I haven’t forgotten. And your dad has been in touch as well. Riding my own butt pretty hard, you could say. As soon as I have anything I’ll call you.”
Mr. Contreras was listening with lively attention, but not asking questions: he didn’t want a young sprout to think he wasn’t fully in my confidence. He tried now to get Ken and me to join him back in his apartment, but I wanted to be alone. Or at least not with those two.
Young Ken already owned some of the confidence his father wore—that people would do what he wanted because he was a Graham and owned a large chunk of stock in a very big company. Now he tried to persuade me that he could do some work for me.
“Yes, I’m sure you could. But I’m not a charity. In any sense of the word.”
“Who’s to know? Dad says you do a lot of pro bono work. You could set me on some of those projects. I’m sure we could persuade my probation officer—”
“Maybe you could, but you can’t persuade me. Thanks for going to all the trouble of stopping by. Give my regards to your father.”
I started up the stairs. Ken followed in my wake. The dogs, thinking any group of people offered more chance for fun than an evening in front of Mr. Contreras’s TV, ran up ahead of us. Mr. Contreras brought up the rear. I couldn’t imagine any other detective in the metropolitan area with such an entourage. Any other detective in the world.
“If I could tell Dad I was working with you, he would get off both our asses for a while. And it would help me get better acquainted with you. So far all I know is you don’t like sugar in your cappuccino.”
I started to undo the dead bolts in my steel-plated door. “Good night, MacKenzie. Good night, Mr. Contreras. If anyone else comes to visit, give them two aspirins and ask them to call in the morning.”
I shut the door firmly on their protests. The dogs took it hardest. Even through the thick door I could hear sharply expressed barks. I opened the door again as the four were just beginning their downward trek.
“I’ll borrow Peppy for the evening if that’s okay with you.”
“Sure, doll, sure. She’s your dog as much as mine, you know that you don’t have to ask. But with you gone so much ... ”
I went out to the landing and kissed his cheek. “Right, I know. You do it out of a keen sense of duty. And Peppy and I both appreciate it.”
Pushing Mitch away, I ushered Peppy inside with me. She was delighted to be top dog again, wagging her tail and affecting not to hear Mitch’s hurt cries from the other side of the door.
After brushing Peppy and playing a little fetch I phoned Camilla, hoping to reach her ahead of Phoebe or one of her partners. The sunny cheer of her greeting evaporated when I told her what I’d been doing this afternoon.
“I didn’t mean to bring up Lamia’s affairs. But the response I got from Heccomb’s office manager unsettled me.”
“What kind of detective are you if you spill all you know every time you get rattled?” Camilla asked, not unreasonably annoyed.
“I scrupulously avoided your name until this afternoon But I’m getting more and more uneasy. There is something wrong—with that organization, or with Phoebe’s connection to it.”
I told her about Phoebe’s reluctance to be seen at Home Free with Alec Gantner. “Jasper Heccomb is a smooth dancer but his office manager is tripping over her feet. I wanted to see if Lamia is the banana she’s afraid she’s going to slip on.”
“And was it? Because if we trip on it thanks to you, Warshawski, my mama is not going to be the only member of this family who thinks you’re dirt.”
I massaged the back of my neck with my left hand. “Look, Camilla, I agreed on Sunday not to ask any more questions about Lamia. But Phoebe is sitting on something that she’s not telling you. I would be a bad friend if I turned my back on an illegal situation that landed you and your friends in hot water. Think about it. Talk about it with your partners.”
“We’ve thought about it and talked about it. We’re happy. So you be happy, too, Vic. Because no one wants you stirring this pot.” She hung up with a snap.
I thought about calling Conrad, but I couldn’t rat on his sister to him. And I was damned if I was going to run to him for comfort just because people were annoyed with me. That was a fact of my business life: people were always more or less peeved with me for the questions I asked. It was only fatigue, or chronic financial stress, that made me care now.
“But what else can I do now?” I cried out loud to Peppy. “I’m almost forty. I don’t have any other skills and it’s been too long since I practiced law.”
She looked at me in concern, hoping my anguish wasn’t connected to her, and was relieved when I stopped howling to stomp into the kitchen.
It had been some time since I’d been to the store. My lettuce was wilted, with black slime on the tips of the leaves. In fact, the only vegetables I had that weren’t withered or rotted were onions and garlic. I sauteed them in my last tablespoon of olive oil while I cooked a pot of polenta. Stirring it all together with the case-hardened end of a piece of cheddar, I sat in front of the tube and watched the Cubs fumble through a game against St. Louis. At my feet Peppy cleaned out the cookpot.
At eight-thirty I couldn’t take any more, either of the Cubs or my own suffocated mood. I went downstairs to knock on Mr. Contreras’s door.
“I’m going out for a bit. I’m taking Peppy for company. Since it may be late when I get back I’ll keep her overnight. Want me to take Mitch too?”
My neighbor complains a lot about my neglecting the dogs, but he’s jealous of my relations with them. As I’d expected he hung on to Mitch.
“Maybe when you come back you’ll be in a better mood. You act this way around Conrad, you’re going to be on your own again before you know it.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll bear that in mind.” Conrad said it was my orneriness that had initially attracted him, but I suppose like any repeated charm it might wear thin with time.
The Alfa Spider was still out front. In the dark it wasn’t possible to see into its low-slung body, so I couldn’t tell if Ken was inside, but as we went down the street I heard the engine start. What was the boy doing?
I bundled Peppy into the Trans Am and drove north to Belmont. The Spider was definitely behind us. It stayed there all the way across Belmont to Lake Shore Drive. I rode a mile south, then exited abruptly at Fullerton and waited at the entrance to the park. A few seconds later the Spider trundled along, saw me too late to stop behind me, and pulled over ten yards or so ahead. I ran up to it and yanked open the passenger door. Ken Graham sat at the wheel grinning as though he’d done something clever.
“What the hell do you think you’re up to? Taking up harassment to tide you over until you can start hacking again?”
“I’ve got you
interested. That was my goal.”
“And what was the point of that? If you think you have to vamp me to keep me from marrying your father, you’re insulting all three of us. Or at least your father and me. You could use a few insults, I expect.”
“Maybe I like you for your own sake.”
“Yeah, and maybe my mother was the pope. Get a grip on yourself, Graham. If you keep stalking me I’ll tell Darraugh without mincing words why I refuse to help find a placement for you.”
“You sound like my old baby-sitter. Behave or I’ll tell Papa. I had the hots for her too.”
“Then maybe it’s time you grew up, kiddo. I’m not interested in boys whose diapers I have to change.”
I turned on my heel and walked back to the Trans Am. While I stood with my hand on the door handle he idled his engine for a bit, then gunned it and roared off with a great show of speed.
28
The Somewhat Lower Depths
I made a U in the Trans Am and continued south. A couple of times I thought Ken might still be following me, but it was hard to be sure. I wondered whether he really did believe I was dating his father and posed a threat to his trust fund, or if he was simply amusing himself. Presumably all his friends were off in school. Time must lie heavy on his hands. Proving to a middle-aged detective that he could track her and outwit her might seem like an agreeable game to him.
When I left the drive at Forty-seventh Street I went past the light at Lake Park and pulled over again. Two cars went on ahead of me; one even seemed to slow a bit, but I’d lost the Spider. I drove on over to Fabian’s mansion and rang the bell.
When the housekeeper answered the door she remembered me and let me in. Whatever the police had said to her they hadn’t persuaded her I was there under false pretenses: I held out a card but she ignored it, saying “Oh, polices” and turned back into the house, leaving me in the hall while she went upstairs. In a few minutes she returned with the command to follow her.
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