Tunnel Vision

by Sara Paretsky

  I started the bath water running and looked up Cyrus Lavalle in my Rolodex. He lived on Buckingham Street, but, in keeping with his ideas of how the rich and famous live, had an unlisted number. I’d acquired it once during a meeting with him when he’d scribbled it on a napkin to give to a waiter he’d been eyeing.

  He was not pleased to hear from me. “I keep my phone unlisted just so people like you won’t bother me. Go away, Warshawski. I’m getting ready for dinner.”

  “So the sooner you tell me what I want to know the sooner you can finish primping. Was it Alec Gantner or Donald Blakely who made Century and Lamia off-limits at City Hall?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He dropped his voice to a whisper.

  “Let me ask the question a little differently. Century is obviously doing something funny with their community loans, or they wouldn’t have made Lamia a hot potato. It would be worth a lot to me, Cyrus, a real lot, to know what.” If he took me up on it, could I get a real lot of money together to pay him?

  He was tempted—he took a long minute to answer. “You’re poison around town these days, Warshawski. You know that? If people found out I was even thinking of talking to you, I’d be dead. Now go away and don’t bother me.”

  When he’d hung up I climbed into the tub. I leaned back in the water, wondering how I could find out what they were doing. It couldn’t be anything as simple as violating the community lending act. They wouldn’t be bribing aldermen over that, anyway—that was a federal offense. Although it might explain how young Gantner tied into the picture, I couldn’t come up with a plausible scenario for the whole story.

  I finally gave up on it and let myself relax, drifting into a light sleep. I woke up shivering in the cold water. Hoping to get a real nap in before Conrad came I dried off and climbed into bed. As soon as I lay down, though, my mind refused to relax. I began a relentless churning through the same muddy paths I’d been following since leaving Morris.

  If only I could see one of Home Free’s buildings maybe I’d understand what was so sacred about them. Shoddy materials, most likely, for which they were paying off the building inspectors. But no, I reminded myself fretfully, it was Century Bank, not the charity, that had caused the omerta at City Hall. So maybe I could go to City Hall or to Dodge Reports and see whether Home Free had pulled a permit recently.

  Tomorrow was Saturday; I wouldn’t be able to get at the records until Monday. And anyway, they were filed by contractor, not developer. And I didn’t have a contractor. As I tossed irritably from my right side to left I remembered the beefy man who’d been so upset the first day I’d gone to Home Free. Gary somebody. Camilla might know.

  I reached her as she was changing for a night on the town. She was in high spirits—a week of hard work was over, she’d recently met a guy she liked, and Phoebe had given Lamia the go-ahead to start ordering materials. She was willing to forget our last strained conversation, and talk to me on the fly.

  “So you start work in ten days—great,” I said. “Conrad and I’ll have some champagne to toast you. ... You met any of Home Free’s other contractors? I saw a guy there once, Gary somebody, who looked like he might tear sides of beef with his bare hands.”

  “That’d be Gary Charpentier. He does look like an angry kind of guy, at that. I think he was hoping to get our job and didn’t take it kindly that Jasper gave it to us. Now, there’s a smoothie, that Jasper Heccomb. I could almost go for him, but I figure his office manager would slice my breasts up for Easter dinner if I made a move.”

  I laughed. “She might if she knows the thought even crossed your mind. She was ready to murder me just for suggesting he was getting together with Phoebe Quirk.”

  “You think he is? With Phoebe? I’ve never seen her with a guy—I always wondered if she liked women better.”

  “I think it’s putting together deals—that she likes better than guys, I mean.”

  Camilla laughed and hung up. Phoebe had always been relentlessly single-minded in all her pursuits. If she took on a lover, of any sex, she would wear the other person out in a week.

  I switched on the bedside light and looked up Charpentier under general contractors in the yellow pages. There he was, with a business address in Des Plaines. On Monday I could go to City Hall to see what permits he’d pulled lately.

  I put on jeans and a T-shirt and began boiling water for pasta. By the time Conrad pressed the bell I had dinner ready. A proper little housewife, welcoming her man home from a hard day in the crime mines.

  “You got me pinned now, babe,” Conrad said by way of greeting. “The old guy inspects me every time I come in the front door and now you have a sprout guarding the sidewalk. Where’d you pick him up? Kindergarten?”

  I made a sour face. “More like nursery school. His father’s my only reliable customer these days. I’m supposed to find a 501-c(3) for the kid to do some community service in. Maybe your African American Police Benevolent Fund could use a volunteer.”

  Conrad wiggled his eyebrows. “I’d love a chance to put a puppy like that through his paces. He bugging you, or you enjoying being the object of puppy love? Ah, ah, the girl is blushing. Maybe I ought to bust the kid again—what’s he need to do community service work for? Selling dope in his nursery?”

  “Working in West Englewood is making you trite. There’s lots of crime besides drugs and murder—you just don’t see any of it.”

  “You’ve got that right, white sugar. This has been a day and a half. I am almighty thankful to see its end. Did I leave any beer here?”

  Conrad stocks his own, since I don’t drink it. I pulled a Moosehead out of the refrigerator for him and moved the conversation on to the Cubs—just as dismal as the mayhem on Chicago’s streets, but not as life-threatening.

  33

  Knock Before Picking

  Conrad’s beeper went off at two-thirty. He stumbled to the living room to use the phone, trying to be quiet about it. A few minutes later he moved stealthily back to the bedroom. I could hear him fumbling in the dark for his clothes. I switched on the light and sat up.

  “Sorry, babe. Didn’t think both of us had to be roused by the city’s punks. One of my informers was just killed. Could be a simple drive-by, or it could be a warning to other stooges. I’ve got to go listen to some statements. If we finish before dawn maybe I’ll come back here?” He finished it as a question.

  I put on a T-shirt and went to the kitchen for my spare keys. “You wearing your vest?”

  He ran a hand through my hair. “I’m just going to be at the station listening to lies.”

  “You don’t know where the night will take you. You can’t afford to move around without it these days, you know that, and the super would tell you the same.”

  “Call Fabian and get him to put in a word to the chief of detectives for me,” he gibed, but he went back to the bedroom and took his vest from the chair.

  I locked the door behind him and went to the living room window to watch him leave. When he’d unlocked his car he looked up and waved at me. After he’d driven off I continued to watch the street, focusing on nothing in particular, depressed by the amount of pointless violence in the city. I stood there for some minutes, until I realized that Ken Graham’s Spider was parked down the street.

  I didn’t know whether I felt more angry or amused. Did he think he was protecting me? Or was he just filling in time? I wished fervently I’d been able to find a placement for him so that he’d have a legitimate piece of work to look after, instead of trailing around after me. Although it would be a boon if he could rebuild my files, his hovering presence was a worse nuisance than Mr. Contreras’s.

  Somewhere between dreaming and waking I’d decided to become aggressive in my search for Home Free’s secrets. It would be difficult to break into the Gant-Ag complex in search of information about JAD, but if the musketeers were all for one and one for all, Jasper might have some data. And at the very least I might find out why their construc
tion projects were so secret.

  I trotted to the bedroom to put on jeans and a jacket. I thought for a minute about what I needed. My picklocks. My Smith & Wesson. A couple of pairs of surgical gloves, donated by Lotty in a friendly mood. I had a flashlight in the car. A stepladder? I didn’t think I could get one from the basement without rousing Mr. Contreras. If I needed something more than the portable stool I kept in my trunk I’d have to improvise. A note for Conrad taped to the front door telling him I’d gone out on an errand.

  If Ken saw me leaving and decided to follow he would be a nuisance on this particular trip. I started to undo the bolts to the back door when I remembered the electronic alarm system—I hadn’t had time to take a class on bypassing phone lines. What I needed—of course, what I needed was a hacker.

  I ran lightly down the front stairs. Mercifully the dogs slept through my exit—it would have been hard to exclude Mr. Contreras from my expedition and impossible to take him along.

  I jogged down Racine to the Spider. The sodium lamps allowed an excellent view inside the car. Young Ken was asleep behind the wheel. I pounded sharply on the window with my picklocks and was perversely pleased to watch him jerk upright in alarm. The car was small; he banged his knee against the steering wheel.

  When he opened the door his face was still soft with sleep. “You felt my pull like Jupiter on an asteroid. I knew if I waited here long enough you’d ditch the cop and come to me.”

  “And how right you were. I want to ask you to do something Sergeant Rawlings will kill me for if he finds out. So if you tell him I’ll kill you.”

  “You can’t commit adultery if you’re not married.”

  He grabbed my wrist and tried to pull me onto his lap and looked aggrieved when I twisted his arm away. “Get your mind above your belt for a minute, sonny. I want your help with something that’s dangerous and illegal, and I want you to think about it seriously before you agree.”

  He rubbed his forearm where I’d twisted it and scowled at the ground. “Are you always this bossy? How does your cop friend stand it?”

  “He loves it. He’s got a thing for women in black leather with whips. Anyway, I thought you liked bossy women—that they reminded you of your old governess. ... Can you bypass a phone alarm system?”

  The prospect of adventure appealed more to him than romance. He stopped rubbing his arm and looked up. “You mean one that goes to the police via a security firm? Sure. If I had the right equipment. And also—is it a continuous feedback system?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. I don’t even know what that is.”

  “One where you have to program in a code word to respond to the security phone every few minutes. If it is I can’t bypass it until I’ve been inside and studied the specs.”

  “Can we assume it isn’t—and be ready to run like hell if the cops pull up?”

  He flashed a smile. “That’s what I like about you—life on the edge. I knew you were too radical for Darraugh or a cop. We’ll need to go out to Niles and find one of those big hardware stores that’s open all night. I can’t do this without equipment.”

  “You need to think for a minute, Ken. If we get caught you could go to jail. You already have one criminal offense on your record.”

  “And what about you?” He gave a cocky smile. “We could use one of those his and hers jails—don’t they have some in Texas?”

  “I’d probably sweet-talk my way out of an arrest,” I said brutally. “Of course I’d feel racked by remorse at your sentence, but it would pass with time.”

  He shrugged. “Okay. We’ll just have to avoid getting caught. Hop in. I’ll drive you to Niles.”

  “I’ll follow you. I want to make sure someone isn’t behind us. If I pass you, hang back and look to see what else is behind us. And make sure you stay within the speed limit. It’s a fundamental rule for a life of crime. More punks give themselves away because they’re stopped for moving violations than for leaving prints at the scene. And speaking as a sports car driver, you’re a favorite target in this thing.”

  He flashed a grin. “I know. I spent my whole first-quarter allowance on traffic tickets. Darraugh was not happy. But what else do you expect from a man who drives a Lincoln?”

  He waited for me to cross the street to the Trans Am. Just to prove he couldn’t be bossed he took the turn onto Belmont at forty. He quickly gained a couple of blocks on me. I pulled over to the side, forcing him to turn around and come back for me. After that he went across town to the expressway at a sedate pace. A couple of times I pulled in front of him. Occasionally I moved to the shoulder for a brief halt. We seemed to be clear.

  Once we got to the suburbs I stayed closer to Ken’s taillights. A slow rain had begun to fall, making it harder to keep track of traffic. The drizzle turned the streets to a black gloss that broke and spilled the lights a thousand different ways.

  Ken led me to one of those shopping zones that dot the suburbs—mile on mile of malls, with discount stores the size of football fields, each identical to the next. The strip looked like a mammoth theme park—all the rides you want through America’s wasteland.

  I admired the nonchalance with which Ken, suburban born and bred, found his way through the anonymous megaplex. He turned left on Route 43, idled impatiently through two slow lights, and shot left again in front of a semi to pull up under the shadow of a giant billboard proclaiming the mall was open twenty-four hours a day. I waited in the Trans Am while Ken went into the hardware store, not wanting to give him more occasion for flirting, and also to make sure no one was watching.

  He was gone about half an hour. When he returned, his arms laden with parcels, he was walking fast, with the excited, self-satisfied air I remembered from the young punks in my PD days.

  My arms prickled with embarrassment. Inviting Ken to help do illegal work was morally indefensible. I could tell him I’d changed my mind. He didn’t know where we were going—he couldn’t possibly carry out the operation alone.

  I got out to ask him if he had everything, and gave him Home Free’s address, adjuring him to park around the corner from the office, near the mouth of the alley running behind the building.

  When we arrived I sent Ken to the front door to make sure no one was in the office. Primed with a story about needing emergency shelter, he rang the bell and pounded on the glass. I played lookout at the corner. When no one answered, we went to the alley to scout the alarm.

  While I shone the new flash over the wires Ken located the phone lines into Home Free. It was four in the morning. The sky was still black behind its thicket of drizzle, but I was beginning to be nervous about time: people on early-morning errands would be leaving home in an hour.

  “Okay, Vic, here’s what we’ll do.” Ken spoke low, near my ear. “We’re going to splice the line and attach it to a jumper box so it thinks the connection is being maintained. I want you to hold these by the tips and hand them to me as soon as I ask for them.”

  “These” were a pair of needle-nosed clips—alligator clips, Ken explained—which would attach the phone line to the jumper box to complete the circuit. He turned over a garbage can and hoisted himself on top of it. It brought him within working distance of the line. I held the end from the phone pole while he cut it, stripped the sheath away, and attached the clip. I handed him the other end of the line and he repeated the operation. Once he had the line clipped to the jumper box he laid the box against the side of the building so that its weight wouldn’t drag down the line. The whole procedure took less than three minutes.

  He was grinning like a fool when he climbed down from the can. “I knew the theory, but it’s interesting to see it in practice. Now what do we do?”

  “Move to the mouth of the alley and wait to see if all hell breaks loose.”

  We sat for fifteen minutes in the dark shadows. Ken put an arm around me and kissed me. I twisted his arm down to his side.

  “What’s that hard thing next to your breast? A gun? You ever use it
?”

  “Yep. But I’d just break your arm for you if I thought you were getting out of hand.”

  “Think you could?” He made fighting sound like an exciting form of foreplay.

  “I know I could,” I said in a voice like chalk.

  He was quiet for a minute. “You don’t think I seriously like you, do you?”

  “I think you don’t know if you’re playing a game or if you like me. And either way it doesn’t matter. I’m old enough to be your mama and I’m not Cher—I don’t need perpetual youth to keep me from feeling my age.”

  Maybe I needed to keep breaking and entering to stay young at heart. I kept that thought to myself, though, and let Ken beguile the rest of the wait by telling me of his hope to join the Peace Corps in Eastern Europe, and Darraugh’s conviction that if he didn’t get a job or go to graduate school straight out of college no employer would take him seriously. I tried not to think about time passing, or—worse—what Conrad would say if he knew what I was doing.

  When we’d waited long enough for an army to arrive, I went around to the front and used my picklocks on the door. Ken kept watch, but the streets were empty in the hour before dawn. The locks were solid but nothing special—Jasper relied too much on his alarm system. Even having to fumble in the dark it only took five minutes to get inside. I relocked them behind us and turned on the lights.

  34

  A Few Bucks in Petty Cash

  I sent Ken to Tish’s computer. “I want to know what her files say about five things: Century Bank, Gateway, Lamia, Home Free’s construction projects, and JAD Holdings. The best place to start is the accounting files. I’m going to look in Jasper’s private office.”

  Ken switched on Tish’s machine, but grumbled that it was no challenge to break into a system like hers: all the files were neatly labeled and accessible. “It would be better if you’d let me use your picklocks: I’ve never actually broken in through a door. I could show you how to look at the computer while I practiced with the door.”