Tunnel Vision

by Sara Paretsky

  My car was still safely parked at the corner of Belmont and Morgan. I got in and drove to the Kennedy in a long, looping route. No one was behind me.

  Charpentier’s office was in Des Plaines, a long trek out to the land beyond O’Hare. He operated from a low-slung brick building, the kind of small office most contractors use. No one was inside. It would have been child’s play to break in, but I’d promised Conrad I wouldn’t burgle. I sighed and looked up Charpentier’s home address. He lived on down the pike a few miles in Arlington Heights.

  Charpentier’s house was a brick two-story, a neo-Colonial or fake Georgian, or whatever the real estate jargon for those phony pillars is. It was large but not outlandish. The plot was only of average size, but meticulously attended. Early though the season was, the grass was already green, covering the ground like spun silk—or Alec Gantner’s experimental corn.

  A late-model Nissan stood in the drive. As I watched from up the street a boy came out with a skateboard, followed by a woman who drove off in the Nissan. Driving back to the main road I found a filling station with a phone. After getting Charpentier’s voice on an answering machine I bought some coffee and a doughnut and returned to Charpentier’s street. Waiting around the corner—to avoid scrutiny by the neighbors—I ate my doughnut, studied the map, and listened to Jessye Norman singing Tchaikovsky lieder.

  A little before two Mrs. Charpentier’s Nissan returned. I waited another twenty minutes, to give her time to settle in with whatever shopping she’d done. Fishing in the backseat for something to give me authenticity, I found a stack of flyers for an Arcadia House benefit. As a board member I’d been supposed to sell twenty tickets.

  The kid who’d been skateboarding came to the door. He was a slender, freckled boy, perhaps ten, who bore no resemblance to the beefy man I’d seen at Jasper Heccomb’s. I frowned portentously and demanded to speak to Gary Charpentier.

  “He’s not here.” His voice hadn’t changed yet; he had a husky contralto that was rather appealing.

  “Where can I find him? It’s important that I speak with him today.”

  The kid bit his lip, then announced he would get his mother. He disappeared into the back of the house, yelling, “Mom! Mo-o-om!”

  Mrs. Charpentier hurried to the door. A woman about my own age whose blond hair had turned a muddy gray, she was pretty beneath a layer of harassment. Early though it was, she had apparently been starting supper: she was drying her hands on a dish towel and smelt strongly of onion.

  “Mrs. Charpentier? I’m from Alec Gantner’s office. He wanted me to get some materials to Gary Charpentier.”

  “Oh.” She looked at her son hovering behind her. “It’s all right, Gary—just business for Dad. I can take it—he’s out now but he’ll be back around five.”

  I drew the folder holding the Arcadia House flyers away from her outstretched hand. “I’m afraid that will be too late: it’s important that he sign some documents in time for the last FedEx pickup. That’s five on Saturdays, you know. Mr. Gantner will be really upset that I didn’t get to him in time.”

  She bit her lip, much as her son had done. “I guess if you want ... If it’s from Mr. Gantner he ought ... He doesn’t like it if—”

  “I’ll be happy to go to him. Is he in his office? I did try there first.”

  “No. No, he went into Chicago. And he doesn’t like people to go on job sites when he’s working. But I guess—let me try to reach him on his car phone. What’s your name?”

  “Gabriella Sestieri.” My mother’s name was the first that popped into my head. “If you’ll just give me the address it’ll be easy for me to stop there—I have to go back to the Loop with the forms when they’re signed, anyway.”

  “It’s better if I check. He won’t be so angry that way.”

  She hurried into the interior. I was sweating—with impatience, annoyance, and an unwelcome twinge of fear. At the same time I wondered if I should leave one of the Arcadia emergency service cards with her. How seriously annoyed did Gary Charpentier get? With Jasper Heccomb he’d been red-faced and irritable, but with his wife he might be less restrained.

  She came back a minute or two later to say she hadn’t been able to reach him—he must not be in his car. After I commiserated on how hard it was to know how to keep a man from getting angry, reminded her how important Alec Gantner was, how his ties to Jasper Heccomb made it unwise for her husband to leave the great man hanging, she gave me the address of a construction site. It was on Elston, just north of where Pulaski cut in.

  36

  She Who Fights and Runs

  Away—Gets Mugged

  Elston Avenue cuts a diagonal swath through the Northwest Side. A busy road during rush hour—it parallels the Kennedy Expressway—at other times it’s a no-man’s-land. Bleak stretches where warehouses and factories once stood dot its route. Few shops or restaurants have filled the gaps, so people from the surrounding neighborhoods don’t frequent the street.

  Charpentier’s construction site was hidden behind the tall grass and broken walls of one of those desolate patches. I drove by it twice without seeing anything, searching for a street number that would let me know I was in the vicinity. I finally parked on Cullom and started hunting on foot.

  It wasn’t until I’d picked my way across chunks of asphalt—the remains of a parking lot—that I saw where building was taking place. No signs blazoned the Charpentier name to the world or warned of construction in progress. Supplies and workers must come in through the alley, instead of down Elston. Unless you knew what to look for you wouldn’t know anything was going on. If this was indeed a Home Free project they believed in hiding their light under a bushel.

  I walked through the dead prairie grass to look more closely at the site. Concrete had been poured for the foundation. Furring for the first story stood about waist high. Some eight or ten men were working, nailing cradles across the furring for pouring concrete. They were calling out in a language I didn’t recognize—it might have been some regional form of Italian, or a bastardized Spanish.

  Lumber was piled along the edge of the alley. Beyond it a cement truck was churning, its giant snout sticking out like an impatient elephant waiting for food. The big panel truck Gary Charpentier drove away from Home Free last week was parked on the edge of the alley.

  The men were dressed in a hobo’s assortment of jeans and ragged shirts. Several, despite the cool gray day, were stripped to the waist. One of them caught sight of me as I climbed over a nest of rusted reinforcing bars. He stopped hammering and called to his fellows. A couple of them let out catcalls and encouraging shouts, which I could translate without a dictionary.

  In response to the outcry a huge man in a cowboy hat emerged from the far side of the cement truck. He glanced at me before turning to swear at the crew. The lookout picked up his hammer and started pounding again, but slowly; the whole crew slowed down to watch. The swearer—presumably the foreman—moved across the weedy ground to me. He was formidable, almost a foot taller than me with an impressive girth.

  “Private construction, miss. Hard-hat area.” A rich accent, reminiscent of my mother’s, seemed incongruous with his cowboy boots and Stetson.

  I gestured at the crew. “Then why aren’t they wearing them? Or you, for that matter?”

  He eyed me narrowly and spat, just missing my left toe. “Their heads already plenty hard. You go on to your shopping or whatever lady thing you do today. These men working.”

  “This one of the Home Free sites?”

  He moved closer to me, so that his gut was almost level with the bottom of my shoulder holster. “Who wants to know?”

  “I do.” It cost an effort not to take a step backward.

  “Then you leave not knowing, lady. This is private, this work, this nothing to do with you.”

  “But they’ve invited me to invest. How can I possibly do so without seeing the kind of work they do?”

  He frowned, weighing my story, but decided he didn�
��t like it. “You take their word. You coming with one of the bosses, we let you look. Otherwise, go do your own business.”

  I frowned in turn, assessing my choices. Not only wasn’t I big enough to take him on, there was no point to it. Except to show I wasn’t scared. Sometimes there’s an advantage in people thinking you’re scared—they don’t keep an eye on you. I could come back anytime, now that I knew where they were.

  I spread my hands and smiled. “Fine. I’ll get one of the bosses. You recognize Eleanor Guziak by sight, or would it have to be Jasper Heccomb himself?”

  His scowl deepened. “They coming with you, I let you look. Now you go.”

  I backed up a few steps to make sure he wasn’t going to follow me, then turned to pick my way through the rubble toward Elston. I took my time, trying to appear nonchalant. As I left, the crew let out a few more raggedy catcalls. I turned and waved, to show I appreciated the spirit, and saw a late-model Bronco pull up next to the cement truck.

  The foreman saw it too. He hurried over to it as Gary Charpentier climbed out. The contractor bellowed something at him. I was too far away to make out the words, but it must have been an order to come and get me, since the foreman started after me on the run.

  Charpentier followed him, moving so fast he didn’t bother to shut his car door. The time for nonchalance was past. I leapt over chunks of concrete, heading for the level grass nearer Elston. A few steps from the sidewalk I heard a whine and a thunderclap.

  I hit the ground almost before I realized the bastards were shooting. I landed on a brick that knocked the wind out of me. Gasping painfully I wrenched myself onto my side and fumbled inside my jacket for the Smith & Wesson. I slipped off the safety and pointed it at the foreman, then realized I had a good chance of hitting the crew if I fired. As the cowboy fired again I rolled over until I found a piece of concrete big enough to provide a minimal barricade.

  Charpentier caught up with the cowboy and wrenched his gun arm down. I pushed myself to a sitting position, holding my gun out prominently. Charpentier lumbered over to me, the cowboy following.

  “Just what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” He was leaning so far over that flecks of spit sprayed my face.

  I staggered upright and made a great display of rubbing a tissue over my cheeks before I spoke. “My very question. Where does this great ape get off firing guns at people?”

  “You were trespassing on a private work site.” He was so angry his cheeks looked like slabs of raw beef.

  “It isn’t posted. And even if it was, what earthly justification does that give this hyena to fire at me?”

  “I telling her to leave,” the cowboy said. “She wanting to know if this is a Home Free site. I telling her to mind her own business.”

  “And I was leaving. You should have been pleased instead of trying to mow me down.”

  “I told him to go after you,” Charpentier said. “I called my wife as I was heading to the Kennedy and she said Alec Gantner had sent a girl around with some papers for me to sign. So I called Gantner—to apologize for missing her. And he said he hadn’t sent anyone. I want to know what you thought you were doing, worming the site location out of my wife. I’m within my rights.”

  A couple of the crew had come up behind him, still holding their tools. I wondered what would happen if the cowboy gave them the order to jump me.

  “I’m a Chicago taxpayer. I have a right to walk on Chicago streets and alleys without justifying myself to you.”

  Charpentier raised a hand to hit me, saw the men watching him, and thought better of it. “You don’t have any right to harass my wife. And this is private property. Even in Chicago that must still have some meaning.”

  “What are you trying to hide here? If it’s so private, why isn’t it posted?”

  “She saying she want to invest,” the cowboy informed Charpentier. “I telling her she bring one of the bosses, she look all she want.”

  Charpentier stared at me closely. “Haven’t I seen you? ... Oh, yes. You’re the detective who’s been bothering Jasper Heccomb over at Home Free. My, my.”

  He turned to the cowboy. “She’s precious, Anton. Treat her like gold.”

  “This is Warshawska?” Anton gave me a full Polish pronunciation. “Why not ... ” He made a suggestive gesture with his gun.

  Charpentier’s full lips curved in an unpleasant smile. “Because now isn’t the right time. You be on your way, detective. But I’ll tell Jasper you stopped by.”

  I turned around and slowly made my way to the street. Under the circumstances I didn’t see I had any other choice. When I crossed Elston I turned around to look. Charpentier and Anton were watching me, arms akimbo. The workmen let out some more catcalls. The tone seemed friendly; I turned to wave.

  During the short drive home I turned Charpentier’s final words over in my mind a dozen times. The only sense I could make of them was that he and Anton were the two men tailing me, and that they were waiting for something specific to happen before they assaulted me. But what?

  I was startled to find how angry I was with both Charpentier and his cowboy-foreman. They had insulted me in a mean, ugly way. I don’t like being called a girl or told I’ll be assaulted to teach me a lesson. As I checked the entrance to the alley behind my building I wondered who’d thought up that idiotic saying about “sticks and stones.” It was Charpentier’s ugly talk that rankled me more than my bruises.

  At least I’d found a Home Free construction site. It would be interesting to go see if Charpentier had pulled a permit for the job. And more interesting would be to look at Charpentier’s books, to see if Home Free was paying him on schedule. He’d been unhappy with Jasper last week, but it couldn’t have been over money. A guy like Charpentier wouldn’t keep coming back if he wasn’t getting paid.

  Presumably Heccomb hadn’t talked to Charpentier today. If he had told them I was snuffling close to the truffles they might well have killed me. I tried not to dwell on the picture of my dead body buried in cement.

  MacKenzie Graham had told me my tail was in a sedan,maybe brown. That certainly would include Charpentier’s wife’s Nissan. But in case it was someone else—or in case Jasper had reserves—I parked again on Morgan and walked the two blocks home.

  I kept my hand on the Smith & Wesson as I unlocked the inside door. No one was lurking in the entryway. My keys in my left hand, I trotted up the stairs, my mind more on a bath than on Anton.

  I heard them an instant before I saw them, an instant that got the Smith & Wesson into my hand, safety off. Three hooded shadows rose at the top landing. I fired and ran down the stairs, bent double.

  “Fucking bitch! Stop her!”

  I careened around the corner of the landing. One of the shadows launched itself down the stairs. I fired at it, missed and heard an answering shot. Spinning on my toe I started down the next flight when the shadow flung itself on top of me. We rolled down the stairs together. My gun went off, searing my hand.

  At the half landing I couldn’t wrench myself free. Drawing my knees inside his dark embrace I pushed into his gut. He grunted and grabbed my hair. I bucked hard. My legs came free and I swiveled under his grip. Just as I pulled my gun up some other hand sliced the back of my head. I felt an instant of pain so exquisite I seemed to be dancing on the edge of the world, and then a merciful darkness enshrouded me.

  37

  Bird of Prey

  The sun was a bright light in the far distance. A falcon sat on a hooded man’s arm, eyeing me coldly, wanting to carry me into the center of the sun.

  “No!” I screamed. I struggled to sit up but the falconer stuck out an arm and pinned me to the earth. The bird bit my hand.

  When I woke up the sun had diminished into a fluorescent light in a stained ceiling. The bird beak was an IV running into my left wrist. Shabby curtains surrounded me on two sides. A cart holding medical instruments stood on my left. A woman in a T-shirt and jeans, but wearing a stethoscope, materialized next to me.
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  “Oh, good. You’re awake. Do you know your name?”

  “Where am I?” I croaked.

  “This is the emergency room at Beth Israel Hospital.”

  “How did I get here?”

  “The police brought you. They want to talk to you, to see what you remember, but before I let them in here I need to make sure you’re up to it. So why don’t you tell me your name?”

  “I’ve hurt my head, haven’t I?” I frowned, trying to remember what had happened. “That’s what they always ask when you’ve hurt your head, but I don’t know how it happened. I keep thinking it had something to do with falcons, but that was because of the eyes.”

  I became aware of an ice pack wedged against the side of my head. I put up a tentative finger to feel what lay beneath the coolness: a tender lump, perhaps the size of a cantaloupe. My arm ached where I’d landed on it.

  The nurse patiently agreed that I’d hurt my head, and once more asked for my name. I told her that, and the date, and who the president was. If he got hit on the head they’d have to keep him for observation because he wouldn’t know who I was. When I suggested this to the nurse she smiled and said she was going to find the resident, and to tell the police they could ask me a few questions.

  The light still hurt my eyes. I shut them and let sleep lap at me until a voice spoke near my head.

  “Ms. Warshawski ... the nurse said you were awake. How are you feeling?”

  I knew the voice but couldn’t place the speaker. When I turned my head to look at her a jagged arc of pain swept through me, a flash of lightning that discharged and left me breathless. The copper hair that fit her head like a shield, the stony mask of a face—but a mask that had slipped to show compassion—I knew who she was, but I couldn’t summon her name.

  “I know you. You work with Terry Finchley.” Tears of frustration pricked my eyes.

  “Don’t try so hard,” the nurse said from my other side. “You’ll remember things better if you let yourself relax.”