Tunnel Vision

by Sara Paretsky

  “The cops and Papa weren’t so discreet with me—they brought search warrants to inspect mine and my friends’ homes last night. Come to think of it, I’m surprised they left you alone.”

  “Maybe they know you’re not very friendly with me. No, no, I take it back. You’re wonderful. Sorry, I momentarily forgot. Are you sitting on the kid?”

  “I don’t know where she is. I told Finchley to look at the Home Free construction sites, but they’re not paying much attention to me these days. My hypothesis, though, has to do with Gantner and Heccomb, and probably Deirdre’s murder.”

  He was so excited by the prospect of nailing one of the Gantners that he didn’t try to push me on Emily’s whereabouts. He was busy until two-thirty, he told me, but would be outside my front door at three.

  “The cops are on my ass. I’ll go down to Illinois Center—you can enter on Michigan and leave almost anywhere. Pick me up at the Fairmont Hotel—you know the valet entrance on lower Wacker?”

  “Yes, ma’am. The code is: John has a long mustache.”

  I was only half a block from the el. Just to keep Terry’s crew on their toes I left my car in the mall lot and walked down Diversey to Sheffield, where I hiked up the ancient stairs to the train. At Chicago Avenue I caught a cab to Wacker and Michigan.

  Illinois Center connects to a complex of a dozen or so buildings, including three hotels, through a series of underground passages. The floods had shut them for a couple of days, but they were open again now. The long passages and steep escalators made it easy to see I was alone. I emerged from the Fairmont’s underground entrance precisely at three.

  Murray held his car door open for me with a flourish. “Heccomb isn’t in. He’s not expected until five. I called on my car phone while you were hobbling downstairs. What are we going to do?”

  “Imitate the Bears in their glory years. Fencik and Singletary hitting high and low. If she isn’t a criminal, she’ll crack.”

  Murray gave a mock salute. “Did they leave scruple out of your brain when you were born, O She-who-must-be-obeyed?”

  “Never heard the word. And now I’ve forgotten it.”

  55

  Coming Up to Bat

  When we burst in on Tish she was hunched over her computer, still wearing the shapeless khaki sweater in which I’d last seen her.

  “Hi,” I said in my heartiest voice. “This is Murray Ryerson with the Herald-Star. He’s doing a story on Home Free. He wants to interview you.”

  Her muddy skin turned mahogany with annoyance. “You can’t barge in here any time you feel like it. And you can’t do an interview with me. Jasper handles all press inquiries.”

  “And there’s a good reason for that.”

  I pulled out my picklocks. As she gasped in fury I unlocked Jasper’s office. She reached out a hand for the phone, but Murray, with an apology, unplugged it and put it on the floor.

  I brought a couple of chairs from Jasper’s office. “We’re going to have a long talk. Murray and I want to be comfortable. As I said, there’s a reason Jasper has forbidden you to talk to the press: he’s sitting on some ugly secrets, about himself and his pals. He’s afraid in your naivete you might blurt out something incriminating.”

  She was on her feet, pummeling Murray’s unmoving arms. “You can’t do this,” she panted. “I’m getting the police.”

  “You are welcome to call them,” I said, picking the phone up from the floor and reattaching it to the cord. “I’ll dial the number for you so we know we’re getting the law, not Gary Charpentier or Anton.”

  She stopped pounding on Murray to scowl at me. With his arms free Murray set up his tape recorder and tested the mike. I waited for him to finish his setup before continuing.

  “We’ll start by showing the cops the cash Jasper keeps in that locked drawer in his office. You know—the stuff he uses for off-the-books payments to his contractors. So that people like Charpentier can throw spare change at illegal immigrants from Eastern Europe while he pockets hundred-dollar bills.”

  She smiled in a contemptuous way but said nothing.

  “She knew about the illegal aliens,” I said instructively to Murray. “I bet her mother will enjoy reading that.”

  “We weren’t hurting anyone,” Tish snapped. “They got more money than they would have made at home. And if they lived a little rough for a few months it wasn’t like they had to do it forever, like they were homeless or sharecroppers or something.”

  “That sounds like Jasper Heccomb speaking. Are you sure you believe that yourself, Tish?” Murray asked her, his blue eyes large and sincere. “Let alone the question of whether American workers could have had decent jobs instead of having to live on the streets, did you approve of this policy?”

  When Tish kneaded her hands without speaking I added, “You knew they were being paid off the books. Did you know Jasper kept five million in that drawer in his office?”

  She looked up at that, startled enough to blurt, “You’re wrong: he showed it to me himself, on Monday. It was only fifteen thousand.”

  I nodded. “Jasper needed to show it to you because I’d broken in here Friday night and seen the drawer when it was stuffed to the brim with hundreds. He figured if he got his story to you first you’d believe it: you’ve looked the other way many times because you need to believe him. He’s counting on you to do it again.

  “But listen carefully while I explain something to you. Jasper and his friends are likely going to jail, possibly for a very long time. You have to decide whether you want to go with them. If the going gets rough it wouldn’t surprise me if Jasper tried to set you up to take the fall for him. He may suggest that financial high jinks here began when you were interim director, for instance. I know for a fact that they’re framing Anton—you do know Anton, don’t you?”

  She was pretending to stare out the window in boredom, but all her emotions registered on her surface with painful intensity. Despite her pose she was trembling.

  “You can avoid a lot of grief by speaking frankly now. Or you can decide the crumbs of attention Jasper throws you will carry you through five years in a federal pen.”

  “You’re the one who’s going to jail,” she said, her eyes full of fire. “You just admitted breaking in here.”

  “Yeah. I broke the law. I agree. The cops know about it”—at least, Conrad knew about it—“and they’re not happy, but they haven’t applied for a warrant. It’ll be the FBI, anyway, not the city police, who’ll look into Jasper’s story. That should make for a fascinating investigation, because we’ll get to see whether Senator Gantner has enough influence to shut down the Justice Department.”

  Tish’s lower jaw jutted out. “I knew Jasper was paying people off the books, but that isn’t such a big crime. The worst that can happen is we’d pay a fine. Everyone wants affordable housing for the homeless, but no one wants to pay the bill. If we had to pay union scale a lot of those people would still be—”

  “Out on the streets; I know,” I cut in. “But that isn’t what I’m talking about. A few million over the years to contractors is peanuts compared to their main game.

  “Jasper, together with Alec Gantner and Donald Blakely, formed a holding company called JAD, which they used to buy Century Bank here in Uptown. They then used Century to funnel money from the Cayman Islands to the Gant-Ag account at Gateway Bank. Now why, you are asking yourself, did Gant-Ag need to bring money into the country in such a secretive way? And the answer is: They were violating the embargo against Iraq. They were working through a man named Manzoor Khalil in Jordan—which sat on the fence during the Gulf brouhaha. I can’t prove it, but I’m betting Gant-Ag shipped corn to Saddam—which meant they had to be paid surreptitiously.”

  Murray’s jaw dropped, then he sprang up, knocking over his mike, and shook my shoulder. “Fact, Warshawski, or fiction? Damn you, how much of this is true? And how do you know?”

  “She’s got some of it in her computer.” I cocked my head at Tish. “Y
our fifty-million-dollar line of credit from Century. Didn’t it ever occur to you that that was a whole lot more than a little not-for-profit like Home Free needed? Even if you’d stopped being a direct service provider and were building affordable housing instead?”

  The color had receded from Tish’s cheeks, leaving them a faint beige. Her lips mouthed the word no, but no sound came out.

  “I want to see it.” Murray’s baritone was cracking with desire; he sounded like Mitch trying to get a squirrel on the other side of the fence.

  “He did it as a favor to Senator Gantner, didn’t he—really, to the whole Gantner family.” I ignored him, speaking directly to Tish. “The money came through Gateway as part of the Gant-Ag line of credit. So not only did they get the money, but they got it in the form of a loan. That meant they could deduct the loan interest from their income tax while they repaid—using cash from Jasper’s magic drawer. The loan repayment, in turn, financed JAD’s acquisition of Century. The whole deal made a tight loop, very symmetrical.”

  “No,” Tish whispered. “It couldn’t be that. Jasper did set up the line of credit as a favor to Senator Gantner. But in return the senator gave us almost a hundred thousand dollars. It was so much—we could do so much good with that kind of money.”

  I held out the Gant-Ag papers I’d taken from Blakely’s office. “It’s all in here, Tish: the Gateway money, the summary of the reports the bank sent to the IRS. Senator Gantner took legal advice on the tax code and offshore banks eighteen months ago. At the same time, by the way, that he was inquiring into the Boland Amendment.”

  Murray snatched the papers from me and started going through them so fast that they fell on the floor. He dropped to his knees to grab them up again, but Tish was sitting motionless with shock. Her skin was pulled so tight across her face that I thought the bones might poke through it.

  “Then Deirdre stumbled on it,” I went on. “She was doing all that volunteer work, and she found the accounting records.”

  “I had the flu,” Tish whispered. “She should never have seen those files. But Jasper was out of the office and she was being a good soldier, entering cash receipts.”

  “And she confronted Heccomb with what she’d seen,” I prodded when her voice trailed away.

  “He told her—what I just said. How much good we were doing, and not to get everyone in trouble when the law itself was a bad one. He said Senator Gantner would appreciate it, appreciate her support—he knew Mr. Messenger was hoping for a federal judgeship.”

  “You sat in on the conversation?” Murray asked.

  She turned a deep red; her gaze flicked at the intercom box on her desk. She wasn’t going to admit it, but jealous love of Jasper made her want to hear what he said to a woman alone in his office with him.

  “Was that why Blakely got Gateway to make a donation to Arcadia House?” I asked.

  “I guess so,” she whispered, looking at her hands. “I didn’t know about the money—the Century line of credit, I mean—until Deirdre stumbled onto those accounts. Jasper always kept the corporate donor files himself. I don’t even know where Deirdre found the diskette. Snooping around, I suppose. Then she couldn’t let it alone. Every time she came in the last few weeks she liked to try to get me to discuss it.”

  We sat silent for a minute. Street noises floated faintly through the Thermopane windows—children shrieking on their way home from school, the occasional car on a shortcut to Montrose.

  “When Deirdre died, you didn’t think Jasper or his friends were trying to shut her up, did you?”

  “No!” The word came out as an explosion that startled her as much as it did Murray and me. “They’d given twenty-five thousand to one of her pet charities. They were going to make her husband a judge. What else did she need?”

  A list of Deirdre’s needs flitted through my mind, but I said aloud, “Did you see a baseball bat in here anytime recently?”

  Surprised by the change of subject, Tish answered without thinking. “Yes. Donald Blakely brought one in—I don’t know, three weeks ago maybe. He and Jasper were laughing about it, then Jasper said something about going to bat for Gantner one more time. Why do you ask?” she added belatedly.

  The police had kept the discovery of Fabian’s bat from the press, but the juxtaposition of Deirdre’s death with my question made the connection for Murray. His eyes blazing, he started to say something, cut himself short in the nick of time, and instead tried to get Tish to pin down the day. She couldn’t be specific, and she couldn’t remember, when I asked her, if it had been a signed bat. She wasn’t interested in baseball; she didn’t know what a signed bat was.

  Murray had the whole interchange on tape. Surely that would make Finchley reconsider his warrant for Emily’s arrest. Tish’s testimony definitely ruled Fabian out as well. A pity, really. But maybe he’d been an accessory.

  No, that wasn’t possible either. Blakely or Gantner must have taken the bat with precisely the aim of implicating Fabian in his wife’s murder. Neither of them would have expected Emily to snatch the weapon away. They must have been on tenterhooks ever since, wondering why Fabian hadn’t been arrested.

  “So what do you want to do now?” Murray asked me. “Take all this to the state’s attorney, or to the federal prosecutor? Or should I just run an exclusive?”

  “What do you want us to do, Tish?” I said.

  “Go to hell,” she snapped.

  “Understood. But since that isn’t among your options?”

  “You have to give me time to think. You can’t print anything anyway. You only have allegations. No proof.”

  Her face was furrowed in agony. I did feel sorry for her. She was bright; she was dedicated to a difficult social cause. Her only crime was in falling in love with Jasper Heccomb. And he was whistling happily around the city, while she would spend the night tossing in torment.

  “We have enough that proof will follow.” Murray spoke with unwonted gentleness—her naked misery was affecting him too. “Can she have forty-eight hours, Nancy Drew?”

  “Not on the baseball bat. But on the money? That stash isn’t going anywhere very fast.”

  Murray moved the phone next to her. He patted her shoulder in a sympathetic way. She drew away from him with a sharp cry. Before the door shut behind us her shoulders were heaving with sobs.

  56

  The Dead Speak

  “I feel sorry for her,” Murray said as we stood outside his car. “You were pretty rough on her.”

  “I feel sorry for her too. Sorry enough to give her a jolt that may keep her from washing Heccomb’s dirty clothes one last time.”

  “Speaking of laundry—these papers are suggestive, but they don’t prove a damned thing. Gateway bought some Gant-Ag debt from Century, but it doesn’t say word one about the Caymans.”

  I grinned at him. “Here’s where you get to prove you’re still the boy reporter who can scoop all the kids hungry for your job. One of those stories you printed out for me mentioned Craig Gantner testifying in front of a Senate select committee that Gant-Ag didn’t break the embargo. Go to Washington and find out who knew enough to get a subpoena for the senator’s brother. Talk to Messenger: he did some legal work for Gantner on the Boland Amendment. Fabian won’t talk to me, but he might confide to you what slant the senator wanted on the amendment.”

  Murray planted a wet kiss on my nose. “This could be a very big story, Warshawski. I’ll take you to dinner at the Ritz if I win a Pulitzer.”

  “Be still, my waiting heart. How about walking me to my front door instead? A big ugly goon is on my tail and I’m not up to fighting him solo.”

  Murray responded with appropriate mockery, but when I told him about Anton’s assault on Emily yesterday, and my scampering around the Gateway stairwells this morning, he agreed I had earned some support.

  “Although, I don’t know, Warshawski. When did Nancy Drew ever ask Ned to watch her back?” he said when we’d reached my apartment without incident. “You
’re going to have to bring Anton to me in your teeth to restore your credibility.”

  “Only if he’s wrapped in latex—I don’t want to catch rabies or worse from touching him.”

  We parted on that light vein, but I wondered how long I would be left in peace by the musketeers. Perhaps, through their pipeline to the city, they knew I’d gone to Conrad’s from the hospital. But at any moment they would learn I had returned to my own home.

  I surveyed the street from my front window. My car was sitting there like a bright red beacon, saying “Come and get me.” It was too late to move it—it had been there for more than a day. I couldn’t worry about that now.

  My legs were aching. I went to the kitchen and made up some ice packs out of bags of frozen peas. Using a couple of Ace bandages I attached them to my legs and lay down on the couch. It was supposed to be a half-hour nap, but the phone woke me a little after six.

  “Don’t you ever check your messages?” It was Ken Graham. “I’ve called four times in the last day.”

  “Excuse me, your highness, for not leaping to attention at the first intimation of your wishes. Before you execute me can I have five minutes to say farewell to my dogs?”

  “Oh. You think I’m being pushy. Sorry. But I found something really amazing in your old computer. A letter to you from Deirdre.”

  He laughed when I could only sputter out half-questions. “I thought you’d be amazed. I got a lot of your accounting numbers pieced together and printed out. Then I thought maybe I should take a look at your word-processing documents, see if there was anything with a recent date that you might need, and there was this message from beyond the grave.”

  “What does it say? How do you know Deirdre wrote it?” I sat up and turned on a lamp.

  “She did it like a memo: To Vic from Deirdre. With the date and everything. She said—well, I’ll read you exactly what she said: ‘I made Fabian tell me how they bring the money in. Just ask him.’ ”