Tunnel Vision

by Sara Paretsky

  She was very like her father in one respect: words gushed out of her in an unstoppable torrent. I murmured “no” and “yes” at appropriate intervals—after all, she was right. I had given the old man a good run for his Medicaid taxes. Before I could come up with any way of stanching the flow, her father appeared on the doorstep.

  “Listen.” I interrupted his jubilant greeting without ceremony. “Your daughter’s been reminding me of all the danger I’ve put you in over the years. I think maybe you should stay in Elk Grove Village until we get shut of—well, whoever’s been taking aim at me lately.”

  He was indignant. If I thought he wanted to pack up and die he sure as hell wouldn’t want to do it out here in the suburbs. He’d move into a retirement community—his local owned one in Edgewater. But he wasn’t going to sit and listen to me try to wrap him up like he was dead and I was a winding sheet.

  Ruthie turned on him for his ingratitude. “Didn’t I drop everything as soon as I got the news you was in the hospital? Didn’t I? And all for what—for you to tell me this—this floozy who got you in trouble to begin with is more important to you than your own flesh and blood!”

  “And didn’t your ma wash your mouth out a dozen times for language like that?” her father shouted. “Now you apologize to Vic here.”

  “No need, no need,” I said hastily.

  This was a family fight—they paid no attention to me. They started in on each other’s past wrongdoings at such a pitch that Mitch and Peppy roared around the corner of the house to see what was happening.

  The dogs were hysterical with delight at seeing me. It had been five days, after all. While they raced up and down the sidewalk a dozen times to show their pleasure, Ruthie’s younger son, a gangly fourteen-year-old, came out of the house with Mr. Contreras’s suitcase. He hovered behind the old man in the manner of teenagers—wanting to say good-bye, not knowing what to do with his body.

  As we finally shepherded the dogs into the car, Ruthie said, “I can’t keep running into Chicago every time this detective gets you bitten or shot.”

  “Good,” my neighbor said truculently. “I keep telling you to leave me alone. Bye, Ben.” He clapped his grandson roughly on the shoulder and got into the car.

  On the way into town I found myself reiterating some of Ruthie’s warnings. “Too many people want my head on a platter these days. I just had a visit from one of Senator Gantner’s aides, with a soft threat from the senator himself.”

  “We already been through this, doll. I ain’t gonna argue about it anymore. Tell me about the kids we brung out Monday morning. How are they?”

  I had called Eva Kuhn before leaving the apartment. I gave Mr. Contreras her report on the two surviving Hawkings children.

  “The biggest problem is the custody fight Leon Hawkings is mounting. The kids are recovering fast physically, but Tamar seems to have disintegrated emotionally. Eva says as long as she had to cope with the real-life problems of survival she was okay, but faced with the threat of losing her children she’s getting withdrawn and morose.”

  “Well, it ain’t like she’s in contention for mother-of-the-year prizes, but we oughtta think about helping her. ’Cause if the guy did mistreat her, and the daughter, the poor girl that died, he’s got no business getting the other two kids back.”

  “You take on that assignment—thinking of something to do to help Tamar. Maybe you could adopt the kids.”

  I meant it for a joke, but his eyes lit up. “Now, that’s a definite idea, doll. We ought to get us a kid to go along with the dogs.”

  “Great idea. I could run all three of them to the lake and back every morning.”

  “Now, doll, you know—oh, you’re pulling my leg. Okay, okay. Maybe we don’t need a kid. But we could give all five of them children a better home than they’ve got to go to right now.”

  I couldn’t fight him on that one. It was one of the—many—things wearing me down these days.

  It was just on noon when I had him settled into his apartment again. I left him fussing with his seedlings and went upstairs to call Fabian.

  After various receptionists and secretaries switched me around the law school I was permitted to talk to the professor. His voice was so tight I could have bounced coins from it.

  “Before I say anything I want you to know that my talking to you is not a sign that I agree to any of the outrageous statements you were hurling at me last night.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, bored. “You’re a lawyer, you’ve talked to a lawyer. Now that we’ve read the fine print, tell me how the cash comes in.”

  “By air, Warshawski. On Saturday nights.”

  “By air?” I echoed. “Where? Surely not to O’Hare.”

  “You pride yourself on being so smart, you figure it out.”

  “Fabian—”

  He hung up, leaving me fuming. When I called back he refused to come to the phone again, sending me a snotty message through the departmental receptionist.

  By air on Saturday nights. Great. I started ticking off airports in the Chicago area. Probably not O’Hare, unless Gantner managed to pay off a whole lot of people—mechanics, controllers, customs agents. The same argument applied to Midway. There was a military runway near O’Hare—the senator might have access to that. And the naval air base in the northern suburbs. Meigs Field, the little corporate airport on the lakefront was a possibility. Gary, Indiana, had an airport. There were dozens of private landing strips in the seven-county area, but presumably the musketeers needed a jet if money was coming all the way from the Caymans.

  And then I smacked my forehead. Gant-Ag had an airstrip. No customs, the mechanics all worked for the company. The elaborate security I’d encountered when I drove out there last week—that didn’t have anything to do with experimental corn hybrids. Gantner needed every possible warning of visitors to the site.

  “Fabian’s right: I am so smart,” I said aloud.

  Or was I? Had the senator sent Eric Bendel because Fabian had called him for help? Or because young Alec had come running to Papa? Fabian might have gone to young Alec anyway. In which case this cryptic hint was a way of baiting a trap for me. But maybe, even if it was a trap, it was still true—the money did come in there on Saturday nights, but they hoped to kill me in the act of trespassing on the sacred experimental farm.

  (“In the dark we couldn’t tell who it was,” young Alec would say, more in sorrow than anger. “She’d been out here last week pulling up our sacred grass. We warned her then—how could we know she had such contempt for private property and the law?”)

  I called Murray. If Alec Gantner was going to unload bags of hundred-dollar bills out at the family farm this weekend, I didn’t want to be the only witness. As Terry had made clear, no cops wanted to touch a U.S. senator’s banker, let alone his son. I’d have to have pictures, names, and dates before I’d get anyone to listen to me.

  As I’d hoped, Murray was eager to ride shotgun for me. When I’d explained the whole situation to him he agreed to come up with a camera that could take nighttime pictures. And he also promised not to nudge any of his volatile Washington sources until after the weekend.

  “It’s not a story yet, you know,” he told me. “I played Tish’s tape to my editor yesterday. He’s willing to let me poke around, but he’s treating me the way Finchley did you. If we get something cold and hard, like an airplane logbook and photos, I may get some real resources assigned to this.”

  We decided to drive out to Morris together around noon, so that we’d have enough time to scout the landscape. Murray would pick me up in the alley behind the Belmont Diner at eleven.

  58

  Lover in Arms

  The cold had worked its way through my windbreaker and pullover. As I lay in the damp soil next to Murray I had to clench my teeth to stop their chatter. I unfolded the blanket from my backpack and wrapped it around my shoulders. Murray grunted and grabbed a corner of it to pull across his neck.

  When we reach
ed Gant-Ag a little after one we drove the perimeter of their headquarters. On the southwest edge of the vast holdings of buildings and experimental farms we found a thicket where a stream crossed the property. Gant-Ag had left four or five acres of brush and trees as a small wilderness.

  We knew we were at risk of being spotted by surveillance equipment anywhere we crossed the property line, but we thought we would be least likely to face detection here. The tangled growth bordered an unpaved side road, so slippery with mud from the spring rains that Murray’s Cobra spun out of control several times.

  We whiled away the rest of the afternoon in the town of Morris. After a late lunch we went into the public library, where Murray used an empty conference room to test his video equipment. Some pal in the public relations office at Ft. Sheridan had come up with a night-vision video camera for him as well as a lightweight set of field glasses. Lugging these, together with an extra battery, extra film cassettes, a blanket, a thermos, his tape recorder, and such supplies as my gun, picklocks, and a flashlight, through muddy cornfields in the dark had left both of us panting. My legs, still sore from Thursday’s hike up the Gateway stairwell, turned rubbery with fatigue by the time we got close enough to the airstrip to set up camp.

  The blanket was Mr. Contreras’s idea. He and I had a major fight over my going off without him. The idea that I would go on an adventure with any man except him cut him to the quick, but that it should be Murray, whom he thinks of as an arrogant boor, was especially upsetting.

  “We may be at this all night,” I warned, “so don’t panic if I’m not back in the morning. But if you don’t hear from me by noon make sure Conrad gets all the details.”

  “You going off without telling him? Now, that really takes the cake,” the old man fumed.

  It was knowing that I hadn’t told Conrad, though, that finally got him to stop arguing. He even relented enough to pack me up a blanket, some chocolate, a ham sandwich—pointedly not including one for Murray—and a thermos of coffee laced with grappa. That I’d dumped in favor of plain coffee at the diner where we had lunch. Now I was glad of all the provisions. Murray ate the sandwich while I drank coffee and nibbled on a piece of chocolate.

  We kept our voices down. Although the buildings around the airstrip were dark, the main office block showed a few lights. In the distance we could hear the occasional truck rumble in through the front gate.

  “You don’t think your pal Fabian made this up to laugh at you spending a night in the mud, do you?” he rumbled in my ear around ten.

  “My pal Fabian is capable of anything. We’ve been here for an hour and haven’t heard anything. Let’s go see what’s in the hangar.”

  “You are the original action woman, aren’t you? If someone is waiting in there to jump us, I’m awfully exposed if I carry this camera.”

  “Hit ’em with it. I’ll cover you anyway. In fact, when we get there you let me go around to the entrance. If someone jumps me I’ll holler and you can come video us.” Murray was as cold as I was. He was only objecting because he hated not being in charge of all the ideas. We carefully packed up our belongings: we’d never find this exact spot again in the dark and we didn’t want to leave anything that could be traced to either of us.

  The last hundred yards to the hangar we did on our hands and knees between the hills of corn. We didn’t want some trucker to pick us up in his headlights as he made the turn toward the warehouses. As we crawled, a fine rain started to fall. Our knees became heavy with mud.

  Near the building we found ourselves in a drainage ditch, almost deep enough that we could stand upright. Taking the burden from our weary knees we crept to the back of the hangar, where we stood up fully and rubbed our sore limbs.

  Murray took a swig of coffee. We stood for a few minutes, straining to hear, but the concrete blocks would shut out any voices. I pulled Murray’s head next to my ear and told him I would go to the front to reconnoiter.

  “If I’m not back in fifteen minutes ease yourself off the site and go find some cops.” Assuming Grundy County or city deputies would mess with Gant-Ag.

  I slipped around the edge of the building and followed the west side, toward the blue lights of the runways. It was a long building, longer than I would have thought they needed for their helicopters and crop dusters. In the dark it seemed interminable.

  When I reached the apron at the front I paused again, squinting up the landing strip with the field glasses. I swiveled and watched a truck move down the side road to the warehouses. Finally I slipped around the corner to the entrance. Heavy doors of corrugated metal closed the front. They were locked shut. I could probably pick them, but the noise of their opening would be horrendous. I hunted around and found an ordinary entrance on the east side, the side that faced the main office block. It also had an ordinary lock. I worked it open, then returned along the west edge of the hangar to fetch Murray.

  “It took you long enough, Warshawski. I was just about to come looking for you.”

  “I think we’re clear,” I muttered back. “But let’s stick to the cornfield side just in case.”

  When we reached the apron we waited for a truck to turn up the track toward the warehouses, then slipped past the corrugated doors to the side entrance. When Murray had followed me in I locked the door behind us.

  In the dark I could smell engines. I switched on the flash, shielding it under the blanket in case there were windows up high that would show light to someone in the office block. In this restricted glow we explored the hangar.

  Up front, next to a small jet, stood the surveillance helicopters, looking like malevolent insects in the dim light, their rotaries giant tentacles, their feet the stingers. I shuddered and moved deeper into the building. Murray followed, filming everything around him.

  Workbenches along the west wall held the wrenches and torches needed to work on aircraft. Fan belts hung from large hooks overhead; underneath the benches were spare rotors, replacement windows, and even several extra airplane doors. Parked neatly alongside the bench stood a couple of carts that airliners use for ferrying equipment to their craft.

  We passed two small planes that I supposed were crop dusters. A few helicopters stood behind them. They may have been in for repairs—their doors were stacked neatly on the floor beside them.

  “What we really need is a logbook,” Murray said, opening drawers in the workbench. “You know—if Fabian is setting you up and there is no plane due in here tonight.”

  “What would it say?” I jeered. “Another load of hundred-dollar bills arrived today from the Caymans?”

  I had to admit he was right. I went to the far end of the room, where a small desk stood, and started riffling through work orders for fuel, engine parts, and the like. Murray joined me with the camera so he could film the documents for later study.

  I was pawing through a pile of coffee-stained invoices when we heard a key turn in the side door. We dropped the papers and dove into one of the open helicopters. Murray slid onto a bench next to the door. I moved next to him, taking my gun from my shoulder holster and easing off the safety.

  Footsteps sounded, male voices, laughter, and then the hangar was flooded with light and I made out Jasper Heccomb’s voice. “Is she coming or not?”

  “No one knows where she is.” That was Alec Gantner. “When Messenger called me yesterday morning I told him to give her the information but not so obviously that she would smell a trap. We didn’t spot her car on the surveillance cameras, but she could have come across the fields, I suppose.”

  “We should have thought of that sooner,” Jasper snapped. “Didn’t you tell me she discovered last week that you survey the traffic on the perimeter?”

  “Yes,” Gantner said. “But she shouldn’t be able to get down here without being spotted from the road. I asked the county people to keep an eye out for her car and it hasn’t been seen around here.”

  “She could have rented one.” Donald Blakely spoke for the first time. “How long ar
e we going to wait?”

  “Oh, the plane will be here in thirty minutes to an hour,” Alec said. “My guess is she’ll pop up when it lands. Unless the senator succeeded in warning her off.”

  “You don’t seriously believe she’ll pay attention to your old man, do you?” Jasper said.

  “We agreed we had to try it,” Alec reminded him sharply. “The Chicago cops seem to be keeping an eye on her—my source in Landseer’s office says they want to see if she leads them to the girl. Until they give up their surveillance we can hardly do anything.”

  I didn’t know whether the mike on Murray’s tape recorder was sensitive enough to pick up their conversation, but moving with extreme care I slid it from my backpack and turned it on. After that we waited for the plane with the musketeers.

  They seemed content to stay in the front of the hangar, their spirits frothy with excitement. The conversation jumped around, from what Heccomb wanted to do next—now that the lid had blown off the contractor scam he didn’t want to continue at Home Free—to the Bulls’ chances for a repeat championship. But they kept coming back to what they wanted to do with me when I showed up. Their descriptions were graphic; a chill washed across my cheeks and arms and I almost dropped the Smith & Wesson.

  “You’re the man for the job, Jaz,” Blakely said. “Didn’t she used to have a thing for you in college?”

  “Good thing you didn’t respond back then—broad that mean could really crack your nuts,” Gantner chimed in.

  “Give me half a chance and I will,” I muttered.

  Murray clamped a hand over my mouth but they were laughing too hard to hear me.