Brush Back (V.I. Warshawski Novels Book 17)

by Sara Paretsky

  Viola had tapped into one of my wells of grief, but I hadn’t realized it until talking about her last night with Jake. She’d mentioned casually that her mother died when she and Sebastian were sixteen.

  “Not to play Dr. Freud with you, V.I.,” Jake drawled, “but isn’t that how old you were when Gabriella died?”

  “Just call me ‘Dora,’” I’d agreed ruefully.

  At least in Viola’s case, Sebastian was actually missing and someone really had been searching their apartment—I’d gone there yesterday after Viola signed my contract.

  She and Sebastian lived in a frugal way on the poorer fringe of Ukrainian Village on Chicago’s West Side, the edge where rehabbed buildings bleed into Vice Lord territory. Despite the cracks in the stairwell walls, and the sour smell in the hallway, the twins kept the apartment clean and neat—or had done before their intruder trashed the place.

  Both beds had been pulled apart, the closets ransacked, but when Viola started picking up clothes, there wasn’t an underlying layer of junk the way there would have been in my apartment.

  The intruders had come in through the kitchen door, with a crowbar, not a slick set of picklocks. While Viola was calling the twenty-four-hour board-up service I contract with, I canvassed the neighbors. A woman on the floor below thought she’d seen a stranger going up the back stairs, but her baby had been fussing and she hadn’t really paid attention.

  White, black, male, female, she couldn’t say, although she was pretty sure it was a man. Wearing? Jeans, maybe a gray hoodie, so she didn’t see the hair. No one had been home in the other three apartments on Viola’s landing.

  “What were they looking for?” Viola was sobbing again when I got back.

  “That’s the question I get to ask you. Did Uncle Jerry leave a will, or give you any documents to look after? He was murdered two days ago; someone may be looking for something they thought you had.”

  She made a helpless gesture. “We hardly ever saw him, I told you. He didn’t really like us, he just used us for money. If he even had a will I’m sure we’re not in it.”

  “The Fughers, the people who adopted him, where is their house?”

  “They died a long time ago,” Viola said. “They lived somewhere on the South Side, I mean, Uncle Jerry, he grew up at 103rd and Avenue O, and they didn’t have any other family. That’s why we thought Uncle Jerry would be glad when we got in touch with him. Only he wasn’t.”

  The drawers from the cardboard filing cabinet where the twins kept their bills and receipts had also been dumped onto the floor. Buried in the middle of them was the loan document Sebastian had signed. The money came through Sleep-EZ, one of the payday loan companies. I’d seen their ads on TV: Debts keeping you awake? Come to Sleep-EZ. We’ll get you the money you need and you can sleep-ez at night again.

  The only difference between Mob-run juice loans and the payday business was that payday loans are legal. Interest tops out at 355 percent a year under current laws halfheartedly designed to curb usury. Eight years back, when Sebastian had signed this paper, there hadn’t been an upper limit.

  The twins’ copy of the loan agreement was barely legible after years of handling. I squinted at it under the light from my flash. Uncle Jerry had cosigned it, since Sebastian had been underage when he got the loan. The twins paid Uncle Jerry directly. Since he presumably had long since paid back Sleep-EZ, he was pocketing a handsome bundle of change. Which reinforced the idea that Viola and Sebastian were the best candidates to have killed him.

  “What about your brother’s room—was there anything in there they might want, anything that would show what he was doing for your uncle?”

  “It could have been on his computer, only that’s gone, like I told you already.”

  It was all unsatisfactory and frustrating, made more so by her resistance to my suggestions for action. “Viola, all this reluctance to talk to the cops points in a bad direction. Are you sure Sebastian didn’t kill your uncle?”

  That opened the sluice gates completely. How could I say such a thing? She was worried sick, she didn’t want to go to the police because they would think like me, but if I wasn’t going to look for Sebastian, she’d do it herself.

  I wondered if I was exuding some subliminal hormone that made all my clients hysterical. “Then you have to let me know where your brother has been working. If you don’t tell me anything, there’s no point in your signing an agreement with me.”

  She capitulated, not happily. Which took me to the Virejas Tower early the next morning.

  Presumably the city would supply a road to the building when it was completed, but right now the only access was a gravel track that I found by following the dump trucks rattling along Illinois Street toward the lake. I bumped my long-suffering Mustang behind them and parked outside the gate. The guard inspected my ID, made sure I had a hard hat—my silver number with “V. I. Warshawski Investigations” on it in red—and decided I could talk to the project manager.

  Up close, the building’s footprint was massive, covering the same amount of ground as the tower formerly known as Sears. As I approached the building, I felt tinier and tinier, an ant approaching Everest. Even the flatbeds looked small as they unloaded girders.

  The building was supposed to top Trump Tower when it was finished; so far, they’d poured the deck for the seventeenth floor. The hoist operator took me to the sixteenth, where the concrete was now dry and ready for work. A crew member who’d ridden up with me escorted me across the acreage, past the open holes for the elevator shafts, to the cranes on the far side where the project manager was overseeing delivery of steel for the day’s work. He wasn’t eager to interrupt his job to talk to a detective, and even less eager when he learned I was private, not with the CPD.

  He also wasn’t interested in Sebastian Mesaline’s disappearance. “We have a dozen construction engineers on a project like this. We expect them to come early and stay late—we need materials double-checked, we need stress points assessed, we need the CE’s to isolate flaws the architect or design engineer didn’t foresee. This design is every project manager’s nightmare, too many curved surfaces, too many unusual materials. So when I have a CE who isn’t on time or is phoning it in, I don’t trust him. The longer Mesaline stays missing, the happier I’ll be. My eleven other guys and gals are picking up the slack nicely, thank you very much.”

  “Why don’t you fire him?” I asked.

  “Brentback, the contractor, they put him on the job. I told them he wasn’t pulling weight but they said he needed the experience of a big project. I’m supposed to babysit him.”

  “You didn’t bury him in the deck, did you?”

  That drew a reluctant laugh from the manager. “Would’ve if I’d thought of it in time. But a kid that useless probably would have made the concrete bubble. Anything else?”

  I got him to take me to the makeshift office on the twelfth floor where five of the other construction engineers were already at work. After comparing notes, they agreed they could pinpoint the last day they’d seen Sebastian at the job site.

  “It sticks out partly because he was the first one here,” an African-American woman with beaded braids said. “I’m one of the newbies so I’m almost always doing setup and making the sludge Tyler likes to drink.”

  Tyler was the senior construction engineer on the project, a man in his forties with a square, wind-beaten face. “Aliana treats coffee like an engineering project, not the art form it is. She’s always calculating air pressure and humidity and adjusting the measurements, instead of realizing you need hot mud to keep you going on a day like this.”

  “Herbal tea, Tyler,” Aliana said. “I don’t want your intestines when I’m your age.”

  I brought the conversation back to Sebastian’s last day on the job.

  “Right. So that morning, Sebastian was acting kind of furtive,” Aliana said, “
like there was something he didn’t want me to see, but it didn’t look like he was stealing materials or anything.”

  “What about your computers?” I asked, waving a hand at the array of monitors.

  “They’re all accounted for,” Tyler said.

  “Software,” I said. “Could he have been putting something onto a thumb drive?”

  The engineers looked at each other and shrugged. “Could’ve been,” Tyler said, “but there’s nothing unusual on our machines. Even if he wanted to give materials specs to a rival firm, it’s not like they’re secret formulas.”

  As to the last time they’d seen him, he’d worked a full day, but with even less than his usual lackluster performance. “I went back over his report with him twice,” the senior man said. “He’d made a couple of mistakes that could have been costly. Aliana here, she makes a mistake like that once and she goes back through her entire workload for the day. She’s the other rookie Brentback sent over, she’s shaping up to be a first-class engineer.”

  Aliana blushed and fiddled with the buttons on her work jacket.

  “I had a heart-to-heart with Sebastian at the end of the day, and he seemed to be listening, but when he didn’t show up the next morning, I thought he’d chickened out, decided he couldn’t face the heavy artillery again. But they told me at Brentback that he hadn’t quit, that they didn’t know where he was.”

  That seemed to be the end of what they knew about Sebastian. The young engineers had felt honor-bound to invite him for drinks after the senior engineer chewed him out, but he’d said he was going to the night game at Wrigley. We all whipped out our cell phones to look up the Cubs schedule. April 8, nine days ago.

  “That’s right,” Tyler said. “We’d poured the deck for the tenth floor and he damned near put a foot in the wet concrete.”

  The room was filling up as the other engineers arrived. The architects came, with changes to the design. The senior engineer left us, giving Aliana a master key so I could look in Sebastian’s locker.

  “Take her back to the hoist as soon as she’s seen it, then meet me on thirteen. We have a problem with the soffits on the first recess.”

  The engineers all had lockers where they mostly kept extra socks or earmuffs, Aliana explained, opening Sebastian’s. He’d left behind a gym bag with running shoes, shorts and a cup. I riffled through the bag and found wadded-up receipts for food or toiletries.

  “Sebastian had to save money,” Aliana said, looking over the receipts with me. “He told us his mother left him and his sister with a humongous debt to pay off, so we weren’t surprised when he wouldn’t go out drinking with us. He didn’t really drink, anyway. And he tried to take care of his sister—it’s one of the good things about him. He isn’t a very good engineer, but he’s not a bad person.”

  Among the receipts was a scrap of paper with “11 P.M., 131” written on it in a black felt-tip. Aliana couldn’t say whether it was Sebastian’s writing or not.

  “We do everything by text, so I never see his handwriting, and anyway, it’s just a few numbers.”

  She also couldn’t explain whether the 131 referred to anything in the Virejas job site. A building involved so many numbers, so many calculations, this could refer to almost anything, but not to anything that jumped out at her.

  Her phone trilled—the senior engineer, texting her to wrap things up with the detective. She steered me to the hoist gate, then trotted to a rough-poured stairwell in a far corner to climb up to thirteen. A couple of the steelworkers catcalled at her; she laughed and bantered back, her beaded braids dancing under her gold Brentback hard hat.

  The worksite had filled while I was talking to the project manager and the engineers. From twelve stories up, I felt as though I was looking at a movie set, something like the pyramid-building scene in The Ten Commandments. Lots of miniature figures crawled across the landscape hauling steel, mixing concrete, loading dump trucks.

  While I was staring, the hoist passed me going up, carrying three men along with the operator. They all turned to look at me, the lone figure in the foreground. I’d seen one of them before, walking down Clark next to a frightened Jerry Fugher. I hoped my hard hat put my face in enough shadow that he wouldn’t recognize me.

  When the hoist came back down to collect me, I asked the operator who he’d been taking up just now. “More engineers?”

  “Nah, they’re with the cement contractor. You guys ought to join a dating service,” he said. “They wanted to know about you, too.”

  “‘Engineers Measure Up,’ that’d be a good dating site for geeks,” I said, but my stomach tightened: the gravel-faced man had recognized me.

  “Nah, if you want to meet them, you need to go to ‘Cementing Relations.’”

  I laughed obligingly. “Who’s pouring for you? Ozinga?”

  “This crew is with Sturlese. Brentback usually subcontracts with them on their big jobs. What dating site do you detectives use?”

  “I don’t know. ‘Caught Flatfooted’ doesn’t sound attractive, does it?”

  We stopped at the sixth floor to pick up another couple of guys and the conversation switched to the weather and the White Sox.

  “The Mesaline kid was a Cubs fan,” I said. “Any of you see him at Wrigley Field?”

  “Yeah, he would be a Cubs fan,” the hoist operator said. “He didn’t have the balls for this kind of work.”

  When we got to the bottom, before he let the next upward-bound group onboard, I pulled out my cell phone and showed him the blurry shot I’d taken of Jerry Fugher at Wrigley Field. “You ever see this guy with your Sturlese Cement crew?”

  “What, with Danny DeVito? Don’t tell me Nabiyev is making movies in his spare time—a dead carp on the sand has more emotion than he does.”

  Nabiyev. At least I had the gravel guy’s name now. “Maybe deep down Nabiyev is a boiling pot of feeling and the hitman façade is just that—a cover to keep us from seeing his profound emotions.”

  “Hitman façade? It wouldn’t surprise me if he was a hit man all the way to the bone. If you can’t detect that, better find a new line of work.”

  ROACH MOTEL

  All the way back across the job site to the gate, I felt as though I had a bull’s-eye painted on the back of my hard hat. It wasn’t until I’d gotten the Mustang safely up the gravel track to Illinois Street that I breathed normally.

  Instead of going to my office, I drove the thirty miles down to Lansing, to the address I’d gotten for Jerry Fugher. As the map app had suggested, it was, in fact, a garage behind a single-story frame house. I parked around the corner and walked up the alley to the garage. I had my picklocks out, but the door opened easily—someone had been ahead of me with a crowbar.

  Jerry Fugher hadn’t been a warm and cozy guy, and a garage, even one where someone has added insulation, a stove, a toilet and a skylight, is still a garage and not a warm and cozy place to live. This one was made particularly repellent by the level of chaos. Whoever had pried open the door had emptied drawers, the little refrigerator under the countertop and even the garbage can.

  I tried to poke through the papers and garbage, using a barbecue fork that I found on the bed. Cockroaches flicked their whiskers at me contemptuously as I upended a sardine tin. When I backed away, more roaches crawled out from under the papers and sauntered to cover under the kitchenette counter. The backs of my legs tingled: I’m not afraid of bugs, exactly, but cockroaches always seem as oily and arrogant as rats.

  If seven maids with seven mops swept the place for half a year they might find something of value, but I couldn’t hunt when I couldn’t even guess what I was looking for. Among the papers I turned over were wadded-up printouts from online bets on horses. In the pages I looked at, Uncle Jerry had won twenty-seven hundred dollars but lost over twelve thousand. No wonder he was putting the screws to his niece and nephew over the loan he�
�d set up for them.

  I probably could track the betting losses to dates when he showed up at St. Eloy’s to exchange electrical work for cash, but the gambling seemed irrelevant. It might explain Fugher’s behavior, but it didn’t seem to be a reason for taking his place apart.

  Footsteps in the alley made me stiffen and back up to the room’s only exit. A gray-haired man in jeans and a Bears jacket loomed in the doorway.

  “What the fuck? Did you do this?”

  “Nope. You the owner?”

  He nodded toward the frame house. “Yeah, I rent to Fugher. Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  “You know Fugher is dead, right? I’m a detective. I’m investigating, but this is too much for one person. When did this happen?”

  “I don’t know. My tenants pay me on time, I leave them alone.”

  “Then why are you here now?” I asked.

  “Lady who lives back of me, she called to say she saw you go in here. We don’t have much crime here in Lansing, but I never heard of Fugher bringing any females home with him before.”

  “Who did he bring home—besides every cockroach in Chicago, I mean?” I pulled out my phone and showed him my shot of Fugher and Nabiyev. “This guy? He one of the regular visitors?”

  The man looked at the screen. “Never saw him before. You with the Lansing police?”

  “I’m from Chicago,” I said. “Fugher died in Chicago. If Nabiyev comes around, call the Chicago PD Fourth District. That’s where the investigation is based.”

  “Nothing here for the police to care about.” He stomped across the yard into the back entrance to his house. I followed him, wanting to ask him how long he’d rented to Fugher, and how he knew Fugher. He refused to open the door, crying at me, “Go away! I don’t need to talk to Chicago cops, I live in Lansing, I don’t know anything.”