Guardian Angel

by Sara Paretsky

  Barbara and her friends had clearly derailed my attackers. I was dawdling just to catch my breath while I figured out my next steps. I needed to do a library search on Jason Felitti, whose name had popped up as the owner of Diamond Head in my late-night research. I also wanted to visit the people flowing cash to Diamond Head—Paragon Steel. I flipped a mental coin: I could always use the library on Saturday. I turned north onto the expressway.

  Paragon used to have their own skyscraper downtown, but they’d sold it during their cost-cutting days fifteen years ago. Their headquarters now occupied five floors of one of a nest of modest towers in Lincolnwood. The outdoor lot at the complex was packed so densely that I had to park over a block from the entrance to the first building.

  From my space at the edge of the lot I could see the purple Hyatt where Alan Dorfman had breathed his last. As I locked the Impala’s door the thought of the gunmen who’d blasted the gangster—on a nod from his driver—reminded me of my own frailty. I patted my own gun for reassurance and strolled into the lobby.

  No guards or receptionists waited to direct the ignorant. I wandered around, looking for a signboard. Apparently I’d come in a back way—I had to go through a couple of corridors before I found a directory. It pointed me to the building next in line, where Paragon held floors four through eight.

  The whole complex seemed oddly empty, as though all those cars in the lot had decanted their owners into outer space. No one passed me in the halls and I waited alone beside the elevators. When I got to the fourth floor I faced a bare aqua wall with a minute sign directing me to reception. Presumably in Paragon’s days of penury they’d decided not to waste money on big letters.

  The place was so empty I was beginning to wonder if a blinking computer screen would greet me at the reception area. I was relieved to see an actual person, a woman about my own age with shoulder-length curls and a brownish jacket dress that was limp and faded from years of wear. I began to feel more confident about my blue jeans.

  I gave a smile intended to convey both empathy and self-assurance and asked for the controller. She obligingly dialed a number, then put her palm over the mouthpiece.

  “Who can I say is calling?”

  “My name’s V. I. Warshawski.” I handed her a card. “I’m a financial investigator.”

  She transmitted the information, stumbling a little over my name, as receptionists so often do, then turned back to me. “They’re not hiring anyone.”

  “And I’m not looking for work. This will be so much easier to explain directly to the controller, instead of through you to her secretary.”

  “It’s a him. Mr. Loring. What do you have to say to him?”

  I counted on my fingers. “Six words. Diamond Head Motors and debt financing.”

  She repeated my words dubiously. When I nodded she said them again into the phone. This time she seemed to be on hold. She answered incoming calls and routed them through, checked back with her own blinking light and waited again. About five minutes later she told me I could have a seat: Sukey would be down for me.

  The wait stretched to twenty minutes before Sukey showed up. She was a tall, thin woman whose skintight skirt emphasized the painful boniness of her pelvis and hips. Her pale face was pitted with acne scars, but her voice, when she asked me to follow her, was deep and sweet.

  “What did you say your name was?” she asked as we got on the elevator. “Charlene wasn’t very clear over the phone.”

  “Warshawski,” I repeated, handing her a card.

  She studied the little rectangle gravely, until the doors opened for the eighth floor. As soon as we stepped off the elevators I realized I’d found the secret cache of Paragon employees. The place was a maze of cubicles, each holding two or three computer stations and the people to staff them. As we moved toward the end of the floor the cubes gave way to offices, still filled with computers and their minders.

  We finally reached a small open area. Sukey’s desk stood outside an open corner office. It was labeled as Ben Loring’s lair, but he wasn’t home. Sukey directed me to one of the foam-core seats and knocked on a nearby door. I couldn’t hear what she said when she stuck her head around the jamb. She disappeared briefly, then came back to escort me in.

  The conference room was filled with men, mostly in shirt-sleeves and all of them looking at me with a mix of suspicion and contempt. No one spoke, but two or three of them were darting glances at the second guy from my left, a burly fiftyish man with a thick bush of gray hair.

  “Mr. Loring?” I held out a hand to him. “I’m V. I. Warshawski.”

  He ignored my hand. “Who are you working for, Warshawski?”

  I sat uninvited at my end of the oval table. “Salvatore Contreras.”

  This time all seven of them exchanged glances. Normally, of course, I keep my clients’ identities secret, but I wanted to watch them all try to figure out what big financial interest Mr. Contreras represented. Maybe they’d even think he was with the Mob.

  “And why does he care about Diamond Head?” Loring asked at last.

  “How about this, Mr. Loring: you explain to me what Paragon’s connection to Diamond Head is and I’ll tell you what my client’s is.”

  There was a little rumble through the room at that. I heard the man on Loring’s right mutter, “I told you this was a waste of time, Ben. She’s just going to dick us around.”

  Loring shook him off like a bad pitch. “I can’t talk to you unless I know who you represent. There’s an enormous amount at stake here. If you work for—well, certain people—then you already know all about it and our legal staff will be filing papers to deal with what looks like a rather naive attempt at espionage. And if your client—Contreras, did you say?—has his own ax to grind, then I’m not going to make you a present of very explosive information.”

  “I see.” I studied my fingernails while I thought it over. “I’ll ask you a different question. Two questions. How many people in this room know that Paragon is bankrolling Diamond Head? And how many of you know why?”

  This time the rumble became a roar. Loring let it go for a minute, then brought the meeting back under control.

  “Any of you boys know anything about Diamond Head? Or bankrolling?” His voice was light with sarcasm.

  The room responded to his tone. People forced out guffaws as they gave their negatives, punching each other on the arms and stealing secret glances at me to see how the show was going over.

  I waited for them to finish enjoying themselves. “Okay, you’ve convinced me: you’re all too naive to manage a multinational. I do find it curious, though, that you agreed to see me cold just because I mentioned Diamond Head’s name in connection with debt financing. And not just you, Loring—all these guys came along to protect your ass.”

  “I agreed to see you cold because I thought you might have a business proposition for us, not an accusation.”

  “Really!” It was my turn for light sarcasm. “That must be why the Journal raved about you guys a few weeks ago—because you interrupt your workdays every time some stranger walks through the door without an introduction or advance material or anything. Just in the hope she may have a business proposition.”

  The man on Loring’s right started to speak, but the controller waved him into silence. “What is it you want, Warshawski?”

  “We could dance this tango all afternoon. I want information. About you and Diamond Head.”

  “I think we made it clear that we don’t have anything to tell you.” The man on Loring’s right ignored the controller’s silencing hand.

  “Come on, guys. I know you’re bankrolling Diamond Head. I’ve seen their cash statements.”

  “Then you’ve seen something I’m not privy to. I can’t comment on it,” Loring said.

  “Who could I talk to who might be able to? Your CEO or COO?”

  “Neither of them would be able to tell you anything. And unlike me, they wouldn’t even grant you an interview.”

&nbs
p; “So should I ask the feds about it?”

  A buzz went around the table again at that. The man to my own right, lean with a shock of white hair, slapped his palm on the table. “Ben, we’ve got to check on her bona fides. And find out what she really wants.”

  I nodded approvingly at him. “Good idea. You can easily find out about me by calling Daraugh Graham at Continental Lakeside. He’s the chairman; I do a lot of work for him.”

  Loring and the man who’d just spoken exchanged long glances, then Loring, fractionally, shook his head. “I may do that, Warshawski. If I do, I may get back to you. But you’d still have to sell me on why you’re asking questions.”

  “I guess I want to know how deep you are in Diamond Head’s decision-making. Because if you are privy to their inner workings—well, then there are a lot more questions I’d like to ask.”

  Loring shook his head. “You’re not selling me. You’re antiselling. And as you were so quick to point out, we’re busy men. We need to get back to acting that way.”

  I got to my feet. “Then I’ll just have to keep digging. And I never make advance guarantees on what I do if my shovel hits a rotting compost pile.”

  No one said anything to me, but as I left the room a major uproar started. I wanted to lean my ear against the jamb, but Sukey was looking at me from behind her desk. I went over to her.

  “Thanks for your help.… You have a beautiful voice, you know. Do you sing?”

  “Only in church choirs. With this”—she gestured at her acne scars, flushing miserably—“no one wants to audition me for the stage.”

  The intercom on her desk buzzed loudly; Ben Loring needed her in the conference room. I wondered if I could take the chance on her absence to try to look in her file cabinets, but it would be impossible to explain away if she came bouncing out and caught me at it. Besides, it was close to three now. I’d just have time to get downtown to check up on Jason Felitti before the library closed.

  After two decades of dickering, Chicago is actually building a new public library. Named for the late, great Harold Washington, the memorial—under construction—has the unfortunate look of a Victorian mausoleum. Until it opens the city keeps what collections it possesses in a series of out-of-the-way locations. They had moved recently from an old barracks just off Michigan Avenue to an even more desolate dump on the west edge of the Loop.

  Unfortunately that corner is also the edge of the hottest new gallery and retail part of the city. I had to go to the underground streets to find a vacant meter. Even though I was confident I’d lost my tail, I still felt uneasy in the labyrinth of truck routes and loading docks. Someone could jump me here and no one would ever notice. These macabre fantasies made my heels tingle with nervousness. I ran up Kinzie toward daylight with more speed than I thought my legs had left in them.

  An hour with the library’s computer specialist reinforced my need to buy my own machine. Not that the specialist wasn’t helpful—she was, very. But the amount of information available at the end of a phone line was so great, and my need for it so strong, that it didn’t make sense to be dependent on the hours the library was open.

  I carried the sheaf of printouts to a crowded table in the periodicals room, one of the few places in the building where one could actually sit and read. My immediate seatmates included a small gray man with a thin mustache who was poring over Scientific American and keeping up an anxious commentary under his breath. It wasn’t clear whether he was reacting to the article or life in general. On my other side a bigger man was reading the Herald-Star one word at a time, running a finger under the sentences as he moved his lips. I hoped the new library would include showers in the rest rooms. It would be a big help, if not for my seatmate at least for anyone who had to sit near him in the future.

  Blotting out the smell as best I could, I began reading about Jason Felitti, owner of Diamond Head Motors. He was Peter’s brother, younger by three years (born in 1931), educated at Northwestern (business), dabbling in politics and entrepreneurship. Peter, one clip mentioned, had also attended Northwestern, taking an engineering degree. Jason, who’d never married, lived in the family home in Naperville, while Peter had moved to Oak Brook with his wife and two daughters in ’68. A portentous year in lives around the world—why not for Dick’s father-in-law as well?

  Amalgamated Portage, the family business, had been founded by Tiepolo Felitti in 1888. It had started as a simple operation—a single pushcart for hauling away scrap. By Tiepolo’s death in the 1918 flu epidemic Amalgamated had become one of the region’s largest cartage firms.

  The First World War had helped their rail line enormously. In the thirties they saw the future and it looked like long-distance trucking. They were one of the earliest carriers to build a fleet. Since the Second World War they had diversified into mining and smelting, at first with great success and then with what sounded like equally great disaster.

  Peter had sold the mining operations at a loss when his father died in 1975. The business now tried to stay closer to its original mission: cartage. In 1985 Peter had bought one of the fledgling overnight delivery services; that seemed to be doing modestly well. Amalgamated remained a closely held family company, so information on it was sketchy.

  Jason had inherited shares in Amalgamated when his father died, but it was Peter who took over the firm. In fact, Peter had been on the management committee for years while Jason just seemed to sit on the board. I wondered if Jason had been tagged early as incompetent, or if the family was so rigidly structured that only the oldest son was allowed to manage. In which case, what would happen to it when Peter died, since Jason had no children and Peter only had daughters? Was Dick the shining knight or did the other son-in-law have to fight him for the spoils?

  For years Jason’s main energy had gone into Du Page County politics. He had been a water commissioner, had worked on the Deep Tunnel project, and finally had spent twelve years on the county board itself. At the last election he’d decided not to seek a fourth term.

  According to a speech that got a few lines in the Herald-Star’s metro edition, Jason announced he wanted to devote himself full-time to business. Ray Gibson at the Trib thought Jason had been worried about some stories his political challenger was digging up, conflict of interest between his role as a county commissioner and his position as a director of U.S. Metropolitan Bank and Trust. But Gib was always expecting the worst of Illinois elected officials—not that they often disappointed him.

  Last year Jason had acquired Diamond Head. The story hadn’t merited more than a paragraph in the business pages. The meager coverage didn’t reveal anything about the financing, although the Sun-Times hinted Peter might have provided some backing through Amalgamated. No one seemed to know how much ready cash Amalgamated had, or whether they, too, had acquired a heavy debt-load during their mining fiasco. It didn’t sound as though Dick had married into the colossal financial empire I’d always imagined.

  “U.S. Met,” I said aloud, forgetting I was in a library.

  I startled the little gray man into dropping his magazine. He stared at me briefly, muttering to himself, then scuttled to a distant table, leaving the Scientific American on the floor. I picked it up and laid it on the table, patting it in what was intended as a reassuring manner. He had picked up a paper and was staring at me over its edge. When he realized I was looking at him, he raised the paper to cover his face. It was upside down.

  I folded my clips into a tidy square, stuck them in my shoulder bag, and left. I couldn’t resist glancing back to see if he’d returned to his magazine, but he was still hiding behind the Sun-Times. I wished I had that much effect on Dick, or even on the goons staking out my apartment.

  It was past five by the time I jogged back down Kinzie to the Impala. Too late to tackle Chamfers again. I sat in the car massaging the small of my back; it had kinked up during my research. Jason Felitti sat on the board of U.S. Met and—probably—had steered Du Page County funds there. Now, three years l
ater, Mrs. Frizell had closed her account at the Bank of Lake View and opened one at U.S. Met.

  “You only want there to be a connection,” I said sharply to the dashboard. “But it’s a pretty thin thread from Jason Felitti to Todd Pichea.” Although it did run through Richard Yarborough. Maybe Freeman was right—that I did harbor a grudge against Dick—for being a supersuccess while I still struggled to make ends meet. Or for preferring a younger, prettier woman to me?

  I didn’t think I minded Teri: she was so much more suited to Dick’s combination of ambition and weakness than I was. But perhaps it did rankle that I had been the promising graduate, third in our class, with a dozen job offers, and now I couldn’t afford a new pair of running shoes. I’d made my own choices, but one’s resentments are seldom rationally grounded. At any rate, I didn’t want to risk proving Freeman right by starting a vendetta against Dick over the kind of business he did.

  On that moral high note I started the car and joined the congealing traffic leaving the Loop. It wasn’t until I found myself driving past west side exits on the Stevenson that I figured out where I was going: Naperville, to the Felitti family home.

  29

  Drinking with the Idle Rich

  Naperville, about thirty miles west of the Loop, is one of Chicago’s fastest-growing suburbs. It’s ringed by genteel tract houses on sizable lots—home to the middle managers of Chicago, and to a depressing amount of concrete. Mighty tollways crisscross the southwest suburbs, eating up farmland and leaving steep, jagged cols in their wake.

  Inside the concrete stilts and the endless succession of malls, fast-food places, and car dealers sit the remains of the town. A hundred years ago it was a quiet farm community, without much connection to Chicago, beyond a river that carried freight between the city and the Mississippi. A number of people, rich either from the land or the water, built themselves solid Victorian homes there. One of those had belonged to Tiepolo Felitti.