Guardian Angel

by Sara Paretsky

  “Nah. I ate enough. Tell you the truth, my stomach’s kind of jumpy. I got us something that’ll really help.”

  I bustled him out to the Nova before he could proclaim it to the diner at large. When we were safely inside the car, he flourished a fistful of paper at me. I tried turning on the overhead light, but that had died during the car’s first hundred thousand miles. I pulled out of the lot and stopped under a streetlamp. Mr. Contreras had lifted a bunch of work orders from Klosowski’s Emergency Electrical Repair van.

  “I saw the door wasn’t locked when we went by, and then, while we was eating, I thought, well, why not? They’ll look more official than anything we could make up down at your office.”

  We had decided to take a chance on finding my office still in the clear and go in there to try to manufacture a document that would get us into Crawford, Mead. Mr. Contreras was right: these would be much better than something jerry-rigged on my Olivetti.

  “And,” he added, his voice squeaking a bit with excitement, “I got you a cap, too—you ought to cover up those curls of yours.”

  He pulled a Klosowski cap from his back pocket.

  “Too bad you didn’t find me a false mustache and a beard as well. You know, I think we’d better move on south. Looks to me like someone’s heading for the van. This might be his favorite hat.”

  We parked the Nova on Adams and circled around on foot to come at the Pulteney from the north. After getting in and out unmolested yesterday I was pretty sure we were dealing with people amateurish enough not to associate me with an office, but there was no point in revealing a car we’d been at such pains to get.

  The elevator was having one of its rare fits of functionality. I would take it up while Mr. Contreras followed on foot. I gave him the key to the stairwell door with instructions to go hell for leather for the cops if I was under attack, not to leap into the fray.

  His jaw set stubbornly. “I ain’t the kind of guy who’s going to run the other way when a lady’s getting beat up. You’d better resign yourself to that.”

  To my dismay he pulled a pipe wrench out from under the boilersuits. It was his favorite weapon, one that he used with more gusto than ability. I started to debate the point with him, then decided there wasn’t time. The likelihood of my being jumped didn’t seem that great, anyway.

  When the elevator creaked to a halt on the fourth floor, I turned off its light and slid out the door on my knees, propping my left hand on the wall for balance, holding the Smith & Wesson in front of me with my right. The hall seemed clear; I used my pencil flash for a quick survey and didn’t see anyone.

  The Pulteney management doesn’t encourage its tenants to use the facilities: night-lights are unheard of in the hallways. I got to my feet and tiptoed down to my own door. After using the building for twelve years, it was easy to move around in it in the dark.

  As I’d hoped, no one was lurking—either in the hall, or inside my place. I had the lights on and one of Mr. Contreras’s filched work orders in the Olivetti when he came in—it had taken him a while to figure out how to open the stairwell in the dark.

  “So they could have beaten you to a pulp while I was back there fooling around with the darn door. As if I don’t already feel bad enough sending Eddie Mohr to his death.”

  I rested my wrists on the keyboard. “It didn’t happen that way. He chose to sign on to some deal with Diamond Head—you didn’t make him do that. Your calling him didn’t make them shoot him, either: it probably only accelerated the timetable. If we’d seen him this afternoon—”

  “You might have talked some sense into him and he’d still be alive. You don’t need to be nice to me, doll, just to save my feelings. I can see there’s more to this business of talking to people than I’ve figured out.”

  I got up from the machine and put an arm around him. “The worst thing you can do in an investigation is slow yourself down chewing over what you did wrong. When the case is finished you can take some time and try to learn from your mistakes. But when you’re in the middle of it—you just have to be like the Duke of Wellington—forget about it and go on.”

  “Duke of Wellington, huh? He’s the guy that beat Napoleon, right?”

  “The very one.” I sat back down at the typewriter. “Tell me something evil-sounding that could go wrong with someone’s electrical outlets—something so bad, we can’t let anyone watch us while we work for fear they’ll fry their eyeballs.”

  Mr. Contreras pulled one of my client chairs next to the typewriter. “I don’t know, doll. All this fancy, modern equipment folks have in their offices, I don’t know what they’d have, and tell you the truth, I don’t know what could go wrong with it.”

  “Don’t worry about that. The junior legal beagles we’re going to run into won’t know either. Dick probably has a computer, and his secretary will have a CRT to the company’s big system.” I tried to imagine my ex-husband’s office. “Maybe she has a big printer, because she’ll be printing a lot of forms. Since he’s one of the senior partners, she might not have to share it with anyone.”

  Mr. Contreras thought about it slowly, drawing himself a diagram on a piece of scrap paper. “Okay. Put in something about a high-voltage short to the cover of the machine—maybe it knocked an operator out, or blew her across the room or something.”

  I typed that in, adding a date and time of call. Then I made a fake form for Klosowski by using the header from the work order and a blank piece of paper in my copier. On Mr. Contreras’s suggestion I used that to type in a report of an earlier inspection of a short in the building’s air conditioner that had been traced to R. Yarborough’s office. The whole thing was about as spurious as I could imagine, but it might get us in the door.

  47

  A Short in the System

  Despite the hour, a bevy of tireless young lawyers were fluttering around Crawford, Mead’s offices. We got in through their locked mahogany doors simply by showing our work order to the night guard in the main lobby and getting him to phone up to the office for us.

  No one had told him about a danger in the electrical plant; he looked surly and frightened and threatened to call his boss. We assured him the problem had been traced to one office on thirty—that our boss had warned us very sternly against alarming people since we only had to deal with the wiring in one room.

  “Don’t get us fired, man, okay?” I pleaded.

  He grudgingly decided he would keep it to himself and phoned upstairs for us. “But you better give me advance warning if this place is going up in smoke.”

  “If it goes up in smoke you’ll be the only one sitting pretty,” I pointed out, following Mr. Contreras onto the elevator.

  Once on thirty Mr. Contreras took charge. Even though the Koslowski cap covered my hair and shielded my face, we didn’t want to run the risk of someone recognizing me. The worst danger was that Todd Pichea, who knew Mr. Contreras as well as me, might be working late. We needn’t have worried, though—as the old man had pointed out earlier, workmen in a professional office are considered about as human as water buffalo, only not as unusual.

  Mr. Contreras flourished our work order at a young man in a T-shirt and jeans, stressing the extreme danger of any inexperienced person coming near the dangerous electrons floating around Dick’s office. Clutching a massive printout for security, the young man escorted us as far as the top of the interior stairwell.

  “Mr. Yarborough’s office is at the end of the hall there. Uh, this key should open his office. If, uh, you don’t mind, I need to get back to work. Maybe you can find it yourselves from here. You can leave the key at the front desk when you leave.”

  “Right,” Mr. Contreras said sternly. “And make sure no one comes down here until we give you the all-clear. We’re going to cut one of the lines. You may notice the lights dim occasionally, but it’s nothing to worry about.”

  Our guide couldn’t wait to get clear of the area. With any luck the whole crew would be scared enough to leave work early
tonight. I didn’t want some braver soul coming to investigate while I was copying Dick’s files.

  When I unlocked my ex-husband’s office I felt a kind of guilty thrill. It reminded me of the times when I was small and hunted out the drawer where my dad hid his police revolver. I knew I wasn’t supposed to touch it, or even know where it was, and excitement and shame would get me so wound up I’d have to put on my skates and race around the block a few times. With an uneasy twinge I wondered if those feelings were what had led me into detective work. I remembered my advice to Mr. Contreras—plenty of time for self-analysis later.

  Dick rated a suite with a waiting room, a small sanctum for his secretary, and a large office whose curved windows overlooked the Chicago River. Mr. Contreras busied himself in the waiting area, unpacking some businesslike cables from his toolbox and snaking them across the floor. He had also brought a small power screwdriver, with which he undid a vent along the floorboards, exposing an interesting nest of wires.

  “You go on inside and look at papers, doll. If anyone shows up I’ll start buzzing away with this guy.”

  I found myself tiptoeing into Dick’s office, as if my steps on his Kerman could raise his hackles out in Oak Brook. The room didn’t run to filing cabinets. He had several shelves of the legal casebooks he felt he needed every day, a slab of burled blond wood that apparently was a desk, and an elaborate sideboard housing German ceramics and a wet bar. Teri and their three blond offspring beamed at me from the burled slab.

  A door on one side led to a private bath. A second door opened on a shallow closet. A few clean shirts hung there. I couldn’t resist looking through them; at the back hung the one I’d flung coffee on. He’d forgotten to take it home for Teri to look after. Or maybe he couldn’t bring himself to explain to her how it got that way. I grinned in rather childish triumph.

  I tiptoed back across the Kerman to his secretary’s office. Harriet Regner had hitched her star to Dick’s when he was starting out and had to share a secretary with five other men. She’d been his executive secretary now for ten years and managed a small staff of clerks and paralegals for him. If Dick was involved in something truly illegal, would he trust it to Harriet? I thought of Ollie North and Fawn Hall. Men like Dick always seem to find women so enthusiastic in their devotion that they consider their bosses more important than the law. Harriet would take care of anything questionable herself. The clerical grunts she supervised would handle her routine filing elsewhere.

  On that fine logic I approached her filing cabinets. Their blond burl matched Dick’s desk, although I suspected in here it was just veneer. Without my picklocks it took a certain amount of force to unlock the cabinets: I had to get Mr. Contreras to come in and blast them with his power driver. I didn’t really care, though, if Dick knew I’d been here—I hadn’t even bothered to wear gloves. It was one thing to find out what he was up to, and quite another to figure out how to confront him with it. If he thought I’d been burglarizing him it might force his hand.

  Once I had the cabinets open, Diamond Head leaped out to greet me. Their affairs occupied an entire cabinet and spilled over into the top drawer of a second. I’d thought I was going to be home free when I found the files. I’d forgotten the amount of paper a law office generated; it was the only way to show they were really working. When Mr. Contreras heard me cursing, he came in to see what was wrong. He clucked sympathetically, but didn’t feel able to help. Anyway, he had to man the lookout post.

  I skimmed through the material in the first drawer. It dealt with the conditions surrounding Paragon’s sale of Diamond Head. Paragon had bought a helicopter manufacturer, Central States Aviation, Inc.; the Justice Department had ruled that they needed to divest themselves of Diamond Head as a condition of the acquisition. That explained why they got rid of the little engine company, something that had been troubling me.

  An enormous stack of documents detailed a consent decree between Paragon and Diamond Head. I hovered over them, tempted to read them closely, but I needed to get to material that might explain terms of a settlement between Diamond Head and Eddie Mohr. Carefully keeping everything in its original order I put that stack on the floor next to me and turned to the next drawer.

  Here I found the documents dealing with the bond issue enabling Jason Felitti to buy the engine maker. Skeletons from the Felitti family popped out at me in the form of letters from Peter Felitti to Dick. Jason had sold most of his shares in Amalgamated Portage years ago, apparently to finance his political ambitions in Du Page County. He’d used the remainder to acquire a stake in U.S. Metropolitan Bank and Trust.

  When he wanted to sell that stake to help finance his acquisition of Diamond Head, Peter put his foot down. Let Jason use debt financing, he wrote to Dick. This was in 1988; Drexel was still riding high. It was relatively easy to find an investment banker willing to issue the debt that would enable Jason to make the purchase.

  That same memo explained why Jason wanted Diamond Head to begin with, or at least gave Peter’s version of the case. Jason played golf with one of Paragon’s outside directors, a political crony who also sat on U.S. Met’s board. The crony knew Jason wanted to establish himself as a financial success separate from his brother—why not buy Diamond Head? Since Paragon had to unload it in sixty days, they would take any offer they could get.

  All this was fascinating, but not illegal. Not even immoral. It was the next drawer that suddenly revealed what I was looking for.

  Jason, a year into his purchase, couldn’t meet his debt payments. The airplane industry was in a recession. No one wanted the splines that were Diamond Head’s specialty. And even if they did, sales wouldn’t begin to cover his interest payments, let alone to repay the principal.

  But the pension fund for Diamond Head’s work force was currently valued at twenty million. If Jason could cash that in, he could breathe more easily. The catch was, an informal poll of the rank and file showed he’d probably lose a vote on converting the fund to an annuity. But Eddie Mohr, the president of the local, agreed on the union’s behalf. In exchange for a cash settlement of five hundred thousand dollars, he signed documents allowing Diamond Head to sell the union pension fund and convert it to an annuity.

  But how could they get away with it? There were all those pensioners like Mr. Contreras. Surely they would notice when their checks went down in value. I was about to call out to my neighbor, when I found the answer. The annuity would be structured so that current pensioners would be paid what they presently received. The paying institution would change from the Ajax Insurance Company, which managed the union fund, to Urban Life, an insurance company owned by U.S. Met’s directors—which also agreed to acquire a significant amount of Diamond Head junk.

  I felt myself gasping for air. Cash in the pension fund without union consent and pay off Eddie Mohr to make it possible. Of course, he was the duly elected representative of the union. The feds might rule that that made it a legal transaction. But Eddie, knowing Mitch Kruger had died sniffing around the deal, might have felt unable to face another old buddy from the shop. When Mr. Contreras called, maybe it pricked his loyalty to the local. Maybe he called Milt Chamfers and told him he just couldn’t keep cheating his buddies. I wondered if I’d ever know.

  A gold-rimmed carriage clock on Harriet’s desk chimed the hour. I looked up with a start: two o’clock and I still had three drawers to go. Mr. Contreras came in to see how I was doing.

  “I just got back from scouting around. I think we’ve got the place to ourselves now. Need me to do anything?”

  “Want to copy some of these documents? I think I’ve found something pretty hot. Don’t stop to read the stuff now; it’ll only get you too mad to go on.”

  He was happy to help out, but had never used a copier before. Harriet’s Xerox was so complicated that it took a fair amount of time to get him comfortable using it. It was close to three when I got back to my papers.

  I riffled through the remaining files quickly, hoping to fin
d a reference to Chicago Settlement. When I couldn’t find anything, I stashed the papers back where they belonged and turned once again to the stack dealing with Paragon Steel. Mr. Contreras finished his photocopying. Laying the copies next to me, he said with a delicate cough that he was going to find a men’s room. I nodded absently, forgetting Dick’s private john until after he’d disappeared down the hall.

  I had just gotten to what looked like a juicy section, dealing with Paragon’s obligation to keep Diamond Head functioning, when Mr. Contreras came racing back in.

  “Someone’s come in, doll. I think it may be the cops. I’d sort of wandered to the front, just giving the place the once-over—”

  “Pack up your tools and explain the rest to me later. If they come here, I want them to find you in the act of restoring the vent cover.”

  He stumbled back to the waiting room. I shoved the papers back in their folders and jammed them into the drawers any old way. I looked at the photocopies in momentary indecision. If it was indeed the cops and I got searched, I couldn’t be found with those on me.

  I opened Harriet’s side drawer and took out a large manila envelope with Crawford, Mead’s return address on the corner. Stuffing my copies into it, I addressed the envelope to myself at my office and sprinted down the hall. I called out to Mr. Contreras as I left not to worry, that I wasn’t abandoning him.

  Mr. Contreras was right: we had cops. I could hear them at the bottom of the interior staircase planning how to search the upper floors. Panicking slightly, I went from room to room until I found one with outgoing mail in a basket. I slid my envelope into the middle of the stack and walked back up the hall to join Mr. Contreras.

  I got there just as one of the patrolmen came down the hall with the night guard from the lobby.

  48

  Off the Hook