Guardian Angel

by Sara Paretsky

  I found myself holding the plate, staring abstractedly out the kitchen window, when Loring finally rang the bell. Mr. Contreras was up and about: I could hear his fierce interrogation of the visitor when I opened my front door.

  It wasn’t until then that I remembered the urine in the corner of the stairwell. The stench was unmistakable, but it was too late to do anything about it now.

  Loring’s face was set in angry lines when he came in.

  “Who the hell’s that old man? What business does he have questioning me?”

  “He’s my partner. Part of his job is to check my visitors. People’ve been stalking me all week—it makes both of us nervous. Coffee? Wine? Tofu?”

  “Nothing for me. I don’t want to be here and I don’t want to prolong it. Your partner, huh? Not much of an operation.”

  “But you’re not here as my business consultant, are you? I need some coffee. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  The pot I’d made with my lunch was cold. It took about five minutes to brew up some fresh stuff. By the time I returned to the living room Loring himself was coming to a rolling boil—always a critical moment in cooking.

  “What are you trying to do to me, Warshawski? I run the finances of a major corporation. I dropped everything to meet with the members of our board who could give me the green light to talk to you—and now you’re jacking me around just for the hell of it. I might be better off taking my chances with the press.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. And you don’t need me to tell you that. I spent all of last night looking at files relating to Diamond Head. I got in at six-thirty this morning and went to bed. I know now—”

  “Where?” he demanded. “If you had access to Diamond Head files, why the hell are you screwing around with me?”

  “I didn’t until last night. Have access, I mean. It was pure luck, in combination with my partner’s areas of expertise. I still don’t know what your problem is, though. I know now that the consent decree when you bought Central States Aviation meant you had to sell Diamond Head.” I sketched out what I’d learned from Dick’s papers last night.

  “If you know that, you know everything,” Loring said. His face was still set in tight lines.

  I shook my head. “What’s so secret about it? Did you have to sign some kind of defense department clearance that means you can’t talk to mere taxpayers about it?”

  “No, nothing like that. What do you know about the decree?”

  “Not a lot. That you had sixty days in which to sell, and Jason Felitti came to you with a better offer than you thought you’d be able to get if you waited. And then you had to give some guarantees that you wouldn’t drive them out of business.”

  Loring gave a bark of laughter. “I wish! No, you didn’t see the real decree. Or you didn’t read it very carefully.”

  “I wasn’t as interested in it as I was in—well, some other things. And I only had a few hours with the files.”

  “What other things?”

  “You first, Mr. Loring.”

  He went to the front window to conduct an interior debate. It didn’t take him long: he hadn’t come all this way on a business day only to return empty-handed.

  “Daraugh Graham warned me about you,” he commented with less animosity. “And I suppose if he trusts you I can too.”

  I tried to smile in a trustworthy way.

  “If you’d read through the whole consent decree, you would see that the Justice Department’s care for Diamond Head went way beyond protecting them from us: we had to guarantee their survival by continuing to provide a market for their products. And by continuing to supply them with raw materials.”

  Loring smiled bitterly as he saw my mouth gape open. “It’s not unprecedented. Some other steel companies have gotten stabbed by the same kind of deal. But Felitti had, or seemed to have, good credentials. I mean, everyone in the industry in Chicago knows Amalgamated Portage. We’ve done business with them for years.”

  “But Peter Felitti wouldn’t tie the family company in with Diamond Head.”

  “We only discovered that later. But that didn’t matter. He was plenty willing to help in other ways: he saw that Jason got debt financing. I suppose most backers assumed Amalgamated Portage would be behind Diamond Head—we did, after all. It wouldn’t have mattered, if Jason had been honest.”

  “So what’s he been doing? Ordering supplies from you that he doesn’t need and then reselling them on the black market? Why don’t you go to the feds?”

  “We didn’t have any evidence.… Is there more coffee? I’m afraid I was a little short earlier.”

  I grinned at him. “I can make some fresh, but it’ll keep you waiting, unless you don’t mind coming out to the kitchen.”

  He followed me to the back of the apartment. I moved the plate of cold tofu to the sink and put water on to boil again. Loring took the papers from a chair and put them on the floor so he could sit down.

  “When you showed up on Friday and started flaunting tales of knowing we were bankrolling Felitti, I thought you were working for him, that you might be trying to muscle something extra out of us. But when you called Monday with the tale of the copper spools—then I knew what they were doing.”

  I poured boiling water into the coffee cone. “You could have hired a detective and had that information a year ago. Why didn’t you?”

  He shook his head in frustration. “We always had complete audit reports from them. And they had a very reputable law firm behind them. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t think—”

  “A detective would quickly have told you that the senior partner handling the buyout was the son-in-law of Jason Felitti’s brother. Then you could have started worrying about conflict of interest.”

  “Okay. I’ll get a detective on the case. What do you charge?”

  “Fifty dollars an hour and any expenses that aren’t part of my normal overhead.”

  “You’re too cheap, Warshawski. But maybe I’ll hire you.”

  I showed my teeth at him. “And maybe I’ll be available.”

  “Sorry, sorry. I said it wrong. Seriously, I’ll talk to the board tomorrow. It’s your turn now. What was it you were mostly interested in—this dead man you mentioned the other day?”

  “Right.” I gave him a thumbnail sketch of Mitch Kruger and Eddie Mohr and what I’d learned last night from my time in Dick’s files.

  “Jason Felitti was just scrambling,” Loring said when I finished. “He was too ignorant to come up with a plan. He got goods from me and stole them, cheated the union out of their pension plan, parked bonds with a charity—all that’s just flailing around.”

  “Yes. Not a criminal mastermind. Not even a bust-out artist, as I originally suspected. Just an incompetent schlep who wanted to prove he was as big as his brother. The problem is, I don’t see how I can tag them for murder. And I care more about that than I do about your theft problem. I’m worried about the pension fund too. I don’t want innocent bystanders screwed out of their rights.”

  Loring, of course, only cared about protecting Paragon’s interests. He wanted me to drop everything and plan a stakeout that would provide definitive proof of Diamond Head’s reselling Paragon raw materials. The way it stood right now I only had evidence that they were loading copper onto trucks in the middle of the night, not whether they were reselling it or whether Diamond Head management was involved.

  I let him argue his case while I tried to figure out answers to my own problems, but at four-thirty I showed him the door. “You were so late getting here you’ve backed up the rest of my schedule. I need to get going. You can talk to me tomorrow after you’ve spoken to your board.”

  “Then you’ll take the case if they approve hiring you?”

  “I don’t know. But I can’t discuss it until I know whether you’re a serious customer or not.”

  He didn’t like it, but when he saw I wasn’t going to budge he finally left, wrinkling his face in disgust at the stench on the stairs. I stayed
long enough to strap on the Smith & Wesson before heading for the el.

  50

  Saint Stevenson and the Truck

  I stopped on my way out to let Mr. Contreras know where I was going. As a full-fledged partner in crime, he deserved to know. Besides, the fact that someone had been waiting in the stairwell last night made me extra cautious. I wanted him to monitor the building’s traffic even more rigorously than he usually did.

  “Vinnie may be letting thugs into the place. Just keep an eye out. Don’t expose yourself unnecessarily—but if strangers go clomping up to the third floor, call the cops. In fact, call Conrad.” I gave him Rawlings’s home number as well as the number at the station and took off before he could flood me with accusations over my intimacy with an officer.

  During the slow el ride south I wondered what I could do about the Picheas and Vinnie and Mrs. Frizell. Even if I proved Vinnie and Chrissie persuaded Mrs. Frizell to buy some of Diamond Head’s useless bonds, I wasn’t sure the state’s attorney would think that rotten enough to remove the Picheas as her guardian. I wondered whether Mrs. Frizell’s strange estranged son might be persuaded to take action. Since his main rivals to her affection, the dogs, were out of commission, maybe he would at least want to protect his own measly inheritance.

  The el let me out at Twenty-second and Kedzie around five-thirty. It was more than two miles down to Barney’s from there, but I longed for a good walk to clear my body. Thunderheads had started to cloud the sun about the time I changed trains downtown, but I thought I could walk fast enough to beat the storm.

  After a few blocks in the dust that the trucks were kicking up on the narrow roadway, I began to doubt the health value of the walk. My old Tigers, too, didn’t have as much left in their soles as I had hoped. My feet started to hurt. Every time I came to a bus stop I’d wait a few minutes to see if one were coming behind the trucks. Plenty of northbound buses trundled by, but they must have been falling off the end of the earth when they got to Congress: nothing was returning south.

  I could just see Barney’s sign when the rain broke. I sprinted the last two blocks and rounded the corner onto Forty-first.

  The rain and my sore feet made me stupid. A truck was double-parked across the street from me, its engine running. I looked at it cursorily, unlocked the Impala, and started to slide into the driver’s seat.

  A movement from the truck startled me and I moved faster into the car, reaching for my Smith & Wesson. My mistake was in trying to do both. The door was wrenched open and a pistol thrust against my head while I was still fumbling for my own gun. Careful not to move my head, I rolled my eyeballs as far up as they would go. I was looking at the Hulk.

  He didn’t speak or move. My stomach heaved. I was glad I’d only put half a plate of tofu into it. That lessened the chance of total humiliation. I heard glass shatter to my right. I jerked around involuntarily and felt the pistol jam into my neck.

  One of the Hulk’s pals had broken the glass in the passenger side of the Impala and was calmly unlocking the door. He, too, had a gun. When he had it stuck in my side, the Hulk climbed into the backseat. Stupidly enough, the only thing I could think was how pissed Luke was going to be when he saw the broken window on a car he wanted to sell.

  “Drive,” the Hulk growled.

  “Your slightest wish is my command. Where to, O king?” Despite my dry mouth and heaving stomach, my voice came out without a quaver. All those years of practicing breath control to my mother’s critical standard paid off in a crisis.

  “Down to the corner and make a left,” the Hulk said.

  I turned left onto Albany. “Back to Eddie Mohr’s?”

  “We don’t want to hear it from you.” A piece of metal attached itself to the back of my head. “Right at the corner.”

  “To Diamond Head, then.”

  “I said we didn’t want to hear it from you. Left on Archer.”

  We were heading to the plant. Rain was starting to come in through the broken glass, spattering the man to my right, but also the dashboard. Another thing that would peeve Luke.

  If they were just getting me to the plant so that they could kill me in private, I didn’t think I had a prayer. I wished I’d seen Lotty before I came down here. I wished she hadn’t spent the last week in fear because of me. And I wished my own last minutes weren’t to be spent in terror.

  I still had my gun. But I couldn’t figure out how to get to it without one of my escorts shooting first. When we pulled up on the tarmac in front of the plant, the Hulk slid out of the backseat and opened the driver’s door. His pal ordered me to kill the engine. I did, but left the key in the ignition. The Hulk yanked on my left arm, wrenching me from the car, while his pal kept me covered. From around the side I could hear the throb of truck engines.

  I whirled inside the Hulk’s arm, so that his body shielded me from his partner, and kicked hard on his shin. The damned Tigers were too soft.

  The Hulk grunted, but kept his hold. “Don’t make it harder on yourself than it already is, girlie.”

  He frog-marched me into the building, his partner covering us. We went down the long hall past the assembly room where the women had been so sympathetic about my uncle. Past the T-intersection that led to the loading bays. On around to the small stretch of corridor that housed the offices. The Hulk pounded on Chamfers’s door. A voice told us to come in.

  Milt Chamfers was sitting on a chair in front on his desk. Jason Felitti was facing him. Behind the desk sat the big brother, Peter.

  “Thanks, Simon,” Chamfers said. “You can wait for us outside.”

  Simon. Why could I never remember his name?

  “She had a gun when she was here before,” the Hulk said.

  “Ah … a gun. Have you searched her?” That was Peter Felitti.

  It didn’t take Simon long to find the Smith & Wesson. His hand lingered longer than was necessary on my left breast. I stared past him stonily, hoping there would be a chance to respond more appropriately in the future.

  “Good afternoon, Ms. Warshawski. You did go back to your maiden name, didn’t you, after your divorce?” Peter Felitti asked when Simon had closed the door behind him.

  “No.” I massaged my shoulder where the Hulk had yanked it from the socket.

  “No, what?” Chamfers demanded.

  “I didn’t go back to my own name: I never gave it up. Thank God, of all the imbecile things I did when I was young and in love, I never allowed myself to be called Mrs. Yarborough. Speaking of which, where is the distinguished counselor?”

  Jason and Peter exchanged angry looks.

  “I wanted to bring him,” Jason began, but Peter cut him off.

  “I tell you, the less he knows, the better.”

  “You mean if it gets to court,” Jason said. “But you keep telling me we can keep things from going that far.”

  “So how much of your shenanigans is Dick privy to, anyway?” That was probably the least essential thing to worry about right now, but it seemed important to know Dick hadn’t been involved in the attempts on my life.

  “We thought you might listen to him,” Peter said. “The way you clung to his arm that night at the concert I thought you were still carrying a torch for him. He said you’d never pay attention to him in a million years. It’s too bad he was right.”

  “Carrying a torch?” I echoed. “No one says that anymore. What was I supposed to listen to, anyway?”

  “To keep your goddamned snooper’s nose out of Diamond Head.” Peter slammed the desktop. Its hollow metal top buckled at the blow; he rubbed the side of his hand. “We were managing perfectly well until—”

  “Until I came along and found out about the bond parking and defrauding old ladies and stealing raw materials from Paragon. Not to mention fooling around with the pension fund.”

  “That was perfectly legal,” Jason said. “Dick told me so.”

  “And stealing copper from Paragon? He okay that too?”

  “Everything would ha
ve been fine if you hadn’t felt you had to make a fast buck under the table.” Peter spat at his brother.

  “It was Milt’s idea,” Jason whined. “He’d take a cut instead of a production bonus.”

  Chamfers moved angrily in his chair and started to protest, but shut up at a gesture from Peter.

  “You were always such a fucking two-bit operator, Jason. You pissed and moaned because Papa didn’t leave you the company, but he knew you were too stupid to run it. Then you pissed for forty years while you screwed around on the fringes of big-time politics, so I helped you get your own company. And now you’ve fucked that up.”

  “Whose fault is that?” Jason’s round face looked green in the uncertain light. “You had to use your hotshot son-in-law to do the legal work. I could have got it—”

  “You could have got it screwed nine ways from Sunday if I’d left it to your Du Page County Board cronies. I’m cleaning up after Warshawski for you, but you know the condition. You stop funneling supplies away from Paragon.”

  My legs felt wobbly at his words. I grabbed the doorknob behind me for support. It had a little button lock in it. I pressed it home. That wouldn’t keep Simon out long, but any fraction of a second would help.

  “Cleaning up after me?” I repeated the scary words, trying to tame them. “Come on, guys. Ben Loring at Paragon knows all about this. The city cops know about Chamfers getting the Hulk to knock Mitch Kruger into the canal. Did he also kill Eddie Mohr, Milt? Or did you do that yourself?”

  “I told you she knew too much,” Jason said. “You should have done something sooner.”

  “Oh, for Christ sake, Jason. I’m telling you this really is the last time I get involved in your problems.”

  “Got that right, big guy,” I said brightly. “This one is probably going to take the rest of your life to sort out.”

  “I can see why Yarborough ditched you as fast as he could,” Peter said. “If you’d been mine I would have beaten some sense into you.”

  A cold rage gripped me, straightening my legs. “You might have tried it once, Felitti, but you sure wouldn’t have wanted to do it twice.”