Love & Other Crimes

by Sara Paretsky

  Teichel said he couldn’t possibly know, but he only spoke after a pause and his tone was uneasy.

  “You know something. You need to tell me.”

  “I know—that I don’t know my son. Always a hard thing for a parent to admit,” he said harshly. “Give me whatever paperwork you need. I need to know what’s happened to Cory.”

  “You would be much better off with the police,” I said.

  “Absolutely no police,” Teichel hissed.

  “Or a big firm. Tintrey, Balladine, they can put a lot of resources into a search. I can’t. Especially not with so little to go on.”

  Teichel didn’t want a big firm—who knew who owned whom when you were with a multinational? He wanted someone loyal to him and his son. We finally signed a contract, me reluctantly, and demanding a $2,500 deposit, more than I usually required, but I didn’t like the setup. Teichel also texted me a couple of somewhat recent photos of his son. And, very reluctantly, let me borrow Cory’s Android.

  When he left, I checked my police and hospital sources. No unidentified white male teens had been found in the last several days. It didn’t mean Cory was still alive, but I could use it as a working assumption.

  I started at the Sulzer Regional Library, since that was Cory’s last known location. The reference librarian was helpful; she remembered Cory, mostly because he was using the pay phone, unlike every other teen glued to their handhelds. She’d been on the late shift on Tuesday; she hadn’t noticed him leaving, because a second wave of heavy users started pouring in around seven, after supper. She’d been swamped until almost closing, but he was definitely gone by then. She sent me to the security staff, who didn’t remember him but said there hadn’t been any rough business in the library that day.

  “Every now and then we have kids who think the library is an extension of the schoolyard or their gang turf and start mixing it up, but nothing like that happened Tuesday,” the head of the detail said after consulting his logs.

  As for where the Android had been discovered, Mike Teichel had found it with his locator app: Cory had stuffed it behind the pay phone he’d been using.

  I sent Teichel a text, saying that the cops could get a warrant to find out what numbers Cory had called from the pay phone, but I couldn’t. NO POLICE came back in all caps, followed by a dozen exclamation points.

  I looked at Cory’s Android, at the texts he’d exchanged with Erica. His last outgoing text, about being bricked, had been in response to a query from Erica. She had sent him several dozen messages from Tuesday evening through last night. None this morning.

  As I looked at the log, I saw she initiated 90 percent of their contacts. Maybe more. She was chasing him, poor puppy, and he was indifferent. Unless Mike Teichel was right and she was using Cory as a way to get into his dad’s study and steal code. Maybe Cory was gay. Maybe he didn’t like her.

  Cory’s initiating texts were messages to the guys he went hiking with, or to members of a school photography club he belonged to. His Facebook page showed seventeen friends. Despite the photography club, he had almost no pictures on the phone—a few dozen of the prairie and the wetlands, a few selfies taken there, a few with his buddies. None of Erica, nor of any other girls. Whether gay or straight, he had the kind of thin, interesting face that attracts a lot of people, male or female. However, the lack of pictures was odd, very un-teenlike.

  When I called Mike Teichel, he couldn’t tell me his son’s sexual orientation. “I’ve never seen signs he was interested in anyone, boy or girl, not even Erica. If he’s seeing anyone, it’s very secretly.”

  I mentioned the puzzling lack of photos on the Android. Most teens like pictures of themselves and their friends, especially pictures of themselves and their lovers.

  Teichel snorted. “I hope I raised Cory to be better than that; my family made it out of Ukraine with the clothes on our backs, not with Androids and selfies and all that self-indulgent crap.”

  “I’m sure it’s a help to his confidence to know that,” I said dryly. “He belongs to the school photography club. I’d at least expect photos he’d taken for the club.”

  Cory was a serious photographer, his father told me; he had two cameras, a pocket digital and a 1975 Nikon that he’d found at a flea market. As to whether he had a photo cache online, Mike couldn’t say. If he did, he’d probably hidden it deeply, to avoid charges of immaturity and self-indulgence, but I kept that wry thought to myself, saying instead that I was on my way over to Teichel’s to look myself.

  Mike Teichel tried to argue me out of it: looking for a teen’s art shots was a waste of time when I should be out beating the bushes for him.

  “The way to find a needle in a haystack, or in the bushes, is to use a magnet,” I said. “I need to find someone Cory felt able to confide in.”

  “It won’t be in a roomful of negatives,” Teichel snapped. After a pause, he grudgingly allowed that Cory might have talked to the adviser to the school photography club. Teichel didn’t know his first name; Cory only referred to him as “Mr. Spiro.”

  3

  Of course, if the needle is made out of plastic, a magnet won’t work and you’re doomed, I realized. I was waiting in the principal’s office for Mr. Spiro, who also taught chemistry; when I showed the staff the contract that Mike Teichel had signed for me to find his son, they were eager to help in any way they could.

  While I waited for Spiro, I texted the nine people in Cory’s message list, telling them Cory was missing and asking them to tell me the last time they’d seen or heard from him. I wanted to talk to Erica face-to-face; the assistant principal said she’d organize that for me once I was through seeing Spiro.

  Mr. Spiro—Antony Spiro, he told me as he briskly shook hands—was a wiry man in his late thirties who smelled of carbolic. He had the friendly inquisitive face of a terrier, even the same high wide cheekbones; I could see that adolescents might confide in him.

  He was distressed to hear that Cory was missing. “That explains why he hasn’t been in class or the club. I thought he might have gone home sick.”

  I told Spiro the same thing I’d said to Mike Teichel, about Cory’s question in my presentation. “I think now it was a cry for help: he’d had sex with someone to get information, or maybe his father was having sex with someone inappropriate, and what should he do about it.”

  Spiro slowly shook his head. “He didn’t confide in me, at least not directly, but there’s a photo in a recent batch he took—he seemed to be trying to draw my attention to it, but I thought it was about the setting, not the people in it.”

  He looked at the wall clock. “I have another class in ten minutes, but I think I can find it pretty quickly.”

  He set off down the hallway at a fast clip, greeting students by name. I trotted behind him along the long corridors favored by early-twentieth-century school designers. Partway down the third hallway, Spiro pulled out his keys and unlocked the door to a small room. The musty smell of developing chemicals hit us. When Spiro flipped on the lights, the walls were so full of pictures that I shrank back; they seemed to make the space too small to breathe in.

  Spiro didn’t pay attention to me or to the pictures but unlocked a cupboard in the far corner and pulled out an artist’s portfolio with Cory’s name on it. Spiro riffled through a set of black-and-white shots until he found the print he was looking for. I leaned over his shoulder as he laid it on a light table. Two men were embracing in a parking lot at night. Their stance was ambiguous. Were they lovers? Combatants? The faces were hard to make out in the poor light, but I thought the man on the right was Mike Teichel.

  I bent over it, trying to get one clue to where the picture had been taken. A tan brick wall with cracks was in the left of the photo, a Dumpster in the background with some slats sticking out of the top, but nothing that would help me identify the building.

  “I thought he wanted advice on the focus and the lighting, but from what you’re saying, I’m wondering if it was the two men.”<
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  I nodded, pointed at Cory’s father. “Can you make me a JPEG of this so I can email it?”

  Spiro looked at his watch and the clock on the wall, called the principal to say he’d be a few minutes late for his 1:50 class. He found the negative in Cory’s folder and made a fresh print, getting as sharp a contrast as he could, then scanned and emailed it to me.

  He hustled me out of the room, pointing me toward the principal’s office, before trotting in the opposite direction to his waiting chemistry class.

  As I walked, I texted the photo to Mike Teichel—this made me blend in with the students, who were almost all focused on their devices yet seemed able to hurry down the hall toward lockers or classrooms without bumping into anyone.

  Cory took this shot. Does this explain his running away? Who were you with?

  Teichel called me before I reached the principal’s office. He was furious; he told me to stop my search and to mind my own damned business.

  “If I’d known you would take that contract as a license to invade my privacy I’d never have come to you. Send me back my retainer and stop at once.”

  “It’s not that simple, Mr. Teichel,” I said. “Seeing you with this man apparently upset Cory. If you want to find him—”

  “I’ll find him on my own. You stop now!” He broke the connection.

  4

  “Cory is really missing?” Erica asked.

  We were alone in the assistant principal’s office. The assistant had been reluctant to leave us alone, but I wasn’t a cop, nothing Erica said to me could be taken down and used in evidence, and Erica had insisted she wanted to speak to me privately.

  “Really missing,” I said. “His father won’t call the cops, which makes me wonder what Mr. Teichel is afraid of. He says you were snooping in his home office. What was that about?”

  Erica was mortified, she didn’t want to talk about it, but I reminded her Cory’s life could be on the line; I needed to know everything, and she was the only person who might know something vital.

  It came in small whispered pieces. Yes, she had a crush on him, he didn’t know she was alive, well, of course, they rode the bus together, they did homework together, but—you know.

  I gave a wry smile: I knew. The adored object did not return the love.

  “I thought if I got his dad all wound up, maybe Cory would say something or do something, notice me as more than a homework buddy. It was pretty pathetic. All it did was make Mr. Teichel say I couldn’t come to the house—he was sure I was trying to steal something my mom could use at Metargon.”

  “Does he work on something she would be interested in?”

  Erica flung her hands wide. “I don’t think so, but I don’t know. My mom doesn’t work on anything secret. She’s not an engineer, she does flow charts for smart home appliances. Mr. Teichel, he’s like a game theory person. The software I saw was for some company in California with a weird name. Knee Ice, Ice Knee, something like that. I asked if he was making portable ice for sports injuries, because I wrecked my knee pretty good last summer and I can’t play soccer now, and he acted like he was going to murder me. Like he couldn’t take a joke,” she added resentfully.

  Knee Ice, Ice Knee. “I-C-E-N-I?” I spelled.

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “Iceni is one of the country’s biggest defense contractors. No wonder he got so bent out of shape when he saw you looking at the file. You didn’t actually take any of the code?”

  “It didn’t mean anything to me!” she cried. “And afterward, Cory, he—he wouldn’t talk to me about it, and then he started acting all weird, not coming home after school, going off with his camera.”

  “Where did he go?”

  She turned scarlet; how would she know.

  “If you followed him, it would be great for me to know, and believe me, I won’t rat you out.”

  At first, Cory had taken off for the forest preserves on his bike. She’d followed him on her own bike, and seen that he was taking nature photos, sometimes with one of his buddies from the photography club.

  “But then, like, five days ago, he went on the L. It was so creepy—he got off at Pulaski and went to this horrid motel down near the expressway. I was totally freaked, but I hid behind a Dumpster.” She giggled nervously. “I was watching him watch a parking lot, but then I started getting, like, a thousand texts from my mom, ordering me to come home. She could see where I was because like an idiot I hadn’t turned off my phone.

  “She knew I wasn’t with Melanie and Caitlin, which is what I’d told her. She was in flamethrower mode. I started to leave, but then Mr. Teichel drove up. Cory didn’t do anything, I mean, he didn’t, like, run over and talk to his dad, he just started photographing him, which seemed totally weird. Mom threatened to call the cops. I had to leave, sneaking all the way around the back of the building so neither of them could see me. And it was—gross. Hookers, I guess. Drunks. I—it was awful.”

  I showed her the picture I’d gotten from Spiro.

  “That’s, like, the place, at least, I think it is. It was this old building with that funny kind of hinge for the bottom of the fire escape. That’s Mr. Teichel, but I didn’t see the other man, I left before he showed up.”

  Her soft round face looked gaunt and haunted. “Is that Mr. Teichel’s lover? Is that why Cory ran away?”

  I shook my head: I didn’t know.

  Erica didn’t remember the name of the hotel where she’d tracked Cory, but she could tell me the location: Pulaski Street, just north of the Lake Street L stop.

  I squeezed her hand with a reassurance I didn’t feel, told her to leave it all to me, but not to talk to anyone else about Cory. “And don’t follow me. I may be moving fast around the city and I don’t want to leave you in a place where you wouldn’t be safe.”

  5

  The Ditchley Plaza on Pulaski was all that Erica had reported and then some. I left my car on the street but approached through the parking lot, stopping to look at the hinged fire escape that had caught Erica’s eye. It was so badly rusted I hoped the residents never had to depend on it for their lives.

  I kicked a few needles aside when I crossed the lot to get to the front entrance. The hotel had a pseudo-Byzantine facade underneath its layers of dirt, and the lobby was a large high-ceilinged space, where half-dead palm trees sat in dusty tubs next to armchairs in front of an unused fireplace.

  A high grille separated the hotel staff from junkies and other customers. I pressed an old metal bell. Five minutes went by while I watched a spider move lethargically along a frond on one of the palm trees. I dinged the bell again and a woman appeared, slowly, from the back. She was thin, with deep disapproval lines gouged along her nose.

  “I heard you. You need to learn some patience. You want a room?”

  “I’m a detective. I’m looking for—”

  “Detective? You have a warrant?”

  “I’m private. No one issues warrants for me.”

  “Then you need to go someplace else to look.”

  She twitched and scratched her arms while she spoke. Liver damage, probably, especially when I saw how yellow her eyes were. I’d made copies of my key photos, Cory’s and Mike Teichel’s faces and the shot Cory had taken of his father embracing another man. I slipped these under the grille with a twenty. The clerk pocketed the twenty but didn’t look at the pictures. I sighed and put another twenty on the counter.

  “Never saw him before.” She stabbed a finger on Mike Teichel. “This one, he came last week.” She stabbed the man with Teichel. “The kid showed up Tuesday night”—that was Cory—“waited in the lobby until the other guy showed, followed him into the elevator. Haven’t seen the kid since Tuesday night, but the other one comes down periodically to get a bottle or a pizza.”

  She jerked her head across the street, where a couple of fast-food joints and a liquor store were flashing their lights. A clutch of men were lounging near the liquor store doorway. Panhandling, maybe, or dealing,
or both.

  “Kid hasn’t shown?” I asked.

  “I just said, I haven’t seen him. ’Course I’m only here two till midnight. Could be Major’s seen him. You come back at midnight, you can ask him.”

  “Room number?” I asked.

  “People come here to be private,” she said. “I don’t tell their business, I leave them alone.”

  I had one twenty left. It wasn’t enough to buy me the room number, but the clerk slipped it into her flat chest anyway. And then told me I couldn’t wait in the lobby: people who stayed at the Ditchley valued their privacy.

  I went outside and moved my car down the street, where I could still see the front of the Ditchley but not be watching in an obvious way. I wasn’t there ten minutes when the clerk emerged, heading for the liquor store. I got out of the car for a better view. She was showing one of the loungers two of my twenties. He took them and hustled her out of sight, around to the back of the building.

  I pulled my picks out of the glove compartment and ran back to the Ditchley. A prim notice, back in 5 minutes, sat in front of the bell I’d rung for service. I went past the counter, around the side, and found the door to the office and front desk. The lock was modern but not difficult.

  The office was just big enough for a desk with two computers and a phone. One of the computers was hooked to security cameras that covered the lobby, a back door, and the front exit. The other held data. It was password protected, but someone had written down the password on a Post-it and stuck it to the keyboard tray.

  I logged in and searched the guest list. More people were staying there than I had thought, especially since I hadn’t seen anyone coming or going. I didn’t know the name of the man in the picture, but only two people had been there longer than two nights, Gene Nielsen in 227 and John Smith in 631. I voted for John, but just in case, I made keys for both rooms—the instructions were helpfully taped to the keyboard tray next to the log-in code and the combination for the wall safe.