Killing Orders

by Sara Paretsky

  Using one of the envelopes I’d just pitched, I made out a “To Do” list:

  1. Inspect Mrs. Paciorek’s private finances & papers

  2. Ditto for O’Faolin

  3. Ditto for Pelly

  4. Find out if Walter Novick had stabbed Uncle Stefan

  5. If yes, bag him

  I couldn’t figure out what to do with the first three items. But it should be easy enough to take care of four. Five might follow, I called Murray at the Herald-Star.

  “V.I.-you ain’t dead yet,” he greeted me.

  “Not for lack of trying,” I answered. “I need some photographs.”

  “Wonderful. The Art Institute has some on sale. I tried calling you last night. We’d like to do a story about Stefan Herschel and your arrest.”

  “Why talk to me? Just make it up. Like your story of a couple of days ago.”

  “Trade you photographs for a story. Who do you want?”

  “Walter Novick.”

  “You figure he stabbed Herschel?”

  “I just want to know what he looks like in case he comes after me again.”

  “All right, all right. I’ll have your pictures at the Golden Glow around four. And you give me half an hour.”

  “Just remember you’re not Bobby Mallory,” I said irritably. “I don’t have to tell you anything.”

  “What I hear, you don’t tell Mallory much either.” He hung up.

  I looked at my watch. Two o’clock. Time enough to think of a way to get at the papers I wanted to see. I could disguise myself as an itinerant member of Corpus Christi and go knocking on Mrs. Paciorek’s door. Then, while she was praying intensely, I could find her safe, crack the combination and.

  And… I could disguise myself. Not for Mrs. Paciorek, but for the priory. If O’Faolin was out there, I could take care of him and Pelly in one trip. If the disguise worked. It sounded like a lunatic idea. But I couldn’t think of anything better.

  As you go along Jackson Street to the river, you pass a number of fabric shops. At Hofmanstahls, on the corner of Jackson and Wells, I found a bolt of soft white wool. When they asked how much I needed I had no idea. I sketched the garment and we settled on ten yards. At eight dollars a yard, not exactly a bargain. They didn’t have belts and it took close to an hour of wandering around leather stores and men’s shops to find the heavy black strap I needed. A religious-goods store near Union Station provided the other accessories.

  As I walked back across the slushy streets toward the Golden Glow, I passed a seedy print shop. On an impulse I went in. They had some photographs of old Chicago gangsters. I took a collection of six to mix in with the shots of Novick that Murray was bringing me.

  It was almost four-there wasn’t time to get to the little tailor on Montrose before meeting Murray. But if I didn’t make it there today, it would have to wait till Monday and that was too late. Murray would have to come with me and talk in the car.

  He obliged with ill grace. When I came in he was happily absorbed in his second beer, had taken off his boots, and was warming his socks on a small fender next to the horseshoe mahogany bar. While he bitterly pulled on his wet boots I picked up a manila folder from the bar in front of him. In it were two shots of Novick, neither in sharp focus, but clear enough to identify him. Both were courtroom shots taken when Novick had been arrested for attempted manslaughter and armed robbery. He’d never been convicted. Pasquale’s friends seldom were.

  I was relieved at not recognizing Novick’s face. I’d been half afraid that he might have been the man I’d kicked last night- if he was that close to Pasquale there was no chance the don would turn him loose.

  I led Murray down the street to my car at a good clip.

  “Damn it, V.1., slow down. I’ve been working all day and just drank a beer.”

  “You want your story, come and get it, Ryerson.”

  He climbed into the passenger seat, grumbling that the car was too small for him. I put the Omega in gear and headed for Lake Shore Drive.

  “So how come you were visiting Stefan Herschel the day he got knifed?”

  “What’s he say about it?”

  “Damned hospital won’t let us in to talk to him. That’s why I’m stuck asking you, and I know what that means-half a story. My gofer at the police station told me you’d been booked. For concealing evidence of a crime. What crime?”

  “That’s just Lieutenant Mallory’s flamboyant imagination. He didn’t like my being at Mr. Herschel’s apartment and saving his life. He had to charge me with something.”

  Murray demanded to know what I was doing there. I gave him my standard story-about Uncle Stefan being a lonely old man and my just happening to drop in. “Now when I saw him at the hospital-”

  “You’ve talked to him!” Murray’s shout made the little car’s windows rattle. “What did he say? Are you going there now? Did Novick stab him?”

  “No, I’m not going there now. I don’t know if Novick stabbed him. The police story right now is that this was random housebreaking. Since Novick runs with the mob I don’t see him as a housebreaker unless he does his own thing on the side. I don’t know.” I explained about the silver collection, and how eager Uncle Stefan was to shower people with tortes and hot chocolate. “If someone rang the bell, he’d just assume it was the neighborhood kids and let them in. Maybe it was the neighborhood kids. Poor old goon.” I had an inspiration. “You know, you should talk to his neighbor-Mrs. Silverstein. She saw a lot of him. I bet she could give you some good tips.”

  Murray made a few notes. “Still, I don’t trust you, V.!. It’s just too damned pat, you being there.”

  I shrugged and pulled up in front of the cleaners. “That’s the story. Take it or leave it.”

  “We had to drive all this way so you could get to the cleaners? That’s your emergency? You’d better be planning on getting me back to the Loop.”

  “Some emergencies are more obscure than others.”

  I took my parcel of fabric and went into the little store. The tailoring part of the shop was a jumbled array of old spools of thread, a Singer that must have dated to the turn of the century, and scraps and snippets of cloth. The man huddled crosslegged on a chair in the corner, hunched over a length of brown suiting, might have gone back to 1900 as well.

  Although he jerked a sideways glance at me, he continued to sew, When he’d finished whatever he was doing, he folded the fabric tidily, put it on a heaped table to his left, and looked at me. “Yes?” He spoke with a heavy accent.

  “Could you sew something for me without a pattern?”

  “Oh, yes, young lady. No question about it. When I was a young man, I cut for Marshall Field, for Charles Stevens. Those were the days before you were born, when they made clothes right there in the store. I cut all day long, and made, with no patterns. What is it you want?”

  I showed him my sketch and pulled the wool from its brown wrapping. He studied the picture for a moment, and then me. “Oh, that would be no problem. No problem at all.”

  “And-could I have it by Monday?”

  “Monday? Oh, the young lady is in a hurry.” He waved an arm in the direction of several heaps of cloth. “Look at all these orders. They thought in advance. They bring their work in many weeks ahead of you. Monday, my dear young lady!”

  I sat down on a footstool and negotiated in earnest. At last he agreed to do it for double his normal fee, payable in advance. “Forty dollars. I cannot do it for a penny less.”

  I tried to appear incredulous, as if I thought I was being gouged. The fabric alone had cost double that. Finally I pulled two twenties from my wallet. He told me to stop in at noon on Monday. “But next time, no rushes.”

  Murray had left a note under my windshield wiper, informing me that he’d caught a cab downtown and that I owed him sixteen dollars. I tossed the paper in the trashcan and headed for Skokie.

  Uncle Stefan had been moved to a regular room that afternoon. That meant I didn’t have to go through a rou
tine with nurses and Metzinger just to see him. However, the police guard had also been removed-if his attackers were ordinary B & E men, he wasn’t in any danger, according to the cops. I bit my lip. Caught by my own story, damn it. Unless I told the truth about the forgeries and the Mob, there was no way to convince the police that Uncle Stefan needed protection.

  The old man was delighted to see me. Lotty had been by in the morning, but no one else was visiting him. I pulled out the photographs and showed them to him. He nodded calmly, “Just like Hill Street Blues. Do I recognize the mug shots?”

  He selected Novick from the pile without hesitation.

  “Oh, yes. That face is not easy to forget. Even though this picture is not totally clear, I have no doubt, no question. That is the man with the knife.”

  I stayed and talked with him for a while, turning over in the back of my mind various possibilities for his protection. If I just gave Novick’s picture to the police… but if Pasquale wasn’t willing to let him go, then he’d get both me and Uncle Stefan without any compunction or difficulty.

  I abruptly interrupted a reminiscence of Fort Leavenworth. “Excuse me. I can’t leave you here without a guard. And while I can stay until the end of visiting hours tonight, it’s just too easy for someone to get in and out of a hospital. If I call a security service I trust and get someone over here, will you tell Dr. Metzinger it’s your idea? He may think you’re a paranoid old man, but he won’t turn your guard out the way he will if I put it to him.”

  Uncle Stefan was disposed to be heroic and fought the idea, until I told him the same hoods were gunning for me: “If they kill me, and you’re dead, there isn’t a soul on earth who can go to the police for me. And our detective agency will vanish.” Put as an appeal to his chivalry, the idea was palatable.

  The service I used was called All Night-All Right. In a way, its employees were as amateurish as their name. Three enormous brothers and two of their friends made up the entire staff, and they only took jobs that appealed to them. No North Shore weddings, for example. I’d used them once when I had a load of rare coins I was returning to an Afghani refugee.

  Jim Streeter answered the phone. When I explained the situation to him, he agreed to send someone up in a couple of hours. “The boys are out moving someone’s furniture”-one of their sidelines. “When they get back I’ll send Tom up.”

  Uncle Stefan obediently rang for the night nurse and explained his fears to her. She was inclined to be sarcastic, but I murmured a few words about hospital safety and malpractice suits and she said she would tell “Doctor.”

  Uncle Stefan nodded approvingly at me. “You are a very tough young lady. Ah, if only I had known you thirty years ago, the FBI never would have caught me.”

  A gift shop in the lobby yielded a pack of cards. We played gin until Tom Streeter showed up at eight-thirty. He was a big, quiet, gentle man. Seeing him, I knew I’d stopped one hole. At least temporarily.

  I kissed Uncle Stefan good-night and left the hospital, checking carefully at each doorway, mixing with a large family group leaving the building. I inspected my car before opening the door. As near as I could tell, no one had wired it with dynamite.

  Driving down the Edens, what puzzled me was the connection between O’Faolin and the forgeries. He hires Novick from Pasquale. How does he know Pasquale? How would a Panamanian archbishop know a Chicago mobster? Anyway, he hires Novick from Pasquale to back me off the forgeries. But why? The only connection I could think of was his longterm friendship with Pelly. But that made Pelly responsible for the forgeries and that still didn’t make sense. The answer had to be at the friary and I had to get through Sunday somehow before I could find it.

  Back at the Bellerophon, I plugged my phone into the wall. It seemed to work. My answering service told me Ferrant had tried phoning me as well as Detective Finchley.

  I tried Roger first. He sounded subdued. “There’s been a disturbing development in this takeover attempt. Or maybe it’s a relief. Someone has stepped forward and filed five percent ownership with the SEC.” He’d been closeted with the Ajax board all day discussing it. One of the other managing partners from Scupperfield, Plouder would be flying in tomorrow. Roger wanted to have dinner with me and get my ideas, if any.

  I agreed to meet him. If nothing else, it would give me something to think about until Monday.

  While I ran water in the bathtub I made my other call. Detective Finchley had left for the day, but Mallory was still at work. “Your lawyer says you’re ready to make a statement about Stefan Herschel,” he growled.

  I offered to see him first thing Monday morning. “What did Detective Finchley want?”

  I could get my gun back, Bobby said grudgingly. They’d gotten the Skokie police to send it down to them. They were confiscating the picklocks, though. It hurt Bobby physically to tell me about the gun. He didn’t want me carrying it, he didn’t want me in the detective business, he wanted me in Bridgeport or Melrose Park with six children and, presumably, a husband.

  XXI

  Deadline

  ROGER POKED MOODILY at his steak. “By the way, thanks for the note you left yesterday. How was the archbishop?”

  “There were two. One was fulsome, the other ugly. Tell me about this filing.”

  I had met him at the Filigree and been moved by his total exhaustion. We had drinks in the bar before dinner, Roger so worn that he hadn’t felt like talking. Now he rubbed his forehead tiredly.

  “I am baffled. Totally and utterly baffled. I’ve been dealing with it all day, and I still can’t understand it… It’s like this. If you own five percent or more of a company’s stock, you have to file with the SEC and tell them what you mean to do with your holding. You know you asked me a week or so ago about a Wood-Sage company? Well, they’re the ones who made the filing.

  “Now they did it late yesterday, just so they wouldn’t have to answer a lot of questions or be in the Journal or anything. But of course, our lawyers got all the material. Such as it was. Wood-Sage isn’t a corporation that does anything apparently. They’re just a group of people who buy and sell stocks for their mutual benefit, figuring if they pool their investments they can do better than they would alone. It’s not that unusual. And they’re claiming they only bought so many Ajax shares because they think the company’s a good buy. The trouble is, we can’t get any kind of line on who owns Wood-Sage.” He ran his fingers through his long hair and pushed his plate away, much of the steak uneaten.

  “The disclosure to the SEC should include the owners, shouldn’t it?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “The owners are the shareholders. There is a board of directors, but it seems to be made up of brokers, including Tilford and Sutton.”

  “The buyers must include their customers, then.” I thought back to my burglary of their offices. “I don’t have a list of all their customers. And I don’t know what it would tell you, anyway. The one strange thing about them is they do business for Corpus Christi. Corpus Christi bought several million dollars of stock last fall. It might have given them to Wood-Sage.”

  Roger had never heard of Corpus Christi.

  “Not surprising-it’s a group that tries to stay secret.” I told him what I’d read about them in the Journal. “Because they do everything in secret, maybe they don’t publicize their ownership of a company like Wood-Sage… Catherine Paciorek is a member-her son let that fall inadvertently

  Roger fiddled with the stem of his wineglass. “There’s something I want to ask you,” he finally said abruptly. “It’s hard for me, because we’ve gotten into difficulties about your detective work and my reaction to it. But I’d like to hire you, for Scupperfield, Plouder. I’d like you to try to find out who’s behind Wood-Sage. Now this business with Corpus Christi and Mrs. Paciorek-it gives you an inside edge on the investigation.”

  “Roger, the SEC and the FBI have the kind of resources you need for that sort of investigation. I don’t. By Tuesday or Wednesday they’ll have the informati
on. It’ll be in the public domain.”

  “Maybe. But that may be too late. We’re doing what we can-sending mailings to shareholders urging them to support current management. Our lawyers are working madly. But no one’s getting results.” He leaned across the table earnestly and took my hand. “Look. It’s a lot to ask. I realize that. But you know Mrs. Paciorek. Can’t you talk to her-find out if Corpus Christi is involved in this Wood-Sage thing at all?”

  “Roger, the lady doesn’t talk to me. I don’t even know what I could do to get her to see me.”

  He looked at me soberly. “I’m not asking you to do me a favor. I’ll hire you. Whatever your normal fee is, Scupperfield, Plouder will double it. I just cannot run the risk of omitting a course of action that might help. If we knew who the owners were, if we knew why they were trying to buy the company, it could make a big difference to our being able to hold on to Ajax.”

  I thought of the three dollars in my wallet, the new furniture I was going to have to buy, the fee to the Streeter brothers for protecting Uncle Stefan. And then my shoulders sank. It was my fault Uncle Stefan was lying in the hospital needing protection. After a couple of weeks of working on the forgeries, I had done nothing but lose my apartment and my life’s possessions. Lotty, my refuge, wouldn’t speak to me. I had never felt so discouraged or incapable in all my years as an investigator. I tried, awkwardly, to explain some of my feelings.

  Roger squeezed my hand. “I understand how you feel.” He grinned briefly. “I was the young hotshot coming over to manage the Ajax operation, show them how to do the job. Now our management are fighting for our lives. I know it’s not my fault-but I feel futile and embarrassed that I can’t do anything about it.”

  I made a wry face, but returned his handshake. “So we’ll bolster each other’s failing vanity? I suppose… But next week you’ve got to go to the FBI and the SEC. Set up a meeting for me with them. They won’t talk to me otherwise. Just as long as you know it’s a most unlikely project, I’ll try to think of a way to get Catherine Paciorek to talk to me.”