Shell Game

by Sara Paretsky

  “No loud parties? You ever see her with anyone?”

  He scratched his left buttock. “No. She’s pretty much a loner. Beautiful girl, you’d think she’d have a million boyfriends, but far as I know, she’s on her own. Except for the sis, who arrived all hot and bothered on Tuesday night.”

  “I’ll be filing a missing persons report with the cops,” I said. “They’ll come and ask you the same questions I did, only more of them. They’ll have warrants to search the building, stuff like that—”

  “Why?”

  “To see if she fell down an elevator shaft. So try to remember when you last saw her, what she was wearing, those kinds of things.”

  “I can’t tell you what I don’t know,” he protested. “But I guess it was that Monday, the morning. She left for work. She carried her lunch in a little bag tied with a green ribbon, but what she had on, I couldn’t say. She worked in an office and she was dressed for the office, not for running or whatever she did for exercise. And that is it, end of story, morning glory.”

  He held the door open wider. I sidled past his bulk, back to the fresher air. It was time to override Harmony’s objections and go to the police, but there was someone else I wanted to talk to first.

  9

  Jousting

  The thousand dollars an hour Crawford, Mead etc. charged its clients was on display as soon as I walked through the open portal to the offices: the receptionist sat behind a highly polished wood counter, with an arrangement of spring flowers the size of the Goodyear blimp on top. She murmured my name into her phone, told me someone would be out for me shortly, offered me coffee or juice, and waved me to a curved couch facing the windows.

  Modern sculptures of hammered metal flanked the couch like bodyguards. I walked past them to the windows to admire the view. A barge was being towed toward the lake, but it was still too cold for the tourist boats and cabin cruisers to be out.

  I had texted Richard Yarborough, one of Crawford, Mead’s partners, requesting ten minutes on a private matter. Dick had written that he had a five-minute window at noon, adding, whenever you’re within 50 yards of the building, we go on high alert: tornadoes, terrorists, warshawski—employee safety instructions are the same for all three.

  Very funny. I had arrived a minute before noon. Twelve-fifteen. Dick had decided to be a jerk. I perched on the couch and opened my laptop to start research for the project Darraugh had asked me to take on. Meanwhile, three people had arrived and gone into their meetings.

  Twelve-thirty. I reminded the receptionist that I was here for a noon appointment. She gave me a sympathetic smile and phoned into the back again. Twelve-forty. I lay on the fluffy rug in front of the couch and started doing leg stretches.

  Glynis Hadden, Dick’s secretary, bustled out two minutes later. Glynis had been in the general pool during Dick’s and my marriage, but she’d recognized his star potential and hitched herself to him early on. Or possibly she’d recognized someone she could build into a star. Either way, they’ve been together a long time.

  “We’re sorry you had to wait, Vic, but Dick is carving out time for you in the middle of a complicated negotiation with our Singapore office.”

  Glynis was never unpleasant with me, but she had a calibrated sense of how to make me feel unimportant next to the big guy.

  When we reached Dick’s office, he was still on the phone. He was in shirtsleeves, tie loosened so I could read the manufacturer’s label: Robert Talbott. I’ve paid more for rent, but not a lot more. No jowls or wobbly Adam’s apple: he was moving into middle age as fit as a racehorse. It was unworthy of me to have hoped for a paunch.

  Dick waved me to a chair—a hard one in front of his desk, no doubt for underlings—mouthed a “thank you” to Glynis, and held up his empty coffee cup. She smiled indulgently and slipped from the room with it.

  I wandered to the window, where I could look east toward the lake. The view included the cream gingerbread building where Al Capone used to hold court. Symbolic, perhaps.

  Family photos stood on a credenza behind him. Dick and Teri were on a beach somewhere with their children, teenagers now, with teeth so white that the sun bouncing off them was blinding even in a picture. Teri’s lean, tanned body didn’t look as though it had ever been pregnant.

  I turned to a document tray and started riffling through the papers. Deposition in Ti-Balt v. Trechette, whose routing slip read, “FYI, Yarborough. Keeping you in the loop. TM.” Behind me Dick began to stammer at his end of the conversation and finally ended it with a hasty “Catch you tomorrow, buddy.”

  “Vic! Those are confidential papers.”

  I grinned at him. “Hey, Dick. Good to see you, too.” I sat in an upholstered client chair to one side of his desk.

  “I don’t bill at your rates, of course,” I said, “but the forty-five minutes you kept me waiting are worth a hundred-fifty.”

  “In that case, Vic, let’s get to the point, because ten minutes with me will balance that out. And you are the one who wanted to meet.”

  “Your nieces. You helped Reno get a job at Rest EZ.”

  “That’s not true, strictly speaking.” Dick was smirking, which always made me want to deck him.

  “Tell me what’s strictly speaking true, then.” I tried for a saintly smile.

  “She called out at the house and talked to Teri, who was furious that Reno tracked down our unlisted number. I had Glynis call Reno and give her the names of some of our corporate clients who hire at the retail level. Glynis!” he barked into an intercom.

  When Glynis shimmered in, he asked her to tell me what she’d done for Reno. “I gave her six or seven names. We told her we couldn’t help her any further. She must have been sulking, because she didn’t let us know that she’d found a place with Rest EZ.”

  “Sulking?” I tried not to screech. “After you told her to leave you alone? Sounds like she knew you didn’t give a rat’s toenail about her.”

  “Don’t get on your high horse, Vic: Becky tried so many scams on Mother and me over the years I was sure that was what Reno was after, too. After all, she lived with a master scam artist.”

  My eyes turned hot, but I kept smiling in an effort not to jump across the desk and strangle him with his Robert Talbott.

  “They lived under viaducts, Richard. They ate from dumpsters. They were sexually assaulted. You knew your sister was an addict; you could have guessed what was happening to her children, but even when she begged you for help with them, you and your mother wanted to pretend it was all a big scam.”

  I paused, watching him squirm a little. “However, you gave Reno a list of contacts and she parlayed that into a job. Now she’s missing and I’m looking for her. She’s apparently been worrying about something since she got back from a Caribbean trip for her company a month ago. I will, of course, tell the police about her connection to you when I file my missing persons report—”

  “Don’t threaten me with the police.” Dick’s mouth was an ugly gash in his face. “No cop in Chicago is going to bother a partner at this firm.”

  “I know one or two who might, but that’s not the point. If she talked to you, or Teri, or your mother in the last month or two, Reno might have mentioned what was bothering her.”

  “I’ll ask them, but I’m sure both of them would have told me if they’d heard from her.” Dick’s voice was still laced with contempt, but he was studying his fingernails, as if wondering whether it was time for another manicure. It was a gesture he used in court to gain time during cross-examination, and he’d done it when we were married and he was trying to see whether he could get away with a lie.

  Glynis sensed a change in the airwaves that required her to remove me from the office.

  “It’s one o’clock, Dick, and your next appointment is here.”

  Dick looked at his console. “Oh, my God, yes. He’s out front? Tell them to put him in Conference E; I’ll join him as soon as Vic is gone.”

  A crude but effective dism
issal.

  Glynis hit a speed-dial number. While she was relaying the message to the front desk, I kissed Dick on the cheek and left. The receptionist was showing a man into a conference room as I came down the hall. He looked like every other rainmaking partner I’d ever met: white, somewhere in the fifties or early sixties, carefully groomed graying hair, custom navy tailoring, slight frown as he turned down an offer of coffee.

  Glynis caught up with me and almost pushed me down the hall to the reception area.

  “I’ve had my rabies shots, Glynis, so no worries if Dick’s special visitor bites me.”

  “Dick gave you twenty valuable minutes when you showed up unannounced,” she said.

  “I requested time before I arrived. And he took the better part of an hour before meeting me, so don’t play the billable-hours record for me.”

  “Of course he won’t bill you, but don’t you think you can ease up a bit?”

  “This isn’t an argument over a bill, Glynis, as you damned well know.”

  “Maybe Dick is tired of you being the moral arbiter of his universe,” Glynis said. “In his place, I would be.”

  “What, when I’m not around he actually is a moral sentient human being?”

  “He has many facets and interests that you know nothing about. Art, for instance.” She pointed to the statues flanking the couch. “The partners had Dick choose those.”

  At the elevator bank, Glynis tapped a piece of shiny metal that looked like hardened lava. “This piece actually belongs to Teri and Dick, but they’re lending it to the firm.”

  “Gee, he must be truly sensitive if he can afford to collect big chunks of steel. And I see Crawford, Mead acquired another law firm, too. Was that also Dick and Teri’s choice?”

  Glynis stared at me blankly. I pointed at the wall around the elevators, where big brass letters announced we were at the international headquarters of Crawford, Mead, LLC. Off to one side, away from the list of the firm’s offices around the globe, was a new sign—we were also in the north american offices of runkel, soraude and minable.

  “Oh—that.” Glynis gave a tinny laugh. “They’re a Belgian firm who need a U.S. address. Elevator D, Vic. I’ll let you know if we hear from Dick’s niece.”

  “Yeah, Glynis, you be sure and do that.”

  Maybe Glynis was right, that I came across as irritatingly sanctimonious. Maybe he was one of those souls who was generous in secret, but I didn’t really think so. What bugged me most was that I’d slept with him, that I’d married him.

  We’d met in law school. At the end of our second year, we’d interned at the same downtown firm. They’d assigned us to a pro bono case involving neurological damage to children growing up near a commercial hog operation outside Sernas, Illinois.

  Dick and I were sent together to Sernas, where we took depositions from parents, the local school nurse, the town doctor, and the managers of the plant. The stench, combined with the sight of hundreds of animals squashed together at food troughs, led to my permanent aversion to pork. The nights I spent with Dick at a local motel led to our getting married the summer after we graduated.

  For some reason, I’d thought Dick shared my passion for social justice. For some reason, Dick thought I’d shared his passion for his career. We’d both been hideously wrong, but we stuck it out for twenty-seven months, while he kept trying to make me act like the wife of an upcoming associate and I’d tried to make him act as though he cared about people at the bottom of the food chain.

  Today I needed to answer a bigger question than that: What exactly was Dick lying about when he’d been studying his nails? That Reno had talked to the present Mrs. Yarborough, or perhaps that she’d actually spoken to him? Or something even murkier?

  10

  Good Cop, Good Cop

  Thanks to my dad, who’d been a cop for forty years, there used to be someone at most stations who knew the Warshawski name. Time passes, people die or quit. I no longer hear “Tony’s girl? How’d you get to be all grown-up and a detective in the bargain?” when I talk to a desk sergeant.

  That was why I was surprised to walk into the Shakespeare District station and see a cop I knew.

  “Lieutenant Finchley?” I said.

  “V.I. Warshawski?” Finchley responded. “Please don’t tell me you’re working this beat—it’s my first week here; I’m trying to make a good impression.”

  Finchley’s cordiality was also a surprise: he’s a good cop, maybe a great cop, but lately his response to me has been somewhere in the low Kelvin range—not because of detective matters, but personal ones.

  “You left Thirty-Fifth Street?” In front of his desk sergeant, I didn’t want to ask anything indiscreet, but the Finch had been Captain Bobby Mallory’s right- and left-hand man at headquarters for the better part of a decade. I hoped Bobby hadn’t demoted him, or even more unsettling, was himself quitting the force.

  “Captain thought his staff needed more field experience,” Finchley said. “Shakespeare drew the short straw and got me. And you? What brings you here?”

  “I’m a worried aunt with a missing niece,” I said.

  Finchley’s eyes narrowed. “On the level, Warshawski?”

  “I wish it wasn’t, but it is. No one has seen her since this past Monday. I’ve been to her place of work, I’ve spoken with her uncle, her sister, and her building super. I should have come in sooner, but her sister kept vetoing police involvement. She’s going to show hackle when she finds I was here anyway.”

  “Cops are used to angry civilians,” Finchley said. “They only let you into the academy if you can prove you have ten instead of five layers of skin.”

  The desk sergeant laughed; I smiled politely. The sergeant called in an officer from the back to take all the details. I explained the mother’s death, the father’s evaporation, the loving foster parents unable now to help. I gave her Harmony’s cell, Donna Lutas’s and Eliza Trosse’s numbers at Rest EZ, along with Dick and Teri’s unlisted home number and Dick’s private line downtown. I stressed that Reno had called both Teri and Dick during her year in Chicago.

  Finchley had lingered in the background while I filled out the report and answered questions, including the last time I’d seen Reno. The fact that I hadn’t known her as an adult raised its own inevitable questions. They still accepted my story, since both cops had seen every variation of family dynamic. Mine was no weirder than others.

  “There are an array of questions underlying Reno’s disappearance,” I said. “Because I don’t know the sisters as adults, I don’t know if Harmony’s reluctance to see you guys dates back to bad childhood experiences, or if she knows something she doesn’t want to talk about. I left Dick Yarborough’s office this afternoon thinking he was sitting on something, but I could be wrong about that, too.

  “All I know is that Reno came home from work on Monday and hasn’t been seen since. Her keys were where she always left them, in a bowl by the door, but her phone and computer are gone. The building super has keys to all the apartments; maybe he knows something he’s not saying.”

  “So you think the cops do bring added value to an investigation?” Finchley asked as I got up to leave.

  “You know I do, Lieutenant,” I said formally. “And I appreciate it, especially at a time like this. Frankly, I’m scared. I think she would have surfaced by now, one way or another, if she—well, if she were able to.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to speak aloud the fear that Reno was dead, but the probability underlay all the other emotions in the room. Finchley even took my hand and said they’d give it their best effort.

  After I left, I called Harmony to tell her I’d filed the report. She was as angry as I’d expected, but I was past the point of empathy.

  “Harmony, either you know something that you don’t want me or the police to know about your sister, or you are being willfully blind to the danger she may be facing. Whichever it is, I’ve been irresponsible myself in not filing this report two days ago.�
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  “You know what happens when you go to the police?” Harmony was shouting, but her voice was tremulous with tears. “Some guy beat you up having sex with you, the best cop says you had it coming, the worst cop rapes you himself!”

  I hung up and drove to Reno’s building. When Harmony finally let me in, her face was swollen from sobbing. She let me hold her until she was finally calm enough to talk.

  “Was that what happened at St. Matthieu?” I asked. “Did someone rape her?”

  “She wouldn’t say,” Harmony whispered. “All she said was she thought it was going to be fun, scuba diving and shit. The first day, she had a good time, but then she said she knew where the rich old guys on Forty-Second Avenue spent their winter vacations. She did her best to stay out of their way, but she couldn’t always. And then when she got back here, she didn’t know what to do, so she kept going to work. She told me not to worry; she told me she’d figure out how to solve the problem, but of course I worried. After her first week back in Chicago she stopped talking to me, which is when I really got worried. And finally I came out here, but you know all that.”

  “Do you think she saw someone at St. Matthieu who’d assaulted you when you were children?”

  “We didn’t know their names,” Harmony said. “We’d call them by their car or their clothes or something. The Merc SUV, or the Nissan. Belt Buckle—this one guy had a huge belt buckle shaped like a cow’s head. He liked to hit with it. I asked, did she see the Buckle or Fat Baldy? But she said not them specifically—it was just they had the same look in their eyes. Greedy and dead at the same time.”

  We talked for almost an hour, but mostly it was about her and Reno’s life on the streets of Oakland. “Even after Clarisse and Henry took us in, we’d sometimes go back to Forty-Second, where Mom used to work a corner or put us to work. This one girl who sometimes looked after us was still hanging out there.”

  My arm was cramping from holding her, but I sat still, letting her talk to my shoulder, which couldn’t judge her.