Shell Game

by Sara Paretsky

  “Let’s take this conversation inside, Warshawski,” McGivney demanded.

  “Do you have a warrant? No? Then we’ll stay out here and take our lumps.”

  McGivney scowled but directed his deputy to go downstairs and talk to the broad—woman—who was making the racket. “Let her know we don’t have jurisdiction for disturbing the peace here; she’ll have to call the CPD. Get the old guy to go down with you and shut up the dogs.”

  The deputy didn’t want to leave—he wanted me intimidated into confessing to arson, tampering with a crime scene, endangering animal life, and who knows what else—but McGivney ordered him summarily. I couldn’t do that with Mr. Contreras, who wanted to see McGivney intimidated into apologizing, but the deputy seized my neighbor’s shoulder and propelled him down the stairs in front of him.

  44

  Purest Water in the Well

  “What’s going on?” the lieutenant and I spoke almost in unison.

  “You first,” he said.

  I leaned against the wall, one foot behind me. “As I said, I think you’re a good cop, but you’ve galloped all the way in from Maywood to try to barge into my apartment. Almost as if you couldn’t get a warrant but you were hoping to sidestep it. Are you looking for something specific?”

  He turned a dull red. “Are you accusing me of wanting to plant evidence?”

  “I want to know what questions were so urgent you couldn’t ask them by phone.”

  He made an angry gesture. “You were in the woods yesterday, Photoshop or not. You’re protecting the Herschel boy—kid—youth. You have a reputation—I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d burned evidence that would have implicated Herschel in Fausson’s death.”

  “I have a reputation?” Fury pulled me upright. “I have a reputation for integrity. If you think it’s for anything else, we are done talking forever. My lawyer is Freeman Carter. From now on, he’s the only one you speak to.”

  “Easy, Warshawski, easy.” McGivney flung his hands up, placating. “You as good as accused me of trying to plant evidence and I didn’t tell you to communicate through the SA.”

  I gave a feral grin. “I don’t feel a need to communicate with you through any channel.”

  He made a heroic effort. “Okay. I want to know about the fire. I will not accuse you of tampering with evidence. And I want to sit down.”

  I gestured toward the hall floor.

  “Don’t push it, Warshawski.”

  I still had Jake’s door key—I’d kept thinking I needed to turn it over to the building management, because I was no longer willing to do the little odd jobs Jake wanted as an absentee landlord (Could you turn down the heat, Vic? Check the windows? See if the pipe under the kitchen sink is still leaking?).

  Jake had let the place furnished to the drummer, but it had been shut up unoccupied for so many weeks that it felt cold and empty. A stack of music stands was collapsed on the floor next to the couch. I was pretty sure the drummer had left those behind. McGivney stepped on the pile and the clatter annoyed him, as if I’d put them there myself to trip him up. I sat on a backless stool some other musician had forgotten.

  “Who lives here?” McGivney asked. “You have a right to be here?”

  “I used a key, remember? So no need to fear being caught on a B and E with a known investigator,” I said. “The fire in the woods.”

  “Old equipment shed. I didn’t know it existed until the Palos fire chief told me it burned. It’s not listed in any county records.”

  “I didn’t know it existed, either, until I bumped my head on it yesterday as I was hiking through the woods. You honestly never knew it existed?”

  McGivney shook his head. “The county’s a big place and some of those forest preserves cover a lot of ground. We patrol the roads, we leave maintenance to the forest crews.”

  He pulled a map out of his pocket and unfolded it onto the couch cushion next to him. I took it and laid it across the sheet music scattered on a table near the window. A desk lamp was plugged in there. The light came on. Either Jake or the drummer was still paying the electric bill.

  The map showed the forest preserves near Palos. McGivney came over and stabbed the map in several places: the road closest to where we’d found Fausson’s body; the spot where Fausson’s body had been found; the location of the shed, which had been written on the map in a small, precise hand. An X showed the shed’s location, but in the map’s margins someone had written in the latitude and longitude.

  The Fausson crime scene had another precise note on it. The direct route between Fausson’s log and the shed was about a quarter mile, but of course I’d gone indirectly, sweeping the woods looking for traces of Reno’s blue scarf.

  “You can see that some buildings are noted officially—picnic buildings, garages, and so on,” McGivney said. “This is a 1999 map, the oldest I had a print copy of, and it doesn’t show the shed. What was in it?”

  “Rusty tools, old toilet seats, that kind of thing, but someone had turned it into a prison-cum-torture-chamber. They’d lined the inside with metal sheeting. The door was padlocked shut. I managed to undo it and found a woman chained to the wall inside, close to death. Before I could carry her away, her torturers returned. We fought, they won, they locked me in with her and took off.”

  “They set the fire?”

  “Is this a trap?” I said. “Your arson investigators can tell you the fire started on the inside, not the outside.”

  “Why didn’t you call for help?”

  “No signal.”

  “How did you set the fire?”

  “The door was the only way out—there weren’t any windows. They’d lined the door with metal, but the frame was all wood. Creeps had vodka in there. I doused the frame and was able to set it on fire and kick out the door when the wood burned away from the hinges.”

  “You think they were leaving you to die with her?”

  “I think they were going off to get instructions from whoever pays them. Even if I hadn’t had to get the victim out, I didn’t want to wait around for the verdict.”

  McGivney’s expression was sour. “I’m guessing that’s where they murdered Fausson, but I’ll never prove it now.”

  “Don’t sit there moodily wishing I’d died in there. You didn’t know the damned shed existed, so you’d never have proved it, ever, not even with my body as the cherry on the sundae.”

  He gave a reluctant smile. “Did you see anything?”

  “Blood, but the woman had been bleeding. If she recovers, she might have witnessed something. Don’t tell me the whole place burned.”

  “The floor, the exterior walls. If I can persuade the county to pay for it, we’ll send the shovels and rakes and old toilet parts out for forensic evaluation, but for now they’re stored in another shed. Which isn’t inside the forest preserve, by the way. Give me a description of the men who shut you in there.”

  “They are musclemen in the most literal sense of the word. Arms like tree branches, legs like tree trunks. I couldn’t make a dent in them, any of the three times they attacked me. Black hair. One has a three-day growth—I’m guessing he watched a lot of Clint Eastwood movies in his youth in Siberia or Sofia or wherever it was and thought grunge made him look tough. Black leather. My dog bit the Clint wannabe so he might have gone to an ER, but he knifed my other dog and very nearly killed him.”

  McGivney digested this before asking, “The woman you brought out with you, that was Reno Seale, wasn’t it?”

  “The woman I brought out was and is unconscious. She had no ID on her. I have no idea who she is.”

  “Come on, Warshawski, everyone knows you were looking for her.”

  I eyed him narrowly. “Even if everyone knows that, it doesn’t stop my obligation as a human being, not to mention an officer of the court, to save the life of someone I find in extremis, even if I don’t know her name. Even if I suspect her of being a right-wing nutcase or a mule for the Mendoza cartel.”

  “Or so
meone involved with a Canadian who’s skating around a murder charge?”

  I smacked the map hard enough to dislodge some of the scores underneath. “So that was the agenda that brought you into Chicago today after all! You can’t find anything to link Fausson to Felix Herschel except a phone number, so you’re going to accuse me of evidence tampering. But even in the era of Trump, a criminal court requires evidence, not imagination.”

  “Then give me some of the evidence you have,” McGivney demanded. “You wouldn’t tell me what professors or colleagues of Fausson’s you spoke to, and I don’t have the manpower to go around Chicago looking for them.”

  “Neither do I. No obliging taxpayers are paying my salary to avoid foreclosure on their homes. You’ve got a budget.”

  “And a board. You can do whatever you damned well please; I have a chain of command.”

  “Did you ever search Fausson’s place?” I asked.

  “No.” He bit the word off, as angry as me. “Yes.”

  “One or the other, Lieutenant.”

  “The CPD executed the warrant. They let us tag along.” He’d hated that: the Chicago cops don’t give the sheriff’s crew the respect they believe they merit.

  “What did you see?”

  “It had been tossed. Even the floorboards had been pried up. We found signs he’d stored cash in a hole by the kitchen, but whoever went through there was looking for more than that—there were holes everywhere. It was like walking through a field of gophers.”

  That jolted me. I wondered if I’d missed other caches. Instead of a storage locker, had Fausson buried everything at home? Could he have hidden a fortune in stolen artifacts between his floor and the ceiling of the apartment underneath?

  McGivney was eyeing me suspiciously. “You look startled.”

  “I am startled. He didn’t seem like the kind of person who cared about money. Syrian poetry, archaeology. Did he have an expensive wardrobe? An art collection?”

  McGivney shrugged. “Anything valuable disappeared with the first intruders. We got the CPD to put motion detectors in place in case anyone comes back, but so far, not a whiff.”

  “And if there’d been trace elements of Felix Herschel you’d have arrested him. So you have nada but you keep trying to build a scaffolding around him.” I didn’t keep the contempt out of my voice as I walked to the door.

  “It’s nice to be a solo op without a boss. You can be the purest goddamn water in the well,” he snapped at my back.

  “There’s always chemical runoff; any water can be poisoned.” I spoke absently, as the subtext of his comment hit me. “Someone in the county wants Felix framed. They don’t want you to put Fausson’s murder in a cold case drawer, they want it finished so that no one, including me, asks any more questions. Who is pushing those buttons?”

  McGivney looked back, uncomfortable, unspeaking, not quite meeting my gaze.

  45

  My Lucky Day

  I’d left Reno’s key on my dresser when I was bathing. I zipped it now into a thin nylon money belt that I could wear inside my jeans. I was tying my shoelaces when Martha Simone called to see how I was doing on protecting Felix.

  I felt like a pinball, bouncing between Felix and Reno. It was Friday afternoon; I wanted to get to banks in Reno’s neighborhood before the end of the business week to see if the key belonged to their safety-deposit boxes, but I sat down so I could focus on my conversation with Simone.

  I told her about McGivney’s visit. “He as good as said someone is pressuring him to nail Felix and close the case. Do you have any sense of why? Are they protecting a power ranger, or trying to get leverage against Rasima Kataba?”

  “It may be the second,” Simone said slowly. “I’m not giving up on her, but so far I can’t get the court to budge on a release. They want her father and they refuse to believe she doesn’t know where he is. Apparently ICE has staked out her building. They’ve taken eleven other occupants into custody but haven’t seen Tarik Kataba on the premises.”

  “My heroes,” I said bitterly.

  “Mine as well. What’s this I hear about you burning down the forest preserve where Fausson’s body was found?”

  “That’s how McGivney put it,” I said. “Where did you get the language?”

  She laughed. “I have access to some of those county reports. Seriously, what happened?”

  I gave her a quick sketch, including finding my niece, but Simone wanted a description of the shed, what had led me to it, all the questions that a litigator thinks of when she’s imagining a trial down the road. I told her everything. Almost everything—I omitted the locket and key. Simone was a lawyer, communications were privileged, but the fewer people who knew the better.

  “If you’re right that they killed Fausson in the shed and moved him to that log, why?” Simone asked. “That sounds as though they wanted him found, not that they wanted the body to decompose.”

  “The shed was a small space,” I said. “They snatched Reno and Fausson right around the same date. If they were both in there, there was hardly space for two thugs. After all, the room was already crammed with junk. Once Fausson died, they had to move him.”

  If the goal had been to torture Reno and Fausson into revealing what they knew, the pair I’d been fighting didn’t speak enough English to understand what their victims were saying. There must have been a fifth person present, the person who’d hired the torturers to make Reno and Fausson tell their secrets.

  “Are you still there?” Simone demanded.

  “I was thinking they hadn’t meant to kill Fausson, at least not then. The guys I tangled with could kick a person to death with one swing of their steel-capped motorcycle boots. They swung too hard, and then they had a dead body. They might have pretended to their boss that Fausson escaped; they could have hidden the body in an effort to protect themselves from the boss’s wrath.”

  That would explain why Reno was still alive—they hadn’t yet been ordered to finish her off when I showed up.

  “I hope your niece makes it,” Simone said. “From my standpoint, the best news is that you can put faces on Fausson’s killers. I’m going to ask for an emergency hearing with Judge Vivian; I will probably need you to testify to the probable identity of Fausson’s killers.”

  “Only with a subpoena, Martha: I am drowning right now and don’t have time to wait in a courtroom.”

  “You’ll do what the law requires and what Felix Herschel needs,” she said sharply. “Since Felix has never been formally charged, we don’t need the extra hoop of asking the judge to drop charges, but we do want him to order an end to the surveillance by ICE.”

  I’d heard McGivney leave Jake’s place while we were talking. As soon as Martha hung up, I ran from my building and drove to Reno’s building at North and Fairfield. I’d mapped out the five banks within walking distance of her home and I trudged from one to the next, checking to see if any of them recognized her key.

  I got to the last one, the Ft. Dearborn Trust, as they were closing, but the guard called a manager over who gave me the same negative I’d gotten from the other four. I’d passed a post office and confirmed that the key didn’t work in their boxes.

  This meant I needed to come back in the morning and begin a tour of all the UPS stores and their ilk. I tried to suppress a feeling of panic. The task was so large—not just tracking down the box, but also figuring out what had brought both Fausson and Reno to that shed in the woods. Dealing with Harmony, protecting Felix, figuring out what Dick’s role in all this was.

  I was climbing into the Mustang when I saw the storefront across the street: olivia’s—your home office without the rent. I ran across the road, swerving around the traffic and nearly colliding with a bicycle. Olivia’s door was locked but people were working inside. I rang a bell, holding up the key, and someone buzzed me in.

  The woman behind the counter began telling me that I was supposed to bring my own front-door key with me after 5:00 p.m., but when I saw the wa
ll filled with lock boxes I went straight to 372. The key turned smoothly. I opened the door, my hands trembling slightly, and pulled out a manila envelope containing a handful of documents.

  I sifted through them. It was an eclectic collection: trading summaries for Climate Repair International; part of an e-mail that urged recipients to sell all shares of GGTHP as soon as the market opened. A loan agreement between the Trechette Trust and Legko Holdings of Saint Helier, Jersey, for two hundred million U.S. dollars.

  The e-mail had been torn so that sender, date, and recipients were missing. Part of the loan agreement had been torn off as well. When the key turned in the lock, I was sure many of my questions about Reno would be answered, but these documents seemed to raise more than they answered.

  I walked slowly back to my car, prudently waiting for the light at California before crossing.

  Donna Lutas, Reno’s boss at Rest EZ, had told me Reno had been trying to learn the identity of their CEO. These documents didn’t seem to help with that, although at least the loan agreement involved Rest EZ’s nominal owner, Trechette. If these were what Reno’s torturers had wanted, they must mean something deeper than I could tell from the surface.

  I drove to my office. I copied all the documents, but instead of locking them in my office safe, as I’d planned, I overnighted them to my lawyer, Freeman Carter, with a brief summary of their connection to Reno and Rest EZ: I didn’t want to be the only person on the planet besides Reno who knew about them.

  Niko Cruickshank, my computer consultant, phoned just as I got back from the FedEx drop box at the corner. Niko was excited: he had recovered most of a text exchange. However, it was in Arabic, so he had no idea what it said.

  “Wonderful, Niko. Five gold stars for you today. I don’t know Arabic, either, but e-mail it to me. I’ll find someone who does.”

  I could take it to the woman at the Syrian-Lebanese center in Palos, but if it contained something negative about Fausson or any of the center members, she might improvise on the content. Peter Sansen from the Oriental Institute probably knew enough Arabic to read it.