Shell Game

by Sara Paretsky

  “Teeth,” I muttered.

  “I won’t tell the dentist you went a night without brushing. Which way to your bedroom?”

  49

  Interlude with Archaeologist

  When I woke, the sky outside my window was turning a paler gray. Six-thirty in the morning and I was wearing only the knit top I’d had on yesterday, my bra dangling unhooked underneath. I didn’t remember undressing; Sansen must have helped.

  I took off my clothes and pulled on a long sweatshirt—it was chilly in the apartment. When I went to turn on the espresso machine, I saw Sansen’s navy windbreaker slung over the back of the chair where he’d been sitting.

  I found him stretched out on the pullout bed tucked into my living room couch. He’d foraged for a blanket and pillow in my hall closet but hadn’t bothered with sheets. His shoes were lined up neatly next to the couch, his trousers folded across the piano bench.

  I knelt next to him and stroked his face. “If you spend any more time lying on this lumpy thing, you’ll have a crick in your neck.”

  He smiled at me sleepily. “It’s more comfortable than a sheepskin laid across a sand dune.”

  “My bed is more comfortable than both choices. No IEDs, either.”

  “Does it come with or without detective?”

  “With. Definitely with.”

  It was past nine when we finally got up again. Sansen had a meeting with a group of potential donors—Saturdays were when enough of them could leave work for a behind-the-scenes tour. I pulled a couple of shots of espresso while he showered.

  When he came into the kitchen for his coffee, he said, “I confess: I almost brought my grown-up clothes with me last night, but I decided I’d feel like ten fools if I’d misread your response to me.”

  He put an arm around me and pulled me next to him. “Delicious coffee. Delectable detective. I need to get going.” He didn’t move.

  “Yes. So do I.” My head was tilted against his cheek, but half my mind was on my to-do list. I wanted to go back to Rest EZ, but that would have to wait until Monday. Today I could focus on Reno’s papers.

  Sansen squeezed my waist and let me go. “A shekel for your thoughts, Victoria.”

  “My New Year’s resolution was to focus on the moment, and I love this moment—but I feel the hounds of hell gnawing on my feet. I need to work out how Fausson and my niece Reno ended up in the same forest preserve—presumably assaulted by the same hired muscle. And of course those papers that Reno had hidden must have some deep meaning. While you’re raising money for the museum, showing them how to read ancient bits of clay, I’ll be trying to read pink sheets.”

  Sansen looked at me seriously. “Treat your papers like an archaeology problem. When you excavate sherds, it’s not at all clear whether you have pieces that belong together. You lay them on a table, you see which ones have the most likely connections—similar finish, similar soil content around the sherd, all those things. And then you try to fit them together. You don’t try to jam them together without thinking about it first. Treat your documents like that.”

  I nodded. “There are also questions about the Dagon; I’m assuming that’s the object Fausson was referring to in the messages you translated. If I get my sherds glued together I’ll start working on that.”

  “I agree about the Dagon, although we don’t know whether Leroy—Lawrence—was actually involved in bringing it to Chicago. Still, he formed a relationship with Kataba when he was working in Syria, and the Dagon came from Kataba’s hometown. The fact that Fausson was here in Chicago could well be why Kataba came here when he was released from prison.”

  “Fausson probably brought it,” I said. “I did wonder about Rasima Kataba, but I don’t think she returned to Syria from Lebanon before coming to the States. I’ve spun a bunch of theories about where Fausson got the cash he was hiding under his floorboards, from drugs, through stolen artifacts, and even by smuggling refugees.”

  “What cash?” Sansen cried.

  I made a face. “I’m losing my grip: I forgot who I told and who I kept this from, but I was in Fausson’s apartment a few days after he died and stumbled on it.”

  By the time I’d gone through the whole story of my search, including my near-death, Sansen was eyeing me with a mixture of alarm and amusement.

  “As for where he got the money, I have no idea, but there’s so much theft these days all over the Middle East, from digs and from museums. There always has been, of course, but now, between the U.S. destabilization of Iraq, the wholesale collapse of Syria, and the way ISIS helps themselves to artifacts to fund their terror operations, important pieces are being destroyed or scattered around the globe. It’s infuriating. Heartbreaking, too. Archaeologists steal, too, sad to say. We oldsters don’t like to admit it, but the temptation is strong for students and postdocs.

  “You’re twenty-five years old, you’ve borrowed money for graduate school that you can’t imagine ever being able to repay, you’re digging up bits of pottery and old coins under a hot sun, and then you wander into an unguarded museum in a tiny town. You come face-to-face with a statue or necklace of unimaginable value—the temptation can be overwhelming. For Fausson, who wanted to be famous and wanted money to fund his own expeditions, the temptation might have proved irresistible. Especially with an object like the Dagon. He’d need a buyer, of course.”

  “I’m wondering if I might be able to name one or two possibilities.” I thought uneasily of the Mesopotamian statue in Dick and Teri’s Oak Brook house.

  Sansen grinned. “If you need someone to lower you upside down through a skylight into the heart of a nefarious antiquities thief’s mansion, I’m your man.”

  I gave a perfunctory smile. “I’d like to talk to your postdoc at the OI again. See if she has any insight on how the Dagon spent a mere fifteen hours in your museum.”

  “I can’t believe Mary-Carol—” Sansen cut himself short. “No one wants to believe anything unsavory of the people they work with. I’ll tell them to talk to you when you call . . . I’m flying to Jordan Thursday night—big conference there and one of our hot topics is stolen artifacts. I know your time is as stretched as mine—but I hope we can have dinner before I leave.”

  “That would be very nice,” I said formally, but I could feel myself grinning fatuously.

  A last kiss and he was gone.

  I showered and brushed my teeth, took the dogs for a quick walk. I couldn’t see anyone watching me. Mitch was eager to run, but the vets had stressed no extraordinary strain on the joint for another week.

  “Patience, big guy, patience. Everyone says it’s a virtue even though you and I know differently.”

  When I brought the dogs back in, my neighbor looked at me critically. “You’re up kind of late for a private eye with a lot of investigating to do. You check up on your niece yet?”

  “Which one?” I asked. “The one who won’t talk to me or the one who can’t talk to me?”

  “This ain’t a joking matter,” my neighbor said sternly. “Those two gals depend on you. You can’t be lying around in bed with some gravedigger when there’s lives in danger.”

  Gravedigger? Was that going to be his nickname for Sansen? He used to refer to Jake’s double bass as a banjo. Mr. Contreras has never liked any man I’ve been involved with. I don’t know if it was jealousy, or if he had an unacknowledged fear that I might marry and leave him in the lurch. I couldn’t really imagine marrying again, but whether I did, I would never abandon him.

  “Right you are,” I said. “I’m racing upstairs this minute to get to work. Mitch is looking good, by the way, healing ahead of schedule. . . . You do know Mitch is the only man in my life, right? Besides you.”

  My neighbor turned crimson. “Oh, go on upstairs and let the dogs and me get some dishes washed.”

  When I got to my own place, I brought one of my big artist’s sketch pads to the dining room table. I could have done this more easily in my office, but I was enjoying the lingering sense
of Sansen in the room with me.

  Before I started work, I called the hospital. My niece was still improving; rehydration and warmth had stabilized her heart and she had intervals where she seemed alert, although they weren’t sure, because she wasn’t talking to anyone. That provided some welcome reduction in my stress, but the faster I solved the problem in Reno’s papers, the sooner her life would be out of danger.

  I opened my computer case files for Reno and Felix and started copying the names of everyone I’d interacted with onto the artist’s pad. I began with Rest EZ and the people I’d talked to there. I put in the locations of the various holdings in the Trechette name, from Latvia to Luxembourg, then moved on to the two law firms—Crawford, Mead and Runkel, Soraude and Minable—adding Dick, Teri, and Glynis. I threw in Kettie for good measure. Harmony, of course.

  I added another column for the sheriff and the Cook County Board.

  A column for Lotty, Felix, Rasima Kataba, and her father the poet, another for the people from the Oriental Institute. I included Peter Sansen. I was human, my judgment wasn’t infallible—I’d married Richard Yarborough, after all.

  The next step was to see which people or companies had the most in common. That was easy, once I laid all the names on the table. Trechette, the Trechette trusts, and the foundation connected with Reno and Dick, although not with Fausson. They connected to Kettie, too, in a roundabout way: Kettie had eaten with Dick and with Arnaud Minable, who represented Trechette. Force 5, the cleaning company, cleaned Kettie’s office as well as Dick’s.

  I had found the Trechette and Minable names in Dick’s trash when I was cleaning his office. Fausson could easily have found other more incriminating documents if he had worked in there. I drew a dotted line from Trechette to Fausson. I still thought it was possible he’d found something that had made him try to blackmail Kettie. Or Dick. I drew another dotted line between the billionaire and Fausson.

  I went into my corporate and legal databases and looked for links between Trechette and each of the other entities I’d written on the sketch pad. Even so, I almost missed the crucial connection, the lawsuit North American Titanium-Cobalt, aka Ti-Balt, had filed against Trechette.

  Earlier, I’d read only a summary of the suit. Today I went through all the documents and attachments. And there it was: the Trechette insurance subsidiary that had actually sold the bond was Legko. Legko had sold a three-hundred-million-dollar completion bond to Ti-Balt’s construction arm to cover the building of a new extraction plant in western Australia.

  When new environmental regulations slowed construction and delayed completion by over a year, Legko refused to pay. The correspondence attached to the lawsuit showed that Legko referred Ti-Balt to Trechette Insurance, which sent them to the Trechette Trust in Havre-des-Anges. Trechette Trust sent them to the Trechette Foundation, which said they had no legal liability for Legko Insurance.

  “Legko rented office space from Trechette Insurance Holdings’ Jersey offices, but we had no legal relationship with them other than landlord and lessee,” according to a lawyer for the Trechette Foundation.

  The fee for a completion bond is typically 1 to 3 percent of the value of the project. As I grimly made my way through all the documents, I saw that Legko had underbid its competitors, offering a rate of .8 percent. Ti-Balt was having a cash flow crunch; this must have looked like pennies from heaven.

  The insurer requires enormous amounts of data from the insured to show that they are doing business legitimately and aren’t pretending to be contractors just to get a big insurance payout. I would have thought Ti-Balt’s risk managers would have performed similar due diligence in looking at their insurer.

  And then the other shoe dropped hard on my head: Gervase Kettie sat on the Ti-Balt board.

  I sat down slowly, carefully, as if I were made of glass and might shatter on impact. What if Kettie had steered Ti-Balt to Legko? I put my papers aside and started a search through LexisNexis for lawsuits involving Legko. There were seven others, six by limited liability companies whose board members weren’t named in the public documents. The seventh, though, was Keep Your Paint Dry, Inc., a well-known firm that built movie sets and architectural prototypes.

  The bond was for sixty million, not a hundred, but again, Legko refused to make good on the completion bond and then led Keep Your Paint Dry through a dance that ended at the Trechette Foundation. To my disappointment, Kettie wasn’t one of the firm’s directors. By this time I was obsessed enough to look at the movie that Keep Your Paint Dry had been building sets for. Kettie was one of the producers.

  Had Fausson found proof that Kettie was helping Legko defraud Legko’s clients? Even if he was, why would a billionaire do something so sleazy? Because he liked proving that the law didn’t apply to him. Because in the billionaire world, rules exist only for working stiffs.

  Any good feelings left by my morning in bed with Peter Sansen had dried up completely.

  50

  Unguarded Comments

  Jerry, the guard, was sitting near the door when I came into Rest EZ’s Austin branch, the Sun-Times open to the baseball scores. He looked up, almost turned back to his paper, then did a double take.

  “You’re not welcome here. We made that clear a week ago.”

  The room was half full of people, some hunched over their lottery tickets, some working out compound interest problems at the loan machines. A woman with two small children scuttled for the exit, in case I was the next crazed person to open fire in a roomful of strangers.

  “A lot changes in a week,” I said, “especially in America’s fast-paced society. People we couldn’t stand a year ago are presidents and cabinet officers. Tell Donna Lutas I’m here with a couple of quick questions.”

  “You weren’t listening, were you?” Jerry said heavily. “I had to escort you from the premises a week ago and I’m happy to do it again today.”

  It was Monday afternoon. I had spent most of Saturday immersed in lawsuits and tax reports, trying to find a direct link between Kettie and insurance or securities fraud. Failing that, I’d looked for the St. Matthieu lawyers, Runkel, Soraude and Minable. The lawyers had done a good job of sewing their trusts up tightly. The only name that appeared was “Trechette,” and I couldn’t find Trechette. I’d looked for Richard or Teri Yarborough and Glynis Hadden and hadn’t found them, either.

  By Saturday night, I had started to think I could smell burning rubber in my brain, I was working the gears so hard without anything to oil them. I needed a day off.

  On Sunday I stopped at the hospital with Lotty to visit Reno, whose face had lost its gauntness. She opened her eyes when I spoke to her and seemed to be listening, but I couldn’t be sure.

  Afterward Lotty and I drove up to the botanical gardens north of the city and spent a peaceful afternoon among the plants. Lotty needed a break as well. Ten hours in the OR never wore her down the way her worries over Felix had.

  We agreed to forgo any talk of Felix, Reno, and the troubles mushrooming around them for the day. Instead we admired orchids, walked through the Japanese garden, and finished with dinner with Max in the solarium behind his kitchen. Although I had worried about leaving Mr. Contreras and the apartment unguarded all day, everyone was fine when I returned.

  Monday morning, I got Darraugh Graham to give me five minutes: he’s the only person I know with the clout to move the Cook County Board. It’s always a long shot, trying to reach a busy CEO who could be anywhere on the planet and in any number of high-power meetings, but Caroline Griswold got me in—my quick turnaround after her nudge the other day had bought me a reward.

  I drove to the Loop and parked in a fifteen-minute zone—with Darraugh, five minutes means five minutes. Darraugh’s wintry personality makes small talk impossible: I went immediately to the point. “If Gervase Kettie is a personal friend, I won’t ask anything else.”

  “I see him at the Potawatomie Club sometimes. He sits on boards, we go to the same fund-raisers. He do somethi
ng you’re investigating?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’m trying to find proof, but he, or whoever is doing it, has all his tracks well covered. Would you know if he was in debt to the Russians?”

  “Don’t know it. Wouldn’t surprise me—he wants people to think he’s the biggest flame in the fire. Fake money. Just my opinion, of course.”

  “Fake? He counterfeits securities?”

  “No, no.” Darraugh was impatient—he was short on time and I wasn’t keeping up. “CALLIE makes things. We build, we supply. Hedge funds, money chasing money, nothing behind it. So they collect money, art, whatever to make it seem like they have something to be proud of. Real estate, too—easy to get in over your head if you’re not as smart as you think you are.

  “You know the kind of boards people like me are on. Symphony, Art Institute. We give a few million around town. Kettie pledges but he never pays up. Could be he’s a louse, or could be he’s bankrupt.”

  “Two weeks ago, a man named Lawrence or Leroy Fausson was murdered and left in a forest preserve west of town.” I gave Darraugh a thumbnail of Felix’s connection to the murder and the various attacks against me and my nieces.

  “I can’t find the men who attacked me and who kept my niece locked inside a shed for over a week. I’m pretty sure they are Russian, in which case, they may have been sent back to Moscow until the heat dies down here. But someone is pushing on the sheriff to arrest Felix, despite my evidence that these two Russians are most likely Fausson’s killers. I know it’s asking a lot, maybe too much—but I was hoping you’d know someone on the county board who could tell you whether someone is pressuring the board to protect the Russians.”

  Darraugh thought it through, quickly but carefully. “See what I can do. You’re hoping the name is Kettie, of course. May just be the sheriff wanting to close a case, you know.”

  “I know. One long shot after another these days. Thank you.”

  “You did a good job on that Toledo machine shop. Shell game, wasn’t it, switching components on us.”