Dedication
For Sue Bowker
With thanks for many things, including your support for this book
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
1: Playing the Sap—Again
2: Fit for Life
3: Auteur Deconstructed
4: Long Shot
5: Designer Beer
6: Crossing the River
7: A Happening Place
8: On the Hill
9: Red Menace
10: What Big Teeth You Have
11: Rabid Fans
12: Ugly Duckling
13: One Sober Minute
14: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Scientist
15: And Besides, the Mensch Is Dead
16: Down by the Riverside
17: Junkyard Dogs
18: Those Good Old Days
19: Dead End
20: The Short-Tempered Arm of the Law
21: Voices from Home
22: Barflies
23: Picture Perfect
24: Trespassers W
25: Trouble in Douglas County
26: Patriots Care
27: Spiritual Adviser
28: Disappearing Act
29: Data Swapping
30: Visiting Brass
31: Origin Stories
32: Carrying the Can
33: Picking Through the Bones
34: Hard Words
35: Knee-Deep in Water
36: Casual Day in Court
37: Twenty-Four-Karat Smile
38: Upscale Housing
39: Surprise, Surprise!
40: Polar Bear
41: You’re So Ignorant
42: Sonia, April 1983
43: Hazmat Site
44: Swabbing the Decks, or Something
45: Here for the Duration
46: The Fighting Germs
47: Playing with Germs
48: Late Night at the Library
49: Baby Blues
50: Where Oh Where Can My Baby Be?
51: Known Unknowns
52: Good Country People
53: Date Night at the Movies
54: Now the Wench Is Dead
55: Men in Black
56: Snake Eyes
57: Tang Soo
58: Ci Sono
59: Entertaining Visitors
60: Fairy Tales
61: The Sisters Grow Up
62: There’s No Place Like Home
Thanks
About the Author
Also by Sara Paretsky
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
Playing the Sap—Again
“The police say it was drug-related, ma’am. They think August was stealing to deal.” Angela Creedy spoke so softly I had to lean forward to hear her.
“That is a bêtise—a . . . a lie, a stupidity.” Bernadine Fouchard stomped her foot for emphasis.
“Bernie, my little volcano, you could be right, but I have no idea what, or even who, you’re talking about. Can you start at the beginning?”
Angela had been looking at her clasped hands, her face tight with worry, but that made her give a brief smile. “You are a little volcano, Bernie. Maybe that’s what we’ll start calling you at the training table. The thing is, August is missing, and when this break-in happened—”
“They had to pick on someone,” Bernie interrupted. “And because he is black—”
Angela put a hand over Bernie’s mouth. “August is my cousin, ma’am. I don’t really know him—I’m from Shreveport, and he grew up in Chicago. We don’t have the kind of family that stages big reunions. I haven’t seen him since he was about eight or nine and came down with his mama to visit. Anyway, when I connected with him, after I moved up here, it turned out he’s trying to be a filmmaker, but he works as a personal trainer to support himself. He also videos parties—weddings, kids’ birthdays, things like that. It just seemed like the perfect combo.”
The southern lilt in her soft voice made it hard for me to understand her. “Perfect for what?” I asked.
Bernie flung up her hands. “But to help us train and video us when we play, naturellement, so we can see where we must improve!”
Bernadine Fouchard was a rising hockey player. Her father had been my cousin Boom-Boom’s closest friend on the Blackhawks, and he’d asked Boom-Boom to be Bernie’s godfather. Now that she was a first-year student and athletic star at Northwestern, I had sort of inherited her.
“Angela is also an athlete?” I asked.
“Can’t you tell? She is like a . . . a giraffe. She plays basketball and plays very well.”
Angela looked at her in annoyance but went back to her narrative. “Anyway, Bernie and I, we’re both freshmen, we have a lot to prove before we can be starters, so we started going to the Six-Points Gym, because that’s where my cousin works and it’s not far from campus.”
“When this gym was broken into two nights ago, the police, at first they thought it was a prank, because of Halloween, but then today they said it must have been August, which is a scandale,” Bernie put in. “So I told Angela about you, and we agreed you are the exact person for proving he never did this thing.”
Bernie favored me with a brilliant smile, as if she were the queen bestowing an important medal on me. I felt more as though the queen’s horse was kicking me in the stomach.
“What does August say about it?”
“He’s disappeared,” Bernie said. “I think he’s hiding—”
“Bernie, I’m going to call you a volcanic kangaroo, you jump around so much,” Angela warned, her voice rising in exasperation. “The gym manager says August told her he was going away for a week but he didn’t say where, just that it was a confidential project. He’s a contract employee, so he doesn’t get vacation time—he takes unpaid leave if he wants to go.”
“He didn’t tell you?” I asked.
Angela shook her head. “We’re not that close, ma’am. I mean, I like him, but you know how it is when you play college ball—Bernie told me you played basketball for the University of Chicago—you’re training, you’re practicing, you’re fitting in your classes. Girls’ ball isn’t like boys’: we have to graduate, we have to take our courses seriously. Not that I don’t want to—I love everything I’m studying—but there isn’t time left over for family. And August is pretty private anyway. He’s never even invited me to his home.”
“You have his phone number?” I said.
Angela nodded. “He’s not answering it, or texts, or anything. No updates on his Facebook page or Twitter feed.”
“The police must have something to go on,” I objected. “Other than saying that nobody knows where your cousin is.”
“It wasn’t really a break-in.” Angela picked at her cuticles. “Someone with a key opened all the doors, and August is the only person with a key they can’t find.”
“How long has he been out of touch?” I asked, cutting short another harangue by Bernie.
Angela hunched a shoulder. “I can’t even tell you that, ma’am. It wasn’t until today that I knew he was missing, and that’s because the police came to talk to me, to see if I knew where he was.”
I got up to turn on more lights. The only windows in the warehouse where I lease my office are at the top of the fourteen-foot walls. I’ve filled the place with floor and ceiling lamps, and at five on a November day I needed all of them to break the gloom.
Neither of my visitors seemed able to tell her story in a straightforward way, but what it boiled down to was that Six-Points Gym’s medical-supplies closet had been ransacked during the break-in. The gym worked with a lot of athletes, from weekend warriors to some of the city’s pro teams, along with m
any of the university’s athletes. They had a doctor on call who could hand out drugs. Neither Angela nor Bernie knew what had been in the ransacked closet.
“We don’t take drugs,” Bernie snapped when I asked. “Why would we know?”
I sighed, loudly. “It’s the kind of question you might have asked the police when they talked to you. Or they might have asked you. Six-Points must have controlled substances, or the cops wouldn’t care.”
“They didn’t say.” Angela was talking to her hands again. “They asked me how well I know August and did I know if he took drugs, sold drugs—all those things. I told them no, of course.”
“Even though you don’t know him well?” I prodded.
Angela looked up at that, her eyes hot. “I know when someone is on drugs. Ma’am. It’s true I don’t know him well—I was only two the one time he came to see us—but my mother told me he brought a toy farm with him that I kept messing with. She says August was so cute, how he put the animals to bed for the night, all the little lambs together, all the cows, how the dog got to sleep on the farmer’s bed. A boy like that wouldn’t be stealing drugs.”
I didn’t suggest that every drug dealer had once been a little child who played with toys.
Bernie nodded vigorously. “Exactement! So we need you to find August. Find him before the police do, or they will just arrest him and never listen to the truth.”
“Which is?”
“That someone else did this break-in, this sabotage,” Bernie cried, exasperated with my thickness.
“This is potentially a huge inquiry, Bernie. You need to fingerprint the premises, talk to everyone on the gym’s staff, talk to customers. The police have the manpower and the technical resources for an investigation like this. I don’t have the equipment or the staff to work a crime scene, even if the Evanston cops would let me look at it.”
“But, Vic! You can at least talk to people. When you start asking questions, they will be squirming and saying things they thought they could keep secret. I know you can do this—I have seen you making it happen. Maybe even the manager of the gym, maybe she is doing this crime and trying to blame August.”
I opened and shut my mouth a few times. Whether it was the flattery or the supplication in both their faces, I wrote down the address of Six-Points, the name of the manager, August’s home address. When I asked Angela for August’s mother’s name, though, she said that “Auntie Jacquelyn” had died six years ago.
“I honestly don’t think August has any other family in Chicago. Not on my side anyway. His daddy was killed in Iraq, years ago. If he has other relatives here, I don’t know about them.”
Of course she didn’t know his friends either, or lovers, or whether he had debts he needed to pay off. At least she could provide his last name—Veriden. Even though I knew that neither woman could afford my fees, I still found myself saying I would call at the gym tomorrow and ask some questions.
Bernie leaped up to hug me. “Vic, I knew you would say yes! I knew we could count on you.”
I thought of Sam Spade telling Brigid O’Shaughnessy he wouldn’t play the sap for her. Why wasn’t I as tough as Sam?
2
Fit for Life
The next day I had an early meeting in the Loop with my favorite kind of client, the kind who pays bills regularly and has well-focused inquiries, so it wasn’t until late afternoon that I made it up to the Six-Points Gym. Which meant I had about a dozen texts from Bernie, demanding to know what I’d found out, before I even started north.
I’d made an appointment with the day manager, Denise LaPorte, and had phoned to let the Evanston police know I was on the case. The detective in charge didn’t sound as though the break-in was high on his own to-do list. No one had been killed or even injured, and property damage was minimal.
“You want to look for this guy—what’s his name? August Veriden?—knock yourself out. Just let me know when you find him.”
“You’re liking him for the break-in?”
The cop said, “We’d like to talk to him. He’s the only employee with a key that we can’t locate, so we’ve put out a bulletin for him.”
I asked what drugs were missing. I whistled under my breath: the gym’s medical closet had quite a cocktail on hand—Oxy, Toradol, Vicodin, along with stuff I’d never heard of.
“Were the quantities enough to make them worth stealing?”
The detective snorted derisively. “You ever been around a junkie, PI? Street value doesn’t mean shit. Ease of access—you’ll see when you get there. It ain’t exactly Fort Knox.”
Duly chastened, I promised I would let him know if I discovered anything helpful. Neither of us was optimistic when I hung up.
When I got to Six-Points Gym: Fitness for Life, it was just after five. The building was a kind of outsize warehouse. A signboard at the entrance advertised an Olympic-size pool, a dozen basketball courts, yoga rooms, weight rooms, five restaurants, and a separate spa wing. The sign urged me to join and become fit for life. Special rates for college and high-school students, 30 percent off for everyone who joined today. There must have been a lot of cancellations after the break-in.
The sign also explained the Six Points: use your head and heart to power your four limbs to fitness.
A security camera videoed the main entrance, but the eye had been covered with a piece of chewing gum. Inside, a guard the size of a football tackle was dealing with a woman who demanded he let her into the locker room right now! He looked at me humorlessly and asked for my membership card and a photo ID.
“You were here during the break-in?” I said while the woman shouted that she’d been here before me and I couldn’t butt in like I owned the place.
“And you get to ask questions because . . . ?” the guard said.
“Because I’m a detective who’s been hired to help with the investigation. Denise LaPorte is expecting me.”
The guard looked as though he’d like to pick me up and break me in half, just for someone to vent his frustration on, but he picked up the desk phone instead and called for permission to let me in.
“Down the hall to the back staircase and up to the second floor. You’ll find her—just follow the noise.”
“And were you here during the break-in?”
“What kind of asshole question is that? Of course not. We’re closed from midnight to five a.m.—that’s when it happened.”
By the time I left, the angry woman had been joined by a couple of men also demanding answers.
I passed locker rooms. Police tape had been crisscrossed over the entrances, but someone had torn it down.
You know the footage that TV loves to show after a tornado or an earthquake, with homes and furniture flung across the landscape? That’s what I saw when I stepped over the tape: every locker in the women’s room had been pried open. Gym bags and backpacks had been dumped. Bras, tampons, water bottles, swimsuits, candy wrappers, makeup kits—all scattered over the benches and floor. Fingerprint dust had settled on the clothes, making them look like the tired remains of a dust storm.
I backed out and peered into the men’s room. The damage was just as appalling, except for the absence of makeup. No one looking for drugs would have looted the locker rooms, although I suppose a serious addict might have been hunting jewelry or electronics. Could one person have done this on his own in five hours? The dumping maybe, but hundreds of lockers had been opened. It looked like a team effort.
I snapped some pictures and moved on to the back staircase. As I started up, I understood what the guard had meant by following the noise. The manager’s office was a small space, and it was overflowing with screaming clients. A man in a purple Wildcats sweatshirt was pounding the desk demanding a refund, two women were shouting about something stolen, a third, weeping in fury, was waving a silver gym bag whose torn lining was hanging out.
“Two hundred twenty-five dollars! This is a Stella McCartney original. Are you going to reimburse me or not?”
“Take a number,” LaPorte snapped at me when I squeezed through to her desk. “I can only deal with one person at a time.”
“I’m V.I. Warshawski, the detective—we spoke earlier. Let me know when to come back.”
LaPorte pressed her palms against her eyes. “There won’t be a good time. There will never be a good time. This is going to go on all night.”
“Damn right,” the man said. “It’s going to go on until you tell us when you’re going to pay for the damages.”
I climbed onto the desk and the room quieted. I looked down at the crowd. “Did the police take down the crime-scene tape, or was that you heroes?”
There was some grumbling and then another outburst from the Stella McCartney woman, wanting to know what difference that made and insisting it didn’t get me off the hook from replacing her property.
I tried to school my face into a mix of sorrow and pity instead of annoyance and impatience. “If you removed the tape, there’s no way to prove that your property was damaged by the vandals who broke into the locker room. Six-Points values you as a member and doesn’t want a legal hassle, but their insurance carrier will be cranky because there’s no way to prove you aren’t bringing ruined property in from outside, hoping to cash in on the disaster. You can’t file a police report, which you need when you’re making a claim, because you tampered with a crime scene. Fresh prints on top of the fingerprint powder will be pretty easy to ID.”
The people in the room seemed to contract, as if a freezing wind had blown through, except for the Stella McCartney woman. She was too outraged for logic, but a man whom I hadn’t noticed—because he’d been quiet—took her arm and steered her out the door. The rest of the unhappy athletes followed.
Denise LaPorte slumped in her chair. She was young, probably early thirties, and on a normal day probably attractive—her buff arms an advertisement for the gym’s fitness trainers, with that honey-colored hair that takes hours to hand-paint and keep glowing. Today her skin was the color of paste, and she had gray circles under her eyes.
“This is the first time the room has been quiet since I started my shift at noon. Is it true what you said about the insurance claims?”
Fallout Page 1
