Fallout

by Sara Paretsky

  I hopped off the desk and shut the door. “Depends on how generous your management and your insurers want to be with your customers, but insurance companies are used to train-wreck add-ons.”

  She looked at me blankly.

  “When trains derail, you get more accident claims than the total number of passengers on board. Your carrier isn’t likely to pay for damaged items people wave around, although the gym may want to take care of them as a goodwill gesture. The claims could turn into a nightmare, so for your own protection make this your legal department’s problem.”

  LaPorte gave a wobbly smile. “Thanks. That’s the first decent advice I’ve had for three days.”

  “You’re beat and beaten up,” I said, “but I need to ask you about August Veriden.”

  LaPorte shook her head. “I can’t tell you much. He’s a quiet guy, qualified trainer—he did a degree at Loyola, which has a great certification program, and he always met or exceeded our standards.”

  I blinked. “That sounds like one of those online questionnaires.”

  She flushed. “I memorized his employee chart when I was talking to the police and to corporate this morning. Some of the trainers like to chat, so I know about who they’re dating or their dental bills or whatever, but August isn’t a chatter. Everyone—I was going to say likes him, but maybe respects is more to the point. We all know that his dream is to be a filmmaker, and he does private jobs for people here—weddings or graduations. I’ve never worked with him, so I can’t tell you how good his videos are.”

  “Any personal details in his file? Partner? Next of kin?”

  LaPorte shook her head again. “When the cops asked to talk to him and he wasn’t answering his phone, I looked him up, but he only put in this cousin, who’s a freshman at Northwestern.”

  I grimaced. “She’s the person who hired me to find him. She doesn’t know other relatives.”

  LaPorte clasped her hands on the desk and looked at me earnestly. “I know his cousin and her friend, the little hockey player—”

  “Bernadine Fouchard,” I supplied.

  “I know they think I gave the police his name because he’s black, but honestly, three of our other trainers are black, one of them from Kenya. We have seventy-eight people working here, everything from janitors to trainers to PTs and massage therapists, and seven people on the management team, including me. August is the only one we can’t locate. I don’t want to finger him, but it does look suspicious.”

  “How long has it been since you last saw him?” I asked.

  She made a face. “This morning I had to check that on my computer, but between talking to the police and to corporate, I know all this by heart. He left ten days ago, said he wanted personal time for a private project. That’s all any of us here know.”

  I digested that: if he wanted to break in and steal the gym’s drugs, he’d waited an awfully long time. “You have a doctor on staff, right?”

  “Oh—you’re thinking of the medical-supplies closet. We have two doctors who oversee any injury treatments that our PTs or exercise trainers do, but they’re not employees.”

  I asked to see the medical closet. She got up readily—I’d saved her from assault, she wanted to help. As she opened her door, she even managed to joke that she wished she had a disguise.

  A few people tried to stop her on our way down the hall, but she told them I was a detective, that she needed to show me part of the crime scene.

  The door to the medical office was open, but the entrance was crisscrossed with more crime-scene tape, this time intact. I ducked underneath to inspect the drugs cabinet.

  “Should you be doing that?” LaPorte glanced around the hall.

  “I’m not going to touch anything,” I assured her.

  The room held a desk and a couple of exam tables. All the drawers—in the desk, under the tables, and in cabinets along the walls—were open. Some had been dumped on the floor with a rough hand, scattering latex gloves, swabs, test tubes across the room. I tiptoed through the detritus to the supply closet at the back, which also stood open. I squatted to shine my flashlight on the lock. It hadn’t been forced, but whether someone had a key or was good with picks, I couldn’t tell.

  Floor-to-ceiling shelves had held everything from support tapes to plastic boxes of medicines. I shone my flash on the labels—over-the-counter painkillers along with an eye-popping collection of controlled substances. The rolls of stretchy tape had been unwound, leaving elastic coiled over the lips of shelves onto the floor like a nest of flesh-colored vipers.

  I rejoined LaPorte in the hall.

  “Do the trainers have keys to the medical supplies?”

  “Only the doctors and the nurse who’s on call. What do you think is going on?” LaPorte pulled nervously on her lank hair.

  “I think your doctors are seriously overmedicating your clients.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “What does that have to do with the break-in?”

  “I can’t tell,” I said. “You’d need the cops to look into it—they’ve got the bodies to question everyone the doctors ever treated, or athletes with a grudge, or parents who think their kids were damaged. Or the doctors could have nothing at all to do with it—it could be junkies helping themselves to a stash that’s easy to get at. You have seventy-eight employees with keys, which means—”

  “No, only about eighteen people have keys. August does because he opens once a week—the trainers all do because they take turns getting here for the five a.m. shift. And then there’s me and the other—”

  “Eighteen is a lot of keys,” I interrupted. “Easy to pass around, even if they’re not easy to duplicate. But unless the front-door key opens the medical closet, I’m voting against a junkie. Someone who’s high or low, desperate for a fix, is more likely to break a lock than finesse it.”

  “What should I do?” LaPorte’s voice was cracking with despair.

  “Get police permission to go into the locker rooms. Photograph them so you have evidence for your insurance company, then hire a cleanup crew to tidy it up. The police don’t seem excited by the crime, since no one was hurt, and the mess isn’t very serious property damage. I don’t think they’ll object. Pity you don’t know where August is—he could video it all for you.”

  3

  Auteur Deconstructed

  When I finished with Denise LaPorte at Six-Points, I was too tired to do anything except go home and collapse in the bath. I could hear the dings announcing incoming texts, but I lay comatose for half an hour, only stirring to add hot water to the tub when it cooled.

  It was the two dogs I share with my downstairs neighbor that finally pushed me to my feet. They started scratching and whining outside the bathroom door. Mr. Contreras is over ninety, and although he’d rather root for the Cubs than admit he’s not up to walking Mitch and Peppy, he must have let them into my place as a hint that they needed exercise.

  “Okay, guys, okay,” I muttered, toweling myself down.

  I pulled on jeans and a heavy sweatshirt, running shoes, got the dogs leashed up, and took them for a quick jog to a nearby park. The tennis courts were empty but brightly lit, in case any enthusiast fancied a game on a cold autumn night. While the dogs ran off steam chasing balls around the court, I checked my texts. Five were from Bernie, anxious for word on August. She was about as subtle as Mitch, and equally insistent, scratching and whining at my in-box.

  I tried August’s phone number—I’d entered it in my speed-dial file and had been trying it periodically throughout the day. This time, as before, I got a tinny voice saying that he wasn’t answering and that his mailbox was full.

  the police aren’t very interested, I texted Bernie and Angela. the odds are the break-in has nothing to do with august, but it still would be good if he turned up.

  Of course Bernie called almost at once and Angela about half an hour later, but I told them both I’d give them more details the next day, after I’d been to his apartment. “I want to see if I
can find a friend or neighbor he might have talked to.”

  I changed into a silk shirt and a wool wrap and went down to the Golden Glow, the bar where I’ve been spending too much time lately. I needed the warmth of Sal Barthele’s Tiffany lamps and the smoothness of her whisky, but mostly her acerbic friendship.

  The next morning, when I got to August’s place, I was long after the fair. My only consolation was knowing that if I’d gone last night, I would still have been too late.

  August rented a one-bedroom in a courtyard building, six entrances, three stories, no doorman. I rang the bell, waited a minute, leaned on it for a good thirty seconds, waited again, but still had no response to my third ring.

  There was a semiresident super—he had an apartment on the ground floor of one of the units opposite August’s, but he also covered another building around the corner on Halsted. I knew this because my superior detecting skills had discovered the notice in the outer doorway about where to find Jorge Baros if he wasn’t in the Buckingham Place building.

  I called the number on the notice, saying I was a detective with some questions about August Veriden. Baros was in the middle of a plumbing repair.

  “I am very worried about Mr. Veriden,” Baros said, “but I have water leaking through two floors here. Wait for me and I will come as fast as I may.”

  I sat on the concrete slab outside the entrance. I was answering e-mails and texts but got to my feet when a young man emerged from August’s doorway. He was in his twenties, dark hair hanging lankly over his forehead and a loosely knotted tie at the neck of a royal blue shirt. He was eating a bagel with one hand, clutching a travel cup in the other, a briefcase tucked under the coffee arm, manipulating the door with the bagel hand.

  I held the door for him. “I’m a detective, looking for August Veriden. Do you know him?”

  He swallowed, tried to speak, had to gulp down some coffee and said, “Not really,” in a thick voice.

  “When did you last see him?”

  “Can this wait? I’m late for work.”

  “Yep, so is August. He hasn’t shown up for over a week. We’re trying to find him.”

  “You and about twenty other people.”

  “How so?”

  He finished the bagel, licked cream cheese from his fingers, and switched the briefcase to the bagel hand. “He lives above me, so I can hear when someone else is there. He’s a nice enough guy but a loner. Last few days he’s had more visitors than the rest of the building put together. I’ve got to run.”

  He took off down the street, his tie flapping over his shoulder.

  I ran after him. “I’ll see you to your train or car or whatever. This is important. Over how many days? Last night? Night before?”

  He stopped at the corner of Broadway, holding out his arm for a cab. One appeared almost magically, which calmed him enough that he paused, hand on the open door.

  “I thought this might be serious. I told—well, the other person in my apartment—that we should have called the police, only you can’t start complaining about other people’s loud parties or they’ll report you next, and August is usually the quietest person on earth.”

  “But when was it?” I tried not to shriek. “Last night? Night before?”

  He thought for a moment. “Three nights ago. Yesterday I was at work, but another guy in the building said some cops showed up.”

  He climbed into the cab and shut the door on my demand for the name of the guy who’d told him about the cops.

  I ran back up Buckingham. Jorge Baros hadn’t arrived yet. When I phoned again, he said he was still drowning but would get there as quickly as possible.

  I’d brought my picks with me on the principle that it’s better to carry more than you need than to curse yourself for leaving vital tools behind. I didn’t have to work the street door—I’d kept it from latching when I shut it behind the bagel eater—and August’s front door was worryingly easy because it wasn’t locked at all.

  Three days ago his apartment had probably been a charming place, sparely furnished with a few good pieces, at least as nearly as I could make them out under the upended plants, CD and DVD covers, and dishes that had been dumped from a wooden hutch onto the floor.

  The destruction felt like a shock wave. Angela’s description of her cousin came to me: the little boy who’d carefully put his farm animals to bed at night. Not nice, not nice at all.

  I tiptoed around the mess to peer into his kitchen alcove. The same violent hands had dumped canisters of rice and pasta onto the countertop. Ants were rooting around in the food, which had spilled onto the floor.

  In the small bedroom, the mattress had been pulled from the bed, the bedding itself wadded into a ball and flung to the doorway. French windows led from the bed to a narrow balcony, where planters with baby sunflowers and late tomatoes had been emptied. The flowers were still alive, growing in the dirt that had landed around them, but the tomatoes looked feeble.

  I tried to search for anything that might tell me where or when August had gone. I snapped pictures with my phone, close-ups of individual pieces of damage, wider shots of the general disarray. I started in the bedroom, then worked my way around the balcony and back to the main room.

  When I’d taken a few hundred shots, I returned to the bedroom and unfurled the bedclothes, laying them across the slit mattress. I didn’t see any bloodstains, either there or on the floor or furniture. Not that I travel with luminol and a UV light, but these weren’t subtle fingers at work, here or in Evanston.

  Bernie and Angela had said August wanted to make movies. I didn’t see any cameras or laptops, but that didn’t mean anything: the wreckers could have taken them, August could have left with them, even the cops might have lifted them, since the bagel eater said they’d been here yesterday.

  Looking around, I wondered if the police had really come. There wasn’t any crime-scene tape, nor the telltale silver dust of a fingerprint search.

  I sat back on my heels. There had to be something here that would give me a starting point. August owned books as well as CDs and DVDs. It seemed beside the point to worry about disturbing evidence; I just didn’t want to leave my own prints here. Using my coat sleeve, I picked up books, shook them to see if any useful notes slipped out, then closed them and put them back on their shelves. He had a solid collection of black writers: James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Malcolm X, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Angela Davis.

  My phone rang. I jumped up, hoping it was the building super, but it was only Bernie. I let it go to voice mail, but the call reminded me to check whether August was old-fashioned enough for a landline and voice mail.

  I didn’t find any jacks or dismembered phones: like his peers, he did everything via cell towers. I came upon an artist’s sketchbook. I didn’t touch it with my hands but lifted some of the pages with a kitchen knife. The book seemed to be a kind of artist’s diary, where August wrote down story ideas and made rough drawings of sets.

  I found a garbage bag in one of the open kitchen drawers and slipped the book inside. I also took some of the unlabeled DVDs, hoping they might include August’s own film efforts. Perhaps he’d been filming something dangerous and the perpetrators had come hunting him, first at the gym and then in his own apartment. Perhaps it would be exciting footage of weddings and bar mitzvahs. Maybe I’d offload them onto Bernie and Angela—it would keep them occupied, keep them from buzzing around me demanding to know what I was doing.

  As I made a last circuit of the rooms, I stopped to study the outsize film posters on the walls. Oscar Micheaux held pride of place over the bed, with a poster for Within Our Gates. Facing him was Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl.

  I squinted to study the paper through the glare on the glass covers—the posters looked like originals, but along with luminol I lacked paper-authenticating equipment. And expertise.

  Kasi Lemmons and Gordon Parks were in the main room. Emerald Ferring, in Pride of Place, faced the entryway. Her portrait, the expression alo
of, filled most of the poster, with a small inset of her in prison garb, presumably a scene from the movie. It was different from the others because it was signed.

  “August, I believe in you: believe in yourself,” she’d written in small, neat letters along the right side and then signed her name with a flourish that covered most of the bottom of the frame. I’d never heard of Emerald Ferring or Pride of Place, but that didn’t mean anything: I’m not a pop-culture maven like Alan Banks or Rebus.

  The ruined apartment seemed to be draining my self-confidence—no luminol, no paper expertise, ignorant of pop culture. There must be something I was good at.

  Jorge Baros, the building super, came up the walk as I was leaving the building. He was a tall, lean man, with the noble face of an Afghan hound. Incongruously, he was followed by a small white terrier, who sniffed at my jeans legs but sat at a hand sign from Baros.

  The super knew about the wreck of August’s apartment—he’d been the person who called the police. “And that was yesterday. Why is only today a detective coming?”

  “I’m private, not with the police.”

  “Ah, private. Someone has hired you to solve this crime?”

  “Someone has asked me to find Mr. Veriden. I didn’t know about the break-in until I got here this morning. It doesn’t look as though the police did much yesterday.”

  Baros spit. “The police did nothing. They asked was Mr. Veriden often fighting with his lovers, and I said he was always quiet, not a fighting kind of man. And always very neat. Whenever I go into his apartment—which is only when there is a problem, I am not spying, believe me, but sometimes I must fix a radiator or a refrigerator—everything is clean, orderly. The flowers—those broke my heart. He cares for his flowers, and they bring cheer to the apartment. He knows my wife is not well, and often he gives me flowers for her. What has happened to him? They did not harm him, did they?”

  I spread my hands, universal sign of bafflement. “The night before Halloween, there was a major act of vandalism at a big Evanston gym where he works. Police think he was stealing their drug supply, but his apartment looks as though someone was trying to find something.”