Photo Finish (9781101537510)

by Paretsky, Sara

  Even I used to read the reports that filtered from the National Enquirer into People and the daily papers after the star-studded wedding in the Reveres’ picturesque private chapel. Following the wedding, Jim Banidore and Lady Helen moved back to America, dividing their time between New York and Charleston. About the time the kid was born, the tabloids began screaming that Banidore hung out in leather bars when he was in New York. Old Mrs. Banidore tried suing the Star over a photo of Jim in an embrace with a man in a motorcycle bar, but the matter was quietly dropped a few months later.

  If Lady Helen was disconsolate at her husband’s behavior, she hid it well. She’d been a lively member of the international nightclub scene before her marriage; after Andrew’s birth she took up with her old playmates. The divorce was messy—old Mrs. Banidore tried to claim Andrew wasn’t even Jim’s son, but the terms of the family trust apparently made it important for Jim to have a male child, so he swore an affadavit of paternity.

  Lady Helen’s alimony, estimated at a hundred thousand dollars a month, depended on her never breathing a word about her husband’s extracurricular activities. If she remarried, of course the alimony stopped, but old Mrs. Banidore also got the family lawyers to insert a clause that gave her custody of the kid if the Banidores could prove Lady Helen was sleeping with other men.

  This last clause lashed the paparazzi into a competitive frenzy. They staked out her apartment on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré; they followed her skiing in the French Alps and the Canadian Rockies; they zoomed on her nude sunbathing in the Virgin Islands. When she went on safari in Kenya with Italian racer Egidio Berni as part of the group, the photographers followed in a helicopter. That was where Lady Helen died.

  The Herald-Star hadn’t paid much attention to Lady Helen, since she didn’t have a natural following in Chicago, but of course they’d covered her death. I flipped through Sherman’s files to read the front-page story.

  Lady Helen’s safari was spending a week at a luxury lodge, from which they took day or night trips to study animals. It sounded like fun: They even followed elephants on their nocturnal treks into mineral caves.

  In deference to the divorce decree, Berni stayed in one suite, Lady Helen and young Andrew in another. One evening Berni and Lady Helen decided to go for a sunset drive. An enterprising photographer had bribed one of the guides to let him know if Lady Helen and Berni were ever alone; the helicopter caught up with the Land Rover three miles from the lodge. Berni took off, hurtling the Rover across the veldt, and smashed into a rhinoceros. He and Lady Helen were killed instantly.

  Some moron brought young Andrew to the crash site, and the Herald-Star had used a photograph of the white-faced boy kneeling by his dead mother, cradling her head on his knees.

  I would have to be brain-dead not to know that the boy was my client as a child. And I’d have to be even deader not to figure Hunter Davenport for the photographer in the chopper.

  “So Andrew Banidore hired me to find one of the men who drove his mother to her death. Or who he thinks drove her to her death. And then what? He lay in wait like James Bond to—”

  I stood up so fast, I knocked half the photos off Sherman’s table. When he squawked a protest, I was already out the door. I shouted, “I’ll call you,” over my shoulder and ran down the hall to the street.

  I’d been an idiot. James Bond. The glimpse I thought I’d had of my client on the L platform two days ago. The guy in the car behind me yesterday morning. My client had tracked me while I located Hunter Davenport. When I’d found Davenport for him, my client breathed threatening messages over the phone until he fled the apartment, then chased him to Uptown, where he ran him over.

  V. I. Warshawski, ace detective. Ace imbecile.

  VI

  The Trefoil’s tiny lobby was filled with luggage and travelers. The receptionist on duty was settling bills and handing towels and keys to joggers while juggling two phones. I took a towel with a smiled thanks and slipped into the elevator behind two lean, sweat-covered men in shorts and cropped tops.

  On the fifth floor I knelt in front of 508 and probed the keyhole. I was in an agony of tension—if some other guest should come out—the maid—if Andrew Banidore had left and a stranger lay in the bed. The guest doors had nice, sturdy old-fashioned locks, the kind that look impressive on the outside but only have three tumblers. In another two minutes, I was inside the room.

  Lying there in bed, Andrew Banidore looked almost like his mother’s twin. The white-gold hair fell away from his face, which was soft with the slackness of sleep.

  “Andrew!” I called sharply from the doorway.

  He stirred and turned over, but a night spent tracking his subject through Uptown had apparently left him exhausted. I went to the bed and shook him roughly.

  When his wistful blue-gray eyes finally blinked open, I said, “He’s not dead. Does that upset you?”

  “He’s not?” His voice was thick with sleep. “But I—” He woke completely and sat up, his face white. “How did you get in here? What are you talking about?”

  “You were too tired when you got in to lock the door, I guess.” I sat on the edge of the bed. “You’ve got five minutes before I call the cops. Better make good use of them.”

  “What are you going to tell them? How you broke into my hotel room?”

  “I’m going to tell them to look for the blue Toyota that hit Hunter Davenport early this morning. If you rented it, that’ll be easy, because you had to show someone a driver’s license. If you stole it, it’ll still have your fingerprints on it.”

  I went to the bureau and rifled through the documents on top. He was traveling on a British passport. He had a first-class ticket on Air France, with an open return date. He had a rental agreement with one of the big chains for a blue Toyota. His wallet held an American driver’s license issued by the state of South Carolina, a variety of credit cards, and two photos of his mother.

  “Put those pictures down.”

  I held them between my fingers, as if poised to tear them. “You can always get more. Most photographed woman in the world and all. There are a million pictures of her lying around. I just saw twenty-eight of them.”

  “She gave those to me. I can’t get more that she gave me.”

  He was out of bed and across the room so fast, I just had time to slip the pictures into my shirt pocket. He tried to fight me for them, but I was dressed and he wasn’t. I stood on his left foot until he stopped punching at me.

  “I’ll return them when you give me a few answers. You have lived in South Carolina, and your mother was killed in a car accident in South Africa. Did you happen to tell me anything else true? Is your grandmother dead? What about all those other tobacco-smoking Banidores? You really an orphan?”

  He pulled on a pair of jeans and looked at me sullenly. “I hate them all. The way they talk about her, they were so happy when she died. It was as if all their dreams came true at once. The fact that Jim died of AIDS five years after I had to go live in fucking stupid Charleston—I wasn’t supposed to mention that. Poor, dear Jim picked up a virus in Africa when he went out to get Andrew, they told all their friends at the country club. We should never have allowed Helen to keep the boy to begin with. Then all my he-man cousins made my life miserable claiming she was a whore and I wasn’t even one of the family. As if I wanted to be related to that houseful of cretins.”

  “Did you kill your grandmother?”

  He gave a hoarse bark of laughter. “If I’d thought of it in time. No, she died the old-fashioned way: of a stroke.”

  “So what made you decide to go after Davenport?”

  “I always meant to. Ever since the day she died. Chasing her all over Europe. It was a game to him. She didn’t have a life. She knew she’d lose me to those damn Banidores if she ever got caught with another man, and I was the one person she really loved. I was
the only one she care about losing.

  “She was trying to protect our life together, and he—that Davenport—he was trying to destroy it. For twenty-four hours he got a taste of what that was like, how it feels when someone knows where you are and is following you. I missed him when he snuck out of that apartment building last night, but when the lady yelled he wasn’t home, I found him at the bus stop. He got on a bus, and I followed the bus. He got off and went into a bar. I went in behind him. But it wasn’t enough he was scared. I told him who I was, what he’d done, and he tried to tell me it was a job. Just a job. He killed my mother, he ruined my life, and he thought I should slap him on the back and say, ‘Tough luck, old sport, but a man’s gotta do . . .’ and all that crap.

  “That was when I couldn’t take it anymore. I got into the car. He started to go back into the bar and I couldn’t stand it. I just drove up on the sidewalk and— I should have gone straight to the airport and taken the first flight out, but my passport and ticket and everything were still here. Besides, I never thought you’d find out before I left this afternoon.”

  I leaned against the door and looked down at him. “You never thought. You are an extremely lucky guy: Hunter Davenport is going to live. But he has very expensive hospital bills and no insurance. You are going to pay every dime of those bills. If you don’t, then I am suddenly going to find evidence that links you to that Toyota. The cursory washing they give it at the rental place— Believe me, traces of Davenport’s blood will be on it a long time. Do you understand?”

  He nodded fractionally. “Now give me back my pictures.”

  “I want to hear you say it. I want to know that you understand what you’ve agreed to.”

  He shut his eyes. “I agree to pay Hunter Davenport’s hospital bills. I agree to look after the man who killed my mother. I agree to live in hell the rest of my life.”

  I wanted to say something, something consoling, or maybe heartening: Let it go, move on. But his face was so pinched with pain, I couldn’t bear to look at him. I put the snapshots on his knee and let myself out.

  Click here for more books by this author

  Read on for an excerpt from Sara Paretsky’s

  latest V. I. Warshawski novel,

  BODY WORK

  Available in paperback from Signet Select.

  PRAISE FOR

  BODY WORK

  “Paretsky’s plotting is always ingenious. . . . The subplots and main story always come together in a seamless, satisfying way. . . . Body Work is as fine a work as ever in the Warshawski canon.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Superb. . . . This strong outing shows why the tough, fiercely independent, dog-loving private detective continues to survive.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A new V. I. Warshawski novel is always a cause for celebration. . . . Paretsky’s the queen of the hard-boiled for good reasons. Her characters are ordinary people. Her dialogue is pitch-perfect.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “Paretsky plays out her trademark political and social themes not with rhetoric, but with a compelling story of lives shattered by pride, greed, and fear of the unknown.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Body Work isn’t just a satisfying whodunit; it’s a rich, well-written why-dunit, striking some surprising chords that will resonate long after you finish the final page.”

  —St. Louis Post Dispatch

  “Teriffic. . . . Paretsky is careful and conscientious, even her subplots are loaded with provocative ideas.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  Nadia Guaman died in my arms. Seconds after I left Club Gouge, I heard gunshots, screams, squealing tires, from the alley behind the building. I ran across the parking lot, slipping on gravel and ruts, and found Nadia crumpled on the dirty ice. Blood was flowing from her chest in a thick tide.

  I ripped off my scarf and opened her coat. The wound was high in her chest—too high, I knew that—but I still made a pad of my scarf and pressed it against her. Keeping pressure on the pad, I struggled out of my coat and placed it under her. Left hand on chest, right hand underneath, pushing my coat against the exit wound. Without looking up or stopping the pressure, I shouted at the people surging around us to call 911, now, at once.

  Nadia’s eyes flickered open as I cradled her. The ghost of a smile flickered at the sides of her wide mouth. “Alley. Alley.”

  “Shhh, Nadia, save your strength.”

  I thought it was a good sign, a hopeful sign, that she spoke, and I kept pushing against her wound, singing snatches of a cradle song, trying to keep us both calm. When the paramedics arrived and pried my hands free from her wounds, they shook their heads. She’d been dead for several minutes already.

  I started to shiver. It was only when the medics forced me to my feet that I felt the January wind cut into my bones. The medics brought me into the ambulance but left Nadia lying on the ground, waiting for a tech team to photograph her. The crew wrapped a blanket around me and gave me hot sweet coffee from their own thermos.

  “You did the best that could be done. No one could have done more.” The tech was short and muscular, with wiry red hair. “She was bleeding out within minutes of being shot. I’m guessing the bullet nicked a major vein, but the ME will tell us more. Was she a friend?”

  I shook my head. We’d barely spoken, and at that point, in fact, I only knew her first name.

  A cop poked his head through the open ambulance door. “You the gal that put her coat on the dead girl?”

  Dead woman, I started to say, but I was too exhausted to fight that battle tonight. Nadia was dead, and whatever one called her, it wouldn’t bring her back to life. I didn’t move from the bench facing the stretcher but croaked out a yes.

  “Can we talk inside, ma’am?” the cop said. “The EMTs are going to take the dead girl to the morgue as soon as the photo team is through, and it’s five degrees here in the parking lot.”

  I handed the blanket back to the ambulance crew and let the cop give me a hand as I jumped off the back. Nadia was lying where I’d left her, her face silver under the blue strobes, the blood on her chest black. My coat was still underneath her. I walked over and fished my car and house keys from the pockets despite cries from the evidence team. My handbag was lying a few feet from the “dead woman,” I muttered out loud. I picked up the bag, also against the outraged shouts of the officer in charge.

  “That’s evidence.”

  “It’s my handbag, which I dropped when I was performing first aid. You don’t need it and I do.”

  I turned on my heel and walked back into the Club Gouge. The bag was handmade from red leather, an apology of sorts from the friend of a dead client, and I wasn’t going to risk losing it or my wallet in an evidence locker.

  Everyone who’d been in the club or the parking lot, except those crafty enough to escape ahead of the team in blue, had been herded into the building. A minute before, I’d been too cold, but the club atmosphere, hot, nearly airless, made me ill. I started to sweat and fought a rising tide of nausea.

  The club staff, including my cousin Petra, was huddled by the bar. After a moment, when I decided I wasn’t going to vomit, I shoved my way through the crowd to Petra’s side.

  “Vic, what happened?” Petra’s blue eyes were wide with fear. “You’re covered with blood.”

  I looked down and saw Nadia’s blood on my jeans and sweater, on my hands. My scalp crawled: Maybe her blood was in my hair.

  “Someone shot a woman as she left the club,” I said.

  “Was it— Who was it?”

  “I heard her called Nadia,” I said slowly, fixing Petra with a hard stare. “I don’t know if that’s her name, and I don’t know her last name. If the cops, or a reporter, ask you questions about what happened tonigh
t, you can answer only truthfully about things you actually know and saw. You shouldn’t answer questions about things that are just guesses because that could mislead the cops.”

  “It would be best if you don’t consult the other witnesses,” a voice said.

  A female officer had fought through the shouting, texting, Twittering chaos to appear at my side.

  Under the club lights, I could see her face, narrow, with pronounced cheekbones, and lank black hair cut so short the ends only just appeared below her cap rim. I read her badge: E. Milkova. E. Milkova didn’t look much older than my cousin, too young to be a cop, too young to be telling me what to do. But—she had the badge. I let her guide me to the small stage at the back of the club, which the police had roped off with crime scene tape so they could use it for interrogations. She lifted the tape so I could crawl under, then dragged a couple of chairs from the nearest table. I reached a hand out and took one of them from her.

  I was in that numb place you inhabit after you’ve been part of violence and death. It was hard to focus on Milkova’s questions. I gave her my name. I told her I’d heard gunshots and run to see what the problem was. I told her I didn’t know the dead woman.

  “But you knew her name,” Milkova said.

  “That was just from hearing someone call her Nadia. I don’t know her last name.”

  “Most people run away from gunshots.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You ran toward them.”

  I still didn’t say anything, and she frowned at me.

  “Why?”

  “Why, which?” I said.

  “Why did you run toward danger?”

  When I was younger and more insouciant, I would have quoted the late great Philip Marlowe and said, “Trouble is my business,” but tonight I was cold and apprehensive. “I don’t know.”