Women on the Case

by Sara Paretsky

  Queenie and Sal grew up together, which may be why I got Gold Coast treatment that night, but not even her private reserve Veuve Clicquot could take the bad taste from my mouth. If I’d beaten up Macauley I’d have looked like the brute she and Barnett were labeling me; but taking a faceful of champagne sitting down left me looking—and feeling—helpless.

  “You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you, Vic?” Sal said as she dropped me off around two in the morning. “’Cause if you are I’m baby-sitting you, girlfriend.”

  “No. I’m not going to do anything rash, if that’s what you mean. But I’m going to nail that prize bitch, one way or another.”

  Twenty-four hours later Lisa Macauley was dead. One day after that I was in jail.

  III

  All I knew about Lisa’s murder was what I’d read in the papers before the cops came for me: Her personal trainer had discovered her body when he arrived Friday morning for their usual workout. She had been beaten to death in what looked like a bloody battle, which is why the state’s attorney finally let me go—they couldn’t find the marks on me they were looking for. And they couldn’t find any evidence in my home or office.

  They kept insisting, though, that I had gone to her apartment late Thursday night. They asked me about it all night long on Friday without telling me why they were so sure. When Freeman Carter, my lawyer, finally sprang me Saturday afternoon he forced them to tell him: the doorman was claiming he admitted me to Lisa’s apartment just before midnight on Thursday.

  Freeman taxed me with it on the ride home. “The way she was carrying on it would have been like you to demand a face-to-face with her, Vic. Don’t hold out on me—I can’t defend you if you were there and won’t tell me about it.”

  “I wasn’t there,” I said flatly. “I am not prone to blackouts or hallucinations: there is no way I could have gone there and forgotten it. I was blamelessly watching the University of Kansas men pound Duke on national television. I even have a witness: My golden retriever shared a pizza with me. Her testimony: She threw up cheese sauce in front of my bed Friday morning.”

  Freeman ignored that. “Sal told me about the dust-up at Corona’s. Anyway, Stacey Cleveland, Macauley’s publicist, had already bared all to the police. You’re the only person they can locate who had reason to be killing mad with her.”

  “Then they’re not looking, are they? Someone either pretended to be me, or else bribed the doorman to tell the cops I was there. Get me the doorman’s name and I’ll sort out which it was.”

  “I can’t do that, Vic: you’re in enough trouble without suborning the state’s key witness.”

  “You’re supposed to be on my side,” I snapped. “You want to go into court with evidence or not?”

  “I’ll talk to the doorman, Vic: you go take a bath—jail doesn’t smell very good on you.”

  I followed Freeman’s advice only because I was too tired to do anything else. After that I slept the clock around, waking just before noon on Sunday. The phone had been ringing when I walked in on Saturday. It was Murray, wanting my exclusive story. I put him off and switched the phone to my answering service. In the morning I had forty-seven messages from various reporters. When I started outside to get the Sunday papers I found a camera crew parked in front of the building. I retreated, fetched my coat and an overnight bag, and went out the back way. My car was parked right in front of the camera van, so I walked the three miles to my new office.

  When the Pulteney Building went under the wrecking ball last April I’d moved my business to a warehouse on the edge of Wicker Park, at the comer of Milwaukee Avenue and North. Fringe galleries and nightspots compete with liquor stores and palm readers for air here, and there are a lot of vacant lots, but it was ten minutes—by car, bus, or L—from the heart of the financial district where most of my business lies. A sculpting friend had moved her studio into a revamped warehouse; the day after visiting her I signed a five-year lease across the hall. I had twice my old space at two-thirds the rent. Since I’d had to refurnish—from Dumpsters and auctions—I’d put in a daybed behind a partition: I could camp out here for a few days until media interest in me cooled.

  I bought the Sunday papers from one of the liquor stores on my walk. The Sun-Times concentrated on Macauley’s career, including a touching history of her childhood in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. She’d been the only child of older parents. Her father, Joseph, had died last year at the age of eighty, but her mother, Louise, still lived in the house where Lisa had grown up. The paper showed a frame bungalow with a porch swing and a minute garden, as well as a tearful Louise Macauley in front of Lisa’s doll collection (“I’ve kept the room the way it looked when she left for college,” the caption read).

  Her mother never wanted her going off to the University of Wisconsin. “Even though we raised her with the right values, and sent her to church schools, the university is a terrible place. She wouldn’t agree, though, and now look what’s happened.”

  The Tribune had a discreet sidebar on Lisa’s recent contretemps with me. In the Herald-Star Murray published the name of the doorman who had admitted “someone claiming to be V.I. Warshawski” to Macauley’s building. It was Reggie Whitman. He’d been the doorman since the building went up in 1978, was a grandfather, a church deacon, coached a basketball team at the Henry Horner Homes, and was generally so virtuous that truth radiated from him like a beacon.

  Murray also had talked with Lisa’s ex-husband, Brian Gerstein, an assistant producer for one of the local network news stations. He was appropriately grief-stricken at his ex-wife’s murder. The picture supplied by Gerstein’s publicist showed a man in his mid-thirties with a TV smile but anxious eyes.

  I called Beth Blacksin, the reporter at Channel 13 who’d filled me in on what little I’d learned about Lisa Macauley before her death.

  “Vic! Where are you? We’ve got a camera crew lurking outside your front door hoping to talk to you!”

  “I know, babycakes. And talk to me you shall, as soon as I find out who set me up to take the fall for Lisa Macauley’s death. So give me some information now and it shall return to you like those famous loaves of bread.”

  Beth wanted to dicker but the last two weeks had case-hardened my temper. She finally agreed to talk with the promise of a reward in the indefinite future.

  Brian Gerstein had once worked at Channel 13, just as he had for every other news station in town. “He’s a loser, Vic: I’m not surprised Lisa dumped him when she started to get successful. He’s the kind of guy who would sit around dripping into his coffee because you were out-earning him, moaning, trying to get you to feel sorry for him. People hire him because he’s a good tape editor, but then they give him the shove because he gets the whole newsroom terminally depressed.”

  “You told me last week they met up at UW when they were students there in the eighties. Where did they go next?”

  Beth had to consult her files, but she came back on the line in a few minutes with more details. Gerstein came from Long Island. He met Lisa when they were both Wisconsin juniors, campaigning for Reagan’s first election in 1980. They’d married five years later, just before moving to Chicago. Politics and TV kept them together for seven years after that.

  Gary rented an apartment in Rogers Park on the far north side of the city. “And that’s typical of him,” Beth added as she gave me his address. “He won’t own a home since they split up: he can’t afford it, his life was ruined and he doesn’t feel like housekeeping, I’ve heard a dozen different whiny reasons from him. Not that everyone has to own, but you don’t have to rent a run-down apartment in gangbanger territory when you work for the networks, either.”

  “So he could have been peevish enough to kill Lisa?”

  “You’re assuming he swathed himself in skirts and furs and told Reggie Whitman he was V.I. Warshawski? It would take more—more gumption than he’s got to engineer something like that. It’s not a bad theory, though: maybe we’ll float it on the four o�
��clock news. Give us something different to talk about than all the other guys. Stay in touch, Vic. I’m willing to believe you’re innocent, but it’d make a better story if you’d killed her.”

  “Thanks, Blacksin.” I laughed as I hung up: her enthusiasm was without malice.

  I took the L up to Rogers Park, the slow Sunday milk run. Despite Beth’s harangue, it’s an interesting part of town. Some blocks you do see dopers hanging out, some streets have depressing amounts of garbage in the yards, but most of the area harks back to the Chicago of my childhood: tidy brick two-flats, hordes of immigrants in the parks speaking every known language and along with them, delis and coffee shops for every nationality.

  Gerstein lived on one of the quiet side streets. He was home, as I’d hoped: staking out an apartment without a car would have been miserable work on a cold February day. He even let me in without too much fuss. I told him I was a detective, and showed him my license, but he didn’t seem to recognize my name—he must not have been editing the programs dealing with his ex-wife’s murder. Or he’d been so stricken he’d edited them without registering anything.

  He certainly exuded misery as he escorted me up the stairs. Whether it was grief or guilt for Lisa, or just the chronic depression Beth attributed to him, he moved as though on the verge of falling over. He was a little taller than I, but slim. Swathed in a coat and shawls he might have looked like a woman to the nightman.

  Gerstein’s building was clean and well maintained, but his own apartment was sparely furnished, as though he expected to move on at any second. The only pictures on the walls were a couple of framed photographs—one of himself and Lisa with Ronald Reagan, and the other with a man I didn’t recognize. He had no drapes or plants or anything else to bring a bit of color to the room, and when he invited me to sit he pulled a metal folding chair from a closet for me.

  “I always relied on Lisa to fix things up,” he said. “She has so much vivacity and such good taste. Without her I can’t seem to figure out how to do it.”

  “I thought you’d been divorced for years.” I tossed my coat onto the card table in the middle of the room.

  “Yes, but I’ve only been living here nine months. She let me keep our old condo, but last summer I couldn’t make the payments. She said she’d come around to help me fix this up, only she’s so busy …” His voice trailed off.

  I wondered how he ever sold himself to his various employers—I found myself wanting to shake him out like a pillow and plump him up. “So you and Lisa stayed in touch?”

  “Oh, sort of. She was too busy to call much, but she’d talk to me sometimes when I phoned.”

  “So you didn’t have any hard feelings about your divorce?”

  “Oh, I did. I never wanted to split up—it was all her idea. I kept hoping, but now, you know, it’s too late.”

  “I suppose a woman as successful as Lisa met a lot of men.”

  “Yes, yes she certainly did.” His voice was filled with admiration, not hate.

  I was beginning to agree with Beth, that Gerstein couldn’t possibly have killed Lisa. What really puzzled me was what had ever attracted her to him in the first place, but the person who could figure out the hows and whys of attraction would put Ann Landers out of business overnight.

  I went through the motions with him—did he get a share in her royalties?—yes, on the first book, because she’d written that while they were still together. When she wanted a divorce his lawyer told him he could probably get a judgment entitling him to fifty percent of all her proceeds, even in the future, but he loved Lisa, he wanted her to come back to him, he wasn’t interested in being vindictive. Did he inherit under Lisa’s will? He didn’t think so, I’d have to ask her attorney. Did he knew who her residuary legatee was? Some conservative foundations they both admired.

  I got up to go. “Who do you think killed your wife, ex-wife?”

  “I thought they’d arrested someone, that dick Claud Barnett says was harassing her.”

  “You know Barnett? Personally, I mean?” All I wanted was to divert him from thinking about me—even in his depression he might have remembered hearing my name on the air—but he surprised me.

  “Yeah. That is, Lisa does. Did. We went to a conservative media convention together right after we moved here. Barnett was the keynote speaker. She got all excited, said she’d known him growing up but his name was something different then. After that she saw him every now and then. She got him to take his picture with us a couple of years later, at another convention in Sun Valley.”

  He jerked his head toward the wail where the photographs hung. I went over to look at them. I knew the Gipper’s famous smile pretty well by heart so I concentrated on Barnett. I was vaguely aware of his face: he was considered so influential in the nation’s swing rightward that his picture kept popping up in news magazines. A man of about fifty, he was lean and well groomed, and usually smiling with affable superiority.

  In Sun Valley he must have eaten something that disagreed with him. He had an arm around Lisa and her husband, stiffly, as if someone had propped plyboard limbs against his trunk. Lisa was smiling gaily, happy to be with the media darling. Brian was holding himself upright and looking close to jovial. But Claud gave you the idea that thumbscrews had been hammered under his plywood nails to get him into the photo.

  “What name had Lisa known him by as a child?” I asked.

  “Oh, she was mistaken about that. Once she got to see him up close she realized it was only a superficial resemblance. But Barnett took a shine to her—most people did, she was so vivacious—and gave her a lot of support in her career. He was the first big booster of her Nan Carruthers novels.”

  “He doesn’t look very happy to be with her here, does he? Can I borrow it? It’s a very good one of Lisa, and I’d like to use it in my inquiries.”

  Brian said in a dreary voice that he thought Lisa’s publicist would have much better ones, but he was easy to persuade—or bully, to call my approach by its real name. I left with the photo carefully draped in a dish towel, and a written promise to return it as soon as possible.

  I trotted to the Jarvis L stop, using the public phone there to call airlines. I found one that not only sent kiddie planes from O’Hare to Rhinelander, Wisconsin, but had a flight leaving in two hours. The state’s attorney had told me not to leave the jurisdiction. Just in case they’d put a stop on me at the airport, I booked a flight under my mother’s maiden name and embarked on the tedious L journey back to the Loop and out to the airport.

  IV

  Lisa’s new book, Slaybells Ring, was stacked high at the airport bookstores. The black enamel cover with an embossed spray of bells in silver drew the eye. At the third stand I passed I finally gave in and bought a copy.

  The flight was a long puddle-jumper, making stops in Milwaukee and Wausau on its way north. By the time we reached Rhinelander I was approaching the denouement, where the head of the American Civil Liberties Union was shown to be opposing the display of a Christmas creche at City Hall because he secretly owned a company that was trying to put the creche’s manufacturer out of business. Nan Carruthers, owing to her wide and loyal band of radio fans, got the information from an employee the ACLU baddie had fired after thirty years of loyal service when the employee was found listening to Nan’s show on his lunch break. The book had a three-hanky ending at midnight mass, where Nan joined the employee—now triumphantly reinstated (thanks to the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by the EEOC and the ACLU, but Lisa Macauley hadn’t thought that worth mentioning)—along with his wife and their nine children in kneeling in front of the public creche.

  I finished the book around one in the morning in the Rhinelander Holiday Inn. The best-written part treated a subplot between Nan and the man who gave her career its first important boost—the pastor of the heroine’s childhood church who had become a successful televangelist. When Nan was a child he had photographed her and other children in his Sunday school class engaged
in forced sex with one another and with him. Since he held an awful fear of eternal damnation over their heads they never told their parents. But when Nan started her broadcast career she persuaded him to plug her program on his Thursday night “Circle of the Saved,” using covert blackmail threats to get him to do so. At the end, as she looks at the baby Jesus in the manger, she wonders what Mary would have done—forgiven the pastor, or exposed him? Certainly not collaborated with him to further her own career. The book ended on that troubled note. I went to sleep with more respect for Macauley’s craft than I had expected.

  In the morning I found Mrs. Joseph Macauley’s address in the local phone book and went off to see her. Although now in her mid-seventies she carried herself well. She didn’t greet me warmly, but she accepted without demur my identification of myself as a detective trying to find Lisa’s murderer. Chicago apparently was so convinced that I was the guilty party, they hadn’t bothered to send anyone up to interview her.

  “I am tired of all those Chicago reporters bothering me, but if you’re a detective I guess I can answer your questions. What’d you want to know? I can tell you all about Lisa’s childhood, but we didn’t see so much of her once she moved off to Madison. We weren’t too happy about some of the friends she was making. Not that we have anything against Jews personally, but we didn’t want our only child marrying one and getting involved in all those dirty financial deals. Of course we were happy he was working for Ronald Reagan, but we weren’t sorry they split up, even though our church frowns on divorce.”

  I let her talk unguided for a time before pulling out the picture of Claud Barnett. “This is someone Lisa knew as a child. Do you recognize him?”

  Mrs. Macauley took the photo from me. “Do you think I’m not in possession of my faculties? That’s Claud Barnett. He certainly never lived around here.”