Guardian Angel

by Sara Paretsky

  CRITICS ARE CALLING

  GUARDIAN ANGEL

  “PARETSKY’S BEST WARSHAWSKI NOVEL.”* HERE’S WHY …

  “RICH IN CHARACTER AND ATMOSPHERE … GUARDIAN ANGEL shows Vic in a different, somewhat softer light. She’s certainly not mellow, but refreshingly introspective, and uncharacteristically vulnerable.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “AMONG TODAY’S P.I.’S NOBODY COMES CLOSE TO WARSHAWSKI!”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “SUSPENSE RARELY FLAGS … densely textured, adroitly plotted, and one of the author’s best.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “V. I. WARSHAWSKI IS THAT RARITY AMONG FICTIVE P.I.’S—A FULLY REALIZED CHARACTER … Sara Paretsky’s sensitivity and moral perspective, coupled with her fine talent, make her a significant American novelist.”

  —Mostly Murder

  “WITH EACH NOVEL PARETSKY LETS INTREPID DETECTIVE V. I. WABSHAWSKI (AKA ‘VIC’) TAKE A FEW MORE PHYSICAL LUMPS, THOUGH THE MORE INTERESTING DINGS ARE EMOTIONAL ONES. Here Paretsky constructs and maintains one monster of a plot.… The author’s gift for finding the precise urban setting and crafting her narrative jigsaw puzzle with unerring accuracy remains intact.”

  —Booklist

  “EVENTFUL … DRAMATIC … Sara Paretsky has hit the big time … she gets better and better!”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “GUARDIAN ANGEL is a good detective story and an even better novel, welcome news for the reader who wants more than just a plausible whodunit.”

  —Boston Sunday Globe

  “What a long way this Vic has traveled. Makes you want to go more of the distance with her!”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  *Chicago Sun-Times

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  Copyright © 1992 by Sara Paretsky

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

  The trademark Dell® is registered in the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-48571-7

  v3.1

  “Tread softly, because you tread on [their] dreams.”

  —W. B. Yeats

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  1 Sex and the Single Girl

  2 Black Tie Optional

  3 Feeding Frenzy

  4 Rye on Eggs

  5 Just a Neighborhood Lynch Mob

  6 Down and Out on Racine Avenue

  7 Signing Up a New Client

  8 Extinguish Your Troubles

  9 Diamond in the Rough

  10 Going to the Dogs

  11 Man Bites Dog

  12 Whom Bruce Has Led—Welcome to Your Gory Bed

  13 Filial Piety

  14 Luther Revisited

  15 Step Aside, Sisyphus

  16 Showdown at the OK Morgue

  17 Another Chicago Float Fish

  18 Not the Jewel in the Crown

  19 The Prodigal Son

  20 Legal Enterprise

  21 Throwing a Friend to the Wolves

  22 Bedside Watch

  23 Stiffed by Technology

  24 The Labors of Hercules

  25 Sticking to the Ribs

  26 Bad Girls Stay Out Late

  27 Down the Street and Through the Diner

  28 Paragon of Virtue?

  29 Drinking with the Idle Rich

  30 Boardinghouse Reach

  31 Creeping Up on a Plant

  32 Swinging Evening

  33 Recollections of a Midnight Swim

  34 The Strong Arm of the Law

  35 Hangover from a Hard Day’s Night

  36 Last Will and Testament

  37 A Chicken for Mr. Contreras

  38 An Old Husband Surfaces

  39 Postmarital Upset

  40 No Longer Missing

  41 A New Breed of Banker

  42 Needling the Fourth Estate

  43 High-Voltage Marketing Plan

  44 Terminal Call

  45 A New Profession Beckons

  46 New Duds—But Not from Saks

  47 A Short in the System

  48 Off the Hook

  49 When Top Management Talks …

  50 Saint Stevenson and the Truck

  51 Just Deserts—or Whatever—for the Guilty

  52 Tying Knots

  53 Subterranean Homesick Blues

  54 A Long Way from Home

  Dedication

  Thanks

  Other Books by This Author

  1

  Sex and the Single Girl

  Hot kisses covered my face, dragging me from deep sleep to the rim of consciousness. I groaned and slid deeper under the covers, hoping to sink back into the well of dreams. My companion wasn’t in the humor for rest; she burrowed under the blankets and continued to lavish urgent affection on me.

  When I covered my head with a pillow she started to mew piteously. Now thoroughly awake, I rolled over and glared at her. “It’s not even five-thirty. You can’t possibly want to get up.”

  She paid no attention, either to my words or my efforts to dislodge her from my chest, but looked at me intently, her brown eyes opened wide, her mouth parted slightly to show the tip of her pink tongue.

  I bared my teeth at her. She licked my nose anxiously. I sat up, pushing her head away from my face. “It was this indiscriminate distribution of your kisses that got you into this fix to begin with.”

  Happy to see me awake, Peppy lumbered down from the bed and headed for the door. She turned to see if I was following, making little whimpering noises in her impatience. I pulled a sweatshirt and shorts from the heap of clothes near the bed and padded on sleep-thickened legs to the back door. I fumbled with the triple locks. By that time Peppy was whimpering in earnest, but she managed to control herself while I got the door open. Breeding shows, I guess.

  I watched her down the three flights of stairs. Pregnancy had distended her sides and slowed her progress, but she made it to her spot by the back gate before relieving herself. When she was finished she didn’t take her usual tour of the yard to drive away cats and other marauders. Instead she waddled back to the stairs. She stopped outside the ground-floor door and let out a sharp bark.

  Fine. Let Mr. Contreras have her. He was my first-floor neighbor, part owner of the dog, and wholly responsible for her condition. Well, not wholly—that had been the work of a black Lab four doors up the street.

  Peppy had come into season the week I left town on the trail of an industrial sabotage problem. I arranged for a friend of mine, a furniture hauler with steel thews, to run her twice a day—on a short leash. When I told Mr. Contreras to expect Tim Streeter he was deeply wounded, although not, unfortunately, beyond words. Peppy was a perfectly trained dog who came when she was called, didn’t need to be on a leash; and anyway, who did I think I was, arranging for people to come walk her? If not for him she wouldn’t get any care at all, me being gone twenty hours out of twenty-four, I was leaving town, wasn’t I? Just another example of my neglect. And besides that, he was fitter than ninety percent of the young jerks I brought around.

  In a hurry to take off I hadn’t heard him out, just agreed that he was in terrific shape for seventy-seven, but asking him to humor me in the matter. It was only ten days later that I learned that Mr. Contreras had dismissed Ti
m the first time he showed up. The results, if disastrous, were utterly predictable.

  The old man met me dolefully when I returned from Kankakee for the weekend. “I just don’t know how it happened, doll. She’s always so good, always comes when she’s called, and this time she just tore away from me and headed down the street. My heart was in my throat, I thought my God, what if she gets hit, what if she gets lost or kidnapped, you know, you read about these labs that hire people to steal dogs off the streets or out of the yard, you never see your dog again and you don’t know what happened to her. I was so relieved when I caught up with her, my goodness, what could I ever have said to make you understand—”

  I snarled unsympathetically. “And what are you going to say to me about this business? You haven’t wanted to spay her, but you can’t control her when she’s in season. If you weren’t so bullheaded you would’ve admitted it and let Tim run her. I’ll tell you this much: I’m not going to spend my time looking for good homes for her damned offspring.”

  That brought a spurt of his own temper, which sent him back to his apartment with an angry slam of the door. I avoided him all day Saturday, but I knew we had to make up before I left town again—I couldn’t leave him in sole charge of a litter. Anyway, I’m too old myself to enjoy bearing a grudge. Sunday morning I went down to patch things up. I even stayed over on Monday so we could go to the vet together.

  We brought the dog in with the angry tension of the ill-assorted parents of a wayward teenager. The vet cheered me no end by telling me that goldens sometimes have as many as twelve puppies.

  “But since it’s her first litter it probably won’t be quite that large,” he added with a jolly laugh.

  I could tell that Mr. Contreras was delighted at the prospect of twelve little black-and-gold fur balls; I did eighty-five all the way back to Kankakee, dragging out my business there as long as possible.

  That had been two months ago. Now I was more or less resigned to Peppy’s fate, but I was much relieved that she seemed to be doing her nesting on the first floor. Mr. Contreras grumbled about the newspapers she shredded in her chosen spot behind his couch, but I knew he would have been unbearably hurt if she’d decided her den was in my apartment.

  This close to her due date she was spending almost all her time inside with him, but yesterday Mr. Contreras had gone to a Las Vegas Night that his old parish was running. He’d been involved in the planning for six months and didn’t want to miss it, but he called me twice to make sure Peppy hadn’t started into labor, and a third time at midnight to check whether I’d written down the phone number at the hall they’d rented. That third call was what was giving me malicious pleasure at her trying to wake him before six.

  The June sunshine was bright, but the early morning air was still chilly enough that my bare feet grew too cold to feel the porch floor. I went back inside without waiting for the old man to get up. I could hear Peppy’s muffled barks continuing as I kicked my shorts off and stumbled back into bed. My bare leg slid over a wet spot on the sheet. Blood. It couldn’t be mine so it had to be the dog’s.

  I pulled my shorts back on and dialed Mr. Contreras’s number. I had my knee socks and running shoes on before he answered, his voice hoarse beyond recognition.

  “You guys must have had a good old time last night,” I said brightly. “But you’d better get up and face the day—you’re about to become a grandfather again.”

  “Who is this?” he rasped. “If this is some kind of joke you oughtta know better than to call people at this time of morning and—”

  “It’s me,” I interrupted him. “V. I. Warshawski. Your upstairs neighbor, remember? Well, your little dog Peppy has been barking her head off outside your door for the last ten minutes. I believe she wants to come inside and have some puppies.”

  “Oh. Oh. It’s you, doll. What’s that about the dog? She’s barking at my back door. How long have you left her outside? She shouldn’t hang around out there barking when she’s this close to her time—she could catch a chill, you know.”

  I bit back various sarcastic remarks. “I found some blood spots in my bed just now. She may be getting ready to whelp. I’ll be right down to help you get things in order.”

  Mr. Contreras started in on a complicated set of instructions about what I should wear. These seemed so pointless that I hung up without ceremony and headed back outside.

  The vet had stressed that Peppy didn’t need any help with her delivery. If we got involved with her while she was in labor or picked up the firstborn puppies it could cause her enough anxiety that she might not be able to handle the rest on her own. I didn’t trust Mr. Contreras to remember in the excitement of the moment.

  The old man was just shutting the back door on Peppy when I got down to the landing. He gave me a harassed look through the glass and disappeared for a minute. When he finally opened the door he held an old workshirt out to me.

  “Put this on before you come inside.”

  I waved the shirt away. “This is my old sweatshirt; I’m not worried about what I may get on it.”

  “And I ain’t worried about your stupid wardrobe. It’s what you’ve got underneath it I care about. Or what you ain’t got underneath it.”

  I stared at him, astounded. “Since when do I need to put on a bra to look after the dog?”

  His leathery face turned a dull crimson. The very thought of female undergarments embarrasses him, let alone hearing their names spoken out loud.

  “It’s not because of the dog,” he said, agitated. “I tried telling you on the phone, but you hung up on me. I know how you like to go traipsing around the house, and it don’t bother me any as long as you’re decent, which generally speaking you are, but not everybody feels the same way. That’s a fact.”

  “You think the dog cares?” My voice went up half a register. “Who the hell else—Oh. You brought someone home with you last night from the gambling den. Well, well. Quite an evening for you, huh?” Normally I wouldn’t be so vulgar about someone’s private life, but I felt I owed the old man a lick or two after all the snooping he’d done on my male visitors during the last three years.

  He turned a deeper mahogany. “It ain’t what you think, doll. It ain’t like that at all. Fact is, it’s an old buddy of mine. Mitch Kruger. It’s been a real struggle for him, making ends meet since him and me retired, and now he’s been tossed out on his rear end, so he come home crying on my shoulder last night. Course, like I told him, he wouldn’t have to worry about his rent if he didn’t drink it first. But that’s neither here nor there. Point is, he’s never exactly kept his hands to himself, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know just what you mean,” I said. “And I promise that if the guy feels inflamed by my charms I will put him off without breaking his arm—in deference to our friendship and his age. Now, put your jacket away and let me see how Her Serene Dogginess is.”

  He wasn’t happy about it, but he grudgingly let me into the apartment. Like mine, it had four rooms arranged boxcar style. From the kitchen you went into the dining room and then into a little hall that fed the bedroom, bath, and living room.

  Mitch Kruger was snoring loudly on the living room couch, his mouth hanging open under his bulbous nose. One arm was flung over the side so that his fingertips trailed the floor. The top row of his thick gray chest hairs peeped out from the edge of the blanket.

  Ignoring him as best I could, I crouched next to the sofa, under the shadow of his malodorous socks, and peered around the back to look at Peppy. She was lying on her side in the middle of a heap of newspapers. She’d spent most of the last few days shredding these, building a nest over the stack of blankets Mr. Contreras had folded for her. When she saw me she turned her head away, but thumped her tail once, feebly, to show there were no hard feelings.

  I got back to my feet. “I guess she’s okay. I’m going upstairs to make some coffee. I’ll come back in a little while. Remember, though, you’ve got to leave her alone—no going back th
ere and trying to stroke her or anything.”

  “You don’t have to tell me how to manage the dog,” the old man huffed. “I guess I heard the vet as good as you; better, since I took her in for a checkup while you was out doing God knows what.”

  I grinned at him. “Right. Got it. I don’t know what she makes of your pal’s buzz saw, but it would put me off my feed.”

  “She ain’t eating,” he began, then his face cleared. “Oh, I get you. Yeah, I’ll move him into the bedroom. But I don’t want you in here looking on while I do it.”

  I made a face. “Me, neither.” I didn’t think I could stomach the sight of what might lie below the fringe of greasy chest hair.

  Back in my own place I suddenly felt too tired to cope with making coffee, let alone assuaging Mr. Contreras’s expectant-father anxiety. I pulled the bloodied sheet from the bed, kicked off my running shoes, and lay down.

  It was almost nine when I woke again. Except for the twittering of birds anxious to join Peppy in maternity, the world was quiet beyond my walls, one of those rare wells of urban silence that give the city dweller a sense of peace. I basked in it until a squeal of brakes and furious honking broke the spell. Angry shouts—another collision on Racine.

  I got up and went into the kitchen to make coffee. When I moved here five years ago this was a quiet blue-collar neighborhood—which meant I could afford it. Now rehab mania had hit. While housing prices trebled the traffic quadrupled as cute shops sprang up to feed the gentry’s delicate appetites. I only hoped it was a BMW that had been hit, not my own beloved Pontiac.

  I skipped my exercise program—I wouldn’t have time to run this morning, anyway. Conscientiously donning a bra, I put my cutoffs and sweatshirt back on and returned to the maternity ward.

  Mr. Contreras came to the door faster than I’d expected. His worried face made me wonder if I should go back up for my car keys and license.

  “She ain’t done nothing, doll. I just don’t know—I called over to the vet, but the doc don’t come in till ten on Saturdays and they told me it wasn’t an emergency, they couldn’t give me his home number. You think you should call and see if you can make ’em?”