Guardian Angel

by Sara Paretsky

  Normally his protectiveness makes me prickly, but the attack on Lotty had shaken me. I could see how you could sit around worrying about someone you loved. I promised, kissed him on the cheek, and took off.

  It was past noon by the time Luke finished his funeral oration on the damage to the Trans Am. Since he wouldn’t hand over the keys to the Impala until he’d had a chance to say everything he wanted on the subject of the state of modern car manufacture in general, Pontiac more specifically, and my car as a particular example, I had to listen with what grace I could muster.

  He was right about the Impala: it rode like a bus after the Trans Am. But its engine felt like spun silk to handle. I maneuvered it cautiously into traffic, getting a feel for its sidelines, and keeping an eye out for uninvited company. I didn’t think anyone had followed me to the garage, but I didn’t want to be foolhardy.

  Remembering my promise to Mr. Contreras, I phoned from the lobby of the Herald-Star. When he didn’t answer I figured he was out with Peppy and went on up to the news floor to talk to the young reporter Murray had assigned me to.

  Lydia Cooper, Murray’s gofer, looked as though she was fresh from journalism school. In fact, with her red, round cheeks and fluffy black bangs she looked as though she were on her way to a high school class. She had a thick Midwestern twang; when I asked, she grinned and said she came from Kansas.

  “And please don’t ask about Toto or whether everything there’s in black and white. Believe me, I’ve heard it a million times already and I’ve only been in Chicago eleven months.”

  Murray had apparently passed along my request without any baggage—she cheerfully offered to fix me up with the Lexis system as soon as we finished talking.

  I gave her the details of the attack on Lotty. With Lydia dutifully taking notes at my shoulder, I called Max to see how Lotty’s tests had gone. As Audrey thought, Lotty had a hairline fracture of her left arm, but the CAT scan didn’t show clots or other head problems. Carol, shocked by the attack, was coming into the clinic for a few hours a day, but Lotty was fretting to get back to work herself.

  Lydia went through a conscientious list of questions, but she had a lot to learn about probing behind partial answers. When she finished, she led me to a computer with a modem and called up Lexis for me.

  “Murray said I should warn you that we might not use the story,” she drawled. “But thanks for talking to me. Just exit the system when you’re done—you don’t need to see me before you go.”

  When I got the Diamond Head file I felt a stab of frustration, and a sweep of irrational anger. The only name given was their registered agent, Jonas Carver, at an address on South Dearborn. Perfectly aboveboard, since they weren’t a publicly held company, but I’d been expecting great things from the computer. I’d imagined finding some close associate of Daraugh Graham, who would quickly put pressure on Chamfers to talk to me.

  Technology had failed me. I was going to have to do my detecting the old-fashioned way, by breaking and entering.

  24

  The Labors of Hercules

  I phoned Mr. Contreras again from Murray’s desk before leaving the paper. He still didn’t answer. I tried not to worry about it—what could be wrong with him, after all? But he’d made such a point of my calling him at one, and anyway, he wouldn’t leave Peppy alone for so long. Maybe he forgot he had a doctor’s appointment when he was talking to me. Maybe Peppy had had some kind of veterinary emergency. He wouldn’t have slipped and fallen, be lying helpless on the bathroom floor like Mrs. Frizell. Certainly not. I took the stairs from Michigan to the service road beneath it two at a time.

  I’d parked the car illegally on underground Wacker, hoping the location was too remote for the traffic detail. Pulling one of the city’s new orange missives from the Impala’s wipers, I realized I should have known better: when the dice are rolling against you, the traffic cops will always find you. I’d have to pay it too—Luke’s histrionics if the Impala got booted didn’t bear imagining.

  I pushed my failing luck on the Drive going home, but managed to make it to Belmont without a blue-and-white pulling me over—the Impala didn’t attract the same kind of attention the Trans Am got. Once on Belmont I had to take it easy because of the traffic. I drummed impatiently on the wheel at lights and took stupid risks around double-parked delivery trucks.

  It wasn’t until I got to Racine that I remembered to look for tails. At this point I couldn’t be sure I didn’t have one, although I didn’t think anyone had followed me to Luke’s to begin with. I certainly didn’t want to make their job easy by parking near the building where they could see what car I was driving. I found a space on Barry and sprinted the two blocks home.

  When I rang Mr. Contreras’s bell, Peppy barked sharply from behind the door, but the old man didn’t appear. I bit my lip in momentary indecision. He had the same right to his privacy that I demanded for myself. Unfortunately the attack on Lotty had made me too jumpy about the welfare of my friends to leave room for Ninth Amendment debates. I ran upstairs to my own place, dug my state-of-the-art picklocks from the jumble in the basket by my front door, and made my first illegal entry of the day.

  Peppy kept up a steady, extremely fierce barking while I worked on the locks. I hoped she would frighten off a genuine housebreaker—even though Mr. Contreras had two locks, they were woefully easy to undo. As soon as she realized it was me, she wagged her tail perfunctorily and returned to her squealing offspring.

  The old man wasn’t in the building. I checked the back in case I’d made a fool of myself while he was nurturing his tomatoes, but he wasn’t outside, either. Peppy came to the back door with me while I looked.

  “Where’d he go, huh? I know he told you.”

  She gave an impatient bark and I let her out briefly. He hadn’t been attacked and dragged from the building by force—there were no signs of battle. I gave it up. Something had come up and I’d hear all about it in due course. I checked Peppy’s water bowl, then left a note on top of his phone telling him I’d been by and would see him tonight.

  After relocking his door I stopped in my own place for a glass of water and a sandwich. I also left the Smith & Wesson—I didn’t think anyone was going to take potshots at me on Racine.

  Marjorie Hellstrom was in her backyard doing something to a rose bush. Except for Mrs. Frizell and me, the block was infested with fanatical gardeners. I couldn’t grow parsley in a window box, while Mrs. Frizell’s yard was returning to native prairie—native prairie replete with hub caps and beer cans, just the way it was when the Indians lived here.

  Mrs. Hellstrom came over to the fence separating her hand-clipped turf from the dump. “Are you going into Hattie’s place, Miss … uh? I washed some of her clothes yesterday and took them over to the hospital, but she didn’t know who I was. I don’t think they’d been laundered since she bought them. Mr. Hellstrom didn’t like me washing them, he was afraid I’d catch something from touching them, but you can’t leave your neighbors in the lurch, and we’ve lived next door for thirty years.”

  “How did Mrs. Frizell seem?” I interrupted.

  “I don’t think she even knew I was there, to tell you the truth. She just lay there with her eyes half shut, kind of snorting but not saying anything, except calling for the dog every now and then. So if you were thinking of taking her some of her things, I wouldn’t bother, Miss … uh.”

  “Warshawski. But you can call me Vic. No, I just wanted to make sure her papers were in order.”

  Mrs. Hellstrom frowned. “Isn’t that what Chrissie Pichea is supposed to do, with her and her husband taking over Mrs. Frizell’s affairs for her? It’s awfully generous of them to take it on, when they have their own work to do, although I don’t think they should have been in such a hurry to put the dogs to sleep. At least they should have talked to me first, they must have known I’d been looking after them.”

  “Yes, I agree. I have some financial expertise that Todd and Chrissie lack. And I feel some r
esponsibility to Mrs. Frizell—I should have done something to protect the dogs.”

  “I know how you feel, dear—Vic, did you say?—because I feel just the same. You go on in, but you may want to open a window. Even though I tried cleaning the floors a bit, the place, well, to be frank, dear, it smells.” She lowered her voice on the last phrase as if using a word too dreadful for polite conversation.

  I nodded portentously and let myself in the back. I’d half expected Todd and Chrissie to have changed the locks, so I’d brought my picks with me, but they must not have felt there was anything in the place that needed guarding. So technically I wasn’t breaking, just entering.

  Mrs. Hellstrom was right about the smell. Years’ accretion of dog, unwashed dishes, and unswept floors produced a thick, cloying atmosphere that made me feel faint.

  I pushed open windows in the kitchen and the living room, in itself quite a task since the ropes and pulleys were stiff with disuse, and made a quick survey of the house. Mrs. Frizell seemed to do fine without the trappings of modern technology: she had a small radio, but no television, no CD, not even a turntable. She did own a camera, an ancient Kodak that wouldn’t have brought a nickel bag on the street.

  Back in the living room I pulled a wobbly chair in front of the secretary. It was an old, dark piece of furniture with a rolltop-covered writing shelf in the middle, book shelves above, and drawers below. The rolltop had been wedged shut years before by the papers stuffed into its edges. Papers were crammed against the diamond-glass doors of the book shelves and were stuffed into the drawers. Everything was covered with a fine layer of grime.

  If I hadn’t been fed up to the gills with Todd, Dick, Murray, and even Freeman, I would have shut the windows and gone home. It was ludicrous to think anything of value, let alone of interest, might be in that landfill. But I needed something, a crowbar to pry Todd Pichea loose from Mrs. Frizell, and I was out of ideas. All I wanted was some kind of document that would give me, if not a crowbar, at least a wedge.

  As I surveyed the horrors in front of me I couldn’t help wondering how much of my determination was due to concern for Mrs. Frizell, and how much was due to my own feelings of humiliation. I’m a sore loser and so far Todd—and Dick—had beaten me in every encounter.

  “You’re not driven by revenge—you fight for truth, justice, and the American Way,” I grinned to myself.

  Presumably Mrs. Frizell had filed her papers on the LIFO system—last in, first out. The trick would be to remove the top layer—from the book shelves as well as the writing shelf—without disturbing the Paleozoic regions underneath.

  Despite Mrs. Hellstrom’s work the living room carpet—a threadbare gray mat that might once have been maroon—was still too thick with dust to sit on. I went upstairs and found one of the sheets she’d laundered. Spreading it on the floor, I carefully began lifting documents from the secretary and putting them on the sheet.

  In the midst of the kitchen squalor I’d noticed a huge pile of paper bags—Mrs. Frizell never threw anything away. I brought those in and stood a row of them next to the secretary. I was making an arbitrary decision to examine everything dated after 1987 and to put earlier stuff in bags by year.

  By five o’clock I’d filled two dozen bags. The sheet below me had turned black from the grime I’d shaken from the papers. Mrs. Frizell was on the mailing list of every animal-care products company in North America and she’d saved all their catalogs. She’d also kept her vet bills going back to 1935—the earliest year that had floated to the top so far—and newspaper clippings detailing cruelty to animals. I hadn’t found anything that concerned her son, but most of the stuff I’d handled only dated to the late seventies.

  Her own financial papers were wedged in pell-mell with the vet bills and newspaper clippings. There wasn’t much to them. She drew a monthly Social Security check, but apparently the box factory she’d worked in hadn’t been union. Or at least there didn’t seem to be any pension plan beyond the U.S. government. The Bank of Lake View had paid her real estate taxes for her and looked after her modest savings. They apparently had also paid her utility bills. I found a couple of copies of the quarterly statements they sent Byron Frizell in San Francisco detailing their transactions on her behalf.

  Social Security doesn’t have an electronic transfer system. They had to send their checks to Mrs. Frizell herself, and she had to be responsible enough to remember to take them to the bank. She apparently was collected enough mentally to do this, since her passbook, which I found under a 1972 Jewel flyer advertising Purina at ten cents a pound, had regular monthly entries.

  That was a feeble straw to catch at, that my self-appointed client was mentally alert enough to take her money to the bank. And it didn’t help deal with the painful condition she was in right now. Obviously no one could say she was competent to handle her own affairs today.

  On closer inspection the passbook didn’t look like much of an ally, either. Mrs. Frizell had brought her check to the Lake View bank on the tenth of every month for eighteen years, but she’d stopped abruptly in February, when the balance stood at just over ten thousand. What had she done with them since? Was I going to find four checks floating in this paper sea someplace?

  I rubbed the back of my neck and my shoulders with my filthy fingers. I felt hollow and depressed. I wasn’t finding evidence of Mrs. Frizell’s vibrant mental state. And certainly not of a cache of assets worth inveigling her estate for.

  I went to the kitchen to rinse myself off under the tap. Even though the weather had broken with last night’s storm, I was stiff and sweaty from my work in the landfill. The sink was dirty enough that I didn’t want to drink from the tap, and I was pretty thirsty. I should have thought to bring a Thermos from home. One half hour more and I’d pack it in.

  When I got to the living room and surveyed the mess with fresher eyes, I was tempted to quit on the spot, but a nagging sense that I’d invested too much time to go away empty-handed pushed me forward. Of course, that’s the classic mistake that drives businesses into bankruptcy: “We’ve put five years and fifty billion into this worthless product, we can’t abandon it now.” But the impulse pushes you deeper into the quag.

  The room faced west. The setting sun gave a lot more light than the forty-watt bulb in the lone lamp Mrs. Frizell kept there. I opened the curtains and continued the search. So far I’d only looked at the middle section and the glassed-in bookshelves. For my last surge I pried the three bottom drawers open. Squatting on my heels, I started removing envelopes. It must have been close to seven when I found the letter from the Bank of Lake View.

  15 March

  Dear Mrs. Frizell,

  Acting on your instructions we have sold your Certificates of Deposit and closed your account, sending the balance to your new account at the U.S. Metropolitan Bank and Trust. It has been our pleasure to serve your financial needs for the last sixty years and we are sorry you no longer find the relationship desirable. Should you change your mind in the future please do not hesitate to call. We will be happy to re-open your account at no charge to you.

  The letter had been personally signed by one of the bank officers.

  The Bank of Lake View is a small, neighborhood institution—they handle my mortgage with the concern and attention most banks reserve for big corporate customers. They must be about the only place in the city that still handles small passbook accounts. It was typical of their character to write a personal note to Mrs. Frizell.

  What was strange was her transferring her money to U.S. Metropolitan. I hadn’t found a passbook or any other documents from them. Either those had slipped down to the Jurassic stratum or she’d kept them someplace else. But that was a detail compared to the bigger question: Why had she moved accounts to a downtown bank? And not just any old bank, but one that was in the news every other week because of the political ties its directors had in the area. The Du Page County Board was only the most recent group to raise journalistic eyebrows for keeping demand dep
osits in U.S. Met’s noninterest-bearing accounts.

  I was grasping at straws and I knew it. Probably U.S. Met had had some marketing campaign that Mrs. Frizell had found irresistible. I got to my feet, my hamstrings stiff from sitting so long. I didn’t know what to do with the mess I’d created on the floor. The secretary was still overflowing with papers—I couldn’t imagine stuffing all these back inside. At the same time I could scarcely leave them lying around as evidence of my labor. Although maybe Chrissie would assume it had been Mrs. Hellstrom’s work; presumably the Picheas knew she’d done some laundry.

  A key turning in the front door solved the problem for me. I folded the letter from the bank into my back pocket a second before Chrissie and Todd bounced in. They looked radiant with health, Chrissie in a mattress-ticking romper suit, Todd in tan shorts and a Polo T-shirt. I didn’t even want to imagine how I appeared—the smell coming from my armpits was discomforting enough.

  “What are you doing here, Warshawski?”

  “Cleaning the Augean stables, Todd. You can call me Hercules. Although I think he had help. In a way I’ve outperformed him.”

  “Don’t try to turn this into a joke, because it isn’t funny. When Mrs. Hellstrom told us you were in here looking at financial records, my first impulse was to call the cops. I could have you arrested, you know. This place is private property.”

  I rubbed the back of my neck. “But not, I think, belonging to you. Unless you’ve used your guardianship powers to sign over the title?”

  It dawned on me suddenly that that was the one valuable document Mrs. Frizell had. Maybe it was at the bottom of one of the drawers. Or maybe Todd and Chrissie had already absconded with it. I didn’t feel up to burglarizing their house to see, at least not tonight.

  “Why don’t you just get out of here,” Todd snapped. “Since we found the old lady you’ve been determined to undermine my care of her, even calling her son—”