Guardian Angel

by Sara Paretsky

  Dick curled a lip. “Oh, yes, you and the guys you know. Being divorced has certainly been an asset to your women’s lib lifestyle, hasn’t it?”

  My hand swept up reflexively; I flung coffee down the front of his charcoal-striped shirt. Barbara was hovering nearby in case I needed protection. I pulled a twenty from my purse and thrust it into her apron pocket.

  “Maybe you and Marge can reenact your Good Samaritan routine for the talent here. Boy can’t go to all his high-priced meetings with coffee on his shirt.” I was on my feet, panting.

  “You’ll be sorry for this, Vic. Very sorry you ever chose to have this conversation with me.” Dick was white with humiliation and fury.

  “You called the meeting, Richard. But by all means, send me the dry-cleaning bill.” My legs were trembling as I left the diner.

  40

  No Longer Missing

  I found a bench at a bus stop across the street and sat there, taking in great gulps of air. I was still shaking with fury, pounding my right fist against my thigh. People waiting for the bus backed away from me: another crazy on the loose.

  When I realized the public impression I was creating, I brought myself under control. The end of active rage left me exhausted. Listlessly I watched Dick emerge from the diner, shut off the alarm to his Mercedes convertible, and spin down the road with a great roar from his exhaust. I didn’t even care enough to hope a blue-and-white stopped him. At least, not enough to hope very hard.

  By and by I crossed the street again and returned to the diner. The place had emptied out; the waitresses were clustered at a table, drinking coffee and smoking.

  Barbara sprang up when she saw me. “You okay, hon?”

  “Oh, yeah. I just need to wash my face and pull myself together. Sorry to treat you to a nursery-school display.”

  She grinned wickedly. “Oh, I don’t know, Vic. You’ve given us more action in five days than we usually see all year. Livens up the place and gives us something besides our bad backs to talk about.”

  I patted her shoulder and went to the tiny bathroom in the rear, along the corridor where Marge had dropped the grease on Friday. That was another good turn I’d done them: the hall was cleaner than I’d ever seen it.

  I bathed my face in cold water for several minutes. It was no substitute for a nap, but it would have to get me through the day. I put on lipstick under the flickering neon light. Its pallid glow emphasized the planes of my face, digging harsh grooves into it. It was a foreshadowing of what I might look like in great age. I grimaced at my reflection, emphasizing its grotesque lines.

  “You look dressed for success to me, my girl.” I saluted my image.

  I suddenly remembered the arrangements I’d made to have a security system installed this morning. I used the restaurant pay phone to call Mr. Contreras; he would be home all morning and would be glad to let the workmen in. He sounded subdued, though.

  “Are you sure you don’t mind? I’ll come back home and wait if it’s going to be a hassle for you.”

  “Oh, no, doll, nothing like that,” he assured me hastily. “I guess I’m worrying about going to see Eddie.”

  “I see.” I rubbed my eyes. “I’m not going to push it down your throat. You should stay home if the idea makes you that unhappy.”

  “But you’re going anyway?”

  “Yeah. I really need to talk to him.”

  He didn’t say anything after that, except that he’d be on the lookout for the workmen, and hung up.

  Barbara brought me a cup of fresh coffee to take with me. “Drinking something hot will calm you down, hon.”

  I sipped it as I walked along Belmont. The reflexive swallowing did indeed make me feel more myself. By the time I reached the Bank of Lake View on the corner of Belmont and Sheffield, I felt able at least to undertake a conversation.

  In a squat stone building with iron bars on the windows, the bank looked sleepy and remote from the financial gyrations of its big downtown brothers. The barred windows allowed little light to penetrate; the lobby was a dingy, musty place that probably hadn’t been washed since it opened in 1923. The bank took its commitment to the neighborhood seriously, though, investing in the community and serving its residents with care. They’d eschewed the high-stakes projects that had ruined many small institutions in the eighties; as far as I knew they were in good financial shape.

  Most bank functions took place in a high-ceilinged room beyond the lobby. The three loan officers sat behind a low wooden rail across the floor from the tellers. I could see Alma Waters, the woman who’d helped me with my co-op mortgage, but I followed protocol and presented my card to the receptionist.

  Alma bustled out to meet me. She was a plump woman somewhere between fifty and sixty who wore bright, tight-fitting dresses draped in scarves and gaudy jewelry. Today she sported a combination of red with shocking pink and a series of black and silver bead necklaces. Sailing toward me on spiky black patent-leather pumps, she shook my hand as warmly as though I’d borrowed a million dollars instead of fifty thousand.

  “Come on back, Vic. How are you? How’s your apartment? That was a good investment you made. I think I told you at the time you could expect that stretch of Racine to start coming up, and it has. I just renegotiated a mortgage for someone on Barry, and you know, the value of her little two-flat had gone up eightfold. Is that why you’re in today?” She had whisked my folder from a drawer while she spoke.

  It was a stretch for me sometimes just to come up with the seven hundred a month on my place on top of my rent downtown. That’s what I needed, all right—to treble my mortgage.

  I smiled. “Partly. The part about that piece of Racine coming up. I need some help—help that you may not feel able to give me.”

  “Try me, Vic.” She gave a rich laugh, showing a mouthful of bright, even teeth. “You know our motto: ‘Growing with the community we serve.’ ”

  “You know I’m a private investigator, Alma.” She should: my uncertain income had made me a tough sell to her managers. “I’m working for an old woman who lives up the street from me, Harriet Frizell. Mrs. Frizell … well, she belongs to old Racine. The part that hasn’t come up yet. And now she’s fallen on hard times.”

  I gave a brief but—I hoped—moving picture of Mrs. Frizell’s plight. “She used to be a customer here, but sometime in February she moved her account to U.S. Metropolitan. I can’t believe she’s got much. But I also can’t believe the pair who leaped in to act as her guardians are neighborhood angels. I’m not asking you to tell me what her assets were—I know you can’t do that. But could you tell me if she gave any reason for making the move?”

  Alma fixed bright, merry eyes on me for a minute. “What’s your interest in this, Vic?”

  I spread my hands. “Call it neighborly. Her world rotated around her dogs. I agreed to help look after them when she went into the hospital, but came home from a trip out of town to find they’d been put to sleep. It keeps me suspicious of the people who did it.”

  She pursed her lips, debating the matter with herself. Finally she turned to the computer on the far side of her desk and played around with the keys. I would have given a week’s pay—from a good week—to read the screen. After a few minutes of tinkering she got up with a brief “I’ll be right back,” and headed for the rear of the bank.

  When Alma had disappeared into an office built into the back of the lobby, my baser instincts overcame me: I got up and looked at the screen. The only thing visible was an opening menu. Untrusting woman.

  Alma spent quite a while pitching my case to her boss. After ten minutes or so the phone rang on one of the other loan officers’ desks. The woman spoke briefly, then got up and disappeared into the back office as well. I finished the coffee Barbara had given me, memorized an upbeat pamphlet on auto financing, found an ornate ladies’ room in the basement of the bank, and still had time to study a home mortgage brochure before the two women emerged.

  They stopped at the second officer�
��s desk long enough for her to pull a file from her cabinet. Alma brought her over to me, introducing her as Sylvia Wolfe. Ms. Wolfe, a tall, spare woman of about sixty, wore a tidy gray cardigan suit more in keeping with a bank than Alma’s flamboyance. She shook hands briskly, but let Alma do the talking.

  “We had a long talk with Mr. Struthers about what we could tell you. Sylvia came along because she actually worked with Mrs. Frizell. Your neighbor had been a customer here since 1926 and it was a blow to lose her. Mr. Struthers decided we could show you the letter Mrs. Frizell sent us, but of course, Sylvia can’t let you look at any of her financial records.”

  Ms. Wolfe thumbed through a fat file with expert fingers and wordlessly handed me Mrs. Frizell’s letter asking that her account be closed. The old woman had written on a piece of yellowing lined paper, torn from a pad she might have had since first opening her account. Her writing was disconnected, as though she’d written the letter over a period of several days without bothering to check what she’d said on the previous occasion, but the content was clear enough.

  I have had an account at your bank for many years and never would believe you would cheat an old customer, but people take advantage of old women in terrible ways. My money with you is all I have, yet you are paying me only 8 percent, but at another bank I can earn 17 percent, and of course I have my dogs to think about. I want you to sell my seedees [sic] and close my savings account and send my money to U.S. Meterpoltan [sic], I have a form for you to use.

  “Seventeen percent? What on earth could she be talking about?” I asked.

  Sylvia Wolfe shook her head. “I called her and tried to discuss it with her, but she refused to talk to me. I even tried stopping by to see her, tried to tell her only someone who really is preying on old people would promise her seventeen percent, but she said of course I’d take that line now that it was too late. We wrote and told her we’d reopen her account without any fees if she ever decided she wanted to come back to us. We had to leave it at that.”

  “How much did she have in certificates of deposit?” I asked.

  Ms. Wolfe shook her head. “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  I turned the letter over in my hand, studying it, but it didn’t tell me anything. No one else had written those words, and they didn’t sound as though she’d been under duress, although there was no real way of telling.

  “Did she keep a safe-deposit box here?” I asked abruptly.

  The loan officers exchanged guarded glances. “No,” Ms. Wolfe said. “I talked to her about it a few times over the years, but she preferred to keep any important documents at home. I didn’t like it, but she wasn’t the kind of person you could tell things to: she pretty much had her mind made up before a conversation started.”

  I handed the letter back to Ms. Wolfe. As I thanked her for her help, I wondered where Mrs. Frizell’s private records were. Todd and Chrissie wouldn’t have been trying to pry the information from her if they had them.

  “You get what you need, Vic?” Alma interrupted me.

  I hunched a shoulder. “It’s something, but I’m baffled. What I’d like to see is her account with U.S. Met, find out what on earth they were offering her that paid that kind of money. And I’d like to know where the title to her house is if she didn’t keep a safe-deposit box.”

  “That’s disappeared?” Ms. Wolfe asked, alarm flickering in her pale-brown eyes.

  “The kids who’ve taken over her affairs don’t have it: they showed up at the hospital on Thursday with a song and dance about not being able to raise the money to pay Mrs. Frizell’s bill. Of course, she’s at Cook County—they’re not going to throw her out—but since she owns a house they do expect her to pay for her care.”

  Ms. Wolfe shook her head. “I don’t know where she’d have it, have the title. But it must be in the house someplace.”

  I thought of the great heap of papers still untouched in the secretary. But surely Todd and Chrissie had searched the place thoroughly by now. If the tide was there they must have found it. I wondered if Mrs. Hellstrom might know. I thanked the bankers again, and went back into the muggy June day.

  Mrs. Hellstrom was in her garden, doing something industrious with a huge bag of peat moss and a hoe. A straw hat shaded her face from the sun while gloves and a smock protected her hands and clothes. She expressed herself as happy to see me, inviting me into the kitchen for iced tea, although she looked wistfully at the yard on her way in.

  She laid her gloves and hat carefully on a small shelf just inside the back door. “I was at the hospital last night. They told me you’d been around, that you got Hattie to talk a little more than usual.”

  My ministering angel routine apparently was what had earned me this těte-à-těte. I didn’t spoil it by saying that I’d wanted to get Mrs. Frizell to talk about her finances.

  Mrs. Hellstrom motioned me to a chair at the spotless Formica table. She pulled a pitcher from the refrigerator and got two amber plastic glasses down from a shelf, the same kind Dick had curled his lip at only a few hours ago. I wondered what he was doing about his coffee-stained shirt and his meetings. Probably he had a spare at the office. Or maybe his secretary raced up to Neiman-Marcus to buy him a new one.

  I’m not much of a tea drinker and Mrs. Hellstrom’s stuff clearly had come out of a package, but I sipped some in a sociable way. It had been sweetened with a generous hand. I tried not to make a face as I swallowed.

  We talked for a bit about Mrs. Frizell, and some of Mrs. Hellstrom’s memories of her. “Of course, she was my mother’s generation, but Mr. Hellstrom grew up in this house and used to try to play with her son, but he—her son, I mean—wasn’t the kind of boy other kids really liked much. But when you think how strange she is, you can’t really wonder, can you? Although she’s always been a good neighbor, all that junk in her yard and those dogs notwithstanding.”

  I didn’t get a clear picture of what Mrs. Frizell had ever done to merit the good neighbor sobriquet. Maybe it was just that she minded her own business. The conversation went from there to the selfishness of my generation, something I didn’t feel able to dispute, but how happy Mrs. Hellstrom was to find young people on the block who did embody the old neighborly values.

  “Of course, I think it was wrong for those young people to put the dogs to sleep, but they did leap in to look after Hattie’s affairs. And it can’t be a lot of fun for them to take on a cranky old lady like her.”

  “No, indeed,” I murmured. “I guess they’re kind of stymied, though, by the fact that they can’t find the title to Mrs. Frizell’s house.”

  “Title to her house?” Mrs. Hellstrom asked sharply. “What do they want that for?”

  I tried to look innocent, even naive. “I expect it’s for the hospital. They need to provide some kind of proof of her financial situation. They might even need to take out a mortgage, since it looks as though she’ll be laid up for quite a while.”

  Mrs. Hellstrom shook her head helplessly. “What are we coming to as a country? Here’s an old lady who worked hard all her life and now maybe she has to give up her house just because of a little fall in her bathroom? It makes you scared to get old, it really does.”

  I agreed. I’ll be forty in a year. It didn’t need Mr. Contreras to make me nervous about what happens to elderly, indigent private eyes.

  “She didn’t give her private papers to you to look after, did she?”

  “Oh, no. Hattie isn’t the kind to trust anyone with her valuables. The only thing of hers I have is her box of dog things—their pictures and pedigrees and stuff. I took it along when we found her that night, because I knew that was what she really cared about.”

  “I wonder if I could take a look at it.” I tried to speak casually.

  “Honey, if it’ll make you happy you can study every photo in it. It’s not much of anything, but she got herself the nicest little box to keep their papers in. Trust Hattie to pay more attention to something for the dogs than to her own recor
ds.… More tea, honey?”

  When I turned it down she bustled into the front of the house. She was back in a minute, carrying a black lacquer box about eighteen inches long by four deep. It was a beautiful piece, inlaid with a brightly painted picture of a dog resting its nose on the lap of a girl as the two sat under a pear tree. The workmanship was so good that the lid fit firmly inside the box but came out with only a gentle tug. I found myself staring at an out-of-focus portrait of Bruce.

  “I want to get back out to my plants, honey. You can just leave it on the table when you’re done looking at it. And be sure to help yourself to more tea if you want some.”

  I thanked her and carefully started pulling papers from the box. Underneath Bruce’s face was a group picture of the other four dogs standing at the back fence. She’d somehow persuaded them all to get up on their hind legs and put their paws on the railing. Although also out of focus, it was a pretty cute shot. Maybe it would cheer her up to have it next to her hospital bed. I put it to one side to take with me on my next visit.

  A series of photos of what must have been earlier dogs lay below those two, along with Bruce’s Kennel Club paper and papers for other dogs long gone. A handful of yellow news clips told of Mrs. Frizell’s glory years when she’d shown black Labs and won prizes for them. No one had ever suggested that she’d done something that disciplined.

  Finally, at the bottom of the box, I found a small bundle of personal papers. The title to the house. And three bonds, each with a face value often thousand dollars. Coupon bonds paying seventeen percent, issued by Diamond Head Motors.