Blood Shot

by Sara Paretsky

  He laughed and hung up.

  Hinsdale is an old town about twenty miles west of the Loop whose tall oaks and gracious homes were gradually being accreted by urban sprawl. It’s not Chicagoland’s trendiest address, but there’s an aura of established self-assurance about the place. Hoping to fit into its genteel atmosphere, I put on a black dress with a full skirt and gold buttons. A leather portfolio completed the ensemble. I looked at my navy suit on the entryway floor as I left, but decided it would keep another day.

  When you go from the city to the north or west suburbs, the first thing you notice is the quiet cleanness. After a day in South Chicago I felt I’d stepped into paradise. Even though the trees were barren of leaves and the grass matted and brown, everything was raked and tidied for spring. I had total faith that the brown mats would turn to green, but couldn’t imagine what it would take to create life in the sludge around the Xerxes plant.

  Chigwell lived on an older street near the center of town. The house was a two-story neo-Georgian structure whose wood siding gleamed white in the dull day. Its well-kept yellow shutters and a sprinkling of old trees and bushes created an air of stately harmony. A screened porch faced the street. I followed flagstones through the shrubs around the side to the entrance and rang the bell.

  After a few minutes the door opened. That’s the second thing you notice in the burbs-when you ring the bell people open the doors, they don’t peer through peepholes and undo bolts.

  An old woman in a severe navy dress stood frowning in the doorway. The scowl seemed to be a habitual expression, not aimed at me personally. I gave a brisk, no-nonsense smile.

  “Mrs. Chigwell?”

  “Miss Chigwell. Do I know you?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m a professional investigator and I’d like to speak with Dr. Chigwell.”

  “He didn’t tell me he was expecting anyone.”

  “Well, ma’am, we like to make our inquiries unannounced. If people have too much time to think about them, their answers often seem forced.”

  I took a card from my bag and handed it to her, moving forward a few steps. “V. I. Warshawski. Financial investigative services. Just tell the doctor I’m here. I won’t keep him more than half an hour.”

  She didn’t invite me in, but grudgingly took the card and moved off into the interior of the house. I looked around at the blank-windowed houses next door and across the street. The third thing you notice in the suburbs is, you might as well be on the moon. In a city or small-town neighborhood, curtains would flutter as the neighbors tried to see what strange woman was visiting the Chigwells. Then telephone calls or exchanges in the Laundromat. Yes, their niece. You know, the one whose mother moved to Arizona all those years ago. Here, not a curtain stirred. No shrill voices betokened preschoolers recreating war and peace. I had an uneasy feeling that with all its noise and grime, I preferred city life.

  Miss Chigwell rematerialized in the doorway. “Dr. Chigwell has gone out.”

  “That’s very sudden, isn’t it? When do you expect him back?”

  “I-he didn’t say. It will be a long while.”

  “Then I’ll wait a long while,” I said peaceably. “Would you like to invite me inside, or would you prefer me to wait in my car?”

  “You should leave,” she said, her frown deepening. “He doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  “How can you know that, ma’am? If he’s away, you haven’t spoken to him about me.”

  “I know who my brother does and does not wish to see. And he would have told me if he wanted to see you.” She shut the door as forcefully as she could, given both their ages and the thick carpeting underneath.

  I returned to my car and moved it to where it was clearly visible from the front door. WNIV was playing a cycle of Hugo Wolf songs. I leaned back in the seat, my eyes half closed, listening to Kathleen Battle’s golden voice, wondering what there was about talking to an investigator that would fluster Curtis Chigwell.

  In the half hour I waited I saw one person go down the street. I began feeling as though I were on a movie set, not part of a human community at all, when Miss Chigwell appeared on the flagstone walk. She moved determinedly to the car, her thin body as rigid as an umbrella frame, and as bony. I courteously got out.

  “I must ask you to leave, young woman.”

  I shook my head. “Public property, ma’am. There’s no law against my being here. I’m not playing loud music or selling dope or doing anything else that the law might construe as a nuisance.”

  “If you don’t drive away now, I’m going to call the police as soon as I’m back inside.”

  I admired her courage: to be seventy-something and confront a young stranger takes a lot of guts. I could see the fear mingling with the determination in her pale eyes.

  “I’m an officer of the court, ma’am. I would be happy to explain to the police why I want to speak to your-brother, is it?”

  That was only partially true. Any licensed attorney is an officer of the court, but I much prefer never talking to the police, especially suburban cops, who hate urban detectives on principle. Fortunately, Miss Chigwell, impressed (I hoped) by my professional demeanor, didn’t demand a badge or a certificate. She compressed her lips until they almost disappeared into her angular face and went back to the house.

  I had barely settled back in my car when she returned to the walk and beckoned me vigorously. When I joined her at the side of the house she said abruptly:

  “He’ll see you. He was here all along, of course. I don’t like telling his lies for him, but after all these years it’s hard to start saying no. He’s my brother. My twin, so I got into too many bad habits too long ago. But you don’t want to hear all that.”

  My admiration for her increased, but I didn’t know how to express it without sounding patronizing. I followed her silently into the house. We went through a passageway that looked onto the garage. A dinghy was leaned neatly on its side next to the open door. Beyond it was a tidy array of gardening tools.

  Ms. Chigwell whisked me along to the living room. It was not large, but gracefully proportioned, with chintz furniture facing a rose-marble fireplace. While she went for her brother I prowled around a bit.

  A handsome old clock stood in the center of the mantel, the kind that has an enamel face and brass pendulum. On either side of it were porcelain figures, shepherd girls, lute players. A few old family photos stood in the recessed shelves in the comer, one showing a little girl in a starched sailor dress standing proudly with her father in front of a sailboat.

  When Ms. Chigwell returned with her brother, it was obvious they’d been arguing. His cheeks, softer than her angular face, were flushed and his lips were compressed. She started to introduce me, but he cut her off sharply.

  “I don’t need you to oversee my affairs, Clio. I’m perfectly able to look after myself.”

  “I’d like to see you do so, then,” she said bitterly. “If you’re in some kind of trouble with the law, I want to hear what it is now, not next month or whenever you feel brave enough to tell me about it.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I seem to have caused a problem, most inadvertently. There’s no trouble with the law that I know of, Miss Chigwell. Merely, I need some information on some people who used to work at the Xerxes plant in South Chicago.”

  I turned to her brother. “My name is V. I. Warshawski, Dr. Chigwell. I’m a lawyer and a private investigator. And I’ve been retained as the result of a lawsuit whose settlement leaves some money to the estate of Joey Pankowski.”

  When he ignored my outstretched hand I looked around and chose a comfortable armchair to sit in. Dr. Chigwell remained standing. In his ramrod posture he resembled his sister.

  “Joey Pankowski used to work at the Xerxes plant,” I continued, “but he died in 1985. Now there’s some question that Louisa Djiak, who also worked there, has a child whose father he may have been. That child is also entitled to a share of the settlement, but Ms. Djiak is very ill and her mi
nd wanders-we can’t get a clear answer from her as to who the father is.”

  “I can’t help you, young lady. I have no recollection of any of these names.”

  “Well, I understand you took blood and medical histories from all the employees every spring for a number of years. If you would just go back and look at your records, you might find that-”

  He cut me off with a violence that surprised me. “I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but that’s an absolute lie. I won’t stand to be harassed and harangued in my own house. Now you get out right now, or I’ll call the police. And if you’re an officer of the court, you can explain that to them in jail.” He turned without waiting for a reply and marched from the room.

  Clio Chigwell watched him leave, her scowl deeper than ever. “You’ll have to go.”

  “He did the tests,” I said. “Why is he so upset?”

  “I don’t know anything about it. But you can’t ask him to violate his patients’ confidentiality. Now you’d better leave, unless you do want to speak with the police.”

  I got up as nonchalantly as I could under the circumstances. “You have my card,” I said to her at the door. “If something occurs to you, give me a call.”

  9

  Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous

  A light drizzle had started to fall. I sat in the car staring at the windshield, watching the rain break up on the greasy glass. After a while I turned on the engine, hoping to coax a little heat from the noisy motor.

  Was it the Pankowski name that had rattled Chigwell so? Or was it me? Had Joiner phoned him telling him to beware Polish detectives and the questions they bring? No, that couldn’t be right. If that was the case, Chigwell would never have agreed to see me at all. And anyway, Joiner wouldn’t know Chigwell. The doctor was almost eighty; he must have been long retired when Joiner started at the plant two years ago. So it had to have been the mention either of Pankowski or Louisa. But why?

  I wondered with growing uneasiness what Caroline knew that she hadn’t bothered to tell me. I remembered in vivid detail the winter she had asked me to fight an eviction notice served on Louisa. After a week of running between courts and landlord, I saw an article in the Sun-Times on “Teens Who Make a Difference.” It featured a glowing sixteen-year-old Caroline and the soup kitchen she’d used the rent money to set up. That was the last cry for help I’d answered from her for ten years, and I was beginning to think I should have let it go for twenty.

  I fished around on the backseat for a Kleenex and found a towel I’d used at the beach last summer. After wiping a peephole in the windshield I finally put the car into gear and headed for the expressway. I was torn between calling Caroline to tell her the deal was off and the elephant child’s ’satiable curiosity to find out what had rattled Chigwell so badly.

  In the end I did nothing. When I had fought my way through the noontime Loop traffic to my office, messages from several clients awaited me-inquiries I’d let slide while I mucked around in Caroline’s problem. One was from an old customer who wanted help with computer security. I referred him to a friend of mine who’s a computer expert and tackled the other two. These were routine financial investigations, my bread and butter. It felt good to work on something where I could identify both problem and solution, and I spent the afternoon burrowing through files in the State of Illinois Building.

  I returned to my office around seven to type the reports. They were worth five hundred dollars to me; since both clients paid promptly, I wanted to get the invoices into the mail.

  I was rattling along on my old standard Olympia when the phone rang. I looked at my watch. Almost eight. Wrong number. Caroline. Maybe Lotty. I picked up the phone on the third ring, right before the answering service kicked in.

  “Ms. Warshawski?” It was an old man’s voice, fragile and quavering.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I want to speak to Ms. Warshawski, please.” For all its quavering, the voice was confident, used to managing people on the phone.

  “Speaking,” I said as patiently as I could. I had missed lunch and was dreaming of a steak and whiskey.

  “Mr. Gustav Humboldt would like to see you. When would it be convenient to schedule an appointment?”

  “Can you tell me what he wants to see me about?” I backspaced and used white-out to cover a typo. It’s getting harder to find correction fluid and typewriter ribbons in these days of word processors, so I capped the bottle carefully to save it.

  “I understand it’s a confidential matter, miss. If you’re free this evening, he could see you now. Or tomorrow afternoon at three.”

  “Just a minute while I check my schedule.” I put the phone down and got Who’s Who in Chicago Commerce from the top of my filing cabinet. Gustav Humboldt’s listing covered a column and a half of six-point type. Born in Bremerhaven in 1904. Emigrated in 1930. Chairman and chief stockholder of Humboldt Chemical, founded in 1937, with plants in forty countries, 1986 sales of $8 billion, assets of $10 billion, director of this, member of that. Headquarters in Chicago. Of course. I’d passed the Humboldt Building a million times walking down Madison Street, an old no-nonsense structure without the attention-getting lobbies of the modem giants.

  I picked up the phone. “I could make it around nine-thirty tonight,” I offered.

  “That will be fine, Ms. Warshawski. The address is the Roanoke Building, twelfth floor. I’ll tell the doorman to look out for your car.”

  The Roanoke was an old dowager on Oak Street, one of six or seven buildings bordering the strip between the lake and Michigan Avenue. All had gone up in the early decades of this century, providing housing for the McCormicks and Swifts and other riffraff. Nowadays if you had a million dollars to invest in housing and were related to the British royal family, they might let you in after a year or two of intensive checking.

  I set a speed record for two-finger typing and got reports and invoices into their envelopes by eight-thirty. I’d have to forgo whiskey and steak-I didn’t want to be logy for an encounter with someone who could set me up for life-but there was time for soup and a salad at the little Italian restaurant up Wabash from my office. Especially if I didn’t have to worry about parking at the other end.

  In the restaurant bathroom I saw that my hair was frizzing around my head from this morning’s drizzle, but at least the black dress still looked tidy and professional. I put on a little light makeup and retrieved my car from the underground garage.

  It was just nine-thirty when I pulled into the semicircle under the Roanoke’s green awning. The doorman, resplendent in matching green livery, bent his head courteously while I gave him my name.

  “Ah, yes, Ms. Warshawski.” His voice was fruity, his tone avuncular. “Mr. Humboldt is expecting you. If you’ll just give me your keys?”

  He led me into the lobby. Most modem buildings going up for the rich these days feature glass and chrome lobbies with monstrous plants and hangings, but the Roanoke had been built when labor was cheaper and more skillful. The floor was an intricate mosaic of geometric shapes and the wood-paneled walls were festooned with Egyptian figurines.

  An old man, also in green livery, was sitting on a chair next to some wooden double doors. He got up when the doorman and I came in.

  “Young lady for Mr. Humboldt, Fred. I’ll let them know she’s here if you’ll take her on up.”

  Fred unlocked the door-no remote-control clicks here-and took me to the elevator at a stately tread. I followed him into a roomy cage with a floral carpet on the floor and a plush-upholstered bench against the back wall. I sat casually on the bench, crossing my legs, as though personal elevator service were an everyday occurrence with me.

  The elevator opened onto what might have been the foyer of a mansion. Gray-white marble tiles showing streaks of pink were covered here and there by throw rugs that had probably been made in Persia when the Ayatollah’s grandfather was a baby. The hall seemed to form an atrium, with the elevator at its center, but before I could
tiptoe down to a marble statue in the left corner to explore, the carved wooden door in front of me opened.

  An old man stood there in morning dress. His scalp showed pink through wisps of fine white hair. He inclined his head briefly, a token bow, but his blue eyes were frosty and remote. Rising to the solemnity of the occasion, I fished in my bag and handed him a card without speaking.

  “Very good, miss. Mr. Humboldt will see you now. If you’ll follow me…”

  He walked slowly, either from age or from some concept of a butler’s proper gait, giving me time to gawk in what I trusted was a discreet fashion. About halfway along the length of the building he opened a door on the left and held it for me to enter. Looking at the books lining three walls and the opulent red-leather furniture in front of a fireplace in the fourth, my keen intuition told me we were in the library. A florid man, heavy without being corpulent, sat in front of the fire with a newspaper. As the door opened he put the paper down and got to his feet.

  “Ms. Warshawski. How good of you to come on such short notice.” He held out a firm hand.

  “Not at all, Mr. Humboldt.”

  He motioned me to a leather armchair on the other side of the fire from him. I knew from the Who’s Who entry that he was eighty-four, but he could have said sixty without anyone raising an eyebrow. His thick hair still showed a touch of pale yellow, and his blue eyes were sharp and clear in a face almost free of wrinkles.

  “Anton, bring us some cognac-you drink cognac, Ms. Warshawski?-and then we’ll be fine on our own.”

  The butler disappeared for perhaps two minutes, during which my host courteously made sure the fire wasn’t too hot for me. Anton returned with a decanter and snifters, poured, carefully placed the decanter in the center of a small table at Humboldt’s right hand, fiddled with the fire tongs. I realized he was as curious as I about what Humboldt wanted and was trying to think of ways to linger, but Humboldt dismissed him briskly.

  “Ms. Warshawski, I have an awkward matter to discuss, and I beg your indulgence if I don’t do so with maximum grace. I’m an industrialist, after all, an engineer more at home with chemicals than beautiful young women.” He had come to America as a grown man; even after close to sixty years a mild accent remained.