Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 07 (10 page)

I
squinted up at the lettering that ran around the roof. Gammidge Wire. I
followed the apron around the building and finally came to Diamond Head.

Only
one truck stood in the open bays at the engine plant. I was afraid that my
exploration of the South Side had made me too late to find anyone, but I went
over to the truck to inquire.

A man
in a coverall stood at the bottom of the loading platform, his back against the
truck. He was a huge guy, his head topping my five-eight by a good nine inches.
The diesel was running, vibrating the body of the truck and making such a
racket that I had a hard time getting his attention. I finally touched his arm.
He jumped and swore.

“Who
are you and what in hell do you want?” I couldn’t hear him over the engine
racket, but he mouthed the words pretty distinctly.

He
had a big, square face with a scar running down his left jaw. His nose had been
broken more than once, judging by the number of twists it took before settling
on the right side of his face. I took a step back.

“Anyone
inside I can talk to?” I bellowed.

He
put his face down close to mine. “I asked who you was, girlie, and what in hell
you want here.”

The
backs of my knees prickled, but I eyeballed him coldly. “I’m V. I. Warshawski.
I want the shop steward. That help you any?”

He
narrowed his eyes and stuck out his lower lip, ready to be plenty mad. Before
he could decide to do anything really violent I ducked behind him and vaulted
up onto the platform. He started after me, but his size and his work boots
limited his agility.

I
looked around for someone to talk to, but the platform was empty. Only a
forklift with a crate on it suggested that someone might be loading—or
unloading—the truck.

I
didn’t wait for my friend to join me but sprinted along the lip of the dock
until I came to an open door going into a long hallway. Here I did find a small
cluster of men, all in shirts and ties, deep in conversation. The bosses. Just
what I wanted.

They
looked up at me in surprise. One of them, a youngish guy with short brown hair
and tortoise-shell glasses, took a step forward.

“You
lost?”

“Not
exactly.” I caught sight of a long tuft of prairie grass stuck in the tongue of
my right shoe and wondered how much more debris I was carrying. “I’m looking
for someone who might know something about an old Diamond Head employee. Either
the shop steward or the plant manager.”

Just
then my trucking friend came pounding in. “Oh, there you are,” he roared, a
world of menace in his tone. “She came sneaking around the back of the place
just now.”

“She
did?” The spokesman turned back to me. “Who are you and just what do you want?”

“I’m
V. I. Warshawski. And I want to speak either to the shop steward or the plant
manager. Despite what Bruno here says, I wasn’t sneaking around. But I spent a
frustrating forty minutes trying to find you from the road and finally had to
come on foot.”

No
one spoke for a minute, then a second man, older than the first speaker, said,
“Who are you working for?”

“I’m
not an industrial spy, if that’s what you’re wondering. I have only the dimmest
notion of what you make here. I’m a detective—” That brought a quick outburst
from two of the group. I held up a hand. “I’m a private detective, and I’ve
been hired to find an old man who used to work here.”

The
older man looked at me sharply for a minute. “I think I’d better talk to her in
my office, Hank,” he said to the brown-haired man. “You go back to the truck,
Simon. I’ll make sure she’s off the premises when she goes.”

He
jerked his head toward the end of the hall and snapped, “Come on.”

He
set off down the hall at a good clip. I followed more slowly, stopping to pull
the tuft of grass from my shoe. When I stood up he had disappeared. Two-thirds
of the way down the hall I found a door that led to a short corridor. My guide
stood just inside it, his hands on his hips, his dark eyes sharp. When I caught
up with him, he whirled without speaking and marched into the utilitarian hole
he used as an office.

“Now,
just who in hell are you and what are you doing snooping around our plant?” he
said as soon as we were seated.

I
looked around on his desktop, but didn’t see a name-plate. “You got a name?” I asked.
“And a position with the firm?”

“I
asked you a question, young lady.”

“I
told you out in the hall there. I haven’t got anything to add. But if you want
to talk it over, it would be really helpful for me to know your name.” I leaned
back in my chair and retied my right shoe.

He
glared at me. I took off the left shoe and shook some dirt from it onto the
floor.

“My
name is Chamfers. And I am the plant manager.” The words came out as though
snapped through a peashooter.

“How
do you do?” I took my wallet from my handbag and dug out the laminated copy of
my PI license and showed it to him.

He
looked it over and threw it contemptuously onto the desktop. “I don’t suppose
you’ll tell me who’s employing you, but I’ve got dicks of my own. I can check
you out fast enough.”

I
made a disgusted face. “And when you’ve spent a couple of thousand bucks doing
that, you won’t be any wiser than you are now. I realize it looks strange, me
crawling around your premises, but there’s a simple explanation. Your guy Simon
was the first person I saw. When I tried talking to him he got kind of ugly, so
I scrambled for safety and found you.”

He
scowled for a minute. “And what’s your story on what you want with me?”

“My
story, as you put it, is also very simple. I’m looking for an old man who used
to work here.”

“Did
we fire him?”

“Nope.
He left the old-fashioned way: he retired.”

“So
there’s no reason for him to be here.” He wasn’t believing me. His tone and the
curl to his upper lip made that clear enough.

“So
it would seem. But the last time my client saw him, on Monday, the guy who’s
missing said he was coming over here to see the bosses—his word. He had
something on his mind about Diamond Head. So, since no one who knows him has
seen him since Monday, I was hoping he might actually have done it. Come over
here, I mean.”

“And
what is this ex-employee’s name?” He gave a little smile to show he appreciated
our game.

I
smiled back, just as thinly, but with more contempt. “Mitch Kruger. Did he show
up?”

“If
he did, he never made it past my secretary.”

“Then
I’d like to talk to him.”

“That
was crude,” he said contemptuously. “Trying to pretend you haven’t done your
homework on our operation to know my secretary is a woman. I’ll ask Angela when
she comes in on Monday. And give you a call.”

“Chamfers,
I’ll tell you a little secret. If I were really committing industrial
espionage, you wouldn’t even know I’d been here. I’d have had you guys staked
out and known your comings and goings and made my move after you’d left for the
weekend. So relax. Save the strain on your brain and your bankroll. All I want
to know is the last time anyone here at Diamond Head saw my boy Mitch. When we
know that, we’ll shake hands forever.”

I
picked up my license from his desk and handed him one of my cards. “It’ll make
it easier for you to call me if you have my number, Chamfers. And I’ll take
yours.”

I
leaned over the desk and copied the number stuck at the top of his phone
buttons before he could stop me. “Want to give me a safe-conduct past Simon?”

He
gave a triumphant smirk. “We’re not going through the body of the plant, so
don’t get your hopes up, missy. We’ll go the long way around. And I’ll make
sure our security forces are on the alert this weekend.”

We
went back to the hallway and out a door that fronted the canal. In silence we
followed a footpath around the side, past the vibrating truck where Simon stood
guard, and on to the main entrance. A cracked road led away from it.

“I
don’t know where you hid your car, but it had better not be on our land. I
can’t promise to hold on to Simon if he catches sight of you sneaking around
here again.”

“I’ll
be sure to bring a bag of raw meat with me next time just in case.”

“There
won’t be a next time. Get that through your head good and solid, missy.”

It
didn’t seem worth it to escalate the conflict further. I blew him a kiss and
headed up the drive. Arms akimbo, he glared me out of sight.

It
was after six when I finally got back to the Trans Am. After hiking down
Diamond Head’s cracked access road to Bridgeport’s side streets, I figured out
the route. My mistake had been in trying to get at the plant from Thirty-first
Street: you had to go down to Thirty-third and snake up and down a few times.

I
laughed a little to myself over my encounter with Chamfers. With all the
industrial surveillance I’ve done over the years it was funny—as well as
embarrassing—to make such a clumsy entrance that they took me for a spy. I
should have just waited for Monday morning, when I could have spoken to Chamfers’s
secretary in the accepted fashion. Now I’d have to do it anyway, but I’d have a
big hurdle of suspicion to jump over.

I
wondered if Chamfers would really get his own detectives to check up on me, or
if that had been bravado to make me back away from my supposed espionage. I
amused myself during the long drive up the Kennedy with figuring out what steps
I would take if I were going to investigate myself. It would be hard for me to
prove I wasn’t spying: by the time they’d checked with some of my corporate
references, they’d realize it made up a significant part of my practice. They’d
have to start tailing me; that would take a lot of time and money. It wouldn’t
make me cry to think of Chamfers trying it to justify it to his corporate
masters, whoever they were.

When
I got home, Mr. Contreras jumped out of his front door to greet me. “Got
anything on Mitch, doll?”

I put
an arm around his shoulder and gently propelled him back into his apartment.
“I’ve started asking people questions, but I’ve got a long way to go yet. I’m
going to tell you the same thing I say to all my clients: I make regular
reports, but I work less and less efficiently the more I get hounded for them.
So pretend we’re neighbors who are both in love with the same dog, and let me
handle the investigation as best I can.”

Mr.
Contreras elected to be hurt. “It’s just that I’m worried about him. I ain’t
trying to hound you or criticize you.”

I
grinned. “Perish the thought. Can you give me Kruger’s old address—the one he
had before he came home with you last Friday?”

“Yeah.
Yeah, I got it right here.”

He
pulled the cover from the desk that stood in the middle of his living room.
I’ve never known either why he keeps it there, where he must bump into it a
hundred times a week, or why he thinks it’s a good idea to drape it. From the
jumble of papers stacked on top and spilling from the drawers I figured it
wasn’t going to be an easy search. I skirted the operation and went over to
check on Peppy.

The
puppies had grown amazingly in one week. Their soft fur coverings were starting
to show distinctive colors. They were still blind, though, and helpless. They
squealed and squirmed in terror when Peppy stood up and left them. She sniffed
my legs to make sure it was me and indicated that she wanted to go outside.

“Yeah,
you take her out, doll. I’m still tracking down Mitch’s address,” Mr. Contreras
called to me.

Peppy
didn’t want to stay out long. She made a brief circuit of the yard to spot any
changes in her domain and headed straight back to the kitchen door. Our quick
tour suddenly reminded me of my insane agreement to do evening duty with Mrs.
Frizell’s dogs.

When
we returned to the living room, Mr. Contreras was leafing through a crumbling
address book.

“Got
it, cookie,” he announced. “I’ll just write it down for you.” A handful of
pages dropped to the floor while he hunted for a pencil and paper.

“Just
tell me what it is,” I suggested. “I can remember it long enough to get
upstairs… By the way, did Mrs. Hellstrom up the street drop off keys for Mrs.
Frizell’s house?”

“Huh?”
He was copying Mitch’s address onto an old envelope with the slow hand of
someone who doesn’t write much. “Keys? Oh, yeah, slipped my mind in my worry
over Mitch, but I got them here for you. Hang-on a second. I thought you wasn’t
going to get involved with any more dogs. Isn’t that what you said?”

“My
lips said ‘No, no,’ but my imbecile conscience said ‘Yes, yes.’ But I’m not
backing down on an addition to our menagerie.”

“Okay,
doll, okay. Cool your jets.” He handed me the envelope with Kruger’s old
address, Thirty-fifth Street west of Damen, spelled out in caps. Really just
walking distance from Diamond Head. “Is that where you lived too?”