Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 07 (25 page)

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 neighbours 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 responsibility 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 bought 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, bookshelves 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 bookshelves 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 bookshelves 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 some place?

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.

Dear
Mrs. Frizell,-

15
March

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 reopen 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 deposits 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—”

“What
care?” I interrupted. “The first thing you two beacons of light did was kill
her dogs, the only thing in the world Mrs. Frizell loved. Everything you’ve
done since last Friday may be legal, but I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole.
You stink, Pichea, worse than any heap of dogshit Mrs. Frizell may have left
lying around.”

“That’s
enough!” he shouted. “You think your moral superiority gives you the right to
break the law? I have papers that prove my right to control who enters this
place, and any judge in the city will agree.” ., I laughed. “You have papers?
You sound like a pedigreed dog. Speaking of documents, though, where’s Mrs.
Frizell’s title? And where’s her passbook at U.S. Met?”

“How
do you know—” Chrissie began, but Todd cut her off.

“You
have two minutes to leave, Warshawski. Two minutes before I call the cops.”

“So
you do have her bank book,” I said, trying to infuse my voice with a wealth of
meaning. Privately wondering what possible difference it could make, I
sauntered out the front door.

Mr.
Contreras had evidently been on the lookout for me: he was outside his apartment
by the time I had the lobby door open.

“Where
you been, doll? You look like the short end of a mud-wrestling match.”

I
patted my sweaty curls self-consciously. “I could ask you the same thing. I
thought we were supposed to talk at one to make sure no one had attacked me.”