Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 07 (48 page)

I
spent the next half hour in misery. I couldn’t take the car up Racine in case
they had someone smart enough to be looking for me regardless of what I was
driving. I went the long way around to Barry and sat hunched down in the
driver’s seat, my gun out, straining my ears for any sounds of violence so that
I might race to Mr. Contreras’s rescue. When he appeared at the mouth of the
alley my stomach heaved uncontrollably; I retched up a mouthful of bile, just
getting my head out of the car in time.

Mr.
Contreras, torn between excitement and worry, offered me his giant handkerchief
to clean my mouth. I used it a little ruefully. Marlowe never let his nerves
get the better of him.

My
neighbor had brought a couple of faded boilersuits with him, along with an
outsize toolbox. We dumped the load in the back. I wrenched at the steering
wheel and moved out of the neighborhood. Before we did anything else I needed a
glass of water and something to eat—other bodily needs that never seemed to
afflict the great detectives.

We
found an all-night diner on Clark and stopped for sandwiches. As the Near North
Side grew ever more yuppified this was one of the few remaining places for cops,
delivery drivers, and others on the graveyard shift.

Mr.
Contreras excused himself after he’d eaten half his ham sandwich. “I just
thought of something, doll. You stay here and act natural.”

He
was gone before I could protest, leaving me in mixed astonishment and anger. I
am definitely not the waiting type. This was my second chance this evening to
reflect on how evil I’d been all those times I’d left my neighbor pacing the
floor unhappily at night while I jumped from gantries. I’m not sure either my character
or my disposition was improved by the reflections.

After
he’d been gone five minutes I took the bill to the cashier. I was on my way out
to look for him when he came in, a look of such self-satisfied mischief on his
face that my ill humor died down.

“Oh,
there you are, doll. I thought you was going to wait for me.”

“I
paid the bill. Someone’s just about to pick up the rest of your sandwich. You
want to rescue it?”

“Nah.
I ate enough. Tell you the truth, my stomach’s kind of jumpy. I got us something
that’ll really help.”

I
bustled him out to the Nova before he could proclaim it ta the diner at large.
When we were safely inside the car, he flourished a fistful of paper at me. I
tried turning on the overhead light, but that had died during the car’s first
hundred thousand miles. I pulled out of the lot and stopped under a streetlamp.
Mr. Contreras had lifted a bunch of work orders from Klosowski’s Emergency
Electrical Repair van.

“I
saw the door wasn’t locked when we went by, and then, while we was eating, I
thought, well, why not? They’ll look more official than anything we could make
up down at your office.”

We
had decided to take a chance on finding my office still in the clear and go in
there to try to manufacture a document that would get us into Crawford, Mead.
Mr. Contreras was right: these would be much better than something jerry-rigged
on my Olivetti.

“And,”
he added, his voice squeaking a bit with excitement, “I got you a cap, too—you
ought to cover up those curls of yours.”

He
pulled a Klosowski cap from his back pocket. “Too bad you didn’t find me a
false mustache and a beard as well. You know, I think we’d better move on
south. Looks to me like someone’s heading for the van. This might be his
favourite hat.”

We
parked the Nova on Adams and circled around on foot to come at the Pulteney
from the north. After getting in and out unmolested yesterday I was pretty sure
we were dealing with people amateurish enough not to associate me with an
office, but there was no point in revealing a car we’d been at such pains to
get.

The
elevator was having one of its rare fits of functionality. I would take it up
while Mr. Contreras followed on foot. I gave him the key to the stairwell door
with instructions to go hell for leather for the cops if I was under attack,
not to leap into the fray.

His
jaw set stubbornly. “I ain’t the kind of guy who’s going to run the other way
when a lady’s getting beat up. You’d better resign yourself to that.”

To my
dismay he pulled a pipe wrench out from under the boilersuits. It was his
favorite weapon, one that he used with more gusto than ability. I started to
debate the point with him, then decided there wasn’t time. The likelihood of my
being jumped didn’t seem that great, anyway.

When
the elevator creaked to a halt on the fourth floor, I turned off its light and
slid out the door on my knees, propping my left hand on the wall for balance,
holding the

Smith
& Wesson in front of me with my right. The hall seemed clear; I used my
pencil flash for a quick survey and didn’t see anyone.

The
Pulteney management doesn’t encourage its tenants to use the facilities:
night-lights are unheard of in the hallways. I got to my feet and tiptoed down
to my own door. After using the building for twelve years, it was easy to move
around in it in the dark.

As
I’d hoped, no one was lurking—either in the hall, or inside my place. I had the
lights on and one of Mr. Contreras’s filched work orders in the Olivetti when
he came in—it had taken him a while to figure out how to open the stairwell in
the dark.

“So
they could have beaten you to a pulp while I was back there fooling around with
the darn door. As if I don’t already feel bad enough sending Eddie Mohr to his
death.”

I
rested my wrists on the keyboard. “It didn’t happen that way. He chose to sign
on to some deal with Diamond Head—you didn’t make him do that. Your calling him
didn’t make them shoot him, either: it probably only accelerated the timetable.
If we’d seen him this afternoon—”

“You
might have talked some sense into him and he’d still be alive. You don’t need
to be nice to me, doll, just to save my feelings. I can see there’s more to
this business of talking to people than I’ve figured out.”

I got
up from the machine and put an arm around him. “The worst thing you can do in
an investigation is slow yourself down chewing over what you did wrong. When
the case is finished you can take some time and try to learn from your
mistakes. But when you’re in the middle of it— you just have to be like the
Duke of Wellington—forget about it and go on.”

“Duke
of Wellington, huh? He’s the guy that beat Napoleon, right?”

“The
very one.” I sat back down at the typewriter. “Tell me something evil-sounding
that could go -wrong with someone’s electrical outlets—something so bad, we
can’t let anyone watch us while we work for fear they’ll fry their eyeballs.”

Mr.
Contreras pulled one of my client chairs next to the typewriter. “I don’t know,
doll. All this fancy, modern equipment folks have in their offices, I don’t
know what they’d have, and tell you the truth, I don’t know what could go wrong
with it.”

“Don’t
worry about that. The junior legal beagles we’re going to run into won’t know
either. Dick probably has a computer, and his secretary will have a CRT to the
company’s big system.” I tried to imagine my ex-husband’s office. “Maybe she
has a big printer, because she’ll be printing a lot of forms. Since he’s one of
the senior partners, she might not have to share it with anyone.”

Mr.
Contreras thought about it slowly, drawing himself a diagram on a piece of scrap
paper. “Okay. Put in something about a high-voltage short to the cover of the
machine—maybe it knocked an operator out, or blew her across the room or
something.”

I
typed that in, adding a date and time of call. Then I made a fake form for
Klosowski by using the header from the work order and a blank piece of paper in
my copier. On Mr. Contreras’s suggestion I used that to type in a report of an
earlier inspection of a short in the building’s air conditioner that had been
traced to R. Yarborough’s office. The whole thing was about as spurious as I
could imagine, but it might get us in the door.

Despite
the hour, a bevy of tireless young lawyers were fluttering around Crawford,
Mead’s offices. We got in through their locked mahogany doors simply by showing
our work order to the night guard in the main lobby and getting him to phone up
to the office for us.

No
one had told him about a danger in the electrical plant; he looked surly and
frightened and threatened to call his boss. We assured him the problem had been
traced to one office on thirty—that our boss had warned us very sternly against
alarming people since we only had to deal with the wiring in one room.

“Don’t
get us fired, man, okay?” I pleaded.

He
grudgingly decided he would keep it to himself and phoned upstairs for us. “But
you better give me advance warning if this place is going up in smoke.”

“If
it goes up in smoke you’ll be the only one sitting pretty,” I pointed out,
following Mr. Contreras onto the elevator.

Once
on thirty Mr. Contreras took charge. Even though the Klosowski cap covered my
hair and shielded my face, we didn’t want to run the risk of someone
recognizing me. The worst danger was that Todd Pichea, who knew Mr. Contreras
as well as me, might be working late. We needn’t have worried, though—as the
old man had pointed out earlier, workmen in a professional office are
considered about as human as water buffalo, only not as unusual.

Mr.
Contreras flourished our work order at a young man in a T-shirt and jeans, stressing
the extreme danger of any inexperienced person coming near the dangerous
electrons floating around Dick’s office. Clutching a massive printout for
security, the young man escorted us as far as the top of the interior
stairwell.

“Mr.
Yarborough’s office is at the end of the hall there. Uh, this key should open
his office. If, uh, you don’t mind, I need to get back to work. Maybe you can
find it yourselves from here. You can leave the key at the front desk when you
leave.”

“Right,”
Mr. Contreras said sternly. “And make sure no one comes down here until we give
you the all-clear. We’re going to cut one of the lines. You may notice the
lights dim occasionally, but it’s nothing to worry about.”

Our
guide couldn’t wait to get clear of the area. With any luck the whole crew
would be scared enough to leave work early tonight. I didn’t want some braver
soul coming to investigate while I was copying Dick’s files.

When
I unlocked my ex-husband’s office I felt a kind of guilty thrill. It reminded
me of the times when I was small and hunted out the drawer where my dad hid his
police revolver. I knew I wasn’t supposed to touch it, or even know where it
was, and excitement and shame would get me so wound up I’d have to put on my
skates and race around the block a few times. With an uneasy twinge I wondered
if those feelings were what had led me into detective work. I remembered my
advice to Mr. Contreras—plenty of time for self-analysis later.

Dick
rated a suite with a waiting room, a small sanctum for his secretary, and a
large office whose curved windows overlooked the Chicago River. Mr. Contreras
busied himself in the waiting area, unpacking some businesslike cables from his
toolbox and snaking them across the floor. He had also brought a small power
screwdriver, with which he undid a vent along the floorboards, exposing an
interesting nest of wires.

“You
go on inside and look at papers, doll. If anyone shows up I’ll start buzzing
away with this guy.”

I
found myself tiptoeing into Dick’s office, as if my steps on his Kerman could
raise his hackles out in Oak Brook. The room didn’t run to filing cabinets. He
had several shelves of the legal casebooks he felt he needed every day, a slab
of burled blond wood that apparently was a desk, and an elaborate sideboard
housing German ceramics and a wet bar. Teri and their three blond offspring
beamed at me from the burled slab.

A
door on one side led to a private bath. A second door opened on a shallow
closet. A few clean shirts hung there. I couldn’t resist looking through them;
at the back hung the one I’d flung coffee on. He’d forgotten to take it home
for Teri to look after. Or maybe he couldn’t bring himself to explain to her
how it got that way. I grinned in rather childish triumph.

I
tiptoed back across the Kerman to his secretary’s office. Harriet Regner had
hitched her star to Dick’s when he was starting out and had to share a
secretary with five other men. She’d been his executive secretary now for ten
years and managed a small staff of clerks and paralegals for him. If Dick was
involved in something truly illegal, would he trust it to Harriet? I thought of
Ollie North and Fawn Hall. Men like Dick always seem to find women so
enthusiastic in their devotion that they consider their bosses more important
than the law. Harriet would take care of anything questionable herself. The
clerical grunts she supervised would handle her routine filing elsewhere.

On
that fine logic I approached her filing cabinets. Their blond burl matched
Dick’s desk, although I suspected in here it was just veneer. Without my
picklocks it took a certain amount of force to unlock the cabinets: I had to
get