Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 07 (49 page)

Mr.
Contreras to come in and blast them with his power driver. I didn’t really
care, though, if Dick knew I’d been here—I hadn’t even bothered to wear gloves.
It was one thing to find out what he was up to, and quite another to figure out
how to confront him with it. If he thought I’d been burglarizing him it might
force his hand.

Once
I had the cabinets open, Diamond Head leaped out to greet me. Their affairs
occupied an entire cabinet and spilled over into the top drawer of a second.
I’d thought I was going to be home free when I found the files. I’d forgotten
the amount of paper a law office generated; it was the only way to show they
were really working. When Mr. Contreras heard me cursing, he came in to see
what was wrong. He clucked sympathetically, but didn’t feel able to help.
Anyway, he had to man the lookout post.

I
skimmed through the material in the first drawer. It dealt with the conditions
surrounding Paragon’s sale of Diamond Head. Paragon had bought a helicopter
manufacturer, Central States Aviation, Inc.; the Justice Department had ruled
that they needed to divest themselves of Diamond Head as a condition of the
acquisition. That explained why they got rid of the little engine company,
something that had been troubling me.

An
enormous stack of documents detailed a consent decree between Paragon and
Diamond Head. I hovered over them, tempted to read them closely, but I needed
to get to material that might explain terms of a settlement between Diamond
Head and Eddie Mohr. Carefully keeping everything in its original order, I put
that stack on the floor next to me and turned to the next drawer.

Here
I found the documents dealing with the bond issue enabling Jason Felitti to buy
the engine maker. Skeletons from the Felitti family popped out at me in the
form of letters from Peter Felitti to Dick. Jason had sold most of his shares
in Amalgamated Portage years ago, apparently to finance his political ambitions
in Du Page County. He’d used the remainder to acquire a stake in U.S.
Metropolitan Bank and Trust.

When
he wanted to sell that stake to help finance his acquisition of Diamond Head,
Peter put his foot down. Let Jason use debt financing, he wrote to Dick. This
was in 1988; Drexel was still riding high. It was relatively easy to find an
investment banker willing to issue the debt that would enable Jason to make the
purchase.

That
same memo explained why Jason wanted Diamond Head to begin with, or at least
gave Peter’s version of the case. Jason played golf with one of Paragon’s
outside directors, a political crony who also sat on U.S. Met’s board. The
crony knew Jason wanted to establish himself as a financial success separate
from his brother—why not buy Diamond Head? Since Paragon had to unload it in
sixty days, they would take any offer they could get.

All
this was fascinating, but not illegal. Not even immoral. It was the next drawer
that suddenly revealed what I was looking for.

Jason,
a year into his purchase, couldn’t meet his debt payments. The airplane
industry was in a recession. No one wanted the splines that were Diamond Head’s
specialty. And even if they did, sales wouldn’t begin to cover his interest
payments, let alone to repay the principal.

But
the pension fund for Diamond Head’s work force was currently valued at twenty
million. If Jason could cash that in, he could breathe more easily. The catch
was, an informal poll of the rank and file showed he’d probably lose a vote on
converting the fund to an annuity. But Eddie Mohr, the president of the local,
agreed on the union’s behalf. In exchange for a cash settlement of five hundred
thousand dollars, he signed documents allowing Diamond Head to sell the union
pension fund and convert it to an annuity.

But
how could they get away with it? There were all those pensioners like Mr.
Contreras. Surely they would notice when their checks went down in value. I was
about to call out to my neighbor, when I found the answer. The annuity would be
structured so that current pensioners would be paid what they presently
received. The paying institution would change from the Ajax Insurance Company,
which managed the union fund, to Urban Life, an insurance company owned by U.S.
Met’s directors—which also agreed to acquire a significant amount of Diamond
Head junk.

I
felt myself gasping for air. Cash in the pension fund without union consent and
pay off Eddie Mohr to make it possible. Of course, he was the duly elected
representative of the union. The feds might rule that that made it a legal
transaction. But Eddie, knowing Mitch Kruger had died sniffing around the deal,
might have felt unable to face another old buddy from the shop. When Mr.
Contreras called, maybe it pricked his loyalty to the local. Maybe he called
Milt Chamfers and told him he just couldn’t keep cheating his buddies. I
wondered if I’d ever know.

A
gold-rimmed carriage clock on Harriet’s desk chimed the hour. I looked up with
a start: two o’clock and I still had three drawers to go. Mr. Contreras came in
to see how I was doing.

“I
just got back from scouting around. I think we’ve got the place to ourselves
now. Need me to do anything?”

“Want
to copy some of these documents? I think I’ve found something pretty hot. Don’t
stop to read the stuff now; it’ll only get you too mad to go on.”

He
was happy to help out, but had never used a copier before. Harriet’s Xerox was
so complicated that it took a fair amount of time to get him comfortable using
it. It was close to three when I got back to my papers.

I
riffled through the remaining files quickly, hoping to find a reference to
Chicago Settlement. When I couldn’t find anything, I stashed the papers back
where they belonged and turned once again to the stack dealing with Paragon
Steel. Mr. Contreras finished his photocopying. Laying the copies next to me,
he said with a delicate cough that he was going to find a men’s room. I nodded
absently, forgetting Dick’s private John until after he’d disappeared down the
hall.

I had
just gotten to what looked like a juicy section, dealing with Paragon’s
obligation to keep Diamond Head functioning, when Mr. Contreras came racing
back in.

“Someone’s
come in, doll. I think it may be the cops. I’d sort of wandered to the front,
just giving the place the once-over—”

“Pack
up your tools and explain the rest to me later. If they come here, I want them
to find you in the act of restoring the vent cover.”

He
stumbled back to the waiting room. I shoved the papers back in their folders
and jammed them into the drawers any old way. I looked at the photocopies in
momentary indecision. If it was indeed the cops and I got searched, I couldn’t
be found with those on me.

I
opened Harriet’s side drawer and took out a large manila envelope with
Crawford, Mead’s return address on the corner. Stuffing my copies into it, I
addressed the envelope to myself at my office and sprinted down the hall. I
called out to Mr. Contreras as I left not to worry, that I wasn’t abandoning
him.

Mr.
Contreras was right: we had cops. I could hear them at the bottom of the
interior staircase planning how to search the upper floors. Panicking slightly,
I went from room to room until I found one with outgoing mail in a basket. I
slid my envelope into the middle of the stack and walked back up the hall to join
Mr. Contreras.

I got
there just as one of the patrolmen came down the hall with the night guard from
the lobby.

Fred
Roper, the night guard, was triumphant. “I knew there couldn’t be something
wrong with the air-conditioning. Not without them telling me about it when I
came on duty.”

“It
only took you five hours to figure it out.” Mr. Contreras said. “What’d you
have to do—take off yoar shoes and socks and think it through with your toes?”

We
hadn’t actually been arrested yet, just taken to one of the small side offices
for questioning. Mr. Contreras’s adrenaline level was about high enough to send
the Galileo probe hurtling past Mars. I kept hoping he would calm down before
the charges against us multiplied—illegal entry and snoopery were bad enough.
Although we’d managed to get most of the evidence packed up in time, Mr.
Contreras was still rewinding coils of wire when the cops showed up.

His
last comment was certainly justified. It miffed Fred Roper no end. He explained
for the third time, in detail, how he started getting suspicious when the last
of the Crawford, Mead, employees left—around one-thirty—and we were still up
there. He finally made up his mind that we might not be up to any good and
called his boss. The security firm’s night manager phoned the building
engineers’ night manager, and confirmed that all the appliances and wiring were
functioning smoothly. On his boss’s instruction, Roper called the cops.

Roper’s
dull, nasal voice and his excited repetitions made me want to jump up and
strangle him. The police were no doubt using him as a weapon to torment me into
confessing.

“What
were you doing here, anyway?” the senior member of the patrol demanded. “And no
more of this shit about you being an electrician and this being your neighbor
helping you out. The unions don’t operate like that. And your normal neighbors
don’t carry guns or PI licenses.”

Officer
Arlington was a thickset man in his late fifties, with a bald spot that he
tried to drape his few lingering hairs across. As soon as he’d pushed us into a
conference room—before saying a word—he’d taken off his cap and combed his
hair.

“No,
I know,” I said quickly, before Mr. Contreras could step to the mat again. “Mr.
Contreras is just trying to protect me, which is really sweet of him. The truth
is, well, this is painful to have to talk about to strangers.”

“Get
used to it, girlie—you’re going to see a lot of strangers before you finish
telling your tale.” Officer Miniver, a younger black man, shared his partner’s
menacing attitude toward suspects.

“Well,
it’s like this.” I spread my hands in a pantomime of feminine helplessness.
“The man whose office we were in, he’s my ex-husband. And I can’t get him to
keep up with his child-support payments. I don’t have any money, I can’t afford
to take him to court—and anyway, how could I win against a big lawyer like
him?”

“Lots
of ladies can’t get their child-support payments, but they don’t go breaking
into their husbands’ offices. What was that supposed to do for you?”

“I
was hoping to find, well, evidence, I guess, of his ability to pay. That’s what
he keeps telling me, that he can’t afford it because of his mortgage and his
new family and everything in Oak Brook.”

“And
you needed a gun for that?” Miniver said derisively.

“He’s
threatened me in the past. Maybe it was foolish of me, but I didn’t want to be
beaten up again.”

“He’s
a terrible man, terrible,” Mr. Contreras confirmed. “How he could treat a sweet
girl like Vic here so mean I’ll never understand.”

I
could see neither Arlington nor Miniver’s heart was going to break over this.
They seemed pleased to think Dick was clever enough to evade his obligations.
They asked me a series of questions about our decree and how Dick had managed
to avoid paying me anything for years.

In
the end, Arlington whistled admiringly. “Guess all that legal education gets
you something after all… Too bad you didn’t spend your money on a lawyer
sooner, girlie, instead of breaking in here. Because you’re sure going to have
to come up with the dough for one now that we’re arresting you.”

“Why
don’t we call Richard Yarborough first? He’s the one who has to press charges
in the end.”

“Yeah,
but a guy who won’t pay child support sure isn’t going to be very understanding
about you digging through his personal papers,” Arlington said.

“Let
him decide that. The one thing I know about Richard Stanley Yarborough is that
he hates other people making up his mind for him.”

It
was four-thirty now. They felt they couldn’t possibly bother such an important
lawyer in the middle of the night. Anyway, they were panting to take Mr.
Contreras and me to the station and stuff us in holding cells for the remainder
of the night.

“I do
get the one phone call,” I said. “And I don’t have any scruples about bothering
a big man at home. So I’ll call him. You can listen in on the extension, but
your watch commander won’t have to know you disturbed him.”

Before
either Miniver or Arlington could object I went to the phone standing in the
corner and dialed his home. It’s one of those mental perversities that I know
Dick’s number by heart.

He
answered on the fifth ring, his voice thick with sleep.

“Dick,
it’s V. I.”

“Vic!
What the fuck are you doing calling now? Do you have any idea what time it is?”

“Four-thirty-five.
I’m down at your office and a couple of cops want to arrest me for illegal
entry. I thought you’d like to put your two cents in first.”

There
was no extension in the room. Arlington had sent Miniver scurrying down the
hall to find a line he could listen in on. I heard a click just then as he came
on.