Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 07 (51 page)

It wasn’t
until then that I remembered the urine in the corner of the stairwell. The
stench was unmistakable, but it was too late to do anything about it now.

Loring’s
face was set in angry lines when he came in. “Who the hell’s that old man? What
business does he have questioning me?”

“He’s
my partner. Part of his job is to check my visitors. People’ve been stalking me
all week—it makes both of us nervous. Coffee? Wine? Tofu?”

“Nothing
for me. I don’t want to be here and I don’t want to prolong it. Your partner,
huh? Not much of an operation.”

“But
you’re not here as my business consultant, are you? I need some coffee. I’ll be
back in a minute.”

The
pot I’d made with my lunch was cold. It took about five minutes to brew up some
fresh stuff. By the time I returned to the living room Loring himself was
coming to a rolling boil—always a critical moment in cooking.

“What
are you trying to do to me, Warshawski? I run the finances of a major
corporation. I dropped everything to meet with the members of our board who could
give me the green light to talk to you—and now you’re jacking me around just
for the hell of it. I might be better off taking my chances with the press.”

“No,
you wouldn’t. And you don’t need me to tell you that. I spent all of last night
looking at files relating to Diamond Head. I got in at six-thirty this morning
and went to bed. I know now—”

“Where?”
he demanded. “If you had access to Diamond Head files, why the hell are you
screwing around with me?”

“I
didn’t until last night. Have access, I mean. It was pure luck, in combination
with my partner’s areas of expertise. I still don’t know what your problem is,
though. I know now that the consent decree when you bought Central States
Aviation meant you had to sell Diamond Head.” I sketched out what I’d learned
from Dick’s papers last night.

“If
you know that, you know everything,” Loring said. His face was still set in
tight lines.

I
shook my head. “What’s so secret about it? Did you have to sign some kind of
defense department clearance that means you can’t talk to mere taxpayers about
it?”

“No,
nothing like that. What do you know about the decree?”

“Not
a lot. That you had sixty days in which to sell, and Jason Felitti came to you
with a better offer than you thought you’d be able to get if you waited. And
then you had to give some guarantees that you wouldn’t drive them out of
business.”

Loring
gave a bark of laughter. “I wish! No, you didn’t see the real decree. Or you
didn’t read it very carefully.”

“I
wasn’t as interested in it as I was in—well, some other things. And I only had
a few hours with the files.”

“What
other things?”

“You
first, Mr. Loring.”

He
went to the front window to conduct an interior debate. It didn’t take him
long: he hadn’t come all this way on a business day only to return empty-handed.

“Daraugh
Graham warned me about you,” he commented with less animosity. “And I suppose
if he trusts you I can too.”

I
tried to smile in a trustworthy way. “If you’d read through the whole consent
decree, you would see that the Justice Department’s care for Diamond Head went
way beyond protecting them from us: we had to guarantee their survival by
continuing to provide a market for their products. And by continuing to supply
them with raw materials.”

Loring
smiled bitterly as he saw my mouth gape open. “It’s not unprecedented. Some
other steel companies have gotten stabbed by the same kind of deal. But Felitti
had, or seemed to have, good credentials. I mean, everyone in the industry in
Chicago knows Amalgamated Portage. We’ve done business with them for years.”

“But
Peter Felitti wouldn’t tie the family company in with Diamond Head.”

“We
only discovered that later. But that didn’t matter. He was plenty willing to
help in other ways: he saw that Jason got debt financing. I suppose most
backers assumed Amalgamated Portage would be behind Diamond Head— we did, after
all. It wouldn’t have mattered, if Jason had been honest.”

“So
what’s he been doing? Ordering supplies from you that he doesn’t need and then
reselling them on the black market? Why don’t you go to the feds?”

“We
didn’t have any evidence… Is there more coffee? I’m afraid I was a little short
earlier.”

I
grinned at him. “I can make some fresh, but it’ll keep you waiting, unless you
don’t mind coming out to the kitchen.”

He
followed me to the back of the apartment. I moved the plate of cold tofu to the
sink and put water on to boil again. Loring took the papers from a chair and
put them on the floor so he could sit down.

“When
you showed up on Friday and started flaunting tales of knowing we were
bankrolling Felitti, I thought you were working for him, that you might be
trying to muscle something extra out of us. But when you called Monday with the
tale of the copper spools—then I knew what they were doing.”

I
poured boiling water into the coffee cone. “You could have hired a detective
and had that information a year ago. Why didn’t you?”

He
shook his head in frustration. “We always had complete audit reports from them.
And they had a very reputable law firm behind them. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t
think—”

“A
detective would quickly have told you that the senior partner handling the
buyout was the son-in-law of Jason Felitti’s brother. Then you could have
started worrying about conflict of interest.”

“Okay.
I’ll get a detective on the case. What do you charge?”

“Fifty
dollars an hour and any expenses that aren’t part of my normal overhead.”

“You’re
too cheap, Warshawski. But maybe I’ll hire you.”

I
showed my teeth at him. “And maybe I’ll be available.”

“Sorry,
sorry. I said it wrong. Seriously, I’ll talk to the board tomorrow. It’s your
turn now. What was it you were mostly interested in—this dead man you mentioned
the other day?”

“Right.”
I gave him a thumbnail sketch of Mitch Kruger and Eddie Mohr and what I’d
learned last night from my time in Dick’s files.

“Jason
Felitti was just scrambling,” Loring said when I finished. “He was too ignorant
to come up with a plan. He got goods from me and stole them, cheated the union
out of their pension plan, parked bonds with a charity—all that’s just flailing
around.”

“Yes.
Not a criminal mastermind. Not even a bust-out artist, as I originally
suspected. Just an incompetent schlep who wanted to prove he was as big as his
brother. The problem is, I don’t see how I can tag them for murder.

And I
care more about that than I do about your theft problem. I’m worried about the
pension fund too. I don’t want innocent bystanders screwed out of their
rights.“

Loring,
of course, only cared about protecting Paragon’s interests. He wanted me to
drop everything and plan a stakeout that would provide definitive proof of
Diamond Head’s reselling Paragon raw materials. The way it stood right now I
only had evidence that they were loading copper onto trucks in the middle of
the night, not whether they were reselling it or whether Diamond Head
management was involved.

I let
him argue his case while I tried to figure out answers to my own problems, but
at four-thirty I showed him the door. “You were so late getting here you’ve
backed up the rest of my schedule. I need to get going. You can talk to me
tomorrow after you’ve spoken to your board.”

“Then
you’ll take the case if they approve hiring you?”

“I
don’t know. But I can’t discuss it until I know whether you’re a serious
customer or not.”

He
didn’t like it, but when he saw I wasn’t going to budge he finally left,
wrinkling his face in disgust at the stench on the stairs. I stayed long enough
to strap on the Smith & Wesson before heading for the el.

I
stopped on my way out to let Mr. Contreras know where I was going. As a
full-fledged partner in crime, he deserved to know. Besides, the fact that
someone had been waiting in the stairwell last night made me extra cautious. I
wanted him to monitor the building’s traffic even more rigorously than he usually
did.

“Vinnie
may be letting thugs into the place. Just keep an eye out. Don’t expose
yourself unnecessarily—but if strangers go clomping up to the third floor, call
the cops. In fact, call Conrad.” I gave him Rawlings’s home number as well as
the number at the station and took off before he could flood me with
accusations over my intimacy with an officer.

During
the slow el ride south I wondered what I could do about the Picheas and Vinnie
and Mrs. Frizell. Even if I proved Vinnie and Chrissie persuaded Mrs. Frizell
to buy some of Diamond Head’s useless bonds, I wasn’t sure the state’s attorney
would think that rotten enough to remove the Picheas as her guardian. I
wondered whether Mrs. Frizell’s strange, estranged son might be persuaded to
take action. Since his main rivals to her affection, the dogs, were out of
commission, maybe he would at least want to protect his own measly inheritance.

The
el let me out at Twenty-second and Kedzie around five-thirty. It was more than
two miles down to Barney’s from there, but I longed for a good walk to clear my
body. Thunderheads had started to cloud the sun about the time I changed trains
downtown, but I thought I could walk fast enough to beat the storm.

After
a few blocks in the dust that the trucks were kicking up on the narrow roadway,
I began to doubt the health value of the walk. My old Tigers, too, didn’t have
as much left in their soles as I had hoped. My feet started to hurt. Every time
I came to a bus stop I’d wait a few minutes to see if one were coming behind
the trucks. Plenty of northbound buses trundled by, but they must have been
falling off the end of the earth when they got to Congress: nothing was
returning south.

I
could just see Barney’s sign when the rain broke. I sprinted the last two
blocks and rounded the corner onto Forty-first.

The
rain and my sore feet made me stupid. A truck was double-parked across the
street from me, its engine running. I looked at it cursorily, unlocked the
Impala, and started to slide into the driver’s seat.

A
movement from the truck startled me and I moved faster into the car, reaching
for my Smith & Wesson. My mistake was in trying to do both. The door was
wrenched open and a pistol thrust against my head while I was still fumbling
for my own gun. Careful not to move my head, I rolled my eyeballs as far up as
they would go. I was looking at the Hulk.

He
didn’t speak or move. My stomach heaved. I was glad I’d only put half a plate
of tofu into it. That lessened the chance of total humiliation. I heard glass
shatter to my right. I jerked around involuntarily and felt the pistol jam into
my neck.

One
of the Hulk’s pals had broken the glass in the passenger side of the Impala and
was calmly unlocking the door. He, too, had a gun. When he had it stuck in my
side‘, the Hulk climbed into the backseat. Stupidly enough, the only thing I
could think was how pissed Luke was going to be when he saw the broken window
on a car he wanted to sell.

“Drive,”
the Hulk growled.

“Your
slightest wish is my command. Where to, Oh king?” Despite my dry mouth and
heaving stomach, my voice came out without a quaver. All those years of
practicing breath control to my mother’s critical standard paid off in a
crisis.

“Down
to the corner and make a left,” the Hulk said.

I
turned left onto Albany. “Back to Eddie Mohr’s?”

“We
don’t want to hear it from you.” A piece of metal attached itself to the back
of my head. “Right at the corner.”

“To
Diamond Head, then.”

“I
said we didn’t want to hear it from you. Left on Archer.”

We
were heading to the plant. Rain was starting to come in through the broken
glass, spattering the man to my right, but also the dashboard. Another thing
that would peeve Luke.

If
they were just getting me to the plant so that they could kill me in private I
didn’t think I had a prayer. I wished I’d seen Lotty before I came down here. I
wished she hadn’t spent the last week in fear because of me. And I wished my
own last minutes weren’t to be spent in terror.

I
still had my gun. But I couldn’t figure out how to get to it without one of my
escorts shooting first. When we pulled up on the tarmac in front of the plant,
the Hulk slid out of the backseat and opened the driver’s door. His pal ordered
me to kill the engine. I did, but left the key in the ignition. The Hulk yanked
on my left arm, wrenching me from the car, while his pal kept me covered. From
around the side I could hear the throb of truck engines.

I
whirled inside the Hulk’s arm, so that his body shielded me from his partner,
and kicked hard on his shin. The damned Tigers were too soft.

The
Hulk grunted, but kept his hold. “Don’t make it harder on yourself than it
already is, girlie.”