Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 08 (11 page)

“Great.
What happened?”

“They
explained their situation to me. That they’re overextended in the community.
But they persuaded Home Free to give Lamia a crack at rehabbing one of their
homeless shelters. You want to send me a bill for any time you’ve put in?”

“Not
especially.” I drew a circle on my notepad and peppered it with dots.

“We
agreed I would donate fifteen hours. You still have thirteen and a half
coming.”

“I’ll
bank them, then. Thanks for calling, Vic.”

“Not
so fast, Phoebe. My City Hall spout, who eats money like a broken vending
machine, is too scared even to say the project name. Now you tell me, as though
you were announcing the weather, that you had a meeting with Century. Two days
ago you said you didn’t know anyone there you could talk to. That changed
mighty fast, didn’t it? I called to chew on you for getting me involved in
something hot, but you’re making me want to dig in earnest.”

Phoebe
laughed. “You’ve been a detective too long, Vic: everything looks suspicious to
you. I got a call at noon from Camilla saying they’d worked out a new deal with
a different source. I’ve been tied up all afternoon and haven’t had a chance to
call you. No big deal.”

I
attacked my peppered circle with a series of sharp lines. Maybe she was right.
Maybe I was just depressed by the ugliness around me—physical as well as
spiritual. The rot of the dying Pulteney was seeping into my mind, withering me
and turning me sour.

“Okay,
Phoebe. I’m seeing Camilla on Sunday. She can tell me all about it.”

“I’m
sure she’ll be happy to.” We hung up on that line, but Phoebe had paused an
instant too long before delivering it. I could almost hear the wheels turning
in her brain, that she’d have to talk to Conrad’s sister before I did to make
sure they were telling the same story.

I
typed the first entry in the Lamia file. “Cyrus is scared and Phoebe is lying.”

The
Old College

Tie
Camilla wasn’t at work. The small contractor for whom she did carpentry said
they hadn’t had a job for her today. She wasn’t at home either. I left urgent
messages with her boss and her answering machine.

I’d
never heard of Home Free until my Arcadia board meeting Monday night, and now
it was cropping up all over, like the dandelions in Lincoln Park. It was
strange that Jasper Heccomb had ended up as head of it. I’d had a crush on him
when we were students, when he’d been an upperclassman who ran with the coolest
crowd on campus. He’d once bought me a cup of coffee in Swift Hall after a
meeting. I’d been ecstatic until I learned he’d been using me to make his
girlfriend jealous. She’d been sitting at a corner table with another guy, but
I’d only known that when my roommate pointed them out to deflate me.

Jasper
hadn’t paid attention to me after that, other than to get me to do girl-work,
like typing and stuffing envelopes. Somehow I’d always thought he’d end up like
Jerry Rubin, a Yippie turned yuppie, and not be content with a small advocacy
group.

Wondering
if he’d even remember me, I looked Home Free up in the phone book.

They
had an office in Edgewater, a mile or so north of Lotty’s clinic. I picked up
the phone to dial, then put it down again. If I called out of the blue to
catechize Heccomb about Lamia I might sour a perfectly good deal for the
tradeswomen.

“Remember
me?” I could say. “I used to hang around the C-Shop hoping for a chance
encounter. One of the legion of women who did grunt work for the peace movement
while you guys got the headlines, in the hopes you’d honor us with a one-night
stand. Now I need to know why you’ve become a savior for Lamia.”

Of
course, I could ask about housing for Tamar Hawkings, even though she’d
disappeared again. I picked up the phone again and dialed. A woman answered.

Naturally.

“Why
do you want to talk to him?” She spoke gruffly, as if I were a phone solicitor
to be cut off at the slightest provocation.

“To
get some information about homeless shelters.”

“We’re
not a direct provider. You need to call the city’s emergency housing bureau.”

“I
still would like to talk to Jasper. I have some questions that he might be able
to answer.”

“Are
you a reporter?” she demanded.

I was
getting exasperated. “Is there a policy against taking messages in your office?
Jasper knew me twenty years ago—he might actually be willing to talk to me.”

As
often happens with belligerent people she became apologetic under
confrontation. “We get too many people calling up either to find shelter or
because they want to do stories on us. He has to be careful not to take too
many calls or he won’t have time to work.”

“Well,
give it a try. Is he in? I’ll hold while you ask.”

“He’s
out. I’ll take a message.”

“Great.
Why couldn’t we just have started there?” I spelled my name, wondering if she
would bother to tell him.

In
the morning, since he hadn’t phoned back, I swung over to Edgewater before
going downtown. I promised the thin air I wouldn’t say anything to ruin
Camilla’s project. I just wanted to get a feel for how Home Free operated, see
whether it smelled legitimate to me.

The
office occupied a storefront between a Korean novelty shop and an Arab bakery.
An old-fashioned panel truck, the kind they used to use for bread deliveries,
took up most of the parking spaces out front. I presumed it belonged to the
bakery and wondered why they couldn’t park in the alley—I had to leave my
beloved Trans Am close to Leland where teenage boys might strip it in my
absence.

It
was cold, as it can be in early April. Wearing only a wool suit-jacket over my
jeans, I shivered as I trotted past the novelty store.

Home
Free didn’t advertise themselves to the public. No name appeared above the
discreetly stenciled street number on the door. Vertical blinds, pulled flat
against the storefront windows, didn’t allow passersby to peer in. Almost
invisible against them were the white plastic circles of an alarm system. I
checked the address against the number I’d scrawled in my notebook and pushed
the door open.

A
woman of about thirty sat at a desk near the entrance typing into a computer.
She hunched over the keyboard like a bow, her shapeless print dress hanging on
her skinny body like sacking. Her gold-brown hair stood away from her face in
corrugated waves. When she looked up, her thick brows contracting into a frown,
I saw she had two tiny braids almost buried in the hair around her ears, as if
ashamed of a concession to fashion.

“What
do you want?”

It
was the same gruff voice that had welcomed me on the phone. “I’m V.I.

Warshawski.
I called yesterday. I want to see Jasper.”

“You
don’t have an appointment. He can’t see you—he’s very busy.” Her muddy skin
darkened as she flushed.

The
room was tiny, barely big enough to hold her desk and a couple of filing
cabinets. The printer was wedged against the windows. I looked around for a
second chair but didn’t see one. A door between the filing cabinets along the
back wall presumably led to Jasper’s space. I debated crashing in on him, but
all it would prove was that I was more muscular than the young woman, and I
didn’t need to barge through doors to demonstrate that.

“I’ll
wait. I only need a few minutes.” If she had asked me, in a normal polite way,
what my business was, I might have said some magic words, but her sullenness
was getting under my skin.

She
frowned more ferociously, trying to make up her mind how to handle me.

The
problem was suddenly solved when the back door opened. A beefy man in a
sheepskin jacket came out, a deep scowl cutting chasms into his jowls. Home
Free’s campers were certainly not a happy lot.

“I’m
warning you, Heccomb: you’d better not leave me high and dry,” he said over his
shoulder.

Jasper
Heccomb appeared behind him, clapping a hand on his shoulder. “I thought you
were going to subcontract the job, Gary.”

I’d
forgotten how deep and resonant his voice was—a timbre for rallying the troops
when faint of heart. Gary didn’t seem to feel very rallied. He started to snarl
that whether he or one of his men did the job, he expected—when he saw me and
cut himself off. Jasper came into the room behind him.

I
can’t say I would have known him anywhere—it had been twenty years since I’d
seen or thought of him. But knowing to expect him I recognized him at once.

The
gold hair that used to hang around his shoulders like a pre-Raphaelite Jesus
was still long, but pulled back in a ponytail. Some thinning at the temples
only made his narrow, dreamy face look distinguished.

“Who’s
this?” he asked across me to the woman at the desk “V. I. Warshawski,” I
answered. “I called yesterday. Did you get my message?”

“Did
we get her message, Tish?”

“She
wouldn’t tell me her business; I didn’t think you’d want to be bothered,” she
muttered, twisting her hands.

The
change in Tish’s attitude, from hostility to gaucherie, seemed to prove women
still worked for Jasper out of love.

“We
used to do some work together down at the University of Chicago—when you were
organizing sit-ins and I helped stuff envelopes,” I said. “Now I’m a private
investigator and a ... friend ... of Deirdre Messenger’s. I thought you might
be able to answer a few questions for me.”

Gary’s
scowl deepened. “Deirdre Messenger? Heccomb—are you coming or going?”

“I’ll
handle this, Gary.” Jasper put his hand back on the other man’s shoulder. “Why
don’t you head on out. And don’t worry so much. We’ve never let you down in the
past, right, big guy?”

Gary
started to speak, looked at me in frustration, and stomped out of the office.
He climbed into the bakery truck and drove off with a furious clanking of
gears.

“So
you went from stuffing envelopes to working for Deirdre Messenger, huh?

Iguess
that’s a climb up the career ladder.” His quick smile robbed the words of some
of their sting.

“You
could say the same about going from sit-ins to this storefront. The University
of Chicago no doubt expects better of its alums.”

He
grinned. “Judging by the fund-raising solicitations, they expect a lot better.”

Tish
banged angrily in a desk drawer. I felt sorry for her, wondering if I, too, had
once frowned so obviously when Jasper smiled at someone else.

“So
what does Deirdre want you to do?”

“She
hasn’t hired me to do anything. Merely, she and Donald Blakely both mentioned
your name to me.”

“Donald
Blakely?” His brows went up. “Tish—has Blakely called recently about ... sorry,
I know I should remember your name if we worked together, but there were so
many ... ”

“Yes,
indeed,” I said as his voice trailed away. “V.I. You can call me Vic.”

Tish
put in, “I can phone Mr. Blakely if you’d like.”

“No,
don’t bother—we can do that later. I’ll just talk to her a minute, see if it’s
something we can sort out in a hurry. You’d better sit in, though, in case it’s
something you know more about than I.” He smiled again. “I’ve only been with
Home Free three years. Tish here kept it going before that, during its lean
period.”

It
was a meager kind of praise, but the young woman flushed with pride. Her bowed
shoulders even straightened a bit.

The
back room had been created by the simple addition of a wall down the middle of
the storefront, but it was a good quality wall, fully soundproofed.

Without
windows, it made me feel as though I’d stepped into a tomb, although a modern
one: the rest of Home Free’s electronics sat here—a fax machine, another
computer, and the latest in Hewlett-Packard printing technology. Jasper
gestured me to a folding chair in front of the desk. Tish edged into a battered
wing chair wedged in the corner.

“What
kind of detective are you, Vic?”

His
tone was patronizing enough to make me feel snotty. “A good one.

Thorough.”

He
smiled, with a genuine touch of humor. “I’m sure you are. But I need to know
what kind of good, thorough detecting you’re planning on doing on me.”

“Blakely
and Deirdre thought you were the person to talk to about a homeless woman I’d
found camped in my office building.”

Jasper
turned to Tish. “You could have saved Vic a trip. Told her we didn’t do direct
placement.”

“She
did,” I assured him. “They were the first words out of her mouth. But I thought
that was Home Free’s mission: housing for the homeless.”

“Webuild
it,” Jasper said. “That’s why we keep a low profile, and keep our door locked.
Before, we’d have hordes of people lining up every evening trying to find a
place to crash. And we do advocacy work—that’s my main job, going to
Springfield.”