Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 08 (13 page)

Back
at my desk I glared at my computer. My name flashed in blue across the screen
every time I stopped working. The sight seemed to mock me. I hit the space bar
and returned to the Lamia file.

Before
Deirdre’s arrival I’d put in the data from Home Free’s 990 filing. My last task
for the day was to enter the names of Century Bank’s directors from the list Lexis
had given me on Tuesday. That would conclude anything I’d do on the Lamia
project.

The
directors’ names had come in alphabetical order. Near the top of the list was
Eleanor Guziak. My jaw dropped slightly. She was the banker who’d sat across
from me at Deirdre’s party Wednesday night. Right-hand woman of Gateway Bank
president Donald Blakely, who’d blandly told me he didn’t know anyone at the
Century Bank well. My, my. How little we know of our own subordinates.

Gateway
was a big downtown bank. Not in the same league as the Ft. Dearborn Trust or
First Chicago, but part of the little group that made policy—both private and
public—in the city.

Century,
on the other hand, was a small community bank whose only office lay in the
Forty-eighth ward, where Camilla’s group wanted to put up their experimental
project. It wasn’t unusual for the officer of a big bank to serve on the board
of a small one. What was strange was Donald Blakely’s unwillingness to
acknowledge the relationship.

I
whistled tunelessly through my front teeth. I could call Guziak, and get her
voice mail or her secretary and hope for a return call.

“None
of your business, Vic,” a voice inside my brain warned me. “You aren’t going to
jeopardize Lamia’s deal, are you?”

It
was close to five-thirty. If I hurried, and if I guessed right, I could
intercept Guziak on her way out of the Gateway building. Turning off the
machine, I pulled my papers into my briefcase and switched off the desk lamp.

As I
got up I saw Deirdre’s coat. In my excitement over Eleanor Guziak I’d forgotten
Deirdre. I was damned if I’d wait while she futzed around hoping to stir up
Fabian. She could retrieve her coat from my doorknob if she ever condescended
to return. I wasn’t running a checkroom.

She
arrived just as I was balancing it on the knob. “Oh. You leaving, Vic? I was
hoping I could use your phone.”

“Sorry.
I’ve got an appointment across the Loop.” I handed her coat to her.

“Any
luck?”

“I
may have found where they were sleeping for a few nights. One of the offices on
six. If you have a spare key I could put it through the mail slot on your door
when I leave.”

My
astonishment at her sheer gall was so great that I found myself fumbling in the
zip compartment of my briefcase for a spare key. I handed it to her wordlessly.
If she forgot to put it through the mail slot it wouldn’t matter; I was going
to move my office home in the morning. This dying building was dragging me down
with it.

“Is
there a washroom on this floor?” she asked, pocketing the key.

“You
have to go up to seven. Unless you’re desperate,I’d wait till I got home: the
lighting’s bad and the hygiene is ... well, sketchy. Or go to the coffee shop
you used this afternoon—they’re pretty accommodating.”

She
followed me down the hall. “I’ll manage. With the hygiene, I mean. And I
brought a flashlight.”

“And
I’d use the stairs,” I added. “The elevator is temperamental. Although, if it
stops, you can open the trap door and climb out over the top. That’s what I do
these days.”

She
looked startled, but she was determined to show me that she was just as tough
as I was. She hit the button and the elevator groaned into a semblance of life.

As I
started down the stairs I called, “And make sure you don’t leave my office
unlocked. If I come back in the morning to find that computer missing I’m going
to make sure you replace it.”

Deirdre
didn’t say anything, but as I looked over my shoulder at her she touched her
hair in a mock salute. I ran down the steps two at a time to keep from going
back up to throttle her.

An
Unsightly Mess

Gateway
Bank named themselves a century ago when Chicago was called the Gateway to the
West. In a more recent fit of corporate adventurousness, they’d built one of
the first skyscrapers when the Loop moved west of the Chicago River in the
early eighties. Gateway’s ads had been trumpeting their resurgent pioneer
spirit ever since.

It
was a quarter to six when I panted into their building. By this point in the
evening the bulk of the work force was on its way home. I shared the lobby with
a security guard and a few desultory late-stayers. There was a good chance that
Guziak was already gone for the day, of course, but most senior officers stay
late. Even if they have no real work to do, such devotion sets them apart from
the rank and file.

The
Gateway lobby was a marvel of red marble and brass, but it didn’t offer much
entertainment. The owners hadn’t thought to fill the ground floor with shops;
the only artwork was a photo display of bank employees grinning happily at
customers. I studied smiling tellers handing cash to old women, laughing
officers in hard hats on top of oil rigs, hearty officers in business suits at
the controls of combines, until my own mouth ached vicariously.

At
six-ten the guard ambled over to see if I needed help. I smiled politely and said
I was just waiting for a friend who had to work late. He let me borrow his
Sun-Times. At six-thirty I’d gleaned what counsel the paper had to offer and
decided I must have missed Guziak. I returned the guard’s paper and left.

Some
impulse made me look back into the building as I was boarding an east-bound
bus. Eleanor Guziak was crossing the lobby, briefcase in hand, her head cocked
deferentially as she absorbed wisdom from Donald Blakely. I stepped back off
the bus. The driver swore at me and roared off.

When
Eleanor and Donald walked to the elevator leading to the building’s underground
garage I bit my lip. There’s no natural way to run into someone who’s driving
off in a car, unless you rear-end her, which doesn’t make her receptive to your
feigned rapturous surprise at the encounter.

The
elevator came. Donald stepped in. Eleanor waved good-bye and joined me at the
bus stop. I feigned surprised rapture.

“Eleanor
Guziak, isn’t it? I’m Vic Warshawski—we met Wednesday night at the
Messengers’.”

Of
course she remembered me, what a pleasure to see me so soon, what a coincidence
that I should be meeting with a client just across from her office.

Now
that I had her I wasn’t sure how to proceed. I asked her where she was headed,
hoping it was someplace I could tag along naturally, not something like
fetching her children from day-care. It proved to be the next worst thing—her
health club.

“Time
for a drink first?” I suggested hopefully, but Eleanor was adamant: she hadn’t
worked out all week.

Since
I’d just dismissed a bus, we might with luck have fifteen minutes here at the
stop. Not ideal as an interrogation site, but better than nothing. We talked
about how hard it was to work full-time, overtime really, and stay in shape,
but of course you function better mentally when you’re fit physically, only it
was such a drag in the winter to work out, so much easier in the summer when
you could ride your bike along the lakefront.

“When
do you find time for your other activities?” I asked. “Volunteer work, that
kind of thing?”

She
didn’t have time for volunteer work, Eleanor confessed, shamefaced. We women
always think that holding an important job full-time isn’t enough justification
for our existence. If we don’t have pet causes, too, that we give another
full-time stint to, we’re embarrassed at our own sloth.

“But
you sit on other boards, don’t you? I was just talking to a friend who said you
play a really active role at Century Bank. How are they doing, anyway?

Uptown
isn’t the greatest location for mortgages.”

“Oh,
that’s a sad case. They’ve got overextended with the paper they put out in the
community. We don’t know how or whether we’ll be able to salvage them.”

“Is
that why you canceled the Lamia project? The papers had all been signed.

I guess
the tradeswomen were taken aback when the loan was withdrawn so suddenly.”

She
stiffened and drew away from me. “How did you hear about Lamia?”

“The
way you always do—friends. Why, is it some big secret?” I tried to sound
casual.

“Secret?
Oh, no.” She looked up the street. “Where’s the damned bus? I think it’ll be
faster if I walk over to Wacker and flag a cab: you never get them west of the
river this late at night. Good to see you, Vic.”

A
minute or two after she disappeared across the bridge a number twenty rolled to
a stop in front of me. As we passed the corner of Wacker and Washington I saw
her huddled in the portico of the opera house. She wasn’t flagging a cab. She
was talking into her portable phone. Maybe she’d suddenly remembered her mother’s
birthday, but somehow I didn’t think so.

I
rode the bus to Michigan Avenue, then raced to the underground garage for my
car. If I ever got another financial breather I’d invest in my own portable
phone. It had to be cheaper and easier than my current communications system:
in my hurry to get home to a phone I was pulled over for doing seventy in the
forty-five zone on North Lake Shore Drive. Sometimes I get lucky and run into a
patrol cop who knew my dad, but as time passes most of those men have retired.

This
one was young, earnest, and implacable. And he took his own sweet time writing
up the citation. It was seven-thirty before I got to my living room phone to
dial Camilla.

“Hey,
girl, I hear you’ve been trying to reach me,” she said. “Funny thing, I wanted
to talk to you too. You know how we met at Phoebe’s office on Tuesday to talk
about the bum deal we got on our permit and financing? Well, today we got—I
wouldn’t exactly call it a miracle. More like a reprieve. Not all of the
sisters are a hundred percent.”

“I
heard Home Free might let you work on some of their stuff. Is that in
concrete?”

“More
like drywall. Oh, you mean do we have a cast-iron guarantee? I don’t know. I
think we get the job of rehabbing a twelve-unit place. Near the corner of
Lawrence and California. We drove by to see it today. It doesn’t look great,
tell you the truth. The electrics and the plumbing are shot to hell and they
get to use their own contractors on those.”

I
fished a Chicago street map from the papers by the phone and found the
location. “That’s almost a mile south of your original location. Right in the
middle of drug alley. Is that what you want?”

“Hey,
it’s like Phoebe said the other day: we’ve got to get a track record.

This
is how we’ll stick our foot in the door, show what we can do, maybe start
building a capital base.”

“And
the sisters who aren’t behind you?”

“They
wanted a place we could build from scratch. And we have a certified
electrician, so that’s a shame. It’s harder even for a woman to become an
electrician than it is any of the other trades. Except plumbing, of course.
That union is so tight—well, never mind.”

I
folded the map, trying to put my finger on what didn’t sit quite right about
the deal. “Who pulled these strings?”

“I
guess Century did—the bank. Jasper Heccomb—he’s head of Home Free—is one of
their outside directors, and they went to him to see if he’d do us a good deed
since they’d had to pull the rug out.”

“Hey,
Zu-Zu, I smell rotting alewives.”

Camilla
laughed. “Phoebe’s right, Vic. You’ve been a detective too long. Why should
that be fishy?”

“You
don’t need me to spell out chapter and verse on back-scratching in Chicago.
Guys don’t just pop out of the woodwork to do you favors. Especially not
construction-related favors. And most especially not for women in trades.”

Camilla
treated me to a spirited defense of her banker, a really good man who merely
had the misfortune to be caught in the middle when financing fell through.
Maybe he’d cashed in some chips with Jasper Heccomb. Why couldn’t I let people
do a good deed once in a while without having to poke it with a pointed stick
until it broke into bits?

Why,
indeed, I had to ask myself. Especially since Camilla and Phoebe were letting
me off the investigation into Lamia’s problems. Somehow, though, instead of
feeling good about getting the hook from a job I didn’t want, I was getting
angry. People were tossing bright-painted eggs in the air to keep me from
looking at the juggler.

I
started to tell Camilla about my strange encounter with Eleanor Guziak, then
shut my lips on it. She wasn’t in the humor to hear any criticism of the deal.
And after all, it is hard for tradeswomen to get funding. The housing business
in Chicago was as stagnant as in the rest of the country. At least the job
would employ most of the Lamia team for a number of months.

“Now,
listen, Vic,” Camilla pushed into my silence. “I want some authentic
hip-hip-hoorays from you, not all this antagonism. Phoebe and I agreed we
didn’t want you going any further with your investigation. Maybe someone did do
a deal under the table for us. Why shouldn’t we take it? Why shouldn’t women
get a slice of the pie after all these years? But if they sense you sniffing
around they’ll just cut us off.”