Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 08 (40 page)

Suppose
Deirdre had found the stash and confronted Jasper with it. Could he have
murdered her after all, instead of Fabian? I was passionately committed to
Fabian as the murderer. It wasn’t just my dislike of him that made me think he
killed his wife, but the ferocity with which she’d been beaten—it argued a
personal rage.

Still,
Deirdre had a difficult personality. She might have inspired a personal rage in
someone else, as well. She could well have found out about the exploitation of
immigrant workers—since she was in the office a lot she could have found out
anything. Maybe she’d confronted Jasper about it and had her brains beaten in
for her trouble.

Tamar
Hawkings might have seen who came to the Pulteney the night Deirdre was killed.
If I could find her before the cops did, maybe she’d talk to me. I added her
name to the to-do list I was compiling under Deirdre’s square.

Then
there was Tish, the Home Free office manager. How much was she a
participant—witting or unwitting—in Jasper’s crimes? What would horrify her
enough about Jasper to make her talk to me? I didn’t have any ideas, so I drew
another neat square next to her name and filled it with question marks.

I
drew a line underneath that section and wrote down Lamia in block letters.

Century
Bank had withdrawn their loan approval. As soon as I started investigating that
action, Home Free had given Lamia a rehab project and the tradeswomen, spurred
on by Phoebe, had accepted the job, accepted the loss of funding, and booted me
off the case. Century Bank was running a fifty-million-dollar line of credit
for Home Free—an unbelievable amount for a small not-for-profit. Why?

There
was some tight connection among Phoebe, Gantner, and Jasper: I’d found them all
meeting together right after the deal was struck. JAD Holdings—that was the
name that connected all these people. JAD was buying Century. Fabian’s advice
on the Boland Amendment had been filed under that name,and the words had acted
powerfully on Alec Gantner on Friday. I wrote JAD in block capitals at the top
of the page.

Why
wasn’t I dead? The question slipped unprompted onto the paper. They could have
killed me so easily instead of leaving me unconscious long enough to trash the
apartment. I didn’t think it was compassion, or a fear of the death penalty,
that had stayed my assailants. If the same people had killed Deirdre, those
kinds of concerns didn’t trouble them. They must have thought I knew something,
or had something, that they wanted, and they wanted me alive until they got it
from me.

I
couldn’t imagine any possibilities. Finally I slapped the pencil down in frustration.

Lotty
looked up. “Bed for you, Liebchen. It’s midnight. Drink some more juice and
I’ll tuck you in.”

I
awoke at ten to an empty house. When I finished a careful stretching of my
stiff muscles and wandered down to the kitchen I found a note on the table in
Lotty’s tidy hand.

8:00
a.m.

Max
is fine and has gone in to work, as I am about to do myself. Please, Victoria,
try to spend a quiet day. I know it goes against all your DNA to sit still, but
you need the rest. Maybe you could take a long walk by the lake. A set of keys
is in the drawer with the silverware.

Love,
Lotty Her affectionate words filled me with a peaceful glow that lasted while I
cut up an apple and some cheese for my breakfast. Putting on water to boil for
coffee, I flipped idly through the papers on the breakfast table, not really
reading, just passing time.

The
name caught the corner of my eye as I flicked the pages of the business
section: Cellular Enhancement Technology. I dropped the rest of the paper on
the floor and spread the business pages open on the table. The article was on
the bottom of page three, just ahead of last week’s futures trading. If it had
been placed higher I probably wouldn’t even have seen it.

CELLULAR
ENHANCEMENT TECHNOLOGY GAINS TEST APPROVAL

Chicago.
The FDA will announce approval this morning for preliminary trials to test a
drug touted as a T-cell enhancer. IG-65, the name of a lipoprotein that
purportedly helps fortify the T-cell membrane, has the potential for boosting
immune systems of people who’ve tested HIV-positive. The drug, in early
development stages, is the product of a small Skokie company, Cellular
Enhancement Technology. Announcing the FDA’s decision on Friday afternoon,
Senator Alexander Gantner (R-Illinois) said that where so many lives are at
stake it was of vital importance to bring drugs like IG-65 to maturity as fast
as possible.

I
searched the paper feverishly but could find no other mention of the company. I
shoved the paper aside and stared sightlessly out the window. So that was
Phoebe’s quid pro quo. Draw the Lamia women away from their project and Alec
Gantner will get the FDA to approve preliminary trials. But why had she done
it?

As
anger started to build inside me the back of my head began to pound. Easy does
it, I admonished myself. Getting angry only made you careless Saturday
afternoon and got you this headache.

I
went to the phone to call Phoebe. Because I didn’t have my address book I had
to call Capital Concerns’s main switchboard instead of using Phoebe’s direct
line. I dialed and got a recorded message.

“Due
to the emergency evacuation of the building none of our staff can answer your
call personally. If you will leave your name, the name of the person you’re
trying to reach, and a number, we will return your call as soon as possible.”

Emergency
evacuation of the building? I held the receiver in one hand, my jaw slack with
incomprehension, until a beep on the other end roused me. I replaced the
receiver without leaving a message and went down the hall to the small sitting
room where Max kept his television.

Channel
13’s Mary Sherrod was standing in the backyard of a clapboard building next to
the Chicago River. As I watched, the camera moved from her to the river where a
pickup truck was dumping gravel.

“That
small whirlpool you can see shows where the breach is. Right now city trucks
are dumping gravel on the site, hoping to fill the opening from above.

It’s
too soon to tell how big the hole is or how extensive the damage will be.

It
may be a disaster for the city, but newlyweds John and Kathy Beamish are
enjoying a front-row view of the activity of the city’s terrified engineers.”

The
camera switched to a couple in a hot tub. The man grinned and raised a glass of
white wine at the camera. I switched channels.

After
a while the story became clear. Water was pouring from the Chicago River into a
series of tunnels that ran deep beneath the Loop. The barrier that shut the
river off from the tunnels had been breached, perhaps when pilings along the
bank had been repaired earlier in the spring. Water had begun flooding the
tunnels early this morning.

I had
never heard of these tunnels. According to one reporter they’d been built at
the turn of the last century. Originally designed to carry the first
underground cable for a phone company, the network had grown so large that
businesses could haul coal and other supplies from barges to their offices. The
tunnels hadn’t been used for transport for decades, but the space had been
ideal for modern skyscrapers to house their electrical lines.

Channel
5 showed frenzied activity at the Board of Trade as a private engineering firm
tried to pump water out of the deep basement that had been built into the
tunnel. The computers had been shut down because of damage to the electrical
plant; no one knew when trading might resume.

“You
and I aren’t aware of these subbasements,” the reporter pointed out.

“They
lie three levels below what we consider the basement of the building.

Those
of you who’ve been in Marshall Fields’s ‘Down Under Store’ will be surprised to
know there are three more basements below that subterranean shoppers’ haven.
One is used for storing inventory; managers are grimly aware that they can do
nothing but pray while water continues to rise.”

Not
all buildings were affected as severely, Channel 13’s Beth Blacksin assured us,
but the Loop was being evacuated until the city could determine which ones were
safe to use. In any event power was out downtown; no one could work there today
anyway. The next shot showed the Loop as a ghost town. Traffic lights and
streetlights were dead. The el wasn’t running. Skyscrapers were dark.

I
watched, fascinated, my quarrel with Phoebe briefly forgotten.

Beth
Blacksin went on to describe the tunnels themselves. “No one at City Hall can
agree on how extensive the network is—I’ve heard estimates ranging from forty
to eighty miles. And no one knows how many of those miles are underwater right
now—especially not at City Hall, where workers are feverishly trying to move
sensitive records from the basement to high ground and beating back rats in the
process.”

I
shuddered involuntarily at the thought of fighting off rats, as Blacksin showed
stills of the tunnels. Some looked like ancient caves, covered with lime
deposits and waist high in sludge. Others, though, appeared ready for immediate
use. The tracks for the mule-drawn trains were as tidy as if they were a model
railroad laid out for Christmas.

The
camera switched back to Blacksin, who was standing in poor light in front of a
brick wall. “A number of Loop buildings boarded up their entrances to the
tunnels years ago. Older buildings with small plants didn’t make use of the
deep tunnels, or they shared power with a giant neighbor.”

Something
about the brickwork behind her seemed familiar. I studied the wall as best I
could for the brief time it stayed in the shot. When they went back to Mary
Sherrod at the Chicago River I turned off the set and shut my eyes.

The
wall behind the Pulteney’s boiler—that false inner wall I’d shied away from
because the rats came and went through it with ease. No wonder that was their
main nesting place. They were coming and going through holes in the brickwork
to the tunnels underneath. And so were Tamar Hawkings and her children.

That
was how she entered the Pulteney without anyone noticing her. How did she get
into the tunnel to begin with? Through a ventilator shaft? By somehow gaining
access to Marshall Fields’s—or some other business’s—inventory basement?

I cut
off my speculations mid-thought: Tamar and her children had no way of knowing
the danger they were in. If the Board of Trade basement was already underwater,
what state was the tunnel beneath the Pulteney in?

I
hurried to the hall phone and called Mr. Contreras. “I need to go downtown and
break into my old office building. And I need help. Are you up for it? It’s
going to be risky, because the Loop is crawling with cops.”

He
was thrilled to be called into action. Not the young punk, nor the cop lover,
nor even yet the smart-ass Ryerson, but Old Reliable himself. He hadn’t seen
the news. I told him to turn on the TV and get caught up, that I didn’t want to
take time to explain things now.

“We’ll
need a crowbar, some rope, maybe a pickax. Work gloves. Waders. See what you
can dig up. I’ll be home as soon as I can find a cab in this bucolic fastness.”

I
hung up on his enthusiastic assurances and looked up the number for a local cab
company. While I waited for the cab I stuffed my few belongings into my
backpack, checked the clip on the Smith & Wesson, and got the spare keys
from the silverware drawer in the kitchen. I was about to leave the house when
my conscience pricked me.

I
went back to the kitchen phone to call Lotty. She was with a patient, her
receptionist, Mrs. Coltrain, told me, and couldn’t be disturbed.

“Tell
her I’m on the trail of our missing homeless family,” I said. “If I’m lucky
I’ll be bringing them into the clinic later on today.”

I
started for the door again, then returned to the phone: my conscience was doing
double overtime with its pricking. Conrad wasn’t at his own place, his
mother’s, or at the station. I heard the cab honk out front. Hurriedly leaving
word with the dispatcher at the precinct, to tell him I was going to try to get
into the tunnels at the Pulteney, I jogged down Max’s sidewalk to the cab.

Dead
Loop

The
unlit Loop looked like the abandoned city of a science fiction horror. The loss
of electricity turned the buildings to dark towers. The sky itself was the
color of tired lead, with a white sheen of ozone reflected onto a dull cloud
cover. Normally on such a day the streetlights would turn on. People moved
silently through the dark streets, as if the blackout imposed quiet.

All
downtown parking had been abruptly banned. A phalanx of blue tow trucks swept
the streets to scoop up those unfortunates who had parked ahead of the hastily
posted notices. Police barricades shut off a number of streets. Traffic crawled
along those that remained open. At various intersections we could see
jury-rigged pumping stations, with fire hoses stretched into sewer outlets.

I
dropped Mr. Contreras at the corner of Wabash and Monroe with our equipment and
went off to find parking outside the tow zone. When I’d collected him we had
gone to a hardware store to fill in the gaps in our supplies—a couple of
heavy-duty flashlights with spare batteries; wading boots; safety glasses; a
dolly; and the kind of portable ladders that are sold as fire escapes. I shut
my eyes when I signed the MasterCard receipt—I didn’t want to know how much my
debt had increased.