Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 08 (53 page)

“They
could have listened to me,” I said out loud. “It’s what they get for not
believing women’s stories.”

“You
said it, honey.” I hadn’t realized the waitress was close enough to hear me.
“This whole damned world would be better off if they ever listened to us.”

The
Thirty-nine Stories

In
the morning I packed a briefcase with essential supplies and walked to Clark
Street for a Loop-bound bus. It decanted me on Madison, a brisk half-mile walk
from the Gateway building.

Some
Loop businesses had managed to reopen, but even those skyscrapers that hadn’t
lost power had to wait for the tunnels to drain, and for city engineers to
declare their foundations safe. The city had closed a number of downtown
streets where the pumping efforts were most concentrated. Logjams of traffic built
up on those streets that were open. The snarling mess was made worse by the
fact that traffic signals still were not functioning. Furious cops tried to
force some semblance of order, or even manners, on the melee.

Some
of the buildings west of the river were alive with lights and workers, but to
my relief the Gateway building was not one of them. Its unlit windows were
black against the dull sky.

The
guard in the lobby let me in when I pounded on the door. I produced an old
badge I’d found in my closet the night before, one that proclaimed me to be on
official business for Cook County.

“I’m
supposed to look for rodent evidence on all the floors where food is prepared.
Can you tell me where to start? Or maybe you’d like to come along?

We’ve
been getting reports about rats the size of beavers in some of these
buildings.”

The
guard hastily disclaimed any interest in rats. The executive dining room was on
thirty-six, he said, and the employee cafeteria in the basement. As I’d hoped,
the idea of giant rats kept him from studying my badge too closely: it was
signed by a man who hadn’t been in county politics for three years.

“You’ll
have to take the stairs to thirty-six,” he warned me. “We don’t have any
electricity in here.”

I
groaned suitably. “The executive dining room on the same floor as the executive
offices? I want to be able to talk to Donald Blakely or Eleanor Guziak as fast
as possible if I find anything serious.”

“People
can’t come to work here, miss: it’s not safe. Mr. Blakely and his officers
picked up their vital documents on Tuesday. And you should have seen him lead
them on a race. Thirty-nine floors. Some of the kids in their twenties had to
quit halfway up, but not Mr. Blakely. He stays in tip-top shape.”

“I
hope to do as well.” I smiled and followed his directions to the stairwell
door.

I
kept to a slow, steady pace, with frequent breaks to stretch out my calf
muscles. Emergency lights burned on every second floor, providing a ghostly
glow in which to read the floor numbers on the doors.

Around
the fifteenth floor I abandoned my briefcase, stuffing my picklocks and rubber
gloves in my pockets. Around the twenty-second my legs felt as though they were
on fire. By the time I got to the thirties I was having to stop and sit for a
minute after each flight. When I finally reached the door marked thirty-nine my
legs felt like rubber bands. I lay down on the hall floor for ten minutes,
resting my ankles against the stairwell doorjamb until the fire in my calves
had subsided to a dull glow. Finally I got back up and wobbled along the
corridors to Blakely’s office.

I
found myself tiptoeing past the empty offices. A place whose only purpose was
to be stuffed with human bodies in the frenzied dance of modern business seems
not just forlorn, but ludicrous when abandoned. I felt a foolish impulse to pat
the walls in comfort, to make sure the building knew I was sympathetic so that
it would be my ally in my search.

When
I got to Blakely’s suite I pulled on my latex gloves. The outer door was
locked. For some reason it hadn’t occurred to me to bring a flashlight;
kneeling in the dark to fumble with my picklocks took longer than I wanted to
spend. I didn’t think the guard would hike up the stairs after me, but he might
have an elevator on an emergency generator not available to people like me.

The
door opened to the typical executive suite:secretary’s office with waiting area
for guests, a conference room, which stood open, and the door to the holy of
holies, also locked. I ignored Blakely’s secretary’s desk and file cabinets,
assuming he didn’t share dangerous secrets with her. His office door yielded to
the same combination of picks as the antechamber.

Once
inside the ghost-room I worked fast. Blakely had a desk with one center drawer
and a filing cabinet made of matching mahogany. Both were locked but opened
easily. I started to pull out files, squinting at labels in the half-light.
Fortunately he had a corner office, so I got two walls of windows.

Whistling
softly through my teeth I flipped through executive reports on loans, profits,
expansion, overseas clients, executive-suite clients—those with assets of a
hundred million or more, according to a memo in the front of the file—there
were only eleven, including Gant-Ag—the pros and cons of offshore banking,
small banks that might make acquisition targets, personnel files of staff
reporting directly to him.

The
details of confidential personnel reports weren’t any of my business; I
returned them immediately to the desk drawer. I skimmed the acquisitions file,
but found no mention of Century Bank. Overseas clients included an impressive
assortment in the Middle East. I thumbed through the pages quickly, and was
about to return it, too, to the drawer, when the Gant-Ag name jumped out at me.

Rolling
a plush armchair over to the window, where I could read better, I went back
through the file until I found the Gant-Ag name again. It was in a letter from
a man named Manzoor Khalil, whose letterhead identified him as an exporter with
offices in Karachi and Amman. He thanked Blakely for the opportunity to do
business with Gateway and with Gant-Ag, and assured him that Gant-Ag’s
Agricultural Products—capitalized in the letter—had safely reached their final
destination.

My
client is extremely satisfied with Gant-Ag’s performance, and has, as
requested, deposited payment in his own bank in the Caymans. I await your
instructions on how to transfer money from this account to your own client.

Manzoor
Khalil considered himself, in conclusion, Donald Blakely’s most esteemed and
obliged colleague. I read the letter through three times, then held it
sideways, as though that might shed further light on it.

If
Gant-Ag was doing business in the Middle East, why couldn’t money simply be
paid straight into their own account? Presumably they had transfer agents all
over the world. Even if it was a country where civil unrest made business
risky, they could still get paid, in dollars, in a bank of their choosing. Why
this rigmarole of getting the customer to put money into his own offshore
account?

Suddenly
I remembered the letter I’d filched from Fabian Messenger’s desk.

Senator
Gantner was thanking him for advice on the Boland Amendment. It hadn’t occurred
to me at the time, but the senator must have dozens or more lawyers on his
staff to give him all kinds of advice on federal law. He’d turned to Fabian
because he didn’t want to alert anyone in Washington to the possibility that
his family’s company was breaking the law.

I
didn’t know much about the Boland Amendment. I thought it only applied to
sending arms to the Nicaraguan contras. But maybe it forbade any financial
deals with terrorist organizations? I wondered what Fabian would do if I called
up and asked him for an opinion.

Come
to think of it, a whiff of Gant-Ag’s dealings must have surfaced somewhere in
Congress: in the stack of documents Murray had pulled for me young Alec and the
senator’s brother Craig had both testified before a Senate select committee
that Gant-Ag was not violating the embargo. Grain companies had been hard hit
by the embargo. If Gant-Ag had felt they wanted to sidestep it, then they would
have to work through a third party like Khalil.

And
the fifty-million-dollar line of credit that Century Bank ran through Home
Free, which Ken Graham had found in Tish’s files: Was that the money from the
Caymans being cycled through a not-for-profit for Gant-Ag?

If
Century and Home Free were laundering money for Gantner, no wonder Blakely and
Heccomb didn’t want me poking around in Century’s affairs. The musketeers had
canceled the Lamia loan because when JAD bought Century they started to cut
back on minority and women-owned enterprises. Then, according to Cyrus, they
had put an effective omertà in place in City Hall.

Everything
was fine until I started asking questions about why Lamia’d lost their zoning
permit and their loan. Gantner talked to Phoebe, asking her to put my
investigation into the deep freeze. In exchange, his daddy would get FDA
approval for her T-cell enhancer. And to sweeten the blow to Lamia, they got
Heccomb to scrounge around and come up with a rehab project for the women.

Small
surprise: Home Free had gotten out of the business of direct placement of the
homeless. If they were indeed serving as the point for bringing Gant-Ag’s money
into the country, they wouldn’t have time or energy to work as a social
services agency. They certainly wouldn’t want the state, or even the city, to
come around on the tours of inspection service providers have to go through.

At
the same time, they were awash in cash. So why not funnel some of it into
construction? By working with the Romanians, paying them almost nothing, they
could pad their payrolls and make it look as though a lot more money was going
into construction than in fact they were spending.

How
much of this had Deirdre known? She might have stumbled onto the padded
payrolls in her volunteer work. She might even have known about the line of
credit. Since she was married to Fabian, she could have learned without too
much difficulty that Gant-Ag was trying to violate the Boland Amendment.

A
chill hand squeezed my stomach. Had Deirdre taken her knowledge to the three
musketeers? Hoping for—I couldn’t imagine. Maybe she wasn’t trying to gain
anything tangible—maybe she just thought if she held their secrets they would
have to respect her. If fifty million dollars was at stake they might well have
decided she was an expendable irritant.

The
memory of Deirdre at her dinner party swam before my brain. Drunk, hostile,
making innuendos—about Jasper Heccomb and how pleased Blakely and Gantner must
be with him. It must have become clear to them that night that their secrets
would not survive longer than it took her to drink a bottle of burgundy.

If.
If all my suppositions were correct. I grabbed a piece of paper from Blakely’s
desk and scribbled down Khalil’s name, address, and the date of the letter.
Returning the foreign client file to his desk, I pulled out the Gant-Ag papers.
This was the biggest collection Blakely had—about six inches of documents.

I
looked at my watch: I’d been up here for over an hour now. Would the guard
become suspicious? And if so, what would he do? Without electricity in the
building I couldn’t photocopy anything. I had to study the papers here, and
today was probably my only chance.

Nervous
about time I flipped through the pages, not sure what to look for.

Finally
I pulled out sections that related to Gant-Ag’s debt. Near the end of the stack
was a section on taxes. Ah, yes, the other half of Gantner’s letter to Fabian,
wanting an expert on tax loans from offshore banks.

I had
settled back into the plush armchair with my load of documents when I became
aware of a whirring in the background. The office had been utterly soundless,
but at first the noise didn’t rouse me because it was the commonplace hum of
office life—an elevator.

I
swore savagely. As I’d feared, the guard had become suspicious. And as I’d also
feared, he had a machine at his disposal.

Down
the Shaft

I
shoved the desk drawers shut, stuffed the papers I was carrying down the back
of my jeans, took a quick look around to make sure I wasn’t leaving anything
personal behind, and scampered out of the office as fast as my sore legs would
carry me. I slammed the doors behind me and went up the hallway in a shuffling run.
My hamstrings protested, but I overruled them. “Move now or you can rest all
you want in jail,” I muttered out loud.

When
I got to the elevators I couldn’t hear them running. Maybe I’d been mistaken.
Or maybe there was a service elevator in another part of the building.

If I
went back to the stairwell I could be intercepted on any floor, but at least I
would hear my pursuer.

I had
turned back to the hall when the motor started up again. I put my ear to each
set of doors in turn: it was the left one on the far end. I looked around for
cover. The elevator bank opened onto the executive reception area. A high
mahogany counter separated the hall from the desk where the receptionist held
court. That would have to do. As the motor behind me whined to a halt I ran to
the counter, put a hand on the top, and vaulted over.