Warshawski 09 - Hard Time (13 page)

16 A Friend of the Family

The sun was still well above the midsummer horizon when we got back to the city. It was early enough and light enough to go down to the Trianon to check on Lacey. I knew Mary Louise was right, that touching anything Global was involved in was an invitation to disaster, but I needed to find out if they were actively trying to set me up. I dropped my neighbor and the dogs at the apartment and went south, first to my office to tack together a letter authorizing me to make inquiries, then on to the Gold Coast.

The doorman at the Trianon sent me to the head of the hotel’s security detail, since he was in checking his duty rosters for the upcoming week. I couldn’t believe my luck when I was ushered into the office: Frank Siekevitz had been a rookie who rode with my dad for a year right after my mother died. With the ethnic insularity of some Chicagoans, Siekevitz had clung to a mentor named Warshawski. That made him doubly delighted to see me; we spent a half hour catching up not just on our lives, but on the contemporary situation in Poland.

“You didn’t lose that big diamond tiara of yours at our reception for the French president, did you, Vicki?” he asked with a wink.

I’d forgotten the tiresome way my father’s colleagues all use a nickname I hate. “I wish. No, I’m an investigator, private, not public.”

“Yeah, private, that’s where the money is. You’re smart to do that. Plus you don’t face the hours or the dangers you do on the force. I’m a hundred percent happier now that I’m doing private security.”

Yep. That was my life. Filled with money and safety. I explained frankly that Global had hired me to keep Lucian Frenada from harassing their big star and that I wondered how much of a pest he really was. After consulting with the doorman, Siekevitz said that Frenada had been around once, on Thursday, but Lacey had brought him to her suite, where he stayed for over an hour. He had phoned twice, and she had taken both calls. Their switchboard kept a list of the people phoning her just in case a question of harassment arose.

Siekevitz actually let me look at the phone log—he knew Tony would want his little girl to get all the help she needed. “Not that you were very little when I met you, Vicki, playing forward on that high–school team of yours. My, my. Tony was that proud of you. He’d love to know you walked in his footsteps.”

I gave a sickly smile, wondering what my father would really make of the life I was leading these days, and bent over the log. Teddy Trant called every day. Sometimes Lacey spoke to him, sometimes she told the operator to say she was in the health club. Regine Mauger, the
Herald–Star
’s gossip columnist, was the only person whose calls she absolutely refused to take. I felt meanly pleased by that.

When I asked if I could speak with the star myself, Siekevitz shook his head regretfully. “She went off to California for a few days, since they weren’t ready to start shooting. She’ll be back Thursday, from what I hear. Of course the studio is keeping the suite for her. It’s only eight thousand a week. For Hollywood that’s the same as a buck for you or me.”

We chatted another few minutes about his private life. No, he’d never married. Never met the right woman, he guessed. He escorted me to the entrance, where I gave the doorman a ten for his pains. I walked across the park to my car: I hadn’t wanted to raise doubts in the hotel staff’s minds by letting them see the wreck I was driving.

As I drove home through the soft purple of early night, I thought sourly that Alex was trying to set me up. But why? Lacey Dowell clearly didn’t feel bothered by Frenada. As for Murray’s role in the errand, he was in so far over his head that my exasperation was tempered by sadness. Even though I wanted to see him and tell him what I’d learned from Siekevitz, I didn’t want to go looking for him: it would be too painful to find him with Alex Fisher. Anyway, I didn’t know where Chicago’s movers shook these days—or nights. Murray used to be a regular at Lucy Moynihan’s place on Lower Wacker, but that was a journalist’s watering hole; television personalities drink elsewhere.

Cruising around town looking for him would really waste time I didn’t have. I went virtuously home and bundled my dirty clothes into the washing machine in the basement. The phone was ringing as I let myself back into my apartment.

“Ms. Warshawski?” It was a man and a stranger. “My name is Morrell. I understand you want to talk to me.”

An hour later I was sitting across from him at Drummers, a wine bar in Edgewater. Morrell was a slender man about my height, with light curly hair. That was as much as I’d been able to tell from watching him walk up the street toward me.

At the fringe of the pavement an older couple ate a late dinner, hunching toward each other to talk across the noise of the tables full of boisterous young people. I felt a twinge of envy for the woman, white–haired in the streetlight, her hand resting on the arm of the old man. Meeting a stranger for a drink because of an investigation made me feel very lonely.

I had tried to explain what I wanted to know over the phone when Morrell called, but he said he would only answer my questions if he could see me in person. He was calling from Evanston, the first suburb north of Chicago; Drummers was a halfway point between us.

“You’re really a private investigator?” he asked when the waiter had brought our drinks.

“No, it’s my hobby,” I said, getting cranky. “My day job is wrestling alligators. Who are you, besides the man talking to people who’ve run away from jail?”

“Is that what the children said?” He laughed softly. “What I really want to know is who is paying you to ask questions about Nicola Aguinaldo.”

I took a swallow of cabernet. It was vinegary, as if it had sat open in the bar too long. Served me right for ordering pricey wine in a neighborhood that only three years ago had been proud to serve Mogen David by the bottle.

“I’d be a mighty poor confidential investigator if I told a complete stranger who was hiring me to do a job. Especially a stranger who is asking questions about an immigrant who died in an unpleasant and, as it turns out, suspicious way. Perhaps you’re an undercover INS agent? Perhaps even an agent of the Iraqi secret police—what are they called? Ammo or something?”

“Amn,” he corrected. “Yes, I see the problem.”

He tapped a finger on his coffee cup and finally decided he’d have to reveal something if I was going to talk. “My interest is in political prisoners. I’ve written on that subject off and on in various places for over a decade. My work has appeared in places like
The New Yorker,
but a lot of what I write is for organizations like Americas Watch or the Grete Berman Institute. They’re the ones who commissioned this particular book.”

I’d vaguely heard of the Grete Berman Institute—a man whose mother died in the Holocaust had endowed it to help torture survivors recover. “This particular book being about?”

He ate some of the nuts on the table. “I’m curious about the life political refugees can make, whether they find unusual obstacles or sources of strength in starting out fresh in a new place. If a man—or woman—was a professional in their home country, they’re often welcomed by an academic institution, here or in Europe. Anyway, professionals are the kind of people who most often have the resources and contacts to emigrate once they’ve been released from prison. But what of someone outside that professional milieu who leaves home? What happens to him then?”

The waiter stopped with the stock inquiry; I asked him to take the cabernet away and bring me a glass of Black Label, neat. “I see. Aisha’s father.”

“Yes. Aisha’s father. What led you to him?”

I smiled. “I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood much like Aisha’s and Mina’s. There’s no such thing as a secret among the children, especially if it involves someone like you—or me—coming in from the outside.”

“Yes, I always worry about who the children will talk to, but if you swear them to secrecy it only makes them behave more suspiciously to strangers. I heard about you from them. That you were a cop who came around with a police dog. Looking for Señora Mercedes.”

I took a sip of whisky. “If you came home with me I’d introduce you to the police dog. She’s an eight–year–old retriever with the incurable friendliness of all goldens. I wasn’t trying to sniff out Señora Mercedes with her. Or I was, but not with deportation in mind. Her daughter ran away from the prison wing of Coolis Hospital a week ago today and ended up dead a few hundred yards from her old front door.”

“And what’s your interest in the young woman?”

“I found her lying in the road Tuesday night. She died a few hours later in the operating room at Beth Israel, of advanced peritonitis caused by a severe blow to the abdomen. I’d like to know how she got from Coolis to Balmoral and who inflicted that desperate injury on her.”

“Are you usually this quixotic, Ms. Warshawski? Spending your life investigating deaths of poor immigrant prison escapees?”

His mocking tone nettled me, as perhaps he intended. “Invariably. It makes a nice change from wrestling alligators, to meet people as uniformly civil and helpful as you.”

“Whoof.” He sucked in a breath. “I apologize: I earned that. I’m not often in Chicago. Who could I talk to who knows your work?”

That was fair. Why should he give confidential information to a stranger? I gave him Lotty’s name and asked him for a reference in return. He knew Vishnikov from forensic work the pathologist had done in South America for the Berman Institute.

The older couple behind me paid their bill. They strolled across the street to the car, their arms around each other. I felt more forlorn than ever.

“If you know Vishnikov, maybe you can remind him about Nicola Aguinaldo’s body. It’s disappeared from the morgue. Tomorrow I hope to find out what it would cost to do an analysis of Aguinaldo’s clothes, if the private lab that looked at them still has them, but it would be so much easier if I knew where her body was. If her mother has it, how did she learn her daughter was dead? She left the old apartment the morning of the day I found Nicola. Some official–looking men came around and scared the neighborhood, as I’m sure you must know.”

I paused and finally Morrell gave a grudging half nod.

“So who were the men?” I continued. “State marshals sent by the prison to look for Nicola? INS agents, as the neighbors suspected? Private agents of a large security firm? At any rate, since Señora Mercedes vanished, the men haven’t been back. So they were looking either for Señora Mercedes or her daughter. If one of your contacts in that neighborhood would tell you the mother’s whereabouts, maybe you’d be the man to talk her into getting the autopsy done.”

Morrell didn’t say anything. I became aware of the waiter and bus crew hovering around our table. It was eleven o’clock; the only other people still at a table were a young couple buried in each other’s necks. I fished a ten out of my wallet. The waiter swooped on it while the crew quickly cleared the table.

Morrell handed a couple of singles to me. We walked down the street together toward Foster, where we’d both parked. Drummers was only seven or eight blocks from where I’d found Aguinaldo’s body, but it might as well have been seven or eight miles.

“I wish I knew someone who could tell me about Aguinaldo’s life before she was arrested,” I burst out as Morrell stopped at his car. “Did she have a boyfriend who beat her up when she came home, then left her to die in the street? Or was it her wealthy employer—she thought he would help her when she ran away from jail, but he hurt her instead? Someone in that building on Wayne knows, at least knows who she was sleeping with.”

He hesitated, as if debating whether to speak. Finally he pulled out a card and gave it to me.

“I’ll talk to Aisha’s family and see if they know anything about Señora Mercedes. I’ve never met her personally. If I learn anything that may be helpful to you I’ll call you. And you can reach me through the number on the card.”

It was the local number for the press agency that represented him. I put it in my hip pocket and turned to cross the street.

“By the way,” he said casually, “who
is
paying for you to ask these questions?”

I turned to face him again. “Are you asking in a more subtle way if INS is bankrolling me?”

“Just wondering how quixotic you really are.”

I pointed across the street. “See that late–model wreck? I’m quixotic enough for that to be the car I can afford to drive.”

I climbed into the Skylark and turned it around, with a roar of exhaust that made me sound like a teenage boy. Morrell’s Honda moved sleekly to the intersection ahead of me. He must make some money writing about torture victims; the car was new. But what did that prove? Even a person with strong principles has to live on something, and it wasn’t as though he was driving a Mercedes or a Jag. Of course, I had no idea what his principles were.

17 Spinning Wheels, Seeking Traction

In the morning I went to my office early: I had a meeting with potential new clients at eleven, and I didn’t want my personal searches to make me late. I looked Morrell up on the Web.

He had written a book about psychological as well as physical torture as a means to suppress protest in Chile and Argentina. He had covered the return to civilian government in Uruguay and what that meant for the victims of torture in a long essay in
The Atlantic Monthly.
His work on SAPO forces in Zimbabwe had won a Pulitzer prize after its serialization in
The New Yorker.

Zimbabwe? I wondered if he and Baladine had met there. Although Baladine probably hadn’t actually gone to southern Africa. He would have directed operations from the Rapelec tower on east Illinois Street, or perhaps met their South African customers in London.

The
Herald–Star
had interviewed Morrell when the Chile book came out. From that I learned he was about fifty, that he’d been born in Cuba but grew up in Chicago, had studied journalism at Northwestern, and still followed the Cubs despite living away from home most of his adult life. And that he only went by his last name; the reporter hadn’t been able to dig his first name out of him. Although they had his initials—C.L.—he wouldn’t divulge the name.

I wondered idly what his parents had called him. Maybe he’d been given some name commemorating a great battle or economic triumph that was so embarrassing he dropped it. Was he Cuban, or had his parents been there with a multinational or the army when he was born? Maybe they’d named him for some Cuban epic, like the Ten Years War, and he’d shed it as soon as he could. I was tempted to hunt through old immigration or court records to come up with it, but I knew that impulse was only frustration at not being able to get a sense of direction.

To change sources of frustration, I turned to the LifeStory report I’d requested on Frenada. I’d invested in a priority turnaround—not the fastest, which sets you back a few grand, but overnight, which was expensive enough. I saved the report to a floppy and printed it out.

Frenada’s personal finances were simple enough for a child of eight to decipher. He had an interest–bearing checking account, where his expenses more or less equaled the thirty–five hundred dollars he took home from his business each month. The business, Special–T Uniforms, was nine years old. It had grown from annual receivables of six thousand to over four hundred thousand.

Frenada was writing regular tuition checks to St. Remigio’s Catholic school for two children—not his own as far as I knew. At least there was no record of a marriage, or any indication of a child–support agreement. He averaged seven hundred dollars a month each on his American Express and MasterCard, for the ordinary business of living. He held a certificate of deposit for twenty thousand dollars. He was paying a mortgage on a $150,000 two–flat in the Irving Park neighborhood, and he had a life–insurance policy worth a hundred thousand dollars, with three children named Caliente listed as the beneficiaries. Besides that munificence, he drove a four–year–old Taurus that he’d just about paid for.

No holdings in the Caymans, no portfolio of stocks or options. No residue of the drug trade, no unusual income of any kind that might indicate blackmail. Frenada was either extremely honest, or so clever that not even LifeStory’s paid informants could track his holdings.

So what did Murray and Alex–Sandy think was buried here? If it was a juvenile crime, I wasn’t interested in digging that far into his past. Maybe he’d done a quasilegal deal to get preferred treatment in orders or to obtain financing. That didn’t seem any different from Baladine and Rapelec in Africa, except the scale was smaller.

I reached Murray in his office. “I can’t take on this Frenada assignment. Since you came along with Alex to try to hire me, I assume I can tell you without needing to talk to her.”

“Yeah, I’ll tell her. Any particular reason?”

I stared at the floor, noticing the dust bunnies that had gathered around my copier. “I’m busy these days,” I said after too long a silence. “An inquiry like this would take more resources than I have.”

“Thanks for trusting me, Vic. I’ll tell Alex you’re too busy.”

His anger, more hurt than rage, made me say quickly, “Murray. You don’t know what Global’s real agenda is here, do you?”

“Alex talked the situation over with me on Friday,” he said stiffly. “If it sounds incredible to you, then it’s because you don’t understand the way Hollywood operates. Everything is image for them, so the image becomes more real than the actual world around them. Lacey’s success and Global’s image are intertwined. They want—”

“I know what they want, babe,” I said gently. “I just don’t know why they want it. In the matter of the actual world, I talked to the house dick at the Trianon. I don’t know if he’d be as forthcoming with you as he was with me, but you might check him out.”

We hung up on that fractured note. Poor Murray. I didn’t think I could bear to witness his vulnerability if Global took him to pieces.

Mary Louise came in around ten, after she’d gotten Nate and Josh off to day camp. She was going to make phone calls to Georgia for me while I pitched my wares to a couple of lawyers who were looking for a firm to handle their investigations. Such meetings often lead nowhere, but I have to keep doing it—and with enough enthusiasm that I’m not defeating myself walking in the door.

“You call this Alex woman to say you weren’t playing Global’s game?” Mary Louise asked as I gathered presentation materials into my briefcase.

“Yes, ma’am, Officer Neely.” I saluted her smartly. “At least, I told Murray.”

The phone rang before I could leave; I hovered in the doorway while Mary Louise answered. Her expression became wooden.

“Warshawski Investigations . . . No, this is Detective Neely. Ms. Warshawski is leaving for a meeting. I’ll see if she can take your call. . . . Speaking of the devil,” she added to me, her finger on the
HOLD
button.

I came back to the desk.

“Vic, I’m disappointed that you won’t take the job for me,” Alex said in lieu of a greeting. “I’d like you to think it over—for your sake as well as Lacey’s—before I take your no as final.”

“I’ve thought it over, Sandy—Alex, I mean. Thought it over, talked it over with my advisers. We all agree it’s not the right assignment for me. But I know the house detective at the Trianon; you can trust him to look after Lacey for you.”

“You talked to Lacey after I expressly asked you not to?” Her tone was as sharp as a slap in the face.

“You’re piquing me, Sandy. What would Lacey tell me that you’d rather I didn’t hear?”

“My name is Alex now. I wish you’d make an effort to remember. Teddy Trant really wants you to take this job. He asked me personally to offer it to you.”

So maybe Abigail was putting a finger in my pie. “I’m excited. I didn’t think the big guy knew I was on the planet. Unless BB Baladine told him?”

That made her huffy. “He knows about you because I recommended you. After Murray gave you a glowing buildup, I might add.”

“I’m grateful to both of you, but the answer is still no.”

“Then you’re making a big mistake. Think it—”

“That almost sounds like a threat, Sandy. Alex, that is.”

“Friendly advice. Although why I bother I don’t know. Think it over, think it better. I’ll leave the offer open until noon tomorrow.” She broke the connection with a snap.

“Murray can do better for himself than that” was Mary Louise’s only comment when I repeated the conversation before taking off.

My presentation went well; the lawyers gave me a small job with the prospect of bigger ones to follow. When I got back at four, Mary Louise had completed her calls and typed up a neat report for me to send over to Continental United in the morning. Altogether a more productive day than I’d had lately.

I finished my share of the report and went over to Lotty’s. We try to get together once a week, but tonight was our first chance for a relaxed conversation in over a month.

While we ate smoked salmon on her tiny balcony, I caught Lotty up on the little I knew of Nicola Aguinaldo’s story. When I told her about Morrell, Lotty went into her study and brought out a copy of
Vanishing into Silence,
his book on the Disappeared in Chile and Argentina. I looked at the photograph on the jacket flap. Of course I’d only seen Morrell by candlelight, and he was seven or eight years younger in the picture, but it was obviously the same man. He had a thin face and was smiling slightly, as if mocking himself for posing for a photograph.

I borrowed the book from her—I wanted to get an idea of how Morrell thought, or at least what he thought. After that, Lotty and I talked idly about other matters. Lotty’s is an intense, sometimes stormy presence, but in her home, with its polished floors and vivid colors, I always find a reassuring haven.

Lotty’s workday starts at six. I left early, my mood benign enough to take on dull household tasks: I put my laundry away, cleaned the mold out of the bathtub, washed down the kitchen cabinets and floor. The bedroom could use a vacuuming, but my domesticity spreads only so far. I planted myself in front of the piano and began picking out a fughetta with slow, loud fingers.

It’s possible, as the detective at the Trianon had said yesterday, that my dad would have loved to see me follow in his footsteps, but I knew my mother would not. She wanted me to live a life of erudition if not artistry, to inhabit the milieu the second World War had destroyed for her—concerts, books, voice lessons, friends who lived for music and art. She had made me learn both piano and voice, hoping I would have the vocal career the war had taken from her. She certainly would have resented anyone who called me a blue–collar girl.

I moved from the fughetta to warming up my voice, which I hadn’t done for several weeks. I was finding my middle range when the phone rang. It was Morrell.

“Ms. Warshawski. I’m in the neighborhood. Can I come up for a minute?”

“I’m not ready for company. Can’t we do this on the phone?”

“I’d rather not. And I won’t be company—I’ll be gone so fast you almost won’t know I was there.”

I’d changed into cutoffs for my housework, and my arms and legs were streaked with dirt. So be it. If he wanted to drop in on me unawares, he had to take me as I was. I went back to my middle voice and let Mr. Contreras and the dogs answer the bell when Morrell rang.

I waited a minute before going out to the landing. My neighbor was interrogating Morrell: “Is she expecting you this late at night, young man? She never mentioned you before that I ever heard of.”

I laughed a little but ran down the stairs in my bare feet before the woman who lived opposite Mr. Contreras came out to complain about the noise. “It’s okay. He’s got some information for a case I’m working on.”

I introduced Morrell to Peppy. “This is the police dog. The big guy is her son. And this is my neighbor and good friend, Mr. Contreras.”

The old man had been looking hurt that I hadn’t told him about Morrell earlier, but my introduction appeased him slightly. He took the dogs back inside the apartment after only a very small discourse on how I needed to let him know what strangers to expect when the police were on my butt.

Morrell followed me up the stairs. “I suppose with a neighbor like that you don’t need a security system. Reminds me of the villages in Guatemala, where people seem to look out for each other more than we do here.”

“He drives me crazy half the time, but you’re right: I’d feel mighty lost without him.”

I ushered Morrell to the stuffed armchair and sat astride the piano bench. In the lamplight I saw that his thick hair was streaked with white and the laugh lines around his eyes were more deeply grooved than in his book–jacket photo.

“This really will take only a minute, but my years in South America make me nervous about giving confidential information over the phone. I managed to find Nicola Aguinaldo’s mother. She didn’t know her daughter was dead. And she definitely doesn’t have her body.”

I looked at him narrowly, but there’s no real way to tell whether people are lying to you or not. “I’d like to talk to Señora Mercedes myself. Can you tell me where you found her?”

He hesitated. “She’s not likely to confide in a stranger.”

“She confided in you, and last night you assured me you’d never laid eyes on her.”

His mouth twitched in the suggestion of a smile. “I’ve talked to a couple of people about your work, and they were right: you are a very astute observer. Can you please take my word for it, that Señora Mercedes doesn’t have her daughter’s body?”

I picked out a minor triad in the bass clef. “I’m getting fed up with people pushing me toward Aguinaldo with one hand and pulling me away from her with the other. There’s something wrong with how she died, but you seem to be joining the group of break–dancers writhing on stage, saying, “Watch,’ “Don’t watch.’ I need to find someone who knows about Aguinaldo’s private life. Her mother may not, but her kid might. Children know a lot about what their mothers get up to.”

He drummed his fingers on the chair arm, thinking it over, but finally shook his head. “The trouble is, the more people who talk to Señora Mercedes, the riskier her position becomes.”

“Riskier how?”

“Deportation. She wants to stay in America so that her surviving granddaughter can get an education and make something more of herself than being a nanny or a factory hand. I can try to find out something for you, if you’d like. . . .” His voice trailed away, leaving it as a question.

I agreed somewhat grumpily. I hate leaving a crucial piece of an investigation in someone else’s hands, especially when I don’t know anything about his skills.

He got up to leave but stopped to admire the piano. “You must be a serious musician to keep a baby grand in your living room. I play some, but not on anything this nice.”

“My mother was a serious musician. One of her old friends keeps this in shape for me, but I never made it past Thompson’s fourth book.” I loved action too much, even as a child, and my hours of practice were a misery when I longed to be running or swimming.