Authors: Sara Paretsky
McGonnigal shrugged wearily but made a note on a second pad—the closest he would come to recognizing that I might have a good suggestion.
I sneezed again. “Do you need me for anything else? I’d like to get home and dry off.”
“No, go. I’d just as soon you weren’t around when Lieutenant Mallory arrives, anyway.”
Bobby Mallory was McGonnigal’s boss. He was
also an old friend of my father, who had been a beat sergeant until his death fifteen years earlier. Bobby did not like women on the crime scene in any capacity—victim, perpetrator, or investigator—and he especially did not like his old friend Tony’s daughter on the scene. I appreciated McGonnigal’s unwillingness to witness any acrimony between his boss and me, and was getting up to leave when the uniformed cops came back.
The sixth timer had been found in a supply closet behind the men’s lockers. He was concussed and groggy from a head wound and couldn’t remember how he got to where he was. Couldn’t remember anything past lunchtime. I waited long enough to hear that and slid from the room.
Alicia was waiting for me at the far end of the hall. She had changed from her suit into jeans and a pullover and was squatting on her heels, staring fiercely at nothing. When she saw me coming, she stood up and pushed her black hair out of her eyes.
“You look a mess, V. I.”
“Thanks. I’m glad to get help and support from my friends after they’ve dragged me into a murder investigation.”
“Oh, don’t get angry—I didn’t mean it that way. I’m sorry I dragged you into a murder investigation. No, I’m not, actually. I’m glad you were on hand. Can we talk?”
“After I put some dry clothes on and stop looking a mess.”
She offered me her jacket. Since I’m five eight to her five four, it wasn’t much of a cover, but I draped it gratefully over my shoulders to protect myself from the chilly October evening.
At my apartment Alicia followed me into the bathroom while I turned on the hot water. “Do you know who the dead woman was? The police wouldn’t tell us.”
“Yes,” I responded irritably. “And if you’ll give me time to warm up, I’ll tell you. Bathing is not a group sport in this apartment.”
She trailed back out of the bathroom, her face set in tense lines. When I joined her in the living room some twenty minutes later, a towel around my damp hair, she was sitting in front of the television set changing channels.
“No news yet,” she said briefly. “Who was the dead girl?”
“Louise Carmody. Junior loan officer at the Ft. Dearborn. You know her?”
Alicia shook her head. “Do the police know why she was shot?”
“They’re just starting to investigate. What do you know about it?”
“Nothing. Are they going to put her name on the news?”
“Probably, if the family’s been notified. Why is this important?”
“No reason. It just seems so ghoulish, reporters hovering around her dead body and everything.”
“Could I have the truth, please?”
She sprang to her feet and glared at me. “It is the truth.”
“Screw that. You don’t know her name, you spin the TV dials to see the reports, and now you think it’s ghoulish for the reporters to hover around? … Tell you what I think, Alicia. I think you know who did the shooting. They shuffled the swimmers, nobody knew who was in which lane. You started out in lane two, and you’d be dead if the woman from Ajax hadn’t complained. Who wants to kill you?”
Her black eyes glittered in her white face. “No one. Why don’t you have a little empathy, Vic? I might have been killed. There was a madman out there who shot a woman. Why don’t you give me some sympathy?”
“I jumped into a pool to pull that woman out. I sat around in wet clothes for two hours talking to the cops. I’m beat. You want sympathy, go someplace else. The little I have is reserved for myself tonight.
“I’d really like to know why I had to be at the pool, if it wasn’t to ward off a potential attacker. And if you’d told me the real reason, Louise Carmody might still be alive.”
“Damn you, Vic, stop doubting every word I say. I
told you why I needed you there—someone had to sign the card. Millie works during the day. So does Fredda. Katie has a new baby. Elene is becoming a grandmother for the first time. Get off my goddamn back.”
“If you’re not going to tell me the truth, and if you’re going to scream at me about it, I’d just as soon you left.”
She stood silent for a minute. “Sorry, Vic. I’ll get a better grip on myself.”
“Great. You do that. I’m fixing some supper—want any?”
She shook her head. When I returned with a plate of pasta and olives, Joan Druggen was just announcing the top local story. Alicia sat with her hands clenched as they stated the dead woman’s name. After that, she didn’t say much. Just asked if she could crash for the night—she lived in Warrenville, a good hour’s drive from town, near Berman’s aeronautic engineering labs.
I gave her pillows and a blanket for the couch and went to bed. I was pretty angry: I figured she wanted to sleep over because she was scared, and it infuriated me that she wouldn’t talk about it.
When the phone woke me at 2:30, my throat was raw, the start of a cold brought on by sitting around in wet clothes for so long. A heavy voice asked for Alicia.
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” I said hoarsely.
“Be your age, Warshawski. She brought you to the gym. She isn’t at her own place. She’s gotta be with you. You don’t want to wake her up, give her a message. She was lucky tonight. We want the money by noon, or she won’t be so lucky a second time.”
He hung up. I held the receiver a second longer and heard another click. The living room extension. I pulled on a dressing gown and padded down the hallway. The apartment door shut just as I got to the living room. I ran to the top of the stairs; Alicia’s footsteps were echoing up and down the stairwell.
“Alicia! Alicia—you can’t go out there alone. Come back here!”
The slamming of the entryway door was my only answer.
I didn’t sleep well, my cold mixing with worry and anger over Alicia. At eight I hoisted my aching body out of bed and sat sneezing over some steaming fruit juice while I tried to focus my brain on possible action. Alicia owed somebody money. That somebody was pissed off enough to kill because he didn’t have it. Bankers do not kill wayward loan customers. Loan sharks do, but what could Alicia have done to rack up so much indebtedness? Berman probably paid her
seventy or eighty thousand a year for the special kinds of designs she did on aircraft wings. And she was the kind of client a bank usually values. So what did she need money for that only a shark would provide?
The clock was ticking. I called her office. She’d phoned in sick; the secretary didn’t know where she was calling from but had assumed home. On a dim chance I tried her home phone. No answer. Alicia had one brother, Tom, an insurance agent on the far south side. After a few tries I located his office in Flossmoor. He hadn’t heard from Alicia for weeks. And no, he didn’t know who she might owe money to.
Reluctantly Tom gave me their father’s phone number in Florida. Mr. Dauphine hadn’t heard from his daughter, either.
“If she calls you, or if she shows up,
please
let me know. She’s in trouble up here, and the only way I can help her is by knowing where she is.” I gave him the number without much expectation of hearing from him again.
I did know someone who might be able to give me a line on her debts. A year or so earlier, I’d done a major favor for Don Pasquale, a local mob leader. If she owed him money, he might listen to my intercession. If not, he might be able to tell me whom she had borrowed from.
Torfino’s, an Elmwood Park restaurant where the don had a part-time office, put me through to his
chief assistant, Ernesto. A well-remembered gravel voice told me I sounded awful.
“Thank you, Ernesto,” I snuffled. “Did you hear about the death of Louise Carmody at the University of Illinois gym last night? She was probably shot by mistake, poor thing. The intended victim was a woman named Alicia Dauphine. We grew up together, so I feel a little solicitous on her behalf. She owes a lot of money to someone: I wondered if you know who.”
“Name isn’t familiar, Warshawski. I’ll check around and call you back.”
My cold made me feel as though I was at the bottom of a fish tank. I couldn’t think fast enough or hard enough to imagine where Alicia might have gone to ground. Perhaps at her house, believing if she didn’t answer the phone no one would think she was home? It wasn’t a very clever idea, but it was the best I could do in my muffled, snuffled state.
The old farmhouse in Warrenville that Alicia had modernized lay behind the local high school. The boys were out practicing football. They were wearing light jerseys. I had on my winter coat—even though the day was warm, my cold made me shiver and want to be bundled up. Although we were close enough that I could see their mouthpieces, they didn’t notice me as I walked around the house looking for signs of life.
Alicia’s car was in the garage, but the house looked
cold and unoccupied. As I made my way to the back, a black-and-white cat darted out from the bushes and began weaving itself around my ankles, mewing piteously. Alicia had three cats. This one wanted something to eat.
Alicia had installed a sophisticated burglar alarm system—she had an office in her home and often worked on preliminary designs there. An expert had gotten through the system into the pantry—some kind of epoxy had been sprayed on the wires to freeze them. Then, somehow disabling the phone link, the intruder had cut through the wires.
My stomach muscles tightened, and I wished futilely for the Smith & Wesson locked in my safe at home. My cold really had addled my brains for me not to take it on such an errand. Still, where burglars lead shall P.I.s hesitate? I opened the window, slid a leg over, and landed on the pantry floor. My feline friend followed more gracefully. She promptly abandoned me to start sniffing at the pantry walls.
Cautiously opening the door I slid into the kitchen. It was deserted, the refrigerator and clock motors humming gently, a dry dishcloth draped over the sink. In the living room another cat joined me and followed me into the electronic wonderland of Alicia’s study. She had used built-in bookcases to house her computers and other gadgets. The printers were tucked along a side wall, and wires ran everywhere. Whoever had broken in was not interested in
merchandise—the street value of her study contents would have brought in a nice return, but they stood unharmed.
By now I was dreading the trek upstairs. The second cat, a tabby, trotted briskly ahead of me, tail waving like a flag. Alicia’s bedroom door was shut. I kicked it open with my right leg and pressed myself against the wall. Nothing. Dropping to my knees I looked in. The bed, tidily covered with an old-fashioned white spread, was empty. So was the bathroom. So was the guest room and an old sun porch glassed in and converted to a solarium.
The person who broke in had not come to steal—everything was preternaturally tidy. So he (she?) had come to attack Alicia. The hair stood up on the nape of my neck. Where was he? Not in the house. Hiding outside?
I started down the stairs again when I heard a noise, a heavy scraping. I froze, trying to locate the source. A movement caught my eye at the line of vision. The hatch to the crawl space had been shoved open; an arm swung down. For a split second only I stared at the arm and the gun in its grip, then leaped down the stairs two at a time.
A heavy thud—the man jumping onto the upper landing. The crack as the gun fired. A jolt in my left shoulder, and I gasped with shock and fell the last few steps to the bottom. Righted myself. Reached for the deadlock on the front door. Heard an outraged
squawk, loud swearing, and a crash that sounded like a man falling downstairs. Then I had the door open and was staggering outside while an angry bundle of for poured past me. One of the cats, a heroine, tripping my assailant and saving my life.
I never really lost consciousness. The football players saw me stagger down the sidewalk and came trooping over. In their concern for me they failed to tackle the gunman, but they got me to a hospital, where a young intern eagerly set about removing the slug from my shoulder; the winter coat had protected me from major damage. Between my cold and the gunshot, I was just as happy to let him incarcerate me for a few days.
They tucked me into bed, and I fell into a heavy, uneasy sleep. I had jumped into the black waters of Lake Michigan in search of Alicia, trying to reach her ahead of a shark. She was lurking just out of reach. She didn’t know that her oxygen tank ran out at noon.
When I finally woke, soaked with sweat, it was dark outside. The room was Ht faindy by a fluorescent light over the sink. A lean man in a brown wool business suit was sitting next to the bed. When he saw me looking at him, he reached into his coat.
If he was going to shoot me, there wasn’t a thing I
could do about it—I was too limp from my heavy sleep to move. Instead of a gun, though, he pulled out an I.D. case.
“Miss Warshawski? Peter Carlton, Federal Bureau of Investigation. I know you’re not feeling well, but I need to talk to you about Alicia Dauphine.”
“So the shark ate her,” I said.
“What?” he demanded sharply. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing. Where is she?”
“We don’t know. That’s what we want to talk to you about. She went home with you after the swimming meet yesterday. Correct?”
“Gosh, Mr. Carlton. I love watching my tax dollars at work. If you’ve been following her, you must have a better fix on her whereabouts than I do. I last saw her around two-thirty this morning. If it’s still today, that is.”
“What did she talk to you about?”
My mind was starting to unfog. “Why is the bureau interested in Ms. Dauphine?”
He didn’t want to tell me. All he wanted was every word Alicia had said to me. When I wouldn’t budge, he started in on why I was in her house and what I had noticed there.
Finally I said, “Mr. Carlton, if you can’t tell me why you’re interested in Ms. Dauphine, there’s no way I can respond to your questions. I don’t believe the bureau—or the police—or anyone, come to
that—has any right to pry into the affairs of citizens in the hopes of turning up some scandal. You tell me why you’re interested, and I’ll tell you if I know anything relevant to that interest.”