V.I. Warshawski: Hard Time Part 10

The thought of Abigail Trant made me wonder if she'd played a role in sending Alex and Murray to me. Something about my operation had roused her full interest. Maybe she'd gone to Teddy. Playing with his tie as they dressed to receive their important guests: Teddy, you know that woman that BB is so riled about? I think she's worth helping. Let's send her some work. So maybe I should think about the offer more carefully. At least find out if Frenada really was hara.s.sing Lacey Dowell.

When I got to the apartment I ran upstairs to call Mary Louise's house. Emily answered, saying Mary Louise had already left for our picnic.

"That's okay. It's your expertise I want right now. Do you know where Lacey Dowell is staying while they're shooting Virgin Six ?"

"You're not trying to prove she committed some kind of crime, are you?" Emily demanded.

"No. Someone was saying an old friend of hers was hara.s.sing her. I want to talk to her doorman and see if it's true."

She thought it over and decided it was an innocuous enough reason to reveal her heroine's whereabouts: a suite at the Trianon, a luxury hotel on the tip of the Gold Coast that overlooks the cardinal's residence on one side and Lake Michigan on the other. A nice change from the corner of North and California, where Lacey had grown up.

"Thanks, honey. You're not coming out with us this afternoon? Mr. Contreras is going to provide the food."

She mumbled something about having to see her father. "He's got a new girlfriend. He wants us to be friends before I leave for France."

"You don't have to do it if you don't want to," I reminded her.

"Yeah. I guess. Anyway, I'm flying on Wednesday, so I might as well tell him goodbye."

I don't suppose you ever outgrow the hope that your parent, however vile and violating he may have been, will magically turn into someone who cares about you. I turned sadly to join Mr. Contreras and the dogs in my car.

In the event, I had a pleasant outing. We joined Mary Louise and the boys in a forest preserve on the northwest side. Over a meal Mr. Contreras had created with boys in mind-fried chicken, potato chips, chocolate cupcakes, and marshmallows-Mary Louise and I went through the list of jobs that had come in this week. I had a half dozen background checks that were her main contribution to my work and a few other odds and ends, but I really wanted to talk to her about AlexSandy's offer and my meeting with Baladine.

"You don't need me to tell you not to touch that Global a.s.signment," she said.

"I hope your pal Murray isn't signing on for some real sleaze with them: that job sounds pretty bogus. As far as I can tell, your only reason for taking it on is to see what Murray is up to-and that's not enough reward for maybe getting hung out to dry by one of the biggest laundries in America."

I sat back on my heels, blus.h.i.+ng-I didn't know I was that transparent. "It's not only that. What if Abigail Trant stuck an oar in to try to keep Baladine from swallowing me up?"

Mary Louise snorted. "What if she did? Are you supposed to fall over and s...o...b..r on her manicured toenails? Come on, Vic. This isn't a job, it's a setup. You know that as well as me."

She was right. Probably right. I didn't need the aggravation of being spun around by an outfit as slick as Global.

"But the Aguinaldo business is different," I said. "That's having a direct effect on me, what with that creep Lemour, and the State's Attorney panting for me to take a fall. Will you check with the paramedics to see if they can remember the officers who came to the scene that night?"

"I can do it, but it's a question of money, Vic. You pay me, remember, so even if it's pro bono for you, it's not for me. I think it's an unnecessary detail right now, given your budget. You have plenty else going on. You told me the evidence from Cheviot Labs on your car got the SA to back off. Let it go for now. I'll make those Georgia phone calls for you in the morning, but you know as well as I that there's a trip south of the MasonDixon line in your future: I can't leave town with those two monsters on my hand." She gestured toward Nate and Joshua, playing Frisbee with the dogs.

She bit her lip, the way people do when they're deciding to say something you don't want to hear, then burst out, "Vic, there's a kernel of truth in what Baladine said to you. About you going after strays all the time-only I call them wildgoose chases. You gnash your teeth over how you're always hard up for money, but you've got the contacts and the skills to build a big agency. It's just there's something in you that doesn't want to go corporate. Every time it's about to happen you get involved in a story like Aguinaldo's, and phht, there goes your chance to grow your business."

"Grow my business?" I faked a punch at her. "You sound like a businessschool manual."

She started shadowboxing me, and pretty soon we were chasing each other around the park, the dogs in hot pursuit and the two boys screaming with excitement from seeing grownups act like children. When we flopped back on the gra.s.s, gasping for breath, the conversation moved in a new direction.

Nonetheless, her wisecrack felt as though it were coming close to some truth that I wasn't willing to face in myself. I wondered about it as I was driving home with Mr. Contreras and the dogs. Maybe Alex Fisher was right, that my bluecollar roots defined me. Would it make me feel guilty to enjoy a material success that my parents hadn't achieved? In fact, that might have saved my mother's life? She had died of cancer, a uterine cancer that metastasized because she hadn't sought treatment when her symptoms first appeared.

Mr. Contreras's conversation made it possible to defer any more serious selfexamination. "Those two boys are awful cute, and the little one might make an athlete. They see anything of their old man?"

"Meaning that growing up with only a foster mother may make him a sissy?" I asked, but when he started coughing with embarra.s.sment I let him off the hook and told him that Fabian was not exactly the athletic type. "He's got a new girlfriend, some student half his age. Maybe she's idealistic enough to think she wants to take on his first wife's children, but I don't know that they'd be better off."

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 hara.s.sing 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 hara.s.sment 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 highschool 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 HeraldStar '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 was.h.i.+ng machine in the bas.e.m.e.nt. 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, whitehaired 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 Inst.i.tute. They're the ones who commissioned this particular book."

I'd vaguely heard of the Grete Berman Inst.i.tute-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 inst.i.tution, 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 gla.s.s 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 Seora Mercedes."

I took a sip of whisky. "If you came home with me I'd introduce you to the police dog. She's an eightyearold retriever with the incurable friendliness of all goldens. I wasn't trying to sniff out Seora 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 Inst.i.tute.

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 a.n.a.lysis 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 officiallooking 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 Seora Mercedes vanished, the men haven't been back. So they were looking either for Seora 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 Seora 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 latemodel 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 HeraldStar 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 embarra.s.sing 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.