Body Work

45 It’s Dangerous to Know V.I.

I sat in my car for a time trying to remember why I’d thought it was a good idea to visit the Guamans or why I’d thought I had a right to intrude on the elder Ms. Guaman when she was at the hospital with Ernest, or even why I thought I should be a private eye at all instead of a street cleaner. At least at the end of a day’s work, a street cleaner left things better than she found them.

I finally turned on the engine and drove up to my office, wondering what crises might await me there. Petra, for instance, had not been in touch. I owed Darraugh Graham a report. Terry Finchley still wanted to try Chad Vishneski for Nadia’s murder. I didn’t know where Rodney Treffer was lurking. Karen Buckley/Frannie Pindero had vanished. Plenty for the dedicated PI to do without tormenting a brain-damaged youth and his family over a nonexistent dog.

When I pulled into my parking lot, I saw Marty Jepson’s beat-up truck. I hurried into my office, imagining disasters, but Petra was there with Jepson. She’d dragooned him into helping her sort the mail.

“Vic!” she said. “What a day! So much happened!”

“Too much excitement even to contact me, O Texting Queen?”

“I dropped my phone in the slush when Marty and me were roping my car up to his truck,” she explained, “and that seemed to kill it, and don’t worry about Marty-about paying him, I mean-because I know you didn’t authorize me putting him to work. I’ll split my check with him, only, I couldn’t have managed the day without him!”

“Staff Sergeant,” I said, “if you’ve spent the day with Petra, you probably deserve some kind of battle pay.”

He blushed, and said, “Uh, ma’am, uh, Vic, it was a pleasure to help you out. Uh, I wonder if you can call me ‘Marty.’ I’m not really a Marine anymore, you know.”

“People get to be called by the highest rank they ever achieve,” I explained, “even if they’ve retired. Like, right now, Petra could be called ‘pest’ by anyone who’d like to know why she couldn’t pick up a landline.”

“Oh, Vic, don’t be such a crab cake! Your phone numbers, they’re in my cell-phone memory, which is as dead as my poor old car. You cannot believe how much they’re going to charge, although, of course, I have insurance. At least, I’m on my mom’s policy.” She stopped, sticking her lower lip out as she always did when she was thinking seriously. “Maybe I shouldn’t allow her to pay for it. But, gosh, with all my bills, and only this temp job for you-”

“I think your mother would be pleased to know you still rely on her,” I interrupted. “But I’m the one who wrecked your car, so I’ll take care of the repairs that your insurance doesn’t cover.”

“Vic, you’re an angel. I’m sorry I called you names last night.”

She launched back into a high-octane account of her day’s adventures: Destroyed cell phone! Towed car! Spilled soup on new jacket! Although the stain on the cuff maybe was the pizza they’d had at Plotzky’s last night-what a cool bar!

The avalanche of information was making me reel. I went to my back room, where I keep a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black for emergencies. I don’t approve of drinking on the job, but responding to Petra right after my painful meeting with the Guamans felt like a medical emergency to me. I offered the bottle to Petra and Marty, but neither liked whisky.

“It’s like drinking gasoline, Vic” was the fetching way my cousin put it. “Don’t you have any beer?”

The whisky washed through me, and I felt warm for the first time since I’d left Mexico City at New Year’s. I sat at my desk and smiled sweetly at Petra. “You’ll have to buy your own beer. You towed the Pathfinder… Then what?”

“Oh, well,” she said, “then we came here to see if you, like, needed anything done. And there was a message from Cheviot labs. Mr. Rieff, he called to say they’d found something really amazing when he ran his tests for you. Guess what they found?”

“The codes for the U.S. nuclear arsenal,” I suggested.

“Oh, Vic, nothing that amazing. Just-the stuff that was supposed to be in the body armor-the, uh, ceramic or whatever it is-someone took it out and replaced it with ordinary beach sand. Can you believe that?”

I put my whisky down.

“Did he say… Could he prove that it was inside the shield to begin with? I mean, Chad had poked a bunch of holes in the shield. How do we know what was in it first?”

Petra hunched a shoulder. “I don’t know.”

“Uh, ma’am… Uh, Vic… We did get the report. Since we didn’t know where you were or what you needed, we drove up to Northbrook and picked it up from Mr. Rieff.”

Marty handed me a sealed envelope with the familiar crest of the Cheviot rams in the corner. I slit it open and scanned the pages, which bristled with “moieties,” “van der Waals forces,” “carbon 60,” and other arcane phrases that I should have paid more attention to in Professor Turkevich’s chemistry lectures when I was an undergraduate, but it was too late to fret about that now.

I called up Cheviot labs. Sandy Rieff was working late. That was one good thing.

“This ratio you have in the report,” I asked, “seventy-five percent sand mixed with twenty-five percent fullerene, how is that different from what it should be?”

“It should be a hundred percent gallium arsenide fullerenes,” said Rieff.

“And how sure are you that this diluted mix was in Chad’s shield from the get-go?”

“My best materials engineer, Genny Winne, did the analysis. Winne says that she’s prepared to testify on both those points. And she doesn’t say that unless she thinks her results are unimpeachable.”

I thought back to the Fortune article, to Tintrey’s rush to get their Achilles body shield to market, to take advantage of all those juicy Iraqi war contracts. “So Tintrey basically put out a shield that wouldn’t stop a bullet. I wonder if that was a temporary thing to grab market share or an ongoing policy. Can you order some Achilles armor from several different production runs and get your Ms. Winne to analyze the content?”

“Will do,” Rieff said. “What kind of priority?”

“Priority service, but not premium.”

“Have you read the whole report?” Rieff asked. “One of the oddities Winne found was scorching around the holes in the mitt. That fabric is too tough to cut without a special blade, so he must have burned it to get into it. That’s the one thing a defense lawyer could jump on in claiming the contents had been tampered with.”

He hung up, but I held on to the receiver, staring at the desktop. If Chad knew that his buddies had died because their armor didn’t protect them, no wonder he’d freaked out when he saw Nadia paint the Achilles logo on the Body Artist. He’d accused Nadia of spying on him. He must have thought she worked for Tintrey.

I looked up to see Petra watching me anxiously.

“Vic,” she said, “is there some kind of problem?”

“Not a problem,” I said slowly. “Just-I think I understand what happened, but not how to prove it. Not who pulled the trigger on the gun that shot Nadia Guaman but why they did, and why they framed Chad. Marty, how much did Chad say about the body armor?”

Jepson frowned. “He never stopped talking about it, ma’am-Vic. We knew he was angry. But he was always angry about the way him and his men had been treated generally.”

“But did he talk about the armor malfunctioning?”

“He said his men should be alive, that their armor didn’t protect them. But, ma’am, no disrespect, you get these IEDs, and nothing can protect you.”

“So he didn’t say the shields were full of sand instead of the nanoparticles they were supposed to contain?”

He shook his head, trying to remember. “I know he said he was going to tell the whole world how his squad got butchered, but, you know, that was just talk. It was his way of letting off steam. Least, that’s how Tim and me and the other guys took it. I don’t remember him ever saying he did like you did, sent the armor to a lab to get it analyzed.”

“No: I think he tested it by shooting at it.” That explained the burn marks around the holes in the mitt as well as the holes in Mona’s bedroom wall that had bothered her so much. Chad had attached the shield to the wall and shot at it. The bullet went through the armor and destroyed the drywall behind it. That was his proof. But how had the men at Tintrey known what he was doing?

“His blog,” I said. “The sections that got erased, I bet those were where he described the mitt. We need Tim. We need to see if he can resurrect Chad’s blog.”

I got up. “Jake’s leaving for Europe this evening. I want to see him before he takes off. Can you two track down Tim and see if he’ll come up to my place when he gets off work? In the meantime, make two copies of this report, will you? Send one to Murray Ryerson at the Star. The other goes to Freeman Carter.”

I’d offered to drive Jake to O’Hare, but the packing of his basses for international travel was a painstaking, if not heart-stopping, business. With a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of instruments, he bought tickets so that they could ride in the plane with him, but they required extra scrutiny and careful repacking once he’d been through security. The manager of his chamber group was bringing a roadie just to oversee the luggage.

Jake greeted me on the landing when he heard me on the stairs. “Vic, you made it. I was afraid you were shooting somebody or being shot at.”

He took me in his arms and danced me into his apartment, where the living room was filled with the luggage, including his two basses-the modern one for the chamber group, the period double bass for his early-music group. In their fiberglass cases, the instruments looked like stiff elderly people at a concert. I bowed to them and sang a few bars from “Non mi dir, bell’idol mio,” my mother’s signature aria.

Jake took me into the bedroom, where he’d touchingly set up a little table with champagne and a vase of flowers. “Three coach seats. I can’t afford to take my children first-class, so we’ll drink my champagne now.”

He slid my heavy winter layers over my head and unhooked my bra. He winced a little when he saw the bruises on my stomach, but he didn’t back away from me as I’d feared. By the time he had to get up to shower and dress for his flight, some of my earlier anguish over my visit with the Guamans had eased. I lingered in bed until the bell rang, when I pulled on my jeans and one of my sweaters while Jake went out to greet his roadie.

I stood on the landing with my champagne as the two men carted out luggage and instruments. “It will be almost April when you come home. I’ll miss you. But I’ll follow your concerts online when they’re being broadcast.”

“I hope you’ll be olive-colored again by the time I’m home,” he said. “This green and purple doesn’t look so good on you, V.I. Try to look after yourself, okay?”

A quick kiss, and then he was gone. I lingered on the landing, but there wasn’t time for me to feel sorry for myself. About half an hour after Jake left, Petra and Marty Jepson arrived with a couple of pizzas. Mr. Contreras and the dogs helped us eat while we waited for Tim Radke. When Tim showed up, around nine, he set straight to work, but even though he managed to crack Chad’s log-in and password, he couldn’t re-create the blog. The entries had been deleted, and that was that.

“Or he never wrote them,” Tim said. “I can’t tell. It’s not like the Artist’s website where we could see someone was issuing a command to shut down the site. Here, there’s just no trace that anything was ever there.”

“If we found his computer?” I asked.

He shook his head. “You’d have to hack into the blog server to see what was deleted. And even if I wanted to go to prison for Chad, which I don’t, I’m not good enough to do that kind of search. The only thing we might find if we had his machine is if he sent an e-mail or wrote a letter or something about the armor.”

I had to be satisfied with that, although it wasn’t the news I’d hoped to receive. The young people took off to go to a club. They invited me to join them in a way that made me feel like an elderly aunt. And like an elderly aunt, I stayed home and went to bed. Oh, those days of having so much energy that I could work all day and go dancing at night… I wanted that time back.

It was after one when the doorbell woke me. Someone was leaning on the buzzer so hard they’d roused the dogs. I could hear the barking as I made my way to the door on sleep-thickened legs. I pulled on my coat, put my gun in the pocket, and tried to run down the stairs so I could get to the door ahead of Mr. Contreras. Petra, I was betting. Petra had locked herself out of her apartment. I rehearsed a stern speech on how she could check into a motel or sleep on the living-room floor.

The ugly words died in my throat. Clara Guaman stood outside, her right eye swollen shut, her nose bleeding. When I pulled open the door, she collapsed in my arms.