Killing Orders

XI

THE FORT DEARBORN Trust, Chicago ’s largest bank, has buildings on each of the four corners of Monroe and LaSalle. The Tower, their most recent construction, is a seventy-fivestory building on the southwest side of the intersection, Its curved, aqua-tinted glass sides represent the newest trend in Chicago architecture. The elevator banks are built around a small jungle. I skirted trees and creeping vines until I found the elevators to the sixtieth floor, where Feldstein, Holtz and Woods, the firm in which Agnes had been a partner, occupied the north half. I’d first been there when the firm moved in three years ago. Agnes had just been made a partner and

Phyllis Lording and I were helping her hang pictures in her enormous new office.

Phyllis taught English at the University of Illinois-Chicago Circle. I’d called her from the Ajax dining room before coming over to the Fort Dearborn Tower. It was a painful conversation, Phyllis trying unsuccessfully not to cry. Mrs. Paciorek was refusing to tell her anything about the funeral arrangements.

“If you’re not married, you don’t have any rights when your lover dies,” she said bitterly.

I promised to come see her that evening and asked if Agnes had said anything, either about Ajax or why she wanted to see me.

“She told me she’d had lunch with you last Friday, you and some Englishman… I know she said he’d brought up an interesting problem.. I just can’t remember anything else now.’

If Phyllis didn’t know, Agnes’s secretary might. I hadn’t bothered phoning ahead to Feldstein, Holtz and Woods, and I arrived on a scene of extraordinary chaos. The inside of a brokerage firm always looks like a hurricane’s just been through; brokers carve perilous perches for themselves inside mountains of documents-prospectuses, research reports, annual reports. The wonder is that they ever work through enough paper to know anything about the companies they trade in.

A murder investigation superimposed on this fire hazard was unbearable, even for someone with my housekeeping standards. Gray dusting powder covered the few surfaces not crowded with paper. Desks and terminals were jammed into the already overflowing space so work could go on while police cordoned off parts of the floor they thought might yield clues.

As I walked through the open area towards Agnes’s office, a young patrolman stopped me, demanding my business. “I have an account here. I’m going to see my broker.” He tried to stop me with further questions, but someone barked an order at him from the other side of the room and he turned his back on me.

Agnes’s office was roped off, even though the murder had taken place on the other side of the floor. A couple of detectives were going through every piece of paper. I figured they might finish by Easter.

Alicia Vargas, Agnes’s young secretary, was huddled miserably in a corner with three word-processor operators; the police had commandeered her rosewood desk as well. She saw me coming and jumped to her feet.

“Miss Warshawski! You heard the news. This is terrible, terrible. Who would do a thing like that?”

The word-processor operators all sat with their hands in their laps, green cursors blinking importunately on blank screens in front of them. “Could we go someplace to talk?” I asked, jerking my head toward the eavesdroppers.

She collected her purse and jacket and followed me at once. We rode the elevator back down to the coffee shop tucked into one corner of the lobby jungle. My appetite had come back. I ordered corned beef on rye-extra calories to make up for skipping lunch at the executive dining room.

Miss Vargas’s plump brown face was swollen from crying. Agnes had picked her out of the typing pool five years ago when Miss Vargas was eighteen and on her first job. When Agnes was made partner, Miss Vargas became her personal secretary. The tears marked genuine grief, but probably also concern for her uncertain future. I asked her whether any of the senior partners had talked to her about her job.

She shook her head sadly. “I will have to talk to Mr. Holtz, I know. They will not think of it until then. I am supposed to be working for Mr. Hampton and Mr. Janville”-two of the junior partners-”until things are straightened out.” She scowled fiercely, keeping back further tears. “If I must go back to the pool, or working for many men, I-I, well I will have to find a job elsewhere.”

Privately I thought that was the best thing for her to do, but being in a state of shock is not the best time to plan. I set my energies instead to calming her down and asking her about Agnes’s interest in the putative Ajax takeover.

She didn’t know anything about Ajax. And the brokers’ names given Agnes by Ferrant? She shook her head. If they hadn’t come in the mail, she wouldn’t have seen them in the normal course of things. I sighed in exasperation. I’d have to get Roger to ask Barrett for a duplicate list if it didn’t turn up in the office.

I explained the situation to Miss Vargas. “There’s a strong possibility that one of the people on the list might have been coming to see Agnes last night. If so, that would be the last person to see her alive. It might even be the murderer. I can get another copy of the list, but it’ll take time. If you can look through her papers and find it, it’d be a help. I’m not sure what will identify it. It should be on letterhead from Andy Barrett, the Ajax specialist. May even be part of a letter to Roger Ferrant.”

She agreed readily enough to look for the list, although she didn’t hold out much hope of finding it in the mass of papers in Agnes’s office.

I settled the bill and we went back to the disaster area. The police pounced on Miss Vargas suspiciously: Where had she been? They needed to go over some material with her. She looked at me helplessly; I told her I’d wait.

While she talked to the police I nosed out Feldstein, Holtz’s research director, Frank Bugatti. He was a young, hard-hitting MBA. I told him I’d been a client of Miss Paciorek. She’d been looking into insurance stocks for me.

“I hate to seem like a vulture-I know she’s only been dead a few hours. But I saw in this morning’s paper that someone might be trying to take over Ajax. If that’s true, the price should keep going up, shouldn’t it? Maybe this is a good time to get into the stock. I was thinking of ten thousand shares. Agnes was going to check with you and see what you know about it.”

At today’s prices, a customer buying ten thousand shares had a good half million to throw around. Bugatti treated me with commensurate respect. He took me into an office made tiny by piles of paper and told me all he knew about a potential Ajax takeover: nothing. After twenty minutes of discoursing on the insurance industry and other irrelevancies, he offered to introduce me to one of the other partners who would be glad to do business with me. I told him I needed some time to adjust to the shock of Miss Paciorek’s death, but thanked him profusely for his help.

Miss Vargas was back at her makeshift desk when I returned to the floor. She shook her head worriedly when I appeared. “I find no list of the kind you’re looking for. At least not on top of her desk. I’ll keep looking if the police let me back in her office”-she made a contemptuous face-”but maybe you should get the names elsewhere if you can.”

I agreed and called Roger from her phone. He was in a meeting. I told the secretary this was more important than any meeting he could be in and finally bullied her into bringing him to the phone. “I won’t keep you, Roger, but I’d like another copy of those names you gave Agnes. Can you call Barrett and ask him to express mail them to you? Or to me? I could get them on Saturday if he sent them out tomorrow morning.”

“Of course! I should have thought of that myself. I’ll call him right now.”

Miss Vargas was still staring at me hopefully. I thanked her for her help and told her I’d be in touch. When I walked past Agnes’s roped-off office I saw the detectives still toiling away at papers. It made me glad to be a private investigator.

That was about the only thing I was glad about all day. It was four o’clock and snowing when I left the Dearborn Tower. By the time I picked up the Omega the traffic had congealed; early commuters trying to escape expressway traffic had immobilized the Loop.

I wished I hadn’t agreed to stop in on Phyllis Lording. I’d started the day exhausted; by the time I’d left Mallory’s office at eleven I was ready for bed.

As it turned out, I wasn’t sorry I went. Phyllis needed help dealing with Mrs. Paciorek. I was one of her few friends who knew Agnes’s mother and we talked long and sensibly about the best way to treat neurotics.

Phyllis was a quiet, thin woman several years older than Agnes and me. “It’s not that I feel possessive about Agnes. I know she loved me-I don’t need to own her dead body. But I have to go to the funeral. It’s the only way to make her death real.”

I understood the truth of that and promised to get the details from the police if Mrs. Paciorek wouldn’t reveal them to me.

Phyllis’s apartment was on Chestnut and the Drive, a very posh neighborhood just north of the Loop overlooking Lake Michigan. Phyllis also felt depressed because she knew she couldn’t afford to keep the place on her salary as a professor. I sympathized with her, but I was pretty sure Agnes had left her a substantial bequest. She’d asked me to lunch one day last summer shortly after she’d redone her will. I wondered idly if the Pacioreks would try to overturn it.

It was close to seven when I finally left, turning down Phyllis’s offer of supper. I had been too overloaded with people for one day. I needed to be alone. Besides, Phyllis believed eating was just a duty you owed your body to keep it alive. She maintained hers with cottage cheese, spinach, and an occasional boiled egg. I needed comfort food tonight.

I drove slowly north. The thickly falling snow coagulated the traffic even after rush hour. All food starting with p is comfort food, I thought: pasta, potato chips, pretzels, peanut butter, pastrami, pizza, pastry… By the time I reached the Belmont exit I had quite a list and had calmed the top layer of frazzle off my mind.

I needed to call Lotty, I realized. By now she would have heard the news about Agnes and would want to discuss it. Remembering Lotty made me think of her uncle Stefan and the counterfeit securities. That reminded me in turn of my anonymous phone caller. Alone in the snowy night his cultured voice, weirdly devoid of any regional accent, seemed full of menace. As I parked the Omega and headed into my apartment building, I felt frail and very lonely.

The stairwell lights were out. This was not unusual-our building super was lazy at best, drunk at worst. When his grandson didn’t come round, a light often went unchanged until one of the tenants gave up in exasperation and took care of it.

Normally, I would have made my way up the stairs in the dark but the night ghosts were too much for me. I went back to the car and pulled a flashlight from the glove compartment. My new gun was inside the apartment, where it could do me the least good. But the flashlight was heavy. It would double as a weapon if necessary.

Once in the building I followed a trail of wet footprints to the second floor, where a group of De Paul students lived. The melted snow ended there. Obviously I’d let my nerves get the better of me, a bad habit for a detective.

I started up the last flight at a good clip, playing the light across the worn shiny stairs. At the half landing to the third floor, I saw a small patch of wet dirt. I froze. If someone had come up with wet feet and wiped the stairs behind him, he might have left just such a small, streaky spot.

I flicked off the light and wrapped my muffler around my neck and face with one arm. Ran up the stairs fast, stooping low. As I neared the top I smelled wet wool. I flung myself at it, keeping my head tucked down on my chest. I met a body half again as big as mine. We fell over in a heap, with him on the bottom. Using the flashlight I smashed where I thought his jaw should be. It connected with bone. He gave a muffled shriek and tore himself away. I pulled back and started to kick when I sensed his arm coming up toward my face. I ducked and fell over in a rolling ball, felt liquid on the back of my neck underneath the muffler. Heard him tearing down the stairs, half slipping.

I was on my feet starting to follow when the back of my neck began burning as though I’d been stung by fifty wasps. I pulled out my keys and got into the apartment as quickly as I could. Double-bolting the door behind me, I ran to the bathroom shedding clothes. I kicked off my boots but didn’t bother with my stockings or trousers and leaped into the tub. Turning the shower on full force, I washed myself for five minutes before taking a breath.

Soaking wet and shivering I climbed out of the tub on shaking legs. The mohair scarf had large round holes in it. The collar of the crepe-de-chine jacket had dissolved. I twisted around to look at my back in the mirror. A thin ring of red showed where the skin had been partially eaten through. A long fat finger of red went down my spine. Acid burn.

I was shaking all over now. Shock, half my mind thought clinically. I forced myself out of wet slacks and pantyhose and wrapped up in a large towel that irritated my neck horribly. Tea is good for shock, I thought vaguely, but I hate tea; there wasn’t any in my house. Hot milk-that would do, hot milk with lots of honey. I was shaking so badly I spilled most of it on the floor trying to get it into a pan, and then had a hard time getting the burner lighted. I stumbled to the bedroom, pulled the quilt from the bed, and wrapped up in it. Back in the kitchen I managed to get most of the milk into a mug. I had to hold the cup close to my body to keep from spilling it all over me. I sat on the kitchen floor draped in blanketing and gulped down the scalding liquid. After a while the shakes eased. I was cold, my muscles were cramped and aching, but the worst was over.

I got stiffly to my feet and walked on leaden legs back to the bedroom. As best I could I rubbed Vaseline onto the burn on my back, then got dressed again. I piled on layers of heavy clothes and still felt chilly. I turned on the radiator and squatted in front of it as it banged and hissed its way to heat.

When the phone rang I jumped; my heart pounded wildly. I stood over it fearfully, my hands shaking slightly. On the sixth ring I finally answered it. It was Lotty.

“Lotty!” I gasped.

She had called because of Agnes, but demanded at once to know what the trouble was. She insisted on coming over, brusquely brushing aside my feeble protests that the attacker might still be lurking outside.

“Not on a night like this. And not if you broke his jaw.”

She was at the door twenty minutes later. “So, Liebchen. You’ve been in the wars again.” I clung to her for a few minutes. She stroked my hair and murmured in German and I finally began to warm up. When she saw that I’d stopped shivering she had me take off my layers of swaddling. Her strong fingers moved very gently along my neck and upper spine, cleaning off the Vaseline and applying a proper dressing.

“So, my dear. Not very serious. The shock was the worst part. And you didn’t drink, did you? Good. Worst possible thing for shock. Hot milk and honey? Very good. Not like you to be so sensible.”

Talking all the while she went out to the kitchen with me, cleaned the milk from the floor and stove, and set about making soup. She put on lentils with carrots and onions and the rich smell filled the kitchen and began reviving me.

When the phone rang again, I was ready for it. I let it ring three times, then picked it up, my recorder switched on. It was my smooth-voiced friend. “How are your eyes, Miss Warshawski? Or Vic, I should say-I feel I know you well.”

“How is your friend?”

“Oh, Walter will survive. But we’re worried about you, Vic. You might not survive the next time, you know. Now be a good girl and stay away from Rosa and St. Albert ’s. You’ll feel so much better in the long run.” He hung up.

I played the tape back for Lotty. She looked at me soberly. “You don’t recognize the voice?”

I shook my head. “Someone knows I was at the priory yesterday, though. And that can only mean one thing: One of the Dominicans has to be involved.”

“Why, though?”

“I’m being warned off the priory,” I said impatiently. “Only they know I was there.” A terrible thought struck me and I began shivering again. “Only they, and Roger Ferrant.”