Sara Paretsky - Body Work

There was a wordless communication going on among the regulars, and then a heavyset woman about my age said, “You really have been out of touch if you think Zina’s death was a blow to Mrs. Kystarnik. She was off to Gstaad for skiing six weeks later. Maybe the mister felt it harder. Everybody said Zina was more his child than hers.”

Someone tried to shush her, but the woman continued, “If this lady… What did you say your name was?”

“Gabriella. Gabriella Sestieri.” I brought out my mother’s birth name glibly.

“If you really were a friend of Melanie’s, it would have broke your heart to see how much trouble that girl of hers got into by the time she died.”

“That’s so sad!” I exclaimed. “No wonder Melanie didn’t answer my Christmas cards. I wondered at the time, but then I decided it was because her life had gotten so glamorous, those ski vacations, the private yacht and everything. But if Zina was doing drugs-”

“Doing drugs!” a man chimed in. “They say she was running the ring that supplied all the kids in the northwest suburbs, her and Pindero’s kid.”

“Clive!” another woman said. “You can’t know that. And this lady doesn’t need to hear that kind of talk when Mrs. Kystarnik is dead. And the girl, too. What has it been, fifteen years now? Let the dead bury the dead.”

“Yeah, but Steve Pindero was a good guy, and he suffered as much as Kystarnik when his Frannie OD’d. More, probably.” Clive’s jaw jutted out, the grievance as fresh as if it had happened yesterday. “And then to find out his girl had been using his own rec room as a drugstore!”

Two men at a table in a corner had been watching me. They had hard hats sitting on the window ledge behind them, but their fingernails were carefully cut and buffed. Not the kind of manicures that would last long if they had to handle heavy equipment.

I finished my coffee and wrapped my sandwich in a napkin. “It’s like my granny used to say: the rich get richer, the poor get trouble. Maybe I won’t call on Anton after all. Sounds like he wouldn’t want to be reminded of Melanie.”

“Forgot about her already,” Clive said, “If you go by the blonde who’s-”

“Clive,” the heavyset woman warned.

This time, he subsided, but as I opened the door to leave I heard the others pick up the gossip. One woman, who worked at a neighboring estate, had heard the doctor say the new girlfriend was already five months pregnant. Another had seen her wearing a necklace that used to belong to Melanie. Diamonds and emeralds, worth a hundred grand, easy.

As I got into my car, the two men who’d been watching me left the coffee bar and climbed into the utility truck. They followed me when I turned onto Argos Lane. I didn’t slow for the Kystarnik estate, but the truck stayed with me as the road wound around a golf course and bent south. When I connected with a major artery, I stood on the brakes and jumped out.

The passenger got out of the utility truck and came over to me, no hurry. “You’re just visiting the area, but you drive a car registered to a local person, hmm?”

“And you drive a truck, but you’ve got computer access to the Illinois DMV in it,” I said. “You handling the feds’ stakeout on Kystarnik?”

Hands on hips, he gave me a Clint Eastwood stare that made him think he looked tough. “Maybe you should get back to the city where you belong.”

“Maybe, indeed,” I agreed. “Any reason to think my old friend Melanie was killed to make way for the new pregnant blonde?”

“We’ve entered your plate number into our database,” he said by way of reply.

“Now I am impressed. Or I would be if I didn’t already have a federal file. By the way, if you want anyone to believe your work really requires a hard hat, nix the weekly manicures.”

When he pulled off one of his gloves to look at his nails, I took a picture of the utility truck’s license plate with my cell phone. He ran to my side, dropping his glove, and tried to grab my phone.

“Off-limits,” he said.

I shook my head. “I have no idea who you are. I thought you were with the feds, but now I’m thinking you work for Kystarnik. The Chicago cops need to see who’s tied to his operation.”

The other guy got out of the truck. “What’s the problem here?”

“Problem is, she took a picture of our plate.”

“Problem is,” I said, “you guys are hanging out around a thug. If you’re on his payroll-”

“Oh, Chrissake, Troy, show her your badge.”

The first guy scowled but pulled out his ID. Troy Murano was with the Secret Service, not the FBI after all. In a spirit of generous reciprocity, I showed them my PI license.

Besides guarding the President, the Secret Service investigates large-scale fraud, but when I tried to ask Troy and his partner what they thought Kystarnik was up to, they told me to mind my own business.

“So why is a Chicago PI sniffing around him?” the partner asked.

“Just minding my own business,” I said in the spirit of reciprocity. I tucked my cell phone into my pocket before getting back into my car.

The utility truck didn’t follow me when I turned onto the main road. I pulled into another strip mall and shared my sandwich with the dogs, who were getting restless after spending several hours in the car.

If the Secret Service was tagging around after Kystarnik, they weren’t being too secretive about it-those security cameras dotting Kystarnik’s fence would have spotted the utility truck long ago. Maybe the feds were hoping to pressure him into a misstep. If he was laundering money, maybe they thought he’d reveal his bank accounts to their electronic scanners. Maybe I should have suggested they look at Club Gouge, but, for all I knew, they already had a lead on Rodney and the club. More than ever, I wanted to get my cousin out of the place.

I guess it had been instructive to drive up here, although it was hard to say what I’d gained besides seeing my tax dollars at work.

I turned to my voice mail, which had been beeping at me in some indignation. “You have eleven new messages,” it cried in my ear.

One of the calls was from Sanford Rieff at the Cheviot labs, saying he’d found something interesting. Since I was in their neck of the woods, I drove on west to Cheviot’s complex.

Rieff came out to the lobby to see me. “Vic! I don’t have anything so dramatic or definite that you needed to make a trip out here.”

“I was in the area,” I explained. “What’s up?”

“We’re still waiting for a report back from a national ballistics clearing center to see if the two guns are involved in any other shootings, but we’ve done an analysis of the beer cans. Mass spectrometry shows a high concentration of Rohypnol. Roofie, you probably call it. In beer like that-whoever drank it is probably very sick.”

Roofie. The date rape drug.

“He’s in a coma,” I said slowly. “Is there any way to tell if he put it in the beer himself?”

Rieff smiled. “That’s the interesting piece of your little puzzle. If this comes to court, it’s going to be tricky, very tricky. Lawyers and expert witnesses will battle for days, and defendants will watch their bank accounts vanish before their startled eyes.”

“Thanks, Sandy, but why?”

He led me back to his office and brought my report up on his computer screen so I could see the graphics.

“The fingerprints on the cans are odd, at least to Louis Arata, who’s our expert. If you pick up a can or a glass yourself, you press only one finger, usually the middle, full against it. Besides your thumb, of course. You touch the can with the tips of the other fingers. Here, face on, we have prints for all five fingers.”

He tapped the screen with a soft pointer to show me what he meant. “The can is clean except for those five fingers. Usually, you pick a can up, put it down, pick it up. Your prints soon overlay one another. I’m betting-or Louis Arata is betting-that a third party held the drinker’s fingers on the can. I’ll put it all in writing for you.”