Sara Paretsky - Killing Orders

“A friend, Miss Warshawski. You might almost call me an amicus curiae.” He gave a ghostly, self-satisfied laugh. “Don’t go on, Miss Warshawski. You have such beautiful gray eyes. I would hate to see them after someone poured acid on them.” The line went dead.

I stood holding the phone, staring at it in disbelief. Ferrant came over to me.

“What is it, Vic?”

I put the receiver down carefully. “If you value your life, stay away from the moor at night.” I tried for a light note, but my voice sounded weak even to me. Roger started to put an arm around me, but I shook it off gently. “I need to think this out on my own for a minute. There’s liquor and wine in the cupboard built into the dining-room wall. Why don’t you fix us something?”

He went off to find drinks and I sat and looked at the phone some more. Detectives get a large volume of anonymous phone calls and letters and you’d be a quick candidate for a straitjacket if you took them very seriously. But the menace in this man’s voice had been very credible. Acid in the eyes. I shivered.

I’d stirred a lot of pots and now one of them was boiling. But which one? Could poor, shriveled Aunt Rosa have gone demented and hired someone to threaten me? The idea made me laugh a little to myself and helped restore some mental balance. If not Rosa, though, it had to be the priory. And that was just as laughable. Hatfield would like to see me out of the case, but this wasn’t his kind of maneuver.

Roger came in with a couple of glasses of Burgundy. “You’re white, Vic. Who was that on the phone?”

I shook my head. “I wish I knew. His voice was so-so careful. Without accent. Like distilled water. Someone wants me away from the forgeries bad enough to threaten to pour acid on me.”

He was shocked. “Vic! You must call the police. This is horrible.” He put an arm around me. This time I didn’t push him away.

“The police can’t do anything, Roger. If I called and told them-do you have any idea of the number of crank calls that are made in this city in any one day?”

“But they could send someone around to keep an eye on you.”

“Sure. If they didn’t have eight hundred murders to investigate. And ten thousand armed robberies. And a few thousand rapes. The police can’t look after me just because someone wants to make crank phone calls.”

He was troubled and asked if I wanted to move in with him until things quieted down.

“Thanks, Roger. I appreciate the offer very much. But now I have someone worried enough to do something. If I stay here, I may just catch him doing it.”

We’d both lost our interest in lovemaking. We finished the wine and I made us a frittata. Roger spent the night. I lay awake until after three, listening to his quiet, even breathing, trying to place that accentless voice, wondering who I knew who threw acid.

SUNDAY MORNING I drove the mile to Lotty’s through a succession of residential one-way streets, turning often, waiting on the blind side of intersections. No one was following me. Whoever had called last night wasn’t that interested. Yet.

Lotty was waiting for me in her building entryway. She looked like a little elf: live feet of compact energy wrapped in a bright green loden jacket and some kind of outlandish crimson hat. Her uncle lived in Skokie, so I went north to Irving Park Road and over to the Kennedy, the main expressway north.

As we drove past the grimy factories lining the expressway, a few snowflakes began dancing on the windshield. The cloud cover remained high, so we didn’t seem to be in for a heavy storm. Turning right on the Edens fork to the northeast suburbs, I abruptly told Lotty about the phone call I’d had last night.

“It’s one thing for me to risk my life just to prove a point, but it’s not fair to drag you and your uncle into it as well. The odds are it was just an angry call. But if not-you need to know the risk ahead of time. And make your own decision.”

We were approaching the Dempster interchange. Lotty told me to exit east and drive to Crawford Avenue. It wasn’t until I’d followed her directions and we were moving past the imposing homes on Crawford that she answered. “I can’t see that you’re asking us to risk anything. You may have a problem, and it may be exacerbated by your talking to my uncle. But as long as he and I don’t tell anyone you’ve been to see him, I don’t think it’ll matter. If he thinks of anything you can use-well, I would not permit you in my operating room telling me what was and what was not too great a risk. And I won’t do that with you, either.”

We parked in front of a quiet apartment building. Lotty’s uncle met us in the doorway of his apartment. He carried his eighty-two years well, looking a bit like Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man. He had Lotty’s bright black eyes. They twinkled as he kissed her. He half bowed, shaking hands with me.

“So. Two beautiful ladies decide to cheer up an old man’s Sunday afternoon. Come in, come in.” He spoke heavily accented English, unlike Lotty, who had learned it as a girl.

We followed him into a sitting room crammed with furniture and books. He ushered me ceremoniously to a stuffed chintz armchair. He and Lotty sat on a horsehair settee at a right angle to it. In front of them, on a mahogany table, was a coffee service. The silver glowed with the soft patina of age, and the coffee pot and serving pieces were decorated with fantastic creatures. I leaned forward to look at it more closely. There were griffins and centaurs, nymphs and unicorns.

Uncle Stefan beamed with pleasure at my interest. “It was made in Vienna in the early eighteenth century, when coffee was first becoming the most popular drink there.” He poured cups for Lotty and me, offered me thick cream, and lifted a silver cover by its nymph-handle to reveal a plate of pastries so rich they bordered on erotic.

“Now you are not one of those ladies who eats nothing for fear of ruining her beautiful figure, are you? Good. American girls are too thin, aren’t they, Lottchen? You should prescribe Sacher torte for all your patients.”

He continued speaking about the healthful properties of chocolate for several minutes. I drank a cup of the excellent coffee and ate a piece of hazelnut cake and wondered how to change the subject gently. However, after pouring more coffee and urging more cakes on me, he abruptly took the plunge himself.

“Lotty says you wish to talk about engraving.”

“Yes, sir.” I told him briefly about Aunt Rosa’s problems. I own a hundred shares of Acorn, a young computer company, given me in payment for an industrial espionage case I’d handled for them. I pulled the certificate out of my handbag and passed it to Uncle Stefan.

“I think most shares are printed on the same kind of paper. I’m wondering how difficult it would be to forge something like this well enough to fool someone who was used to looking at them.”

He took it silently and walked over to a desk that stood in front of a window. It, too, was an antique, with ornately carved legs and a green leather top. He pulled a magnifying glass from a narrow drawer in the middle, turned on a bright desk lamp, and scrutinized the certificate for more than a quarter of an hour.

“It would be difficult,” he pronounced at last. “Perhaps not quite as difficult as forging paper money successfully.” He beckoned me over to the desk; Lotty came, too, peering over his other shoulder. He began pointing out features of the certificate to me: The paper stock, to begin with, was a heavy-grade parchment, not easy to obtain. “And it has a characteristic weave. To fool an expert, you would need to make sure of this weave. They make the paper like this on purpose, you see, just to make the poor forger’s life more difficult.” He turned to grin wickedly at Lotty, who frowned in annoyance.