Sara Paretsky - Killing Orders

“Anyway, Agnes was born fighting it. She fought it through twelve years at Sacred Heart, and came to the U of C against their harshest opposition. She borrowed the money because they wouldn’t pay to send her to a Jewish commie school. So it wasn’t too surprising that she got swept up in all the causes of the sixties. And for both of us, feminism was the most important, because it was central to us.”

I was talking more to myself than to Bobby; I wasn’t sure how much he could really hear of what I was saying.

“Well, after Tony died, Agnes used to invite me up to Lake Forest for Christmas and I got to know the Pacioreks. And Mrs. Paciorek decided to hang all Agnes’s weird behavior on me. It took her off the hook, you see-she wasn’t a failure as a parent. Agnes, who figured as sweet and impressionable in this scenario, had fallen under my evil influence.

“Well, buy that or not as you choose, but keep in mind that sweet impressionable people don’t build up the kind of brokerage business Agnes did.

“Anyway, Agnes and I were good friends at the University. And we stayed good friends. And in its way that was a small miracle. When our rap group followed the national trend and split between radical lesbians and, well, straights, she became a lesbian and I didn’t. But we remained very good friends-an achievement for that era, when politics divided marriages and friends alike. It seems pointless now, but it was very real then.”

Like a lot of my friends, I’d resented suddenly being labeled straight because of my sexual preferences. After all, we’d been fighting the straights-the prowar, antiabortion, racist world. Now overnight we were straights, too? It all seems senseless now. The older I get, the less politics means to me. The only thing that seems to matter is friendship. And Agnes and I had been good friends for a longtime. I could feel tears behind my eyes and squeezed them tightly again. When I looked up at Bobby he was frowning at the desk top, drawing circles on it with the back of a ballpoint pen.

“Well, I’ve told you my story, Bobby. Now explain why you needed to hear it.”

He continued to stare at the desk. “Where were you last night?”

My temper began rising again. “Goddamn it, if you want to charge me with murder, come out and do it. I’m not accounting for my movements otherwise.”

“From the way the body looked, we believe she was seeing someone she expected, not a chance intruder.” He pulled a leather-covered date book from the middle desk drawer. He flipped it open and tossed it to me. For Wednesday, January 18, Agnes had written: “V.I.W.,” heavily underscored, followed by several exclamation points.

“Looks like a date, doesn’t it.” I tossed the book back to him. “Have you established that I’m her only acquaintance with those initials?”

“There aren’t too many people in the metropolitan area with those initials.”

“So the current theory reads that she and I were lovers and we had a falling-out? Now she’s been living with Phyllis Lording for three years and I’ve been involved with God-knows-who-all since we left school, besides being married once-oh, yeah, I guess the theory would say I divorced Dick to keep Agnes happy. But despite all that, suddenly we decided to have a grand lovers’ quarrel and because I’m trained in self-defense and carry a gun at times, I won by putting a couple of bullets through her head. You said hearing about me from Mrs. Paciorek made you want to puke; frankly, Bobby, listening to what goes on in the alleged minds of the police makes me feel like I’ve wandered into a really low-grade porn shop. Talk about puking… Anything else you want to know?” I stood up again.

“Well, you tell me why she wanted to see you. And were you there last night?”

I stayed on my feet. “You should have started with your last question. I was in Melrose Park last night with the Reverend

Boniface Carroll, OP., Prior of St. Albert’s Dominican Priory, from about four-thirty to about ten. And I don’t know why Agnes wanted to talk to me-assuming I’m the one she wanted to talk to. Try Vincent Ignatius Williams.”

“Who’s he?” Bobby demanded, startled.

“I don’t know. But his initials are V.I.W.” I turned and left, ignoring Bobby’s voice as it came bellowing down the corridor after me. I was furious; my hands were shaking with rage. I stood by the door of the Omega taking in deep gulps of icy air, slowly expelling it, trying to calm myself.

Finally I climbed into the car. The dashboard clock read eleven. I headed the Omega north into the Loop, parking at a public lot not too far from the Pulteney. From there I walked three blocks to Ajax ’s headquarters.

Their glass-and-steel skyscraper occupies sixty of the ugliest stories in Chicago. Located at the northwestern corner of Michigan and Adams, it overwhelms the Art Institute opposite. I’ve often wondered why the Blairs and the McCormicks allowed a monster like Ajax so near their favorite charity.

Uniformed security guards patrol Ajax ’s gray lobby. Their job is to keep miscreants like me from attacking officers like Roger Ferrant. Even after they’d checked with him and found he was willing to see me, they made me fill out a form for a visitor’s pass. By that time my temper was so brittle that I scribbled a note under my signature promising not to mug any of their executives in the hallway.

Ferrant’s office lay on the lake side of the fifty-eighth floor, which proved the importance of his temporary position.

An angular secretary in a large antechamber informed me that Mr. Ferrant was engaged and would see me shortly. Her desk, facing the open door, kept her from seeing Lake Michigan. I wondered if that was her own idea, or if Ajax management didn’t think secretaries could be trusted to work if they saw the outside world.

I sat in a large, green-covered plush armchair and flicked through the morning’s Wall Street Journal while I waited. The headline in “Heard on the Street” caught my eye. The Journal had picked up the rumor of a potential takeover for Ajax. The Tisch brothers and other likely insurance-company owners had been interviewed, but all of them professed total ignorance. Ajax chairman Gordon Firth was quoted as saying:

Naturally we’re watching the share price with interest, but no one has approached our shareholders with a friendly offer.

And that seemed to be all they knew in New York.

At a quarter to twelve the door to the inner office opened. A group of middle-aged men, mostly overweight, came out talking in a subdued hubbub. Ferrant followed, straightening his tie with one hand and pushing his hair out of his eyes with the other. He smiled, but his thin face was troubled.

“Have you eaten? Good. We’ll go to the executive dining room on sixty.”

I told him that was fine and waited while he put on his suit jacket. We rode in silence to the top of the building.

In the executive dining and meeting rooms, Ajax compensated for the stark unfriendliness of the lobby. Brocade drapes were looped back over gauze hangings at the windows. Walls were paneled in dark wood, possibly mahogany, and the recessed lighting picked up strategically placed bits of modern sculpture and painting.

Ferrant had his own table near a window, with plenty of space between him and any eavesdropping neighbors. As soon as we were seated, a black-uniformed waiter popped out of the ground to waft luncheon menus in front of us and ask for our drink orders. Last night’s scotch was adding to the discomfort of my morning with Mallory. I ordered orange juice. I flipped indifferently through the menu. When the waiter came back with our drinks, I found I didn’t have any appetite.

“Nothing for me now.”