Sara Paretsky - Killing Orders

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.