Sara Paretsky - Killing Orders

He pulled a stack of prospectuses from a desk drawer and shuffled through them with the speed of a professional card dealer. I left with two hot prospects tucked into my bag and a promise to call again soon. On my way to number seven, I called my answering service and told them to take messages if anyone phoned asking for Carla Baines.

At four-thirty, I’d finished with Barrett’s list. Except for Preston Tilford, everyone had recommended buying Ajax. He was also the only one who discounted the takeover rumors. That didn’t prove anything one way or another about him. It might mean only that he was a shrewder broker than the rest-after all, only one man in one brokerage firm had recommended against buying Baldwin when its stock was soaring, and he was the only one out of the entire universe of security analysts who had been correct. Still, Tilford’s recommendation against Ajax was the sole unusual incident of the day. So that was where I had to start.

Back home I changed out of my business clothes into jeans and a sweater. Pulled on my low-heeled boots. Before charging into action, I called the University of Chicago and undertook the laborious process of tracking down Phil Paciorek. Someone finally referred me to a lab where he was working late.

“Phil, it’s V.I. There was someone at your house yesterday whose name I’d like to know. Trouble is, I don’t know what he looks like, only how his voice sounds.” I described the voice as best I could.

“That could be a lot of different people,” he said dubiously.

“No accent at all,” I repeated. “Probably a tenor. You know, most people have some kind of regional accent. He doesn’t. No midwestern nasal, no drawl, no extra Boston r’s.”

“Sorry, V.I. Doesn’t ring a bell. If something occurs to me, I’ll call you, but that’s too vague.”

I gave him my phone number and hung up. Gloves, pea jacket, picklocks and I was set. Cramming a peanut butter sandwich into my coat pocket, I clattered down the stairs into the cold January night. Back at the Stock Exchange, a security guard in the hall asked me to sign in. He didn’t want any identification so I put down the first name that came to me:

Derek Hatfield. I rode to the fifteenth floor, got off, checked the stairwell doors to see that they weren’t the kind that lock behind you, and settled down there to wait.

At nine o’clock a security guard came up the stairs from the floor below. I slid back into the hallway and found a ladies’ room before he got to the floor. At eleven, the floor lights went out. The cleaning women, calling to each other in Spanish, were packing up for the night.

After they left, I waited another half hour in case anyone had forgotten anything. Finally leaving the stairwell, I walked down the hall to the offices of Tilford & Sutton, my boots clopping softly on the marble floor. I’d brought a flashlight, but fire-exit lights gave enough illumination.

At the outer door I shone my flashlight around the edges to make sure there was no alarm. Offices in a building with internal security guards usually don’t have separate alarms, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Pulling my detective’s vade mecum from my pocket, I tried a series of picklocks until I found one that worked.

No windows opened onto the outer office. It was completely dark, except for the green cursors flashing urgent messages on blank computer screens. I shivered involuntarily and ran a hand across the burn spot on the back of my neck.

Using my light as little as possible, I picked my way past desks and mounds of papers to Preston Tilford’s office. I wasn’t sure how often the security guards visited each floor and didn’t want to risk showing a light. Tilford’s door was locked, too, and took a few minutes of fumbling in the dark. I’d learned to pick locks from one of my more endearing clients in the public defender’s office, but had never achieved the quickness of a true professional.

Tilford’s door was solid wood, so I didn’t have to worry about light shining through a panel as I did with the outer door. Closing it softly, I flipped a switch and took my bearings. One desk, two filing cabinets. Try everything first to see what’s locked and look in the locked drawers.

I worked as quickly as I could, keeping my gloves on, not really sure what I was trying to find. The locked file cabinet contained files for Tilford’s private customers. I picked a couple at random for close scrutiny. As far as I could tell, they were all in order. Not knowing what should be in a customer statement made it hard to know what to look for-high debit balances, maybe. But Tilford’s customers seemed to keep on top of their accounts. I handled the pages carefully, leaving them in their original order, and refiled them neatly. I looked at the names one by one to see if any of his customers sounded familiar. Other than a handful of well-known Chicago business names I didn’t see any I knew personally until I came to the P’s. Catherine Paciorek, Agnes’s mother, was one of Preston’s clients.

My heart beating a little faster, I pulled out her file. It, too, was in order. Only a small amount of the fabled Savage fortune amassed by Agnes’s grandfather was handled at Tilford &

Sutton. I noticed that Mrs… Paciorek had purchased two thousand shares of Ajax on December 2. That made me raise my eyebrows a little. Hers was a blue-chip portfolio with few transactions. In fact, Ajax was the only company she’d traded in 1983. Worth pursuing further?

I could find no other clients trading in Ajax stock. Yet Tilford had registered many more than Catherine Paciorek’s two thousand shares. I frowned and turned to the desk.

This was carefully built, of dark mahogany, and the lock in the middle drawer was tough. I ended up scratching the surface as I fumbled with the picklocks. I stared at it in dismay, but it was too late now to worry.

Tilford kept an unusual collection in his private space:

Besides a half-empty bottle of Chivas, which wasn’t too surprising, he had a fine collection of hard-core porn. It was the kind of stuff that makes you feel we should work toward Shaw’s idea of a disembodied mind. I grimaced, flipping through the whole stack to make sure nothing more interesting was interleafed.

After that, I figured Tilford owed me a drink and helped myself to some of the Chivas. In the bottom drawer I uncovered file folders of more clients, perhaps his ultrapersonal, super-secret accounts. There were nine or ten of these, including an organization called Corpus Christi. I dimly remembered reading something about it recently in The Wall Street Journal. It was a Roman Catholic lay group, made up primarily of wealthy people. The current pope liked it because it was conservative on such important points as abortion and the importance of clerical authority, and it supported right-wing governments with close Church ties. The pope liked the group so much, according to the Journal, that he’d appointed some Spanish bishop as its leader and had him-the Spaniard-reporting directly to him-the pope. This miffed the archbishop of Madrid because these lay groups were supposed to report to their local bishops. Only Corpus Christi had a lot of money and the pope’s Polish missions took a lot of money, and no one was saying anything directly, but the Journal did some discreet reading between the ledger lines.

I flipped through the file, looking at transactions for the Corpus Christi account. It had started in a small way the previous March. Then it began an active trading program, which ran to several million dollars by late December. But no record existed of what it was trading in. I wanted it to be Ajax. Tilford & Sutton was supposed to have taken largish positions in Ajax, according to Barrett. Yet the two thousand shares Mrs. Paciorek bought in December were the only trace of Ajax activity I’d seen in the office. Where were copies of Corpus Christi’s statement showing what it was actually buying and selling? And why wasn’t it in the file, as was the case with the other customers? Tilford’s office didn’t include a safe. Using my flashlight as little as possible, I surveyed the other offices. A large modern safe stood in a supply room, its door to be opened by someone who knew which eighteen numbers to punch on the electronic lock. Not me. If Corpus Christi’s records were in there, they were in there for good.