Sara Paretsky - Killing Orders

The bells at the nearby Methodist Temple chimed the hour: two o’clock. I took the Corpus Christi and Mrs. Paciorek files out to the main room and hunted around for a photocopier. A large Xerox machine stood in the corner. It took a while to warm up. Using my flashlight surreptitiously, I copied the contents of the two files. To separate the pages I had to take off my gloves. I stuffed them in my back pocket.

I had just finished when the night watchman came by and looked in through the glass panel. Like a total imbecile, I had left Tilford’s office door ajar. As the watchman fumbled with his keys, I hit the off button and looked around desperately for a hiding place. The machine had a paper cupboard built in underneath. My five-feet-eight frame fit badly, but I squeezed in and pulled the door as nearly shut as I could.

The watchman turned on the overhead lights. Through a crack in the door I watched him go into Tilford’s office. He spent long enough in there to decide the place had been burglarized. His voice crackled dimly as he used his walkietalkie to call for reinforcements. He made a circuit of the outer room, shining his flashlight in corners and closets. Apparently he thought the Xerox machine held nothing but its own innards:

He walked past it, stopped directly in front of me, then returned to the inner office.

Hoping he would stay there until help arrived, I gently shoved the door open. Silently easing my cramped body onto the floor, I crawled on hands and knees to the near wall where a window overlooked a fire escape. I slid the window open as quietly as possible and climbed out into the January night.

The fire escape was covered with ice. I almost ended my career forever as I skidded across its narrow iron platform, saving myself with a grab at the burning-cold railing. I’d been holding both the originals and photocopies of Tilford’s documents, as well as my flashlight. These flew across the ice as I seized the guardrail. Cursing to myself, I crawled precariously across the platform retrieving documents, stuffing them into my jeans waistband with numbed fingers. I pulled the gloves from my back pocket and put them on while skidding my way down as quickly as possible to the floor below.

The window was locked. I hesitated only seconds, then kicked it in. Brushing glass fragments away with my sweatshirted arm, I soon had a hole big enough to climb through.

I landed on top of a desk covered with files. These scattered in my wake. I kept bumping into desks and cabinets as I tried running to the far door. How could people get to their desks in the morning with so much clutter blocking their paths? I cracked the outer door, heard nothing, and made my way down the hall. I was about to open the stairwell door when I heard feet pounding on the other side.

Turning back down the hail, I tried every door. Miraculously one opened under my hand. I stepped inside onto something squishy and was hit in the nose by someone with a stick. Fighting back, I found myself wrestling a large mop.

Outside I could hear the voices of two patrolmen agreeing in low murmurs about which parts of the floor to guard. Trying to move quietly, I edged my way to the wall of the supply closet and ran into a coatrack. Clothes were hanging from it: the regulation smocks of the cleaning women. I fumbled in the dark, pulled my jeans off, stuck my documents inside the waistband of my tights, and pulled on the nearest smock. It came barely to my knees, and was miles too large in the shoulders, but it covered me.

Hoping I was not covered with paper, glass shards, or blood, and praying that these patrolmen had not dandled me on their knees thirty years ago, I swung open the closet door.

The policemen were about twenty feet from me, their backs turned. “You!” I screamed, donning Gabriella’s thick accent. They swirled around. “What goes on here, eh? I am calling manager!” I started off in righteous indignation to the elevator.

They were on me in an instant. “Who are you?”

“Me? I am Gabriella Sforzina. I work here. I belong. But you? What you doing here, anyway?” I started shouting in Italian, trusting none of them knew the words to “Madamina” from Don Giovanni.

They looked at each other uncertainly. “Take it easy, lady. Take it easy.” The speaker was in his late forties, not far from pension time, not wanting any trouble. “Someone broke into one of the offices upstairs. We think he left by the fire escape. You haven’t seen anyone on this floor, have you?”

“What?” I shrieked, adding in Italian, “Why do I pay taxes, eh, that’s what I want to know-for bums like you to let burglars in while I’m working? So I can be raped and murdered?” I obligingly translated into English for them.

The younger one said, “Uh, look, lady. Why don’t you just go on home.” He scribbled a note on a pad and ripped off the sheet for me. “Just give that to the sergeant at the door downstairs and he’ll let you out.”

It was only then that I realized my gloves were lying with my jeans on the floor of the supply closet.

LOTTY WAS NOT amused. “You sound just like the CIA,” she snapped, when I stopped by the clinic to tell her my adventure. “Breaking into people’s offices, stealing their files”

“I’m not stealing the files,” I said virtuously. “I wrapped them up and mailed them back first thing this morning. What troubles me from a moral standpoint is the jacket and gloves I left there-technically their loss is a business expense. Yet will the IRS turn me in if I itemize? I should call my accountant.”

“Do that,” she retorted. Her Viennese accent was evident, as always when Lotty was angry. “Now leave. I’m busy and have no wish to talk to you in such a mood.”

The break-in had made the late editions. Police speculated that the watchman interrupted the thief before he took anything of value, since nothing of value was missing. My prints are on file at the Eleventh Street station, so I hoped none showed up that I couldn’t reasonably account for as part of my business visit to Tilford’s office.

What would they make of Derek Hatfield’s name on the Stock Exchange’s sign-in register, I wondered. I had to figure out some way of finding out if they questioned Hatfield about

Whistling through my teeth, I started the Omega and headed out to Melrose Park. Despite Lotty’s ill humor I was pleased with myself. Typical criminal failing-you carry off a coup, then have to brag about it. Sooner or later one of your bragees tells the police.

Snow was beginning to fall as I turned onto Mannheim Road. Small dry spitballs, Arctic snow, no good for snowmen. I was wearing long underwear under my navy pantsuit and hoped that would be enough protection against a minus 28 wind chill. Some time today I’d have to find an Army-Navy Surplus and get another pea jacket.

The Priory of Albertus Magnus loomed coldly through the driving pellets. I parked the car out of the wind as far as possible and fought my way to the priory entrance. The wind sliced through suit and underwear and left me gasping for air.

Inside the high-vaulted, stale hallway the sudden silence was palpable. I rubbed my arms and stamped my feet and warmed myself before asking the anemic ascetic at the reception desk to find Father Carroll for me. I hoped I was too early for evening prayers and too late for classes or confessions.

About five minutes later, as the building’s essential chill began making me shiver, Father Carroll himself came down the hall. He was moving quickly, yet not hurrying, a man in control of his life and so at peace.

“Miss Warshawski. How nice to see you. Have you come about your aunt? She’s back today, as she probably told you.”