Sara Paretsky - Killing Orders

“I’m not laughing, Albert. If you read the paper, you know how hard it is to get good coke these days. But tell me, has Rosa ’s problem taken a turn for the worse? Just to show you I mean well, I won’t even charge you for my time waiting on hold.”

I could visualize his fat round face puckered up in a full-scale pout as he breathed heavily into my ear. At last he said angrily, “You went to St. Albert ’s Priory yesterday, didn’t you?”

I assented.

“What did you find out?”

“That this is going to be incredibly tough to sort out. Our best hope is that the securities had already been faked before the priory got them. I’m meeting with the FBI this afternoon and I’m going to see if they’re looking into that.”

“Well, Mama has changed her mind. She doesn’t want you to investigate this after all.”

I sat frozen for a few seconds while anger came to a focus inside my head. “What the hell do you mean, Albert? I’m not a vacuum cleaner that you switch on and off at will. You don’t start me on an investigation, then call up two days later to say you’ve changed your mind.”

I could hear paper rustling in the background, then Albert said smugly, “Your contract doesn’t say that. It just says ‘Termination of the case may be requested by either party, whether the requested results are obtained or not., Regardless of the state of the investigation, and regardless of whether either party disagrees with the results, the fee and expenses incurred to the time of termination shall be paid.’ If you send me a bill, Victoria, I’ll pay promptly.”

I could smell my brain burning. “Albert. When Rosa called me on Sunday she made it sound as though her suicide would be on my head if I didn’t come out and help her. What’s happened since then? She find a detective she likes better? Or did Carroll call and promise her her job back if she’d get me out of the investigation?”

He said aloofly, “She told me last night she felt she was acting in a very unchristian way by getting so worried about this. She knows her name will be cleared; if it’s not, she’ll bear it like a Christian.”

“How noble,” I said sarcastically. “ Rosa as a bitter martyr is a pose I know well. But the woman of sorrows is a new departure.”

“Really, Victoria. You’re acting like an ambulance chaser. Just send me a bill.”

At least I had the dubious satisfaction of hanging up first. I sat fuming, cursing Rosa in Italian, then in English. Just like her to jack me around! Get me out to Melrose Park by screaming about Gabriella and my duty to my dead mother, if not to my live aunt, send me off on a wild-goose chase, then call the whole thing off. I was strongly tempted to phone her and tell her once and for all exactly what I thought of her, omitting no detail, however slight. I even looked her number up in my address book and started dialing before I realized the futility of such an act. Rosa was seventy-five. She was not going to change. If I couldn’t accept that, then I was doomed to be a victim of her manipulation forever.

I sat for a while with Fortune open in my lap, staring across the room at the gray day outside. Last night’s strong wind had blown clouds in front of it across the lake. What was Rosa ’s real reason for wanting the investigation to stop? She was cold, angry, vindictive-a dozen disagreeable adjectives. But not a schemer. She wouldn’t call a hated niece after a ten-year hiatus just to run me through hoops.

I looked up St. Albert ’s Priory in the phone book and called Carroll. The call went through a switchboard. I could see the ascetic young man at the reception desk reluctantly putting down his Charles Williams to answer the phone on the sixth ring, picking up the book again before switching the call through. I waited several minutes for the prior. At last Carroll’s educated, gentle voice came on the line.

“This is V. I. Warshawski, Father Carroll.”

He apologized for keeping me waiting; he’d been going over the household accounts with the head cook and the receptionist had paged the kitchen last.

“No problem,” I said. “I wondered if you’d spoken with my aunt since I saw you yesterday.”

“With Mrs. Vignelli? No. Why?”

“She’s decided suddenly that she doesn’t want any investigation into the counterfeit securities, at least not on her behalf. She seems to think that worrying about them is very unchristian. I wondered if someone at the priory had been counseling her.”

“Unchristian? What a curious idea. I don’t know; I suppose it would be if she got absorbed by this problem to the exclusion of other more fundamental matters. But it’s very human to worry about a fraud that might harm your reputation. And if you think of being Christian as a way to be more fully human, it would be a mistake to make someone feel guilty for having natural human feelings.”

I blinked a few times. “So you didn’t tell my aunt to drop the investigation?”

He gave a soft laugh. “You didn’t want me to build a watch; you just wanted the time. No, I haven’t talked to your aunt. But it sounds as though I should.”

“And did anyone else at the priory? Talk to her, I mean.”

Not as far as he knew, but he’d ask around and get back to me. He wanted to know if I had learned anything useful yet. I told him I’d be talking to Hatfield that afternoon, and we hung up with mutual promises to stay in touch.

I puttered around the apartment, hanging up clothes and putting a week’s accumulation of newspapers into a stack on the back porch where my landlord’s grandson would collect them for recycling. I made myself a salad with cubes of cheddar cheese in it and ate it while flicking aimlessly through yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. At twelve-thirty I went down for the mail.

When you thought about it seriously, Rosa was an old lady. She probably had imagined she could make her problem disappear by scowling at it, the way she’d made all her problems, including her husband, Carl, disappear. She thought if she called me and ordered me to take care of it, it would go away. When the reality came a little closer after she’d talked with me, she decided it just wasn’t worth the energy it would take to fight it. My problem was that I was so wound up in all the old enmities that I suspected everything she did was motivated by hatred and a need for revenge.

Ferrant called at one, partly for some light chat, and partly because of questions about Ajax ’s stock. “One of my responsibilities seems to be our investment division. So I got a call today from a chap named Barrett in New York. He called himself the Ajax specialist at the New York Stock Exchange. I know reinsurance, not the U.S. stock market, or even the

London stock market, so I had some trouble keeping up with him. But you remember I told you last night our stock seemed really active? Barrett called to tell me that. Called to let me know he was getting a lot of orders from a small group of Chicago brokers who had never traded in Ajax before. Nothing wrong with them, you understand, but he thought I should know about it.”

“And?”

“Now I know about it. But I’m not sure what, if anything, I should do. So I’d like to meet that friend you mentioned-the one who’s the broker.”

Agnes Paciorek and I had met at the University of Chicago when I was in law school and she was a math whiz turned

MBA. We actually met at sessions of University Women

United. She was a maverick in the gray-tailored world of

MBAs and we’d remained good friends.

I gave Roger her number. After hanging up I looked up Ajax in The Wall Street Journal. Their range for the year went from 28¼ to 55½ and they were currently trading at their high. Aetna and Cigna, the two largest stock-insurance carriers, had similar bottom prices, but their highs were about ten points below Ajax. Yesterday they’d each had a volume of about three hundred thousand, compared to Ajax ’s which was almost a million. Interesting.