Sara Paretsky - Blood Shot

I hunted around for the phone book. It had somehow gotten buried under a stack of music on the piano. Naturally enough, Humboldt’s number wasn’t listed. Frederick Manheim, Attorney, had an office at Ninety-fifth and Halsted and a home in neighboring Beverly. Lawyers with large incomes or criminal practices don’t give their home numbers. Nor do they usually hide out on the southwest side, away from the courts and the major action.

I was restless enough to want to move now, call Manheim, get the story from him, and gallop down to Oak Street to confront Humboldt. “Festina lente, ” I muttered to myself Get the facts, then shoot. It would be better to wait until morning and make the trek down south to see the guy in person. Which meant yet another day in nylons. Which meant I’d better get my black pumps clean.

I foraged in the hall closet for shoe polish and finally found a tin of black under a sleeping bag. I was carefully cleaning the shoes when Bobby Mallory called.

I cradled the phone under my ear and started buffing the left shoe. “Evening, Lieutenant. What can I do for you?”

“You can give me a good reason for not running you in.” He spoke in the pleasant conversational tone that meant his temper was on a tight rein.

“For what?” I asked.

“It’s considered a crime to impersonate a police officer. By everyone but you, I believe.”

“Not guilty.” I looked at the shoe. It was never going to recover the smooth finish it had when it left Florence, but it wasn’t too bad.

“You aren’t the woman-tall, thirtyish, short curly hair-who told Hugh McInerney you were with the police?”

“I told him I was a detective. And when I spoke of the police, I carefully used third-not first-person pronouns. As far as I know that is not a crime, but maybe the City Council blew one by me.” I picked up the right shoe.

“You don’t think you could leave the investigation of the Cleghorn woman’s death to the police, do you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You think Steve Dresberg killed her?”

“If I told you yes, would you drop out of sight and go do the stuff you’re qualified to work on?”

“If you have a warrant with the guy’s name on it, I might. Without arguing over what I’m qualified to do.” I capped the polish tin and laid it and the rag on a newspaper.

“Vicki, look. You’re a cop’s daughter. You should know better than to go stirring around in a police investigation. When you talk to someone like McInerney without telling us, it just makes our job a hundred times harder. Okay?”

“Yeah, okay, I guess,” I said grudgingly. “I won’t talk to the state’s attorney again without clearing it with you or McGonnigal.”

“Or anyone else?”

“Give me a break, Bobby. If it says POLICE BUSINESS in all caps, I’ll leave it to you. That’s the best you’re going to get from me.”

We hung up in mutual irritation. I spent the rest of the evening in front of the tube watching a badly cut version of Rebel Without a Cause. It did nothing to abate my ill humor.

Manheim’s office lay between a beauty parlor and a florist among the little storefronts crowding Ninety-fifth Street. He had put his name on the plate glass in those black-and-gold transfers that are supposed to look old-fashioned and discreet-Frederick Manheim, Attorney-at-Law.

The front of the place, the part the little shops used as their sales floors, had been turned into a reception area. It held a couple of vinyl chairs and a desk with a typewriter and an African violet set on it. A few old copies of Sports Illustrated sat on a pressed-wood table in front of the vinyl chairs. I flipped through one for a few minutes to give the help a chance to make an appearance. When no one showed up I tapped on the door at the back of the room and turned the knob.

The door opened on a tiny hallway. A few pieces of wall-board had been stuck in the area where the stores held their excess inventory to create an office and a little bathroom.

I knocked on the door that had Manheim’s name on it-this time in solid black Gothic-and got a thick “Just a minute.” Paper rustled, a drawer slammed, and Manheim opened the door still chewing, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. He was a young man with rosy cheeks and thick fair hair that hung over the tops of heavy glasses.

“Oh, hi. Annie didn’t tell me I had an appointment this morning. Come on in.”

I shook his proffered hand and told him my name. “I don’t have an appointment. I’m sorry to just come barging in, but I was in the area and hoped you might have a minute or two.”

He waved me in. “Sure, sure. No problem. Sorry I can’t offer you any coffee-I get mine from the Dunkin’ Donuts on the way over.”

He’d crammed a couple of visitors’ chairs in between his desk and the door. If you leaned back in the one on the left, you ran into the filing cabinet. The one on the right was jammed against the wall; a line of gray scuff marks showed where people had rubbed too hard against the pasteboard. I felt kind of bad about not being able to infuse a little cash into the operation.

He’d taken out a pad of legal paper, carefully setting the Dunkin’ Donuts coffee to one side.

“Can you spell your name for me, please?”

I spelled it out. “I’m a lawyer, Mr. Manheim, but these days I work primarily as a private investigator. A case I’m involved in has brought me to two clients of yours. Former clients, I guess. Joey Pankowski and Steve Ferraro.”

He’d been looking at me courteously through his thick lenses, his hands clasped loosely around his pen. At the mention of Pankowski and Ferraro he let the pen drop and looked as troubled as a man with rosy cherub’s cheeks could.

“Pankowski and Ferraro? I’m not sure-”

“Employees at Humboldt Chemical’s Xerxes plant in South Chicago. Died two or three years ago.”

“Oh, yes. I remember now. They needed some legal advice, but I’m afraid I couldn’t do much for them.” He blinked unhappily behind his glasses.

“I know you don’t want to talk about your clients. I don’t like talking about mine, either. But if I explain what’s gotten me interested in Pankowski and Ferraro, will you answer a couple of questions about them for me?”

He looked down at the desktop and fiddled with his pen. “I-I really can’t-”

“What is going on with these two guys? Every time I mention their names grown men tremble in their shoes.”

He looked up at me. “Who are you working for?”

“Myself” Myself, myself, it is enough, or so Medea said.

“You’re not working for a company?”

“You mean like Humboldt Chemical? No. I was hired originally by the young woman who used to live next door to me to find out who her father was. It seemed remotely possible that one of those two-most likely Pankowski-could have been the guy and I started poking around trying to find someone at Xerxes who knew him. This woman fired me on Wednesday, but I’ve gotten piqued by the way people are reacting to me. Lying to me, basically, about what went on between Pankowski and Ferraro and Xerxes. And then a guy I know at the Department of Labor told me you used to represent them. So here I am.”

He smiled unhappily. “I don’t suppose there’s any reason the company would send someone around after all this time. But it’s kind of hard for me to believe you’re on your own. Too many people got too excited over that case, and now you come in out of the blue? It’s too-too strange. Too pat.”

I rubbed my forehead, trying to coax some ideas into my brain. Finally I said, “I’m going to do something I’ve never done in my whole history as an investigator. I’m going to tell you exactly what happened. If after that you still feel you can’t trust me, so be it.”