Killing Orders (7 page)

Chapter 8 - At the Old Forge

SUNDAY MORNING I drove the mile to Lotty’s through a succession of residential one-way streets, turning often, waiting on the blind side of intersections. No one was following me. Whoever had called last night wasn’t that interested. Yet.

Lotty was waiting for me in her building entryway. She looked like a little elf: live feet of compact energy wrapped in a bright green loden jacket and some kind of outlandish crimson hat. Her uncle lived in Skokie, so I went north to Irving Park Road and over to the Kennedy, the main expressway north.

As we drove past the grimy factories lining the expressway, a few snowflakes began dancing on the windshield. The cloud cover remained high, so we didn’t seem to be in for a heavy storm. Turning right on the Edens fork to the northeast suburbs, I abruptly told Lotty about the phone call I’d had last night.

“It’s one thing for me to risk my life just to prove a point, but it’s not fair to drag you and your uncle into it as well. The odds are it was just an angry call. But if not—you need to know the risk ahead of time. And make your own decision.”

We were approaching the Dempster interchange. Lotty told me to exit east and drive to Crawford Avenue. It wasn’t until I’d followed her directions and we were moving past the imposing homes on Crawford that she answered. “I can’t see that you’re asking us to risk anything. You may have a problem, and it may be exacerbated by your talking to my uncle. But as long as he and I don’t tell anyone you’ve been to see him, I don’t think it’ll matter. If he thinks of anything you can use—well, I would not permit you in my operating room telling me what was and what was not too great a risk. And I won’t do that with you, either.”

We parked in front of a quiet apartment building. Lotty’s uncle met us in the doorway of his apartment. He carried his eighty-two years well, looking a bit like Laurence Olivier in
Marathon Man.
He had Lotty’s bright black eyes. They twinkled as he kissed her. He half bowed, shaking hands with me.

“So. Two beautiful ladies decide to cheer up an old man’s Sunday afternoon. Come in, come in.” He spoke heavily accented English, unlike Lotty, who had learned it as a girl.

We followed him into a sitting room crammed with furniture and books. He ushered me ceremoniously to a stuffed chintz armchair. He and Lotty sat on a horsehair settee at a right angle to it. In front of them, on a mahogany table, was a coffee service. The silver glowed with the soft patina of age, and the coffee pot and serving pieces were decorated with fantastic creatures. I leaned forward to look at it more closely. There were griffins and centaurs, nymphs and unicorns.

Uncle Stefan beamed with pleasure at my interest. “It was made in Vienna in the early eighteenth century, when coffee was first becoming the most popular drink there.” He poured cups for Lotty and me, offered me thick cream, and lifted a silver cover by its nymph-handle to reveal a plate of pastries so rich they bordered on erotic.

“Now you are not one of those ladies who eats nothing for fear of ruining her beautiful figure, are you? Good. American girls are too thin, aren’t they, Lottchen? You should prescribe Sacher torte for all your patients.”

He continued speaking about the healthful properties of chocolate for several minutes. I drank a cup of the excellent coffee and ate a piece of hazelnut cake and wondered how to change the subject gently. However, after pouring more coffee and urging more cakes on me, he abruptly took the plunge himself.

“Lotty says you wish to talk about engraving.”

“Yes, sir.” I told him briefly about Aunt Rosa’s problems. I own a hundred shares of Acorn, a young computer company, given me in payment for an industrial espionage case I’d handled for them. I pulled the certificate out of my handbag and passed it to Uncle Stefan.

“I think most shares are printed on the same kind of paper. I’m wondering how difficult it would be to forge something like this well enough to fool someone who was used to looking at them.”

He took it silently and walked over to a desk that stood in front of a window. It, too, was an antique, with ornately carved legs and a green leather top. He pulled a magnifying glass from a narrow drawer in the middle, turned on a bright desk lamp, and scrutinized the certificate for more than a quarter of an hour.

“It would be difficult,” he pronounced at last. “Perhaps not quite as difficult as forging paper money successfully.” He beckoned me over to the desk; Lotty came, too, peering over his other shoulder. He began pointing out features of the certificate to me: The paper stock, to begin with, was a heavy-grade parchment, not easy to obtain. “And it has a characteristic weave. To fool an expert, you would need to make sure of this weave. They make the paper like this on purpose, you see, just to make the poor forger’s life more difficult.” He turned to grin wickedly at Lotty, who frowned in annoyance.

“Then you have the logo of the issuing company, and several signatures, each with a stamp over it. It is the stamp that is most difficult; that is almost impossible to replicate without smearing the ink of the signature. Have you seen those fake shares of your aunt’s? Do you know what they did wrong?”

I shook my head. “All I know is that the serial numbers were ones that the issuing companies had never used. I don’t know about these other features.”

He snapped off the desk lamp and handed me back the certificate. “It’s a pity you haven’t seen them. Also, if you knew how the forger intended to use them, that would tell you how good, how—convincing—they had to be.”

“I’ve thought about that. The only real use for a phony share would be as collateral, They’re always examined closely by the banks at the time of sale.

“In this case, though, some real stocks were stolen. So the thief just needed to convince some priests and their auditors that they still had their assets. That way it wouldn’t be like an ordinary theft where you’d know just when the stuff was taken and who had had access to it since you last saw it.”

“Well, I’m sorry I can tell you nothing else, young lady. But surely you will have another piece of cake before you go.”

I sat back down and took a piece of apricot-almond torte. My arteries were screaming in protest as I ate a bite. “Actually,

sir, there is something else you might know. The forgeries could have been done anytime in the last ten years. But suppose, for the sake of argument, they were made relatively recently. How could I find out who did them? Assuming he— or she—worked in the Chicago area?”

He was gravely silent for a long minute. Then he spoke quietly. “Lottchen has told you about my past, how I created twenty-dollar bills. Masterpieces, really,” he said with a return of his more jovial manner. “Considering I made all my own equipment.

“There are really two breeds of forger, Miss Warshawski. Independent artisans like me. And those who work for an organization. Now here you have someone who has done the work at another person’s request. Unless you believe that the same person who created the new stole and disposed of the old. Really, what you want is not the—the master engraver, but his client. Am I not right?”

I nodded.

“Well, I cannot help you with finding this engraver. We independent artisans tend not to—to make public our handiwork and I am not part of a network of forgers. But perhaps I could help you find the client.”

“How?” Lotty asked before I could.

“By making up such a piece and letting it be known that I have one for sale.”

I thought about it. “It might work. But you’d be running a terrible risk. Even with my most persuasive intervention, it would be hard to convince the feds that your motives were pure. And remember that the people who ordered these things might be violent—I’ve already had a threatening phone call. If they found out you were double-crossing them, their justice would be even harder to take than a stint at Fort Leavenworth.”

Uncle Stefan leaned over and clasped one of my hands. “Young lady, I am an old man. Although I enjoy life, my fear of death has passed. And such an occupation would be rejuvenating for me.”

Lotty interrupted with some vigorous arguments of her own. Their discussion got quite heated and moved into German, until Lotty said disgustedly in English, “On your grave we will put a marker reading ‘He died stubborn.”

After that, Uncle Stefan and I discussed practical details. He would need to keep my Acorn certificate and get some others. He would find any supplies he needed and send me the bills. To be on the safe side, in case my anonymous caller really meant business, he wouldn’t phone me. If he needed to talk to me, he’d run an ad in the
Herald-Star.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t promise very speedy results.

“You must resign yourself to weeks, perhaps many weeks, not days, my dear Miss Warshawski.”

Lotty and I left amid mutual protestations of goodwill—at least between Uncle Stefan and me. Lotty was a little frosty. As we got into the car she said, “I suppose I could call you in to consult on geriatric cases. You could think of criminal enterprises that would bring adventure and the flush of youth back to people worried about making ends meet on Social Security.”

I drove over to Route 41, the old highway connecting Chicago and the North Shore. Nowadays it offered a quiet, pretty drive past stately homes and the lake. “I’m sorry, Lotty. I didn’t go there with anything more than the hope that your uncle might know who’s who in Chicago forging. Personally, I think his idea is a long shot. If he can do the job and make some contacts, how likely is it he’ll come up with the right people? But it’s a clever idea, and better than anything I can think of. Anyway, I’d certainly rather have a charming criminal as my only Chicago relative than an honest bitch; if you’re too upset, I’ll trade you Rosa for Stefan.”

Lotty laughed at that and we made the drive back to Chicago peaceably, stopping on the far North Side for a Thai dinner. I dropped Lotty at her apartment and went on home to call my answering service. A Father Carroll had phoned, and so, too, had Murray Ryerson from the
Star.

I tried the priory first. “They told me you were by here yesterday, Miss Warshawski. I’m sorry I couldn’t see you then. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but we had some rather extraordinary news this morning: We found the original certificates.”

I stood momentarily stunned. “That
is
extraordinary,” I finally said. “Where did they turn up?”

“They were on the altar this morning when we began celebrating mass.” Since well over a hundred people had legitimate business in the priory chapel on Sunday mornings, no one could possibly say who might or might not have gone there early and returned the stolen goods. Yes, the FBI had sent someone out to take possession, but Hatfield had called at three to say that these shares were genuine. The FBI was keeping them awhile to run lab tests on them. And Carroll didn’t know now if they’d ever get them back.

Out of curiosity I asked if Rosa had been to mass that morning. Yes, and looking grimly at anyone who tried to talk to her, Carroll assured me. Her son stayed away, but he usually did. As we started to hang up, he remembered my question about whether anyone at the priory had talked to Rosa about pulling out of the investigation. He had asked the fathers whom Rosa would most likely listen to and none of them had talked to her.

I called Murray next. He wasn’t as full of the returned certificates as I expected. More recent news occupied his attention.

“I talked to Hatfield twenty minutes ago. You know what an arrogant, uncommunicative bastard he is. Well, I couldn’t get shit Out of him about the returned stocks and I asked every question in my arsenal and more besides. I got him in a corner finally and he as good as admitted the FBI is dropping the investigation. Putting it on the back burner, he said, cliché hack that he is. But that means dropping it.”

“Well, if the real things have turned up, they don’t need to worry so much.”

“Yeah, and I believe in the Easter bunny. Come on, Vic!”

“Okay, wordly-wise newspaperman. Who’s applying the screws? The FBI isn’t scared of anyone except maybe J. Edgar’s ghost. If you think someone’s backing them off, who is it?”

“Vic, you don’t believe that any more than I do. No organization is exempt from pressure if you know where the right nerves are. If you know something you’re not telling I’ll—I’ll—” he broke off unable to think of an effective threat.

“And another thing. What was that crap you gave me about your poor frail old aunt? I sent one of my babies out to talk to her yesterday afternoon and some fat goon who claimed he was the son practically broke my gal’s foot in the door. Then the Vignelli woman joined him in the hall and treated her to some high-level swearing on newspapers in general and the
Star
in particular.”

I laughed softly. “Okay, Rosa! Two points for our side.”

“Goddamn it, Vic, why’d you sic me onto her?”

“I don’t know,” I said irritably. “To see if she’d be as nasty to anyone else as she is to me? To see if you could learn something she wouldn’t tell me? I don’t know. I’m sorry your poor little protégé had her feelings hurt, but she’s going to have to learn to take it if she plans to survive in your game.” I started to tell Murray that I, too, had been warned off the investigation, then held back. Maybe someone had brushed back the FBI. And maybe that someone had called me as well. If the FBI respected them, so should I. I bade Murray an absentminded good-night and hung up.

Chapter 9 - Final Trade

THE SNOW HELD off overnight. I got up late to do my virtuous five miles, running north and west through the neighborhood. I didn’t think anyone was watching me, but if they were, it was sensible to vary my route.

A little later I followed the same procedure in my car, looping the Omega north and west through the side streets, then hitting the Kennedy from the west at Lawrence. I seemed to be clean. Thirty miles south on the expressway, past the city limits, is the town of Hazel Crest. You cannot buy handguns in Chicago, but a number of suburbs do a flourishing legal business in them. At Riley’s, on 161st Street, I showed them my private investigator’s license and my certificate that proved I’d passed the state’s exam for private security officers. These enabled me to waive the three-day waiting period and also to register the gun in Chicago; private citizens can’t register handguns here unless they bought them before 1979.

I spent the rest of the day finishing up a few outstanding problems—serving a subpoena to a bank vice-president hiding unconvincingly in Rosemont, and showing a small jewelry store how to install a security system.

And I kept wondering who was backing off first Rosa and then the FBI. It wouldn’t help to park in front of Rosa’s and watch her. What I really needed was a tap on her phone. And that was beyond my resources.

I tried thinking about it from the other end. Who had I talked to? That was easy: the prior, the procurator, and the student master. I’d also told Ferrant and Agnes what I was doing. None of these five seemed a likely candidate for threatening either me or the FBI.

Of course, Jablonski could be that type of antiabortion fanatic who thinks it’s a worse sin to have an abortion than to kill someone who promotes freedom of choice, but he hadn’t struck me as particularly crazy. Despite Pelly’s protests, the Catholic Church does carry a lot of clout in Chicago. But even if it could pressure the FBI out of the investigation, why would it want to? Anyway, a priory in Melrose Park was on the fringes of the Church power structure. And why would they steal their own stock certificates? Even assuming they were in touch with forgers the whole idea was too far out. I went back to my original theory—my phone call had come from a crank, and the FBI was backing out because it was understaffed and overworked.

Nothing happened to make me change my mind during the next several days. I wondered vaguely how Uncle Stefan was doing. If it weren’t for the fact that there really had been a forgery, I would have put the whole thing out of my mind.

On Wednesday I had to go to Elgin to testify in a case being tried in the state appeals court there. I stopped in Melrose Park on my way back to town, partly to see Carroll, partly to see if a visit to the priory might tickle my threatening caller back to life. If it didn’t, it would prove nothing. But if I heard from him again, it might show he was watching the priory.

It was four-thirty when I reached St. Albert’s, and the friars were filing into the chapel for vespers and evening mass. Father Carroll came out of his office as I stood hesitating and gave me a welcoming smile, inviting me to join them for evening prayer.

I followed him into the Chapel. Two rows of raised stalls faced each other in the middle of the room. I went with him to the back row on the left side. The seats were divided by arms raised between them. I sat down and slid back in the seat. Father Carroll gave me a service book and quietly pointed out the lessons and prayers they would be using, then knelt to pray.

In the winter twilight, I felt as though I had slipped back five or six centuries in time. The brothers in their white robes, the candlelight flickering on the simple wooden altar to my left, the few people coming in from the outside to worship in the public space divided from the main chapel by a carved wooden screen—all evoked the medieval Church. I was the discordant note in my black wool suit, my high heels, my makeup.

Father Carroll led the service, singing in a clear, well-trained voice. The whole service was sung antiphonally between the two banks of stalls. It’s true, as Rosa said, that I’m no Christian, but I found the service satisfying.

Afterward, Carroll invited me back to his office for tea. Almost all tea tastes like stewed alfalfa to me, but I politely drank a cup of the pale green brew and asked him if he’d heard anything more from the FBI.

“They tested the shares for fingerprints and a lot of other things—I don’t know what. They thought there might be dust or something on them that would show where the things had been stored. I guess they didn’t find anything, so they’re going to bring them back tomorrow.” He grinned mischievously. “I’m making them give me an armed escort over to the Bank of Melrose Park. We’re getting those things into a bank vault.”

He asked me to stay for dinner, which was being served in five minutes. Memories of Kraft American cheese restrained me. On an impulse I invited him to eat with me in Melrose Park. The town has a couple of excellent Italian restaurants. Somewhat surprised, he accepted.

“I’ll just change out of my robe.” He smiled again. “The young brothers like to go out in them in public—they like people to look at them and know they’re seeing a foreign breed. But we older men lose our taste for showing off.”

He returned in ten minutes in a plaid shirt, black slacks, and a black jacket. We had a pleasant meal at one of the little restaurants on North Avenue. We talked about singing; I complimented him on his voice and learned he’d been a student at the American Conservatory before entering the priesthood. He asked me about my work and I tried to think of some interesting cases.

“I guess the payoff is you get to be your own boss. And you have the satisfaction of solving problems, even if they’re only little problems most of the time. I was just out in Elgin today, testifying at the state court there. It brought back my early days with the Chicago public defender’s office. Either we had to defend maniacs who ought to have been behind bars for the good of the world at large, or we had poor chumps who were caught in the system and couldn’t buy their way out. You’d leave court every day feeling as though you’d just helped worsen the situation. As a detective, if I can get at the truth of a problem, I feel as though I’ve made some contribution.”

“I see. Not a glamorous occupation, but it sounds very worthwhile….I’d never heard Mrs. Vignelli mention you. Until she called last week, I didn’t know she had any family besides her son. Are there other relatives?”

I shook my head. “My mother was her only Chicago relative—my grandfather and she were brother and sister. There may be some family on my uncle Carl’s side. He died years before I was born. Shot himself, actually—very sad for Rosa.” I fiddled with the stem on my wineglass, tempted to ask him if he knew what lay behind Rosa’s dark insinuations about Gabriella. But even if he knew, he probably wouldn’t tell me. And it seemed vulgar to bring up the family emnity in public.

After I took him back to the priory I swung onto the Eisenhower back to Chicago. A little light snow had begun falling. It was a few minutes before ten; I turned on WBBM, Chicago’s news station, to catch news and a weather forecast.

I listened vaguely to reports of failed peace initiatives in Lebanon, continued high unemployment, poor retail sales in December despite Christmas shopping. Then Alan Swanson’s crisp voice continued:

Tonight’s top local story is the violent death of a Chicago stockbroker. Cleaning woman Martha Gonzales found the body of broker Agnes Paciorek in one of the conference rooms in the offices of Feldstein, Holtz and Woods, where Miss Paciorek worked. She had been shot twice in the head. Police have not ruled out suicide as a cause of death. CBS news correspondent Mark Weintraub is with Sergeant McGonnigal at the Fort Dearborn Tower offices of Feldstein, Holtz and Woods.

Swanson switched over to Weintraub. I almost swerved into a ditch at Cicero Avenue. My hands were shaking and I pulled the car over to the side. I turned off the engine. Semis roared past, rattling the little Omega. The car cooled, and my feet began growing numb inside their pumps. “Two shots in the head and the police still haven’t ruled out suicide,” I muttered. My voice jarred me back to myself; I turned the motor on and headed back into the city at a sober pace.

WBBM played the story at ten-minute intervals, with few new details. The bullets were from a twenty-two-caliber pistol. The police finally decided to eliminate suicide since no gun was found by the body. Miss Paciorek’s purse had been recovered from a locked drawer in her desk. I heard Sergeant McGonnigal saying in a voice made scratchy by static that someone must have intended to rob her, then killed her in rage because she didn’t have a purse.

On impulse I drove north to Addison and stopped in front of Lotty’s apartment. It was almost eleven: no lights showed. Lotty gets her sleep when she can—her practice involves a lot of night emergencies. My trouble would keep.

Back at my own apartment, I changed from my suit into a quilted robe and sat down in the living room with a glass of Black Label whiskey. Agnes and I went back a long way together, back to the Golden Age of the sixties, when we thought love and energy would end racism and sexism. She’d come from a wealthy family, her father a heart surgeon at one of the big suburban hospitals. They’d fought her about her friends, her life-style, her ambitions, and she’d won every battle. Relations with her mother became more and more strained. I would have to call Mrs. Paciorek, who disliked me since I represented everything she didn’t want Agnes to be. I’d have to hear how they always knew this would happen, working downtown where the niggers are. I drank another glass of whiskey.

I’d forgotten all about laying some bait for my anonymous phone caller until the telephone interrupted my maudlin mood. I jumped slightly and looked at my watch: eleven-thirty. I picked up a Dictaphone from my desk and turned it to “Record” before picking up the receiver.

It was Roger Ferrant, feeling troubled about Agnes’s death. He’d seen it on the ten o’clock news and tried calling me then. We commiserated a bit; then he said hesitantly, “I feel responsible for her death.”

The whiskey was fogging my brain slightly. “What’d you do—send a punk up to the sixtieth floor of the Fort Dearborn Tower?” I switched off the Dictaphone and sat down.

“Vic, I don’t need your tough-girl act. I feel responsible because she was staying late working on this possible Ajax takeover. It wasn’t something she had time for during the day. If you hadn’t called her—”

“If you hadn’t called her, she would have been there late working on another project,” I interrupted him coldly. “Agnes often finished her day late—the lady worked hard. And if it comes to that, you wouldn’t have called her if I hadn’t given you her number, so if anyone’s responsible, it’s me.” I took another swallow of whiskey. “And I won’t believe that.”

We hung up. I finished my third glass of scotch and put the bottle away in the built-in cupboard in the dining room, draped my robe over a chair back, and climbed naked into bed. Just as I turned out the bedside light, something Ferrant had said rang a bell with me. I called him back on the bedside phone.

“It’s me, Vic. How did you know Agnes was working late on your project tonight?”

“I talked to her this afternoon. She said she was going to stay late and talk to some of her broker pals; she didn’t have time to get to it during the day.”

“In person or on the phone?”

“Huh? Oh, I don’t know.” He thought about it. “I can’t remember exactly what she said. But it left me with the impression that she was planning to see someone in person.”

“You
should talk to the police, Roger.” I hung up and fell asleep almost immediately.