Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 08 (61 page)

We
let Emily digest that for a few minutes before I spoke. “The question, Emily,
is what do you want to do next? Eva and Marilyn and I think it would be good if
you stayed here another month or so. Then we’d like to find a place you could
live where you’d get the respect you need. And where you could see a good
therapist—someone like Eva, but with more time. You need to think about that,
about whether you want to go back to your old school in the fall, all those
kinds of things.”

“I
can’t abandon the boys,” she whispered.

“I’m
not asking you to abandon them. I’m only saying you need your own life, and
that we need to find a better place for you to live than with Fabian. You have
rights, Emily, not just duties. You have the right to a peaceful night’s
sleep.”

She
started to cry. “If I move out he’ll never let me see them again. He’ll be so
angry with me. I can’t—”

“You
leave that to me. I will make sure that you get to see your brothers as often
as you want to. Don’t worry about your dad’s anger. I’ll take care of that too.
Believe me.”

“But
where would I go?” she wailed.

“We’ll
work on that together,” Eva said. “We won’t ask you to leave Arcadia House
until we have a good home for you to go to.”

Eva
signaled to me to leave, asking me to wait in Marilyn’s office for a word with
her before I went home. As I got up something occurred to me.

“Are
you still writing, Emily?”

She
kept her head bent over her lap, but shook it so vigorously that the colored
beads bounced in all directions.

“I
think you should start again. Keep a journal. Write more poems. Your poems will
tell you the right thing to do.”

She
looked up at that, her face alert in a way I’d never seen it. That was the face
that had written “A Mouse Between Two Cats.” I found myself smiling on my way
to Marilyn’s office.

Mal
du Pere

Eva
joined me in Marilyn’s office about ten minutes later. “We have a real problem
in what to do with Emily. She mustn’t go back to that dreadful father.

And
he shouldn’t keep custody of the kids, either. But if we lodge a formal
complaint with DCFS, we’ll only generate a host of new problems. If they
believe us, they’ll whisk the kids into foster care, probably separately. If
they don’t, we face lengthy proceedings to establish our case. Either way,
given Fabian’s standing in the community, the overwhelming probability is that
the kids will end up back with him.”

“There’s
a grandmother,” I said. “Could they go to her? Or are there other relatives?”

Marilyn
shook her head. “None that Emily knows at all well. Deirdre had one sister,
about ten years older, living near Los Angeles, but she and Deirdre hadn’t
spoken in years. Fabian has a sister in Baltimore, but I won’t trust anyone in
that family sight unseen.”

I
whistled a little under my breath. “Say I can get Fabian to agree to let go of
the kids—is it better or worse for Emily to have her brothers with her? She’s been
their minder for so long, would it give her a chance to grow up if she didn’t
have to have them around for a while?”

Marilyn
and I both looked at Eva, who thought it over for a minute before answering.
“The three are pretty attached. If we could get them in the right kind of
placement, with a foster parent who took over the parenting, and let the three
of them learn how to be brothers and sister, I’d say keep them together.

Besides,
even if Fabian isn’t going to rape his sons, I don’t think he should be trusted
with their care. But getting him to agree to let them go is a pretty big if:
the guy’s a control freak.”

“I’ll
take care of Fabian. You figure out where to put the kids.” I got up to go.

“What
are you going to do?” Marilyn demanded. “You can’t shoot him.”

“You’re
starting to sound like Lotty,” I said. “Don’t ask. You’ll be happier not
knowing.”

Mary
Louise Neely got out of her car as I came down the steps. “Emily must be in
good shape, from the look on your face,” she said as she passed me.

“She’ll
do.” As I climbed into my car I realized I was still whistling under my
breath—“Se vuol ballare” fromThe Marriage of Figaro .

When
I spoke to Fabian on Saturday, the conversation was actually more tiresome than
difficult. His responses ranged from angry bluster, through denial that
anything had ever gone amiss between him and Emily, to a characterization of
her as a very sick girl badly in need of help.

“That’s
where our minds meet,” I said. “We’re going to get her help. Here’s the deal:
We will put Emily, Joshua, and Nathan in foster care together. You will support
a good day-care program for your sons where they meet and play with other
children. You’ll pay Emily’s school fees and her psychotherapy. And Tamar
Hawkings—the woman who helped Emily survive for a week in the tunnels—you pay
for her stay in a top-quality residential facility where she can keep her
children and receive proper help. In exchange for this you get to keep your
job.”

“How
dare you?” His cheeks quivered in fury. “How dare you interfere with my
children? I’ll have you arrested if you go near them again. Now get out of my
house!”

I
leaned back in my chair and waited for his shouts to subside. When he’d
finished, after a good—or bad—twenty minutes, my ears were ringing.

“You
don’t get it, Fabian. My goodwill toward your children is the only thing
standing between you and an ugly meeting with the state bar association, not to
mention the dean of the law school.”

As he
started another tiresome litany I spelled it out for him. I told him I had
taped evidence that he had collaborated with Alec Gantner, not only in his
knowledge of the money-laundering scam, but in trying to get me murdered. Of
course, that was stretching the truth—I didn’t have any of his complicity on
tape—but as I’d told Fabian earlier, the Marquess of Queensberry hadn’t hung
out in my South Side highschool.

I
would be willing to publish those tapes, I warned Fabian, as well as his
involvement with Gant-Ag’s violation of the embargo against Iraq. And, if he
proved really obdurate, I would help Emily through the process of testifying
against him in a child-molestation suit.

“Maybe
your tenure appointment will survive all that. It could be an interesting year
for you if you wanted to slug it out in court. I’ve put our agreement in a
document for you. Actually, I got Manfred Yeo to write it up—I’ve never done
enough contracts to know how to write all that stuff down in a cast-iron way.”

“You
went to Manfred?” Fabian was stricken.

I
nodded, smiling seraphically, and held out a copy of a ten-page document our
old professor had drafted. I’d gone to him right after leaving Arcadia House on
Tuesday. It seemed appropriate that he help finish the story, since it had all
begun at Fabian’s farewell party for him.

Manfred
had been grieved but not shocked by my recital. Of course, he’d been following
the Gantner end of the tale in the press, but nothing had appeared about
Fabian. Manfred agreed that it was in Emily’s best interest to keep her from
going through a difficult court case with her father, and promised to draw up a
document.

“Fabian
was one of my most brilliant students,” he told me at the end of our session.
“I supported his faculty appointment. But an incident occurred early in his
tenure that troubled me. He tried a case—a big antitrust suit—where the legal
expenses ran to twenty million dollars. The case was selected for review in the
Harvard Law School journal, and they gave it to a jury of very distinguished
trial lawyers—all in private practice—who criticized the conduct of the case.
They didn’t think he had committed misconduct, mind you, but thought sloppy
work had led to the high fees involved. They held it up as a typical example of
how remote academic lawyers have become from the realities of courtroom life.

“When
the article was published Fabian became utterly withdrawn. I found him one day
curled up on the floor of the men’s room. I helped him to his feet and told him
he was in urgent need of psychiatric help. Although the suggestion wounded him,
it also seemed to galvanize him back to life. But since then I’ve wondered
whether someone so mercurial was really reliable.”

Naturally
Manfred had not mentioned the episode to anyone. It must have been in Fabian’s
mind, though, when I told him I’d been to our old professor—it was the thought
that Manfred was privy to his most shameful secrets that made him stop arguing
with me about Emily.

“You
can tell all your colleagues that you’re too shattered by Deirdre’s death to
provide a good home for your children right now,” I suggested as I got up to
leave.

Fabian
started to shiver behind his antique desk. His fury spent, he had dropped with
surprising speed into his shrunken, withdrawn state. On my way out I told the
nurse who was looking after his sons that Fabian seemed ill, and not to let the
boys play around him.

That
night I talked with Lotty about Fabian, struggling to understand why he’d
encouraged the police to arrest Emily. “The cops and I were fighting over
whether he or Emily had killed Deirdre, but I don’t think Fabian saw it that
way. He wasn’t trying to frame his daughter to get himself off the hook—he’s so
self-absorbed that it never occurred to him he could be a suspect.”

“But
he was trying to get himself off a very particular hook,” Lotty said.

“Not
for Deirdre’s murder, but for raping Emily. He isn’t rational—he didn’t sit
down and work this out with a slide rule—but if he could convince himself that
Emily killed Deirdre, for the reasons his pet psychiatrist outlined, Fabian
could convince himself that he had never touched his daughter. Everything
you’ve said about him makes me believe he’s a particular kind of paranoid: he
can function well in his professional life—it probably holds him together. But
he isn’t pretending to forget the horrible things he does—beating his wife,
assaulting his daughter: he really does forget them.”

“Disgusting.”
I poured myself another whisky. “And you know, he’s likely to marry again and
have another family.”

“It’s
not a perfect world,” Lotty agreed. “You can’t get him arrested for complicity
in Gant-Ag’s crimes? That would solve the problem.”

I
shook my head. “We need him to keep working—he has to pay for day care and
school and therapy and stuff. Besides, we’re having enough trouble getting the
musketeers arrested for complicity in Gant-Ag’s crimes. Anyway, Fabian wasn’t
really a coconspirator, he just provided the senator with some valuable legal
advice. He only fingered me in the hopes of staying on Gantner’s good side. He
knew about the money coming in, but he didn’t benefit from it: all he wanted
was his wretched spot on the federal bench.”

I
kept drinking, even after Lotty warned me that I would feel like hell in the
morning. But I couldn’t get drunk. Not even Black Label could wipe the taste of
Fabian from my mouth.

Storyteller

Eva
Kuhn and Officer Neely were delighted by my work with Fabian, but once I’d
resolved Emily’s problems I sank into a lethargy that I couldn’t shake. I did
give a deposition to the state’s attorney on Anton’s assault against Emily and
me in the hospital. I talked to endless federal authorities about the illegal
Romanian workers, and I wondered, listlessly, why people from the Treasury
Department weren’t asking me about the money scams.

Murray
came around almost daily, with energetic reports of his efforts to nail the
Gantners, big and small. He kept trying to goad me into joining him in his
investigations. I felt as though I were being attacked by a jumbo-jet-size
mosquito and started hiding out on the lakefront with the dogs.

A few
days after Fabian signed my contract, I got a notice of a lawsuit from Gant-Ag,
suing me for the cost of the airplane that had gone up in smoke.

Depression
makes a good protector—I couldn’t feel the fear I might have expected. I
studied the paper for a long hour, then phoned Gantner’s Chicago office and
asked for Eric Bendel.

“Give
Senator Gantner a message from me about his lawsuit.” I cut through Bendel’s
efforts to pretend he didn’t know why I was calling. “Tell him this: If thatwas
a Gant-Ag plane, it raises some puzzling questions about what it was doing
flying in all that money from the Caymans, without a flight plan or any other
acknowledgment of the Chicago area air traffic. Tell him I have the records of
the jets registered with the air towers at O’Hare and Aurora for that night.”

That
was one benefit of Murray’s frenzied investigations. The morning after the
plane blew up, Murray had talked to people he knew at the FAA. No one wanted to
acknowledge his questions, but two days later he’d received a bootleg copy of
the logs for northern Illinois. Whoever sent it had gone to great pains to keep
his identity secret—the controllers were federal employees, after all: an angry
senator could see that they lost their jobs.

Bendel
hung up without saying anything, but a day or two later I came back from a run
to find him waiting for me. His navy sedan was double-parked in front of my
building, with the children from the second floor swarming around it—limos were
still a rarity on our street, even as upscale as the neighborhood had become.