Shell Game Read online

  I willed my face into its impassive lines. I willed myself not to ask who of their language-speaking friends would scrub the toilets in this building for whatever scut wage Force 5 paid.

  When the car came, it took me down to the crossover floor at 48. I wasn’t finished for the evening: I rode back up to the main entrance to Crawford, Mead’s offices. I hadn’t reckoned on the big glass doors leading to the reception area being locked, and locked electronically—you needed a pass card to get in.

  I took the cleaning cloth off my head and began polishing the elevator doors. As I was finishing the second set, the light above them pinged; a young woman got out, balancing a carryout bag from a Mexican restaurant with a cardboard drinks tray and her briefcase. She put down the carryout bag while she used her pass card on the door. I scurried over to pick up her food bag and hold the door for her.

  She saw my smock, not my face. She mumbled a thanks but didn’t think it was strange that I followed her inside—cleaners clean. For verisimilitude, I wiped my fingerprints from the doors, waited for her to disappear, and headed down the hall past the reception area to Richard Yarborough’s suite.

  Glynis had the outer office. The only thing on her desk was her computer monitor. Paper, stapler, pens, any of the paraphernalia of the work life, had been stashed out of sight. A shelf behind her desk held reference books and a photograph of a smiling man in fishing gear with two teenage girls. I had forgotten Glynis was married—she had such a vestal attachment to Dick I never pictured her with her own family.

  I clicked on her mouse and the monitor came to life. I needed a password to get in and doubted it was I’ll Do Anything for Richard Yarborough, although I was tempted to try it.

  Dick didn’t have his own conference room—the partners were supposed to use the communal ones—but he did have a small round table in a corner of his office where he could hold impromptu meetings. The real cleaners hadn’t been in yet: coffee cups and crumpled paper were still on the table. I unfolded the pages, looking for—I wasn’t sure what.

  There was nothing in the papers that told me anything except that the meeting had to do with the FATCA, the Foreign Account and Tax Compliance Act. I always imagined it stood for Fatcats, because who else was affected by the act? And Dick’s practice was nothing if not full of Fatcats.

  I remembered my idea that Lawrence Fausson might have stolen something from Dick’s office. I couldn’t see anything worth the kind of cash Fausson had under his kitchen floor, at least not anything small enough to smuggle out, but what if he’d been part of the Syrian team on Kettie’s floors? There were plenty of valuables there.

  On the other hand, Dick’s clients represented a lot of money. It was possible that Fausson got access to their accounts through Dick’s computer. Dick seemed careless enough to leave log-on information around, and the cleaners were alone in the offices for a long stretch.

  In my role as cleaning woman, I recrumpled the pages and looked around for Dick’s trash can. It was next to his desk, in a spot where visitors could see it, since it was apparently an object more decorative than utilitarian, being made out of a silvery beaten metal with feet that looked like alligator toes. Before dumping the Fatcat documents, I pulled out the detritus already in the alligator.

  Dick had eaten a Snickers bar and two peanut butter cups today. The empty wrappers made me realize how hungry I was. Peanut butter—that was what I needed to get me through my weariness.

  I shook my head. Remember the Silicon Valley diet: surely you’re as tough as any Facebook exec, I admonished myself. Although their judgment wasn’t always stellar.

  I put the wrappers on top of the Fatcat sheets and removed a fund-raising solicitation from Princeton, where Dick had done his B.A., and a letter from a resort in Portugal where he and the present Mrs. Yarborough had recently vacationed.

  Buried in the junk was a typed list of Dick’s appointments for the day. Phone meetings, lunches, coffee, and, at the end of the day, a meeting with Arnaud Minable concerning Ti-Balt v. Trechette.

  I knew both of those names, but I couldn’t place them. I heard a cart rattling along the hallway and two women speaking Spanish. These would be actual cleaners. I stuffed the paper into my smock pocket and hurried away. The women with the cart stared and called at me.

  I paused, smiling apologetically, and hurried to the elevators.

  While I was waiting for Car D to take me down, I looked at the map of the world on the wall highlighting all the Crawford, Mead offices. And saw the sign for the new firm attached to Crawford: Runkel, Soraude and Minable.

  27

  Part of the Furniture

  Arnaud Minable, one of Dick’s new partners. Meeting with Dick to discuss a lawsuit involving Trechette. Their plaque on Crawford, Mead’s wall jarred my memory loose: Trechette owned Rest EZ. Trechette owned banks and whatnot around the world but had no listed officers or shareholders. I stood, jaw agape, as my elevator car opened and closed without me.

  Dick’s niece worked for Rest EZ. Dick handled affairs for Rest EZ’s nominal owners. Reno had told her sister that Dick “sort of helped her” get a job—in this case, Glynis had given her a handful of companies to try where she could use the law firm’s name. Even so, it seemed a strange coincidence for the lawyer for Rest EZ’s parent company to show up soon after Reno disappeared.

  The door in front of me dinged. I quickly turned away and started polishing a neighboring elevator—in the nick of time: Dick, Glynis, and the stranger—presumably Arnaud Minable—emerged. I dropped my cloth, bent over, head hidden. It didn’t matter—I was a maid; none of the trio even noticed me.

  They were jovial—whatever flies the Ti-Balt lawsuit, or I myself, had put in their soup had apparently been strained away by the good food and drink at the Potawatomi Club. Gervase Kettie had gone his own way, which also lightened the atmosphere.

  I needed more information than Dick’s discarded appointment schedule provided. I wanted to shake him until he told me how his niece and Trechette were connected—but for once in my life I curbed the fiercer impulses Dick stirred up in me. I needed more information before I staged a confrontation.

  Glynis was informing Minable that the room he’d used today was available through Thursday; Minable said he was heading back to Havre-des-Anges on Wednesday. Glynis swiped her pass card over the door lock and the group disappeared into Crawford, Mead’s offices.

  I summoned another elevator car and returned to the women’s changing room. I’d planned on dropping off the smock, but it made the perfect disguise. Anyone who’s cleaning up after you is part of your furniture, not a person. I might want to be invisible here some other night. I collected my windbreaker, which mercifully still held my wallet and phone, and rolled the smock into a tight ball that fit into the hood.

  Vending machines stood in an alcove between the women’s and men’s changing rooms. I’m not much for sweets, but Dick’s peanut butter cups sounded irresistible about now. I ate two packets and sat cross-legged on the floor by the machines. I downloaded an Arabic translator to my phone, then dozed until the shift ended and the regular cleaners began returning to change into their street clothes.

  When the man I’d approached in Kettie’s boardroom appeared, I pushed myself standing and went over to him. He looked around nervously. Two of his co-workers said something bantering in Arabic that made him flush, but one of them said, “Elorenze, yes?”

  I nodded.

  “Guards for Ket-tie being much angry to Elorenze.”

  I pulled up the Arabic app and asked it to translate whether Fausson had stolen from Kettie.

  The three men looked at the phone. They conversed among themselves and then took my phone and spoke into it.

  The translation app was partial to the present progressive. It told me that the men “are not knowing, was Elorenze a thief. Guard is thinking Elorenze is cheating. He is very angry, shouting, and after that we are not seeing Elorenze again, so we are thinking he is losing his job.” />
  “Cheating him of money or of time or of statues?” I asked.

  The men all smiled, held up their palms—they were regretting to make me unhappy, but they were telling me everything they knew.

  “What about Tarik Kataba, the poet?” I asked. “Did he work here with you and Elorenze?”

  They smiled, but their eyes turned hard and they moved quickly into the men’s changing room: they weren’t going to say anything else.

  When I rode to the ground floor, I saw the battered van waiting at the curb. I flagged a taxi to Pilsen for the Mustang. It was still there. It had a seventy-five-dollar parking ticket in the window, but I hoped my accountant would agree it was a business expense.

  As I drove home, slowly, keeping to side streets, I texted Martha Simone. Late though it was, she was still working. She called to say that she’d managed to stop the county from charging Felix; they’d let him go home, with stern adjurations not to leave the jurisdiction.

  “Did you have any luck with background on Fausson?” she asked. “I told the state’s attorney that my investigator was on the trail of some associates with a close connection to him and that they’d look stupid if they charged Felix, who’d never met him.”

  “I went down a long and difficult trail and I’m not sure if it led any place helpful. The men who cleaned the Kettie Enterprises offices with Fausson say one of the guards chewed him out for cheating. They didn’t know, or perhaps wouldn’t say, how he’d been cheating.”

  When I described the encounter, Simone said, “If there’s a chance they’re undocumented, I can’t call them as witnesses. I can use this information as leverage with the sheriff, but not in court.”

  “There’s another thing you should know,” I said. “I can’t decide if revealing it would help or hurt Felix, but I was inside Fausson’s apartment last week.”

  “Who let you in?” she demanded.

  “The door happened to be open,” I said, not adding that it was open because I’d undone the lock. “That part’s irrelevant.”

  I told Simone about the cache of money.

  “How you got in is not irrelevant if you entered unlawfully,” Simone said. “I can’t possibly give this information to the state’s attorney.”

  “Confidential informant,” I suggested. “The bigger question is whether it would help or hurt Felix to tell them about the money.”

  We batted it around but agreed that revealing news about the hoard would implicate Felix further—how could we have known if he hadn’t told us? And since I’d gone in illegally, it would be assumed it was at Felix’s behest.

  Simone was interested in the fact that men identifying themselves with ICE had shot at me.

  “They could have been muggers parading as feds,” I said.

  “They could have been ICE—the agency is getting increasingly ruthless,” she said. “I’ll talk to someone I know in the state’s attorney’s office, see if they’ve searched Fausson’s apartment and what they’ve found.”

  I told her about my discoveries tonight as well.

  “My God, Vic, I’m glad Freeman’s your attorney, not me! First your B and E at Fausson’s, and now this. Nothing you learned tonight could ever be admissible.”

  “I’m not interested in admissible. I’m interested in usable information,” I snapped, “and that is very thin on the ground. I’m juggling two relatives here: Lotty’s nephew and my ex-husband’s and my niece. You know what’s going on with Felix, but our niece has disappeared, and I haven’t been able to find one hint of a clue about what happened to her.”

  I stopped talking while I thought it over. Dick must know something about his niece. If Reno had been harmed when she was in St. Matthieu, Rest EZ’s senior staff would tell their attorney, even if they wouldn’t confide in Reno’s supervisor at the Austin branch.

  But nothing in that scenario connected Dick to Lawrence Fausson, unless Fausson had also been cleaning the Crawford, Mead offices. Everyone was in the same building, but as I’d seen tonight, the cleaning crew looked invisible to Dick. If Fausson had been stealing from him or blackmailing him, surely Dick or at least Glynis would have been inspecting every Force 5 employee on their floor.

  “Are you still there, Vic?” Martha Simone’s sharp voice made me realize I was looking blindly at a gas station.

  “Sorry, Martha. Too long a day. I’m glad you got Felix home.”

  Before hanging up, I asked if she’d kept Lotty up-to-date. Drily, she said that Lotty had phoned every fifteen minutes or so. She’d also talked to Hugo, Lotty’s brother.

  “They’re worried, as they have every right to be, but I told both the doctor and her brother that unless they can persuade Felix to tell me the truth, we run a serious risk of being blindsided.”

  I reached home thoroughly demoralized. Mr. Contreras had been waiting up. He cracked open his front door, saw me, and came out, resplendent in his maroon bathrobe and matching pajamas. The dogs bounced out behind him, sure we were going for a swim or at least a run.

  “Harmony is asleep. It’s been a tough day for her, but she’s holding up good. What about you? Where you been? I was beginning to think you got yourself arrested or shot or something.”

  I put an arm around him. “Long day, but I saw Dick this evening, and I’m thinking he knows something about Reno. We’ll talk it over in the morning.”

  He started to protest—if it was something that affected Harmony—if there was a chance we could find Reno, then we needed to go over right now.

  “Unless you want to wrap me in bedsheets and roll me out to the car, I am not moving from this building. The only thing I want right now is an elevator, which we don’t have.” I kissed him on the cheek and started for the stairs.

  Mitch went back into the apartment with my neighbor, but Peppy followed me up. She watched expectantly as I surveyed my larder.

  “If you’d gone shopping we could have a real dinner,” I said. “As it is, the choice is between a cheese sandwich or eggs, and the sandwich doesn’t have to be cooked.”

  I’d forgotten to put my good bread in the freezer; it had turned a kind of steely green. Cheese on rye crisps. Yum. Washed down with Johnnie Walker Black. Better.

  I took off my clothes, rubbed arnica into my arms and legs, and went off to bed. Peppy jumped in next to me, but I didn’t turn out the light. I opened my laptop and asked LexisNexis to reveal what it knew about Ti-Balt v. Trechette.

  Ti-Balt was North American Titanium-Cobalt, Inc., a twenty-billion-dollar mining and machining company headquartered in Duluth, Minnesota. They were suing Trechette for recovery of completion bonds bought through Trechette Insurance Holdings of Saint Helier, Jersey. Some construction project Ti-Balt undertook had not been finished, or perhaps not finished on time. Trechette’s insurance subsidiary was claiming Ti-Balt hadn’t met the terms of the agreement.

  This was a typical corporate squabble over a few hundred million. It would take years to work through the courts. Trechette was represented by Runkel, Soraude and Minable; Dick was apparently pitching in—this was his bread-and-butter kind of case.

  My eyes were burning. I saved the results, but before shutting down for good I looked up Gervase Kettie. Why had he taken part in Dick’s meeting with Arnaud Minable? His name hadn’t been on the schedule Glynis had prepared for Dick. Did he have a financial stake in Trechette? As I started reading about him, Kettie seemed to have a financial stake in everything, from real estate to reality TV, but his was a closely held company, so I couldn’t see what his holdings were in detail.

  Kettie Enterprises was headquartered in Chicago, behind those heavy wood doors I’d just visited. The company was involved in myriad legal actions, about patent infringements, environmental problems, real estate completion bonds, and any number of other issues. Crawford, Mead was only one of the law firms they worked with. I recognized most of the firms, some based in New York or Chicago, others in Australia, Shanghai, and Mumbai. Arnaud Minable’s name wasn’t among their couns
el in the lawsuits I looked at, and the Trechette name didn’t appear, either.

  I lay down. I’d shut my eyes for ten minutes and then try to dig up personal information on Gervase Kettie. The next thing I knew, Peppy was licking my face. It was seven-thirty and she needed to get outside.

  28

  Bringing a Dog to a Knife Fight

  Yesterday’s rain had passed, but a cold front had come in behind it. The sky was a sullen gray, the temperature not quite forty, but I badly needed to stretch my legs and lungs; I’d been in cars and vans for too much of the last few days. I put on warm running gear and took Peppy with me to collect Mitch from Mr. Contreras.

  Harmony was in the kitchen, stirring a bowl of oatmeal while my neighbor clucked at her, urging her to eat. When I leashed up Mitch and Peppy, she insisted on coming with us.

  “That’s the ticket,” my neighbor agreed. “Fresh air with the dogs and Vic, you’ll have an appetite when you get back.”

  I gritted my teeth—I’d wanted to be alone, to have a chance to clear my head before trying to figure out what last night’s discoveries meant.

  Once we got going I wished I’d left her behind: I wanted to set a fast pace: I needed to work the muscles that had stiffened while I was healing. Harmony didn’t want exercise, though: she wanted to worry over the break-in at Reno’s, Reno’s probable fate, what she herself should do next—legitimate concerns, all, but by the fourth time Harmony said “But if it wasn’t drug addicts looking for stuff to sell, who else did it?” I began to feel like an overtightened guitar string, close to breaking the next time Harmony tried plucking it.

  “Did Reno ever talk to you about a man named Kettie?” I interrupted. “Gervase Kettie?”

  “I don’t think so. Who is he?”

  “A real estate tycoon that your uncle Dick works with. What about a lawyer named Minable?”

  “How did Reno know him?”