Wildcat Page 4

  “You have his phone number?” I said.

  Angela nodded. “He’s not answering it, or texts, or anything. No updates on his Facebook page or Twitter feed.”

  “The police must have something to go on,” I objected. “Other than saying that nobody knows where your cousin is.”

  “It wasn’t really a break-in.” Angela picked at her cuticles. “Someone with a key opened all the doors, and August is the only person with a key they can’t find.”

  “How long has he been out of touch?” I asked, cutting short another harangue by Bernie.

  Angela hunched a shoulder. “I can’t even tell you that, ma’am. It wasn’t until today that I knew he was missing, and that’s because the police came to talk to me, to see if I knew where he was.”

  I got up to turn on more lights. The only windows in the warehouse where I lease my office are at the top of the fourteen-foot walls. I’ve filled the place with floor and ceiling lamps, and at five on a November day I needed all of them to break the gloom.

  Neither of my visitors seemed able to tell her story in a straightforward way, but what it boiled down to was that Six-Points Gym’s medical-supplies closet had been ransacked during the break-in. The gym worked with a lot of athletes, from weekend warriors to some of the city’s pro teams, along with many of the university’s athletes. They had a doctor on call who could hand out drugs. Neither Angela nor Bernie knew what had been in the ransacked closet.

  “We don’t take drugs,” Bernie snapped when I asked. “Why would we know?”

  I sighed, loudly. “It’s the kind of question you might have asked the police when they talked to you. Or they might have asked you. Six-Points must have controlled substances, or the cops wouldn’t care.”

  “They didn’t say.” Angela was talking to her hands again. “They asked me how well I know August and did I know if he took drugs, sold drugs—all those things. I told them no, of course.”

  “Even though you don’t know him well?” I prodded.

  Angela looked up at that, her eyes hot. “I know when someone is on drugs. Ma’am. It’s true I don’t know him well—I was only two the one time he came to see us—but my mother told me he brought a toy farm with him that I kept messing with. She says August was so cute, how he put the animals to bed for the night, all the little lambs together, all the cows, how the dog got to sleep on the farmer’s bed. A boy like that wouldn’t be stealing drugs.”

  I didn’t suggest that every drug dealer had once been a little child who played with toys.

  Bernie nodded vigorously. “Exactement! So we need you to find August. Find him before the police do, or they will just arrest him and never listen to the truth.”

  “Which is?”

  “That someone else did this break-in, this sabotage.” Bernie cried, exasperated with my thickness.

  “This is potentially a huge inquiry, Bernie. You need to fingerprint the premises, talk to everyone on the gym’s staff, talk to customers. The police have the manpower and the technical resources for an investigation like this. I don’t have the equipment or the staff to work a crime scene, even if the Evanston cops would let me look at it.”

  “But, Vic! You can at least talk to people. When you start asking questions, they will be squirming and saying things they thought they could keep secret. I know you can do this—I have seen you making it happen. Maybe even the manager of the gym, maybe she is doing this crime and trying to blame August.”

  I opened and shut my mouth a few times. Whether it was the flattery or the supplication in both their faces, I wrote down the address of Six-Points, the name of the manager, August’s home address. When I asked Angela for August’s mother’s name, though, she said that “Auntie Jacquelyn” had died six years ago.

  “I honestly don’t think August has any other family in Chicago. Not on my side anyway. His daddy was killed in Iraq, years ago. If he has other relatives here, I don’t know about them.”

  Of course she didn’t know his friends either, or lovers, or whether he had debts he needed to pay off. At least she could provide his last name—Veriden. Even though I knew that neither woman could afford my fees, I still found myself saying I would call at the gym tomorrow and ask some questions.

  Bernie leaped up to hug me. “Vic, I knew you would say yes! I knew we could count on you.”

  I thought of Sam Spade telling Brigid O’Shaughnessy he wouldn’t play the sap for her. Why wasn’t I as tough as Sam?

  Chapter 2

  Fit for Life

  The next day I had an early meeting in the Loop with my favorite kind of client, the kind who pays bills regularly and has well-focused inquiries, so it wasn’t until late afternoon that I made it up to the Six-Points Gym. Which meant I had about a dozen texts from Bernie, demanding to know what I’d found out, before I even started north.

  I’d made an appointment with the day manager, Denise LaPorte, and had phoned to let the Evanston police know I was on the case. The detective in charge didn’t sound as though the break-in was high on his own to-do list. No one had been killed or even injured, and property damage was minimal.

  “You want to look for this guy—what’s his name? August Veriden?—knock yourself out. Just let me know when you find him.”

  “You’re liking him for the break-in?”

  The cop said, “We’d like to talk to him. He’s the only employee with a key that we can’t locate, so we’ve put out a bulletin for him.”

  I asked what drugs were missing. I whistled under my breath: the gym’s medical closet had quite a cocktail on hand—Oxy, Toradol, Vicodin, along with stuff I’d never heard of.

  “Were the quantities enough to make them worth stealing?”

  The detective snorted derisively. “You ever been around a junkie, PI? Street value doesn’t mean shit. Ease of access—you’ll see when you get there. It ain’t exactly Fort Knox.”

  Duly chastened, I promised I would let him know if I discovered anything helpful. Neither of us was optimistic when I hung up.

  When I got to Six-Points Gym: Fitness for Life, it was just after five. The building was a kind of outsize warehouse. A signboard at the entrance advertised an Olympic-size pool, a dozen basketball courts, yoga rooms, weight rooms, five restaurants, and a separate spa wing. The sign urged me to join and become fit for life. Special rates for college and high-school students, 30 percent off for everyone who joined today. There must have been a lot of cancellations after the break-in.

  The sign also explained the Six Points: use your head and heart to power your four limbs to fitness.

  A security camera videoed the main entrance, but the eye had been covered with a piece of chewing gum. Inside, a guard the size of a football tackle was dealing with a woman who demanded he let her into the locker room right now! He looked at me humorlessly and asked for my membership card and a photo ID.

  “You were here during the break-in?” I said while the woman shouted that she’d been here before me and I couldn’t butt in like I owned the place.

  “And you get to ask questions because . . . ?” the guard said.

  “Because I’m a detective who’s been hired to help with the investigation. Denise LaPorte is expecting me.”

  The guard looked as though he’d like to pick me up and break me in half, just for someone to vent his frustration on, but he picked up the desk phone instead and called for permission to let me in.

  “Down the hall to the back staircase and up to the second floor. You’ll find her—just follow the noise.”

  “And were you here during the break-in?”

  “What kind of asshole question is that? Of course not. We’re closed from midnight to five a.m.—that’s when it happened.”

  By the time I left, the angry woman had been joined by a couple of men also demanding answers.

  I passed locker rooms. Police tape had been crisscrossed over the entrances, but someone had torn it down.

  You know the footage that TV loves to show after a
tornado or an earthquake, with homes and furniture flung across the landscape? That’s what I saw when I stepped over the tape: every locker in the women’s room had been pried open. Gym bags and backpacks had been dumped. Bras, tampons, water bottles, swimsuits, candy wrappers, makeup kits—all scattered over the benches and floor. Fingerprint dust had settled on the clothes, making them look like the tired remains of a dust storm.

  I backed out and peered into the men’s room. The damage was just as appalling, except for the absence of makeup. No one looking for drugs would have looted the locker rooms, although I suppose a serious addict might have been hunting jewelry or electronics. Could one person have done this on his own in five hours? The dumping maybe, but hundreds of lockers had been opened. It looked like a team effort.

  I snapped some pictures and moved on to the back staircase. As I started up, I understood what the guard had meant by following the noise. The manager’s office was a small space, and it was overflowing with screaming clients. A man in a purple Wildcats sweatshirt was pounding the desk demanding a refund, two women were shouting about something stolen, a third, weeping in fury, was waving a silver gym bag whose torn lining was hanging out.

  “Two hundred twenty-five dollars! This is a Stella McCartney original. Are you going to reimburse me or not?”

  “Take a number,” LaPorte snapped at me when I squeezed through to her desk. “I can only deal with one person at a time.”

  “I’m V.I. Warshawski, the detective—we spoke earlier. Let me know when to come back.”

  LaPorte pressed her palms against her eyes. “There won’t be a good time. There will never be a good time. This is going to go on all night.”

  “Damn right,” the man said. “It’s going to go on until you tell us when you’re going to pay for the damages.”

  I climbed onto the desk and the room quieted. I looked down at the crowd. “Did the police take down the crime-scene tape, or was that you heroes?”

  There was some grumbling and then another outburst from the Stella McCartney bag, wanting to know what difference that made and insisting it didn’t get me off the hook from replacing her property.

  I tried to school my face into a mix of sorrow and pity instead of annoyance and impatience. “If you removed the tape, there’s no way to prove that your property was damaged by the vandals who broke into the locker room. Six-Points values you as a member and doesn’t want a legal hassle, but their insurance carrier will be cranky because there’s no way to prove you aren’t bringing ruined property in from outside, hoping to cash in on the disaster. You can’t file a police report, which you need when you’re making a claim, because you tampered with a crime scene. Fresh prints on top of the fingerprint powder will be pretty easy to ID.”

  The people in the room seemed to contract, as if a freezing wind had blown through, except for the Stella McCartney woman. She was too outraged for logic, but a man whom I hadn’t noticed—because he’d been quiet—took her arm and steered her out the door. The rest of the unhappy athletes followed.

  Denise LaPorte slumped in her chair. She was young, probably early thirties, and on a normal day probably attractive—her buff arms an advertisement for the gym’s fitness trainers, with that honey-colored hair that takes hours to hand-paint and keep glowing. Today her skin was the color of paste, and she had gray circles under her eyes.

  “This is the first time the room has been quiet since I started my shift at noon. Is it true what you said about the insurance claims?”

  I hopped off the desk and shut the door. “Depends on how generous your management and your insurers want to be with your customers, but insurance companies are used to train-wreck add-ons.”

  She looked at me blankly.

  “When trains derail, you get more accident claims than the total number of passengers on board. Your carrier isn’t likely to pay for damaged items people wave around, although the gym may want to take care of them as a goodwill gesture. The claims could turn into a nightmare, so for your own protection make this your legal department’s problem.”

  LaPorte gave a wobbly smile. “Thanks. That’s the first decent advice I’ve had for three days.”

  “You’re beat and beaten up,” I said, “but I need to ask you about August Veriden.”

  LaPorte shook her head. “I can’t tell you much. He’s a quiet guy, qualified trainer—he did a degree at Loyola, which has a great certification program, and he always met or exceeded our standards.”

  I blinked. “That sounds like one of those online questionnaires.”

  She flushed. “I memorized his employee chart when I was talking to the police and to corporate this morning. Some of the trainers like to chat, so I know about who they’re dating or their dental bills or whatever, but August isn’t a chatter. Everyone—I was going to say likes him, but maybe respects is more to the point. We all know that his dream is to be a filmmaker, and he does private jobs for people here—weddings or graduations. I’ve never worked with him, so I can’t tell you how good his videos are.”

  “Any personal details in his file? Partner? Next of kin?”

  LaPorte shook her head again. “When the cops asked to talk to him and he wasn’t answering his phone, I looked him up, but he only put in this cousin, who’s a freshman at Northwestern.”

  I grimaced. “She’s the person who hired me to find him. She doesn’t know other relatives.”

  LaPorte clasped her hands on the desk and looked at me earnestly. “I know his cousin and her friend, the little hockey player—”

  “Bernadine Fouchard,” I supplied.

  “I know they think I gave the police his name because he’s black, but honestly, three of our other trainers are black, one of them from Kenya. We have seventy-eight people working here, everything from janitors to trainers to PTs and massage therapists, and seven people on the management team, including me. August is the only one we can’t locate. I don’t want to finger him, but it does look suspicious.”

  “How long has it been since you last saw him?” I asked.

  She made a face. “This morning I had to check that on my computer, but between talking to the police and to corporate, I know all this by heart. He left ten days ago, said he wanted personal time for a private project. That’s all any of us here know.”

  I digested that: if he wanted to break in and steal the gym’s drugs, he’d waited an awfully long time. “You have a doctor on staff, right?”

  “Oh—you’re thinking of the medical-supplies closet. We have two doctors who oversee any injury treatments that our PTs or exercise trainers do, but they’re not employees.”

  I asked to see the medical closet. She got up readily—I’d saved her from assault, she wanted to help. As she opened her door, she even managed to joke that she wished she had a disguise.

  A few people tried to stop her on our way down the hall, but she told them I was a detective, that she needed to show me part of the crime scene.

  The door to the medical office was open, but the entrance was crisscrossed with more crime-scene tape, this time intact. I ducked underneath to inspect at the drugs cabinet.

  “Should you be doing that?” LaPorte glanced around the hall.

  “I’m not going to touch anything,” I assured her.

  The room held a desk and couple of exam tables. All the drawers—in the desk, under the tables, and in cabinets along the walls—were open. Some had been dumped on the floor with a rough hand, scattering latex gloves, swabs, test tubes across the room. I tiptoed through the detritus to the supply closet at the back, which also stood open. I squatted to shine my flashlight on the lock. It hadn’t been forced, but whether someone had a key or was good with picks, I couldn’t tell.

  Floor-to-ceiling shelves had held everything from support tapes to plastic boxes of medicines. I shone my flash on the labels—over-the-counter painkillers along with an eye-popping collection of controlled substances. The rolls of stretchy tape had been unwound, leaving elastic coiled over the
lips of shelves onto the floor like a nest of flesh-colored vipers.

  I rejoined LaPorte in the hall.

  “Do the trainers have keys to the medical supplies?”

  “Only the doctors and the nurse who’s on call. What do you think is going on?” LaPorte pulled nervously on her lank hair.

  “I think your doctors are seriously overmedicating your clients.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “What does that have to do with the break-in?”

  “I can’t tell,” I said. “You’d need the cops to look into it—they’ve got the bodies to question everyone the doctors ever treated, or athletes with a grudge, or parents who think their kids were damaged. Or the doctors could have nothing at all to do with it—it could be junkies helping themselves to a stash that’s easy to get at. You have seventy-eight employees with keys, which means—”

  “No, only about eighteen people have keys. August does because he opens once a week—the trainers all do because they take turns getting here for the five a.m. shift. And then there’s me and the other—”

  “Eighteen is a lot of keys,” I interrupted. “Easy to pass around, even if they’re not easy to duplicate. But unless the front-door key opens the medical closet, I’m voting against a junkie. Someone who’s high or low, desperate for a fix, is more likely to break a lock than finesse it.”

  “What should I do?” LaPorte’s voice was cracking with despair.

  “Get police permission to go into the locker rooms. Photograph them so you have evidence for your insurance company, then hire a cleanup crew to tidy it up. The police don’t seem excited by the crime, since no one was hurt, and the mess isn’t very serious property damage. I don’t think they’ll object. Pity you don’t know where August is—he could video it all for you.”

  About the Author

  SARA PARETSKY is the New York Times bestselling author of nineteen previous novels. She is one of only four living writers to receive both the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers’ Association in Great Britain. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.