Killing Orders

Rosa as a secret Torquemada appealed to me but there wasn’t any real evidence of it. It was hard to imagine her feeling positive enough about anyone or anything to love it, let alone steal for it.

“As the procurator, Father Pelly, perhaps you know whether the shares were ever authenticated. If this wasn’t done when you got them, it’s possible they came to you as forgeries.”

Pelly shook his head. “It never occurred to us. I don’t know if we’re too unworldly to handle assets, but it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing anyone does.”

“Probably not,” I agreed. I asked him and Jablonski some more questions, but neither was very helpful. Pelly still seemed miffed with me over the Church and politics. Since I’d compounded my sin by not being a Catholic girl, his answers were fairly frosty. Even Jablonski commented on it.

“Why are you on such a high horse with Miss Warshawski, Gus? So she’s not a Catholic. Neither is eighty-five percent of the world’s population. That should make us more charitable, not less.”

Pelly turned his cold stare on him, and Carroll remarked, “Let’s save group criticism for chapter, Stephen.”

Pelly said, “I’m sorry if I seem rude, Miss Warshawski. But this business is very worrying, especially because I was the procurator for eight years. And I’m afraid my experiences in Central America make me sensitive to criticisms about the Church and politics.”

I blinked a few times. “Sensitive how?”

Carroll intervened again. “Two of our priests were shot in El Salvador last spring; the government suspected they were harboring rebels.”

I didn’t say anything. Whether the Church was working for the poor, as in El Salvador, or supporting the government, as in Spain, it was still, in my book, up to its neck in politics. But it didn’t seem polite to pursue the argument.

Jablonski thought otherwise. “Rubbish, Gus, and you know it. You’re only upset because you and the government don’t see eye to eye. But if your friends have their way, you know very well that the Friary of San Tomás will have some very powerful allies.” He turned to me. “That’s the trouble with people like you and Gus, Miss Warshawski-when the Church is on your side, whether it’s fighting racism or poverty, it’s just being sensitive, not political. When it goes against your position, then it’s political and up to no good.”

Carroll said, “I think we’re all getting a long way from Miss Warshawski’s real business in coming out here. Stephen, I know we Dominicans are supposed to be preachers, but it violates some rules of hospitality to preach at a guest over lunch, even so meager a lunch as this.”

He stood up and the rest of us got up also. As we walked from the refectory, Jablonski said, “No hard feelings, Miss Warshawski. I like a good fighter. Sorry if I offended you in your role as a guest.”

To my surprise I found myself smiling at him. “No hard feelings, Father. I’m afraid I got a little carried away myself.”

He shook hands with me briskly and walked down the hail in the opposite direction from Carroll, who said, “Good. I’m glad you and Stephen found some common ground. He’s a good man, just a little aggressive sometimes.”

Pelly frowned. “Aggressive! He’s completely without-” He suddenly remembered to save group criticism for chapter and broke off. “Sorry, Prior. Maybe I should go back to San Tomás-that’s where my mind seems to be these days.”

IV

IT WAS CLOSE to three when I threaded my way to my office in the South Loop. It’s in the Pulteney Building, which is of the right vintage to be a national historic landmark, I sometimes think it might even qualify if it ever acquired a management interested in looking after it. Buildings around there don’t fare well. They’re too close to the city lockup, the slums, the peepshows and the cheap bars, so they attract clients like me: detectives on shoestring budgets, bail bondsmen, inept secretarial services.

I put the car into a lot on Adams and walked the block north to the Pulteney. The snow, or rain, or whatever it was had stopped. While the skies were still sullen, the pavement was almost dry and my beloved Magli pumps were free from further insults.

Someone had left a bourbon bottle in the lobby. I picked it up and carried it with me to throw out in my office. My long-awaited oil-tanker billionaire might show up and be put off by empty whiskey bottles in the lobby. Especially if he saw the brand.

The elevator, working for a change, clanked lugubriously down from the sixteenth floor. I stuck the bottle under one arm and slid open an ancient brass grille with the other. If I never worked out I’d stay in shape just by coming to the office every day-between ru

The elevator grudgingly stopped at the fourth floor. My office was at the east end of the corridor, the end where low rents sank even further because of the noise of the Dan Ryan L ru

I spend so little time in my office that I’ve never put much into furnishing it. The old wooden desk I’d bought at a police auction. That was it, except for two straight-backed chairs for clients, my chair, and an army-green filing cabinet. My one concession to grace was an engraving of the Uffizi over the filing cabinet.

I picked up a week’s accumulation of mail from the floor and started opening it while I called my answering service. Two messages. I didn’t need to get in touch with Hatfield; he’d called me and would see me in his office at nine the next morning.

I looked at a bill from a stationery company. Two hundred dollars for letterhead and envelopes? I put it in the trash and dialed the FBI. Hatfield wasn’t in, of course. I got his secretary. “Yes, please tell Derek I won’t be free tomorrow morning but three tomorrow afternoon will be fine.” She put me on hold while she checked his calendar. I continued through the mail. The Society of Young Women Business Executives urged me to join. Among their many benefits was a group life and health insurance plan. Derek’s secretary came back on the line and we dickered, compromising on two-thirty.

My second message was more of a surprise and much more welcome. Roger Ferrant had called. He was an Englishman, a reinsurance broker whom I’d met the previous spring. His London firm had underwritten a ship that blew up in the Great Lakes. I was investigating the disaster; his firm was protecting its fifty-million-dollar investment. We hadn’t seen each other since a night when I’d fallen asleep-to put it politely-across from him at a posh steakhouse.

I reached him at his firm’s apartment in the Hancock Building. “Roger! What are you doing in Chicago?”

“Hello, Vic. Scupperfield, Plouder sent me over here for a few weeks. Can we have di

“Is this my second chance? Or did you like my act the first time so well you want an encore?”

He laughed. “Neither. How about it? Are you free this week anytime?”

I told him I was free that very night and agreed to meet him at the Hancock Building for a drink at seven-thirty. I hung up in much better spirits-I deserved a reward for messing around in Rosa ’s affairs.

I quickly sorted through the rest of my mail. None of it needed answering. One envelope actually contained a check for three hundred fifty dollars. Way to pick your clients, Vic, I cheered silently. Before leaving, I typed out a few bills on the old Olivetti that had been my mother’s. She subscribed firmly to the belief that IBM had stolen both the Executive and Selectric designs from Olivetti and would have been ashamed of me if I’d owned one of the Itsy-Bitsy Machine Company’s models.