The Hinky Bearskin Rug (19 page)

“I am
not
being
faithful
to you!” she bellowed.

“Hey, you
can’t be on this site,” said a voice out of the darkness. A flashlight played
over them. “Oh. That you, Jewel?”

She waved. “Me,
Alfonzo.”

“You alone?”
Alfonzo asked invitingly.

“Uh, no.
Sorry.”

Another ex-boyfriend of Jewel’s.
Feeling conspicuous with his hand
around her back, Clay strolled past the guard, out of the restricted area, and
up the steps to the Corncob Building.

“I’m not being
faithful to you,” she repeated. “I’m just slowing down a little.” She sniffled.

“Whatever,”
Clay said. “All I mean is, Randy knows who you are, and he’d rather eat his old
brass bed with butter and gravy than leave you to my attentions for too long.”

“Why?” she
said again. “It’s not like you want me.”

“You’d be
surprised what I want,” Clay said suavely.

“Yes, I would.
Because I never do know what you want.”

Thank God for small favors.
“I don’t have two hundred years of
mystery going for me. I have to play up all the mystery I’ve got.”

That made her
laugh.

But she still
wouldn’t let him come upstairs.

o0o

Jewel met Clay
on the front steps of the Kraft Building late the next afternoon. He was
carrying a double armful of big white bags.

Her eyes
bugged out. “Is that what I think it is?” The air filled with the scent of
toasted butter and cinnamon, and her mouth watered.

“I thought we
should test our hypothesis about the connection between the porn, and the
bakery, and O’Connor’s little friend Wilma,” he said.

“At the
department? Do you think that’s smart?” But she had taken a bite out of a cow
plop before the elevator doors opened. “Mmmm!” Crisp, cinnamony, buttery
yummyness! Her bruised heart began to scab over.

The office was
buzzing. Ed was out. It seemed like every investigator who wasn’t actually
undercover had showed up for work in a rowdy mood. Jewel remembered that the
OED assistant commissioner was due to visit, and that the mission was to make
the place look crowded. The whole gang seemed to be on board.

Merntice took
the white bags and laid out the pastry at the coffee station. The investigators
pounced with animal cries.

Jewel grabbed
Clay and a couple of cow plops and coffees and led him into Ed’s empty office,
where they could hear themselves think, and shut the door. She sat behind Ed’s
desk and marshalled her thoughts.

“Okay,” she
said, “this is what I didn’t tell you last night because I was too busy being a
big baby. That guy Steven Tannyhill, who may have put Viagra in the coffee and
started that office orgy? He’s connected up with a bunch of other shit.” She
told Clay about Steven’s plan to sell the Artistic Building out from under
Onika.

Clay whistled.
“How’d you find this out?”

“Margaritas
with the girls,” she said briefly.

She took a
deep breath. It took guts and patience to tell him, next, how Steven had
brought her home and then uploaded naked pictures of her, but she did it. “I’m
thinking it was a preemptive strike. It’s about that night. Something he thinks
I might have learned then.”

“I’ll be sure
to look ’em up,” was all Clay said. “So what does he think you know?”

“Beats me. It
was only one night.” She avoided Clay’s eye. “He picked me up in the bar at the
Doral and two hours later we were in the sack.” Memory began to stir. “Oh. And
he took me to dinner with some of his friends.”

“Who were
they?”

“I don’t think
he said. I think he introduced me to them, but he didn’t introduce them to me.
It’s all pretty cloudy. I was drinking when we met, and he kept feeding me more
drinks.”

“Did he know
who you were?”

“Yeah, we did
the dance, what do you do, blah blah blah. He said he was in real estate. He
was sooo impressed with my job. That would have tipped me off, if I’d been
sober. Nobody thinks Consumer Services is cool.”

“What did they
talk about at dinner?”

Jewel shut her
eyes against raucous laughter coming from the staff room outside Ed’s office. “Steven
was on the defensive, acting macho. But I could tell he was tense. He kept
reassuring these guys that their investment was protected. They kept saying the
window was closing, and Steven said he was taking steps to speed it up. One big
fat guy winked at him. Steven kept giving me a bedroom smile, as if I
understood. But I didn’t.” She opened her eyes. “I was so plowed I can’t even
remember how we ended up in bed.”

Clay’s blue
eyes crinkled. “So can I see the pictures?”

Breezing smartly past that topic.
“That reminds me, I want to make a list
of everything in these cases that starts with the phrase ‘two years ago.’ It’s
beginning to haunt my dreams.”

Clay took a
pad and a pen off Ed’s desk. “Shoot.”

“In no
particular order.” She leaned back in Ed’s chair and stared at the ceiling
tiles. “Two years ago, John Baysdorter died. Two years ago Lena Sacker took a
job as Steven’s assistant, Steven hit on her, Lena complained to her mom, and her
mom stonewalled her. Whereupon instead of calling the EEOC on Steven, for fear
of endangering her mother’s job, Lena went to work at the Artistic to get dirt
on Steven, because that was the company occupying the nine-sixty west
Washington building, which Steven has a permanent hard-on about.”

“Slow down.
You ended that sentence with a preposition.”

“Write faster.
Lena and Maida haven’t spoken in two years. Although Lena walked in yesterday
just as Maida was saying, ‘I have no daughter,’ and asked her mother to take a
stand about something, and Maida said ‘I can’t.’”

She looked at
Clay’s pad. “Oo, shorthand. You could be employable in the pink collar ghetto.
Where was I?”

“Two years
ago.”

“Right. Two
years ago, coincidentally, Bill Tannyhill, owner and Adult Uses registrant at
Artistic, dies and leaves his daughter Onika in charge. Two years ago, Steven
Tannyhill, nephew of Onika and part heir of the company, has a plan to sell her
building out from under her, only something goes wrong.” Jewel paused.

“Got it.”

“What else?”
she mused to herself.

“How about
this one?” Clay said. “A bit less than two years ago, City Council approved
final plans for the Circle Line, a new elevated train line running in a big arc
from the north side all the way down to the Eleventh Ward.”

“The Eleventh
Ward,” Jewel echoed. “Mrs. Othmar!”

“And last week
her house develops a pocket zone and then mislays it.”

“So Ed came
through with the lists?”

“I had them
yesterday,” Clay said reproachfully.

“Only I was
too busy having a cow about His Lordship to listen,” she said remorsefully. “I’m
sorry.”

A burst of
raunchy hooting came from the staff room outside.

Excitement
bubbled in Jewel. “It connects! Steven’s at the Artistic and finds out about
the hinky porn. He gets hold of the properties list somehow, and he gives the
list and some hinky porn to someone bent in Inspectional Services, who plants
hinky porn on the target properties and then goes in and scares the crap out of
the homeowners. The homeowners decide to sell. Steven buys the properties up,
launders the titles, then resells to the city for a fat mark-up. We’ve got him!”
She slapped the conference table.

“Not quite. We
need material facts, officer,” Clay said. “Gotta trace the money from the city
back to the conspirators.”

“He’ll be
using a secret blind trust,” Jewel said positively. “Illinois still has them.”

“We need to
identify the bent Inspectional Services inspector and connect him with Steven,”
Clay said. “Oh, and find out who leaked the property list.”

“Your job,”
Jewel said. “It’ll give you a chance to get acquainted with IS. Mostly a nice
bunch of guys, with the exception of the guy with the biblical name on his
windbreaker.”

“That ought to
narrow it down,” Clay said.

She punched
the air. “We’re detecting shit! Is this cool or what? Let’s tell Ed.”

The door
opened on a roar of hilarity and Ed walked in with a double fistful of cow
plops, looking red in the face. “Tell Ed what? Whaddaya doin’ in my chair?”

Jewel moved
out of Ed’s chair and talked. Ed wolfed pastry. Clay read him the list of “two
years” items.

Ed cut to the
chase. “You need facts. Taylor won’t ask for an indictment without.”

Jewel shook
her head. “It’s hinky. Right to the bone, Ed. We can’t prosecute in the normal
way.”

“Then why you
bringin’ this to me?” The boss seemed unusually impatient. “You’re the Hinky
Division!” He finished his last cow plop and licked all ten hairy fingers, one
by one.

Clay said, “We
may need the Chief Attorney to back us up, if we get them cornered.” He
coughed. “Somehow I don’t think Steven Tannyhill is impressed with Senior
Investigator Heiss.”

Jewel glared
at him.

“And he’d be
even less impressed with me,” Clay added. “I can present it to the Chief myself
if you don’t have time.”

“Fuck that.
You, presenting to the Chief, right.” Ed breathed heavily for a moment. “Okay,
I’ll brief Taylor. I ain’t promising him nothing until you got evidence.”

“Even evidence
we can’t use in court?” Jewel said.

Ed rose. “I
need another danish before this putz from OED shows up.” He drained his coffee
and stumped out. A wave of locker-room chanting came through the open door.

Jewel slammed
it shut. “Maybe we can search Steven’s house or his car for porn.”

“We need
Randy’s hinky radar for that,” Clay reminded her.

She flushed. “We’ll
get it. But he’s not to drive without a license again. And I want you to get
him those ID papers!”

Clay looked
his most innocent. “Absolutely. Right now. Say, did Ed just say the OED guy was
coming?” He got up and fingered a peephole in the venetian blind, looking at
the outer office. “Hm.”

Jewel went to
check the street outside from Ed’s exterior window. “Yeah.” She peered through
the smeary windowpane. A huge fat guy was finishing his cigarette on the front
steps of the Kraft. From above he was practically spherical, a cartoon of a
city-hall fat cat. “In fact, this is probably him.”

A sound of
smashing glass came from the staff room.

“Uh-oh,” Clay
said.

Jewel’s head
whipped around. Clay was hunched, transfixed, peeping through the blinds. She
came to peep, too.

The staff room
was a scene of ribald revelry. Britney was standing on a computer chair,
stripping, throwing her bra at a mixed gaggle of roaring investigators.

“Holy shit!”

Possibly
because the chair was a swivel job and wildly unsafe, Digby was kneeling in
front of the chair holding Brit’s legs, while Finbow steadied the wobbly chair
from behind, and Sayers tried to stuff a folded bill into Brit’s underpants.

“Yike!”

Someone dashed
past the office window, too close and fast for Jewel to identify her, but it
was definitely someone female with a beach tan.

Someone else
female passed the window, followed by someone who was probably male, although,
with that paunch, who knew.

“Oh. My. God.
And the OED assistant commissioner due any second! Where the hell is Ed?”

“Uh—” Clay
pointed downward, and Jewel crammed herself against the crinkling venetian
blind to look at the staff room floor. Under the conference table, a familiar
pair of hairy ankles stuck out, tangled with a pair of brown legs ending in
sensible pumps.

Jewel seized
Clay by the arms. “Listen. You have to get out there and stop them. I’ll go
down and head off Bing Neebly.”

Clay’s eyes
were glazed. “Do I hafta?”

“Clay! Snap
out of it! Bing Neebly is downstairs and he’ll be here in about thirty seconds.
I’m gonna try to head him off. You’ve got ten minutes. Get this place cleaned
up before he walks in, or the whole department is toast!”

With that she
jerked open Ed’s office door and bolted through the staff room, trying not to
look right or left. This was not easy. Discarded clothes and shoes lay
everywhere. She tripped over two naked people lying in the aisle by the coffee
station, bumped against two more who were putting a stapler to unauthorized
use, and ducked as someone swooped naked overhead, cackling, nearly braining
her with his roller skates.

Then she
escaped the staff room and hurtled down the stairs.

o0o

She needn’t
have rushed. Bing Neebly still stood outside the Kraft. She opened her navy
polyester pantsuit jacket a little wider, tugged down the matching shell as low
as it would stretch, and tucked it into the matching stretch pants. Then she
stepped outside.

He was
flicking his still-smoldering cigarette butt down the steps where pigeons
milled at his feet. Quick as thought, Jewel whipped out her cell phone and took
three pictures.