39
Girlie Mags—and Fortune
As soon as we were in the elevator, Mr. Contreras tore into me.
“Why didn’t you tell me that woman was letting some scumbag put his filthy hands on Peewee? Why didn’t she tell me herself? She shoulda known I’d help her out if she got in a jam.”
I put an arm around him.
“Darling, the only reason we didn’t tell you is because we love you. What good would it do either of us if you were in prison for murder, even if you killed a scumbag who wouldn’t be missed?”
He let himself be mollified at the suggestion that I thought he was tough enough to kill someone who bothered Petra. He drove me to the store, helped me push my shopping cart, didn’t fight me over the bill even though he’d put a few items of his own in the cart.
“Guess I can call that payment for chauffeuring you, doll.”
I needed to be in motion, but I was so exhausted by the outing that I had to lie down when we got home. I let Mr. Contreras put my chicken in the oven to roast, let him make me an ice pack to put on my sore stomach while he settled down in my living room with the dogs.
I tried to relax, but I kept replaying my conversation with Olympia. She was afraid of Anton, but who wouldn’t be? She seemed especially afraid that he would know that I’d been to see her. I felt a grudging sympathy. When I met Anton last night, I hadn’t been sure I’d be alive today. In fact, if Tim and Marty hadn’t come along, I might well not be.
The ice had melted through my Ace bandage, and my stomach was wet and cold. A counter-irritant to take my mind off the pain. I rolled to a sitting position and unwrapped the bandage.
Nadia had kept painting Allie’s face surrounded by the same design that was on Chad’s body armor. If Rodney and Anton had been using the Body Artist as a message board, maybe Nadia had been doing the same thing. She was writing about her sister, that was definite. But the rest of the message was obscure. There was a connection to Chad’s body armor, but was it to the secret object he might have brought back with him from Iraq? Or was it to Chad himself, or to his massacred squad?
I thought of the porn magazines I’d taken from under Mona Vishneski’s bed, the magazines Chad had tucked away so Mom wouldn’t see them. Maybe Allie had posed in one of them and Chad was blackmailing the Guaman family. The magazines were at my office.
I got to my feet, put on a dry shirt, pulled on a sweater over it—a big, loose one that didn’t require me to wriggle and struggle—and went to the living room. Mr. Contreras was dozing on the couch. I thought about slipping out without waking him on the theory that it was better to apologize than to explain, but we’d had too many skirmishes over the years about my secretive nature. And I was too weak and sore to fight my friends along with my enemies.
When I woke my neighbor, he didn’t want to go back out in the cold and snow, and who could blame him? He argued that the magazines could wait until morning, but when I said I’d call Petra, ask her to stop at the office and find what I needed, he grumped to his feet.
“You ain’t sticking Peewee’s head in another tiger trap.”
“There’s nothing dangerous about going to my office,” I objected.
“Trust me, if you send little Petra there to get a magazine for you, chances are someone’s put a bomb in it.”
“So you’d rather my head got blown off?” I was half teasing, half hurt.
“Don’t give me those puppy-dog eyes,” he growled. “All the years I been knowing you, I been begging you to keep yourself safe, and you ain’t paid one minute of heed to me. I’m just asking you to take better care of the kid than you do of yourself. Look at you—bruises on your hand, your stomach, would make your own mother faint—”
“You’re right.” Gabriella used to beg me the same as Mr. Contreras when my cousin Boom-Boom and I ran into danger. Cuore mio, spare me more grief than my life has already held.
I bit my lip. But I still wanted to look at those magazines. The old man nodded, grimly pleased that his words had hit home. He started the slow process of pulling on his boots and his coat while I set the oven timer for the chicken. We took the dogs for company—the walker wasn’t coming for another couple of hours.
At my office, Tessa was working on some immense steel thing. While I went into my files, Mr. Contreras pulled up a stool to watch her. Tessa doesn’t usually tolerate an audience, but Mr. Contreras was a machinist in his working life, and she respects his advice on tools.
Chad had stuffed his girlie pix inside a copy of Fortune, and I’d left them bundled together when I put them into the file. The issue dated to before the economy’s collapse: there was an article on the high demand for luxury goods and the way you could make the middle class feel they were part of the hyper-wealthy elite. Another teaser claimed that Fortune had tested the iPhone against all comers. A third asked, “Will a change of owner change Achilles’ fortunes?”
I had removed the girlie magazines and was thumbing through them looking for Alexandra Guaman’s face, wondering if I would recognize it floating airbrushed above improbable breasts, when I did a double take on the Achilles headline. I had read it online when I was looking up background on Tintrey.
I went back to Fortune to reread the story. Tintrey had acquired Achilles, the maker of body armor, when it became obvious that the war in Iraq was going to last for a long time. Achilles had been developing nanotechnology, using particles I’d never heard of and wasn’t sure I could pronounce. Inorganic, fullerene-like nanostructures. They apparently were “gallium-based,” whatever that was, and stronger than steel. In a photograph of one of the particles blown up a few hundred times, the stuff looked pretty much like the cement they were pouring into potholes on the Kennedy Expressway.
Achilles had been losing money; R & D doesn’t come cheap. Fortune had a lot to say about shortsighted corporate policy that let Wall Street’s insatiable demand for current-quarter profits block long-term development strategies. Anyway, the long and the short of it was, Tintrey bought Achilles, which was bleeding red ink too fast to fight off a hostile takeover bid.
Jarvis MacLean’s first order of business was a campaign to sell Achilles shields to the Department of Defense. Some Achilles staffers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, expressed concern that Tintrey was marketing a product that wasn’t ready for full-scale production. Yet the new owners had spent almost ten million dollars on building a PR campaign.
“When you’re making a new product, why worry about graphic design? Why not put the money into hiring a good science team?” asked one former member of the R & D staff.
Indeed, Tintrey has been downsizing the R & D division since acquiring Achilles. “They have a great product in place. We need to focus now on getting it into the hands of our troops, not on endlessly refining it,” said Gilbert Scalia.
As head of Tintrey’s Enduring Freedom Division, it’s Scalia’s job to outfit the nine thousand Tintrey employees in Iraq and to provide matériel to the U.S. Armed Forces deployed around the world.
A year after acquiring Achilles, Tintrey has already changed the profit picture at the division. Maybe the new publicity did the trick.
The magazine showed some of the PR materials, including the Achilles logo: a pink-and-gray fleur-de-lis. This was the design on the black mitt I’d found in Chad Vishneski’s duffel. And it was the design Nadia Guaman had been painting on the Body Artist.
I read the article through carefully twice, curled up on the couch in my client corner with the dogs at my feet. I learned a bit about the structure of fullerene nanoparticles, at least, I learned they were named for Buckminster Fuller, but not much else.
The article had been important to Chad Vishneski, important enough that he kept it alongside his girlie magazines. And he’d cut holes in one of the armor mitts. But why he’d done it would have to wait until he regained consciousness—or Sanford Rieff at Cheviot labs found out a dramatic secret about the shield.
Neither John Vishneski nor Tim Radke had ever heard Chad talk about the armor. But Chad’s squad had been killed around him: that was when he lost the equilibrium that carried him through his first deployments. Maybe he blamed Tintrey for the failure of their armor in protecting his men and was savaging their equipment as a way to vent his feelings of helplessness.
I called Vishneski. He’d had to go to a jobsite, a building far enough along that they were working on the interior, but he said Chad’s status continued to improve.
“The docs are all pretty optimistic. He hasn’t been speaking anymore, at least, he hadn’t before I left this morning, but he’s restless in a good way, they say. The police have been around some, wanting to know if he’s well enough to go back to prison, but that Dr. Herschel, she’s a pistol, isn’t she? She told them where to get off.”
I silently blew Lotty a kiss. “No strangers have come around to try to see him?”
“Not that I know of. But I’ll talk to Mona. Of course, we don’t know who his friends are, so they’d all be strangers to us. But, like I said, some of my buddies are hanging around. They’ll let me know if anyone comes calling.”
That was one less worry, at least for now. When he’d hung up, I started looking for Rodney Treffer. He wasn’t in the morgue, so I called around to the hospitals on the near North Side. I hadn’t heard back from Finchley or Milkova. And I wanted to find out how much time I had before Rodney was fit enough to come after me. I said I was Sunny Treffer, searching for my brother. He was supposed to meet me for breakfast this morning and never showed, and given his history of psychosis, I was worried whether he’d had some breakdown and been brought in.
I was lucky with the third place I called. The ER charge nurse told me Rodney had injured himself in a fall but didn’t seem to be having a psychotic episode when he was with them. They’d kept him overnight for observation and discharged him an hour ago. He’d had a concussion and some brain swelling, but they’d done a second CT scan before they released him; the swelling had gone down.
“You’re his sister? Make sure he rests for the next several days. He shouldn’t be out on this ice where he could slip and fall again.”
“I’ll do my best to keep him off the streets,” I promised. “Did Mr. Kystarnik pay his bill?”
The charge nurse transferred me to the billing department, where a service rep said someone had stopped by with Rodney and paid cash, all twenty-three thousand dollars that were owed for his emergency care.
I gave an embarrassed titter. “I need to know who paid for my brother. He . . . Well, he’s not good with bills, and I’m kind of responsible . . .”
The rep misunderstood me. “Don’t worry about that, honey. Our cashier looked at the money, it wasn’t counterfeit.”
“But who paid for him?”
I heard her clicking at her keyboard. “His friend said the receipt should be made out to your brother.”
“Did he give his own address?” I asked. “On Bobolink Road in Highland Park?”
She clicked her teeth. “No, he said he was at 1005 North Inscape Drive in Deerfield.”
“Oh, dear,” I said. “That’s his ex-wife’s address. Well, it can’t be helped. Thanks for looking after him. He probably didn’t tell the doctors about his risperidone, either. You should add that to his chart.”
The helpful rep said she’d pass a note on to the doctor who’d treated my brother.
The address Rodney had given, on Inscape Drive, belonged to Anton Kystarnik and/or Owen Widermayer at Rest EZ. As his worried sister, I hoped Rodney would stay there, firmly put, for a month, but I was more afraid he might be looking for me and for Karen Buckley’s computer.