Yosano squirmed in embarrassment. “Really, Lieutenant. It’s not as though Ms. Warshawski has a criminal record. She’s working for the Graham family.”
“Or says she is,” Schorr snapped. “Every time something fishy has happened out here this week, this Chicago dickette has been in a front-row seat. I’d kinda like to know why.”
“Is it all right if I use the bathroom?” I asked in a meek little voice. “There’s one just off the pantry here and my cramps are starting to get the better of me. You don’t have a tampon, do you? Mine are in my car.”
Like many he-men, Schorr was disgusted by talk of real women’s real bodies-he was out of the kitchen before I finished speaking. I went into the bathroom, switched on my diver’s lamp and climbed up onto the toilet seat to undo the window locks. There was an extra bolt in the window for security, but that was to keep outsiders away: the key was on a hook next to the frame.
The bottom sash was stuck through years of disuse; flushing the toilet a couple of times covered the sound I made forcing it open. The alarm would definitely go off now, but since it rang in Lebold, Arnoff’s office, and they already had their dogsbody on the scene, I hoped they’d think the deputies had tripped it looking around on the upper floors. I took a quick look out: the window faced south, toward the road. The deputies were searching the north.
Back in the kitchen, Yosano was fiddling with a handheld, trying to play some game by the computer’s backlight. I didn’t know how long Benjamin
could keep quiet in that oven; I needed some strategy for getting the lawyer out of the kitchen.
“They interrupt your private life to bring you over here tonight?” I asked.
He nodded. “But I’m only on call one week a month. And usually we don’t have such dramatic crises: usually it’s just a client wanting to change a will, or being lonely in the night.”
“Did Mr. Taverner call you in out of loneliness?”
He continued fiddling with the keys; the computer binged every time he made a score. “Oh, yes. And like many of the old ones, he thought of me as a servant. Oh, they all think the lawyers are their servants, but being a Japanese-American, I’m like a gardener in their eyes. They need to pee, I’m supposed to help them with their bottles and bedpans.”
“Sounds horrible. Surely you could get a less demeaning job.”
He shrugged. “The money is incredible. And some of it’s interesting: we work for such powerful people, you’re sort of part of history sometimes. Like these papers that Taverner had, it’s been so long since Mr. Arnoff’s done dayto-day work with the clients, he probably wouldn’t know about them, but Taverner was a lonely old guy. He’d tap that locked drawer and say he knew people in New York who’d pay ten million bucks to get their hands on them.”
I thought of Benjamin in the oven, but I couldn’t miss this chance to ask Yosano what was in the papers.
“I never saw them.” The computer made a derisive sound to let him know he’d bombed. “But he used to say they’d make the Hollywood Ten look like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and it was a shame he was a man of honor who gave his word not to divulge them.”
“Didn’t you wish he’d show them to you?”
“Oh, sure,” Yosano said. “But we’re his executors, I knew I’d see them sooner or later. And then, you always wonder if it really is going to be such a big deal. It’s human, when you get that old, to hope you’ve done something so big the rest of us will never forget you, but a lot of the time it’s something no one cares about anymore.”
I was about to argue that someone cared, or Marcus Whitby wouldn’t have drowned outside the room we were standing in, when a gunshot ripped open the night.
CHAPTER 28
When You Need a Ride —
Steal a Car
When you hear a .45, you never think it was a backfire or a firecracker. Yosano and I froze, and then he ran through the swinging door to the front of the house.
As soon as the door swung shut, I opened the oven.
“Come with me. Don’t ask questions, and don’t speak,” I told Benjamin. He was giving off the sweet sickly sweat of fear, and he couldn’t stand, he’d been lying doubled up so long. I slung him over my shoulder, firemanstyle, and humped to the bathroom double time. He was clutching his book still, and it dug into my sore shoulder. He was fifteen or sixteen, but such a skinny kid it wasn’t as hard a ride as I’d feared.
Inside the bathroom, I set him down and worked on his legs. He was still shying away from my touch, but fear and cold had made him numb; he didn’t resist. As soon as he could stand, I turned off my headlamp, opened the window and looked out. We could hear the excited yelling from the front of the house, but we were clear here in the back.