“No, indeed.” She took her cue a little breathlessly. “Louis and I often had to wait several days before he could fit us in.”
Dick again looked ostentatiously at his wrist: he was a busy man with a lot of demands on his time. I was close enough that I could see a glass panel that showed the works moving in little circles. A separate circle showed the time. “F.P.Journe, Invenit et Fecit” was engraved across the bottom.
The meeting was over. I exchanged a few joking comments with Dick, just to make his colleagues think we were closer than we were, but I left more puzzled than when I came. I didn’t know about Louis Ormond, but smart money said that Eloise Napier had a pretty good idea why Miles Wuchnik had visited Ruhetal.
25.
IN THE HUDDLE
THE GROMMET BUILDING WAS JUST TWO BLOCKS FROM GLOBAL Entertainment’s monster headquarters on the Chicago River. Global One was a chunky building whose architect hadn’t been able to decide if he was putting up an amusement park or a Gothic cathedral—the steel frame was encased in concrete after about the fourth story, but the high lobby held an entertainment corner with a merry-go-round, a small putting green, and some giant video screens.
Global One had become such a popular tourist destination that the city had blocked off an entire lane of traffic in front of it for buses and cars to drop off their loads. People signed up for tickets to live tapings of Wade’s World and other popular shows, for tours of the studios, and for the round-the-clock screenings of Global’s archive of movies and TV series. If you had insomnia, you could wander over to the lobby and watch old TV shows at three in the morning.
When I strolled over from Dick’s office to take a look, the tourist line was already around the block. To keep the populace from feeling bored or fractious, vendors plied them with food and drink, and the big screens in the lobby showed reruns of Nerve Center, a spy drama set at the National Security Agency. Local actors worked the line dressed up as animals from Global’s kid show Gator Under Cover.
I walked down the stairs to Lower Wacker Drive, where you usually find the service entrances to buildings that front the river. Global’s service bay had all kinds of trucks coming and going. I hadn’t really thought through what I would do if I went inside. To be honest, I hadn’t thought about it at all—I just followed one of the truckers as he went into the loading dock in search of a signature, nodded at the guy checking off items in a load, and got into an elevator. As the doors shut, I heard someone calling to me angrily to get out, I couldn’t go inside without a pass.
One thing about makeup and a beautifully cut dress: you look as though you belong in corporate headquarters. I got off the service elevator at the fourth floor, where a knot of employees were waiting at the elevator banks, carrying bags of chips, coffee cups, and other accoutrements of having been on break.
I followed them into a car and interrupted a spirited replay of this morning’s project meeting by saying, “I have an appointment with Harold Weekes, but I forgot what floor they said he’s on.”
The group stared at me in silence—the sheep herd realizing there’s an ibex in the mix—and then one woman muttered, “Forty-eight.” The group shut down for the remainder of the journey: no one wanted to risk revealing themselves in front of a stranger bound for the head guy’s office.
On the forty-eighth floor, a locked glass wall separated me from the executive offices. A woman at a high desk on the far side of it spoke through an intercom, demanding my business.
“V. I. Warshawski to see Harold Weekes,” I said.
She worked her phone. “You’re not on the calendar. Are you sure you’re in the right place?”
“I don’t want to bellow private information around the hall,” I said, “but everyone at Crawford, Mead is wondering how he knew that Miles Wuchnik worked for them.”
“I didn’t get those names.”
I pulled a business card out of my bag and wrote my message on the back. I felt like an inmate in the lockup, pasting messages to a window, but I held my card against the glass panel for her to read. After hesitating for a moment, she must have decided she felt as stupid as I did; she released the door lock and let me present the card to her in person.
The woman muttered into her headset, listened, pronounced Wuchnik’s and my names with passable accuracy, and finally told me I could be seated, someone would be with me in a minute.