Phillips kept a strange collection of junk in his upper desk drawer—three different kinds of antacids; datebooks going back for six years, most of them without any appointments written in; nose drops; an old pair of overshoes; two broken calculators; and odd scraps of paper. These I carefully smoothed out and read. Most of them were phone messages which he’d crumpled up and tossed in the drawer. A couple from Grafalk, one from Argus. The others were all names I didn’t recognize, but I wrote them down in case I ran so far out of leads that I wanted to check them.
The ledgers were in a walnut filing cabinet on the window side of the office. I pulled them out with great alacrity. They were in the form of computer printouts, issued once a month with year-to-date totals and comparisons with prior years. After a certain amount of looking, I found report A36000059-G, payments to licensed carriers. All I needed now was my list of shipping contracts and I could compare the dates and see if the totals matched.
Or so I thought. I went out to Lois’s file cabinets and found the originals of the contracts Janet had photocopied for me. These I took back into Phillips’s office to lay next to report A36000059-G. Only then did I discover that the ledger recorded by invoice number, not by contract date. At first I thought I could just match totals of individual orders against totals in the ledger; I pulled the Pole Star Line’s as an example.
Unfortunately the carriers apparently submitted more than one job on an invoice. The invoice totals were so much greater than the individual transactions, and the number of total invoices paid so much smaller, that it seemed to me that was the only explanation.
I added and subtracted, matching the numbers up every way I could think of, but I was forced to conclude that I wasn’t going to be able to tell a thing without the individual invoices. And those I could not find. Not a one. I went through the rest of Phillips’s files and all through Lois’s and finally through the open file cabinets out on the floor. There wasn’t an invoice in the place.
Before giving up for the evening, I looked up the payroll section of the ledgers. Phillips’s salary was listed there just as Janet had told me. If I’d known I was going to burgle the place I would never have let her risk getting fired by going through his garbage.
I tapped my front teeth with a pencil. If he was getting extra money from Eudora Grain, it wasn’t through the payroll account. Anyway, the ledgers were printed by the computers in Eudora, Kansas—if he was monkeying around with the accounts, he’d have to do it more subtly.
I shrugged and looked at my watch. It was after nine o’clock. I was tired. I was very hungry. And my shoulder was throbbing. I’d earned a good dinner, a long bath, and a sound sleep, but there was still another errand on the day’s agenda.
Back in my apartment, I threw some frozen pasta into a pot with tomatoes and basil and ran a bath. I plugged the phone into the bathroom wall and called Phillips’s Lake Bluff house. He wasn’t in, but his son politely asked if he could take a message.
I lifted my right leg out of the water and ran a soapy sponge over it while I considered. “This is V. I. Warshawski,” I said, spelling it for him. “Tell him that Mr. Argus’s auditors will want to know where the missing invoices are.”
The boy repeated the message back to me dubiously. “You got it.” I gave him both my and Lotty’s phone numbers and hung up.
The pasta was bubbling nicely and I took it into the bedroom with me while I got dressed—black velvet pants with a high-necked blouse and a form-fitting red and black velvet toreador jacket. High heels and very dangly earrings and I was set for an evening at the theater. Or the end of an evening at the theater. By some miracle I hadn’t spilled tomato juice on the white blouse. My luck really was turning.
I got to the Windy City Balletworks just at ten-thirty. A bored young woman in a leotard and stretchy wraparound skirt told me the performance would end in ten minutes. She gave me a program and let me go in without paying.
The tiny theater was filled and I didn’t bother trying to find a seat in the dim light. I lounged against the back wall, taking off my shoes to stand in my stocking feet next to the ushers. A spirited pas de deux from a classical ballet was in progress. Paige was not the female dancer. Whoever it was, she seemed technically competent but lacked the special spark with which Paige infused her performance. The whole company appeared on stage for a complex finale, and the show was over.
When the lights came on, I squinted at the program to make sure Paige was, indeed, dancing tonight. Yes, Pavane for a Dope Dealer had been performed right before the second act of Giselle, which we’d just seen.