“What are you trying to do to me, Warshawski? I run the finances of a major corporation. I dropped everything to meet with the members of our board who could give me the green light to talk to you—and now you’re jacking me around just for the hell of it. I might be better off taking my chances with the press.”
“No, you wouldn’t. And you don’t need me to tell you that. I spent all of last night looking at files relating to Diamond Head. I got in at six-thirty this morning and went to bed. I know now—”
“Where?” he demanded. “If you had access to Diamond Head files, why the hell are you screwing around with me?”
“I didn’t until last night. Have access, I mean. It was pure luck, in combination with my partner’s areas of expertise. I still don’t know what your problem is, though. I know now that the consent decree when you bought Central States Aviation meant you had to sell Diamond Head.” I sketched out what I’d learned from Dick’s papers last night.
“If you know that, you know everything,” Loring said. His face was still set in tight lines.
I shook my head. “What’s so secret about it? Did you have to sign some kind of defense department clearance that means you can’t talk to mere taxpayers about it?”
“No, nothing like that. What do you know about the decree?”
“Not a lot. That you had sixty days in which to sell, and Jason Felitti came to you with a better offer than you thought you’d be able to get if you waited. And then you had to give some guarantees that you wouldn’t drive them out of business.”
Loring gave a bark of laughter. “I wish! No, you didn’t see the real decree. Or you didn’t read it very carefully.”
“I wasn’t as interested in it as I was in—well, some other things. And I only had a few hours with the files.”
“What other things?”
“You first, Mr. Loring.”
He went to the front window to conduct an interior debate. It didn’t take him long: he hadn’t come all this way on a business day only to return empty-handed.
“Daraugh Graham warned me about you,” he commented with less animosity. “And I suppose if he trusts you I can too.”
I tried to smile in a trustworthy way. “If you’d read through the whole consent decree, you would see that the Justice Department’s care for Diamond Head went way beyond protecting them from us: we had to guarantee their survival by continuing to provide a market for their products. And by continuing to supply them with raw materials.”
Loring smiled bitterly as he saw my mouth gape open. “It’s not unprecedented. Some other steel companies have gotten stabbed by the same kind of deal. But Felitti had, or seemed to have, good credentials. I mean, everyone in the industry in Chicago knows Amalgamated Portage. We’ve done business with them for years.”
“But Peter Felitti wouldn’t tie the family company in with Diamond Head.”
“We only discovered that later. But that didn’t matter. He was plenty willing to help in other ways: he saw that Jason got debt financing. I suppose most backers assumed Amalgamated Portage would be behind Diamond Head— we did, after all. It wouldn’t have mattered, if Jason had been honest.”
“So what’s he been doing? Ordering supplies from you that he doesn’t need and then reselling them on the black market? Why don’t you go to the feds?”
“We didn’t have any evidence… Is there more coffee? I’m afraid I was a little short earlier.”
I grinned at him. “I can make some fresh, but it’ll keep you waiting, unless you don’t mind coming out to the kitchen.”
He followed me to the back of the apartment. I moved the plate of cold tofu to the sink and put water on to boil again. Loring took the papers from a chair and put them on the floor so he could sit down.
“When you showed up on Friday and started flaunting tales of knowing we were bankrolling Felitti, I thought you were working for him, that you might be trying to muscle something extra out of us. But when you called Monday with the tale of the copper spools—then I knew what they were doing.”
I poured boiling water into the coffee cone. “You could have hired a detective and had that information a year ago. Why didn’t you?”
He shook his head in frustration. “We always had complete audit reports from them. And they had a very reputable law firm behind them. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t think—”
“A detective would quickly have told you that the senior partner handling the buyout was the son-in-law of Jason Felitti’s brother. Then you could have started worrying about conflict of interest.”
“Okay. I’ll get a detective on the case. What do you charge?”
“Fifty dollars an hour and any expenses that aren’t part of my normal overhead.”
“You’re too cheap, Warshawski. But maybe I’ll hire you.”
I showed my teeth at him. “And maybe I’ll be available.”
“Sorry, sorry. I said it wrong. Seriously, I’ll talk to the board tomorrow. It’s your turn now. What was it you were mostly interested in—this dead man you mentioned the other day?”