Belinda bit her lips and looked again at her screen, perhaps hoping her toddler could help her decide what to do. She finally picked up her phone and tapped in a four-digit number with her pencil.
“It’s Belinda here, Mr. Vijay. We have a situation, a QL file that someone’s asking about.”
She listened for a moment, then spelled Alexandra’s last name. I could hear Mr. Vijay barking with excitement, and then, apparently, he put her on hold. After another wait, while I kept prodding Belinda in my role as baffled visitor, a stocky man in a gray jacket and sporting a pale pink tie strode into Belinda’s cubicle.
“I’ll take over from here, Belinda. You go on with your other assignments. I’ll call you when I’m through with this person.”
He took Alexandra Guaman’s résumé from Belinda.
“What did you say your name was?”
I handed him a card.
“V. I. Warshawski. What’s the problem with Ms. Guaman’s file?”
He refused to answer but led me down the hall to a door with his name on it. It was a small office, but it was private.
“What are you up to?” he asked without preamble.
“I am trying to verify Alexandra Guaman’s work history,” I said. “It’s a simple query, so I’d appreciate it if Tintrey would stop acting as though I wanted the design specs for the cruise missile.”
His mouth tightened, and he consulted the computer in front of him. I kept a look of honest bewilderment on my face, which wasn’t a complete act. Why couldn’t they just tell me that Alexandra had died in Iraq? Vijay typed an e-mail, and then sat with his hands folded in front of him. I asked him about Alexandra’s assignment in Iraq, but he didn’t speak. I asked him if he thought Indianapolis would make it to the Super Bowl again, and he looked nettled, so I expanded on that theme.
“Manning is the kind of quarterback a championship team needs: reckless, and convinced he’s invincible. Teams believe in leaders like that. Remember-”
“I’m not interested in football,” Vijay snapped before I could dwell nostalgically on Jim McMahon, the old Bears quarterback.
“Then let’s talk about Alexandra Guaman,” I said. “What did she do that warrants this kind of reaction?”
Vijay’s door opened, and another man came in wearing the kind of hand-cut wool you can afford only if your stock options survived the market meltdown. I recognized him from Rainier Cowles’s table at Club Gouge and from the Tintrey website. It was Gilbert Scalia, head of Tintrey’s Iraqi operations.
“I’ll take over from here, Vijay. What does she know?”
“I didn’t ask. The policy on QL files-”
“Right. Well done.”
Scalia looked at me narrowly.
“Haven’t I met you before? Oh, yes. At that strip joint the other night. You’re a detective, that’s what the owner told us. A detective who’s unpleasantly obsessed with Nadia Guaman. And now you’re up here trying to blackmail us about her sister.”
“What an extraordinary accusation,” I said. “And, by the way, an actionable one, as your friend Prince Rainier would be glad to tell you.”
“Don’t try to play word games with me. You’re way out of your league. You’re in my building under false pretenses, and, believe me, any legal action will be directed against you. By us. Not the other way around.”
He looked at Vijay. “What was she asking?”
“She has a résumé that she pretends came from the Guaman woman. She’s been trying to find out what Guaman did for us in Iraq.”
Scalia shook his head. “Her activities are classified.”
“Whoa, there, Mr. Scalia. You’re a private contractor, not the Department of Defense.”
“When we’re doing DOD’s work, their security clearances extend to our employees. We all regret the death of Alexandra Guaman, but we’re not at liberty to discuss it. Especially not with an ambulance chaser. Time for you to get out, before I bring along a team to throw you out.”
“A whole team?” I said. “That’s flattering, but I’m afraid someone-Olympia, maybe-exaggerated my fighting skills. One person would probably be enough if she knows what she’s doing. Two, if she doesn’t.”
Scalia’s lips tightened. “Before you leave, you’ll hand over whatever document you brought with you.”
“Wrong again. It’s a private document, and you don’t have the necessary security clearance to read it.”
“Where is it?” Scalia asked Vijay.
“She put it into her briefcase.”
“Then call security. We need someone up here to take her case and get the document.”
Scalia had me backed up where he wanted me, which I hated, but I opened my case and took out the spurious résumé. Scalia held out a hand for it, but I ducked under his arm and stuck it into Vijay’s shredder, which gulped it down with a satisfying growl.
Scalia grabbed my case and dumped the contents on Vijay’s desk, his face swollen with rage. My field notebooks that I use in client meetings and off-line research, a tampon that was coming unraveled, and a small makeup kit bounced out. I crossed my arms and leaned against the door while he looked through the papers.
Scalia suddenly ripped a page out of the center of one of the notebooks and fed it through Vijay’s shredder, then dropped the notebook on Vijay’s desk and dusted his hands with a satisfied smirk. I fought back the tide of rage that swept through me. I had just enough self-control to know that if I slugged him, I’d spend the next week either in jail or a hospital.
“What a he-man,” I said, my voice high and bright. “Able to rip a piece of paper with your bare hands. No wonder they put you in charge of war operations.”
“Pick up your shit and get out of my building,” Scalia roared, his face swelling again in anger.
I put the notebooks and the makeup back into my case. As soon as I had the door open, I turned back and stuck the tampon into Scalia’s jacket pocket.
“A souvenir,” I said. “Something to put on your wall along with all those pictures of you in uniform inside the war zone.”
I moved briskly to the stairs. A couple of guys in heavy security costumes appeared as I reached the front doors, but no one shot me, or even tripped me, as I crossed the walk to the visitor’s spot where I’d left my car.
25 Surviving Guaman Daughter
I drove east until I found a forest preserve where I could take time to pull myself together again. I dug through my case for the notebook that Scalia had mutilated. He’d pulled three pages out of a section where I’d been researching title changes last year. The case was coming to trial next month. I’d been deposed, I’d written the report. It was just the violation of having my papers attacked that I minded.
You might say I had provoked him by shredding the bogus résumé, but his reaction had been designed to humiliate, and, unfortunately, it had worked. My own response, with the tampon, had been briefly satisfying but not too bright. Someone who had as much need to be in power over others as Scalia did would feel it as real indignity, especially since a subordinate had witnessed it. Who knew what he might do next.
I opened one of my notebooks and started doodling. What had I learned? That despite the twenty thousand or so employees Tintrey had worldwide, and the nine thousand in Iraq, there was something about Alexandra Guaman that kept her in the foreground of the company consciousness-so much so that a senior officer had to be summoned when someone asked questions about her. I wished I knew what QL stood for-that was what Vijay had called Alexandra’s file. Maybe “quit living.”
I stared at the bare trees. Even if Alexandra had known Chad in Iraq, why would that be important to Tintrey? Unless Chad had been on some mission that involved Tintrey and he’d learned a discreditable secret about them? If Alexandra had died as part of a truck convoy, maybe Chad had been in one of the trucks. That black oblong he’d waved in front of Nadia, was that something he’d picked up from the detritus around her exploded truck? But a piece of black fabric, something that might be a scarf, as Tim Radke had suggested? I slapped my notebook shut. All this speculation, it led nowhere.