He grabbed my briefcase and dumped the contents on the floor. When he didn’t see a puppy, he sat on the floor and began to tear up one of my documents. Clara bent over and snatched it from him.
I gathered up my laptop, my wallet, and the rest of my possessions. Clara hunted under the couch for a lipstick that had rolled away. By the time I’d put everything away, Ernest had forgotten his outburst and was watching the Three Stooges again. I left without saying another word.
45 It’s Dangerous to Know V.I.
I sat in my car for a time trying to remember why I’d thought it was a good idea to visit the Guamans or why I’d thought I had a right to intrude on the elder Ms. Guaman when she was at the hospital with Ernest, or even why I thought I should be a private eye at all instead of a street cleaner. At least at the end of a day’s work, a street cleaner left things better than she found them.
I finally turned on the engine and drove up to my office, wondering what crises might await me there. Petra, for instance, had not been in touch. I owed Darraugh Graham a report. Terry Finchley still wanted to try Chad Vishneski for Nadia’s murder. I didn’t know where Rodney Treffer was lurking. Karen Buckley/Frannie Pindero had vanished. Plenty for the dedicated PI to do without tormenting a brain-damaged youth and his family over a nonexistent dog.
When I pulled into my parking lot, I saw Marty Jepson’s beat-up truck. I hurried into my office, imagining disasters, but Petra was there with Jepson. She’d dragooned him into helping her sort the mail.
“Vic!” she said. “What a day! So much happened!”
“Too much excitement even to contact me, O Texting Queen?”
“I dropped my phone in the slush when Marty and me were roping my car up to his truck,” she explained, “and that seemed to kill it, and don’t worry about Marty-about paying him, I mean-because I know you didn’t authorize me putting him to work. I’ll split my check with him, only, I couldn’t have managed the day without him!”
“Staff Sergeant,” I said, “if you’ve spent the day with Petra, you probably deserve some kind of battle pay.”
He blushed, and said, “Uh, ma’am, uh, Vic, it was a pleasure to help you out. Uh, I wonder if you can call me ‘Marty.’ I’m not really a Marine anymore, you know.”
“People get to be called by the highest rank they ever achieve,” I explained, “even if they’ve retired. Like, right now, Petra could be called ‘pest’ by anyone who’d like to know why she couldn’t pick up a landline.”
“Oh, Vic, don’t be such a crab cake! Your phone numbers, they’re in my cell-phone memory, which is as dead as my poor old car. You cannot believe how much they’re going to charge, although, of course, I have insurance. At least, I’m on my mom’s policy.” She stopped, sticking her lower lip out as she always did when she was thinking seriously. “Maybe I shouldn’t allow her to pay for it. But, gosh, with all my bills, and only this temp job for you-”
“I think your mother would be pleased to know you still rely on her,” I interrupted. “But I’m the one who wrecked your car, so I’ll take care of the repairs that your insurance doesn’t cover.”
“Vic, you’re an angel. I’m sorry I called you names last night.”
She launched back into a high-octane account of her day’s adventures: Destroyed cell phone! Towed car! Spilled soup on new jacket! Although the stain on the cuff maybe was the pizza they’d had at Plotzky’s last night-what a cool bar!
The avalanche of information was making me reel. I went to my back room, where I keep a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black for emergencies. I don’t approve of drinking on the job, but responding to Petra right after my painful meeting with the Guamans felt like a medical emergency to me. I offered the bottle to Petra and Marty, but neither liked whisky.
“It’s like drinking gasoline, Vic” was the fetching way my cousin put it. “Don’t you have any beer?”
The whisky washed through me, and I felt warm for the first time since I’d left Mexico City at New Year’s. I sat at my desk and smiled sweetly at Petra. “You’ll have to buy your own beer. You towed the Pathfinder… Then what?”
“Oh, well,” she said, “then we came here to see if you, like, needed anything done. And there was a message from Cheviot labs. Mr. Rieff, he called to say they’d found something really amazing when he ran his tests for you. Guess what they found?”
“The codes for the U.S. nuclear arsenal,” I suggested.
“Oh, Vic, nothing that amazing. Just-the stuff that was supposed to be in the body armor-the, uh, ceramic or whatever it is-someone took it out and replaced it with ordinary beach sand. Can you believe that?”
I put my whisky down.
“Did he say… Could he prove that it was inside the shield to begin with? I mean, Chad had poked a bunch of holes in the shield. How do we know what was in it first?”
Petra hunched a shoulder. “I don’t know.”
“Uh, ma’am… Uh, Vic… We did get the report. Since we didn’t know where you were or what you needed, we drove up to Northbrook and picked it up from Mr. Rieff.”
Marty handed me a sealed envelope with the familiar crest of the Cheviot rams in the corner. I slit it open and scanned the pages, which bristled with “moieties,” “van der Waals forces,” “carbon 60,” and other arcane phrases that I should have paid more attention to in Professor Turkevich’s chemistry lectures when I was an undergraduate, but it was too late to fret about that now.
I called up Cheviot labs. Sandy Rieff was working late. That was one good thing.
“This ratio you have in the report,” I asked, “seventy-five percent sand mixed with twenty-five percent fullerene, how is that different from what it should be?”
“It should be a hundred percent gallium arsenide fullerenes,” said Rieff.
“And how sure are you that this diluted mix was in Chad’s shield from the get-go?”
“My best materials engineer, Genny Winne, did the analysis. Winne says that she’s prepared to testify on both those points. And she doesn’t say that unless she thinks her results are unimpeachable.”
I thought back to the Fortune article, to Tintrey’s rush to get their Achilles body shield to market, to take advantage of all those juicy Iraqi war contracts. “So Tintrey basically put out a shield that wouldn’t stop a bullet. I wonder if that was a temporary thing to grab market share or an ongoing policy. Can you order some Achilles armor from several different production runs and get your Ms. Winne to analyze the content?”
“Will do,” Rieff said. “What kind of priority?”
“Priority service, but not premium.”
“Have you read the whole report?” Rieff asked. “One of the oddities Winne found was scorching around the holes in the mitt. That fabric is too tough to cut without a special blade, so he must have burned it to get into it. That’s the one thing a defense lawyer could jump on in claiming the contents had been tampered with.”
He hung up, but I held on to the receiver, staring at the desktop. If Chad knew that his buddies had died because their armor didn’t protect them, no wonder he’d freaked out when he saw Nadia paint the Achilles logo on the Body Artist. He’d accused Nadia of spying on him. He must have thought she worked for Tintrey.
I looked up to see Petra watching me anxiously.
“Vic,” she said, “is there some kind of problem?”
“Not a problem,” I said slowly. “Just-I think I understand what happened, but not how to prove it. Not who pulled the trigger on the gun that shot Nadia Guaman but why they did, and why they framed Chad. Marty, how much did Chad say about the body armor?”
Jepson frowned. “He never stopped talking about it, ma’am-Vic. We knew he was angry. But he was always angry about the way him and his men had been treated generally.”
“But did he talk about the armor malfunctioning?”