Sara Paretsky - Tunnel Vision

Acknowledgments

As always, my work benefitted from the advice of experts. Egidio Berni first suggested the germ of what became this book by describing the events in Chapter Thirty-nine. Dave Sullivan and Bill Boardman were most helpful in providing information about great and small details of the contracting business in Chicago, including Wage and Hour Reports. Allan Fenske told me how to circumvent a phone-linked alarm system.

Although I try to do careful research, especially for physical sites that actually exist, I was never allowed access to the location described in Chapters Forty-two and Forty-three. Those scenes therefore are based partly on photographsprovided by Mary Lynn Dietschebut chiefly on my own imagination.

Jeri Linas, the director of Rainbow House, was most generous in letting me tour this Chicago shelter for battered women. Anne Parry, on the Rainbow House staff, sought me out to offer me information, and made the necessary connections. Arcadia House is totally fictitious, and does not resemble Rainbow House in any way, except as it is a battered womens shelter.

Some people keep coming back with more help: Sue Riter provided advice on the treatment of Jessie Hawkings; Marilyn Martin on what happens to people declared not guilty by reason of insanity; Jay Topkis again provided technical assistance. The Mad Go Player gave me tips on hacking. Professor Wright and Dr. Cardhu gave their usualbut extraordinarysupport.

I owe a special thanks to the men and women who created a most wonderful space for me to work in. The Bauer-Latoza Studio provided the design. Firehouse Construction worked on it as carefully as though it had been their own home. Thanks to: Al, Bill and Bill, Bob, Carlos, Carm, Daniel, Dave, Doug, Fausto, Gerardo, Gino, Greg, Hannah, Joanne, John and John, and Paula. Thanks also to the Withers, Charlie, senior, Charlie, junior, and John. Gerardo, may light eternal shine upon you.

V. I. is a character who ages with time and who is located in historical time. The books detailing her adventures usually take place in the year I write them. For specific historical reasons, which will become clear in the course of the story, Tunnel Vision is set in April of 1992.

Except for the historical events described, this is a work of fiction, and no attempt should be made to connect any character in this novel with any real people, whether living or dead. Illinois has no Republican senators. For that reason Alec Gantner, the United States senator in this story, was made a Republican. This should not be construed as a belief that Republicans are more venal than Democratsor vice versa.

Finally, as Cervantesmore or lesssaid: Idle reader, you can believe without any oath of mine that I wish this book, as the child of my brain, to be the most beautiful, the liveliest and the cleverest imaginable. But I have been unable to transgress the order of nature, by which like gives birth to like. It may happen that a mother has an ill-favored child, and that her love for it so blinds her eyes that she cannot see its faults, but takes them rather for talents and beauties. But I, though V. I. Warshawskis mother, will not drift with the current of custom, nor implore you, almost with tears in my eyes, dearest reader, to pardon or ignore the faults you see in this child of mine.

BOOKS BY SARA PARETSKY

GHOST COUNTRY
WINDY CITY BLUES
TUNNEL VISION
GUARDIAN ANGEL
BURN MARKS
BLOOD SHOT
BITTER MEDICINE
KILLING ORDERS
DEADLOCK
INDEMNITY ONLY

EDITED BY SARA PARETSKY

WOMEN ON THE CASE
A WOMANS EYE

About the Author

SARA PARETSKY lives in Chicago with her husband and their golden retriever.

1

Power Failure

When the power went I was finishing a ten-page report. My office turned black; the computer groaned to a halt. Helpless, I watched my words fade to a ghostly outline that glowed on the screen before vanishing, like the mocking grin of a Cheshire cat.

I cursed myself and the building owners impartially. If Id stuck with my mothers old Olivetti instead of going electronic I could have finished my work by candlelight and left. But if the Culpepper brothers werent scuttling the Pulteney Building the power wouldnt have gone off.

Id had my office there for ten years, so long Id come to overlook its litany of ills. Decades of grime obscured the bas-reliefs on the brass doors and filled in missing chips in the lobbys marble floor; great chunks of plaster were missing from the cornices in the upper floors; three ladies rooms served the whole building, and the toilets backed up more often than they worked. For that matter, Id just about memorized the design on the elevator panels during the hours Id been stuck in it.

All these evils were made palatable by the Pulteneys low rents. I should have realized long since that the Culpepper boys were waiting for the wave of Loop redevelopment to wash this far south, waiting for the day when the building would be worth more dead than alive. The dickering we did every fall, in which I walked away triumphant without a rent hike and they left without agreeing to put in new plumbing or wiring, should have been a warning to a detective like me who specializes in fraud, arson, and commercial misbehavior. But as with many of my clients, cash flow was too insistent a problem for me to look beyond relief from my immediate woes.

The building had already been one-third empty when the Culpeppers handed out their notice at New Years. They tried first to bribe, then to force, the rest of us into leaving. Some did, but tenants who could take the Pulteney couldnt easily afford new space. Hard times were pushing everyone who operates in the margins right off the page. As a private eye in a solo practice, I felt the pinch as much as anyone. Along with a hatmaker, a dealer in oriental health and beauty aids, someone who might have been a bookie, an addressing firm, and a few others, I was sticking it out to the bitter end.

I picked up my flashlight and moved with the speed of much practice through the dark hall to the stairwell. The report Id been writing had to be in Darraugh Grahams hands by eight tomorrow. If I could find a faulty wire or blown fuse fast enough, I could pull in enough material from my data files to reconstruct the essentials. Otherwise Id have to start from the beginning on the Olivetti.

I undid the locks on the stairwell door but left them open against my return. With Tom Czarnik gone Id put padlocks on the doors that all worked to the same key. Czarnik, whod been the superalleged superduring my tenure in the building, had done nothing for the last two years but deliver angry tirades against the tenants, so it was no hardship to manage without him. In fact it had dawned on me lately that the Culpeppers probably paid him to speed the Pulteneys disintegration.

The brothers were certainly doing what they could to drive our feeble group out ahead of schedule. Theyd halted any pretense of maintenance immediately. Next they tried turning off the utilities; a court order restored electricity and water. Now it was just their negligence and sabotage against our witsmostly, it must be confessed, mine. While the other tenants had signed on to the emergency petition to restore power, none of them ever came below stairs with me to mess with the wiring and plumbing.

Today overconfidence did me in. I was so used to the basement stairs that I didnt shine a light on my feet. I tripped on a loose piece of plaster. As I flailed to regain my balance I dropped the flash. I could hear the glass shatter as it bounced off the steps.