The Hinky Bearskin Rug (2 page)

Add a
manipulative sneakypants for a partner. Put them all in a car. Clamp the lid on
and shake—

The car
bounced heavily. She bit her tongue. “Ow!”

“My apologies!”
Randy called.

“Be careful!”

The car hit a
pot hole. Jewel almost swallowed her tongue.

“My apologies!”

By eight they
had made it to the Kraft Building. Jewel left Randy with the car and dragged
her butt and her partner into the Department of Consumer Services staff room,
only to find every one of her colleagues plastered against the east windows.

“Gimme the
field glasses.”

“C’mon, I saw
them first!”

“There goes
her shirt! Hoo boy!”

“Me, me, let
me see!”

Clay strolled
up to the nearest peeper, who happened to be their boss, and calmly took the
field glasses out of his hands. “Where are they?”

“Hey!” Ed
said, turning.

“Eighth floor
of the Darth Vader building,” Digby said, indicating the seventy-story
black-glass condo monster across Lake Shore Drive, which had earned its name by
looming dark and ugly against the shoreline.

“Third time
this week,” Sayers said.

“You people
are disgusting.” Embarrassed for the anonymous naked people in the Darth Vader
window, Jewel turned away.

She poured
herself a cup of stale coffee and took a cinnamon cow plop off the pile of
pastry next to the coffeepot. The coffee sucked, as usual, but the plate-sized
pastry disk was so sensuously cinnamony, so addictively crumbly and crunchy, it
made her swoon.

“Gimme those.”
Ed snatched the field glasses back from Clay and trained them on the black
curve of the Darth Vader. “Damn. Those rings in her nipples?”

“You wouldn’t
catch me piercing myself. I fainted when they did my ears,” Britney said.

“Ouch,”
Tookhah agreed.

“Pussy,” Lolly
said.

“That’s
harassment,” Finbow grunted, cupping his hands around his eyes and fogging up
the window.

“Girls can
call each other pussy.
You
gotta
watch your mouth,” Merntice said, folding her opera glasses and tucking them in
her cardigan.

“Jewel, you
gotta see this,” Jason called.

Jewel yawned. “I
don’t have to watch, Roller Skates. At least I know what sex looks like.”

“Clay leave
you any sleepytime?” Britney said. “Or was it that hunky Englishman?”

“Hunk,” Jewel
said. Clay looked at her with annoyance in his face. “I don’t sleep with my
partner,” she added, putting out her tongue at him.
Much.

Ed stuck the
field glasses up in the air with both hands. “Jesus mother Mary, don’t you
women have any discretion?” He came away from the window, glaring at Clay. “Can’t
you do nothin’ about her mouth?”

Jewel looked
at her boss with patience. “You are so lucky I am not recording this
conversation.”

“Get in my
office,” Ed said.

In his office
he slapped a file across his desk to Jewel. “That shit out there.” He made an
Italian gesture with thumb and two fingers. “Been going on all over town. Some
broad from a real estate company complained anonymously over the weekend to
three-one-one,” he said, referring to the city’s hot line for consumer
concerns. “They had a orgy in her office four days ago. She thinks the boss put
Viagra in the coffee urn.”

Oh, brother.
Why did hinky stuff so often come
coupled with sex? “This is not my problem.”

Ed looked at
her under his bushy eyebrows. “She says people were flying around the
conference room naked.”

Jewel’s heart
sank. “So the boss put Viagra and LSD in the coffee urn.”

“Nope. Lab
test came back negative.”

“Actually
flying,” Jewel said.

“It’s hinky,”
Ed said flatly. “Yours. We wouldn’t of taken the case at all, only the PD was
in there that very day for a disorderly. No charges filed.”

“Why not?” Clay
said.

She said, “Yeah,
if the cops thought it was worth coming out for, why didn’t they send the case
over at the time? How come I get it stale?”

“The owners of
the company are connected.”

“Oh, God.”
Jewel groaned. “What do you want me to do?”

“Go in undercover.
Sniff around. You find anything beyond this isolated incident, it’s your
problem. Otherwise find out who filed the complaint and smooth her down, shut
her up.”

Jewel grumbled
under her breath, but she took the file, feeling more cheerful. She’d been
undercover twice in the past month and loved every minute of it.

Ed leaned
forward. “Now, what did you get in the Eleventh Ward?”

“A wash,”
Jewel said. “She doesn’t have a pocket zone and she never had a pocket zone and
she wouldn’t know a pocket zone if it bit her on her Junior League heinie, but
she’s thrilled to be of assistance to the Department.”

“She give you
any names?”

“Nope.” Jewel
tossed aside the orgy file. “What gets me is, it sounds like Inspectional
Services really did pay her a visit. And they had the balls to diagnose a
pocket zone and threaten to condemn her place within ten days, as if that was,
like, Policy, which it totally is not. How come I never heard about it?”

The Hinky Policy was, “Don’t ask, don’t tell. Cope.” Jewel’s division enforced it.

Ed said,
“They’re
in violation of Policy. All
hinky investigation should come through your division. Trouble is, nobody talks
about the Policy, so it kinda slid by so far.”

“So it was a
scammer with fake pocket zones,” she concluded. “But how can you fake that? And
why?”

“Money.” Clay
shot Jewel a keen, blue-eyed glance under his bangs. “Somebody wants to buy
that specific property cheap so he can sell it high.”

Ed grunted. “And
it’s a snap it ain’t his first victim. Mrs. Whatserface was just the toughest nut
they met so far. If they keep at it, we’ll catch up with ’em.”

Leafing
through the file, Jewel said, “Any feds involved?”

“Nope. But if
we get too many pocket zones, even fake ones, the feds’ll find out, and the
whole city could end up with a yellow-striped necktie. That would be bad,” Ed
said heavily. “Only last week, they closed off four square blocks of Hollywood,
California, best part of the tourist district.”

Clay’s eyes
widened. “That’s expensive real estate.”

“So this means
what?” Jewel said. “Somebody covets Mrs. Othmar’s lobelia bed?”

“Da mayor
wants it worked out on the quiet. Since the key is the hinky stuff, you’re
elected.”

“I know, I
know.”

“Let me look
into it,” Clay said. “I’m good at following paper trails.”

Ed nodded. “At’s
what I figured. Both of youse can track the pocket zones, and Heiss can take
the orgy thing.”

Jewel dragged
herself back to the coffee urn for a refill. The cow plops were gone, so she
scored a doughnut.

The peep show
seemed to be over. Her coworkers were off to their rounds: Weights and Measures
to the delis and gas stations, Taxis to O’Hare inspection, or home to test
response times, Immigration to their undercover stings, Credit Card Fraud to
burrowing into their mountains of paperwork. Maxwell Street detail went back to
the land of hot dogs and cheap tee-shirts, Child Support to their phones.
Target Investigations was wrapping up a big identity theft case, organizing
evidence for indictments.

Jewel had been
like them, once, rotating from duty to duty, learning new scams, busting new
crooks, keeping up with every possible way Chicago could protect its citizens
from chicanery, sharp practice, and other forms of financial abuse.

Now she was
going undercover to find out if some secretary had been dropping acid, or if
the wave of daytime sex enlivening the summer had its root in something hinky.

My job is so glamorous.

Later that
morning Jewel presented herself at the offices of Baysdorter Boncil, a real
estate development firm located within eyeshot of Neiman Marcus. It was like
walking into a cigar box. The walls were rare mahogany below the chair rail and
ornate, tan-flocked, Skokie-baroque wallpaper above. Every window office had a
kind of corral in front of it made of the same expensive wood, and inside every
corral sat a beautiful girl at a computer. Checking out the secretaries in
their flirty little I’m-a-virgin-but-I’m-desperate-not-to-be dresses, Jewel
knew her navy polyester pantsuit was not adequate.

In fact, it
seemed nothing about her was adequate.

The
complainant was a Ms. Sacker, who turned out to be the office manager. As
arranged, she interviewed Jewel for a temp job — Jewel’s cover — behind closed
doors. Maida Sacker had that pinched blondeness that doesn’t age well. Her
pastel skirt suit was just a shade over into the desperate zone, with white
eyelet at her suit collar and in the bosom of her low-cut, hot-pink shell. Her
makeup was perfect, if bland. Jewel felt more like a dairy-farmer’s daughter
than ever.

Ms. Sacker
said, “It is very important, Ms. Heiss, that management doesn’t know about your
presence at Baysdorter Boncil.”

“Good thing,
if one of them put Viagra in the coffee. You were present for the incident?”

Ms. Sacker
said, “I wasn’t involved in the — the incident. I discovered it.”

“You don’t
seem comfortable. Shall we meet outside of work?”

Ms. Sacker
scowled.

Boy, that must have been some orgy.
“I understand that there were, ah,
hinky elements. Magical,” Jewel added, when Ms. Sacker raised her pencilled
eyebrows. “You suspect that management was involved.”

Silence.

And now Ms. Sacker doesn’t want to talk
about it.
Letting
understanding into her voice, Jewel said, “If there is a corporate culture of
abuse, I’m not the right officer to prosecute it, but I can certainly go
between for you.
Is
that a problem
here at Baysdorter Boncil?”

Ms. Sacker
pressed her bloodless lips together.

Okay, that was
an admission that some shit was going down. Jewel realized she was dealing with
a tricky legal moment. As a woman and as office manager, over the girls but
under the men in the window offices, Ms. Sacker was in an equivocal position.

“Are you
telling me there was a rape? Were you—” she tried to soften her manner, “were
you raped, Ms. Sacker?”

“No!” Ms.
Sacker turned her head to the side and glared, apparently at a lucite teamwork
trophy sitting on her sideboard.

Through the
floor-to-ceiling window by the door, Jewel spotted a dark suit, a pale face. “Date
rape counts. Coercion, even subtle coercion without the threat of force,
counts. If your employer exerts pressure—”

“There may
have been drugs,” Ms. Sacker burst out.

“Date rape
drugs also count.”

“I can’t
discuss that here,” Ms. Sacker said.

“O-kay. Can we
proceed with the portion of this discussion you are willing to have?”

The door burst
open. A sleek, forty-something man in an expensive suit swept in.

Ms. Sacker
snapped, “I’m busy, Mr. Tannyhill.”

“This won’t
take long, Maida,” the man called Tannyhill said. He flicked a glance at Jewel
and then away, as if she didn’t register on his people meter.

Maida Sacker
looked up at him. “This is the new temp. You remember Mr. Boncil said we might—”

“Mr. Boncil
approved it. I didn’t.”

Jewel
pretended to be fascinated with the teamwork award.

“Mr. Boncil is
the firm’s principal,” Ms. Sacker came back.

There was a
prolonged silence. Jewel noticed a bandaid on the back of Maida’s left hand.

Without
breaking eye contact with Tannyhill, Ms. Sacker handed Jewel a glossy maroon
folder with Baysdorter Boncil embossed on it.

Jewel looked
in the folder. It was empty except for a yellow sticky note:
Billy Goat at six.