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Authors: Sara Paretsky
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school, drove it hard for five years, and wanted to unload it now that he’d landed a real job with serious money. All the time we talked about his beater, he couldn’t stop looking at the Ford truck he’d bought to celebrate entering the job market at a hundred thousand a year. Without much real haggling we got the Skylark for twelve hundred.
Mr. Contreras overwhelmed me by pulling twenty carefully folded twenties from his inside pocket: “My contribution to the family car,” he insisted, when I tried to demur. I offered to let him drive home, but he refused.
“I don’t see so good at night anymore, cookie. Matter of fact, I been worrying about it some.”
“Then let’s get you to the doctor,” I said. “You can’t neglect your eyes. If you need new glasses or have cataracts or something, now’s the time to take care of them.”
“Don’t make me out to be an old man,” he snapped, locking the seat belt. “You’re as bad as Ruthie, wanting to push me into an old–age home. I can still see good enough to make out that gizmo you took from them girls on the street. What was it, anyway?”
I’d forgotten about it during our long ride and pulled it out of my shirt pocket for his inspection. He couldn’t place it any more than I could, but when we got home—in twenty minutes versus the eighty–seven we’d spent on the way out—I dug a copy of
Mirabella
out of the stack of papers in my recycling box. I went through it page by page studying the ads and on the inside of the back cover struck gold—or painted plastic. A pair of Ferragamo loafers were standing back to front against a rose silk scarf, and a pair of omegas like the one the girls had found were stitched into the strap across the instep.
“
Va bene,
Signor Ferragamo,” I said aloud. A horseshoe, not an omega. The Ferragamo logo. I’d recognized it because I tried on some Ferragamo pumps a few weeks ago: my beloved red Bruno Magli’s had finally become so worn that not even old Signor Delgado out on Harlem could patch the sides enough to attach new soles.
I’d decided I couldn’t afford shoes that cost almost three hundred dollars this summer—a wise decision, considering the expenses I was racking up right now. It was hard to imagine that the immigrants living along Balmoral and Glenwood could afford them either. I suppose someone might have gone into debt for an upscale logo, but I went to bed wondering where in the metropolitan area someone was looking in annoyance at a shoe or handbag with a damaged strap.
7 Habeas Corpus?
Mary Louise called me early in the morning. “Vic, I’m running to get Nate to day camp, so this’ll be quick: there isn’t much, anyway. Aguinaldo was working as a mother’s helper for someone named Baladine out in Oak Brook. She’d been there two years when she stole a gold necklace worth forty or fifty thousand dollars—it had gems in it too, bitty diamonds or rubies. They pressed charges—”
“The Baladines?” I interrupted. “As in the Robert Baladines?”
“Robert, Eleanor, and their three children. Do you know them?”
“No, darlin’, he’s so big I don’t even think of him as competition. He runs Carnifice—you know, the billion–dollar PI firm, only when they get that big they’re called “Security Providers,’ or something.”
“Well, be that as it may, Mrs. Baladine loved that necklace—Robert gave it to her when little Robbie was born, blah, blah, so she pressed charges in a serious way. The defense tried to plead Aguinaldo’s blameless previous life and the fact that she was the sole support of a mother and two kids of her own, but we were being tough on immigrants that month and Aguinaldo got five years. She’d been a model prisoner for fifteen months, had worked her way into the clothes shop, which is a premium gig at Coolis, when she escaped. Last known address on Wayne, about two hundred yards from where we found her.” She read out addresses and phone numbers both
Mr. Contreras overwhelmed me by pulling twenty carefully folded twenties from his inside pocket: “My contribution to the family car,” he insisted, when I tried to demur. I offered to let him drive home, but he refused.
“I don’t see so good at night anymore, cookie. Matter of fact, I been worrying about it some.”
“Then let’s get you to the doctor,” I said. “You can’t neglect your eyes. If you need new glasses or have cataracts or something, now’s the time to take care of them.”
“Don’t make me out to be an old man,” he snapped, locking the seat belt. “You’re as bad as Ruthie, wanting to push me into an old–age home. I can still see good enough to make out that gizmo you took from them girls on the street. What was it, anyway?”
I’d forgotten about it during our long ride and pulled it out of my shirt pocket for his inspection. He couldn’t place it any more than I could, but when we got home—in twenty minutes versus the eighty–seven we’d spent on the way out—I dug a copy of
Mirabella
out of the stack of papers in my recycling box. I went through it page by page studying the ads and on the inside of the back cover struck gold—or painted plastic. A pair of Ferragamo loafers were standing back to front against a rose silk scarf, and a pair of omegas like the one the girls had found were stitched into the strap across the instep.
“
Va bene,
Signor Ferragamo,” I said aloud. A horseshoe, not an omega. The Ferragamo logo. I’d recognized it because I tried on some Ferragamo pumps a few weeks ago: my beloved red Bruno Magli’s had finally become so worn that not even old Signor Delgado out on Harlem could patch the sides enough to attach new soles.
I’d decided I couldn’t afford shoes that cost almost three hundred dollars this summer—a wise decision, considering the expenses I was racking up right now. It was hard to imagine that the immigrants living along Balmoral and Glenwood could afford them either. I suppose someone might have gone into debt for an upscale logo, but I went to bed wondering where in the metropolitan area someone was looking in annoyance at a shoe or handbag with a damaged strap.
7 Habeas Corpus?
Mary Louise called me early in the morning. “Vic, I’m running to get Nate to day camp, so this’ll be quick: there isn’t much, anyway. Aguinaldo was working as a mother’s helper for someone named Baladine out in Oak Brook. She’d been there two years when she stole a gold necklace worth forty or fifty thousand dollars—it had gems in it too, bitty diamonds or rubies. They pressed charges—”
“The Baladines?” I interrupted. “As in the Robert Baladines?”
“Robert, Eleanor, and their three children. Do you know them?”
“No, darlin’, he’s so big I don’t even think of him as competition. He runs Carnifice—you know, the billion–dollar PI firm, only when they get that big they’re called “Security Providers,’ or something.”
“Well, be that as it may, Mrs. Baladine loved that necklace—Robert gave it to her when little Robbie was born, blah, blah, so she pressed charges in a serious way. The defense tried to plead Aguinaldo’s blameless previous life and the fact that she was the sole support of a mother and two kids of her own, but we were being tough on immigrants that month and Aguinaldo got five years. She’d been a model prisoner for fifteen months, had worked her way into the clothes shop, which is a premium gig at Coolis, when she escaped. Last known address on Wayne, about two hundred yards from where we found her.” She read out addresses and phone numbers both
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