Warshawski 09 - Hard Time by Sara Paretsky Read Free Book Online Page A

inspection. And yet another thousand or two for a replacement? Maybe I’d be better off renting by the week. Of course, I could let the Trans Am go for scrap and buy a used car with more oomph than the ones Mr. Contreras was investigating, but I loved my little sports car.
    I smacked the tabletop in frustration. Why can’t I ever get ahead of the game financially? I work hard, I pay serious attention to my clients, and here I am, past forty and still scrambling at month’s end. I looked with distaste at the melted remains in the cup. Soggy waffle and lumps of berry floated in beige sludge. It looked like an artist’s depiction of my life. I stuffed the cup into an overflowing garbage can by the door and went out to catch the Blue Line to my office.
    Since it was rush hour a train came almost as soon as I climbed onto the platform. Not only that, it was one of the new ones, air–conditioned and moving fast. It didn’t make up for everything that had gone wrong today, but it helped. In ten minutes I was at Damen and back in the wet heat.
    A new coffee bar had opened, I noticed, making three, one for each of the three streets that came together at that corner. I stopped for an espresso and to buy a
Streetwise
from a guy named Elton who worked that intersection. Over the months I’d been renting nearby we’d struck up a relationship of the “Hi, how’s it going” kind.
    When I moved my operation to Bucktown two years ago, the only liquid you could get by the glass was a shot and a beer. Now the bars and palm–readers of Humboldt Park are giving way to coffee bars and workout clubs as Generation X–ers move in. I could hardly criticize them: I’d helped start that gentrifying wave.
    The Loop building where I’d rented since opening my practice had fallen to the wrecker’s ball more than a year ago, taking with it not just inlaid mosaic flooring and embossed brass elevator doors, but the malfunctioning toilets and frayed wiring that had kept the rent affordable. After the Pulteney’s demise I couldn’t find anything even close to my price range downtown. A sculpting friend convinced me to rent space with her in a converted warehouse near North and Damen, on Leavitt. I signed before the area started to be trendy and had been savvy enough—for once—to get a seven–year lease.
    I miss being downtown, where the bulk of my business lies, but I’m only ten minutes away by L or car. The warehouse has a parking lot, which I couldn’t offer clients before. And a lot of the queries I used to have to do on foot—trudging from the Department of Motor Vehicles to Social Security to the Recorder of Deeds—I can handle right in my office by dialing up the Web. The one thing I don’t automate is my answering service: people in distress like a real person on the line, not a voice menu.
    Inside my office I sternly turned my back on the futon behind my photocopier and powered up my computer. I logged on to LifeStory and submitted the name and social security number of the man Darraugh wanted to put in charge of his paper division.
    Most investigators use a service like LifeStory. Data on things you imagine are private, like your income, your tax returns, those education loans you welched on, and how much you owe on that late–model four–by–four—not to mention your moving violations in it—are all available to people like me. In theory you have to know something about the person, like a social security number and perhaps a mother’s maiden name, to get this information, but there are easy ways around that, too. When I first went on–line two years back, I was shocked by how easy it was to violate people’s privacy. Every time I log on to LifeStory I squirm—but that doesn’t make me cancel my subscription.
    The menu asked me how much detail I needed. I clicked on FULL BACKGROUND and was told that it would be a forty–eight–hour turnaround for the report—unless I wanted to pay a premium. I took the slow cheap