Scalia had me backed up where he wanted me, which I hated, but I opened my case and took out the spurious résumé. Scalia held out a hand for it, but I ducked under his arm and stuck it into Vijay’s shredder, which gulped it down with a satisfying growl.
Scalia grabbed my case and dumped the contents on Vijay’s desk, his face swollen with rage. My field notebooks that I use in client meetings and off-line research, a tampon that was coming unraveled, and a small makeup kit bounced out. I crossed my arms and leaned against the door while he looked through the papers.
Scalia suddenly ripped a page out of the center of one of the notebooks and fed it through Vijay’s shredder, then dropped the notebook on Vijay’s desk and dusted his hands with a satisfied smirk. I fought back the tide of rage that swept through me. I had just enough self-control to know that if I slugged him, I’d spend the next week either in jail or a hospital.
“What a he-man,” I said, my voice high and bright. “Able to rip a piece of paper with your bare hands. No wonder they put you in charge of war operations.”
“Pick up your shit and get out of my building,” Scalia roared, his face swelling again in anger.
I put the notebooks and the makeup back into my case. As soon as I had the door open, I turned back and stuck the tampon into Scalia’s jacket pocket.
“A souvenir,” I said. “Something to put on your wall along with all those pictures of you in uniform inside the war zone.”
I moved briskly to the stairs. A couple of guys in heavy security costumes appeared as I reached the front doors, but no one shot me, or even tripped me, as I crossed the walk to the visitor’s spot where I’d left my car.
25
Surviving Guaman Daughter
I drove east until I found a forest preserve where I could take time to pull myself together again. I dug through my case for the notebook that Scalia had mutilated. He’d pulled three pages out of a section where I’d been researching title changes last year. The case was coming to trial next month. I’d been deposed, I’d written the report. It was just the violation of having my papers attacked that I minded.
You might say I had provoked him by shredding the bogus résumé, but his reaction had been designed to humiliate, and, unfortunately, it had worked. My own response, with the tampon, had been briefly satisfying but not too bright. Someone who had as much need to be in power over others as Scalia did would feel it as real indignity, especially since a subordinate had witnessed it. Who knew what he might do next.
I opened one of my notebooks and started doodling. What had I learned? That despite the twenty thousand or so employees Tintrey had worldwide, and the nine thousand in Iraq, there was something about Alexandra Guaman that kept her in the foreground of the company consciousness—so much so that a senior officer had to be summoned when someone asked questions about her. I wished I knew what QL stood for—that was what Vijay had called Alexandra’s file. Maybe “quit living.”
I stared at the bare trees. Even if Alexandra had known Chad in Iraq, why would that be important to Tintrey? Unless Chad had been on some mission that involved Tintrey and he’d learned a discreditable secret about them? If Alexandra had died as part of a truck convoy, maybe Chad had been in one of the trucks. That black oblong he’d waved in front of Nadia, was that something he’d picked up from the detritus around her exploded truck? But a piece of black fabric, something that might be a scarf, as Tim Radke had suggested? I slapped my notebook shut. All this speculation, it led nowhere.
Gilbert Scalia had come to Club Gouge with the head of Tintrey, Jarvis MacLean. If Alexandra Guaman was this big a hot button at Tintrey, I had to believe they’d gone down there to see if the Body Artist’s tribute to Nadia included anything about Alexandra.
More speculation.
I would have to move fast to get some answers before Gilbert Scalia closed every door I knocked at. Rainier Cowles was already hovering over the Guaman family, but maybe if I drove down there now I could find out something from Ernest or the grandmother. That didn’t seem likely, but I didn’t know what else