Breakdown (3 page)

It wasn’t a statue, as I’d idly thought when I’d glanced inside earlier, but a man. He was laid on the slab in a parody of a crucifixion, arms wide at his sides, feet together. In the dim light from my cell phone I saw something sticking out of his chest.

I stepped between Tyler and the figure and knelt to feel his neck. His skin was cool and the carotid pulses were still, but when I stuck a gingerly hand underneath his windbreaker, I could feel the wet flood of fresh blood. We must have arrived on the scene right after he died.

While I was kneeling I squinted at the stick in his chest. I couldn’t tell much, but it looked like a metal rod, perhaps a foot long. Behind me I could hear Tyler starting to give way to sobs. I got up and guided her down the stairs. She was trembling and she clung to me convulsively.

The man had died a terrible death, but I had learned from years of experience with violence to suction off my feelings, to keep the outer shell of my self smooth and dry. A twelve-year-old didn’t need this experience, and shouldn’t have to acquire my patina.

The other girls were huddled at the foot of the steps. “What happened?” “What’s up there?”

I started to say, “There’s a dead man in that tomb,” but that sounded ludicrous. “A man has been murdered up there. And not very long ago. I have to call the police. I’d like to protect you ladies from a police investigation, at least until you’ve gone home and talked to your parents about what you were doing here tonight. However, before I can let you go, you need to answer a few questions. You claimed that you saw someone right before you began your ritual. I believe it was Tyler who said there was a vampire nearby?”

The girls sucked in a collective breath and looked furtively into the thick shrubbery beyond the clearing.

“So she really did see one, even though she wasn’t initiated?” one of the girls who hadn’t spoken before said.

“No, she didn’t see a vampire, she saw a person.” I pushed Tyler shoulder distance from me so I could look into her eyes. “Was it the man on the tomb up there?”

“I don’t know why I said what I did, about seeing a vampire, I mean. I didn’t see anyone,” Tyler whispered.

“What about the rest of you? Did any of you see someone in the shrubbery when you got here?”

They all stared at me dumbly. Finally, Nia said, “Tyler was really excited about the ceremony, so maybe she thought she saw something.”

Lightning flashed in the eastern sky and clouds began to thicken across the moon again, a warning that Mother Nature hadn’t finished with us for the night. I didn’t want to stand arguing with these kids in a rainstorm, and I needed to call the cops to report the murder. I told the girls I would take them to the apartment where they’d met up, and leave them in my cousin Petra’s charge while I talked to the police.

“You can call your folks from there, but none of you is to go home unless Petra sees who’s escorting you.”

Arielle started to object, but I overrode her. “You are not in charge of this expedition; I am. If you try to leave the Dudek apartment with anyone besides your parents or guardian, Petra will sit on you until I get back.”

“They can’t sleep there.” A girl with long, pale hair spoke for the first time. “We only have three beds.”

“You’re Kira Dudek, right? Lucy’s big sister? I don’t care if your friends stand on their heads all night, as long as they don’t leave without an adult. Let’s get going.”

“But my mother—” Kira started to say.

“This is known as education,” I said. “You are learning, all seven of you, that actions have consequences.”

I corralled them into an ungainly bundle and started pushing them toward Leavitt Street. As we got closer, blue lights flashed beyond the fence. Someone must have heard Tyler’s screams and called the police.

“Cops on Leavitt,” I said. “I want you girls to be with your parents before you have to deal with the police. We’re going to turn around and try to find a way out on the street at the back of the cemetery. It’s going to be rough going because I don’t want to show a light, so stay close together, and close behind me.”

I turned around, made sure my team—if that’s what they were—was with me, and started picking my way back toward the clearing, the temple, the thicket of briars.

Tyler insisted on holding my hand. This made it harder for me to stay on a path, but I didn’t have the heart to detach her. Behind us we heard the bullhorns:
This is the Chicago police; stay where you are; we know you’re in there.
We could see the glow from their searchlights as the cops began to work their way into the cemetery. Tyler grabbed me more tightly and one of the girls whimpered in fear. The lightning intensified and thunder began to rumble among the clouds like a moody drummer.

“It’s okay,” I said softly, under the cover of the thunder. “They’re just guessing; they don’t really know we’re here. The important thing is to keep as quiet as possible.”

More than once the girls or I stumbled against a piece of broken marble as we threaded our way east. Rain began to fall again, fat, greasy drops that slipped through the tree branches and down our necks. The storm broke in earnest as we reached a wall that marked the cemetery’s eastern edge.

As the rain swept down, I turned to Arielle, the sprite. “I’m going to give you a leg up to the top. Look over, and if there’re no cops or prowlers on the street, you climb over and jump down. And all of you: go to Kira Dudek’s apartment and stay there. I will join you as fast as I can, but I have to talk to the cops. And please don’t imagine you can just run away: Petra will be able to give me all your names, and I will talk to all of your parents tomorrow.”

Nia started to protest, but Arielle cut her short. “My mom will handle it; don’t try arguing with
her.
”

I decided to pretend I hadn’t heard that and made a cup of my hands for Arielle. She sprang up lightly to grab the top of the wall, where she bent over and looked around before giving me an “all clear.” I hoisted the others over as fast as I could, even Tyler, who said she’d rather stay with me.

“Right now, it doesn’t matter what happened to you in the middle of that circle back there,” I said. “Being with Arielle and the others is going to be way better than a police interrogation. Why were you out after curfew? Did you know the dead man? Did you and your friends put a spike through his chest?”

She gasped. “We didn’t kill him; we didn’t know he was there!”

“Those are the kinds of questions the police will ask, and they won’t believe your answers. They’ll keep talking to you all night long, until you say something they want to hear. So get over that wall.”

She nodded bleakly and let me push her to the top. I waited a minute but didn’t hear any sounds of pursuit from the other side.

As I stood there, rain pouring under the hood of my jacket, I wondered about the girls. Tyler and her friends were twelve and thirteen, but it didn’t take much imagination to figure out how a girl that young could persuade a man to lie on his back, arms outstretched, waiting passively for a blow to the heart.

I didn’t really believe these girls had killed the man in the temple. It was far more likely that they hadn’t been aware of the violence taking place just steps from where they were dancing and preening. But why was Tyler unwilling to admit she’d seen someone earlier? She’d cried out that she’d seen a vampire—but perhaps, on reflection, she’d recognized the figure, and didn’t want to identify him. Or her.

I’d have to talk to all the girls in depth, which sounded exhausting. Or turn them over to the police, which seemed callous. In the meantime, I needed to talk to the police myself. There were risks inherent in presenting myself to them, but there were bigger risks in staying away. I turned around and started working my way west again.

2.

IN THE GARDEN OF BAD AND WORSE

I
T WAS SEVERAL HOURS BEFORE
I
WAS ABLE TO JOIN THE GIRLS
at the Dudek apartment. I hadn’t been foolish enough to think the cops would let me show them the crime scene and take off, but they put me through a longer process than I’d expected.

By the time I’d retraced a path through the undergrowth to the Leavitt Street side of the cemetery, rain had pounded through my jacket and I was soaked to the skin. My scarlet frock was cut from silk faille; I sincerely hoped it would survive tonight’s abuse.

I slithered through the hole in the fence I’d used to enter and walked down Leavitt to the cops. Four squad cars were parked there, their lights flashing so brightly that I could see the people in the apartments across the street peering at us through the cracks in their curtains. Most of the officers were already in the cemetery. I told the man left to watch the street that there was a dead body in one of the tombs.

“That doesn’t seem too shocking, miss,” he said and smirked. “It’s a graveyard.”

“Right.” I grinned sourly. “A murdered body. Can you call your team and tell them? If they come back for me, I can show them the location.”

He asked me—a thinly veiled order—to get into the back of his squad car and wait to talk to Sergeant Anstey. The sergeant arrived within a couple of minutes and moved me to his own car to hear my story.

“You want to phone your team, tell them to wait for me? It would make their lives easier if I went with them,” I said. “I know where the victim is.”

“They’re big boys and girls; they can find that tomb thing on their own. Tell me again what you were doing in an abandoned graveyard in a thunderstorm.”

I repeated my story. “I was on my way home when I thought I heard someone screaming inside the cemetery. I followed the sound, but then I tripped on a chunk of marble and landed in the mud. By the time I got back on my feet, the screams had stopped; I poked around and found the dead man, but whoever killed him managed to take off without my spotting him.”

Anstey snorted. “You really expect me to believe a woman goes alone into an abandoned cemetery in the middle of a thunderstorm? Why didn’t you call 911?”

“I know what kind of backlog this district has on Saturday nights—my dad used to work out of the Twelfth.”

“This is about a lover who dissed you, isn’t it. Or was it a drug deal gone bad?”

“Just a South Side street fighter who forgot for a minute that she was fifty, not fifteen.” I rubbed my arms, hoping to get some blood moving in them. “If I’d known you were going to give me a hard time, I would have made an anonymous call about the vic to 911, but I thought you would appreciate help in locating the body.”

Anstey phoned in to the station and got a report back on me. The CPD file said I was a private eye with a track record, both for results and for a chip on the shoulder. I couldn’t argue with either claim. The file apparently also included a note that a senior officer, namely Captain Bobby Mallory, was a personal friend. And that my dad really had been a cop.

Anstey revealed that news with disgust—it meant he had to treat me like a person, not a criminal. Although the hostility of his questions lessened, his voice still sounded like he wished he could use his baton on my skull.

The person who lingers around a crime scene is a perpetrator more often than not. I’d known that was what the cops would think. But if I’d left a print at the crime scene, they’d have found me fast enough, and they’d have grounds for getting the state to suspend my license if I didn’t report the crime.

I decided it was time to shift the ground. “What brought you here, Sergeant, on a night like this? Is Mount Moriah a regular part of your unit’s beat?”

“That’s right. We like driving around among the dead, cheers us up to think that we have peace and quiet to look forward to even if we’ll never be able to afford to retire.”

“Someone called you. I wonder why? Was it someone who wanted that body found, or had they heard me running through the grounds?”

Anstey paused, measuring me in the dark squad car. “Give Captain Mallory a call, see if he’ll tell you, because I certainly won’t.”

After that, Anstey turned to his computer and began clearing incident reports. When I started to make bright conversation, he ignored me, so I tried to leave, but he’d locked the back doors. He kept me in the car until his troops phoned that they’d found the body.

“Okay. Your turn to shine, Warshawski. Lead me to my team.”

Anstey unlocked the back door and pulled me out. His squad had used bolt cutters on the chain across the front gate, so at least we didn’t have to sidle through a hole in the fence.

The police spots sent a bright glow through the cemetery, which made it easy to pick out the remnants of the gravel paths. The rain had stopped again, and Anstey and I didn’t have any trouble getting to the crime scene.

Under the lights, the little temple looked like part of a movie set, maybe for something like
In the Garden of Bad and Worse.
It was an elaborate tomb, resembling an Italian cathedral. A carved frieze swung from the dome that had been planted on top of the columns. Like the columns and the shallow steps leading to the tomb, the dome and frieze were badly cracked and covered with lichen. The Saloman family, whose name was on the mausoleum, had put a lot of money into interring their dead, but now there was no one to care for the dead or the tomb, or even the graveyard.

The lights made it easy to see the space where the girls had performed their ritual. It wasn’t actually a clearing, just an area where tombstones had been placed flat into the ground rather than set at right angles to it. At one side, I saw a bottle of alcopop and hoped that wasn’t what the girls had been passing around. I didn’t call attention to it—plenty of drunks hang out in cemeteries, after all. People without a lot of options make love in them, too. Empties are a cemetery commonplace.

Sergeant Anstey dragged me up the shallow steps to look at the dead man. “This the guy you want me to believe was screaming in here? You put a spike through his chest as payback for dragging you through the mud?”

I didn’t respond to the gibe, just stared down at the man. He’d been around forty, a white man with thick, dark hair that was just beginning to turn gray at the sides.