Breakdown (49 page)

While lightning forked and writhed across the lake and rain made the floor-to-ceiling windows shudder, I sifted through the papers in Leydon’s living room and bedroom. I made no attempt to organize them; I simply looked for a picture that included firemen. All the clippings, all those articles about diet or conspiracies involving oil or water, I put into blue recycling bags.

Around ten, when I’d been at it for three hours, it occurred to me to call Leydon’s sister-in-law. No, Faith said, Leydon hadn’t shown or mailed any pictures to her, of firemen or of anything else.

“I talked to Sewall,” she said quickly, as I was hanging up. “We’ll move her to a place in Skokie, probably next Monday. They have a good reputation, and maybe she’ll get back to—” She broke off, as she remembered what normal was for Leydon.

“That’s good, Faith,” I said with a hollow heartiness.

I was glad that Faith had taken a stand with Sewall on his sister’s care, but Leydon’s depressing condition, combined with the mess I was sorting, made it impossible to be optimistic. The weather dragged my spirits down as well. At noon, when the rain paused, I went out for food.

The little indie bar I’d found before made me up a vegetable sandwich and two cappuccinos. I brought them back with me—I was afraid if I took a long break I’d never summon the energy to get back to the Augean stables.

At two, I was pretty sure I had handled every paper in the apartment, gone through mattresses, couch cushions, books, looked under appliances and inside CD covers. I lay on the Navajo rug in the living area and stretched my sore shoulders and hamstrings. After a time, I remembered my other obligations. Still lying on the floor, I called various clients, and then checked in with Murray.

He’d found five members of the old volunteer fire department. They’d all been glad to show him their group photos; he’d even seen one with Tommy holding Good Dog Trey’s leash, grinning like he’d just won the lottery, but the pictures didn’t shed any light on the Lawlors.

“Tommy’s photo has to be a red herring,” Murray announced. “It has to be something Tommy said that Wuchnik and Leydon both pounced on. You’d better go talk to him again.”

“You could be right,” I agreed dispiritedly.

If the photo had meant something, the person who attacked Leydon probably found it when he rifled through her handbag. Or cleaned out Wuchnik’s apartment. I’d buy some jelly beans and go see Tommy tomorrow afternoon. I needed to do some real work in the morning for my most important client.

I lay back down on the Navajo rug. A spider had put up a three-dimensional web in a corner by the windows. A literary detective like Spenser or Marlowe would have a good time drawing an analogy to my confused brain, but I thought it just showed that the cleaning service wasn’t doing much of a job for Leydon. It was hard to blame them, given the level of chaos in here.

My mind wandered off to other places where Leydon might have put Tommy’s picture, which made me realize that only my conscious mind agreed with Murray. I called down to Dean Knaub at Rockefeller, but he said the housekeeping crews hadn’t turned in anything else that might have belonged to Leydon, either pictures or news clippings or pill bottles. He even trundled up to the balcony to see if she might have stuck something in a hymnal, but came back empty-handed.

I called Tania Metzger. She didn’t have much time to spare, so I tried to speak fast. I explained to her that I had become Tommy Glover’s legal representative, and had spoken to him yesterday about the day that Leydon showed up in the forensic wing. I gave her as concise a history as I could about Glover’s situation.

“Leydon told him she was a lawyer,” I added, “which of course she was. I know you said she didn’t tell you the name of the person she visited, but did she talk about his story in a general way? I’m wondering how she got to him to begin with. If it was through his mother, how did Netta find her?”

Metzger mulled over what she could say without violating Leydon’s confidentiality rights. “She talked a lot about the law and mental illness, and she used the Internet here to look up Illinois case law on mental incompetence. I thought she was preparing some defense of her own, because she’d also started talking about people spying on her.”

Her voice became tinged with anger. “I thought she was being delusional. Now I see she thought she couldn’t trust me—she thought I knew that her family, or the hospital, had sent this investigator to the hospital! How could I—well, never mind that now. This person, Glover, did you say his name is? I don’t know much about the people in the forensic wing, but if Leydon had encountered his mother, that wouldn’t have been hard, given what a warren this place is, and how easy it is for patients to move around, despite the watch that the staff try to keep on them. On top of which, Leydon is a skilled escape artist; she’s so articulate that she could fool unwary staff members into thinking she had some official role in the hospital. What does Glover’s mother say?”

“She died. Killed by a hit-and-run driver a few days after Leydon was released from Ruhetal.”

“Oh my God, not another death! You don’t think—”

“What, that it had something to do with Leydon talking to her son? I know that life throws up a lot of coincidences, but that’s not one I believe in. I think Netta Glover’s death and Leydon’s fall had everything to do with each other, and probably something to do with Wuchnik’s and Jurgens’s deaths as well.”

“I’m keeping a patient waiting,” Metzger said. “Unless there’s something else—something quick?”

“The photograph that went missing from Tommy Glover’s room. Did Leydon describe it, or describe arguing with Miles Wuchnik about it? Or even bring it back and give it to you? It’s missing and I think it’s a crucial item in sorting out what went on with Glover and Leydon and a whole bunch of other people.”

“I told you she came back speaking about fires, but she didn’t say anything about a picture, at least not that I can remember. She talks—talked—so much that I didn’t always catch everything. I tried to listen for the subtext, since I couldn’t follow her across the surface. She was always showing me newspaper articles, either online or things she’d cut out of the daily paper. She managed to get hold of some paper every day, even though I tried to stop that; I thought reading the news overexcited her.”

She hung up on that note. I took one of Leydon’s printouts and tried to construct a chronology on the back.

The first thing that happened was that Leydon met Netta Glover—somehow—wandering around, the escape artist leaving the ward and roaming the halls at Ruhetal. Leydon heard Netta’s sad story and introduced herself as a lawyer; Netta got permission for Leydon to meet Tommy.

Miles Wuchnik showed up in the same bat cave at the same time. Because he was following Leydon, on her mother’s orders? Or a coincidence? How had Wuchnik become aware of Tommy Glover? If he’d been spying on Leydon, then he knew she was talking to Glover, but what made him bribe Jurgens into taking him to Tommy’s room?

Lawlor did not want anyone looking at Tommy Glover. Because memories of his sister were so painful that they made him cry on-air, or because, like Netta Glover, he knew Tommy was innocent? Which meant he was protecting his sister’s killer.

I felt queasy. Could Lawlor have killed Magda himself? But why? He adored her, and he needed her—that wasn’t just his on-air story but what everyone said who’d known the two as children.

A lot of deaths around Leydon, her social worker had pointed out. But there was also a lot of death around Tommy Glover. Despite what Murray thought, I had to find that damned picture.

I’d looked through Leydon’s car after I’d been to her apartment the first time; I would have remembered a photograph of a group of firemen. I smacked my forehead in annoyance: Leydon’s had been in the shop. It was Sewall’s car she’d driven down to the University of Chicago. His BMW, which he kept in the garage at the building on North Franklin, where Ashford Holdings had their offices.

Rafe knocked on the door as I was getting to my feet; he was ready to leave for the day; was I finished? When he stuck his head into the room and looked around, he was dazzled by the order I’d created, the stack of some dozen recycling bags.

“Leave them there. I’ll get Clarence—the super—to take them out tomorrow.”

We rode down in the elevator together. Rafe was heading up to Rosemont with his two girls to catch a game by the Bandits, Chicago’s women’s pro softball team. The sky was still a heavy gray; more rain was forecast, but perhaps it would hold off for their outing.

I drove down to the Loop and found a street space not too far from Ashford Holdings. In my cutoffs and T-shirt, I didn’t look very professional, but I told the garage attendant I was Faith Ashford’s assistant; she’d sent me down to see if she’d left a document in her husband’s car. The attendant, no doubt remembering the furor over Leydon’s making off with the Beemer two weeks ago, tried calling Sewall to get permission, but fortunately for me, Sewall was in a meeting.

As a compromise, the attendant stood over me while I looked under floor mats and seats and lifted the felt lining in the trunk. Nothing except the usual detritus of human life: parking slips, ticket stubs, seven quarters, which I put in the coin holder. A packet of condoms. Well, Sewall, you naughty Ashford.

Does Faith know you travel with these?
I couldn’t stop myself from scrawling on the back of a parking slip to place on the dashboard next to the packet.

I gave the attendant a five and took off. I’d better wrap this case up soon—the tips I was spreading around town were eating a hole in my bank account.

I got back to my car within seconds of the city tow truck. I’d forgotten to check the rush-hour no-parking sign. Cops were writing tickets and a phalanx of tow trucks was hauling off the guilty, all in one smooth movement; I backed up as the truck operator was about to attach the chains, ignored the goose-honk from the squad car, and darted into traffic, heading for the Dan Ryan Expressway. They wouldn’t bother to chase me in this traffic. V.I., you’re so cool.

I was so cool that I didn’t notice where I was going until I saw the I-57 sign overhead. I was heading south, not north: my unconscious mind had decided to go to Danville, where Iva Wuchnik lived.

48.

THE PURLOINED PHOTO

I
T WAS PAST EIGHT WHEN
I
PULLED UP IN FRONT OF THE
shabby building near the Vermilion River. I let myself into the lobby; I didn’t want to try to have a conversation with Iva through her intercom.

I ran quickly up the three flights of stairs and rapped sharply on her front door. A young man in running clothes, coming out of the apartment across the hall, stopped to stare at me. Perhaps I was the first visitor he’d ever seen at Iva’s place.

“Who’s there?” The door muffled her flat voice so that I could barely make it out.

“V. I. Warshawski, Ms. Wuchnik.”

“I don’t want to talk to you. Go away.”

“I have some exciting news for you: I know who killed your brother.”

The man in the running shorts couldn’t help being interested. Iva opened her door the length of the chain bolt. Her skin looked muddy in the bad light.

“So it is you. Who killed him?”

“Do you want me to bellow it through the door here, where all your neighbors can hear?”

She scowled but began scraping back her array of bolts and chains. As I walked into the musty apartment, the runner reluctantly made his way down the stairs.

Iva shut the door with a bang and faced me just inside the furniture-packed living room. I looked over to the scarred teak cabinet. The books Miles had used for sending her cash were gone. She had moved his photograph in its heavy silver frame to the middle of the cabinet top.

“All right. Who killed Miles?”

“Xavier Jurgens.” I smiled at her brightly.

“Who is that?” she demanded.

“Xavier was the guy who paid cash for the brand-new Camaro. When I was here before, I thought Miles had given him the money for it, but I realized that someone else paid off Xavier for killing your brother.”

Her face puckered in misery, and when she spoke, her voice had thickened with unshed tears. “Why didn’t the police tell me they made an arrest? They said they would tell me if they learned anything, they knew I was Miles’s only close relative.”

I felt ashamed for treating the conversation as a game. “I’m sorry, Ms. Wuchnik, but someone else killed Xavier before the police could get to him.”

“What?” She shook her head, trying to make sense of what I was saying. “Why did you drive down here to tell me this? Why would a complete stranger kill my brother? You’ve made this up, haven’t you?”

“I don’t have any proof, or I’d have taken this story to the police. But Xavier Jurgens is the person who let your brother into Tommy Glover’s room at Ruhetal. Tommy had a picture on his wall, of himself with some firemen. Your brother removed that picture, and it’s because of what it showed that Miles was killed.”

Iva’s eyes turned to her brother’s photograph on the teak cabinet.

“Yes. I’ve come to collect it. He sent it to you, didn’t he, and asked you to hide it for him?”

I walked over to the photograph and undid the clasps at the back of the frame. I had expected Iva to fight me, but she watched me passively, shoulders slumped. When I pulled off the cardboard backing, I didn’t find the photograph I was expecting but a newspaper clipping, yellow and brittle with age.

I unfolded it carefully and saw the faded color shot that had been the pride of Tommy Glover’s life: the Tampier Lake Township volunteer brigade, dirty from a fire they’d just put out, clustered around their truck. The caption read, “Tommy Glover joins Eddie Chez and the rest of the boys for a celebratory photo after battling a blaze at Reinhold’s Garage yesterday afternoon.”

I stared at it. I could just make out a much younger Tommy, arms around a big mongrel dog, both of them grinning ear to ear. I could understand why it mattered so much to Tommy, but not why Leydon or Miles Wuchnik would have cared about it.