Breakdown (5 page)

“Why do their mothers let them come here?” I wondered.

Kira hunched a shoulder. “I suppose they say they’re going off to do good deeds on some poor stupid immigrant family.”

“It’s not like that!” Tyler burst out. “Arielle said we all should say we were going to her place for a sleepover, except her, she told her mother she was going to Nia’s. Then we met over on North Avenue, at the bus stop next to our school, and rode over here.”

I rubbed my eyes. I could picture it all. In fact, when I thought of my own childhood, the exploits I’d committed with my cousin Boom-Boom when my mother thought I was asleep in my attic bed, I could picture it all too well.

“You headed over to the cemetery, all seven of you together, and then Tyler saw the vampire.”

“I didn’t really,” Tyler said.

“No, really you saw a person,” I agreed. “Man or woman?”

“I don’t know. It was just out of the corner of my eye, it was just like a shadow, I can’t talk to the cops, if I do they’ll tell my dad.” Her voice rose in her anguish.

I wondered uneasily about Tyler’s home situation, whether her father was a garden-variety domestic tyrant, or if he was actively violent. I decided to sic Petra on that and keep my focus on what had happened in the cemetery.

“And the dead man—who was he?”

“I don’t know! Don’t keep acting like I killed him or something, I never saw him before.”

I glanced at the clock on the television. It was almost three. If Tyler or Kira knew anything about Miles Wuchnik, the dead detective, my brain wasn’t working well enough to come up with a clever question to pry it out of them. In any event, Arielle and Nia were the driving forces of the group; they had chosen the site. But did they have enough power over the other Carmilla club members to get them to engage in murder?

“What did Arielle and the others say when they left you?” I asked the girls.

“This one girl, Jessie Morgenstern, her dad gives a lot of money to, like, politicians. She said her dad would get someone who works for the mayor to take care of things with the police,” Kira said. “But me and Beata, we can’t talk to the police, our moms could get deported, so Beata, she went back to her place, she just lives two blocks from here. Her mom and mine work at the same hotel.”

“Enough for tonight.” I got up. “Tyler, are your parents really out of town? Where were you going to spend the night?”

“I thought maybe Arielle—or even Nia—but I asked them before they ran off, and they—they were mean, they said I was a coward and a crybaby and they wouldn’t ever talk to me again and they’d see no one at Vina Fields ever did, either—” Tears rolled down the sides of her face.

“She can’t stay here,” Kira said stonily. “Me and Lucy, we share a room, and my mom has a bed, and that’s it.”

“I’ll take her,” Petra said. “Your folks coming back tomorrow, Tyler? I’ll take you home in the afternoon and tell them you were meeting with my book group.”

I blew my cousin a grateful kiss. Before she left, I went over to inspect the place on Tyler’s palm where Arielle had stuck her. There was a small puncture hole, covered with a thin crust of dried blood. I told Petra to clean it with peroxide when they got to her place.

“If it starts swelling, or you find any red blotches on you, you get to a doctor on the instant,” I warned her. “You can make up any story you like for your dad, but you ladies are playing with plague, poking each other with needles like that.”

Petra put her arms around Tyler and led her gently into the night. I stayed behind to tuck Kira into bed, in the room she shared with her little sister. A map of Poland hung between the two beds, with Tarnow circled in red on the southeast side.

The wall above Lucy’s bed was covered with pictures of horses. She had fallen asleep in a nest of toy horses of all sizes and colors. Kira had a poster of the jacket art for
Carmilla, Queen of the Night,
by Boadicea Jones, on her side of the room
.
On it, a raven grew out of the body of a young girl; behind her, just visible in a syrupy palette of browns and greens, were the tusks and gleaming red eyes of a boar.

I waited outside the bedroom door while Kira undressed. I was dozing against the wall when I heard her give a howl of anguish.

“Now what?” I was too tired for a new crisis.

“My phone,” she wailed. “I must’ve dropped it in the cemetery. My mom will be so mad, we can’t afford—”

“I’ll go back tomorrow and look for it,” I promised hastily. “Try not to worry about it now, just get some sleep. You’re sure you don’t need me to stay here until your mother gets back?”

“We always stay by ourselves,” she snuffled, climbing into the narrow bed. “Promise you’ll go look for my phone? Can you make sure the door is locked when you go? The key is on a hook next to the door, so can you just lock it from the outside and push the key under the door?”

I pulled a sheet over her, but left the coverlet folded at the bottom of the bed—a window fan did feeble duty, but it was hot in the room. Lucy, worn out by her own histrionics, slept through her sister’s new crisis.

On my way out, I left the key on its hook, using my picks to turn the deadbolt into place. The rain had cleared, but the moon was setting and the streets were dark. I walked slowly back to my car, wondering again what had brought the girls to the very spot where a man was being murdered. Not just murdered, but pierced through the heart, as if the killer thought he was a vampire. A vampire murder on the spot where the girls were hoping to become shape-shifters. It seemed like a mighty big leap to think that had happened by chance.

4.

CHARMS—OR SOMETHING

A
S
I
WALKED ALONG
C
HICAGO
A
VENUE, A COUPLE COMING
out of a bar tried to offer me a dollar for a cup of coffee. Their gift made me realize just what a bizarre vision I must present—in my running shoes and bedraggled evening gown I was an avatar for homelessness.

I’d started the evening looking like I belonged in a limo, or at least in the grand ballroom at the Valhalla Hotel, which is where I’d been headed. I’ve never been fond of big glitzy events, and you go to the Valhalla only if glitz is your middle name. I especially wasn’t fond of them when they celebrate the life and work of people I despise: in this case, Wade Lawlor.

If you don’t know Lawlor, it’s because you get all your news from microform copies of the Chicago
Daily News.
Local boy made, well, “good” would be putting a values spin on it. Local boy made national superstar was more like it.

Although I tried never to watch the show, you can’t live in Chicago and not know Lawlor’s face—it’s on the sides of buses, on billboards, on the back of the
Herald-Star.
GEN, the Global Entertainment Network, whose lead cable news show Lawlor hosts, often features him on its billboard along the Kennedy Expressway.

Lawlor’s signature is a blue-checked work shirt, open at the throat to show he’s a working man who scorns the suit and tie of an effete liberal journalist. His thick black hair is artfully tousled on-air:
America’s in danger, I don’t have time to comb my hair!

For his anniversary carnival, Lawlor incongruously wore his checked shirt with a dinner jacket, a modern one with square pockets sewn to the jacket front. An American flag picked out in jewels was on the lapel. It had a fancy little ear of corn on top of it, as if to point out that he could afford diamonds and rubies, but he was basically a Midwest hick at heart.

Lawlor was working the room with one of those top-grossing stars whose name and face you keep seeing in
Us
and
People.
My red evening dress is a backless ankle-length number, but the star, whose smile seemed epoxied in place, made me feel overdressed. When Lawlor came over to where I was standing with Murray Ryerson, I tried, discreetly, to see how his date kept her breasts from tumbling out of the front of her dress, since it opened all the way to her waist. More epoxy, I decided, keeping a glass in my right hand and food in my left so that I wouldn’t have to touch Lawlor.

“Hey, Ryerson, thanks for showing up.” Lawlor’s eyes scanned the room behind us, looking for people more worth his attention.

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Murray said with unnecessary heartiness.

Lawlor smirked. “And who’s the talent?”

“V. I. Warshawski,” I said.

“I haven’t seen you before. Out of town?”

“Totally local,” I assured him. “Steel City. And you?”

“What’s ‘Steal City’? The Chicago motto?”

“Very clever, Mr. Lawlor. I’ll have to put that in my blog, how clever you are, and what a thrill to meet you, and so on.”

I kept my voice languid, trying, for Murray’s sake, to keep the venom I felt out of it. Even so, Lawlor’s lips tightened and his eyes narrowed. He put his hand on the star’s elbow and started to guide her away, but she stayed put. Perhaps she didn’t like him any better than I did; perhaps it was her publicist’s idea that she be seen with him on the entertainment sites.

“Are you with GEN?” she asked.

“I’m a private investigator,” I said. “Murray Ryerson and I have worked together on a number of stories.”

Lawlor eyed me in a way that made me long to take his ribs apart. “She your legwoman, Ryerson? Why’d the network give you the one with the body and me the ugliest guy in Chicago?”

“I guess our looks match our results,” I said.

Lawlor frowned; the veneer of charm vanished to expose a startling rage. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Murray knocked my arm hard enough that the wine sloshed over the rim of the glass. We all exclaimed at the mishap, and the star allowed Lawlor to lead her away.

“Why the fuck did you have to say that?” Murray demanded.

“It was just banter, Murray. I didn’t know he was sacred and that you’re not allowed to answer back to his gibes. Is it critical for your career for me to find him and apologize?”

“No, no, don’t!” Murray said. “Your apology might involve black eyes and stuff that would really end my career.”

“And that flag pin—does he have that glued to every garment he owns?” I fumed. “What’s with the ear of corn? Is he showing that he’s the corniest man in America?”

“Where have you been since campaign season started, Vic? That’s Helen Kendrick’s signature—U.S. flag with corn from the heartland. Ethanol is a big chunk of her husband’s family fortune, you know that. And Lawlor is her number-one booster.”

Kendrick was running for Senate. She thought the last time America had been a great country was the day before Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, so it was no surprise that Lawlor backed her campaign.

Various other media and entertainment celebrities drifted by. If I did keep a blog, I’d have written up the number of national figures who felt their careers required them to get freshly Botoxed and painted, and show up in little numbers by Chloé or Vera Wang. I didn’t care about spotting stars of GEN’s reality show
All-American Hero.
What staggered me were the senators and even Supreme Court justices who’d flown in from Washington to see and be seen. That told a sobering tale of how influential Lawlor’s voice was on America’s political scene.

A few minutes later, Harold Weekes, head of GEN’s news division, ambled by. Even though I thought he was the slime on the pond, I smiled, said little or nothing, and even let him leer at my cleavage.

“Keep up the good work, Ryerson!
Chicago Beat
matters to us at Global One, you know.”

I couldn’t help rolling my eyes at that—what a name for the ugliest chunk of glass and steel to go up in Chicago since Trump Tower broke ground.

“I’m happy to hear that, Harold,” Murray said, with an effusiveness that made me wince. “I wanted you to meet Vic here. V. I. Warshawski. She’s one of Chicago’s most skilled criminal investigators.”

Weekes’s brows went up. “Expecting to find murder here?”

“Nope,” I said. “Just the usual graft and corruption, nothing special.”

“Vic has done background work on a lot of my stories,” Murray said hastily. “Last winter’s exposé on war profiteering, for instance.”

Weekes frowned. “I know you thought you had a big scoop there, Ryerson, but it’s always been true that war creates opportunities for the alert.”

I grinned insanely, the little woman ecstatic to be in the presence of power. “For the alert opportunist, I suppose. Other people just have the chance to get their heads blown off.”

There was an uncomfortable silence for a beat, and then Weekes laughed. A smiling woman in a silky red dress, she could be given the benefit of the doubt.

Murray plowed ahead doggedly. “You know the series I’m working on,
Madness in the Midwest
, on the mentally ill, from the streets to state hospitals’ forensic wings—Vic could add a lot of depth to the series.”

Weekes patted Murray’s arm. “We’ll certainly keep that in mind, Ryerson. If your friend has investigative experience we can probably find a role for her.”

Like Lawlor’s a few minutes earlier, Weekes’s eyes were glazed over. Talking to Murray and his friend was his idea of purgatory. I couldn’t really blame him—the feeling was completely mutual.

The governor of Wisconsin came along and tapped Weekes’s arm. The news king moved on.

“Murray, is that why you invited me to this horror show? To help you with some story about mentally ill criminals?” I demanded. “Why didn’t you tell me you had an agenda?”

“You put up such a song and dance about coming at all, I didn’t feel I could go into it with you,” he blazed back.

That much was true. When Murray called last week, asking me to be his date to tonight’s celebration of Lawlor’s tenth anniversary as GEN’s star, I’d said no without thinking.

“I hate Wade Lawlor,” I protested. “I hate his politics, I hate his molassied voice, and I hate his pretense of being a working-class boy. That fake work shirt makes me throw up every time I drive up the Kennedy. I bet the closest he ever got to a day’s hard labor was paying a neighbor to mow his mother’s lawn when he was a kid.”