Dead Certain (31 page)

“Her father arrives in two hours,” I said. “What am I supposed to tell him?”

I stood in the shower and tried to wash away the memory of what had happened. Growing in me like a cancer was a sense of realization, a suspicion bordering on fear, that if I hadn’t met Elliott for dinner, or if we hadn’t lingered in the stairwell, everything would have ended up differently. But what I couldn’t figure out was whether Claudia would still be alive or whether I would have been killed, too.

I closed my eyes but could not get the picture of Claudia’s body out of my head. As the hot water rushed over my body, I ran through the entire clichéd litany of grief. I cried and demanded answers from God and from myself, felt the anger coursing through me at the injustice of what had been done. Claudia, who’d worked so hard to save lives, had had hers taken in an instant.

Someone once said that pain is a teacher who must be understood. But that morning I knew that they were wrong. Pain is pain. Sometimes the best you can do is try to keep it from knocking you flat.

Eventually the wave of emotions passed through me, having run its course. Slowly I forced myself to turn to more practical matters. I washed my hair and tilted my head back and let the soap run down my back. My body felt like it was made of lead, and every action seemed to be an effort of will.

I got out of the shower and turned off the taps, drying myself on the pristine hotel towels that Elliott had managed to procure for me. I dressed slowly, like an invalid, in the black pantsuit that Elliott had brought, forcing myself to focus on the details—zippers, snaps, buttons. Then I dug a hairbrush out of my purse along with a big clip, which I used to pin up my still-wet hair. I didn’t bother with any makeup. Under the circumstances, what would be the point?

I found Elliott in the kitchen, sitting at the antique farm table, making notes on a legal pad.

I sat down across from Elliott, feeling drained from the effort of getting dressed and making the trip from the bedroom. I didn’t know how I was going to make it through this day. Elliott, having anticipated my state of internal disorder, had begun making me a list. On the yellow pad he’d written not just the flight information for Claudia’s father, but the name of a Jewish funeral home that would handle the arrangements for bringing Claudia’s body back to New York. I had never thought of death as a religious event. Somehow after you were dead, I didn’t see how it made a difference. But Claudia’s parents, for all their radicalism, had brought her up in synagogue. I hoped that the care that Elliott had taken over these arrangements might bring them some small comfort.

He and Cheryl had also put together the death notice for the Chicago paper. Cheryl had also called my mother to spare her learning about what had happened on the news and to assure her that I was safe. Mother had called the new apartment while I was in the shower and had a long talk with Elliott.

“She seemed very concerned that what happened might in some way be connected to what’s going on with HCC,” reported Elliott.

For a minute I couldn’t breathe. I felt overwhelmed with the feelings of my adolescence, a powerful mixture of helplessness and rage.

“It’s all about her, isn’t it?” I demanded, unable to control myself. “Claudia is stalked and murdered by her scumbag ex-boyfriend, and my mother is sure it has to somehow be because of her. I really don’t give a shit what she thinks,” I said, my voice spiraling into the unfamiliar registers of hysteria.

“I was talking to Joe this morning, and he’s starting to think that the killer might turn out to not be the boyfriend.”

“Was this before or after he talked to Carlos?” I demanded. “Does Carlos have an alibi?“

“I have no idea. I think what’s bothering Blades is the lack of overkill.”

“What?”

“Usually when a stalker kills his victim, it’s the culmination of a long string of escalating events. There’s usually a lot of unnecessary violence, slashing, a struggle even—”

“Carlos is a big man. Maybe he just overpowered her.”

“Maybe. Or maybe it’s really a different kind of crime.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but Elliott raised his hand to ask me to hear him out. “Just think about it,” he said. “I’m not saying that it happened, but what if whoever sent your mother that package knew enough about you to know that you would never be deterred by that kind of blackmail? What if they realized that it would take much more to stop you?”

“Are you suggesting that HCC had Claudia killed in order to somehow get to me, to make me drop the fight against them?”

“Listen,” said Elliott, taking my hands in his across the table. “I don’t know who killed Claudia, and I sure as hell don’t know why. But I do know that her death has accomplished what no threats could have done.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“In your eyes it’s suddenly made the whole thing seem unimportant.”

Before I left for the airport, Elliott sat me down and made me agree to take the Browning. None of my arguments—not even the fact that my carrying it, concealed without a permit, was a felony—deterred him. Indeed, he refused to let me leave the table until I not only agreed to take it but also showed him that I knew how to use it. I couldn’t believe that whoever had killed Claudia had reduced me to this—sitting at my own kitchen table, with a 9mm semiautomatic pistol in my hand.

CHAPTER 23

When I got to O’Hare, I made my way to the United terminal and pulled up to the curb at the departures level. The act of finding a parking space was completely beyond me, so I flagged down a skycap, gave him a hundred bucks, and asked him to keep on eye on my car. As I put my wallet back in my purse I felt the pistol, heavy as a hammer among the rest of the litter in my bag. Uncertain of what to do about it, I threw my purse under the front seat. As I closed the car door I said a silent prayer of thanks that I hadn’t forgotten about it and ended up answering questions in the airport security office as a prelude to my arrest.

Inside the terminal I sleepwalked down the concourse, jostled by the passing crowds. Most days I was a part of the hurrying hoard, impatient and focused on my destination. But today my grief seemed to not just set me apart, but also to have made everything seem foreign and somehow sinister. I searched the faces of the passersby and the people whose job it was to serve slices of pizza and hamburgers at eight o’clock in the morning. How many of them were capable of violence? How many of murder?

I found the gate and waited, watching for Claudia’s father. Morton Stein had been a lion in his day, a founding member of Philosophers for Justice, a radical academic organization that had challenged the morality of the war in Vietnam and later embraced a number of other causes in the name of social justice. Claudia’s mother, also a philosophy professor, was a friend of Betty Friedan’s and an outspoken proponent of the feminist movement. While I’d been hanging out at the country club, Claudia had been marching against nuclear power and boycotting grapes.

I remembered that Elliott had said that Mrs. Stein was taking it hard. I couldn’t imagine any other way to take it. How could two people who had devoted themselves to advocating social justice ever even begin to come to terms with the senseless murder of their only child? How could anyone?

Professor Stein was one of the last people off the airplane. For a minute I almost didn’t recognize him, he seemed so much older than the last time I’d seen him. It was a shock to realize that it wasn’t the passage of time that had wrought the change, but rather grief that seemed to have shrunken him.

He was a small man, like his daughter, with a face that had delighted campus cartoonists for generations. His eyebrows were as thick as caterpillars, and his hair, receding from a high forehead, was white and long enough to reach his collar. But today he just looked like a beaten old man, a refugee from someplace terrible. He’d also developed a new habit overnight, an involuntary shaking of the head, as if mentally he was arguing against some terrible tide that only he could understand. I stepped up and hugged him.

He didn’t have any luggage, just a single black duffel that he carried on a strap over his shoulder. As we made our way slowly down the concourse the silence between us was excruciating. Unlike Claudia, her father and I both made our livings from our words and from our wits. Somehow tragedy had robbed us of our gifts.

As we took the escalators up to the relative quiet of the ticketing level I did my best to explain the arrangements that had been made so far. I don’t know if he actually heard me. His wife, he explained, was too devastated to make the trip and was in bed under a doctor’s care.

The Jaguar was where I’d left it. The skycap gave me back the keys, and I opened the trunk to put in Professor Stein’s bag. For a minute I just stood staring at the box of patient files from Prescott Memorial. They were sitting right there, exactly where I’d left them, last night or a thousand years ago, whenever I’d brought the box home to return them to Claudia.

I laid Professor Stein’s bag beside it, curious to find that it was heavy. As I slammed the trunk on top of it I couldn’t help but wonder what it was that you packed when you went to fetch your daughter’s corpse.

Professor Stein said he wanted to go back to Hyde Park and see the apartment. He explained that his wife had made him promise that he would choose the clothing that Claudia would be buried in. Inside I cringed, imagining his pain at going through her things, but I realized that he also might need to visit the place where she had been killed, to see it for himself so that he could understand that she was really gone.

“So,” he said after I’d retrieved my purse from under the seat and we’d pulled away from the curb, “do they know who did this terrible thing?”

“The police think she may have surprised a burglar.”

“But you don’t think so,” he replied. I remembered what Claudia had once said about her father, that he was the most intuitive man on the face of the earth.

“It’s too early to say,” I answered. “We have to give the police a chance to do their job. One of the homicide detectives that is investigating the case is a man I know, very bright, a graduate of Princeton,” I added, knowing that to an Ivy League professor that would mean something. “I honestly believe he won’t rest until he finds out what happened to Claudia and brings whoever is responsible to justice.”

“Justice,” sniffed Morton Stein, “now there’s a relative term. Of my entire family I am the only Holocaust survivor. Everyone else was lost, killed in the camps. I grew up in Brooklyn with a woman who I called Nana, but actually she’s no relation. She was just another survivor from the camps who’d promised my mother that she would take care of me.

“Even though we never talked about it much at home, I think Nana used to tell Claudia stories about the war. I think that was part of what made Claudia choose a career in medicine. She wanted her life to be a force for good.”

“She did,” I said. “Even though her life was cut short, I know she made a difference. You know, for as long as we’d been friends, I’d never really seen Claudia at work before a couple of nights ago. A client of mine had a heart attack just a few miles from Prescott Memorial, and I brought him into the emergency room. It just so happened to be a night that Claudia was taking trauma call. I mean, I drove a dead man to Prescott Memorial Hospital, and Claudia brought him back to life. There have to be hundreds of people that she saved, people that ended up being able to walk out of the hospital.”

“And then just like that she’s gone,” her father said angrily. “Some animal breaks into her apartment looking for something he can pawn for drugs and takes her away from the world forever.” He frowned. “I used to believe that the death penalty was a barbarous perversion of the power of the state. Now... now I would like to kill whoever did this to my daughter, with my bare hands. I can’t stand the idea of him breathing air, eating food, enjoying the luxury of an uninterrupted night’s sleep, while my daughter lies there cold and dead.”

I parked behind the apartment in the space reserved for one of the neighbors, a physicist who worked at the university’s facility in Argonne. Under the circumstances I didn’t think he’d mind. Beside us was Claudia’s car, a nine-year-old Honda Civic, just one more loose end that would somehow have to be dealt with.

As I got out of the car I felt suddenly self-conscious, as if there were people watching me from every window. Even in a crime-ridden neighborhood like Hyde Park, murder is not an everyday occurrence. The interest of the neighbors would be intense. It made me feel vulnerable and strangely exposed.

I went around to help Professor Stein out of the car and led him through the narrow passageway, no more than three feet wide, that ran between our building and the one directly to the north. I didn’t want him to go in the back way. Besides, I needed the buffer of more time before I made my way into the part of the house where Claudia had died.

Elliott’s operative was an off-duty FBI agent named Cecilia Roth, who’d spent the night standing guard in the sunporch of the apartment. She was young but carried herself with the kind of self-confidence that comes from being not just physically fit but heavily armed. Who knows, I thought to myself, maybe Elliott has a thing for girls with guns?

After we introduced ourselves, she made herself scarce. She said she was running out to get something to eat, and I believed her. I knew that a person could easily starve to death on what there was to eat inside the apartment.