Breakdown (29 page)

She dropped the glass she’d been about to put on the counter next to me. “Oh! I always was the clumsy one in the family, Mother said that a thousand times if she said it once.”

“Let me.” I slid off the stool and squatted to pick the pieces of glass out of the mass of brownish ice.

“These glasses, Mother got them as a wedding present. I shouldn’t have been using them for everyday.”

“I know,” I said sympathetically. “I’ve destroyed two of the wineglasses my mother carried with her from Italy, and I think a piece of my heart breaks off every time I lose one of them. No matter how often you tell yourself that accidents happen. Like just now, I shouldn’t have sprung that information about your brother on you.”

“What information?” She tried to laugh but she wasn’t good at it.

“How generous Miles was. I know he gave a Camaro to a complete stranger, for instance. How many people would do that?” I didn’t actually believe Miles had given Xavier the money for the Camaro, but I had to find some wedge to pry information out of Iva Wuchnik.

“Miles gave—a Camaro is a sports car, right?”

“A kind of baby Corvette. Worth about twenty-five thousand. I’m wondering where Miles got that kind of money.” I stood, my hands full of shards.

“He was a brilliant investigator, brilliant!” Her voice thickened with emotion.

“Yes, I’m sure he was,” I said sycophantically. “He had dozens of clients; I’ve seen his log just for the last three months. Where is the garbage can, by the way?”

“Oh! Oh, thank you, sorry, I wasn’t focusing.” She opened the door under the sink and pulled out a garbage can filled with the empty microwave pans for frozen dinners.

I dumped in the glass shards and pulled a length of paper towel from a roll above the sink to blot up the mess. It was so much easier a way to consume instant tea than drinking it.

“He talked to you about his cases, didn’t he?” I suggested. “None of your other brothers paid as much attention to you as Miles, did they?”

“You did know him, didn’t you? He must have told you that, because no one outside the family would have known that.”

“I didn’t know him personally, but he talked about you a lot to a friend of mine.” When I was a child, you were supposed to cross your fingers if you were telling a lie: that meant, sorry, this doesn’t count as a sin. My fingers were full of wet paper towel and the remaining slivers of glass I’d found; I couldn’t cross them.

“Did he ever mention my friend to you?” I continued. “Leydon? Leydon Ashford? He met her at a case that took him to a big mental hospital outside Chicago.”

She frowned over the name. “You mean Ruhetal? He told me he was going out there, but he never mentioned that person’s name. Miles said it was the biggest case of his career and if it turned out the way he thought, I’d never have to work again. Not that I’d know what else to do with my time; I sometimes wonder what I’ll do if I have to retire, but Miles said he’d take me to Europe, take me to the town in Poland where our grandparents came from, go to London, all those places you see on TV.” She started pleating her fingers again, pushing her thumbs against the palms.

“Did he give you any hint that the case was dangerous?” I dropped my load into the garbage can and rinsed my hands under the tap. I’d managed to slice a finger open. Shedding blood two days in a row on this investigation. Not a trend I wanted to continue.

Iva’s eyes grew round in her square face. “You mean one of the inmates killed him?”

“I don’t think so. He died fifty miles from the hospital and there’s no suggestion that any of the patients was involved. But he wanted to go into the wing where the criminals are housed, and that’s a risky place to be. Did he tell you why?”

I eyed her surreptitiously as I wrapped a strip of paper towel around my bleeding finger, but her worried frown and head shake seemed genuine. I returned to one of her earlier comments.

“When Miles said you could retire, was he imagining that the two of you would live together?”

“We didn’t talk about that, because he has—had—his work in Chicago and I have a job here. Anyway, I moved in here when Mother passed.”

“Your mother’s house was too big for one person?” I asked, even though I sort of knew the answer.

“Sam and Pierce—my two other brothers—they made us sell the house after the funeral. Sam, he moved to Indianapolis, and Pierce went down to Louisville. They never even helped out when Mother needed nurses round the clock, even though they both have good jobs. You wouldn’t believe the medical bills, almost a hundred thousand and Medicare wouldn’t cover any of it. Anyway, Sam and Pierce, they said we had to sell the house, the place our parents bought back in 1958, they didn’t care for one second about sentimental value, let alone where was
I
going to live?

“Miles said I ought to get to keep the house, seeing as how I looked after Mother and Daddy and everything, but the other two wouldn’t give one nickel to help with the bills. Their wives, they’re just as bad.”

Iva Wuchnik paused, her jaws working, all the grievances of the last few years welling up as if they had happened yesterday.

I murmured something sympathetic, to keep the spigot flowing, while I tried hard to think what had scared her into dropping the tea glass. It was when I’d said her brother was generous, but before I mentioned the Camaro. Maybe she resented his bestowing that much money on a stranger, but it was the comment about Miles’s generosity that upset her. She was afraid I knew something particular about her brother’s money. The question was how to ferret it out.

“I’m trying to follow up on Miles’s open cases,” I said. “Did the police tell you someone had broken into his home and stolen all his papers, his computers, everything?”

She clutched involuntarily at her throat. “No.” She mouthed the word, cleared her throat, said it again in a harsh croak. “Everything? Who—was it—that means they know—they want—”

“Who will know what, Ms. Wuchnik?” I said gently when she stopped mid-dither. “You think the people who killed Miles may come after you?”

She gave another of her unconvincing laughs. “That’s ridiculous, when I don’t know who killed him myself.”

“He was sending you money, though.” I spoke with the kind of certainty we learned in the Public Defender’s Office:
I know you were holding the gun for your homey. Better tell me now before we’re in front of the judge.

“How did—who did he tell? Your friend with the weird name?”

I smiled enigmatically. “He sent you cash. But did he tell you where he got it?”

“He—he thought it was better for me if I didn’t know. Is that why he was killed?”

“I don’t know why he was killed, but I’m trying to find out. How did he send you the money?”

Her eyes darted toward the front room and then quickly fell to her hands. “Your tea, I never made you a fresh glass of tea, and you did all that work cleaning up after me.”

Twenty questions. Miles sent his sister cash. And he sent it to her via something in the living room, and—the image of the dismembered book in Miles Wuchnik’s kitchen garbage popped into my head. I’d thought the intruder in his home had slashed a book to shreds, but it was Wuchnik himself, carving books like a pumpkin.

29.

TALKING TO A SPECIAL SISTER

I
SLID OFF THE BAR STOOL AND RETURNED TO THE FRONT
room. The old books that Iva had stacked on the teak storage cabinet made up one of those motley collections you see at garage sales.
A Girl of the Limberlost, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Ramona.

While Iva twittered nervously behind me, I started flipping through them. The
Better Homes and Gardens Junior Cookbook
held more than two hundred dollars in twenties and fifties. An old twenty was stuck inside
Daddy-Long-Legs
but
Sanders of the River
was as dry as a dead riverbed.

I closed the books and put them back on the sideboard. “I don’t care about the money, Ms. Wuchnik. I mean, I don’t care if you give it to the Humane Society or use it for a trip to Poland. But I’d like to know where your brother got it.”

“He didn’t steal it!” Her square cheeks turned a blotchy mahogany.

“I’m not suggesting he did. But you must have wondered; you surely asked him when he started sending you hollowed-out books full of money.”

“I don’t know where he got it, but he told me he was working hard, harder than he’d ever worked in the past. He wanted to quit, and there wasn’t enough in his 401K for him to retire, so he was taking extra jobs. If people wanted to pay him in cash, was that a crime?”

Only if he didn’t report it, but I kept that to myself—I didn’t want to get onto a side track about income taxes. “So you put it in a bank account to keep for him?”

“What I do with it is none of your business.”

“You’re right, you’re right.” I held up my hands, surrender mode. “My business is to try to figure out who killed Miles, who pounded on his chest hard enough to split the ribs and reach his heart. I found him, as I told you, and his blood was still warm.”

Her lips quivered. “That’s not right, that’s not fair, to come into my home and describe my own brother’s body to me like that.”

“It was even harder to be there with him,” I said. “What I’m trying to find out is who he’d made so angry that they ambushed and killed him.”

“They said on TV it was the black woman, the one who wants to be Senator. They said on TV she was having an affair with him.”

So Iva was one of Wade Lawlor’s legion of fans. I sat on the sectional couch. The aqua cushion gave a small poof, air escaping, and with it, a cloud of dust that made me sneeze.

“Do you believe that?” I asked, trying to keep contempt out of my voice. “Did Miles ever give any sign to you that he was having an affair with anyone?”

“If he thought it would hurt my feelings to hear it, he might not say.” She spoke to the floor, her voice thick with shame, as if there were something wrong with her for being hurt by her brother’s sex life.

“He cared more about you than anyone. Everyone I’ve talked to who knew him says that.” Okay, ‘everyone’ was just Wuchnik’s ex-wife, but she still counted. “Aren’t you the one he sent his money to? Aren’t you the one he promised to help make famous? Not Dr. Durango, or Helen Kendrick. But his sister.”

I was afraid I was laying it on with too heavy a trowel, but Iva Wuchnik brightened. She even sat down, across from the couch on one of the old armchairs, unleashing another cloud of dust.

“I’m thinking that one of these cases your brother was working on so hard got him killed. And I’m especially interested in his trips to the Ruhetal Mental Hospital. He somehow made it into the locked wing there, which is just one sign of how skilled he was as an investigator—I’d love to know how he managed it.”

Iva agreed that Miles was way smarter than anyone gave him credit for, but she couldn’t shed any light, either on how he got into the locked ward or on who he was trying to see there.

She added, darting a glance at his photograph, “He said he couldn’t tell me anything because it wasn’t safe, if someone was listening in on his phone calls.”

“He knew a lot about that, didn’t he?” Sandra, the ex-wife, had talked about his eavesdropping. “Detectives have to employ a lot of methods that ordinary citizens can’t, and your brother was an expert on electronic eavesdropping, so he’d know he had to be careful.”

She nodded cautiously, not sure where I was going.

“Did he ever talk to you about his techniques? Some of that equipment isn’t just expensive, it’s hard to get access to it.”

She frowned. “Were you talking to Sandra? She totally did not support Miles’s work, or understand it, and he finally had to leave her because of it. But if you’re on her side—”

“The only side I’m on is finding Miles’s killer,” I interrupted before she worked herself up into enough anger to throw me out. “It’s just—devices to intercept cell-phone calls, if they’re really effective, they cost thousands of dollars, and I wondered if they were something your brother ever discussed.”

“Miles never talked about his methods with me, but he got results.”

“Would he call you when he was getting ready to send you another book?”

“E-mail,” she muttered to her hands.

“Could I see how he phrased the messages?” I was scraping past the bottom of the barrel into open air.

Iva communed about it with her hands, plaiting her long, slim fingers together again. She seemed torn between wanting to show me that her brother trusted her and wanting to tell me to mind my own business, but she finally took me to her bedroom, where her computer sat. This was the one room that was authentically hers, not a storeroom of her parents’ furniture. Drapes with pink peonies, a matching duvet, everything else in white, including a vanity table with a frilled skirt, and a painted white desk.

“He told me to delete them, but I couldn’t bear to, not after he died and they were what I had left of him,” she whispered.

That and the money.

There were eight e-mails from Miles altogether. Iva wouldn’t let me print them, or forward them to my own computer, so I focused on the dates and the headers. The first three were hush-hush, burn before reading, hints of a lucrative new project.

Can’t tell you more, sis, but you will definitely ride to heaven with me when I come into my kingdom. I think I’ve finally found the goose that will lay our golden eggs.

“It was after he sent me that one that he drove down here in person, to tell me about his idea for sending me the money in books,” she said.

“And that would have been about when?”

“May seventeenth. I got in from church and he was waiting for me on the doorstep, with the first book.”

So six cash deliveries in all. I got up from the stool in front of the painted white desk, but there was one more topic I wanted to bring up before I left. “Did he ever mention Chaim Salanter?”