Breakdown (45 page)

I’d pleaded incompetence or insanity only a few times in my stint as a public defender, even though a huge proportion of offenders are mentally ill, or addicted to drugs—the two often go together—or can’t understand the crimes they’d allegedly committed. Anyone working in public-aid law has seen more than their share of perpetrators with competency issues, and if the system had worked well, I would have mounted that defense more often.

Unfortunately, incompetent inmates become stateless and defenseless. Letting your client be deemed unfit for trial is like condemning him to a horrible purgatory. If your client never stands trial, he’s never sentenced. Doctors, not a court, decide whether he ever becomes fit enough to stand. If he’s never tried, it’s a tribunal, not a judge, that decides whether he can be released. And most of those judged mentally incompetent come from families without the education or resources to lobby for a tribunal hearing.

I opened the results file. No one was at Ruhetal because of arson-related crimes, but the DOC database gives information only at the highest level. There were plenty of murders, attempted murders, aggravated assaults, assaults with attempted murder—any of those could have been caused by arson.

I went slowly through the Ruhetal list but didn’t find anyone I’d represented. Perhaps I could pick someone at random and see if they or their families would appoint me as a lawyer. The state says that a lawyer in good standing can call any inmate and offer to represent them, and the hospital has to let you in.

There were three inmates who’d been at Ruhetal so long that they predated the automation of case reports—the case-file system didn’t include the crime they’d been arrested for. One of the names sounded vaguely familiar—Tommy Glover. Google gave back twelve million results when I asked it.

The court records didn’t tell me what Glover had done, just that he’d been sent to Ruhetal twenty-seven years ago. I went into Lexis to do a news search but didn’t turn up anything. There was no way to get access to arrest reports—even if the arresting force had kept them after all these years, they’re not available to the public eye in any shape or form.

I’d been hunched over my laptop for more than two hours and my neck and shoulders were too sore to continue. I took the dogs to the lake, where the three of us swam a half mile between the buoys. When I got home, I needed a nap more than ever.
Sleep is just a craving, I told myself. Distract yourself and the craving will diminish.

I drove to my office as a distraction so I could go through my complete case file on the vampire killing. I found the reference by accident, after sifting through all notes and documents I’d collected during the past two weeks.

In desperation, I pulled out the clippings I’d removed from Leydon’s Hermès bag the day she fell at Rockefeller. Most were about the Fukushima reactor or on nutrition, but she’d also kept a story on the death of Netta Glover in a hit-and-run accident.

Two days before Wuchnik’s murder, Netta Glover had been walking from her suburban bus stop to her home in Tampier Lake Township when she was struck by a car and killed. It was nine at night and no one had seen the incident, but a man walking his dog had come upon her, probably within minutes of the accident. He’d called 911 but by the time an ambulance arrived she was already dead. So far, no one had come forward to ID the car that had hit her.

When I looked up the story online, it didn’t mention her family, just that she had been on her way home from her job as a nurse’s aide in a neighboring suburb, that the road was badly lit, so a driver going too fast could well have swerved onto the sidewalk, and that services would be held at the Open Tabernacle Church in Tampier Lake Township, where Netta had worshipped for many years. The Net couldn’t tell me anything else about her; people like Netta Glover don’t leave a trail behind, not even on the World Wide Web.

Leydon had thought Netta’s death was important enough that she’d cut out the story. I suppressed the thought that she’d also clipped stories about the goji berry. Maybe a trip to the Open Tabernacle Church was in order. I combed my hair and tried to smooth the wrinkles out of my cargo pants.

For once, I hit the tollways and expressways when everyone else was at work or the beach or something: the fifty miles out to Tampier Lake Township took just an hour. The Open Tabernacle Church, on Slough Road, also proved easy to find. Even a tired, bewildered detective is lucky every now and then.

The message in the sign box in front of the modern brick building surprised me: “Wherever you are on life’s journey, the Open Tabernacle community welcomes you. We learn from your journey as we hope you learn from ours.”

My prejudices constantly catch me up: from the church’s name, and Netta Glover’s occupation, I’d assumed that this would be a storefront, fundamentalist church. Instead, as a list of principles posted inside the narthex door stated, they were an open and affirming community, embracing anyone, regardless of race, creed, sex, or sexual orientation. Beneath that earnest welcome was a staff listing: the pastor, Al Ordonez, a Christian ed director, a secretary, Doris Kaitano, and a music director.

The pastor wasn’t in the building but a woman in her sixties, presumably Doris Kaitano, was in the parish office, creating the bulletins for Sunday’s service. She wasn’t happy at being interrupted—“I’m here on my own. Can you come back?”—but when I introduced myself, and explained that I was hoping to learn something about Netta Glover, her expression softened. Slightly.

“If you could wait for Pastor Ordonez it would be better. Her death was a sad one, but I don’t really—”

“I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “Can you answer one question for me? Is she related to anyone named Tommy?”

“Tommy? You honestly don’t know? That’s her son. Goodness! And what he will do—Al—Pastor Ordonez—has explained to Tommy that his mother is with Jesus, but we’re not sure he understands.”

“He’s at Ruhetal, right?”

“Yes. It was all long before my time. People say he killed that poor girl, but he’s mentally deficient and they finally decided he wasn’t competent to plead and put him in the mental hospital. Netta says—used to say—it’s why she joined our church—her old church, they told her it was God’s will, that she should accept the burdens that He was placing on her and not fight against them so hard. She always said Tommy couldn’t have killed the girl, and even though the evidence was against him, of course a mother should stand up for her son.”

“She tried to get a tribunal hearing for him?” I asked, trying to figure out the narrative.

Ms. Kaitano was so caught up in her story that she’d forgotten how harassed she was, there on her own and all. “Netta did hire a lawyer, but the law fees just about ate her alive, she’s still paying that old bill. She worked two jobs, bad jobs, nurse’s aide and clerking at Buy-Smart, because she had to keep paying the damn—darned—lawyers, even though they never did anything for her. She even had to sell her car to pay those bills! Which is how she got killed, poor soul. Getting up to Downers Grove to see Tommy, that was a public-transportation nightmare. We have people who volunteered to drive her once a month, but they didn’t always come through for her. It might have been easier if she’d sold her place and moved up near to the hospital, but it’s a little bit of a house that she wouldn’t get anything for, and even one bedroom up in Downers Grove would’ve cost her a fortune.”

“Did Netta talk to you about any of the other patients she met up at the hospital?” I ventured. “A woman in the regular part of the complex, for instance, who was a lawyer.”

Ms. Kaitano nodded slowly. “I forgot about that, but Netta did say there was a lady who offered to talk to Tommy, maybe put together a defense for him. A lawyer who offered to do it for nothing. I told Netta not to trust her, because in the first place, what lawyer works for nothing, and in the second, if the lady was a patient, it could all be a delusion. But Netta was so glad to find someone interested after all this time that she went ahead with it, at least, I think she did, but maybe nothing came of it, because she never mentioned it afterwards.”

“Leydon Ashford, was that the lawyer’s name?”

Ms. Kaitano threw up her hands. “I sit here all day long listening to a million stories. If Al—Pastor Ordonez—is out people think I’m ordained or something, with the time to let them chew my ear off. If Netta said the name, I wouldn’t remember anymore.”

“Right,” I smiled. “I know you’re overworked and I’m sorry to take up this much of your time, but one last thing: the murder Tommy was accused of—did it have anything to do with arson?”

“Arson? Good grief, no. Completely the opposite—it was water, drowning. You mean you don’t know? They said Tommy killed Wade Lawlor’s sister. His older sister, Magda, that Tommy drowned her right here in Tampier Lake.”

44.

NEIGHBORHOOD GOSSIP

“
A
RE YOU ALL RIGHT, DEAR?”
D
ORIS
K
AITANO HAD GOTTEN
up from her desk, was offering me water, wondering if I needed to lie down.

“I’m fine. Just an ignorant idiot.” I heard myself laugh wildly but tried to control it when I saw how alarmed Ms. Kaitano was looking. “He trumpeted his sister’s death in my face, but then he attacked my mother so that I paid attention to the attack, not to the rest of his text. It’s his best technique, it’s how he keeps people like Salanter or Sophy Durango off balance, isn’t it?”

“I think I should call someone. Is there anyone who can come get you?” Ms. Kaitano backed away from me uneasily, her hand hovering over the phone.

“No, no. I’m gone, don’t worry.” I thanked her for her time, her trouble, her information, babbling like Leydon at her most manic, sliding out the church door to sit in my car.

In death they were not divided.
Not Iva and Miles Wuchnik. Not even Leydon and Sewall Ashford. Magda and Wade Lawlor.

After a time, my head cleared. When Kaitano revealed that it was Wade’s sister’s killer Leydon had been visiting, my brain had jumped off a cliff. I hated Lawlor so much that I’d assumed I’d found the thread that unraveled the whole tapestry, but it wasn’t that simple. Lawlor didn’t try to keep his sister’s death a secret: he wept like a lachrymose walrus every time he mentioned her on his broadcasts. And he didn’t keep Tommy Glover a secret, either. He’d referred to him obliquely as one of the “underdogs” I spent my time supporting. He would have killed Tommy himself if he’d known he wouldn’t get the death penalty, Lawlor had said on-air.

But. But. Wuchnik and Leydon had both been in the locked wing where Tommy Glover was housed. What had they unearthed?

If I was right that someone had paid Jurgens fifteen grand to kill Wuchnik, well, Wade Lawlor could peel off those Ben Franklins as if he were scraping carrots and not notice he’d spent them. But why would he want Wuchnik dead? My big breakthrough was beginning to look like more of the same confusion I’d been feeling ever since I went into that abandoned cemetery for the first time.

I wanted to see Tommy Glover, but I needed to take this one step at a time. Leydon had come back from the locked wing obsessed by fire, not water. I needed the facts on Magda Lawlor’s death before I did anything else.

The Tampier Lake Township Library lay a few blocks from the church. They had plenty of documents about the town and its history, with a special drawer devoted to their most illustrious native son, Wade, but nothing on the murder, just a few references to the tragic loss of his sister. Tampier Lake had never had its own newspaper. Their news was tucked into the larger
Southwest Gazette.
Between the
Gazette’s
microform copies and some of the subscription databases I called up from my laptop, I got what information was available.

On July 6, twenty-seven years ago, Magda Lawlor’s dead body had been found floating in Lake Tampier in the far western suburbs. There wasn’t much beyond that. Twenty-seven years ago, Wade Lawlor had been fourteen, not a national television celebrity. The twenty-four-hour news cycle lay in the future, so a suburban teen’s death didn’t make many waves, even a beautiful suburban teen.

Two days later, Tommy Glover had been arrested. The day of the murder, Magda’s boyfriend had found Tommy at the lake, watching her body from the shore. The boyfriend said Tommy had a history of trailing around after her. Nothing was said about a sexual assault, about whether Magda had tried to fight off Tommy. The one piece of forensic evidence the paper reported was that Magda had been strangled before she was put into the water.

I couldn’t find out anything about the legal process that had landed Glover in Ruhetal’s locked wing. There was no record of who had evaluated him, how his incompetency had been determined, or whether his mother had any reason other than her love to proclaim his innocence.

The time had come to abandon the World Wide Web and do some legwork. I started with the people next door to Wade Lawlor’s childhood home, a run-down ranch whose current occupants were a few decades behind on painting and weeding. No one was home on one side, but on the other, a neighbor, now in her eighties, could tell me what she’d been barbecuing for dinner when her youngest son had raced home from a pickup baseball game with the news. After getting what I could from her, I tracked down the woman who’d been the high school librarian, who told me how the kids had put up a photomontage in Magda’s memory when school started that year.

I spoke with the mother of Magda’s boyfriend. Jackie Beringer was working in her garden, when I stopped by. She didn’t question why I was coming around to ask about the old murder: it had loomed so large in the lives of the people in Tampier Lake Township that everyone I talked to assumed the whole world knew and cared about Magda Lawlor’s death.

“Oh, her death hit Link—Lincoln, my boy—so hard, it scarred him for years. He joined the Army, but after that he couldn’t settle down. He finally married three years ago, a nice enough lady, but they live down in Texas and I don’t know if they’ll ever have kids, it’s as if seeing Maggie—that’s what we all called her, not Magda—get killed made him think it was too dangerous to bring a child into this world.”