Breakdown (51 page)

“Why did I kill Maggie, you fucking useless bitch? Because she had sex with that loser Link. Me. I was the one who loved her. I was who she loved best, she told me that, then I saw them, saw them by the lake. And that idiot retard Tommy saw them, too. Dancing. He said they were dancing, he didn’t know what he was looking at. They were
screwing.”

He was leaning over me, covering me with spittle. Bad to spit on people, but he wouldn’t stop. “I ran off, but I came back later, came back when Link had gone to work and the retard was getting his rocks off at a fire. Maggie was sitting by the lake, smiling—smiling over Link, not me.

“ ‘How could you.’ I was crying, sobbing real tears, can you believe that, over a stupid bitch who lied to me. ‘Oh, Wade, I’m in love with him,’ ” Lawlor mimicked her in a savage falsetto.

“In love with him? She was in love with that stupid loser? And look what’s become of him, never held a job for more than six months, needed the Army just to get him out of bed in the morning. She could have had
me.
I’m the success, I make fifty million a year, she chose the wrong person to play games with.

“I choked her, my God, that felt good, and she made it easy, putting her hands on my arm, ‘Oh, Wade, don’t take it so hard, you’ll find the right girl for you, you’ll see.’

“ ‘But what about me? You always said, you and me against the world, I’ll always love you, Wade, but you were lying, you’re just the whore of Babylon.’ ”

He grabbed my shoulders and shook me in his rage. He could strangle me right now and I couldn’t lift my arms to save myself. I tried kicking but my feet moved clumsily. My slack hand bumped against my pocket. My phone. I had just enough strength to turn it on, but I couldn’t speak loudly enough for anyone who answered to hear a cry for help.

“Tommy,” I managed to croak.

“Don’t cry over him.” Lawlor let me go and dusted his hands. “He’s lucky they didn’t give him a lethal injection back then. I called the cops, I told them they’d find Tommy up to no good at Tampier Lake, and sure enough, there he was, crouched over Maggie’s body, looking at her the way he did, like some useless dreary spectator at the show of life.”

“Wuchik?” I slurred.

“Oh, him. You PIs, you think you’re so smart, you watch too many TV shows. Vern Mulliner knows the pain I feel over my sister’s death, the fact that the state lets that retard live on. He lets me know if anyone like a reporter or a fucking stupid lawyer goes talking to him, like the Ashford bitch did! We were already using Wuchnik to dig up crap on Salanter; when we learned that Ashford’s crazy sister was talking to Tommy, we sent Wuchnik out to put a stop to it. And then he saw the clipping and thought he could put the bite on me. Bite me! The vampire bit back. And you thought you could outsmart me! No one can, you socialist liberals, you’ve been after me for years but you can’t touch me.”

He gave a hyena laugh, the way Tommy had, then suddenly bent and picked me up. I still couldn’t fight, couldn’t move my arms except to pat him, a touch like love, not rage. My head spun, swooped, as he hoisted me, raindrops on my face, he staggered, cursed, wobbled along a path in the dark. Frogs, I could hear them, and crickets, night noises. Water lapping.

He shoved me and I fell hard. Metal across my chest and legs, rocking underneath me. Nothing in my stomach, dry heaves, and then a laugh, metal rocking harder, the world upside down, metal on top, water below.

Hold tight to the rail,
Boom-Boom said
, we go upside down here, cool, it’s the coolest thing ever.

I grabbed the rail, metal cutting into my hands, we were floating through space, so cool, don’t be mad, Mama, we floated like fish in the aquarium.

50.

GONE FISHING

S
TAN
C
HALMERS DROVE TO
T
AMPIER
L
AKE JUST AS THE SKY
was turning pink. A morning on the lake with a rod and line usually cured most of the ills he’d ever suffered, and he badly needed a cure today. Too much unpaid overtime, too many unpaid bills. He’d call in sick at seven, when his shift started.

He walked down to the quay, but didn’t see his boat. When he realized the dock line had been cut, he tried to dial back the rage that swept through him; that was bad for his blood pressure, already high. A day at the lake was supposed to relax you, not give you a stroke.

He started the long hike around the shore, slapping at mosquitoes, swearing under his breath at the garbage-brained, meth-snorting, beer-guzzling jerk who’d done this on the one perfect fishing morning of the month. He caught a bit of luck: he spotted the boat a mere half hour after setting out. It had come aground upside down in a mesh of reeds and high grasses. Stan fought his way through the reeds and lifted the boat up. His plan to row quietly back to where he’d left his gear evaporated when he saw the body of a woman underneath.

51.

V.I.’S LAST CASE

“
I
WANT TO THANK
M
R.
W
EEKES FOR MAKING THIS STUDIO
available for today’s taping of
Chicago Beat.
I want to thank the friends and family of V.I. Warshawski for being present, as well. We know this was a difficult decision for them.”

A woman with a clipboard, who’d identified herself as Deirdre Zhou, paused while the audience turned to gape at the friends and family. Petra Warshawski shrank into her chair as the cameras panned them, but Lotty Herschel held herself upright, looking straight ahead, as if she weren’t there. Max, on Lotty’s left, could feel her trembling, and gently squeezed her hand.

Deirdre Zhou thanked the audience for understanding why the studio inspected their cell phones on their way in. “We tape this, but the show goes out live. We don’t want you tempted to make that one ultra-important call in the middle of the show.”

A little ripple of laughter greeted that.

“We’ll be starting in about five minutes. We debated whether to call the show, ‘V.I.’s Last Case’ or ‘Chicago’s Own Nancy Drew.’ We chose the second title because even though V. I. Warshawski is well known in our city, the show goes out to many other locations where they won’t have heard of her, and we in the production team decided she was very much Chicago’s own girl detective.”

“Vic would just hate that,” Petra burst out. “She can’t—couldn’t stand it when people call grown-up women ‘girls.’ ”

The cameras swung around again to focus on her. Mr. Contreras, sitting next to her, shielded her face with his straw boater. “They’re acting like we’re some kind of zoo exhibit or something,” he said to Lotty and Max. “That Beth Blacksin, the reporter who Cookie gave a million leads to, she even tried to come up to us with a mike when we got here, like we’re a movie or something, not people with real feelings.”

Jake Thibaut, who’d driven him and Petra to the event, patted Mr. Contreras comfortingly on the shoulder, and the older man subsided. His voice had carried through the small space, though, and a number of people turned to look at him, including Wade Lawlor. Lawlor, in his signature checked shirt, had smirked at Lotty when she and Max arrived. She had withdrawn into what Max called her “Princess of Austria” hauteur: Lawlor was vermin whose existence she didn’t acknowledge.

Murray had never before rated Global One’s premier studio space, where Wade Lawlor taped
Wade’s World
in front of a live audience. Lawlor was unhappy at Weekes’s decision to let Murray use the studio, but the head of the news division was adamant:
Chicago’s Own Nancy Drew
was generating ad revenues almost as big as a
Wade’s World
taping. Tickets to the show were gone within five minutes of appearing online.

Weekes stayed on the forty-eighth floor for the show, but most of Global’s other big guns arrived, including their pet Senate candidate and commentator, Helen Kendrick. After looking at Kendrick, resplendent in red, Lotty noticed a pudgy, balding man sitting next to her. Although his round cheeks and turned-up nose made him look like a surprised baby, he had cold, shrewd eyes that Lotty found unnerving. She nudged Max, who—unlike Lotty—followed local news.

“Les Strangwell,” Max scribbled on a piece of paper. “Right-wing kingmaker, Kendrick’s campaign adviser.”

Lawlor’s and Kendrick’s excited supporters leaned across Max and Lotty, hoping for autographs from their stars. Max tried to keep people from stepping on Lotty, but two small older people apparently didn’t exist for the excited fans. Lotty shrank from the fawning fans. She wished she hadn’t agreed to attend.
This is not my method, to make a display, a pretense of feeling. Everything I hate about the current world is present in this vulgarity.
She looked at her watch, wishing the program would start, end, be done.

Murray Ryerson had moved onto the set while she’d looked away. The brashness that usually annoyed her had left him; he seemed withdrawn, uneasy, and while he was going over some details with Zhou, he ran a finger behind his collar button, as if his shirt felt too tight.

Zhou said, “Thirty seconds to live, people.”

The theater lights went down. Zhou stood in the wings, looking into a monitor. She held up a hand, lowering her fingers one at a time, and then the
Chicago Beat
theme song began and Murray half danced to stand in front of a city map. As the opening credits rolled, he touched parts of the map and the city beneath came alive, ballparks, suburban forests, the malls, the beaches along Lake Michigan.

When the music stopped, he put a finger on South Chicago and everyone saw the mills in full operation.

“V. I. Warshawski was born down here amid the fire and water where the country’s great steel mills used to stand. The life and death of the mills, the life and death of her parents, of her beloved cousin, Boom-Boom”—and the Black Hawks hero, grinning, appeared on screen, holding up the Stanley Cup while V.I. joined the team on the ice to pour champagne on his head—“above all, the life and death of communities, of justice, made her who she was. Boom-Boom helped shape her as a street fighter—a pit bull, some called her—but her demand for justice for the least of those among us brought her first to the law, and then to her life’s work as a private detective.

“Her successes were legendary. She and I first worked together twenty years ago; I was part of the famous, now defunct City News Bureau, which used to turn news wannabes into real reporters.”

The audience laughed, then murmured appreciation or gasped as Murray went on to recount some of V.I.’s death-defying escapades: the time she jumped from a crane into the Sanitary Canal, the time she crawled through a burning building to rescue her aunt Elena, the night she was slashed by street gangs, the day she was trapped in the tunnels underneath the Loop, where she’d gone to bring a homeless family to safety.

“Her last case began as so many of her others did, with a call for help from family and friends. It ended in Tampier Lake ten days ago. We may never know what caused a strong swimmer like Warshawski to drown in those waters, but after a break, we’ll uncover the events that led her to that suburban lake in the middle of the night.”

While the commercials ran, the audience noise rose, until Zhou once more called time.

“Brothers and sisters,” Murray said. “We love each other, hate each other, fight, but no one else understands our lives and our histories the way those people we grew up with do. And this is a story of brothers and sisters, of a sister whose mental illness led her from a brilliant legal career to a state mental hospital and the brother who thought she’d disgraced a famous family.”

The camera picked out Sewall Ashford, who frowned ferociously. Lotty recognized his wife sitting next to him—Victoria had introduced them at the opera one night. Lotty knew that Murray had invited them today but was surprised that they’d shown up.

“A different brother and sister were devoted to each other. Miles Wuchnik was a private eye in Chicago. Like V. I. Warshawski, he had a solo practice. Unlike V.I., he supplemented his income with a little blackmail on the side. People hired him to uncover dirty secrets, and then he ferreted out the secrets of his clients. And charged extra to keep those secrets to himself.

“An Illinois politician’s campaign hired Miles to dig up dirt on one of Chicago’s richest men. The candidate’s team hoped they could find some way to pressure Chaim Salanter into dropping his support for Sophy Durango’s Senate campaign.”

A shocked gasp went through the audience. Helen Kendrick looked as though she was going to get to her feet in protest, but Les Strangwell apparently cautioned her to silence. The studio camera left them alone—the crew knew Strangwell appeared on-screen rarely, and only when he had complete control over the situation.

Murray went on to explain how Miles tried to approach Salanter’s granddaughter, and how he started eavesdropping on her text messages by planting a bug in her cell phone.

“There is yet another brother and sister in this story: a lonely pair of suburban teens. The sister took care of a brother three years younger than herself, because their drunk single mother wasn’t up to the job of raising him. When the sister was seventeen, she was murdered, leaving her brother desolate. The killer, a man named Tommy Glover, was judged mentally incompetent and has been spending his days in the Ruhetal State Mental Hospital’s forensic wing.

“The brother went on to have a successful career, but he’s always been bitter that Glover wasn’t executed. He paid a handsome fee to the hospital’s security director to let him know if anyone ever approached Glover: the brother didn’t want a lawyer or a reporter trying to drum up sympathy for a mentally incompetent man who’d spent nearly thirty years behind bars.”

Murray nodded to Zhou, and the big TV screens showed Ruhetal Hospital, and then a stern-looking Vernon Mulliner, locking an Audi convertible and walking up to the front door of a mansion.