Breakdown (52 page)

“Yes, the state of Illinois pays Mr. Mulliner two hundred thousand dollars a year to look after security at this hospital, but this summer, he bought the house he’s walking into here for five million dollars. He also acquired that beautiful German sports car. And when we looked at his brokerage statements, we saw some amazing activity in them.”

When Murray showed Mulliner’s brokerage statements—obtained in ways that she didn’t want to know—Lotty sat rigid. She didn’t dare look at the men from Global Entertainment behind her, but she heard a sharp whisper—Lawlor to Strangwell?
Where did those come from?
The statements showed pay-ins of hundreds of thousand dollars’ worth of shares in high-flying companies.

“By one of those coincidences that occasionally happen in life,” Murray continued, “the mentally ill sister—the brilliant lawyer Leydon Ashford—met Tommy Glover’s mother when Netta Glover came on one of her frequent visits to her son. Netta claimed that her boy was innocent, but that he’d never had proper legal representation. Leydon, who was still a member of the bar, agreed to take on his case. Two weeks later, Netta Glover was killed in a hit-and-run accident. Coincidence?

“The day Netta died, Leydon was released from Ruhetal; she was desperately trying to get in touch with her old law school buddy V. I. Warshawski to tell her about Tommy, when someone pushed her from the balcony in Rockefeller Chapel.

“In the last few days, Leydon recovered enough from her injuries to tell me what she learned in the locked wing; I’ll share that with you when we come back.”

The murmur through the audience this time was one of shock but also expectation; Lotty heard Lawlor say, “Sewall told me she’d never recover! Why doesn’t someone pull the plug on this damned farce of a show?” and Strangwell reply, “Calm down, Lawlor. Don’t turn a match into a forest fire. I’ll just make sure Harold is watching upstairs.”

As the show broke for another five minutes of commercials, Lotty saw Strangwell hurry from the studio. She didn’t know if Murray also saw him go—he spent the break going over notes with Zhou. When the cameras started rolling again, Murray continued.

“When Leydon Ashford went to see Tommy Glover, Mulliner moved smoothly into action. He let the grieving brother know a lawyer was calling on his sister’s killer. The brother complained to Leydon Ashford’s family and they said, ‘We’re already working with a private investigator who’s digging up dirt on Chaim Salanter for us; we’ll get him to go out to Ruhetal and put a stop to Leydon. She doesn’t listen to us, but a PI can be ruthless if he has to.’ ”

Lotty heard Faith Ashford’s shocked outcry, quickly suppressed by her husband.

“And lo and behold, when Miles Wuchnik went into that locked wing, he found a picture, a photograph, that had also interested Leydon. Because this photograph suggested that maybe Tommy Glover hadn’t been a killer after all.” Murray made a suitable dramatic pause.

“And now Miles made a huge mistake. He stole the photograph from Tommy and mailed it to his own beloved sister, and then he tried to blackmail the man who he thought might be the real killer. Well, a guy who can strangle a woman and dump her body into a lake, and then let a mentally deficient man go to prison for it—a man like that knows how to deal with blackmailers.

“Our killer knew from Miles Wuchnik that Chaim Salanter’s granddaughter was a big fan of that popular series of fantasy books,
Carmilla, Queen of the Night.
Wuchnik, eavesdropping on the girls through the bugs he’d planted in their cell phones, knew they were going to an abandoned cemetery for a late-night ritual to act out the lives of their favorite characters.”

Murray paused while footage ran on the screens of the initiation ceremony. One of the girls, possibly Nia Durango, had been persuaded to turn over her cell phone, with its shaky video of the ceremony. The audience was able to laugh at the girls dancing in the rain, and tension in the studio eased a bit.

“Our killer thought he could kill two birds with one stone: murder Miles Wuchnik, and throw dirt onto Chaim Salanter, whom he seemed to hate for no particular reason. Our killer worked with one of the orderlies out at Ruhetal. He gave Xavier Jurgens the price of a new Camaro for going to the cemetery and murdering Miles Wuchnik.

“Our killer was a mile away at a lavish fund-raiser in his honor, but he couldn’t resist slipping away to the cemetery to make sure the foul deed had been done. He called the police himself, hoping that Chaim Salanter’s granddaughter and Sophy Durango’s daughter would be trapped at the cemetery next to Miles Wuchnik’s dead body.”

The screens showed Miles Wuchnik with the rebar sticking out of his chest, police evidence photos that the public had never seen. Again, there were oohs and ahhs of horror and titillation.

“Imagine how annoyed our killer was—cranky, to use one of V.I.’s own favorite understatements—to discover that she had found the girls and was shepherding them to safety.”

Murray paused to drink a glass of water. When he spoke again, his voice was dry, sunk at the back of his throat.

“V. I. Warshawski was a dogged and intrepid investigator. She followed Miles Wuchnik’s trail and she discovered Xavier Jurgens. When V.I. started talking to Xavier, Xavier’s girlfriend panicked and went to see the killer’s lawyer. This lawyer was the man they’d worked with, the man who’d actually given Xavier the cash for the Camaro in exchange for killing Miles Wuchnik.

“When the lawyer reported the girlfriend’s panicked visit to the killer, our man was cool. He laughed—he was riding on the big roller coaster, the one where you play God and decide who shall live and who shall die.

“The killer told Xavier he needed some antipsychotic drugs from the Ruhetal pharmacy, and Xavier, in exchange for a bonus, agreed to meet him near the cemetery with the drugs.

“One of the Carmilla club girls had dropped her cell phone the night of Wuchnik’s murder. The killer had picked it up that night, but it didn’t have any way for him to identify its owner. However, he was alarmed when he saw that whoever owned it, she’d photographed him. He decided on a bold throw of the dice: he would get rid of Salanter’s granddaughter. She was the girls’ ringleader; if the others realized Arielle Salanter had been murdered, well, they’d be very circumspect about anything they said or published about their night in the cemetery. So he lured Arielle to the cemetery with a bogus text message, got Xavier there, filled them both with antipsychotic drugs, and left them to die in the shiny new Camaro Xavier had bought.”

The monitors again showed police evidence photos, this time of Xavier Jurgens in his Camaro.

“But all this time, the killer worried about Tommy Glover’s photo. Remember that? The evidence that Miles Wuchnik had taken from Tommy’s room? The killer ransacked Wuchnik’s home and car, he stole Leydon Ashford’s computer and went through her papers, but the photo was nowhere to be found. After another break—who found the picture? And what did it prove?”

“What a crock of shit,” Lawlor snapped. “And why are you in my studio space? A retard has a photo on his wall and this gets a lawyer and a private eye bent out of shape? Come on, Ryerson, you can do better.”

“I’ll try, Wade, I’ll try.” Murray waved from the set.

After the commercials, Murray brought out Iva Wuchnik. She was belligerent; she thought V. I. Warshawski had behaved like a common thug, coming into her home, taking apart her precious photo of her dead brother.

“If she got killed, I’m not surprised. She probably got someone else really steamed, someone big enough to teach her a lesson.”

“Yes, it looks as though she did get someone else thoroughly steamed. But when she took your brother’s photo apart, what did she find, Ms. Wuchnik?”

“A newspaper, an old newspaper that my brother had sent me for safekeeping. He said it was dynamite and that it would make our fortunes, but he died before he could explain why. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the Warshawski woman was behind—”

“Take a look at the monitor to your right, Ms. Wuchnik,” Murray interrupted. “Does that look like the same clipping your brother gave you to keep safe?”

Everyone craned their necks to look at Tommy Glover, grinning in the midst of the Tampier Lake volunteer fire department, with his arms around Good Dog Trey.

Iva Wuchnik grudgingly allowed as how it was the same photo, as far as she could recollect.

“And what did the article say?” Murray said.

“I don’t know—it was something about a fire they put out. What difference does it make?”

Murray gave an odd smile. “We have an expert here in the studio who can explain that.”

Everyone watched a white-haired man limp onto the set, heard him introduce himself as Eddie Chez, heard him explain that the picture was taken of his volunteer firefighters after they’d put out a garage fire in Tampier Lake Township on July 6, twenty-seven years ago.

“And what’s so special about that fire? Or really about that date? For that, we’ll turn to our final guest.”

A woman emerged from the wings. She moved slowly, as if walking were not easy for her. A large hat shrouded her eyes and nose, but when she spoke, her voice was strong and clear.

“The photo shows that Tommy Glover was with Mr. Chez, putting out a fire, at the same time that Wade Lawlor was strangling his sister, Magda.”

The murmur in the audience grew to an uproar: “What did she say?” “The fireman killed Wade’s sister?” “
Wade
killed his sister? No way!” “Gosh, whoever that is, I hope she’s got a lot of money, he’s going to sue, for sure.”

Murray let the noise build for a moment or two, then brought the room back to silence. “How do you know that, ma’am?”

“He told me. After he’d shot me full of haloperidol, so that I couldn’t move, but before he dumped me into Tampier Lake to die. He killed his sister because she was in love with someone besides his own precious self.”

“No!” Lawlor shouted. “That’s a lie, it’s a lie, whoever you are, whatever casting service Ryerson got you from! It was on the news feed, you said it yourself in the huddle, Ryerson! You saw her body, you went with the foreign doctor, you identified it, everyone in Chicago knows V. I. Warshawski is dead.”

Lotty let out a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding. Murray pushed a stool forward, and the detective sat.

“Greatly exaggerated, that news,” she said.

52.

RAISING THE DEAD

I
CAME TO WHEN THE BOAT BUMPED INTO THE REEDS.
I
WAS
thirsty, feverish, my arms suspended above me on a metal bar. I thought my parents had wrapped me in a shroud and were burying me alive. Water was seeping into the coffin. I was going to drown before they realized what they’d done. Mama! Papa! I tried to shout, but I couldn’t get out anything except a hoarse cry. The birds were singing, they were covering up any noise I could make.

Someone lifted the coffin away. I couldn’t open my eyes; the sunlight was too sudden, too intense.

“Jesus H. Christ.” It was a stranger’s voice above me.

I tried to cry out again. A jumble of images, of my mother, the Spin Out, a black SUV. I couldn’t make sense of it; my mother was dead, but maybe she had sent for me?

“Oh my God, she’s breathing.” The stranger was talking to himself.

I felt him cutting the shroud away from me. “It’s a hell of a way to try to kill yourself. Next time, steal someone else’s boat!”

“I don’t steal,” I tried to say, but it was too much effort; I drifted back to sleep.

I was being shaken, pulled, the shroud came off a bit at a time, I was wet. Had I peed all over myself? “Sorry,” I slurred.

“Yeah, you should be sorry. You want to drown yourself, don’t involve other people.”

I didn’t want to drown myself; I felt indignant that anyone would think that, but then the shroud was off, I was slung across a man’s back. That had happened before, the man put me on his back and threw me into the lake. But now we were in a forest. Was I at camp in Wisconsin? That wasn’t right somehow, but I couldn’t figure it out and went back to sleep.

When I woke again, I was in the front seat of a pickup. The driver was a sunburned man who I’d never seen before.

“Are we in Wisconsin.” I managed to ask.

“Is that where you’re from? I’m taking you to the nearest hospital, not to goddamn Wisconsin. What got into you, stealing a boat in the middle of the night to do away with yourself?”

My childhood kept blurring into the present, but I knew that I had a photograph I had to protect.

“Lotty will help,” I said, the name coming to me out of the blue. “My phone, my phone too wet, use yours, call Lotty.”

The driver was happy to offload his problem onto someone else. Lotty’s phone number, I’d dialed it so many times it popped into my head before I had time to worry about whether I could remember it.

“Ma’am? You don’t know me, but I got a half-drowned lady in my truck who says you can help her.”

Lotty spoke to me, realized how little able I was to respond, talked to the Good Samaritan, who gave her directions to a motel near Palos Heights. He waited for her to arrive—more because he didn’t want to be stuck with the motel bill than out of kindliness, but I was thankful not to be left on my own.

Lotty probably broke every speed law in the four-state area, racing to the southwest suburbs. As soon as she saw me, she realized how badly drugged I was.

“You need to be hospitalized, at once, to get this junk pumped out of you, get fluids into you. But—the nearest hospital—I wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on you. Can you hold on until we get back to Chicago? Drink this.”

She somehow came up with a glass of orange juice. I was so feeble that most of it went down my damp and smelly T-shirt, but she brought another glass, put a straw in my mouth, held it steady while I swallowed.

“Call the police?” she said to the Samaritan. “I’ll take care of that for you: I’m a physician, they know me.”

He was glad to let Lotty do the rest of the work. “Ma’am, no offense, but—if I hadn’t decided to take the day off to go fishing, no telling what this gal would have got up to. She stole my boat, see, and I went off looking for it. When I come to pick it up and get going, well, there she was, trying to drown herself. If she’s a patient of yours, you’d best get her into a hospital.”