Breakdown (53 page)

“Yes, don’t worry, you’ve been more than kind. We will of course reimburse you for damage to your boat. And your name, if the police need to talk to you?”

“Don’t worry about that. Can’t have my boss finding out I wasn’t home with flu. Even though it’s too hot now for the fish to be biting, I need a day on the water to recover from finding your patient.”

On the drive back into Chicago, I tried to explain to Lotty what had happened, but I was having trouble with my memory at that point. Besides, it was still hard for me to talk.

Lotty stopped at a fast-food place and ordered a giant lemonade; she kept shaking me awake and demanding that I drink. The traffic was heavy, and the way she darted around tractor-trailers would have made me fear for my life if I hadn’t been so doped.

Despite my incoherence, Lotty grasped enough of the story that she decided not to take me to the hospital: if Wade found out that I was still alive, protecting me would be a security nightmare. She took me instead to her own home. Jewel Kim agreed to tend to me personally; Lotty found a temporary advanced practice nurse to look after the clinic.

It was a good three days before I was well enough to sit up on my own. My memory came back slowly, too, but somewhere deep in my unconscious mind, I must have already decided on a strategy for exposing Lawlor: Lotty said that even while I was still delirious, I was crying, “Don’t tell him I’m alive.”

When I began speaking, and thinking, clearly again, Lotty reluctantly gave in to my demands to see Murray. It was Murray who said he would announce my death in the huddle.

“Wade’s been mighty strange in the mornings,” Murray said. “He hovers around, wanting to know if anyone’s heard about unusual deaths in the area. I asked him point-blank if he thought the vampire was sucking children’s blood, and he went off in a tirade. Hearing that you’re dead should lull him.”

Lotty and Max had spoken to Jake, who took a leave from his Marlboro fellowship to see me: every afternoon he played a private concert for me, a medley of my favorites from the bass repertoire.

Petra and Mr. Contreras had to be told the truth, too. I was afraid my cousin might not be able to keep the secret, but she handled it by taking a leave of absence from the foundation and hunkering down with the old man and the dogs.

Petra drove Mr. Contreras over to see me every afternoon. He annoyed Lotty by making spaghetti and meatballs for me in her kitchen, but she didn’t have the heart to send him away, except on the day he thought it would be a good idea to bring Mitch and Peppy with him. Jake, his arms around me in the guest bed, laughed with me as Lotty ordered the dogs away so fiercely that Mitch’s voice was strangled mid-bark.

It was after I’d made my first solo walk from Lotty’s guest room to the balcony and back that Lotty let me start working with Murray on the program. Murray’s first hurdle was to clear the topic with his management.

Murray’s producer, Deirdre Zhou, didn’t know I was still alive; she’d been told that Murray’s final guest was someone with a special insight into the death of Wade Lawlor’s sister. Part of what kept Murray up several nights running was writing two scripts: one for Deirdre Zhou, which showed me following leads to nowhere in the so-called vampire murder. That was the one that made it up and down Murray’s chain of command, getting approval from Weekes himself.

The second script was the one that Murray memorized, going off the teleprompter, leading Wade to his frenzied outburst.

Once his producers had gotten permission from Weekes to do the show, Murray worked like a demon. He turned up another copy of the
Southwest Gazette
with Tommy Glover’s picture in it. Wade apparently had gone into the paper’s archives when he first learned about the photo and pulled their old paper copy, but Murray put out a bid on eBay, and paid five hundred dollars to someone in Utah who had kept a copy of that issue. Murray persuaded Iva Wuchnik to come on the show, telling her that this would be her chance to vindicate her brother. He went to Eddie Chez, from the Tampier Lake Township Fire Department, and said they wanted to go over a story that went back to the department’s volunteer days.

We all wondered why Chez hadn’t come forward when Tommy was first arrested. When we spoke to him after the show, the old fireman scratched his head in embarrassment.

“I didn’t connect the dots. Tommy, when he was arrested, it was two days after the fact, and, well, even though he hung around our crew, a lot of times we didn’t really notice him special. And then Wade, well, he told everyone he’d seen Tommy follow Maggie into the woods. It’s terrible that we all believed him without even thinking about it.

“And even though Netta kept saying Tommy was innocent, well, she’d been at work when Tommy was at the Reinhold Garage fire, and even she was so rattled she didn’t connect the picture in the
Gazette
to the murder. Wade must’ve been like a cat on hot coals when that come out, but nobody put two and two together. It’s like my wife says, we all had this unconscious idea about what a retarded guy might do—we all were just prejudiced, plain and simple.”

53.

VAMPIRES DON’T KILL EASY

I
F MY STORY CAUGHT MEDIA ATTENTION AS FAR AWAY AS MY
mother’s hometown in Umbria, the results were more complicated here at home. Max, who has more organizational savvy than I, knew that we couldn’t blindside Detective Finchley. Right before we left for the Global studios, Max called Finchley to warn him that a major balloon was going up involving me, Lawlor, and the deaths of Miles Wuchnik and Xavier Jurgens.

Even so, Finchley was angry that we’d kept him in the dark. “If you’d come to me straight off, instead of playing your cute game on television, I could have gotten a warrant to search Lawlor’s SUV. He got rid of the car, says it was stolen and he doesn’t know where it is, but the trail Liz Milkova followed suggests he sent it to a junkyard. Which means, as you know very well, that we’ll never find the backseat where you threw up, or the front fender that probably killed Tommy Glover’s mom. Lawlor bought a nice new Land Rover with his insurance money.”

“Terry, he confessed it all to me, and he tried to kill me!”

“I don’t doubt your word, but we can’t get the state’s attorney to agree that a confession you heard while you were heavily drugged carries weight.”

“But he also confessed right there on television,” Max said.

Finchley shook his head. “He said something wild on television, but he’s getting beaucoup e-mails and phone calls crying out for his vindication: his fans believe he’s the victim of a frame-up by Chaim Salanter and the so-called liberal media. The state’s attorneys from Cook and DuPage are very aware that they’re up for reelection—they don’t want to antagonize his massive fan base. And Global is exerting its own pressure on the state’s attorneys and the CPD, believe me. I’m doing my best, V.I., but, man, it would be so much easier if you’d brought me in on day one.”

Even so, Finchley was able to get Mulliner and Louis Ormond to strike deals. Ormond admitted that he had delivered money to Xavier Jurgens on behalf of his client, but insisted he knew nothing about any murders, or attempted murders: yes, he’d been in my office when Mulliner and Lawlor jumped me, but he’d been trying to persuade his client to use the law, not brute force, to restrain me.

Mulliner was on shakier ground: a search of hospital records proved that he’d removed ten milligrams of injectable haloperidol from the pharmacy on the day I’d been assaulted. Lawlor had paid him so much money for reporting on visits to Tommy Glover that he’d felt compelled to do whatever the cable star wanted; each demand he acceded to sank him deeper in Lawlor’s mire.

Our biggest breakthrough came from finding the owner of the rowboat. Murray haunted the fishing quay at Lake Tampier, offering rewards to anyone who could ID the rowboat Lawlor had stolen. Stan Chalmers finally came forward. He’d been afraid that his boss would fire him if he learned that Chalmers had been playing hooky, but Murray’s money, coupled with the drama of my story, got him to change his mind. Chalmers let Finchley take the boat; the evidence techs found Lawlor’s fingerprints on the prow.

The Internet gave us another break. When Les Strangwell, Helen Kendrick’s campaign guru, had gone up to the forty-eighth floor to alert Weekes to what Murray was actually saying, Weekes pulled the plug. Weekes also tried to kill any footage of the “Nancy Drew” episode of
Chicago Beat,
but by then the show had gone viral across the Web.

The blogosphere was filled with screams over the story. Wade’s detractors thought it was such a chilling story that he should be banned from the airwaves. When advertisers began backing away from
Wade’s World
as fast as fleas jumping from a dead plague victim, Harold Weekes gave Lawlor a leave of absence. This caused Wade’s hardcore supporters to picket Global One for a good ten days, demanding his reinstatement, but GEN’s senior staff noted that the pickets weren’t just a small group, but one that was decidedly unmediagenic.

All the time we’d been putting together the script for the show, Murray had worried that he’d lose his job. I’d scoffed: it just didn’t seem possible that a great scoop, one that gave Global the best viewer rating they’d ever had, would boomerang on him, but that’s what happened. A week after the Nancy Drew segment, Weekes fired Murray. By e-mail, not even giving him the courtesy of a phone call, let alone a personal meeting. He might agree in private that Lawlor had been a criminal, but he couldn’t forgive Murray for killing his golden-egg layer.

Once the axe had actually fallen, Murray seemed more relaxed. He took a job with Sophy Durango, as her campaign’s media adviser. They exploited the Kendrick campaign’s hiring of Miles Wuchnik to dig up dirt that didn’t exist on Chaim Salanter, and Durango’s poll numbers going into the end of summer kept climbing. Sometimes class wins.

Murray and I both put as much muscle as we could into getting Tommy Glover released. Murray framed the copy of the
Southwest Gazette
story he’d bought for the show; I delivered it to Tommy Glover in person.

Tania Metzger at Ruhetal agreed to act as Tommy’s advocate. She got the Open Tabernacle Church to rally around him—they were, after all, an open community, embracing people wherever they might be on life’s journey. The church was able to get his arrest voided, although that took an amazing amount of work. And they found a place for him in a group home. The Tampier Lake Township Fire Department made him their honorary mascot, so that was one happy ending.

Dick came to see me one night. I was back in my office part-time, trying to assure my clients that I hadn’t become such a media hound that I’d forgotten my professional commitments. Dick wouldn’t apologize for his partners, but he did say that the “incident” had caused them to draw up strict guidelines for the use of outside investigators, and what those investigators could do.

“Louis has agreed to take early retirement. We believe him when he says he didn’t know he was giving Xavier Jurgens money to kill Miles Wuchnik, but we’re a little concerned about the ethical lines he may have crossed.”

I didn’t argue with him about it—he’d done more than many in his position might have. He left behind a case of Barolo. I was touched that he’d remembered my favorite wine after all these years, although I couldn’t help wondering if I was letting myself be bribed into silence by accepting it.

Right before Labor Day, Chaim Salanter sent his private jet to fly me to Marlboro with Max and Lotty so we could attend Jake’s end-of-the-season concerts. The pilot had just brought Arielle Zitter and Nia Durango back from Israel in time to start the school year. Arielle, like me, had fully recovered from her drug overdose.

When we boarded Salanter’s plane, the flight attendant gave us each an envelope, with information about the jet’s amenities, how to make phone calls on board, and the sanitized, public version of Chaim Salanter’s life. My envelope also included a check, for fifty thousand dollars, drawn on Salanter Enterprises, labeled “for professional services.” Which covers a lot of ground indeed.

Chaim’s gratitude spread in several directions. He persuaded Boadicea Jones to come to Chicago to give a private reading from her new
Carmilla
book for the girls in the Malina Foundation’s book groups. That event brought girls and parents back to Malina in record numbers. He also hired Kira and Lucy’s mother to work as the resident housekeeper at his fifteen-room Michigan cottage—another happy ending, especially since he had a couple of horses out there.

My own happiness during the flight to Marlboro was muted: Leydon had died the week before. Murray’s on-air claim that she had regained consciousness was never true—just an effort to get Wade to expose himself.

I went to the funeral with Faith and her daughter, Trina. Neither Sewall nor his mother attended. Leydon’s will specified that she wanted to be cremated, and her ashes spread in Forest Park’s Waldheim Cemetery, where the anarchists Lucy Parsons and Emma Goldman lay. Sewall threatened to go to court to block the burial, claiming that Leydon was not in her right mind or she wouldn’t have chosen a posthumous way to embarrass her family further.

Faith told Sewall that by the time he got an injunction, he’d have to get a rake to collect his sister’s ashes, and that he would look pretty darned stupid. I don’t know who was more impressed, Trina or me.

Jake’s High Plainsong group played the funeral service at Rockefeller Chapel. They let me dust off my rusty alto to take part in singing the Stravinsky setting of Psalm 39, which Leydon had liked all those years ago. Dean Knaub conducted the service and delivered the eulogy.

“We know that Leydon did not believe in God, or the Resurrection of the Body, but there is an immortality to love, to the love within Leydon that made her lay down her life for a stranger, to the love of her friend, Victoria, who risked her own life to see justice done to that same stranger.