Breakdown (24 page)

Murray nodded.

“That also seems beneath Crawford, Mead’s dignity,” I said, “but I’ll check in with Dick. Maybe that will cheer me up, watching his face, although the tea helped. Thanks, Luana.”

Back in my car, away from the need to keep up a public face, I felt so pummeled that I dozed off behind the wheel. A passing ticket writer rapping on my windshield woke me. She pointed at my parking receipt, which had expired three minutes ago. I was grateful that she hadn’t issued the ticket—the city is so cash-hungry that many of the enforcers wouldn’t have cut me the slack.

I wanted to go to my ex-husband’s law firm, but not in this condition. I drove to my office, where I fell instantly asleep on the daybed in my back room.

24.

TALKING TO THE EX. SIGH.

W
HEN
I
GOT UP AGAIN, IT WAS A SHOCK TO OPEN THE PHONE
log on my computer: I had more than fifty messages from clients and friends who had seen Lawlor’s tirade. Some commiserated, but others worried that being on
Wade’s World
’s hit list would make me unreliable as a detective.
Give us a call; we want to know your mind is on the job
was the gist of about fifteen messages. At the same time, to my astonishment, simply being mentioned by Wade Lawlor made me interesting to other people. I had queries from various non-GEN media outlets, wanting interviews, along with a good half dozen potential new clients. Maybe I’d have to share their retainers with Lawlor.

I buckled down and sent e-mails, made calls, and organized interviews with a couple of local television stations. All the time that I was reassuring clients of my undying commitment to their needs, the back of my mind was thinking about Lawlor’s harangue. Who had he talked to about my mother? He’d said Gabriella came here as an illegal alien, but how had he known to ask about her? How had he known her memory was so sacred to me?

Gabriella had come to America as a refugee during the Second World War. The drama of her escape was what I always thought about, not whether she’d had the right papers on her when she arrived. She had been hiding with her father in the hills northeast of Siena when one of her music teachers arranged passage for her on a ship bound for Cuba. My mother had never seen her father again, nor her only brother, who’d been fighting with a group of partisans in the north.

My grandmother’s sister Rosa had grudgingly given my mother a place to stay in Chicago, but I’d never asked Gabriella how she made the journey from Cuba to the States. Wade Lawlor apparently had made discovering that his business. It was frightening to think what a deep and wide network of spies Lawlor could call on, to get information that was almost seventy years old.

In the middle of my fretting, I dimly realized that Lawlor could have made it up, that he’d learned my mother was an immigrant and decided to say she was illegal. He fabricated so much of what he screeched on the airwaves that when he hit home, he might only have made a lucky guess.

I had to remind myself that his real goal had been to attack me, not my mother. Why, though? I’d been a little rude at his anniversary bash on Saturday. Was his ego so inflated that he went after anyone who was sarcastic to him?

When I’d cleared my inbox, I called my lawyer, Freeman Carter, to tell him about Lawlor’s attack. He’d heard about it already.

“All week, Lotty and Max and I have been fuming over why Chaim Salanter doesn’t sue him for slander,” I said. “Now that he’s assaulting me, I’d like to explore the possibility of suing him myself.”

There was a long silence at the other end of the line. “I was just reading the online transcript of Lawlor’s remarks about you,” Freeman explained. “I’m no expert on L and S law, but I don’t think his broadcast meets the requirement for slander. He was offensive, but he doesn’t accuse you of anything worse than being a liberal, which you are.”

“But he attacked Gabriella,” I protested.

“Vic, no one should make a decision about a lawsuit when they’re in the heat of strong emotion. You know that as well as I do. I can talk to someone I know who does libel and slander law, but if you sue, your legal fees and court costs could go to half a million. Since Lawlor has some of the deepest pockets in America, he could keep a suit going until you were in so deep you’d have to scrub toilets in Soldier Field to pay your bills.”

My face contorted into a horrible scowl, as if looking like a gargoyle could somehow menace Wade Lawlor. Freeman was right. Which made it all the more infuriating that the Salanters, with pockets as deep as the Grand Canyon, wouldn’t take on Lawlor and GEN.

“Out of curiosity, what did you do to get on Lawlor’s radar at all?” Freeman asked.

“I tweaked him a little at his anniversary party, but I didn’t threaten him.”

“If you show him you care, he’ll sink his teeth deeper into your calf. He’s like any other bully. If he sees you’re not paying attention, he’ll go away fast enough.”

“That’s exactly what Chaim Salanter and his daughter say, but Lawlor, and Helen Kendrick, for that matter, keep gunning for both Salanter and for the Malina Foundation.”

“Don’t do anything rash before next Tuesday,” Freeman said dryly. “I’m going to Martha’s Vineyard for a long weekend and I don’t want to have to find someone to post emergency bail for you.”

I promised I wouldn’t do anything either reckless or criminal in the next four days, but I hung up with a little resentment. It wasn’t Freeman’s fault that people like me gave him a seven-figure income that allowed him to lease a plane for weekend jetaways, but I still wished I could get ahead of the game for once. I was tired of racing around in Chicago’s hot sticky heat. Big security firms bill their clients the same way lawyers like Freeman do—at four hundred an hour and up, but solo ops like me or Miles Wuchnik don’t command those kinds of fees.

One of my clients—mercifully, not one who’d been on my case about being a feature in
Wade’s World
—had once offered me the use of her Michigan weekend retreat. When I called, she told me her place was free this weekend. Not only that, I was welcome to bring the dogs. When I got home, I invited my neighbor to join us. Mr. Contreras was delighted; he packed a hamper with enough provisions to keep us through Labor Day and we set off early enough the next morning to avoid the backups on the roads.

We spent three days swimming, hiking, and rebuilding our relationship while sitting around my client’s gas-fueled barbecue grill. Mitch had a glorious time rolling in the rotting buffalo fish on the beach, but we just poured shampoo on him and sent him into the lake. I kept in touch with clients by text but resolutely stayed away from the television. We came home late Sunday, tired but refreshed. No emergency calls from my cousin, no horses’ heads in my bed. All good.

Monday morning I went early to the cleaners to pick up my good clothes. My lovely scarlet frock would never be the same. They’d done their best, but they couldn’t get out the grass stains without tearing the delicate silk.

“It’s just a dress,” I scolded myself for wanting to cry. It may be, as the Romans said, that clothes make the man, but for women, or at least for this woman, clothes are a projection of the self: I felt personally damaged.

At least the gold cotton dress had come out okay: you couldn’t see the blood unless you stuck your nose into the fabric. I couldn’t imagine Dick doing that, so I slipped it on for my trip to his office.

While I did my makeup, I gave in to temptation and looked up the new
Wade’s World
segments on YouTube. He’d attacked Sophy Durango and Chaim Salanter, along with his usual venom about filthy immigrants and vile health-care reform. Nothing new about me. Maybe I’d been a one-day filler on his show.

I drove to my office and rode the L into the Loop, getting off at Wells and Lake, near the Chicago River. My ex-husband’s firm occupied seventeen floors of the Grommet Building, one of those glass towers that make you think of Darth Vader—the glass façade was black and all you could see was the reflection of the skyline and the clouds, not any signs of life within.

Crawford, Mead had changed offices since the end of my marriage; this was my first trip to their new headquarters. When I got off at the elevator at the fifty-second floor, I was glad I’d taken the trouble to pick up my dress, do makeup, and so on. I felt cool and professional, as if I belonged in a space that proclaimed,
We bill at a thousand dollars an hour and we’re proud of it.

The reception area, decorated in soft greens and golds, had several tasteful pieces of sculpture strewn about, while the two women behind the marble counter were as glossy as the glass on the building.

I handed my card to one of the receptionists. No, I agreed, or perhaps stipulated, I didn’t have an appointment, but Mr. Yarborough and I were old friends; I had a quick question for him.

Dick was in a meeting, naturally enough, but I had to wait only twenty minutes before he strolled into the reception area. His greeting was unenthusiastic. “I have five minutes, Vic. Try not to blow me up in that length of time.”

I put my fingers on his jacket sleeve and batted my eyelashes. “Why, Richard Yarborough, what a thing to say after all we’ve meant to each other.”

The receptionists looked at each other, eyes widening: my arrival was adding a little excitement to the workday.

Dick’s mouth twisted in a reluctant smile. “It’s because of what we’ve meant to each other. What do you want?”

“Information about Miles Wuchnik.”

“Miles Wuchnik? Who is—oh, the vampire killer’s victim. I don’t know anything about the guy, sorry.”

He slid his shirt cuff up to check the time. His watch was impressive, covered with gold dials and a revolving star map. Maybe the millennium gen have given up watches because they tell time on their cell phones, but nothing says “I’m important” quite like a handmade timepiece.

“He worked for you, Dick. He was one of your firm’s investigators. Surely that was on your ‘important news affecting Crawford clients’ report when you logged on last Monday morning.”

Dick turned to the receptionists. “Celeste, look up Wuchnik—spell it for me, Vic.”

He could have said please, but it was too late to teach him now.

Celeste shook her head. “Mr. Yarborough, I checked when I heard he was dead. He was freelance, mostly working on projects for Eloise Napier, but sometimes for Mr. Ormond.”

Dick turned back to me. “If I say we don’t know anything, you’ll just hack into my firm’s computers, or disguise yourself as an electrician and break into our vault, so let’s settle this now. Celeste, get Ms. Napier and Mr. Ormond to meet us in conference room J for ten minutes.”

Dick had Celeste escort me to conference room J, another tribute to the firm’s billable hours. Webcams were mounted at several stations around the table for ease of teleconferencing, a flat-screen TV took the place of old-fashioned dry-erase boards, and a large oil painting of a woodland scene dominated the facing wall.

The room overlooked the Chicago River. Dick followed me in as I was watching the drawbridges go up for a sailboat. He offered me a drink from a collection on a wood trolley in a corner. In fact, he was more solicitous than I ever remembered him being during our marriage, a fact that made me eye him thoughtfully.

“You remember Leydon Ashford?” I asked, sipping a glass of grapefruit juice.

“That’s right: you two were tight in law school. Sewall and I have worked on civic committees together; she hasn’t aged well.”

“Sewall didn’t look too good when I saw him last week,” I said. “His sister had just been carted off to the hospital with her head bashed in, and all he cared about was his car keys.”

Dick hadn’t heard about Leydon’s accident. He was appropriately shocked but added, “The two of you brought out the worst in me when you were together. It wouldn’t surprise me if you threw Sewall off balance.”

“Who brings out the best in you?” I asked.

The question startled him, but he was saved from answering by the arrival of his colleagues. Eloise Napier, very blond, with a good coating of cosmetics covering any signs of age, held out a hand heavily weighted by gold bracelets. More gold at her ears and throat, and the wheat-colored suit in slubbed rayon, made her look like a giant daffodil. Only her eyes, a cold, shrewd hazel, belied the appearance of a Gold Coast lady who lunched. I noticed she sported one of those jeweled American flags topped by an ear of corn worn by Helen Kendrick supporters.

Louis Ormond looked like a quiet middle-aged rodent next to Napier, his thinning gray hair combed back behind his ears, making his long beak of a nose appear even longer.

The meeting was short, to the point, or really, to no point. Of course all client affairs were confidential, Eloise Napier explained, so she could neither confirm nor deny that Miles Wuchnik had worked on any cases for her clients. If I was a cop with a court order it might be a different story, but even then, privilege, liability, confidentiality, couldn’t promise there’d ever be a time when Wuchnik’s workload could be disclosed.

I smiled, to help me keep my temper: the last thing I needed was for Dick to see me get angry. “Was he working for one of your clients—of course, unspecified—when he went to the cemetery on Saturday night?”

Napier and Ormond exchanged glances with Dick. “We have no idea why he was there,” Eloise spoke for the trio. “We understand that Sophy Durango’s daughter was there, and we’ve heard talk that Durango might have had an assignation with the dead man.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that talk, too, but only in one place: on Helen Kendrick’s program on GEN. Dick, I don’t know your colleagues, but I know you’re too smart to repeat actionable lies in public.”

Spots of real color burned beneath the rouge on Napier’s cheeks. “Helen is a good friend. I’ve known her for years, and I can assure you that she doesn’t make up stories like that unless she has reason to believe they’re true.”

“From messages she gets in her fillings?” I asked.