Breakdown (30 page)

“Who? Oh, you mean
Shame
Salanter.” She mispronounced the name in the manner of Wade Lawlor. “Miles said it was terrible what rich people get away with in this country.”

At last there was something we could genuinely agree on: the free ride America gives its hyper-wealthy. I started to say as much, but Iva’s outrage with Chaim Salanter burst out of her.

“You see Salanter on television all the time, how he wants to fill the country up with illegal immigrants, probably just so he can get his garden looked after for nothing with Mexican workers. That isn’t right.”

“Did Miles have a plan for stopping Salanter?” I asked.

She didn’t say anything, but a smile lurked at the corners of her mouth. She knew something, but what?

“It would take a lot of courage to go up against a powerful billionaire,” I said, coaxing. “It doesn’t sound as though your other brothers had the moral fiber that Miles possessed.”

“You’re right about that. Sam and Pierce always called Miles a loser, because he didn’t own his own home or drive a fancy car, like they do. But he was going to show them. That’s why he was giving me the money to keep for him; it all had to be a secret, from the FBI and everyone.”

“You mean the IRS?” I couldn’t figure out what the FBI had to do with a stash of cash.

“Oh, them! No, Miles said the FBI was on his trail, along with Shame Salanter, so we couldn’t talk until the whole operation was finished, and then we’d be on Wade Lawlor’s show, and be national heroes and everything for exposing Salanter.”

“Maybe you can keep up the good work,” I suggested. “Miles must have shared
some
of his strategy with you.”

She stopped in the doorway between her bedroom and the living room. “Why are you really here? Are you trying to horn in on Miles’s business?”

“No, ma’am! I have no interest in the kind of business that gets you a spike in the chest. But if I don’t understand what he was working on, I’ll never get close to finding his killer. He never told you who hired him to investigate Chaim Salanter?”

“No. Clients’ business stayed confidential with Miles. Didn’t you say you were a PI, same as him? You should know that.”

“Of course. It’s just, someone suggested that your grandparents and Chaim Salanter’s family might have known each other in Europe, before they all came to America. I wondered if somebody doing genealogy research might have hired your brother to look into that.”

“Who told you that? Who said we might be related to a—a liar and a cheat like Shame Salanter?”

“Oh, Ms. Wuchnik, you know how it is: like your brother, I have to protect the confidentiality of my clients.” I moved past her into the furniture showroom. “If you think of anything at all that you want to tell me, please call. I’m leaving my card on your table here.”

The July heat swallowed me as soon as I walked into the hall outside her apartment, but it was a relief to be away from the dusty room. It wasn’t until I started down the stairs that I saw my hand was bleeding again, too freely to drive comfortably with it. I didn’t really ever want to see Iva Wuchnik again, but maybe she could slip me a few Band-Aids across the length of the chain lock on the door.

Her phone rang as I was lifting my fist to knock. Some Miles-like impulse made me wait, my ear to the door. At first I couldn’t hear anything except her husky voice muttering the conventional greetings, brief answers to questions, but then she gave out a sudden protesting squawk.

“I didn’t tell her anything because I don’t know anything. Who is this, anyway? Miles
protected
me. He didn’t want me to get hurt, and—”

She was silent for a moment, then said quietly, “No. Of course not . . . I understand.”

I crept down the hall again. I could wrap my hand in the T-shirt I’d packed in my overnight bag.

Someone had been tracking me. But who, and why? I thought of Jana Shatka, going off in a taxi yesterday to talk to someone. As I got into my car, I shivered, despite the heavy summer air.

30.

LOST DAUGHTER

I
WOKE THE NEXT MORNING TO BLOODSTAINED SHEETS.
E
VEN
though it was just from the cut on my hand, it seemed like an ominous echo of Miles Wuchnik’s death. I couldn’t shake a sense of oppression from my strange conversation with his sister. Her own depression, her determined devotion to her blackmailing brother, they were like an illness that had infected me through the cut on my hand. I knew I should write up my notes before I forgot too many of the details, but the encounter felt so sordid that I found it hard to think about it head-on.

The most puzzling, and ultimately most worrying, part of the conversation was what happened at the end. Who had called her? Who knew I was there, and what was their stake in the conversation? Iva’s protest, that she hadn’t told me anything because she didn’t know anything—had her caller been asking, as I had, about the source of the money? Or was there something else that she’d played close to her chest, so close I hadn’t realized she was sitting on a second secret?

I walked slowly to the kitchen to put on water for coffee. Iva Wuchnik had gone on about Chaim Salanter: she saw him on television all the time, she’d said, wanting to fill America with illegal immigrants. I didn’t think Salanter was on television—he wasn’t a publicity seeker. Iva saw his face or heard his name on Helen Kendrick’s or Wade Lawlor’s show. Miles had been doing some dangerous investigations that would show up Salanter, Iva said. And Lawlor would heap fame and glory on her brother.

Did that mean Lawlor had hired Miles Wuchnik? The two-bit Berwyn PI and the man with the twenty-million-dollar annual contract from Global? Wade Lawlor had hundreds of investigators at his command, but maybe he was spreading his net wide, trying to snare Salanter.

On a whim, I logged on to Lawlor’s website, to see if he was offering some kind of reward for nailing Salanter. I didn’t see a header that said “Wanted, Dead or Alive,” but he did have a tip line.

If you have information on any topic Vital to the Survival of Our Republic and Our Christian Values, e-mail me:
[email protected]

The website showed photos of some of his stalwart tipsters, with a little blurb about the vital information each had supplied. Other tipsters had written under a cloak of anonymity: “This information is so damning that our reporter’s life could be in danger for revealing it,” the caption read.

As I scrolled down, my own name jumped out at me. An anonymous source had claimed that my mother was an illegal immigrant.

The fury I’d felt at the
Herald-Star
offices two days ago welled up in me again. How dare they,
how dare they,
these faceless, mindless, cowardly, jackboot-licking pond scum? I was shaking with rage, halfway to my closet to collect my gun, when a night soon after I’d learned my mother was ill, that she might not get well, came to my mind.

One of the women on South Houston whom Gabriella had scorched for her advice on how to control me—
Your daughter is a disgrace to the neighborhood,
the woman had said, and Gabriella had said,
She’s growing up to inhabit a larger world than you’ll ever visit.
As I walked past the woman’s house she’d spat out an insult about Gabriella,
Melez,
she’d called her. I’d grown up hearing that Croatian word: my mother was a mongrel, a half caste—half Jewish, they meant. I’d jumped up the stairs in the dark and been on the point of punching her when my father materialized.

“Come on home, Tori,” he’d said.

I was fifteen and almost as tall as he was, but he picked me up and carried me down the stairs. He didn’t berate me and he wouldn’t listen to my side of the story. He sat me down on our back stoop, where we’d listened in the darkness to Gabriella working on her breathing exercises: cancer was not going to still her voice, she was determined about that.

After a time, Tony said, “The worst cops are the ones whose gun is their first weapon, instead of their last. The best cops go into a situation head-first, not hand-first. You remember that, Tori: you get yourself into trouble you don’t need with that hot temper of yours. And anger doesn’t make a bad situation better. It depletes your strength and it depletes your mind.”

I was letting rage at Wade Lawlor and his minions deplete my mind. I sat back down in front of my laptop. It was almost as though someone was trying to keep me so angry that I wouldn’t be able to see my way clear.

Was it Wade Lawlor, with his attacks? I thought of my meeting with Harold Weekes. Lawlor was his—GEN’s—money machine, but Weekes was the brains. Lawlor had smirked all through the meeting like the smart-aleck kid at school, but every time he was about to blurt out a revelation, Weekes shut him up.

I remembered my Monitor Project report on Vernon Mulliner’s finances. Where had he gotten all that money? From Harold Weekes? In which case, what was Mulliner doing for him out at Ruhetal?

I rubbed my eyes. None of this made any sense.

I turned back to Wade’s site and looked for the tipster entries on Chaim Salanter or the Malina Foundation. There was a lot of vitriol, a lot of speculation about Chaim Salanter’s past as a Nazi collaborator, and his present as Sophy Durango’s financial adviser, but nothing that sounded like a damning fact.

And yet Miles Wuchnik believed he was on the trail of such evidence. And there was another fact: Chaim Salanter had tried to bribe me to stay away from the Wuchnik investigation. That sounded as if he was hiding something shameful. And he knew that if Wuchnik hadn’t found it out, he was close to doing so.

My espresso pot had boiled all over the stove. I turned off the burner and looked at the mess in disgust. Cleaning Iva Wuchnik’s spilled tea last night, my own stove this morning. Mopping up messes, it’s what I did for a living, but that didn’t mean I wanted to do it in my kitchen as well.

Had Chaim Salanter murdered Miles Wuchnik? Salanter was small; he was old. He couldn’t have dragged a man so much bigger than him onto the catafalque on his own, but his daughter might have helped him. When I’d first found Wuchnik, I’d had unsettling ideas about the girls in the Carmilla book club luring him to the catafalque and then stabbing him.

Now I wondered if Julia Salanter could have done it. Nick Vishnikov, the ME, had said Wuchnik had been bashed on the back of the head before he was stabbed. If Julia thought Wuchnik was going to reveal some nasty secret about her father, she could easily have persuaded him to meet her in the cemetery. I wondered if any of her mother’s family were buried at Mount Moriah—that could explain the choice of venues. Gabe the houseman was big enough to heft any number of Wuchniks onto slabs. And his role in the household seemed very much more active than that of a garden-variety servant.

I shivered. I didn’t like this line of thought at all. It wasn’t just that I’d taken a liking to Julia Salanter, but it also meant that Wade Lawlor would be vindicated for his pile-driving attacks on her father. It would be a blow to Lotty and Max, as well.

And then there was young Arielle to consider. She was sitting on some information about Wuchnik. What if it had to do with Julia, rather than with Chaim? What if Gabe’s role in the household was intimate enough to include being Julia’s lover?

I put the soiled rags in the sink with some bleach and refilled my little pot with water and grounds. This time I shut everything else out of my mind until I’d poured espresso into a cup.

The money that Miles Wuchnik had been sending his sister, that screamed
BLACKMAIL!
at the top of its lungs. My hand kept creeping across the kitchen table toward my phone. My hand wanted to call Julia Salanter and ask what secret Miles Wuchnik had uncovered about her father. And what would she say?
Oh, Daddy murdered his mother and all his sisters to save his sorry ass?

If I could find out who had hired Miles, then maybe I could follow the trail from the other direction. It’s true that someone had swiped his computer, his cell phone, and all his files, but I had a little more information today than I’d had yesterday. I knew Miles’s e-mail address, from looking at Iva’s computer, and with some luck I might get into his server and recover them.

I also knew that Miles had gone to see his sister on May 17. Maybe he’d considered that journey a deductible expense. I’d locked the original of his mileage log in my office safe, but I had the photocopies in my briefcase.

Mr. Contreras came up the back stairs with the dogs while I was spreading the pages out on my kitchen table. He turned a dark umber when he realized I was wearing only a T-shirt and underpants.

“Not to worry,” I said kindly, but I went back to my bedroom and pulled on a pair of cargo pants.

When I returned to the kitchen, he was standing at the sink, washing my week’s accumulation of dishes, carefully not looking at me. “How’d it go yesterday, doll?”

“Weird. Very weird. You can turn around now.”

I assembled a bowl of fruit and yogurt while I described my visit to Iva Wuchnik.

“Wuchnik was sending her money in hollowed-out books,” I said. “Either it’s cash he found lying around and stole, or someone agreed to pay blackmail.”

“Or drug sales,” my neighbor said.

I nodded thoughtfully; that hadn’t occurred to me. “Yes, the women out in Burbank think that Xavier Jurgens is selling drugs that he steals from the hospital. Maybe Wuchnik found out about it, and either tried to muscle in on the deal or blackmailed Xavier, until Xavier had had enough and lured him to the cemetery.”

It made sense; proving it would be another story. “And in a way, it’s disappointing if that’s the end of the story. I was kind of hoping it had something to do with Lawlor, or Helen Kendrick, or even my ex’s law firm. Just out of spite, I suppose. I don’t think Xavier could make enough out of filched hospital supplies to put fifteen thousand down on a new car. That kind of money sounds more like recreational drugs, unless he had help.”