Breakdown (11 page)

POLITICS AS USUAL?

J
AKE HAD GONE INTO THE KITCHEN WITH A BACK COPY OF
The Atlantic
while I was talking to Julia
.
He put the magazine down when he saw my unhappy face, but didn’t speak, just got up and led me to my bedroom.

Our lovemaking was hard, almost furious, as if we could use our bodies to suppress the demons invading our minds. Neither of us slept well. I finally got up at five-thirty, trying to slip quietly out of bed, but Jake was already awake. He joined me in the kitchen for an espresso, but went back to his own apartment when I left for the beach with the dogs.

Yesterday’s bright, clear day had been a one-shot wonder. It wasn’t seven o’clock when the dogs and I left the beach to come back home, but the sun on the water already had a glare that made the eyes ache, and the air was as thick and sticky as a bowl of oatmeal.

The phone was ringing when I reached my apartment, but it had stopped by the time I got the door open. Caller ID again showed the incoming number as blocked. I carried the handset into the kitchen while I fed the dogs and cut up a mango for myself. Just as I was stirring the mango into a dish of yogurt, the phone began to ring again. I’d been expecting someone from the press, or the Salanter-Durango operation; I’d forgotten Leydon.

“Victoria! Thank goodness. I was starting to think you’d left the country, or that you hated me, which I couldn’t bear, nothing would drive me to the top of the tower formerly known as Sears faster than thinking you didn’t love me anymore. I need you, my little huntress, they’ve sent someone after me, I knew it, I knew it when I saw his weaselly face and now they’ll come after me and kill me or worse.”

“Ley—”

“Not my name, not on a phone, you know how it is when they don’t leave you alone! They’re tracking me. I need your help, you’re such a clever huntress, you’ll be able to think like them and tell me what I need to do.”

“Take a breath, tell me what’s going on.”

“Not on the phone, Iphigenia, darling, it’s much too Gordian for the phone. These days, it’s not just who’s in the room with you, it’s who’s on the scanner or the GPS chip with you. Just go to our old favorite meeting place. I can be there in forty minutes, or thirty if I can retrieve my car. I took it to the garage yesterday, only they said they couldn’t get to it until this morning, but it’s just a leaky gasket, that’s an easy fix. They have loaners, although then you have to sign the paperwork, and you know how it is, as soon as you put your name on something, you’ve got telemarketers, not to mention Uncle Sam and your own brother tracking—”

“Leydon, I have meetings today that I can’t miss—”

She cut me off again, hysterical that I’d said her name. I apologized and offered to meet her at the end of the day.

“I need you now, you need me, this could be a great story for you, this is hot, red hot, hotter than the midday sun on a July day in Chicago. A red-hot photo op, one for the photo shop, but you’d better hop!”

“Leydon, please, I can’t—”

“When did I ever turn my back on you when you needed me?” she cried. “When you left Dick Yarborough, didn’t I put you up for the night? When you started your detective business, didn’t I get my firm to send work your way? Why can’t you do this for me? I know it’s not a little thing, saving someone’s life, but I would do it for you if you asked, I’d be there in a heartbeat, in a half beat, in a half second, I wouldn’t put you second, the way you’re doing to me.”

I could feel my head splintering under her pile-driving chatter. “I have to run. Give me a hint about the problem now.”

“Can’t on the phone, I told you, darling, it’s too Gordian, it’s a Gordian knot, too overwrought for the phone.”

Gordian. That was Leydon’s code when we were young to let me know someone was in the room while she was on the phone. The subject was too personal, too knotty, for her father or roommates to overhear.

“Then I’ll meet you at five-thirty; just tell me where.”

Leydon repeated that she’d be at our favorite spot, but she wouldn’t reveal the address—she was too worried about eavesdroppers. “You remember it, my little huntress, our old haunts, far from the prying eyes of men; be there at five-thirty.”

“Far from the prying eyes of men? You mean the women’s toilet at the law school?”

“Don’t joke about it, Victoria, be there, don’t be square, you know where, I’ll see you—”

I hung up. I’d forgotten Leydon’s riddling, rhyming talk. Her clever language, filled with double or even triple entendres had added to her allure when we first met. In my family, with my slow-talking father, and a mother whose English didn’t come easily, I’d never experienced such linguistic fireworks. Later, though, the brilliance had faded from Leydon’s speech, leaving only difficult riddles at the core.

That was why she called me “her little huntress.” It was Leydon who knew that my middle name, Iphigenia, was an avatar of the Greek goddess Artemis, the huntress. When I became a private eye, she thought it a clever joke that I was now a hunter, and she kept me up until three one morning, debating why my mother had chosen to call me that. Leydon was sure the choice had an unconscious effect on my career decision, and her chat had veered off into topics I couldn’t follow, such as the Lacanian unconscious. (“Victoria Iphigenia, this
proves
that you absorbed the Greek avatar in your preconscious Italian mind, where it’s hovered all these years!”)

Our favorite spot, far from the prying eyes of men: that was a good example of an irritating riddle. Leydon might be thinking of almost any place, and I was supposed to unravel the code, or end up feeling responsible for the meltdown that would lie on the other side of a missed meeting.

I smacked my espresso pot down hard enough to splash coffee across the countertop and across my torso. Fortunately I was still in my T-shirt and cutoffs.

I wiped a sponge across the counter and went off to dress for work, choosing something sleeveless because of the heat. Not a sundress, since I was seeing clients today, but a severely tailored dress in gold cotton with big black buttons, cut for me by Joseph Parecki. He was an old friend of my parents’ who’d made my mother’s concert gowns.

Parecki was eighty-three now and didn’t sew much anymore, but he’d had a crush on Gabriella, and he liked to cut for me because I looked like her—“Only you are much bigger, Victoria, not that I mean to insult you. Your mother was a small woman, but her voice—that was the size of Mount Everest. You, you are tall like the mountain but with a smaller voice—Mother Nature has a sense of humor.”

While I dressed, I turned to channel 12 so I could watch Rachel Lyle’s interview with Chaim Salanter’s granddaughter.

“Here with me in the studio today are a couple of America’s most significant women: Dr. Sophy Durango, president of the University of Illinois and a candidate for Illinois Senator. Also with us is Julia Salanter, director of the Malina Foundation. The women have brought their daughters with them to the studio today, and if Helen Kendrick, Durango’s opponent, sells a moisturizer that produces those complexions, I want it, no matter what it costs!”

Her last sentence was a light reference to the skin-care products and drugstore chain that made up a big part of the Kendrick fortune.

The camera moved in close on Nia Durango and Arielle Zitter, who were sitting side by side on a couch. Lyle had placed herself at the end of the couch, sitting with her profile to the camera so she could look at the girls, who were dressed in pink sundresses that made them appear young, innocent, guileless.

The two mothers watched their daughters from armchairs at either end of the couch. The whole tableau looked like a set for a Victorian charade: anxious, doting mothers dressed in prim summer suits, hair carefully coiffed. “We drink tea and do good works,” the stage set proclaimed. “We support old-fashioned family values. We may run gigantic enterprises, but at heart we are just women who long to stay at home with our daughters, baking chocolate-chip cookies.”

Lyle talked with the girls about their fondness for the
Carmilla
books, and whether they’d ever expected to have adventures like the ones the girls in the series faced.

“Every kid wants adventure, as long as it isn’t scary,” Nia said gravely. “We thought going into the cemetery would be an adventure. It was sort of like the
Carmilla
books, but it seemed more like Huck Finn, when he goes to the cemetery with Tom Sawyer.”

The comparison felt like a PR clunker—it was meant to make the girls seem all-American, but it was hard to believe kids that age would make the leap on their own. If I’d been Rachel Lyle, I would have pushed Nia to see when she’d read
Tom Sawyer.

“Only then it got really scary,” Arielle chimed in. “A man was killed where we were having our Carmilla club meeting. We were lucky that our book group leader, Petra, sent her cousin to find us. Her cousin is a detective, see, and she helped us get home and be safe again.”

A nice smooth skate there over abandoning their friends and followers and running home—and trying to pretend to their mothers that they hadn’t left the Durango home all night even long enough to let the dog out.

The mothers said that they were grateful, too, to Petra and to me, but they wanted Nia and Arielle to understand that actions have consequences. “Like girls all over America, our daughters are swept up in Carmilla mania. Still, they know that it was wrong to sneak out of the house to meet with their school’s Carmilla club, and they’re grounded for two weeks.”

“Our moms have blocked each other’s numbers on our phones,” Nia pouted. “So no texting, either.”

I watched the performance through to the end. No mention of vampires, no mention of lying to their mothers, of sticking needles into one another’s hands. As the cameras rolled away from the tableau, I started flipping through the other channels.

The story was the number-one feature everywhere I looked. A number of channels already were rolling footage of the interview I’d just watched. No one seemed very interested in Miles Wuchnik, alive or dead, although they all made use of the Gothic murder backdrop, showing the crumbling pillars of the tomb where he’d been killed.

Most commentators focused on whether Nia Durango’s presence at Wuchnik’s murder site would kill her mother’s bid for senator.

“It’s July,” one pontificator pontificated. “People in Chicago have short memories and a deep tolerance for their politicians’ misbehavior. By November it’ll be forgotten.”

“Typical of Chicago corruption” was Global Entertainment’s response. Their color-balanced morning news team—a bleached-blond woman with a dark African-American man—said that Durango letting her daughter run wild in a graveyard was unsurprising, given the loose morals you could expect from a single mom, and did Illinois need more of that?

“Sophy’s on record as being against the Bible,” the female half of the sketch said. “As a result, her daughter belongs to a dangerous cult that worships vampires, or birds, or something, in a graveyard. Sophy can’t recover from this kind of revelation before election day.”

The
Global Morning Show
(motto:
We Spin the Globe in Your Kitchen
)
also brought in Helen Kendrick to give her a chance to comment. All I knew about Kendrick’s personal life was that she had married wisely, into a family whose holdings included ethanol plants along with their international drugstore chain. Helen had taken charge of Kendrick’s online skin-care division and turned it into an international gold mine. Ken-Care for the skin, Ken-Hair for the head, Ken-Scare for the politics.

Her on-screen presence was a credit to the family business. Her skin glowed with health, and her hair had a gold-blond sheen that looked natural, although it was probably not as genuine as the jewel-studded crucifix at her throat. If the stones were genuine, the pendant probably represented a year’s rent for someone in my childhood neighborhood—where Kendrick’s support ran high in the Eastern European part of the ward.

As soon as Kendrick started speaking, it was clear that she’d avoided elitist vocal coaches who might have tried to tone down the grating nasal of the true Chicagoan. “I guess if you think your grandfather was a monkey, you don’t care if your girls are worshipping animals in a cemetery. I can’t believe Sophy Durango can be so casual about her daughter’s behavior, calling it an innocent prank. Nia Durango was out after curfew, she was in a cemetery, she was practicing a cult, and all the time a man was being murdered nearby.

“I raised five children and saw them safely into adulthood before I turned to public life, but, like the apes she thinks are her ancestors, Sophy
Duran-goo
believes in letting her one teenage daughter loose in the urban jungle on her own.”

Kendrick paused dramatically. “Who was Miles Wuchnik, and why doesn’t Sophy Durango want to talk about him? Was he her lover? Was her daughter in the cemetery because Sophy brought her child there with her while she met her lover? The voters of Illinois have a right to answers to these questions.”

The harsh voice went on and on with one hate-filled phrase after another. I couldn’t seem to move, not even to summon the energy to turn off the television. The leap from Nia, to Wuchnik’s death, to the assertion that he’d been Sophy Durango’s lover, was made seamlessly, but without any regard to facts or logic. What could Durango possibly say to counter such extreme language?

The station finally turned to a commercial. The sight of women jumping up and down in a field of daisies, extolling the freedom that came from a drug to control leaky bladders, seemed like a garish counterpoint to Kendrick’s onslaught. The drug might well be part of Kendrick Pharm’s profit centers, but the dancing women broke the spell of Kendrick’s voice enough that I could turn off the set and resume dressing.

11.

HERE A MOB, THERE A MOB