Breakdown (14 page)

“No, Sewall,” I said firmly. “They came because your sister is badly injured, nearly dead. Your car seems mighty unimportant.”

“What? Did she run it into a tree? She’s been out of the hospital for ten days, and if she’s taken her risperidone once since they released her—against my most urgent warnings that they keep her—I’d be astounded. She talked to Faith yesterday, and Faith couldn’t make head or tail of anything she was saying. It was all a jumble about spies, and then a string of obscenities directed at me! Poor Faith was so embarrassed she finally hung up!”

Faith was Sewall’s long-suffering wife.

“She stole your car, sir?” The officer tried to pull a followable strand out of the tangled yarn Sewall had flung at us.

“Probably egged on by Warshawski here. The two of them have lived to make my family’s life a misery ever since they met in law school. Did you actually tell Leydon to steal my car, or just suggest it would be a good way to piss me off?”

“Steal your car? What do you drive, anyway, that someone could hot-wire it?” I was rattled, and seized on the one point I could understand—perhaps I’d told Leydon how Boom-Boom and I once hot-wired my uncle’s old Buick. Leydon could quote poetry by the ream; maybe she’d memorized the details of solenoids and ignition wires when I recounted them all those years ago.

“Hot-wire my Beemer? What are you talking about? She waltzed into our company garage and helped herself to my BMW and then had the gall to tell the garage man I’d given her permission to drive it. The idiot didn’t check with me first.”

“So your—sister, is it?—borrowed your car, sir,” the officer said. “The word we’re getting from the hospital is that if Ms. Ashford recovers, it’s going to be a long time before she drives again, so I think we’ll just let that dog lay down and sleep.”

I restrained an impulse to slap him on the back and cry, “Good show.” Sewall was less impressed.

“She has the keys. Did she leave them with you, Warshawski?”

“I got here too late to talk to her,” I said. “I was wondering where her handbag was. I found a piece of paper she’d been writing on, something about seeing someone on a catafalque.”

“Oh, that catafalque crap!” Sewall snapped. “That was part of what she laid on Faith yesterday, she kept saying she’d seen him on the catafalque and then asking, well, I won’t repeat it, it’s too embarrassing.”

“Seen whom?” I asked.

“Oh, you know Leydon when she’s jumped the rails, who knows? It was all some jumble, some garbage she likes to taunt Faith with, about ‘the faith once delivered to the sinners,’ whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean! She says that all the time to my wife, and then yesterday she added on all this catafalque crap.”

“You weren’t here earlier, were you, Sewall?” I asked. “A witness heard Leydon shouting up on the balcony. They couldn’t tell who was with her.” If anyone, I added to myself; it was always depressingly possible that Leydon had simply been shouting.

The officer who’d made the remark about letting the dog lay down and sleep stopped what he was doing to look more closely at Sewall. “Were you here earlier, sir?”

“I was at my office in the Loop until thirty minutes ago. And I have a dozen witnesses, including a senior officer of the Fort Dearborn Trust, and one of my attorneys. We’re underwriting a bond issue and I did not need my damned sister derailing herself and my work right now.”

“Your sister may not live through the night,” the officer said. “You need to show some respect.”

One of the evidence techs strolled over. “We found some pill bottles. Risperidone and some vitamins. We’ll bag and tag just in case. Which one of you would be the responsible party, so we can get a signed receipt?”

“Do you have her power of attorney?” I asked Sewall.

“Faith—my wife—does. Did you find my car keys?”

“No, sir, but they may show up. This is a big space and it’s not easy to find things.”

Sewall turned to me. “What hospital did they take her to?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know—I suppose the one right here, but it doesn’t have a trauma center. You’d better call around.”

The cops took care of that for us: Leydon was at Mitchell Hospital here on the university campus, going into surgery to deal with damage to the brain. The hospital would be glad if Sewall stopped by to give them financial information.

“Her wallet isn’t here?” Sewall said. “It has her Link card in it.”

“Your sister is on public aid?” My jaw dropped down to my chest. “I thought she had a trust fund—”

“She does,” Sewall cut me off. “But she needs health insurance and she’s disabled.”

I clasped my hands tightly behind me. “You know, Sewall, it would be a really good idea for you to get over to the hospital and deal with them. Because I feel this horrible urge to break your nose and your ulna and all these other body parts you’ll need if you want to locate your Beemer and drive back to the North Shore tonight.”

Sewall protested, and tried to get the officer to take note of my threats, but the police were as disgusted as I was, maybe more so. They live on fifty or sixty thousand a year, but the cops I know, the ones I grew up with, scramble and scrape to care for their families. The idea that a wealthy man would cut his sister loose didn’t sit well with the men I was talking to. They sent Sewall packing. A few minutes later, they took off themselves, with the advice to go home and have a good stiff drink with “hubby.”

The evidence techs lingered a few minutes longer. When they finished with their photographs and measurements, I got up to go, but my legs didn’t want to carry me forward.

I sank onto the chancel stairs, head in hand. I’d been galloping from point A to point B all day, not having time to reflect on anything I was doing, from my meetings with clients, to chasing after Petra, to sprinting across campus in Leydon’s wake. If I’d stopped to think for one second, I could have done it all differently. Leydon would be maddening me with her chatter, but she’d be upright, alive.

I had been in the chapel choir in my student days. Leydon never came to the service. She despised church, but she enjoyed sitting in on choir rehearsals. (“Too many Sundays with Jesus after breakfast and ‘by Jesus, young lady, do as I say’ after lunch. The outside of the plate polished so you could see your reflection, the inside full of filth and mire, you know how that goes.”)

I found myself singing the alto line to a setting of Psalm 39 that Leydon had particularly liked.

“That’s Stravinsky, isn’t it?” A man had joined me on the steps without my noticing. “
Let me know my end and the number of my days.
I’ve always found that a troubling verse. Would you want that knowledge?”

If I’d known twenty-five years ago what the end of Leydon’s days might look like—that launch from the parapet—what would I have done? Tried harder, probably, to change the ending, but the day would still have come when I would have walked away because Leydon’s problems were too difficult for me to handle.

I’m not prone to unburdening myself to anyone, let alone a stranger in a darkening church, but I was so tired my usual filters weren’t in place. I spoke my thoughts aloud.

“It’s like reading the
Iliad,
” my companion said.
“You want to reach into the text and tell Achilles’ mother to stick his whole foot in the river. You see the danger and want to avert it, but there’s nothing you can do. Sometimes events have a tragic momentum that you’re powerless to halt.

“I’m Henry Knaub, by the way, the chapel dean. The police called to tell me about your friend, but I was at a meeting on the North Side and couldn’t get back sooner.”

“I’m a detective,” I said. “It’s not my nature to be so—so passive in the face of events. I’ve been like one of those tether balls that we used to play with in school, getting batted round and round a pole, so much so that I can’t think!”

“I heard the end of your quarrel with—Leydon, did you say her name was?—with her brother,” Knaub said. “Crisis makes people behave oddly, but if that’s how her family typically responds to her, she was lucky to have you as a friend.”

I shook my head in the gloomy chamber; I hadn’t been much of a friend lately. “She has a phenomenal memory; when we were law students she could remember almost the page where she’d seen a citation or a case reference. If she started to argue with you, or most especially, with her brother, she’d start pulling poetry or legal precedents, or who knows what, out of her hat.

“I was on her side, always, but I didn’t blame her brother for getting wound up. For instance, her brother’s wife is called Faith, and Leydon always refers to her as ‘the Faith once delivered to the sinners,’ meaning Sewall and their parents—they live with Sewall’s mother.”

Knaub chuckled softly. “Oh, yes, that was a favorite line of the reformers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; they were trying to recapture ‘the faith once delivered to the saints.’ Yes, I can see your friend could be trying. Brilliant, but trying.”

“The last few days, according to Sewall, Leydon was going on about a catafalque. She suffers from hypergraphia when she’s cycling high, and she’d written it over and over on a piece of paper I found in your gallery.” I pulled the crumpled paper from my pocket:
I saw him on the catafalque.

Knaub squinted at it. “
Portrait of the Artist;
the child Stephen Dedalus is overhearing adults talk about the death of Parnell.” He was apologetic, as if he thought I’d be embarrassed at having my ignorance exposed.

“One of the differences between Leydon and me.” I smiled with difficulty. “We both read Joyce as undergraduates but his words stuck in her head and not in mine.”

“Could she have seen someone laid out on the communion table here?” the dean asked. “Is she delusional?”

I shook my head. “I can’t tell you; I got here when she was already on the floor. It’s all extremely—Gordian—in her favorite phrase.”

My cell phone buzzed in my briefcase. I pulled it out—incoming from Chaim Salanter’s personal assistant. Mr. Salanter was waiting, and no, he didn’t want to reschedule to a more convenient time: this was his only convenient time. He was leaving for Brazil in the morning.

“Oh, my God!” I got to my feet. “I’m supposed to be meeting the world’s twenty-first richest person for dinner. Another thing that didn’t stick in my head.”

The dean stood with me. “The twenty-first richest person? How odd that they can be counted that way, from top down. I wonder if they know the twenty-first poorest person in the world?”

“I looked up the
Forbes
list this afternoon between meetings,” I said. “Five of the top fifty are women. I don’t know if
Forbes
could figure out where the fifty poorest live, but a dollar says they’re all female.”

“I’ll be praying for your friend,” the dean said. “In return, if number twenty-one is feeling charitable, the chapel can always use a billion or two.”

He held out a bronze leather handbag with a distinctive “H” picked out in the leather. “I found this behind the pulpit, with Ms. Ashford’s name on a nearby pill bottle. I put in the papers and a car key that might belong to her, but if she’s missing something let me know; our cleaning crew is very good about turning in the oddments people drop in church.”

I took the bag but pointed behind him at a little tower on the right side of the chancel. “Is that what you mean—behind that?”

“That’s the pulpit, yes. Is that a problem?”

“Leydon had to have been up in the west gallery to fall as she did. If she was carrying the bag, it traveled up the steps and thirty feet away from her.”

“If she’s bipolar and cycling high, maybe she threw it from the gallery.” His voice was diffident.

I went back to the gallery staircase. “Can you turn on a light?” I called as I climbed.

I waited a moment at the top until the dean had found the right switch, then went to the balustrade.

“Okay. Here I am, filled with irrational exuberance. I fling my bag.”

I did a windup and released the bag, throwing it as far as I could. It landed in the middle of the chancel, a good fifteen or twenty feet from where Knaub said he’d found it. The force of my throw propelled me forward; I had to clutch the low railing to keep from following Leydon over the edge.

“I can see how throwing the bag might have made her fall,” I conceded. “But she doesn’t have nearly as strong an arm as I do. You’d have to be Johnny Unitas to get that handbag from here to the back of the pulpit. Someone else dumped it there, but who?”

14.

ONE ARMAGNAC TOO MANY

I
T WAS CLOSE TO EIGHT WHEN
I
REACHED
C
HAIM
S
ALANTER’S
appointed meeting place. The sun was low in the horizon and the air had that quiet warmth, a lover’s embrace, that it offers at twilight in summer. I left my car in the club’s loading zone and stood for a moment, eyes shut, listening to the birds cheeping their end-of-day messages, breathing the heavy scent from the flowers planted around the club’s stairs.

The Parterre Club was housed in one of those discreet old greystones on Elm Street, just off Lake Shore Drive—and a short walk from the Salanter mansion on Schiller Street. When I finally summoned the energy to climb the stairs to the front door, I saw a framed placard next to the bell: the club had been founded in 1895 for “Ladies and Gentlemen with an Interest in Ornamental Horticulture.” That was reassuring—all during my drive north, I’d been thinking of the parterres under cathedral balconies.

An attendant came to the door and took my car keys, while a stooped woman who looked old enough to be my grandmother escorted me to the ladies’ lounge so that I could “freshen up”—a euphemism for doing something about the blood that had dried in stiff brown Rorschachs down the right side of my dress. When I saw myself in the full-length mirror, I winced: my hair looked like Tom’s fur after Jerry had run an electric current through him. My olive skin had a gray sheen, fatigue mixed with sweat.