Breakdown (15 page)

There was nothing to be done about the blood tonight, unless I stripped to the altogether and gave the dress to the attendant. I sponged off my feet. I’d sprouted blisters on the soles and around my little toes from running in high heels, but the lounge’s toiletry counter included Band-Aids along with combs, deodorant, and mouthwash. When I’d taped my feet and made myself presentable from the cleavage up, I let the elderly woman escort me to the second floor, where Chaim Salanter was waiting for me in the members’ dining room.

The ornamental horticulturalists had lined the club stairwell with bonsais and decorative shrubs. There had even been an array of sweet-smelling flowering plants in the ladies’ lounge.

My guide turned me over to a waiter, who led me to Chaim Salanter. The billionaire half rose to his feet when I reached him, but told the waiter to take me to the bar while he finished a phone call.

I ordered an Armagnac and wandered around the room with it, admiring the paintings. Most were of plants, but there were several startling Expressionists by Lasar Segall. When I finished my tour, Salanter was still on the phone.

I moved to an empty table and took Leydon’s Hermès bag out of my briefcase. Her wallet was in it, with her driver’s license and her Link card and about forty dollars in cash. No credit cards, perhaps a wise precaution, although hurricane-like shopping sprees had never been part of her bipolar illness. Dr. Knaub had stuffed in the handful of papers he’d found floating behind the pulpit, the news stories that Leydon followed obsessively—one on an
E. coli
outbreak in Germany, one on a woman who’d been killed in a hit-and-run accident, three on the nuclear reactors in Fukushima, and two on diets that help improve brain function. Leydon had written heavily on all of them, mostly about the huntress and the catafalque.

Dr. Knaub had found some pills the evidence techs had overlooked. He’d also discovered the key to Sewall’s BMW under the altar, but he hadn’t found Leydon’s personal keys. Perhaps she lived in a group home, where some manager buzzed you in. I checked the address on Leydon’s driver’s license. It was on Sheridan Road, near the Loyola University campus. I pulled out my iPad and found the building, a high-rise that seemed to be a mix of condos and rentals.

I was clicking on a link to the building’s Realtor when my cell phone rang. A blocked number, which made me think of Leydon, but it was a man’s voice on the phone, speaking so softly I could barely hear him.

“There was a person in the church with your friend this afternoon.”

“Who is this?” I demanded.

“I’m sorry, I cannot be involved in American police matters. And I saw nothing, only I heard the shouting. A man and a woman, with the woman saying most of the words. The emotion was too intense for an outsider to follow; also, the English was too fast for us, so we left the church. That is all I can tell you.”

Behind him I heard a woman’s voice, sharply telling him the plane was closed, all cell phones had to be shut down. The connection went dead. I stared at the bottles on the bar, so fixedly that the bartender thought I wanted another drink. I shook my head.

Leydon had been arguing with a man. Maybe she’d just been shouting at a man. Perhaps a lover, perhaps even her brother, although I didn’t think so. I could imagine Sewall being angry enough to fling Leydon over the balcony, but he wanted his car keys, and if he’d found her earlier and fought with her, he’d have extracted his Beemer keys then.

Chaim Salanter appeared next to me, apologizing for keeping me waiting. A billionaire’s apologies! Exciting, worth waiting for!

“I understand from my assistant that you were involved in a tragic event this afternoon,” he said. “I wouldn’t have insisted on our meeting going ahead, but I have to leave for Brazil in the morning and I needed to talk to you before I left.”

He took my elbow and ushered me to his table. Salanter was a small man: the top of his bald head just came to my ears. His voice was soft, but both voice and movements were authoritative. As soon as we sat, a waiter had menus in front of us. Salanter didn’t look at it, just nodded at the waiter, who nodded back. Bring me my usual? Put rat poison in my guest’s food?

Although the day had been hot and sticky, I found myself craving heavy food. A steak, mashed potatoes, broccoli with cheese sauce.

“I like to see women eat heartily,” Salanter surprised me by saying. “Too many women starve themselves these days. Even my daughter thinks she needs to diet. If age didn’t force me to take the low cholesterol special, I would join you with pleasure.”

His face was brown and lined, like a leather book that had cracked with time. What remained of his hair was white, but his eyebrows had stayed black; they formed a startling smear across his forehead, as if someone had drawn across the book jacket with a fat Magic Marker. The heavy brows made it hard to pay attention to how he was saying what he said. Maybe he dyed them to keep people off balance.

“I was at the Malina Foundation this afternoon,” I said. “My cousin runs one of your book groups, the one your granddaughter is part of. Arielle was showing the flag, coming to the group even though most of the parents had pulled their kids, and she, my cousin, and another girl were attacked by the mob.”

“Yes, that was disturbing. I spoke to my daughter, and to the police. Perhaps that discussion can wait until we’re on our own.”

Until the waiter had finished delivering the food, Salanter talked idly, about the history of the Parterre Club, his own interest in growing ornamental plants—“a good hobby for a desk-bound man. You can groom them while you’re waiting for the markets to open in Tokyo or London”—and about the Segall paintings I’d admired. His English was impeccable, but the remains of an Eastern European accent floated underneath it.

“My grandfather knew the Segall family because he lived around the corner from them in the Vilna ghetto. My grandfather acquired several of the paintings in the nineteen-twenties, out of sentiment—he thought Expressionism was trash. As did Hitler, actually. Lasar Segall himself was long gone from Lithuania by the twenties, and the Orthodox thought it was good riddance.

“Of course all my grandfather’s art was stolen once the war started. The advantage of a billion dollars: I was able to trace all but one of his Segalls. Those I keep at home, but the two here are very fine and I like to see them while I eat.”

It was disconcerting to hear a hyper-wealthy man speak so frankly and casually about his wealth. The waiter appeared with our food—cold salmon for Salanter, steak for me. My appetite disappeared as soon as I saw the food. The blood oozing onto the plate was uncomfortably like Leydon’s blood oozing onto the chapel floor.

Salanter didn’t comment on my unheartiness—he was ready for the meat of the meeting. “My daughter explained how you came to be involved in Wuchnik’s death, but she couldn’t say what you planned to do about it.”

“No, we didn’t discuss that,” I agreed.

The heavy black line contracted, but he asked, with exaggerated patience, “What do you plan to do about it?”

“There’s not much I can do, Mr. Salanter. He’s going to stay dead, no matter what I plan.”

“This is a serious matter, young woman. Flipness like that is out of place.”

“Mr. Salanter, you called this meeting. I have no idea what you want out of it, but I have had an extremely long day, what with dealing with the attack on your granddaughter this afternoon, and finding a good friend close to death. I am still covered with her blood and I would love to go home and take a bath. Tell me what you want as directly as possible and I’ll keep my flippancy to myself.”

“Are you investigating Wuchnik’s murder?”

I had a flash of glittering fantasies, on retainer to the twenty-first richest man in the world. “Would you like me to?”

“I would like you to leave the matter alone.”

“Leave it alone?” My voice rose half an octave. “When your foundation was attacked today as a result of Wuchnik’s death?”

He shook his head. “The foundation was attacked because of anti-immigration hysteria in this country, not because a man was killed.”

“But at least two commentators, Wade Lawlor and Helen Kendrick, tied your granddaughter’s presence at the murder site to their rabid commentaries. They accused Sophy Durango of being Wuchnik’s lover and there’s a ton of filth circulating the Net saying she killed him.”

“All the more reason to leave it alone,” he said sharply. “The more you dig, the more avid the flies who feed on filth become. Ignore the story and it dies on its own.”

“With respect, Mr. Salanter, is there anything in the history of the Jews in Europe that makes you believe that?”

“Americans use Hitler and Stalin as political insults far too freely, without any understanding of the context. The people spewing garbage, at me, at Sophy, at my foundation, are a tiny handful on the fringe. Most people in this country are decent and don’t act on hate.”

I thought of lynchings, and the murders of abortion providers, and the assaults on Muslims and gays, but I was too tired to argue. I needed what was left of my wits to try to understand what he really didn’t want to come to the surface about Wuchnik’s death.

“Did Miles Wuchnik work for you?” I asked.

“No, Ms. Warshawski. When I need information, I use a staff of more sophisticated investigators than this Wuchnik seems to have been. I’m asking you to leave the matter alone to keep from getting more hands on the spoon that’s stirring up pond scum.”

“Are you making the same request of the police?” I signaled to the waiter: I needed coffee. Armagnac on an empty stomach after a major trauma hadn’t been the best way to approach a meeting with a man like Salanter.

“The police understand that their duty is to find Wuchnik’s killer.”

I tried to parse this. Leydon would have done so standing on her head. No one had been more skilled at taking apart arguments.

I thought through the problem out loud. “To find the killer, period. You have asked the police to limit their investigation in some way. Perhaps the coincidence of your granddaughter playing at vampire and Wuchnik having a stake through his heart?”

He nodded courteously. The affable gesture told me my guess was wrong.

“I wouldn’t go out of my way to hurt your granddaughter,” I said. “You don’t think Arielle killed Wuchnik, do you?”

His upper lip curled in disgust. “Of course not. Is this how you spend your time? Making obscene suggestions?”

I smiled. Once the opponent was angry you had the upper hand. “A better detective than I’ll ever be said you have to start an investigation by eliminating the impossible. It may be obscene to imagine how two girls as enterprising as Arielle and Nia got a grown man to lie passively on his back, but it isn’t impossible. Do you think your daughter killed him to protect Arielle?”

“Also not impossible.” He had recovered his equilibrium. Years of practice at high-stakes poker.

“And it’s possible you killed him yourself.”

He nodded. “More possible than my daughter or granddaughter, certainly. Why do
you
think this man Wuchnik was murdered?”

“I have no idea. Because of something he was working on? Because his wife was furious that he was sleeping with someone else? Because he was spying on your granddaughter and a mugger came on him randomly?”

“Was he sleeping with another woman?” Salanter asked the question a shade too eagerly.

“I don’t know if he was gay or straight, married, divorced, or had a steady partner. I’m just tossing out possibilities. Why do
you
think he was murdered? Because of your family?”

“Like you, I have no idea. How many of your possibilities are the police likely to follow?”

“All of them,” I said. “The detective in charge is one of the most competent investigators on the force.”

“So you will leave the matter in his hands, then.”

“What is it you’re afraid will come out, Mr. Salanter?”

“Merely I want to protect my family from further harassment.”

The waiter brought my coffee, which was bitter and caramelly; it had sat on a warming coil all evening. “Did your daughter tell you I harassed her yesterday? It was she who summoned me, just as you did today. Truth to tell, I’m starting to feel a mite bit harassed by the Salanter family.”

The thick black brows went up in a skeptical line. “I promise you we won’t bother you anymore if you leave the investigation to this most competent of police detectives.”

I tried again to think like Leydon. What could I do that the police—with their evidence technicians, their thirteen-thousand-strong force, their forensics lab, and the power of the law—could not?

Detective Finchley was not just an inspired investigator, he was beyond corruption. But he was also part of a military-style organization with an inviolable chain of command. Salanter, and some of the other parents in Petra’s book group, had connections in the mayor’s office. If the word came from the mayor through the superintendent to leave the Salanters alone, or to put the Wuchnik murder on a back burner, then Finchley would have to obey it.

But if I wanted to ask questions, I would do so. I have been known to ignore threats, orders, and attempts on my life, and someone may have told Salanter that.

I saw him on the catafalque,
Leydon had scribbled. Was it Miles Wuchnik she’d been referring to? She surely hadn’t been in Mount Moriah cemetery Saturday night—in her manic state she wouldn’t have been able to keep her presence a secret. She’d seen his picture in the newspaper or on TV, then. But why did she care? She had something that was “hot,” she’d said. What could she know about Wuchnik?

And then, the German organist had heard Leydon arguing with a man this afternoon. Maybe she’d had evidence that led her to Wuchnik’s murderer, and the man, whoever he was, had tossed her over the balustrade onto the chapel floor.

I was staring at the congealed blood on my plate, not seeing it. I had a duty to Leydon, and I had a duty to my cousin and her book group. I didn’t agree with the billionaire: I tied this afternoon’s mob at his foundation to the exploitation of Wuchnik’s murder.