Breakdown (16 page)

“I’m sorry, Mr. Salanter, but I agreed earlier today to look into Miles Wuchnik’s activities. I don’t think they have anything to do with—”

“Who hired you?”

I shook my head. “If I don’t respect the confidentiality of my clients, in a short while I won’t have any clients.”

“Whoever your client is, if you only agreed to do the work this afternoon, you can’t have had time to start. I’ll pay double whatever you’re charging this other person to leave the investigation alone.”

I couldn’t help smiling, since twice zero is still zero, but I was annoyed all the same. “I don’t work that way. I drop investigations very rarely, and then only if they are futile, or if the client has been lying to me. I don’t send my investigations out to bid.”

Salanter pressed his hands together with the forefingers steepled against his lips. The gesture apparently helped him think, or at least kept him from blurting out the first thing that came to mind.

“I’d like to hire you to report your findings to me before you make them public,” he said at length.

“Your biography says you started out as a poor boy on the streets of Vilna. You can’t always have believed you had an absolute right to whatever you want.”

“If you’ve read my biography, then you know that I have had to be ruthless in order to survive.” His voice was still soft, but the implied threat was credible.

“You didn’t hire Wuchnik but you think he was investigating you,” I said slowly. “You think he found something to your discredit, or perhaps to your daughter’s or Dr. Durango’s. Is that why you won’t sue Wade Lawlor over the sickening statements he makes about you on his show?”

“Wade Lawlor is an annoying mosquito. People on the left take him far too seriously. I don’t sue him because I’m past eighty; I want to spend my remaining energy on more attractive pursuits than the courts.”

“If that was what you cared about, you wouldn’t have summoned me to dinner, nor waited an hour and a half for me. I don’t know who you wait for, but a PI like me, you’d be up and out of here if I were thirty seconds past due unless you wanted to quash this investigation more than you want to pack for Rio. No, you’ve got something weighing on you. It could be your granddaughter, of course. I’m pretty sure she had met Wuchnik, or at least talked to him, but she refuses to tell me.”

“You can do as you please about who you work for, but I will not allow you to talk to my granddaughter.”

The words were sharp, but something in his movements, a restless moving of his knife and fork, meant he was worried—about what Arielle had done? Or about what might happen to her?

When I didn’t say anything, he added, “I’ll be checking up on you from time to time to make sure you leave her alone.”

“With your highly competent team of investigators.” I got to my feet. “I hope whatever skeleton you’re draping with velvet and sable to keep out of the public gaze isn’t about Sophy Durango. I like her. I’d like to see her in the U.S. Senate and it won’t happen if anything discreditable emerges. Thanks for the Armagnac.”

15.

A HARD DAY’S DAY

D
ESPITE MY FATIGUE AND MY BLOODY DRESS,
I
STOPPED AT
Lotty’s on my way home. Max was with her. I joined them on the balcony and felt better as soon as I drank some of Lotty’s rich Viennese coffee.

“Why can’t a private club that caters to the wealthy and horticultural make good coffee? Don’t they understand that coffee is a shrub, that the berry requires careful tending?” I complained.

Max laughed, but Lotty swept aside my comment, demanding a report on my meeting with Salanter.

“I hope our conversation doesn’t cost Beth Israel the funding for the Chaim Salanter wing, or whatever he’s pledged to you. He wanted to hire me
not
to investigate Miles Wuchnik’s death.” I summarized our Byzantine conversation. “The trouble is, I’m committed to looking into, not Wuchnik’s death exactly, but the cases he was working on leading up to his death. Do you know anything about Salanter that I should know before I jump onto a land mine?”

“No,” Max said slowly. “I know next to nothing about his history, and I’m not sure anyone knows those details. He arrived in Chicago around 1950, but I only met him after I became executive director at Beth Israel and started cultivating potential donors. His response was tepid, so I was surprised when he asked me to be a director of the Malina Foundation.”

“His past, that’s his business,” Lotty said crisply.

She’d sat on her own wartime secrets for decades. She would have preferred that they never come to light, but her past had overtaken her and forced her into some partial revelations, and reconciliations. I wondered if the same thing might be happening to Salanter.

“His past is his business,” I agreed, “unless it’s responsible for Miles Wuchnik’s death. Wuchnik was investigating Salanter, or Salanter is afraid he was. What is Salanter afraid that people will find out?”

Neither Max nor Lotty had any ideas, although both agreed he would go to great lengths to protect Arielle, his only grandchild. The Malina Foundation was important to him, too.

“Not important enough to take on the creeps who drove a mob into an attack on the foundation. Not to mention his own granddaughter, besides my cousin and another of her charges.”

Max and Lotty had seen the coverage of the protest but hadn’t realized Petra or Arielle had been assaulted. I explained what had happened, and Salanter’s insistence that I not pursue the matter. “I don’t think the mob knew Arielle was there, or the attack would have been even more savage. As it was, she and one of the other kids were pelted with eggs and paint bombs. So was Petra. I’m worried that these girls will find it hard to recover from such an assault.”

“We should get a private security firm to look after the children in the book groups,” Max said. “At least until this episode blows over.”

“According to Petra, there are seven groups. It would be a big financial burden to look after—what—a hundred or so kids?” I said. “Better to cut the head off the snake.”

We talked that idea back and forth without reaching a conclusion.

“Salanter’s from Vilna,” I said. “But the name sounds Polish or Russian to me.”

“Like Warshawski?” Max laughed softly in the dark. “You can’t tell country of origin that easily with Eastern European surnames, especially not Jewish ones. ‘Wuchnik’ doesn’t sound Jewish, however. The word means ‘archer,’ or ‘bowman.’ Which is ironic, when you think how he was killed, almost as if he’d taken an arrow in his chest. Are you thinking Wuchnik and Salanter knew each other in Europe?”

“His father or grandfather,” I admitted. “Wuchnik was only forty or so.”

“It’s possible,” Max grunted. “Anything is possible in that neck of the woods, but Salanter is a guy who faces forward, not backward. You don’t amass all that wealth by dwelling on past grievances. Look at how he brushes off Wade Lawlor’s attacks. I would be astounded if he had anything but a ‘publish and be damned’ attitude toward any bilge a private eye could turn up.”

“Not that you think
I
sink my net into bilge,” I said.

Max, whose courtesy is legendary, was embarrassed. He apologized but added, “I suppose I am worried about you digging up something Salanter would find painful. I don’t want him harmed—not because he’s rich and deserves more respect than the average person, but because, like Lotty and me, he lost his childhood and came here, like us, as a refugee.”

Lotty nodded, her expression bleak. Like Salanter, though, or Max himself, she faces forward, in this case to an early surgery call in the morning. She said she was shooing me out.

I got up but asked if she could check on Leydon before I left. Max and I carried coffee cups to the kitchen while Lotty went to her study to work her network at the University of Chicago hospitals.

She came into the kitchen, shaking her head. “Your friend is out of surgery, but it’s hard to say what the prognosis will be. Right now she’s in a medically induced coma. The good news is that she doesn’t need to be on a respirator; the bad news is that she bruised the brain badly—she hit her head on stone, I gather. The family have left a DNR order, claiming that the jump was proof that she wished to end her life. You don’t know if she left any written directives, do you?”

“She wasn’t thinking in such a linear way the last decade or so, but I don’t think she was trying to kill herself this afternoon. I think if she fell it was by accident, and it’s even possible she was pushed.”

“Pushed?” Max said. “What makes you say that?”

“Some German tourists went into the chapel. They heard her shouting with a man, and fled, not wanting to be part of someone else’s quarrel. And then there’s this business with her handbag.” I explained where the chapel dean had found Leydon’s bag, and how impossible I’d found it to throw it that far.

“She might have dropped it herself before climbing to the gallery,” Lotty objected.

“Yes, that’s always possible. Anything is possible, especially where Leydon is concerned,” I agreed.

Lotty caught sight of my dress for the first time and her eyes widened in dismay. “Victoria—I didn’t realize you’d come straight to us from the accident—you’re covered in blood. No wonder Chaim Salanter reacted to you so negatively. Go home, change, take a hot bath. But no more alcohol, do you hear?”

She held me tightly for a moment, then propelled me gently out her door. Max rode down with me in the elevator and escorted me to my car.

He held the door open for me with old-fashioned grace, and apologized again for his “bilge” comment. “You’ve had too stressful a day; I shouldn’t have added to it by insulting your profession. I know you work hard for those who are poor and needy. But don’t assume the rich don’t also sometimes need care.”

I was too tired to argue, and too grateful, anyway, for his concern. As I drove off, though, I argued with him in my head, the way one does.
Salanter implied he could order the police to limit their investigation. He didn’t exactly threaten me, but he didn’t exactly not.

Petra was still with Mr. Contreras when I got home. I put my beautiful gold dress in a bag for the cleaners, although whether all the dry-cleaning fluids of Chicago could ever sweeten that little frock I didn’t know. Between that and my scarlet party gown, my involvement with the Salanters had already taken a terrible toll on my wardrobe.

When I’d showered and washed my hair, it took every ounce of will I could muster to avoid bed and go back down to check in with my cousin.

Mr. Contreras and she had long since moved out of the worry-and-fear phase of her experience to revenge fantasies, which they’d spelled out over burgers on the grill. They were sitting on the back porch, my neighbor with some of his abominable homemade grappa, my cousin with a beer.

Petra said her boss had called, to tell her that enough parents had canceled their daughters’ participation in the Malina book groups that they were consolidating the groups from seven to four.

“But they’re keeping me half time,” Petra said. “They like what I’m doing, and maybe something else will open up with kids that doesn’t require an advanced degree. You don’t have to worry that I’ll want to be on your payroll or anything.”

I grinned. “You are right about that, my sister. I’ll buy
StreetWise
from you before I put you on my payroll again.”

Mr. Contreras began a protest, but Petra just laughed. I kissed them both good night and was on my way out the door when Petra called to me.

“I forgot to tell you, but Murray phoned me to talk to me about the protest at the foundation today.”

“Murray?” I echoed. “How did he know you were there?”

“I guess me and Kira showed up on TV when we were trying to get back to the Malina Building. So he had some questions about what it felt like, the attack and all.”

“Did he ask you about the cemetery?”

“I can’t remember. I’m pretty sure he did, but of course, I wasn’t there, so I couldn’t tell him anything.”

I was too tired to figure out why that made me uneasy. I just told Petra to make sure her boss knew she’d been talking to the press. “The one thing bosses hate is surprises, especially surprises involving their underlings and publicity.”

As I climbed the stairs, my legs so itchy with fatigue that I could hardly lift them, I thought enviously of Lotty’s high-rise. Glossy floors, elevators, doormen. I should have become a surgeon instead of a private eye.

I fell instantly and heavily asleep, but my night was filled with unquiet dreams. Over and over, Leydon jumped or flew or fled from terror while I stood frozen to the spot, watching but not acting. She taunted me, reminding me that she could quote James Joyce, poets, Puritans, while I was only a bailer of bilge.

In another dream, Chaim Salanter knelt on Miles Wuchnik’s chest, sticking darning needles into his neck and sucking his blood. Arielle and Nia Durango danced around him, shrieking, “Do it again, Grandpapa, do it again!”

I got out of bed the next day leaden of brain and foot. I drove the dogs to the lake, too groggy to run that far. The air was already hot and heavy, but the water was icy, and the flies were biting hard. The dogs could keep swimming to get away from the swarms of insects, but the water was too cold for me. I threw balls for the dogs as long as I could stand it, running up and down the beach, swatting at the flies that were stinging me, but I finally had to drag my pair back to the car. At least my frenzied movements had taken my mind off my troubles and brought some life to my dull brain.

16.

ANGEL MOTHER—NOT

I
LEFT THE DOGS TO THE COOL OF
M
R.
C
ONTRERAS’S FRONT-ROOM
air conditioner and drove myself to the eighteen-room mansion in Lake Bluff where Leydon Ashford had spent her childhood. The journey took me along congested expressways, where grinding trucks belched gray smoke into the heavy air.