Breakdown (17 page)

The route north led past the city’s sleeper suburbs, past Ravinia, where the Chicago Symphony had its summer home, and decanted me into paradise. As soon as I left the expressway, the air was bright and clear, the lawns a miracle of tightly clipped emerald. No empty chip bags or McDonald’s wrappers spoiled the gutters. Children biked or skateboarded along the streets, terriers barking happily at their heels. It was as if the drawings in my first-grade reader had been pasted onto cardboard and set in motion.

There must be an app for this somewhere in the Apple or Droid worlds. You clicked on it and suddenly the temperature dropped eight degrees, pollution and congestion evaporated, and everyone around you turned miraculously wealthy. And white.

It had been a good twenty years since I’d last been to the Ashford home, but I found my way there without stopping to check apps or maps. I’d spent a lot of weekends there with Leydon, swimming off the private beach between bouts of studying, and then going inside to argue about civil rights or economics with Sewall and Mr. Ashford. There’d been an especially hideous Thanksgiving when my dad was in the hospital and I’d let Leydon persuade me to come north with her. I’d almost come to blows with Mr. Ashford over the laziness of immigrant workers.

Before turning in to the Ashfords’ private drive, I called Lotty’s clinic nurse for any fresh news about Leydon. Jewel Kim put me on hold and returned to say that Leydon was still unresponsive but still able to breathe on her own. It was impossible to know how she was doing.

Ashford money, like Salanter money, had come originally from steel, although the Ashfords had been in the production, not the scrap, end of the business. At one time, Ashford mills stretched from Gary, Indiana, to the Canadian border, with a bunch of iron-ore mines tucked in here and there along the way.

I don’t know what they did for money now that the mills were closed, but they didn’t seem to be suffering. Trees, grass, flowers, shrubs were all well enough tended that the Parterre Club would have admitted the Ashfords on sight. I saw a dark-skinned man in an orange vest cleaning out the ornamental pond, while another was riding a mower around the three acres of lawn.

When I reached the house, a Lincoln Navigator was in the drive, but I didn’t see a BMW. That was a relief—Sewall was presumably downtown, doing whatever he did all day long; it was his wife I’d come to visit.

I didn’t know her well: we’d met at a handful of big events—her wedding to Sewall, and fund-raisers for that small circle of causes where our ideas of the worthwhile intersected. Lyric Opera was the only one I could think of.

A maid answered the front door. That was a change from the last time I’d been here—the elder Mrs. Ashford liked butlers. Perhaps women’s lib had reached the North Shore. The maid took my card and went to find Faith.

The house was built in two wings around a wide hall that led directly from the front door to a garden room and the grounds beyond. I watched the maid walk down the hall and out through the garden room. After a few minutes, Faith came hurrying toward me. She was wearing cutoffs and a dirty T-shirt, but she’d dropped a tool-filled apron and kicked off her clogs in the garden room.

“V. I. Warshawski. You were with Leydon in the church yesterday, Sewall told me. What a terrible ordeal. Sewall was very upset.” She looked at her dirty hands. “I’ve been staking up my dahlias and the weather is unforgiving. I know you and Leydon were—are—good friends. I hope you haven’t come here in person because there’s bad news?”

The dahlias and Leydon seemed to be vying for the front of her mind. “Leydon’s condition hasn’t changed, but she isn’t worse, which I guess is a good thing,” I said. “I came to find out what she was doing the last few months. Leydon hired me to make some inquiries for her, but she fell before she could give me any background and we hadn’t talked for a time.”

“Oh, my.” Faith pushed some sweaty wisps of hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand, leaving a dirty smear across her forehead. “I don’t know—we don’t see her that often. Sewall and she—and then, I suppose if you’ve known her a long time you know that sometimes she can be, well, a little unpredictable.”

“That’s a charitable way of putting it,” I said. “Leydon is the most brilliant person I’ve ever known, but I know how maddening she can be.”

Faith smiled gratefully. “Can you come out back with me? Mother Ashford will be as unforgiving as the weather if I stand here dropping dirt on the floor; this marble was imported from Carrara when they built the house in 1903 and she just about killed Terence—my eleven-year-old—when she caught him skateboarding on it.”

I followed her to the back of the house, to a large stone patio on the bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. Stairs led down to the beach, which was littered with water toys, including a small sailboat. A trio of boys was windsurfing twenty or thirty yards from shore; farther out we could see a phalanx of sailboats.

Dahlias of all colors and sizes filled the borders around the patio, and Faith looked at them wistfully before gesturing me to a wooden deck chair. She used a cell phone to ask the maid, or a maid, to bring us iced tea.

“Sewall mentioned that Leydon had left the hospital a week or so ago,” I said.

Faith nodded. “She has an apartment in Edgewater, but she was getting very wound up. One weekend she drew pictures on all the walls, not just in her own apartment but all over the halls. She wouldn’t stop, she wouldn’t take her medication. In the end the building manager called Sewall and he got the police to take her to Ruhetal.”

Ruhetal was a state mental hospital in Downers Grove, one of the suburbs west of Chicago. It annoyed me that Sewall wouldn’t use Leydon’s own money to get her private care, but I tried to put the feelings aside.

“I don’t suppose you know what the pictures were about?”

Faith looked again at her flowers, and a wagon filled with stakes and twine. “No, I never went down there and if the manager described them to Sewall, he never said. You don’t think they were valuable, I mean, you don’t think they were real art, do you? We had to pay to have them painted over!”

“I never knew Leydon could draw at all,” I admitted. “I’m just trying to find out what was going on in her life. Sewall said Leydon called you two days ago and talked to you in an obnoxious way.”

Faith’s sunburnt face turned redder. “I got upset at the time, but if I’d known—if I’d had any idea she meant to—do what she did—I would give anything to be able to go back two days and be more patient with her!”

I smiled sadly. “I’ve been beating myself up, too, for not taking her more seriously. It would be a help if you’d tell me what she said.”

“She called because she thought Sewall was spying on her. She wanted me to tell him to stop, especially if he was using her own trust fund to pay for spies, that was how she put it. She called him
See-all,
which always makes him furious. He got on the line and told her he was fed up with her not taking her drugs, and then she said, did he want her to take a drug test, and she asked—she said—did he want to hold out his hands so she could—pee—in them.”

Faith ducked her chin like a guilty seven-year-old. “She could be so dirty in how she talked,” she whispered. “She talked about how it would be incest, brothers and sisters exchanging bodily fluids, and how distressed Mother Ashford would be, but she’d do it if he wanted to know her drug profile.”

I couldn’t keep back a crack of laughter.

Faith looked at me with startled, wounded eyes. “It wasn’t funny at all, Victoria.”

“Leydon has always had the knack of driving Sewall around the bend,” I said. “Sorry I didn’t see his face when she said that. But is he spying on her?”

Faith grimaced. “You know, he and Leydon don’t agree on one single thing. He doesn’t think about her unless he has to.”

“So he wouldn’t have hired a private detective to follow her when she got out of the hospital?”

“I can ask him.” Her voice was doubtful, as if asking him would be a painful exercise. “Or Mother Ashford.”

“Ask me what?”

Mrs. Ashford had appeared on the patio. She was about eighty now but still moved easily, holding herself erect. She was dressed for day in a silk print shirtwaist, her makeup complete, despite the heat. On her collar she sported the pin of an American flag topped by a corncob: Helen Kendrick’s campaign button for high-end donors.

I got to my feet. “Hello, Ms. Ashford. I’m sorry about Leydon; I was with her—”

“You were with her when she jumped. Sewall told me that you had encouraged her to steal his car.”

I felt the pulses in my temples begin to throb but made a halfhearted effort to control my anger. “She didn’t jump. I was with her when Sewall came in, yapping about his car keys. The cops were as disgusted as I was that he didn’t even pretend to care about Leydon.” Okay, very halfhearted.

“Leydon always did her utmost to upset her family,” her mother said. “I’m sure that’s why she used to invite you out here, for the pleasure it gave her to see you enrage my husband. If you came out here today to see how angry you can make me, you might as well leave now, because I’m already angry.”

Faith shifted uncomfortably in her deck chair. She picked up a pair of binoculars from an occasional table and looked at the windsurfers. “I think Terence has gone out too far; I’ll just go down and wave him in.”

She scurried down the stairs to the beach. Ms. Ashford didn’t look at her, or at her grandson out on the water.

“You could be right,” I said. “I think Leydon enjoyed having a blue-collar friend to flaunt at her dad. But with all her flaws, and despite her illness, I continue to love her, and I’ve agreed to do some work for her. I wondered—”

“If you think Sewall or I will pay you, you can stop wondering.”

“Leydon has her own money, no?”

“She has a trust fund from her father, but Sewall is her trustee and he certainly won’t authorize payments to a private detective.” She bit the words off as if she were spitting out cigar ends.

“Would he pay a different detective?” I asked. “I mean, would he, or you, hire someone to follow Leydon to make sure she didn’t commit any major new embarrassment? Although it would be hard for someone to stay in her apartment with her, making sure she didn’t paint all over the walls again.”

“Are you trying to suggest that we employ you?” Ms. Ashford’s nostrils dilated in her outrage.

“Not at all. Leydon has hired me and it would be a conflict of interest for me to work for both of you. Merely, I wondered—”

“Hired you to do what?” Ms. Ashford interrupted.

I smiled. “To conduct a confidential inquiry. Did Sewall spy on Leydon when she left the hospital? That’s what she told Faith.”

Down on the beach I could see Faith waving small colored flags, trying to signal the windsurfers, who seemed to be paying no attention to her. Her fate in the Ashford family, apparently.

“What we do about Leydon is our business. All I can do is ask you to leave us alone. Leydon has caused us many decades of heartbreak and embarrassment, and if she dies from yesterday’s injuries, we will all be—” She stopped, unable to think of a graceful way to finish the sentence.

“Ecstatic?” I suggested. “Jubilant?”

The lines around her thin mouth deepened. “We would be within our rights to feel some relief from the misery she’s caused us all these years.”

“Your daughter has been a hard burden,” I said, squeezing her hand in mock sympathy. “And yet you bear up nobly. I’ll make sure her doctors know that you’re too distraught to be interrupted with bulletins about her health.”

17.

CLEANING OUT THE DEAD

I
TOOK THE LONG, SLOW ROUTE DOWN
S
HERIDAN
R
OAD BACK
to the city, forty miles of meandering roads, with the lake on my left hand keeping the worst of the summer heat at bay. Leydon’s mother had depressed me, as she doubtless meant to, with her dig about why Leydon used to bring me up here. Mr. Ashford had been an overwhelming presence in the family and Leydon had never felt able to stand up to him directly. I might not have been as clever at remembering Joyce or quoting Puritan preachers, but I wasn’t afraid to tackle Sewall Senior, over everything from his disdain for women in public life to his virulent racism.

“Leydon loved me,” I said aloud, as if Leydon’s mother could hear me. “She might have used me to give herself a stronger voice, but none of you Ashfords are worth as much as one strand of her red-gold hair. So there!”

I finally meandered to my office. Heat rose from the sidewalks in translucent sheets. The tree that my leasemate and I had planted in a hole she’d drilled through the concrete outside our front door was gray from smog and humidity. And no one seemed to care that we’d put a large trash can along the curb—the usual dreary detritus of the heedless lined the street—empty bottles, cups, plastic bags.

Inside my office I resisted the urge to collapse onto the cot I keep in my supply room. I returned e-mails and phone calls, did some desultory work for my paying clients, and then asked LifeStory, my favorite search engine, to fetch me details on Miles Wuchnik.

While the computer searched, I called Nick Vishnikov, the deputy chief medical examiner. Even though I’m not with the police, we serve on a human rights committee together, and he’s willing to give me autopsy results.

“He died where you found him, which you probably already guessed from the amount of blood. But he’d been whacked on the back of the head first, which explains why he was lying so peacefully on his tomb.”

I saw him on the catafalque.
Leydon’s line, or Joyce’s, ran through my head. Still, it sounded as though I could end my inchoate fears about Nia Durango and Arielle Zitter having lured him to the vault. They were two very enterprising young ladies, though—maybe they’d whacked him before they met the rest of their friends at the Dudek apartment. Perhaps they figured out a way to drag him up the steps onto the vault. Or agreed to meet him in the tomb and then hit him.