Breakdown (18 page)

I put the possibility cautiously to Vishnikov.

“I doubt it. I can’t see two young girls being strong enough to heft an unconscious body onto a slab as high off the ground as that one was. Anyway, he didn’t have the kind of scrapes and abrasions you’d find if he’d been hoisted up the side of the slab. Whoever put him there lifted him. Unless your girls are junior weightlifting champs, I’d strike them from my ‘possibles’ list.”

By the time I finished talking to Vishnikov, LifeStory had finished its study of Miles Wuchnik. He, and his two brothers and one sister, had been born and raised in Danville, Illinois, home of Dick Van Dyke, Bobby Short, and the Danville Correctional Center. He’d played high school football, and studied criminal justice at Eastern Illinois University, taken a job with the Illinois State Police, and then moved to the Chicago area nine years ago, where he set up as an investigator in private practice, specializing in finding lost and missing people but willing to do pretty much anything.

His sister still lived in Danville; both parents were dead and his brothers had moved farther afield. Like me, Wuchnik had been married once and divorced; his ex-wife, Sandra, had remarried five years ago and was living in the southwest suburbs. Miles lived alone in Berwyn, a modest town on the border of Oak Park where Frank Lloyd Wright was king. As far as I could tell, Wuchnik’s office had been in his home and his car.

LifeStory couldn’t tell me whether Wuchnik’s family had come from Vilna, and whether Chaim Salanter had been pals with Wuchnik’s father, or perhaps grandfather, when they were little boys before war spattered and scattered Lithuania. Neither could my other favorite violator of privacy, The Monitor Project, although the Monitor told me Wuchnik had left an estate of thirty-two thousand, less whatever his outstanding debts were.

That depressed me further. If I died tomorrow, I wouldn’t leave a whole lot more to my heirs. My car, almost paid for, my condo, ditto. A modest 401K. Why hadn’t I followed my ex into private practice?

I went back out into the heat, stopping at La Llorona for a cold vegetable sandwich. I couldn’t resist Ms. Aguilar’s hot sauce, which meant that by the time I got back to my car, I had a line of red juice across my white knit top. Good thing I’d started the day in Lake Bluff—I never would have survived Mother Ashford’s withering scrutiny.

Even though I didn’t expect ever to bill Leydon for my work, I scrupulously entered my mileage, as I had on my way to Lake Bluff. In yesterday’s excitement I’d forgotten to include the mileage down to the university and back. That would be my donation to Leydon’s trust fund.

Berwyn, Little Bohemia, it used to be called, when Chicago’s Czech population filled its streets. There was a time when they called Cermak Road—the town’s main commercial strip—the Bohemian Wall Street, but the area had long since changed identities. A handful of the famous Czech bakeries remained, but they were outnumbered these days by taquerias. No matter what the ethnicity, Berwynites were house-proud: when I left the expressway and headed south, I saw that the bungalows were carefully painted and tended. Even without a phalanx of gardeners to clip the shrubs and fertilize the grass, the small front yards were tidy and well groomed.

Wuchnik’s home, mostly owned by the Fort Dearborn Trust, turned out to be the top floor of a two-flat on Grove Avenue. At three on a hot afternoon, there wasn’t any foot traffic. I’d passed some parks where a few kids were playing ball, but anyone looking at the Wuchnik place would be doing so behind the closed blinds in their air-conditioned front rooms.

I rang the bell for the ground-floor apartment, but no one answered. Just to be safe—after all, the guy hadn’t been married, but many people didn’t bother these days—I rang Wuchnik’s bell as well. When there was no answer, I pulled out my picks. It took me only a minute to undo the front door, which said more about Wuchnik’s carelessness than my skill. The stairs to the second floor weren’t carpeted; I found myself tiptoeing my way up, as if someone might hear me.

At the top, it took me no time at all to get into his apartment. That was because someone had been here before me and not bothered to lock up when they left. The six rooms had been searched thoroughly. Not violently, but the searcher hadn’t bothered to be careful: drawers stood open, the dead man’s few books were splayed. If he’d owned a landline, that had been removed. In fact, no electronics remained, unless you counted the microwave and the television. Certainly no computers, discs, flash drives, or cell phones that might give me some kind of clue about who Wuchnik had been working for when he died.

The searcher had apparently been angry at not finding what he—she?—was hunting, because he’d slashed a book to ribbons. In the kitchen wastebasket, I found a chunk of paper as if someone had scooped out a book like a pumpkin. Little puffs of gray print clung to my fingers after I’d sifted through the trash.

The first intruder had dumped the contents of Wuchnik’s files onto the living room floor, and I looked through those, without much hope of finding anything useful. Wuchnik had kept clippings about old murder cases, mostly unsolved murders, and he’d made a few notes in the margins:
no next of kin; mother wouldn’t speak to me; wife remarried & left for ca 5 yrs ago.
On a piece of scrap paper that clung to the back of one of the clippings, he’d written, “ ‘In death they were not divided’? Told me to look it up.”

Just because nothing else in Wuchnik’s place seemed to mean anything, I tucked that scrap into my briefcase and went back into the July heat, where I called Terry Finchley, the Area Six detective in charge of investigating Wuchnik’s murder.

“V. I. Warshawski,” Finchley said. “That would be ‘Vexatious Investigator’ Warshawski?”

“Try ‘Veracity In Person.’ I’m outside Miles Wuchnik’s place. It’s been thoroughly tossed.”

“And it’s in Berwyn.”

“I know you always got A’s in geography; you don’t have to show off for me.” I was sitting with the windows down, hoping for a breeze, but sweat was trickling down my neck.

“Don’t ride me when it’s ninety-three outside. You know it’s a jurisdiction issue. You call the locals?”

“I thought you’d be interested. And I also thought the locals might inspect the scene more thoroughly if a highly decorated Chicago PD lieutenant alerted them, instead of a vexatious investigator.”

Finchley laughed. “So your skin is thin in places. Wuchnik’s homicide isn’t at the top of our pile here—no physical evidence at the scene, nothing in his private life to indicate someone with a grievance. His ex married a guy in pharmaceuticals and is living way better than Wuchnik ever hoped to. He hadn’t dated anyone for about fifteen months and we couldn’t find anyone with a grudge.”

“I had dinner last night with Chaim Salanter.” I decided I had to sacrifice a polar bear: I turned on my engine so I could run the air-conditioning.

“I ate with my wife and little girl at Navy Pier. Which one of us do you think was happier?”

“I’m sure you were, Terry. Salanter wanted to hire me
not
to investigate Wuchnik’s death. It didn’t occur to me to ask if he was making the same offer to all the other PI’s in the Chicago area, but I suppose a guy that rich can pay everyone off and not notice it.”

“If you are implying that I can be—”

“Scout’s honor, I am not trying to ride you. I told Salanter last night you were an inspired investigator, and an incorruptible one, and both those things are true. But guys like Salanter don’t deal at the Area detective level—they go to the mayor’s office.”

Terry was silent for a beat or two. “That explains—the directive we got on the murder. Not to stand down, just to acknowledge, well, what I told you at the outset. No physical evidence, et cetera. Do you have any idea why Salanter cares?”

“None at all, although it stands out a mile that he thought Wuchnik was investigating him. Do you have a list of what the guy was working on? You weren’t the people who made off with his computer, were you?”

“No. We dropped the ball there.” Terry was bitter, with himself for not getting out to Berwyn. “Thanks, anyway, for the call, Vexatious—can I call you Vexie for short?”

“Only if I’m not there in person to tie your tongue into a bow.”

“I’ll call Berwyn. You might not want to be sitting in front of Wuchnik’s place when they arrive. You can’t keep being spotted around the guy when the police show up. Sooner or later some dumb cop is going to get suspicious.”

He hung up before I could thank him.

18.

THE WRITING ON THE WALL

I
HAD THOUGHT ABOUT CANVASSING THE NEIGHBORS, TO SEE
if anyone had spotted someone carting off computers and flash drives from Wuchnik’s home in the last two days, but Terry’s warning was very much to the point. I joined the long, slow crawl back to the city, getting off the Ike at Ashland Avenue to avoid congestion on the Kennedy, only to get stuck in a backup of similar-minded people.

At Chicago Avenue, I abruptly turned west again. Wuchnik hadn’t walked from Berwyn to Mount Moriah cemetery. If his killer hadn’t driven him, his car might still be somewhere in the neighborhood.

I pulled out my Monitor Project report on him. Wuchnik had driven a Hyundai Tucson and he probably hadn’t parked far from the cemetery, as heavy as Saturday night’s rain had been. I made a slow circuit of Mount Moriah, but it wasn’t until I widened my search that I found the car. It was parked nearer to the Dudek apartment than to the cemetery.

The streets here were crowded with people returning from work, mothers laden with children and groceries, kids skateboarding, kids throwing balls in the street, and everyone texting like mad no matter what they were doing.

It had been a long time since I’d broken into a car, but I was relying on people’s focus on their handhelds to keep them from noticing anything I might do. However, when I got to the car, I saw I didn’t need a cover: someone once more had been ahead of me. The rear window was smashed and the locks were popped.

I looked at the mess, depressed. Except for the broken glass, and the empty pizza boxes that showed how much Wuchnik lived behind the wheel, the car was empty. No files, no car fax, not even a GPS tracker.

“This your car, miss?”

A couple of boys on skateboards had stopped near me.

“Friend of mine. He sent me down here to collect his papers, but someone got into his car ahead of me. I don’t suppose you saw anything, did you?”

“No, miss. It must’ve happened in the night, ’cause it was okay last night, but it was all busted up this morning.”

So if I’d just come here yesterday—although yesterday, I’d been pretty tied up, come to think of it. The boys were rocking back and forth on their skateboards, ready to take flight. I thanked them for stopping.

The second boy said, “Whoever broke in, they dropped one of his papers. It was half under the car when we come down this morning. You want it, miss?”

“Absolutely!”

They skated off toward one of the three-flats up the street. I poked around in the detritus while I waited and found several credit-card slips, which I tucked into my briefcase. The boys returned quickly, holding a grimy spiral notebook, one wider than it was long.

“What’s your friend’s name, miss?” the first one asked as I stuck out a hand.

“Miles Wuchnik.”

They studied the notebook and whispered to each other. “It’s just got an address.”

“On Grove Avenue in Berwyn?” I asked.

That did the trick. They handed over the notebook and I gave each of them a five, which made their faces light up. I also handed each of them a card.

“I’m a detective, private, and so was Miles. You know the dead man who was found over in the cemetery?” I jerked my head toward Mount Moriah. “That was Miles. I agreed to take on his old cases and try to solve them for him, but I think the murderers broke into his car to keep me from finding out what he was working on. So if you see anything, or hear anything, give me a call. And for pity’s sake, don’t tackle them on your own. You are two very brave and resourceful young men, but the killers are ruthless.”

Their eyes grew big with excitement. “What’s that, miss, ruthless, that where they were born?”

“It’s a word meaning they are utterly cold-blooded with no regard for human life.”

“So was your friend killed by a vampire, like they’re saying?”

“Nope. Not a vampire. A very human sort of being, just not a nice one.”

They raced down the street on their boards, so excited they almost collided with a woman pushing a baby carriage. By five p.m., everyone on the street would know they were helping to track down the vampire.

I took the notebook back to my car. When I opened it, I couldn’t believe my luck. It was Wuchnik’s mileage log. I started to read it but realized how much I’d exposed myself, identifying myself to the boys, asking questions, and now sitting near Wuchnik’s own car. Since I had no idea what the vampire killer looked like, it could be any of the people looking at my Mustang as they walked up the street. Not enough of them were buried in their texts for my comfort.

I turned back to Ashland Avenue. Traffic had become marginally lighter; I made it home in half an hour. Jake was leaving for Marlboro in the morning. We were going out for dinner and dancing, and I was not bringing my cell phone with me: no one was going to break up my evening, not even if the Malina Building was on fire and Petra was stuck on the top floor with fifteen screaming twelve-year-olds.

Back home, I showered and put on a pair of black silk pants and a shimmery silver top. I wished I’d kept my scarlet dress for tonight, instead of letting it get wet and dirty Saturday night. My cleaners had said they’d do their best with it, but they hadn’t been optimistic. Maybe Joseph Parecki could make me a new one, if I made some money this month. I taped up my blistered feet with enough padding that I could put my dancing shoes on without feeling the pain, or at least, without feeling much pain.

While I waited for Jake to finish his packing, I started working through Miles Wuchnik’s mileage log. Some of the entries were in pencil, which had smeared and blurred with time, others in ballpoint. He seemed to have entered every place he went, with dates, times, and miles. The last column on each page identified the client, or at least the case he was working on, but he’d used a code here, probably the case number he assigned to the investigation, and I didn’t have a way to crack the code. Somehow it made him become a real person to me, touching the numbers he’d written moments before his death.