Breakdown (19 page)

Wuchnik had been a busy detective, so busy that the notebook covered only the last four months and was already almost full. He’d trekked from the county buildings dotting Greater Chicago’s six counties to the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District’s headquarters, to hospitals, restaurants, and to Ruhetal in Downers Grove.

I put the spiral notebook down, carefully, as if it were made of glass and might shatter. Ruhetal, the state mental hospital where Leydon had spent the month of June. This was Gordian indeed.

I picked up the notebook again. Wuchnik had made six trips to Ruhetal, starting on the Wednesday before Memorial Day, with the last one ten days before he died. I’d have to get the exact dates Leydon had been out there.

Wuchnik had also carefully noted the eight-point-nine-mile trip from his home to the parking space on Augusta. The code in the margin was the same as for the trips to Ruhetal. I tried to analyze Wuchnik’s numbers. All of them ended in eleven, so that probably referred to the year. Brilliant, V.I. Keep this up and you’ll have a job at Langley in no time.

But the first two numbers couldn’t possibly be a date. It had to have something to do with how he labeled his cases.

“Victoria Iphigenia. You are the most beautiful thing I’ve seen—I don’t know—in my whole life, maybe.”

I’d left my front door open for Jake but hadn’t heard him come in. I sprang to my feet—a skintight top that wows your lover—the best cure for the puzzled and weary detective’s sore feet and baffled brain.

I went to my bedroom safe for my mother’s diamond earrings, and tucked Wuchnik’s notebook into it. Not that I expected the vampires to come after it, but it was the only thing I’d been able to salvage from his belongings, that and the little scrap of paper that said, “In death they were not divided.” And a few credit-card slips, but those I left in my briefcase.

Jake and I closed down the Peacock Walk at two Wednesday morning. I resolutely kept my mind on dancing, food, and sex, using a small corner for sadness at saying good-bye to Jake for a month or so. Anytime Wuchnik or his notebook popped up, I counted backward from eleven. But at ten-thirty Wednesday morning, as soon as Jake had driven away with his two basses, I was on North Kenmore Avenue, at Leydon Ashford’s apartment.

Any lingering ideas I’d had that Leydon might have been in a group home, or even Section 8 housing, disappeared when I saw the glossy high-rise, with a uniformed doorman. When I explained who I was and what I wanted, the doorman phoned through to the manager, who directed me to his office on the second floor.

The manager was a man in his fifties or sixties, wearing a short-sleeved shirt and a tie but no jacket. When I arrived, he was handling a complaint about a water leak in 4J while listening to an elderly lady whose cat had run into the stairwell on twelve and not yet returned. The nameplate on his small desk announced that he was Saul Feldtman.

“What can I do for you, ma’am?”

Feldtman froze when I mentioned Leydon’s name, but when I explained that she was seriously injured and wouldn’t be home for some time, he was perfectly willing to look up the date he’d called the cops to come get her.

“She’s on the ninth floor. We didn’t know at first that she was doing all this painting, but she covered the stairwell, and then started on the halls. When I tried to get her to stop she became very agitated. And then it turned out she’d been painting the common room—and not like she was Michelangelo, mind, more like—well, I took photos, in case, you know.”

In case it came to court. America, land of the fee, home of the litigant. Feldtman pulled up his photo album on a computer and let me look while he calmed down the woman whose cat was missing and called a plumber to deal with the leaky showerhead.

Leydon’s painting was dramatic, but she definitely belonged more to the R. Crumb school than Michelangelo’s. She had used black and red house paint. Much of what she’d done was hard to make out in the photos because she’d gone over and over the same space with a thick brush, but there were places were I could make out male figures. They had large penises and tiny heads where only a large mouth was drawn, and they said things like, “Don’t move or I’ll fuck,” or, “I am thinking with my big head, dude.” I hated to sympathize with Sewall Ashford and his mother, but I could barely bring myself to look at the photos.

Leydon hadn’t gone to Ruhetal until four days after Wuchnik made his first visit. When the manager finished with the plumber and the cat lady, I asked if he could find when he’d first noticed Leydon’s behavior.

Feldtman was methodical, organized: he had a log of all his calls and tenant complaints. Someone first saw one of the cartoons in the stairwell about ten days before she was hospitalized, but in the beginning, she was just making a few drawings and it took a few days to trace them to Leydon.

“Then we called the brother, because he pays the bills and it’s his number in our files, and him and the mother, they came and tried to talk to her. So then she locked herself in her own place for a few days and we didn’t see her, but then suddenly there she was in the middle of the night, painting up and down the stairwell; we couldn’t get her to stop.

“And then, my God, when I and the super forced her back into her own apartment—it was such a mess—she’d painted on the tables and couches, it was unbelievable. So the brother told me he’d call the cops, and they took her out to Ruhetal. There’s a real good private place just a mile from here, and I told the cops to take her there, but the brother, he wouldn’t pay for private, so they took her out to Ruhetal.”

19.

THE AUGEAN STABLES

I
FOUND AN INDIE COFFEE BAR AND SAT AT THE COUNTER,
trying to decide if I should drive out to Downers Grove to look at Ruhetal. Even if the Ashford family had sent Miles Wuchnik out to the hospital to spy on Leydon, I couldn’t see how it connected to his death.

But why would the Ashfords have hired a private eye at all? He wouldn’t be allowed into the wards, and since Sewall’s wife had Leydon’s medical power of attorney, they could get all the information they wanted from the hospital. Maybe Sewall was denuding Leydon’s trust account and he wanted a private eye to see if she’d figured it out. I tried to imagine how a client would frame such a query:
Wuchnik, my friend, disguise yourself as an orderly and get my sister into conversation about her trust fund. Shouldn’t be hard—her mind jumps from topic to topic like a kangaroo.

I shook my head. I couldn’t come up with a scenario to validate Leydon’s fears. But the fact remained that Wuchnik had made numerous trips to Ruhetal last month. Perhaps he had a different agenda than spying on Leydon Ashford.

I looked again at Wuchnik’s mileage log to see if I could make any sense of his case numbering system. The scrap of paper I’d found in his apartment had somehow ended up in the log: “ ‘In death they were not divided’? Told me to look it up.”

If someone had given the detective a quotation and a riddle, that someone was likely Leydon. The dean at Rockefeller seemed to have the same portmanteau memory as Leydon. I called down to the chapel and was lucky enough to find Dr. Knaub in his office.

“Sorry to treat you like a walking dictionary,” I said, after updating him on Leydon’s condition. “But I found, well, call it a clue that I’m guessing she left behind.”

“Second Samuel,” Knaub said, when I read what was on the scrap of paper. “It’s a famous passage, David lamenting the deaths of Saul and Saul’s son Jonathan. Is that a help?”

“Not that I can see. Not unless Leydon had a lead on a father-son death that she discussed with Miles Wuchnik.”

“It could be something else,” the dean said. “David adds that his love for Jonathan surpassed the love of women. Is there a homosexual component to your case?”

“If there is, Leydon was way ahead of me on that, as on so many things before. Thanks, Dr. Knaub.”

“Not at all,” he said courteously. “I like puzzles. And please call me Henry.”

I wrote Knaub’s suggestions in my notebook. You never know. Although there was so much here I didn’t know that adding “Homosexual love? Father-son double slaying?” to my notes just confused me further.

If it was indeed Leydon who’d given Wuchnik that cryptic message, then she’d known what he was working on. And she’d known that because she’d met him at Ruhetal. Or someplace else? Had they connected earlier and he’d followed her to the hospital?

I went back around the corner to her apartment building. The manager was between complaining tenants. Once he’d satisfied himself that I had a legitimate interest in finding out what had led up to Leydon’s fall from the chapel balcony, he took me up to the ninth floor and let me into her apartment.

“I’ll just watch you, miss, while you look around.” Feldtman unlocked the door and then hesitated. “You may not want to go in there.”

I peered over his shoulder. The door opened into a large living space with a glass wall that faced Lake Michigan. If you kept your chin up and your eyes on the lake, you could ignore the chaos that billowed underneath. Papers filled the floor and the chairs—newspaper clippings, computer printouts, brown paper bags, all covered in Leydon’s large, reckless script. A few plates with uneaten food were scattered in the wreckage, along with some of the wispy lingerie Leydon favored. Feldtman was right—I didn’t really want to go in.

“At least she hasn’t started writing on the walls,” I said, trying to put a hopeful spin on it.

I sat cross-legged on the floor and started to pick up clippings, which covered topics ranging from reports on the supercollider in Geneva to health claims for the goji berry. Leydon clipped stories on election reform, on Chicago’s electoral politics, on personnel changes at my ex-husband’s law firm. She’d printed out reams of stories from Internet sources, on hit-and-run accidents, on climate change, on mammograms. Some were covered in her own handwriting, with incomprehensible phrases:
The Fire Last Time, No Smoking Gun Without Fire.
I wished her hypomanic phase had led her to collect something large and disposable, like sleeping bags, instead of news.

I found two articles from the
Herald-Star
and the
Sun-Times
that covered Wuchnik’s death. The
Times
had mentioned me as finding the body. Perhaps that’s what prompted Leydon to call me—she’d circled my name with such a heavy hand that she’d almost obliterated it. Both papers showed the Byzantine vault where Wuchnik’s body had been found. Under the photograph in the
Times,
Leydon had scrawled,
He is dead. We saw him lying upon the catafalque but no wail of sorrow went up, instead a gleeful cry, He is dead, he is dead!

She’d gone on at greater length in the
Herald-Star,
crisscrossing the page and the margins.
Home is the hunter, home from the hill, from the dale from Happy Dale, the hunter of the haunted, tormentor of the damned, who else hated your haunting hunting?

“Are you going to look at all of these?” Feldtman asked.

“I don’t have the stamina or the time. If you want to help give them a quick once-over, you might look for Miles Wuchnik’s name.”

His eyes widened. “Was Ms. Ashford involved in the vampire murder?”

“I don’t think so, but there’s some connection that I don’t understand. Ms. Ashford thought he was spying on her. Did you ever see him hanging around the building?”

The
Herald-Star
had found a good headshot of Wuchnik, but when I showed the picture to the manager, he said he’d never seen him.

“I’ll check with Rafe—the doorman—but realistically, if someone comes around snooping on one of our tenants, Rafe tells me right away. It happens, you know, stalkers, or even”—he lowered his voice, as if about to say something too vile for normal speech—“repo men. These hard times affect our tenants along with everyone else.”

Feldtman made a stab at the papers, while I took the dishes to the kitchen and threw out the food. I emptied perishables from Leydon’s refrigerator, washed the dishes, then went back to the front room and picked up the lacy bits of Natori and La Perla. When I took them into the bedroom, I found Leydon had been writing on Post-its and sticking them to the wall around her bed. A whole box of them sat on the table by her bed, on top of a stack of books and magazines.

In death they were not divided,
she’d written more than once, along with her messages about the catafalque and Happy Dale. And her crude comments to her brother.
Sea-wall See-well Pee-well.

What I didn’t see was her computer. The printer was in the front room, buried under back copies of
The New Yorker,
but the computer itself was gone.

I pointed this out to Feldtman. He turned huffy, thinking I was accusing him, or Rafe the doorman, of theft, until I made it clear that I wanted to know only whether he or Rafe had seen Leydon leave with it.

“Maybe her brother took it when he picked her up in June,” Feldtman suggested.

“I don’t think so—she’s got printouts with dates from after she got out of the hospital. Maybe she took it in for repairs. Maybe it’s in her car; she said that was in the shop when we spoke Monday morning.”

Feldtman didn’t know where Leydon took her car for service but referred me again to the doorman, Rafe. Feldtman was getting beeped on his cell phone and was anxious to return to his battle station. I didn’t see what else I could do in Leydon’s apartment. In fact, the shambles was so disturbing, not just in itself but as a reminder of various past episodes I’d experienced with her, that I was eager to leave with him.

On my way out of the lobby, I stopped to talk to Rafe. He liked Leydon—a classy lady, not like some of the women in the building who were full of attitude because they were professors or something. He was sorry to hear of her troubles, but he didn’t remember whether she had her computer with her or not.

“Everyone has one these days, miss, so it’s not something you notice special.”