Breakdown (20 page)

He did know where Leydon took her car for service, or at least he knew the garage he’d recommended to her. It was a place on Devon, about a mile from the apartment. I copied the name into my notebook and gave him a couple of bucks.

The garage manager didn’t share Rafe’s enthusiasm for Leydon. He’d done $2,700 worth of work on her car, and she wouldn’t pay for it. Her credit cards were maxed out, and her brother wouldn’t release any money from her trust fund to cover the bill. Leydon apparently had had a molten phone argument with Sewall in the garage manager’s office, and when that didn’t get her anywhere, she’d jumped into her car and tried to drive out of the garage, almost hitting one of the mechanics.

The manager was still angry. It didn’t calm him any to learn that Leydon was in a coma: “I’ve still got this car that no one’s paying for taking up room on my lot.”

“I’ll talk to her sister-in-law,” I promised. “She has Ms. Ashford’s durable power of attorney and can authorize getting the car paid for, even if the brother won’t release any money from Ms. Ashford’s trust fund. In the meantime, all I want is to find out if she left her computer in the car.”

The manager refused to cooperate, but on my way out, I casually waved a twenty at one of the mechanics. He waited until the manager was busy at another end of the garage, then led me behind the building to Leydon’s car. The car wasn’t empty: she’d filled the backseat with newspapers, magazines, recipes, and a few odd pieces of junk. But there was no computer, nor, as far as I could tell, anything that related to Miles Wuchnik and his trips to the hospital in Downers Grove.

20.

CHATTER IN THE PEACEFUL VALLEY

“
R
UHETAL?
T
HAT MEANS ‘A PEACEFUL VALLEY,’”
L
OTTY SAID.
“What an idyllic spot for the mentally ill—or any ill person, for that matter.”

Today was one of her days in her storefront clinic off Irving Park Road. I had stopped by on my way from Leydon’s apartment to see if Lotty could give me any advice on how to get information about Leydon from the staff. Faith Ashford had Leydon’s medical power-of-attorney, but I hadn’t wanted to drive the forty miles to Lake Bluff to try to wheedle a signed permission to talk to Leydon’s doctors about her condition.

“You know I am not going to violate the law, especially not the law that protects confidential records, for any reason, even if you are convinced it’s in your friend’s best interest,” Lotty told me severely, when I explained what I wanted. “And I don’t know Philip Poynter, or any of the other physicians attached to the hospital.”

Poynter was the prescribing physician’s name on a bottle of Risperdal the police had picked up at Rockefeller.

I held up my hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. I’ll just show Wuchnik’s photo around and see if anyone remembers him.”

“A word of advice,” Lotty relented marginally. “Don’t ask for Poynter. The doctors often don’t see the patients, they just write prescriptions. Find out who the advanced practice nurse and the therapists are and see if any of them will talk to you. Now, you’d better get going—I’m keeping patients waiting.”

“Would it violate your code of ethics to find out how Leydon’s doing? The hospital won’t tell me anything because I’m not a family member.”

“Talk to Mrs. Coltrain on your way out. Tell her I asked her to call down to the U of C for you.” She was out of her office and on her way to an examining room before I had a chance to thank her.

Leydon’s condition was unchanged, Mrs. Coltrain said, but the neurological team wasn’t optimistic.

“People do recover from head injuries, Ms. Warshawski,” Mrs. Coltrain comforted me. “Look at that congresswoman in Arizona, shot in the brain, and up and walking six weeks later.”

“You’re right,” I agreed, but I drove down to my office in a somber mood.

I used my search engines to turn up a staff directory for Ruhetal. I was starting to feel like an automaton, going through the motions of the same job over and over. Search the Web, spy on people’s private data, drive around town like a madwoman, get shot, do it all over again.

LifeStory gave me the names of the psychiatric advanced practice nurses and the social workers
.
It also told me a bit of the history of the place. Ruhetal had been started in 1911 by German Evangelical missionaries who had advanced notions of how to treat the mentally ill. The photographs of limestone buildings set in the prairie made it seem like an idyllic setting, and, indeed, it had been a fashionable sanitarium for writers and movie stars in the twenties.

In the thirties, it proved impossible to keep the place going. The Nazis, with their brutal ideas about murdering the mentally ill, cut off the aid coming from Germany, and the U.S. froze Ruhetal’s assets once the war started. The place might have disintegrated completely, but in the fifties, the state of Illinois bought it and turned one of the buildings into a state mental hospital with a wing for “the criminally insane.”

I looked at an aerial photo: the place was huge, with acres of grounds surrounding five buildings. In 1911, the founders had included tennis courts and a baseball field, but Google’s photo didn’t show whether they still existed.

It was late morning before I finally got on the road. I packed lunch and picked up a cortado from the coffee bar across the street. There may be good coffee in the western suburbs, but I didn’t have time to hunt for it.

By the time I reached Downers Grove, it was one o’clock. I found a park where I could eat my lunch. The park had public toilets, where I washed and fixed my makeup—even with air-conditioning, a long drive in the July heat had made me grimy.

I’d been up and down Ogden Avenue a thousand times over the years, but I’d never noticed the turnoff to the Ruhetal State Mental Hospital. I finally saw a little sign on the curb by a Ford dealership. Ruhetal sat on Therbusch Road, a small side street that ran between the dealership and a Buy-Smart superstore.

The hospital complex loomed into view as soon as I passed the parking strip. The lawns and sports facilities that I’d read about online were just a memory now. The state’s budget today could barely pay the hospital staff; no one was maintaining the grounds. Such grass as had been hardy enough to outlast the weeds formed islands in the large stretches of bare soil. The leaves on the surviving trees and shrubs were a sickly gray-green.

Ruhetal’s forensic wing was separated from the general population by three sets of fences, but the whole complex looked like a penitentiary. The state had kept the original limestone building, but they’d augmented it with the gray concrete blocks beloved of builders like Stalin. Gray façades, narrow barred windows. If you weren’t already depressed when you got here, it wouldn’t take long to bring you down in a place like this.

Poor Leydon! A spasm of anger against her brother rose in me. How could he put his sister in such a place? Maybe Sewall really was stealing from her trust fund. Maybe I’d have to find a way to inspect his finances—although the probability was that he stuck Leydon here out of a punitive rage.

Acres of asphalt, easier to maintain than grass, surrounded the buildings. Cars that looked as tired and dirty as the hospital filled the parking lot. It was a busy place. The lot was full; I had to drive around for ten minutes until I found a space a quarter mile from the administrative wing.

I wasn’t the only one arriving, either. Cars kept pulling into the lot, some even left, and I noticed a Pace bus drop off a clump of people outside the main gate. I had to wait in line for several minutes just to get into the front door. When I explained that I wanted to talk to Alvina Northlake, the head of the social work department, the woman guarding the entrance told me to step aside.

“You need to talk to Mr. Waxman.”

“And I can find him where?”

“You can’t. He’ll find you. Step aside and let me deal with the rest of this line.”

She was in her fifties, an experienced bureaucrat who enjoyed the opportunity to control people’s lives. And where better to control them than in a state psychiatric hospital, where people were depressed or confused and very likely poor. If I showed any resentment or sarcasm, she’d take it out on me by not calling Mr. Waxman, so I wandered over to look at portraits of the founders that hung in the entryway.

They had been a serious bunch, those Brenners and Altmans and Metzgers. They looked at us without smiling, men and women both, yet with a certain ardor in their faces. They had been successful in setting up compassionately run mental health hospitals in Hesse and Niedersachsen, the plaque said, and they were sure they could succeed in Illinois.

I looked at the scuffed linoleum on the floor and the painted cinder-block walls and wondered what Dr. and Frau Brenner would have made of Ruhetal’s current incarnation.

“Miss!” my bureaucrat shouted at me. “Do you want to see Mr. Waxman or not?”

“I do, I do,” I said hastily. “And does he want to see me?”

“Want? That I can’t tell you, but he will see you.” She scanned my driver’s license and printed out a pass for me. “Down corridor A on your left, and then turn right when you get to corridor D, follow that up the stairs to two, and you’ll find corridor K. Mr. Waxman’s is the second door on your right.”

When I’d followed the yellow brick road to Waxman’s office, I decided the hospital tucked the senior administrators out of sight so that patients and their families couldn’t see how much more money was spent on their maintenance than on the patients themselves. Corridor K was carpeted, the lights in the hall were in sconces, not overhead fluorescent banks, and the walls were painted a soft yellow.

Eric Waxman’s door card identified him as deputy chief of operations. A deputy chief gets a secretary, a bottle blonde about my own age, who sat at a faux-wood desk so crammed with paper there was barely room for her computer and phone.

She looked up and demanded my business with Mr. Waxman.

“I’m a lawyer, Ms.”—I squinted at her nameplate—“Ms. Lilyhammerfield. A lawyer and a licensed investigator. I want to talk to Alvina Northlake about a client of mine who was recently a patient here.”

“And your client’s name?”

“This is a confidential inquiry, Ms. Lilyhammerfield—”

“My name is Lily Hammerfield. They put it all together as one word when they made the nameplate.”

“Sorry. Ms. Hammerfield. This is a confidential inquiry. I can rely on your discretion?”

“I see confidential papers day in and day out. I wouldn’t have lasted my first year here if I had a big mouth, and I’m coming up on twenty.”

Twenty years fielding inquiries about patients or budgets, or whatever it was that Eric Waxman did all day long. I hoped Ruhetal employees got a discount on Prozac.

“Well, this has nothing to do with litigation, Ms. Hammerfield. It concerns some of my client’s visitors. As soon as I can talk to Ms. Northlake, I’ll be gone. If you’ll direct me to her office?”

Eric Waxman stepped out of the inner office. He was a young man, in his early thirties, with a tan mustache that was groomed to curl at the ends, making him look like an advertisement for the wax he was named for.

“What’s going on out here, Lily?”

Maybe it was my calling her by her last name, maybe it was his officious tone—the little woman can’t handle a simple query without management direction—but Lily Hammerfield smiled and said, “This woman is looking for Alvina Northlake’s office, Mr. Waxman. I was just giving her directions.”

He looked me up and down, nodded condescendingly, and went back to his own office. Ms. Hammerfield told me where to find Alvina Northlake—back down the stairs to corridor B. “I’ll tell her you’re coming.”

When I reached Northlake’s office, it was to discover she was in a meeting that would run another hour. Her office was a step down from Waxman’s in every way. It was on the ground floor, with beat-up furniture, and an antechamber that held not just the group secretary but four other desks. A woman sat at one of them, going over a file with someone on the phone; the other three desks were also covered with papers, but the owners were away.

The group secretary said that Lily Hammerfield had called to warn them I was on my way; why did I want to talk to Alvina Northlake?

“I really want to talk to the person who worked with Leydon Ashford,” I said. “I don’t need to disturb Ms. Northlake.”

“And why is that?”

“Ms. Ashford thought she was being stalked while she was out here. I need to find out if there’s any truth to that.”

The other woman hung up the phone and said, in unison with the secretary, “We can’t give out any confidential information.”

“I know. This is a difficult situation. Ms. Ashford was badly injured in a fall two days ago; it’s not clear whether she’ll live.”

There was a shocked intake of breath. “Did she—is there any evidence—”

“I think she was pushed,” I said. “But I can’t prove it. And I can’t prove it’s connected to the man she thought was stalking her. But I thought if I showed her social worker, or maybe the advanced practice nurse on the ward, his picture, someone could tell me if he’d been out here, and if his business had been with Ms. Ashford.”

The second woman got to her feet. “I’m Tania Metzger, one of the social workers here, and by coincidence, I was Leydon’s caseworker during her stay.”

“V. I. Warshawski,” I said. “Are you related to the Metzgers hanging in the front hallway?”

Tania Metzger laughed. “That’s such an odd-sounding way of putting it, but yes, they were my great-grandparents. They died long before I was born, of course, but I knew from my dad how passionate they felt about this place, and I suppose that guided my decision to go into social work. Now, let’s see what you want to know, why you want to know it, and what I can tell you without violating confidentiality laws. Chantal here might be able to help, so let’s just go into the conference room.”

I followed her into a small side room where a table and six chairs had been fitted, leaving just enough space for a not-very-wide person to get in. I slid into a chair. Chantal, who was on the substantial side, grimaced and lifted a chair over her head in order to get close enough to the table to sit.