Breakdown (21 page)

“It’s terrible space,” Tania apologized, “but we won’t get any privacy if we stay in the hub.”

The huddle, the hub, oh, the portentous names organizations give their workplaces. I would have to start calling my own office the command module.

Something in Metzger’s manner made me decide to be frank with her. “I am an investigator and a lawyer, but I’m also a friend of Leydon’s, going back to when we were in law school together. She—she was a challenging friend and I’m afraid I wasn’t up to the challenge the last few years; I let the relationship slide.”

I went on to describe Leydon’s phone call, our date, and where I found her. “It was because of Miles Wuchnik that she wanted to talk to me. At least, I’m ninety percent sure it was—she wouldn’t spell it out in so many words on the phone.”

Metzger nodded. “Yes, she’s brilliant, as you said, and maddening as well. My last name means ‘butcher’ in German, and she knew that; our sessions together often devolved into wordplays on whom or what I might be slaughtering.” She put a hand over her mouth in dismay. “Even that much information is off-limits. I’d better just listen to you.”

Metzger and Chantal both had followed the news about Wuchnik’s death. It was so melodramatic that almost everyone in the six counties knew most of the details.

“Leydon thought her brother had hired Wuchnik to spy on her out here,” I said. “I found Wuchnik’s mileage records. He did come out six times while Leydon was a patient here. The question is, was he really spying on her?”

I spread out a sheaf of photos that I’d printed from my LifeStory report on Wuchnik, and the two women looked at them.

“He was here,” Chantal said. “He came in one afternoon to ask questions about a patient, but it wasn’t about Leydon.”

“What did you tell him?” Tania asked.

“I told him he had to speak to Alvina. She wouldn’t give him the time of day, of course. But I saw him later talking to one of the orderlies from the forensic wing.”

The place for people found not guilty by reason of insanity or mental incompetence. If medication couldn’t make arrestees fit to plead, they might end up serving a de facto life sentence.

“The patient he was asking about is in the forensic unit?”

Tania and Chantal exchanged glances and then gave the barest of nods. They wouldn’t reveal the person’s name, nor would they give me the name of the orderly. I wheedled in vain: they couldn’t see any connection to Leydon, and they didn’t believe one lapse in discretion, assuming someone had blabbed to Wuchnik, was any excuse for a second one.

“Would Leydon have gone to the forensic wing?” I asked.

Again the women exchanged looks. “It’s completely secure,” Tania said, “and you can’t get there from the other buildings, I mean, not through any interior hallways. But Leydon is a lawyer, and she did sweet-talk her way over there one afternoon. She apparently persuaded one of the men that she could help him with his case.”

“Who?”

Tania shook her head. “That isn’t confidential, but I just don’t know. The warden was furious with me for letting her get over there, as if I was supposed to run twenty-four-hour surveillance on her, but if he knew who she was talking to, he didn’t say. Just that the whole wing was in an uproar for days after her visit.”

21.

SOMETHING WAS HAPPENING HERE, BUT YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT IT IS

T
HE TWO WOMEN COULDN’T TELL ME ANYTHING ELSE ABOUT
Wuchnik. I pulled my photographs together but said idly, “Wasn’t it strange that Leydon was admitted out here, instead of in the city? She has private money, even if she doesn’t have private insurance.”

“We didn’t ask about that,” Chantal said. “It was an involuntary admission, as you know, and we were focused more on her well-being than her financial health.”

“Is that true for most of your patients?”

Tania grimaced. “More and more in these times, when Medicaid budgets are being slashed. The state is so hard up for funds they make us jump through fifteen hoops before they’ll let us admit anyone. A lot of our patients get pretty unraveled, even the ones who seek a voluntary admission, before we’re allowed to find a bed for them.”

“But you must be pretty full—the website says you have forty-three social workers on staff.”

Tania’s cell phone beeped. She looked at the screen. “I have a patient in five minutes. She’s an outpatient and that’s true of about half our load. We run group therapies as well as one-on-ones with a lot of people in DuPage County.”

Tania got to her feet. “If you visit Leydon, tell her everyone here is rooting for her. Remember, people in comas or with brain damage can still hear what we say to them! It does them good.”

I pulled my photos together. By the time I’d helped Chantal extricate herself from the table, Tania had disappeared into some counseling room.

Instead of heading for the main entrance, I wandered on down corridor B until I came to a side door. This led to a recreation area, where a few people were sitting on the patchy grass, or walking aimlessly about. A group of children was kicking a soccer ball in the distance. I wondered if they were inmates, or just waiting while their parents went to one of Tania’s group-therapy sessions.

The forensic wing, a few hundred yards to my right, was surrounded by the triple fences of all prisons. When I walked over to look at it, a guard surged forward to demand my business.

“I’m a colleague of Miles Wuchnik. I’m trying to find the orderly he was talking to last month. Before he was killed, you know.” I pulled out one of my pictures of Wuchnik and held it up to the gate, with a twenty beneath my thumb.

The guard looked at the photo, and then looked beyond me. “We don’t give out any confidential information here, young lady. Anyone you need to talk to, you go through Mr. Waxman in the main building.”

I looked behind me. Eric Waxman was standing near the door I’d just come out of with a woman and another man, who looked a bit like David Niven, if Niven had just had an attack of reflux. The guard saw them; they apparently had enough authority that the guard didn’t think he should be seen talking to me. Even so, he’d learned some nimble tricks over the years—the twenty was missing when I tucked the photo back in my briefcase. I handed him a business card.

“Call me if you think of something nonconfidential you can tell me,” I said, before ambling back to the door where the trio was standing.

“What were you doing there?” the Niven look-alike demanded.

“And you are asking because?”

“Because I’m in charge of security for the hospital,” he said.

He had that aura, the suit, the tie, but I asked for identification. “This is a mental hospital,” I said. “Anyone could impersonate the head of security and fool a stranger like me.”

The security chief glared, but the woman laughed. “She’s right, Vernon. Show her your ID.”

He turned out to be Vernon Mulliner, not David Niven at all. The woman shrugged but held out an ID identifying her as Lisa Cunningham, director of patient services.

Vernon was seriously annoyed by now. His demand that I tell him what I’d been doing at the forensic wing had a real bite to it this time. I gave him a card and repeated what I’d told the guard.

Vernon didn’t bother looking at Wuchnik’s photo. “Why do you care?”

“I’m tying up loose ends on Mr. Wuchnik’s cases,” I said. “This is one of them.”

“No employee gives out information here,” Lisa Cunningham said. “Everyone signs a strict confidentiality agreement, and if they violate it in the slightest, they are terminated instantly.”

“Have you fired anyone recently?” I asked her.

“I can’t tell you that, Ms.”—she looked at my card—“Warshawski. But we all want to know why you’re interested in what goes on here at Ruhetal.”

“Miles Wuchnik was murdered last Saturday night,” I said. “Maybe it didn’t make the news out here, but he was found stabbed to death in a cemetery in Chicago.”

“Oh, yes, the vampire murder,” Cunningham murmured.

“And he was out here when a client of mine was hospitalized. She wanted to know if he was stalking her. I’m talking to the people he talked to.”

Cunningham took the photo I’d tried showing Vernon. “I never saw him around the building. Did he check in with you, Vernon?”

Mulliner glanced at it this time but shook his head.

“It’s time you left,” Eric Waxman said to me, his mustache handlebars puffing out. “We’re running a state hospital on a small budget; our staff can’t spend time with private eyes who are trying to drum up business.”

I didn’t argue; if I wanted to return, I didn’t want to make my persona completely non grata. Waxman went back inside, but Vernon and the director of patient services walked me to the main entrance.

It was time for the shift change; there was a lot of traffic in and out, and I quickly disappeared from my escort’s sight. The queue to the exit was slow; I waited a good ten minutes before I eased back onto Therbusch Road. Before heading back to Chicago, I made a circuit of the hospital, looking for any breaches in the fences around the forensic wing. However little they spent on the grass, the state did a good job of keeping their razor wire in good shape. I didn’t see any place where I might slip through.

The shift change meant it was also the start of the evening rush hour. Since the city-bound expressways were glue, I turned south toward Palos, where Wuchnik’s ex-wife, Sandra, now lived.

She had just gotten home herself when I pulled into the cul-de-sac where she lived with her second husband. She came to the door still holding her handbag, a little girl of about four clinging to her pant legs. She was a heavy-set woman whose cheerful smile disappeared when I explained that I was investigating her ex-husband’s death.

“Oh, Miles! I was sorry to read about his murder, of course I was, but he was a dreary, depressing man who dragged me down with him. He didn’t want children, I don’t think he even wanted me. The only person he seemed to care about was his sister, Iva, and she was just as dreary as he was. When I learned he’d made her the beneficiary of his 401K instead of me, that was when I found a good divorce lawyer and took a hike. And met my new husband, and got my little precious here, right, sugar?”

She bent over to hug the little girl, who was trying to fill her in on the day’s activities. These involved going with Gram to the park, making a bear out of Play-Doh, and getting an ice cream.

“So you hadn’t heard from him lately?” I tried to get part of her mind back to her ex. “He wouldn’t have talked to you about his current investigations?”

She shook her head: she hadn’t heard from him since the divorce. “And frankly, miss, if I was you I wouldn’t bother. Miles had these big vague schemes that never went anywhere. In fact, he did really creepy things, like listen in on people’s phone conversations. As far as I’m concerned, that’s just dead wrong. Which I told him more than once. It wouldn’t surprise me if someone caught him eavesdropping and let him have it.”

There was definitely food for thought in that commentary. As I crept along the Eisenhower, I wondered who had been furious enough over Miles’s eavesdropping to murder the detective, and then ransack his home and his car to make sure all traces of his investigations were obliterated. Was it anyone connected to Wuchnik’s tour of the locked wing?

Leydon had managed to get into the forensic unit, and Wuchnik had been talking to one of the orderlies. What did the two of them know that I didn’t? What magical skills had Leydon possessed to breach the security there?

I had reached the grim row of Cook County detention buildings, block after block encased in the same triple fencing that had surrounded Ruhetal’s forensic wing. Guard towers on top. It looked like the German prison camp in
Stalag 17.

When I’d been a Cook County public defender, you could trade money or drugs or sex with many of the guards for access or power, and the same was probably true at Ruhetal. The guard had taken my money, and he might even have given me access if the bosses hadn’t appeared. I didn’t want to think of Leydon having sex with him, but even if she had, what was on the other side of that gate that she wanted that badly?

“You always were smarter than me, babe,” I murmured. “Smarter and nimbler.”

Saying the words out loud reminded me of the social worker’s advice, that Leydon needed to hear her friends speak to her. I turned onto Roosevelt Road and made my way east and south to the University of Chicago hospitals. Leydon was still in intensive care. I said I was her sister, which was true enough in the broadest sense of the word.

The ward head clucked her tongue. “We wondered when her family would show up. ICU is hard on people; they need love, they need to know they’re not forgotten.”

She helped me encase myself in a protective shield—Leydon’s skull was open; they couldn’t risk my transferring any germs. When I got into the unit, I found it hard to look at her, with her head shrouded and the shunt sticking out the side, but I took her hand in my own latex-gloved one and gently massaged her fingers.

“I don’t think Wuchnik was following you, Leydon,” I said when we were alone. “You just kept running into him. Did you see him in the forensic wing? Was that what made you nervy? You’d seen him in the general population wing and then over in the forensic building. Or did you follow him there and try to confront him?”

That was possible. If Wuchnik had bribed a guard to let him into the forensic wing, Leydon could have—and would have—run after him to demand his business.

I wanted to believe that her expression was changing, that she was following what I was saying and was trying to offer a comment of her own. I pressed my fingers against her palm.

“You worked out something that he wanted to know, and you told him the clue lay in that Bible verse, ‘In death they were not divided.’ Was someone in the prison wing because he murdered his father, or his own son, or a queer lover?

“Babe, I wish you weren’t so brilliant. I wish you just said what was going on, beginning, middle, end. I could follow you then, but it’s like all those classes we took together—you always saw where the case was going and danced to the conclusion. I had to put my head down and work it out one step at a time. You were a greyhound, I was a Newfoundland.”