Breakdown (27 page)

The receptionist coughed loudly and pointed toward the owner’s office. Carm Bevilacqua was waiting in the doorway. A heavy man who would have had trouble squeezing into a Camaro, with eyes as cold as the air-conditioning, he demanded to know what authority I had to question any sale on his premises.

“Easy does it, Mr. Bevilacqua. This isn’t about you but about one of your customers. He has a long list of creditors and they’re licking their chops over the Camaro he just bought. If he wrote you a check, it’s probably bouncing around like a kangaroo right now, but before I let any of my clients seize the car, I’m doing you the courtesy of seeing how he financed it.”

My glib patter was essentially meaningless, but Bevilacqua didn’t pounce on the faulty logic. He didn’t even demand my ID, so relieved was he to find out I wasn’t raising a legal issue about his dealership. Instead, he wanted the name of the customer.

I looked around to see who was in earshot, and prudently closed the door. “Xavier Jurgens,” I murmured.

He asked for the spelling, sat at his desk, and busied himself on the computer. I perched on the visitor’s chair. The smell in the showroom seemed to come from the upholstery.

“Yes, here it is,” Bevilacqua said. “Jurgens bought a new model Camaro eighteen days ago, with premium wheels and the extended warranty. He paid fifteen in cash and financed the remaining ten, but we ran a credit check, Ms., uh—”

“Cash? You mean actual dollar bills?”

“Actual hundred-dollar bills, to be precise.” Bevilacqua permitted himself a chuckle; we were teammates now. “He has the title, and our financing company looked at his employment.”

“I know: he’s at the Ruhetal hospital,” I said absently. “Works in the forensic unit, so he’s probably got good job security. Which he needs, since the woman in his life doesn’t seem able to work.”

“I wouldn’t know about that. She certainly was the one who asked the tough questions during the financing session—he was all about the car. Between you and me, he would have paid an extra half point in interest if he hadn’t had her along. If your clients are dealing with her, well, they’ll have a hard time getting that car away.”

“I’ll make sure they know.” I was out the door and back to my Mustang before Bevilacqua remembered he didn’t know my name.

Word must have traveled fast that I hadn’t come to challenge the dealership’s financing policies. My hearty friend personally opened the Mustang’s door for me and handed me his card. “When you’re ready to trade in your baby, you come talk to me!”

27.

JUST A FLESH WOUND

I
DROVE BACK TO
X
AVIER AND
J
ANA’S WITH THE WINDOWS
open. Muggy air, even stained with exhaust fumes and grease from the fast-food chains, still sat easier in the lungs than the frozen gluey smell inside the car dealership.

When I got back to Burbank, the Camaro was still in the carport, but no one answered the Shatka-Jurgens bell. A couple of women were sitting on a bench in the little park across the street. I asked if they’d noticed anyone coming or going, but they just shrugged. They were texting, even while sitting next to each other, and hadn’t been paying attention to the neighbors. A boy bouncing a ball nearby spoke up: he’d seen Jana Shatka get into a taxi about half an hour ago. Another jet was closing in overhead; I wondered idly if Jana was heading back to Russia.

I got back into my car and started returning e-mails, but I couldn’t focus on my clients’ needs. I kept wondering where Jurgens had gotten fifteen thousand in cash. Not from his twenty-four-thousand-a-year job, not unless he’d skipped lunch for twenty of his thirty-nine years.

At the same time, Wuchnik’s own finances weren’t that brilliant. If he’d bribed Jurgens, where had he gotten the money? Anyway, Jana had smirked when I’d suggested that Wuchnik had paid for the car. Someone else had paid off Jurgens, or maybe it was what one of the women had suggested this afternoon: Jurgens was stealing drugs from the hospital and selling them.

But Jana knew Wuchnik’s name. Her smirk suggested that she’d met him, done business with him. Bevilacqua said it was Jana who drove the bargaining over the Camaro, not Jurgens. So maybe Jurgens had called in his lady friend to deal with Wuchnik. Maybe Wuchnik had welched on a deal and Jana Shatka had impaled him with a spike at Mount Moriah. She had enough fury to do it, and she might have the strength, as well.

Speculation, speculation. I needed facts. I turned resolutely back to my iPad and focused on e-mails for forty minutes. In fact, I got so focused that I almost missed Xavier Jurgens’s return home in his beater. Another jet was screaming overhead, so I didn’t hear him slam the door to his Hyundai; it was just the motion out of the corner of my eye that made me look up in time to see him go into the duplex.

I turned off the iPad and followed him. The women who’d been on the park bench when I arrived had left, replaced by a couple of older men. One of them shouted after me, “You can do better than him, baby. Try me.”

Xavier Jurgens was still in his hospital whites when he answered my knock, but he’d taken time to open a can of Pabst. “Yeah?”

I opened the screen door. “Mr. Jurgens? I’m a coworker of Miles Wuchnik’s. We need to talk.”

Jurgens filled the doorway. He wasn’t a big man, but he had impressive neck muscles, which his shaved head made appear more pronounced. In his uniform he looked like the guy on the Mr. Clean bottles.

“What do you mean, coworker?” he said.

“I mean someone like me, who works with someone else, in this case, Miles Wuchnik. I’m clearing up loose ends on his outstanding cases.”

“I know what a fucking coworker is. But he told me he worked alone.”

“You can’t trust anyone these days, can you?” I mocked him. “Bevilacqua Chevy isn’t sure they can trust you for the remaining payments on that Camaro, for instance.”

“What are you talking about? Are you from the car dealer? I signed the papers, they know I’m good for the money.”

“But what nobody understands is where you came up with all those lovely portraits of Benjamin Franklin.”

Jurgens shook his head, not in denial—he just wasn’t following me.

“Mr. Jurgens, you paid cash. You counted out a big stack of hundred-dollar bills. You were proud of them, everyone in the dealership came around to look. But if you stole that money, or got it from drug sales, the government will come and take your shiny red Camaro away from you.”

“I didn’t steal the money, and Miles knows—knew that. So go away.”

“Like Jana,” I said. “Jana explained to me that it wasn’t Miles who gave you the fifteen grand, but she was jittery that I was even asking questions about him and you and the car, so she took off about an hour ago.”

“So what? It’s a free country, she can come and go when she wants.”

“Yes, indeed. She hopped in a taxi. Now, I will confess that I didn’t hear her give the destination to the driver, but my guess is that she went off to talk to the person who gave you all that lovely money. What do you think?”

“I think you’d better leave.”

I was able to slip inside when he backed up to shut the inner door. He was used to dealing with obstreperous patients. He grabbed me and wrenched my arms behind my back. I went limp and fell toward him. My dead weight took him off balance. While he struggled to hold me up, I hooked my right leg around his and upended him. The beer can hit the floor and sprayed the room.

He rolled over and sprang to his feet. “Goddamn bitch.”

“No.” I moved behind a chair. “A fight isn’t a good idea. We’ll both end up hurt, and we still have to have this conversation. Tell me who gave you the money for the Camaro.”

He lunged at me over the chair. I shoved it into his abdomen and he doubled over with a horrible grunt.

“Who did Jana go see so fast? She called you after I left, and told you what she thought you needed to do.”

He started to dance around me. I kept turning, chair in hand. It was exhausting.

“Who did Miles Wuchnik want to see in the forensic wing?” I panted.

“You think you’re smart, but you’re not,” he said.

“You could be right,” I agreed. “Was it a guard or a patient?”

Jurgens grabbed a butcher knife from the kitchen table and started slashing at me. I flung the chair at his head and fled through the back door.

A cab pulled up just as I reached the street. Jana Shatka got out. She had changed for her appointment from the thin sundress and flip-flops to a tight-fitting navy skirt with hose, heels, and a white jacket.

“You! You have been breaking into my home while I was out? I’m calling the police!” It wasn’t an idle threat—she pulled her cell phone from the outsize blue handbag she was carrying.

“Xavier let me in.” I was gulping in air. “He ran into some chair legs, so he’s in a bit of pain. But he agreed you must have been off talking to the money pot who funded the Camaro.”

“What? You went into my house and attacked my man? You are a crazy person! You belong in that hospital with the other lunatics Xavier works with all day long. Get away from here!”

We had drawn a crowd, homebound commuters along with the people hanging out in the park.

“You told your donor I’d come around asking questions, didn’t you? What advice did you get back?”

“To put you in a straitjacket and take you to the locked ward at the hospital,” she snapped.

“Hey, she’s bleeding,” one of the spectators called. “What did Xavier do? Bite her?”

“No, man, he cut her—look, he’s there with the knife!”

I turned with the rest of the crowd to stare at Xavier, who was standing next to the Camaro, brandishing the butcher knife. It was pathetic, in a way: the car was perhaps the dearest thing he’d ever owned. I’d threatened it, and he was standing guard.

I hadn’t noticed until now, but blood was seeping through the front of my knit top. Xavier had managed to strike me, and I hadn’t even noticed. My shirt was sliced open at the shoulder. I craned my neck to squint at the wound. It didn’t seem very deep, but in the aftermath of the fight, the sight of my own blood suddenly made me weak in the knees.

“Better call the cops,” someone said. “He’s turned violent, cut this lady, who knows what he’ll do next.”

“She started it,” Jana growled.

“How do you know? You weren’t here—you were off on a date with your fancy-pants guy, weren’t you?” one of the women cawed.

“She admitted it out loud,” Jana said. “She hit him with a chair.”

“Maybe she hit some sense into him. A smart man would get rid of a lazy bitch like you, pretending to be on disability.”

“I am on disability,” Jana said. “It’s my lungs, the doctor agreed!”

I went over to the woman who’d said Jana was off on a date. “Have you seen Mr. Fancy Pants?” I asked. “I’m anxious to find him.”

She shook her head. “It’s just talk around the street. You know, she goes off like this, makeup, pantyhose, the whole bit, when most of the time she is wearing some old housedress.”

Another woman chimed in. “Of course she has a rich boyfriend. Why else would a whore like that who spends her day listening to Wade Lawlor make up lies about Mexicans—”

“What, that Mexicans are lazy vermin?” Jana interrupted.

The other woman lunged at Jana, calling her a
cerdo ruso perezoso,
a lazy Russian pig, but a man stepped between them. I decided I’d had enough excitement for one day and slipped off to my car while the crowd’s attention was on the new contestant.

A woman at the fringe of the group nodded at me as I was crossing the street. “Those two women, they’re always at each other’s throats. You should get to a doctor. Out of curiosity, why did you come to fight Xavier?”

“I didn’t come to fight him.” I leaned wearily against the Mustang. “But there are questions about where he got the money for the car. You wouldn’t know, I suppose.”

She shook her head regretfully: she longed to know. Everyone on the street longed to know. “Xavier works hard, you know. He’s not a lazy man, but he’s an unlucky man—especially to get tied up with a
neryacha
like that Jana. I’m from Eastern Europe, same as her, but I work for a living! But we all know what they pay over at the hospital and it’s not enough to buy a car like that.”

“You think that’s where money for the car came from—from Jana’s lover?”

“Who would pay a creature like her that much money? I’m thinking he maybe stole drugs from the hospital.”

Oh, the word on the street—it was like revisiting my childhood, all the local feuds, with each set of immigrants trying to push the other off the bottom rung of the ladder they were all trying to climb. What is it we fear in those who aren’t part of our tribe? Is it the old sibling rivalry—who gets the most love, or the last piece of chocolate cake?

As I eased into traffic, I watched the crowd in my rearview mirror. People were drifting away, home to dinner, or in search of better entertainment elsewhere.

I stuck to the side streets heading back into the city. My wound, or maybe the fight, had caught up with me; I wasn’t alert enough to be safe on the expressways. I called Lotty while stalled in a backup on a bridge over the Sanitary Canal. She told me she would wait in her clinic for me.

As I drove slowly north, I wondered how I could have made so many mistakes. “You think you’re smart, but you’re not,” Xavier Jurgens had said, and I had to agree with him.

When I reached the clinic, on the western fringe of Uptown, Lotty’s clinic manager gasped in shock, as did the handful of patients still waiting for attention. “Ms. Warshawski! Dr. Herschel told me you’d been injured, but this is terrible. I’ll let Doctor know you’re here.”

Despite having known me for twenty years, Mrs. Coltrain still addresses me formally. Before she could pick up the phone, Lotty swept into the waiting room, looked at my bloodstained shirt, and ushered me back to the examining room attached to her office. I could hear one of the waiting patients grumble to Mrs. Coltrain.

While she cleaned the wound, Lotty demanded a report on how I’d come by the injury. “We don’t need stitches or staples; it’s not deep, the knife just glanced your shoulder.” She used surgical tape and carefully pulled the edges together. “You’re up to date on your tetanus, yes?”