Breakdown (34 page)

It still didn’t explain where Jurgens got the money to buy the Camaro, or where Wuchnik had gotten the money he was sending his sister, or who had sent Arielle Zitter whatever message had brought her onto the mean streets.

I got up and walked back to my car. I needed to change clothes. And probably, despite the dull nausea I felt in the wake of Jurgens’s death, I needed to eat something—I’d gotten the SOS from Gabe Eycks in the middle of breakfast, and that had been six hours ago. Maybe if I ate, I’d be able to think of what I needed to do next.

By the time I reached home, I found that Mr. Contreras was running out of steam. He’d been on his own for an hour, since Petra had to go in to work, and little Lucy not only had the energy of an atomic pile but a certain ruthlessness that made her realize she could get pretty much what she wanted from “
Dziadzio
Sal” by opening her blue eyes as wide as possible and looking like an orphan about one second away from death.

The girls had been playing with the dogs: red ribbons festooned Peppy’s neck and tail, but Mitch was wearing a pink babydoll pajama top and a baby bonnet. When I laughed at the sight, he gave me a look of burning indignation and slunk behind Mr. Contreras’s couch.

“Did you find Arielle?” Kira asked.

“Yep. She’d gone back to the cemetery where you had your initiation ceremony.”

“Why’d she do that?” Mr. Contreras said. “And the middle of the night, too, like she hadn’t already caused her ma and her grandpa a carload of grief!”

“You know her better than we do, Kira,” I said. “Why do you think she did it?”

Kira hunched a thin shoulder. “I don’t know. Arielle does what she wants and the rest of us are supposed to clap.”

“Everybody clap your hands,” Lucy started to sing, but her sister told her to shut up.

“You know, girls, your
Dziadzio
needs a little time alone if he’s going to stay up to watch a movie with you tonight. You’ll be sleeping in my apartment, so I need you to come upstairs and help me put clean sheets on the bed.”

Despite his humiliating wardrobe, Mitch bounded up the stairs after Lucy and Kira. I set them to changing the bed while I took a shower and found some clean clothes. When I was dressed, I logged on to my laptop as a guest, to keep the girls out of my confidential files, and downloaded a Nancy Drew puzzle for Kira to solve. Lucy was happy enough in front of the television, so I went back to my neighbor, to tell him the full story on what had happened to Arielle.

“The techs are slanting their findings toward suicide, but I’m not convinced,” I said. “We don’t know why or how Xavier got Arielle into that car. Teens and their phones are glued to each other; Arielle’s is missing. The techs say she probably dropped it struggling with Xavier, but if that’s the case, where is it? And then there’s Kira’s phone, which I’m pretty sure the killer used to send Arielle that bogus text.”

“It’s not that I’m questioning you, doll, because I seen you before, you been right when the cops say you’re wrong, but why couldn’t it be like they said. This guy Xavier, he even cut you with a butcher knife last week. He coulda killed Wuchnik and then figured the law was closing in on him, just like your techs say. ’Specially if Wuchnik was blackmailing him over drugs.”

I thought it over. “That might be right, but someone gave Xavier money to buy that Camaro. You don’t shell out fifteen thousand for doing nothing. I think whoever gave Xavier the money orchestrated last night’s event, set it up to look like a kidnapping-suicide.”

“Then how are these two gals involved?” Mr. Contreras jerked a thumb toward the third floor.

“The girls were all taking pictures with their phones and one of them shouted that she’d seen a vampire. She probably really saw either Wuchnik lurking in the shadows, waiting to meet the person who killed him, or the killer himself. If Kira took a picture with her phone and the killer found the phone, he may be trying to track her down. She doesn’t have a service plan, so there isn’t a way to ID her from the phone itself. I may be completely off base here, but just in case, I don’t want anyone to get a whiff of who or where Kira and Lucy are. I know it’s a lot of strain, especially the little one, but—”

“Oh, come on, doll. The day a couple of cute little girls are too much for me is the day you send me off to live in Ruthie’s basement.”

I hugged him and gave him a grateful kiss. Ever since he turned eighty, his daughter has been lobbying to get him out to her family room in Hoffman Estates. Since she whines and complains whenever she’s around him, I don’t understand why she wants him to live with her, although I know jealousy of his closeness to me plays a role.

“But why did he text the other gal, this Arielle?”

“Can’t answer that one—we don’t have her phone or Kira’s. Maybe I’m wrong, anyway—Kira’s phone could be in some drunk’s pocket right now. And until Arielle gets her wits back, we can’t ask her anything. Although I will talk to Nia Durango before the day is done.”

But my first stop would be Burbank, to see how Jana Shatka was bearing up under her loss.

34.

DRUG REQ

W
ORD OF
X
AVIER’S DEATH HAD REACHED
L
ARAMIE
A
VENUE:
when I pulled up across the street, I saw a little knot of women pause on the sidewalk in front of his duplex and point.

I crossed over to them. “Is Ms. Shatka home, do you know?”

One of the women shrugged, but another looked at me. “You were here before, weren’t you? Xavier, he slashed you for asking about the car. Are you with the bank? Because he is dead, and the car is gone, I don’t think you’ll see it no more.” She apparently thought I’d come to repo the Camaro.

“I’m a detective.”

“Oh, the police, they were here already. Breaking the news. Is it true Xavier killed himself?”

“It’s too early to know what happened,” I said. “He died in the car, though.”

“You saw him?” A current of excitement ran through the group. “What happened? He drove that car into a tree?”

“Nah,” second woman said. “He realized he had to come home to her and put the hose in his mouth.”

The woman who’d recognized me reminded them that I was with the police. “But how did he die, can you tell us?”

“He mixed alcohol and drugs,” I said. “But he went into Chicago to do it, which seems strange.”

The blinds in the front window twitched. Jana was watching us. I walked up the drive, where the battered Hyundai sat in the carport, and knocked on the kitchen door. The women watched expectantly at the bottom of the driveway, but Jana didn’t answer. I could hardly pull out my picklocks in plain view, so I knocked again.

When she still didn’t answer, I went to the Hyundai and tried the doors. They were locked, but the car had a lot of papers sitting in the backseat. You never know—they could hold information about Xavier’s sugar daddy. Or mommy.

The window on the passenger side was loose in its tracks. I went back to my own car for a piece of wire, then wiggled the Hyundai’s window enough to get my wire inside to undo the lock. When I had the rear doors open and was sifting through the papers, Jana charged out the kitchen door. She was holding the same knife that Xavier had used on me last week.

“Get away from here. This is private property.”

“It’s part of an investigation into a crime, Ms. Shatka.” I stepped back, hoping to keep out of range of the knife.

“What are you talking about? Xavier is dead. That is a tragedy, but it is not a crime.”

“I don’t know about Russia,” I said, “but in the United States, we consider murder a crime.”

The skin beneath her freckles turned pale, making her blue eyes seem very dark. “What are you saying? The police came. They told me that Xavier killed himself. And this I already knew because he wrote to me from his car, wrote me his apology so that I would know he can be buried as a Christian. The police said not one word about murder.”

“Maybe they didn’t want to scare you, Ms. Shatka, but Xavier was definitely murdered.”

“No!” she said fiercely, waving the knife at me.

I backed up another step. “When I was out here last week, we talked about where Xavier got the money to buy his Camaro. The neighbors think he was selling drugs, and I thought he’d been bribed by Miles Wuchnik. You knew we were both wrong, because Xavier told you who paid him off and why. You called a cab and went to see the person—was it a man? A woman?”

She sucked in a breath, astonished that I knew this much. The arm holding the knife went slack.

“This person—shall we call him your banker?—persuaded Xavier to drive into Chicago in the middle of the night. Your banker then persuaded Xavier to kidnap a young girl and put her in the trunk of that Camaro. After that, somehow this financial friend got Xavier to drink vodka laced with toxic drugs. I think it’s time you told me your friend’s name. Or you will be the next person he kills.” Or she, I added to myself, thinking again of Eloise Napier and Helen Kendrick.

“You are crazy.” The words lacked conviction. “No one will kill me, because no one killed Xavier.”

“Who did you go see after I was here last week, Ms. Shatka?”

She rolled her eyes as she thought and then produced, “My hairdresser.”

“I’d sue, if I were you: your roots are longer than they were a week ago. Who gave Xavier all that cash?”

“Xavier saved his money for many years. That car was his dream car; from the time I met him he talked about it, wanting a Corvette.”

“Not to be picky in your time of grief, but it was a Camaro.”

“He decided to cut his dream down to size. Everyone does; me, too. I came here thinking America is where everyone gets rich quick. Instead, it’s like anyplace else—work, work, work.”

“What work did you do in Russia, Ms. Shatka?” I got sidetracked out of curiosity.

“I don’t come from Russia, from Vilnius, Lithuania.”

It was my turn to be silent. Vilnius, Vilna, Chaim Salanter’s hometown. “I thought you were speaking Russian last week,” I finally said.

“I am ethnic Russian, my family lives in Vilnius, there are many Russians there. Why do you care?”

The hot sun, the strange conversation, my long day, I couldn’t think clearly to pick and choose my questions. How had she met Xavier, I wanted to know, and how long had she been in America—quite a time, judging by the quality of her English.

Instead, I heard myself blurt out, “If Miles Wuchnik didn’t approach you with questions about Chaim Salanter’s past, who did?”

She ran back to her house. I sprinted after her, but she already had a chain lock in place. When I tried to push against it, she stuck the butcher knife through the crack and sliced at me.

“Ms. Shatka, you are going to need something more powerful than that knife if the same person comes after you who killed Xavier. If you tell me who you talked to, I can help you, but if you hug that information to yourself, well, I sure wouldn’t sell you a life-insurance policy today.”

“Go away, busybody. I can look after myself with no help from you!”

I’d dropped my bag next to the Hyundai. I went back for it and took out a card. She’d shut the door all the way, but I slipped the card through the mail slot cut into the jamb.

A jet was screaming overhead. I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted, “If you change your mind, call me.”

She didn’t answer. I stood at the door for several minutes, my ear against the jamb, but heard very little, even when the screaming from the airplane had died down. I think Jana tiptoed over to the door to pick my card up from where it had fallen inside, but I wasn’t even sure of that.

At length, I returned to the Hyundai and started looking through the papers Xavier, or Jana, had tossed into the backseat. Most of them were store receipts—Jana seemed to buy a lot of clothes with her disability checks. Three pairs of shoes from a discounter on Roosevelt Road just last week. The same date that I’d been out here, in fact. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe she really had been out shopping, not calling on Xavier’s sugar parent. I looked more closely at the receipt: seven p.m. She’d bought shoes to cheer herself up after her hard day of neighborhood confrontations.

I found ticket stubs from the Kane County Cougars, wadded up detritus from McDonald’s and the Colonel, a past-due notice for unpaid parking tickets, and a receipt from the county assessor’s office. Stuck to a greasy napkin, I found a carbon of a requisition slip to the Ruhetal pharmacy for twenty ten-milligram tablets of Abilify. The pharmacy had stamped it at ten a.m. yesterday, and Xavier had countersigned it; I could just make out the blurry capital “X” at the start of the signature.

A doctor had signed the requisition, but again, the carbon was so blurry I couldn’t make out more than the flourish of the “MD” at the end of the line.

“Hey, you! What are you up to?”

I’d been so intent on the papers that I’d lost track of what was going on around me. A man in a patrol officer’s uniform had come up the drive; his squad car, labeled “City of Burbank, Illinois, Public Service with Honor,” was parked at the curb. In the best movie tradition, he was wearing wraparound mirror shades; I couldn’t see his eyes.

I introduced myself as a licensed private eye. “You know Xavier Jurgens died this morning? I’m the person who found him, in that fancy new Camaro he was so proud of. I’d hoped to ask Ms. Shatka a few questions, since Jurgens had a missing girl locked in the trunk of the car.”

He grunted. “Maybe you found Jurgens, maybe you dug up a fortune in gold coins you’re trying to hand over, but we got a call from the home owner that you’re trespassing. Whoever you are, whatever you’re here for, if the home owner doesn’t want you on the premises, you get off the premises.”

I thought about trying to explain myself, but even as I opened my mouth I couldn’t imagine how to put my tangled nest of assumptions into one short, plausible sentence: Wuchnik’s death and
Carmilla, Queen of the Night’s
devotees; Xavier’s death and Arielle’s kidnapping; Leydon’s fears and her fall from the Rockefeller balcony, and Jana Shatka’s reaction to my suggesting she’d been investigating Chaim Salanter’s past. Instead, I nodded meekly and went down the drive.