Breakdown (38 page)

When I got to the Ashford mansion, the Lincoln Navigator wasn’t in the drive, but as I was wondering if I should wait or hurl myself against Leydon’s mother, Faith Ashford pulled up. A girl of fourteen or so flounced out of the passenger seat, ignoring Faith’s call for help with the groceries.

“Let me.” I stepped over to the back of the Navigator, where Faith was wrestling with four overflowing bags.

She gasped. She hadn’t noticed me until then, and she was so startled she almost dropped one of the bags. “Vic—sorry—have you been here long? This is Trina’s day for her flute lesson and she’s upset that I kept her waiting. I guess I spent too much time at the market.”

I didn’t say anything, just followed her into the house. Faith’s mother-in-law, trailed by the sullen Trina, came into the kitchen as Faith was unpacking the bags. The eldest Ashford woman criticized the strawberries—“You didn’t inspect the ones underneath again, did you?” and the salmon—“The tail piece, Faith? When Helen is our guest tonight?”

“Howdy, Ms. Ashford,” I said. “The tail is the leaner part of the fish, of course, and your health-conscious friends will be glad to see it on your table. Why don’t you finish critiquing the food while I take Faith outside for a private word.”

“If this has to do with Leydon, Sewall will make those decisions. And you need to mind your own business, not intrude into my family’s.”

“Ma’am, with respect, Faith holds Leydon’s durable power of attorney for medical decisions as well as legal ones, and if she lets Sewall make those decisions, she is liable for an action at law by the public guardian.”

I didn’t know that my statement had any effect on Leydon’s mother, but it made an impression on Trina. Her jaw dropped, and she started putting away groceries, as if I had threatened her personally with legal action.

Faith took me into a side room and shut the door. “Vic, please don’t get Mother Ashford upset, she just takes it out on me later.”

“Faith, everyone in this household takes out their frustrations on you, including your bratty daughter. You can choose to let that go on or choose to stop it—I don’t care which. But I do care about Leydon’s welfare. I know you do, too, or Leydon wouldn’t have given you her various powers of attorney, would she?”

“I suppose,” Faith muttered, wringing her hands in misery.

“The hospital told me this morning she has to move into a nursing home. You have the power to choose a good private home for her. The ICU staff told me Sewall is talking about a public-aid clinic, but that’s not his decision to make—”

“Father Ashford’s will left Sewall in charge of her money. It’s in a trust; she wasn’t reliable . . .” Her voice trailed away.

“Yeah, well, if he’s been robbing her so that there’s nothing left in her trust fund, I can hire a forensic accountant to find evidence of fraud. If Sewall is threatening to put his sister in a substandard nursing home out of spite, it’s not just a pathetic revenge, it’s laying him open to a serious legal charge. If that’s where Leydon lands, I will know about it and I will make sure that the public guardian also learns about it. That’s really all I have to say.”

I waited for her to respond. She gulped miserably. I was one more strong personality pressuring her, but she finally nodded. On my way back through the kitchen I stopped beside Leydon’s mother, who was pulling bad strawberries out of the boxes Faith had brought home, laying them on a gold-rimmed serving plate.

“I don’t fault you for getting worn out by Leydon’s illness,” I said. “It’s hard on everyone around her. But you always accused her of being ill on purpose, and you never appreciated her amazing gifts—that’s what infuriates me.”

Behind me, Faith gave a nervous gasp, but her mother-in-law said, “You and Leydon never had any standards of decency, so it doesn’t surprise me that you would think it proper to lecture me in my own home. Faith, I’m putting these where you can clearly see their flaws, so that you know what to look for next time. We couldn’t give these to the maid, let alone to Helen.”

“Helen?” I did a double take as the name finally registered with me. “Would that be Helen Kendrick?”

Faith murmured, “Sewall is one of her Gleaners and is an adviser to the campaign. She—we—”

“The Warshawski woman has no need to know our private business, Faith,” her mother-in-law interrupted. “I am only grateful that Leydon won’t be here. The last advisory committee meeting she disrupted in a disgraceful way!”

“What? She argued with Kendrick and made her look stupid on abortion or immigration or Social Security?” I asked.

“She was funny.” Trina Ashford, who’d stood silent in the background, startled all of us by speaking. “She quoted all this Shakespeare. At school they never tell us he wrote about real life, but she was going on and on—something about the country and all the offices being for sale—I didn’t even know it was Shakespeare at first, because she made it sound like it was right out of the news. Then she told me and Terence how—”

“It was a vulgar display and utterly typical of how Leydon and the Warshawski woman disregarded normal social conduct,” Mother Ashford said to her granddaughter. “It was the next week that we had to go to her apartment and see the disgusting drawings she’d created. You may want to lecture Sewall on his financial responsibilities, Ms. Warshawski, but paying to clean and repaint the stairwells in Leydon’s building did not come cheap, I assure you. And that was on top of trying to clean up the mess she was making at Ruhetal.”

“What mess was that?” I asked. “The social workers who talked to me never said anything about her destroying any hospital property.”

“She thought she was still a lawyer. She thought she was in a position to represent someone else, when she couldn’t begin to look after herself. We had to send—” Mother Ashford clipped her lips shut.

“Had to send what?” I thought of my meeting at Dick’s law firm. “You sent Eloise Napier out to stop her?”

Ms. Ashford smiled, a grim, sly smirk that would have looked coarse on anyone, even a vulgar person like me. “You don’t need to know. Suffice it to say, we put a stop to all that nonsense, but it didn’t come cheap.”

“So the only thing you really care about is the money you spend on your daughter. Interesting. Maybe that’s why you live with your son, to save yourself a few bucks.” I picked up the plate and dumped the moldy berries into the garbage disposal. “If you treated Leydon the way you treat Faith, all she ever learned was how little respect you have for others. And, by the way, Leydon is still a lawyer.”

I set the plate in the sink. The maid materialized as I marched down the hall. She gave me the ghost of a smile before shutting the door behind me.

As I walked down the drive to my car, Trina surprised me, running around from the back of the house to intercept me. “Are you friends with my aunt Leydon?”

I answered her honestly, although I wondered what had made her approach me. “We were close friends in law school. Not so much in the last few years—my fault. I wasn’t strong enough to cope with her illness.”

“Is she going to die?”

I looked at her seriously. “I don’t know. I’ve been to see her several times and she still hasn’t recovered consciousness. But she can breathe on her own, so there may be some hope.”

“I know Aunt Leydon can be a pain, but no one out here is, I don’t know, energetic the way she is. Maybe you think I’m rude to my mom—I saw how you were looking at me—but I wish she’d stand up to Grandma the way Aunt Leydon did!”

“Maybe your mother realizes your household would explode if everyone was standing up to each other all the time. Although if it was me, I would solve the problem by moving out.”

When Trina’s eyes widened in amazement, I added casually, “Who did your dad and grandmother send out to stop Leydon’s nonsense at Ruhetal? And what nonsense was it?”

Trina shrugged. She hadn’t paid attention to those battles. She could tell me only that her grandmother had announced at dinner one night that she’d
solved that problem,
meaning the problem of Aunt Leydon, but not what the solution had been.

I drove back to the city, mulling over the situation at Ruhetal. Leydon had gone into the locked wing. To offer legal services to someone there, because, in Mother Ashford’s charming phrase, she thought she was still a lawyer.

And this had annoyed someone, maybe Vernon Mulliner, the director of security? He’d told the Ashford family and they’d dispatched—of course, they’d dispatched Miles Wuchnik to deal with the situation. I wondered if Wuchnik had threatened Leydon in some way, if that was why she’d been so frightened of revealing her name on the phone to me. He certainly had made it clear he could eavesdrop on people.

Back in my office, I called Tania Metzger at Ruhetal. She was furious when I told her about the Ashford family’s sending someone—probably Wuchnik—out to the hospital to deal with Leydon.

“More than most people, even those with her illness, Leydon creates drama around her, and when she got back from the forensic wing, everyone was stirred up, the guards, the patients! It’s an outrage that the family intervened in some way without consulting the therapeutic staff. How can we possibly look after our patients if we don’t know what’s happening to them? As Leydon became more agitated, I thought she was having paranoid delusions. Now it turns out that an outsider actually was involved. She thought she was being stalked, and maybe she was! I’m taking this up with the head of the hospital, you can be sure of that. I need to find out who allowed a third party to interfere with one of my patients.” She put the receiver down with a bang.

The warehouse where I lease space is hot in summer and cold in winter—I can’t afford the utility bills to cool such a large office properly. I put on a fan, weighting down my papers so they didn’t fly across the room, and used a program designed by one of my old colleagues from the Public Defender’s Office to hack into the Department of Corrections database. I asked it to find me anyone who’d been convicted of arson, anywhere in the prison system.

The computer told me it would take twenty minutes to do the sort. I was too wound up from my meeting with Leydon’s mother to wait patiently. I needed to do something active.

It was Xavier Jurgens who had taken Wuchnik into the locked wing. If Wuchnik had been sent out to clean up after Leydon, he might well have talked to the patient Leydon had promised to represent. In which case, Jurgens would have known the patient’s name. Which meant that Jana Shatka probably knew it as well.

If the police were still treating Jurgens’s death as a suicide, they might not have bothered interviewing Shatka. My track record with her had been unimpressive so far, but perhaps I could frighten her into coughing up the inmate’s name.

38.

HOT ON A TRAIL—OR SOMETHING

“
Y
OU’RE TOO LATE.”

I had pulled up in what was beginning to feel like “my” parking place, across from Shatka’s duplex. One of the women I’d seen on my first trip out saw me and pushed her baby over to talk to me.

“Too late?” I felt my stomach turn over: Shatka had been murdered in the night.

“She left yesterday afternoon. Five suitcases she had with her, and when the taxi came, she told him to take her to O’Hare.”

“You heard her, did you?” I asked.

“Not me, but Anita Conseco happened to be out front when Jana left. She even helped her put her suitcases into the trunk, not that the
puta
had one word of thanks for her.”

“So when she went out last week—the day I first came here—did Anita happen to hear where she told the cab to take her?”

The woman looked as though she was going to get on her dignity—she pulled herself up and took a breath—so I forestalled her. “No one around here has time to gossip or spy on each other, I know—not with kids and work and laundry—but if you’re like me and my neighbors, you try to keep an eye out so you know if someone’s in trouble.”

“That’s right, and that’s what that bitch Jana never could appreciate. My brother shoveled her walk the first year she was living here, before Xavier moved in, and was there one word of thanks? Just swearing that if he thought he could squeeze a nickel out of her he was mistaken!”

“So did anyone hear where she went last week?”

My non-gossiping, non-spying informant shook her head regretfully. Jana had managed to depart in secrecy.

The woman’s cell phone rang. She began an animated conversation in Spanish. I walked up the drive and let myself into the house. The lock wasn’t much of a challenge, and even if the Burbank police came around again I didn’t think they’d hassle me.

Jana had left in a hurry. She’d apparently dumped the contents of her closet and drawers on the unmade bed and abandoned what she didn’t want to take with her. Xavier’s clothes still hung in a corner of the closet, looking somehow shrunken and forlorn. I went through all his pockets, my flesh cringing, as if I were touching his dead body again. I found some spare change and a card from the Bevilacqua car dealership, but nothing else.

Jana’s remaining clothes also held nothing more interesting than used tissues and an empty glasses case. I scrabbled through bureau drawers and kitchen cupboards, hoping for some damned thing or other, a computer, a thumb drive, a cell phone, but whatever else she’d left behind, she’d been careful to take all her electronic trails with her.

I moved the bed away from the wall but found only large gray mounds of dust. Not good for an asthmatic, if that was her complaint, but there was no point in telling her that now.

A couple of thin blue aerograms covered in Cyrillic script had fallen behind the dresser. I put them in my briefcase. It shouldn’t be too hard to find someone who could translate them for me.

The landline sat between the microwave and the sink. I scrolled through the caller ID. Very few calls had come in over the last week, but I wrote down all the numbers and names; I could check them when I got back to my office.

The bathroom was in a state of complete disarray, with bottles of lotion and bath salts scattered on the floor amid used linens and Jurgens’s dirty underwear and hospital clothes. I fished through more pockets, even took the top off the toilet tank and looked under the float, but didn’t find as much as a parking receipt.