Coop opened and shut his mouth a couple of times but didn’t speak—an effect Mr. Contreras often has on younger men.
“Anyway, he’s super protective of Lydia, warned Bernie and me off her. I told Peter Sansen and Sal about her on my birthday, and Murray was there. He thought it would be interesting to run a series. I’d forgotten that, because of the excitement over Bernie’s arrest—which Coop also instigated.”
I glared at him, but he was already back at full boil. “So it was your fault,” Coop shouted. “We had TV crews down there this morning. I protect her identity because she doesn’t want people bothering her, but thanks to you and your friend Murray, she almost got hit by a train. She ran up the stairs to get away from the cameras and was on the tracks.”
“Was she hurt?” I cried. “Did she get medical attention?”
“Commuters pulled her off the track in time.”
“Has she seen a doctor?” I demanded. “Where is she?”
“Why would I tell you where to find her? So you can sic another reporter on her? The damned story brought the city in, cops, and Streets and Sanitation. They took everything—everything—and dumped it somewhere. I can’t find the piano, I don’t know where her sleeping bag is—you goddamn bitch!”
“No call to talk like that, young man. You need to learn some manners,” Mr. Contreras said.
“I’ll talk however I goddamn well please. And you, Cookie, you leave Lydia the hell alone.” He called Bear to heel and headed back down the walk.
His departure seemed anticlimactic. His rage had propelled him to the North Side, but he hadn’t known what he wanted to accomplish when he found me. Maybe just to scream abuse because of a situation he was powerless to control.
6
Murray Signs Up
Mr. Contreras stayed out front for several minutes: he wanted to relive his arrival on the scene with his hammer—“Saved your skin this time, Cookie, didn’t I?” he exulted.
I assured him he was right: I could have fought Coop off, but Mr. Contreras had startled the younger man into subsiding without a drop of blood being shed. He had earned some bragging time. I finally reminded him that he was wearing nightclothes in public. He turned a red that matched his pajama shirt and hurried inside.
Upstairs in my own space, I took a shower, pulled an espresso, looked at the box scores, and finally felt calm enough to deal with Murray’s story. I started at the end, namely this morning’s news feeds from the train station.
A number of crews were there both from cable and the local networks, but they all behaved the same: mikes thrust at Lydia under a barrage of questions. She’d been momentarily frozen and then had grabbed her piano and fled up the stairs.
Global’s team had been the most nimble, chasing up to the train platform after her. They’d gotten some dramatic footage of two men and a woman lifting Lydia out of the path of an oncoming train. She apparently hadn’t been able to hold on to the piano, since I didn’t see it in subsequent frames. There were the requisite interviews with the three commuters who’d saved Lydia, and a shot of the ambulance carrying Lydia to a hospital. I didn’t see Coop or Bear in any of the videos.
I finally turned to Murray’s story, which filled two inside pages. Besides the front page pictures of Lydia playing, the paper ran her graduation photo from the New England Conservatory, her appearance at fifteen with the Kansas City Youth Orchestra, and one of Murray sitting with Lydia’s mother in the Zamir home in Eudora, Kansas; a pitcher and two glasses sat on the table in front of them.
“We never wanted Lydia to go to Boston to school,” Debbie Zamir told me. We were talking in the living room of the comfortable frame home she and her husband have lived in for the last forty years.
“We always thought her piano teachers here in Kansas encouraged her to have a swelled head about the size of her talent, but she wouldn’t listen to anything her father or I said; she had to go out east to study. She could have gotten a nice job here in Kansas, being a school music teacher, or even a choir director. But she was so sure she was going to be like Judy Garland in that movie and become famous. And then she met that Communist writer and that was the end of everything. She turned into a hippie, playing a guitar at rallies for immigrants. She never held down a real job. And then he was killed.”
Lydia did return to her parents’ home in the wake of the shooting. Mass murders always leave a residue of trauma for those unfortunate enough to be involved; the Zamirs knew their daughter couldn’t be expected to recover overnight, but they were disappointed that she seemed to make no effort to return to normalcy.
I sat with the paper open in my hands. The death of a beloved brings a torrent of grief that comes close to drowning us, but to have that death be from murder, and a murder one witnessed—what can possibly look like normal after that? I finally went back to the story, to Lydia’s mother telling Murray,
“We hoped being back here, maybe she’d find a job that could keep her steady, but she—it was terrible. We couldn’t get her to accept counseling, she was up at all hours, playing the piano, playing the guitar, singing horrible songs about blood and death. When she finally left, I hate to say it about my own child, but it was a relief.”
Murray had also spoken to Lydia’s instructors at the New England Conservatory, who said she arrived with good technique, although a spotty musical education.
One of her instructors, a Professor Szydanski, said, “We are used to helping kids overcome gaps in their training, but the one thing we can’t do is figure out in advance who has a special spark, even with all the video auditions kids have to submit these days.
“Piano—all music—is like any art, or maybe it’s like a sport. You have a group of kids who all look brilliant when they’re fifteen, and then some mysterious alchemy happens over the next few years. A handful find something deeper in themselves that turns them into world-class performers. The rest are good, and we’re proud of them, but that mysterious inner piece is missing.”
Szydanski said he couldn’t possibly comment on why Lydia was living on the streets, if it was Lydia—when he looked at Murray’s photos, he didn’t recognize her. “She looks eighty, not forty.”
The story ended with Lydia’s dorm roommate from New England, who “loved, loved, loved” Lydia’s protest songs. She’d seemed so ordinary at the conservatory. “It sucked that she wasn’t making progress with her auditions for chamber groups or postgrad fellowships, especially since I was getting a ton of callbacks. She tried to be a good friend and not let it show, but it’s hard—and then I started hearing her songs on just about every streaming service. ‘Savage’ was brilliant—so fun! It’s a shame she’s not doing any new stuff.”
When I’d read it through a couple of times, I called Murray. “It’s an interesting story, but there seem to be missing pieces,” I said. “Although great shot of you drinking—what, margaritas?—with Lydia’s mother.”
“Iced tea,” Murray said sourly. “Kansas isn’t dry these days, but you’d be surprised how many of its inhabitants are. What’s missing? I’ll bite.”
“Hector Palurdo, Zamir’s lover—he grew up in Chicago, and his mother still lives here. What did she have to say?”
“Don’t try to play ‘gotcha’ with me, Warshawski. Of course I tried to find her, but she wouldn’t talk to me, text me, respond to emails.”
“And the woman under the viaduct? Did she confirm or deny?”
“Ah, yes. That was an interesting exercise. The first time I went down there, she started pounding her damned piano and screeching.”
“Did Coop and Bear show up?” I asked.
“That’s the guy with the dog? Oh, yeah, chip on his shoulder the size of the Sears Tower. But then, I took a few days to grow out my beard, slept in my oldest clothes, came back as a street person myself.”
He paused, as if waiting for applause.
“Ingenious,” I said politely. “Did it make her trust you? I didn’t see any quotes in the story.”
<
br /> “Yeah, well, the best I can say, besides getting a rash, is it fooled the guy Coop. He comes around once or twice a day, bringing food or whatever, so he looked me over, told me if I hurt Zamir he’d cut me to pieces and feed me to the dog. The dog looked bored, but maybe the guy has fed him so many human parts over the years he can’t stand the taste anymore.”
I had to laugh. “But the woman herself? Did you being homeless make her talk to you?”
“Nope. If I mentioned Palurdo or his family, she began shrieking her head off. If I asked her about her music she’d plunk it out on that idiotic excuse for a piano. I told her I’d met her mother and she turned her back on me.”
“Do you think she can speak at all?” I asked.
“You want to try?” he jeered.
“Not at the moment. At the moment I’d like to know where she is, and that she’s safe.”
“What?” Murray was jolted.
“You didn’t monitor the feed?” I asked. “Camera crews arrived early this morning; Zamir fled up the stairs and along the tracks to escape them. Someone apparently called an ambulance, but there’s no word on where they took her.”
For a moment all I heard was Murray breathing heavily on the other end of the phone, the clicking of his keyboard, then a smothered “Oh, shit!” and he hung up.
He rang me back a few hours later, as I was crossing the Loop on my way to a meeting with the one client who I jump through hoops to please. “She’s vanished,” he said abruptly.
“Your sommelier?” My mind was on the client I’d just left, who was worried about a container of Ligurian wine that had evaporated.
“Damn it, Warshawski, this is serious.”
“Murray!” I gathered my wits. “You mean Lydia Zamir?”
“No, Michelle Obama,” he snarled. “Of course I mean Zamir. Ambulance crew took her away, supposedly to Provident, only the hospital doesn’t have any record of her. She might have been logged as a Jane Doe, but she took a hike before they did more than recommend sending her to the big house for an MRI.”
Provident was part of Cook County’s health care system. I clicked on a map app; they were the closest facility to the Forty-seventh Street station, but didn’t have an imaging unit.
“And you want to find her because . . . ?”
“My editor thinks we need to make sure she has appropriate medical care, housing, the works.”
“Gosh, Murray, I’ll have to take back a tenth of my nasty thoughts about Global Entertainment’s moguls. Big corporation with an even bigger heart. The headline practically writes itself. Can’t wait to see tomorrow’s edition, but right now I have to get to a meeting.”
“Wait a second, Vic.”
I was on Wells Street, where it crosses the Chicago River. I watched a crowded Architecture Center tour boat pass below. People were taking selfies with the Merchandise Mart in the background.
“Murray, I really have to get going.”
He ignored me. “People up the food chain are apparently afraid of legal exposure.”
“Surely your legal team vetted the story before it ran.”
“Of course. But that was before Zamir’s agent saw her old client being chased by our camera crew all over social media. Not to mention ABC, CBS, and the rest of the alphabet.”
“Touching. What’s this agent been doing while Zamir’s been aphasic on the streets?”
“Doesn’t matter. Senior staff needs a head on a block just in case, which means I need to find Lydia and get her into a locked ward.”
“Murray, you have a staff. I have me. You have a budget that flies you to Kansas. Did Zamir run back to her parents? Speaking of running, I’m going to have to sprint not to keep Darraugh Graham waiting.”
Murray hung up but called again an hour later. “You grovel sufficiently to keep Graham happy? Lydia’s parents haven’t heard from her. Look, Vic, can you see if Zamir has gone to Elisa Palurdo? Palurdo absolutely won’t talk to me. And the guy, Coop—I can’t find a last name or an address.”
I was on the L. Between the train noise, people shouting into their mouthpieces, and a group of teens sharing a rap download, it wasn’t possible to talk. I called him again as I walked up Milwaukee to my office.
Before I spoke, Murray said, “Don’t remind me again about all my resources. I want this done privately. Global is a snake pit of rumormongers and backstabbers. I don’t want any sharks smelling my blood in the water.”
I bit back a snarky comment on the mixed imagery. “Global will pay?” I didn’t try to keep the derision out of my tone.
“Of course not. Why do you think I’m calling you? You’re the one person I can trust to investigate without word getting to my management.”
“No freebies, Ryerson. I have bills to pay, just like you.”
“Out of my own pocket.”
“This call has been recorded for quality assurance, Murray. It’s one-fifty an hour plus expenses. Five hundred up front—check, credit card, or even good old-fashioned Ben Franklins.” I typed in the code on my office street door. “I’m about to email you a contract. When you’ve signed it and sent it back, with a down payment, I’ll fit you into my schedule.”
He thanked me meekly.
7
A Teaspoon in the Desert
I started my investigative career right after my thirtieth birthday. I’d been with the public defender for five years. I’d done my share of plea bargains, of trying to save the sorry asses of sorry punks. I’d also seen my share of people railroaded by cops and prosecutors: the State of Illinois compensates courts that have high conviction rates, not high clearance rates. I had often been the one tiny pair of nail scissors cutting at a fitted-up noose.
It used to make me furious that the macroscum, the policy-makers, the good old cronies, the brokers and bankers, almost always got a pass. If you could actually indict one of them, they had a bottomless bucket of money to pay attorneys and investigators. My clients had to share my attention with upward of twenty others in the same hearing.
I figured that as a solo op, without a politically needy boss to tell me whom to save and whom to condemn, I could uncover the vermin hiding in the shadows. When I saw my first business cards, I was so excited I handed them out to passersby on Wabash Avenue: Yes! V.I. Warshawski, Private Investigator, would see that justice rolled down like waters!
Every now and then it did, but most days I felt like a child pouring water on a desert with a teaspoon.
I’d help Murray out because we were old friends with a long history. I’d help him out because Lydia Zamir’s story was an all-too-common American tragedy: she’d lived past a mass murder, but she’d been hideously damaged by it.
I’d help him regardless of money or outcome, because I had an uncomfortable realization—a lurching in the pit of my stomach—that I shared responsibility for this morning’s disaster. It was I who’d told Murray about Zamir. I’d been judgmental, on my high horse, accusing him of selling out. I’d essentially goaded him into writing his big exposé.
I’d do what I could to find her and help her, but I hated knowing that if I was successful, Global’s executives would preen as if they’d done something noble, while nothing would change in the big picture. No assault weapons would be taken off the streets, no assurances that Lydia, and the thousands of others damaged by these assaults, would be the last people to see such harrowing violence. At the end of the story, they would still be packets on an assembly line of death.
My lease mate, Tessa Reynolds, came into our office bathroom as I was frowning at myself in the mirror. “Warshawski, if you looked at me like that, I’d confess on the spot.”
I tried to smile but told her what had been going through my mind.
Tessa looked at me soberly. “Think about it like this, Vic: maybe you are only a drop in a bucket—or a teaspoon in a desert—but there are some fragile plants that will die if your teaspoon goes away. Go up to La Llorona and get yourself a bowl of tortilla soup and get back to
scooping and pouring. Oh, and lock the bathroom door if you want privacy.”
At that I did smile. And I did go down the street to La Llorona.
Tessa and I had moved into our warehouse when this stretch of Milwaukee Avenue was still mostly Hispanic and mostly blue-collar. La Llorona was one of the few survivors of the invasion of boutiques, loft apartments, and chic restaurants. It was a comforting place, like the diners of my childhood, where all the regulars knew one another by name. Mrs. Aguilar gave me soup and a glass of her homemade limeade. We talked about our families and mutual friends.
By the time we finished, I wasn’t filled with the thrill of the chase, but I was ready to face the world again. I sat on a bench outside the café to call the hospitals on the near South Side. Posing as a worried sister, I asked for Lydia by name, and then for Jane Does. Not even Provident acknowledged they’d received a Jane Doe today. I guess if Lydia had disappeared without treatment that was understandable, but it still troubled me.
The morning shift would be on duty for another hour. I jogged up the street to my car. Traffic was predictably thick, but I still made it to the hospital with twenty-five minutes to spare.
I bypassed the main entrance and went to the ER, which was full on a weekday afternoon, because American medical insurance dictates that if you’re poor, you go to an emergency room, not to a doctor.
The woman running the admitting desk was experienced, but weary. So many people had passed through her hands today, and so many were clamoring for attention in the moment—including me—that it was hard for her to cast her mind back to the morning’s catastrophes. She called one of the ER techs, who emerged from the back, as harassed as the admitting clerk herself.
I’d downloaded photos from Murray’s story and showed those to the technician. He was wary, thought he should call his supervisor.
“Believe me, please, I’m not interested in a lawsuit,” I said. “Lydia has been in mental torment for a number of years. We can’t get her to get help, but at least if we knew where she was, we could keep an eye on her, make sure she was warm in winter and had access to help if she was ready for it. Now, though—the city has dismantled her nest and we don’t know where she is. Please—if she was here, if she left—”
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