“Hey, Donna,” I said. “You a Lydia Zamir fan? Does your team at Devlin & Wickham sing ‘Savage’ to psych yourselves up before you head into court?”
She looked blank for a moment, long enough for me to open Mr. Contreras’s door. The dogs jumped on me, squeaking hysterically. Behind me I heard Lutas say something about the condo board, but I figured my best strategy was not to turn around.
My neighbor ushered me inside. “Dogs heard you talking to Ryerson out there. Mitch didn’t like it. Peppy neither, but Mitch was worse.”
I smiled appreciatively. Mr. Contreras resents almost every man who’s ever been part of my life, but for some reason, Murray gets his goat more than most.
“You’re going to get me evicted,” I said, scratching Mitch behind his ears. He grinned, sure we were all doing the right thing.
“What’s Ryerson doing here, anyway?” Mr. Contreras demanded. “You ain’t throwing over that digging guy for him, are you?”
“Nope. I’m helping Murray look for Lydia Zamir.”
“Oh, the singer gal.” Mr. Contreras’s paper is the Sun-Times, but after Coop’s furious visit, he’d read Murray’s story in the Herald-Star. “They showed it on the nine o’clock news, her being chased by the TV cameras. Could have got her killed. That’s Ryerson, not thinking of anything but his own fame and glory.”
I didn’t argue but switched the subject to my own futile search for Zamir. I focused on the things Mr. Contreras would enjoy most, like the hospital not noticing Zamir was leaving in time to stop her. I told him about Bernie’s infatuation with Leo Prinz, and her disappointment that Prinz didn’t share her warlike spirit.
Mr. Contreras was sure, sight unseen, that Leo wasn’t good enough for Bernie. Of course, not even Prince Harry would have made the grade with him.
When I’d taken the dogs for a last jog around the block, I logged on to my home computer to do a little research.
I started with Larry Nieland, the Nobel Prize–winning economist. He had a joint academic appointment at Chicago and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. That seemed odd, but when I fished around for more information, I saw that Chicago had actually helped build the Chilean economics school back in the 1950s. There seemed to be a lot of back-and-forth between the two universities, with Chicago-trained economists forming a big part of the Pinochet government policy advisers in the 1960s and 1970s.
Nieland was doing a postdoc at the Santiago campus when Pinochet came to power. He now owned an apartment in the hills above the Chilean city of Valparaíso, as well as his condo in Chicago.
Like many business and economics professors, Nieland sat on a number of company boards both in the States and in South America. He had his own closely held company, Capital Unleashed, which “offered investment advice and support to a curated list of clients.” He could probably have afforded a better shirt than the one he’d worn to the meeting.
Some of his money went into sailing. In Chicago, he kept a ninety-foot yacht that had been built for one of our robber barons in the 1870s. He also had a modern racing yacht, which he’d entered in several ocean races.
My beloved city is hovering near bankruptcy. How much were they spending on Nieland’s carefully curated advice for the lakefront? I wished I could get Murray involved, to help ask some of these questions, but I didn’t trust his discretion these days.
I turned my mind to Lydia Zamir’s disappearance, which was a more urgent worry: I needed to find people who knew her. I looked up her agent, Hermione Smithson, whose office was in Boston, near the New England Conservatory. Most of Smithson’s clients appeared to be classically trained. I hadn’t heard of any of them, but when I checked their disc and streaming sales, only three had significant numbers.
I suppose Smithson got a commission from concert bookings, but she was not a young woman; she’d turned seventy last year. If Lydia Zamir’s career was coming back to life, Smithson would want a piece of that action.
The next morning, Zamir’s disappearance had made the national news feed, while the footage of her on the Metra tracks appeared on all social media platforms. Photos of Provident Hospital purported to show how easy it was for a person to be kidnapped without anyone noticing—someone had uploaded a picture of a Chicago cop in a hospital waiting room, bent over his device. Whether it was Provident or Northwestern, whether it was from yesterday or five years ago, was impossible to tell.
After I’d checked the overnight reports of dead bodies and called the South Side hospitals to see whether a semistarving Jane Doe had come in, I phoned Zamir’s parents in Eudora, Kansas. They knew about the dramatic chase along the Metra tracks, thanks to a helpful neighbor.
“That nice reporter called to tell us she’d disappeared from the hospital, but Lydia hasn’t tried to reach us.”
“That must be stressful,” I murmured.
“Oh, you get used to it.” She sighed. “Looking back, I don’t think we were ever as close as some of my friends are with their daughters. I always hoped she’d move back, start a family, but she wanted to do something big that got her a lot of attention. One of her teachers called her an ardent spirit, but I thought she just acted, well, I hate to say this about my own child, but, well, conceited. And after she got involved with that Mexican, she paid even less attention to her father and me.”
“I thought he was American,” I said. “With a father from Chile.”
Debbie Zamir ignored that. “All he ever talked about were those people trying to cross the border into our country. He never cared about hardworking people who are already here. That doesn’t sound American to me. And then Lydia would go on and on about how Hector unleashed a well of creativity in her. His books were the most exciting thing she’d ever read. I tried to read them, I really did, but they seemed like nonsense to me. All about Indians appearing in visions and talking about plastic in the drinking water.
“It was like Hector hypnotized Lydia. She started writing songs about savages, and the lyrics were crude, not like the beautiful pieces she used to play for her recitals. If I tried to comment on them, she’d get angry and say ‘you have to face the truth.’ Well, she wouldn’t face the truth: all that political agitation did was expose her to violence.”
I was digging my nails in my palms hard enough to draw blood, trying not to shout at Zamir’s mother. “Seeing someone die—anyone—it’s terrible. And when you see your lover dead by shooting—unbearable. She needed help.”
“We tried to take care of Lydia after the shooting. Our doctor referred her to a very good psychiatrist in Kansas City, who prescribed Haldol and Ativan for her. She threw out the pills; she said they kept her from remembering Hector.”
To change the subject, I asked who Lydia’s Kansas friends were, but Debbie Zamir couldn’t give me any names. Lydia had left for her conservatory training twenty years ago and hadn’t stayed in touch with childhood friends.
“Where did she go when she left you after the shooting?” I finally asked.
“She took off for Chicago and moved in with Hector’s mother. We couldn’t believe it when we saw the news reports that she was living in the streets. I was sure she was with the mother.”
I asked Ms. Zamir if Lydia had known Arthur Morton, the killer, before the massacre.
“What do you mean, did she know him?”
“Did she ever mention his name? Did she ever worry about him stalking her?”
“I keep telling you: after she left for the East Coast she never told me her secrets. And certainly not for the few weeks she stayed here after the shootings. She was too strung out to talk about anything. If she’d met the boy who did the shooting, I wouldn’t have known.”
My head was starting to hurt from the effort of dealing with her mix of truculence, hurt feelings, and anger over her daughter’s refusal to conform. “What about a man named Coop? He looked out for your daughter while she was living under the railroad tracks.”
“Coop? Like a chicken coop? There weren’t any b
oys with a name like that in her school, at least not that I ever heard of.”
“He might have come to the trial,” I suggested.
She was silent for a beat. “I didn’t go. Maybe I should have, maybe it would have made Lydia less agitated later. I thought that immigrant, that Hector, was a bad influence on my girl, and—and it didn’t break my heart that he was dead.”
The words were aggressive but there was an undercurrent of remorse that kept me from pouncing on her. There must be something I could ask, something Lydia’s mother could tell me, but her hurt feelings and her random accusations made it hard for me to think. I gave her my own phone number and email address and hung up, massaging my sore temples.
After that conversation, I wasn’t in the best mood to question more strangers, but it was important to finish the list of people who had known Lydia. I called Hermione Smithson, the agent.
Smithson’s receptionist said that “Madame” had no interest in talking to detectives. I explained my mission; after a few minutes on hold, I was put through to Madame.
When I explained that I was looking for Zamir, Smithson demanded to know my interest.
“I was hired to find her.”
“By whom?”
“My clients appreciate my discretion, ma’am. You know that she has disappeared, right? I was hoping she’d been in touch with you.”
“A reporter called me yesterday asking for her. If you’re trying to help the media avoid responsibility for her disappearance, I have no interest in talking to you.”
“I’m not trying to help anyone avoid responsibility for anything,” I said. “Ms. Zamir’s disappearance is a big news story. That’s reviving interest in her work, isn’t it?”
“She is getting some long overdue attention,” Smithson said cautiously.
“Do you think some unscrupulous person might be holding her hostage to drive up her commercial value?” I said.
There was silence at the other end for a long beat before Smithson said, “I’m in discussions with various recording companies. If she’s disappeared she’s less valuable—a company could get her old releases, but not any new content.”
“Have you seen or talked to her lately? She isn’t capable of new content.”
“Are you a trained psychiatrist and musician as well as a detective?” Smithson mocked. “A few months in a rehabilitation facility with the right medications and the right therapists can make a difference in a hurry. I’ve seen other musicians come back from farther down.”
“You wouldn’t be holding her, then, would you, to drive up Spinning Earth or Deutsche Grammophon’s bids?”
“How dare you? That’s a complete outrage. Whatever your name is, don’t bother to call back.” She hung up.
Complete outrage? Maybe, but not beyond belief.
I looked up the piano teacher Murray had talked to, a Professor Szydanski, Gershon Szydanski. Of course he had seen the stories about Lydia. He was also fascinated by her success as a singer-songwriter.
Apparently she hadn’t shown much interest in composition when she was a student. Szydanski had looked up her record; she’d majored in piano, minored in voice, had taken a few composition courses but hadn’t produced any memorable material.
“Most of our students are like Lydia,” he added. “They are gifted, they go on to have good careers as performers and teachers, but we don’t often see their names in the music press. When they get national or international recognition, we’re pretty excited.”
He went on in that vein for several minutes; I finally interrupted to ask if he knew where she was, or if he could give me names of New England students she’d been close to who might help out.
“Sorry, Ms. Warshawski, but she graduated at least fifteen years ago. However, even when they’re students here, we don’t like to be too involved in their private lives.”
Before hanging up, I asked if he knew Hermione Smithson. He laughed. “She’s a fixture here, as much as we all are, I suppose. She puts down a seine and sees which students she can fish up. I guess that’s unkind. Hermione doesn’t cross a legal or ethical line, but she grabs rights from naive performers that they’d be better off retaining.”
“Lydia’s street value went up about three hundred percent after those camera crews chased her along the train tracks. I don’t see any way that Smithson could be involved in her disappearance—the logistics are formidable—but she’s still benefiting from the drama.”
“Oh, my God, I have given you a totally false impression of Hermione if you think that.” Szydanski was alarmed. “She’s a thorough New Englander: you know, the old-school model of morality and rectitude and so on. She’d never collude in a kidnapping.”
We finished on that note.
I’d put off trying to reach Hector Palurdo’s mother for as long as I could, but there wasn’t anyone else to talk to. I started by looking for background on the family.
The broad details were easy to find from Hector’s Wikipedia page: Palurdo’s father, Jacobo, had fled to Chicago from Chile in the 1970s, about a year after Pinochet came to power. His mother, Elisa, taught English as a second language at one of the community colleges. Jacobo had taken a class with her. One thing led to another. They’d married. Hector was their only child.
Elisa was still listed as a member of the language faculty at the same college where she’d taught Jacobo, but the departmental secretary said she was on long-term leave. She absolutely would not give me a phone number for Ms. Palurdo. I could send the secretary an email and she would forward it.
I tried to find her through other avenues. After her son’s murder, Elisa started a blog called “Death Trail.” A year ago, she’d gathered the essays into a book, but she’d also kept up the blog. I skimmed the summary on one of the online book sites.
At first, Elisa had written about mass shootings in the States, tracking the guns where she could, listing the names of the dead, the families left behind. She’d started with her own son’s death, and the lives of the other grieving families. After about a year, she’d expanded her coverage to the Americas, and then she started counting dead children in Syria, Yemen, and Sudan.
She’d become a target of the hate fringe that finds exposés of gun violence a visceral threat. I guess that wasn’t a surprise, but it was thoroughly depressing.
It also explained why it was hard to dig up her home address or any phone numbers. It took me two hours and a lot of fees to private search engines, but, in the age of Google and Apple, unless you’ve never used a credit card or had a bank account, you are ultimately traceable. Elisa Palurdo lived on Edgebrook Terrace in the Forest Glen neighborhood on the city’s northwest side.
12
Quicksand in the Valley of Regret
Technically, Forest Glen is part of Chicago, but when I drive through the streets that wind between the Chicago River and a forest preserve, I feel as though I’ve stumbled onto a film set for Norman Rockwell’s America: old trees shade well-kept homes. Many are standard Chicago lots with small houses, but just as many are big enough to be called mansions. A lot of the city’s power brokers have homes here—it’s sometimes called the City Hall annex.
Maybe if Donna Lutas made the condo board evict me, I could move here. The houses are about two hundred thousand above my price point, but perhaps someone in the city, maybe Parks Superintendent Taggett, needed a live-in investigator.
Although Elisa Palurdo lived in a small brick home, she had plenty of security herself. The lot was covered with motion sensors. She had a dog who didn’t bark but growled with credible menace when I rang the bell. No one answered. I rang a second time, then noticed the security camera over the door.
“My name is V.I. Warshawski.” I spoke to the camera’s live red eye. “I am trying to find Lydia Zamir, who disappeared from Provident Hospital yesterday morning. If you’d call my cell phone, I’ll explain why I’m looking for her. If you know where she is, I will not betray her confidence. My website lists references.
”
I stuck my hand into my handbag, slowly, so any watchers could see I wasn’t reaching for a weapon, and slowly extracted a business card, which I put through the mail slot, to the dog’s increased rage. I felt its breath on my fingers and quickly removed my hand.
“I’ll drive a few blocks away to keep people from paying attention to my car or your house. I’ll wait half an hour in case you’re willing to speak to me.”
As I drove away, it seemed as though my sardonic thought about the parks superintendent had conjured him: a block from the Palurdo home, he emerged from one of the great houses and headed toward a black Lexus SUV. I stopped to see what my tax dollars were paying for. The SUV included a chauffeur, who sprang from the driver’s seat to open both rear doors. Taggett paused with one hand on the door and another on his device.
In a moment a man whose silver hair matched his summer suit came out of the house and strolled to the car. The chauffeur tucked the two inside and headed out. I hadn’t seen the second man’s face clearly, but I was pretty sure he was the Off Duty guy who’d been with Larry Nieland last night at the SLICK meeting.
I parked in a grocery store lot, where I read some of Elisa’s blog posts from the time of her son’s death.
I watched my son die. Not in person. I, his mother, was not there to cradle him in my arms as the Virgin could do for her son. No, I watched him die a thousand times. On television, on the Internet, on my phone. His death was a titillating circus-show for the world.
He and his partner, Lydia, were speaking and singing to raise money for the land and the people who work on it when a man opened fire and murdered him, along with sixteen other mothers’ children. Fifty-two others suffered serious wounds.
Thirteen months after his death, I can write of the pain in my heart that won’t go away. I can write of the pain of the other families. I can write of those wounded by those bullets. I can write of the damage to the mind and voice of Hector’s nightingale, Lydia, who lost her voice. All these things I can write, but instead I will tell you the story of the AR-15 that the murderer used.
Dead Land Page 8