I recorded her while she agreed to my terms, with the proviso that she could have Coop’s note. I let her inside but kept her henchperson in the hall with all three dogs. None of the four appreciated that.
Pizzello walked through my four rooms, checked the bathroom, the tub behind the shower curtain, the walk-in closet in the front hall, my bedroom closet with the safe where I keep my gun. I even opened that for her. She asked to see my license. I showed it. She looked in all the kitchen cabinets, and then checked the back stairs.
“Of course you could have smuggled him out. I was a fool not to post someone back here.”
“Sergeant, he was never in my apartment. I don’t want responsibility for his dog. I want him, I want to know what he did with Lydia Zamir, who I believe is close to death from malnutrition and neglect.”
“How do you know he has Zamir?”
“I don’t. Hoping, I guess, hoping that she’s still alive, still salvageable. Coop is reportedly the only person she allowed near her the last few months. If you haven’t found her in the Burnham Wildlife Corridor, then I hope Coop plucked her from the ground and gave her a bed and a bath and a meal.”
I felt weary, beyond the physical fatigue of my short night, and slumped on the piano bench. I can’t be near the piano without thinking of my mother, my ardent, musical mother, who very nearly didn’t survive a war and then died behind a maze of tubes. She should have been at home, with my father and me, dying in our arms. Why did we let the great medical maw swallow her last days?
I picked out notes on the keyboard, spoke without looking at the sergeant. “We talk so much these days about resilience and whatever its opposite is. Crumbling, maybe. As if resilience could be taught or learned. Almost like another way of shaming people who crumble. Every time we have a mass slaughter in this country, we move in a team of trauma experts, who surely themselves become traumatized by absorbing so much unbearable anguish. Long after Parkland, long after Newtown, survivors take their own lives. Lydia Zamir was creating something like performance art out of anguish.”
Pizzello stared at me. “I don’t know what you’re trying to say. That her incoherence was an act?”
I realized I was playing “Dido’s Lament”: Remember me, remember me. “No, that it was the only way she could make a public expression of a nightmare that isn’t expressible. Anyway, I can’t speak for her. Just trying to imagine the hell inside her head.”
I went to the kitchen to make coffee. I pulled espresso shots and handed a cup to Pizzello, who opened my refrigerator.
“Coop isn’t in there,” I said.
“I was looking for milk,” she said.
“The closest I come is kefir,” I said. “It’s emblematic of your approach, isn’t it? The surprise gesture in the hopes of taking me off guard, when all you have to do is ask. And speaking of asking, has that guy from SLICK, the gavel banger, been able to produce the mallet he uses? He’s a security guard at one of the library branches. Bet he could come and go in his uniform and nobody would notice him.”
“Good point. We’ve asked forensics to make the gavel a priority, but you know what it’s like in an underfunded department. Can’t tell you if it has fingerprints on the handle or traces of Leo Prinz embedded in the head.”
“That wasn’t my question,” I said.
“That’s my answer.” She put down her espresso, undrunk. “Stuff is foul without milk.”
“What makes you sure that Coop is the killer?” I asked.
“My patrol team reported his anger with the Prinz kid at the SLICK meeting. It was out of proportion to what Prinz was saying or doing.”
“He wasn’t the only person in the room who was acting out,” I said. “The guy at SLICK who keeps their records, Simon Lensky, was upset with Leo. From where I sat, it looked as though Leo had seen something they didn’t want revealed; Leo and Simon seemed to be arguing about it. And then Taggett intervened, smooth as old Scotch, and diverted attention from the stage. By the way, did you know Simon was mugged after that meeting? And now he’s disappeared. His boss has no idea where he is.”
Pizzello said, “If you think the parks super is involved in killing Leo Prinz, then you are crazier than Lydia Zamir.”
“Could be,” I agreed. “I’m simply pointing out that there was a lot of friction in the meeting room that night surrounding Leo, or what Leo was saying. Not all of it came from Coop. I want to know why he’s the only one you’re interested in.”
Her mouth set in a stubborn line. “He fled. As soon as someone alerted him that we were onto him, he fled. Everyone else is where we can talk to them anytime we want.”
I smiled blandly. “Great. That means even if you don’t want to question Mona Borsa or Curtis Murchison, I can.”
She started to utter a grand threat to me about questioning witnesses but realized in time she would only look foolish.
“By the way,” I said as I walked her to my front door, “have you found where Coop lives? I can’t believe you had to stake out the Metra tracks in the hopes of catching him.”
“You’d think,” she agreed bitterly. “People see him all the time but no one knows where he lives. The homeless guys under the Darrow bridge in Jackson Park say he’s in the park in the middle of the night sometimes. You found him on the lakefront. Other people see him around grocery stores in Hyde Park. No one knows whether Coop is his first or last name. However, there are only four or five thousand people named Coop in Illinois. My tech wizards tell me none of them is likely to be our guy. He might as well be a vampire living in a cave somewhere. Except the patrol guys tell me he doesn’t look homeless.”
“A vampire in a cave?” I echoed, derisively. “And you think I’m crazy?”
27
Lease Is Up
I took Bear to my office with me. Every aspect of my life was making me feel helpless: I couldn’t find Lydia, I didn’t know who Coop was, and I certainly couldn’t manage three dogs, especially not in my building. What would I do if Donna Lutas succeeded in getting the board to evict me? I couldn’t abandon Mr. Contreras, but I didn’t want to share a house, let alone an apartment, with him.
Tessa Reynolds, my lease mate, was arriving as I did. She looked at Bear. “Cute. Did he eat your other two?”
“Don’t you need a guard dog?” I asked. “Someone to protect all that valuable metal you work with?”
“I have me.” She flexed an arm, displaying impressive -ceps, both bi- and tri-. “Does he have a name?”
“Bear. But he doesn’t bark or bite and so far he hasn’t eaten. You’d hardly know he was there.”
“Especially after he died from hunger.” Tessa scratched Bear behind the ears but moved briskly to her studio before either of us got the idea she liked him.
I went into my own space. I put out food and water for Bear and folded a blanket for him next to my desk. He made a slow tour of the room and finally lay down on the blanket with a mournful grunt.
I was going through emails when my office phone rang.
“Bolton,” the voice on the other end pronounced.
“Hello, Bolton,” I said. Norm Bolton, head of Global Entertainment’s media division.
“Where are we, Warshawski?”
“We are still regretfully declining the chance to entertain Global’s global viewers,” I said.
“You’re making a mistake.” The sentence came out more as threat than comment.
“What is it about the Zamir story that is so important to Global, Mr. Bolton?”
“Not the Zamir story specifically,” he said. “This is a reality show about how investigators work.”
“These days it’s ninety-five percent desk work, in front of a computer. How about for ten thousand dollars I send you all the URLs I consult and your viewers can create their own investigations?”
“I hope your work doesn’t depend on financial negotiations,” he said. “That’s a ludicrous offer. Trust me: you will be happier in the long run if you sign that contr
act. After all, we can follow you without paying you.”
He hung up.
I called Murray. “Your boy Bolton just phoned; he’s not happy that I’m turning down the chance to run around town with a camera attached to my head. He may well have a tap in place on my phone, although my encryption is pretty good—I’m telling you in case you were tempted to call him a repellent worm who crawled out of the dung to run your media division.”
There was a long silence at Murray’s end before he said, “It’s probably the smart decision, but I still wish you’d rethink it. It would mean, well, a lot to me.”
What was ‘a lot’? His career? His self-esteem? His life? I didn’t want to dig in that ground.
As a diversion, I told him about Coop arriving with Bear. Murray liked that—dog stories always draw an audience. I feigned reluctance but finally agreed to let him send a camera crew to film Bear and me, in the hopes that someone somewhere would view the footage and recognize Coop’s dog and let us know where Coop was.
While I waited for Murray, I got caught up on emails and did some digging for the truckload of Ligurian wine I’d agreed to find.
Murray arrived with a cameraman who knew something about filming dogs: he brought a carton of meatballs, which coaxed Bear to his feet. Despite the food, his face looked old and mournful, as though Coop’s disappearance was merely the latest in a string of human barbarisms he’d witnessed.
TV crews work fast. Twenty minutes after arriving, they were ready to go south with Murray to look for the place where the police had found the gavel. I’d told him about the gavel the day before, but this was his first chance to film the hole where I’d found it.
Murray tried to talk me into going with him and his crew. That made me wonder if he wanted my company, or if Bolton had told him to try to pull me into a joint investigation without calling it that.
To stop his pleading, I told him about Curtis, the SLICK gaveller. “I don’t know that he had anything against Prinz, but he does own a gavel. I don’t know if the cops are checking on it. I also don’t know if they’re checking on an argument Prinz had with Simon Lensky, SLICK’s documents maestro, but in another development, which doesn’t interest the cops, Lensky has disappeared.”
That brought a gleam to his reporter’s eye, and we parted more or less as pals. He had a couple of good nuggets to put on-air, and I had someone who might confirm that the gavel in Lydia’s hideout had come from SLICK.
Back at my desk, I tried to organize my thoughts. Arthur Morton, mass slaughterer, I wrote on one of my big sketch pads. Hector Palurdo, immigrant rights activist and murder victim. Devlin & Wickham, law firm who magically popped up to defend Morton. Lydia Zamir, Hector’s lover and creative partner who tried to attack the Devlin lawyers. Global Entertainment, worried about what I might turn up.
Presumably, Global’s cable news division had covered the aftermath of the massacre, as had every other cable outlet in the country. Blood, disaster, the inalienable right to own weapons of mass destruction, continue to grab headlines despite the wearying number of times they come together.
When I first started looking at Devlin & Wickham’s involvement, I’d wondered if someone at the firm was connected to Arthur Morton, but maybe I’d been asking the wrong question.
What would the right question be? It couldn’t be about Sea-2-Sea’s decision to take part in the Tallgrass fund-raiser for immigrants and refugees—all the other ag companies had supported it. They wanted to protect the cheap labor, the people who do the disgusting parts of bringing meat to the table. People like my father’s parents, immigrants from Poland, who worked on the killing floors of the Chicago stockyards for eleven dollars a week during the Depression.
My grandmother Warshawski scrubbed blood from the slaughterhouse floors; my grandfather hit steers in the forehead with a giant mallet. A kind of outsize gavel. Leo Prinz’s head battered like a steer—the image made my gorge rise. I put down my pen and walked around the room. Bear followed me, but on my second circuit he decided I wasn’t about to abandon him; he went back to the blanket and lay down.
If Lydia had been stronger, both physically and mentally, I might have thought she’d sought refuge with one of the migrant families she’d met through the Tallgrass Meet-Up. She’d made it from Provident Hospital to the Metra tracks on her own, but the work it would take to get from Chicago to Kansas—I couldn’t see it. Of course, Coop could have taken her there. But where?
I went back to the files about the fund-raiser itself. The online photos showed how easy it would be to hide a horse, maybe a whole herd of them, along with a few thieves, inside Horsethief Canyon. I dug up the names of the organizers. Two who’d survived the massacre were so far in retreat from public life that I couldn’t find them, but I sent an email to the remaining man, to see if he had heard from Lydia.
With Bear nearly glued to my pant leg, I took one of my burner phones up the street to a coffee shop I never use: if you think someone’s tracking you, break your routine. The coffee shop wouldn’t let Bear inside, even when I explained that I was his emotional support human.
I took one of their bitter, undrinkable espressos outside and squatted on the curb to call Elisa Palurdo. She hadn’t heard from Lydia, she said in a tired voice.
“I was calling about the apartment you said you rented for her. Is there any chance she could be there?”
“Do you know, it never occurred to me,” she said in an arrested tone. “I renewed the lease nearly a year ago, hoping I might persuade her to move back in.”
“The lease must be up about now,” I said.
“End of next month. I guess it’s time to let it go. If she isn’t there now, I suppose I need to clean it out and hand back the keys.”
She’d kept an extra set; she agreed to meet me at the apartment and let me in.
28
No Place Like Home
The apartment was on the south fringe of the University of Chicago campus: Lydia had wanted to live there, Elisa said, because it made her feel connected to Hector.
I bundled Bear into the back of the Mustang and drove again to the South Side. I parked in a covered lot near the university theater. I didn’t know how seriously to take Bolton’s threat of keeping track of my investigation, but I left my iPhone in the car, happily alerting anyone to the Mustang’s location, but not to mine. Bear and I crossed the quads, disguised as a woman with a dog.
Lydia’s apartment was almost a mile to the south, beyond the Midway Plaisance boulevard, where the 1893 White City had been built. Once we crossed the Midway, Bear picked up his pace. He’d been sticking to my left leg as if chained there, but now he surged ahead, trotting down Kimbark Avenue to a three-flat halfway between Sixty-second and Sixty-third Streets. He stood at the locked gate, wagging his stub of a tail.
The gate lock would have been easy to undo, but I waited for Elisa. I didn’t know if Norm Bolton or Sergeant Pizzello were keeping an eye on me, but I had that prickly feeling along my scalp that you get when the neighbors are peering from behind their curtains. They would know who came and went, and I was definitely not a regular, although Bear clearly was.
Elisa didn’t keep us waiting long.
“That dog!” she cried. “Isn’t that the dog that belongs to the man you asked about, the one with the weird name?”
“Yep. This is Bear, Coop’s dog, and he knows this building.”
She fumbled with her key ring, finally found the one that undid the gate and the one for the front door. Once we were inside the hall, Bear ran up the stairs, his toenails clattering and skittering on the uncarpeted floor. He trotted down the second-floor hallway and stopped in front of a door at the end, his doggy face stretched into a wide grin. We’d clearly found where Coop had been living.
He was barking and whimpering while Elisa fiddled with the lock. She kept dropping the keys, tension stretching her skin so tautly that her cheekbones jutted out in almost skeletal relief.
As soon as she turned
the knob, Bear pushed the door open and rushed into the apartment. He disappeared into the back and began to bark, the sharp urgent sounds of warning.
“Must he make that racket?” Elisa cried.
I didn’t answer. My lesser nose had picked up the sickly sweet odor the dog had been tracking. I followed on dragging feet. Bear was standing in front of a closed door, scratching at it, hurling his shoulder against it. Just as I reached it, he managed to force it open. We were in the bathroom. A man was in the tub, head slumped at a steep angle. The sight was shocking, so shocking the details registered only slowly: the blood covering his head, congealing in the hair, covering the arms of his suit jacket. The suit—he’d been fully clothed when he was attacked. The tub was dry—he’d thought he could hide in here but he’d been cornered. He’d tried to protect himself from the blows that had battered his head—his crossed arms had fallen onto his knees.
Behind me, Elisa made a strangled sound. She was choking, vomiting, and I turned to try to get her head over the toilet but ended up with the remains of her breakfast on my arm and jeans leg.
I led her to the kitchen, where I took off my shirt and pants and rinsed them in the sink. It was unpleasant to put the clammy clothes back on, but less unpleasant than wearing her vomit. When I’d bathed Elisa’s face under the tap, I took her into the hallway.
“I’m calling the police. You stay out here.”
“Who—was it the man Coop?” she whispered. “What was he doing in Lydia’s apartment?”
“It wasn’t Coop. I’m pretty sure it’s a man named Simon Lensky.”
“Who is he? Why was he in the bathtub?” Palurdo was struggling to regain control.
“I know almost nothing about him, but Leo Prinz worked with him on a presentation. Now they’re both dead.” I didn’t try to answer her other question—why was Simon in the bathtub, why was he even in the apartment—because I could only guess. Whoever killed him hadn’t beaten him with the gavel: Simon had been missing only a day or two, and the gavel had turned up before that.
Dead Land Page 18