Dead Land

by Sara Paretsky

  I called Pizzello, instead of 911.

  “You know, Warshawski, there are judges who’d agree you’re stalking me.”

  “Sergeant, I’m looking at what’s left of Simon Lensky. His battered body is in a bathtub on South Kimbark. Do you want the details, or should I hang up and call 911?”

  She took the address. “And don’t touch anything. That includes anything. I’ll be there straightaway.”

  Straightaway from Fifty-first and the Ryan would give me about fifteen minutes to scope the place. I wouldn’t have a second chance to look before the cops went through, tagging and bagging.

  Bear had left the bathroom while I was on the phone. He’d gone through the rooms, looking for Coop, and now was slumped in the open doorway to the hall.

  When I looked through the apartment’s three rooms, I saw they’d already been searched, but by pros. Things weren’t tossed around as they are when an addict is looking for valuables.

  The unit was sparsely furnished, making it quick to examine: a chest of drawers, a bed, and a straight-backed chair in the bedroom; a few chairs, a table, and some bookshelves in the main room. A handful of pans, a few bowls and cups in the kitchenette. The food was minimal as well: dried beans, molding cheese in the refrigerator, a half-eaten bag of tortilla chips. The only concession to taste, a pottery teapot and a collection of loose teas. All these had been spread on the kitchen counter.

  Bear’s excitement when we reached the building made me certain that this was where Coop had been living, but he’d left precious little sign of it.

  The sheets had been stripped from the twin bed, so I couldn’t tell if Coop might have left telltale hairs in the linens. The mattress and box springs had been slit in multiple places, along with the curtain hems and pillows. Whatever the killers were seeking was small.

  A fifty-pound bag of dry dog food in the mop cupboard showed that at least a dog had been here. The killer must have gone through the dog food, but it hadn’t been emptied, the way the teas were, so I stuck my hand inside, probing for something small, like a flash drive, but didn’t feel anything.

  The closet and the drawers in the bedroom dresser were half open. They were almost empty, except for a few pieces Lydia had left behind, but one drawer held a navy sweater, big enough for a man. Elisa had come into the room behind me; she seized it from me.

  “I made that for Hector, after Jacobo died, when Hector began trying to explore his father’s roots. You can see it here, the white star of the Chilean flag.” The star was on the chest, where it would have covered Hector’s heart. Elisa buried her face in the wool, rocking on her heels.

  I had trouble looking in the bathroom, with Simon Lensky’s battered eye sockets staring at me. Using a kitchen towel to keep from overlaying fingerprints, I made myself open the medicine cabinet. No toiletries. A tube of organic toothpaste, Lydia’s prescriptions for Ativan and Haldol, the bottles still almost full.

  There was no sign of a computer or charger—no trace of current electronics. Coop used a cell phone, but he’d probably taken the charger with him when he bolted.

  An old sound system stood in a corner, not plugged in. It included a DVD player, but no television. If thieves had come in and taken the computer and a television, they would have taken the sound system, too—so either Coop never had electronics or the killer had taken them.

  A guitar case was propped against the wall next to the stereo. I opened and gave an inadvertent gasp. The guitar had been smashed into pieces, the strings dangling like the useless veins of a decapitated body.

  Elisa said Lydia had destroyed her best guitar. Had Lydia herself destroyed the instrument? No guitars, no reminders of the music she’d made from her lover’s words, returning to the piano but only to a joke piano, as if ridiculing her youthful attachment to music.

  The makeshift bookshelf held a few dozen books and some stacks of papers, including maps and pamphlets about Horsethief Canyon, the park where Hector had been murdered. I put those in my daypack, but didn’t see any personal documents, no notes saying, “Meet me in the Burnham Wildlife Corridor at midnight,” no letters or bills showing Coop’s full name. In fact, no documents in anyone’s name.

  The books were a dry selection of economics and political history. Capitalism and Freedom: Utopia or Possibility, by Larry Nieland; Government and Economics: Peaceful Coexistence, by Ottavio Misombra. Hector Palurdo’s Once Upon a Time: Ancient Fables for Modern Readers. His poetry in Spanish and in English.

  “Was Lydia interested in economics?” I asked Elisa.

  She stared at me dumbly, then squatted to inspect the titles. “These may have been Hector’s. I don’t know. Lydia might have clung to them out of sentiment. The way I keep all of Jacobo’s old protective gear.”

  She started to flip through the pages of Once Upon a Time. Bear gave a warning bark: a moment later we heard the thunder of a police army’s shoes on the stairs. Beneath that layer of sound I heard a startled gasp from Elisa. A second before Pizzello came into the room, I saw her slide a paper into her handbag.

  29

  Brothers and Comrades Forever

  “You have a lot of explaining to do, Warshawski. That was an awfully big coincidence, you stumbling on Lensky’s body so patly.”

  We were back in the Second District, in one of the interrogation rooms. While we’d been at the apartment on Kimbark, Pizzello had double-checked that Elisa Palurdo was the renter and entitled to enter and leave. She was almost disappointed by the confirmation—she was pining to arrest me for something.

  Pizzello sent Elisa home, but my stumbling on Lensky’s body bugged her. I was guessing her real annoyance was with herself, for not taking my information about Lensky’s disappearance seriously. She was too good a boss to offload on her team, too egotistical to blame herself. I was handy.

  “Perhaps,” I said.

  “Perhaps nothing.” Pizzello bit off her words, just like an old-school male cop. “You tell me Lensky is missing, and then, when I don’t jump to attention, you present me with his body. How did you know he was in that apartment?”

  A dozen hot answers sprang to mind, but I bit off my own words before they left my mouth: when you’re with the cops, keep responses to a minimum. Any long explanation can be sliced and spliced to use against you in court.

  “I’m calling my lawyer,” I said. “I have nothing else to say until he is with me.”

  I’d been searched for weapons, but they’d let me keep my phone—I wasn’t under arrest, just being held for questioning. I have Freeman Carter on speed dial. When his secretary answered, I named myself and said quickly, “I am being held at the Second District because I reported finding a dead body. Can you have Freeman or one of his associates—”

  Pizzello snatched the phone from me. “She doesn’t need a lawyer; she can leave whenever she feels like it. I simply want her to tell me how she happened on the dead man.”

  I grabbed the phone back. “Helen, I need an attorney present before I answer that question—too hostile an environment here.”

  Pizzello scowled at me but went to confer with her team. She took my phone with her. She left the door open—I guess to keep an eye on me without using an officer to watch me through the window.

  Bear was with me: Elisa wouldn’t take him when we left the apartment and I dug my heels over leaving him in a car on a muggy day for however long she might want to detain me.

  “Dogs having heatstroke while the police detain their guardians is a good way to add to public annoyance with the CPD,” I said. “You’re lucky I’m talking to you—don’t push it over the dog.”

  While we waited for my lawyer, I squatted next to Bear and stroked him. This kept both of us calm, while I listened in on the conversation in the hallway.

  Simon Lensky’s body had been transferred to the morgue. In big cities, autopsies don’t happen as quickly as they do on CSI, but the preliminary read was that Lensky had died about twelve hours ago, from blows administered ten to tw
enty hours before that. It hadn’t been a fast or pleasant death. It was even possible that if Elisa and I had gone to the apartment a day earlier, we could have saved his life.

  My abdominal muscles contracted at that thought. A good detective must not indulge in “should haves,” but it’s sometimes hard to keep them at bay.

  When Stacey Kawasaki arrived from Freeman’s office, I gave her a quick précis of the background and the players. As soon as we finished, Pizzello joined us in the interrogation room.

  “We want to know what prompted Warshawski to go to that apartment this afternoon,” Pizzello said. “Did you have a tip that Simon Lensky was there?”

  I conferred with Kawasaki, who agreed I should say I was hoping Lydia might have returned to the apartment Elisa Palurdo rented for her. Pizzello tried to push on that—did I really think someone as ill as Lydia could navigate the streets?

  “She made it from Provident to Forty-seventh Street, Sergeant.”

  Pizzello scowled and switched to whether I was really looking for Coop or had inside knowledge about Lensky’s fate—but I let the lawyer handle those.

  “Why was Lensky there at all?” Pizzello burst out. “We know there was ill will between Coop and the SLICK officers. What would make him meet with Coop? Or was the Zamir woman there?”

  “Your forensics team can doubtless tell you whether Lydia Zamir had been in the apartment recently. Until you find this man, Coop, it’s all speculation,” Kawasaki said. “We’re done here.”

  “I guess.” Pizzello rubbed her eyes. Her fine mousy hair was coming loose from her clip, making her look young and vulnerable. I wondered if she knew that—if it was an interrogation trick to make people like me feel sorry for her.

  I murmured to Kawasaki, who repeated to Pizzello, “The timeline on the injuries makes it clear that Bernadine Fouchard had nothing to do with them.”

  “We’ll talk to her and determine that,” Pizzello said.

  I grinned. “Her mother’s been with her nonstop for the past forty-eight hours. I want to be there when you interrogate Arlette Fouchard. In fact, I’ll sell tickets.”

  “Oh, go away,” Pizzello cried. “And take that wretched animal with you.”

  “My phone?” I held out a palm. Pizzello smacked my iPhone into it with more force than was strictly necessary.

  The long-suffering Bear followed me to Kawasaki’s car, a late-model BMW. I thanked her for coming down to the station, but really, fees from people like me allow her to drive a car like hers, so she should have been thanking me.

  After Kawasaki dropped me and Bear at my car in the university’s garage, I drove up to Elisa’s home on the Northwest Side. She didn’t answer my ring, but her dog growled convincingly behind the door.

  I smiled winsomely and spoke to the security camera. “I’d like to talk to you about my conversation with Sergeant Pizzello.”

  When there was no response, I wondered if she was out. I texted: I didn’t mention the document you took from the apartment, but I’d like to know what it was. I’m taking Bear to the forest preserve; we can meet you at the library or back here at your house.

  She still didn’t answer. I drove to the nearby forest preserve. Mosquitoes whined around my ears; planes on the final approach to O’Hare roared overhead, but the setting itself was lush with midsummer foliage. Jogging along the Des Plaines River path was like being in the country—except for the planes. And the traffic on the Kennedy, hidden by the dense woods but still loud. Mitch and Peppy would have been in the underbrush, flushing smaller animals, but Bear stuck close to my left side.

  Palurdo still hadn’t answered when I got back to my car. I drove to her house, worried about what might have happened to her. I left Bear in the car with the windows open and a pan of water, but as I went up the walk, a man came out, closing the door behind him. He was heavy-set, middle-aged, his gut straining the waistband of his jeans. His face was so deeply creased it wasn’t possible to read his expression.

  “I’m Jesse. Friend of Elisa and Jacobo.”

  “I’m V.I. Warshawski.”

  He asked for ID, I gave it, he opened the door. Palurdo’s dog appeared. It was an Akita, famed for their fierce loyalty. This one seemed to be measuring my fat content for roasting. Jesse gave the dog a command in Spanish, and it curled its lip at me.

  “For Elisa to see that murdered man, it brought back the horror of seeing her son’s dead body. She will talk to you, but I will be there.”

  He led me down a short hall to a small room that overlooked the backyard. Elisa was sitting there in a chaise longue, wearing a man’s flannel shirt over sweatpants: shock had left her cold, and her face still had a waxy pallor. Her hands were wrapped around a mug of hot liquid.

  “Do you ever stop?” she said to me. “Do you ever stop running, asking questions, prying at people’s lives? Do you take time to think about the damage you do?”

  “Did I damage your life by asking you to let me look at Lydia’s apartment?” I said. “I didn’t plant Simon Lensky’s body there. I didn’t kill him. It distressed me to see him, too.”

  “But if you’ve never seen the dead body of someone you love—”

  “The cousin who was the companion of my childhood was murdered,” I cut her off. “His body was torn up by the screw of a Great Lakes freighter. I was distraught, so I did what I do when I’m distressed: I ran around asking questions until I found his killer, and the people who betrayed him into his killer’s hands. What else would you like to know about me?”

  It was unfair, I guess, to play the dead Boom-Boom card. Elisa was suffering, acutely, and really, what business did I have asking questions of her?

  The silence built, like a scene from a spaghetti western—camera on Jesse, looking anxiously at Elisa; camera on Elisa, eyes on the mug she was holding; camera on me, eyes on Elisa’s small garden, avoiding a look at more misery.

  I was turning to leave when Elisa said, “Grief is a selfish bitch. She wants you to shut out the rest of the world, including other people’s suffering. Sit. I’ll tell you about the photograph.”

  Jesse perched on the arm of a couch next to Elisa. I pulled up a hassock.

  Elisa nodded at Jesse, who went to a side table and returned with an old black-and-white picture of two youths, perhaps sixteen years old, both in cutoff jeans and T-shirts. Both were handsome, one dark, with a chipped front tooth, the other fairer. Their arms were linked across their shoulders, and they were grinning for the camera, as if happy to be alive and together.

  “Jesse was with us—with Hector and me—when we found this,” Elisa said. “The man on the left is Jacobo. I don’t know who the other man is. Jacobo never spoke of him, but the inscription on the back—”

  I turned the photo over to see an inscription in a sprawling adolescent hand, Hermanos y compañeros por siempre.

  “Brothers and companions forever?” I ventured.

  “Brothers and comrades is probably more accurate,” Elisa said.

  “This was on its own? No envelope, no name?”

  “It was in a manila envelope,” Jesse said, “but not labeled.”

  “Jacobo had hidden this in his toolbox,” Elisa explained. “After his death, Hector and I wanted Jesse to choose among Jacobo’s tools. When we emptied the box, a kind of false bottom came out. The photo was underneath. Jesse knew Jacobo longer than anyone—they started at the company at almost the same time, but even he had never seen this before.”

  I looked at Jesse, who nodded solemnly.

  “Anyway, Hector became obsessed with the picture,” Elisa said. “He took it away with him, he took it with him to Chile—he wanted to learn his father’s history and he thought perhaps someone would recognize the photo, although it must be from the late sixties or early seventies—Jacobo was born in 1953. I don’t know who would recognize two barrio boys forty years or more after the fact. If the friend is even still alive, he would look different—life in the mines changed everyone. That much Jacobo said, the
rare times he talked about his life in Tocopilla.”

  “How did you cope with so much secrecy?” I blurted out. “Didn’t you ask him about his life, why he left Chile?”

  Her waxen skin turned faintly pink. “Of course I asked. I wanted to know for myself, but more important, I thought our son deserved to know his father’s background. Jacobo would say only that the past was too painful for him to discuss. All he ever told me was that he was an orphan and his only sister had been murdered. It was after her death that he came to America.”

  “Did he talk about the murder?” I asked. “How it happened, whether the murderer was caught and tried?”

  Elisa said, “The country was in chaos then—the Pinochet years—so many deaths and disappearances, Jacobo said one individual death couldn’t rouse police interest.

  “Hector went to Chile, to Tocopilla, where Jacobo was born: he’d told us that much. It’s a small mining town on the coast. But the church where his parents were married and where he and Filomena—his sister—were baptized had collapsed in an earthquake. All the records had been destroyed.

  “Jacobo always said the Palurdos were an insignificant family, and I guess that was true. His father worked in the mine, his mother cleaned houses for the wealthy in the town. Hector couldn’t find anyone who remembered them. He couldn’t find anyone with our surname, but when he came home, he was furious. He wanted to know what Jacobo had told me about the mines, the conditions, the lives of the workers. And I could tell him nothing. He had already started seeing Lydia, but he and she became a tighter couple and seemed to feel a missionary fervor for uncovering the history of injustices in the Americas. It was exhausting to be with them.”

  She drank from her mug. “So many deaths, so many murders. I was on the sideline of history—American girl, ignorant about the bigger world, thought I could change people’s lives by teaching them English. Instead my life got changed. I didn’t even know Spanish when I met Jacobo.”