Dead Land

by Sara Paretsky

  “Yes.” Jesse smiled. “You learned the Spanish that Jacobo spoke. We used to tease him on the job, spouting that high-class grammar.”

  The bitter lines around Elisa’s mouth relaxed. “He said he learned his Spanish from one of the wealthy ladies his mother cleaned for. She brought him with her—there was no one to mind him at home—and to the lady he was like a little pet monkey she could feed and carry about. She made him speak the language of the upper classes. His mother encouraged it—she thought educated speech would help him get a better job. When he was here in the States, he kept trying to alter his Spanish accent, because it set him apart from his coworkers.”

  Jesse said, “We called him ‘the Professor’ because of his vocabulary, but he was a good welder, a hard worker, always the first to volunteer if someone needed to change a shift. We miss him still, even after these five years.”

  I waited a respectful moment before asking if there had been anything else in the bottom of Jacobo’s toolbox.

  “No, and the only family picture he brought with him—at least, the only one I ever saw—was of him with Filomena, dressed up for their first communion. The clothes were so beautiful—he said his mother had worked for months sewing them. And the two children were beautiful, too. Other than that, no, nothing. Hector also took that photo with him to Chile, but again, he said no one remembered them. The priest who presided over their first communion was dead by then, anyway, it was so long ago. I hoped that Lydia would also have kept that photograph, but I don’t think it was in the apartment.”

  Her smile turned bitter again. “One death after another—that’s what I learned from Jacobo, in addition to Spanish, that you must learn to endure one death after another.”

  30

  There Is an i in “Quit”

  On my way home, I again passed the park superintendent’s home. No one was in the front yard, but as I reached the main road, a black SUV turned off and headed toward his mansion. I stayed at the stop sign, watching in my rearview mirror. Sure enough, it turned into Taggett’s driveway.

  On an impulse, I made a U-turn back to the house. Taggett was in his front doorway, greeting a child, as I walked up the drive. The chauffeur jumped out of the SUV, gun in hand. It was an ugly thing, probably a Sig.

  “Whoa.” I held up my own hands, palms spread wide, but Taggett had already flung the child inside and slammed the door.

  “Sorry to alarm you,” I said, keeping my voice steady, not looking at the gun barrel, treating it like a wild dog that might bite if I made eye contact. “I saw the superintendent arrive home just now and wanted to ask him about the two murders of SLICK personnel.”

  Taggett stepped down from the shallow porch. “Are you a reporter?”

  “Nope. I was at the SLICK meeting you attended last week. I’m sure you know the young man making the presentation was murdered in the Burnham Wildlife preserve a few days later. My goddaughter was dating him.”

  “A hell of a thing,” Taggett said. “But why did you come up here to ask me about it? I have an office, I have a staff. Make an appointment.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I was visiting a friend around the corner when I saw your car pull into the drive. You heard about Simon Lensky, right?”

  “What friend?”

  “I have friends all over the city,” I tried to infuse the words with sinister meaning, as if I were deeply connected. “You don’t think SLICK’s remaining staff are at risk, do you? Lensky and Prinz didn’t seem to have much in common except their work on your plan to redo the lakefront at Forty-seventh.”

  For a split second, Taggett’s face froze, like a halibut on a trawler, and he darted a glance at the gunman. The expression was so fleeting that when he pulled his mouth down in a mime of sorrow I almost doubted I’d seen it.

  “God, I hope not. That would be a hell of a way to greet a wonderful improvement to the South Side lakefront. Do you live down there, Ms.—?”

  “Warshawski,” I supplied. “I grew up near Ninetieth and Exchange.”

  “Give your goddaughter my condolences. I need to assure my family that they’re not under siege.” He turned back to the door.

  I burst out laughing. “You’re watching too many Game of Thrones reruns if a middle-aged woman on your sidewalk makes you feel under siege. You’re the one whose muscle is pointing a weapon at me. I hope you and Bowser have a permit for that thing.”

  Taggett scowled, but nodded his head at his bodyguard. The gunman put his arm down, but he was still holding the Sig. It was big enough that a single shot could take out both my heart and my stomach. The skin on the back of my neck tingled as I walked back to the street. I could hear Bowser’s steps behind me but I willed myself to keep my pace steady, not to look around, to whistle a lighthearted tune from Snow White. After all, Lensky and Leo had been bludgeoned to death, not shot, so Bowser probably hadn’t killed them. Possibly hadn’t killed them.

  When I got into the Mustang, a police car pulled up behind me and followed me until I made the turn onto Lehigh, the main north-south street leading to the expressway.

  I drove back to the forest preserve and reclined the seat, waiting for my legs and arms to stop trembling, breathing in deep breaths, getting my whole system to calm down.

  Of course Taggett had the police on call—all city department heads get protection as a perk. In fact, it should have surprised me that the cops weren’t there the first time I passed the house.

  I tried to decode the encounter. That fleeting expression on Taggett’s face when I mentioned the lakefront project—someone in the city government would make money from any new development, big or small. If Taggett was getting a cut from whoever wanted to build a new beach and playground, he wouldn’t kill to keep the news a secret. In Chicago, that is so much part of the business plan that we pay no attention to the amount of money the city collects from developers eager to do business here. I’m so inured to the corruption that I took for granted that money was changing hands over Taggett’s lakefront proposal.

  In my mind, Leo’s and Simon’s murders were linked to that proposal. I suppose Sergeant Pizzello could be right—that they were random muggings. Although why was Simon in Lydia’s apartment? And what were the killers looking for when they took both Leo and Lydia’s apartments apart?

  The cops said the ME’s preliminary report put Lensky’s death at about two this morning. Coop lured Lensky to the apartment. He cornered Lensky in the bathtub and beat him horribly. He realized his victim was not likely to recover and panicked. He packed up his belongings, left Bear on my front walk, fled to—someplace.

  “Bear, what happened in that apartment? Where did Coop say he was going?” I cried out loud to the animal, but he wisely said nothing I could slice and splice into evidence.

  I couldn’t shut down the churning in my brain. The photo of Jacobo Palurdo, for instance—that was a strange story. His past had been so painful he couldn’t talk about it, even with his wife and son. Living through a torturing regime, as my mother also had, creates wells of silence. In time, Gabriella had shared a number of those deeply hidden memories with my father and me, but probably not all, so Jacobo Palurdo’s refusal to share memories with his wife didn’t surprise me.

  I didn’t think the photo was what the killers were looking for when they slit open cushions and the mattress. Maybe Hector had hidden it from his mother, or used it as a page marker, but whoever killed Lensky was looking for something you could hide in a curtain hem or a box of tea leaves.

  Being paraded around like a pet monkey by his mother’s rich boss must have left its own traumatic memories. I wondered if this patron had also given him dental care—Jacobo’s teeth gleamed white and straight in the picture, but his friend’s were uneven and one incisor had broken.

  Where Coop entered the story didn’t seem connected to Hector, but to the park and to Lydia. Coop was furious over the proposal to change the lakefront. The bludgeoning deaths were the work of someone who was enraged, and Coop’
s anger spilled out like lava from Popocatépetl.

  My mind felt like a horrible stew, with beans and overcooked okra turning over and over, not tasty and not improved by continued boiling. I tried to sing under my breath to keep from thinking.

  The rush hour was still clogging the expressways. I drove home on side streets, watched ordinary people have ordinary after-work reunions. Men ruffled their children’s hair, women squatted to talk face-to-face with toddlers. People were mowing lawns and playing catch in the streets. I felt like an outsider, the Little Match Girl watching happy families through a window.

  It was six when I reached home, a mere fourteen hours since Coop left Bear here, but it felt like an event from my distant past, so much had gone on during the day. I let Bear out and stood for a moment, doing push-ups against the side of the car to stretch out my hamstrings and my traps.

  I needed to walk Mitch and Peppy, and be prepared for another attack from Donna Lutas and the rest of the tenants. The thought made me put my arms on the car roof and lay my head on them.

  “There is no i in ‘team,’ but there is one in ‘quit,’” I chivvied myself—one of my old basketball coach’s bromides. Of course, there’s also an i in “win.” “I will win,” I said, without much conviction.

  Mitch and Peppy were not happy that I’d spent the day with a foreign dog. I left Bear with Mr. Contreras, while I leashed up my pair and jogged to the lake, but they behaved abominably. At the lake, they ran away, wouldn’t come when they were called, rolled in dead fish, and generally pushed me beyond the brink.

  When I finally brought them home, Donna Lutas was coming down the stairs from the upper floors. The dogs lunged for her and it took every ounce of my remaining strength to keep them from rubbing dead fish onto her.

  “Can we talk?” Lutas said.

  I sighed. “Sure. You want to come to the basement while I wash these two?”

  She followed me down to the laundry room. I tied the dogs to a pole near a drain in the middle of the floor and attached a hose to one of the sinks. When Lutas saw what the splash radius was likely to be, she decided to wait upstairs.

  I scrubbed slowly, not to be meticulous, but to delay the confrontation. My mother would have condemned me sharply: Swallow the bad-tasting medicine quickly, get done with it. The anticipation is worse than the taste.

  “Got it: stop complaining,” I said, out loud. I turned off the water, towel-dried the dogs, and clomped back up the stairs.

  Lutas was standing in the doorway of her own apartment, scrolling through her phone. She was aware that I’d arrived, especially since Mitch gave a sharp bark outside Mr. Contreras’s door, but she didn’t look up.

  “Let me know when you want to talk,” I said. “I need to shower and then I’m going out.” Peter and I were grabbing what time together we could before he flew out—the only bright spot in a hideous day.

  “No, no, let’s do it now.” She was breathy, nervous, which made me feel less powerless.

  I sat on the bottom step, holding the dog leashes in a light hand, but didn’t say anything.

  “I—uh, I may have been, uh, I may have lost my temper this morning.”

  “That’s possible,” I agreed.

  “There was significant provocation, you must admit,” Lutas said, her voice rising. “The noise, the risk you bring into the building—gunfights in the stairwell are a threat to all of us, not just you!”

  When I didn’t respond, she demanded that I say something.

  “You’re doing a good job on your own.” I took a last burr from Mitch’s left earflap. “I don’t see what I can add.”

  “Don’t you think I have a right to be angry?”

  “Can you tell me what we’re talking about?” I asked. “Are you hoping to push me into losing my temper on tape, or agreeing to something you can use in court?”

  “I—no.” She gave a titter of fake laughter. “Just—I know I lost my temper, but I’d like you to admit I had a good reason to.”

  “Ms. Lutas, I don’t admit anything. I know you’re a lawyer at Devlin & Wickham, but I’m not sure you know I’m also a lawyer. I earned my stripes at Twenty-sixth and California, where the hardest part of the job was to get my clients to shut up in court.” I got to my feet and started up the stairs, the dogs following.

  “Wait,” she said. “I meant to say, I didn’t take the time to ask why you brought that other dog in. Salvatore Contreras told me he’s connected to a missing person you’re looking for, that singer. To be honest, I hadn’t ever heard of her when you asked about her last week, but two of the women in my group, they love Lydia Zamir’s work. They want to meet you, and they said maybe they could help look for her.”

  I stopped at the first landing, my jaw agape. “You do know that there are orders of protection against Zamir at your firm, right?”

  “Yes, Mr. Gorbeck—my boss—told me, but he talked to the other partners and they agree that the sooner we can find the Zamir woman the easier everyone can sleep at night. He—they—are eager to help you find her.”

  “Gosh, Ms. Lutas, that’s extremely generous—another example of Devlin’s pro bono work, like their defense of the man who murdered Zamir’s lover.”

  Her thin face flooded with color. “So you’ll do it?”

  I smiled. “I’ll have to talk it over with my own lawyer. I’ll get back to you.”

  While I showered, I tried to figure out what was going on with Lutas. No, with her firm. What was going on that made Devlin & Wickham want to be privy to my investigation? Perhaps Global Entertainment was a client.

  I lay down, wanting to rest for half an hour before going out to meet Peter, but my brain wouldn’t shut off. I finally called Murray.

  “Crap, Warshawski, don’t you look at your messages? Someone at the Second told me you’d been in interrogation all afternoon about Simon Lensky’s murder. You know I’m following the Coop-Zamir story. Why the fuck didn’t you let me know?”

  “Because I was in interrogation at the Second all afternoon. I just got home.”

  “Well?” he demanded.

  “Well, nothing,” I said. “Simon Lensky was killed. Sergeant Pizzello wanted to know if I had murdered him. I didn’t.”

  Murray pushed on me. When I’d filled in as many blanks as I was willing to share—leaving Elisa Palurdo and her husband’s photo out of the story—I asked him if Global was a client of Devlin & Wickham.

  “Who knows? They have both local and imported lawyers on tap. Why do you care?”

  “Devlin & Wickham has an order of protection against Lydia Zamir. One of their juniors lives in my building. She does not like me, my dogs, nor the riffraff I attract. At ten this morning, she told me she was drafting a legal notice to my condo board, seeking approval for evicting me. At six this evening, she was backpedaling: her managing partner wants her and her pals to help look for Lydia Zamir.”

  Murray chewed that over. “You think, because you wouldn’t wear a wire for Bolton, he got his lawyer to open a back door into your investigation.”

  “The boy reporter has not lost his keen edge,” I said dryly.

  “If I ask around, jeopardizing my relationship with Bolton, what do I get?”

  “How about: I sent you to Zamir’s hideout on the Metra tracks. I let you photograph me with Bear. I told you about finding Lensky. You finding a lawyer’s name is a tiny payment on your accounts due.”

  He grumbled for a minute before agreeing, but added, “You know, Warshawski, if I was stupid enough to move into your building, I’d demand combat pay from you. Your neighbor has facts and right on her side.”

  31

  Everyone Joins the Chase

  Over dinner, I told Peter about finding Simon Lensky’s body, talking some of the horror of the murder out of my system. I told him, too, about the photo Elisa Palurdo had taken from Lydia’s apartment.

  “And then there’s this bizarre business of Donna Lutas—you know, my downstairs neighbor—being ordered to help me
look for Lydia Zamir.”

  Peter listened empathically, but couldn’t make more sense of it than I did. “I can only offer you the archaeologist’s mantra: keep digging, because you don’t know how deep some bones are buried.”

  Peter and I said our goodbyes in the morning: he was leaving for Ankara tonight and we both hate airport farewells.

  “Don’t let anyone near you with a gavel,” he murmured into my hair. “I like your head the way it is. I sometimes think you would be safer working in Sudan or Syria than in Chicago.”

  I tried to say something insouciant, but it sounded flat even to my ears. I hoped I wasn’t getting old, fearing risk, needing comfort in a lover’s arms, but it was hard to let go and say goodbye.

  When he’d gone, I took the dogs for a long walk, all three of them, trying to dispel the sinking in the stomach that Peter’s departure left behind. Bear was also suffering from melancholy. He plodded along but refused to engage with Mitch, who was nipping at his ankles.

  When we got home, I called a dog-walking service to organize care for Mitch and Peppy. Fitting their exercise and Bear’s into my schedule had me at my tipping point—namely, the point at which I tip over and can’t get back on my feet.

  With the dog walkers in place, I drove to my office, taking Bear with me, not just to spare Mr. Contreras the struggle of keeping Mitch from bullying him, but if I found a trail to Coop, I wanted to offload his dog as soon as possible.

  When we’d settled in, one with a cortado, the other under a desk with a bully stick, I called SLICK’s Mona Borsa. I didn’t recognize her voice when she answered, it was so changed by the shock of her coworker’s death.

  She and Simon Lensky had known each other for thirty years, she said, in her tremulous new voice. They’d met over shared community issues, gone to the same church, and then had run SLICK, along with Curtis Murchison, for the last eleven years.

  I listened to her memories and her grief for some time. When she seemed ready to talk about Lensky’s death, I asked if she knew why he’d gone to Coop’s apartment.