Dead Land

by Sara Paretsky

  “The police don’t know,” I explained.

  “I can’t understand it.” She wept. “Coop—we all were tired of Coop. He was always disrupting our meetings. We have regular cleanup days in the parks, as you saw. We plant trees, we try to keep glass and used diapers off the beaches, but whatever we did, Coop knew it was wrong.

  “He attacked one of our volunteers for using Roundup on the running paths. I mean attacked with his fists. He said we were trying to kill dogs and chipmunks, probably even rats, who chew on the plants. If it had been Coop found dead in that bathtub, it would have made sense, he upset so many people.

  “But Simon? He wasn’t that kind of person, not the kind of person to go around picking fights. After he lost his wife, that was eight—no, it’s been nine years now—he buried himself in Chicago history. He cared about his collection of old history books, he cared about the lakefront. He was writing a history of the lake, from La Salle to Lightfoot. What possible reason could that maniac Coop have to kill him, except that he is a maniac?”

  “Do you know if Coop invited Simon over to the apartment?”

  “Yes.” Mona sniffled. “He got a text message from Coop, saying he had something to show Simon about the beach plan.”

  That didn’t make sense: Coop wanted to be off the grid. He didn’t use devices that made him easy to trace; if he used a phone, it wasn’t a smartphone. He might carry a burner, but an old-fashioned flip phone seemed more his style.

  “Are you sure the message came from Coop?” I asked.

  “It was signed with his name. Simon forwarded it to me; I saw it myself.”

  I persuaded her to send it to me, but she sent only the words, not the identifying phone number: You’re being used as a fall guy over the beach plan. Meet me at my place at seven tonight and I’ll show you the real plans. Coop.

  The message ended with the address for Lydia’s apartment on Ingleside.

  “Why did he go alone, when he knew Coop could jump the rails at a moment’s notice?” I asked.

  “I know. I told him not to, but he thought, he said, that time of evening, it’s still light, there’d be plenty of people around.” Her voice trailed away into a fresh bout of tears.

  “Tell me more about the lakefront development plan,” I said when she’d regained some composure. “Leo Prinz was working on that, too. Leo went through the maps and documents Mr. Lensky was preparing. Was there some controversy over the plan?”

  “There’s always controversy over any change. Some people hate change—Coop was one of them, and that Nashita Lyndes who’s always picking apart our proposals is another. That place where they’re planning a new beach, you can’t use it unless you don’t mind climbing over rocks and gravel. This would be such a gift to the South Side. We never get the city to pay any attention to what we need down here and those two were trying to shut the project down before it got off the ground.”

  “That last SLICK meeting where Leo Prinz was speaking, he and Mr. Lensky had a disagreement about one of the maps or diagrams,” I said.

  “That was nothing,” she said. “I asked Simon after the meeting, because Leo was making a song and dance about it. Simon said it was an old map from the thirties that he was using for his book, only he’d got it mixed into the beach proposal. It happened all the time with him, he was such a—not a pack rat—but papers, he hoarded every document he ever saw.”

  “I’d like to look at Simon’s stack of papers. When could I stop by the SLICK office?”

  “Oh, you can’t,” she cried. “He never left them with us, or anywhere except his own apartment. And then, he was mugged after the last meeting. Someone grabbed his case—it was one of those big cases architects use. It held all his old maps of that part of the lakefront and the new ones that Mr. Taggett had given us. That was why he wanted to meet with Coop. He thought he could talk Coop who mugged him to get the plans. Simon could talk him into giving them back. He’d never copied them all—Leo was going to help him do that, but they’d never started work on the project.”

  She spoke for a few more minutes on how irreplaceable Simon was. The maps and drawings of the proposed new beach had all been given to them by the Park District, but Simon’s analysis, his cost estimates, those were things they’d have to do over from scratch.

  “And without Leo to help—I don’t know how we’ll manage.”

  “Look out for your own safety, Mona,” I said. “Leo and Simon both murdered, that doesn’t sound like a coincidence to me. You and your friend Curtis need to be careful.”

  “Sergeant Pizzello told me they are stepping up patrols around our buildings, but it all depends on how quickly they can catch Coop,” she said. “That dog of his would probably kill on his command, so I’m wearing a neck brace when I go out at night.”

  When she’d hung up, I looked at Bear. “Coop might go for someone’s throat, but you strike me as the moderating influence in your relationship.”

  He looked somberly at me—the responsibility of keeping Coop under control weighed heavily on him.

  I leaned back in my desk chair and stared at the ceiling. Two of the acoustic tiles had come loose, and the others were covered with grime or cobwebs or both. Climbing up to clean and repair them was number 713 on my to-do list.

  I shut my eyes. If it weren’t for coincidences, we wouldn’t have any novels by Dickens, so I know they exist. But Leo and Simon both dead, Simon mugged and his papers stolen, Leo’s computer missing—that was too much coincidence even for Bleak House.

  Mona took for granted that Coop was the killer. Leo had been killed with SLICK’s gavel, which meant Coop would have to have filched it, enticed Leo to the park, and killed him. I didn’t know what weapon had been used on Simon, but it was similarly a planned murder.

  Coop’s anger could certainly ride him to the point where he’d attack physically—as he had the person putting Roundup in the park—but would he sit down and plot out a death? He didn’t seem to be someone who thought ahead, but his leaving his dog with me and disappearing—he clearly was fleeing someone, or at least fleeing somewhere.

  “Where did he go? Why did he go?” I said to Bear. “Something to do with Lydia? And where is she?”

  If she’d died in the park, surely someone would have found her body by now. I was hoping Coop was the person who’d found her. I was hoping he’d moved her somewhere safe.

  Coop, Lydia. Coop, Elisa Palurdo. Coop, Leo Prinz and Simon Lensky. Was he really the fulcrum that moved all the activity around these people?

  I looked up Debbie Zamir, Lydia’s mother, in my database and called her.

  “I’m not talking to reporters.”

  “I’m not a reporter, ma’am. I’m a detective. We spoke a few days ago, but I’m calling again because I found your daughter close to death in a Chicago park four days ago. She disappeared again and I’m hoping and praying she’s someplace where she can recover her strength.”

  Zamir was briefly silent. When she spoke again, her voice was softer. “Do you think she’s dead? I’ve had calls from half a dozen reporters today, including someone from New York, but none of them said that.”

  “I don’t know how much longer she can live without food or proper medical care. Or a place where she can sleep through the night undisturbed. Her friend Coop has also vanished. I need some thread of an idea about where they might have gone.”

  “I don’t know.” She was worried, finally, about her daughter; the belligerence was gone from her voice. “It’s been so long since we’ve spoken. I don’t have threads.”

  “Coop is a man in his forties with a big tawny dog. You never saw him?”

  She hesitated a second too long. “A lot of people came around after the shootings. Lydia wasn’t popular in high school, but her music attracted all kinds of attention. Plus the notoriety of a big shooting—all kinds of weird men came around. They brought flowers, and incense burners, like this was some graveyard. Young women came, too, dressed in Indian costumes, singing tha
t one song of hers that everyone liked so much. We had to get the sheriff to chase them off the land, and then they just camped on the other side of the river with their candles. Some of them had dogs, but I didn’t keep track of them.”

  “When people came, which ones did Lydia respond to?”

  “She didn’t respond to any of them,” Zamir said.

  “She never went to the window to watch the young women singing ‘Savage’?”

  “I was her mother, not her jailor. I don’t know what she did in her bedroom.” She spoke sharply

  “Do you have an email address? If I sent you a picture of the dog, it might spark a memory. I’m desperate to find your daughter, and Coop, the man with the dog, he’s my only lead.”

  “You don’t think I’m desperate? My only child? But she went so far away from me so long ago, how do you think you can bring her back?”

  She was quiet, waiting for me to come up with the right response, but I couldn’t figure out what that would be. She finally hung up.

  I studied my dirty ceiling for another long minute before once again calling Murray Ryerson. “You have competition on the Zamir story, Murray: multiple reporters have been bugging Debbie Zamir. Lydia’s story even roused someone east of the Hudson. Did you go down to Kansas in person?”

  “Not that it’s your business, but I’m at the Kansas City airport right now, Warshawski. I couldn’t get past the Zamirs’ front door this time, which told me someone had beaten me to the punch. She tell you who paid her the most for her story?”

  “You were down there offering her money?” I was almost screaming in outrage. “Debbie Zamir is scared for her daughter’s life and you wanted to pay her to talk about it?”

  He started to justify himself, but I hung up and texted Donna Lutas at Devlin & Wickham: I’m grateful to your coworkers for wanting to help search for Lydia Zamir. Can we start tomorrow?

  32

  Digging Up the Deep State

  Yesterday had been so exhausting that in the morning I couldn’t galvanize myself to work. I sat in the garden with the dogs, drinking coffee and watching the birds in the bushes along the back fence. It had rained again in the night, but it hadn’t cleared the air: the sky was low and gray, the air thick.

  The storm had battered my neighbor’s tomato plants. When Mr. Contreras came out to mourn them, I helped him tie them up, pluck off any blackening leaves, and put fresh straw around them to keep blight at bay.

  It was noon by the time I’d finally pulled myself together to exercise the dogs and shower. At my office I took care of some outstanding client searches, but in the back of my mind, I was turning over Peter’s advice to keep digging.

  My subscription search engines mostly harvest data about Americans and Canadians. Given that our own government can’t distinguish between hardened criminals and terrified mothers, it’s not surprising that it’s difficult to get good information from south of the border.

  I did the best I could, looking for people named “Palurdo” up and down both Americas. There were none.

  I looked for earthquake damage in Tocopilla, where Jacobo Palurdo’s childhood church had been destroyed. Tocopilla suffered constantly from earthquakes. There’d even been two this past spring, and there’d been a biggish one in 2007. That made it plausible that all traces of the Palurdo family had been destroyed when their parish church was ripped apart.

  Elisa’s story bothered me. Not that she was lying—although maybe she was. It just seemed strange that when Hector went to Tocopilla, not one person remembered a family named Palurdo. It wasn’t a big town, only 24,000, and if he’d explored the barrios and the city government records, some other person with that name, or someone remembering the family, would pop up. Hector’s grandmother had cleaned houses for the wealthy; she’d done exquisite needlework. She’d made something for a rich person’s child that would stick in the memory. Maybe Hector had seemed like an outsider and people were afraid to tell him what they knew.

  I hunted for records of those who’d been disappeared and murdered under the Pinochet regime. Those were patchy, but I didn’t find Filomena’s name. Finally I made a big sweep: Filomena and Chile. That gave me a St. Filomena, from the nineteenth century, some hotels named for her, and dozens of hits for a Filomena Quintana.

  Quintana was very much alive. Her bio, in Spanish, was hard for me to read, but she was sixty-two, so a contemporary of Jacobo Palurdo. She hadn’t grown up in Tocopilla, but in Valparaíso, which was apparently an important city both economically and politically. She’d attended university at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where she’d studied political economy, had worked for the Aguilar Mining Company and made the transition to television in the 1990s.

  Despite her age and television’s insistence on youth, she had a large following on a Chilean cable show. I clicked on some of her YouTube clips. She was a striking woman, who carried herself with confidence. Her shoulder-length blond hair was streaked with silver. Her eyes were an unusual green with brown flecks—not one’s stereotype of the dark South American.

  As an Italian speaker, I could sort of follow her talks, but it was a strain to keep up. In one, she startled me by holding up a copy of Atlas Shrugged in Spanish—La Rebelión de Atlas. She seemed to be exhorting her viewers to read it for an understanding of how a human being should live a fulfilling life.

  I scrolled through the web hits until I found an English-language entry: she’d been interviewed by Global Media, on one of their political talk shows, Digging Up the Deep State. I’ve watched it occasionally, fascinated by their carefully balanced presenters—one an anorectic blond woman, Stevie something, the other a very dark African-American man, Horace something else.

  Quintana appeared with Larry Nieland, the Chicago Nobel Laureate who’d spoken at the SLICK meeting where poor Leo got into an argument with the equally unfortunate Simon.

  Quintana laid a fleeting hand on Nieland’s arm, saying to Stevie and Horace, “Larry was my professor, my mentor. He brought me to Chicago for a memorable year of study. Such an education. Yes, we discussed monetary theory, but mostly I had to learn baseball, which is not popular in Chile as it is in Venezuela or Colombia. And then I must learn to hate Cubs and love White Sox.”

  Everyone laughed, Stevie opening her mouth so wide her cheekbones pushed her eyes half-shut. Compared with their usual conspiracy theory-laden interviews, this was fluff for Horace and Stevie. They bring up everything from how climate Nazis are spreading fear in order to bankrupt the American oil industry, to allegations of cover-ups of the secret work liberals do to promote mass shootings because “they want to take away your guns,” as Stevie would solemnly tell Horace. “That’s right, Stevie,” Horace would respond, equally solemn. “They actually create these shootings and blame them on gun owners. Or they stage shootings with actors so they can make people frightened of guns.”

  That thought made me dig into the Deep State archive for Horace and Stevie’s coverage of the massacre at Horsethief Canyon. Global’s Wichita, Kansas, affiliate had had a camera at the Meet-Up. I watched some of the footage; they’d had a camera going when the gunfire opened, but it was so sickening that I couldn’t keep watching.

  I turned to something even more upsetting: Deep State’s coverage of Arthur Morton’s trial. Horace and Stevie were in full throttle, showing Morton’s childhood home, the farm with dust rising from the ground, barns, and other outbuildings exhibiting signs of neglect six years after Sea-2-Sea had bought the land.

  “This is what happens when we let people with a globalist agenda set our foreign policy,” Horace said. “Good decent people like the Morton family get swallowed alive.”

  They had a cute graphic for that segment, of a python squeezing its tail around a mock-up of the Morton farm, then swallowing the outbuildings and the people.

  Stevie and Horace questioned whether radicals like Lydia and Hector really belonged in a family place like Horsethief Canyon. Families got together for picnics
and music. They didn’t want someone pushing politics down their throats.

  “Really,” Horace said, “you could make a case that the kind of speeches people like Hector made goaded the Morton boy into pulling the trigger.”

  It’s not enough that we’re awash in weapons as a country, but TV personalities actually find excuses for mass killers. I left the site, wishing I could make a more forceful exit. I miss the days when you could slam down a phone to end an annoying conversation.

  I packed up my office, but before going home, I drove downtown to the Park District headquarters: Lydia’s disappearance wasn’t the only worrying business I was trying to sort out; there were also the murders of Leo Prinz and Simon Lensky.

  The Park District planned to relocate into an actual park on the Southwest Side, but until that building was finished they were housed in the old Time-Life Building, within spitting distance of the city’s most expensive shopping. Chicago’s power elite like their creature comforts—really, who doesn’t? How would Taggett and his buddies adjust to neighborhood diners instead of Gold Coast bistros?

  In the Park District office, I told a woman at the information counter what I was looking for. She slowly wrote it down and handed it to another clerk, who disappeared with it into the bank. Patronage-rich fiefdoms like the Park District build support by employing two people per task.

  After a few minutes, the phone on the information counter rang. The clerk grunted a few times, then told me that none of the Forty-seventh Street drawings were available for public viewing. “Until a plan has been put together, the public can’t view them.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “I was in the meeting where SLICK presented them to the public only last week.”

  The clerk shook her head. “You probably saw some community group’s ideas on the subject, but that development is definitely only in the idea stage.”

  “Taggett was there,” I persisted. “He took questions on the proposal.”