Angela gave me keys to the apartment, in case she or Bernie needed me to find items they might have left behind. She also asked if I could take charge of her old Subaru: she didn’t have a garage space and, “I know it’s a lot to ask, Vic, but, like when they do street cleaning, can you see that it gets moved?”
I took the keys with a murmur of “Of course, no problem,” although figuring out how and where to store a second car wasn’t a responsibility that raised my spirits. Still, she’d been injured for the sole crime of sharing an apartment with Bernie. I owed her special attention.
After I’d waved them goodbye, I called Freeman Carter, my defense attorney, to let him know what had happened. His firm was standing by to help Bernie; he needed to know about the break-in and that she’d gone back to Canada.
I met with the sports management program director to explain why Angela and Bernie would not be completing their summer work stints. That involved a certain amount of arguing over whether the two could return to campus in the fall. I won, mostly because both young women were significant players on their respective teams.
I dealt with the landlady, who wanted the young women to pay for a new door. When I told her the families were thinking of suing her for not having better security on the premises she backed down, but two fights before 10:00 a.m. was an exhausting way to start the day.
All the time I was talking to these people, the flash drive was burning a hole in my jeans pocket. As soon as I finished with the landlady, I drove to the Cheviot labs in the northwest suburbs. They’re a private forensic engineering company with more sophisticated equipment than I can afford; they might be able to refine and enhance the pictures.
When I explained to my account manager that this little stick might be behind two unsolved Chicago murders, he took it in stride. They’ve worked with me for years, and their security, both cyber and physical, is always being tested and upgraded. He agreed to email me an encrypted copy of the contents, but to guard the original against all but the most precisely worded subpoena.
Back home, I made sure Mr. Contreras had time to vent his own agitated feelings over the attack on Angela, and on Bernie’s safety. He wasn’t totally convinced that Pierre Fouchard and the entire Canadiens team could look after her. I agreed that he would be a significant help in looking after her, but in the end he turned down my offer of a plane ticket to Quebec.
I slept heavily for some hours, but returned to consciousness through my worry dreams, where I was facing a wall of fire, my mother and Lotty on the far side, beyond my ability to rescue.
I took an espresso to the tiny deck outside my kitchen door and sat with the dogs, running my hands through their fur, trying to think. To take the pressure off Bernie, I needed to make sure Taggett knew I had the pictures. Not just Taggett, but his private-public partners, whoever they were. Also the Devlin & Wickham lawyers, and Norm Bolton at Global. I wanted them all to know that I wasn’t the only person who’d seen Leo’s photos. Otherwise, I’d be next in line for the person who liked treating human heads like soft-boiled eggs.
I called Murray, who was angry with me.
“Whatever you’re selling, Warshawski, I’m not buying. I am fucking sick to the fucking gills with your holier-than-thou Olympian approach to the world. And to my place in it.”
“I can imagine that it’s very annoying,” I said. “I’m not selling anything, just pondering the Chicago lakefront. Wondering how realistic the plan is to put an eighteen-hole golf course around Forty-seventh Street. The picture I saw showed Lake Shore Drive covered in grass, which had those little holes people hit balls into.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“We all have fantasies, Murray. One of mine is of Leo Prinz requesting copies of conversations within the Park District or maybe City Hall about these pictures. I imagine someone on LaSalle Street, or maybe Fairbanks Court, reading the FOIA request, and skittering into, oh, maybe Giff Taggett’s office. And then I imagine Taggett saying something like, ‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome Prinz,’ and another person taking that frustrated outcry as a command and battering poor Prinz’s skull in with a gavel. Have a good day.”
I hung up. Murray called right back. “Did you really see these pictures? And how did you find them?”
“A flash drive stuck in the bottom of a sky-blue backpack. The people who tore Leo’s apartment to shreds can’t really be blamed for missing it—it blended so perfectly into a crease in the fabric.”
Murray digested this, then demanded copies of the photographs. I demurred, on the grounds that he might interpret my involving him as an example of my holier-than-thou-ness, but finally forwarded the Dropbox document to him.
“I still think you’re a pain in the ass, Warshawski.”
“That’s not a unique opinion,” I said, thinking of the worried look the Sung family gave me whenever I saw them on the stairwell or in the garden. And the venomous stares I still got from Donna Lutas, despite her firm’s insistence that she cooperate with me in looking for Lydia.
That thought reminded me of Norm Bolton’s desire to turn me into a series character. “Did Bolton ever explain to you why he was so insistent on filming a search for Lydia Zamir?”
“We’ve had this conversation too many times already,” Murray said stiffly.
“By the way,” I said, before hanging up, “when I was scouring the Wildlife Corridor looking for Leo’s phone or any clue of any kind, I found a bunch of surveyor’s boundary markers near the railway embankment.”
“Is that the real reason you called?” Murray said. “You want me to do your dirty work looking up surveys of the lakefront?”
“No. I wanted to share those pictures with you, which I have done. The survey is gravy.”
When we’d hung up, I continued to stare at the garden. Lydia Zamir had come from Kansas. Perhaps, like Bernie and Angela, she’d tried once again to turn to her mother. Coop might even have driven her down to the town, Eudora. Perhaps her mother would be more responsive to me in person than on the phone. Then I could drive to Salina to visit Arthur Morton’s mother. Maybe she’d tell me why Devlin & Wickham had taken over her son’s legal defense—definitely not a conversation to have by phone.
And if I let Taggett know that I was going away for a few days, he could believe he’d frightened me into withdrawing from my investigation. I’d take Bear with me, partly to keep the dog count within the condo’s charter, but mostly so that I could give him back to Coop if I got lucky and actually found him and Lydia. Mr. Contreras and the rest of my building would be safe. Mr. Contreras wasn’t happy with the plan, but he was never happy when I left town.
“You can get Donna Lutas on your side while I’m gone. Make her French toast for breakfast—yours is so delicious it would charm someone crankier than her.”
“Don’t try to butter me up, Victoria Warshawski. I been watching you slather it over other people for years, and I don’t like you doing it to me.”
He uses my name only when he’s distressed.
I apologized, but said, “If you see Lutas, let her know I’ve gone to Kansas. If she pushes on you for more information, act coy, but let her know that I’m checking into Arthur Morton’s background, and the trial.”
He cheered up at the thought of helping with the investigation.
37
Trouble in the Fields
Bear and I reached Lawrence, Kansas, a little before three in the afternoon, after nine hours of hard driving. All along my route I’d seen water standing in the fields, worse in Iowa, but heavy again around Kansas City, where two rivers joined. In the spring I’d read about the rains that were keeping farmers from planting, but seeing the waterlogged fields made me realize how serious the problem was. The U.S. president had announced a gift to farmers to cover their losses in his tariff wars, but looking at the fields, I couldn’t imagine how anything could grow in that swamplike land.
We drove past Eudora, where Lydia Zamir had grown up, on ou
r way into Lawrence, but I wanted lunch, a good espresso, and a nap before trying to talk to Zamir’s mother. All those things were easier to find in Lawrence—including the nap, where the bigger town would be more likely to have a motel that accepted big dogs.
When we climbed out of the car in Lawrence, hot winds whipped my face. Two hundred miles south of Chicago, with no alleviating lake winds, the weather was hotter and muggier than it had been at home. I took Bear down to the Kaw River to cool off, but the water was high and running fast; I kept a long rope attached to his collar and didn’t let him stay in long.
I found a room in one of the big-chain motels on the west end of town and fell deeply asleep—the drive and the stress of the last few days had taken a toll. It was past six when I woke up, stiff and groggy. I wanted to have a leisurely evening, stretching my muscles in a long run, enjoying dinner with a glass of wine, but I couldn’t defer my conversation with Lydia’s mother. I was sure she knew something, either about Coop, or where Lydia might be.
On my way to Eudora, I swung by the Decadent Hippo, hoping a couple of double espressos would make me feel less doltish. I took them outside with Bear, stretching my tight traps and hamstrings in between swallows, trying to persuade my body that caffeine and five minutes of movement could offset a long day in a car. I’d missed lunch but was feeling tense about the time. I picked up a bowl of soup at one of the student joints on the main street and ate it messily at stoplights.
When we followed the old highway east out of town, it was an hour from sunset. Storm clouds were building in the western sky, turning the trees and stunted corn plants a menacing blackish-green.
The Zamirs lived at the end of a cul-de-sac near the river and train tracks that created Eudora’s western edge. Theirs was the biggest house on the street, an old Victorian with turrets and a screened porch that faced the river. This was where Murray had sat drinking iced tea with Debbie Zamir.
Over the chirping of birds getting ready for the night, I could hear frogs or maybe toads calling from the river bottom. Crickets sawed away. The house had settled into the landscape; the whole setting seemed peaceful, a place where people were at ease in their lives, no loud arguments, no bristling anger. It was hard to place the anger I’d heard in Debbie Zamir’s voice in that comfortable house.
When I parked on the shoulder, Bear growled. Low, soft, deep in the throat: he knew this house and he didn’t think it was a place of peace. At first he refused to leave the car altogether. I finally persuaded him to get out but no amount of coaxing or his favorite treats could bring him to the house. He stayed behind me in the middle of the sidewalk, on his feet, hackles raised.
Lights were on in the room behind the porch, in what I guessed to be the kitchen, but I saw the flash from a TV screen at the other end of the house, the side that faced the neighbors. I opened a screen door to use a knocker, a piece of tarnished brass that made a satisfying clang as it struck the plate behind it.
After a moment, a man opened the door. “If you’re another reporter, we’re done talking to the media.”
He was thin, and stoop-shouldered, the weight of his daughter’s illness bending him over. His mop of curly graying hair and his narrow face made him look eerily like Lydia as I’d last seen her.
I held the screen door open. “I’m not a reporter, Mr. Zamir, but a detective. I’m from Chicago, trying to find some trace of what happened to your daughter. You know she’s disappeared, and her health is precarious.” I handed him one of my cards.
In the background Debbie Zamir called out, wanting to know who it was, wanting to make sure her husband knew better than to talk to the media. He shouted back that I was some kind of detective from Chicago.
Lydia’s mother hove into view. She was holding up better than her husband, at least superficially. Her hair was neatly dressed and her jeans and blouse had been ironed. She had on sandals that showed off gold-painted toenails.
“Ms. Zamir, I’m V.I. Warshawski. We’ve spoken on the phone a few times. I need you to tell me what you know about Coop.”
She sucked in air. “Nothing.” Her voice wobbled; she took another breath to steady herself. “I don’t know anyone with such a strange name, I told you that before.”
When he heard her voice, Bear let out a short warning bark. I backed up to grab his leash. He didn’t try to jump her, nor to run away, but I could feel his legs trembling as he stood his ground. I knelt to put a reassuring hand on his neck.
“The dog says otherwise,” I called from the middle of the path. “He knows you; he knows you did something that hurt Coop.”
“What are you talking about?” Lydia’s father stayed prudently inside the doorway.
“Were you here when a man named Coop came around to see your daughter, Mr. Zamir?”
“A lot of people came to see Lydia,” Zamir said. “But most of the time I was at work. At work, like there was some reason to keep to a schedule. What’s this BS about the dog knowing my wife?”
“Your wife was here when you were working. She’s seen the dog, and she’s seen his owner. A man named Coop.”
“That right?” He turned to his wife, puzzled, not angry.
“Of course not, Tyler.” Debbie Zamir was aiming for a soothing tone, but her voice shook.
“Time to stop lying, Ms. Zamir. Nothing you did with Coop in the past could be as dreadful as refusing to act while your daughter is dying.”
I was shouting from the middle of the walk. A window opened across the street and a woman asked if everyone was okay.
Debbie Zamir called back—“No problem, just a driver who got lost.” To me she said, “Do you have a hold of that dog?”
“Yes.” I tightened my grip on the leash.
“If you put him back in your car, I’ll come out and talk to you.”
“Debbie! You don’t know this lady and you don’t know this dog. Don’t go talking to strangers. You saw what happened when you talked to that Chicago reporter last month. Everything got blown out of proportion and Lydia almost was run over by a train up in Chicago.”
“No, Ty, I’ll talk to her. She’s right: I saw more of the people who came around after the shooting than you did. I’ll tell her what I know. You go watch the game; I’ll only be five minutes.”
Ty looked uncertainly from his wife to me, but defeat had become a way of being for him. He turned back to the living room and the flashing light of the TV.
Debbie Zamir stood in the doorway while I escorted Bear into the Mustang. I had the windows down, and his great head leaned out, staring at us. Debbie skirted the house, clutching the siding, her eyes on the car until she’d moved out of sight. When I followed, I found her standing behind a bench, clutching the back tightly, staring toward the river but not seeing anything.
I stood near her, not crowding her, not looking at her. “Tell me about Coop and his dog.”
She seemed to be choking on her thoughts, not able to put them into speech.
“He was a friend of your daughter,” I stated.
“No. Yes. I don’t know.”
“He’s probably ten years older than she is, so they didn’t meet in high school. Was he at the conservatory?”
“Conservatory? You mean music? No. He wasn’t a friend. I don’t know where they met. The stupid Tallgrass event, I guess. Maybe he’d been stalking her before. After the shooting, after the funeral and all the media hype, when Lydia came home, he came around.”
“You think he was stalking her?” I asked.
“He came around a lot, more than any of the others.”
“What others?” I held tight to my patience. If I gave way to anger, she’d clam up completely.
“She had fans all over the world. People loved that Savage album. Not what she called it, but that was what it was, full of savages. None of her real work ever got that kind of response. She had beautiful recordings of playing Chopin and Schumann that no one paid any attention to, and then she came under the influence of that Mexican man and s
he started writing songs that were offensive and dirty. And that’s what people liked!”
Her hands were clenching and unclenching the back of the iron bench, so hard that the finials were digging into her palms. “Girls showed up here at all hours, singing that horrible song, dressed—or hardly dressed, trying to make themselves look like they were Indians from 1492. It was ludicrous and horrible. The sheriff came and made them keep off our property, but then they acted even worse: they went down to the railway and set up a sound system. You could hear them all over the county.”
She gestured at a barrier of trees about a quarter mile from the house. They grew on top of a low cliff above the railway tracks that lay between her home and the Wakarusa River.
“And Coop joined them?”
“No.” She bit the word off. “The men—God, it was sickening, they were even worse than the crazy girls. There were men who thought someone who’d survived a mass murder was sexy. They came around wanting to—who knows what they wanted. Lydia—she was out of her mind. She didn’t pay attention to the women, but one afternoon she came to her bedroom window. Naked. Yelled down, this what you want? I was in the yard, trying to make them leave, and so I looked up—I saw—”
Her shoulders began to shake. She mastered her voice with a terrible effort. “Touching herself. Flaunting, but remote, like she was taking some drug and sailing over them, over me, over the world.”
The language was strangely, exotically poetic—Lydia’s offensive, dirty images had a heritage.
“Coop was there?” I asked.
“He showed up that afternoon. He had flowers, prairie flowers. He’d come five or six times before, always with these flowers he picked from the edges of the fields, and always with that dog. Lydia came down to talk to him, two or three times. She wouldn’t talk to me or her father or the doctor, but this crazy man, he was fine to talk to. And he had the nerve to lecture me on what Lydia needed, like her own mother didn’t know as much as some stranger off the wheat fields.
Dead Land Page 24