Dead Land

by Sara Paretsky

  I moved to the recliner and fell into an uneasy sleep. Murray’s groans woke me a little after seven. He was thrashing in the narrow bed and two nurses on the day shift were fiddling with his IVs. A fine bodyguard I’d turned out to be—the staff had come in and wedged themselves between the recliner and the bed without my stirring.

  I staggered to my feet, shoved the recliner out of the way, and checked that the two women were in fact nurses attached to the hospital. I went to the far side of the bed, where I squatted and rubbed Murray’s shoulder. “It’s V.I., Murray, I’m here with you.”

  His eyes fluttered briefly open, so bloodshot you couldn’t tell their color. “Vic?” His throat was swollen from intubation, but my heart lifted; he knew me right off the bat. His memory was good.

  I squeezed his hand. “Yes, it’s me, Murray. You’re going to be fine. Someone shot you but I’m going to track them to the ends of the earth.”

  The nurses looked at me in alarm. “Don’t get him agitated.”

  “I’m trying to reassure him,” I protested. “He knows I do what I promise.”

  “It would be better if you didn’t promise violence,” the woman said.

  I was getting really tired of being criticized for everything I did. I bent back over Murray. “No worries, Murray. You’re safe here. Lotty’s looking out for you. Even Mr. Contreras.”

  I thought I saw his mouth twitch, as if he were trying to smile at the thought that Mr. Contreras might be rooting for him.

  “Vic. Dunce.” He tried to sit up, his fingers scrabbling on the sheet, trying to find mine.

  I took his hand. “Not a dunce, Murray. The boy reporter following a lead. Can you tell me what it was?”

  “Dunce. Dunce.”

  The nurses, with an exasperated glare at me, squirted something into his IV line and he fell back into sleep.

  60

  The Dunce

  I’d brought a go-bag with me, a change of clothes, a toothbrush. I showered in an empty patient room, brushed my teeth, gave myself a pep talk. Warshawski is in the forward line, she’s moving the ball, she’s scoring! Right.

  The one document in Lydia’s piano I still wanted to explore was the cryptic message from Samantha Watkins, JD: I have not been able to persuade the Chilean courts to reconsider their decision. Call me if you wish to discuss.

  According to Watkins’s website, she practiced general family law, with a specialty in wills and trusts. She was trilingual in English, Spanish, and Portuguese and had experience in handling estates in South America. Her photo showed a woman in her forties, dark hair, with a somber expression that seemed to say she was tough enough to fight the big boys. Or girls.

  An assistant answered the phone when I called. Ms. Watkins was on her way to court, but the assistant would take a message and see whether Ms. Watkins wanted to schedule an appointment with me.

  I spelled my name. “I’m working for Lydia Zamir. Does Ms. Watkins know she’s been living on the streets and now is recovering in a private clinic? She has entrusted me with some documents, including a note Ms. Watkins sent her with a message about the Chilean courts. It will help me protect Ms. Zamir if I know the details.”

  I was on hold for five minutes and then the assistant told me that Ms. Watkins would see me at eleven for fifteen minutes.

  I went to a coffee bar and tried to organize my case notes. The more I learned, the more helpless I felt. I didn’t know why the Quintanas and Nieland needed to eliminate Hector. I didn’t know who had killed Leo Prinz and Simon Lensky—thugs hired by the Quintanas? The men from Taggett’s entourage who had threatened me? All I knew was that I couldn’t figure out any way to act, any way to remove a threat from Murray’s life, Bernie’s life, Lydia’s—not to mention my own.

  I put the problem to one side while I went to meet Samantha Watkins. In person, she was as serious as her web photo. She shook hands perfunctorily, announcing she could give me only fifteen minutes for a consultation. Since she’d kept me waiting for over twenty minutes, that was annoying, but I needed her more than she needed me.

  “What is your involvement with Ms. Zamir? I’ve had detectives in here before who were trying to get access to Ms. Zamir in the hopes of cashing in on Hector Palurdo’s book royalties. It is not a confidential matter to tell you that Hector was my client; I wrote his will, which has been through probate; he left the bulk of his estate to Lydia Zamir.”

  “If you want to check on my reputation, I have clients who are willing to talk to outsiders about my work.”

  “When we’re done, you can give a few names to Inesa”—her assistant, who was in the room with us taking notes. “But let me hear what you think I will tell you.”

  “I stumbled onto Lydia’s problems like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, by complete accident, but I ended up looking at a horrific crime—the deliberate use of an emotionally disturbed man to carry out a mass shooting. While that slaughter was taking place, the person behind this vile manipulation lay on a cliff above the mass shooter to make sure his real target was killed. That target was Hector Palurdo.”

  That startled Watkins: of course she knew about the massacre, she said, and she’d followed Arthur Morton’s trial and death. There had never been any mention of a second shooter.

  “This is one of the facts I uncovered when I went to Kansas a week ago to meet the people involved in Hector’s death. Another fact: while the coroner was conducting autopsies on the massacre victims, someone helped himself to the bullets from Hector’s body; they were a different caliber, and came from a different weapon, than the one Arthur Morton used.

  “Another fact: the firm of Devlin & Wickham came in from nowhere to muscle away the public defender assigned to Morton’s defense. They wouldn’t use any of the material the PD had come up with—including the websites on Morton’s computer that seemed to herd him toward Horsethief Canyon, and Morton’s own belief that he heard another rifle near him. Interesting, don’t you think?”

  Watkins took time to digest this, drawing a series of boxes on her yellow pad. “And?”

  “I got involved in Lydia Zamir’s life, as I said, by accident.” I told her about SLICK and Bernie, the deaths of Leo and Simon, the attempt on Murray’s life, and the secret drawings showing the rebuilding of Lake Shore Drive and the park to create a luxury beachfront resort.

  “The firm that drew up the plan is Minas y Puentes.”

  “What? No! That’s not possible. That’s the firm—” She broke off in confusion.

  “That’s the firm that Hector Palurdo hired you to do battle with,” I said quietly. “On a trip to Chile, he discovered that his father fled the country after witnessing his own brother-in-law, or perhaps his own father, oversee the murder of Jacobo’s closest friend. Their dead bodies were thrown into the family mine. Hector caused some kind of disturbance at the mine, but when he came back, I’m guessing he hired you to help him with a legal battle in Chile. And you weren’t successful; you wrote that note to Lydia, after Hector died.”

  I showed her the photo I’d made of the documents in the piano.

  “Where did you find these?” Watkins demanded.

  “Where Lydia had hidden them.” When she pushed harder for an answer, I said, “You want to make sure I’m reliable but I have no idea whether you are. The Aguilar and Quintana families and their lawyers are prepared to put a lot of effort and money into finding Lydia and killing her. They’ve tried to kill me. You’re a solo practitioner—maybe the Devlin & Wickham lawyers have come around bribing you, or threatening you. Maybe you’ll be on the phone to them as soon as I leave.”

  Inesa, her assistant, started to sputter denials.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “That is, I hope you aren’t under their thumb, but it doesn’t matter if you tell them what I’ve told you because they are already gunning for me. I don’t know why I’m not dead, except that perhaps they want these documents. I will figure out my next steps without your help. But if you told me what you we
re trying to accomplish with the Chilean courts, it might make my next steps easier.”

  Watkins shut her eyes, communing with herself. At length she gave a tiny nod, and said, “Okay, you’ve taken a chance with me. I’ll take one with you. It’s true what you said about the discoveries Hector made in Tocopilla. As you can imagine, they shook him to the depths of his being. And he behaved in a way very uncharacteristic of him—he says he created a scene, at the mine. He wouldn’t tell me what happened, just that he lost his aunt and uncle’s support. And the Chilean government deported him. I could only assume he had tried to harm his aunt, but that had no bearing on proving his status as an heir.

  “Then began a legal battle. The aunt and uncle stated that there was no proof that Hector was the son of Fernando Aguilar and not the child of a welder—the photograph he was waving about proved nothing. And, of course, they were right to do that—anyone can claim to be the heir to a great fortune.

  “Hector had his DNA tested. And he demanded that Filomena Quintana Aguilar do the same, to see whether they were in fact related.”

  “So he signed his death warrant,” I said sadly. “No way were the Quintanas going to allow Hector access to his inheritance. And that’s what you tried to do, after Hector’s death?”

  “Yes. It mattered greatly to Lydia. We tried to get a Chilean judge to force Filomena to undergo a DNA test, but the Devlin & Wickham lawyers in Santiago were too powerful for me.

  “That note I sent her—it was the last straw for Lydia. She tried to attack the lawyers from Devlin & Wickham, she wanted me to force the woman in their transcription unit to turn over all the correspondence between the lawyers, the Aguilars, and an economist who is on the board of Minas y Puentes.”

  “Larry Nieland.”

  “Yes, Nieland. Anyway, after they took out restraining orders on her she retreated, and I lost touch with her. I—” She flushed painfully. “I couldn’t do this work pro bono, and she had no money to pay my bill. I didn’t realize she was living on the streets. I’m sorry about that.”

  “What happened to Hector’s DNA test? Do you know the company that performed it?”

  “Oh, I kept a copy of the results in his file, in case we succeeded in forcing the aunt to provide a DNA sample.”

  “What about Hector’s mother? Was she in the will?”

  Watkins smiled sadly. “He left her his love, and the first editions of his books. He’d published three, and I’m not sure they were valuable.”

  She had spent almost two hours with me, not fifteen minutes, and she and Inesa both exclaimed in horror when they looked at the time: she was late for a meeting elsewhere in the Loop.

  Inesa raced to her desk and grabbed a folder for her boss, who snatched it on her way out the door.

  I walked the mile from Watkins’s office to the lake, blind to Kate Buckingham’s fountain, oblivious to the crowds pushing against me. Anyone could have shot me, or injected me with ricin, while I stumbled dumbly along. I knew almost everything, but I couldn’t prove it. At least—I couldn’t prove it in a way that would discredit the Quintanas or Nieland or Gifford Taggett.

  I stared at the horizon, where boats looked like shadows, the sails a wispy white, shape barely visible. They might have been paper cutouts in a puppet theater.

  When I’d been cooling off in the lake at Forty-seventh Street a few weeks ago, an outsize sailboat had been cruising near the shore. I’d idly wondered if it might be Nieland’s antique yacht, the Abundance. I pictured Larry Nieland anchoring there and having a powerboat ferry him to shore when it was time for his lectures at the university. The water there was shallow. An outboard motor would get caught in the rocks or sand. A good reason to put in landfill, move the shoreline out so that bigger boats had access.

  Dunce, Murray had repeated the word urgently. He wasn’t calling himself names, he was trying to say “abundance.” He was too savvy to go to the Burnham Wildlife Corridor alone, but if Larry Nieland promised him an exclusive aboard the Abundance, he’d have leapt at the chance.

  61

  Recording Artist

  “No, absolutely not.” I was in Mr. Contreras’s doorway.

  I had to speak loudly for him to hear me over planes on their final approach to O’Hare, people laughing in a neighboring garden, and other sounds of a summer night.

  “But, doll, you can’t go there, either,” my neighbor said. “If that gal has come back and is playing her piano again, you know that guy, the one with the dog, he’ll be there. She don’t need you. Look who’s been killed there—that boy Bernie was dating, Murray close to being dead. You stay up here.”

  Behind me, something hit the ground with a thud. I whirled to see Donna Lutas opening her own front door. She’d dropped a bag of groceries and was trying to pick them up while clutching her briefcase to her side.

  “Hey, Donna,” I said without enthusiasm, and headed for the stairs.

  My neighbor pushed past me to help her pick up the peaches that had rolled free. I stopped on the landing when Mr. Contreras said, “She’s so gol-darned pigheaded. Someone told her that singer gal has been back playing her rinky-dink piano in the park—”

  “Lydia Zamir?” Donna said, eagerness flooding her voice.

  “That’s the one. Vic, she thinks she always knows best, she thinks it’s her job to go down and hunt out this gal, who’s hiding in the park somewhere, and I say let nature take its course, why put yourself in front of the kind of people who beat your brains out—oh, there’s another peach over there, no, I got it—oh, dang, now I dropped the others.”

  Donna assured him she could manage. “Why does, uh, Vic care so much about Lydia?”

  “I don’t know. Some tangled story about how Ryerson—now there’s a guy I don’t have a lot of use for. It’s always about him, well, he got himself shot and now Cookie—Vic—she wants to get her own self shot? After people been shooting at her all over Kansas? This Lydia’s hiding something, and Vic aims to be the first person to find it. Who’s got an ego as big as the Sears Tower now, I asked her—you in competition with Ryerson? With her it’s, oh, no, she’s noble, she’s doing it for justice, and there’s something about DNA, some aunt has DNA. Don’t we all have DNA? I expect your aunt has—”

  Donna shut him off with more speed than grace. When I heard the door to her apartment bang shut, I went on up to my own place, while I worked out what to do.

  I’d dated a musician for several years, an accomplished bass player. When he moved to Switzerland the relationship foundered, but I’d remained on good terms with his friends, including a man named Cousins. Cousins had a recording studio in his house—Jake and his friends used to try out their performances there.

  Cousins helped me create a playlist: the accompaniment for “Dido’s Lament,” Lydia’s “Savage,” and a song I created, using the music and lyrics from the Impressions’s “For Your Precious Love” as a template. I didn’t need the tinkling sound of a toy piano—Cousins created that with a synthesizer—but I still spent the rest of the day hunting for a red piano like Lydia’s, and investing in a bunch of remote speakers.

  The other task that consumed me that day was trying to set up protection for the people I cared about. I was worrying about everyone close to me, especially Murray, but also Lotty, Max, and Mr. Contreras.

  Max, who lived alone in a house next to Lake Michigan, moved into Lotty’s high-rise, which at least had a doorman. Beth Israel’s security team agreed to send him and Lotty an escort to and from work for the next few days. I hoped that would be good enough.

  With Max’s assistance, I got the university’s security department to approve my request for the Streeter brothers to guard Murray. That took the best part of three hours. As I sat on hold for thirty minutes at a time—transferred from university security to hospital security, putting both on a conference call with the Streeters—my anxiety level kept growing. I wanted to scream at them all, but had just enough self-control to know that would end the process in its tra
cks.

  By the time I had it all settled, it was near the end of the evening rush hour. I left the Subaru in a downtown garage and boarded a Metra electric train, holding a big box with the piano inside. I had switched out the colorful carton it came in for plain cardboard.

  The electric train ran parallel to the Burnham Wildlife Corridor. I rode it to Eighty-third Street, where I got off and took a northbound train halfway back to the Loop. I made the maneuver three times, until I was sure I didn’t have company.

  On my last circuit, I left the train at Forty-seventh Street, where I waited until night had truly fallen. In the dark, I walked up the tracks to the hideout Lydia had used three weeks ago. I shone my flash around inside it, and a small gray animal scurried to the back.

  I suppressed a shriek. Tough detectives are not afraid of possums, raccoons, rats, or voles. We’re a little scared of skunks and porcupines, but I was pretty sure this was a vole.

  I wished I had worn my hard hat and my heavy protective gear, but I unpacked the piano and climbed down with it into the hole. I knew I ought to be quiet, but I sang “Men of Harlech” in a loud deep voice so that the voles would keep their distance. When I had the piano hidden, I backed out of the hole as quickly as I could and jogged back to the Forty-seventh Street platform.

  I was covered in dirt. I looked like that most disgraceful member of American society, a homeless woman. When a train stopped, the conductor insisted I ride in the vestibule, even though I proved I had a valid ticket.

  All the way downtown, where I’d parked the Subaru, all the way north to my building, my mind was focused on a shower, but when I reached my front door, I realized that looking homeless was not just a disgrace, but a badge of invisibility. I couldn’t disguise myself any more thoroughly than this. I hated getting into bed covered in dirt, but I spread a sheet across the cover and removed only my shoes and socks before lying down.