When I’d finished that, I started working through my in-box—seventy-three new e-mails since this morning, including, of course, the piercing bleats from politicians and Nigerian princes, desperate for two hundred or even just five dollars, whatever I could spare, the situation is dire.
Two clients had problems I could solve long-distance. Mr. Contreras had written a chatty message from St. Croix, filled with goodwill and the endearing typos of a hunt-and-pecker. I wrote back, mostly highlights from my visit to Fort Riley, which a veteran of Anzio would care about, and included a photo that Dr. Dan had sent from Wisconsin of Mitch stalking a chipmunk.
I’d written Jake this morning before my visit to the Lawrence Police Department, when it had been 3:00 p.m. in Basel. It was 3:00 a.m. there now, and he hadn’t had time to fit in a response.
No estés lejos de mí un solo día. The Neruda sonnet that Peter Lieberson had set to music for his wife came into my mind. Do not be far from me for a single day. Jake used to play the melody for me over Skype when he was on tour, and I had worked hard on the song so I could sing it to him when he’d been in Australia for six weeks last year. Now—not even an e-mail.
I got up and frowned at my reflection in a small mirror over the desk. More wiry threads of white in my dark hair, deeper crow’s-feet around the eyes. Silvered is the raven hair . . . Mottled the complexion fair. Maybe Gilbert and Sullivan’s Lady Jane was more suitable for me than Neruda’s love sonnets.
Fortunately, I had my dog and my career: What more does a woman need? I settled down to the client queries, and after a time, deep in spreadsheets and a trail of strangely oscillating share prices, I forgot my bruised heart and my futile efforts to find August Veriden and Emerald Ferring.
I stretched out my hamstrings, did a half backbend in the doorway, took Peppy out to the small patio outside my room.
The rain had passed, bringing colder air behind it, cold air from the north, from home. We stood for a moment, looking at the night sky, at the North Star. I felt a longing for home deeper than my longing for Jake.
“Sniff the air, girl,” I told Peppy. “Maybe you’ll smell Mitch. I’ll smell the Golden Glow and Lotty. Any luck and we’ll be back there soon.”
The bells on the university campanile were tolling midnight in the distance. I climbed into bed, the dog curled at my side, and fell deeply asleep. When my phone rang only two hours later, I woke disoriented, thinking I was in my Chicago bedroom, and floundered in the unfamiliar space, bumping into the couch where my phone was flashing its LEDs.
“Yes?” I grumbled, rubbing my sore shin.
“Did you put up those posters?” It was a woman’s voice, hoarse from alcohol or cigarettes or maybe from screaming into phones in the middle of the night—the background noise sounded like a full-scale riot was in progress.
“What pos— Oh, looking for August Veriden and Emerald Ferring? Yes.” I sucked in a breath.
“I saw them. I saw them out where my truelove is buried. They were walking on his grave.”
Great. Another homeless drunk looking for a handout. “What did you see?” I demanded.
“A black kid was photographing the grave, and this black lady was egging him on! That ground is sacred, and they were taking pictures as if it was a football game.”
“Where?” I shouted.
“I told you. At his burial place.”
“But where is his burial place?”
“I tried to make him stop, but he wouldn’t.”
I was pulling on my jeans as she talked. “Where are you right now? I’ll bring the reward down to you.”
“The Lion’s Pride.”
I asked her name, but she’d hung up. I pulled boots on over my bare feet, hustled Peppy into the car, asked my phone to find the Lion’s Pride. Eighth Street at Rhode Island, two blocks east of Massachusetts, the main downtown street. I hadn’t gone that far with my posters.
Two-thirty in the morning; most places had closed, but the handful of bars still open had crowds of kids spilling into the streets, music blaring onto the sidewalks, roars of laughter, cars honking up and down Massachusetts. I found a parking space on a street of rickety bungalows and crooked brick sidewalks.
I thought living near Wrigley Field was a misery on game nights, but for the poor people near the bars it looked as though every night downtown might be game night.
The Lion’s Pride was in the cellar of a building on the corner. When I got there, a young woman was being sick over the railing; two youths with her were laughing, one of them pulling on her cami straps.
I put an arm around the woman but looked at the young men. “You boys need to go home. Kindergarten starts early tomorrow, and you don’t look adult enough for anything else.”
One of the guys started to call me names, but when I demanded their IDs, they backed away—I might be a university cop. The woman stared at me with glassy, unseeing eyes. I didn’t know what to do with her, so I kept an arm around her as I muscled my way down the stairs to the entrance.
As soon as I got there, I realized what a hopeless job it would be to find one person in this mob scene. I backed out again, set the young woman on the stairs, and called the number that had rung mine.
It rang about ten times before anyone answered: it was a bartender at the Lion’s Pride. Great. My anonymous caller had used the bar’s phone.
The young woman had passed out. I propped her against the edge of an iron staircase leading to the upper floors of the building. She had a purse dangling from her shoulder. I took it with me, just to keep it from being stolen while I went inside.
“I hope you’re going to be okay out here, honey. I don’t know how long this will take.”
The elbows I’d developed growing up on Chicago’s South Side got me past the thicket at the entrance and up to the bar, but the noise was so ferocious it was harder to take than the crowd. A balding man with a sizable paunch was filling beer steins without looking at them, putting them on the end where waitstaff picked them up and distributed them through the mob.
I waved, trying to get his attention, shouted, and finally worked my way around to his side of the bar.
“Five Moscow Mules!” one of the waitstaff screamed.
The balding man nodded, filled three more steins, and turned to plunk five copper mugs on the bar. I put my arm over them.
“Before you serve another underage drinker, I need to know who was using your phone half an hour ago.”
He looked at me sourly. “Get your arm off the mugs. They have to be washed again if you get them dirty.”
“Your phone. A woman called me from here. I’m a detective, she has information I need, and I want to know who she was.”
He glared at me. “Some stupid homeless woman who I threw out because she hassles the customers begging for booze. She helped herself to the phone just like you’re helping yourself to my Mule mugs. Now, get out of my bar before I throw you out after her.”
“Don’t make threats you can’t back up,” I said. “If she’s a regular, you must know her name or where she lives—”
“I just told you she’s homeless, which means she doesn’t live anywhere.”
The noise and my lack of sleep were making me light-headed. I saw a row of switches on the wall behind him. I shut down the three closest to me, and the bar went dark. People gasped and shrieked, but the noise decreased a few decibels. I counted five and turned the lights on again.
Before the roar could rebuild, I shouted, “Free Moscow Mule to the person who knows the homeless woman who was using the phone in here a little bit ago!”
The bartender shouted to one of the waitstaff to get Fred, time to throw me out and then call the cops.
“I’m a detective,” I said loudly. “I need to find the woman who used your phone. If I do, when the cops arrive, I won’t report you for serving alcohol to kids who are drunk and very likely had roofies fed to them at your bar while you were watching. Deal?”
He slapped an empty stei
n onto the counter so hard it broke. “Sonia. She comes around when she’s scored enough change to buy a drink. She’s a pain in the ass, but not as big a pain as you. Now, get out.”
A muscly man in the ubiquitous Jayhawk T-shirt was waiting at the end of the bar for me. He grabbed my arm harder than was truly necessary and hustled me to the door, where I somehow tripped on the stoop and kicked his shin while I righted myself. Childish but satisfying.
The young woman was still slumped at the top of the stairs. The trio of youths was still there, carrying freshly filled mugs, speaking in disjointed sentences interspersed with loud laughter, when they pounded one another’s shoulders.
I shone my phone flash inside the young woman’s purse, where I found a student ID. It told me she was Naomi Wissenhurst but didn’t reveal her address. I slapped her lightly, trying to wake her up.
“Naomi! Where do you live!”
The trio moved out to the sidewalk, not wanting to be part of Naomi’s drama. It was then that I saw the bundle of clothes under the iron staircase. I shone my flash on it, but my gut twisted: the bundle had a shape of sorts, and in the light I could see a foot sticking out at an awkward angle.
12
Ugly Duckling
She wasn’t dead, but her pulse was so faint I could barely feel it. I called 911: two ODs at the Lion’s Pride. I put my coat over the woman to keep her warm. I photographed her and Naomi Wissenhurst in situ. I didn’t want any complaints coming back that I’d moved them, injured them, robbed them.
Just because the three guys were gawking and not helping, I took their pictures, too. They scowled and moved away from me.
The cops arrived first, blue-and-reds flashing. My one brief entertainment for the night—the male trio melting away like snow as the squad cars arrived, dumping little bags filled with pills and powders into the gutter as they fled.
I stood as two officers reached the staircase. “I was trying to get this woman to wake up when I saw the other one under the staircase.”
They shone their flashlights, more powerful than my phone flash, and I saw the woman’s face. Middle-aged, jowly, thick eyebrows, a trickle of vomit at the corner of her mouth.
The female officer called in the report, demanding two ambulances at once. A third squad car pulled up. The driver stayed put; he was ferrying a more senior officer, who joined us at the top of the stairs.
By now the police strobes had penetrated the bar. Eager patrons were trying to leave, or at least to gape at the action. The senior officer sent one of the uniforms down the stairs to keep everyone in place.
“What have we got here, Suze?”
Suze swung her light in my direction. “This person called it in, but that’s Sonia Kiel, Sarge, you know—”
“Oh, yes, we all know Sonia.” The senior man squatted and felt her wrist. “Sonia, what’d you take this time, huh? We gonna save your life for you one more time, or are you determined to let it go?”
He stood. “And the other one?”
I hesitated, not wanting to be closer to the center of attention than I already was, but when Suze didn’t speak, I said the other one seemed to be a student who’d drunk too much, or swallowed roofies, or both.
“I was trying to get her to wake up enough to tell me where she lived when I saw the other woman lying there.” I hesitated again, but there was no point in keeping my connection to Sonia quiet; everyone in the bar would report my dramatic effort to get her name.
“I’ve never seen Sonia before, but she called me about forty-five minutes ago, asking me to come here to talk to her.”
The ambulances arrived. The officers backed away as the EMTs jogged over with their equipment.
“Let’s get our ladies to the hospital, and then you”—the sergeant nodded at me—“come over to the station and tell me all about it. You know where we are?”
I assured him I knew. When I started away from him toward my car, he said, “Other way.”
“I know, Sergeant. My dog is in my car. I need to make sure she’s okay.”
“Officer Peabody will go with you. Suze, I’ll drive your squad car back to the station.”
As we walked to my car, I said, “Your sergeant said you all know Sonia Kiel. Does this happen often, her passing out near a bar?”
“Sergeant Everard can tell you more about her than I can,” Suze said stiffly.
I ignored the rebuff. “I’d think if she needed hospitalizing very often, her health must be close to the breaking point.”
“She isn’t in good shape,” Suze admitted, “but usually we just take her back to the group home. They don’t want to keep her—” She broke off, remembering she was supposed to leave all those details to the sergeant.
We’d reached the Mustang. Peppy stuck an eager head over the backseat to inspect Suze, who patted her in return, a good sign, before strapping herself into her seat.
When we got to the station, I took Peppy out to stretch her legs. Suze said she thought it would be okay with the sergeant if I brought Peppy into the station. “If it isn’t, I’ll take her out and walk her while he talks to you.”
Everard raised his eyebrows when we walked in. “That your lawyer?”
“More like my analyst,” I said. “I don’t have any secrets from her.”
“I hope you don’t have any from me. You want to start by telling me who you are?”
When I told him my name and started to pull out my PI license, he said, “Oh, right. We got a notice about you coming into town looking for two missing African-Americans. What took you to the Lion’s Pride in the middle of the night, or is that all in the line of a big-city detective’s life? They tell me you caused a bit of a disturbance.”
“Hmm. More like I quieted the place down.” I told him about getting Sonia’s phone call and finding out that she’d used the bar’s phone. “It was hard to get them to acknowledge that Sonia had been in there or that she’d used the phone. The place was pretty wild, even by big-city standards.”
“Hawks won tonight, Sarge,” Suze contributed.
I looked blank, thinking Chicago Blackhawks and wondering why Lawrence, Kansas, would care.
“Men’s basketball,” Sergeant Everard said sardonically. “If you’re going to spend more than another twelve hours here, you’d better memorize the Hawks—Jayhawks—men’s schedule so you know when you’ll be able to get anyone to listen to what you’re trying to say.”
He asked me for chapter and verse on why I’d come to Lawrence to look for August and Emerald. I told him. He asked for proof that Sonia had phoned me from the bar. I showed him my call log. He asked what Sonia had to say. I gave him the gist.
“You really think she saw them?” Everard said. “She’s quite a few filaments short of a bulb.”
“She said a young man was taking pictures and an older black woman was encouraging him. I didn’t include anything about Veriden being a videographer in the posters I put up.”
Everard thought it over. “Maybe Sonia did see them. Just seems odd that no one else in town knows anything about them.”
“Where’s the cemetery that Sonia was talking about, where her truelove is buried?” I asked. “If I go there, maybe I can find someone who would have seen Ms. Ferring or August Veriden.”
Everard shook his head. “That’s all in Sonia’s mind, a truelove and his burial ground.”
“Who is she? Officer Peabody said you’d explain about the group home and who Sonia— What’s her last name? Kiel, was it?”
Everard made a sour face. “Sonia Kiel. She grew up in this town. My older brother went to high school with her, and she was an oddball then. She’s only turned odder with time.”
I would have put Everard at about forty: the skin on his face was still taut, none of that sag under the chin where aging begins. Even if his brother were a lot older, Sonia had looked to be a tired fifty-something. Life on the streets does terrible things to the human body; a diet of alcohol and drugs isn’t exactly a healing recipe.
“Oddball how?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s all ancient history. Her old man was a big noise up on the hill, scientist, knew all there was to know about what bugs got you sick. Anyway, Sonia, she’s his youngest kid. Her two older brothers were academic all-stars, you know the kind. One was a math whiz, and the other could learn any language you put in front of him.”
His cell phone rang. When he hung up, he told Suze that a fight had broken out over by the Cave. “Polanco is there. No shots fired yet, but you go help him sort it out. Call me if you need a bigger club to hit them with.”
After Suze had taken off, he was interrupted by one of his patrols who’d found some kids slashing tires in a west-side mall lot, and then a holdup in a park on the south end of town. By the time he got back to me, he’d lost his train of thought.
“Sonia,” I said helpfully. “Two whiz-kid brothers.”
“Oh, yeah. Sonia was the ugly duckling, only she never turned into a swan. When she and Tyrone—my brother—were in school together, she used to spy on the kids who were dating. She was lonely, she was ugly, who knows what was driving her? She started making up stories about having a romance with some mystery man in her father’s department. It was embarrassing to listen to.
“I don’t know all the details, but there’ve been a lot of hospitalizations. When she was younger, she tried to make a go of it out east somewhere—thought she was a singer or an artist, I forget what—but it all fell apart, and she came toddling home. Kiel and his wife finally got fed up, turned to tough love. She’s supposed to be living at St. Rafe’s, only she keeps sneaking out and ending up drunk. They should boot her out, but I guess Dr. Kiel still has plenty of pull in the town.”
“Dr. Kiel? He’s a doctor?”
“Well, yeah, he’s a professor up there, with all the degrees and everything.” Everard stared at me, puzzled at my urgency.
Cady had started to ask about a doctor when Gertrude Perec cut her off. I’d assumed it was an M.D., because at the University of Chicago, where I’d done my degrees, there’s a kind of inverted snobbery about the title “doctor”: it’s only for M.D.s. Ph.D.s are Mr. or Ms., and they call you out pretty sharply if you violate the code.
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