“Trucker who might have Mob ties invited me to dinner,” I said.
Jake propped himself up on an elbow. “You want me to play while you eat? Those gigs are so depressing. You get to measure 113 of the Martinsson, for instance, where the bass goes into an upper register that sounds like a cello, and at table nine, the trucker with the oil under his fingernails starts telling a crude joke, and the detective next to him, who you thought at first had some understanding of you and your music, in fact you were imagining what her skin might feel like under that red thing she has on, this detective laughs so loudly no one can hear—”
“You make it sound so romantic.” I put my cup down and curled up next to him. “I didn’t know the detective had such a disruptive laugh.”
“When she’s genuinely happy, it sounds like champagne fizzing out of the bottle, but when she’s faking it, like laughing at a mobster’s vulgarities, it’s more like a barnyard cackle.”
To protect my relationship, I’d left the gun at my place, but my phone was in my hip pocket. I ignored it when it started to ring, but the terrified voice leaving the message made me forget laughter, whether fizzy or cackling.
“This is Adelaide, you know, from Mr. Villard. Someone shot him, it’s really bad, I’m calling his daughters, I’m calling the hospital, but you’re a detective, I need you to come.”
Jake sat up. “Who was that?”
“Caregiver to an elderly gentleman I met with yesterday.” I rolled over and off the bed, tucking the red thing I had on back into my slacks.
Jake pulled on a pair of jeans and walked me to the door. “Be careful, V.I. Whoever your elderly gentleman is and whatever happened to him, don’t risk your life, please. I hate that way worse than people telling jokes while I’m playing.”
I squeezed his fingers and ran across the hall to put on shoes and collect my gun. While I tied my laces I called Adelaide to let her know I was on my way. Her phone went to voice mail, which sent me to the car at double-speed, worried that if someone had attacked Villard, she might be in danger, too.
When I reached the cul-de-sac in Evanston where the mansion sat, police sawhorses were blocking the road. I didn’t bother trying to argue my way past the cops, but turned left, away from the lake, and found parking on a through street a block away. I jogged back to Sheridan Road and cut across the garden of a house north of the barricade. This section of Evanston sits twenty or thirty feet above Lake Michigan. A high rock fence runs about a quarter mile up the coast here, more to keep kids and dogs from tumbling down the bluff to the water than to keep out miscreants like me.
I scrambled to the top of the fence and started walking down toward Villard’s place. The top was only about as wide as one of my feet, and there were places where a thin iron rail had been inserted. As I skirted the grounds of Villard’s neighbor, a woman came to the door, shouting at me. I smiled, waved, which made me teeter and grab the overhanging branch of a tree. The woman opened the door and let out one of those Hungarian hunting dogs, which roared over to me, yelping in a high-pitched, indignant tone. Using the branch, I swung over the edge of the wall into a corner of Villard’s garden.
“Nice doggie,” I said as it stood on its hind legs to bark across the wall at me. Probably playful, since it was a house pet, but you never know.
I was screened from the road by a thicket of bushes and spiky prairie grasses, but I could make out a clutch of Evanston squad cars, as well as an officer at the bottom of the marble steps. I watched the woman who’d sicced the dog on me cross the drive and begin talking urgently to the officer on duty.
I did not need to be picked up by the Evanston cops. I faded behind a giant ash to text Adelaide. Mercifully, she came out through the back door a moment later. Her skirt and shirt were stained with blood.
“What happened? How badly is Mr. Villard hurt? Did they get you, too?” I demanded.
Her usually calm face was crumpled with worry and fear. “He was alive when the ambulance came, I hope he still is. I didn’t know, if I’d known I’d never have left him on his own, but my gentlemen and ladies, they need respect, you shouldn’t treat them like they’re little children, only the daughters don’t believe me.”
“Of course they need respect,” I assured her, “and I’ve watched you with Mr. Villard. He told you to leave him on his own because he was meeting someone he wanted to be private with?”
She nodded, miserable.
“After you left last night, he was very troubled. I was blaming you, to say the truth, for upsetting him in his mind. He sat looking at his old pictures from the baseball team for hours, letting his food get cold. When I came in to help him up the stairs to his bedroom, he was on the phone and motioned to me to leave, so I only heard a little bit of the conversation.”
“Which was?” I prompted.
“Something about of course he’d listen to the other person’s side of the story. Then this morning he told me someone would be coming to see him. He asked me to help him out to the garden and then to leave him on his own. I brought out a tray with coffee and cups and the little cookies he likes, but I went inside, only I stood with the door open, so I could hear him if he needed me. I could only see his back, or the back of the chair where he sat, but not the driveway, or anyone who might be sitting with him.”
She took me through the kitchen to an enclosed porch that opened onto the garden. I saw what she meant: only one chair and a bit of the wrought-iron table where Villard had been sitting could be seen from here. The scene looked peaceful, no overturned chairs or coffee cups, none of the blood that Adelaide had gotten on her clothes. I started down the steps so I could see the rest of the setup, but an officer held up a hand, warning us to stay inside.
I went back to Adelaide, who was twisting her hands over and over. “The police, they act like I knew these people, like I could have stopped them, but it happened so fast, I couldn’t see them, just heard their voices.”
“How many were there?” I asked.
“I think it was two, I think they were both men, but I can’t be sure. Anyway, one of them talked to Mr. Villard, and Mr. Villard, he played this recording you gave him, and the one man tried to laugh, but the other—he—I couldn’t believe it—he shot Mr. Villard, then the two of them ran around to the front. I could hear the car taking off, but I was in the garden helping my gentleman and calling for help and calling you.”
As if on cue, a plainclothesman came into the sunporch. “Who are you?” he demanded of me.
“V. I. Warshawski. A private investigator.”
“Let’s see some ID.”
I hate being cooperative, but the law has so much enforcement going for it these days I didn’t want to protest enough to be detained for questioning—I didn’t have time today for heroics. I showed my licenses, driver’s, investigator’s, gun permit.
“You follow the sirens?” he asked.
“You mean, am I cruising the streets, hoping for clients? No, Officer. Mr. Villard was sharing some of his old photos of Wrigley Field with me.”
“You the woman who climbed the fence next door? That how you always arrive at your contacts’ houses?”
“When the cops are blocking access I have to get to my clients as efficiently as possible.”
“And how do you know this gal?” He jerked a thumb toward Adelaide.
I was white, so I was the woman who climbed the fence. Adelaide was dark, which made her a gal. Was that a step up or down from being a girl?
“This woman is a professional caregiver whom I’ve talked to when I’ve met with Mr. Villard. Did anyone get a look at the car that the shooters drove?”
“We’re taking care of canvassing the neighbors and asking questions. We’re looking for this woman’s contacts.”
“Mr. Villard made an appointment with someone for coffee this morning. Rather than wasting your time harassing people who ne
ver heard of him, you might check his phone records, see who he called last night at—what time was it?” I asked Adelaide.
“It would have been around ten o’clock, right before I came to help him get ready for bed.”
“It’s a good story,” the detective said, “and the two of you have had plenty of time to rehearse it.”
Instead of answering him, I called Murray Ryerson, who fortunately picked up. I cut short his sarcastic greetings. “A situation in Evanston. Stan Villard, used to be head of media relations for the Cubs, has been shot, taken off to the hospital. Evanston cops are trying to frame his caregiver, but smart money is wondering where Boris Nabiyev or Vince Bagby were when the shots were fired. Also, call Freeman Carter for me, in case we get too crowded here.”
The detective took the phone from me. “Call is over.” He pressed the off button.
“Murray Ryerson is a reporter with Global Entertainment,” I said. “He’ll get the rest of the details from his connections at the state’s attorney’s office. And my lawyer will be ready to help Ms.—” I realized I didn’t know Adelaide’s last name.
“Trimm,” she said.
“Right. Ms. Trimm, as well as me.”
The detective stared at me, then called over to one of his patrol officers to come get some names from me.
“This gal seems to know a hell of a lot about what was happening here. Take down her details, and get the names of the people she thought we should be talking to. And then get the Trimm woman’s personal phone book and see where her friends and relations were this morning.”
Being confrontational had transformed me from a woman into a gal. Interesting.
“You’ll want to check Mr. Villard’s phone,” I prompted, as the officer came over. “He set up this meeting around ten last night; see whom he called.”
“The day I need a private dick to tell me my job is not coming anytime soon,” the detective said. “You can leave when you’ve given your details to my officer, but you stay close, real close.”
He was saving face, so I didn’t push him further. I gave his officer my phone numbers, gave him Murray’s number to call for more information, and texted Freeman Carter’s contact information to Adelaide’s phone in case the detective decided to arrest her as soon as I was gone.
For the time being, the Evanston police were willing to leave her sort of alone, although when I asked her to show me the pictures Villard had been looking at last night, the detective sent his officer along with us. Who knows what might happen if two gals were alone together.
The photos didn’t tell me anything, except that Villard missed his wife and wished she’d been there for him to consult—he’d been going through an album of family pictures, mixed together with some of the players and staff who apparently had been close to him over the years: these were candid shots, not the posed press pictures.
Adelaide asked me to stay with her until she’d talked to the daughters. The movers were supposed to come in three days, and she thought they should be canceled, but that was the family’s decision.
“I hope my gentleman will recover and be happy, but—” She let the sentence finish itself.
Talking to the daughters was an ordeal. They were distressed, they had questions Adelaide couldn’t answer, and, as she’d predicted, they blamed her for letting their father go outside on his own to meet with a stranger. I tried to help Adelaide talk to them, but the daughters felt I had introduced an element of sorrow or perhaps instability into their father’s world. It was hard to argue with that—if I hadn’t come up yesterday with Sebastian’s recording, he wouldn’t have made the appointment he’d set up this morning.
The nurse, calling from Tucson, relented near the end of her conversation, at least toward Adelaide, if not me. She knew her father was a stubborn man who liked to do things his way, and how could Adelaide possibly have known he’d be meeting with someone who wanted to shoot him.
“But you’re a detective; you should have known better,” the nurse told me.
My superpowers don’t include predicting the future, I started to say. It’s true I had tried to warn him, but I hadn’t really pictured this kind of attack. It was best to say nothing: her father had been shot and she was twenty-five hundred miles away. I turned her over to Adelaide, who needed to know whether the sisters wanted her to remain in the house for the present.
BEHIND IN THE COUNT
About half an hour later, Murray called back. He had a contact in the ER at Evanston Hospital, who told him that Mr. Villard was in surgery, but the prognosis was hopeful.
“Whether he was cocky, or afraid of witnesses, the hitman only took one shot. Turns out Villard had a Cubs doodad on his jacket that saved his life—slowed down the bullet, deflected it, so it went into his chest but missed the heart. Of course he’s an old guy and getting shot is never good for you, but if the creek don’t rise he’ll live long enough to see the Cubs in the cellar for at least another year. If they haven’t arrested you in suburbia, I’ll meet you in your office in an hour.”
Adelaide was calmed by the better news about Villard’s condition, which she quickly passed on to the daughters. Before I left, I put my lawyer’s and my numbers on speed dial for her, making sure the Evanston detective knew I was guaranteeing her high-end legal aid.
“If worse comes to worst,” I said, loudly enough for the cops to hear, “do not say one word to the police without your lawyer present. Anything you say will be twisted into a shape that will have nothing to do with what happened, so best keep completely quiet. Don’t even say you are exercising your right to remain silent; that will make them think they have a lever they can use to pry on you. Believe me, I’ve heard them all, starting with, ‘Only a guilty person would want a lawyer,’ or ‘An innocent person wouldn’t be afraid to talk to us.’ Got it?”
Adelaide pressed her lips together, bottling in her fears, and gave me a convulsive hug. “Got it,” she whispered.
I smiled cheerfully at the detective. “The reporter and I will follow up on Nabiyev’s whereabouts this morning. Also, if you’re not going to check Mr. Villard’s calls, why don’t you give me his cell phone. The person he was trying to reach at ten last night will likely know who was coming to breakfast.”
The detective’s scowl would have dug craters in the few pothole-free roads left in the city.
Murray reached my office almost an hour after me. He’d made a detour to the Villard mansion, but the cops hadn’t let him past the roadblock. He was envious of my strategy for getting into the house and pelted me with questions about the scenery, the photos Villard had been studying last night, his eating habits, his children.
“Murray, I don’t know his waist size, but I’m guessing boxers, not briefs, okay?” I glared.
“Give me the gal’s number who’s looking after him, she’ll tell me that.”
“You’re talking like a cop. Just because she provides elderly people with intimate care does not turn her into a child. And she also has the ordinary person’s right to privacy, so no.”
“Come on, Warshawski, I’m doing—”
“Whoa. I’m the one who got you your scoop.”
“I’m getting rusty—I have to practice badgering someone, might as well be you,” he said. “Do you think Bagby and Nabiyev are involved in this?”
I told him about Bagby’s phone call this morning, although I left out the bit about the dinner invitation. “Have you found out anything that links Bagby or Scanlon to the Dragons, or the Mob?”
Murray pulled out his notebook. “I’ve found the ties between Scanlon and Spike Hurlihey, but they aren’t a surprise. Scanlon has been a big money tree for Spike for years, helped bankroll his first campaign for the Illinois House when Spike decided to leave Mandel & McClelland and go into politics. Pretty much nothing in Illinois fund-raising is illegal, so it doesn’t seem to be much of a story.
>
“The cousin, Nina Quarles, seems willing to be a front for both Bagby and Scanlon. The best guess is that lets both of them qualify as a woman-owned business—her name appears as a co-owner of the insurance agency, and as a trustee for Bagby’s daughter as owner of the trucking company. Even though Nina’s voting address is in South Shore, her real residence seems to be Palm Beach in the winter and Long Island in the summer. With lots of months in Europe or Singapore in between.”
“What a life, when your name does the work for you and all you have to do is spend the profits,” I sighed. “What about Nabiyev?”
“That’s been a more fruitful search, because it’s harder for foreign nationals to funnel U.S. funds to overseas shell companies. I can’t prove the Grozny Mob bailed out Sturlese Cement, but I have found a trail between one of Nabiyev’s accounts and Grozny. What do you know that I don’t? Besides Adelaide’s phone number.”
“Jerry Fugher was the conduit for covering Stella’s bills while she was in prison, but I can’t find out where that money came from. Everyone who paid him gave him cash, including his unfortunate niece and nephew. I also don’t understand who would underwrite Stella, or why. But it has to be connected to her decision to go after an exoneration, because all this other stuff began boiling up after Frank Guzzo came to see me.”
I told Murray about yesterday’s conversation with Frank. “I think he was telling me the truth, about coming to see me because he was worried about his mother, and that she blew up at him for doing it, but there’s still something not right about the story. Joel Previn, who handled Stella’s defense twenty-five years ago, knows something, but I can’t figure out a way to make him tell me. And whoever shot Villard this morning, that person must have some connection to the Cubs, or why would Villard have wanted to talk to him privately first?”
“Please, Warshawski, don’t try to connect the Cubs to the Mob—if they had that kind of protection, they’d be winning more.”
Brush Back (V.I. Warshawski Novels Book 17) Page 32