Breakdown (43 page)

Eycks grabbed my arm. “Not so fast, not until you talk to Mr. Salanter.”

I dropped the pizza, turned into his body, and chopped his wrist with my left hand. He gasped in shock more than pain but dropped my arm.

I glared at him. “If you want to talk to me about this, ask politely. Every conversation I’ve had with someone from your Schiller Street protectorate has begun with the assumption that I’m a lead-footed cretin out to harm you. So if you want to talk to me, you need to give me a reliable promise to have a civilized conversation.”

I picked up the box and looked inside. The crust had broken into a dozen jagged pieces and goat cheese and spinach were mushed together in the bottom of the box. It didn’t look at all appetizing anymore. I sighed and started up the stairs.

42.

OLD NEWS

E
YCKS DIDN’T FOLLOW ME UP THE STAIRS, BUT HE DID STAY
inside our entryway, cell phone in his ear. In my own apartment, with all the locks in place, I looked out the front windows and saw Chaim Salanter get out of the back of the Mercedes. Lotty and Max climbed out the other side; Sophy Durango stepped from the front seat.

“Merda!”
I said under my breath: I couldn’t shut Lotty out of my home.

I took the pizza to the kitchen, washed my face, took off my shoes and socks, collected a whisky bottle and some glasses. By the time I’d done all that, Eycks was leaning on the bell outside my third-floor door, the rest of his entourage in tow. When I opened the door, I heard a couple of barks from the bottom of the stairwell, and then a shout from Mr. Contreras, wondering if everything was all right.

“Not the dogs, Victoria,” Lotty said. “Make him keep the damned dogs downstairs.”

“We’re absolutely splendid,” I shouted down to Mr. Contreras. “Dr. Herschel’s allergies are acting up—she wants you to hang on to Mitch and Peppy.”

My five visitors entered my living room, looking like a jury in a capital case. I poured myself a few fingers of Johnnie Walker and offered the bottle to my executioners.

Max and Lotty gave me polite negatives, but the other three stared at me glassily. Sophy Durango took the lead.

“In Wade Lawlor’s attack on me this evening, he mentioned that Nia was joining Arielle overseas. How did he learn that? Our two families are the only people who know this!”

“Along with Gabe, Diane Ovech, the flight attendants on El Al, anyone at O’Hare who recognized Nia—”

“Who did you tell?” Gabe interrupted me.

“I’m not going to answer that one, Mr. Eycks. Since you think I’m capable of betraying my word, then you won’t believe anything I say.”

Lotty addressed me gravely. “I know you well, Victoria, and I know you would never put children in danger, but is there any possibility you mentioned this to Murray, thinking you could trust him to keep it confidential?”

Max chipped in with an equally mixed message, whose gist seemed to be that I was wonderful but impulsive. Durango and Salanter were more passionate—I had put their precious girls at risk.

When they’d all finished their differently calibrated pitches, I said to Eycks, “Arielle’s cell phone wasn’t with her when I found her yesterday morning. Did it ever turn up?”

He shook his head. “Julia bought a new one to give to her on the plane.”

I turned to Durango. “Did you and Julia Salanter lift the text-message block on your daughters’ cell phones?”

She looked disdainful. “I assume that question is relevant, or that you are trying to shift attention away from yourself to the girls.”

“Something like that,” I agreed. “I told you yesterday that it was possible someone was monitoring their texts to each other. If Nia and Arielle were telling the truth—”

“Don’t start suggesting that our children are liars just to exculpate your—”

“My involvement in this business began because your children lied about where they were spending the night. Each claimed a sleepover at the other’s home as a cover for going to a midnight rendezvous in a cemetery. So let’s stop pretending the girls are above reproach and concentrate on what we know, okay?”

“What do you think you know?” Max asked, before Durango could leap to a further defense of her daughter.

“Miles Wuchnik apparently was hired to dig up dirt on Chaim Salanter: Nia told me this afternoon that he approached her and Arielle outside Vina Fields earlier this spring.”

Salanter and Durango both gasped in alarm and looked at Eycks, who shook his head—this was the first he’d heard of it.

“I don’t know who hired Wuchnik,” I continued, “but I learned this evening that he was doing dirty work on a different project, and that he’d been hired for that by one of the attorneys at Crawford, Mead. So I’m assuming a Crawford, Mead client was trying to find out Mr. Salanter’s deeply held secrets, maybe as a way to derail your campaign, Dr. Durango. That means it could have been Helen Kendrick herself, or one of her Gleaners. Perhaps Sewall Ashford.”

I stopped. If that was the case, Ashford was how Salanter and Ruhetal and Leydon all hooked up. Could Sewall have murdered Wuchnik? He was strong enough physically, but was he strong enough mentally? If Wuchnik had found out some vile secret of Sewall’s and was holding him up for more money—

“Victoria!” It was Max who brought me back to the present. Chaim Salanter sat unmoving, as if we were discussing the weather in Kamchatka rather than attempts to dig up his carefully guarded past.

“Right,” I said. “After Wuchnik’s death, his apartment was stripped bare, but from what his ex-wife said, he used high-tech spy equipment to dig up dirt on people. Wuchnik approached Arielle and Nia. He spun them a line about wanting background on Mr. Salanter so that he could embarrass Wade Lawlor on national TV. This inspired Arielle to try to learn something of her grandfather’s history. She approached the Holocaust Museum, and went to genealogy websites, but she apparently came up empty.”

Salanter’s hands came up in an involuntary gesture, trying to push something away from himself.

“Yes, Nia said they talked to you, Mr. Salanter, but you shut them down in such a frightening way that they never approached you again. Wuchnik got hold of their cell-phone numbers, either directly from the girls or through one of the databases that provide people’s private information.”

Lotty was shocked. “That can’t be right, Victoria! If you pay to have an unlisted number, how can someone find it and sell it?”

I smiled sadly. “I’m sorry, Lotty, it’s not that hard and I have to confess I use those same databases. But Wuchnik took it a step further; at least, I’m guessing that he did. Once he had the girls’ cell-phone numbers, he used a program to install a remote transmitter into their phones. Any messages they sent or received would be bounced to his phone without their knowing it. This is just a guess, mind you, but I’m assuming it’s how he knew they were going to Mount Moriah that Saturday night he was murdered. It was how he tried to keep track of Arielle’s searches into her grandfather’s history, and how he realized she wasn’t making any progress. When Wuchnik died, I think whoever killed him knew what he’d been doing and picked up on the eavesdropping where Wuchnik had left off.”

“How do you know that?” Gabe Eycks demanded.

“It’s just an assumption, of course. But it’s a pretty good bet that Wuchnik was blackmailing someone who killed him for his pains. And that his killer would have figured out how Wuchnik got some of his information.”

I rolled my whisky glass between my hands, watching the liquid slosh—little ocean waves created in my living room. I was more than tired; I was depressed and anxious about confronting Chaim Salanter over his past.
Swallow it, get it over with,
one of my mother’s frequent admonitions.
The poison builds the longer you hold it in your mouth.

“Jana Shatka,” I said. “She saw an ad that Wuchnik placed where Lithuanian immigrants might find it. He wanted information on—on a refugee from Vilna, and the name rang a bell with Shatka. Her great-uncle had known the man as a youth during the war. Shatka wrote her mother, who was still in Lithuania, for information, hoping to collect a big payout. Shatka lived with a guy named Xavier Jurgens.”

Gabe Eycks made a strangled sound and glanced at Salanter, who shook his head.

“Yes, Jurgens, the same man who was dead in the car where I found Arielle. Jurgens was an orderly at Ruhetal State Hospital. One of Wuchnik’s clients had sent him to Ruhetal, where he persuaded Jurgens to let him into the locked wing. So there is a connection between the two men, but I don’t know that it has anything to do with the Salanter family.”

I paused, looked invitingly at Salanter, but he only shrugged.

“A lawyer gave Jurgens fifteen grand a few weeks ago, a cash gift from a client. It wasn’t from Wuchnik, that’s all I know. Jurgens used the money to buy a new Camaro, and someone with access to and knowledge of pharmaceuticals used a powerful antipsychotic to kill him. The knowledge of his murder terrified Jana Shatka—she knew everything Jurgens had known and she realized his knowledge cost him his life. So last night she hopped on a plane to Kiev.”

Durango made an impatient gesture. “This is completely irrelevant to Nia and Arielle, and how the news of their flying to Israel leaked out.”

“Perhaps.” I swallowed some of the whisky—the alcohol, or maybe the sugar, gives a jolt of wakefulness before it numbs you. “But going back to the ad Shatka responded to, the ad for information about a Jewish refugee from Lithuania whose name Shatka recognized. She wrote her mother, her mother wrote back. I don’t know what Shatka said, but I found two aerograms from her mother to her. A Chicago graduate student translated the Russian for me earlier this evening. Shatka’s mother can’t give chapter and verse, but she does talk about the man’s history in a believable way.”

Everyone was staring at Salanter, who continued to sit like a small Buddha in the corner of my couch.

I pulled the printout of Ted Austin’s e-mail from my bag and held the pages out to Salanter. “I don’t understand what’s in this history that’s so shameful you would forbid your granddaughter to discuss it. But you have put great energy into keeping your past to yourself. Did Jana Shatka come to you? Or Miles Wuchnik?”

“If you are asking whether they tried to buy my silence, you are correct. The man Wuchnik wanted to meet me, he wanted to give me the opportunity to bid on the information in here”—he took the printout from me and shook it—“against whoever his other buyer was. I didn’t see the letters, but Wuchnik described their content. I never met him personally, of course, but he persuaded Wren Balfour to bring me to the phone. There isn’t much in here, the half memories of a bitter woman who doesn’t know anything firsthand.”

“But when he died, and you learned I was involved, you tried to bribe me into
not
investigating his murder,” I said. “Didn’t you realize that would raise red flags, make me want to know what you were concealing?”

Salanter shrugged. “If Wuchnik had found information out about me, then I knew it was only a matter of time before it appeared on Wade Lawlor’s TV show. Killing the detective would have solved no problems. I wasn’t thinking broadly enough when I met with you—I was concerned about my daughter and granddaughter’s peace of mind, and that made my approach to you narrow. And ill-advised, as it turns out, but my one experience of a private detective had been Wuchnik—I imagined all were like the one.”

This sounded like a noble apology, an invitation to believe he thought I was his equal in broad thinking, but he was a master juggler; if I paid too much attention to the ball in the air I’d miss the two he was whipping into his pocket.

“You frightened Nia and Arielle when they asked about your past, so much so that they even concealed from their mothers the fact that they’d been approached to try to uncover the information,” I said. “If you could react so vehemently to your own granddaughter, I don’t believe you’d have just shrugged off an approach from an outsider.”

“So you think I murdered Wuchnik. Even if that had been my impulse, I would have needed help, and getting help, even from Gabe, would have exposed me to a domino of potential blackmailers.”

He crumpled the printout into a ball, saying with sudden savagery, “Let the whole damned world read these. Let them share the affronted outrage of this mealymouthed peasant woman: the Jew was ungrateful after all her uncle did for him. And after he fell under the spell of those sexually potent Jewesses, who were alluring even while they were starving to death in the ghetto. They were so wanton, so lacking in . . . in humanness that they were willing to lie with a pig at night so their children could get a little something to eat in a man-made famine.”

He flung the balled-up paper at Max. “So the bastard spent time in a Soviet gulag—for the wrong reasons but, by God, it was a righteous judgment.”

Max unfolded the printout and read it, then handed it to Lotty, with a murmured comment I couldn’t hear, although it was probably a warning that she would find the material distressing. As she read it she took his hand and squeezed it tightly. When she’d finished with it, she didn’t speak but passed the printout to Sophy Durango.

“Of course, there’s nothing in there but the usual dreary stereotypes.” Max made a face. And so this man Shatka was your mother’s—” He broke off, fumbling for a word:
lover, rapist.

“His name wasn’t Shatka—that’s the name of this woman Warshawski encountered, I suppose the married name of his niece. My
benefactor’s
name was Zudymas.” Salanter’s rage had subsided. He was leaning back in his corner of the couch, his face pale with exhaustion.

“When the Red Army retreated in the face of the German invasion, my parents had twenty-four hours to decide what to do before the German troops moved in.” Salanter’s eyes were shut, his voice dull. “Rumors abounded about German cruelty to Jews but we didn’t have real information. My parents decided that the most bestial rumors couldn’t be correct, that no one could really be throwing babies into lime pits and laughing at their agonized death screams. My parents believed adult men would be at risk but that the invaders wouldn’t harm women and children.