Breakdown (46 page)

“He saw her get killed?” I asked.

“Oh, just a way of talking, miss. Link went to work that day at noon; he had a summer job in his uncle’s box factory out by Wheaton, working the one-to-eight shift.

“The police went into all that at the time, could he have killed Maggie himself, but it was a small factory, everyone knew he’d been there all afternoon. We knew they had to ask those questions, but that was hard, too, for me and for Link’s dad—he passed three years ago—the cops come and talk to your boy, and you’re mad and righteous in standing up for him, but there’s a little splinter of doubt that buries itself in your mind, wondering if your own son could have done such a cruel thing.”

“It must have been hard on the Lawlors,” I said. “Did you know them well?”

Her mouth pursed into a tight “o.” “The dad, he took off when the kids were little. That was before we moved here, so we never met him. As for the mom, if Virginia Lawlor was ever sober after ten in the morning, I never saw it. Maggie pretty much raised Wade. Even when he got to be a teenager himself, he was still as close to her as when he’d been a little boy. She’d be so proud, if she’d lived, to see what he made of himself.”

Lincoln’s mother shook her head sadly. “Maggie was a beauty, but she was a sad lonely girl, living with Virginia, doing all the housework and raising Wade. That’s what drew my boy to her. He felt she needed someone watching over her. Link used to say she’d make him bring Wade along when they went out sometimes because she hated to leave him home alone with Virginia. You can imagine how hard it hit Wade when she was killed.”

“I guess Wade was a different kind of person than his sister—she doesn’t sound like someone who’d have been comfortable in the kind of big public role he’s taken on.”

Jackie agreed heartily. “But it’s good that he can bring his message to the country. We don’t need any more liberals going to Washington messing in our business, and Wade is doing an important job, making sure people know what this Sophy
Duran-goo
is really like.”

I dug my nails into my palms to keep the anger out of my voice. “The person who killed her, Tommy Glover . . .” I let my voice trail away.

“That was another sad story in the neighborhood,” Jackie Beringer said. “He just was mentally—I don’t know what word we’re supposed to use now. But he could never learn his alphabet. He’d try to say it, and he’d get up to the letter ‘g,’ and then he’d forget. He’d be so upset, some days he cried. Back then, this was still like a little country town and folks looked out for him. He used to follow Maggie around some, but no one ever thought he meant any harm by it. He’d follow a dog for a day, or sometimes ride with the local volunteer fire crew or the sheriff’s deputies—we were all so surprised when he killed Maggie, but the deputies said likely Tommy saw my Link kissing Maggie and got all excited and confused. His ma, she begged and pleaded, she said he never could have hurt a soul. But he was twenty or something like it, big guy, it was obvious he was plenty big and strong enough to kill a little bit of a thing like Maggie.”

“Someone saw him do it?” I asked.

“No, but Maggie, she was crossing through the woods as a shortcut to get to her job—she worked as a cashier at the drugstore; back then it was a little local-owned place, not a Kendrick’s, like we have now—and Wade said he saw Tommy go into the woods after her. Wade didn’t think anything of it, of course, because Tommy was always wandering around. It wasn’t until late in the afternoon, when they called from the drugstore wondering where Maggie was, that anyone went looking for her, and it wasn’t until night, when he got off work, that my Link came on Tommy Glover staring at her where she was lying in the lake.”

I got the same story in shorter and longer forms from everyone I talked to, along with praises for Netta Glover for standing by her boy. She’d been a good mother before he went and killed Magda, no one blamed her for one minute. She taught him at home, showed him how to do simple jobs like shovel snow or mow lawns and that was how he made a little money. But she’d been at work herself when Maggie was killed, so how could she possibly be a witness to his innocence? Everyone reckoned it was just as well for him to stay at Ruhetal until he died: what were you going to do, let a big man with no sense run around loose in the community?

It was past seven when I finished talking to people who had known the key players. I was about to head back into the city when something occurred to me. I called Murray; I heard bursts of laughter and glasses clinking in the background when he answered.

“How’s the girl detective?” he said. “Any dazzling feats of investigation that make the rest of us look like chumps?”

“I detect that you’re in a bar, and that you imagine you’re being amusing and conciliatory at the same time, but that’s more the result of my psychic powers than active investigating. Do you happen to remember the names of the long-term mental-health inmates you were proposing to look at it in the series you pitched to Weekes?”

“Why? You have proof that one of them is Weekes’s love child?”

It is not fun talking to people who’ve been drinking, especially when they think they’re being witty. “Murray, my psychic powers are seeing one of the names glowing green in my mind, but I can’t quite call up the other two.”

He was instantly serious. “What happened? Did one of them escape? Was he released?”

“You have the names on you in the bar or bleacher seats or wherever you are?”

“Hang on a second.” He put his phone down; over the roar of laughter, talk, clinking glasses, a woman asked what was going on, didn’t he know it was rude to take calls when you’d invited someone out for a drink?

“It is, it is, you’re so right,” I heard Murray’s babble. “But this is V. I. Warshawski, and I think she’s got something.”

I smirked at myself in the rearview mirror: You are hot, V.I., and all the guys know it.

A scrabbling sound, Murray scraping his phone across the bar. “Hey, Warshawski. Yeah, I kept the e-mail in my inbox to spit on every now and then. The three guys at Ruhetal were Greg Robertson, Tommy Glover, and Sheldon Brookes. You want the names from Elgin, too?”

“Not tonight. Did you do any digging on them, find out what crimes sent them to Ruhetal?”

“No, I just pulled them out of the DOC database. Why?”

“I know you’re on a date and it’s Friday night and all, so I hate to interrupt.”

I paused and waited until Murray practically screamed at me to deliver. “I believe I know why Harold Weekes canceled the series.”

45.

FIRE TRUCKS, FIRE TRUCKS

T
HE LAWYER-PATIENT VISITING ROOM AT
R
UHETAL WASN’T
much different from rooms like it that I’d used in the state prison’s. Scarred furniture, stained gray carpet, the smell a mix of disinfectant and urine. The main difference was that the guard who brought Tommy Glover down to see me didn’t stay in the room with us and didn’t manacle Tommy first.

I met with Tommy Glover on Sunday, during peak visitor hours. The whole hospital complex, including the forensic wing, was loud with noise—crying babies, anxious lovers, querulous spouses, sullen adolescents who’d been dragged against their will to visit a strange relative. I felt so fretful about the time slipping through my fingers that I hadn’t wanted to wait for a weekday.

“Tommy, your visitor is here,” the orderly who brought him to the lawyer-patient meeting room said. “It’s great that you’ve come to see him, Ms. Warshawski. Since his mother died, he hasn’t had any visitors and he misses company. Tommy, this is Ms. Warshawski. Can you say that?”

Tommy blinked at me. He was a big man, somewhere in his forties, with heavy jowls and close-cut iron-colored hair. He tried to say my name but it got strangled in his throat.

“How about ‘Vic,’ ” I suggested. “Tommy, I’m Vic.”

“Hi, Vic,” he said, after a bit of prodding from the orderly.

“I have a lot of people to see to this afternoon,” the orderly said. “You’ll be fine with Tommy here, but when you’re done, or when he gets tired and wants to quit, you push one of the buzzers.” He showed them to me, in the table, by the door, on the floor. “He understands most things pretty good if you talk slowly enough and don’t use real big words.”

“Fred? Fred?” Tommy said as the orderly started through the door. “This lady, is she a friend of my mom?”

“She’s a lawyer, Tommy,” the orderly said. “She wants to see if you need help with the law.”

“The other lady, she was a lawyer, my mom brought her to see me. She had hair that was so pretty I wanted to touch it and she said, fine, you can touch it, but then Xavier made me stop.”

“That’s too bad,” I said, as Fred shut the door. “I think I know that lady lawyer, and you’re right, her hair is very pretty. Let’s see if we can find her picture in here.”

I pulled some photographs out of my briefcase. Murray and I had spent Saturday putting together a portfolio of everyone I could think of who had a connection with the case: the Salanters, Gabe Eycks, Iva and Miles Wuchnik, the Carmilla club girls, my cousin from Chicago. I also included the lawyers from Dick’s firm.
I’d found a snapshot of
Leydon and me in our law school robes, grinning like maniacs, another of Leydon at my wedding in a gauzy white hat.

Murray brought the pix we could find online, or in my old snapshots, to the photo director at the
Herald-Star.
The photo director, who’d worked with Murray for years, didn’t try to probe into why we were getting headshots of Chaim Salanter or Wade Lawlor; he just grunted and cropped Leydon’s graduation shot so that we had a close-up of her face, the eager smile, the red-gold hair curling around her like fine-spun threads.

While Murray worked with the
Star’s
photographer, I’d gone back to Tampier Lake Township and found a couple of snapshots of Netta Glover at the Open Tabernacle Church. I’d also persuaded Jackie Beringer to lend me a photo she had of her son Link with Magda Lawlor; the man at the
Star
had worked his magic on these as well.

The town library had old high school yearbooks; I’d found pictures of an adolescent Wade, with his thick black hair worn like early Paul McCartney; getting contemporary photos was easy. I’d struck out with Virginia Lawlor, Wade and Magda’s drunk mother, but the yearbooks gave me a couple of shots of Magda, looking solemn and fragile in the high school chorus.

This afternoon, in the lawyer-client room, I laid a quartet of pictures in front of Tommy: Leydon, Julia Salanter, Eloise Napier, and Lotty. I asked if the lady with the pretty hair was one of them.

“That’s her,” he crowed, picking up Leydon’s picture and stroking her hair. “I liked her, I took her up to my room but then Xavier got mad, he made her leave, he said it was against the rules.”

“Do you remember anything the lady said?”

Tommy sucked on his index finger. “She said it was sad and terrible to lock me up here like I was a dog, some kind of dog, not like Good Dog Trey but a sick dog.”

“Rabid,” I suggested.

He smiled again. “That was her word. You and her, you know the same words! She said she could help me leave, maybe, and go live with my mom, but my mom died and the lady, she never came back, so now I just keep staying here with Fred and all these other people. Anyway, when people leave they get put in handcuffs, I see them, they get put in handcuffs and chained up in this old white bus, I hate that, I hate handcuffs, they make your hands hurt and hurt and hurt. The police make you safe but then they take you away from your mom and Good Dog Trey and make you hurt!”

“What happened, Tommy? Do you know why the police took you away from your mom and put you in handcuffs?”

Tommy looked at his hands, big hands, white and flaccid from long years without much to do. He was quiet for several minutes and I let him take his time.

“Because I was watching Maggie in the water. I didn’t know it was a bad thing, she liked me watching her, but she never woke up again, and the police took me away. First they put handcuffs on me and I didn’t like it. Then they took the handcuffs away because I was good.”

“Handcuffs are no fun, I know that. It’s good that you don’t need to wear them anymore.”

I took some more pictures out of my briefcase and started laying them out slowly, beginning with Tommy’s mother. His heavy face lit up.

“That’s Mom. She died, she’s in heaven with Jesus. Did she send you this picture? Is it from heaven?”

“No. The minister at her church let me have it. Mr. Ordonez.”

The name didn’t mean anything. “I miss Mom, she brought me clothes and trucks and jelly beans.”

“You like jelly beans, Tommy?”

“Yum, jelly beans are good, good, good.”

I hadn’t been sure I could bring food, or if he might have allergies I needed to know about. “When I come next time, I’ll bring jelly beans. Today, I only have pictures.”

Tommy didn’t recognize Salanter, or his daughter or Lotty. He thought he knew Sophy Durango but then wasn’t sure, but he recognized Wade Lawlor’s current photo at once, from seeing him on television.

He frowned over the old picture of Wade as a young teen for quite a long time, and then nodded decisively. “He lives next door. We don’t like him.”

“Who’s ‘we,’ Tommy? You and—?”

“My mom. He hates Good Dog Trey, I seen him kick Trey, then when I told on him, he called me ‘retard’ and said I was too dumb to know anything, but when I see I know, he was a liar, and you can’t call people bad names, like ‘retard,’ that is a very bad name.”

So Lawlor had started his name-calling career young. “Your mom told you that?”

“Yep.”

“She’s right. It’s a bad word and Wade was a bad boy to say it.”

“Yeah, Colin called me that and I punched him, but they took my trucks away.” His lips trembled in remembered injury.

“Who’s Colin?”

“You know Colin. He has all this long yellow hair and he laughs like—like the wild animals on TV, like this!” Tommy gave an imitation of a hyena’s laugh. “They gave him drugs and now he’s in prison. That’s what he gets for using bad words.”