Breakdown (50 page)

There was a small paragraph about the fire, which had started in a pile of oily rags and gotten out of control. I looked at the top line, for the name of the paper. The story had run in the
Southwest Gazette
on July 7, twenty-seven years ago.

“Did Miles say anything when he sent you this picture? I don’t understand why—” I broke off in the middle of my own sentence, my spine turning cold.

The story had run a day after the fire. On July 6, when he was supposedly murdering Magda Lawlor, Tommy Glover had been with Eddie Chez and Good Dog Trey at Reinhold’s Garage. It had been a small story in a small suburban paper, but for Tommy, it was a treasure, his time in the limelight.

After the fire, Tommy had left his buddies and wandered through the woods to see if Magda was lying by the lake “to turn her skin brown.” Perhaps he wanted to brag to her about how he and Good Dog Trey put out the fire. He found her floating in the water and stared, hoping she’d look up and say, “That you, Tommy?”

And then Link, the boyfriend, came on Tommy, watching Magda lying dead in the water. I could almost hear the shouts, the hysterical accusations,
What have you done, you damned retarded bastard?
and Tommy’s bewildered
I’m waiting for her to open her eyes.

“Miles told me to keep that for him,” Iva Wuchnik whispered. “What are you doing with it?”

“It’s private property, Ms. Wuchnik; it belongs to the man from whose room your brother took it. And it’s also evidence in a murder case. I’m taking it back to Chicago with me.”

Using my cell phone, I photographed the back of Miles’s picture where the clipping had rested, photographed as much of the ambient space as I could, and then took several shots of the clipping itself before carefully putting it into a file folder in my briefcase.

“You said your brother never mentioned anyone named Leydon Ashford,” I said, “but did he ever talk about a lawyer who was with Tommy Glover when he went into Glover’s room to take the picture?”

“He said there was some crazy lady pretending to be a lawyer who wanted the picture. He was lucky to get it away from her without tearing it.”

“She is a lawyer,” I snapped, “and one of the brightest who ever passed the bar. I want to know what she and Miles said to each other when they fought about the picture.”

“I don’t know,” she suddenly shouted. “I wasn’t there! You think you’re so special, coming in here, ripping up my property; well, you’re not. If that smart lawyer thinks she’s going to muscle in and make the money Miles promised—”

“Miles died because he thought he could turn this clipping into cash,” I said coldly. “You are an incredibly lucky woman that I am the person who figured out he’d sent it to you. If the people who organized his death knew you had it, you would be dead now yourself. If you take my advice, you’ll forget you ever saw this piece of newsprint.”

I turned on my heel and left. Behind me I heard her cry out that I could at least have put her brother’s picture back together.

I’d been on the go since five this morning, but I ran down the three flights of stairs to the lobby, propelled by a nervous energy, a need to get back to Chicago as fast as possible and get this clipping into my safe.

I tried to phone Murray: I didn’t want to be the only person who knew about this. When his phone rolled over to voicemail, I left a message about what I’d found, urging him to go into the
Southwest Gazette
archives to get the details on the July 6 fire all those years back.

The photo was crucial, because the story didn’t say anything about Tommy. The photo was the only proof that Tommy had been elsewhere when Magda Lawlor was being murdered, and pictures often didn’t show up in microforms, especially not from small suburban newspapers. We needed more print copies, I told Murray’s voicemail, along with the log of the fire department, if it even still existed after all this time.

All the way back to Chicago, I kept an uneasy eye in my rearview mirror. I remembered the call Iva Wuchnik had gotten when I left her place the first time. She was angry with me; she would report me in a heartbeat to whoever she’d spoken to before. I didn’t think it would have been Lawlor, showing his hand in person. Maybe Vernon Mulliner, earning his mansion. Or one of the Crawford, Mead lawyers.

Even this late at night, traffic was heavy. Bouncing around amid the long-haul truckers and the SUVs, I was having a hard time telling whether any particular set of brights in my mirror was tailing me or just tailgating. When I-57 finally fed me into the Ryan around eleven o’clock, I got off and took side streets until I was sure I was clean.

I drove to my office: I wanted to get the newspaper into my big office safe, more secure than the little one in my closet at home. I could crash on the daybed in the back, even wash off in my leasemate’s little shower stall.

Our little parking area was empty. I surveyed the street, gun in hand. The coffee shop across from my office was closed, but the bar five doors up was still in full gear. Despite signs urging customers to respect the neighbors, the band noise spilled out onto the street, and the smokers, leaning against cars or girders, were creating their own field of noise.

Briefcase under my arm, I kept my gun in my hand while I typed in the code on my front door. One last look around the street, and I slipped into my building.

49.

IN THE AQUARIUM

T
HEY WERE WAITING FOR ME JUST INSIDE MY OFFICE.
I
smelled the sweat just after I turned on the lights. I had my gun out, but one of them hit me from behind, a chop to the back of the head. I fired wildly as the assailant’s arms locked around my neck.

I collapsed in his grasp, falling back against him, legs locked around his so that he had to go down under me. His head hit the cement floor and he grunted. I rolled over, but the blow to my head had dazed me and a heavy foot stepped on my gun hand before I could fire again.

I pulled my knees to me and kicked hard at the shin. Heavy-foot yelped and backed away, and I fired again, trying to roll over and get to my feet.

The man on the floor recovered and put an arm around my throat. “Sit on her chest,” he panted, and a third man was suddenly straddling me.

I tried to bite him but got a mouthful of vinyl. There were three of them, all wearing black hooded rain jackets. The faces of death, Kira had said. The faces of death looking down at me.

“Get a needle into her fast, before she does any more damage. That last shot, she clipped Lou.”

“Mulliner!” I recognized the Ruhetal security director’s voice. “This is how you earned your mansion, isn’t it?”

I made myself relax, deflated my chest, twisted to my side, was almost free, when I felt the sting of a needle through my cutoffs into my hip. I got a knee up and into the groin of the sitter, tried to stand as he fell away with a scream of pain, but then I fell myself, my head and arms as heavy as if a thousand pounds of sand had landed on my head.

“Ten milligrams. I thought that would get to her fast.” Mulliner speaking, proud of himself.

“Where’s the clipping?” I was sure I knew that voice, too, that fruity baritone.

I had to protect the clipping, I knew that. I could see my briefcase by the front door and I tried to crawl to it, but I was so dizzy and heavy-headed that I could barely move. One of the death dealers walked over easily, picked it up, dumped the contents on the floor, found the clipping.

“We’ll take care of this now,” Fruity said. He pulled a cigarette lighter from his pocket.

“No smoking in here,” I tried to say, but that wasn’t the point, the point was he was setting fire to the newspaper story, which I needed to save, it was so important, it was the story of Leydon’s life. No, that wasn’t right, but it didn’t matter, he was rubbing the charred fragments between his fingers and laughing.

“And now let’s get this overeager snooper to bed. She needs to sleep with the fishes tonight,” Fruity said.

“Not Marlon Brando,” I muttered. “Know you.”

“Yeah, bitch, and I know you, too. So up you get.” He laughed again and tried to pick me up. “Jeez, bitch weighs a ton! Give me a hand here, guys.”

“She got Lou in the nuts,” Mulliner said. “And my head isn’t too good, but hers won’t be worth shit in the morning.”

Mulliner put an arm between my legs, seized my arms, and tried to lift me, but a hundred fifty pounds of dead weight is hard to move.

“Why do you want to go all the way out to the country with her? Leave her here. Smother her or something and let’s get going.”

“Chicago cops won’t let it rest if they find her here,” Fruity said. “Anyway, it’s poetic justice.”

Together, Fruity and Mulliner got me up, slung me over Mulliner’s back. The motion made me seasick. I threw up and Mulliner swore, but he wobbled along, bouncing, making me sicker.

“Lou, you nutless wonder, stop crying, hold the doors,” Fruity said.

We bounced down the hall. Out the back door. Something hit my back. Pellets? Was Boom-Boom firing his air gun at me? Gabriella would be furious. No,
idiota.
Water. Water from the sky. Rain, rain, I made myself remember the word. Death dealers wear slickers, I get hit by rain.

Over Mulliner’s shoulder I saw the alley door to my building swinging loose. It opens from the inside only. How they got in, they blew out the lock. Noise, whole street full of noise. Sky noise, too. Thunder.

“I’m going home from here,” Lou said. “You don’t need me for anything else, and I need to get to a doctor; I’m bleeding all down my arm.”

“I always need you, Lou: I’m your client, and a good lawyer sticks with his client.”

Lou walked away. I wanted to cry; that was my only friend, he was leaving me with the death dealers. That wasn’t right, he was a killer, too.

“Everything all right here?” A male voice, sharp, concerned.

“It’s okay, buddy. We try to keep her out of the booze but she sneaked over here with a bottle.”

“Not drunk. Drugs, they drugged me, get a cop.” My mouth couldn’t shape words, nothing came out but my raspy breath.

Buddy was solicitous—did Fruity and Mulliner need help getting me to the car? Nope, not as long as I hadn’t thrown the damn keys away; I’d done that once and he’d had to call AAA in the middle of the night. I tried again to move my arms, but the punch I wanted to land drifted through the heavy night air like the tentacles on a jellyfish.

“We’re okay here,” Fruity said. “It’s embarrassing to have you watch—can you move along?”

“Buddy, don’t go.” My tongue had become thick and furry, a dog tongue that wouldn’t produce human speech.

Fruity opened a car door. Black SUV. Mulliner dumped me onto the backseat and I threw up again.

“Bitch threw up on my leather upholstery!” Fruity cried. “You should have warned me, damn it, Mulliner, I could have put some towels down.”

A whiner would complain if God poured gold from the sky onto his head, that’s what my mother said when our neighbor won a new Chevy in a contest at the mill and complained because he wanted a four-door.
Oro dal cielo,
of course, she said it in Italian and ever after that’s what Boom-Boom and I called him, Signor Oro, which made him mad because he knew we were making fun of him but he didn’t know what it meant.

“I’ll follow you in my car,” Mulliner said, slamming the door shut.

My head was spinning like a ride at the street fair. I begged and begged to go, all the other kids get to go, why can’t I? My mother said they weren’t safe, the company was unreliable, but Boom-Boom and I ducked under the fence and climbed onto the Spin Out and we both threw up the cotton candy we’d shared beforehand.

My eyes were still unfocused; I didn’t see my father standing by the gate, grabbing me as Boom-Boom and I staggered out.

“We never strike you, Tori,” my father said. “We think it’s brutal to hit a child, but what can we do to get you to listen? The companies that run these street fairs don’t bolt down their rides properly. If there’s an accident, do you know what that would do to your mother and me?”

He threw me down onto my bed. I was too big for it, maybe he was punishing me by making me sleep in my baby crib. He stuck his hand into my pants and took my keys, I couldn’t leave the house, but then he had pushed me onto the Spin Out and was whirling me around. “Stop, I’m sorry, stop, please,” but the bouncing and the whirling kept on and on.

I threw up again, but my mother didn’t wipe my face. She was too angry with me, I’d broken her heart for good and she was leaving me to rock and bounce in this horrible unsafe ride while the thunder rumbled and lightning bolted and a mean man with a voice from television laughed about me.

My head was filled with gravel. Signor Oro was so angry, he’d poured gravel into my ear. First he filled and filled my head with it. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t move. I was asleep, in the middle of a terrible nightmare, but I couldn’t wake up.

The ride stopped but my head was still spinning, too many circles, too much gravel, we were at a gravel pit, mean Signor Oro was going to fill me to the bottom of my feet. Where was my papa, even if he was mad at me he should save me.

Signor Oro leaned into the Spin Out. “Now how am I going to get you out of here? Where’s Mulliner? He’s supposed to be behind me, and he fucking disappeared on me.”

He pulled me to a sitting position. “I need a fucking crowbar to move you. Should have put that in my commentary, bleeding hearts add thickness to the belly. Maybe I will tomorrow when they put out the sad news you drowned. Snooping around Ruhetal, talking to the retard. But you got the clipping for me, thank you very much indeed.”

Clipping. My brain moved feebly, as weak as my heavy arms and legs. The story about Tommy. Not Signor Oro leaning over me. Wade. Wade Lawlor. He’d killed his sister, and now he was going to kill me.

“Why? Why you kill Mag?”

I slurred the words into Lawlor’s shoulder, barely intelligible, but they goaded him into fury. He flung me back onto the SUV’s narrow backseat.