Breakdown (8 page)

I walked all the way down Hamilton Avenue to the end of the street, but didn’t see a phone.

7.

FRIENDS I’D RATHER NOT HAVE

I
DECIDED TO SWING BY THE
D
UDEKS ON MY WAY HOME.
Mr. Contreras waited in the car with the dogs, listening to the Sox on the radio, while I spent a fraught half hour with Lucy and Kira’s mother. Since I don’t speak Polish, I had to rely on the girls’ translating skills to discuss what had happened last night. The only reason I had any confidence that the truth was transmitted was the quarreling that went on between Lucy and Kira: Kira was trying to put a spin on the story that Lucy wouldn’t accept.

I also had to tell Kira I hadn’t found her cell phone. This caused some fierce words between mother and daughter that ended with Kira stomping out of the room. I left soon after, without learning how serious an issue Ms. Dudek’s immigration status was. As a matter of form, I gave Ms. Dudek my card, although the language barrier meant I didn’t really expect her to use it.

“How could she be here eight years and not speak a lick of English?” Mr. Contreras demanded when I reported on the meeting.

“I don’t know. The kids translate for her, she’s mostly around other Polish speakers. I suppose she keeps hoping she’ll save enough money to go home. My mother never was truly fluent in English; she always spoke Italian to me. I think in some corner of her mind she kept a dream that she’d return to Italy and sing.”

Maybe dreaming of a triumphal return to Pitigliano was the only way Gabriella could get through those days in South Chicago, with the dust from the mills covering everything, and no one around who cared as passionately as she did about art or music.

“My folks spoke English at home.” Mr. Contreras sounded as though he was ready to start a full-scale rant, but he paused, then added in a surprised voice, “Come to think of it, they had to. My ma came from Messina and my dad was from Naples, and they neither of ’em could understand the other’s dialect. It was like the fighting at Anzio to hear them going at it, which one of them spoke real Italian.”

When we reached home, my answering machine was blinking. So few people call my landline anymore that it was strange to see it lit up so excitedly.

The first message was from a Julia Salanter. “It’s important that we talk
today,
so please call as soon as you get this message.”

My answering service had texted me that she’d called my office with the same message—I just hadn’t taken time to scroll through my texts this afternoon.

I didn’t know Julia, but I sure knew the name: the Salanter family were power players in Chicago. They had one of those fortunes where you don’t have enough fingers and toes to count all the zeroes in their holdings. I knew a little bit about Chaim Salanter from Lotty, because he’d started the Malina Foundation. I hadn’t paid close attention, but I think she said Salanter came from one of the Baltic states in his teens, made a fortune in scrap metal or commodities or something, and set up the foundation to ease the path for other immigrants.

I did a quick look at the family online. Julia was Chaim’s daughter; she chaired the Malina Foundation. A son, Michael, helped run the trading company. So Julia probably wanted to talk about the foundation’s exposure to liability or publicity from last night’s episode.

The next five messages, in rising levels of intensity, all came from one voice, high, bright, imperious. “Victoria! Are you there? Pick up the phone! We need to talk!”

“Victoria, this is hot, you’re all I’ve got, I need you a lot! My situation’s fraught. If
you
called
me
I’d be off like a shot.”

“Victoria, you’re making me crazy. You know who this is, I can’t say my name, but it’s not a game. Answer me, come on, I wouldn’t be begging if they weren’t coming after me.”

I felt a sinking beneath my diaphragm. I did indeed know who that was. There had been a time when I answered Leydon Ashford’s calls on the first ring. Returned the messages as soon as I got them.

Leydon Ashford was the first person I ever encountered who had two last names. We’d both grown up along the shores of Lake Michigan. The difference was, her family owned an eighteen-room mansion backing onto three hundred yards of private beach, whereas the Warshawskis’ five-room bungalow was separated from the lake by a century of cyanide-laced landfill.

In our law school days, just hearing Leydon’s voice on the phone conjured the glamour and excitement she seemed to embody. It was only later that she came to embody trouble—urgent summonses to places where she didn’t appear, tempestuous monologues that started with a point but ended in a bewildering morass, and trips to the emergency room that became more frequent with time.

When I first met Leydon, in our Civil Procedures study group, I’d been prepared to despise her, along with her family, and the Austin-Healy Sprite her father gave her when she graduated from Wellesley. Leydon looked like a fairy-tale princess—she had hair like spun gold, and she seemed to float when she walked, like a feathery ballerina. I wasn’t a ballerina, I was a street fighter, a product of the mills and ethnic wars of Chicago’s Steel City.

Even so, we became friends, sharing the same political meetings, law school study groups, even the occasional family holiday. Leydon held me in her arms the afternoon I’d come from taking my dad to the ER when he’d been drowning in his own lungs. She called me “Victoria,” not “Vic,” because she said it matched my regal bearing.

Leydon had tried to talk me out of marrying Dick Yarborough: “I know that type, Victoria, I grew up with guys like him. He only wants to marry a strong woman so he can wrestle her to the ground and grind the life out of her.” She brought me a case of champagne and a dozen roses the day I called to tell her we were divorcing.

It was I who’d helped her celebrate her appointment to clerk for Justice Brennan—her family thought she was a traitor, that Brennan was a dangerous subversive.

And it was I, not her parents, who got her to the hospital the first time. The week before we took the bar exam, she became convinced that her father was sending a hit man to stop her from becoming a lawyer. Her father had opposed her law school education. He didn’t like women who were aggressive, who tried to do men’s jobs, and more than once, he and I had clashed at the Ashford dinner table.

When Leydon started talking about hit men, I thought she was joking. Then I thought she was short on sleep. It was only after I found her huddled in a corner of the stacks at the law library that I realized she needed help.

She recovered quickly that time, quickly enough to pass the bar in the next exam cycle, which she did brilliantly. Her next episode didn’t occur until she was back in Chicago, on the fast track at one of the big firms, when she started delivering all her reports by hand because the Department of Justice was monitoring her outbound mail. After that, the periods of hospitalization became longer, and the time in between them grew shorter.

I had lost the stamina for Leydon’s universe. I felt like a rat, but I’d stopped returning her calls. It had been over a year since I’d last talked to her, and listening to her frantic messages this afternoon, I knew I wasn’t ready to deal with her again.

I called Julia Salanter instead.

“Ms. Warshawski, I want to talk to you today.”

“Great. I have a few minutes right now.”

“It will be better if you come to my home.”

“If you’re concerned about the Malina Foundation, I can’t advise you. And it can surely wait until tomorrow: I have an opening in my schedule at—”

“I understand you’re related to Petra Warshawski, who’s working with some Malina book groups. I need to discuss what the girls were doing last night.” She gave me an address on Schiller Street and hung up on my abortive protest that I was busy.

I looked at my watch. Ten to four. Jake and I were due at Lotty’s at six-thirty, and I wanted to make sure I was home in time to ride over with him. I hate the assumption of the rich and powerful that when they say “jump,” the rest of us salute and say, “Ma’am, yes, ma’am!” But Julia Salanter’s reference to Petra worried me—if she was going to hold my cousin responsible for the girls’ extracurricular behavior, I’d have to hire every law firm in town to protect her, and even then I probably wouldn’t succeed. Which meant that I saluted and said, “Yes, ma’am,” and walked over to Belmont and Sheffield to pick up the L.

8.

MOTHERLY ADVICE

S
CHILLER
S
TREET, WHERE
J
ULIA
S
ALANTER LIVED, WAS BOUNDED
on the east by Chicago’s most popular beach and on the west by the city’s hottest bar scene. At four-thirty on a sticky July Sunday, every inch of sidewalk was filled with sunburnt young people heading from beach to bar, or vice versa. If I’d driven I’d never have found parking: the traffic was bumper to bumper along both Clark and Division Streets.

I muscled my way through people texting, people carrying coolers, kids drumming on overturned buckets, mango vendors, ice cream carts. Car stereos cranked to the max shook the sidewalks, and the honking, drumming, screeching horde made me feel that my own street near Wrigley Field was a rural oasis.

Salanter’s house, which was shielded from the street by a forest of arbor vitae, was reached through a wrought-iron fence whose graceful curlicues concealed security eyes. I called on a phone embedded in the front gate. As I waited to be buzzed through, I saw a nice collection of empty bottles and food bags cached in the shrubbery.

Once I was inside the grounds, a houseman greeted me with an easy courtesy, but kept me waiting outside the front door until Julia Salanter arrived.

She was a small woman, with curly dark hair cut close to her head. She was probably attractive in a gamine kind of way, but this afternoon, tension was pulling her skin tight across her face. She looked at my PI license, and then at me, and invited me inside, but it wasn’t until I told her I knew Lotty Herschel that she actually smiled.

“I wanted to see you in person rather than talk on the phone because I’m hoping to persuade you to be as discreet as possible about last night. And also because I—because Sophy Durango and I—want to get a better idea of what happened than what the girls are saying.”

All the way down to the Gold Coast, I’d been imagining my conversation with Salanter, scenarios that started with her arrogance, my anger. Her statement took me so by surprise that I could only murmur something disjoint. She took that as a sign that she’d offended me, but I interrupted her apology.

“You can count on my discretion as long as you’re not asking me to conceal a crime, Ms. Salanter, or go against the interest of a client, but I really can tell you very little.”

“Come into the back with me, where we can talk in comfort. Physical comfort, at any rate.” Her mouth twisted in a wry smile. “And I’m one of those tiresome women who cares about her floors more than her guests; we ask people to take off their shoes.”

She gestured at a kind of bench made out of welded bits of scrap metal. “From my dad’s first scrap yard. He has a sentimental attachment to the car parts that started him on his road to success in America.”

I unbuckled my sandals while the houseman shut the front door. The street noise disappeared instantly. I stood, and the marble of the foyer felt cool and caressing against my toes. If I’d known I’d be barefoot in paradise, I would have washed my feet, which were as dirty as my shoes after traipsing through the cemetery. Maybe I’d even have removed the chipped nail polish.

The houseman, a tall bald man of about forty, asked Salanter if she needed his help with our meeting. I was interested to note that he called her by her first name.

“No, thanks, Gabe: Sophy and I have our script prepared.”

My hostess led me down a hall along a wood floor so polished it could have served as a skating rink. My sweaty feet squeaked as I trotted after her. We passed paintings, a couple of sculptures that seemed to be more twisted pieces of scrap metal, and a dress made out of metal mesh, but Julia was moving at such a clip that I caught only glimpses of the art, as if seen from a fast-moving train.

We landed in a small side room. Unlike the gleaming hallway, this was occupied space. Newspapers were spread across a low rattan table, a plate with half-eaten sandwiches was on another stand, and the floor was strewn with cushions so that people could lie on the thick carpet and read or dream or whatever seemed right at the moment.

It was chaotic, but reassuring, a nest where you could curl up and feel safe. And curled up in the middle of a white wicker couch was an urchin with a mop of curly hair. In the daylit lounge, she bore a striking resemblance to Julia Salanter.

I stopped to stare at her. “Arielle Zitter. What are you doing here?”

“I live here. Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

The tall girl who’d led the chanting last night was sitting on a stool near Arielle. She was drumming her middle fingers against her knees.

“And Nia Durango. Where did you girls go when you left the cemetery last night?”

“So your friend Jessie was telling her parents the truth. When her dad called me this morning, I didn’t believe him.” A woman I hadn’t seen at first spoke from the windows behind the couch. “Nia, Arielle, you have a lot of explaining to do.”

The Senate candidate was a tall, slender woman, whose hair, pulled into a knot at the nape of her neck, accentuated the severe lines around her mouth.

Nia and Arielle spoke almost in the same breath. “It was her idea!”

“You two blaming each other makes you sound like street criminals. I’m ashamed to hear you behaving like a couple of crooks caught with your hands in the till.”

That was Sophy Durango; Julia Salanter added, “I’m not interested in apportioning blame between the two of you and your friends. I want to know what you thought you could gain by lying to us. Aunt Sophy and I trust you girls, because we’ve always believed you were mature enough to understand the fishbowl we all swim in. We trust you to behave responsibly in public. To find out you both lied to us last night is a source of grief. And you have also created opportunities for Aunt Sophy’s opponents to attack her.”