12
Shooting Up
Mona lived in an old building that had probably been rather grand when it went up in the 1920s. Back then, each of the six floors held only two apartments, those big ten-room jobs with a cubicle behind the kitchen for the maid. In the nineties, some developer had gutted the place, converting grandeur into shoe boxes.
The elevator itself was a small box, barely big enough to hold the three of us. Husband and wife—ex-husband, ex-wife—moved together unconsciously as we rode to the fourth floor.
When we got off, Mona’s apartment was obvious at once: wooden slats were nailed across the hole left by the cops and a padlock had been screwed into the wall to keep the door shut. The sight was ugly and shocking. Mona’s hand shook as she burrowed in her giant bag for her keys. John silently accepted the scarf, the book, the billfold, the wad of tissues she pulled out as she hunted.
I had that prickly feeling that makes you think someone is watching you. When I turned to look, I didn’t see anyone, but down the hall there was a soft thud as a door was quickly shut. Some neighbor cared that we were here. I wondered if it was the woman who’d been screaming on television that she’d sue the condo board, that Mona Vishneski ought to be thrown out.
At last, Mona located her key ring, a plait of twisted metal, as laden with keys as a medieval jailer’s. It seemed to take her forever to go through them as she muttered, “No, that’s Ma’s storage locker . . . Oh, I think that’s Chad’s bike lock.” I resisted the desire to push her aside and work my picks into the lock.
When she finally had her door open and had stretched an arm around the corner for a light switch, I peered over her shoulder into the long rectangle that made up her living space. It had probably been an attractive shoe box a week ago, before the police tracked mud and salt across the newly sanded wooden floors and the area rugs that dotted them. One wall was lined with blond built-in shelves and cupboards.
Craning my head, still staying near the front door, I saw a stereo and a flat-screen TV. Mona didn’t have many books, but the shelves around the TV held pottery and treen, those small wooden objects whose original purpose always baffles me. The pieces were unexpected, and I looked at Mona again. What other unexpected depths might lie beneath that flat surface?
The kitchen stood at the far end, separated from the main room only by a kind of work island or maybe peninsula, since it was attached to the wall at one end.
Mona and John started into the room, but I put out an arm to hold them back.
“What all have you handled in here since you came home?”
Mona was startled. “I don’t know! How can I remember? The phone. I called an emergency service to put up the board and the padlock, like you saw just now, a place I used to use when I was at Mercurio. They remembered me and came right away, and while I was waiting, I’m sure I had a glass of water.
“I went into the bathroom. It was such a mess in there, Chad probably hadn’t even washed the tub while I was gone. I wondered if he’d taken his toothbrush.” She gave a hiccup which was half sob. “I stood looking at the sink and shaking my head over his messy ways like he wasn’t in a coma. They don’t know if he’ll recover, but you think these things automatically after twenty-five years: have you washed your hands, have you brushed your teeth.”
John put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed.
“I cleaned the sink. It . . . I don’t know, cleaning . . . When I’m upset, I clean.”
When I’m upset, I add to the landfill in my apartment. And then I’m more upset because the apartment is squalid. I wondered if there were drugs that could turn you into a neat freak.
“Then I went to my closet; I needed to get some sweaters. It wasn’t this cold in Phoenix, of course, and I knew I’d freeze to death at John’s, he doesn’t pay for heat, and—”
“Do you have to go through every detail of every sweet minute of your life?” John asked, his moment of empathy passing.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “You touched everything.”
“Is that bad?”
“If someone came in while Chad was asleep and planted the gun on him, it will be harder to find that someone’s traces, that’s all.”
“So you do believe he didn’t shoot that woman?” she said eagerly.
“Oh, Mona, why’d you have to go destroying evidence?” John said.
“How was I to know?” she defended herself hotly. “It’s not like you were doing—”
“Please.” I put my hands up traffic cop style. “Don’t argue, least not on my dime. It doesn’t help the investigation. And before you get too carried away blaming Mona for her glass of water, look at the mud and scratches the cops left behind. If someone else was here ahead of them, the police did a good job of wiping out all signs of them. Let me see the bedroom.”
Mona took me across the big room to her bedroom. Parting the blinds, I looked out at an enclosed courtyard, big enough for a bit of garden and some tables and chairs. The skeleton of a swing set rose out of the snow.
The building had been carved up in a way that created small alcoves in the bedroom. One held a desk, where Chad had left a partly eaten chicken dinner on top of a heap of bills and papers. While I inspected the bed, I heard Mona clucking over the bills under her breath.
Chad promised to pay the phone bill and the car insurance, but here are the envelopes not even opened! And Chad’s MasterCard . . . Who let him have a credit card when he didn’t have any income?
“And these holes in the wall!” she cried out so loudly that John came into to the room.
We both went to look at the wall. Three ovals that cut deep into the drywall made a little triangle over the desk. The paint had come away in a lip around each hole.
“They weren’t here before you left for Arizona?”
“My goodness, no. You notice a thing like that. Was he trying to put up a picture?”
“I think he was using your wall for target practice.”
“Shooting at a wall? Chad? But that’s just ridiculous!”
I took a letter opener from the desktop and dug around in the lath behind the drywall. I was able to recover one bullet, which I showed the Vishneskis. Both of them were shocked; Mona suggested in a feeble voice that one of Chad’s friends had come home drunk with him and shot at the wall.
“It’s possible, of course,” I agreed, but I thought about the way Chad had behaved when I’d seen him in Club Gouge. He was angry enough, and drunk enough, to do just about anything. A disheartening thought, if I was the lead member of the defense team.
John shouted, “So what if he shot up the wall? It doesn’t mean he shot that gal at the nightclub. Means he knew to take his anger out on a wall, not a person.”
I smiled and patted his arm. “Right you are. I’m going to finish searching in here. You go find me some clean garbage bags for things I want to show to my forensic lab.”
Vishneski left the room, relieved to get away from the empty beer cans, the moldy chicken dinner. Mona continued to hover behind me, talking worriedly under her breath.
The bed was unmade, of course. The cops had come in, guns drawn. Everyone knew Chad was big and angry, so they’d tossed the duvet aside, grabbed him as he lay there, cuffed him. Maybe it was then they realized he was unconscious, not asleep. And the Glock that had killed Nadia Guaman, where had it been? I sniffed tentatively at the pillow and detected a hint of sour vomit but not of gunpowder.
I didn’t think the cops had searched the room, but, even if they had, I would bet they’d overlooked something. I started with Chad’s Army duffel bag, which sat open on the far side of Mona’s bed. It was like a mountain spring, with clothes spilling out into a small stream that eddied around the bed and the floor. I photographed the bag and the room with my cell phone before touching anything.
“Why are you doing this?” Mona asked. “What good does it do to see Chad’s mess?”
“We’ll know what it looks like today so if someone comes in and rummages, we’ll be able to tell.”
The chaos seemed overwhelming. I poked through the clothes Chad had dropped on the floor, not sure if it was worth taking any of them to the lab for forensic analysis. Most of his wardrobe seemed to be left over from his Army service—fatigues; a second, summer-weight field jacket. He had a handful of civilian T-shirts, including one with Bart Simpson copping an attitude. I felt in the pockets of the field jacket and the jeans and found the usual detritus of modern life: ATM receipts, a stick of gum, the earpiece for his iPod. None of it seemed particularly meaningful.
My shoulders drooped as I looked around at the rest of the room. Empty beer cans littered the place; two were buried in the duvet. I photographed them in situ with my cell phone, then picked them up, using a corner of a sheet to hold them. I laid them next to the pillowcase, ready to pack into a bag.
Mona clicked her teeth. “Chad never was really tidy, but when he got back from the war it all got worse. I knew he was drinking. You don’t like to think that about your child, but if I called after six or so I could tell by his voice. We tried to get him to go to a counselor, John and me both, and he did see this lady at the VA for a bit. But then he said she was just a waste of time, and he wouldn’t go back—”
“You said his phone was still here,” I cut in, “but I don’t see it.”
“Oh. Yes. It was on the kitchen counter. I’ll go get it.”
I searched through the pile of clothes spilling from Chad’s duffel bag and looked into the bag itself. I didn’t see the black object Chad had been waving under Nadia’s nose the night before she was killed.
I stuck a hand between the mattress and box springs and found two guns, a Magnum Baby Eagle and a Beretta. I smelled them. Both had been fired and not cleaned, but it was hard to say how long ago that had been. Maybe Chad had lain in bed one night, shooting at the wall, and tucked the guns back under the mattress. I laid the guns under the pillowcase so his parents wouldn’t see them and start fussing over them. I’d get the Cheviot labs to give me an idea how long it had been since they’d been fired.
A further search under the mattress turned up a copy of Fortune magazine. Tucked inside were a couple of steamy publications: Mags4Lads, from Britain, filled with giant-breasted women committing extraordinary athletic feats; the other, in Arabic, had similar pictures. Both English and Arabic readers favored blondes, with a sprinkling of redheads. Someone who read only ancient Sanskrit would have no trouble accessing the content of either.
I heard Mona’s nervous murmuring as she came back to the room and slipped the athletic blondes back into Fortune, then put the magazines into my briefcase. Chad’s mother didn’t need to see his reading material.
“I thought I saw his phone yesterday, but it’s not there now.”
“You probably just thought you saw it.” John had appeared behind her, holding a couple of black plastic bags. “You were tired and flustered, you know how you get. I’ve looked all over your living room, and it’s not there.”
“It was on the kitchen counter,” she fussed. “I saw it when I got my glass of water.”
I put all my specimens into the bags, conscientiously writing down labels on some scrap paper from Mona’s desk, and sealed them with her packing tape.
“If Chad’s phone turns up, give me a call. I’ve seen everything I need for now. It’s late, we all need some rest. If you want to talk to a criminal defense lawyer, Freeman Carter is good. He’s the person who got the court order that let you move Chad this morning. He has a new associate in his office who seems very capable to me, a woman named Deb Steppe whose fees won’t be as steep as Freeman’s.”
I wrote Freeman’s details down for them while Mona took the chicken dinner her son had left in the bedroom to the garbage. When she’d turned out the lights, she couldn’t find her keys. While she hunted through her purse, I picked them up from the chair where she’d dropped them on her way into the apartment. I had a feeling Chad’s phone was in that big shoulder bag of hers, but I was getting impatient to take off. If I couldn’t find a phone number for Tim Radke, the one friend whose name John and Mona knew, maybe I’d mug her and search her bag.
The door at the far end of the hall opened again as we waited for the elevator. If I’d actually believed in Chad’s innocence at this point, I would have talked to the watchful neighbor. The trouble was, I thought he was guilty. I was sloppy. It came back later to haunt me.
The storm had stopped when we finally got back downstairs. The building super was running a snowblower around the walks, and strewing salt, but beyond the building perimeter the snow was ankle-deep. I didn’t want to trudge through it carrying all the souvenirs I’d collected—Chad’s guns, his beer cans, his porn collection—so I waited at the curb while John and Mona went off to fetch the car.
When they dropped me at home, it was past eight. I knew I had to do something about the dogs. And now that I was away from the mess and tension in Mona’s apartment, I realized I was hungry as well. I was about to call Jake, to see if he wanted to walk up to Belmont for a snack, when my cousin phoned.
“Vic! Didn’t you get my messages?”
I’d turned my phone off when I was meeting with Mona and had forgotten to turn it back on. Petra had been trying to call all afternoon to say that Olympia was reopening the club tonight. Karen Buckley was going to do a special tribute performance in Nadia’s honor.
“I thought—I know they arrested that guy, that vet—but do you think you could come? Everyone’s so totally on edge, and Olympia is behaving strangely. It’s, like, something else is going to happen. I’d like you to be there—if you can, of course.”
I looked wistfully at my cozy living room and my dogs, who were panting hopefully in the doorway. “Petra, darling, on Friday I gave you my best advice and you ignored it. But let me repeat: You don’t have to keep working at Club Gouge.”
“Oh, Vic, I know, I know. I’m a pest. But you will come tonight, won’t you?”
Maybe I could talk to Karen Buckley. Maybe she would be more forthcoming after her performance than she had been at Nadia Guaman’s funeral this afternoon. I wasn’t too hopeful, but I told Petra I’d come down to the club after I’d run the dogs and eaten something.
“Oh, Vic, thank you, thank you. You’re the best!”
The best chump, she meant. I was more annoyed with myself than Petra. Why did I cave so easily to her demands?
I was worn out. When I finished taking care of the dogs, I lay down for almost an hour before heading back out into the cold.