7
No-Smoking Zone
Olympia’s call effectually ended my brief sense of well-being. When we returned from dinner, while Jake practiced I looked up the news of Nadia’s killer. Web news sites can be as obnoxious as any tabloid—maybe more so, since it’s so easy to play with images.
“From War Hero to Club Killer” screamed the Herald-Star’s blog.
An anonymous tip led police to an apartment on a quiet street in Lakeview, where the troubled vet who allegedly murdered Nadia Guaman was living. Chad Vishneski, awarded the Bronze Star for valor in Iraq, couldn’t take civilian life. He returned with a ferocious anger that moved him from random acts of vandalism to the sinister, when he began stalking and finally murdered a young graphic artist at Club Gouge on Friday.
The Chicago native was a Lane Tech football star, who went to Grand Valley State on a scholarship, but dropped out to join the Army, where he served four tours before his discharge last summer.
I clicked on a link to a video report and saw footage of a woman, her face swollen with fury.
“The police broke down the door,” she said.
The video showed a door with the wood splintered behind a yellow crime scene banner.
“When I heard the noise, I thought it was Chad. He was so angry all the time since he got home, so I went in the hall to look. Only it was the police come to arrest him. Mona, that’s his mother, she’s out of town. She let him sleep there, even though everyone knows how unstable he is. The condo board is going to have to take action, maybe evict her—we could all have been murdered.”
The video footage shifted to Terry Finchley, standing solemn-faced in the lobby of the police headquarters building, holding a gun in the approved fashion—suspended from a stick passed through the trigger guard.
“We found the perpetrator passed out in bed with this Baby Glock next to him on the floor. Our forensics tests prove that this was the weapon that was used to kill Nadia Guaman.”
Someone asked if it was true that Chad had been brought in drunk. Terry said Chad had apparently taken a drug overdose. He was in the intensive care ward at Cermak Hospital, on the grounds of the Cook County Jail complex, over at Twenty-sixth and California.
I skimmed the rest of the story. Childhood friends recalled Chad as a lighthearted, fun-loving guy. He hadn’t been a football standout, but he’d been big enough to get a Division II scholarship. Back then, “his life was, like, girls, beer, games. The war, it gave him a reason to quit school and serve his country,” one high school buddy said. “When he got home, he was so different, just angry all the time. The war really messed with his head. You couldn’t be in the same room with him.”
The county had assigned him a public defender, although right now it was an open question as to whether Chad would regain consciousness, let alone have enough brain function to stand trial. Still, the PD gallantly told the press that his client was innocent, that this was all a terrible mistake. He didn’t add that the county public defender’s office didn’t have the resources to sort out mistakes, even if Chad’s arrest turned out to be one.
Poor Nadia, crossing paths with a distraught veteran. Poor Chad, another casualty of the endless Iraq war. Poor public defender, and poor Mona Vishneski, Chad’s mother. She’d been spending the winter in Arizona, looking after her own mother, but was flying back to Chicago to be with her son.
Mona Vishneski responded to the Herald-Star’s invasive questions with the age-old litany of mothers: “Chad is innocent. He’s a good boy. He never would have killed a girl at a nightclub.”
Of course, the maniacs in the blogosphere were out in full force, some braying that Nadia Guaman “had been asking for it,” since only an evil woman would frequent a place like Club Gouge. Others claimed that soldiers in Iraq got a taste for blood because of all the Iraqi civilians they’d been encouraged to torture and murder, and vets were bound to take out their bloodlust on innocent civilians, once they returned home.
Still others cried out against liberals who hated America and wanted to ban guns. “Obama used one of his Constitution-hating liberal stooges to commit the murder so he’d have an excuse to take away our guns,” warned one hysteric.
I switched off the computer. Chad’s life, Nadia’s death, weren’t my business, except for the way her face haunted me, asleep and awake. “Alley,” she’d whispered, her expression arrested, almost happy, as if this were a pleasant surprise, to be dying in an icy parking lot.
I went to put my arms around Jake. He smiled but didn’t stop playing. His fingers dancing up and down the strings were sinuous, erotic. My grip on him tightened. Finally, torn between desire and annoyance, he put his bow down and went to bed with me.
In the morning, I left while he was still asleep. It was dark, but I drove to the lakefront with the dogs and ran almost to the Evanston border and back, seven miles, in the thin January air, hoping to sweat nightmares of Nadia’s blood out of my pores.
By the time we returned home, the sky had lightened to a dull pewter. When I’d showered and changed, I accepted Mr. Contreras’s offer of French toast. He’d been a little hurt that I’d spent Sunday with Jake—it’s his job to fuss over me when I’ve been involved in violent crime—but, this time, his fussing had included ragging on me for getting Petra involved with Club Gouge. We’d had a fight about it Saturday night, but after a twenty-four-hour cooling off, we were both prepared to let bygones be bygones, more or less.
When I reached my office, a car was parked in front, engine running. My first thought was the cops, but this was a grime-crusted Corolla with a lot of years under its hood. As I typed in the code on my door keypad, the driver turned off the engine and climbed out of the car. All he had on against the cold was a worn khaki field jacket, unzipped.
“You the detective?” He pitched a cigarette butt into the gutter as he limped across the sidewalk.
“I’m V. I. Warshawski. And, yes, I’m a detective. What can I do for you, Mr.—?”
“Vishneski. I’m John Vishneski.” His face was lined and scarred, and his voice was a soft, tired rumble.
I paused, with my hand on the doorknob. “You’re related to Chad Vishneski?”
“His dad.” He shook his head, as if the relationship were new, or surprising to him. “Yes, I’m his dad.”
I shoved the door open—it always sticks more in the winter—and held it for Chad’s father. When he got inside, Vishneski carefully wiped his boots on the hallway mat three or four times, the gesture of a man who wasn’t sure he was welcome and wanted to minimize any evidence he’d been there.
I directed Vishneski to the couch in the client alcove and switched on the coffee machine in the back. While I turned on lights and put my coat and case away, Vishneski sat completely still, looking at nothing in particular. The cold didn’t seem to bother him, even though my office was barely sixty degrees. It’s such a barn of a place, I keep the thermostat turned low on weekends. I brought a space heater over from my desk, and sat down myself.
“I’m sorry for the trouble you’re going through, Mr. Vishneski.”
“Yep. It’s a hard time.” He made it a statement, not a complaint.
A minute or so went by when he didn’t say anything else. A lot of people have trouble getting to the point when they’re in the detective’s office. Like visiting the doctor: you have this lump in your breast, but now you’re in the office, you don’t want to ask, you don’t want to be told.
“Is Chad your only child?” I asked, just as a way to prod him into speaking.
“My only one, and I didn’t even know he was in trouble, not until one of the gals in the office called me Saturday night. My own boy, and I didn’t know. That’s what that I-raq war did, turned him into a boy who couldn’t call his old man when he was in trouble.”
“Would he have, before the war?”
He nodded. “We used to talk every day, even when he was off at Grand Valley State. Even when he first deployed. But then the war got to him. The violence. He saw his whole unit die around him during his third deployment, and that did him in. It was like he blamed me, in a way.”
“Blamed you?”
“I thought a lot about this,” he said. “I think he felt I should have protected him. I was his dad, see, and he always, oh, looked up to me. At least when he was small. I worked construction my whole life, although I’m a project manager now, for Mercurio. I was stronger than most guys, and Chad, he thought I could always take care of trouble around him, or me, and I always thought so, too. Until he went off to I-raq, where no one could protect him. It’s in my dreams all the time, that I should have saved him from seeing what he had to see. I couldn’t save him, and he couldn’t talk to me anymore.”
He stuck a hand reflexively inside his jacket pocket, then looked a question.
“You’re right,” I said. “This is a no-smoking zone.”
“Smoking in the cold outdoors—don’t know why pneumonia hasn’t carried me off by now.” He ran his fingers through his graying hair. “They’re holding my boy in a prison hospital ward. Do you know it?”
“Cermak Hospital. I’ve been there.”
“Terrible place. Terrible, terrible place. Just getting in to see my own boy, they searched me. I had to take off all my clothes just to see my son.”
Strip searching, it’s so humiliating. When you’re worried about your child, the violation is even more acute.
“My boy is in intensive care,” Vishneski was continuing. “He’s unconscious, but they got him chained to the bed. How can anyone get well if they’re chained to the bed like that? I begged them, Let me move him to a real hospital where he can get real care, but the judge, he set the bail at seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. If I can’t pay the bail, Chad has to stay there in the jail hospital.”
I could hear my office phone begin to ring behind the partition. Monday morning: everyone wanted me faster than yesterday.
“Why did you come to me, Mr. Vishneski?”
He rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “They told me you were at this nightclub, this Club Gouge. They told me maybe you saw what happened. Maybe you can explain what that dead gal did to Chad to get him so upset.”
“Who’s ‘they,’ Mr. Vishneski?”
“Oh. Secretary in the office, the gal who called to tell me about Chad. She read the whole story, going back to before Christmas, she came up with your name. She says you were in the club the first time Chad, well, started carrying on. She looked you up on the computer, read about your work. She told me you have a good reputation, you’re honest, you do a good job.”
“I do my best, but I’m not sure I can explain what happened between your son and Nadia Guaman. Was there something specific you wanted to know?” I sat quietly, hands easy at my sides, letting the calls roll over to my answering service.
“The woman who owns the club, she’s kind of a hard case, isn’t she? She says Chad kept attacking this Nadia whenever she showed up. Is this true?”
“You talked to Olympia?” I was puzzled. Surely she wouldn’t have been in bond court or at the prison hospital.
“I went over to her club yesterday afternoon after I went to see Chad. I wanted to see what kind of a place it was. The cops shut it down while they did their investigating, if that’s what you call it, but she was there, working on accounts or something. Like I said, I’m a project manager, at least I was until this economy destroyed the construction industry. You meet tough women in construction—well, they have to be to survive in that world—but this Olympia, she’d chew up my crew chief for dinner and spit him out and not think twice about it! She claims Chad tried to assault the dead gal. She says after someone broke it up, Chad must’ve lain in wait so he could shoot her. Is any of that true?”
I hate it when people ask questions for which there’s no happy answer. “I was at the club two times when both Chad and Nadia were there, and I’m afraid that both times Chad boiled over when Nadia did her drawings. The first time, he tried to jump her onstage, and the bouncer did throw him out. I’m not going to lie to you, Mr. Vishneski: I heard a snippet of a conversation between your son and Nadia in the parking lot. Each was accusing the other of spying. My first reaction was that it was an ugly divorce case. But if they weren’t lovers, if they hadn’t met outside the club, what was that about?”
“I don’t know.” He stuck his hand inside his jacket pocket again and then remembered we weren’t smoking in here. “One of his buddies called me, says at the time that gal was being murdered, Chad and them were all in a bar watching a Hawks game, and when it ended, Chad announced he didn’t feel well, he was going home. Going back to my ex’s, that meant.”
“Did any of them actually see him go home?”
Vishneski hunched a shoulder. “This one friend, he dropped Chad off. But when I told the cops that, they said even if Chad watched the game, it ended an hour before that woman was shot, plenty of time for him to pretend to be sick and get over to the club to lie in wait for her.”
The office phone had continued to ring while we talked. Now my cell phone chirped out a few bars of Mozart, my signal that one of a handful of key callers wanted me. I looked at the screen: my answering service was texting me that the cops, the media, and my clients were all getting restless over my inaccessibility.
“What is it you want from me, Mr. Vishneski?” I tried to mask my impatience.
“I want to know what really happened. I—my boy, he came back from I-raq in a bad way, I’ll be the first to admit that. He bounced off the walls, you couldn’t talk to him without getting your head bit off. He ran around with his Army buddies, got drunk, got in fights, couldn’t hang on to a job. But it’s hard for me to see him shooting a helpless young lady like that. I just don’t believe it. The cops, they’re happy to write ‘Case Closed’ on their file. And that public defender the county gave Chad . . . If he can remember Chad’s name when he gets into court, I’ll be surprised.”
“If he’s guilty, I can’t prove he’s innocent, Mr. Vishneski,” I said quietly.
“I wouldn’t want you to. But I need to know—What is it they always say on those law-and-order shows? ‘Beyond a reasonable doubt.’” He smiled, a painful crack in his lined face.
“What about the gun? The news reports say the cops found the murder weapon next to Chad when they went to arrest him.”
“It’s not his, I’m sure it’s not. Maybe he found it in the street and picked it up.”
I didn’t even try to respond to that parental fantasy. I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands, and Nadia’s face appeared behind my lids. Death chasing away anger, catching her by surprise.
“You said you weren’t sure you could afford bail for Chad, Mr. Vishneski, but I can’t take on a case like this pro bono.”
“I’m not asking you to. I’ve been running the numbers every which way all weekend. I’m still working three-quarter time, job-sharing with some other guys at Mercurio, although who knows how long that will last. Sorry, getting sidetracked. Mona’s getting into town tonight. I’ll talk to her. But if she agrees—she’s retired, took early retirement last year, was an office manager with Mercurio, one of their buildings—anyway, I think we can afford to hire a detective and still have something for a good defense lawyer, if we’re careful. If you can work without running up the bills on us. If you can recommend a good lawyer who’ll give us a bit of a break.”