My day didn’t unfold in a way that made me any happier. Back in my apartment, I found a message from Bryant Vishnikov. He’d phoned only a few minutes after I left. Hoping that meant he had hot information, I dropped my coat and purse on the floor and returned his call at once. He interrupted an autopsy to talk to me.
“Why didn’t you tell me the city wanted an autopsy on your stiff?” “Hi, Bryant. Have a nice weekend? Mine was good, too, thanks, just the usual two hours under bright lights with three law enforcement agencies. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but, despite my winsome manners, the police aren’t my biggest admirers. They don’t share their hopes and wishes with me. When did they order the autopsy?”
“The paperwork came over from Bobby Mallory’s office yesterday afternoon. When I called to explain I’d already done it, as a private job, Captain Mallory not surprisingly wanted to know who for. He said you were at the meeting Sunday where they agreed to send Whitby here for a second opinion. And he was not happy that you hadn’t told him that you’d hired me on behalf of the Whitby family.”
“I was at that meeting,” I agreed. “As a suspect in hiding an Egyptian boy from the Feds, not as a participant in discussions about crime fighting. What did you find when you did the autopsy?”
“Damn you, Warshawski, don’t blindside me like this and then think I’ll tell you what I know.”
“And damn you, Vishnikov, for calling me up to yell at me instead of talking it through with me,” I said, thoroughly angry. “I hired you in good faith, I followed the protocol you outlined for getting the body to you through a private funeral parlor. What did you find?”
“For nothing I’ll tell you what I told Mallory: there weren’t any external blows or wounds. Whitby wasn’t shot or knifed or bludgeoned before he went into the pond. He drowned.”
“And his blood alcohol?”
“The tox screen will come in tonight or tomorrow. That you can get from Mallory. I won’t charge you for my work, since the county ordered the same job, but you also don’t get a free look at the screen.”
He severed the connection. Whick, like slicing off the top of a corpse’s head. I looked at my hands with a sense of deflation. I had expected so much more from Vishnikov. I’d been so sure there’d be some kind of in jury … and then, the golf cart that had gone through the culvert-or maybe those wheel tracks hadn’t belonged to a golf cart. Sherlock Holmes would have measured a cart, taken a plaster cast of the wheels, checked them against the tracks in the culvert. Maybe I’d made up a whole lot of connections that didn’t exist, wanting to create a murder where there’d only been an inexplicable accident.
My father used to lecture me about being too impulsive. “Don’t ride your emotions so much, Pepper Pot. Take the time to think it through first. You can save yourself a lot of grief, and me as well.”
He’d said that more than once, but I vividly remembered his voice from a day he’d been called to meet me in the principal’s office. I’d tried to stage a sit-in to protest a schoolmate’s expulsion. I thought they’d done it because Joey lived in a shanty and stank; it turned out to be because Joey was setting fires in the lockers. I wondered now if riding my emotions was leading me to shelter another Joey, whether Benjamin Sadawi would prove to be a fire starter as well. I didn’t seem to have learned much in twentyfive years.
I took the dogs for a short run, then went to the safe in my bedroom closet for my Smith & Wesson. I drove out to the range and fired a hundred rounds, venting my frustration with myself more than anything else. I was off the target more than I was on it, which didn’t improve my mood; I went to my office feeling that I’d better be able to use finesse to solve my problems.
I didn’t remember any finesse when Bobby called me a little after ten. It was his turn to chew me out, for not letting him know that Vishnikov was already working on Whitby. “You heard that whole discussion about where the body was and who would do the second autopsy, and you didn’t let out one peep that you already had Vish working on it.”
“I’d been the subject of a hostile interrogation for over two hours. If I said anything to that crew, I’d have been there another two hours.”
“But later, when you were alone with me?”
“Bobby, you were focusing on the Egyptian kid, and I was tired-I forgot. Have you found him yet?”
“I’m telling you, Vicki, this isn’t a joke. If you know where Benjamin Sadawi is and you’re sitting on him, like you sat on the autopsy, I am personally going to tie you up in pink ribbon and deliver you to the federal marshals.”
“Use some other color, okay?” I forgot I was going to think things through before speaking. “You know I hate sex stereotyping.”