“No solicitation in this building, young lady.”
I’ve never enjoyed the “young lady” greeting, and as I age I like it less and less, but I put on my best public face: confident, friendly. “No solicitation intended. I’m a detective investigating Chad Vishneski. I hear you saw the men who came home with him last week.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
I jerked my head down the hall toward his neighbor.
“Mrs. Murdstone,” he sighed. “Always minding everyone else’s business but her own.”
“What did they look like?”
“How should I know? I barely saw them. I was just trying to keep Wood-E here from going after them. He bites strangers.” He had the dachshund in his arms, but the dog was squirming, wanting to get at me.
I tried to look even friendlier. “How many were there?” I asked.
“Two, far as I could tell.”
“Were they white? Chinese?”
“White, I guess,” he said grudgingly after a moment.
“Tall? Short?”
“About average. Taller than you, but not by much.”
“About Chad’s age?”
“Maybe some older. More like your age, I reckon. What are you, forty?”
“Lucky guess.” In the dim light, anything was possible. “You know how they always have some trick in the detective stories: the guy limped, he had a scar on his face, he wore a ring with a Celtic cross in it. Anything stand out for you?”
“A Celtic cross? I don’t think . . . Oh, I get it. You mean, did one of them have anything odd that would make you know him if you saw him again?”
He was definitely going to the head of the class after this. I nodded, my warm, empathic smile beginning to make my cheeks ache.
“Not so I could say,” he said. “Real expensive clothes—I thought that at the time. You know, soft overcoat, not a parka like the rest of us put on. That all?”
He closed the door on Wood-E’s disappointed whine—my nose apparently had looked like a tasty snack. Dorrit was sliding the dead bolt home when he changed his mind and opened the door again. “One of them, he had this gold pin. It was like a military medal. Sort of like my Vietnam service medal, don’t you see. The guy didn’t look like a soldier, but I thought at the time that that was how they knew Chad. They’d been in Iraq together.”
“Thanks, Mr. Dorrit.” I stopped trying to grin and felt embarrassed instead. He really did belong at the head of the class.
I thought it over as I got on the elevator. Expensive clothes, military service medal. Maybe Tim Radke would know. Maybe one of them had been Tim Radke. True, he wasn’t anywhere near forty. But his pock-marked face made him look older, especially in a bad light.
The building super was out front salting the walks again. I asked him when garbage was picked up for the building. Tuesdays. Even if I’d talked to the old woman my first time here, I would have been too late to look in the Dumpster. A very minor consolation.
I started to build a frame, an outline, of what had happened the night Nadia was murdered. Two men came home with Chad. Where had they picked him up? Outside Plotzky’s bar? Or had they been waiting for him to come home? They took him upstairs, they fed him doctored beer, they put the Baby Glock in his flaccid hand when he’d passed out. And then they’d taken something—the vest Chad wanted?—out to the garbage. They’d waited until morning to call the cops, maybe figuring that Chad would be dead by then. One of them wore an Armed Forces service medal. But who were they?
While I waited at the long light on Broadway, I called Lotty, who was working late at her clinic. “Your Dr. Rafael worked a miracle with Chad Vishneski. He came to and asked for his vest.”
“Vic, I have eleven people waiting to see me. Don’t bother me with talk about clothes.”
“Lotty, before you hang up . . . We shouldn’t advertise the fact that he’s recovering. I don’t want the state’s attorney to pronounce him fit enough to move to County Jail. I’d like to see him live until his trial date, if we can’t get them to vacate the arrest.”
“I’ll talk to Eve about it.” Lotty’s mind wasn’t on my problem. “I’m backed up here for another two hours, so if that’s all—”
“Lotty, if he goes back to the prison hospital, or to the jail itself, he may be murdered, with his death conveniently blamed on some gang-banger in the jail. I think he was supposed to die of an overdose, and it’s only because he’s got some superhuman genes that he’s still alive now. We can’t risk sending—”
“Victoria, I don’t care why you think this: it doesn’t matter. What matters is my intensive care unit. I cannot have it turned into a war zone. If someone may attack Chad Vishneski in my hospital, then you must move him somewhere else. Too many other lives are at stake.”