The woman’s cell phone rang. She began an animated conversation in Spanish. I walked up the drive and let myself into the house. The lock wasn’t much of a challenge, and even if the Burbank police came around again I didn’t think they’d hassle me.
Jana had left in a hurry. She’d apparently dumped the contents of her closet and drawers on the unmade bed and abandoned what she didn’t want to take with her. Xavier’s clothes still hung in a corner of the closet, looking somehow shrunken and forlorn. I went through all his pockets, my flesh cringing, as if I were touching his dead body again. I found some spare change and a card from the Bevilacqua car dealership, but nothing else.
Jana’s remaining clothes also held nothing more interesting than used tissues and an empty glasses case. I scrabbled through bureau drawers and kitchen cupboards, hoping for some damned thing or other, a computer, a thumb drive, a cell phone, but whatever else she’d left behind, she’d been careful to take all her electronic trails with her.
I moved the bed away from the wall but found only large gray mounds of dust. Not good for an asthmatic, if that was her complaint, but there was no point in telling her that now.
A couple of thin blue aerograms covered in Cyrillic script had fallen behind the dresser. I put them in my briefcase. It shouldn’t be too hard to find someone who could translate them for me.
The landline sat between the microwave and the sink. I scrolled through the caller ID. Very few calls had come in over the last week, but I wrote down all the numbers and names; I could check them when I got back to my office.
The bathroom was in a state of complete disarray, with bottles of lotion and bath salts scattered on the floor amid used linens and Jurgens’s dirty underwear and hospital clothes. I fished through more pockets, even took the top off the toilet tank and looked under the float, but didn’t find as much as a parking receipt.
I scrubbed my hands at the kitchen sink, spraying them with Clorox and washing myself up to my elbows. I looked again at the landline. I had checked the incoming calls but not outgoing. The landline didn’t give a long history, not like a cell phone, but it did let me see the last five numbers dialed. One was an 800 number, which turned out to be Polish Airlines. The most recent was a local cab company. I was about to try a third, in the 312 area, when I realized I knew that number. It belonged to the main switchboard at Crawford, Mead, my ex-husband’s firm. They’d changed buildings, but the phone numbers were the same they’d been when he went to work there twenty-five years ago.
A plane made its final approach overhead, the noise drowning the hum of the refrigerator and a distant lawn mower. I sat down gingerly on one of the kitchen chairs and tried to think.
The sequence of calls Jana had made yesterday: she’d called 911 to report me to the police. She’d called Crawford, Mead. And then she’d booked a flight and fled town as fast as possible.
What had made her run? Me, with my news that her lover had been murdered, had that scared her into bolting? Or had it been her conversation with Crawford, Mead?
Miles Wuchnik had done occasional freelance work for the firm. Eloise Napier and her rodent-looking pal, Louis Ormond, had denied using Wuchnik recently, but this phone record made them look like a couple of liars. Wuchnik had gotten Xavier to let him into the locked wing, and somehow, Xavier had found out that Wuchnik was doing it for my ex’s firm. On behalf of a mystery client.
If I called Crawford, Mead, I wanted to make sure I had a good escape route planned. Maybe I could hole up in the Umbrian hills, where my mother’s father had hidden during the war.
I drove slowly back to the city, concentrating on the traffic, looking for anyone who might be staying close to me. I thought I was clean. I stayed south, returning to the University of Chicago. The closest parking was half a mile from campus, nothing when you’re fresh and the air is, too, but a wilting walk in the muggy late-morning.
I found the Slavic languages and literature department. The young man working the reception desk reluctantly put aside the thick volume he was reading when I said hello for the third time. He unwrapped himself from his chair to see what I wanted, proving to be such a tall, thin stick of a guy that I wondered how blood made it from his feet to his brain. I showed him the Cyrillic aerograms, explaining I was hoping to get them translated. He brightened: he was a graduate student in Russian literature; he could do the work in an evening. We agreed on a hundred dollars, but he waved aside my offer to give him half up front.
“Send me a check when I’ve finished. Just write down your phone number and your e-mail for me.”
He made copies of the letters for me on a machine behind him and was coiled back in his chair over his book—in Russian—before I’d left. It made me wistful to see someone so deeply in love with the written word that money seemed not to matter to him. So different from the world where I spend most of my time, filled with the dying or the lying.