“Right,” I smiled. “I know you’re overworked and I’m sorry to take up this much of your time, but one last thing: the murder Tommy was accused of—did it have anything to do with arson?”
“Arson? Good grief, no. Completely the opposite—it was water, drowning. You mean you don’t know? They said Tommy killed Wade Lawlor’s sister. His older sister, Magda, that Tommy drowned her right here in Tampier Lake.”
44.
NEIGHBORHOOD GOSSIP
“ARE YOU ALL RIGHT, DEAR?” DORIS KAITANO HAD GOTTEN up from her desk, was offering me water, wondering if I needed to lie down.
“I’m fine. Just an ignorant idiot.” I heard myself laugh wildly but tried to control it when I saw how alarmed Ms. Kaitano was looking. “He trumpeted his sister’s death in my face, but then he attacked my mother so that I paid attention to the attack, not to the rest of his text. It’s his best technique, it’s how he keeps people like Salanter or Sophy Durango off balance, isn’t it?”
“I think I should call someone. Is there anyone who can come get you?” Ms. Kaitano backed away from me uneasily, her hand hovering over the phone.
“No, no. I’m gone, don’t worry.” I thanked her for her time, her trouble, her information, babbling like Leydon at her most manic, sliding out the church door to sit in my car.
In death they were not divided. Not Iva and Miles Wuchnik. Not even Leydon and Sewall Ashford. Magda and Wade Lawlor.
After a time, my head cleared. When Kaitano revealed that it was Wade’s sister’s killer Leydon had been visiting, my brain had jumped off a cliff. I hated Lawlor so much that I’d assumed I’d found the thread that unraveled the whole tapestry, but it wasn’t that simple. Lawlor didn’t try to keep his sister’s death a secret: he wept like a lachrymose walrus every time he mentioned her on his broadcasts. And he didn’t keep Tommy Glover a secret, either. He’d referred to him obliquely as one of the “underdogs” I spent my time supporting. He would have killed Tommy himself if he’d known he wouldn’t get the death penalty, Lawlor had said on-air.
But. But. Wuchnik and Leydon had both been in the locked wing where Tommy Glover was housed. What had they unearthed?
If I was right that someone had paid Jurgens fifteen grand to kill Wuchnik, well, Wade Lawlor could peel off those Ben Franklins as if he were scraping carrots and not notice he’d spent them. But why would he want Wuchnik dead? My big breakthrough was beginning to look like more of the same confusion I’d been feeling ever since I went into that abandoned cemetery for the first time.
I wanted to see Tommy Glover, but I needed to take this one step at a time. Leydon had come back from the locked wing obsessed by fire, not water. I needed the facts on Magda Lawlor’s death before I did anything else.
The Tampier Lake Township Library lay a few blocks from the church. They had plenty of documents about the town and its history, with a special drawer devoted to their most illustrious native son, Wade, but nothing on the murder, just a few references to the tragic loss of his sister. Tampier Lake had never had its own newspaper. Their news was tucked into the larger Southwest Gazette. Between the Gazette’s microform copies and some of the subscription databases I called up from my laptop, I got what information was available.
On July 6, twenty-seven years ago, Magda Lawlor’s dead body had been found floating in Lake Tampier in the far western suburbs. There wasn’t much beyond that. Twenty-seven years ago, Wade Lawlor had been fourteen, not a national television celebrity. The twenty-four-hour news cycle lay in the future, so a suburban teen’s death didn’t make many waves, even a beautiful suburban teen.
Two days later, Tommy Glover had been arrested. The day of the murder, Magda’s boyfriend had found Tommy at the lake, watching her body from the shore. The boyfriend said Tommy had a history of trailing around after her. Nothing was said about a sexual assault, about whether Magda had tried to fight off Tommy. The one piece of forensic evidence the paper reported was that Magda had been strangled before she was put into the water.
I couldn’t find out anything about the legal process that had landed Glover in Ruhetal’s locked wing. There was no record of who had evaluated him, how his incompetency had been determined, or whether his mother had any reason other than her love to proclaim his innocence.