“No, but Maggie, she was crossing through the woods as a shortcut to get to her job—she worked as a cashier at the drugstore; back then it was a little local-owned place, not a Kendrick’s, like we have now—and Wade said he saw Tommy go into the woods after her. Wade didn’t think anything of it, of course, because Tommy was always wandering around. It wasn’t until late in the afternoon, when they called from the drugstore wondering where Maggie was, that anyone went looking for her, and it wasn’t until night, when he got off work, that my Link came on Tommy Glover staring at her where she was lying in the lake.”
I got the same story in shorter and longer forms from everyone I talked to, along with praises for Netta Glover for standing by her boy. She’d been a good mother before he went and killed Magda, no one blamed her for one minute. She taught him at home, showed him how to do simple jobs like shovel snow or mow lawns and that was how he made a little money. But she’d been at work herself when Maggie was killed, so how could she possibly be a witness to his innocence? Everyone reckoned it was just as well for him to stay at Ruhetal until he died: what were you going to do, let a big man with no sense run around loose in the community?
It was past seven when I finished talking to people who had known the key players. I was about to head back into the city when something occurred to me. I called Murray; I heard bursts of laughter and glasses clinking in the background when he answered.
“How’s the girl detective?” he said. “Any dazzling feats of investigation that make the rest of us look like chumps?”
“I detect that you’re in a bar, and that you imagine you’re being amusing and conciliatory at the same time, but that’s more the result of my psychic powers than active investigating. Do you happen to remember the names of the long-term mental-health inmates you were proposing to look at it in the series you pitched to Weekes?”
“Why? You have proof that one of them is Weekes’s love child?”
It is not fun talking to people who’ve been drinking, especially when they think they’re being witty. “Murray, my psychic powers are seeing one of the names glowing green in my mind, but I can’t quite call up the other two.”
He was instantly serious. “What happened? Did one of them escape? Was he released?”
“You have the names on you in the bar or bleacher seats or wherever you are?”
“Hang on a second.” He put his phone down; over the roar of laughter, talk, clinking glasses, a woman asked what was going on, didn’t he know it was rude to take calls when you’d invited someone out for a drink?
“It is, it is, you’re so right,” I heard Murray’s babble. “But this is V. I. Warshawski, and I think she’s got something.”
I smirked at myself in the rearview mirror: You are hot, V.I., and all the guys know it.
A scrabbling sound, Murray scraping his phone across the bar. “Hey, Warshawski. Yeah, I kept the e-mail in my inbox to spit on every now and then. The three guys at Ruhetal were Greg Robertson, Tommy Glover, and Sheldon Brookes. You want the names from Elgin, too?”
“Not tonight. Did you do any digging on them, find out what crimes sent them to Ruhetal?”
“No, I just pulled them out of the DOC database. Why?”
“I know you’re on a date and it’s Friday night and all, so I hate to interrupt.”
I paused and waited until Murray practically screamed at me to deliver. “I believe I know why Harold Weekes canceled the series.”
45.
FIRE TRUCKS, FIRE TRUCKS
THE LAWYER-PATIENT VISITING ROOM AT RUHETAL WASN’T much different from rooms like it that I’d used in the state prison’s. Scarred furniture, stained gray carpet, the smell a mix of disinfectant and urine. The main difference was that the guard who brought Tommy Glover down to see me didn’t stay in the room with us and didn’t manacle Tommy first.
I met with Tommy Glover on Sunday, during peak visitor hours. The whole hospital complex, including the forensic wing, was loud with noise—crying babies, anxious lovers, querulous spouses, sullen adolescents who’d been dragged against their will to visit a strange relative. I felt so fretful about the time slipping through my fingers that I hadn’t wanted to wait for a weekday.
“Tommy, your visitor is here,” the orderly who brought him to the lawyer-patient meeting room said. “It’s great that you’ve come to see him, Ms. Warshawski. Since his mother died, he hasn’t had any visitors and he misses company. Tommy, this is Ms. Warshawski. Can you say that?”
Tommy blinked at me. He was a big man, somewhere in his forties, with heavy jowls and close-cut iron-colored hair. He tried to say my name but it got strangled in his throat.
“How about ‘Vic,’ ” I suggested. “Tommy, I’m Vic.”
“Hi, Vic,” he said, after a bit of prodding from the orderly.
“I have a lot of people to see to this afternoon,” the orderly said. “You’ll be fine with Tommy here, but when you’re done, or when he gets tired and wants to quit, you push one of the buzzers.” He showed them to me, in the table, by the door, on the floor. “He understands most things pretty good if you talk slowly enough and don’t use real big words.”
“Fred? Fred?” Tommy said as the orderly started through the door. “This lady, is she a friend of my mom?”