“You never said you were a lawyer. As I recall, you claimed you were a detective the last time I saw you.”
“It’s not impossible to be a member of two professions at the same time. As Mark Twain said, you can be an idiot and a congressman both at once. I do understand, though, after Xavier Jurgens’s death, you can’t be too careful here.”
“Jurgens stole from the pharmacy. He died in Chicago, probably killed in a drug deal. Nothing to do with us here at Ruhetal.”
“Except for lax security at the pharmacy, but you can’t be everywhere at once. And speaking of lawyers, how did the Ashford family find out that Leydon Ashford had agreed to represent Tommy Glover?”
Mulliner did a narrow-eyed Clint Eastwood impersonation. “We keep track of who tries to stir up trouble in the forensic wing. Which means, of course, that I’ll be keeping track of you.”
“They give you a bonus for keeping track of people?”
He glanced at the guard, who quickly looked away. “What are you talking about?”
“That beautiful house you just moved into. Five million dollars on your and your wife’s salaries—that’s a lot of appreciation.”
The look Mulliner gave me now was more in the Hannibal Lecter category. “Private eyes who snoop into people’s private lives don’t last long out here. If you come around here again, I’ll take steps.”
My hand went involuntarily to my chest, to the place where the stake had entered Miles Wuchnik. “Mr. Mulliner, I’ve agreed to represent a patient in the forensic unit, so any steps that get taken will be in front of a judge. And I don’t imagine you want that kind of spotlight on your security operation here at the hospital, because then we’d have to talk to the Ashford family, and find out why they got to send their own PI out here. And whether they paid you for that privilege.”
He took a hasty step toward me, then realized that not only the guard but visiting families were staring at him. The tendons in his neck strained, but he managed to master his fury enough to say, “You’d better really be a lawyer. Do you have any proof?”
I pulled out the laminated copy of my PI license and the card that declared I was a member of the Illinois bar in good standing. Meaning I paid my dues every year.
Danced the dance, as Link and Magda had done, watched over by my client, Tommy Glover. I’d been surprised that Tommy remembered Magda so clearly. He didn’t have a good sense of the passage of time, but he remembered people. I pictured him in the shrubbery between his mother’s house and the Lawlor place, spying on Lincoln Beringer and Magda Lawlor, and shivered.
I felt sickened, too, by my own behavior. Vernon Mulliner wasn’t that far wrong: I was pretending to be a lawyer, pretending to care about Tommy’s interests, when all I really wanted to know was what went on in the locked wing that had interested Miles Wuchnik and Leydon Ashford both. The photograph, apparently, but what was so arresting about the picture of Tommy Glover with his local fire department? Why would that make Leydon return to her therapist overflowing with language about fire?
The social workers weren’t in on Sunday, of course; I’d have to talk to Tania Metzger tomorrow, to see if Leydon had said anything about Tommy’s photograph.
I’d hit a nerve with Mulliner, bringing up his mansion and his brokerage account. I hadn’t wanted to accuse him of dealing drugs in a public space, so I’d blurted out the idea of someone paying him a bonus to report on visitors to the locked wing. It had been meant as a wild guess, but now I was wondering if there was some truth to it. Maybe Wade Lawlor wanted to make sure his sister’s killer stayed permanently behind bars.
I needed to do more digging, to see if I could find out a way to learn who was bulking up Mulliner’s account. Maybe Murray could do some of the heavy lifting on that. In the meantime, since I was out this far anyway, I drove back south to Tampier Lake Township.
Twenty-seven years ago, when Tommy lived there, they’d had a volunteer fire department, but the town had grown, become incorporated, had a full-fledged department with two station houses. I struck it lucky at the first, where one of the men on duty directed me to an Eddie Chez.
“He’s an old-timer, he was here when it was just a bunch of volunteers who worked day jobs. He never lets us forget how easy we have it, not having to fight fires after teaching high school all day, which is what he did. Mind, Sunday afternoons, Eddie is likely to be on the golf course, but you can take a chance, see if he’s home.”
My informant called Chez for me. My luck held: Chez didn’t mind if I stopped by, although I should know that the grandchildren were visiting, too.
“Hope you’ve got time to burn, miss,” one of the other firefighters called as I left. “Eddie can talk the hind leg off a donkey. When that falls off, he moves on to the front leg.”