I walked over to the photograph and undid the clasps at the back of the frame. I had expected Iva to fight me, but she watched me passively, shoulders slumped. When I pulled off the cardboard backing, I didn’t find the photograph I was expecting but a newspaper clipping, yellow and brittle with age.
I unfolded it carefully and saw the faded color shot that had been the pride of Tommy Glover’s life: the Tampier Lake Township volunteer brigade, dirty from a fire they’d just put out, clustered around their truck. The caption read, “Tommy Glover joins Eddie Chez and the rest of the boys for a celebratory photo after battling a blaze at Reinhold’s Garage yesterday afternoon.”
I stared at it. I could just make out a much younger Tommy, arms around a big mongrel dog, both of them grinning ear to ear. I could understand why it mattered so much to Tommy, but not why Leydon or Miles Wuchnik would have cared about it.
There was a small paragraph about the fire, which had started in a pile of oily rags and gotten out of control. I looked at the top line, for the name of the paper. The story had run in the Southwest Gazette on July 7, twenty-seven years ago.
“Did Miles say anything when he sent you this picture? I don’t understand why—” I broke off in the middle of my own sentence, my spine turning cold.
The story had run a day after the fire. On July 6, when he was supposedly murdering Magda Lawlor, Tommy Glover had been with Eddie Chez and Good Dog Trey at Reinhold’s Garage. It had been a small story in a small suburban paper, but for Tommy, it was a treasure, his time in the limelight.
After the fire, Tommy had left his buddies and wandered through the woods to see if Magda was lying by the lake “to turn her skin brown.” Perhaps he wanted to brag to her about how he and Good Dog Trey put out the fire. He found her floating in the water and stared, hoping she’d look up and say, “That you, Tommy?”
And then Link, the boyfriend, came on Tommy, watching Magda lying dead in the water. I could almost hear the shouts, the hysterical accusations, What have you done, you damned retarded bastard? and Tommy’s bewildered I’m waiting for her to open her eyes.
“Miles told me to keep that for him,” Iva Wuchnik whispered. “What are you doing with it?”
“It’s private property, Ms. Wuchnik; it belongs to the man from whose room your brother took it. And it’s also evidence in a murder case. I’m taking it back to Chicago with me.”
Using my cell phone, I photographed the back of Miles’s picture where the clipping had rested, photographed as much of the ambient space as I could, and then took several shots of the clipping itself before carefully putting it into a file folder in my briefcase.
“You said your brother never mentioned anyone named Leydon Ashford,” I said, “but did he ever talk about a lawyer who was with Tommy Glover when he went into Glover’s room to take the picture?”
“He said there was some crazy lady pretending to be a lawyer who wanted the picture. He was lucky to get it away from her without tearing it.”
“She is a lawyer,” I snapped, “and one of the brightest who ever passed the bar. I want to know what she and Miles said to each other when they fought about the picture.”
“I don’t know,” she suddenly shouted. “I wasn’t there! You think you’re so special, coming in here, ripping up my property; well, you’re not. If that smart lawyer thinks she’s going to muscle in and make the money Miles promised—”
“Miles died because he thought he could turn this clipping into cash,” I said coldly. “You are an incredibly lucky woman that I am the person who figured out he’d sent it to you. If the people who organized his death knew you had it, you would be dead now yourself. If you take my advice, you’ll forget you ever saw this piece of newsprint.”
I turned on my heel and left. Behind me I heard her cry out that I could at least have put her brother’s picture back together.
I’d been on the go since five this morning, but I ran down the three flights of stairs to the lobby, propelled by a nervous energy, a need to get back to Chicago as fast as possible and get this clipping into my safe.
I tried to phone Murray: I didn’t want to be the only person who knew about this. When his phone rolled over to voicemail, I left a message about what I’d found, urging him to go into the Southwest Gazette archives to get the details on the July 6 fire all those years back.
The photo was crucial, because the story didn’t say anything about Tommy. The photo was the only proof that Tommy had been elsewhere when Magda Lawlor was being murdered, and pictures often didn’t show up in microforms, especially not from small suburban newspapers. We needed more print copies, I told Murray’s voicemail, along with the log of the fire department, if it even still existed after all this time.