“What we do about Leydon is our business. All I can do is ask you to leave us alone. Leydon has caused us many decades of heartbreak and embarrassment, and if she dies from yesterday’s injuries, we will all be—” She stopped, unable to think of a graceful way to finish the sentence.
“Ecstatic?” I suggested. “Jubilant?”
The lines around her thin mouth deepened. “We would be within our rights to feel some relief from the misery she’s caused us all these years.”
“Your daughter has been a hard burden,” I said, squeezing her hand in mock sympathy. “And yet you bear up nobly. I’ll make sure her doctors know that you’re too distraught to be interrupted with bulletins about her health.”
17.
CLEANING OUT THE DEAD
I TOOK THE LONG, SLOW ROUTE DOWN SHERIDAN ROAD BACK to the city, forty miles of meandering roads, with the lake on my left hand keeping the worst of the summer heat at bay. Leydon’s mother had depressed me, as she doubtless meant to, with her dig about why Leydon used to bring me up here. Mr. Ashford had been an overwhelming presence in the family and Leydon had never felt able to stand up to him directly. I might not have been as clever at remembering Joyce or quoting Puritan preachers, but I wasn’t afraid to tackle Sewall Senior, over everything from his disdain for women in public life to his virulent racism.
“Leydon loved me,” I said aloud, as if Leydon’s mother could hear me. “She might have used me to give herself a stronger voice, but none of you Ashfords are worth as much as one strand of her red-gold hair. So there!”
I finally meandered to my office. Heat rose from the sidewalks in translucent sheets. The tree that my leasemate and I had planted in a hole she’d drilled through the concrete outside our front door was gray from smog and humidity. And no one seemed to care that we’d put a large trash can along the curb—the usual dreary detritus of the heedless lined the street—empty bottles, cups, plastic bags.
Inside my office I resisted the urge to collapse onto the cot I keep in my supply room. I returned e-mails and phone calls, did some desultory work for my paying clients, and then asked LifeStory, my favorite search engine, to fetch me details on Miles Wuchnik.
While the computer searched, I called Nick Vishnikov, the deputy chief medical examiner. Even though I’m not with the police, we serve on a human rights committee together, and he’s willing to give me autopsy results.
“He died where you found him, which you probably already guessed from the amount of blood. But he’d been whacked on the back of the head first, which explains why he was lying so peacefully on his tomb.”
I saw him on the catafalque. Leydon’s line, or Joyce’s, ran through my head. Still, it sounded as though I could end my inchoate fears about Nia Durango and Arielle Zitter having lured him to the vault. They were two very enterprising young ladies, though—maybe they’d whacked him before they met the rest of their friends at the Dudek apartment. Perhaps they figured out a way to drag him up the steps onto the vault. Or agreed to meet him in the tomb and then hit him.
I put the possibility cautiously to Vishnikov.
“I doubt it. I can’t see two young girls being strong enough to heft an unconscious body onto a slab as high off the ground as that one was. Anyway, he didn’t have the kind of scrapes and abrasions you’d find if he’d been hoisted up the side of the slab. Whoever put him there lifted him. Unless your girls are junior weightlifting champs, I’d strike them from my ‘possibles’ list.”
By the time I finished talking to Vishnikov, LifeStory had finished its study of Miles Wuchnik. He, and his two brothers and one sister, had been born and raised in Danville, Illinois, home of Dick Van Dyke, Bobby Short, and the Danville Correctional Center. He’d played high school football, and studied criminal justice at Eastern Illinois University, taken a job with the Illinois State Police, and then moved to the Chicago area nine years ago, where he set up as an investigator in private practice, specializing in finding lost and missing people but willing to do pretty much anything.
His sister still lived in Danville; both parents were dead and his brothers had moved farther afield. Like me, Wuchnik had been married once and divorced; his ex-wife, Sandra, had remarried five years ago and was living in the southwest suburbs. Miles lived alone in Berwyn, a modest town on the border of Oak Park where Frank Lloyd Wright was king. As far as I could tell, Wuchnik’s office had been in his home and his car.
LifeStory couldn’t tell me whether Wuchnik’s family had come from Vilna, and whether Chaim Salanter had been pals with Wuchnik’s father, or perhaps grandfather, when they were little boys before war spattered and scattered Lithuania. Neither could my other favorite violator of privacy, The Monitor Project, although the Monitor told me Wuchnik had left an estate of thirty-two thousand, less whatever his outstanding debts were.