That depressed me further. If I died tomorrow, I wouldn’t leave a whole lot more to my heirs. My car, almost paid for, my condo, ditto. A modest 401K. Why hadn’t I followed my ex into private practice?
I went back out into the heat, stopping at La Llorona for a cold vegetable sandwich. I couldn’t resist Ms. Aguilar’s hot sauce, which meant that by the time I got back to my car, I had a line of red juice across my white knit top. Good thing I’d started the day in Lake Bluff—I never would have survived Mother Ashford’s withering scrutiny.
Even though I didn’t expect ever to bill Leydon for my work, I scrupulously entered my mileage, as I had on my way to Lake Bluff. In yesterday’s excitement I’d forgotten to include the mileage down to the university and back. That would be my donation to Leydon’s trust fund.
Berwyn, Little Bohemia, it used to be called, when Chicago’s Czech population filled its streets. There was a time when they called Cermak Road—the town’s main commercial strip—the Bohemian Wall Street, but the area had long since changed identities. A handful of the famous Czech bakeries remained, but they were outnumbered these days by taquerias. No matter what the ethnicity, Berwynites were house-proud: when I left the expressway and headed south, I saw that the bungalows were carefully painted and tended. Even without a phalanx of gardeners to clip the shrubs and fertilize the grass, the small front yards were tidy and well groomed.
Wuchnik’s home, mostly owned by the Fort Dearborn Trust, turned out to be the top floor of a two-flat on Grove Avenue. At three on a hot afternoon, there wasn’t any foot traffic. I’d passed some parks where a few kids were playing ball, but anyone looking at the Wuchnik place would be doing so behind the closed blinds in their air-conditioned front rooms.
I rang the bell for the ground-floor apartment, but no one answered. Just to be safe—after all, the guy hadn’t been married, but many people didn’t bother these days—I rang Wuchnik’s bell as well. When there was no answer, I pulled out my picks. It took me only a minute to undo the front door, which said more about Wuchnik’s carelessness than my skill. The stairs to the second floor weren’t carpeted; I found myself tiptoeing my way up, as if someone might hear me.
At the top, it took me no time at all to get into his apartment. That was because someone had been here before me and not bothered to lock up when they left. The six rooms had been searched thoroughly. Not violently, but the searcher hadn’t bothered to be careful: drawers stood open, the dead man’s few books were splayed. If he’d owned a landline, that had been removed. In fact, no electronics remained, unless you counted the microwave and the television. Certainly no computers, discs, flash drives, or cell phones that might give me some kind of clue about who Wuchnik had been working for when he died.
The searcher had apparently been angry at not finding what he—she?—was hunting, because he’d slashed a book to ribbons. In the kitchen wastebasket, I found a chunk of paper as if someone had scooped out a book like a pumpkin. Little puffs of gray print clung to my fingers after I’d sifted through the trash.
The first intruder had dumped the contents of Wuchnik’s files onto the living room floor, and I looked through those, without much hope of finding anything useful. Wuchnik had kept clippings about old murder cases, mostly unsolved murders, and he’d made a few notes in the margins: no next of kin; mother wouldn’t speak to me; wife remarried & left for ca 5 yrs ago. On a piece of scrap paper that clung to the back of one of the clippings, he’d written, “ ‘In death they were not divided’? Told me to look it up.”
Just because nothing else in Wuchnik’s place seemed to mean anything, I tucked that scrap into my briefcase and went back into the July heat, where I called Terry Finchley, the Area Six detective in charge of investigating Wuchnik’s murder.
“V. I. Warshawski,” Finchley said. “That would be ‘Vexatious Investigator’ Warshawski?”
“Try ‘Veracity In Person.’ I’m outside Miles Wuchnik’s place. It’s been thoroughly tossed.”
“And it’s in Berwyn.”
“I know you always got A’s in geography; you don’t have to show off for me.” I was sitting with the windows down, hoping for a breeze, but sweat was trickling down my neck.
“Don’t ride me when it’s ninety-three outside. You know it’s a jurisdiction issue. You call the locals?”
“I thought you’d be interested. And I also thought the locals might inspect the scene more thoroughly if a highly decorated Chicago PD lieutenant alerted them, instead of a vexatious investigator.”