I went to my bedroom safe for my mother’s diamond earrings, and tucked Wuchnik’s notebook into it. Not that I expected the vampires to come after it, but it was the only thing I’d been able to salvage from his belongings, that and the little scrap of paper that said, “In death they were not divided.” And a few credit-card slips, but those I left in my briefcase.
Jake and I closed down the Peacock Walk at two Wednesday morning. I resolutely kept my mind on dancing, food, and sex, using a small corner for sadness at saying good-bye to Jake for a month or so. Anytime Wuchnik or his notebook popped up, I counted backward from eleven. But at ten-thirty Wednesday morning, as soon as Jake had driven away with his two basses, I was on North Kenmore Avenue, at Leydon Ashford’s apartment.
Any lingering ideas I’d had that Leydon might have been in a group home, or even Section 8 housing, disappeared when I saw the glossy high-rise, with a uniformed doorman. When I explained who I was and what I wanted, the doorman phoned through to the manager, who directed me to his office on the second floor.
The manager was a man in his fifties or sixties, wearing a short-sleeved shirt and a tie but no jacket. When I arrived, he was handling a complaint about a water leak in 4J while listening to an elderly lady whose cat had run into the stairwell on twelve and not yet returned. The nameplate on his small desk announced that he was Saul Feldtman.
“What can I do for you, ma’am?”
Feldtman froze when I mentioned Leydon’s name, but when I explained that she was seriously injured and wouldn’t be home for some time, he was perfectly willing to look up the date he’d called the cops to come get her.
“She’s on the ninth floor. We didn’t know at first that she was doing all this painting, but she covered the stairwell, and then started on the halls. When I tried to get her to stop she became very agitated. And then it turned out she’d been painting the common room—and not like she was Michelangelo, mind, more like—well, I took photos, in case, you know.”
In case it came to court. America, land of the fee, home of the litigant. Feldtman pulled up his photo album on a computer and let me look while he calmed down the woman whose cat was missing and called a plumber to deal with the leaky showerhead.
Leydon’s painting was dramatic, but she definitely belonged more to the R. Crumb school than Michelangelo’s. She had used black and red house paint. Much of what she’d done was hard to make out in the photos because she’d gone over and over the same space with a thick brush, but there were places were I could make out male figures. They had large penises and tiny heads where only a large mouth was drawn, and they said things like, “Don’t move or I’ll fuck,” or, “I am thinking with my big head, dude.” I hated to sympathize with Sewall Ashford and his mother, but I could barely bring myself to look at the photos.
Leydon hadn’t gone to Ruhetal until four days after Wuchnik made his first visit. When the manager finished with the plumber and the cat lady, I asked if he could find when he’d first noticed Leydon’s behavior.
Feldtman was methodical, organized: he had a log of all his calls and tenant complaints. Someone first saw one of the cartoons in the stairwell about ten days before she was hospitalized, but in the beginning, she was just making a few drawings and it took a few days to trace them to Leydon.
“Then we called the brother, because he pays the bills and it’s his number in our files, and him and the mother, they came and tried to talk to her. So then she locked herself in her own place for a few days and we didn’t see her, but then suddenly there she was in the middle of the night, painting up and down the stairwell; we couldn’t get her to stop.
“And then, my God, when I and the super forced her back into her own apartment—it was such a mess—she’d painted on the tables and couches, it was unbelievable. So the brother told me he’d call the cops, and they took her out to Ruhetal. There’s a real good private place just a mile from here, and I told the cops to take her there, but the brother, he wouldn’t pay for private, so they took her out to Ruhetal.”
19.
THE AUGEAN STABLES
I FOUND AN INDIE COFFEE BAR AND SAT AT THE COUNTER, trying to decide if I should drive out to Downers Grove to look at Ruhetal. Even if the Ashford family had sent Miles Wuchnik out to the hospital to spy on Leydon, I couldn’t see how it connected to his death.
But why would the Ashfords have hired a private eye at all? He wouldn’t be allowed into the wards, and since Sewall’s wife had Leydon’s medical power of attorney, they could get all the information they wanted from the hospital. Maybe Sewall was denuding Leydon’s trust account and he wanted a private eye to see if she’d figured it out. I tried to imagine how a client would frame such a query: Wuchnik, my friend, disguise yourself as an orderly and get my sister into conversation about her trust fund. Shouldn’t be hard—her mind jumps from topic to topic like a kangaroo.