I had reached the grim row of Cook County detention buildings, block after block encased in the same triple fencing that had surrounded Ruhetal’s forensic wing. Guard towers on top. It looked like the German prison camp in Stalag 17.
When I’d been a Cook County public defender, you could trade money or drugs or sex with many of the guards for access or power, and the same was probably true at Ruhetal. The guard had taken my money, and he might even have given me access if the bosses hadn’t appeared. I didn’t want to think of Leydon having sex with him, but even if she had, what was on the other side of that gate that she wanted that badly?
“You always were smarter than me, babe,” I murmured. “Smarter and nimbler.”
Saying the words out loud reminded me of the social worker’s advice, that Leydon needed to hear her friends speak to her. I turned onto Roosevelt Road and made my way east and south to the University of Chicago hospitals. Leydon was still in intensive care. I said I was her sister, which was true enough in the broadest sense of the word.
The ward head clucked her tongue. “We wondered when her family would show up. ICU is hard on people; they need love, they need to know they’re not forgotten.”
She helped me encase myself in a protective shield—Leydon’s skull was open; they couldn’t risk my transferring any germs. When I got into the unit, I found it hard to look at her, with her head shrouded and the shunt sticking out the side, but I took her hand in my own latex-gloved one and gently massaged her fingers.
“I don’t think Wuchnik was following you, Leydon,” I said when we were alone. “You just kept running into him. Did you see him in the forensic wing? Was that what made you nervy? You’d seen him in the general population wing and then over in the forensic building. Or did you follow him there and try to confront him?”
That was possible. If Wuchnik had bribed a guard to let him into the forensic wing, Leydon could have—and would have—run after him to demand his business.
I wanted to believe that her expression was changing, that she was following what I was saying and was trying to offer a comment of her own. I pressed my fingers against her palm.
“You worked out something that he wanted to know, and you told him the clue lay in that Bible verse, ‘In death they were not divided.’ Was someone in the prison wing because he murdered his father, or his own son, or a queer lover?
“Babe, I wish you weren’t so brilliant. I wish you just said what was going on, beginning, middle, end. I could follow you then, but it’s like all those classes we took together—you always saw where the case was going and danced to the conclusion. I had to put my head down and work it out one step at a time. You were a greyhound, I was a Newfoundland.”
At the end of fifteen minutes, the nurse took me away. “Try to come back. I know it’s painful to see her like this, and it’s difficult to put on all the gear, but you being here will do her good, believe me.”
When I got back onto Lake Shore Drive, heading north toward home, I knew I wasn’t in the mood for solitude, but I wasn’t up to an evening with Mr. Contreras. I drove to the Golden Glow, the bar near the Board of Trade owned by my friend Sal Barthele. The traders had finished their postpartum gulping. Only a handful of dedicated drinkers, with a sprinkling of local residents, sat at her mahogany horseshoe bar.
I persuaded Sal to turn the Glow over to Erica, her senior bartender, and come out with me for a meal. We went to a quiet restaurant in the west Loop, and ate a civilized dinner. Sal knew Leydon, and she shared my sadness over the trajectory of Leydon’s life.
Even while I was relaxing with Sal, in the back of my mind I continued to fret about what I’d learned at Ruhetal today, enough that I looked up some of the players when I got home. Although Tania Metzger, Leydon’s social worker, had seemed like a level person, I wondered what swings in fortune had moved her family from running Ruhetal to working there.
I did a search on Metzger through LifeStory. What if she had taken a job at the hospital to get back at the people who she imagined had wrested control of the hospital from her family?
Just because Eric Waxman and his waxed mustache had rubbed me the wrong way, I requested information on him, as well as on the woman who was head of patient services, and on the director of security.
The Metzger family’s control of the hospital had ended when German funds dried up in the mid-thirties. LifeStory couldn’t tell me what her grandparents had done next, but her parents had served as missionaries in Korea for an Evangelical church. I lifted my brows: Metzger had grown up in Korea and apparently was fluent in the language. That was quite an accomplishment but not one that made you think of revenge fantasies, although it did explain her hobby—Korean drumming and dancing.