“By the way,” I said, “you told me on Sunday that Wuchnik did a lot of work for my ex’s firm. How did you know that?”
“Who’s your ex?” Luana demanded.
“Richard Yarborough, at Crawford, Mead.”
“Just think—if you’d stayed with him, you’d have the capital to start a newspaper, or an international security firm. You wouldn’t have to deal with people like us,” Murray said.
I smiled sourly. “I never thought there was an upside to my marriage, but you’re making it sound attractive. Anyway, how did you know about Wuchnik and Crawford, Mead?”
“It came up in Sunday’s extra-alarm huddle, I think,” Murray frowned in an effort to remember. “Weekes must have told us, because it’s not something I knew on my own. Luana?”
She shook her head. “I was out sailing with my brother and his partner on Sunday. I didn’t get the news until later and then all I was supposed to do was a feature on the Carmilla books and why tweens all over the world love them so much.”
“If it’s true, I can’t figure out why Crawford, Mead use him,” Murray said. “I’ve called around, and he was a two-bit kind of guy. Solo shop, but not the kind of sophisticated work you do, Warshawski. If you wanted private information on someone, he got it for you, sometimes by pretty—well, unorthodox methods is the charitable spin.”
“So if you were trying to undermine someone in court and you wanted the goods on their fetish for sleeping with goats, he’d find that out? That kind of thing?”
Murray nodded.
“That also seems beneath Crawford, Mead’s dignity,” I said, “but I’ll check in with Dick. Maybe that will cheer me up, watching his face, although the tea helped. Thanks, Luana.”
Back in my car, away from the need to keep up a public face, I felt so pummeled that I dozed off behind the wheel. A passing ticket writer rapping on my windshield woke me. She pointed at my parking receipt, which had expired three minutes ago. I was grateful that she hadn’t issued the ticket—the city is so cash-hungry that many of the enforcers wouldn’t have cut me the slack.
I wanted to go to my ex-husband’s law firm, but not in this condition. I drove to my office, where I fell instantly asleep on the daybed in my back room.
24.
TALKING TO THE EX. SIGH.
WHEN I GOT UP AGAIN, IT WAS A SHOCK TO OPEN THE PHONE log on my computer: I had more than fifty messages from clients and friends who had seen Lawlor’s tirade. Some commiserated, but others worried that being on Wade’s World’s hit list would make me unreliable as a detective. Give us a call; we want to know your mind is on the job was the gist of about fifteen messages. At the same time, to my astonishment, simply being mentioned by Wade Lawlor made me interesting to other people. I had queries from various non-GEN media outlets, wanting interviews, along with a good half dozen potential new clients. Maybe I’d have to share their retainers with Lawlor.
I buckled down and sent e-mails, made calls, and organized interviews with a couple of local television stations. All the time that I was reassuring clients of my undying commitment to their needs, the back of my mind was thinking about Lawlor’s harangue. Who had he talked to about my mother? He’d said Gabriella came here as an illegal alien, but how had he known to ask about her? How had he known her memory was so sacred to me?
Gabriella had come to America as a refugee during the Second World War. The drama of her escape was what I always thought about, not whether she’d had the right papers on her when she arrived. She had been hiding with her father in the hills northeast of Siena when one of her music teachers arranged passage for her on a ship bound for Cuba. My mother had never seen her father again, nor her only brother, who’d been fighting with a group of partisans in the north.
My grandmother’s sister Rosa had grudgingly given my mother a place to stay in Chicago, but I’d never asked Gabriella how she made the journey from Cuba to the States. Wade Lawlor apparently had made discovering that his business. It was frightening to think what a deep and wide network of spies Lawlor could call on, to get information that was almost seventy years old.
In the middle of my fretting, I dimly realized that Lawlor could have made it up, that he’d learned my mother was an immigrant and decided to say she was illegal. He fabricated so much of what he screeched on the airwaves that when he hit home, he might only have made a lucky guess.
I had to remind myself that his real goal had been to attack me, not my mother. Why, though? I’d been a little rude at his anniversary bash on Saturday. Was his ego so inflated that he went after anyone who was sarcastic to him?
When I’d cleared my inbox, I called my lawyer, Freeman Carter, to tell him about Lawlor’s attack. He’d heard about it already.