I couldn’t resist looking up Dick’s Journe watch first. I’d never heard of the make, but it apparently was the ultimate watch if you needed every platinum screw carved by hand. The price, when I found it, staggered me. What was Dick trying to prove, buying a watch that cost as much as a house—assuming you didn’t need six bedrooms and a swimming pool? Even if I could afford a watch like his, I wouldn’t spend the money on it. I had a moment’s happy fantasy of Dick leaving his Journe on a bathroom sink. Good-bye, five hundred thousand dollars.
All the arguments we used to have came back to me: Dick’s insecurities, needing the most expensive car, the best wine, an impressive address, even when we couldn’t afford them. My belligerence, the chip on my shoulder that made me combative with his firm’s managing partners. I worked for the public defender—I was a loser, wasting my time on losers, Dick said, demanding that I quit my job so that I’d be at home, preparing delightful meals and making enchanting small talk with those partners.
I said he already had scoliosis from bending double in front of his bosses all day long, and he retorted, and I snapped back, and then we were divorced. I wouldn’t take alimony. In those days, I’d imagined myself as too idealistic to want a lot of money. And now, it just depressed me, how hard I worked, and how little I had to show for it.
“Money doesn’t matter,” I announced grandly. “Just what you can do with it.”
I opened the call log on my computer. I have an answering service, even in these days of voice mail and text messaging, because people with urgent problems need to talk to a live person, not a machine. The service posts calls to my computer as soon as they answer them. They also text me if an emergency comes in.
I ran down the list, picking out the urgent calls, which the service marked with a red asterisk. Halfway down was a message marked with a tiny blue crankshaft, the signal that alerted me to possible crank calls.
Anonymous caller, left message specifically for you, as follows: Xavier Jurgens has a new Camaro. Double-checked all spellings. Phone number blocked.
Despite the last sentence, I called the answering service, but they couldn’t tell me more than what was on my screen, not even whether the voice had belonged to a woman or a man: gruff, deep, whether a woman pretending to be a man or a man roughening his voice; either way, the operator who’d taken the call figured the caller was disguising their voice.
I looked up Xavier Jurgens. There were two, one in central Pennsylvania, and one in Burbank, Illinois. The one who lived in Burbank was thirty-nine years old; he shared his address with a Jana Shatka. LifeStory said he drove a nine-year-old Hyundai. There was nothing about a new Camaro, but if it was really new the information might not be showing up on the DMV database yet.
Shatka was on long-term disability, for reasons not specified. Nor could I find where she’d worked, but Xavier Jurgens was employed. He was an orderly at Ruhetal State Mental Hospital, making just over twenty-four thousand a year.
I sat back in my chair and stared for a long time at nothing in particular. The secretary in Ruhetal’s social work unit—I looked in my notebook—Chantal was her name. Chantal had seen Miles Wuchnik talking to one of the orderlies from the forensic wing. Perhaps it had been Chantal who had left the anonymous message with my answering service.
If I called out to the hospital, I doubted very much that anyone would give me Xavier Jurgen’s work hours. But if I drove out to Burbank, I could see for myself if the guy owned a red Camaro.
I drove home and changed out of my gold dress into khaki cargo pants, an outfit more suited for stakeout work. A loose white knit top. My iPad, so I could do a little paying work if I had a long wait. A Thermos of coffee, some fruit.
Mr. Contreras was ostensibly tending his small vegetable patch behind our building, but after a weekend in the country, he and the dogs were all snoozing. I didn’t wake him, just left a note next to his chaise longue asking him to take care of the dogs this evening, since I didn’t know how late I’d be.
I managed to get on the expressway before noon, and, despite the construction on the Ike, I had a fast run, relatively speaking, to the western suburbs. I stopped in Downers Grove and toured the employee parking lot at Ruhetal. I saw a couple of Camaros, but none that looked especially new.
Jurgens lived a pretty good hike from the hospital, but on twenty-four thousand a year, there weren’t a lot of places he could afford out here. I drove the twenty miles to Laramie Avenue in Burbank. Jurgens’s address was a duplex across the street from a small park, just big enough for a single baseball diamond, a set of swings, and a sandbox.
I parked near the swings and walked up the street to the duplex. Midway Airport was nearby; a jet on its final approach seemed so close that I instinctively ducked my head, but none of the kids in the park paid any attention.