When I got back to Burbank, the Camaro was still in the carport, but no one answered the Shatka-Jurgens bell. A couple of women were sitting on a bench in the little park across the street. I asked if they’d noticed anyone coming or going, but they just shrugged. They were texting, even while sitting next to each other, and hadn’t been paying attention to the neighbors. A boy bouncing a ball nearby spoke up: he’d seen Jana Shatka get into a taxi about half an hour ago. Another jet was closing in overhead; I wondered idly if Jana was heading back to Russia.
I got back into my car and started returning e-mails, but I couldn’t focus on my clients’ needs. I kept wondering where Jurgens had gotten fifteen thousand in cash. Not from his twenty-four-thousand-a-year job, not unless he’d skipped lunch for twenty of his thirty-nine years.
At the same time, Wuchnik’s own finances weren’t that brilliant. If he’d bribed Jurgens, where had he gotten the money? Anyway, Jana had smirked when I’d suggested that Wuchnik had paid for the car. Someone else had paid off Jurgens, or maybe it was what one of the women had suggested this afternoon: Jurgens was stealing drugs from the hospital and selling them.
But Jana knew Wuchnik’s name. Her smirk suggested that she’d met him, done business with him. Bevilacqua said it was Jana who drove the bargaining over the Camaro, not Jurgens. So maybe Jurgens had called in his lady friend to deal with Wuchnik. Maybe Wuchnik had welched on a deal and Jana Shatka had impaled him with a spike at Mount Moriah. She had enough fury to do it, and she might have the strength, as well.
Speculation, speculation. I needed facts. I turned resolutely back to my iPad and focused on e-mails for forty minutes. In fact, I got so focused that I almost missed Xavier Jurgens’s return home in his beater. Another jet was screaming overhead, so I didn’t hear him slam the door to his Hyundai; it was just the motion out of the corner of my eye that made me look up in time to see him go into the duplex.
I turned off the iPad and followed him. The women who’d been on the park bench when I arrived had left, replaced by a couple of older men. One of them shouted after me, “You can do better than him, baby. Try me.”
Xavier Jurgens was still in his hospital whites when he answered my knock, but he’d taken time to open a can of Pabst. “Yeah?”
I opened the screen door. “Mr. Jurgens? I’m a coworker of Miles Wuchnik’s. We need to talk.”
Jurgens filled the doorway. He wasn’t a big man, but he had impressive neck muscles, which his shaved head made appear more pronounced. In his uniform he looked like the guy on the Mr. Clean bottles.
“What do you mean, coworker?” he said.
“I mean someone like me, who works with someone else, in this case, Miles Wuchnik. I’m clearing up loose ends on his outstanding cases.”
“I know what a fucking coworker is. But he told me he worked alone.”
“You can’t trust anyone these days, can you?” I mocked him. “Bevilacqua Chevy isn’t sure they can trust you for the remaining payments on that Camaro, for instance.”
“What are you talking about? Are you from the car dealer? I signed the papers, they know I’m good for the money.”
“But what nobody understands is where you came up with all those lovely portraits of Benjamin Franklin.”
Jurgens shook his head, not in denial—he just wasn’t following me.
“Mr. Jurgens, you paid cash. You counted out a big stack of hundred-dollar bills. You were proud of them, everyone in the dealership came around to look. But if you stole that money, or got it from drug sales, the government will come and take your shiny red Camaro away from you.”
“I didn’t steal the money, and Miles knows—knew that. So go away.”
“Like Jana,” I said. “Jana explained to me that it wasn’t Miles who gave you the fifteen grand, but she was jittery that I was even asking questions about him and you and the car, so she took off about an hour ago.”
“So what? It’s a free country, she can come and go when she wants.”
“Yes, indeed. She hopped in a taxi. Now, I will confess that I didn’t hear her give the destination to the driver, but my guess is that she went off to talk to the person who gave you all that lovely money. What do you think?”
“I think you’d better leave.”
I was able to slip inside when he backed up to shut the inner door. He was used to dealing with obstreperous patients. He grabbed me and wrenched my arms behind my back. I went limp and fell toward him. My dead weight took him off balance. While he struggled to hold me up, I hooked my right leg around his and upended him. The beer can hit the floor and sprayed the room.
He rolled over and sprang to his feet. “Goddamn bitch.”
“No.” I moved behind a chair. “A fight isn’t a good idea. We’ll both end up hurt, and we still have to have this conversation. Tell me who gave you the money for the Camaro.”
He lunged at me over the chair. I shoved it into his abdomen and he doubled over with a horrible grunt.
“Who did Jana go see so fast? She called you after I left, and told you what she thought you needed to do.”
He started to dance around me. I kept turning, chair in hand. It was exhausting.
“Who did Miles Wuchnik want to see in the forensic wing?” I panted.
“You think you’re smart, but you’re not,” he said.