Mr. Contreras shook his head in disapproval. “I seen you go through a lot of guys in the years I’ve known you, cookie. This Jake is better than most of them, but you can’t keep beating them up or beating them off. One of these days you’ll be as old as me, always assuming you don’t let some punk stab you to death first, and who’s going to look out for you then?”
That was unanswerable, so I deflected him by telling him my day’s travel plan. I further deflected his desire to accompany me by reminding him that if I got stabbed to death he’d have to be in Chicago to take care of Mitch and Peppy. He did drive over to the lake with me to give the dogs a long swim, since the heat was building too much to let them run. And he made lunch for me while I changed into my last clean pair of summer slacks. I packed an overnight bag just in case, and finally made it to the Kennedy Expressway a little after noon.
Before setting out, I’d run a couple of searches on Miles Wuchnik’s sister, Iva. I was still annoyed with myself for doing so little preparation before calling on Xavier Jurgens yesterday. I let my iPad read the search reports to me while I drove.
There had been four children in the Wuchnik family—Iva, Miles, and two other brothers. All three boys had moved from Danville when they were in their twenties, but Iva had stayed behind, looking after their aging parents in the time-honored tradition. In another time-honored tradition, the parents hadn’t rewarded her sacrifice. Their father had died back in the nineties; when their mother died three years ago, the family home and her modest savings had been divided equally among the four children, with no special recognition of Iva’s work. The house had been sold, right after the market fell out of real estate, and Iva had moved into an apartment near the claims office where she worked as a clerk.
It was a depressing story. I shut off the iPad and put in a CD Petra had created for me of her favorite indie bands. I was pleasantly surprised by my cousin’s taste, especially Neko Case, who took me down to 138th Street, where the road finally opened up. After that, I had a smooth drive south to Danville.
I found Iva Wuchnik’s apartment easily enough, but I’d gotten into town before the end of the business day. I didn’t think it would help either of us if I showed up at her office, so I found a park, where I ate the chicken sandwich Mr. Contreras had packed, then wandered along the Vermilion River for a bit.
At four-thirty, I went back to Iva’s apartment. The five-story building wasn’t run-down, exactly, but it had an air of shabbiness, as if the management company had gotten too depressed to care about the dirt in the corners of the lobby. Poor Iva, first caring for her elderly parents, then having to move into this.
I rang her bell, but there wasn’t an answer. I went back to my car, where I could watch the front entrance while pretending to work my cell phone. Just one of 286 million U.S. texters, as unnoticed as the setting sun. I didn’t pay close attention to the cars going into the building’s underground garage, and would have missed Wuchnik if she hadn’t had to fumble around with her card key.
Something about the depressed set of the lines around her mouth, or the square forehead, similar to her brother’s, made me stare over the top of my phone. I gave her twenty minutes to settle in before ringing her doorbell.
“My name is Warshawski,” I called through the intercom. “I’m the person who found your brother’s body last week.”
There was a pause, as if she were wondering whether to believe me, and then she buzzed me in. When I got to the third floor, she opened her door the length of a short chain.
“Who did you say you are?”
“V. I. Warshawski. I’m sorry for your loss; I’m the person who found Miles’s body at Mount Moriah cemetery last week.”
“Let me see some ID,” she demanded.
A sensible precaution. Although it really was no proof of anything, I showed her the laminate of my PI license. This satisfied her enough that she undid the chain.
She ushered me into a living room so stuffed with old furniture it looked like a showroom to a down-market antiques store. Iva had apparently grabbed every piece of furniture from her parents’ home when she and her brothers sold it. A sectional couch in aqua Naugahyde took up the most space, but there was also a card table and chairs with the spindly legs so popular in the fifties and sixties, an overstuffed armchair and a scarred teak cabinet with a stack of old books on top.
Next to the books stood an eight-by-ten of Miles in a decorated frame. It dated from some earlier epoch, before his hair had started turning gray, before the jowls had begun to grow heavy, before someone stuck a piece of rebar through his heart.
Iva saw me looking at the picture and said, in her flat, heavy voice, “So you’re a private investigator, like Miles. He never mentioned you to me.”
“No. We never met.”
“Then how come you were in that cemetery where he died?”