“A missing-persons search,” I said, not exactly lying. “I had a tip that my target would be there, but I found your brother. The medical examiner told me he had been hit on the head hard enough to knock him out. His body was then carried to the tomb, where he was stabbed to death.”
“I see.” She kneaded her hands together. Despite her thick shoulders and short, square body, she had long, slender fingers. Another woman might have painted the nails to draw attention to a fine feature, but Iva Wuchnik’s hands were rough, untended, like the skin on her face, or her hair, dyed a shoe-polish brown.
She roused herself. “I was making some iced tea; you want a glass?”
She led me past the furniture storeroom to a kitchen that was also cluttered, this time with racks of pots hanging from the ceiling. I sat on a bar stool next to the counter while she poured cold tap water into two glasses of powdered tea.
“It looks as though you’re quite a cook.” I gestured toward the pots.
“Oh—those were my mother’s, and my grandmother’s. I don’t have time for that kind of thing. Most of what I eat is take-out, although I suppose if I had company . . .” Her voice trailed off; she couldn’t imagine herself with company.
I couldn’t, either. I hastily changed the subject.
“I’m trying to follow up on some of your brother’s cases. He seems to have been a very generous man.”
She dropped the glass she’d been about to put on the counter next to me. “Oh! I always was the clumsy one in the family, Mother said that a thousand times if she said it once.”
“Let me.” I slid off the stool and squatted to pick the pieces of glass out of the mass of brownish ice.
“These glasses, Mother got them as a wedding present. I shouldn’t have been using them for everyday.”
“I know,” I said sympathetically. “I’ve destroyed two of the wineglasses my mother carried with her from Italy, and I think a piece of my heart breaks off every time I lose one of them. No matter how often you tell yourself that accidents happen. Like just now, I shouldn’t have sprung that information about your brother on you.”
“What information?” She tried to laugh but she wasn’t good at it.
“How generous Miles was. I know he gave a Camaro to a complete stranger, for instance. How many people would do that?” I didn’t actually believe Miles had given Xavier the money for the Camaro, but I had to find some wedge to pry information out of Iva Wuchnik.
“Miles gave—a Camaro is a sports car, right?”
“A kind of baby Corvette. Worth about twenty-five thousand. I’m wondering where Miles got that kind of money.” I stood, my hands full of shards.
“He was a brilliant investigator, brilliant!” Her voice thickened with emotion.
“Yes, I’m sure he was,” I said sycophantically. “He had dozens of clients; I’ve seen his log just for the last three months. Where is the garbage can, by the way?”
“Oh! Oh, thank you, sorry, I wasn’t focusing.” She opened the door under the sink and pulled out a garbage can filled with the empty microwave pans for frozen dinners.
I dumped in the glass shards and pulled a length of paper towel from a roll above the sink to blot up the mess. It was so much easier a way to consume instant tea than drinking it.
“He talked to you about his cases, didn’t he?” I suggested. “None of your other brothers paid as much attention to you as Miles, did they?”
“You did know him, didn’t you? He must have told you that, because no one outside the family would have known that.”
“I didn’t know him personally, but he talked about you a lot to a friend of mine.” When I was a child, you were supposed to cross your fingers if you were telling a lie: that meant, sorry, this doesn’t count as a sin. My fingers were full of wet paper towel and the remaining slivers of glass I’d found; I couldn’t cross them.
“Did he ever mention my friend to you?” I continued. “Leydon? Leydon Ashford? He met her at a case that took him to a big mental hospital outside Chicago.”
She frowned over the name. “You mean Ruhetal? He told me he was going out there, but he never mentioned that person’s name. Miles said it was the biggest case of his career and if it turned out the way he thought, I’d never have to work again. Not that I’d know what else to do with my time; I sometimes wonder what I’ll do if I have to retire, but Miles said he’d take me to Europe, take me to the town in Poland where our grandparents came from, go to London, all those places you see on TV.” She started pleating her fingers again, pushing her thumbs against the palms.
“Did he give you any hint that the case was dangerous?” I dropped my load into the garbage can and rinsed my hands under the tap. I’d managed to slice a finger open. Shedding blood two days in a row on this investigation. Not a trend I wanted to continue.
Iva’s eyes grew round in her square face. “You mean one of the inmates killed him?”