“I don’t know where he got it, but he told me he was working hard, harder than he’d ever worked in the past. He wanted to quit, and there wasn’t enough in his 401K for him to retire, so he was taking extra jobs. If people wanted to pay him in cash, was that a crime?”
Only if he didn’t report it, but I kept that to myself—I didn’t want to get onto a side track about income taxes. “So you put it in a bank account to keep for him?”
“What I do with it is none of your business.”
“You’re right, you’re right.” I held up my hands, surrender mode. “My business is to try to figure out who killed Miles, who pounded on his chest hard enough to split the ribs and reach his heart. I found him, as I told you, and his blood was still warm.”
Her lips quivered. “That’s not right, that’s not fair, to come into my home and describe my own brother’s body to me like that.”
“It was even harder to be there with him,” I said. “What I’m trying to find out is who he’d made so angry that they ambushed and killed him.”
“They said on TV it was the black woman, the one who wants to be Senator. They said on TV she was having an affair with him.”
So Iva was one of Wade Lawlor’s legion of fans. I sat on the sectional couch. The aqua cushion gave a small poof, air escaping, and with it, a cloud of dust that made me sneeze.
“Do you believe that?” I asked, trying to keep contempt out of my voice. “Did Miles ever give any sign to you that he was having an affair with anyone?”
“If he thought it would hurt my feelings to hear it, he might not say.” She spoke to the floor, her voice thick with shame, as if there were something wrong with her for being hurt by her brother’s sex life.
“He cared more about you than anyone. Everyone I’ve talked to who knew him says that.” Okay, ‘everyone’ was just Wuchnik’s ex-wife, but she still counted. “Aren’t you the one he sent his money to? Aren’t you the one he promised to help make famous? Not Dr. Durango, or Helen Kendrick. But his sister.”
I was afraid I was laying it on with too heavy a trowel, but Iva Wuchnik brightened. She even sat down, across from the couch on one of the old armchairs, unleashing another cloud of dust.
“I’m thinking that one of these cases your brother was working on so hard got him killed. And I’m especially interested in his trips to the Ruhetal Mental Hospital. He somehow made it into the locked wing there, which is just one sign of how skilled he was as an investigator—I’d love to know how he managed it.”
Iva agreed that Miles was way smarter than anyone gave him credit for, but she couldn’t shed any light, either on how he got into the locked ward or on who he was trying to see there.
She added, darting a glance at his photograph, “He said he couldn’t tell me anything because it wasn’t safe, if someone was listening in on his phone calls.”
“He knew a lot about that, didn’t he?” Sandra, the ex-wife, had talked about his eavesdropping. “Detectives have to employ a lot of methods that ordinary citizens can’t, and your brother was an expert on electronic eavesdropping, so he’d know he had to be careful.”
She nodded cautiously, not sure where I was going.
“Did he ever talk to you about his techniques? Some of that equipment isn’t just expensive, it’s hard to get access to it.”
She frowned. “Were you talking to Sandra? She totally did not support Miles’s work, or understand it, and he finally had to leave her because of it. But if you’re on her side—”
“The only side I’m on is finding Miles’s killer,” I interrupted before she worked herself up into enough anger to throw me out. “It’s just—devices to intercept cell-phone calls, if they’re really effective, they cost thousands of dollars, and I wondered if they were something your brother ever discussed.”
“Miles never talked about his methods with me, but he got results.”
“Would he call you when he was getting ready to send you another book?”
“E-mail,” she muttered to her hands.
“Could I see how he phrased the messages?” I was scraping past the bottom of the barrel into open air.
Iva communed about it with her hands, plaiting her long, slim fingers together again. She seemed torn between wanting to show me that her brother trusted her and wanting to tell me to mind my own business, but she finally took me to her bedroom, where her computer sat. This was the one room that was authentically hers, not a storeroom of her parents’ furniture. Drapes with pink peonies, a matching duvet, everything else in white, including a vanity table with a frilled skirt, and a painted white desk.
“He told me to delete them, but I couldn’t bear to, not after he died and they were what I had left of him,” she whispered.
That and the money.
There were eight e-mails from Miles altogether. Iva wouldn’t let me print them, or forward them to my own computer, so I focused on the dates and the headers. The first three were hush-hush, burn before reading, hints of a lucrative new project.
Can’t tell you more, sis, but you will definitely ride to heaven with me when I come into my kingdom. I think I’ve finally found the goose that will lay our golden eggs.