I WOKE THE NEXT MORNING TO BLOODSTAINED SHEETS. EVEN though it was just from the cut on my hand, it seemed like an ominous echo of Miles Wuchnik’s death. I couldn’t shake a sense of oppression from my strange conversation with his sister. Her own depression, her determined devotion to her blackmailing brother, they were like an illness that had infected me through the cut on my hand. I knew I should write up my notes before I forgot too many of the details, but the encounter felt so sordid that I found it hard to think about it head-on.
The most puzzling, and ultimately most worrying, part of the conversation was what happened at the end. Who had called her? Who knew I was there, and what was their stake in the conversation? Iva’s protest, that she hadn’t told me anything because she didn’t know anything—had her caller been asking, as I had, about the source of the money? Or was there something else that she’d played close to her chest, so close I hadn’t realized she was sitting on a second secret?
I walked slowly to the kitchen to put on water for coffee. Iva Wuchnik had gone on about Chaim Salanter: she saw him on television all the time, she’d said, wanting to fill America with illegal immigrants. I didn’t think Salanter was on television—he wasn’t a publicity seeker. Iva saw his face or heard his name on Helen Kendrick’s or Wade Lawlor’s show. Miles had been doing some dangerous investigations that would show up Salanter, Iva said. And Lawlor would heap fame and glory on her brother.
Did that mean Lawlor had hired Miles Wuchnik? The two-bit Berwyn PI and the man with the twenty-million-dollar annual contract from Global? Wade Lawlor had hundreds of investigators at his command, but maybe he was spreading his net wide, trying to snare Salanter.
On a whim, I logged on to Lawlor’s website, to see if he was offering some kind of reward for nailing Salanter. I didn’t see a header that said “Wanted, Dead or Alive,” but he did have a tip line.
If you have information on any topic Vital to the Survival of Our Republic and Our Christian Values, e-mail me:
The website showed photos of some of his stalwart tipsters, with a little blurb about the vital information each had supplied. Other tipsters had written under a cloak of anonymity: “This information is so damning that our reporter’s life could be in danger for revealing it,” the caption read.
As I scrolled down, my own name jumped out at me. An anonymous source had claimed that my mother was an illegal immigrant.
The fury I’d felt at the Herald-Star offices two days ago welled up in me again. How dare they, how dare they, these faceless, mindless, cowardly, jackboot-licking pond scum? I was shaking with rage, halfway to my closet to collect my gun, when a night soon after I’d learned my mother was ill, that she might not get well, came to my mind.
One of the women on South Houston whom Gabriella had scorched for her advice on how to control me—Your daughter is a disgrace to the neighborhood, the woman had said, and Gabriella had said, She’s growing up to inhabit a larger world than you’ll ever visit. As I walked past the woman’s house she’d spat out an insult about Gabriella, Melez, she’d called her. I’d grown up hearing that Croatian word: my mother was a mongrel, a half caste—half Jewish, they meant. I’d jumped up the stairs in the dark and been on the point of punching her when my father materialized.
“Come on home, Tori,” he’d said.
I was fifteen and almost as tall as he was, but he picked me up and carried me down the stairs. He didn’t berate me and he wouldn’t listen to my side of the story. He sat me down on our back stoop, where we’d listened in the darkness to Gabriella working on her breathing exercises: cancer was not going to still her voice, she was determined about that.
After a time, Tony said, “The worst cops are the ones whose gun is their first weapon, instead of their last. The best cops go into a situation head-first, not hand-first. You remember that, Tori: you get yourself into trouble you don’t need with that hot temper of yours. And anger doesn’t make a bad situation better. It depletes your strength and it depletes your mind.”
I was letting rage at Wade Lawlor and his minions deplete my mind. I sat back down in front of my laptop. It was almost as though someone was trying to keep me so angry that I wouldn’t be able to see my way clear.
Was it Wade Lawlor, with his attacks? I thought of my meeting with Harold Weekes. Lawlor was his—GEN’s—money machine, but Weekes was the brains. Lawlor had smirked all through the meeting like the smart-aleck kid at school, but every time he was about to blurt out a revelation, Weekes shut him up.
I remembered my Monitor Project report on Vernon Mulliner’s finances. Where had he gotten all that money? From Harold Weekes? In which case, what was Mulliner doing for him out at Ruhetal?