I rubbed my eyes. None of this made any sense.
I turned back to Wade’s site and looked for the tipster entries on Chaim Salanter or the Malina Foundation. There was a lot of vitriol, a lot of speculation about Chaim Salanter’s past as a Nazi collaborator, and his present as Sophy Durango’s financial adviser, but nothing that sounded like a damning fact.
And yet Miles Wuchnik believed he was on the trail of such evidence. And there was another fact: Chaim Salanter had tried to bribe me to stay away from the Wuchnik investigation. That sounded as if he was hiding something shameful. And he knew that if Wuchnik hadn’t found it out, he was close to doing so.
My espresso pot had boiled all over the stove. I turned off the burner and looked at the mess in disgust. Cleaning Iva Wuchnik’s spilled tea last night, my own stove this morning. Mopping up messes, it’s what I did for a living, but that didn’t mean I wanted to do it in my kitchen as well.
Had Chaim Salanter murdered Miles Wuchnik? Salanter was small; he was old. He couldn’t have dragged a man so much bigger than him onto the catafalque on his own, but his daughter might have helped him. When I’d first found Wuchnik, I’d had unsettling ideas about the girls in the Carmilla book club luring him to the catafalque and then stabbing him.
Now I wondered if Julia Salanter could have done it. Nick Vishnikov, the ME, had said Wuchnik had been bashed on the back of the head before he was stabbed. If Julia thought Wuchnik was going to reveal some nasty secret about her father, she could easily have persuaded him to meet her in the cemetery. I wondered if any of her mother’s family were buried at Mount Moriah—that could explain the choice of venues. Gabe the houseman was big enough to heft any number of Wuchniks onto slabs. And his role in the household seemed very much more active than that of a garden-variety servant.
I shivered. I didn’t like this line of thought at all. It wasn’t just that I’d taken a liking to Julia Salanter, but it also meant that Wade Lawlor would be vindicated for his pile-driving attacks on her father. It would be a blow to Lotty and Max, as well.
And then there was young Arielle to consider. She was sitting on some information about Wuchnik. What if it had to do with Julia, rather than with Chaim? What if Gabe’s role in the household was intimate enough to include being Julia’s lover?
I put the soiled rags in the sink with some bleach and refilled my little pot with water and grounds. This time I shut everything else out of my mind until I’d poured espresso into a cup.
The money that Miles Wuchnik had been sending his sister, that screamed BLACKMAIL! at the top of its lungs. My hand kept creeping across the kitchen table toward my phone. My hand wanted to call Julia Salanter and ask what secret Miles Wuchnik had uncovered about her father. And what would she say? Oh, Daddy murdered his mother and all his sisters to save his sorry ass?
If I could find out who had hired Miles, then maybe I could follow the trail from the other direction. It’s true that someone had swiped his computer, his cell phone, and all his files, but I had a little more information today than I’d had yesterday. I knew Miles’s e-mail address, from looking at Iva’s computer, and with some luck I might get into his server and recover them.
I also knew that Miles had gone to see his sister on May 17. Maybe he’d considered that journey a deductible expense. I’d locked the original of his mileage log in my office safe, but I had the photocopies in my briefcase.
Mr. Contreras came up the back stairs with the dogs while I was spreading the pages out on my kitchen table. He turned a dark umber when he realized I was wearing only a T-shirt and underpants.
“Not to worry,” I said kindly, but I went back to my bedroom and pulled on a pair of cargo pants.
When I returned to the kitchen, he was standing at the sink, washing my week’s accumulation of dishes, carefully not looking at me. “How’d it go yesterday, doll?”
“Weird. Very weird. You can turn around now.”
I assembled a bowl of fruit and yogurt while I described my visit to Iva Wuchnik.
“Wuchnik was sending her money in hollowed-out books,” I said. “Either it’s cash he found lying around and stole, or someone agreed to pay blackmail.”
“Or drug sales,” my neighbor said.