“It’s not that I’m questioning you, doll, because I seen you before, you been right when the cops say you’re wrong, but why couldn’t it be like they said. This guy Xavier, he even cut you with a butcher knife last week. He coulda killed Wuchnik and then figured the law was closing in on him, just like your techs say. ’Specially if Wuchnik was blackmailing him over drugs.”
I thought it over. “That might be right, but someone gave Xavier money to buy that Camaro. You don’t shell out fifteen thousand for doing nothing. I think whoever gave Xavier the money orchestrated last night’s event, set it up to look like a kidnapping-suicide.”
“Then how are these two gals involved?” Mr. Contreras jerked a thumb toward the third floor.
“The girls were all taking pictures with their phones and one of them shouted that she’d seen a vampire. She probably really saw either Wuchnik lurking in the shadows, waiting to meet the person who killed him, or the killer himself. If Kira took a picture with her phone and the killer found the phone, he may be trying to track her down. She doesn’t have a service plan, so there isn’t a way to ID her from the phone itself. I may be completely off base here, but just in case, I don’t want anyone to get a whiff of who or where Kira and Lucy are. I know it’s a lot of strain, especially the little one, but—”
“Oh, come on, doll. The day a couple of cute little girls are too much for me is the day you send me off to live in Ruthie’s basement.”
I hugged him and gave him a grateful kiss. Ever since he turned eighty, his daughter has been lobbying to get him out to her family room in Hoffman Estates. Since she whines and complains whenever she’s around him, I don’t understand why she wants him to live with her, although I know jealousy of his closeness to me plays a role.
“But why did he text the other gal, this Arielle?”
“Can’t answer that one—we don’t have her phone or Kira’s. Maybe I’m wrong, anyway—Kira’s phone could be in some drunk’s pocket right now. And until Arielle gets her wits back, we can’t ask her anything. Although I will talk to Nia Durango before the day is done.”
But my first stop would be Burbank, to see how Jana Shatka was bearing up under her loss.
34.
DRUG REQ
WORD OF XAVIER’S DEATH HAD REACHED LARAMIE AVENUE: when I pulled up across the street, I saw a little knot of women pause on the sidewalk in front of his duplex and point.
I crossed over to them. “Is Ms. Shatka home, do you know?”
One of the women shrugged, but another looked at me. “You were here before, weren’t you? Xavier, he slashed you for asking about the car. Are you with the bank? Because he is dead, and the car is gone, I don’t think you’ll see it no more.” She apparently thought I’d come to repo the Camaro.
“I’m a detective.”
“Oh, the police, they were here already. Breaking the news. Is it true Xavier killed himself?”
“It’s too early to know what happened,” I said. “He died in the car, though.”
“You saw him?” A current of excitement ran through the group. “What happened? He drove that car into a tree?”
“Nah,” second woman said. “He realized he had to come home to her and put the hose in his mouth.”
The woman who’d recognized me reminded them that I was with the police. “But how did he die, can you tell us?”
“He mixed alcohol and drugs,” I said. “But he went into Chicago to do it, which seems strange.”
The blinds in the front window twitched. Jana was watching us. I walked up the drive, where the battered Hyundai sat in the carport, and knocked on the kitchen door. The women watched expectantly at the bottom of the driveway, but Jana didn’t answer. I could hardly pull out my picklocks in plain view, so I knocked again.
When she still didn’t answer, I went to the Hyundai and tried the doors. They were locked, but the car had a lot of papers sitting in the backseat. You never know—they could hold information about Xavier’s sugar daddy. Or mommy.
The window on the passenger side was loose in its tracks. I went back to my own car for a piece of wire, then wiggled the Hyundai’s window enough to get my wire inside to undo the lock. When I had the rear doors open and was sifting through the papers, Jana charged out the kitchen door. She was holding the same knife that Xavier had used on me last week.
“Get away from here. This is private property.”
“It’s part of an investigation into a crime, Ms. Shatka.” I stepped back, hoping to keep out of range of the knife.
“What are you talking about? Xavier is dead. That is a tragedy, but it is not a crime.”
“I don’t know about Russia,” I said, “but in the United States, we consider murder a crime.”
The skin beneath her freckles turned pale, making her blue eyes seem very dark. “What are you saying? The police came. They told me that Xavier killed himself. And this I already knew because he wrote to me from his car, wrote me his apology so that I would know he can be buried as a Christian. The police said not one word about murder.”
“Maybe they didn’t want to scare you, Ms. Shatka, but Xavier was definitely murdered.”