“No!” she said fiercely, waving the knife at me.
I backed up another step. “When I was out here last week, we talked about where Xavier got the money to buy his Camaro. The neighbors think he was selling drugs, and I thought he’d been bribed by Miles Wuchnik. You knew we were both wrong, because Xavier told you who paid him off and why. You called a cab and went to see the person—was it a man? A woman?”
She sucked in a breath, astonished that I knew this much. The arm holding the knife went slack.
“This person—shall we call him your banker?—persuaded Xavier to drive into Chicago in the middle of the night. Your banker then persuaded Xavier to kidnap a young girl and put her in the trunk of that Camaro. After that, somehow this financial friend got Xavier to drink vodka laced with toxic drugs. I think it’s time you told me your friend’s name. Or you will be the next person he kills.” Or she, I added to myself, thinking again of Eloise Napier and Helen Kendrick.
“You are crazy.” The words lacked conviction. “No one will kill me, because no one killed Xavier.”
“Who did you go see after I was here last week, Ms. Shatka?”
She rolled her eyes as she thought and then produced, “My hairdresser.”
“I’d sue, if I were you: your roots are longer than they were a week ago. Who gave Xavier all that cash?”
“Xavier saved his money for many years. That car was his dream car; from the time I met him he talked about it, wanting a Corvette.”
“Not to be picky in your time of grief, but it was a Camaro.”
“He decided to cut his dream down to size. Everyone does; me, too. I came here thinking America is where everyone gets rich quick. Instead, it’s like anyplace else—work, work, work.”
“What work did you do in Russia, Ms. Shatka?” I got sidetracked out of curiosity.
“I don’t come from Russia, from Vilnius, Lithuania.”
It was my turn to be silent. Vilnius, Vilna, Chaim Salanter’s hometown. “I thought you were speaking Russian last week,” I finally said.
“I am ethnic Russian, my family lives in Vilnius, there are many Russians there. Why do you care?”
The hot sun, the strange conversation, my long day, I couldn’t think clearly to pick and choose my questions. How had she met Xavier, I wanted to know, and how long had she been in America—quite a time, judging by the quality of her English.
Instead, I heard myself blurt out, “If Miles Wuchnik didn’t approach you with questions about Chaim Salanter’s past, who did?”
She ran back to her house. I sprinted after her, but she already had a chain lock in place. When I tried to push against it, she stuck the butcher knife through the crack and sliced at me.
“Ms. Shatka, you are going to need something more powerful than that knife if the same person comes after you who killed Xavier. If you tell me who you talked to, I can help you, but if you hug that information to yourself, well, I sure wouldn’t sell you a life-insurance policy today.”
“Go away, busybody. I can look after myself with no help from you!”
I’d dropped my bag next to the Hyundai. I went back for it and took out a card. She’d shut the door all the way, but I slipped the card through the mail slot cut into the jamb.
A jet was screaming overhead. I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted, “If you change your mind, call me.”
She didn’t answer. I stood at the door for several minutes, my ear against the jamb, but heard very little, even when the screaming from the airplane had died down. I think Jana tiptoed over to the door to pick my card up from where it had fallen inside, but I wasn’t even sure of that.
At length, I returned to the Hyundai and started looking through the papers Xavier, or Jana, had tossed into the backseat. Most of them were store receipts—Jana seemed to buy a lot of clothes with her disability checks. Three pairs of shoes from a discounter on Roosevelt Road just last week. The same date that I’d been out here, in fact. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe she really had been out shopping, not calling on Xavier’s sugar parent. I looked more closely at the receipt: seven p.m. She’d bought shoes to cheer herself up after her hard day of neighborhood confrontations.
I found ticket stubs from the Kane County Cougars, wadded up detritus from McDonald’s and the Colonel, a past-due notice for unpaid parking tickets, and a receipt from the county assessor’s office. Stuck to a greasy napkin, I found a carbon of a requisition slip to the Ruhetal pharmacy for twenty ten-milligram tablets of Abilify. The pharmacy had stamped it at ten a.m. yesterday, and Xavier had countersigned it; I could just make out the blurry capital “X” at the start of the signature.
A doctor had signed the requisition, but again, the carbon was so blurry I couldn’t make out more than the flourish of the “MD” at the end of the line.