We had made a still of Nicola smiling, from a frame of the home video where she’d been talking to Robbie. I explained who she was, using a slide with bullet points, how she’d landed in prison, and how I’d inadvertently found her.
“I don’t think we’ll ever know what became of her body: her grief–stricken mother was denied the chance to bury it. But my guess is that a political appointee of Jean–Claude Poilevy at the county morgue removed the body on Poilevy’s orders so that no one would be able to see what kind of boot kicked in Nicola Aguinaldo’s abdomen.”
I nodded at Morrell, who clicked up the slide of Hartigan standing over me with the stun gun. The audience gasped with shock.
“He was about six foot two, perhaps two hundred, two–twenty pounds. She wasn’t five feet tall and weighed maybe ninety pounds. She didn’t have too much of a chance against him. I managed to take this picture with a hidden camera seconds after I’d been shot with fifty thousand volts from a stun gun, right before I was kicked into insensibility.” I held up my right hand, which was in a kind of brace; I’d reinjured the fingers fighting Baladine. “Two of my fingers and five of the small bones in the back of my hand broke as I tried to protect my head.”
I heard another intake of horrified breath but continued with my presentation in a dry, academic voice. It was the only way I could speak without giving way to emotion. I went through the details of Nicola’s daughter’s death, what I’d been told by the women at Coolis about Nicola’s desperate grief and how she’d pounded on the guard’s chest when they laughed at her plea to be allowed to attend the baby’s funeral. I couldn’t look at Mr. Contreras; he was so upset that I knew my own composure would crack. I heard Peppy whining by his side with shared misery.
Morrell put up another slide. This one had a red flashing header reading Speculation! Speculation! We’d decided to use that to separate fact from guesswork. I told them I was guessing that Nicola was dumped on the Chicago streets in the same way I was.
“What takes some of the guesswork out of this is the fact that the guards changed my shirt before they took me out of Coolis. I was concussed, manacled, and running a high fever and not able to defend myself; they tore off my shirt and put on one that wouldn’t show the scorch marks from the stun gun.” I stopped for water, remembering Polsen touching the burned skin on my breasts. “They made a comment about not making the mistake they had before, where they had to change the victim’s shirt in Chicago, so they had clearly done this before. It’s just a guess that Nicola Aguinaldo was the person they’d done it to.
“Now here comes more speculation, and mighty interesting it is. The shirt they put on Aguinaldo had been made by Lucian Frenada. You may remember Mr. Frenada’s name: his dead body was found floating in Lake Michigan right before the Fourth of July. Everyone who isn’t brain–dead knows Frenada was a boyhood friend of Lacey Dowell, because Global has been trumpeting that information on television and in the Herald–Star for two months. They grew up together right here at St. Remigio’s.” I glanced at Murray. He was studying the floor.
Beth Blacksin from Channel 8 interrupted with a question about Lacey, and several other reporters jumped in. I ignored them and explained how Frenada had gone to Lacey and asked for a chance to make some of the Global Entertainment spin–off products.
“Money in movies isn’t just made on the screen. When your kid has to have that Captain Doberman T–shirt or those Space Beret action figures, the cash registers at Global are ringing. Mad Virgin shirts are very popular with young teens—they’re one of the first movie spin–off items to find a huge marketing success with teenage girls. Oversize denim jackets are another hot seller in Global’s Virginwear line.
“When Nicola Aguinaldo’s body was found, she was wearing one of the T–shirts that Lucian Frenada made as a demo for Teddy Trant at Global. You all remember the party at the Golden Glow back in June, when Frenada came and Lacey had him thrown out? He was demanding to know why Trant had stolen one of the shirts. Global didn’t want to work with him, but Frenada was highly suspicious that Trant might be going to copy some of his workmanship. Of course everyone thought Frenada was trying any tactic he could to get Lacey to influence Global into buying from him: why would a studio head, who could pick up a Mad Virgin T–shirt anytime he walked into his office, go to the trouble of stealing one from a small Humboldt Park entrepreneur?
“But I believe that is exactly what Trant did. He was at Frenada’s shop on the Tuesday night right before Nicola died. That’s a fact. This next is a guess, but I believe that in some crazy scheme, maybe caused by watching too many of his own movies, Trant stole one of Frenada’s shirts to put on Nicola, so that if any questions were asked about her death he could direct attention away from Coolis, from Global, and toward an innocent bystander.”