“Yes, I always worry about who the children will talk to, but if you swear them to secrecy it only makes them behave more suspiciously to strangers. I heard about you from them. That you were a cop who came around with a police dog. Looking for Se?ora Mercedes.”
I took a sip of whisky. “If you came home with me I’d introduce you to the police dog. She’s an eight–year–old retriever with the incurable friendliness of all goldens. I wasn’t trying to sniff out Se?ora Mercedes with her. Or I was, but not with deportation in mind. Her daughter ran away from the prison wing of Coolis Hospital a week ago today and ended up dead a few hundred yards from her old front door.”
“And what’s your interest in the young woman?”
“I found her lying in the road Tuesday night. She died a few hours later in the operating room at Beth Israel, of advanced peritonitis caused by a severe blow to the abdomen. I’d like to know how she got from Coolis to Balmoral and who inflicted that desperate injury on her.”
“Are you usually this quixotic, Ms. Warshawski? Spending your life investigating deaths of poor immigrant prison escapees?”
His mocking tone nettled me, as perhaps he intended. “Invariably. It makes a nice change from wrestling alligators, to meet people as uniformly civil and helpful as you.”
“Whoof.” He sucked in a breath. “I apologize: I earned that. I’m not often in Chicago. Who could I talk to who knows your work?”
That was fair. Why should he give confidential information to a stranger? I gave him Lotty’s name and asked him for a reference in return. He knew Vishnikov from forensic work the pathologist had done in South America for the Berman Institute.
The older couple behind me paid their bill. They strolled across the street to the car, their arms around each other. I felt more forlorn than ever.
“If you know Vishnikov, maybe you can remind him about Nicola Aguinaldo’s body. It’s disappeared from the morgue. Tomorrow I hope to find out what it would cost to do an analysis of Aguinaldo’s clothes, if the private lab that looked at them still has them, but it would be so much easier if I knew where her body was. If her mother has it, how did she learn her daughter was dead? She left the old apartment the morning of the day I found Nicola. Some official–looking men came around and scared the neighborhood, as I’m sure you must know.”
I paused and finally Morrell gave a grudging half nod.
“So who were the men?” I continued. “State marshals sent by the prison to look for Nicola? INS agents, as the neighbors suspected? Private agents of a large security firm? At any rate, since Se?ora Mercedes vanished, the men haven’t been back. So they were looking either for Se?ora Mercedes or her daughter. If one of your contacts in that neighborhood would tell you the mother’s whereabouts, maybe you’d be the man to talk her into getting the autopsy done.”
Morrell didn’t say anything. I became aware of the waiter and bus crew hovering around our table. It was eleven o’clock; the only other people still at a table were a young couple buried in each other’s necks. I fished a ten out of my wallet. The waiter swooped on it while the crew quickly cleared the table.
Morrell handed a couple of singles to me. We walked down the street together toward Foster, where we’d both parked. Drummers was only seven or eight blocks from where I’d found Aguinaldo’s body, but it might as well have been seven or eight miles.
“I wish I knew someone who could tell me about Aguinaldo’s life before she was arrested,” I burst out as Morrell stopped at his car. “Did she have a boyfriend who beat her up when she came home, then left her to die in the street? Or was it her wealthy employer—she thought he would help her when she ran away from jail, but he hurt her instead? Someone in that building on Wayne knows, at least knows who she was sleeping with.”
He hesitated, as if debating whether to speak. Finally he pulled out a card and gave it to me.
“I’ll talk to Aisha’s family and see if they know anything about Se?ora Mercedes. I’ve never met her personally. If I learn anything that may be helpful to you I’ll call you. And you can reach me through the number on the card.”
It was the local number for the press agency that represented him. I put it in my hip pocket and turned to cross the street.
“By the way,” he said casually, “who is paying for you to ask these questions?”
I turned to face him again. “Are you asking in a more subtle way if INS is bankrolling me?”
“Just wondering how quixotic you really are.”
I pointed across the street. “See that late–model wreck? I’m quixotic enough for that to be the car I can afford to drive.”
I climbed into the Skylark and turned it around, with a roar of exhaust that made me sound like a teenage boy. Morrell’s Honda moved sleekly to the intersection ahead of me. He must make some money writing about torture victims; the car was new. But what did that prove? Even a person with strong principles has to live on something, and it wasn’t as though he was driving a Mercedes or a Jag. Of course, I had no idea what his principles were.
17 Spinning Wheels, Seeking Traction