She hung up on me midsentence.
All I knew about death from nicotine patches was what anyone who’s watched Thank You for Smoking knows—that it is possible in a movie. I looked it up online and came away with hazy information. Thirty patches would perhaps do it in three hours, but there seemed to be some obstacles.
For one thing, you’d need a prescription. Could Arthur Morton have gotten one filled from the Saline County prison? At least in Cook County, the idea of a prisoner being given nicotine patches to quell his cigarette withdrawal would cause a laff riot among the guards.
For another, it would be hard to get a prescription filled for thirty patches. If Morton could have gotten them, wouldn’t someone in a small jail notice he was covered in patches and beginning to suffocate?
I sent an email to Chicago’s deputy chief medical examiner, a man named Nick Vishnikov who inhabits that gray area between friend and work acquaintance.
Can someone really commit suicide with nicotine patches? How many would you need?
Before putting the whole Lydia-Hector story to one side, I called the two men whose names Elisa Palurdo had given me, his boyhood friend and his college roommate. Neither had seen Lydia recently—like Elisa, they had felt unable to respond to her as she became more agitated.
“What was her relationship with Hector like?” I asked.
“Hector was on the road the last few years,” Stu Shiffman, the roommate said. “He liked to talk to me when he was in town—you know I teach Latin American studies at Northern Illinois?—he had become deeply interested in Chilean history and politics, and I was one person who knew enough to help him with resources, but we didn’t get together socially, so I didn’t see him with Lydia very often. Still, I thought Lydia was good for him, or maybe they were good for each other. His best-known book was a collection of short stories based on some of the oldest histories we have of the Americas. Lydia wrote her famous song, ‘Savage,’ culled from the stories Hector unearthed about the First Nations at the time of Columbus.”
We chatted for a few more minutes. Just as we were saying goodbye, he said, “One thing—after his father died, Hector started traveling to Chile more often. He’d gone a couple of times, hoping to find relatives, I think, but after Jacobo’s death, he wanted more specific help in tracking down what happened to victims of the Pinochet regime. Between forty and fifty thousand people were tortured or disappeared and the postregime truth and reconciliation efforts were brief and didn’t account for most of them.”
“Was Hector’s father a refugee from Pinochet?”
“I don’t think so. I got the idea he was a blue-collar guy who emigrated because he couldn’t find work when the Chilean economy started to come apart.”
“When was that?” I tried to remember what little I knew about Chile—the destabilization of the economy when the socialist Allende was president, the right-wing Pinochet coup.
“No, after that,” Shiffman said. “It’s a complicated history and I won’t take your time with all the details—who did what to the economy and the infrastructure—but about a decade into the Pinochet regime, inflation and unemployment both began to climb. Pinochet had undercut a lot of the social network, so people who couldn’t feed their families or afford health care looked elsewhere.
“Some looked to the north and from what Hector said, his father was one of those. I have a feeling, too, that Jacobo was pretty red—another good reason to leave Chile. Leftists were prime targets of the Pinochet death squads. I know Jacobo Palurdo didn’t want Hector at the University of Chicago—Hector told me his father thought it was an elitist institution that would make Hector ashamed of his roots.”
It was something to think about, but not a help in finding Lydia. I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I finally put her out of my mind to attend to jobs for other clients.
I worked doggedly for three hours, ignoring a text from Murray, and met Peter Sansen for a late dinner. My phone buzzed as we were having drinks at the bar—Bernie. She rang again five minutes later, and again as the waiter led us to our table. This was followed by a text: You must phone at once. URGENT, URGENT, URGENT.
For Bernie, urgent could mean anything, but her recent arrest made me uneasy. I excused myself and went outside to call.
“Vic, I thought maybe you were in bed with Peter and not answering your phone until morning. I need you, à l’instant!”
“What?”
“Leo! He’s dead! They found him—found his body—he was in that wild park by the viaduct.”
14
Thorough Search
Someone took the phone from Bernie before I could ask where she was, but from the background sounds before the phone went dead, I guessed she was with the police at the crime scene. Peter settled the drinks bill and drove me to Forty-seventh Street.
The Burnham Wildlife Corridor was narrow, but it stretched about two miles, from the parking lot at McCormick Place—Chicago’s big convention center—to the Forty-seventh Street viaduct. As we approached the northern edge, we could see bright circles of police flashlights bobbing among the shrubbery. Gapers slowed the exit to a maddening creep. When we finally left the Drive, Peter let me out near the parking lot.
The sidewalk was even thicker with gawkers than the Drive had been, but I’d learned the art of breaking through a crowd on the streets of South Chicago. I quickly made it to the front, not bothering to apologize to anyone cursing me after colliding with my elbows.
The entrance to the parking lot was barricaded. I told the officer on duty that I was Bernie Fouchard’s attorney and asked to be taken to her.
The man looked at my credentials with painstaking—and pains-giving—care before grudgingly deciding I was actually an attorney and might be allowed in to see my client. He called someone for permission and pulled the sawhorses apart to let me pass.
All the local TV stations had cameras set up, aimed at the entrance to the lot. The sight of a new body entering the enclosure caused major excitement: three people rushed up with their mikes, wanting my identity. Beth Blacksin, from Global’s cable news channel, recognized me and hollered for the name of my client. When I kept on walking, the other reporters converged on Beth, demanding my name.
Once I was in the main part of the lot, the strobes and arc lights from the police blinded me. I squinted through the glare and finally saw a knot of uniforms at the north end, where they’d herded some twelve or fifteen people into a makeshift holding pen.
Most of the detainees were older, worn-out people, mostly men, in threadbare shirts and baggy trousers, some in their winter parkas, since they had no safe place to store them in summertime. A handful of women was segregated from the men onto a couple of benches where they were watched by a trio of women cops. On one bench, wedged between a massive woman in a halter top and long skirt and a younger woman, pencil thin, whose twitches and rolling eyes betrayed an urgent need for medication, I saw Bernie. She was hunched over, her hands clutching the edge of the bench.
I ran to her, calling her name, and she hurled herself into my arms, breaking down into sobs.
One of the women officers put a hand on Bernie’s shoulder, as if to pull her back to the bench.