I went into my own space. I put out food and water for Bear and folded a blanket for him next to my desk. He made a slow tour of the room and finally lay down on the blanket with a mournful grunt.
I was going through emails when my office phone rang.
“Bolton,” the voice on the other end pronounced.
“Hello, Bolton,” I said. Norm Bolton, head of Global Entertainment’s media division.
“Where are we, Warshawski?”
“We are still regretfully declining the chance to entertain Global’s global viewers,” I said.
“You’re making a mistake.” The sentence came out more as threat than comment.
“What is it about the Zamir story that is so important to Global, Mr. Bolton?”
“Not the Zamir story specifically,” he said. “This is a reality show about how investigators work.”
“These days it’s ninety-five percent desk work, in front of a computer. How about for ten thousand dollars I send you all the URLs I consult and your viewers can create their own investigations?”
“I hope your work doesn’t depend on financial negotiations,” he said. “That’s a ludicrous offer. Trust me: you will be happier in the long run if you sign that contract. After all, we can follow you without paying you.”
He hung up.
I called Murray. “Your boy Bolton just phoned; he’s not happy that I’m turning down the chance to run around town with a camera attached to my head. He may well have a tap in place on my phone, although my encryption is pretty good—I’m telling you in case you were tempted to call him a repellent worm who crawled out of the dung to run your media division.”
There was a long silence at Murray’s end before he said, “It’s probably the smart decision, but I still wish you’d rethink it. It would mean, well, a lot to me.”
What was ‘a lot’? His career? His self-esteem? His life? I didn’t want to dig in that ground.
As a diversion, I told him about Coop arriving with Bear. Murray liked that—dog stories always draw an audience. I feigned reluctance but finally agreed to let him send a camera crew to film Bear and me, in the hopes that someone somewhere would view the footage and recognize Coop’s dog and let us know where Coop was.
While I waited for Murray, I got caught up on emails and did some digging for the truckload of Ligurian wine I’d agreed to find.
Murray arrived with a cameraman who knew something about filming dogs: he brought a carton of meatballs, which coaxed Bear to his feet. Despite the food, his face looked old and mournful, as though Coop’s disappearance was merely the latest in a string of human barbarisms he’d witnessed.
TV crews work fast. Twenty minutes after arriving, they were ready to go south with Murray to look for the place where the police had found the gavel. I’d told him about the gavel the day before, but this was his first chance to film the hole where I’d found it.
Murray tried to talk me into going with him and his crew. That made me wonder if he wanted my company, or if Bolton had told him to try to pull me into a joint investigation without calling it that.
To stop his pleading, I told him about Curtis, the SLICK gaveller. “I don’t know that he had anything against Prinz, but he does own a gavel. I don’t know if the cops are checking on it. I also don’t know if they’re checking on an argument Prinz had with Simon Lensky, SLICK’s documents maestro, but in another development, which doesn’t interest the cops, Lensky has disappeared.”
That brought a gleam to his reporter’s eye, and we parted more or less as pals. He had a couple of good nuggets to put on-air, and I had someone who might confirm that the gavel in Lydia’s hideout had come from SLICK.
Back at my desk, I tried to organize my thoughts. Arthur Morton, mass slaughterer, I wrote on one of my big sketch pads. Hector Palurdo, immigrant rights activist and murder victim. Devlin & Wickham, law firm who magically popped up to defend Morton. Lydia Zamir, Hector’s lover and creative partner who tried to attack the Devlin lawyers. Global Entertainment, worried about what I might turn up.
Presumably, Global’s cable news division had covered the aftermath of the massacre, as had every other cable outlet in the country. Blood, disaster, the inalienable right to own weapons of mass destruction, continue to grab headlines despite the wearying number of times they come together.
When I first started looking at Devlin & Wickham’s involvement, I’d wondered if someone at the firm was connected to Arthur Morton, but maybe I’d been asking the wrong question.
What would the right question be? It couldn’t be about Sea-2-Sea’s decision to take part in the Tallgrass fund-raiser for immigrants and refugees—all the other ag companies had supported it. They wanted to protect the cheap labor, the people who do the disgusting parts of bringing meat to the table. People like my father’s parents, immigrants from Poland, who worked on the killing floors of the Chicago stockyards for eleven dollars a week during the Depression.
My grandmother Warshawski scrubbed blood from the slaughterhouse floors; my grandfather hit steers in the forehead with a giant mallet. A kind of outsize gavel. Leo Prinz’s head battered like a steer—the image made my gorge rise. I put down my pen and walked around the room. Bear followed me, but on my second circuit he decided I wasn’t about to abandon him; he went back to the blanket and lay down.
If Lydia had been stronger, both physically and mentally, I might have thought she’d sought refuge with one of the migrant families she’d met through the Tallgrass Meet-Up. She’d made it from Provident Hospital to the Metra tracks on her own, but the work it would take to get from Chicago to Kansas—I couldn’t see it. Of course, Coop could have taken her there. But where?
I went back to the files about the fund-raiser itself. The online photos showed how easy it would be to hide a horse, maybe a whole herd of them, along with a few thieves, inside Horsethief Canyon. I dug up the names of the organizers. Two who’d survived the massacre were so far in retreat from public life that I couldn’t find them, but I sent an email to the remaining man, to see if he had heard from Lydia.
With Bear nearly glued to my pant leg, I took one of my burner phones up the street to a coffee shop I never use: if you think someone’s tracking you, break your routine. The coffee shop wouldn’t let Bear inside, even when I explained that I was his emotional support human.
I took one of their bitter, undrinkable espressos outside and squatted on the curb to call Elisa Palurdo. She hadn’t heard from Lydia, she said in a tired voice.
“I was calling about the apartment you said you rented for her. Is there any chance she could be there?”
“Do you know, it never occurred to me,” she said in an arrested tone. “I renewed the lease nearly a year ago, hoping I might persuade her to move back in.”
“The lease must be up about now,” I said.
“End of next month. I guess it’s time to let it go. If she isn’t there now, I suppose I need to clean it out and hand back the keys.”
She’d kept an extra set; she agreed to meet me at the apartment and let me in.
28
No Place Like Home
The apartment was on the south fringe of the University of Chicago campus: Lydia had wanted to live there, Elisa said, because it made her feel connected to Hector.