A guitar case was propped against the wall next to the stereo. I opened and gave an inadvertent gasp. The guitar had been smashed into pieces, the strings dangling like the useless veins of a decapitated body.
Elisa said Lydia had destroyed her best guitar. Had Lydia herself destroyed the instrument? No guitars, no reminders of the music she’d made from her lover’s words, returning to the piano but only to a joke piano, as if ridiculing her youthful attachment to music.
The makeshift bookshelf held a few dozen books and some stacks of papers, including maps and pamphlets about Horsethief Canyon, the park where Hector had been murdered. I put those in my daypack, but didn’t see any personal documents, no notes saying, “Meet me in the Burnham Wildlife Corridor at midnight,” no letters or bills showing Coop’s full name. In fact, no documents in anyone’s name.
The books were a dry selection of economics and political history. Capitalism and Freedom: Utopia or Possibility, by Larry Nieland; Government and Economics: Peaceful Coexistence, by Ottavio Misombra. Hector Palurdo’s Once Upon a Time: Ancient Fables for Modern Readers. His poetry in Spanish and in English.
“Was Lydia interested in economics?” I asked Elisa.
She stared at me dumbly, then squatted to inspect the titles. “These may have been Hector’s. I don’t know. Lydia might have clung to them out of sentiment. The way I keep all of Jacobo’s old protective gear.”
She started to flip through the pages of Once Upon a Time. Bear gave a warning bark: a moment later we heard the thunder of a police army’s shoes on the stairs. Beneath that layer of sound I heard a startled gasp from Elisa. A second before Pizzello came into the room, I saw her slide a paper into her handbag.
29
Brothers and Comrades Forever
“You have a lot of explaining to do, Warshawski. That was an awfully big coincidence, you stumbling on Lensky’s body so patly.”
We were back in the Second District, in one of the interrogation rooms. While we’d been at the apartment on Kimbark, Pizzello had double-checked that Elisa Palurdo was the renter and entitled to enter and leave. She was almost disappointed by the confirmation—she was pining to arrest me for something.
Pizzello sent Elisa home, but my stumbling on Lensky’s body bugged her. I was guessing her real annoyance was with herself, for not taking my information about Lensky’s disappearance seriously. She was too good a boss to offload on her team, too egotistical to blame herself. I was handy.
“Perhaps,” I said.
“Perhaps nothing.” Pizzello bit off her words, just like an old-school male cop. “You tell me Lensky is missing, and then, when I don’t jump to attention, you present me with his body. How did you know he was in that apartment?”
A dozen hot answers sprang to mind, but I bit off my own words before they left my mouth: when you’re with the cops, keep responses to a minimum. Any long explanation can be sliced and spliced to use against you in court.
“I’m calling my lawyer,” I said. “I have nothing else to say until he is with me.”
I’d been searched for weapons, but they’d let me keep my phone—I wasn’t under arrest, just being held for questioning. I have Freeman Carter on speed dial. When his secretary answered, I named myself and said quickly, “I am being held at the Second District because I reported finding a dead body. Can you have Freeman or one of his associates—”
Pizzello snatched the phone from me. “She doesn’t need a lawyer; she can leave whenever she feels like it. I simply want her to tell me how she happened on the dead man.”
I grabbed the phone back. “Helen, I need an attorney present before I answer that question—too hostile an environment here.”
Pizzello scowled at me but went to confer with her team. She took my phone with her. She left the door open—I guess to keep an eye on me without using an officer to watch me through the window.
Bear was with me: Elisa wouldn’t take him when we left the apartment and I dug my heels over leaving him in a car on a muggy day for however long she might want to detain me.
“Dogs having heatstroke while the police detain their guardians is a good way to add to public annoyance with the CPD,” I said. “You’re lucky I’m talking to you—don’t push it over the dog.”
While we waited for my lawyer, I squatted next to Bear and stroked him. This kept both of us calm, while I listened in on the conversation in the hallway.
Simon Lensky’s body had been transferred to the morgue. In big cities, autopsies don’t happen as quickly as they do on CSI, but the preliminary read was that Lensky had died about twelve hours ago, from blows administered ten to twenty hours before that. It hadn’t been a fast or pleasant death. It was even possible that if Elisa and I had gone to the apartment a day earlier, we could have saved his life.
My abdominal muscles contracted at that thought. A good detective must not indulge in “should haves,” but it’s sometimes hard to keep them at bay.
When Stacey Kawasaki arrived from Freeman’s office, I gave her a quick précis of the background and the players. As soon as we finished, Pizzello joined us in the interrogation room.
“We want to know what prompted Warshawski to go to that apartment this afternoon,” Pizzello said. “Did you have a tip that Simon Lensky was there?”
I conferred with Kawasaki, who agreed I should say I was hoping Lydia might have returned to the apartment Elisa Palurdo rented for her. Pizzello tried to push on that—did I really think someone as ill as Lydia could navigate the streets?
“She made it from Provident to Forty-seventh Street, Sergeant.”
Pizzello scowled and switched to whether I was really looking for Coop or had inside knowledge about Lensky’s fate—but I let the lawyer handle those.
“Why was Lensky there at all?” Pizzello burst out. “We know there was ill will between Coop and the SLICK officers. What would make him meet with Coop? Or was the Zamir woman there?”
“Your forensics team can doubtless tell you whether Lydia Zamir had been in the apartment recently. Until you find this man, Coop, it’s all speculation,” Kawasaki said. “We’re done here.”
“I guess.” Pizzello rubbed her eyes. Her fine mousy hair was coming loose from her clip, making her look young and vulnerable. I wondered if she knew that—if it was an interrogation trick to make people like me feel sorry for her.
I murmured to Kawasaki, who repeated to Pizzello, “The timeline on the injuries makes it clear that Bernadine Fouchard had nothing to do with them.”
“We’ll talk to her and determine that,” Pizzello said.
I grinned. “Her mother’s been with her nonstop for the past forty-eight hours. I want to be there when you interrogate Arlette Fouchard. In fact, I’ll sell tickets.”
“Oh, go away,” Pizzello cried. “And take that wretched animal with you.”
“My phone?” I held out a palm. Pizzello smacked my iPhone into it with more force than was strictly necessary.
The long-suffering Bear followed me to Kawasaki’s car, a late-model BMW. I thanked her for coming down to the station, but really, fees from people like me allow her to drive a car like hers, so she should have been thanking me.