I didn’t think the photo was what the killers were looking for when they slit open cushions and the mattress. Maybe Hector had hidden it from his mother, or used it as a page marker, but whoever killed Lensky was looking for something you could hide in a curtain hem or a box of tea leaves.
Being paraded around like a pet monkey by his mother’s rich boss must have left its own traumatic memories. I wondered if this patron had also given him dental care—Jacobo’s teeth gleamed white and straight in the picture, but his friend’s were uneven and one incisor had broken.
Where Coop entered the story didn’t seem connected to Hector, but to the park and to Lydia. Coop was furious over the proposal to change the lakefront. The bludgeoning deaths were the work of someone who was enraged, and Coop’s anger spilled out like lava from Popocatépetl.
My mind felt like a horrible stew, with beans and overcooked okra turning over and over, not tasty and not improved by continued boiling. I tried to sing under my breath to keep from thinking.
The rush hour was still clogging the expressways. I drove home on side streets, watched ordinary people have ordinary after-work reunions. Men ruffled their children’s hair, women squatted to talk face-to-face with toddlers. People were mowing lawns and playing catch in the streets. I felt like an outsider, the Little Match Girl watching happy families through a window.
It was six when I reached home, a mere fourteen hours since Coop left Bear here, but it felt like an event from my distant past, so much had gone on during the day. I let Bear out and stood for a moment, doing push-ups against the side of the car to stretch out my hamstrings and my traps.
I needed to walk Mitch and Peppy, and be prepared for another attack from Donna Lutas and the rest of the tenants. The thought made me put my arms on the car roof and lay my head on them.
“There is no i in ‘team,’ but there is one in ‘quit,’” I chivvied myself—one of my old basketball coach’s bromides. Of course, there’s also an i in “win.” “I will win,” I said, without much conviction.
Mitch and Peppy were not happy that I’d spent the day with a foreign dog. I left Bear with Mr. Contreras, while I leashed up my pair and jogged to the lake, but they behaved abominably. At the lake, they ran away, wouldn’t come when they were called, rolled in dead fish, and generally pushed me beyond the brink.
When I finally brought them home, Donna Lutas was coming down the stairs from the upper floors. The dogs lunged for her and it took every ounce of my remaining strength to keep them from rubbing dead fish onto her.
“Can we talk?” Lutas said.
I sighed. “Sure. You want to come to the basement while I wash these two?”
She followed me down to the laundry room. I tied the dogs to a pole near a drain in the middle of the floor and attached a hose to one of the sinks. When Lutas saw what the splash radius was likely to be, she decided to wait upstairs.
I scrubbed slowly, not to be meticulous, but to delay the confrontation. My mother would have condemned me sharply: Swallow the bad-tasting medicine quickly, get done with it. The anticipation is worse than the taste.
“Got it: stop complaining,” I said, out loud. I turned off the water, towel-dried the dogs, and clomped back up the stairs.
Lutas was standing in the doorway of her own apartment, scrolling through her phone. She was aware that I’d arrived, especially since Mitch gave a sharp bark outside Mr. Contreras’s door, but she didn’t look up.
“Let me know when you want to talk,” I said. “I need to shower and then I’m going out.” Peter and I were grabbing what time together we could before he flew out—the only bright spot in a hideous day.
“No, no, let’s do it now.” She was breathy, nervous, which made me feel less powerless.
I sat on the bottom step, holding the dog leashes in a light hand, but didn’t say anything.
“I—uh, I may have been, uh, I may have lost my temper this morning.”
“That’s possible,” I agreed.
“There was significant provocation, you must admit,” Lutas said, her voice rising. “The noise, the risk you bring into the building—gunfights in the stairwell are a threat to all of us, not just you!”
When I didn’t respond, she demanded that I say something.
“You’re doing a good job on your own.” I took a last burr from Mitch’s left earflap. “I don’t see what I can add.”
“Don’t you think I have a right to be angry?”
“Can you tell me what we’re talking about?” I asked. “Are you hoping to push me into losing my temper on tape, or agreeing to something you can use in court?”
“I—no.” She gave a titter of fake laughter. “Just—I know I lost my temper, but I’d like you to admit I had a good reason to.”
“Ms. Lutas, I don’t admit anything. I know you’re a lawyer at Devlin & Wickham, but I’m not sure you know I’m also a lawyer. I earned my stripes at Twenty-sixth and California, where the hardest part of the job was to get my clients to shut up in court.” I got to my feet and started up the stairs, the dogs following.
“Wait,” she said. “I meant to say, I didn’t take the time to ask why you brought that other dog in. Salvatore Contreras told me he’s connected to a missing person you’re looking for, that singer. To be honest, I hadn’t ever heard of her when you asked about her last week, but two of the women in my group, they love Lydia Zamir’s work. They want to meet you, and they said maybe they could help look for her.”
I stopped at the first landing, my jaw agape. “You do know that there are orders of protection against Zamir at your firm, right?”
“Yes, Mr. Gorbeck—my boss—told me, but he talked to the other partners and they agree that the sooner we can find the Zamir woman the easier everyone can sleep at night. He—they—are eager to help you find her.”
“Gosh, Ms. Lutas, that’s extremely generous—another example of Devlin’s pro bono work, like their defense of the man who murdered Zamir’s lover.”
Her thin face flooded with color. “So you’ll do it?”
I smiled. “I’ll have to talk it over with my own lawyer. I’ll get back to you.”
While I showered, I tried to figure out what was going on with Lutas. No, with her firm. What was going on that made Devlin & Wickham want to be privy to my investigation? Perhaps Global Entertainment was a client.
I lay down, wanting to rest for half an hour before going out to meet Peter, but my brain wouldn’t shut off. I finally called Murray.
“Crap, Warshawski, don’t you look at your messages? Someone at the Second told me you’d been in interrogation all afternoon about Simon Lensky’s murder. You know I’m following the Coop-Zamir story. Why the fuck didn’t you let me know?”
“Because I was in interrogation at the Second all afternoon. I just got home.”
“Well?” he demanded.
“Well, nothing,” I said. “Simon Lensky was killed. Sergeant Pizzello wanted to know if I had murdered him. I didn’t.”
Murray pushed on me. When I’d filled in as many blanks as I was willing to share—leaving Elisa Palurdo and her husband’s photo out of the story—I asked him if Global was a client of Devlin & Wickham.