That was supposed to scare me. Actually, it did, but I said, “Chicago police only clear seventeen percent of our homicides each year. They need help, and as a trained investigator that’s something I can do for my city. About the maps, Superintendent?”
“There’s nothing about the maps. Lensky was working with a preliminary plan that we scrapped because it was getting too much pushback from the community. Mona Borsa, who is the kind of hardworking volunteer this city depends on, told me Lensky lost all his documents in a mugging after the last SLICK meeting. It’s a shame, because if we had his papers I’d be able to show you that he was looking at a very old plan.
“The cops have a suspect for his killing. They just have to find him. Unless you’re hiding him, they don’t need your help. Save your Girl Scout badge for something you know about. Which, believe me, is not the city’s parks. Leave them to the experts.”
He turned back to the Escalade. His triggermen exchanged regretful looks with Bear: both had hoped their principals would unleash them into a fight.
The SUV pulled away from my parking lot with a great squealing of rubber. A squad car trailed them. I’d been so focused on Taggett and his goons that I hadn’t noticed he had his usual police escort.
I squatted on the pavement next to Bear and put my arms around his neck. “If you’d gone for their throats, the cops would have testified they killed you and me in self-defense. Don’t do it, boy. Let’s survive to find Coop.”
35
Found in the Shuffle
I drove home slowly, rattled by the encounter. Chicagoans know that politics ain’t beanbag, as Mr. Dooley put it all those years ago, but Taggett’s threats were out of proportion to my asking about the maps for the Forty-seventh Street beach project. Some people like to use muscle just to show they have it. Taggett had some of that impulse, but he was a savvy player. His threats to me implied I was threatening a deal he’d done over the Burnham Wildlife Corridor.
Money was already changing hands, the woman from the community had said bitterly. Money people had come to the SLICK meeting. Larry Nieland had significant resources, but it was the Off Duty guy who’d been there and at Taggett’s home who looked like the real money tree. He wouldn’t have been at a small community meeting if he didn’t see the lakefront sprouting rich greens that he could harvest.
“I can imagine that putting in a new beach is a serious engineering challenge,” I commented to Bear, “but it wouldn’t bring global investors to a South Side meeting.”
At home, I wrote down the names of everyone I’d talked to over the last month, from Lydia Zamir and her mother, through the SLICK managers, Coop, Norman Bolton at Global Entertainment, Donna Lutas, her coworker Rikki Samundar. Leo, Bernie, Taggett. Murray. Elisa Palurdo. Her husband’s friend Jesse.
I was looking at two murders, Lensky and Prinz, whose deaths had nothing to do with Lydia Zamir’s disappearance, whose only connection was Coop: he was the cop’s main suspect in the murders. And he had vanished with Zamir.
I sketched a tree with all the different names on branches to see which ones connected to one another. Coop’s, SLICK’s, and Zamir’s branches were knotted together. Norm Bolton was linked to Murray through Global, of course, but that didn’t explain why he’d wanted to film my search for Lydia.
It was the lawyers who seemed to run through the tangled collection of stories, like the trunk of a real tree that all the branches sprouted from. I’d never gotten word back from Murray on whether Global Entertainment was a Devlin & Wickham client, but Devlin had represented the mass murderer who killed Zamir’s lover; they had taken out an order of protection against Lydia, and if my deduction was correct, they had given information about my domestic fracas with Donna Lutas to Park Super Taggett—who was, of course, tied to SLICK.
Rikki Samundar said Devlin & Wickham had gotten involved to protect Sea-2-Sea’s water from poisoning, but pro bono work on a capital case to protect a client sounded thin to me. Global Entertainment was involved, too, I reminded myself. My tree’s branches were getting too tangled to keep straight.
I hadn’t dug into Global shareholders to see if one of them might be the reason Norm Bolton had wanted to film me chasing Lydia Zamir all over Chicago. I took the time now to see who held big enough stakes in Global and in Sea-2-Sea to cross the SEC’s minimum threshold for reporting holdings. Nobody on my tree drawing appeared in those lists, but a firm called Minas y Puentes held a biggish stake in Global.
I’d seen their name on Larry Nieland’s site—this was one of the Chilean firms where he was a board member. It was a closely held Chilean company, and so didn’t have to report its shareholders to U.S. authorities; it was only because Nieland put it on his own web page that I’d heard of it. When I looked it up, I found it was a firm started by the Aguilar family, which owned Chilean copper mines.
Jacobo Palurdo’s father had worked in the Chilean copper mines in Tocopilla. This had to be significant—but of what?
I drew roots on my tree. Some were in Kansas, some in Chicago, some in Chile. Flying to Chile wouldn’t be useful: I don’t speak Spanish, and an investigator who knows neither the language nor the local customs is someone who will be easily duped. Maybe Rikki Samundar and Donna Lutas were hoping I’d fall into that trap—that could explain why they’d spun me a line about Hector’s aunt working for Devlin in Santiago.
The dogs had been nipping at each other for some minutes while I created my tree. I took the three to the lake and let them swim, although Bear stayed close to shore.
On the way home, my phone rang, the dramatic chords I use for my private contact list. I fished the phone from my back pocket while trying to hold all three leashes in my left hand.
Arlette Fouchard spoke before I could say “hello.”
“It is terrible, Victoire. Someone broke into the apartment. They hit Angela, knocked her out. We are at the ’ospital, the room for urgence. I cannot let Bernadine stay in Chicago, not one more night.”
I tied the leashes to a bicycle rack so I could focus on the call.
“Was Bernie hurt?”
“No, no, we are coming home from Bernadine’s coaching day, we are finding Angela, and the girls’ apartment, ma foi, it is a disaster. I am staying with Angela until her own mother can be here and then, poof, we are in Quebec.”
“You called the police, right?”
“Naturellement. And they are saying, girls living off campus in a ’ouse that is falling down, of course someone breaks in. The other two girls, they ’ave moved back into their sorority, but Bernadine, she will return to Canada. That is final.”
Her tone bristled with challenge, but I thought she was right. I ran home with the dogs and explained the situation to Mr. Contreras. He was eager to go to the hospital with me, mostly to make sure Bernie really was all right. When I explained that Arlette was with her, and that Bernie was unharmed, he reluctantly agreed to stay home. I promised to let him know if she had been hurt and left him pacing anxiously in the living room, Mitch at his heels.
By the time I reached the hospital, Angela had been moved from the emergency room to a regular room. When I found her, Bernie was sitting by the bed, her vivid face stretched tight over the cheekbones.