We were walking up Racine for a late supper when Olympia called me. “Have you seen the news?”
“What, Club Gouge is doubling its space in the wake of Friday’s homicide?”
“You have a weird sense of humor, Warshawski. No, the police found Nadia’s killer. That huge tattooed guy who kept tearing up the club. They picked him up with the gun used to shoot Nadia. Such a relief. They’ll let us open on Tuesday!”
“That is a relief, Olympia. And wonderful that you could keep such a focused perspective on Nadia’s death.”
I hung up on her demand to know “Just what do you mean by that?”
7 No-Smoking Zone
Olympia’s call effectually ended my brief sense of well-being. When we returned from dinner, while Jake practiced I looked up the news of Nadia’s killer. Web news sites can be as obnoxious as any tabloid-maybe more so, since it’s so easy to play with images.
“From War Hero to Club Killer” screamed the Herald-Star’s blog.
An anonymous tip led police to an apartment on a quiet street in Lakeview, where the troubled vet who allegedly murdered Nadia Guaman was living. Chad Vishneski, awarded the Bronze Star for valor in Iraq, couldn’t take civilian life. He returned with a ferocious anger that moved him from random acts of vandalism to the sinister, when he began stalking and finally murdered a young graphic artist at Club Gouge on Friday.
The Chicago native was a Lane Tech football star, who went to Grand Valley State on a scholarship, but dropped out to join the Army, where he served four tours before his discharge last summer.
I clicked on a link to a video report and saw footage of a woman, her face swollen with fury.
“The police broke down the door,” she said.
The video showed a door with the wood splintered behind a yellow crime scene banner.
“When I heard the noise, I thought it was Chad. He was so angry all the time since he got home, so I went in the hall to look. Only it was the police come to arrest him. Mona, that’s his mother, she’s out of town. She let him sleep there, even though everyone knows how unstable he is. The condo board is going to have to take action, maybe evict her-we could all have been murdered.”
The video footage shifted to Terry Finchley, standing solemn-faced in the lobby of the police headquarters building, holding a gun in the approved fashion-suspended from a stick passed through the trigger guard.
“We found the perpetrator passed out in bed with this Baby Glock next to him on the floor. Our forensics tests prove that this was the weapon that was used to kill Nadia Guaman.”
Someone asked if it was true that Chad had been brought in drunk. Terry said Chad had apparently taken a drug overdose. He was in the intensive care ward at Cermak Hospital, on the grounds of the Cook County Jail complex, over at Twenty-sixth and California.
I skimmed the rest of the story. Childhood friends recalled Chad as a lighthearted, fun-loving guy. He hadn’t been a football standout, but he’d been big enough to get a Division II scholarship. Back then, “his life was, like, girls, beer, games. The war, it gave him a reason to quit school and serve his country,” one high school buddy said. “When he got home, he was so different, just angry all the time. The war really messed with his head. You couldn’t be in the same room with him.”
The county had assigned him a public defender, although right now it was an open question as to whether Chad would regain consciousness, let alone have enough brain function to stand trial. Still, the PD gallantly told the press that his client was innocent, that this was all a terrible mistake. He didn’t add that the county public defender’s office didn’t have the resources to sort out mistakes, even if Chad’s arrest turned out to be one.
Poor Nadia, crossing paths with a distraught veteran. Poor Chad, another casualty of the endless Iraq war. Poor public defender, and poor Mona Vishneski, Chad’s mother. She’d been spending the winter in Arizona, looking after her own mother, but was flying back to Chicago to be with her son.
Mona Vishneski responded to the Herald-Star’s invasive questions with the age-old litany of mothers: “Chad is innocent. He’s a good boy. He never would have killed a girl at a nightclub.”
Of course, the maniacs in the blogosphere were out in full force, some braying that Nadia Guaman “had been asking for it,” since only an evil woman would frequent a place like Club Gouge. Others claimed that soldiers in Iraq got a taste for blood because of all the Iraqi civilians they’d been encouraged to torture and murder, and vets were bound to take out their bloodlust on innocent civilians, once they returned home.
Still others cried out against liberals who hated America and wanted to ban guns. “Obama used one of his Constitution-hating liberal stooges to commit the murder so he’d have an excuse to take away our guns,” warned one hysteric.
I switched off the computer. Chad’s life, Nadia’s death, weren’t my business, except for the way her face haunted me, asleep and awake. “Alley,” she’d whispered, her expression arrested, almost happy, as if this were a pleasant surprise, to be dying in an icy parking lot.
I went to put my arms around Jake. He smiled but didn’t stop playing. His fingers dancing up and down the strings were sinuous, erotic. My grip on him tightened. Finally, torn between desire and annoyance, he put his bow down and went to bed with me.
In the morning, I left while he was still asleep. It was dark, but I drove to the lakefront with the dogs and ran almost to the Evanston border and back, seven miles, in the thin January air, hoping to sweat nightmares of Nadia’s blood out of my pores.
By the time we returned home, the sky had lightened to a dull pewter. When I’d showered and changed, I accepted Mr. Contreras’s offer of French toast. He’d been a little hurt that I’d spent Sunday with Jake-it’s his job to fuss over me when I’ve been involved in violent crime-but, this time, his fussing had included ragging on me for getting Petra involved with Club Gouge. We’d had a fight about it Saturday night, but after a twenty-four-hour cooling off, we were both prepared to let bygones be bygones, more or less.
When I reached my office, a car was parked in front, engine running. My first thought was the cops, but this was a grime-crusted Corolla with a lot of years under its hood. As I typed in the code on my door keypad, the driver turned off the engine and climbed out of the car. All he had on against the cold was a worn khaki field jacket, unzipped.
“You the detective?” He pitched a cigarette butt into the gutter as he limped across the sidewalk.
“I’m V. I. Warshawski. And, yes, I’m a detective. What can I do for you, Mr.-?”
“Vishneski. I’m John Vishneski.” His face was lined and scarred, and his voice was a soft, tired rumble.
I paused, with my hand on the doorknob. “You’re related to Chad Vishneski?”
“His dad.” He shook his head, as if the relationship were new, or surprising to him. “Yes, I’m his dad.”
I shoved the door open-it always sticks more in the winter-and held it for Chad’s father. When he got inside, Vishneski carefully wiped his boots on the hallway mat three or four times, the gesture of a man who wasn’t sure he was welcome and wanted to minimize any evidence he’d been there.
I directed Vishneski to the couch in the client alcove and switched on the coffee machine in the back. While I turned on lights and put my coat and case away, Vishneski sat completely still, looking at nothing in particular. The cold didn’t seem to bother him, even though my office was barely sixty degrees. It’s such a barn of a place, I keep the thermostat turned low on weekends. I brought a space heater over from my desk, and sat down myself.