“I’m sorry for the trouble you’re going through, Mr. Vishneski.”
“Yep. It’s a hard time.” He made it a statement, not a complaint.
A minute or so went by when he didn’t say anything else. A lot of people have trouble getting to the point when they’re in the detective’s office. Like visiting the doctor: you have this lump in your breast, but now you’re in the office, you don’t want to ask, you don’t want to be told.
“Is Chad your only child?” I asked, just as a way to prod him into speaking.
“My only one, and I didn’t even know he was in trouble, not until one of the gals in the office called me Saturday night. My own boy, and I didn’t know. That’s what that I-raq war did, turned him into a boy who couldn’t call his old man when he was in trouble.”
“Would he have, before the war?”
He nodded. “We used to talk every day, even when he was off at Grand Valley State. Even when he first deployed. But then the war got to him. The violence. He saw his whole unit die around him during his third deployment, and that did him in. It was like he blamed me, in a way.”
“Blamed you?”
“I thought a lot about this,” he said. “I think he felt I should have protected him. I was his dad, see, and he always, oh, looked up to me. At least when he was small. I worked construction my whole life, although I’m a project manager now, for Mercurio. I was stronger than most guys, and Chad, he thought I could always take care of trouble around him, or me, and I always thought so, too. Until he went off to I-raq, where no one could protect him. It’s in my dreams all the time, that I should have saved him from seeing what he had to see. I couldn’t save him, and he couldn’t talk to me anymore.”
He stuck a hand reflexively inside his jacket pocket, then looked a question.
“You’re right,” I said. “This is a no-smoking zone.”
“Smoking in the cold outdoors-don’t know why pneumonia hasn’t carried me off by now.” He ran his fingers through his graying hair. “They’re holding my boy in a prison hospital ward. Do you know it?”
“Cermak Hospital. I’ve been there.”
“Terrible place. Terrible, terrible place. Just getting in to see my own boy, they searched me. I had to take off all my clothes just to see my son.”
Strip searching, it’s so humiliating. When you’re worried about your child, the violation is even more acute.
“My boy is in intensive care,” Vishneski was continuing. “He’s unconscious, but they got him chained to the bed. How can anyone get well if they’re chained to the bed like that? I begged them, Let me move him to a real hospital where he can get real care, but the judge, he set the bail at seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. If I can’t pay the bail, Chad has to stay there in the jail hospital.”
I could hear my office phone begin to ring behind the partition. Monday morning: everyone wanted me faster than yesterday.
“Why did you come to me, Mr. Vishneski?”
He rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “They told me you were at this nightclub, this Club Gouge. They told me maybe you saw what happened. Maybe you can explain what that dead gal did to Chad to get him so upset.”
“Who’s ‘they,’ Mr. Vishneski?”
“Oh. Secretary in the office, the gal who called to tell me about Chad. She read the whole story, going back to before Christmas, she came up with your name. She says you were in the club the first time Chad, well, started carrying on. She looked you up on the computer, read about your work. She told me you have a good reputation, you’re honest, you do a good job.”
“I do my best, but I’m not sure I can explain what happened between your son and Nadia Guaman. Was there something specific you wanted to know?” I sat quietly, hands easy at my sides, letting the calls roll over to my answering service.
“The woman who owns the club, she’s kind of a hard case, isn’t she? She says Chad kept attacking this Nadia whenever she showed up. Is this true?”
“You talked to Olympia?” I was puzzled. Surely she wouldn’t have been in bond court or at the prison hospital.
“I went over to her club yesterday afternoon after I went to see Chad. I wanted to see what kind of a place it was. The cops shut it down while they did their investigating, if that’s what you call it, but she was there, working on accounts or something. Like I said, I’m a project manager, at least I was until this economy destroyed the construction industry. You meet tough women in construction-well, they have to be to survive in that world-but this Olympia, she’d chew up my crew chief for dinner and spit him out and not think twice about it! She claims Chad tried to assault the dead gal. She says after someone broke it up, Chad must’ve lain in wait so he could shoot her. Is any of that true?”
I hate it when people ask questions for which there’s no happy answer. “I was at the club two times when both Chad and Nadia were there, and I’m afraid that both times Chad boiled over when Nadia did her drawings. The first time, he tried to jump her onstage, and the bouncer did throw him out. I’m not going to lie to you, Mr. Vishneski: I heard a snippet of a conversation between your son and Nadia in the parking lot. Each was accusing the other of spying. My first reaction was that it was an ugly divorce case. But if they weren’t lovers, if they hadn’t met outside the club, what was that about?”
“I don’t know.” He stuck his hand inside his jacket pocket again and then remembered we weren’t smoking in here. “One of his buddies called me, says at the time that gal was being murdered, Chad and them were all in a bar watching a Hawks game, and when it ended, Chad announced he didn’t feel well, he was going home. Going back to my ex’s, that meant.”
“Did any of them actually see him go home?”
Vishneski hunched a shoulder. “This one friend, he dropped Chad off. But when I told the cops that, they said even if Chad watched the game, it ended an hour before that woman was shot, plenty of time for him to pretend to be sick and get over to the club to lie in wait for her.”
The office phone had continued to ring while we talked. Now my cell phone chirped out a few bars of Mozart, my signal that one of a handful of key callers wanted me. I looked at the screen: my answering service was texting me that the cops, the media, and my clients were all getting restless over my inaccessibility.
“What is it you want from me, Mr. Vishneski?” I tried to mask my impatience.
“I want to know what really happened. I-my boy, he came back from I-raq in a bad way, I’ll be the first to admit that. He bounced off the walls, you couldn’t talk to him without getting your head bit off. He ran around with his Army buddies, got drunk, got in fights, couldn’t hang on to a job. But it’s hard for me to see him shooting a helpless young lady like that. I just don’t believe it. The cops, they’re happy to write ‘Case Closed’ on their file. And that public defender the county gave Chad… If he can remember Chad’s name when he gets into court, I’ll be surprised.”
“If he’s guilty, I can’t prove he’s innocent, Mr. Vishneski,” I said quietly.
“I wouldn’t want you to. But I need to know-What is it they always say on those law-and-order shows? ‘Beyond a reasonable doubt.’” He smiled, a painful crack in his lined face.
“What about the gun? The news reports say the cops found the murder weapon next to Chad when they went to arrest him.”
“It’s not his, I’m sure it’s not. Maybe he found it in the street and picked it up.”
I didn’t even try to respond to that parental fantasy. I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands, and Nadia’s face appeared behind my lids. Death chasing away anger, catching her by surprise.