Murray is an investigative reporter for the Herald-Star, which used to be a great newspaper until, like papers all over America, they began cutting staff and pages to keep Wall Street happy. These days, the paper looks more like My Weekly Reader than a serious daily.
Murray is still a good reporter, but he has less and less incentive to keep digging since so many of his stories get killed. He has a TV gig through the Star’s Global Entertainment news channel, so I never worry about his starving to death, but he’s depressed a lot of the time and turns to me way too much for news.
“Your sources are as lazy as you are these days, Murray.” I was too tired to be tactful. “A: Chad Vishneski is not the perp. And B: It was his father who hired me.”
“I know I’m late to the party, but I hear you held the dying woman outside a strip club. Doesn’t seem like your kind of venue.”
“Go there yourself,” I said. “It’s a great show. I’m surprised you haven’t caught it yet.”
“Truth is, I’ve been on vacation. Buenos Aires in January beats Chicago to hell. I got home last night and saw that the Girl Detective had been super-busy in my absence. Can I buy you a drink tonight and hear all about it?”
“Golden Glow at eight, Murray, if you’ll do one little thing for me first.”
“Not the dogs or the old man…”
“You still have friends in the DMV and I don’t. If I give you a license plate, will you tell me who owns it?” I read off the number from the sedan that Rodney had driven last night.
It was a relief to off-load even one of my chores. When I finished changing for work and went back outside, I wished I’d given him something more challenging, like cleaning off my car and shoveling a path for it. It took twenty minutes to dig it out, but there wasn’t an easy way to take public transit to Nadia Guaman’s apartment. And if Nadia had managed to track down her dead sister’s lovers, then I needed to go through her apartment to see who else she might have been targeting.
Nadia had lived about a mile from my office. In the snow, it was a quiet neighborhood, but the telltale gang graffiti were present on the bus stops and overpasses.
Nadia’s apartment was in a well-kept courtyard building on one of the side streets just north of North Avenue. People were leaving for work, and I didn’t have to stand on the sidewalk long before a woman emerged. She held the door for me, her eyes on the weather outside, not on the face of a stranger entering.
In the entryway, away from the wind and blowing snow, the quiet fell on me like a blessing. I brushed the snow from my pant legs, stomped my feet clean, and climbed up to the third floor. Nadia had respectable locks but nothing out of the ordinary; even with my hands stiff from cold, I worked the tumblers in under ten minutes. I was lucky: I was just opening the door when a man came out of the apartment across the landing.
“Who are you?” he asked. “Miss Nadia isn’t at home, and she doesn’t live with anyone.”
“I’m a detective. You know Miss Nadia is dead-her family buried her yesterday. I want to look for evidence in her apartment.”
He shook his head. “You’re too late. Someone else was in here yesterday, and they said the same thing, that they were detectives looking for evidence. I saw them going in, and when I asked them for identification, they showed me their guns instead.”
“Did you call 911?”
“Why, when everyone knows the police themselves are operating burglary rings in this neighborhood? And you? Are you also a detective whose identification is a gun?”
I fished my wallet out of my briefcase and showed him the laminated copy of my PI license. “I’m a private investigator. I’ve been hired to uncover the reason for Miss Nadia’s murder.”
“They made an arrest. I saw it was some lovers’ quarrel.”
“They make wrongful arrests every day,” I said.
The neighbor nodded, and started an involved story about his sister’s second son. I went into Nadia’s place and found a light switch. The neighbor, still talking, followed me in, but he fell silent when he saw the chaos created by yesterday’s “detectives.” Whoever had been searching, whatever they’d been looking for, they’d done a thorough job of tossing books from shelves and DVDs from their cases.
Like every artist I’ve known, Nadia covered her walls with pictures, masks, unusual found objects. Most of these had been flung to the floor, the hooks and the dust outlines on the walls showing where they’d once hung.
“Have you been in here before?” I asked the neighbor.
“I didn’t take anything,” he said. “You can’t accuse me of that.”
I looked at him closely. “So you have been in here. That was you in here yesterday, not people pretending to be detectives.”
“That isn’t true!” he cried. “They really came. I only wondered why. And they hadn’t locked the door when they left.”
“So you locked up behind them? How did you have a key to Ms. Guaman’s dead bolt?”
“She gave it to me. In case there was an emergency. Or to feed her cat when she was out of town.”
I had a hard time picturing the shy, intense Nadia with a life that took her out of town. Although maybe she’d gone around the country hunting for her dead sister’s lovers. People do odd things when they’re gripped by an obsession.
I walked through the apartment’s three rooms. In the bedroom, I found the one piece of art left on the walls: a crucifix, where the head of Jesus had been replaced by the head of a girl taken from an old doll. The hair had been pulled from the doll’s head and wrapped around the hands of the crucified Christ. The image was profoundly disturbing, not what I would want to wake to.
I realized there were no signs of a cat, no litter box, no food or water dishes. “Where is the cat?”
“In my home. When I learned Miss Nadia was dead, I took in the cat. She called it Ixcuina, after some old goddess. A strange name for an animal, but it is a strange animal.”
I looked from the dismantled apartment to his flushed face. I didn’t believe that he hadn’t been here yesterday, but I also didn’t think he would have destroyed the apartment if he’d been inside surreptitiously.
“So, Mr.-?”
“Urbanke,” he muttered, defensive.
“So, Mr. Urbanke, as a frequent visitor to Ms. Guaman’s, can you tell me what yesterday’s fake detectives might have taken with them? Can you tell if any of her art is missing?”
He looked around slowly but shook his head. “It-I can’t tell, with everything on the floor like this. Maybe if I put the pictures back on the wall…”
We spent the next hour or so matching artwork to dim outlines. We worked our way through the apartment’s three rooms, but at the end, even though there were still some gaps on the walls, Urbanke couldn’t tell what was gone.
“Besides,” he added, “she was always bringing in something new, taking down something she was tired of. It was like a museum, her private museum, where the exhibits were always changing. The one thing I don’t see is her computer. She kept it here.”
He pointed at a worktable in the corner of the apartment’s big front room. The table was built for artists or drafters; one half could be lifted up and down at different angles, depending on how the person liked to work, while the other half remained flat. The flat space, Nadia’s office worktop, held bills and a scattered pile of sketches. The charger for the computer was still plugged into the wall, but of the computer itself there was no trace.
Urbanke stood next to me looking through Nadia’s sketches. “Who knows if this artwork is valuable. Those detectives didn’t take it, but her computer, definitely you could sell it for drugs.”