Pay Dirt, page 14
I waited a beat, but he was watching me warily, not responding. He might be a loose cannon but this wasn’t his first interrogation.
“I’m guessing Clarina Coffin was a fake identity. There was a suffragist named Clarina Nicholls who lived in Kansas in the nineteenth century. Clarina Coffin claimed to be deeply interested in local history, so I’m wondering if she named herself after that activist. There are thousands of people in the country with the ‘Coffin’ surname. Did your Clarina ever talk to you about how she chose her name?”
“She wasn’t ‘my’ Clarina. Just someone who understood the importance of the issues facing our country.”
“When did she start joining the protests?” I asked.
“What does this have to do with her death? You think Brett Santich murdered her to stop her picketing his school?” He sat up straighter, expression hopeful.
“I don’t think anything because I don’t have data,” I said. “I’m hoping you can help with that. Was Cady Perec’s suspension the first time Clarina joined you in one of your actions?”
“How can I trust you to keep what I say confidential?”
“You can’t,” I said. “It’s a murder investigation. If you tell me something that connects to her killer, I’m bound to act on it. But if you tell me something about trespassing or throwing paintballs at a building, I’ll keep it to myself.”
“Yeah, that’s about the level I’m good at,” he said bitterly. “I thought I could make a difference in the world, but trespassing and throwing paintballs doesn’t change anything.”
He watched me for signs of ridicule, perhaps, or judgment, but I sat still, not speaking, keeping my face neutral.
“It’s not a big secret. Clarina first came around last fall, when Santich and his lackeys suspended Cady Perec for trying to teach their children the truth about race and class in America. Zoë, the kid at the paper, wrote up the way the school board reacted to Cady’s class on Kansas history. Clarina read the story. She said she’d been digging into Lawrence history and could shed some amazing light on hidden corners of it.”
“What kinds of things did she think she could reveal?”
“Things like lynch mobs in Kansas, or the way the heroes of the abolitionist movement treated Indigenous people after the Civil War. She offered to help Cady improve her reading list. The Perecs go around with their damned noses in the air, acting like they’re the people who created this town, so of course Cady told Clarina she didn’t need her help.
“Clarina wasn’t the kind to take offense. When Santich took things with Cady to the next level and got his lapdog board to fire her, Clarina came out to picket with me.”
Trig breathed heavily, his fury at Santich boiling to the surface again.
“Anyway, I told her about the Yancy project when she was working with me at the school. Brett Santich farmed that land on top of the mound, and suddenly he gives it over to some company that wants to put in a fancy resort. Like, all the rich people in Kansas City will invite their friends here for skiing or whatever rich people do, instead of going to Aspen.
“High-and-mighty Perec, she was head of the planning commission when the deal went through, she says it’s a private concern, not run by local government. But when I ask why local government doesn’t have responsibility for environmental impact or safety, but this private concern has, she tells me to raise the question with the right authorities. And when I do that, they tell me I don’t have standing. So I picket, because it’s all I can do. I’d been out there Tuesday mornings, because Tuesdays and Wednesdays are my days off from the recycling center.
“Santich, he got the sheriff to come around with some kind of injunction, but I fought that one—it’s one of the few times that Judge Bhagavatula took my side. I’m moving, I’ve got a sign. Yes, I have a bullhorn, but the only people I’m disturbing are the creeps working the site.”
When his bitter avalanche ended, I tried to bring the conversation back to Clarina, asking if she’d mentioned specific documents she’d thought Cady should use in her class.
Trig looked at me blankly. “I don’t know. I don’t know what she had, just that this was her life’s work, research on displaced native people, that kind of thing.”
“She tried to get the university press to publish her memoir, but she couldn’t show them anything in writing. Still, someone tore her place apart, looking for something,” I said. “You have any idea what that could have been?”
He shook his head.
“When did you last see Clarina?”
He thought it over, and finally decided it was the Thursday before she died. She’d joined him at the access road to the Yancy construction.
“She said it was probably the last time she’d be coming out to picket with me. I asked if she was leaving Lawrence, and she gave this kind of superior smile and said, maybe, if everything worked out the way she hoped.”
I pushed a little, hoping he’d asked Clarina what she meant, where she was heading if she left town, but he said she did stuff like that all the time. “She’d throw out some crumb of information, see if she had your attention, then she’d act all mysterious and not say anything else. I appreciated her support, but I got fed up with her act.”
“Why did you go out to the Dundee house Tuesday morning?” I asked. “Did you get a message from Clarina?”
He picked at his nails, finally said without looking up, “I have a scanner so I know where the cops or sheriff are going to be. I saw they were out at the Dundee place.”
I turned that response over in my mind. “You knew the Dundee place was used for drug parties?”
He looked up at me, looked down again. “Not in so many words.”
“You didn’t go to parties out there?”
“You think I’m that stupid? Cops are on my ass twenty-four-seven and I tempt them by going to a drug house? Besides, I don’t use anything. I hate that loss of control.”
“Did you think Clarina would be at the house when you saw the police activity?”
“Not her. Someone I know,” he muttered after another pause. “I worried whether they’d get caught in some kind of sweep. When I got there, the place was all shut down. I was going inside to look, then her majesty Queen Gertrude showed up.”
“Was Sabrina Granev the person you were looking for?” I asked.
“Who? Oh, the missing college student. No. It was someone who shouldn’t be there but won’t stay away.”
It was all he would say: he wasn’t going to feed an innocent person to the cops.
“You must have been surprised when Gertrude Perec showed up.”
“I was sure the cops had sent her. She’s so tight with Everard’s mom you’d think the two were doing a synchronized act—maybe looking down their noses in unison.”
I hadn’t expected that kind of mordant humor. He had depths, which meant I needed to watch my step around him.
“She had some story about looking for a friend, but she wouldn’t say who, so I thought Everard’s mother. Of course I didn’t tell Gertrude why I was there, and I wasn’t going to go inside as long as she was hanging around. I finally took off. Was Clarina—was she there then?”
“Yes,” I said. “Dead, in the basement where I found her a few hours later.”
Peter’s student, on the floor with their face in pieces, blood and bone and the soft gray mass that had been their agonized mind, appeared before me. I dug my nails into my head. You will not faint. You have never fainted and tonight will not be the first time.
Trig was suddenly in front of me, forcing a glass of water into my hands. The glass was greasy, but I drank, anyway.
“You going to be okay?” he asked roughly.
I nodded. I would be okay. Maybe not tonight, but surely someday soon. I was exhausted but I still had some questions.
“The picture. The police have a picture of you and Perec outside the house. Who took it?”
He snorted. “If I knew that I’d be outside their house right now with a bullhorn. It’s the only reason I’m telling you why I was there. Because of the picture. It wasn’t photoshopped, I was there.”
I got unsteadily to my feet and sidestepped the cardboard and paper on the floor. In the doorway I stopped to look at him again. He’d swiveled in his chair to face his computer.
The screen saver had come up, a boy with a mop of dark hair and a gap-toothed grin. A redhaired woman was bending over him, hands crossed over his chest. When Trig saw me looking at the picture, he pressed a key and his files came back up on the screen. He gave me a menacing look: I dare you to say anything about that picture.
I said nothing about the picture. I asked instead whether Clarina ever said anything about where she came from.
“I told you, no! No, every time you ask, so stop asking.”
He started a routine rant about cops not caring about the truth, no matter whether they were public or private, but something about me, maybe the lingering anguish in my face, caught him up short.
“There was this one time. It was—I was telling her—I have a brother. Football star. Me, I was the skinny nerdy one, but not nerdy enough to be a genius and win prizes.” His eyes squeezed shut from decades-old pain.
“At school, teachers and everyone thought I’d be another star, so when I couldn’t even catch a ball I turned into a joke. The jocks liked to—never mind what they did. My brother, he was on TV every Saturday running back touchdowns for Iowa. To my parents, I was the world’s biggest loser. When I was beaten up in school, my mother told me not to be a crybaby.
“Clarina, I told her about it one time. It was that jerk Santich, he was taunting me outside the school. Somehow he’d figured out who my brother was. His nickname, Galloping Garrity, so Santich, he said he’d get the police to tear-gas me and see—see if I could run as fast as Galloping Garrity.”
He looked at me sideways, to see if I was going to join the mockery. “Clarina said, she came from a place where the town name meant everyone in school piled on, making fun of her for being chubby.”
“The town name?” I echoed, bewildered. “What—was it some kind of Indigenous word for ‘fat’?”
“She didn’t say. I didn’t pay enough attention, I guess.”
I made my way out the door and down the linoleum stairs. Outside I walked to the end of the block and back, sucking in the cold air. Parents shoot their children, they bully their children, children bully each other. Was there no end to the grief we cause each other?
20
Pissing for Justice
All nine hours from Kansas to Chicago, I’d been thinking happily of reconnecting with Mr. Contreras and the dogs, followed by a peaceful night in my own bed. That happy fantasy was crashed by reality. When I reached home, Mr. Contreras was agitated, almost in tears: someone had come this morning and searched my apartment.
“They had a warrant, doll, I couldn’t hardly stop them. I stuck with them, me and Mitch, to make sure they didn’t steal nothing or maybe plant some drugs or something on you, but they was hardly civil.”
The searchers had been with the FBI. My neighbor had studied their credentials. “Told them I was old, needed time to make sure they hadn’t got those things out of a cereal box, and I wrote down their badge numbers, like you taught me, but I couldn’t stop them. There was three of them, but one, he never showed me his badge, and the other two said he was an observer.”
I asked if they’d let slip anything to say what they were looking for. They hadn’t said anything, but they’d been searching through all my papers, including my mother’s music, which I hold sacred. They hadn’t been sloppy, exactly, but they hadn’t used ordinary courtesy. I spent my first hour home inserting loose pages back in the proper folders. I even sprayed the collection with Lysol to get rid of federal cooties.
They’d also been to my office, my leasemate reported. They hadn’t taken it apart, not like the searchers in Clarina’s trailer, but as with Gabriella’s music, they hadn’t taken pains to hide their footsteps.
On Thursday, the home news got even more distressing. I’d cheered myself with a long run up the lakefront with the dogs, then stopped near Lotty Herschel’s clinic. She took an hour away from duty to have coffee with me. After that, I’d seen Sal Barthele, who owns the Golden Glow in the South Loop, to catch up in private ahead of my upcoming night meeting there with Murray.
My happier frame of mind ended with my third slice of Mr. Contreras’s French toast. That was when Bernie called.
“Vic, have you seen the news? I am so sorry, it is my fault they are saying these things about you!”
“Who is saying what things?” I asked.
“Mon Dieu, you haven’t seen, then? It is the Lawrence policier, they arranged a press conference about this murder you found, and about Sabrina.”
My neighbor has a tablet, which he mostly uses to keep in touch with his grandsons and his old buddies from his Machinists local. I found a video of Lawrence police chief Rowland McDowell’s press conference.
McDowell and the county sheriff met reporters on a small plaza in front of the Douglas County Judicial Center. Cornell Stamoran, the FBI agent, was on the dais, along with a man who was identified as Frank Karas, the Douglas County DA. Deke Everard stood behind the chief and the sheriff.
The first questions had to do with Clarina Coffin: no one had come forward who claimed to be a relative, or know anything about her past, the chief said, so if anyone could help with that information, please call the number on the screen. They also posted a portrait, where they’d photoshopped out the blood and fixed up her matted hair.
Reporters asked about time of death, cause, weapon, suspects—all the usual. The chief said they didn’t have any details to give yet.
A Wichita reporter asked about the drug house where both Sabrina and Clarina had been found. Another man, in a suit and tie, was next to Stamoran. He was never identified, but before the chief answered, the stranger stepped forward to murmur into his ear.
The sheriff nodded. “The owner of the property has promised to put better security in place. It’s a historic house, dating back to the Civil War, and the owner is trying to get landmark status for it. He definitely doesn’t want it used for drugs or murdered bodies”—a ripple of laughter at that.
Another person wanted to know about the Chicago detective who’d found both Sabrina and the dead woman.
“She’s a person of interest,” Chief McDowell said. “We’ve told her to stay in the jurisdiction until we’re a hundred percent sure she’s not responsible for either crime.”
Zoë piped up. “The Chicago detective is V.I. Warshawski. She saved Sabrina Granev’s life, Chief. Why does that make her a person of interest?”
I blew her a kiss while the chief waffled around.
Someone who identified himself as with the Kansas University newspaper said, “Warshawski apparently came on campus on Monday and accused Omicron Delta Beta members of selling drugs. Trevor Millay, he’s the chapter president, said she was snooping around their garage. He thinks she was looking for drugs. Do you know if she’s a user herself?”
The chief turned to Deke, who said, “We saw the post Millay made on the chapter’s Instagram account. We don’t believe Ms. Warshawski is a drug user, but we will take measures to make sure of that.”
A red mist rose in front of my eyes. I looked up the Omicron account and their other social media. They’d picked up my photo from the Web and posted it over the caption: Pretending to look for a missing student but really searching for drugs for herself?
Trevor Millay was the name of the punk I’d seen in their garage on Monday. “Don’t cross a South Side street fighter, buster,” I hissed, “because I can make you sorry you ever drew breath.” I had just enough self-control not to post the threat on his feed.
“That’s terrible, doll, terrible,” Mr. Contreras said. “What can you do to shut him up?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s a lie, but these days, incredible lies spread faster than Canadian wildfires, and they’re harder to extinguish. I’ll check in with Freeman Carter, and the woman in Kansas City whom Freeman found to represent me, but if I find Clarina Coffin’s killer, that should quiet some of the more obnoxious creeps.”
“How you going to do that?” he fretted. “You don’t have any friends down there, and if the cops are fixing to frame you—”
“I do have a couple of friends, but my big advantage is an open mind. The cops are looking at me and maybe two or three other people. I’m willing to look at everyone in Kansas as a suspect. After that, I’m going to nail that frat boy’s hind end to his Porsche.”
A good speech, but we all know how valuable talk is. My troubles hadn’t exactly peaked, either. I had a voice message from Deke Everard.
“We knew you were staying in Gertrude Perec’s garage, but when I went by to talk to you, Cady said you’d gone back to Chicago. You were told not to leave the jurisdiction. The DA is issuing a subpoena. Unless you are back in Lawrence by ten Monday morning to talk to Karas, we will send sheriff’s deputies to bring you back.”
I forwarded the message to Freeman, who phoned me at once.
“You are not my client who’s the biggest pain in the ass, but you are in the top ten,” he said. “There is no good ‘why’ in this scenario.”
“Freeman, I struggle to keep on top of your bill. I cannot afford to set up a separate household and office in Kansas. I’m here to collect my computer, my files, my clothes, all those things. I’ll be back in Kansas by tomorrow night. I’m even putting on my red Magli pumps to seal the deal.”
“You’re not convincing me,” he said. “Someone could mail you all those things. Meanwhile, you’re adding another buck-fifty to your outstanding balance with me. Shipping your home to Kansas wouldn’t cost that much.”
Shorthand for a thousand fifty. Which went up to twelve hundred when he phoned again half an hour later.
“Someone in Kansas hates you, Vic. The LKPD wants a urine sample to prove whether you’re an opioid user. They’ve agreed to let the Chicago cops oversee it, but this isn’t negotiable. They have a warrant, Chicago will honor it.”
