Sara Paretsky - Body Work

“And these holes in the wall!” she cried out so loudly that John came into to the room.

We both went to look at the wall. Three ovals that cut deep into the drywall made a little triangle over the desk. The paint had come away in a lip around each hole.

“They weren’t here before you left for Arizona?”

“My goodness, no. You notice a thing like that. Was he trying to put up a picture?”

“I think he was using your wall for target practice.”

“Shooting at a wall? Chad? But that’s just ridiculous!”

I took a letter opener from the desktop and dug around in the lath behind the drywall. I was able to recover one bullet, which I showed the Vishneskis. Both of them were shocked; Mona suggested in a feeble voice that one of Chad’s friends had come home drunk with him and shot at the wall.

“It’s possible, of course,” I agreed, but I thought about the way Chad had behaved when I’d seen him in Club Gouge. He was angry enough, and drunk enough, to do just about anything. A disheartening thought, if I was the lead member of the defense team.

John shouted, “So what if he shot up the wall? It doesn’t mean he shot that gal at the nightclub. Means he knew to take his anger out on a wall, not a person.”

I smiled and patted his arm. “Right you are. I’m going to finish searching in here. You go find me some clean garbage bags for things I want to show to my forensic lab.”

Vishneski left the room, relieved to get away from the empty beer cans, the moldy chicken dinner. Mona continued to hover behind me, talking worriedly under her breath.

The bed was unmade, of course. The cops had come in, guns drawn. Everyone knew Chad was big and angry, so they’d tossed the duvet aside, grabbed him as he lay there, cuffed him. Maybe it was then they realized he was unconscious, not asleep. And the Glock that had killed Nadia Guaman, where had it been? I sniffed tentatively at the pillow and detected a hint of sour vomit but not of gunpowder.

I didn’t think the cops had searched the room, but, even if they had, I would bet they’d overlooked something. I started with Chad’s Army duffel bag, which sat open on the far side of Mona’s bed. It was like a mountain spring, with clothes spilling out into a small stream that eddied around the bed and the floor. I photographed the bag and the room with my cell phone before touching anything.

“Why are you doing this?” Mona asked. “What good does it do to see Chad’s mess?”

“We’ll know what it looks like today so if someone comes in and rummages, we’ll be able to tell.”

The chaos seemed overwhelming. I poked through the clothes Chad had dropped on the floor, not sure if it was worth taking any of them to the lab for forensic analysis. Most of his wardrobe seemed to be left over from his Army service-fatigues; a second, summer-weight field jacket. He had a handful of civilian T-shirts, including one with Bart Simpson copping an attitude. I felt in the pockets of the field jacket and the jeans and found the usual detritus of modern life: ATM receipts, a stick of gum, the earpiece for his iPod. None of it seemed particularly meaningful.

My shoulders drooped as I looked around at the rest of the room. Empty beer cans littered the place; two were buried in the duvet. I photographed them in situ with my cell phone, then picked them up, using a corner of a sheet to hold them. I laid them next to the pillowcase, ready to pack into a bag.

Mona clicked her teeth. “Chad never was really tidy, but when he got back from the war it all got worse. I knew he was drinking. You don’t like to think that about your child, but if I called after six or so I could tell by his voice. We tried to get him to go to a counselor, John and me both, and he did see this lady at the VA for a bit. But then he said she was just a waste of time, and he wouldn’t go back-”

“You said his phone was still here,” I cut in, “but I don’t see it.”

“Oh. Yes. It was on the kitchen counter. I’ll go get it.”

I searched through the pile of clothes spilling from Chad’s duffel bag and looked into the bag itself. I didn’t see the black object Chad had been waving under Nadia’s nose the night before she was killed.

I stuck a hand between the mattress and box springs and found two guns, a Magnum Baby Eagle and a Beretta. I smelled them. Both had been fired and not cleaned, but it was hard to say how long ago that had been. Maybe Chad had lain in bed one night, shooting at the wall, and tucked the guns back under the mattress. I laid the guns under the pillowcase so his parents wouldn’t see them and start fussing over them. I’d get the Cheviot labs to give me an idea how long it had been since they’d been fired.

A further search under the mattress turned up a copy of Fortune magazine. Tucked inside were a couple of steamy publications: Mags4Lads, from Britain, filled with giant-breasted women committing extraordinary athletic feats; the other, in Arabic, had similar pictures. Both English and Arabic readers favored blondes, with a sprinkling of redheads. Someone who read only ancient Sanskrit would have no trouble accessing the content of either.

I heard Mona’s nervous murmuring as she came back to the room and slipped the athletic blondes back into Fortune, then put the magazines into my briefcase. Chad’s mother didn’t need to see his reading material.

“I thought I saw his phone yesterday, but it’s not there now.”

“You probably just thought you saw it.” John had appeared behind her, holding a couple of black plastic bags. “You were tired and flustered, you know how you get. I’ve looked all over your living room, and it’s not there.”

“It was on the kitchen counter,” she fussed. “I saw it when I got my glass of water.”

I put all my specimens into the bags, conscientiously writing down labels on some scrap paper from Mona’s desk, and sealed them with her packing tape.

“If Chad’s phone turns up, give me a call. I’ve seen everything I need for now. It’s late, we all need some rest. If you want to talk to a criminal defense lawyer, Freeman Carter is good. He’s the person who got the court order that let you move Chad this morning. He has a new associate in his office who seems very capable to me, a woman named Deb Steppe whose fees won’t be as steep as Freeman’s.”

I wrote Freeman’s details down for them while Mona took the chicken dinner her son had left in the bedroom to the garbage. When she’d turned out the lights, she couldn’t find her keys. While she hunted through her purse, I picked them up from the chair where she’d dropped them on her way into the apartment. I had a feeling Chad’s phone was in that big shoulder bag of hers, but I was getting impatient to take off. If I couldn’t find a phone number for Tim Radke, the one friend whose name John and Mona knew, maybe I’d mug her and search her bag.

The door at the far end of the hall opened again as we waited for the elevator. If I’d actually believed in Chad’s innocence at this point, I would have talked to the watchful neighbor. The trouble was, I thought he was guilty. I was sloppy. It came back later to haunt me.

The storm had stopped when we finally got back downstairs. The building super was running a snowblower around the walks, and strewing salt, but beyond the building perimeter the snow was ankle-deep. I didn’t want to trudge through it carrying all the souvenirs I’d collected-Chad’s guns, his beer cans, his porn collection-so I waited at the curb while John and Mona went off to fetch the car.

When they dropped me at home, it was past eight. I knew I had to do something about the dogs. And now that I was away from the mess and tension in Mona’s apartment, I realized I was hungry as well. I was about to call Jake, to see if he wanted to walk up to Belmont for a snack, when my cousin phoned.