I wanted to see this detective of yours for myself.”
John gave the smile that seemed to crack his cheeks. I looked away, it was so painful to watch.
“I got too lonely sitting around the hospital,” he said, “looking at Chad hooked up to all those machines. That Dr. Herschel, she’s something, isn’t she? The way she made those county so-and-sos stand up and salute, it’s the one good thing I’ve seen this week. Mona, you want more tea? Do I order at the counter?”
“The Glock,” I said to Mona while John was ordering drinks. “Was that one of Chad’s guns?”
“How should I know? I told you, I hate them, I don’t know one from another. You should ask those Army friends of his. They probably know.”
“Ask his Army buddies what?” John Vishneski said, pulling up a chair. “About his guns? Chad didn’t own—”
“John, what’s the point in lying?” Mona asked. “When it’s you who used to take him to target practice?”
“It’s not a crime, is it, to teach your own son how to handle a gun?” Vishneski cried.
“You know the Glock is his, and you can’t bring yourself to acknowledge it,” I said in a flat voice.
Vishneski reached for his cigarettes, as he seemed to do any time he didn’t want to talk about something. Studying the pack, not me, he said, “Not know, not for sure. Before he shipped out, he had two, a Beretta and a Smith and Wesson. I kept them while he was overseas, but when he came home and I saw how . . . how . . . well, how he was, I worried he might hurt himself, so I told him there’d been a break-in, someone had stole those guns out of my place. But I’m pretty sure he went down to Indiana, picked up something down there. You can, you know—no one even wants to see your driver’s license. So maybe he does own a Baby Glock, how do I know?”
The hair at the nape of my neck prickled. “Mr. Vishneski, everything you’re saying makes Chad sound unstable. Why do you think he didn’t kill Nadia Guaman?”
Vishneski sucked in a breath as if it were a lungful of smoke. “Shit, Ms. Warshawski—sorry, ladies—you have to know Chad. He might have put a bullet through his own self to put an end to his nightmares, but he wouldn’t go out killing some girl in an alley. Or anywhere else. He just wouldn’t. He wasn’t that kind of boy.”
Mona nodded vigorously: Chad wasn’t that kind of boy.
None of us spoke. I listened to the espresso machine hiss and to the snow sting the window. The bad weather, the awful economy, they had already pushed my spirits low without adding an unstable Iraq vet to the mix. I wanted to get up and walk away, but the Vishneskis were both looking at me as if I were all that tethered them to the planet.
“Okay,” I finally summoned the energy to speak. “Chad’s friends that he hung around with since getting home, how do I get in touch with them? Mr. Vishneski said there’s one called Marty, another one named Tim something.”
“Tim Radke,” Mona said. “Marty, I don’t know what his last name is. Probably they’re on the speed dial on Chad’s phone.”
Chad’s phone was still at her apartment. When the cops rushed him to the hospital Saturday morning, they’d left everything behind—phone, wallet—everything but his Army dog tags and his field jacket. He’d been wearing those.
“That’s why I went to stay at John’s,” Mona said. “It got me down too much, all his stuff, and then the police, they broke down the door when they came to get him. Why did they have to do that? And it’s me that has to pay to repair it. The city sure won’t! I should have been here instead of in Arizona. My ma, she’s got nurses around her, she only made me come down so she could run me around. I should have been here taking care of Chad. Shouldn’t have expected that John would know how to keep him out of trouble.”
“Mona!” Vishneski expostulated.
I interrupted before they could get into the kind of argument that probably led to their divorce all those years ago: she said, he didn’t do, back and forth. We agreed, all three of us, to go to her apartment, where I could collect the phone and study Chad’s habitat to see if he’d left any clues about his life that could prove