his aunt, but that had no bearing on proving his status as an heir.
“Then began a legal battle. The aunt and uncle stated that there was no proof that Hector was the son of Fernando Aguilar and not the child of a welder—the photograph he was waving about proved nothing. And, of course, they were right to do that—anyone can claim to be the heir to a great fortune.
“Hector had his DNA tested. And he demanded that Filomena Quintana Aguilar do the same, to see whether they were in fact related.”
“So he signed his death warrant,” I said sadly. “No way were the Quintanas going to allow Hector access to his inheritance. And that’s what you tried to do, after Hector’s death?”
“Yes. It mattered greatly to Lydia. We tried to get a Chilean judge to force Filomena to undergo a DNA test, but the Devlin & Wickham lawyers in Santiago were too powerful for me.
“That note I sent her—it was the last straw for Lydia. She tried to attack the lawyers from Devlin & Wickham, she wanted me to force the woman in their transcription unit to turn over all the correspondence between the lawyers, the Aguilars, and an economist who is on the board of Minas y Puentes.”
“Larry Nieland.”
“Yes, Nieland. Anyway, after they took out restraining orders on her she retreated, and I lost touch with her. I—” She flushed painfully. “I couldn’t do this work pro bono, and she had no money to pay my bill. I didn’t realize she was living on the streets. I’m sorry about that.”
“What happened to Hector’s DNA test? Do you know the company that performed it?”
“Oh, I kept a copy of the results in his file, in case we succeeded in forcing the aunt to provide a DNA sample.”
“What about Hector’s mother? Was she in the will?”
Watkins smiled sadly. “He left her his love, and the first editions of his books. He’d published three, and I’m not sure they were valuable.”
She had spent almost two hours with me, not fifteen minutes, and she and Inesa both exclaimed in horror when they looked at the time: she was late for a meeting elsewhere in the Loop.
Inesa raced to her desk and grabbed a folder for her boss, who snatched it on her way out the door.
I walked the mile from Watkins’s office to the lake, blind to Kate Buckingham’s fountain, oblivious to the crowds pushing against me. Anyone could have shot me, or injected me with ricin, while I stumbled dumbly along. I knew almost everything, but I couldn’t prove it. At least—I couldn’t prove it in a way that would discredit the Quintanas or Nieland or Gifford Taggett.
I stared at the horizon, where boats looked like shadows, the sails a wispy white, shape barely visible. They might have been paper cutouts in a puppet theater.
When I’d been cooling off in the lake at Forty-seventh Street a few weeks ago, an outsize sailboat had been cruising near the shore. I’d idly wondered if it might be Nieland’s antique yacht, the Abundance. I pictured Larry Nieland anchoring there and having a powerboat ferry him to shore when it was time for his lectures at the university. The water there was shallow. An outboard motor would get caught in the rocks or sand. A good reason to put in landfill, move the shoreline out so that bigger boats had access.
Dunce, Murray had repeated the word urgently. He wasn’t calling himself names, he was trying to say “abundance.” He was too savvy to go to the Burnham Wildlife Corridor alone, but if Larry Nieland promised him an exclusive aboard the Abundance, he’d have leapt at the chance.
61
Recording Artist
“No, absolutely not.” I was in Mr. Contreras’s doorway.
I had to speak loudly for him to hear me over planes on their final approach to O’Hare, people laughing in a neighboring garden, and other sounds of a summer night.
“But, doll, you can’t go there, either,” my neighbor said. “If that gal has come back and is playing her piano again, you know that guy, the one with the dog, he’ll be there. She don’t need you. Look who’s been killed there—that boy Bernie was dating, Murray close to being dead. You stay up here.”
Behind me, something hit the ground with a thud. I whirled to see Donna Lutas opening her own front door. She’d dropped a bag of groceries and was trying to pick them up while clutching her briefcase to her side.
“Hey, Donna,” I said without enthusiasm, and