Free Body Work by Sara Paretsky

something for a good defense lawyer, if we’re careful. If you can work without running up the bills on us. If you can recommend a good lawyer who’ll give us a bit of a break.”

8
    The Hind at Bay
    A fter we’d signed a contract and Vishneski left for work, I did a background check on him just to see if he really could pay his bills. He was, indeed, on Mercurio’s payroll, and his credit history had no more hiccups than any other person who’d lived as long as he had. For the present, he could pay my bill and maybe that of my own defense lawyer, Freeman Carter.
    I put away Vishneski’s file and started returning the phone calls that had come in during our meeting. It wasn’t until the end of the afternoon that I had time to get back to Chad Vishneski’s problems.
    John Vishneski wanted to believe Chad was innocent, but he had confirmed the picture of a young man whose anger was close to the surface at all times. “He never was like that as a boy. He had such a happy disposition, even after Mona and I split up. We got two places, Mona and me, sold the house and got two condos pretty near each other so the boy could be both places and not feel he was in the middle of our problems. He always had a bunch of friends, boys, girls, always in and out of both apartments, all having fun. Clean fun. No drugs, no drunks. Mona and I set the same rules.”
    According to Vishneski, Iraq had changed Chad’s personality. Jekyll and Hyde and which was the mean one? He could never remember. As he talked, Vishneski finally pulled a cigarette from his breast pocket. He played with it, tapping it on the tabletop, running it between his fingers, a prop to help him get through his story.
    “He didn’t tell me he was joining up. I knew he wasn’t one for the books, but he just wandered into an Army recruitment office on Addison Street during spring break. Next thing I knew, he was off to basic training.”
    “That must have startled you,” I said.
    “I was pissed off, him doing it without even talking to me, throwing away his college scholarship. But then I saw how much the Army suited him, and I thought, well, maybe he knew best after all, he needed that discipline. That and the activity. He used to send us these pictures of him and his unit, they’d be laughing, Chad teaching Iraqi boys how to play American football. ‘That soccer, that’s for sissies,’ he says he told them.”
    Vishneski rubbed his face. I wasn’t supposed to see the unexpected spurt of tears as he thought of his son’s happy-go-lucky past.
    “But those endless deployments, they put the big hurt on all the kids out there. And they saw stuff no person ought to have to see, grown women fighting over a piece of bread, babies with their arms blown off, other things Chad wouldn’t even talk about. It was too much for him.”
    I went back to the murder weapon that the police supposedly found next to Chad when they picked him up. “What kind of guns did Chad have?”
    “He was a soldier. They don’t get handguns. Chad, he likes—liked—to shoot, but Mona wouldn’t let him keep a gun in her place any more’n I would in mine.”
    Anymore than they allowed drugs or alcohol, which is to say parents often see what they hope will be in front of them.
    “But did he own a gun? Guns?”
    John claimed Chad didn’t. And certainly not the Baby Glock that the police had found in bed with Chad.
    “So whose gun was that?” I asked.
    “If you’re going to clear his name, you’ll have to find that out, won’t you?” He gave me a ferocious glare, as if anger with me could keep grief and uncertainty at bay.
    “You’re not hiring me to clear his name but to find out what happened,” I reminded him.
    He argued with me a bit about that but in an unfocused way, not sure what he believed about his son. I asked him for names of Chad’s friends, those boys and girls who used to have good clean fun with him.
    Vishneski said, “The kids he hung out with before he