Full Tilt

44

Chicago

After leaving Thornwood High School, Kate sat at the wheel of her rental car making notes while struggling to put together the pieces of information she’d gleaned about Sorin Zurrn.

Am I any closer to finding him?

The women of the Alumni Association had been friendly and helpful, but they wouldn’t give her addresses, emails or phone numbers. She’d sensed an undercurrent of unease at having a reporter asking questions about former students.

After looking over her notes, Kate tried, yet again, to find any address information for Sorin Zurrn in Chicago. Again she struck out. She then searched for Tonya Plesivsky’s family and caught her breath.

An Ivan Plesivsky came up on Craddick Street.

Two blocks from the Zurrn home.

He has to be a relative.

Newslead subscribed to an array of online information databases that allowed reporters to conduct extensive searches through any device they used. Kate ran the Plesivsky name through the databases for the Chicago papers, an obit or news item, anything on Tonya’s death.

A story in the Sun-Times came up. It was short with no byline.

Girl Dies after Fall in Park

A fifteen-year-old girl from the Northwest Side died Saturday night after she fell in Ben Bailey Park while looking for her lost dog, officials said.

Medical crews responded to a 911 call at around 3:35 p.m. Saturday that reported a girl with a traumatic head injury was found by joggers at the base of a stone stairway. The joggers administered CPR until paramedics arrived and transported the girl, identified as Tonya Plesivsky of Craddick Street, to Verger Green Memorial, where she was pronounced dead.

“This is not real. I can’t believe it,” Ivan Plesivsky, the girl’s father, told the Sun-Times.

It appears that the girl tripped and fell, striking her head on the stone steps, according to parks officials and Chicago police.

A small photo of Tonya holding her dog, Pepper, accompanied the article.

That’s so sad. She was such a young girl. But this was the girl who would “torment” Sorin. Why did her friend Gwen stop bullying him? I suppose it could be expected in the wake of Tonya’s death. But how bad was it if, after all these years, Gwen refused to talk about it? And would any of this have any connection to Jerome Fell in Denver, or Carl Nelson, or Vanessa, or anything? Kate shook her head. Sure it’s a long shot, but that’s what I’m here to do, take a long shot.

The white picket fence protecting the islands of dirt and tufts of browned grass of the Plesivskys’ front yard was missing a few pickets. The next thing Kate noticed was that the front of the wood frame bungalow had a wheelchair ramp. She glimpsed sheets and shirts flapping on a clothesline in the backyard as she went to the front door and knocked.

Kate heard movement, then voices. A moment later the door cracked open, releasing the smell of cigarettes as a woman, her face creased with a taut frown, greeted her.

“We’re not buying anything, thank you.” She started closing the door.

“Wait, please! I’m a reporter from New York. I need your help.”

The door stopped.

Kate held up her ID. “Kate Page with Newslead.”

“She says she’s a reporter!” The woman shouted to someone else in the house, which prompted a muffled response before the woman turned back to Kate: “What do you want?”

“I’m researching some neighborhood history that involves Tonya Plesivsky. Would you be a relative?”

A cloud of pain passed over the woman.

“Tonya was our daughter.”

Kate let a moment of respect pass.

“May I talk to you a little bit?”

“Wait.”

The woman left Kate at the door. She heard subdued voices before she returned and invited Kate inside. Now the cigarette smell mingled with onions and something evocative of a hospital as they went to a small living room where a man in a wheelchair muted Wheel of Fortune on a large-screen TV.

He had thin white hair, glasses and white stubble. He wore a flannel shirt and work pants that looked like shorts. His legs were missing below his knees. He gestured to the sofa and Kate sat.

“Why’re you writing an article about our daughter?”

Kate took out her notebook.

“I’m sorry. I’ll explain,” she said. “First, I should get your name, you’re Ivan Plesivsky?”

“Yes, and my wife, Elena. Do you have a card or something?”

Kate gave him a card.

“Would you like a coffee or soda?” Elena asked.

“I don’t want to trouble you.”

“No trouble.”

“Black coffee would be fine.”

“So?” Ivan leaned forward in his chair. “Answer my question.”

“I’m researching the background of Sorin Zurrn for a story. He may have some connection to some crimes. Or he may not.”

“What kind of crimes?”

“Computer crimes, cyber theft, maybe harming people physically, but we’re not sure.”

“Doesn’t surprise me.” Ivan grunted. “He was odd.”

“I understand Tonya and Sorin went to Thornwood High and knew each other. And since you were neighbors, I was hoping you’d tell me what you remember of the Zurrn family.”

The man looked long and hard at Kate before turning to the mantel holding framed photographs of Tonya with Pepper. Then he removed his glasses and ran his hand over his face.

“You’re aware of what happened to our daughter?” Elena asked from the doorway.

“Yes, and I’m terribly sorry.”

“It’s very painful for us to think about that time,” Elena added as a kettle in the kitchen came to a boil.

Ivan replaced his glasses, sat straighter as if steeling himself.

“We didn’t know the Zurrns,” he said. “We weren’t friends. We knew his mother was a slut and her boy was odd. Some kind of computer whiz who chased butterflies all day, or something. We didn’t bother with them.”

Elena set a mug of coffee with a Cubs logo on the table before Kate.

“Didn’t Tonya and Sorin have difficulties with each other?”

Elena and Ivan exchanged glances, telegraphing to Kate that she’d shifted matters to an uncomfortable level.

“That was so long ago,” Elena said. “Why bring this up?”

“I need to know as much about Sorin as possible for the story.”

“We were aware of the rumors,” Ivan said.

“What rumors?”

“That Tonya and her friends sometimes teased the Zurrn boy. And maybe his mother a little bit.”

“His mother?”

“Look,” Ivan said. “They were kids in high school. Hell, who doesn’t get teased at school?”

“Tonya was very popular at school,” Elena said.

“That’s right,” Ivan agreed. “She had a bit of a following. Was it right for her to tease Sorin? No, but that’s what goes on in high school. Besides-” His chin suddenly crumpled and he froze a heaving sob as he turned to the photo shrine of his daughter.

Elena stood, put her hands on his shoulders and, as if sensing what was coming, turned to Kate.

“Maybe you should go.”

Surprised, Kate was at a loss. In the moment she’d hesitated, Ivan found his composure.

“No, stay. I want her to hear this. All of it.”

“Ivan,” his wife cautioned him.

“Listen.” Ivan stared at Kate, his jaw muscles pulsating. “Whatever sins our little girl may have committed as a child, she paid for them. I paid for them.” He glanced to his wife. “We paid for them.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“What happened with Tonya is why I’m in this chair.”

Kate glanced at Elena, then back at Ivan.

“Pepper was Tonya’s dog,” Ivan started. “When he was lost, Tonya was beside herself, putting up posters, looking everywhere. When she fell in the park our world stopped turning. You can’t imagine our pain at losing our angel, our only child. It hurt so much. But we had to go on. For Tonya. So I went back to work thinking I was coping with it, thinking I was strong, but I wasn’t. I was a shell.”

“What work did you do?” Kate asked.

“I was a utility lineman. After Tonya was gone, the silence of her room, seeing her things and knowing she was never coming back…God. I started drinking. One day I was doing maintenance work on a substation. Something went wrong and I got electrocuted. I lived, but I lost my legs below the knee. I tried to sue, but the court said because of the level of alcohol in my blood at the time, I was at fault. Go figure. I’m mourning my daughter and I’m at fault. Anyway, I got a tiny compensation and pension. We barely survive.”

“I’m so sorry it’s been so hard for you.”

Ivan looked off at the photographs.

“Every day, it feels like it happened yesterday. I miss her so much. She was so pretty, wasn’t she, Elena?”

“She was.”

“I think of what she’d look like now, that she’d have children, our grandchildren, and how you would spoil them and how happy we’d be.”

Elena patted Ivan’s shoulders and Kate said nothing.

Ivan inhaled a loud, deep breath.

“And then it happened,” he said.

“Excuse me?” Kate was confused.

“Then, one by one, the years passed and we started to cope with losing Tonya. We were holding strong, then that Zurrn woman, that psychotic-”

“What happened?”

“She came to our house one night, banging on the door. She was a mess, drunk, crying. She’d been living alone for years. We knew she was the neighborhood whore, with men coming and going, that she took drugs.”

“What did she want?”

“It was about two in the morning. She was drunk or high. She was nearly incoherent, but she starts telling us that she’s been haunted by her fear that her son, Sorin, pushed Tonya down the stairs that day at the park.”

“What?”

“We didn’t know what to do with her. There she was on our kitchen floor in a heap of self-pity going on about missing her boy, who had grown and was long gone. She was going on about her wasted life and that she needed to go back to her homeland, wherever that was.”

“What did you think about her fear that Sorin killed Tonya?”

“We didn’t put any stock in her drunken mutterings. Later I talked to a cop about it. He said without evidence, witnesses or a verifiable admission of guilt, there was nothing we could do. It wouldn’t bring Tonya back. Then a few weeks later the Zurrn woman killed herself.”