Red Hot Lies
Laura Caldwell
Usually I pride myself on my intuition. I listen to that voice that says, “Something bad is appening…” or maybe “Get out. Now. ”But on that Tuesday at the end of October, my psyche must have been protecting the one remaining day I still believed life was orderly and the universe liked me. Because I didn’t hear that voice. I never saw it coming. They say bad things happen in threes. When her fiancé, Sam, disappears on the same day her mentor and biggest client is killed, hotshot Chicago attorney Izzy McNeil starts counting. But trouble keeps coming. Sam is implicated in the client’s death, her apartment is broken into and it’s not just the authorities who are following her.Now, to find Sam and uncover her client’s murderer, Izzy will have to push past limits she never imagined. Luckily for her she’s always thrived under pressure, because her world is falling apart. Fast. And the trail of half-truths and lies is red-hot.
Praise for the novels of Laura Caldwell
“Laura Caldwell writes remarkable, sexy, razor-edged thrillers that race to the finish and yet always make you stop to think. Chicago is brilliantly illuminated in Red Hot Lies, a book bursting with scandals and secrets. Caldwell’s stylish, fast-paced writing grips you and won’t let you go, making the Izzy McNeil trilogy a riveting must-read.” —David Ellis, Edgar Award-winning author of Line of Vision and Eye of the Beholder
“Caldwell’s writing is always smart, sassy and sexy, with more suspense than a celebrity murder trial. In Red Hot Lies, her prose burns up the page, and you’ll be still reading waaaaay past your bedtime. Highly recommended!” —JA Konrath, author of the Lieutenant Jacqueline Daniels thrillers
“Red Hot Lies is a wonderfully plotted story, smoothly crafted, filled with striking characters and great narrative. Caldwell slips seamlessly between voices to deliver an emotional roller coaster of a thriller. A legal lioness—Caldwell has written a gripping edge-of-the-seat thriller that will not disappoint.” —Steve Martini, New York Times bestselling author of Shadow of Power and Compelling Evidence
Also byLaura Caldwell
THE YEAR OF LIVING FAMOUSLY
Red Hot Lies
Laura Caldwell
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
Dear Reader,
The Izzy McNeil series is fiction. But it’s personal, too. Much of Izzy’s world is my world. She’s proud to be a lawyer (although she can’t always find her exact footing in the legal world), and she’s even more proud to be a Chicagoan. The Windy City has never been more alive for me than it was during the writing of these books—Red Hot Lies, Red Blooded Murder and Red, White & Dead. Nearly all the places I’ve written about are as true-blue Chicago as Lake Michigan on a crisp October day. Occasionally I’ve taken licence with a few locales, but I hope you’ll enjoy visiting them. If you’re not a Chicagoan, I hope you’ll visit the city, too, particularly if you haven’t recently. Chicago is humming right now—a city whose surging vibrancy is at once surprising and yet, to those of us who’ve lived here a while, inevitable.
The Izzy McNeil books can be read in any order, although Izzy does age throughout, just like the rest of us. Please e-mail me at info@lauracaldwell.com to let me know what you think about the books, especially what you think Izzy and her crew should be doing next. And thank you, thank you, for reading.
Laura Caldwell
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My deepest appreciation to Margaret O’Neill Marbury, Amy Moore-Benson and Maureen Walters. Thanks also to everyone at MIRA Books, including Valerie Gray, Donna Hayes, Dianne Moggy, Loriana Sacilotto, Craig Swinwood, Pete McMahon, Stacy Widdrington, Andrew Wright, Pamela Laycock, Katherine Orr, Marleah Stout, Alex Osuszek, Margie Miller, Adam Wilson, Don Lucey, Gordy Goihl, Dave Carley, Ken Foy, Erica Mohr, Darren Lizotte, Andi Richman, Reka Rubin, Margie Mullin, Sam Smith, Kathy Lodge, Carolyn Flear, Maureen Stead, Emily Ohanjanians, Michelle Renaud, Linda McFall, Stephen Miles, Jennifer Watters, Amy Jones, Malle Vallik, Tracey Langmuir and Anne Fontanesi.
Much gratitude to my panel of experts—Chicago Police Detective Peter Koconis; Chicago Police Officer Jeremy Shultz; private investigators Paul Ciolino, Sam Andreano and John Powers; criminal defence lawyer Catharine O’Daniel; Gabriele Carles and Jason Billups for their help with Panamanian real estate; Dr Richard Feely for explaining Chinese herbs; Dr Doug Lyle for his autopsy and cardiology expertise; Matt Garvin for his computer hacking intel, and Chicago Lions rugby coach Chris McClellan.
Thanks also to everyone who read the book or offered advice or suggestions, especially Dustin O’Regan, Margaret Caldwell, Christi Smith, Katie Caldwell, Rob Kovell, William Caldwell, Pam Carroll, Liza Jaine, Morgan Hogerty, Beth Kaveny, Katie Syracopholous, Brooke Shawer, Clare Toohey, Mary Jennings Dean, Steve Gallagher, Les Klinger and Joan Posch.
One day can shift the plates of your earth.
One day can age you.
Usually, I pride myself on my intuition. I listen to that voice that says, “Something bad is happening …” or maybe, “Get out now, you idiot.”
But on that Tuesday at the end of October, my psyche must have been protecting the one remaining day while I still believed that the universe was kind, that life was hectic but orderly. Because I didn’t hear that voice. I never saw it coming.
1
Day One
“McNeil, she’s not signing this crap.”
“She told me she was signing it last week.”
“She told you she was considering it.”
“No.” I moved the phone to my other ear and pinned it there with my shoulder. With my hands free, I shifted about ten stacks of papers on my desk, looking for Jane Augustine’s contract. I punched the button on my phone that would send a bleating plea to my assistant. “She told me she was signing it. Period.”
“That’s insane. With that lame buyout clause? No way. No. Way. You have no idea what you’re doing, kid.”
I felt a hard, familiar kernel of fear in my belly.
“It’s the same buyout clause she had in her last contract.” I ignored the personal comment he’d lobbed at me. I had gotten my fair share of them while representing Pickett Enterprises over the past three years and, although I acted like such comments didn’t sting, I often thought, You’re right. I have no idea what I’m doing.
I finally found the current contract under a pile of production-facility agreements. I flipped through it as fast as I could, searching for the clause in question.
My assistant, Q—short for Quentin—stuck his head in my office with a nervous what now? look. I dropped the document and put my hand over the mouthpiece. “Can you get me Jane’s last contract?”
He nodded quickly, his bald, black head shining under the fluorescent lights. He made a halfhearted attempt to find it amongst the chaos that was my law office—redwell folders that spanned the length of my visitors’ couch, file folders, motions and deposition transcripts stacked precariously on my desk. Throwing his hands up, Q spun around and headed for his own tidy and calm workstation.
“I’m not messing around, kid,” Steve Severny continued. Severny was the biggest agent/lawyer in town, representing more than half of Chicago’s broadcasters and nearly all its top actors. “Change the buyout or we’re walking. NBC has been calling, and next time I’m not telling them no.”
I swallowed down the tension that felt thick in my throat. Jane Augustine was the most popular news anchor at the station owned by Pickett Enterprises, my client. The CEO, Forester Pickett, was a huge fan of hers. I couldn’t lose Jane to another station.
Meanwhile, Severny kept rolling. “And I want a pay-or-play added to paragraph twenty-two.”
I flipped through the contract and found the paragraph. It was tough, yes, and it was favorable to Pickett Enterprises, but as much as I couldn’t lose Jane, I couldn’t simply give in to anything her agent wanted. My job was to land the terms most favorable to Pickett Enterprises, and although the stress of that job was always heavy, sometimes so heavy I could barely see through it, I would do my job. There was no alternative.
“No pay-or-play,” I said. “It’s nonnegotiable. I told you that last time, and I’m telling you again. That comes from Forester himself.” It always helped to throw Forester’s name in the mix, to remind people that I was here, making their lives tough, because he wanted me to.
“Then let’s talk about the non compete.”
“Let’s do that.” I thumbed through the contract, grateful to have seemingly won a point. Q darted into the room with Jane’s previous contract, cleared a space on my desk and put it down.
I nodded thanks.
Q then placed a sheet of white paper on top of it, giving me a sympathetic smile. In red ink, he’d written, Izzy, your meeting with the wedding Nazi is in forty-five minutes.
“Crap,” I said.
“That’s right,” Severny said, his voice rising. “That’s what I told you before. It is crap. And we’re not signing it!” And with that, he hung up.
“Mother hen in a basket!” I yelled, slamming down the phone.
I was trying not to swear anymore. I thought it sounded crass when people swore. The problem was it sounded great to me when I did it. And it felt so damn good. But swearing wasn’t appropriate at a law firm, as Q had reminded me on more than one occasion, and so I was replacing things like goddammit with God bless you and Jesus Christ with Jiminy Christmas and motherfucker with mother hen in a basket.
Q sank into a chair across from my desk. “I know you’re crazed, and I know you have to leave soon, but first I need some of your fiery, redheaded decisiveness.”
I sat down, crossed my hands on my desk and gave Q my army-general stare. “I could use a quick break. Hit me.”
Q was wearing his usual crisp khakis and a blazer. He tugged at the blazer to try to hide the slightly protruding belly he hated—his personal nemesis to the perfect gay physique. Not that this deterred him from sizing up the rest of the male species. Q had emerged from the closet six years prior, and though he had a live-in boyfriend, Max, he still enjoyed the “new gay” privilege of ogling every man he came across.
He paused dramatically now. “Max’s mother is coming to town tomorrow.”
“I see your problem.” Max’s mother was a former Las Vegas showgirl, an eccentric woman with whom you’d love to grab a martini, but who wears you out after two hours. The last time she’d come to Chicago, Q nearly broke up with Max just for an excuse to get out of the house.
“How long is she in for?” I asked.
“Two weeks.”
“That’s not going to work.”
“I know it’s not going to work.”
“You can make her help with your Halloween party this weekend.”
He nodded, reluctantly conceding the point. “What am I going to do the rest of the time?”
“Watch a lot of football?” Q had retained many of his straight-man tendencies. A love of football was one of them.
Q had gray eyes that I’d always found calming, but they flashed with irritation now. “That’s another not decisive, Izzy. There’s a question mark at the end of that sentence. And you know she’ll hover and talk, hover and talk. I won’t see a single play.”
“Okay, okay. Tell Max she has to stay in a hotel, and you guys will pay for part of it.”
Q ran his hands over his head again. “I guess maybe that would work.” He sighed. “God, I hate being in a relationship.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do.”
Just then Tanner Hornsby, a high-ranking partner in his mid-forties, walked by my office. He was tall, with deep-black hair (dyed, I suspected) that arched into a widow’s peak. He was rumored to run five miles a day, every day, before work, and so he was lean and wiry, but he had the tired, slightly puffy eyes of a career drinker.
He stopped now and frowned at us.
Q turned in his seat. “Oh, hello, Mr. Hornsby,” he said in a breathy, effeminate voice, which he doled out only to annoy certain people like Tanner and his father.
“Hi, Tan,” I said.
His frown deepened. No one called him Tan. He was Mr. Hornsby to most, and Tanner to the elite few, myself definitely not included, but I needed him to consider me his legal equal. I ignored his disdain and called him Tan because I wanted him to know he didn’t scare me, even if he did. Behind closed doors, Q and I had other names for him—Toad Horny, Tanned Hide, the Horned One …
“I couldn’t help but hear your phone conversation from down the hall,” Tanner said. “Was that Steve Severny you were speaking with? Problems?”
Tanner Hornsby had negotiated hundreds of contracts with Steve Severny. Severny would never tell Tanner he didn’t know what he was doing.
“No problems.” I gave Tanner my dutiful-nice-girl look that served me well at the law firm of Baltimore & Brown. Though truthfully, I didn’t need the look anymore. The ludicrous amount of dough I pulled in through the Pickett Enterprises work allowed me to get away with just about anything. I was my own little island amid a sea of associates who hadn’t been as lucky as me and, as a result, were forced to be ass kissers and line-toers.
“How are your hours this month, Isabel?”
“Just fine, Tan, thanks for asking.”
Ever since Forester Pickett had made me the lead attorney for Pickett Enterprises, taking the cases away from Tanner, Tanner had hated me. Tanner was lifelong friends with Forester’s son, Shane. He’d originally gotten the Pickett Enterprises work because of that connection and thought he’d never lose it. Every so often, Tanner tried to throw his lean, wiry weight around and remind me that he was still my superior by asking questions about billable hours or continuing legal education. I felt bad for him. I felt guilty. I hadn’t tried to take Forester’s work from him. Forester had simply taken a shine to me, and I rode that windfall as far as I could. I knew many attorneys at the firm thought I’d gotten the work because I was a woman—a young woman with long curls of red hair who wasn’t afraid to wear high, high heels and drink with Forester until the wee hours.
Even if that was true, I didn’t care. I adored Forester. He was a smart, sweet man—not one of those older guys who oh so accidentally kept touching your hand … and your elbow … and your lower back. No, Forester was a prince, and like a prince he’d swooped in and saved me from the torment and agony of being just another associate slave. The job was hard, but I knew I was now doing good things for Pickett Enterprises. Still, that knowledge couldn’t hedge my occasional yet powerful bouts of self-doubt or the feeling that I was an impostor, one who could be exposed at any time.
Tanner grunted. “Keep the hours up. We’ve got the end of the year soon.”
I put a concerned look on my face, as if I didn’t have the top billable hours of any associate at the firm, and nodded. “Sure. Will do.”
He left. Thank God.
My cell phone dinged from where it sat atop a monstrous deposition transcript on my desk. I picked it up. A text message from Sam. Hey, Red Hot. Leaving for Cassandra’s. See you there.
“Dammit.” Cassandra was the wedding planner.
Q raised his eyebrows.
“Darn it,” I corrected.
I swiveled around and started scrambling through the chaos on my credenza until I found my bag. I couldn’t be late again. Plus, I needed to talk to Sam about this wedding stuff, which was starting to weigh me down as heavily as my job.
“Are you taking home the Casey research?” Q asked. “We have to file the motion by tomorrow.”
“I know, I know.” I stuffed a pile of case law and my Dictaphone into my bag.
“And don’t forget Sam’s work dinner tonight at the Union League Club,” Q said.
I tried to ignore the mountain of panic taking over my insides. “Yeah, it’s going to be torture. Those financial dinners always are. But I’ll leave early and work on the motion.”
“You can do it,” Q said. “You always do.”
“Thanks.” I stopped and smiled, and he flashed one back.
As I kept stuffing things into my bag, I thought about how a big blowout wedding had not been my idea. In fact, when Sam and I got engaged, I was fine to book a trip to the Caribbean with a few friends, throw on a little slip dress and get married to the sound of steel drums. But my mother, who hadn’t planned much of anything, or didn’t usually care about much of anything, seemed stuck on a huge, traditional wedding. And my soon-to-be husband, who had legions of friends from grade school, high school, college, business school and work, said he was on board for that as well. I want everyone to see how much I love you, he’d said. How does a girl say no to that?
My phone rang. Q took a step toward my desk and we both looked at the caller ID. Victoria McNeil. My mother.
Q picked it up, handed it to me and left the office.
“Hi, Mom.” I zipped up my bag. “What’s up?”
“Izzy, I know you two picked out the plates with the silver border for the reception, but I think we should consider the gold again.” My mother’s voice was calm and smooth, as always. “I’ve been thinking about it, and the linens are a soft white, rather than a crisp white, and that really lends itself toward gold rather than silver.”
“That’s fine. Whatever you think.” Reflexively, I extended the fingers of my left hand and glanced at my engagement ring, an antique, art-deco piece with an emerald-cut diamond. Looking at my ring used to make me grin. Now, it made me wince a little.
“Okay, and another thing. If you talk to your brother, Charlie, give him a little encouragement, will you? We need him to try on suits.”
“The wedding is still six weeks away.”
“That’s right. Only six weeks away.”
My stomach hollowed. Only six weeks.
“Charlie has to stop dragging his feet,” my mom said.
I murmured in vague agreement, but for once I felt simpatico with my brother. Mentally, I, too, needed to stop dragging my feet about this wedding thing.
“Don’t forget, you have another dress fitting tomorrow night.”
I tried not to sigh. “I know,” I said. “Battle number five.”
During the first visits with my bridal seamstress, Maria, it seemed she was trying to flatten my breasts and hide my hips, parts of my body I rather liked. I kept telling her, “I think the dress needs to be sexier,” and so she’d been dutifully making the bustline lower and the waistline tighter, until the last time, when she’d taken the pins out of her mouth and said in her accented English, “You want to look like hooker on wedding day?”
I told her I’d think about it.
I realized that most women wanted an ethereal look for their wedding, but I liked wearing sexy clothes on a daily basis, so why not for my wedding day? Plus, Sam said he wanted me in something hot. So I was going to give him hot.
“Izzy, really,” my mom said. “I don’t want you showing nipple on your wedding day.”
I laughed, and it felt good, like it was loosening up my insides. “See you tomorrow.”
I logged off the computer, grabbed my bag and left to meet Sam.
It was just an average day.
2
The funny thing—although maybe funny isn’t the right word—is that I already knew a single day could slap you around and send you reeling. I’d had such a day twenty-one years ago when my father died. It was Tuesday, and it was gloriously sunny and clear—I always remember the weather first—and Charlie and I were playing in the leaves in the backyard, making painstakingly neat piles, which we would dive into with a yelp and destroy in an instant.
My mother came out of the house. She was wearing jeans with a brown braided belt that tied at the waist, the ends of which slapped her thighs as she walked. Her red-blond hair was loosely curled around her face, as usual, but that face was splotched and somehow off-kilter, as if it had two different sides, like one of those Picasso paintings my teacher showed us in art class.
She sat us down on the scattered leaves and told us he was gone. He had been on a solo flight, training for his helicopter license when the helicopter experienced mechanical trouble and went down over Lake Erie. My father was a psychologist and a police profiler, but my mother would later tell us that he was always learning new skills. And now he was dead. It was as simple, and awful, as that.
Charlie seemed to take the news well. He furrowed his tiny brow, the way he did in school in order to avoid accusations of not paying attention. He nodded at her. He was six then, two years younger than me, and I could tell he didn’t understand, or at least he didn’t grasp the gravity of the situation. It was a trait Charlie would carry all his life.
After my mom and Charlie went inside, I raked the scattered leaves into neat piles and left them that way.
We moved from the small log house in Michigan to an apartment on the north side of Chicago, where my mother knew a few distant family members. We changed our wide swath of lawn for a concrete sidewalk. The air we breathed no longer smelled of pine or lake water, but of bus fumes and sometimes, when the wind was right, dark cocoa from the chocolate factory a few blocks away.
My mother, who had been a local radio DJ in Michigan, got some help from her boss, who found her a job as a traffic reporter. Every day, she ironically boarded a helicopter and floated above a city she hadn’t known since childhood, telling people about the congestion on the Dan Ryan Expressway, the gridlock on the Northwest Tollway.
Sometimes at my new school, I would stare out the classroom window and into the sky, imagining her flying around up there, like an angel. My mother had taken on angelic properties, too. She was thin—so thin I sometimes imagined I could see her veins and muscles right through the translucent shell of her skin. She rarely played with us anymore. She never laughed. I thought she was probably thinking of my father, of his messy brown hair and mischievous eyes that made him look as if he was about to crack up, despite his serious round glasses.
I thought I’d grown up that day, sitting on those leaves. My mother would tell people afterward that I was an “old soul,” a comment I took as the highest of compliments and a quality I worked hard to cultivate. It wasn’t difficult given the fact that I had taken on many of my mother’s duties. Every morning, I toasted two slices of bread, just like she used to. Every morning, I smeared them with peanut butter, and then, very carefully, striped the middle of the bread with a column of strawberry jam, just like my mother had when we were in Michigan. I would coax Charlie from bed and make him sit in the kitchen, where we would eat our toast, just like we used to.
And then one day, my mother came back, at least for a while. She smiled again, she had gained a little weight, she laughed when Charlie spilled chocolate milk on the couch.
As I got older, I felt stronger for having lost my dad at a young age. There was a certain relief in having experienced that loss, because I knew what pain was like; I knew I could survive. I laugh now when I think of that. The fact was I was only eight—old enough to be nearly destroyed, yet resilient enough to see no alternative but to march forward.
I’m not eight anymore, and the truth is, I grew lighter over the years. Maybe the old soul was still there, a piece of me that watched over my life, but my life had become fun again; I found friends with whom I could be silly and revel in it. Eventually, I found Sam, who had brought me so much joy. And then came that Tuesday—another autumn Tuesday—when the plates of my world screeched and shifted.
3
Forester Carlton Pickett loved being alone. Absolutely loved it. He was the youngest of eight from a poor Southern family. He had begun working steady jobs when he was eleven, and since his twenties, he had run Pickett Enterprises, which had some four hundred employees. All of this meant he was rarely alone.
At age sixty-eight, he now felt entitled to an occasional bit of solitude. So at a time like this—home early on a surprisingly balmy autumn day with no dinner parties, no date, no work occupying his mind—he planned to take advantage of that solitude.
His Audi hugged the long gravel driveway. At first, only the towering pines lining the drive were evident, but then they cleared, and his house, still far in the distance, came into view. Its style was Greek Revival, the kind Forester used to stare at in awe while growing up. It was made of white stone, the front protected by massive columns. Inside, the house boasted ten bedrooms, eleven baths, two kitchens, a gym and a movie theater. The place would have been ostentatious if it wasn’t in the big-money area of Lake Forest and if it wasn’t surrounded by acres and acres of lawn and trees. Forester had known the house was over the top, but he entertained frequently, and he felt he deserved it. He had never been shy about living a big life.
Forester entered through the garage door and came into the kitchen. His housekeeper stood at the counter, back turned, fixing his meal.
“Hello, Annette,” he said. He remembered when it was Olivia he used to call hello to. He remembered that every day, even though she’d been gone thirteen years now, stolen by ovarian cancer.
Annette turned at the waist and bid him a subdued good-evening, then returned to her work.
Forester walked from the kitchen and through his large marble foyer. In the front living room, he opened the four sets of French doors looking out onto the patio, the vast yard and a small pond. For some reason, Annette liked to keep the house sealed up tight, a habit he couldn’t seem to break. He glanced around the living room. The effect, he hoped, was one of eclectic elegance. The designer had packed it full of expensive rugs, couches and wall coverings that showcased Forester’s unique and odd collection of objects collected on his travels—an oxidized brass bowl he paid two dollars for in Malaysia; the plaster statue of a radio microphone his mother gave him after he bought his first station.
Annette stepped into the room. “Cornish hen tonight,” she said simply.
“Wonderful.”
“They’re in the warming oven when you’re ready.”
“Thank you, Annette.”
In the study, he opened a bottle of DuMol Pinot Noir and poured it into a glass decanter. He turned on Ramsey Lewis. God, he loved jazz. He could still remember arriving in Chicago when he was twenty-one. He would hang out at the Green Mill, seeing every kind of jazz he could. His favorites were the southern, bluesy stuff that made him think of home, and the true Chicago style, guys like Franz Jackson that reflected the big, new, shiny city he lived in. In a way, it was jazz that had brought him everything he owned.
Looking back at his life, Forester was amazed at the apparent organization of it. He believed now that everything had happened for a reason—leading him to the next stage—but while he was busy living that life it had felt, at the time, like a convoluted, random mess. It was random that he had lost his factory job only seven months after moving to Chicago. It was random that a radio-station owner, a guy named Gus Connifer whom he’d met at the Green Mill, offered him a job as a “production assistant” at the jazz station, where he was essentially a glorified gofer. And it was decidedly random that after a year at the station, a year in which Forester had soaked up the world of radio the way the summer ground soaks up rain, he had a chance to buy the station.
Gus Connifer was a smoking, drinking, hard-living man who’d finally been diagnosed with emphysema and a host of other respiratory illnesses. He thought he would die soon, and he was fine with that, except for one little thing—he couldn’t stand his wife, whom he suspected of cheating, and wanted her to inherit nothing. Gus was a Catholic, so divorce wasn’t an option. He wanted to unload the radio station, and he didn’t care for how much. He liked Forester, who over the last year had been a bigger help to him than his ten other employees combined. He told Forester he’d sell the station for exactly a thousand dollars. Forester got a loan and with it his first property. Later, he bought other radio stations, not to mention television stations, cable networks, production companies, newspapers, recording studios and publishing companies, making Pickett Enterprises the largest media conglomerate in the Midwest.
Forester poured wine into a long-stemmed glass. Thank God red wine was considered healthy these days. It gave him an excuse to indulge in one of his few vices. And hopefully it would give him a mellow buzz, maybe take away that vague sense that something was wrong inside his body. He was a fit, strong sixty-eight—that’s what all his doctors said, and he had a few of them. Forester now believed in preventive medicine rather than a reactionary approach. Yet there was still this tiredness, this sense that his body wasn’t exactly right. But he was nearing seventy. What did he expect?
He glanced at the framed pictures above the wet bar. He kissed the tips of his fingers and touched the photo of his late wife, Liv. He would give up everything to have her back. Were Livvie here, he would gladly give up his current preference for solitude.
The photo next to Liv’s was of their only son, Shane. He often wished they shared the bond he saw and envied between many fathers and sons. That envy had worsened with the recent doubts he suffered about Shane—ever since the anonymous letters and peculiar occurrences that had happened over the past few months.
He picked up the photo of Shane. Looked closely at it. Was there any chance he was the source of the threats? Logically, it made sense, because Shane would take over the reins of his empire whenever Forester decided to hand them over. But they both knew and understood Shane simply wasn’t ready yet. He thought they both knew and understood that.
He put the photo back. His doubts sometimes ashamed him. But who else could be behind the threats? He thought of Chaz and Walter, his two right-hand men at Pickett Enterprises. They knew Shane’s limitations, and they knew they could pull his strings if he was CEO. If Forester was out, they could manage the company the way they wanted, which was often different from his way. But that’s why Forester had hired people like them, people who didn’t think exactly as he did. And until he figured out the source of the threats, he wasn’t going to start axing people.
He heard a ding telling him a door had been opened—Annette leaving for the day. With Ramsey Lewis pounding the black and whites on “Limelight,” Forester walked to the kitchen and made himself a plate with the Cornish hen and potatoes she had prepared. He took his dinner and wine through the French doors of his study and seated himself at the iron patio table.
In the deep-blue twilight his lawn took on a silvery hue, the edges of his estate blurring in the distance. He took a few bites of the hen, then a sip of the Pinot Noir. He sighed, anticipating the pleasure he got from such nights. But satisfaction eluded him. Why? He was alone, he had a perfect glass of wine and a delicious dinner, he had his jazz. He had everything he needed for a quiet night of contentment.
Yet that vague discomfort kept command of his body. In fact, it grew, and spread to his mind. Forester felt an overwhelming tiredness, even sadness, while something else—what was it?—caused his heart to race. His eyes swept across the acres of lawn, the old, drooping oaks and the stately pines. For the first time, he wished he had gated his estate. He’d never liked that concept, didn’t like the thought of closing himself off from the rest of the world, but now it would have been a comfort against this strange dread.
He saw no one. He noticed nothing out of the ordinary.
Still, he took his cell phone out of his pants pocket. He hit a speed-dial number, not identifying himself to the person on the other end, and began to speak. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but I’m just confirming that you understand what has to be done if … well, if something should happen to me.” He paused, listening. “No, of course not. I don’t anticipate anything. I just wanted to ensure your help and tell you how much I appreciate it. And I wanted to remind you that discretion, absolute discretion, is required.”
He listened, then gave a short shake of his head. “No, really. It’s nothing. I didn’t intend to startle you. Everything is fine.”
And indeed it was. The sky was turning a sultry blue-black now. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” he said into the phone. “Thank you, and have a pleasant night.”
He picked up his wine again. He speared a bit of scalloped potato. He tried to force himself into the relaxed, almost euphoric state he would usually enjoy on such an evening.
The Ramsey Lewis CD came to an end, throwing his estate into cavernous silence.
Suddenly, he didn’t like being alone. What an odd thought.
For the first time in a very long time, Forester Pickett was afraid.
4
Sam was distracted. I could see it when I walked into the office of Cassandra Milton, Wedding Creator. Sam and I both thought the title wedding creator was pompous, but Cassandra was one of my mother’s best friends, and we’d heard her weddings always went off flawlessly.
“Hi, gorgeous.” Sam got up from his seat on one of the white couches in the waiting room. He was wearing a navy suit over his short but trim, strong body. He was thirty, a year older than me, and he had cropped blond hair and the sweetest olive-colored eyes I’d ever seen. But those eyes were strained today, the faint creases at the corners somewhat deeper.
He hugged me just a fraction tighter than normal.
I pulled back, studied him. “What’s up with you?”
“Just some complications at work.”
“Forester Pickett kind of work?” Sam also worked for Forester Pickett. Specifically, he worked for a private wealth-management firm that handled most of Forester’s investments, and Sam was one of the financial advisors assigned to him.
He nodded.
“Want to talk about it?”
“Not right now.”
“Does Forester know about it?”
“Yeah. But I need to talk to him some more.”
“Sometimes Forester likes determinations rather than discussions.”
“I know. And it makes me nuts.” Sam let me go and sank back into the couch. He dropped his head in his hands for a second, and his gold hair glinted under the muted overhead lights.
I sat next to him. “Are you all right?” Maybe it wasn’t work. Maybe he was suffering the same issue I was—feeling as if the wedding was a speeding train that wouldn’t stop. Hell, I was starting to feel like my life was that train. In a few short years, I’d gone from single girl associate with no responsibilities (except to bill some hours and have a good time on a Saturday night) to a nearly married, almost-partner, lots-of-responsibility woman with a fiancé who, just this past weekend, had started talking about houses in the suburbs.
Sam raised his head and put on the composed smile he used when he wanted to pacify his mother. “I’m fine.”
“C’mon, tell me.” And then I’ll tell you.
I had a happy vision of us blowing off Cassandra and the dinner at the Union League Club. We’d flee to a dark bar on Roscoe near Sam’s apartment. We’d drink beer and talk about how it had all gotten away from us, how we wanted to put the breaks on. We would decide that we wanted to be together, sure, but without all this formality and fuss. I would continue to get my sea legs at work. I would finally feel like I owned that job. And, in a few years, when we were both established and tiring of it all, maybe then we’d get married and think about a house in Winnetka.
Just then Cassandra Milton floated into the room. She was a tall, immaculately dressed woman in her fifties. “Well preserved,” Sam once called her. He was right. All I knew was that when the time came, I needed to have the name of the surgeon who preserved her.
“Ready for a few details?” Cassandra said. She said this every meeting. “A few details” almost always consisted of an hour of excruciating decisions about shrimp forks and frosting.
“Absolutely.” Sam stood and loosely clapped his hands in front of him, as if he’d just been in a huddle and someone had called Break!
I stood, too, telling myself it would all be worth it—eventually. I was just being immature about wanting to slow things down. I was a hundred percent certain I wanted to be with Sam. I’m not going to lie and say it had always been that way. When Sam and I first discussed getting married, I was struck with the enormity of the situation—no sex with anyone else ever again; having to see the same person every morning for as long as my life lasted; having to consult with someone about every major life decision from what blender to buy to what vacation to take. Being in the holy state of matrimony was nothing I’d ever romanticized. I didn’t need it as a notch on my belt. But I was wild for Sam. I adored him in a way I’d never realized was possible. Monogamy required giving a lot up, but I was going to gain a hell of a lot more. I loved Sam in such a way, that my whole body said, God, yes, each time I saw him.
And now here we were at the office of a Wedding Creator. It was all going to be okay.
I glanced at him for the hang in there look he always gave me at Cassandra’s, but he didn’t meet my gaze.
“Sure, Cassandra.” I stood and reached for Sam’s hand, but he just sat there, staring straight ahead.
“Sam?”
He looked up. “Sorry.” He stood quickly. “I forgot something. I mean, I’ve got to check on something. Can you handle this on your own?”
“You want to leave?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll go with you. We can put this off.”
“We cannot put this off,” Cassandra said. “The contract with the restaurant requires we choose our appetizer selections by tomorrow.”
“Can you do it?” Sam said. “Please?” With any other groom, I would assume he was wisely trying to shirk his duties. But Sam actually enjoyed all the planning that went into our wedding.
“Of course, but seriously, are you all right?”
He put on that practiced smile again. “Sure, yeah.”
“Okay. I’ll meet you at the dinner.” We’d talk then. I would get the whole thing out—all my doubts—and the talking would dispel my panic.
He blinked. He seemed to have forgotten about the work dinner. He looked at his watch. “Right, okay. I might be a little late, but I’ll meet you there.”
“Shall we?” Cassandra said, in the voice I knew as her impatient tone, even if it was cultured and low.
I squeezed Sam’s hand and kissed him on the cheek. “I’ll see you at the club.”
Later, I realized Sam hadn’t answered me. He just watched me walk into Cassandra’s office, and when I turned back to give him a reassuring smile, he seemed to be studying me, memorizing my face.
5
I sat in the ballroom of the Union League Club, an empty chair at my side.
“Where’s Sam?” asked Faith McLaney, a woman from Carrington Associates, the wealth-management firm where Sam worked. Faith was ten years older than Sam and, in some ways, a mentor to him. Their boss, Mark Carrington, handled only a few exclusive clients, while Sam and Faith backed him up, dividing the clients between the two of them.
“I’m not sure.”
I texted him again—Where are you? Still no reply.
I watched while a line of speakers from a newly formed venture-capital firm took the dais and eternally praised themselves for raising so much funding. I tried to make small talk with the others at our table—two people from a local accounting firm and their spouses—but because of my increasingly agitated worries about Sam, they were tough to tell apart save one woman’s lazy eye and her husband’s psoriasis.
“Sam’s on his way,” I kept saying to no one in particular, starting to doubt my own words with each second. Had he gotten held up with some emergency with Forester’s work? It was strange for him not to text me and let me know what was happening.
I went to the bathroom, stood at the counter and called Sam’s cell. It went to voice mail.
Q was someone I turned to for help with everything, not just work, so I called him to see if he had any ideas.
I’d been lucky enough to find Q while he was night staff at Baltimore & Brown doing word processing for attorneys, like me, who worked too much and too late. He had simply wanted to make some money until he could figure out what he should do with his life, having realized that his acting career wasn’t exactly taking off. He was conscientious and meticulous, and as soon as he’d handled a few projects for me, I begged him to become my assistant. Yes, he’d be working for someone slightly younger, I told him, and yes, maybe “legal assistant” wasn’t the day job he’d always dreamed of, but I’d get him as much money as I could, I’d let him go on auditions anytime he wanted and we’d have a blast. I told him that I needed him. Desperately. At the time, I was twenty-six. Only a year and half out of law school, and suddenly I’d found myself handling a large chunk of the legal work for Pickett Enterprises—and I knew I was in way over my head.
Q finally caved, and now, three years later, he was, as Sam always joked, my “work husband,” a husband who could and would always make things better.
But oddly, Q’s phone didn’t ring either and went straight to voice mail.
I went back into the dining room and sat staring at my engagement ring, while the speakers droned on. I tried to figure out when it had happened—when the feeling had started that the wedding was getting away from us, didn’t seem like us anymore. I had to talk to Sam about it. So where was he?
Whenever a dinner course was cleared, my eyes darted to my lap, where my cell phone sat, and I stared at the empty display. I texted him a few more times. Again, nothing. Something was wrong.
The desserts—glazed pears that were better suited for a Gerber jar—were served, but I pushed them away.
When the dinner ended I said goodbye to Faith and the rest of the table, then I left and tramped down the stairway that was lined with an eclectic, expensive array of oil paintings. Once in the lobby of the club, I called Q again, but again it went right to voice mail. I tried Sam’s cell phone … and his office … and his apartment number. Nothing.
I jammed the phone in my purse and wondered whether to keep being worried about Sam or move to pissed-off mode. This no-show was completely unlike him. In fact, he’d never done something this inconsiderate, this out of character, so my usual repertoire of fiancé-management techniques seemed inappropriate.
I walked back to my office, through the mostly empty Loop, now lacking its daytime vitality. I found my silver Vespa parked behind the building. My mom had gotten me started on scooters when I was sixteen. We didn’t need a car in the city, and yet she constantly worried about me waiting at public bus stops and El stations. I’d used the scooter through college and bought a new one during law school. I thought that when I started practicing law I’d get rid of it. But then gas prices skyrocketed, and there was something about driving the Vespa I found not only convenient and energy saving, but cathartic. After a day spent in the stale stratosphere of the law firm, I liked the fresh air on my face, the feel of movement, of getting somewhere, sooner than later.
I got on the Vespa and pointed it in the direction of Sam’s office. There was little traffic, so I was able to floor it up LaSalle Street. The dazzling lights of office buildings and restaurants bled past me into streams of colors. The wind tore through my hair, causing strands of orange curls to flick against my eyes and cheeks. I tried not to think of Sam. Instead, I let myself think how grateful I was that Illinois had no helmet law and, as a result, I could let my ears and my head fill up with the rumble and roar of city life.
In the lobby of Sam’s building the security guard called upstairs, at my request, and said no one was answering. Everyone had gone for the night.
“Can I look at the log to see when he signed out?” Sam had told me about how the security in his building was woefully out of date. To make up for it, the building required every person, even employees, to sign in and out each time they left or entered.
The guard, an overweight, middle-aged man with a drooping mustache, shook his head. “Sorry. No one can see the log.”
“Sure, sure.” I flipped my hair over my shoulder. “How do you like the Bears this year?”
The guard waved a hand. “Ah, shit, that kid they got as quarterback doesn’t even have gonads yet. We need somebody good.”
“Somebody like McMahon?” Most Chicagoans had never emotionally recovered from the beauty of the Bears’ mid-eighties victory in the Super Bowl. A reminder of such beauty was a guaranteed way to become best friends with anyone over forty who lived within a sixty-mile radius of Soldier Field. Name-drop a player from the ‘85 team to these guys and they were putty in your hands.
“Exactly!” the guard said.
“And they need a moral leader. Somebody like Singletary.” At this point I was just spouting names I remembered from seeing the Super Bowl Shuffle video after we moved to Chicago.
“Right! Shit, that’s exactly what they need.”
“My fiancé and I are big Bears fans. He was at Soldier Field the day Payton broke the rushing record.”
The guard’s eyes narrowed. “You kidding me?”
“No.” At the time, Sam had only been a kid, visiting a distant relative in Chicago, but he remembered it vividly.
“Wow,” the guard said in a hushed, reverent tone. “Wow.”
“Yeah, I gotta find him.” I straightened up. “Can you check that log and just tell me when he left?”
The guard eyed me. Then he put the logbook on the counter, swung it around and pointed to an entry at the top of the page. There, Sam had signed out of the office ten minutes before I’d seen him at Cassandra’s.
I looked up at the guard. “And he didn’t come back?”
He shook his head then retracted the book.
“Thanks.”
“Sure thing. Go Bears.”
“Go Bears,” I answered and left.
I called Sam’s apartment, then mine. No answer at either. I started my Vespa, but I wasn’t sure where I should go. What was I supposed to do now? Sam, where are you?
I called my best friend, Maggie, but only got her voice mail. Where in the hell was everyone?
As I clicked the Off button, my phone rang. I felt a tiny bit of relief rupture my worry. But it was a Chicago number I didn’t recognize.
“Hello?”
“Izzy, it’s Shane.”
“Oh. Hi, Shane.” Forester’s son rarely called me, but then maybe Sam was out with him for some reason. God, let it be as easy as that.
“Izzy,” Shane said. He seemed to choke, then I heard a snuffle. “My dad is dead.”
6
The first time I spoke to Forester I’d been out of law school for eleven months. After living the student life, with natural built-in breaks of a week here, two months there, I had struggled to get my body and mind on what Grady, my friend at work, and I called the coal-miner’s schedule. To us, it seemed that we labored as hard as coal miners with only a tiny light to illuminate the work ahead of us. As first-years, we were clueless about the law. We were given projects in piecemeal fashion, we worked until the wee hours to finish them, and then we turned them over to demanding partners, crossing our fingers that we hadn’t just prepared a thirty-page memo on the completely wrong topic—something that happened more frequently than one would think. Often, the partners weren’t clear about what they wanted, because they weren’t even sure themselves. Other times, they were pompous jerks who believed that associates should be able to divine precisely what they needed without a lick of direction.
Tanner Hornsby fell into that second category, and so working for him, as I did, required lots of late nights in the office. But that first time I spoke to Forester, it wasn’t even late. It was about five o’clock, and I’d just run downstairs to the lobby and bought myself a massive green tea with a shot of vanilla syrup to keep me sharp for the next few hours. Tanner had already left for the day. With the weather warming up, I’d heard him on the phone earlier making plans to sit outside at Tavern on Rush, where he and his buddies would no doubt ogle women and drink themselves silly.
I was jealous of Tanner that night. Jealous that he already understood the law, that he had the money and time to hit the town on a Tuesday night.
In my office, I sipped my tea and tried to focus on an option agreement Tanner had asked me to finish.
But it became hard to concentrate because of the ringing phone in Tanner’s office, which was a few doors down from mine (and on the side of the building that actually had windows). Closer to me was the desk of Tanner’s assistant, Clarice, and I could hear her phone chiming, too.
Finally, I got up, walked to Clarice’s desk and picked it up. “Baltimore & Brown,” I said in a quick, what-the-hell-do-you-want kind of tone.
“Tanner Hornsby, please.” The man’s voice was melodic, with a slight Southern accent.
“Mr. Hornsby is gone for the day. May I take a message?”
“Gone for the day? It’s only five o’clock.”
I thought of Tanner, probably already well into his second Bombay Sapphire. “Mr. Hornsby is in a meeting.”
“Is this Clarice?”
“No, it’s Izzy McNeil, one of the associates.”
“Forester Pickett here.”
I coughed involuntarily. Everyone at Baltimore & Brown knew Forester, at least by name, but the associates were typically kept away from the clients. “Hello, Mr. Pickett. May I help you with something?”
“Well, I’m calling about Steven Baumgartner, and I need some assistance ASAP.”
Steven Baumgartner, commonly known around Chicago as “the Bomber,” was the morning shock jock on a radio station Forester owned. We’d been working on his new contract, which he had been expected to sign for millions more dollars than before, but after a recent stunt that resulted in over a hundred listeners jumping into the Chicago River to win concert tickets (many of them ending up with a waterborne virus), the station had considered letting him go.
“I’m familiar with Mr. Baumgartner,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m at Baumgartner’s house. I’ve told the guy he’s got to tone it down on air, and he’s willing to do it. He’s also willing to take a lot less money than we thought. But he wants to sign tonight. He thinks the bad press is going to lose him listeners, and he wants to turn it around as quickly as possible. His agent is on board. So I need you folks to get me that contract in the next two hours.”
I felt a charge of energy. I’d always thrived under deadlines. “No problem, Mr. Pickett. I’ll find Tanner, and we’ll get this to you right away.”
“I’ve tried his cell phone a number of times already.”
“I know how to reach him.”
I hung up the phone and called Tavern on Rush. I spent ten long minutes describing Tanner to the maître d’, insisting they find him, asking him to look again, all to no avail. I tried his cell phone, but he didn’t answer. Maybe they’d gone to Lux Bar? Or Gibson’s? Or Hugo’s? I tried each one. No one at any of these establishments matched Tanner’s description.
Finally, I called Forester back, taking pains not to reveal my panic. “I’m having a hard time reaching Tanner, but I’m sure we can get this done first thing tomorrow.”
Forester lowered his voice. “His agent is here now. They’re in talks with stations in L.A. But if we get this done tonight, they’ll sign with us. And I’ll have just saved my company a truckload of money.”
I thought about the contract. It was essentially ready to go. All I’d have to do was insert the new salary. “No problem, Mr. Pickett. What are the new contract terms?”
Forester named an amount, hundreds of thousands less than the original. I pulled up the contract on the computer, typed in the new salary term and printed it out. Now I’d have to proof the thing. If I made one mistake, I’d be collecting unemployment in a week.
Thirty minutes later I called Forester. “Does Baumgartner still get a signing bonus?”
“Ah!” he said, sounding pleased. “Excellent point. No. No signing bonus anymore.”
“I’ll take that out. And what about the bonuses if he reaches certain ratings?”
“Keep in the ratings bonuses.”
“May I have your fax number? I’ll send the contract to you in five minutes.” I took down the fax, gave Forester my direct line and told him I’d stay in my office for the next few hours in case any additional changes were needed.
I went back to my office with a pleased smile on my face. Making the changes to the Bomber’s contract, although simple, had been the first time I’d felt any proficiency with the law.
Forester called back in an hour and a half. “So you said your name was Isabel McNeil, is that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How do you spell McNeil?”
I spelled it for him. I could hear Forester murmuring, as if he was writing this down, and the notion that Forester Pickett—media mogul, founder and CEO of Pickett Enterprises—was writing down my name was thrilling.
“Well, Ms. McNeil, you saved Pickett Enterprises today.”
I blushed. I couldn’t help it. As a redhead, the blush is impossible to control. “I think that’s overstating it, sir.”
“It’s the truth. That’s all there is to it. Now, tell me, how long have you been a lawyer?”
“Only about a year. I’ve been working here with Tanner Hornsby most of the time.”
Forester grunted at the mention of Tanner’s name. I interpreted this as a derisive grunt, which made me love him even more.
He asked me where I’d gone to law school, and I described Loyola University in Chicago. He asked about college, and I told him about the University of Iowa. And soon, I was talking about high school in the city and grade school before that and how we’d lived in Michigan before that. Forester was one of those great listeners. He chuckled at all the right times, and asked for clarification about this and that. He told me a few stories, too, like how he’d started in the business by buying a radio station, but how he’d gone to the University of Chicago at age fifty to get his college degree.
By the end of our conversation I felt, oddly, as if I was becoming friends with the man. The fact that he was a bizillionaire and I was a relative pauper didn’t matter, nor did the fact that he was one of the firm’s biggest clients and I was merely a peon associate.
When we were about to hang up the phone, Forester said, “You did well today, Izzy.” It was the first time he’d called me that, and I blushed again, but this time with pride.
The next day, Forester sent a new case to the firm. The lawsuit wasn’t anything big, just a simple torts case, a slip-and-fall accident at a theater Forester owned, and it arrived at our offices the same way all Pickett cases did.
The only remarkable thing was that the letter of retention wasn’t directed to Tanner. Instead, it was made out to Isabel McNeil.
7
An emergency-room nurse in pink scrubs stepped in front of me and held out an authoritative arm. “Who’re you here to see?”
“Forester Pickett.”
She pursed her mouth. “Mr. Pickett is …” She glanced over my shoulder, as if looking for reinforcements.
“He’s passed away. Yes, I know.” I put on my courtroom face and refused to let the statement register. “I’m actually here to see his son.”
“No one can go in except the family.”
A green curtain that covered the entrance to one of the rooms was flicked back at its corner and Shane Pickett’s face peeked out. “She’s okay.” He let the curtain fall closed.
“All right, go ahead,” the nurse said. “Sorry about your loss.”
The emotion hit me for the first time, and I felt as if I might gag on something large, something wrong, in my throat. “Thank you.”
I pulled back the curtain and stepped inside. Shane sat next to a metal bed, staring at the form that lay there, covered. Shane was a small man, a sharp dresser, his brown hair always parted severely and combed precisely. He had recently started wearing glasses that were stylish, but I got the feeling he wore them so that he would somehow look older, smarter. When Forester had had a heart attack a few years ago and succession planning was done at the company, Shane was made president of Pickett Enterprises, so that if something happened to Forester or when he stepped down as CEO, Shane would run the place. Forester was determined to keep it a family company. (I think he hoped Shane would have kids and that those kids would work there, too.) But Shane hadn’t been a “natural” in the business like his father was. There had been a lot of talk that he wasn’t ready or worthy for the position of CEO.
Shane looked up at me now, then back at what was apparently the form of Forester Carlton Pickett, the kindest and most vibrant man I’d ever known, now covered with a white, hospital-issue sheet. Forester had been a simple man in many ways, but he’d loved luxury in all its forms, and in particular he’d often spoken about his 1500 thread-count sheets and how he always bought the best bedding money could buy. Something about the hospital sheet that now covered him struck me as deeply wrong.
“Shane, I’m sorry,” I said.
Shane stood and launched himself into my arms, crying.
“It’s okay,” I murmured, rubbing his back. “It’s okay.”
But it wasn’t.
As Shane’s sobs continued, all I could think about was the discussion I’d had with Forester two weeks ago.
We were in my office for our “monthly roundup” as Forester called it. Forester met with his key professionals to find out precisely what everyone was up to. In the early days, I hosted him in the big Baltimore & Brown conference room with its view of the Sears Tower. I always ordered in a vast assortment of coffees, pastries and exotic fruit, but he’d soon had enough of that.
“You don’t need to feed me, Izzy,” he’d said. “And your office is just fine. Wherever you work, I work.”
So each month, I sat at my desk with its stacks of documents and contracts, and Forester sat unperturbed on the other side, sometimes moving a large folder in order to see me better.
That day, a few weeks ago, Q had come into the office with Forester’s usual cup of black coffee and a green tea for me.
“How are you, Quentin?” Forester said, standing to greet him. He was a little distracted that day, but as always, Forester took the time to speak with everyone.
“Great, sir, thanks.” Q handed him his cup of coffee with a smile. If anyone else had called him Quentin, he would have grimaced, but Q loved Forester as much as I did.
“And how’s Max?” Forester asked, even though being gay didn’t quite register with Forester. “I don’t understand it,” he’d once said to me, almost under his breath, but not in an unkind way. Just in a bewildered way. Yet he dutifully and honestly asked about Max every month.
“Great,” Q said. “He’s fantastic.”
“Good. Say hello for me.” Forester patted him on the shoulder affectionately. “And thanks for the coffee.”
We took our seats and spent the next hour discussing a lawsuit we’d filed against a delinquent contractor from a build-out of one of Forester’s studios.
As we wrapped up, Forester shifted in his seat. “Look, Izzy, you’ve got to promise me something.”
“I’ll be nice to the contractor at his deposition. I promise.” Forester hated needless nastiness, which was, I suppose, why he wasn’t a lawyer.
“Thank you but, no, it’s not that.”
I closed my notebook and waited.
Forester shifted again. “Look, if something should happen to me, which of course it’s not going to, but if someone tries to … I don’t know … harm me, I want you to look into it.”
“What exactly are you talking about?” I said.
“I’m healthy as a horse.”
“Right, I know that.”
“It’s been three years since the heart attack, and you know everything I’ve done—how I’ve changed my eating, my exercising?”
“Right.”
“And this morning, I had a physical with my cardiologist. Stress test, EKG, the whole rigmarole. I passed with flying colors.”
“Good. I’m glad. So what do you mean about someone trying to harm you?”
Forester paused, which was unlike him. “I’ve had some problems at Pickett Enterprises. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been getting letters telling me I need to step down. That I’m too old for the job.”
“Sent by whom?” I said, indignant.
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe it’s a prank.”
“Possibly.” Another pause. “It’s just the damnedest thing.” Forester shook his head. “There’s also the matter of this homeless man. Twice outside Pickett I’ve been approached by a homeless gentleman.”
“And of course you gave him twenty bucks.” Forester could never pass up an opportunity to help someone on the street.
“Something like that. But he spoke to me. He said something disturbing.” Forester’s face, perennially sun-kissed from hours at golf courses and gardening, seemed to pale slightly. I noticed the lines crinkling his face. “He said to be careful. Otherwise I would join Olivia.”
I inhaled sharply. “Are you sure?”
Forester met my eyes. “Positive. The next time I saw him, I gave him money again, and he said the exact same thing.”
I crossed my hands on my desk and squeezed them together. Suddenly, I felt my youth. As Forester’s attorney, I was meant to advise him, but I had no idea what should or could be done. “Did you call the police?”
“No. There’s no crime. No extortion or anything.”
“We’ll get you a security detail then.”
Forester made a face. “Izzy, you know me better than that.” He cleared his throat and sat taller, as if throwing off the conversation.
“Then let’s call John Mayburn,” I said, referring to the private investigator the firm hired for big cases.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m handling this for now, and nothing is going to happen to me. I’m sure it’s all a coincidence.” He gave me the kind smile he was known for, and he changed the topic.
Since that conversation, I’d worried about Forester, but I did what he wanted, and I let him manage the situation. And now he was dead. I stared at his body covered by the hospital sheet.
“God, I can’t believe it,” Shane said, wiping his face. He took a step back. “Sorry about that, Izzy.”
“Don’t be.” I sat in a chair at the foot of the bed, then pushed the chair back a few feet. “What happened?”
“Annette made him dinner and left. But she forgot something and came back about forty-five minutes later and she found him. He was dead. Out on the patio.”
I put my hand to my mouth. Poor Forester. What had he gone through in those last moments? “What do the doctors say?”
“Heart attack. You know he had that heart attack a few years ago?”
“Yeah, but he had the angiogram after that and he’s been so diligent about everything—his diet, the medications, the Chinese herbs, the exercise.”
“You know about all that?”
“Your dad and I were close.”
Shane nodded. “He thought of you like a daughter.”
“I also know that he had a stress test a few weeks ago.”
Shane looked surprised. “He did?”
“And an EKG. And he was told everything was fine.”
“Well, I know if you’ve had a heart attack once, it can happen again.”
“I guess.”
We both looked at the covered form on the bed. I felt an intense urge to cry. I took a huge breath. “Shane, why is he still here? I mean, the body. Shouldn’t they take him out or something?”
“They will. Any minute. We’re just waiting.” He laughed, a raw sound. “I guess I’m just waiting. He’s not really here anymore is he?”
“Will they do an autopsy?” I asked.
“They say they have to.”
“Good.” My mind raced. Had someone hurt Forester or was it as tragically simple as Shane had suggested and just another heart attack?
Shane slumped forward, shaking his head back and forth.
“Shane, are you okay?”
He righted himself and nodded.
“Has anyone been here with you?”
“Walt just left to start calling people.”
“Good.” “Walt” was Walter Tenning, the chief financial officer of Pickett Enterprises and the most efficient of men.
“I called my aunts and uncles,” he said, “but they all live down south. They’re coming in tomorrow.”
It seemed incongruous that Forester, a man who was loved by everyone he touched, would have so few people at his deathbed. I couldn’t believe that Forester—wonderful Forester who had done so much for so many—was gone. He’d given both Sam and me our careers, and Sam had always said Forester had been the best teacher, not just about business, but about life.
“Where’s Sam?” Shane asked, as if reading my thoughts.
I opened my mouth, then closed it. I thought about making up an excuse for my fiancé. But nothing came.
“I don’t know,” I said to Shane. “I have no idea where Sam is.”
8
After Forester’s body had been taken away, Shane and I hugged one last time in front of the hospital, and I went to my place in Old Town. I lived on Eugenie Street, in a brick three-flat converted to condos. I had bought the top unit, mostly because it gave me the rooftop deck with the city view, while the other owners had to make do with a balcony or patio. The downside was the three-flight walk up. Those stairs had never seemed so long as they did the day Forester died.
When I finally reached the landing and began to push open my door, I felt a twinge of optimism peek its head through my grief. Maybe Sam was here. He had spent less and less time at his place in Roscoe Village lately, and in a few short months, after our holiday wedding, he’d be living here officially.
But the place was dark, and over the kitchen bar top, I saw Sam’s orange coffee mug, sitting at the side of the sink where he’d left it that morning. Now the kitchen was bathed in a cold pool of moonlight that filtered through the window. Where was he?
The only upside to not finding Sam was that I didn’t have to tell him about Forester’s death. Forester meant the world to him and he would take this news hard.
I turned on the overhead lights and stared around the condo. The polished pine floors and the marble turn-of-the-century fireplace with its bronze grate had seemed cozy when we left this morning. Now the place felt cold. I called Sam’s two closest friends. Neither had heard from him that night. I called Sam again. It went right to voice mail without even ringing. Had his battery died or had he turned off his phone? If he had turned it off, then why? My head reeled with possibilities—an accident, a robbery, a sudden all-encompassing desire to scare the living shit out of me?
I tried his home phone once more, then the office again. I repeated the process five more times. Insanity is sometimes defined as repeating the same action over and over again, expecting a different result. I pondered this as I dialed Sam one more time.
Then a new thought hit me—it was Tuesday night, which meant the Chicago Lions rugby team practiced tonight, which meant the team would be out boozing at this moment. Sam had taken this season off, in preparation for the wedding, something that had drawn merciless taunting from his teammates. But maybe sweet, responsible Sam had flipped under the pressure. The team didn’t usually go out after practice, but maybe they’d headed to McGinny’s Tap, their favorite postgame hangout. Maybe Sam had gotten loaded, and maybe he was even cheating on me with one of the women who chased around the team.
Strangely, I was fine with this thought. Drunken debauchery I could handle right now. I could even forgive it. Yesterday, the thought of Sam cheating would have sent me careening around the city on my Vespa, a kitchen knife tucked in my faux-crocodile clutch. Now, I actually found myself praying that my fiancé was throwing up too much beer into a gutter, his arm still around a big-boobed blonde. Because then he wouldn’t be hurt. Because then, somewhere, he would be okay.
I scrolled through my phone to see if I had any numbers of the rugby guys, but there were none. There’d never been a reason to call them before.
I flicked the lights back off, went into my bedroom and stripped off my clothes. I pulled on a Jeff Beck-concert T-shirt of Sam’s and crawled under the thick duvet. It seemed wrong to lie down, to be doing nothing, but the urge to escape the day was overpowering. Behind the grief of losing Forester and the worry about Sam, I felt inconsolably guilty. Today, I’d felt overwhelmed with my job—with everything Forester had given me. And I’d felt overwhelmed, too, with the wedding, with Sam, I guess. And now, they were both gone.
9
Day Two
I never slept. The phone never rang. I finally got up at 6:00 a.m. I got on my computer and checked my e-mail. The usual batch of messages appeared in my in-box—notes from other lawyers, one from Maggie about tickets to a concert at the Vic, announcements from local clothing stores where I spent too much money—but nothing from Sam.
I showered but couldn’t deal with my hair and so I pulled it back in a low ponytail, and decided to go to the office where Q would help me, where I could figure out what to do next.
I had always liked the crisp quiet of Baltimore & Brown when the gray-white early-morning light filtered in the windows and hung there before all the troops descended. But at 7:05 it was too quiet. I texted Q and asked him to get in as soon as possible. I tried Sam’s numbers again. And again. And again. This insanity was seriously fucking with my calm. I mean, flubbing with my calm. Flubbing.
I looked at my watch. It was too early to phone Sam’s mom or sisters in California. I called the police and was told Sam hadn’t been arrested and I could fill out a missing persons report if I came to the station.
“What would you do then?” I asked.
“We just take the report,” the officer said.
“And then what?”
“We just take the report,” he repeated.
I tried Northwestern hospital, along with Michael Reese, Illinois Masonic and every other hospital I could think of. Nothing. I tried his best friend, R.T., again, who answered sleepily and said he still hadn’t heard from him.
From down the hall, I heard the swishing sound of a key card and then the click of the door opening.
“Q?” I yelled.
No answer.
“Q?”
Not a sound. It was too early for assistants to be here, and most of the attorneys didn’t start arriving until at least eight. Goose bumps rose suddenly on my arms.
I stood from the desk and hurried to the door.
“Oh!” I said, colliding with someone turning in to my office.
Tanner’s slicked-back hair had its usual sheen, but his blue eyes looked as tired as mine.
“You scared me,” I said, a hand on my chest.
“Sorry.” It was the first word of apology I’d ever heard Tanner utter. To anyone. “I saw your light on. Guess you couldn’t sleep either?”
“No. You heard about Forester?”
He nodded. “Can I come in?”
“Of course.” I sat at my desk, watching Tanner sink into a chair.
“I thought the old guy would live forever,” he said.
“Me, too.” I choked a little as I uttered the words.
Tanner shook his head, and we sat in a silence that felt both mutual and poignant. I wouldn’t have thought Tanner capable of such a moment, and I never thought I’d share one with him, but grief, I suppose, makes for unusual buddies.
“Have you talked to Shane this morning?” I asked.
“I just got off the phone with him. He’s a mess. Thank you for being at the hospital last night.”
“Of course.”
“I was at the opera. I didn’t get the message until late.”
I heard the outside door click again, then I heard Q’s voice yell hello from down the hall.
A few seconds later, Q stepped into my office then stopped suddenly when he saw Tanner.
“Hiya, Mr. Hornsby,” he said in his fake-effeminate voice.
When neither of us responded right away, Q’s eyes swung from me to Tanner and back.
“Q,” I said, “Forester died last night.”
A beat went by. “What?”
“Yeah. Heart attack.”
Q slumped against the back wall and put his head in his hands.
My phone rang, and I snatched it up.
“Izzy?” I heard a man’s voice say.
Damn it. Not Sam. “Yes?”
“It’s Mark Carrington.” Sam’s boss. I sat up straighter. “We’ve got a problem over here.”
“Mark, is it Sam?”
“Yes.”
Something sour and rotten twisted in my stomach. “Is he there?”
Mark paused. “No, he’s not. Do you know where he is?”
I looked at Q and Tanner. Both were watching me curiously. “No.”
“Well, there’s something else that’s not here. A series of bearer shares from Panama, owned by Forester.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“I was supposed to fly to New York this morning for another client, and I came in early to get something from the firm’s safe. I saw that Sam had logged in to it last night.”
“Sam logged in to the safe last night? You’re sure?”
“Positive. We each have our own codes, so we can tell exactly who’s been in there. I couldn’t think of anything he would have needed, so I looked around the safe, and Forester’s bearer shares are missing. They represent ownership of a corporation that holds about thirty million dollars of real estate in Panama. Whoever’s in possession of those shares essentially owns them, and they’re as good as cash.”
My mind skittered back and forth. Panama. Missing. Thirty million.
“Something is screwed up here,” Mark said. “Really screwed up. Because those shares aren’t the kind of thing we usually keep in our safe. Just a month ago, Sam came to me and told me Forester wanted to move them from the safe-deposit box where he kept them. Something about switching banks and it being a temporary thing.”
“Really?” Sam and I tried to be good about not discussing Forester’s legal work or his financial holdings. I had an attorney-client privilege to protect, and Sam had a duty as his wealth manager not to discuss his portfolio. But there was something called the spousal privilege, and although we weren’t married quite yet, Sam and I exercised it on a regular basis discussing Forester. It was impossible not to when Forester was the center of both of our professional worlds. But Sam hadn’t mentioned anything about Forester changing banks or moving thirty million dollars of shares into the safe.
“Yeah, really,” Mark said, his voice angry. “This is serious. You sure you don’t know where Sam is?”
“I don’t have any idea.”
Mark exhaled loudly. “I called Forester, but he hasn’t gotten back to me yet.”
“Mark … Forester died last night.”
“Are you kidding?”
“He had a heart attack.”
“Oh, God.”
“What time did Sam log in to the safe?” I asked.
I saw Tanner’s eyebrows rise. I wanted to ask him to leave, but I couldn’t wait even a minute to get some answers about Sam.
“Around eight-thirty.”
A half an hour after I’d talked to the lobby security guard.
“What time did Forester die?” Mark said.
“I’m not sure. I guess around six or seven.”
“When is the last time you saw Sam?”
“Five-fifteen or so.”
We were both silent.
“Izzy,” Mark said. “I think I’d better call the cops.”
10
The day I met Sam I made him bleed.
We were at Forester’s house in Lake Forest, at the annual end-of-June barbecue he threw for all his employees and business associates. Everyone was invited—from the execs to the valets.
The weather was crisp and sunny, a brand-new summer day with everyone conscious of how the Chicago climate would soon give way to sticky humidity and biting mosquitoes. Families were invited to the party, and many people rowed their children across Forester’s pond or whacked the croquet balls across his rich, green lawn.
I had already spent the better part of a painful hour sipping a mimosa and listening to Tanner Hornsby talk at his pack of sycophants. Technically, I was one of those sycophants. I was a year out of law school, and although Forester had thrown me a couple of cases, he wasn’t yet giving me the bulk of his files. I understood that my job as an associate was to perform grunt work, to smile about it and to murmur comments of thanks to Tanner for the great opportunity.
Tanner was repeating a story I’d heard ten times before about a caddy who’d given him bad advice on a putt. This story was always told with scathing scorn toward the caddy and a hero’s verbal welcome for Tanner himself, since he’d seen through that awful recommendation and, using his stellar athletic intuition, read the green perfectly and sunk the putt.
That was how Tanner operated—he pumped himself up and up and up, so that his bloating, floating presence seemed akin to a Macy’s parade balloon on Thanksgiving morning. Tanner only talked about three things—sports, the law and, most importantly, himself. The rest of us were supposed to scuttle along after him, guffawing and clapping him on the back. Some people liked getting their butts kissed, others despised it. Tanner thrived on it.
My buddy Grady was there, too, but Grady loved sports stories so he asked Tanner lots of questions and yucked it up. Meanwhile, my only contribution was a few saccharine chuckles, until I couldn’t take it anymore.
“You know, Tanner,” I interjected, “the word caddy comes from the term cadets after the men who attended Mary, Queen of Scots, when she played the game. Caddies are there to merely aid the golfer, not ensure victory.”
This comment was the intellectual sports equivalent of flashing my tits, and Tanner stared at me, verbally stumped for a moment. A few of the other guys raised their eyebrows.
Tanner recovered by ignoring me and launching into a story about how he then went on to birdie the eighteenth hole. I was plotting my escape when Forester stepped up to our group. He was dressed in a cream linen jacket and a yellow tie, with a matching handkerchief tucked in his jacket pocket. His thick silver hair was perfectly groomed. He looked every inch the gentleman he was. Everyone immediately hushed, except for Tanner, who boomed to Forester about the just fantastic party and asked about “the Mouse.”
“The Mouse” was Tanner’s nickname for Forester’s son, Shane, who was one of his best friends from childhood. I hated that moniker, especially since “the Mouse” was the precise reason that Tanner had all of Forester’s legal work.
Forester smiled kindly and pointed to his son Shane—a short man in a seersucker jacket—who was speaking with a few other people on the limestone patio.
Forester turned to me. “Can I steal you away, Miss McNeil? I’d love you to meet someone.”
I saw Tanner’s face flash with surprise, then annoyance. Just as fast, the look disappeared. “Sure, sure,” Tanner said, as if giving permission. “But don’t keep my girl too long. Izzy’s got a big Saturday night ahead of her, working on interrogatories for me.”
Forester blinked a few times at Tanner’s proprietary statement, which made me sound like a little lawyer geisha he only brought out at parties.
“That’s right,” I piped in, unable to stop myself. “I’ll be working tonight, since Tanner will be too busy house hunting.”
Tanner had just gotten a divorce from his third wife, a very public divorce in which she’d forcibly removed him from their home, a home the judge had awarded to her. The story of Tanner being ousted from his own castle had spread rapidly. We all knew that Tanner was living in a temporary apartment on Ohio Street.
I bit my lip as soon as I’d said it. Grady laughed loudly, then when no one joined him, shut his mouth. Tanner glowered.
“All right then,” Forester said, like a dad on a playground. “Izzy will be back shortly.”
Don’t count on it, I thought as I followed him across the lawn.
Forester wore a bemused grin. “You know, you shouldn’t have said that.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not, and I don’t blame you. The man can be insufferable. Has been since he was a kid. But then, I don’t work for him.” He looked pointedly at me.
I felt a flash of panic. I’d probably just set my career back by that jab at Tanner. It was one thing to toss in a random remark about golf history. It was another to attack him personally.
We passed the bar, and I swiped a beer from a tub full of ice. Enough mimosas. I needed something heartier, and I noticed Forester had a beer himself.
I’d just twisted the cap off when Forester stopped and tapped the shoulder of a man who swung around in mid-chuckle. He had blond hair that shone in the sunlight and eyes that were both soft and sparkling, like an olive in a martini glass. He was so yummy I wanted to mop him up with a biscuit.
“Forester, how are you?” the man said. I noticed he was about my age, but he spoke to Forester as if they were old and dear friends. Later, I would learn that Sam viewed Forester as a father figure. Sam’s own dad was a jackass of epic pro-portions—a hard-partying, fist-flinging man who Sam’s mom had finally divorced when Sam was in high school.
And, apparently, Forester felt the same way. “Son,” he said to Sam, “I want to introduce you to a member of my legal team, Izzy McNeil. Izzy, this is Sam Hollings. Sam is one of my financial advisors.”
Sam turned his gaze my way and held out his hand. He was on the shorter side, but he gave the impression of solidity and strength. He dipped his head slightly as if shy, yet a grin pulled at the corners of his wide mouth. And then the strangest thought occurred to me. I could kiss that mouth. Forever.
I’d really never had such a thought before. I could be hot for a guy, and I could think he might make a decent date to a wedding (i.e., drink enough to be funny, but not enough to embarrass me), but I usually didn’t want to kiss—just kiss—someone so immediately. And I never used the word forever. I knew forever didn’t exist.
I realized suddenly I was staring. I noticed Forester watching us, and it dawned on me that I hadn’t shaken the guy’s hand. I thrust my hand forward and gave him a fierce, tight handshake to cover up my lapse.
“Nice to meet you.” I pumped his hand, squeezing it. “Really … nice.”
Sam winced a little and looked down when I finally let go. There, on the tender pad of skin below his thumb was a small bead of blood.
“Oh my gosh.” I opened my own hand and saw the bottle cap I’d forgotten I was holding, one of its sharp edges tinged red. “I’m so sorry …”
“No problem.” Sam brushed away the dot of red with his other hand. “I’ll live.”
“He’ll live,” echoed Forester. “He’s a tough one. He plays rugby, did you know that?”
Sam smiled. “She just met me, Forester, how is she supposed to know that?”
“I would have thought everyone knew about the great Sam Hollings.” Forester patted Sam’s shoulder. “Now if you two will excuse me …”
When he was gone, I gestured at Sam’s hand. “I’m really sorry.”
His eyes were fixed on mine. “I’m not.”
Sam and I began our “forever” that moment, in the sun, on Forester’s green lawn. Later, it became a ritual of ours—I would ask him if he loved me, and he would say, “Of course. I love you so much it makes me bleed.”
11
After the phone call from Sam’s boss, I had to get out of my office, away from the sad, sympathetic way Tanner was looking at me. I realized I liked his snarling criticism much better than his pity. And I also realized that the one place I hadn’t looked for Sam was one of the most obvious—his apartment. I bolted out of the office, jumped on my scooter and headed to Roscoe Village.
Sam’s apartment was next to a bar called the Village Tap. It was a cozy bachelor pad where we’d spent our early dating days.
I parked the Vespa and stood outside Sam’s apartment building, shivering. The sky was a moody mix of white clouds broken up by occasional shots of sunlight that disappeared just as fast.
“Izzy!” I heard.
Maggie came trotting down the street, her tiny feet pounding on the sidewalk, her little arms swinging determinedly back and forth. Her light-brown hair with its natural streaks of gold hung in waves to her chin. She pushed it out of her face with an annoyed hand.
“What is going on?” she said when she reached me.
I’d left her a message, telling her that Sam was gone and that Forester had died, and that I needed to look around Sam’s apartment but that I couldn’t go alone. His place, which had once held me like a hug, scared me.
Maggie and I embraced. She was shorter than me by five inches, so I had to lean down. She was so delicate that she made me feel downright ungainly by comparison.
I pulled away and looked at her. “You cut your bangs again. You know you’re not supposed to cut your own bangs.”
Maggie had a habit of getting so irritated with her curly hair that she often took matters into her own hands and chopped away. It usually left erratic results causing Mario, her stylist, to throw a snit and swear he would stop cutting her hair if she didn’t halt the self-mutilation.
“Yes, Mario will disown me. Now, what is going on?” She gave me that intent Maggie look—head bent down while her eyes looked up intently, her bottom lip dropping slightly away from the top.
I filled her in about Forester’s death, about Sam not showing up last night, about the letters and threats Forester had received over the last couple months, about Mark Carrington’s phone call and the missing Panamanian bearer shares.
“Holy cow.” Maggie’s eyes narrowed. “What’s the deal with these Panamanian shares?”
“Mark Carrington told me Panama is big with retirees and people who want cheaper vacation homes. Apparently, Forester thought the country would be as popular as Costa Rica, so he was buying a lot of property there. Mark said that a common way to buy real estate in Panama is to have a corporation own the real estate. They issue shares of stock for the corporation, but the ownership of the corporation isn’t recorded in any registry or database.”
Maggie nodded. “The owners are anonymous.”
“Right. And they don’t have to report the transfer of ownership either. Panama is supposedly the last place you can get a truly anonymous corporation with no loopholes and no financial statements to file. Within the last few months, Forester put a lot of money into real estate there. With Sam’s help.”
“Did you know about this?”
“No. Mark said Sam came to him recently and asked to put those shares in the company safe. He said Forester wanted them moved from his safe-deposit box.”
“And you’re telling me that Sam now has those shares.”
“Apparently.”
We exchanged a look. I knew we were both thinking, Why, Sam? Why, why, why?
“Yesterday, Sam seemed worried about something,” I told her. “He said it had to do with Pickett Enterprises, but I assumed it was the usual work stuff.”
Was it possible he had felt the pressure of the wedding, too? He had said he was ready. He seemed a hundred percent about it. But maybe he was just trying to convince himself. Maybe the pressure had driven him to do something crazy. Maybe. But it simply didn’t seem like Sam.
“Any chance Sam was the one sending those anonymous letters to Forester?” Maggie asked.
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. Sam worshipped the man. Forester was the father he never had. Plus, what would Sam possibly gain from Forester stepping down from the company? He was one of Sam’s biggest clients.”
“What happened when Mark Carrington called the police?”
“They came to the office. He’s talking to them right now.”
“So, look,” Maggie said, waving an arm in the direction of Sam’s apartment, “maybe it’s simple. He could be dead up there.”
“That’s helpful. Thank you. I’m glad I asked you to be here.”
“You know what I mean. Maybe he came home and he fell or something.”
“If he stole from Forester, I’ll kill him myself.”
“Maybe he was abducted.”
“What?”
Maggie shrugged. “Who knows? I’ve heard of it happening.”
“Yeah, to one of your drug clients. In Colombia.” Maggie represented a host of drug runners. Alleged drug runners, as Maggie would say.
“I’m just throwing some possibilities out there.”
“Let’s not guess, okay?”
“Did he update his Facebook page or his MySpace?”
“You know neither of us have those.” It was one of the things Sam and I had bonded over, our aversion to putting the tiniest details of our life on the Web.
“That’s right. You guys are freaks.”
“Really, you’re so helpful.”
“Okay.” Maggie grabbed my arm and propelled me to the front door. “Open it.”
Inside the front door, three metal mailboxes were attached to the wall. I stared at the second box—Sam Hollings.
We walked up the stairs and let ourselves into the second-floor apartment. It looked the way it always did. His leather couch was slouchy and slightly dusty. The blue afghan with the Cubs logo, which Sam’s grandmother had knitted for him, was tossed over the side.
Maggie scoffed at the sight of the afghan. She was a Sox fan, a true-blue South Sider.
Sam’s kitchen was typically unused looking, the refrigerator empty save for half a six pack of Blue Moon beer and a withered orange with a few slices cut out of it.
“Iz!” I heard Maggie yell from the bedroom. “Will you come here?”
Sam always made his bed in the morning and hung up his clothes at night, a trait he’d gotten from his mother. But Maggie was standing at the side of the bed, pointing at a blue suit that had been tossed there. “New or old?”
I walked to the bed and lifted it. I held it to my face and breathed in a faint smell—a little of the tea-tree aftershave he used and a little of something deeper, something pure Sam. “He wore this yesterday. He had it on at the wedding planner’s.”
“So.” Maggie said, trailing off.
“So he came home sometime after he saw me, and changed clothes and left.”
“Not abducted, then.”
“Probably not.”
Maggie and I stood still.
I balled up the suit and hugged it to me.
I sat down hard on the wood floor. And then I started to cry.
“Oh, Iz,” Maggie said, huddling her little form around me. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not,” I said between my tears.
“I know.”
I wept for a few minutes and Maggie said nothing, just holding me.
Finally, I sat up straight. “I am okay,” I said to convince myself.
Maggie sat back and watched me, saying nothing. Maggie always knew when to say nothing.
She hugged her arms around her chest, her black wool coat pooling around her, making her look like a little girl playing dress up. The difference was that Maggie was smarter than most adults I knew.
“The thing is,” I said, “I really can’t believe Sam stole those shares on purpose. He’s the most honest man I know.”
“We don’t always know the people we love. I’ve seen that often enough,” Maggie said. As an attorney specializing in criminal law, very little shocked her anymore.
“I know Sam.” I shook my head. “Or at least I thought I did.”
I closed my eyes and thought of Sam and me sitting on my rooftop deck, drinking Blue Moon, while Sam played guitar for me. He played songs he’d known for years—Buddy Guy and John Hiatt and Eric Clapton and Willie Nelson. He played songs he’d heard on the radio, since he could pick up almost anything by ear. And then he’d play songs he wrote for me. One was called “Wanting You Everywhere.” At the bridge of the song, Sam would look at me with his martini-olive eyes, and he would say all the places he wanted us to go together—Barcelona, Bangkok, Africa, Indonesia, Peru, Iceland, Tibet. Panama had never been on that list.
Maggie pushed herself to her feet. “We’d better look around and see what he took.”
“Is this a crime scene or something like that?”
“Not yet, and you need to figure out if he grabbed anything after he tossed off that suit.”
I went into the bathroom and looked under the sink. “His shaving kit is gone.” I opened a drawer. “And his toothpaste. And his deodorant.”
“What about his clothes?”
Back in the bedroom, I opened the closet. “I can’t really tell. It looks like a few things are gone, but I’m not here that much. Some stuff could be at my house or at the dry cleaner’s.”
“Is there anything he would take if he was going to be gone for a while?”
I stood in Sam’s bedroom and glanced around. I tried to think like Sam. Like Sam standing in his bedroom with thirty million dollars in bearer shares.
I seized on a thought. I opened his nightstand drawer and reached under the small stack of rugby magazines. My fingers searched for the textured top of Sam’s journal, a thin, green leather notebook one of his sisters had given him a few years ago. He wrote song lyrics in there, I knew, and occasionally thoughts about work or whatever else people wrote in journals. I didn’t know for sure because I had never read it. Don’t get me wrong, I’d thought about it a few times—once when Sam was pissed at me and stormed out of his house, another time when he’d been getting a few phone calls from his ex, Alyssa. But I wasn’t a snooping kind of girl.
I knew exactly where he kept the journal, though, because I’d seen him pack it when he went on vacation or long business trips. My hands searched through the drawer. I took out the magazines and a few books until the drawer was empty. The journal was gone.
12
Maggie offered to stay with me for the day, but I didn’t want to just sit around, staring at the walls of Sam’s apartment or mine, so I went back to work. Forester might be gone, but he wouldn’t want the business of Pickett Enterprises to stop, or so I told myself, not sure if this thinking was for his benefit or mine.
Back at the building, I got off the elevator, ran my key card through the slot and hustled to my office. Was it a little quieter as I strode through the hallways? Were some of the assistants giving me looks?
Q sat at his desk, his bald head gleaming like a black globe under the lights. “Everyone’s talking about it.”
My eyes moved up and down the hall. “Talking about which part of it?”
“All of it. Forester. Sam taking those bonds.”
“They’re called shares.” Why I was making the point, I have no idea. “How did everyone hear?”
“How do you think?”
“Tanner?”
“As far as I can tell. You shouldn’t have had that conversation with him there.”
“But I didn’t really say anything out loud.”
“He knew you were talking to Mark Carrington. Tanner used to be Forester’s number-one guy, remember? He knows the inside circle. And you said something about ‘the safe.’ From what I can tell, he called Mark, who told him the whole story.”
I groaned. Q was right. Talking in front of Tanner was a mistake. One I wouldn’t have made twenty-four hours ago. I looked around. Down the hallway, a twenty-year-old assistant named Sheridan eyed me openly. The mail guy, pushing his cart, looked at me then quickly averted his gaze.
I turned back to Q’s desk. “Where were you last night? I called you a bunch of times, but I couldn’t get you.”
“Out.”
“With Max?”
“We didn’t quite make it. His mother decided to come in early.”
I groaned. “Oh, boy.”
“Yeah. Oh, boy. I had to get the hell out of there.”
“So what did you do?”
“Drank too much.” Q looked down at his desk. “Look, Iz, I’ve got to tell you something. Elliot came down and got the Casey file this morning. Said he would finish the Motion to Dismiss.”
“Great. I’ve been asking him to help me for weeks.”
Elliot Nuster was an associate assigned to me. He had a stick-up-his-butt personality, but who could blame him when he also had to work with Tanner. Since Elliot was a year ahead of me, I often felt awkward giving him work, always having to ask nicely, and usually over and over again. But I simply couldn’t handle all the Pickett work myself. Luckily, many of the projects or cases that came in the door from Pickett could be farmed out to the specialty groups—our intellectual-property people or the tax department—but the rest was mine and it was a struggle to keep on top of it, especially when I had to beg my associate to help.
“Yeah, it sounds good,” Q said. “But it’s weird, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“He never offers to help.”
“No lawyer ever offers to help, but if Elliot heard what happened, he’s probably just chipping in, right?”
“Probably.”
Q and I locked eyes.
“What are you going to do now?” he asked.
I looked at my watch, a Baume & Mercier given to me by Forester. The image of his covered form on the hospital bed made tears tug at the insides of my eyes. Then I thought of something equally unpleasant. “I have to call Sam’s mom.”
As I spoke the words to Lynette, Sam’s mother—gone since yesterday, no sign of him, looks like he took Forester’s shares from the safe—the sky outside my office window grew dark. Rain swooped into the area, bruising the sky with patches of deep gray.
“I don’t understand.” Lynnette said. “What?” Her voice caught. I could tell she was trying not to cry, struggling for an answer. Just like me.
I pressed the phone to my ear, giving her any details I knew, which weren’t many.
“This isn’t right,” Lynette said. “I’m his mother. I brought that boy into the world, and I raised him. He is not a thief. There has to be a reason.”
Silently, I looked out at the rain. I nodded. But what that reason was, I couldn’t imagine.
When I was off the phone with Sam’s mom, I called every other friend of Sam’s I had a phone number for. Trying not to alarm anyone, I asked simply if they’d seen him yesterday. The answer was always no.
I looked at my watch. I called Mark Carrington to see if he’d learned anything new, but his assistant told me, in a frosty voice, that he was in meetings.
Panic started to rise in me, as much from futility as fear. Sam—disappeared. Forester—dead.
But Forester’s company was still here. Which meant Forester needed me.
I picked up a contract I needed to work on—Jane Augustine’s new one, but the words swam in front of me, like a bunch of tiny black fish in a white sea.
A memory crept into my mind of another day when I couldn’t concentrate on work. A year ago, the day Sam and I got engaged.
It was the week after Thanksgiving, and we were each in our respective offices, ostensibly working but at the same time sending a bevy of flirty instant messages back and forth. Outside, the temperature had hit a bizarre sixty degrees, making everyone in the office gaze wistfully out the window.
I had just finished a letter that would be sent to the hundreds of employees of Pickett Enterprises, explaining the new paternity-leave policy, an easy task because it gave new dads a paid week off work. I called out to Q that I was e-mailing it to him, and I hit Send. But when I tried to move on to something new, I had a hard time focusing.
A message from Sam popped up on my computer with a pleasing ding. Hey Red Hot, it said, Want to play hooky and pretend we’re rock stars?
I wrote back, It’s 1:00 on a Wednesday.
Exactly. Let’s pretend we’re rock stars and we’re just waking up from a gig last night. We’ll get a hotel room and order food and champagne and drink it in bed.
I flipped open my calendar. No meetings scheduled that afternoon. Nothing to do, except attack the work that had been piling up, that was always piling up. I got back on the computer. You serious?
There was no message for three or four minutes. I opened a proposed contract for the renewal of a talk show Forester’s company produced.
The computer dinged. James Hotel. Meet me in the lobby in thirty minutes.
That was something I loved about Sam—his ability to cut loose. He worked hard, and he didn’t fear responsibility even a little. But he could also toss it aside and have a hedonistic amount of fun.
An hour and a half later, we were rock stars.
In the center of the suite, a huge room-service cart was piled with a strange mix of every single thing that had struck our fancy—popcorn, filet mignon, lobster salad, cheeses, champagne, beer and a huge ice-cream sundae that was chilling on a bed of ice under a silver cover.
Sam had brought CDs from his office, and we blared the tunes.
“C’mere,” Sam growled at me at one point. He was standing at the side of the bed where I was sprawled in a haze of food and sex and music. He tugged me into a standing position and led me to the room-service cart. “We still have the ice-cream sundae, and I want to lick it off your collarbone.”
“I won’t say no to that.”
Sam held my hand in his warm grasp and with the other, lifted the silver cover off the sundae.
“Yum.” I pointed at the mounds of whip cream. “I can think of something better we can do with that.”
I began to kiss his neck. I loved the way he tasted right then—a little salty, a little sweet, a little something darker.
“Can you think of something we can do with this?”
I looked. Sam was pointing at the top of the sundae. I blinked. Looked closer. Something was imbedded in the cream, and it was sparkling. I leaned forward, peered harder. It looked, oddly, like the art deco ring we’d seen in a window of a jewelry store.
I glanced at Sam, whose cute face was simply beaming. He nodded.
“Is that …?”
He nodded again. He took the sparkle from the top of the sundae and wiped it off with the edge of his robe. “Baby,” he said, “you are a star. You’re my star. I want you shining in my life forever.”
Tears, like a cool, soothing rain, ran down my hot face. At the same time, I threw back my head and laughed. I had debated before about whether I wanted to get married. Sam and I had discussed the issue from every angle and we’d decided, in reasonable fashion, that we did want to get married eventually. But now, with Sam sinking to his knees, logic and reason were nowhere in the room. I was filled with a love so ferocious it seemed as though it could swirl around us and carry us out onto the street. I looked down at him, and my tears splashed his cheeks.
Now that Sam was gone, I started to doubt my memories of that day, the beauty of it, the beauty of us. Were Sam and I who I thought we were? Was Sam the man I knew? And without Sam, was I the same person I thought I was? I looked out the window into the rainy day and got no answers.
Grady Fisher pulled me out of my reverie when he stuck his head in my office. “Where have you been?”
I shot a look into the hallway. “Close the door, will you?”
Grady pushed the door closed and leaned back against it. His tie was loose, his shirtsleeves rolled high on his arms. “You all right?”
“I assume you’ve heard.”
“Yeah. Everyone has heard, or at least heard the gossip.” He paused. “I just want to know if you’re all right. Give me a yes or no. You don’t have to talk about it. You know that.”
“I do know that. Thank you.”
Grady and I had been buddies since graduation from law school. Professionally, we had been raised as brother and sister by our parents, the law firm of Baltimore & Brown. Grady was the sweetest guy—the kind who cleaned the firm kitchen when people left their microwave-popcorn bags out, the kind who bought a Streetwise newspaper from every homeless guy he saw, even though he already had a copy. When Grady and I were together, we didn’t get deep with each other on a regular basis. We talked about the law firm and general stuff about our dating lives. We bailed out one another by covering court calls and depositions, but emotionally we never pushed too hard.
“So, are you all right?” Grady asked. He looked worried.
I blinked. “I don’t know.”
He moved into the office and sat down. “I can’t believe Forester is …”
“Dead.”
He winced.
“Yeah.”
Everyone at the firm knew I was Forester’s girl. People had been malicious at first. After that initial case he had sent me I’d gotten more and more of his work. Then the rumors started that I was sleeping with him. Such talk rattled me. I tried to point out to everyone that Forester hadn’t even met me in person when he sent me the first case. No one cared. The talk continued.
It was only Grady who stuck up for me. I’d heard him once in a conference room, muttering, “Fuck you, dude, she’s a great lawyer,” to a clerk who had made a snide, sexual comment. It wasn’t exactly true—I wasn’t a great lawyer yet. The more I handled my own cases, the more I realized it took years, maybe even decades, to be a truly great attorney—but I appreciated Grady for saying it.
And it was also Grady who eventually told me, in his brief I-don’t-want-to-discuss-this-much way, to get over it.
Lots of Forester’s work was coming to me then. I’d gotten a huge bonus and a big office with a window and I got a portion of every new case I brought in. But I still was troubled about the way people were viewing me, and the pressure of the job was mounting.
“Izzy, enough bitching,” Grady said one day over a beer. “You’ve got it better than any other associate at this firm. Better than any other associate in the city probably. You need to work hard and make a ton of cash and just let all those dickheads root around in their jealousy. Shut up and enjoy it, okay?”
It was a radical instruction. Enjoy it. There isn’t a lot of talk about enjoyment in the law. Some attorneys love the law and some put up with it for the salary and the prestige, but rarely did you hear someone speak about deriving actual pleasure from the whole experience.
I made a conscious decision to ignore the gossip and sink myself deeper into the work. I got to know Forester better, and I both adored and respected him. I wore suits that were sexy, not caring if such attire led to discussions about how I’d used my looks to get ahead. Soon after, I found Q, who made the work all the more fun. I sometimes missed the fraternitylike camaraderie that other associates experienced. But I had Forester, and I had Q, and I had Grady, and when I needed a little less testosterone in my legal world, I had Maggie, and then eventually, to flesh out my personal life, I had Sam.
But now, two of those pieces were missing.
“So, what have you heard?” I asked.
“Sam is gone and so is fifty million worth of some kind of corporate shares.”
“Thirty million.”
Grady blinked.
“Allegedly, it’s thirty million,” I said, channeling Maggie. I rubbed my forehead, wanting desperately, even for a moment, to be away from all this. “Look, for just a second, can we pretend it’s yesterday. Before all this happened?”
“Sure.” Grady sat back in his chair.
“So.” What would Grady and I usually talk about?
“Got any trials coming up?” Grady asked. “I have to make sure I’m there to mop up the flop sweat.”
“Fuck you,” I said, feeling the relief of using curse words knowing we were about to talk about something that normally embarrassed the hell out of me.
Like siblings, we knew the other’s weaknesses. Grady’s was billing. And like the brother figure he was, Grady saw it as his job to ridicule me about mine—acute nervousness I occasionally experienced at the start of a trial that resulted in extreme perspiration.
The first time it happened was during my very first trial for Pickett Enterprises under the most mortifying of conditions—as if the devil had taken a coal straight from the furnace of hell and plopped it onto my body. The results were worse than Whitney Houston at the Super Bowl. Panicked, I asked the judge for a recess, locked myself in a bathroom stall and, using a nail file and my teeth, I cut the shoulder pads free from my suit. I put the suit back on and kept the shoulder pads tucked under my arms for the rest of the morning. My hand gestures were probably a bit mechanical, but it did the trick.
The upside of my little dilemma was that it had happened only a few times, only under severe stress, and it seemed to last just a few hours.
“Okay, new topic,” I said. “Dating anybody?”
Grady was a catch—dark-brown hair (most of it still there), a charming, wide grin and a great intellect that never made anyone else feel small.
“Ellen,” he answered.
“Ellen is back?”
“Ellen is definitely back.”
“Great.” I liked Ellen. “Does she want a ring?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to give it to her this time?”
“I might.”
Grady had told me over and over, I don’t want to be with the same person all the time. Plus, Ellen and I aren’t like you and Sam. We’re not in love like that.
“So this thing with Sam.” Grady trailed off.
“I don’t know anything.” The image of his blue suit seared my mind. “New topic.”
There was an uncomfortable silence.
“I don’t know what else to talk about right now,” Grady said.
I made an exasperated sound.
“Well, it’s true. I feel like an ass talking about my dating life when you just lost the client you loved and your fiancé.”
“I did not lose my fiancé.”
“So where is he?”
“I’ve simply misplaced him. New topic, please.”
Just then, the door flew open and Q sprinted into my office. “Iz,” Q whispered. “The police are here.”
13
Two men stepped into my office. Somberly, they introduced themselves as Detectives Damon Vaughn and Frank Schneider. They both wore pants and fall jackets that looked slightly bulky. When Detective Schneider unzipped his jacket, I realized they were both wearing bulletproof vests and guns in holsters at their waists.
The sight of those guns crystallized the intensity of the situation. This was serious. Deadly serious.
Grady left. I knew I should call Maggie—she was a criminal defense lawyer after all—but the problem was that Maggie would tell me not to talk to them. I had heard her tell people many times, Don’t speak to the cops. Never talk to them unless they arrest you. Maggie had seen many interrogations go awry; she’d seen suspects confess to crimes they didn’t commit. As a result, she viewed Chicago cops with the same wariness usually reserved for perfume-counter salesladies. Just say no thanks, Maggie would say, and walk away fast.
But I wasn’t a suspect here. I couldn’t see any way that I’d be considered a part in anything that had happened. More importantly, the detectives might know something about Forester. And Sam. If I just said “no, thanks,” I wouldn’t be able to find out what they knew.
“Have a seat, please,” I said.
The detectives sank into their chairs. Schneider was a big guy, whose bulk draped over the chair. Detective Vaughn was lean, a runner, I guessed.
With hands the size of Frisbees, Detective Schneider held a form with white lettering while Vaughn sat motionless and watched me move behind my desk to take a seat. I was used to men looking at me, and yet his gaze wasn’t as simple as being sized up by a guy hungry for a post-bar make-out. He was scrutinizing me.
Detective Schneider raised his eyes to me. He glanced at my hair and smiled. “My girlfriend in college was a redhead. Mindy Draper.”
“Mmm,” I said in a noncommittal way. For some reason, many people think all redheads are connected, maybe by a secret society that provided photos and contact information.
Detective Schneider dropped the chat. “We just have a couple of questions.” His voice was low and soft, but there was a rumble to it that was almost menacing. “We’re looking into the death of Forester Pickett.”
“Good. Great.” I felt a window of relief open in the room. Forester had asked me to look into the matter if something happened to him, and now I could be assured that someone was doing that.
“You were Forester Pickett’s attorney,” Schneider said.
“That’s right.”
“What kind of business was Mr. Pickett in?” I had the feeling he knew the answer already, but I explained that Forester was the Midwest’s largest media mogul. He owned radio stations, newspapers, magazines, publishing companies and television studios. As his attorney, I did his contractual work, and I defended the company if it was sued.
“Was he involved in any takeovers?” Schneider asked. “Any corporate messiness?”
“No,” I answered.
He asked a few more similar questions, all vague. I knew he was fishing, which was what he was supposed to do, but I grew impatient.
“Look,” I said, “I’ve got to tell you that Forester had been receiving threats.”
“What kind of threats?” Detective Vaughn said, speaking up for the first time.
“He received anonymous letters saying he was too old for his job and that he should step down.”
The detectives exchanged a glance, then looked back at me, and it was as if the air shifted into something brittle, crackling.
“Do you have copies?” Vaughn asked.
“No. I never saw them.”
As I had that day Forester was in my office, I felt my youth then. As his attorney, I should have insisted that I get copies of the letters. I should have had them analyzed. But Forester said he didn’t want to take action at that time, and no one told Forester Pickett what to do.
“How many letters were there?” Schneider asked in his rumbling voice.
I tried to think of the one conversation we’d had about it. “I don’t know.”
“What did they say other than he was too old?”
Why hadn’t I asked to see the letters? “I don’t know. There was also a homeless man who threatened him on two occasions.”
“Tell us about that.”
“Forester told me both times happened outside the Pickett offices. A homeless man came up to him and said if he wasn’t careful he would join Olivia. Olivia was Forester’s wife. She passed away from ovarian cancer.”
“When was that?”
“He told me about the homeless guy two weeks ago. I got the impression the incidents had taken place recently.”
Schneider blinked at me. Wrote nothing down. “What I meant was when did his wife pass away?”
I could easily remember Forester talking about Olivia, or Liv, as he called her. They had met when he was twenty-three and about to close on his first radio station. Forester had gone to a men’s clothing store to buy his very first suit. Liv’s father owned the store, and she was working that day. Forester said he was immediately “smitten.” For their first date, he took her to the closing. “She helped me with that suit,” Forester had said, “and she helped me with that closing, and then she helped me with life.” His face would always sag when he spoke about her.
“I believe Olivia passed away twelve or thirteen years ago,” I told Detective Schneider.
“Did Mr. Pickett file a police report about this homeless guy?” Vaughn asked.
“No. He said no crime had been committed.”
He grunted. “He was right. Doesn’t sound like much of anything to me.”
I crossed my fingers and leaned forward—the pose I always took during contract negotiations or depositions when I sensed things were about to get tough. “It doesn’t sound like anything? He gets these letters and then a homeless guy tells him to be careful or he’ll join his dead wife, and then he dies, suddenly, and that doesn’t sound like anything to you?”
Vaughn raised an eyebrow. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Did you want him to step down?”
“No!”
Vaughn glanced around my cluttered office, then stared warily at my law-school diploma hanging on the wall. “You’re pretty young to be handling all this legal work for Pickett, aren’t you?”
“Technically, yes.”
“How did you get it?”
“Forester. He chose me to be his lead attorney.”
He glanced at my chest, then back to my face. “Why?”
A good question. He must have seen the hesitation in my face. He leaned forward, his eyes lasering onto mine. “You sure you didn’t want him to step down?”
I was overwhelmed with the work. It was too much. But I didn’t want it to go away. I didn’t want Forester to go away.
“No, of course not. Forester is the reason I have this job,” I said.
The detectives looked at each other again, then back at me.
Schneider shrugged. “Look, at this point, our investigation into Mr. Pickett’s death is really just a formality, given the autopsy.”
“The autopsy results are already available?” I knew from some medical cases I’d worked on during law school that autopsies usually took a couple of days, sometimes a week.
“Yeah.” Schneider flipped through his notebook. “Mr. Pickett’s son got somebody to push that through.”
Why, I wondered, would Shane want to rush the autopsy? “What were the results?”
Schneider glanced back down at his notebook. “Acute myocardial infarction.”
“Heart attack.”
“Yeah. Likely caused by the usual—high blood pressure, age, history of smoking.”
“But Forester’s blood pressure was under control. He hasn’t smoked in years.”
“He had all the classic signs—he was slumped over when the EMTs found him, and he was clutching his chest.”
I squeezed my eyes shut at the image.
“We did get a tip that something might not be right with this guy’s death,” Schneider said.
“Wait, you got a tip about Forester’s death?”
Vaughn shot his partner a shut-up kind of glance, but Schneider just lifted his massive shoulders up, then let them drop. He nodded at me. Why did I get the feeling their little exchange was just for show?
“Who left the tip?” I said.
Another shrug. “Anonymous. We tested his food from that night. Clean. And Mr. Pickett’s cardiologist saw him in the emergency room after he coded. He signed the death certificate saying it was a heart attack.”
“But Forester had recently had a stress test. He said he passed with flying colors.”
“The guy had a heart attack before. You’re always at risk for another one. Could happen to anyone.”
But Forester wasn’t just anyone.
“Now, having thirty million dollars in corporate shares stolen,” Vaughn said, speaking up, “that’s a little unusual.”
I met his eyes. I felt a blush creep over my neck, but I didn’t move an inch. An uncomfortable silence filled the room as Detective Vaughn and I stared at each other. If he thought I would flinch first, talk first, he was absolutely wrong. I might doubt my legal abilities on occasion, but in a staring contest, I would always win.
Ten seconds passed, then twenty, thirty.
Schneider cleared his throat again. “You were engaged to Sam Hollings?”
“I am engaged to Sam Hollings,” I said without moving my eyes from Vaughn’s.
“When is the last time you saw him?”
“Yesterday. After work. We had a meeting with our wedding coordinator.”
Vaughn chuckled, scornfully it seemed. Still, we stared at one another.
“He was supposed to take you to some shindig last night, huh?” Vaughn said with an upward flick of the corner of his mouth.
“That’s right.”
“Didn’t show up?”
I felt my intensity melt away. “No, he did not.”
Vaughn nodded, very slowly. Finally, he dropped his gaze downward. But I felt no sense of victory. It was like winning a game deliberately thrown by the opponent.
“Any idea where he might be?” Schneider asked.
“No.” My voice came out soft.
“Any idea why he’d take the thirty million in those shares?”
“I’m not even sure that he did.”
Vaughn smirked.
Schneider looked at me for a long minute, then looked down at the form in his lap. He asked me a bunch of questions in a monotone voice. What was Sam’s height, weight, build? Did he have sideburns? A beard? A mustache? What were his hobbies and pastimes? Did he have any skin disorders? What kind of car did he drive?
I answered all his questions quickly.
When he was done, Schneider placed his hand on top of the form. “We’re going to turn over the Panamanian-share thing to the feds.”
“What will happen?”
Schneider shrugged. “The feds will do whatever the feds do.”
I took a breath and sat back in my chair. “And what about Forester’s death. Will you look into those letters?”
“Nah,” Schneider said. “Doesn’t sound like much. We’ve got a man who died of natural causes. We’re closing the matter.”
“What about the homeless guy?” I couldn’t believe they wouldn’t be looking into Forester’s death. If they didn’t, who would?
“You find that homeless guy, you let us know, okay?” Vaughn said. He stood. The meeting, apparently, was finished.
Schneider shifted his heft to one side and fished a business card out of his pocket, handing it to me. It had the Chicago skyline on it. “Be careful if you see him.”
“The homeless guy?”
“No, your fiancé.”
“What do you mean, ‘be careful’?”
“You didn’t expect him to do something like this, right? Take off with those shares?”
“I’m not even sure he did.”
“Well, you didn’t expect him to disappear, right?”
“No.”
“And he has. Apparently.” Schneider opened his big hands wide. “So who knows what else he’ll do. Maybe it’s of his own volition, maybe not. Until it’s all settled, keep your eyes open, be careful, and call us if anything changes.”
I am rarely a speechless girl, but his warning had hijacked my words. Be careful of Sam?
Schneider stood with his partner. “Thanks, Ms. McNeil.” His expression softened. If I read it right, it was one of pity. “And good luck.”
14
John Mayburn followed the navy-blue Mercedes down Hubbard Street and watched as it turned in to the parking lot of the East Bank Club. He drove past the lot, found a spot on the street, threw quarters in the meter and hustled to the club.
When he was a few hundred feet away, he saw Michael and Lucy DeSanto entering the place. For once, he wouldn’t have to sneak around or talk his way into an establishment in order to follow a subject. He was a member of the East Bank Club, although he rarely showed his face there anymore. He’d joined the club, the ritziest gym in the city, eight years ago when he was in his early thirties. The fact was, the East Bank Club, or simply “East Bank,” as its members called it, was also a social club. It boasted a grill, lounge and spa and, in the summer, a rooftop pool that could have been outside a Miami hotel with all the beautiful bodies splayed around it.
Mayburn had joined East Bank when he’d first started out in the world of private investigations. Out of college he had initially started work as a claims analyst for an insurance company. He spent a few years there, then a few more following that as an independent adjuster, digging up evidence about malingering in personal-injury cases. It all bored him. So one day, when a lawyer he’d worked with asked if he did investigations for other types of cases, he lied and said yes. He quickly got his P.I. license and hung up his own investigative shingle. Once he was a P.I., he needed to meet potential clients in a discreet way and, when someone hired him, he needed to buy them drinks and meals in a not-so-discreet way. Which brought him to East Bank.
And now, years later, he’d been hired by Bank Midwest to investigate Michael DeSanto, one of its executives suspected of laundering funds, and Mayburn was pleased to discover DeSanto was an East Bank member. Before the DeSanto case, Mayburn had considered canceling his membership because it seemed he was too busy to use it, yet he carried around a tiny pipe dream that he would find time to start working out again, he would find time to sit in the grill and chat up a gorgeous female exec in high heels. In short, he dreamed of an ordinary existence, but he just couldn’t seem to find the time to live it.
Mayburn ran his membership ID through the kiosk card reader and entered the gym, his eyes firmly on the black, curly-haired head of Michael DeSanto. When Michael and his wife, Lucy, a petite, elegant blonde with short hair, reached the locker rooms, they parted. Lucy called out to her husband as he walked away. She grabbed his arm and pulled him back for a kiss. Michael seemed to suffer through the gesture. Lucy stood for a second, watching his retreating back before she turned and pushed open the door of the women’s locker room.
Mayburn had been watching the DeSantos for over a month now. They were ultrawealthy—definitely wealthier than they should be on DeSanto’s executive salary. Mayburn had been trying to determine where the couple got the money that supported their high-flying lifestyle—a stunning home in Chicago, two others in Aspen and Grand Cayman, memberships on all the glitziest charitable boards and a small yacht they docked at Monroe Harbor in the summer. So far, he hadn’t had a lot of luck finding the source. And Bank Midwest was getting anxious.
Just that morning, he’d gotten a call from Ken Cook, his contact at the bank.
“Look, I’ll get to the point,” Cook had said. “The board had a meeting yesterday. We’re concerned as hell about DeSanto. We want him out, but we can’t let him go without proof. If we fire him and accuse him of laundering funds for organized crime, he’ll sue the hell out of us. We need something on this guy and soon.”
Mayburn had been getting this message from them indirectly for the past few weeks, but now the real call. What Ken Cook was nicely saying was Give us something fast or you’re the one who’s fired.
“I need a little more time,” Mayburn said. “This guy is smooth as hell, and his house might as well have a moat around it.”
“We don’t have the time. With the banking industry the way it is, we can’t take on any kind of scandal, and we all think DeSanto is bad news and we want to cut him out. Quietly. We just need proof.”
Mayburn wondered for a second if he should call it quits on this one. He’d had absolutely no luck getting inside their fortress of a mansion in Lincoln Park, nor had he had any success in getting close to Lucy, who he thought might inadvertently lead him to some piece of information about her husband. She was always at her husband’s side, or else surrounded by women—usually other moms at the playground. Private investigations of this sort—with an intelligent subject who had protected himself like a medieval king—required sitting on one’s hands, waiting and waiting and waiting, until the right moment of opportunistic light shot into your day. Unfortunately, there was little light breaking through the gloom in this case.
But if he quit, he’d have to give back the sizable deposit they gave him and then, most likely, he’d have to give up doing business with the bank ever again. Corporate clients were like that. If you couldn’t produce the goods one time, they forgot your name.
“Ken,” he said. “Just give me a few weeks. I’ll find out what you need to know.”
“You’ve got one week,” Ken said. “That’s it.”
With this on his mind, Mayburn trailed DeSanto into the locker room and went to his own locker fifteen feet away. Using the mirror inside the door, he watched DeSanto change from a charcoal-gray suit into black shorts and a T-shirt. DeSanto had a toned body but for a pair of faint love handles. Mayburn had no real reason to believe this, but he imagined Lucy DeSanto was the type of person who actually liked that extra flesh on her husband’s waist; thought it was sweet somehow, despite how DeSanto treated her—at least in public. In fact, it might be precisely because of how he treated her—like a possession he had little use for anymore—that Lucy probably found those love handles a sign of the humanity her husband no longer evidenced.
“Excuse me,” Mayburn heard someone say.
He shot a quick look to his right, surprised. It was just another member, gesturing to get past him.
“Pardon,” Mayburn said softly. He moved closer to the locker to let the man through. As he did so, he looked in the mirror again, and saw DeSanto glance his way.
Was he recalling that he’d seen Mayburn before? Was he remembering the guy behind him at the Starbucks on Armitage Avenue, near his home? Was he thinking of the man who’d sat two rows behind him while he was courtside at the Bulls game last week?
Mayburn turned his back to DeSanto. He doubted DeSanto could place him at either the coffee shop or the basketball game (or the bar at the Four Seasons or the men’s bathroom at Bank Midwest), even though he’d been in all those places within mere feet of DeSanto. Mayburn had a knack for blending into his surroundings. His medium-size build, nondescript brown eyes and typical forty-year-old face worked perfectly to keep him inconspicuous. There was also his ability to change looks—jeans and a Jordan jersey for the Bulls game, a pin-striped suit and ivory handkerchief for the Four Seasons—that led subjects to occasionally think they’d met Mayburn. But rarely did anyone recognize him outright.
When he allowed himself to think about it, he wondered if this vagueness about him was the reason his personal relationships tended to suffer. His family in Wilmette thought of him as slightly odd, slightly standoffish, if only because he hadn’t truly participated in their world. He hadn’t gotten married despite a girlfriend here and there (he’d been dumped last year by Madeline, a half-Swiss, half-Japanese stunner), he didn’t have children and he didn’t work in the family’s commercial-leasing business.
He left the locker room and followed Michael DeSanto to the cardiovascular room—a massive football field of a space lined with shiny silver treadmills, bikes and elliptical machines. The clientele here wanted a workout for sure—you could see the sweat and the rippling of toned leg muscles—but they were also here to be seen, hence the snazzy workout gear, the makeup on all the women’s faces, the carefully constructed ponytails.
Mayburn trailed DeSanto from a wide distance for the next hour—first on the treadmills, later into the weight room. DeSanto spoke to no one, said nothing that could help Mayburn get into the guy’s head or, even better, into the guy’s house, where it was believed he ran the bulk of his laundering operations.
Mayburn left the weight room and went in search of Lucy, who he saw inside a glass-walled studio, her body held in an awkward V-shape, next to ten other women struggling themselves into the same position. Mayburn checked the class schedule. Advanced Pilates, it read.
Mayburn suppressed a sigh and turned away. Advanced Pilates was not something he was going to be able to fake, and besides, Lucy was once again surrounded by other women. He could usually blend in just fine, but not in Lucy DeSanto’s world.
Something on this case had to give.
Mayburn left the club. As he walked toward his car, his cell phone vibrated. He reached inside his jacket pocket for the phone.
Baltimore & Brown, the display read.
He hit the Answer button, hoping to God it wasn’t that dickhead Tanner Hornsby, who treated everyone who wasn’t a lawyer as if they were distinctly second-rate. “Hello?”
“John, it’s Izzy McNeil.”
“Hey, Izzy.” Now, Izzy McNeil was the rare kind of lawyer—the kind who didn’t think her J.D. made her better than anyone else. And it didn’t hurt that she was hot as hell. He’d worked with her a few times when she was still Tanner’s associate and once when Forester Pickett was courting a well-known editor and Izzy wanted to know if the editor was in talks with other newspapers.
“You got a second?” she said.
“Sure.” He found his silver 1969 Aston Martin DB6 coupe. It was a pain-in-the-ass car, always needing work, and when it got icy in Chicago, it was useless, but he loved the thing.
He slid inside and started the engine. He listened to Izzy’s tales of woe—a fiancé who’d skipped town, apparently with a bunch of corporate shares of stock; the death of Forester Pickett; some business about letters Forester had gotten before he died and a freaky homeless guy.
“I’m really sorry about Forester,” he said. He didn’t meet the man when he’d handled the editor investigation, but he’d heard good things.
“Yeah.” Izzy sounded on the verge of tears, which made Mayburn uncomfortable. He stared through the windshield at two girls, probably high-school students, eating bagels while they walked up the street.
He said nothing to Izzy. He’d found it more helpful to let people say what they wanted on their own terms.
Izzy got herself together and asked if she could hire him to find the fiancé—Sam, the guy’s name was—and if he’d look into the matter of whether Forester Pickett had been killed.
“I thought you said he died of a heart attack.” Mayburn put the car into drive and pulled out of the lot.
“That’s what they say. But he’d been getting those letters. And what the homeless guy said to him—about how he’d join Olivia if he wasn’t careful—I mean, it’s clear someone was threatening him.”
“I don’t know about that.” Izzy was sounding like a conspiracy theorist, and it depressed him that this woman he’d always thought of as sexy with her head screwed on straight was losing it a little.
She made a short growl, like she was irritated with him. “I promised Forester I would look into this if something happened, and now it has. I just don’t think there’s any way Sam would steal outright from Forester.”
“But he logged in to the safe and now those shares are gone, and they’re worth, what, thirty million?” He turned onto Franklin and headed north. “He made off with them in the middle of the night and disappeared. On the same day Forester died.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Yes, but what?” he said.
They both fell into silence.
Lately, Mayburn had found himself simply wanting to do his work and go home. He knew this meant he was growing bored.
He only wanted cases that paid top dollar, or that gave him the street cred to continue building his résumé. Because if he wasn’t personally drawn to the work anymore—and he wasn’t, he was sick of the brain-stultifying effort that mostly involved sitting in a car with an audio surveillance system, listening to people taking a shit and having sex and just generally living their lives the way he wasn’t—then he might as well get paid a heck of a lot of money to do it, and it better not depress the hell out of him. There was no way that Izzy’s case—if he could even call it that—was not going to depress him. He would watch her go from a girl with exuberance and optimism to a bitter, pissed-off woman who’d been dumped and bamboozled.
“Hey, Izzy, I’m sorry this is happening to you, but I don’t handle domestic stuff.”
“This isn’t domestic! It’s not like Sam is screwing around on me, and I’m asking you to take pictures for evidence.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but that’s probably what would happen. If I could locate him, I’d probably find him in bed with some sweet young thing, and I’d have to give you photos of it, in order for you to believe it.”
“Screw you.”
He chuckled, grudgingly. She had a mouth, he had noticed and despite his North Shore upbringing, he liked that in women. “Really, I’m sorry. I’ve got my hands full right now and, even if I didn’t, you couldn’t afford me.” He reached Division, turned left and then right onto Clybourn, headed toward his house just south of Lincoln Square.
“Sorry,” she said. “Look, I’ll pay whatever it takes.”
“I charge a retainer up front, and it’s big.”
“I remember. I approved your bills when you investigated the editor.”
“That was small-time, and my rates have gone up since then. I’ve got more work than I can handle.”
He mentioned a sum, the same he’d charged the bank where DeSanto worked. He explained how he then charged hourly, eating away at the retainer, but how he usually went well over it. He detailed the incidental fees that the client also had to pay—food, gas, copying, phone calls. He told her how his hourly rate soared if he worked nights or weekends, which was often, especially in a missing person’s case. And then just to scare her, he told her how much he’d charged on his last case.
Izzy went silent. “We’re getting married,” she said, “and so we’ve got a lot of money going out the door. I couldn’t afford those fees.”
“Right.” Sad that the girl thought she was still getting married. “I really wish you the best, and if you hire someone else and you want to run things by me, give me a call, okay?”
“Yeah. Sure.” Her voice sounded flat, which was hard to hear, since he’d always thought of her as full of life.
He’d watched her during the editor case. He was good at that—the watching. What he’d observed about Izzy was a quick ability to adapt. You could see her changing her vocabulary, her thinking, to fit whatever she was talking about or dealing with. She didn’t seem like a natural at her job as Forester’s lawyer, but he could also see that she believed she could be good at it if she just tried her ass off.
It would be an uphill battle for her now that Forester was dead. He’d gotten the feeling from everyone at the firm that they thought of her as the pretty girl who’d lucked into the gig.
He pulled into the alley behind his house and then into the garage. “Again, I’m sorry you’re going through this, Izzy. Good luck.”
“Thanks. Okay, thanks.” Her voice sounded far away, fragile.
He hated to do it, but he hung up.
15
Between the meeting with the detectives and Mayburn’s rejection I was feeling scared, my anxiety soaring. I paced my office. I picked up my phone over and over. I couldn’t think of who else to call, and so I kept banging the phone onto the base.
Q opened the door and came inside. “Need anything?”
Behind him, I could see Holly, the assistant of the attorney next door, watching us. “I need you to get Holly to stop staring at me.”
“Oh, ignore her.” He looked over his shoulder and waved a hand. “She’s two bad decisions away from being a crack whore.”
I sat down. “I don’t know what to do with myself.”
“Sounds like what you need is a Halloween party with a lot of gay men.”
I groaned. “I forgot.” Q’s annual party was that weekend.
“Max and his mother have been decorating for days.”
“I don’t think I can do it.”
“I don’t want to do it either. I’m so not in the mood. But you have to come. It wouldn’t be the same without you.”
“Sam was supposed to come with me.” I swallowed. I was supposed to do everything with Sam. For the rest of my life.
“You can still wear the pumpkin costume,” Q said.
I managed half a laugh. “I did not get a pumpkin costume, you pervert.”
Q’s big idea had been for me to dress as a pumpkin and for Sam to stick pumpkin seeds all over his face and wear a name tag that said, Peter the Pumpkin Eater.
“It’s not for a few days,” Q said. “Give it some thought.”
“A few days. That seems so far away.” For a long time, I’d been able to see my entire future before me—my work with Forester, my marriage to Sam. When it was all overwhelming me it seemed that the future was just a postcard—appealing and detailed on the front but flat when you really looked at it. And yet now that I had no idea what the next day would be like, I craved that pretty picture.
I glanced at Holly, then back at Q. “What are they saying? Does anyone know anything new?”
Q sighed. “It’s just Tanner flapping his gums. But nothing new.”
I felt a presence outside my door, I saw two first-year attorneys walking by, pausing for a second when they got to my office. One threw a nervous smile my way. The other glanced around.
“Hi, guys,” I said.
I was usually a favorite among the law clerks, all of whom were stellar students from the local law schools. I was closer to their age than a lot of the other lawyers. I would sometimes drink with them after work, and I would give the straight skinny about whose butt to kiss and who to avoid.
But now they looked at me with curiosity and something approaching pity. “Hi,” they said then kept walking.
I wanted to yell out, Nothing to see here! Instead, I stood, closed the door and grabbed my suit coat off the back of it. I put it on and looked in the mirror. My lightly freckled skin appeared pale with a faint gray hue, and my hair, normally bright and orange-red, looked faded. It was as if, in a twenty-four-hour span, I’d lost some of my luster. The thought only powered me into action.
I looked at Q. “I’ll be back.”
He squinted his eyes, probably sensing I could get myself into trouble. “Why don’t you …”
“I’ll be back.” I turned, opened the door and stormed down the hallway.
I marched to the elevators and pushed the button repeatedly. I rode for two floors then made my way to the last door down the long hallway. Tanner’s office.
Inside, Tanner was on the phone, his chair turned toward his windows so that he didn’t notice me at first. I stood in the doorway, trying for patience, and looked around the place.
Every partner at Baltimore & Brown was encouraged to decorate their office in their own way and each got a small budget, but Tanner had clearly gone over his. His desk was a massive Oriental-teak affair, carved in detail and polished with a rosy, high gloss. His rug was plush, swirled in shades of crimson. Unlike most of the other lawyers who dealt with the overhead fluorescents, Tanner’s office was lit by a trio of antique lamps.
He must have sensed me there, for he turned in his chair. The exhaustion in his eyes seemed to mirror mine.
“I’ve got to go,” he said into the phone. “Hi to Peg. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
He waved me toward the brocade couch across from his desk. I closed the door and took a seat.
Tanner’s eyes moved to the closed door, then to me. No one called the stage directions in his office except Tanner. I was past caring.
“How are you?” Tanner said. He looked as if he cared about the answer, which threw me.
“I’ve been better.”
He nodded. He stared out his window for a moment, then back at me. “What do you need?” He glanced down at his watch.
There it was—the typical brusque tone, the usual attitude that assumed everyone would run around him like obsequious puppies. I was glad for the condescension. It put me right back in the mood.
“You know what I need?” I said, heavy on the sarcasm. “I need you to stop spreading rumors about my fiancé. The whole firm is talking about Sam and the bearer shares and the safe and Forester. And the only way they could be finding this out is from you or Q. And I know it’s not Q. I’d have thought that you’d respect the privacy of another lawyer.”
Tanner didn’t say anything immediately, but his face softened into empathy. This left me feeling off-kilter. Tanner rarely listened or heard or thought about anyone apart from himself. Finally, he said, “I would think that you would appreciate my position.”
“What position is that? This is none of your business.”
His eyes narrowed, and he shook his head as if disappointed. “Izzy.” He paused. It was the first time he hadn’t called me Isabel. “What was I supposed to do here? I found out that the fiancé of one of my associates, one of the firm’s best associates, appears to have stolen a lot of money from one of our biggest clients. I have to tell my partners about that. It is my fiduciary duty to do so. And if those partners tell their associates and the associates tell the secretaries, I cannot control that.”
I blinked. He was right. “I’m sorry.”
He shook his head, brushing off my apology.
“No, really, I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just personal, what with Sam being gone, and then Forester. I’m having trouble seeing things correctly.”
“Yeah. We’re all having a tough time with Forester’s death.”
“I know. I realize you knew him much longer than I did. How … how are you?” I almost stumbled over the last few words. I’d never imagined being so personal with Tanner.
His mouth sagged a little. “Such a great man.”
“He was.”
He nodded. I nodded back. He stood, and I followed suit. It seemed we’d reached an impasse on our little come-to-Jesus moment.
“Izzy!” a woman’s voice screamed. “Where you?”
Back in my office, I moved the phone away from my ear and sighed. On even the best of days, Maria, my weddingdress seamstress, was hard to handle. First there was her energy level, which rivaled that of a Chihuahua on cocaine. Then there was her dual approach to life—one was Hispanic blue-collar, the other patrician elite. Maria only sewed and made patterns for the wealthiest and most fashionable of Chicago’s crowd. I would normally not have been able to afford her, or meet her extremely high taste levels, but our wedding coordinator had railroaded her into making my dress, and my mother had graciously offered to pay. And every other Wednesday for the last few months, Maria and I been making each other crazy.
I looked at my watch. “Shazzer,” I said, one of my replacement curse words for shit. It made no sense, but I liked it. My appointment had been at six o’clock, ten minutes ago, and I’d completely forgotten. Or maybe I’d forgotten on purpose. Yesterday, when the wedding had swamped my mind, I had wanted to forget. I was hit by guilt again now. Was I unconsciously borrowing trouble for myself?
“What you say?” Maria said, indignant.
“Maria, I’m sorry. I forgot our appointment.” I breathed out hard. “This has been a terrible day.”
A stumped silence. “Terrible day? We all have terrible day! I work hard. You work hard. But you go for appointment, you do what you say and you say you be here.”
“Yes, Maria, I know.” I paused. “A friend of mine died yesterday.” There. I’d thrown the highest card. You can’t trump death. Everyone gives you a pass for death.
Except, apparently, Maria.
“I no care that your friend die! You should call me if you want cancel. I have you book for one hour, and do you know what one hour of my time cost?”
“Yes, I do,” I said forcefully.
But the truth was, I didn’t know. Lately, I’d gotten so weighted down with the wedding and my job that I’d been somewhat avoiding my mother, who only wanted to talk about all things bridal. She was so wrapped up in the affair—what I would wear, what she would wear, what the tables would look like, what the place cards would say. She was not normally this frenetic or enthused about anything. She was normally the calmest of women, usually wearing a shawl of melancholy. But the wedding had jump-started her. Even her husband, Spencer Calloway, a well-known, now mostly retired real-estate developer, was surprised by how intense she’d gotten about it. But that’s what mothers were supposed to do, he’d said to me.
Suddenly, with Maria prattling on, I was embarrassed by how strained I thought I’d been by the wedding and my work. I would have given anything to go back to that kind of stress. The kind of stress that had me worrying about what bikini to take on the honeymoon in Costa del Sol, Spain. The kind of stress that left me pondering truly momentous decisions like whether to have a jazz trio for the cocktail hour or a full band. The stress of being the highest-paid associate at the firm.
And how could I have been so dismissive to my mother? My kind, wonderful mother who had raised two kids by herself? I had never really known what she had gone through when Dad died, but now I had an inkling.
Maria railed on about appointments and the importance of keeping them.
“Maria,” I said. She continued. Finally, I yelled, “Maria!”
She stopped.
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” And I called my mom.
* * *
Maria’s studio was on a lonely strip of Clybourn Avenue, north of Fullerton. The sole indication that business was conducted there was a small, neon sign that spelled Maria’s in magenta, cursive letters.
Inside, a team of seamstresses, mostly Hispanic, bent over the sewing machines. They looked up when I walked in. I often wondered what they thought of girls like me, spending so much time and money on one dress. The women quickly turned their gazes down when Maria strolled into the room. Maria was a steely sixty-year-old. She always dressed in timeless dresses—black, brown or navy shifts that could have been made today or forty years ago—and clunky, low-heeled pumps. Her black hair, which was giving way to silver, was pulled back in a chignon.
“You here. Okay,” Maria said, waving me toward the fitting room in the back. “Come, come.”
Just then the front door opened and my mother, Victoria McNeil, entered. The seamstresses glanced up again, but this time they weren’t as quick to return their eyes to their work. They couldn’t help but gawk at my mother. She had that effect on people.
Victoria McNeil was beautiful—in a willowy, elegant, strawberry-blond kind of way—but there were also some other qualities she possessed that drew people to her—that manner of melancholy combined with a hint of mystery. It was bizarre that we were mother and daughter. I was more brassy and flashy and quick to talk to everyone, while my mother was reserved and graceful and spoke quietly and only when needed. Then there were our looks—I’d gotten the bright red hair and freckles, while my mother clearly bore her ancestors’ more Nordic aesthetic.
Even Maria’s prickly face brightened at the sight of my mother. “Ah, Mrs. McNeil!” she exclaimed.
My mother greeted her, then turned to me and beamed. She always beamed when she looked at me or Charlie, but I don’t think I’d ever appreciated that open-eyed, unconditional appreciation as much as I did now.
“Hi, Boo,” she said, calling me by the nickname given to me by my father.
“Come, come.” Maria helped my mother out of her cashmere coat and dumped it in my arms. She took the purse from my mother’s grasp and shoved that in my direction, as well. Then she took my mother gently by the elbow and led her through the workroom, while I trailed behind like a Sherpa.
The fitting room was swathed in white wallpaper and curtains, and contained two slightly worn couches and a carpeted pedestal in the middle of the room.
Next to the pedestal, my dress was hanging. And it was gorgeous. Even now, unsure of whether I would ever wear it, having not wanted to wear it for a while now, I let out a little gasp.
The dress, made of a creamy, ivory Duchess satin, had a strapless top with a bustline that curved gently inward. The gown was A-line with graduated bands of ribbon. The effect, I hoped, was sweet but fashionable. I also wanted it to be sexy, hence the eight hundred fittings so that Maria and I could argue about how low the neckline should be, how tight the waist.
My mother sighed with pleasure when she saw it.
“Oh, Izzy,” she said. “Put it on.”
Maria left the room so I could change.
I stripped off my clothes, lifted the dress off the hanger and slipped it over me. I saw myself in the mirror—a palette of ivory topped with the red of my hair. I saw myself standing like this, in this dress, with Sam in front of an altar. Now, it didn’t seem so overwhelming. Now that he was gone.
The thought nearly flattened me.
I flopped back onto the couch.
“What’s wrong?” My mother sat next to me.
“A lot of things.” I gulped and looked at my mother’s face—smooth but for the faint lines around her eyes and throat. She had gone through so much when my dad died. I didn’t normally confide much in her, not because she couldn’t handle it, but simply because we had different styles of handling stress. Yet now more than ever, I needed advice from someone who had lost a spouse.
“It’s Sam,” I said. “He’s … well, he’s disappeared. And Forester died.”
My mother’s delicate lips formed an O. Her eyes, muted blue with flecks of gray, opened bigger. “What? My God.”
“I know.” I fell into her body and she wrapped her arms around me tight. For the second time in two days, I gave in to the tears lingering like unwelcome party guests. Apparently, the tears heard it was a big bash, because I cried huge gulping sobs. My mother squeezed me hard. I managed to tell her the story.
When I pulled back, she wore the same startled expression, but she was quiet. This was how my mother reacted to bad news—she went inside herself, she gathered evidence, she turned it over like a gem in her hand until she could determine its quality, its clarity.
“I can’t believe this,” she said quietly. “Why didn’t you call me sooner?”
I shrugged. “I guess I thought it would end. But it isn’t ending.”
I told her about the safe and the bearer shares and the cops who’d visited my office.
“Sam wouldn’t steal from Forester,” she said in a strangled voice. My mother loved Sam.
“I know. That’s what I think, too, but with him gone, with no other explanation.” I threw my hands up. “I don’t know what to believe.”
“Oh, Izzy, baby.”
The words were said with such feeling, and my mother’s eyes fixed on me like never before. We sat like that—two women who’d always thought themselves so different from one another, suddenly had so much in common.
My mother opened her mouth to speak again, when Maria stuck her head in the fitting room. “You ready now?” Her irritation was undisguised. She’d had enough of this.
“I don’t know,” my mother said. She grabbed my hand. “Do you want to do this?”
I sucked in a breath and thought about it. The doubts about Sam were starting to flood me, but I hated that. At my core, I believed he was a good man, but the evidence seemed so far the other way. I reminded myself the case wasn’t over. All the evidence wasn’t in yet. And so I would go forward, for now, with the wedding that just yesterday I didn’t think I wanted.
“Yeah, I do.”
I disentangled myself from my mom, gathered the cool, heavy satin skirt in my hands and climbed onto the pedestal.
Maria was already surveying me, pins at the ready on her wrist cushion.
Just then, my cell phone bleated from my purse. I jumped off the pedestal and scrambled for it.
Maria mumbled something in Spanish that I guessed were curse words.
Instead of Sam, cell, the display on my phone read, Unknown.
I answered it.
“Isabel McNeil?” It was a woman’s voice, calm and confident. “This is Andi Lippman with the FBI.”
I sat down hard on the pedestal. I felt bad news looming, large and black.
Maria cursed again and took the pins out of her mouth. My mother mouthed, “What is it?”
“Ms. McNeil? I’m calling about Sam Hollings.”
“Is there any news?”
“The FBI is investigating the matter of the shares owned by Forester Pickett, which are missing from Carrington & Associates.”
I blinked fast. The FBI, I thought. Once again, I was hit with how real this was, how severely momentous. “Have you heard anything new?”
She paused. “Well, I’m not exactly sure what you know and what you don’t. I’d like to meet with you in person.” She mentioned an address on Roosevelt Avenue. “Tomorrow at eleven.”
I rooted in my purse for my date book. Most people I knew kept their calendars on their BlackBerries or computers, but I liked the old-fashioned hard copy. I liked seeing my months, my weeks, my daily appointments laid out and organized in front of me.
I found the date book—thin with a maroon cover embossed in gold. A gift from Forester, I suddenly remembered. “One second, please.” I cupped the phone between my ear and shoulder and rifled through the pages for the end of October. I tried to think whether I had any meetings tomorrow, maybe a court call.
But as I reached the right page, everything blurred in front of me, because I realized it didn’t matter. Whatever I had to do tomorrow wasn’t important, not even a little bit, compared to Sam. And Forester.
I closed the book. “I’ll be there.”
16
Sam Hollings walked down Duval Street, sidestepping a woman sitting on the curb, talking on her cell phone, then one block later a pack of college kids pouring out of a bar, all drunk and happy and loud.
Sam gave the kids a wide berth. He hated how far away from them he felt, how much older. He easily remembered when getting loaded on a Wednesday night was not uncommon. God, the simplicity of those days, so unappreciated at the time. He was grateful for it now, feeling ancient and well past them.
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