She smiled and reached across the red-checked tablecloth to squeeze my hand. “Just have dinner at my house, Saturday night.” And then she told me she lived at Crystal Waters.
I hadn’t put it together that she came from huge rich. She dressed simply, wore little jewelry, and drove an old Toyota. She’d told me once that she lived west of Chicago, and that had been enough. We were in a hurry, and there were other things to talk about. Or not.
That Saturday evening, I got off the Eisenhower Expressway at Rivertown. I drove past the houses where I’d lived growing up, past the graffiti-blighted high school, past the abandoned, ruined turret that had been my grandfather’s dream and folly. Rivertown was less than fifteen miles west of my lakeshore condominium, but I hadn’t been back in twenty years.
I didn’t linger. I took Thompson Avenue out of Rivertown and followed it to where it widened to four lanes and the shallow, cookie-cutter colonials began. Red brick facades, skinny white pillars, little green ribbons of side yards. “Fronts,” people in Rivertown call them, but they say it with envy.
The money real estate begins a mile farther west. That’s where the houses get big and different from one another, each one set back from the road, framed in its own setting of full, rich trees. Gateville is three miles west of there, six total from Rivertown. But that’s as the birds fly. Measured by money, it’s as far away as the moon.
A half mile east of Gateville, I drove up the hill that always seemed like it had been put there to give pause before the beauty of the good life down below was revealed. I’d looked at Gateville plenty of times but had never known anyone who lived inside.
The guard at the gate checked my name on a list, gave me a half salute, and waved me through. As I pulled past the guardhouse, I saw him pick up the phone.
Amanda was waiting outside her front door. “I’m not here much,” she said as I got out of the car. It sounded like she was apologizing.
“Quite a house to not live in very much,” I said as we went through the huge walnut double doors. And it was. Beige brick, gray tile roof, three-car garage, and lots of tinted windows around what I later counted to be ten rooms.
She led me through an unfurnished foyer to the center hall. She bypassed the arched entry to the living room and started the tour in the dining room. It was a bare room, empty of anything except a lone oil portrait of a man’s face hanging on an interior wall, where it couldn’t be seen from the hall. It was a stern face and looked vaguely familiar.
“This used to be my father’s house,” she said, her voice echoing in the empty room. “He took all his furniture except for the stuff in the living room when he moved to the North Shore.”
“That was recently?”
She laughed and led me out to the hall. “No.”
We walked through to the kitchen. White tile countertops, stainless steel refrigerator, big restaurant-sized stove-and, strangely, a junk-store porcelain-top table and two white-painted chairs. The table had been set with white plastic plates.
We continued through an unfurnished family room and a cherry study whose built-in bookshelves were crammed with art books but which also had no furniture. We came back to the foyer, climbed the stairs to the second floor, and walked down the hall past four empty bedrooms. At the rear of the house she stopped. “My bedroom, growing up.” It was the smallest of the bedrooms, and the only one that was furnished, with a twin bed, a dresser, a nightstand, and a student desk with a computer. It looked like a room in a college dorm. She cocked her head up at me and smiled. “Any questions at this point in the tour, Dek?”
I had about a hundred but narrowed them to one. “Why live here?”
“The answer is downstairs.” We went down to the arched entry off the first-floor hall. Unlike the rest of the rooms on the first floor, the living room was nicely furnished. “Mostly Louis XIV reproductions,” she said of the cream-colored chairs, the tables, and the two settees. “My father left them. He was going for a different look in his new place.”
She paused in front of a small oil painting hanging above a Chinese lamp on a little table. The oil was of a woman in a long white gown, reading a book. “Pierre-Auguste Renoir,” she said. She turned and pointed to several other small oils, naming artists I’d never heard of. The two-foot bronze of a cowboy, though, I knew was by Remington.
“You asked why I live in Crystal Waters?” She moved to stand in front of a larger painting, perhaps two feet by three, of water lilies on a placid pond. It hung above the fireplace, in a gilt frame withhexagonal corners. She looked at it for a minute without speaking, as if she were seeing it for the first time. “Claude Monet. It has never been shown publicly.” After another minute, she smiled at me. “If there were ever a fire, I would get the Monet out of the house before I’d call the fire department.”
She led me to one of the antique white sofas. “These were my grandfather’s favorite pieces. Collectively worth nine point eight million dollars, at last appraisal.”
I’d been worrying she had money. I hadn’t let myself fear she had that kind of money.
“Was that your grandfather’s portrait hanging in the dining room?”
“No. That’s my father. He left it behind when he moved. He said it would remind me he was keeping an eye on me.”
Then I had it. I’d seen that face in the newspapers. He headed Chicago’s largest electric utility, along with being a big time fund-raiser in Democratic circles.
“Your father is Wendell Phelps?”
She nodded. “We don’t get along.”
Over dinner of bakery baguettes, marinara heated in the jar in the microwave, and undercooked pasta, she filled in the blanks. She was one of eight grandchildren of an enormously wealthy steel magnate. “My share of my grandfather’s estate was just over twelve million. I didn’t want his money; I wanted his art.”
“So you gave up your share for the pieces in the living room?”
“And used the rest to buy this house from my father,” she smiled. “Strange?”
“Not the art part. But I don’t understand why you live here in this big empty house.”
“Security. Constant surveillance, monitored neighborhood, the gatehouse. It costs every dime of what I make to live here, but it’s the safest place for the art.”
“Does all this mean you won’t marry me?”
“It means I wanted you to see how I must live before you ask.”
“We’re so different, Amanda.”
“Precisely.”
“Will you marry me?”
“Of course.”
She hadn’t bought dessert. We didn’t notice.
That was in March of last year. Every day, when I think of that evening, it cuts like it happened yesterday.
Back at the turret, I called the Bohemian before I got out of the Jeep.
“You’ve got an enemy,” I said. “I just met with the document examiner. The envelope is common, available everywhere, and was computer-addressed with the kind of printer that can be found in every public library. There are no fingerprints on the note, the paper is old, and the lettering looks controlled, not the work of a quick scam artist firing off a false threat.”
“Thank you, Vlodek,” he said too quickly.
“Not so fast. A handwritten note makes no sense when your man obviously had access to a computer. It would have been much safer for him to type the letter on the computer as well, not chance leaving fingerprints or other clues. You need the police to puzzle through his motivation for using a handwritten letter.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” he said, in a flat tone that meant he would do no such thing. “Send me a report.”
“You should take the police a list of anyone who might wish to harm Crystal Waters.”
He sighed. “I can think of no one, and everyone.”