She laughed, for the first time I’d heard in a month. “I’m sure it’s just a little background checking.”
“To put a face to the man you’re seeing?”
She paused one heartbeat too long to be encouraging. “More likely to be sure I’m on the up-and-up. Sweetie is very particular about her donations.”
“I could be a liability?”
“There’ll be food, Dek. She’ll give you an air kiss, spend two minutes talking to you, and leave you thinking you are the most important person she’s ever met. She’s nice.”
“Then we can slip away, have a drink someplace?”
Again, a pause. “Not tonight, I’m afraid. There’ll be people from foundations there, people who can get things done.”
“Tomorrow night, then?”
“A dinner with the board of the Metropolitan YMCA.”
I didn’t bother to ask if she was free for dinner any other nights. That’s what bothered me the most, after we hung up.
That I hadn’t bothered.
CHAPTER 10.
The Gold Coast of Chicago, those blocks along and surrounding Michigan Avenue north of the river, is studded with solid midwestern values, so long as the midwesterner is a millionaire and values huge-buck condominiums and glitzy stores that offer hundred-thousand-dollar necklaces and thousand-dollar shoes.
Once, early in our relationship, Amanda and I were walking along Michigan Avenue. It was a splendid spring evening, and we paused to look at the men’s clothing displayed in the window of one particularly expensive-looking place. Go in and look around, she taunted, knowing full well that although I liked good, grand made me itch. A dare was a dare, though, so I took it. We went in, and I moved around trying to appear like I belonged, all the while avoiding looking at what I was sure would be a smirk on her face. At one point I stopped to finger the cuff of a two-thousand-dollar sport coat. A salesman came up and inquired whether I liked it. Indeed I did, I said, but then inspiration struck. I told the man I was wondering about the pants. Sir? he asked, confused. The pants, I responded; surely, for two thousand dollars, the coat came with about fifty pairs of pants? Amanda lost it then. Choking with laughter, she hustled me out of there quick as lightning, and proposed that we never walk along Michigan Avenue again.
Sweetie Fairbairn’s address was in the middle of all that, on Oak, a side street. I drove past it three times before I realized she lived in the Wilbur Wright. It was an old, ten-story hotel built right after the Wright Brothers’ first flight and named after one of them, though whether Wilbur was the one who flew the contraption or jumped up and down on the ground, I couldn’t remember.
The doorman didn’t come over when I pulled to the curb. He might have been reluctant to offer encouragement to anyone lingering in such a battered vehicle, or perhaps he was confused about how to communicate through a plastic side window crisscrossed with so much silver tape.
I unzipped the window corner and fluttered my hand out in a beckoning fashion. It was enough. He nodded, came over, and bent down to put his mouth to the small triangular opening.
“Sir?”
“Does Sweetie Fairbairn live here?”
“We’re not allowed to give out…”
I’d spiked her invitation on a wire that used to connect to the radio. I pulled it off and held the paper to the opening.
What I could see of his mouth softened as he reclassified me from poor to strange. “Very well, sir. We have valet parking.”
I got out and handed the key to the kid who came up. “Anything falls off, put it in back, on top of the Burger King wrappers.”
The kid nodded like that was a usual request, and I walked inside.
The lobby was small, polished stainless steel and shiny black marble. The concierge was a young man with glossy black hair, hired perhaps because he matched the marble. I flashed Sweetie’s invitation, punctured though it was.
“Sweetie Fairbairn’s suite,” I said, not only using the S words symmetrically, but announcing as well that I had enough class to know hers would not be some closet-sized room facing an air shaft.
“Penthouse,” the glossy young man corrected, raising his nose a half inch. “Not suite.” He pointed to the last elevator down a short corridor, where a broad-shouldered man was talking to two slender blond women.
They turned as I approached, anticipating a fellow social traveler. It wasn’t just the man’s shoulders that were broad, I saw; his whole suit coat was cut wide. He had a gun on his hip.
All smiled-the man carefully; the women uncertainly, and then only after all four of their eyes had lingered on my necktie. I’d taken special care with my outfit, going over my blue blazer twice with my Shop-Vac to make sure I’d gotten up all the oak dust. The khakis were selected as being the cleanest from the pile on the chair by my bed, though I supposed their wrinkles might have caused the pickiest of observers to wonder if I’d slept in them more than once. Finally, I’d selected the new-looking floral necktie because it matched my blue button-down shirt. Also because it was the only tie I owned.
The elevator had barely begun to rise when first one woman, then the other, began sneezing. Apparently, I’d not vacuumed enough. I took a discreet step back into the corner, to give them better air. It didn’t work. They sneezed, almost in unison, a second and then a third time.
Mercifully, the door opened after that. The women fled. The guard remained, motioning me out.
I stepped into a small foyer papered in red silk. A young man in a tuxedo offered me a flute of champagne from a tray. I took it into an enormous, softly yellow living room.
At least a hundred people were there, chatting and laughing and bobbing their heads with such animation that they could well have been filled with helium. There was lots of tan cleavage-some wrinkled, some not-white teeth, and glittering jewelry, but no formal evening gowns or tuxedos other than on the waitstaff, I was relieved to see. The room smelled of the fresh cut flowers that seemed to be everywhere, and, I supposed, of the smug self-assurance that comes from mingling with one’s affluent own.
I’d paused, unsure where to go, when a hand gently touched my arm. It was a lovely hand, attached to an equally lovely arm, all part of my most favorite terrain on the planet.
“I’ve been watching the door, hoping I could stop you before you belly flopped onto the buffet table,” Amanda whispered.
She was, as always, magnificent. She wore a simple black dress that matched her hair, and a garnet and diamond pendant that caught the flecks of fire in her eyes. The skin around them was taut, though-and wary. She looked tired.
“You look tired,” I said.
She squeezed my arm. “I told Sweetie you’d want to bolt as soon as you saw the crowd.”
She led me to a quiet place by a tall window that looked out over the city. Even though the Wilbur Wright was small-ten stories is nothing in any city anymore-the Wright Brothers for sure would have been impressed. I was standing higher than they first flew, and I’d made the ascent without getting a single bug stuck to my teeth.
Amanda made a show of standing back and looking at my outfit. “Same blazer, same pants, same shirt, same tie,” she said.
“I remain unchanged.”
She winced slightly at what she took to be a small pettiness.
“I didn’t mean that the way it came out,” I said quickly.
“It won’t last forever, Dek. Just until I get settled into whatever it is I’m settling into.”
“Good deeds.”
“Good deeds.”
For a minute we both stared out the window like strangers new to town.
“Ever hear of the heiress who built that penthouse?” She pointed at another hotel, across Michigan Avenue.
“Never.”
“Airlifting the construction material by helicopter required F.A.A. approval.”
“Sounds like a reasonable use of an inheritance.”
“Sweetie heard about that. Ten years ago, she and Silas bought the roof on this place and did the same, helicopters and all.”