She looked magnificent as always, in dark slacks, a cream blouse and the garnet pendant I’d given her for her birthday.
I, in my blue blazer and the least wrinkled of my khaki pants, looked like a used office furniture salesman.
We ordered drinks and proceeded carefully. ‘How’s business?’ she asked.
A scandal, stemming from a false accusation, had trashed my business and our marriage. The business was resurrecting, though slowly.
‘Two more old insurance company clients are using me again to verify accident information. It’s not much, but it’s a foot on the road to hope.’
‘And the turret?’ she asked. We were stilted, awkwardly catching up, but there was something else in her voice. Hesitation. She was stalling, not yet ready to tell me why she’d called.
‘I’ve finished hanging the kitchen cabinets and am awaiting only the funds for new appliances. Now I’m up on the third floor.’
‘The master bedroom,’ she said. It had never been ours. We’d lived in her multi-million-dollar home in Crystal Waters, a gated community, before my career, our marriage, and then her neighborhood had blown up.
The bed, though, had been ours. She hadn’t wanted it, but I’d not been willing to give up. I’d hauled it from her house before it had been reduced to rubble.
‘I’ve built a closet,’ I said, with as much pride as another man might say of a new Ferrari.
She sent a bemused glance toward the wrinkles in my blue button-down shirt.
‘I don’t as yet have hangers,’ I said.
She smiled. ‘Of course.’
‘Any day now, some hotshot commodities trader is going to drive by, see my five-story limestone cylinder, and buy it for millions. The turret is my other foot on the road to hope.’
Her smile tightened. I’d slipped, seemingly into pettiness. Richard Rudolph, her silver-haired new beau, was a wealthy commodities trader, and precisely the sort of hotshot I was trying to snare.
‘You are well, you and Mr Rudolph?’ I asked of the hotshot, trying for casual. It had been some time since my friend Leo Brumsky had reported seeing their picture in the papers, always at some appropriately charitable event. I’d supposed that at some point, Leo had decided I didn’t need to stay current on such news.
‘He’s in Russia – new opportunities,’ she said, perhaps a little too quickly. Then, ‘Jennifer Gale, the newswoman?’ Her gaze was direct, her eyes unblinking.
We were catching up more pointedly now. ‘How could you know…?’
‘Your photo ran in the papers too, Dek. Some journalism awards dinner. She’s as lovely in print as she is on television.’
Jennifer Gale had been a features reporter for Channel 8 in Chicago until she’d been offered newsier television opportunities in San Francisco. With me, though, she was Jenny Galecki, a sweet, solidly Polish girl struggling to mix celebrity and ambition with feelings for me. For eight months, we’d managed to stay involved, telephonically. And now I was about to head to San Francisco.
‘She is lovely, yes,’ I said.
For a moment, we let silence shelter us. We’d moved on, some.
I veered away, asked about her work. She’d given up teaching at the Art Institute to establish philanthropies in her father’s name. Wendell Phelps, head of Chicago’s largest electric utility, had come to regret being an indifferent parent, and had offered Amanda the chance to do really good things with really big money. It was an offer she did not refuse.
‘He’s moving me into operations. I’m day-to-day electricity now, Dek. I liaise with every city and town on our grid, building relationships. Philanthropy hasn’t been on the agenda for several months.’
‘He’s prepping you for great responsibilities.’
‘All of a sudden, he’s in a rush.’
‘He’s the major shareholder. It’s prudent to bring his only child into the family business. Lots of investment to protect.’
Our waitress came with drinks – a Manhattan for her; a first-ever, low-carb beer for me. As in old times, we ordered the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink salads that had long been one of the prides of Petterino’s.
She stirred her drink for a long minute, and I took a pull from the bottle of de-carbed beer. It tasted like it had been run through something alive, perhaps hooved, to get the carbohydrates out.
She removed the cocktail stick, its cherry still impaled, and set it on the napkin. ‘I’ve told my father to hire you,’ she said.
‘Whoa,’ I said, understanding why she’d played too long with her drink. I set down the bottle of carb-less beer residue. ‘Me, work for your father?’
Wendell Phelps was no admirer of mine. We’d never talked face-to-face, but we’d argued plenty on the phone after his daughter had been abducted. His arrogance, along with my stupidity, had almost gotten her killed.
‘Actually we’ve discussed it several times. No, that’s wrong. I’ve brought it up several times.’
‘What, exactly?’
‘He’s hired bodyguards.’
‘A deranged shareholder or some nut pissed about his electric bill?’
‘He won’t say.’
‘The business pages say he’s taking heat because of all the service outages. The governor and the mayor are pushing him for equipment upgrades, but the big shareholders don’t want him to spend the money. It’s a real tussle.’
I reached for the low-carb but quickly stopped my hand; drinking more might stick the taste to my tongue permanently. ‘I also heard his stock price dropped. People have lost money. Maybe some cranky shareholder got wiped out.’
‘He said it was nothing like that.’
‘What then?’
She shook her head. ‘He won’t say, other than he hired an investigator to take care of it. The man found out nothing, apparently. My father looks old, Dek; old and afraid and weak.’
‘Could that have something to do with his new wife?’ Long a widower, Wendell’s recent marriage lingered only briefly on the society pages before descending into the gossip blogs. The most charitable of them said the bride was charmingly eccentric.
‘You’re wondering whether she’s driven him into becoming delusional? I don’t think so. His fear is real.’
‘Cops?’
‘He hasn’t gone to them.’
‘What is it with rich people, so afraid of going to the police?’ A bomb-wielding extortionist had assaulted the mega-rich homeowners in Crystal Waters, yet none of her neighbors wanted to call the cops. At least not until people started getting blown up.
‘He said he’d talk to you.’
‘Because if he didn’t, you’d hire me yourself, and then he’d lose control of what I learned?’
She smiled a little. ‘Of course.’
‘No doubt he pointed out I’m a lightweight as far as investigators go, that I research records for lawyers, chase down accident information for insurance companies. I don’t do life or death.’
‘You did, for me.’
‘I got you kidnapped.’
‘Talk to him, Dek. Reassure me he’s having some sort of small mental lapse. Tell me he’s just feeling too many ordinary pressures.’
I smiled then, too, because ultimately that was what I always did with Amanda. Our salads came, and we smiled through them as well. Our awkwardness was disappearing.
After the play, she told me I’d slept through another magnificent performance. That was too close to old times, too.
THREE
Wendell Phelps’s house, stone clad and slate roofed, loomed high, a dark fortress on the bluffs above Lake Michigan. To the south, the Chicago skyline was a blur in the gloom of the late March sky, as though it were a backdrop painted pale and inconsequential to make the magnificent mansion stand out even more. Down below, past the closely mowed lawn and the terrace of tightly trimmed yews, the lake lapped at the edge of the raked beach, gray and vaguely restless.
One of the doors in the five-car garage was open, exposing the tail end of what I knew was Wendell’s old black Mercedes and, alongside it, the lighter-colored fender of something inexpensively American, likely belonging to a live-in housekeeper. I drove past the garage and stopped behind a dark brown Nissan pickup truck.