A young woman in her early twenties, wearing a brown sweatshirt that matched the truck, was picking shredded yellow flowers out of the concrete urns at the base of the front steps. Large money bought that; fresh flowers before spring. I got out of the Jeep and smiled at the girl, one tradesperson to another.
‘Pigs,’ she said, jamming the ruined blooms into a paper yard-waste bag.
‘Ah, but they pay the bills,’ I said, and walked up the stairs to the massive walnut door.
Amanda told me once that state senators, mayors and business leaders had been summoned to this house, but the only visitor who’d not been made to wait at the door like a pizza driver was the mop-headed former governor of Illinois, now doing prison time out west. Go figure, she’d said, laughing.
An unremarkable man answered the door. Not tall, not short; not dark haired, not blond; not young and certainly not old. Right down to the faint gray stripes in his bland blue suit, he was indistinct, an average man, a medium all around. The best ones are like that: mediums all around. They don’t get noticed in a crowd. Only the slight bulge in his suit, under the left arm, gave him away. He was one of the bodyguards Amanda had mentioned, and he was packing.
I showed him my driver’s license. ‘Dek Elstrom to see Mr Phelps.’
‘You’re expected.’ He pulled the door open all the way.
The foyer was dark, lit only by four small wall sconces. It was only after I’d followed him halfway across what seemed like a football field of black-and-white tile that I realized the walls were paneled in walnut as thick as the front door. That the head of Chicago’s largest electric company was wasting none of the company product at home might have come from frugality. Or it could have come from fear.
The bodyguard knocked on a door, stepped aside, and motioned for me to enter. I went into a library as dim as the foyer. The curtains were drawn. The only light came from a yellow glass lamp on the desk in front of the curtains.
‘Mr Elstrom,’ Wendell Phelps said, rising from behind the lamp.
I’d seen his face in the business news and, of course, in the oil portrait I’d cut to make a Halloween mask in the last drunken days of my marriage. Those pictures were of a younger and more relaxed man. As he came closer, I saw lines deeper than any sixty-three-year-old should have. He wore golf clothes – yellow slacks to match the lamp, and a green knit shirt with a crocodile on it – as though he were about to go hit a bucket of balls in his foyer. The croc’s mouth was open, which fit with what I knew of Wendell Phelps.
‘Mr Phelps,’ I said.
We sat on opposing sofas without shaking hands. A tan envelope lay on the low plank table between us. The only other thing on the table was a small framed photograph of a little girl holding a blue balloon. The picture might have been of Amanda, but it was too small to tell in such dim light.
‘What has Amanda told you?’ he asked.
‘She said you hired bodyguards, one of which I saw for myself, and that you retained an investigator, who learned nothing.’
‘We speak in confidence, you and I? You do not report back to Amanda?’
‘So long as you’re the client, and not her.’
He frowned at the reminder of his daughter’s threat, and pushed the tan envelope an inch toward me. ‘There have already been three murders.’ His hand shook a little as he lifted it from the envelope.
There were three letter-sized sheets in the envelope. I held them up to catch the faint light from the desk. They were photocopies of obituaries from the Chicago Tribune, the big, quarter-page kind that ran with photographs when someone important died. Each of the three dead men had been prominent in Chicago business. The first had died of a heart attack the previous October, the second from cancer two months later, in December. The most recent had been the victim of a hit-and-run in February, just the month before. None of the obituaries implied murder. I slipped the three sheets back into the envelope and set it on the table.
‘They were murdered,’ he said.
‘Did your investigator tell you this, or is this a hunch?’
‘That man was ineffective, and I try never to rely on hunches.’
‘Two deaths from illness, the third from a hit-and-run. Not the stuff of foul play.’
‘They were CEOs of major corporations.’
His eyes seemed steady; his focus appeared good. Yet he seemed to be speaking gibbered paranoia.
‘CEOs die just like ordinary people,’ I said.
‘They were murdered,’ he said again.
‘Because they were CEOs?’
‘Don’t patronize me, Elstrom.’ He turned around to look at the heavy curtains. A thin sliver of light, half the width of a pencil, shone where the two fabric panels did not quite meet. He got up and went to pull them together.
‘Yes,’ he said, remaining by the curtains as though worried they’d open again on their own. ‘I believe they were killed because they were CEOs.’
I stood then, and walked to the desk. Another tiny picture frame had caught my eye. ‘For what motive?’ I asked, picking up the photo.
It was the same as the one on the plank table: a little girl holding a blue balloon. I wondered whether it was the only childhood photo he had of Amanda.
‘I’m hiring you to find that out,’ he said.
‘To keep your daughter from nosing into it?’
‘She need not worry about this.’
‘A plot to kill major business executives would surely interest the brass of the Chicago Police Department. They’ll investigate for free.’
‘A man with my links to the business community would lose credibility if such accusations were seen as unsubstantiated, or worse, just plain crazy. The effect on my shareholders would be disastrous. Gather sufficient information, Elstrom, and then I’ll go to the police.’
He handed me a folded check from the pocket of his golf shirt. It was for two thousand dollars.
It was too big a retainer to indulge what seemed like a rich man’s delusion, and it was more than I’d made in the last two months. I put the check in my pocket.
He reached to pinch the seam in the curtains, though no light was coming through. Whatever the man’s tensions were, they were very real to him. I took the manila envelope and showed myself out into the hall. The Medium Man was waiting, and together we made footstep echoes across the marble to the front door.
The flower girl had almost finished replacing the shredded yellow blossoms with vibrant, dark red blooms. I winked at her as I came down the concrete stairs.
She frowned. ‘Pigs,’ she said.
FOUR
The Bohemian’s offices are on the top floor of a ten-story rehabbed yellow brick factory on the west side of Chicago. The ancient wrought-iron elevator doors opened right into the reception area. Earnest-looking bond and stock-fund salespeople, wearing good suits and carrying thin attachés, sat on the green leather wing chairs and sofas, studying the proposals they were about to pitch to the Bohemian’s staff of financial advisors. I crossed the red oriental carpet to the black walnut reception desk.
‘Dek Elstrom, wondering if I might have a moment of Mr Chernek’s time.’
The receptionist was new, a tanned brunette at least a decade shy of murmuring the word ‘Botox.’ She flashed a perfect white smile. ‘Do you have an appointment, Mr Elstrom?’
I shook my head. ‘If you would just ask?’
‘Certainly, sir.’ She pushed a button on her telephone console and said my name with a question mark into the thin mouthpiece of her headset.
Behind me, I thought I heard the uneasy shifting of good wool. The tailored suits had sensed a sudden intrusion of polyester. Though my blue blazer, with but the merest hint of mustard on the left cuff, had a forty-five per cent wool content, a blend is a blend, and was as out of place in that reception area as a bongo drummer at a chamber recital. Even the grandfather clock in the corner seemed to stop ticking, anticipating my swift dispatch.