Buffy, the Bohemian’s frozen-faced, helmet-haired assistant, materialized in less than a minute to hold the door open for me. And a woman in one of the green leather chairs behind me sighed.
In a different life, I couldn’t have gotten into Anton Chernek’s offices to wash the windows. He’s an advisor – a consigliere to Chicago’s most prominent families, the ones whose names adorn the city’s museums and parks, endow its philanthropies, and attend its most fashionable events. I imagined his financial counseling was straightforward enough – the usual recommendations on blue- chip stocks, bonds, mutual funds and such – but it’s his role as the go-to guy for other, touchier concerns that defines his real value to the city’s ruling elite. When a problem arises that cannot be handled traditionally – a divorce arising from the gamier appetites of human behavior; a scion caught cheating at a prestigious university; an embezzlement within a family firm – the rich summon the Bohemian. He is wise and he is discreet. He makes problems go away quietly, with smiling assurances, packets of cash and, if need be, swift retribution.
We first met when he accompanied Amanda’s lawyers to our divorce settlement conference. He’d liked that I’d brought no lawyer and no demands. Months later, he hired me to uncover who’d begun blowing up houses in Amanda’s gated community. The case got more gnarly when Chernek was accused of embezzling from his clients. The charge was false, but he was publicly humiliated, and that cost him most of his staff and, for a time, many of his clients.
I knew about false accusations, so I didn’t pile on. I kept on reporting to him as though nothing had happened. He never forgot that, or the fact that I never hit him up for freebie financial advice about how to manage the 250 dollars I’d rat-holed in a passbook savings account.
‘Vuh-lo-dek,’ he boomed from behind his carved desk, stretching the two syllables into three. I’m named for my grandfather, a handle that charmed the Bohemian the first time we met. He’s been the only one. Not even an animal used to extract carbohydrates from beer should be named Vlodek.
I sat in one of the burgundy leather guest chairs. The Bohemian was around sixty, and a big man, just shy of my six feet two. Today he wore a pale yellow, spread-collar shirt with a figured navy tie that perfectly matched the color of the custom coat hanging on his antique mahogany coat rack. His teeth gleamed; his tan glowed. Not a single combed-back silver hair was out of place.
‘You’re prospering, Anton,’ I said.
‘Times are fine, Vlodek. And you?’
‘Improving.’ I handed him Wendell Phelps’s tan envelope. ‘I’m interested in these three men.’
He removed the photocopies. He might well have been on retainer with the men whose obituaries he was now reading, but his face betrayed nothing. The Bohemian respected confidences, even with the dead.
‘Fine businessmen, in the heavy cream,’ he said, looking up. ‘Right up at the top with your ex-father-in-law.’ He leaned forward slightly. ‘Why do their deaths interest you?’
‘A client is wondering if anything about those deaths was overlooked.’
He nodded, respecting my need to maintain confidentiality. ‘How may I help?’
‘How well did you know these men?’
He eased back in his chair. ‘Two of them quite well. The third, Grant Carson, the one who got killed by a car last month, I’d met only at social functions.’
‘Have there been rumors about their deaths?’
‘None that I’ve heard. It was no surprise that Benno Barberi died of a heart attack last October. His friends knew he had a bad heart,’ he said. ‘Jim Whitman’s death last December came after a long illness, also as the Tribune said. That’s true enough, as far as it goes, but technically his was a suicide. Jim was dying, and he swallowed all his painkillers at one time. The papers had the decency not to print that, though it’s widely known. As for Carson’s hit-and-run, you’ll have to check with the police. They haven’t found the driver, but I don’t believe they saw it as anything other than a tragic accident.’ He slipped the papers back into the envel-ope. ‘How is Wendell Phelps, Vlodek?’ His smile had become sly, venturing a guess about who had hired me.
I gave back just enough of a grin to keep him wondering. ‘How many men in Chicago are like these three?’
‘Of their stature in business? Off the top of my head, I’d say perhaps fifty.’
‘May I have a list?’
The Bohemian’s eyes worked to get behind my own. ‘You’ll keep me apprised?’ Meaning that I’d alert him to anyone I thought might be in trouble. Client safety was always his major concern.
‘Of course.’ It was a necessary quid pro quo.
‘I’ll email names,’ he said.
FIVE
Traffic was backed up solid on the outbound expressway. No matter the years of supposed improvements, the Eisenhower is almost always a crawl. In my darker moments, I let myself think a secret cabal of oil and communications executives engineered it that way, to trap drivers into burning up expensive gallons of gasoline while raging on their phones, burning up cell-plan minutes. Like my Goodman Theater imaginings, it’s baloney – a poor man’s cranky fantasy and flimsy as a cobweb – but ever since the Jeep’s radio got boosted, it’s given my mind something to mull when I’m stuck on the Ike.
I wondered if that sort of paranoia got notched up inside Wendell Phelps. The Tribune had seen nothing suspicious in the deaths of Barberi and Whitman, nor had they reported Carson’s death as anything more sinister than a typical hit-and-run. More calming was the Bohemian’s ear. It was finely tuned, and he kept it pressed to the ground, yet nothing about the three deaths had tripped his sensors. Likely enough, Wendell Phelps had given me nothing more than a dark delusion, except his came with the money to pursue it. Me, I had to get stuck in traffic, sucking auto exhaust, to indulge mine.
I got back to Rivertown as the dying sun began turning the turret’s rough limestone blocks into a hundred soft shades of yellow, orange, and red. My narrow five story cylinder is always beautiful at sunset, with its shadows and fiery colors, marked hard here and there with the black stripes of the slit windows, but it can be melancholy then as well, a slim monument in dying light to a dead man’s dead dream. The turret was my grandfather’s fantasy. A small-time bootlegger with big-time plans, he built it as the first of four that were to connect with stone walls to form a grand castle on the bank of the Willahock River. The one turret was all he got built. He died broke, leaving behind only a corner of his dream.
I walked down to the river to count leaves. When I’d moved to the turret on the first of a November several years before, out of money and out of hope, the spindly purple ash growing alongside the water had already turned its expected autumn purple color and seemed healthy enough. The next July, after a normal spring, it suddenly shed its leaves. By then, that summer had already gone bad. My records research business was struggling to survive and I was trapped in a seemingly hopeless bomb and extortion case that I could not puzzle through. I took the hollow clacking noise the dying ash’s branches made, in the wind, in the night, as one more sign the world wasn’t spinning right.
I didn’t need new signs of bad times. When the next new spring came and the other trees along the Willahock began budding and my ash still resembled nothing but upright kindling, I went out with a pole saw. Better to cut it down than to suffer its death rattle in the night any longer.