“Why’d you tangle with Lisa Macauley? She’s Chicago’s most important artiste, now that Oprah has decamped.”
“She come yammering to you with some tale of injustice? She wanted a bodyguard and I told her I didn’t do that kind of work.”
“Oh, Warshawski, you must have sounded ornery when you turned her down. She is not a happy camper: she got Claude Barnett all excited about how you won’t work for anyone who doesn’t agree with your politics. He dug up your involvement with the old abortion underground and has been blasting away at you the last two days as the worst kind of murdering femmunist. A wonderful woman came to you, trembling and scared for her life, and you turned her away just because she’s against abortion. He says you investigate the politics of all your potential clients and won’t take anyone who’s given money to a Christian or a Republican cause and he’s urging people to boycott you.”
“Kind of people who listen to Claude need an investigator to find their brains. He isn’t likely to hurt me.”
Murray dropped his bantering tone. “He carries more weight than you, or even I, want to think. You should do some damage control.”
I felt my stomach muscles tighten: I live close to the edge of financial ruin much of the time. If I lost three or four key accounts, I’d be dead.
“You think I should apply for a broadcast license and blast back? Or just have my picture taken coming out of the headquarters of the National Rifle Association?”
“You need a new-millennium operation, Warshawski—a staff, including a publicist. You need to have someone going around town with stories about all the tough cases you’ve cracked in the last few years, showing how wonderful you are. Make your social media accounts more active. On account of I like hot-tempered Italian gals I might run a piece myself if you’d buy me dinner.”
“What’s a new-millennium operation—one where your self-promotion matters more than what kind of job you do? Come to think of it, do you have a publicist, Murray?”
The long pause at the other end told its own tale: Murray had definitely joined the new millennium. I looked in the mirror after he hung up, searching for scales or some other visible sign of turning into a dinosaur. In the absence of those, I’d hang on to my little one-woman shop as long as possible.
I logged onto Global Entertainment and searched for Claude Barnett’s stream. After a few minutes from his high-end sponsors, Claude’s rich folksy baritone rolled through my speakers like molasses from a giant barrel.
“Yeah, folks, the femmunists are at it again. The Iron Curtain went down in Russia so they want to put it up here in America. You think like they think or—phht!—off you go to the Gulag.
“We’ve got one of those femmunists right here in Chicago. Private investigator. You know, in the old stories they used to call them private dicks. Kind of makes you wonder what this gal is missing in her life that she turned to that kind of work. Started out as a baby killer back in the days when she was at the Red University on the South Side of Chicago and grew up to be a dick. Well, it takes all kinds, they say, but do we need this kind?
“We got an important writer here in Chicago. I know a lot of you read the books this courageous woman writes. And because she’s willing to take a stand, she gets death threats. So she goes to this leftist snowflake dick, this hermaphrodite dick, who won’t help her out. ’Cause Lisa Macauley has the guts to tell women the truth about rape and abortion, and this chick-dick, this V.I. Warshawski, can’t take it.
“By the way, you ought to check out Lisa’s new book. Slaybells Ring. A great story which takes her fast-talking talk-show host Nan Carruthers into the world of the ACLU and the bashing of Christmas. We carry it right here in our bookstore. If you call in now Sheri will ship it out to you right away. Order online, and it will be in your hands tomorrow. Maybe if this Warshawski read it, she’d have a change of heart, but a gal like her, you gotta wonder if she has a heart to begin with.”
He went on for thirty minutes by the clock, making an easy segue from me to the right’s perennial favorite, Hillary. If I was a devil, she was the Princess of Darkness.
When he finished, I sat in my darkening office, staring at nothing. I felt ill from the bile Barnett had poured out in his molassied voice, but I was furious with Lisa Macauley. She had set me up, pure and simple. Come to see me with a spurious problem, just so she and Barnett could start trashing me on the air. But why?
2
Murray was right: Barnett carried more weight than I wanted to believe. He kept on at me for days, not always as the centerpiece, but often sending a few snide barbs my way. The story went viral pretty fast. Between Barnett and the Net, Macauley got a load of free publicity; her sales skyrocketed. Which made me wonder again if she’d typed up that threatening note herself.
At the same time, my name getting sprinkled with mud did start having an effect on my own business: two new clients backed out midstream, and one of my old regulars phoned to say his company didn’t need any work for me right now. No, they weren’t going to cancel my contract, but they thought, in his picturesque corpo-speak, “we’d go into a holding pattern for the time being.”
I called my lawyer to see what my options were; he advised me to let snarling dogs bite until they got it out of their system. “You don’t have the money to take on Claude Barnett, Vic, and even if you won a slander suit against him, you’d lose while the case dragged on.”
On Sunday I meekly called Murray and asked if he’d be willing to repeat the deal he’d offered me earlier. After a two-hundred-dollar dinner at the Filigree he did a five-minute story at the end of his own cable show, recounting some of my great successes. This succeeded in diverting some of Barnett’s attention from me to Murray—my so-called stooge. Of course he wasn’t going to slander Murray on the air—Barnett could tell lies about a mere mortal like me, but not about someone with a big media operation to pay his legal fees.
I found myself trying to plan the total humiliation of both Barnett and Macauley. Let it go, I would tell myself as I turned restlessly in the middle of the night: this is what he wants, to control my head. Turn it off. But I couldn’t follow this most excellent advice.
I also did a little investigation into Macauley’s life. I called a friend of mine at Channel 13, where Macauley had once worked, to get the station’s take on her. My friend Beth Blacksin told me Macauley moved to Chicago after college hoping to break into broadcast news. After skulking on the sidelines of the industry for five or six years she’d written her first Nan Carruthers book.
Ironically enough, the women’s movement, creating new roles for women in fiction as well as life, had fueled Macauley’s literary success. When her second novel became a bestseller, she divorced the man she married when they were both University of Wisconsin journalism students and began positioning herself as a celebrity. She was famous in book circles for her insistence on personal security: opinion was divided as to whether it had started as a publicity stunt, or if she really did garner a lot of hate mail.
I found a lot of people who didn’t like her—some because of her relentless self-promotion, some because of her politics, and some because they resented her success. As Sal had told me, Macauley was minting money now. Not only Claude, but the Wall Street Journal, the National Review, and all the other conservative outlets hailed her as a welcome antidote to writers like Marcia Muller or Denise Mina.
But despite my digging I couldn’t find any real dirt on Macauley. Nothing I could use to embarrass her into silence. To make matters worse, someone at Channel 13 told her I’d been poking around asking questions about her. Whether by chance or design, she swept into Corona’s one night when I was there with Sal. Sal and I were both enthusiastic fans of Belle Fontaine, the jazz singer who was Corona’s Wednesday night headliner.
Lisa arrived near the end of the first set. She’d apparently found an agency willing to guard her body—she was the center of a boisterous crowd that included a couple of big men with bulges near their a
rmpits. She flung her sable across a chair at a table near ours.
At first I assumed her arrival was just an unhappy coincidence. She didn’t seem to notice me but called loudly for champagne, asking for the most expensive bottle on the menu. A couple at a neighboring table angrily shushed her. This prompted Lisa to start yelling out toasts to some of the people at her table: her fabulous publicist, her awesome attorney, and her extraordinary bodyguards, “Rover” and “Prince.” The sullen-faced men didn’t join in the raucous cheers at their nicknames, but they didn’t erupt, either.
We couldn’t hear the end of “Little Lies” above Lisa’s clamor, but Belle took a break at that point. Sal ordered another drink and started to fill me in on family news: her lover had just landed a role in a sitcom that would take her out to the West Coast for the winter, and Sal was debating hiring a manager for her own bar, the Golden Glow, so she could join Becca. She was just describing—in humorous detail—Becca’s first meeting with the producer when Lisa spoke loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear.
“I’m so glad you boys were willing to help me out. I can’t believe how chicken some of the detectives in this town are. Easy to be big and bold in an abortion clinic, but they run and hide from someone their own size.” She turned deliberately in her chair, faked an elaborate surprise at the sight of me, and continued at the same bellowing pitch, “Oh, V.I. Warshawski! I hope you don’t take it personally.”
“I don’t expect Chanel Number Five from the sewer,” I called back heartily.
The couple who’d tried to quiet Lisa down during the singing laughed at this. The star twitched, then got to her feet, champagne glass in hand, and came over to me.
“I hear you’ve been stalking me, Warshawski. I could sue you for harassment.”
I smiled. “Sugar, I’ve been trying to find out why a big successful writer like you had to invent some hate mail just to have an excuse to slander me. You want to take me to court I’ll be real, real happy to sort out your lies in public.”
“In court or anywhere else I’ll make you look as stupid as you do right now.” Lisa tossed her champagne into my face; a camera flashed just as the drink hit me.
Fury blinded me more than the champagne. I knocked over a chair as I leaped up to throttle her, but Sal got an arm around my waist and pulled me down. Behind Macauley, Prince and Rover got to their feet, ready to move: Lisa had clearly staged the whole event to give them an excuse for beating me up—and to make me look out of control.
Queenie, who owns the Corona, was at my side with some towels. “Galen! I want these people out of here now. And I think some cute person’s been taking pictures. Ms. Macauley, you owe me three hundred dollars for that Dom Pérignon you threw around.”
Prince and Rover thought they were going to take on Queenie’s bouncer, but Galen had broken up bigger fights than they could muster. He managed to lift them both and slam their heads together, then to snatch the fabulous publicist’s bag as she was trying to sprint out the door. Galen took out her phone, erased the photos, and handed the bag back to her with a smile and an insulting bow. The attorney, prompted by Galen, handed over three bills, and the whole party left to loud applause from the audience.
Queenie and Sal had grown up together, which may be why I got Gold Coast treatment that night, but not even her private reserve Veuve Clicquot could take the bad taste from my mouth. If I’d beaten up Macauley I’d have looked like the brute she and Barnett were labeling me; but taking a faceful of champagne sitting down left me looking—and feeling—helpless.
“You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you, Vic?” Sal said as she dropped me off around two in the morning. “’Cause if you are, I’m babysitting you, girlfriend.”
“No. I’m not going to do anything rash, if that’s what you mean. But I’m going to nail that prize bitch, one way or another.”
Twenty-four hours later Lisa Macauley was dead. One day after that I was in jail.
3
All I knew about Lisa’s murder was what I’d read in the papers before the cops came for me: her personal trainer had discovered her body when he arrived Friday morning for their usual workout. She had been beaten to death in what looked like a bloody battle, which is why the state’s attorney finally let me go—they couldn’t find the marks on me they were looking for, nor any blood under my fingernails. And they couldn’t find any evidence in my home or office.
They kept insisting, though, that I had gone to her apartment late Thursday night. They asked me about it all night long on Friday without telling me why they were so sure. When Freeman Carter, my lawyer, finally sprang me Saturday afternoon, he forced them to tell him what they had. The doorman was claiming he had admitted me to Lisa’s apartment just before midnight on Thursday.
Freeman taxed me with it on the ride home. “The way she was carrying on, it would have been like you to demand a face-to-face with her, Vic. Don’t hold out on me—I can’t defend you if you were there and won’t tell me about it.”
“I wasn’t there,” I said flatly. “I am not prone to blackouts or hallucinations: there is no way I could have gone there and forgotten it. I was blamelessly watching the University of Kansas men pound Duke on national television. I even have a witness: my golden retriever shared a pizza with me. Her testimony: she threw up cheese sauce on my bed Friday morning.”
Freeman ignored that. “Sal told me about the dust-up at Corona’s. Anyway, Stacey Cleveland, Macauley’s publicist, had already bared all to the police. You’re the only person they can locate who had reason to be killing mad with her.”
“Then they’re not looking, are they? Someone either pretended to be me or else bribed the doorman to tell the cops I was there. Get me the doorman’s name and I’ll sort out which it was.”
“I can’t do that, Vic: you’re in enough trouble without suborning the state’s key witness.”
“You’re supposed to be on my side,” I cried. “You want to go into court with evidence or not?”
“I’ll talk to the doorman, Vic: you go take a bath—jail doesn’t smell very good on you.”
I followed Freeman’s advice only because I was too tired to do anything else. I slept the clock around, waking just before noon on Sunday.
In the morning I had forty-seven messages from reporters from around the world, including Japan, where Macauley’s books also were bestsellers. When I started outside to get the Sunday papers I found a camera crew parked in front of the building. I retreated, fetched my coat and an overnight bag, and went out the back way. My car was parked right in front of the camera van, so I walked the three miles to my office.
When the Pulteney Building turned condo last April I’d moved my business to a warehouse on the edge of Wicker Park, near the corner of Milwaukee Avenue and North. Fringe galleries and night spots compete with liquor stores and palm readers for air here, and there are a lot of vacant lots, but it was ten minutes—by car, bus, or L—from the heart of the financial district, where most of my business lies.
I had twice my old space at two-thirds the rent. Since I’d had to refurnish—from Dumpsters and auctions—I’d put in a daybed behind a partition: I could camp out here for a few days until media interest in me cooled.
I bought the Sunday papers from one of the liquor stores on my walk. The Sun-Times concentrated on Macauley’s career, including a touching history of her childhood in the resort town of Rhinelander, Wisconsin. She’d been the only child of older parents. Her father, Joseph, had died last year at the age of eighty, but her mother, Louise, still lived in the house where Lisa had grown up. The paper showed a frame bungalow with a porch swing and a minute garden, as well as a tearful Louise Macauley in front of Lisa’s doll collection. (“I’ve kept the room the way it looked when she left for college,” the caption read.)
Her mother never wanted her going off to the University of Wisconsin. “Even though we raised her with the right values and sent her to church schools, Madison is a terrible place. She
wouldn’t listen to us, though, and now look what’s happened.”
The Tribune had a discreet sidebar on Lisa’s recent contretemps with me. In the Herald-Star, Murray published the name of the doorman who had admitted “someone claiming to be V.I. Warshawski” to Macauley’s building. It was Reggie Whitman. He’d been the doorman since the building went up in 1978, was a grandfather, a church deacon, coached a basketball team at the Henry Horner homes, and was generally so virtuous that truth radiated from him like a beacon.
Murray also had talked with Lisa’s ex-husband, Brian Gerstein, an assistant producer for one of the local network news stations. He was appropriately grief-stricken at his ex-wife’s murder. The picture supplied by Gerstein’s publicist showed a man in his mid-forties with a TV smile but anxious eyes.
I called Beth Blacksin, the reporter at Channel 13 who’d filled me in on what little I’d learned about Lisa Macauley before her death.
“Vic! Where are you? We’ve got a camera crew lurking outside your front door hoping to talk to you!”
“I know, babycakes. And talk to me you shall, as soon as I find out who set me up to take the fall for Lisa Macauley’s death. So give me some information now and it shall return to you like those famous loaves of bread.”
Beth wanted to dicker, but the last two weeks had case-hardened my temper. She finally agreed to talk with the promise of a reward in the indefinite future.
Brian Gerstein had once worked at Channel 13, just as he had for every other news station in town. “He’s a loser, Vic. I’m not surprised Lisa dumped him when she started to get successful. He’s the kind of guy who would sit around dripping into his coffee because you were out-earning him, moaning, trying to get you to feel sorry for him. People hire him because he’s a good editor, but then they give him the shove because he gets the whole newsroom terminally depressed.”
Love & Other Crimes Page 33