by Tracy Clark
Until then I had to get moving. I got up, showered, dressed, and hit the office, tearing into Allen’s life for whatever or whomever she was hiding. I pulled up everything I could find on the woman, no matter how small or absurd the item was, keeping an eye out for anything that could be the fuel behind someone’s hate. The anonymous caller, the one Kendrick had transferred to Chandler, had said he knew Allen almost thirty years ago. That’d put her at about college age. I couldn’t track down everyone she’d known back then, of course; all I could do was cast a wide net, go back as far as seemed prudent, and see if I hit on anything. My odds of success weren’t great: there was too much ground to cover.
Break it up, Cass. Pick a starting point. Work your way back.
Allen’s magazine. I stacked the issues I had on top of my desk and started in on each one. There was no one in the mastheads named Eric. What about the two young writers who’d bailed after her first year? They’d likely been in the same position Kendrick was in now, underpaid, overworked. Despite what Chandler had said, that had to have led to hard feelings. Maybe one or both were resentful enough to do something about it now? Worth checking.
I found nothing on Loudon in the usual searches. Maybe she had married and wasn’t using her maiden name? I had better luck with Adkins, or bad luck, as it turned out. I found a short, cryptic obituary in the paper. He’d died at the age of twenty-two, the victim of a violent hit-and-run. I saved the obit, searched the paper for the news story on the accident, but got only a little more than what I had. No mention of the driver having been found. Adkins was survived by his grandparents. That was all. A life summed up in less than twenty lines of newspaper copy. It was possible Chandler didn’t know about the accident, but how likely was it? Would I find that Reesa Loudon had met a bad end, too? And while I was looking at obituaries, I looked for one for Allen’s mother but came up empty. Allen’s memoir said she’d died when Allen was still in college, that she’d missed out on her success. Maybe she’d died somewhere else? I’d have to come back to that.
I scribbled down names, dates, and particulars on a notepad, not knowing what might be important. Allen had attended Northwestern University for a year before transferring to the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois, from which she eventually graduated. Nothing jumped out from either place. Why the change in schools?
I stuck to it until my eyes began to cross, digging deep until finally I stumbled upon a reference to a write-up on Allen titled “The Magazine Wars” in a women’s magazine. It took a while to find the original piece, but I did. It detailed a contentious tug of war between Allen’s publication, Strive, and a competing magazine called Veritas, published by a father-son team, Deton and Henry Peets. The Peetses had accused Allen of stealing their concept, siphoning off readers, and bleeding them dry, and neither had been shy about hurling insults. The father, Deton, had called Allen a Jezebel, a thief in the night. The article was over four years old, and I couldn’t find a follow-up article or anything else on the feud.
I printed the story out, stuck it into a file folder, then glanced at my phone, hoping for news from the hospital, but there was nothing from Carole. I stuffed my notes into my bag, grabbed my jacket, and headed out. Dontell Adkins, the mudslinging Peetses, and Allen’s university switch were threads I could follow. If I kept busy enough, I might even be able to ignore the sinking feeling in my gut that my world was about to come crashing down on me . . . again.
The UIC campus was a sprawling, fast-moving melting pot of nationalities and academic concentrations, minus a lot of the rah-rah, quad-lounging fervor of its sister campus downstate in Champaign. UIC offered higher education on the down and dirty for those who didn’t have a lot of time or money to Jung Byson their way toward a diploma on frat parties, football games, and navel-gazing Proust fests in the back of dusty on-campus bars.
I wanted a look at the alumni lists, hoping to find Allen on them. I parked in the lot across from Hull House and trotted across busy Halsted, dodging heavy traffic, the rumble of the trains running along the CTA Blue Line drowning out the honking horns. I could smell the sausages cooking on Taylor Street from here, and across the bridge in Greektown, lamb roasting on the spit. I’d thought to try my luck in the administration building, where maybe I’d find a staffer I could convince to let me take a look, but I switched gears halfway through the concrete quad and took off for the library instead.
“You’re looking for old school papers?” the pudgy boy behind the counter asked. Maybe he was eighteen or nineteen, grungy, beady rat eyes. “How old?”
“Let’s start with those between nineteen eighty-seven and ninety.”
He blinked. “Seriously? That’s, like, a hundred years ago.”
I was stressed, scared, pressed for time. “Do you have them or not?”
“Everything’s digital now. I’d have to put you in a room and cue up the reader,” he said, as though it was an impossible ask, as though the “putting me in a room” part should be enough to get me to reconsider my request.
“Okay,” I answered flatly.
We stood there for a time in silence. I didn’t know if he didn’t think I could handle the reader or if he thought I thought I couldn’t handle the reader. In either case, it didn’t appear that he was planning on putting me next to one anytime soon.
“The papers,” I snapped. “It’s important.”
He pointed over my left shoulder. “The rooms are over there. I’ll come around and get you started, I guess.”
I had no trouble handling the reader. I scrolled through the digitized papers, looking for Allen’s name, a photo, or any mention of her. I started at the year she transferred in, and made my way slowly through to the end of the year, not finding a thing. I did the same for the next year and got the same result. It wasn’t until what would have been her junior year that I spotted a grainy black-and-white photo of her taken at a student rally. In it she was standing at a podium, her fist raised defiantly. The caption was a revelation—BLACK STUDENT UNION PRESIDENT BENITA RAMSEY PROTESTS INEQUITIES IN EDUCATION FOR MINORITY STUDENTS.
Benita Ramsey? I zoomed in closer on the face. It was definitely Allen, minus the wealth and the air of pretention. I’d never heard the name before. It wasn’t in her bio or her memoir. Why? The photo proved to be just the tip of the iceberg. There were other photos, many of them. Vonda-Benita’s junior year apparently was the year she flew out of the gate to make her mark. There were awards and academic honors; she was named student ambassador and student liaison. She campaigned for editor of the paper and got it. She won a prestigious scholarship worth fifty thousand dollars. I stopped at a photo of her looking chummy with a trio of twentysomethings. The caption identified them as staff writers on the paper—Patsy O’Keefe, Angela Dotson, Dennis Seymour. They all looked happy, even Allen. Did she actually at one time have friends?
“I need to see your student and alumni directories.” I was back at the counter, but the boy wasn’t thrilled to see me again. “I’ll take student directories for the same year range, and any alumni listings you have for the years right after.”
He didn’t ask any questions, just went to get them, glancing back at me like he expected me to jump over the counter and tackle him. I met his look, matched it, and idled at the counter till he came back. I took the short stack of directories back to the small room, then looked for names, addresses, telephone numbers for the three kids in the photograph. When I’d found them in the older directories, I checked the newer ones to see if they were still listed. They were. Score one for me. I jotted down the information and then returned everything to the counter. I then asked for a computer to use and was directed to a room of communal desktops for rent by the half hour.
Ramsey, not Allen. That was likely why I hadn’t been able to find an obituary for her mother. I tried again, typing in Ramsey and the date range that worked, and found not only a short obituary but also a news story about a shooting death, the victim one Louise Culvert Ramsey, age f
orty-four. She’d been the manager of a neighborhood dry cleaners when she was shot and killed while walking to her car after her shift. One round to the head. Her valuables taken.
As I walked back through the campus, the enormity of my task suddenly hit me. I had only two legs, two hands, one brain. Allen’s mother’s death disturbed me. It would have been a devastating loss for Allen to have experienced, losing her mother in such a tragic way. One shot to the head. A random robbery. Did it mean anything that the death of Allen’s mother was similar to the deaths of Hewitt and Sewell? If it did, what was the connection? And what, if anything, did any of it have to do with the man who’d shown up at the bookstore?
I stopped, took a seat on a stone bench, and tried calling each of Allen’s writer friends but got only voice mail. I left detailed messages for each, then tried Deton and Henry Peets but got the same result at the Veritas office. Their automated message said I’d missed them by half an hour, but I could try again when they opened the following morning at ten. It was just past 5:00 PM now.
It was then I noticed the message light blinking on my phone. It was a text from Carole. I held my breath. Ben had a fever they couldn’t control, the text read, which hinted at an infection. People whizzed past me; the train rumbled; the traffic sped by. For a moment I wasn’t sure which way I needed to go. I should be at the hospital in case . . . but I wasn’t needed there. I couldn’t get my bearings. I couldn’t think straight. Carole and Ben’s family were expecting too much. Infection.
I stood, eyed the lot with my car in it, turned to glance down the street toward Greektown across the bridge, fully aware that I was standing at a crossroads. My feet started walking toward the bridge before I even made the decision to go that way. I dialed Tanaka’s number. She picked up on the second ring.
“We need to talk,” I said. “Can you meet me?”
Chapter 18
I sat at a window table in the Persephone restaurant, watching the other diners pass their time, seemingly content. The waiter, nice enough, had tried pushing the souvlaki, on special today, but I’d shooed him away twice. I had no appetite. My mind was on the hospital, on Ben’s fever. I spotted Tanaka the moment she walked in the door, and I straightened up as she walked over to the table.
“Thanks for coming,” I said.
She sat across from me. “Your call was the last thing I expected.” She eyed her water glass but left it where it sat. We weren’t here to pass the time or share a meal. This was business. “You said you had something?”
“Two more deaths tied to Allen. A hit-and-run and another mugging, her own mother. The driver and the shooter were never found. Maybe they’re unrelated, but what if they aren’t? What if whatever we’re dealing with now has deep roots and goes back years?”
“Sounds like you’re trying to shoehorn these incidents into a pattern where there isn’t one. Anyway, I thought you were out of this?”
“I’m back in.”
She watched me but didn’t say anything.
“Allen’s the link. She has to be. It’s worth giving these other cases a closer look.” Tanaka stared at me. It didn’t look like she was going to give me an inch, but I didn’t have time to play it slow. “Were Hewitt and Sewell shot with the same gun?”
Tanaka’s brows rose, and she had a curious look on her face. “I thought this meeting would be about you telling me something I could use, not me divulging something you need.”
“Like?”
“Like what Allen’s hiding.”
So much for Chandler breaking ranks. “Chandler didn’t come to you?”
“Was she supposed to?” She waved it off. “Doesn’t matter. No peeing babies or Jones to set you off. Tell me.”
It didn’t take long for me to decide between Ben and Allen. I would always be on Ben’s side, and he on mine. “She’s been receiving threatening letters, nuisance calls, flowers. He addresses the letters Dear Bitch. I know of maybe half a dozen for sure, but there’ve been more, which they’ve destroyed. I think this all started a couple months ago. The flowers come delivered to her office, unsigned, apparently untraceable. Creepy. She ordered Chandler to destroy those, too, and they haven’t gone to the police, because Allen doesn’t want to damage her brand or put her business out on the street. That’s why she hired me and Ben. To protect her. She doesn’t seem to be too concerned about those around her, Hewitt, Sewell. Allen won’t win any awards for altruism.”
“You saw these letters?”
“I saw a copy of one of them. Chandler slipped it to Ben. The threat wasn’t specific, but the letter was menacing, and it was written in red ink. You might even be able to dismiss it all as some sick prank, but then her employees started dying. And now the hit-and-run and her mother’s death. It’s curious.”
“And you think the bookstore guy looks good for all that?”
I shook my head. “He feels different somehow, outside the pattern, but he’s connected to her in some way. We find him, we might get closer to some answers.”
“Only he got away.” There was a hint of condemnation in her voice. She knew I had let him go and had stayed with Ben. It’d been the right choice then and now, and I stood by it.
“She knows who he is, and she’s afraid, not of the letters so much, but of him. I saw the look on her face. It was as if she’d seen a ghost. She’s hiding something, something dangerous. I don’t think even Chandler knows what it is, not completely, but she may be able to get her to talk a lot easier than you or I could.”
“You can’t even know for sure the guy who knifed Mickerson’s the same one harassing her.”
“You’re right. He could be somebody totally different, a needy fan. Maybe he didn’t come there to do anything to her. He wanted face time. We kept him from getting it. That’s when he got agitated and pulled the knife. He scared himself. I could tell he’d gone further than he meant to go with things.”
Tanaka leaned back. “You know, you’re the only one saying she knows the guy. Just because of a look? She swears she doesn’t know a thing.”
“She’s lying.”
Tanaka paused. “Funny. A couple of days ago, you were stonewalling the hell out of us. Now, suddenly, everything’s on the table. Pardon me for being just a little suspicious of your motives.”
The waiter rolled up again, all smiles, this time with two menus big enough to water-ski on, but he didn’t get far.
Tanaka held up a hand, not bothering even to look at him. “Not yet.”
Abashed, a little startled by the brush-off, the waiter melted away.
“I want the guy,” I said.
“It looked like you’d washed your hands of the whole thing. Now you want the guy?”
Our eyes locked. “Ben’s not doing well. He was at first. Then something happened. A clot. He’s running a fever now. I don’t know what that means. His family wants me to find the man who hurt him. I work alone. I like it that way usually, but I’m only one person. It’s slow going, and I don’t have the resources you do. He’s family. They’re family. I can’t mess this up, and I’m afraid I might.” I pushed past the lump in my throat. “Cooperation is faster. I asked before, but you didn’t answer. Were Hewitt and Sewell killed by the same gun?”
Tanaka took a sip of water, set the glass down, then let moments pass. “Striations match. Caliber too. We’ll need the gun, of course. Cooperation. What’s that mean exactly?”
“I’m operating on the premise that whatever Allen is holding on to is something long buried, so I’m starting in her past and working my way forward. Maybe I’ll find this Eric there. Maybe I’ll find something that explains him. I could be totally off base. I won’t know until I run things down. What I do know is, I can’t do it all myself. Time, like I said, might be a factor.”
“It’s got nothing to do with you trying to show up Jones? Because whatever went on between the two of—”
I cut her off, answered curtly. “Marcus Jones is the last thing on my mind right now.”
“I didn’t think you were that wild about me, either.”
“That was my initial feeling. I’ll have to wait and see if it holds.”
Tanaka grinned. “Wow. You don’t pull any punches, do you? Not even going to try to butter me up?”
“Is that what it’s going to take?”
She tapped her fingers on the table, watched me. “So, we open lines of communication, share information. My resources, your pain-in-the-ass-ness?”
“I follow my leads. You follow yours. First one to find something hollers. I don’t care who ends this first, only that it ends.”
“Two bodies,” Tanaka said, “and the possibility that there could be more. That’s a lot of dots to connect when you’re racing against time.”
I looked around the restaurant, at life as it went on while Ben’s hung in the balance. “The thing about time is you don’t pay it a bit of mind until you have so little of it left.” I turned back to Tanaka. “Then you’d trade your soul for even a second more.”
She took another sip from her glass. “If I agree, if, this cooperation better be a two-way street, and you’d better stay in your lane.”
“I agree to the first,” I said, “but can’t guarantee the second if your side drops the ball.”
Her lips twisted into a cocky grin. “I’ve never dropped a ball in my life.”
I stood, grabbed my jacket from the back of the chair. “Me either.” I flagged the lonesome waiter, who rushed over expectantly. “Try the souvlaki, Tanaka. It’s on special today. I’ll be in touch.”