by Tracy Clark
“That’s interesting,” I said. “So, you’re the closet gardener. What’s a lotus flower mean?”
He slurped down more Jell-O, swallowed. “It symbolizes estrangement, somebody forgetful of the past.”
“So, somebody thinks Allen forgot something that meant a lot to whoever?”
“Or they just like lotus flowers and went with that,” Ben said.
“Now, that makes me want to know what the other flowers were. If they mean something, too, that might tell us who sent them. Like maybe Deton Peets. Allen sure forgot about him and his son pretty quickly. Dontell Adkins, too. And you could say Allen was estranged from both Hewitt and Sewell. I don’t think she’s gotten another delivery since either of them was killed.”
“Could be something.” Ben finished his Jell-O and three-pointed the empty container into the wastebasket by his bed. He grinned, winked. “Mickerson is back, baby.”
I stood to leave. I wanted to touch base with Tanaka.
“Estrangement’s not so bad. Could have been a lot worse,” Ben said. “It could have been crimson roses.”
“What’s so bad about crimson roses?” I asked, almost certain I didn’t want to know.
“Well, they sure as hell don’t mean I love ya,” Ben said.
Chapter 31
I walked into Huddleston Park around nine that night, the approximate time that Chandler had taken her fateful stroll. I wanted to see what the park looked like at that hour, get a feel for it. This was Lincoln Park, so condos, bars, and upscale restaurants hemmed the park in on all sides, and there was a lot of open space with playlots, sports fields, and tennis courts set out around the perimeter. I found the pedestrian path and followed it in, a thick canopy of trees mottling the light from the streetlamps. I couldn’t see any woman walking alone along this path at night even in this neighborhood, which was known to be safer. Why had Chandler?
I stopped at the head of the path, scanned the empty park, not seeing a soul in it. I turned and looked behind me, toward the bright lights of the street—lots of people out and about on bikes, walking, strolling. Wouldn’t someone have heard a gunshot or a scream?
I plucked a small flashlight out of my pocket and walked on, listening, alert, armed. The path forked at a big memorial fountain with water spouting out of the trunks of iron elephants, and a few feet from that, I saw the emergency phone Chandler must have used. I lifted the receiver, got a dial tone, hung up.
They’d cleared away the crime-scene tape, but Tanaka had explained the scene clearly enough to me. Chandler had been found just inches from a broken sewer grate. I trained my flash on the path, swept it right and left till I found the grate. It was rusted, had a gap on one side, where the metal had worn away and fallen off. I toed the grate. It wobbled.
I squatted down and trained the light into the hole but couldn’t make out much of anything in the murk, though I could faintly hear water dripping and could smell the stench of stagnation and rot. Overhead the leaves on the trees rustled. So, he came up behind her, shot her, and ran? I stared at the phone again, then at the grate. Maybe a few hundred feet to the left lay a softball field, its lights blazing, but none of that shine made it to this spot.
Why here? I looked around. No cameras. I pulled at the grate to see if I could lift it or slide it, but it was too heavy. I stuck my hand through the opening, flexed my fingers, pulled my hand out clean.
I heard footsteps and shot to my feet, whirled to find Marcus standing on the path yards from me, his hands in the pockets of a dark trench coat, his expression unreadable. I backed up. Neither one of us said anything for a time.
“I knew you’d need to see it,” he said finally.
I kept my eyes on him but worried about the rest of the path, the parts I couldn’t watch. I worried about who else might be on it and what they planned on doing. I worried that someone might be Farraday, back for more, this time with help. An ambush. I hadn’t told anyone where I was going tonight. My mistake. If I went missing from this park and my body ended up in some landfill, no one who loved me would even know where to start looking.
“What are you doing, Marcus?”
“Following up. It’s still my case. You and Tanaka seem to have forgotten that.” He took a step forward.
“Marcus.” It was a warning.
I hadn’t meant it to come out so harsh, but he was the last person I wanted to see in a dark park at nine at night. I scanned the bushes, looking for Farraday. Marcus slid his hands out of his pockets, then displayed them so I’d see he had nothing in them. It was no comfort at all. I held my breath, braced.
“I’m a cop, not some street thug after your purse.”
I didn’t answer. I checked the fountain to see if anyone was hiding behind it. “Is Farraday with you?”
“No reason he would be. I figure he’s halfway to the nearest rehab by now. He’s dead in the water.”
“That leaves you hanging,” I said.
“Not as much as you’d think. He wasn’t my only connection. I can always make a deal. We never did walk in lockstep.”
“Seriously?” I would have laughed if I hadn’t been 100 percent worried about walking out of this park alive. “Did you know he was following me? That he’d meant to come after me?”
He didn’t answer right away, which made me wonder about his hesitation. “No.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He moved forward again, one step.
I shook my head. “Marcus, I swear to God.”
“I’m a cop.”
“So you keep saying.”
“What happened to our spirit of cooperation?”
“That’s Tanaka and me. You? Back it up.”
He took a step back, smiled, calm as anything. That was the creepy part. “We found a gun down that hole, a Glock seventeen. Could be the one used on Chandler.” He glanced at the grate. “Also found a muddy glove.”
I didn’t look. I knew where the grate was. I was standing just inches from it.
“Chandler was found right where you’re standing,” he said. “Why do you think he ditched it?”
“Good question. Why don’t you head on out and check on that?”
“Guess I’d better. I wouldn’t want to be ‘set straight’ like Farraday was.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Another pause. “Your guy paid him a visit, had a little talk about the incident at your office. I heard it got intense. Me? I’ve got no beef with him, unless he takes exception to this little meet after the fact.”
Eli and Farraday? “When was this?”
“Yesterday.” The cocky look on his face made my blood boil. “I guess chivalry isn’t dead. Funny, though, I didn’t think you went in for that sort of thing, but I guess people change.”
I glared at him. “Some don’t.”
He looked around, then back at me. “Have a good night.”
He walked off down the path. I didn’t follow him. Instead, I waited until he was out of sight, and then darted off across the softball field, staying under the lights, out in the open. I ran all the way back to my car, my legs shaking.
Chapter 32
The air was still as I sat out on my back porch, in my grandfather’s wicker rocker, one of my favorite spots. The chair was old, way past its prime, but I remembered being rocked in it when I was a kid and being read to while sitting in my grandfather’s lap. I’d repaired the rocker at least twenty times since he’d sat in it last, but it was still good. It felt like a safe place.
I ran my hands along the rests, worn smooth over time, thinking about the park and about landfills and about Eli riding in on a white horse to put a good scare into Farraday. I kept up a slow, steady rock, my eyes closed, wondering about the grate and the gun and the glove and why Marcus had told me about them.
My doorbell rang. I had a good idea who it was. I got up and went inside. I stood, my finger hovering over the intercom button without pressing it, longer than I would have before the
park. Then I punched it.
“Yeah?”
“It’s me.”
I buzzed him up, then walked back to the kitchen. The front door opened, and he walked back to join me, his tie loosened, his cuffs rolled up.
“I tried calling.”
“I was outside, getting some air.” I stared at him, wondering what he saw when he looked at me, and how far afield that image was from how I saw myself.
“You okay?”
Maybe it was me who was looking at things from a crooked perspective, causing friction where there didn’t have to be any. Maybe I was too independent? Too self-contained? I didn’t lean or cling or hang on too long. When you’d lost as much as I had, when almost everyone you counted on had been taken away, you found your feet, you moved under your own steam, distrusting everything else, or you flamed out. I hadn’t flamed out yet.
I’d handled my run-in with Farraday. That should have been where it ended. I wasn’t angry, not really, just sure of where the line should be, a little worried that Eli had gotten me wrong and wasn’t seeing me.
“You went to see Farraday.” It was not a question.
He unbuttoned his collar, understanding slowly dawning. “That’s it.” He leaned back against the counter. “I did.”
“Were you going to tell me?”
“Hadn’t planned on it. It was between him and me.”
I waited for him to say more, but he seemed content to leave it there. “Yeah, I’m going to need more than that.”
He pushed himself off the counter, stood close to me. “This doesn’t have to get heavy, does it?”
“That depends on what you say next.”
“It wasn’t about me riding in, okay? He crossed a line. He messed with someone who matters to me. He didn’t know that. Now he does.”
“Sounds like riding in to me. I had it covered. It was over, done. I know because I finished it. That should have been enough.”
He stared at me, intensity in the look. “Look, I told him that if he came at you again, if I or you saw him anywhere close ever, I was going to rip his arms off and shove them down his throat. I didn’t do it, because you couldn’t. I didn’t do it to stake a claim. It was him and me coming to an understanding.”
The kitchen clock marked the time, the steady brush of the second hand uncharacteristically loud, as we stood watching each other, at a kind of crossroads.
“I didn’t ask for your help,” I said. “I didn’t need it. Man to man doesn’t work for me, Eli.”
He took a step back, his eyes never leaving mine. “Are we heading in a certain direction?”
“What?” I’d been thinking things through, weighing what I was willing to throw away and what I’d fight to keep.
“You and me. Are we heading in a certain direction?”
I had envisioned this discussion going another way. I was on firm ground, in the right. He’d overstepped. Not maliciously, but he’d done it. And I wasn’t okay with it. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“You and me,” he said. “We get along? Fit nicely together?”
“I thought we did. But that’s got nothing to do with . . .”
He stopped me mid-sentence. “Farraday needed a reality check. He got it. First from you, then from me. He needed to know how far I was willing to take things. I let him know straight up.”
“I fight my own battles, Eli, always have.”
“I know. I’ve seen you do it. Like I said, I didn’t do it because you couldn’t.” He searched my face, blew out a breath. “But we’re still going to talk about this, aren’t we?”
I pulled out a kitchen stool, then one for him. I was beat and would have preferred another kind of end to the day, but here we were. This was important, and it wasn’t so much about Farraday as it was about me. I wanted Eli to get it before we went another step forward. We sat facing each other, our knees touching, and I told him who I was.
Chapter 33
The next morning, I sat in the kitchen with my laptop, sipping a cup of tea, wondering, not for the first time, about Kaye Chandler and her relationship with Allen. Where’d she come from? She’d mentioned working with Allen at a PR firm before they branched off together to steal the magazine idea from the Peetses. Curious, I had Googled Allen and tapped into the longest bio sheet I’d ever seen. The PR firm, the Halliwell Agency, was mentioned. Had they met there, or somewhere else?
I couldn’t find much on Chandler through usual channels. She didn’t have an arrest record, she didn’t owe the IRS, and she hadn’t been foreclosed on or had her car repossessed. By all accounts, she was leading an exemplary life, but all accounts could be deceiving. Nobody skipped through life without picking up a little dirt somewhere. I closed down my laptop, got showered, dressed, and out of the house, bent on finding it. I’d start with Halliwell and work my way back till something started to stink.
The agency was a small firm with, by all accounts, a sterling reputation, started by a husband-and-wife team, Margaret and Ronald Halliwell, but Ronald was now deceased. I called first and spoke to Margaret personally, explaining what I was looking for. She had heard about the murders and about Chandler’s attack and agreed to meet with me, but not in her office, in her home, which was one floor up, in a boutique setup on East Chestnut in the Gold Coast. Separate entrance, she told me, more discreet, away from prying eyes and wagging tongues.
I got there in half an hour, parked, and rang the bell at a red door. The entrance to the agency was around the corner. I eyed the building, wondering if Halliwell owned all of it, knowing that if she did, she’d shelled out millions. The door opened, and a well-dressed black woman in her early sixties, I’d estimate, was standing there. I recognized Margaret Halliwell from the photos I’d found on her agency’s website. We exchanged pleasantries; then she saw me in and led me into a swanky living room with east-facing windows overlooking the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier.
“May I get you anything? Coffee?”
“I’m fine. Thanks.”
“Sit, please.” She offered the sofa, then sat across from me in a wing chair. “I can’t imagine what use I can be to you, really, as I explained on the phone. I haven’t seen Vonda or Kaye in years.”
“I know. I’m interested in their background. Anything about their time with the agency. What you can tell me about their friendship.”
“You think they may be involved in what’s happened, don’t you?”
“That doesn’t surprise you?”
She watched me. “It doesn’t, no.”
Halliwell stood, walked over to a side table where a coffeepot, cups, and saucers were set up. She poured herself a cup and came back and sat down again. “Vonda would drop little things about herself, college, places she’d been, jobs she’d had. Kaye never revealed anything. We hired Vonda first. She was phenomenal, so great with the clients. She’d worked with another firm before us and came highly recommended. A few months after she joined us, we had a position open, and she recommended Kaye, quite highly, as I recall. We hired her, too.”
She put down her cup, smoothed her skirt. “They weren’t friends in the usual sense, I don’t think, but still they were strangely bonded. Vonda was consumed with herself—always just so, always wanting the best. Kaye was the list maker, the priority setter. She had the ideas. Together, they made a good team. Apart, well, Vonda seemed to stall, and Kaye all but melted into the wallpaper.”
“So, they knew each other before Chandler was hired.”
“Yes, for how long, I have no idea. I do know we were sorry to lose them to Senator Devin.”
“Senator Devin? How’d that happen?”
“We didn’t know it, but Vonda began seeing him, though he was married at the time. They tried to keep it low key, or at least I think he did, but when you’re that high profile . . . Anyway, after a few months, she resigned.”
“And Chandler?”
“Vonda never told Kaye she was leaving. Kaye seemed genuinely surprised by the news. She became su
llen, quiet. It was like a lightbulb had burned out. Then, not long after, she resigned, too. We discovered later that she’d gone to work as Vonda’s personal assistant, of all things. We heard rumors that Kaye and Devin weren’t getting along, but I could see why they wouldn’t. Kaye always stayed very close to Vonda, and no man likes a third wheel.
“The senator had a daughter, but I don’t think either Vonda or Kaye got along with her. She was very close to her father. Vonda wouldn’t have liked that. She needs to be the center of everyone’s attention, and, of course, Kaye doesn’t like whatever Vonda doesn’t like.”
“Sounds . . . unhealthy.”
Halliwell smiled. “I agree. The two of them are like a puppeteer and her puppet. One pulls the strings, and the other dances, each dependent on the other.”
“So, if Chandler got tired of dancing at the end of Allen’s strings . . .”
Her eyes widened. “Kaye? Oh, no. You’ve got it the wrong way around. It’s Kaye holding the strings, not Vonda. Vonda’s a star, shrewd in many ways, but it’s Kaye who has the vision and the drive. Vonda couldn’t make a move without her.”
Chandler in charge, not Allen? That couldn’t be right. What about the way Allen ordered Chandler around, dismissed her? “You’re sure?”
Halliwell nodded. “Very sure.”
You wouldn’t happen to have Chandler’s résumé or old contact information, would you?”
She rose. “Wait. I keep business files here, in the office and off-site. Redundancies. I just may have a copy.”
She walked out of the room, and I waited impatiently, checking my watch, glancing out the window at the wheel. I had a feeling something was about to shake loose. I nearly pounced on Halliwell when she came back, a file in her hands.
“Here it is,” she said.
“You kept it all this time?”
“I keep all personnel files. We’re a small firm. I see no reason to do away with them.” She handed the file to me and sat back down.