“Even if someone close to my father were implicated, I don’t know what could be proven.” She smiled the smile of a calculating woman. “You can speak in front of Joel. If he doesn’t know that he was the last person to see my father alive, other than my mother and my father’s mistress, then I don’t know what.” She addressed Joel. “You forgot to tell me you took Mac out on the sailboat that day, honey. Wasn’t it a little cold?”
“He wanted to see the boat. He didn’t want to wait until spring.”
“Oh dear. A premonition. There you have it, Detective. It’s all in the family. We tell no lies and keep no secrets. Do we, Joel?” Kendra turned back to the detective. “What do you know about Mrs. Santana? You are familiar with Eddie Santana’s widow.”
“Wife of the reputed mobster?”
“How kind of you to put it that way.”
“Are you speaking of Juliana Morrissey? Or the first Mrs. Santana? Eloise?”
“You’re very up on things.” She sent Joel a sly glance. “He left everything to his new wife, which begs the question. Did he marry the first Mrs. Santana for love or money?”
“He had his own money,” Joel said. “He didn’t need hers.”
“Then it was for love. And the second Mrs. Santana? Did she marry him for love? Or for money?”
“Where are we going with this?” Wakeman asked.
“I’m not sure. But I’m curious. Did he have the first Mrs. Santana killed?”
“I believe it was a drunk driver.”
“Yes, I know, but did he have her killed?”
“I don’t know. Can you arrange a head-on collision?”
“With money, anything’s possible.” She was looking at Joel when she said, “You have my solemn promise, Detective. I won’t bother the Cutlers again.” She swiveled her head and stared into the policeman’s eyes. He acknowledged her with a nod and scraped back his chair.
After Wakeman let himself out, Kendra turned toward Joel and met his anger.
“Why the hell did you bring up my client?” he said. “In front of a goddamn cop?”
“Homicide detective,” she corrected. “And the operative word isn’t ‘why’ but ‘when’. When did I find out my marriage was in trouble? The night, I suppose, of my birthday. The night you dined with Juliana Morrissey Santana and pretended she was your wife.”
After the back door banged, only Kendra McSweeney Swain remained in the kitchen. But Joel Swain’s anger stayed behind.
Chapter 15
MRS. JELLINEK WELCOMED Kendra into the Queen Anne and gave her a warm hug. As she stamped snow from her boots, Kendra whiffed the latent fragrance of her father’s pipe tobacco. This should have been a moment to cry. But she hadn’t cried since the funeral.
A grand staircase led up from the foyer, and side banisters curved gracefully to the landing. From there, two short flights climbed to either side of an outer corridor. The doors of three bedrooms were closed, but one was ajar.
Emily appeared in the doorway and looked below. “How nice,” she said. “A neighbor come to call.” Carpet runners of royal blue—inset with golden fleur-de-lis—covered the stair steps. Emily descended, regal in profile. “Come in, dear. You look cold. Take off those wet things. We have plenty of room at the palace. Rooms and grooms and sonic booms. Here, there, and everywhere.”
Kendra exchanged a telling glance with Birdie. “Now, Emily. You know this is your daughter.”
When Emily reached the bottom of the staircase, she tilted her head birdlike and considered the stranger who was visiting on a Sunday afternoon. “Who’s fooling who? My daughter is twelve years old. This woman is thirty, if she’s a day.” As was her habit, Emily McSweeney approached her daughter with an outstretched hand. Her palm lay tenderly on Kendra’s icy cold cheek. “Though she’s very beautiful, isn’t she?” Emily said to no one in particular. Her face was flat and expressionless. Her eyes were another matter. Behind them lurked chaos, confusion, and oddly, joy. “Kendra will look like her when she grows up.” She turned to Birdie. “Speaking of which, where is Kendra? Late from school again?”
“Yes, dear, late from school,” Birdie said.
In the kitchen, Birdie and Kendra sat down to a cup of tea. Teaspoons clinked against the sides of their cups. Emily had returned to her bedroom. The sounds of opening and closing drawers filtered downstairs. She was forever searching for things lost long ago but never forgotten.
“I’ve been to the lawyers,” Kendra said to Mrs. Jellinek. “For the reading of the will. You remember Keller and Finch?” The partners had been handling Mac’s personal affairs for years.
“Then he didn’t transfer his interests to Joel or Jordan?” Birdie said.
Kendra shook her head. “We can be grateful for continuity, I suppose, but ....” She braced herself with a shuddering breath. “I’m not sure what to make of what they told me, but I think you should know.”
While Mrs. Jellinek was a woman of few words, she possessed uncanny reasoning powers. Her expression of concern mirrored Kendra’s own doubts. “What is it, dear? What’s going on?”
Staring into the amber liquid that filled the delicate blue porcelain, Kendra considered the steam rising from its surface. She had tried to reason away her fears on the drive over but couldn’t deny the facts any longer. “Mac changed his will. Less than a month ago.”
Chapter 16
SHOULDERS HUNCHED AGAINST the bitter winds, Hunter approached the parked minivan. He climbed into the passenger seat and instantly gathered Kendra into his arms. “Don’t look,” he said. “She might see you.” Hiding her face with the back of his head, he pressed his lips over hers.
Wearing a leather coat, Juliana Santana appeared outside the bookstore on Wabash Avenue, gathered her bearings, and strolled in their direction. The tendrils of her long hair whipped around as she passed the minivan. Had she looked past the foggy windows, she would have seen a pair of lovers drowning in a sea of passion.
Looks deceived. The adulterous wife and her boy toy weren’t paramours in the classic sense. Even though the kiss lasted like an overlong page from a romance novel, infatuation had nothing to do with their clinch.
Kendra struggled inside the clutch, but he pressed his advantage and dug insistent fingers into her sides. Their blended breaths raced at breakneck speed. His mouth stuck to hers like freezer burn. His eyes were more inquisitive than his tongue. Theirs was a fierce competition between equals, to see who would outlast the other. The prize was as fleeting as a wink or a sigh, but the means and methods of winning were as tricky and devious as a high stakes poker game. She tore her lips away and swore, but he placed a silencing finger across her mouth. “I won’t be long,” he said, and scrambled out of the car.
She watched his performance in the rearview mirror. The dance he danced was a mastery of showmanship as he crowded Santana’s heels. The way he stalked women was as dirty as the way he kissed them.
Kendra lost sight of Hunter in the thick of the holiday throng. It was Christmas Eve Day, and the sidewalks overflowed with last-minute shoppers. Five minutes went by. Ten. Snow swirled like detergent and coated the windshield. She flipped on the wipers. Hunter emerged from a professional building two doors down and ambled back to the minivan. The vehicle was registered to him, but as before, he settled into the passenger seat. Using the sleeve of his jacket, he swiped off condensation from the side window. “She’s seeing a psychiatrist.”
“Freudian or Jungian?”
“There’s a difference?”
“For Freud, sexual orgasm is destructive to the human psyche. Whereas Jung celebrates it.”
“Freudian.” Using the edge of a finger, he followed the bouffant wave of her black hair. “I like.”
“The wig?”
“The woman.” Hunter released her seatbelt and discovered heat beneath her ski jacket and cable-knit sweater. He urged her to lower her head into his lap. When she nuzzled lips past his unzipped fly, he flew solo and moaned with pleasure.
/> The engine hummed. The windshield wipers scraped. A fake Santa Claus rang his bell with the pumping action of an oil derrick. Hunter repeated her name like a mantra. When she sat up, he stretched with reptilian satisfaction. They didn’t look at each other. They didn’t clasp hands. They didn’t speak. They didn’t have to. The connection between them was understood, and as defiled as it gets.
“Should I pay you?” he asked.
“I’m not a prostitute.”
A sunray peaked out from behind a cloud and licked a golden strand of hair falling over his brow. A second later, the luminosity shut off like a switch. His complexion reverted to a bluish haze of disquiet.
She asked, “What about you? Are you a prostitute? A hustler?”
He fidgeted with the zipper of his jacket. The ratcheting sounded vaguely erotic. Everything about Hunter Steele seemed vaguely erotic, craven, and illicit. He admitted, “You could call it that.”
“Women find you ... appealing?” she concluded. “Easy to be with?”
“Older women especially.”
“By older women, you mean ... what ... thirty?”
“Closer to forty or fifty. When the wrinkles start to show. When their husbands take them for granted. When men stop admiring them from across a crowded room. When they avoid looking at themselves in mirrors.” His words lacked emotion. He didn’t care about those women. Only himself. Yet another character flaw he and Joel shared.
“What you give them ...” She hesitated asking the question. She didn’t want to know the answer. She asked anyway. “Is it different from what you give me?”
“No different.”
“At least you’re honest.”
He favored her with a fleeting look of respect. It was scary how she understood him, and more importantly, how he understood her. “Like you, they’re grateful for the ...” He searched for the right word and settled on, “Fragility. That’s it. They’re grateful for the fragility of the moment. It’s like breaking a pane of glass. They can reach through the shards and never get scarred.”
“Is that what’s going on between us? Something fragile?”
“That’s what I am. Fragile.”
A seagull swooped over the city towers. On the lookout for refuse, she glided in circles and squawked a singled-voiced chorus.
“What about younger women?” Kendra asked.
“Except for you, I have no use for them.”
“And girls? Do you lead them astray as well?”
Outrage covered his face. “What do you think I am?”
“I wish I knew. I wish I understood. Why I feel the way I do. As if I’ve known you forever. As if you know everything about me without me having to tell you. As if you can read my thoughts.”
He was quiet before uttering, “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“I want to be different from the other women.”
“You are.”
“But you just said ...”
“I can’t explain it. You are.”
A screech and a whoop, a flutter of pale white feathers, and a nosedive. The seagull purchased her quarry: a tossed French fry. She took off, but moments later, released the prize from her beak and let it drop to the street. It seemed too great an effort for something so transient.
“What about men?” she asked.
He flinched before saying, “What about them?”
“Do you swing both ways?”
His face paled. His jaw clenched. He didn’t look at her. Instead, he blinked and stared ahead. “I’ve never been with a man, except ...”
“Except they have been with you.” The pain she saw in his colorless eyes transfixed her. “Someone you knew?”
“Once. A long time ago. He was ... much older.” His fists opened and closed. He was fighting an illusionary fight. “Why all these fucking questions?”
“You’re a dangerous man to be with, Hunter Steele.”
“But here you are.” His eyes slid over to hers. She didn’t look away.
“You never said what you do when you’re not with me.”
When he spoke, it wasn’t to Kendra but to her misshapen reflection in the windshield. “Classes. I take classes. At Illinois. Audit them, but not for credit. I tried ... once ... several times ... for a degree. Something ... life ... always got in the way. Now I just audit. And pretend I’m working toward a doctorate. Probably earned three degrees by now, but nothing engraved on a certificate.”
“Don’t the professors mind?”
“They’re used to me. They call on me sometimes. I usually have the answers. Or better questions.”
“How do you live?”
“I’ll take you home now if you like.” Hunter had grown uncomfortable with the track of their conversation. Despite putting himself on public display in a way most men wouldn’t dare attempt, he was a very private person. Whenever Kendra got too close, he shut off.
“I want to stay,” she said. They sat side by side, not touching each other for a very long time, until she couldn’t stand it any longer and reached over. Clutching the hair at the back of his head, she attacked him with a violent kiss. Hunter kissed her back just as violently. When their burning kisses ended, they parted and stared out the windshield, strangers once more.
Eventually Mrs. Santana emerged from the building, pressed a cell phone to her ear, and hailed a taxi parked on the other side of the elevated tracks. The yellow cab made a U-turn and picked her up. Kendra put the minivan into gear.
The cab headed toward Jackson Boulevard, turned down LaSalle Street, and pulled in front of a familiar office building. Joel was waiting out front. He climbed into the back seat and delivered a friendly kiss to the other passenger before the taxi lurched forward.
Hunter asked, “Does your husband suspect?”
“That I’m spying on him?”
“That you’re seeing another man.”
“You’d have to ask him.”
Fifteen minutes later, the taxi cruised in front of a hotel. Joel slipped the cabbie a twenty-dollar bill and held the door open for Mrs. Santana. She stepped out, her shapely legs leading the way.
“Do you think she suspects?” Hunter asked.
“That we’re watching her?” Kendra shrugged. “Women always think someone is noticing them. Admiring them.”
“Even if no one is?”
She gave him a sidelong glance. “Exhibitionism comes in many forms.”
He had the presence of mind to blush.
Joel canvassed the street but paid little attention to the unfamiliar minivan. Tossing a domineering arm around the widow—the same kind of domineering arm he often tossed around Kendra—he guided his lover inside.
Hunter exchanged a glance with Kendra. “We can go now.”
She gestured toward the lobby entrance. “Make sure first.”
He got out of the car and entered the hotel.
Kendra let several minutes pass before stepping outside and lighting up. The wind swept through the clipped edges of her wig and flounced them like the skirt of a ball gown. She was numb to the biting cold. Nothing bothered her these days. Nothing except her own nagging thoughts.
Guests arrived and departed. Luggage was carried off or loaded into car trunks. Bellhops hustled for dollar bills. Hunter sneaked up from behind her and crooked an arm around her neck, tugging her against him the same way Joel had taken possession of Juliana Santana. He buried his face into her swirling hair and said, “I’ll drive.”
“We might miss them.”
“They’ll be awhile. They ordered room service.”
“How do you know?”
“I delivered it. Gave the porter a twenty spot. She’s shorter than you and not as pretty. She stiffed me on the tip. He didn’t like me much.”
“The porter?”
“Your husband.” He brandished his cell phone. “He’s going to give us a heads-up when they check out.”
“My husband?”
“The porter.”
Chapte
r 17
HUNTER’S APARTMENT WAS located on the north side of town. He parked on the one-way street and steered her through a gangway between buildings. Creaking back stairs led up to a large porch. Snow dusted a patio table and four green-striped chairs. The door was unlocked.
“Who lives downstairs?” Kendra asked.
“A doctor. My mother handpicked him. Just in case.”
“In case of what?”
“I go off the deep end.” He answered her astonishment. “I’m on Zyprexa. Since I was seventeen. It’s an antipsychotic drug.”
“Are you psychotic?”
“It depends on the day of the week.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Why? Because I seem perfectly normal today?”
“You won’t be tomorrow?”
“It’s a status symbol, like not having to work for a living. The rich,” he said, “are different.”
“Your family’s rich?”
“Very. But then you suspected it since I don’t work for a living. Except for hustling on street corners.” Hunter was more like her than she imagined. But unlike her, he didn’t care that he was mad. His madness was so ingrained in his personality, it had become a part of him, like the color of his hair.
The kitchen was dark, but the clarity of his eyes cut through the shadows. He massaged her shoulders and drew his forehead against hers. His breath smelled minty and his clothes like winter. Hunter was a strange amalgam of wholesomeness and immorality. Innocence and compunction. Inscrutability and directness. It kept him interesting and mysterious.
Kendra wanted to know more about him. In fact, she wanted to know everything about a man who hid behind a veil of eccentricities and secrets. “Have you? Gone off the deep end?”
“Once.” After thinking about it, he amended the count. “Three times.”
He guided her through rooms choked with furniture. Everything came from the 1930s and 1940s. Upholstered chairs. Formal sofas. Tiffany lamps. Roll-top desk. Formal dining table. Oriental rugs. Ornate chandeliers. Even the wallpaper, the bleak colors, and the stale odor came from another era. Except for discarded textbooks and paperback novels stacked everywhere, nothing belonged to Hunter.
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