‘That scene was straight out of The Godfather,’ said Flynn, as we walked out the back door. The yard was filled with people sitting at café tables around the pool or on the lawn. We found a place in the shade and put down our plates. I made myself comfortable on the grass while Flynn went back inside for drinks. I was picking at my food when I spied Albert Evans standing by himself, looking overwhelmed at his equally overloaded plate. He saw me and came over.
‘May I join you?’ he asked.
‘Of course. Where’s Julian?’
‘He had to go back to work.’ Albert removed the Irish linen handkerchief from his pocket and unfolded it, placing it on the grass before sitting down. He studied his plate as if the food was going to eat him instead of the other way around. ‘Isn’t this ridiculous? Some gargantuan woman corralled me in the kitchen and wouldn’t let me escape until she’d given me enough to feed the better part of Outer Mongolia – wherever that is.’
‘Angie’s aunt. That’s the Italians for you. No matter the disaster, it’s always important to eat. They talk lunch at breakfast and dinner at lunch.’ I put my fork down on my plate. My stomach was queasy, so I had no appetite. ‘How are you holding up without your old boss?’
He turned teary and reached into his pocket for his handkerchief before realizing he was sitting on it. He touched his thumbs to his eyes. ‘It hasn’t been easy. Angie wasn’t only my boss, you know, she was one of my best friends. I loved her very much. It’s so beyond the beyond that she met such a violent death. I just hope she was messed up enough to not suffer.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I asked.
Albert looked around surreptitiously and leaned in close to me. ‘Oh God, I’ve been practically dying keeping this to myself. Swear yourself to secrecy?’
I crossed my heart.
‘I saw Angie right before she was murdered.’
‘What? How could you have seen Angie?’
‘I was in The Zone and she came in just before closing.’
‘The Zone? What would Angie be doing in The Zone?’ I knew of the Boystown bar because it advertised in the Chicagoan. With its almost exclusively gay clientele, it didn’t seem the sort of place Angie would patronize. Especially on her own.
His face changed from sad to guilty. ‘I think she came in to score.’
‘So you think she got her coke there?’
The guilty look thickened. ‘I turned her on to a bartender acquaintance who deals a little on the side. She was so depressed after her breakup with Harvey that I thought a bump from time to time would make her feel better. So I introduced her to Lyle. I was only trying to be helpful.’
‘Nice move, Albert.’
‘How could I know she’d end up so out of control? I mean, really.’
He seemed to be trying to convince himself rather than me. ‘Did you talk to her that night?’ I asked.
‘No. I was with friends and she didn’t see me. I didn’t go up to her because … well, you know how abrasive Angie can get. Especially when she’s fucked up. I didn’t feel like dealing with her.’
‘Oh, Albert,’ I admonished him. ‘Maybe if you’d talked to her things would be different.’
‘Fuck me. Tell me I haven’t had that thought about a million times. But there’s more to the story. After she scored, on her way out, she stopped to talk this good-looking dark-haired dude sitting by himself. You could tell they knew each other and you could tell he wasn’t happy to see her there. She said something to him that made him look like he was going to punch her. Then she left.’
‘Oh my God, have you told the police about this?’
‘That’s the problem. I can’t. If I tell the cops she was in The Zone, they’ll go after Lyle. You may think it’s a brave new world, but lots of cops are real homophobes and have a hard-on for gays. No pun intended. Lyle called me the minute he saw Angie’s face on the news and begged me to keep my mouth shut.’
‘But, Albert, what if the guy she talked to killed her?’
He hung his pomaded head. ‘I’ve been eating a guilt sandwich over this all week. I haven’t slept in days.’
You’re not the only one eating a guilt sandwich. Or not sleeping. But I was finding a saving grace in Albert’s confession. If the dark-haired guy Albert saw turned out to be Angie’s killer, then her murder would be solved and I wouldn’t have to deal with the police asking me more questions and possibly stumbling over my secret. ‘Albert, you have to call Area 3 headquarters and ask for Detective O’Reilly. He won’t care about Lyle. He just wants to find out who killed Angie.’
He paused and rolled his eyes. ‘I’ll think about it, Maggie. Seriously. But in the meantime remember you promised not to say anything.’
‘But, Albert, this is different.’
‘Let me handle this my own way. Otherwise, I’ll deny the whole thing.’
‘Albert, you’ve got to do what’s right.’
Our conversation skidded to a halt as Flynn arrived armed with two glasses of wine. Carol Anne and Kelly were trailing behind him. Albert stood and picked up his handkerchief, folding it primly before placing it back in his pocket. He nodded at the girls and walked away, leaving a mound of untouched food on the grass.
‘What’s with him?’ asked Carol Anne, settling in on the lawn. Her navy suit made her blue eyes look bluer, but there was something unreadable in them I couldn’t pin down.
‘I guess he lost his appetite,’ I replied, taking my glass of wine from Flynn. ‘Where’s Michael?’
‘His pager went off during Mass. There was some emergency and he had to go to the hospital.’
‘A plastic-surgery emergency?’ quipped Kelly, forking an immense meatball into her mouth.
‘They happen,’ Carol Anne replied defensively.
‘What about Suzanne?’ I asked.
‘She went back to work. If you ask me, seeing Angie’s family was just too emotional for her. Hitting too close to home,’ Carol Anne added.
I envisioned Suzanne so folded up in grief the day of her brother’s funeral, she had to be escorted to the car with one of us holding her up on each side. I thought of my own siblings, the two sisters I was sandwiched in between. We may have had our differences, but I couldn’t imagine the world without them. The same way none of us could imagine the world without Angie.
Flynn and I stopped to say goodbye to Angie’s parents on our way out. This turned out to be the most difficult task yet. There was finality to this goodbye that colored the air like a bad haze. Angie’s mother hugged me and cried, while her father stood beside her owning the same pained silence he had at the wake and the funeral.
‘If we only knew who did this horrible thing …’ Ida Lupino sobbed.
My thoughts zoomed straight to Albert Evans. Under circumstances like this did I really have to keep his secret? Would he do the right thing and come forward? If he did, would it unlock the mystery of Angie’s death and provide the Lupinos some modicum of relief?
The problem was there were too many secrets to keep. Including my own. After begging off with the honest – for once – excuse that my next day was going to be hellish, I had Flynn drop me at the office where I lost myself in work until well after midnight.
NINETEEN
Kelly
The black cloud descended while Kelly was lacing up her running shoes. It was like the moon passing between the earth and the sun, eclipsing all light and leaving her in inky shadow. When it came it was without warning like a train barreling through a crossing. But unlike a train, it did not recede within minutes. It lingered ominously, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days.
The phenomenon had started taunting her after her mother’s death. Over the years she’d employed different strategies of dealing with it. In high school, she’d lock herself in her room with a good book. In college, she buried herself in her studies. The booze and drugs and one-night stands came later. Though the cloud had been in remission since her sobriety, it had been simmering just beyond the h
orizon. Now it had reappeared with a vengeance, a squall of depression crushing her towards a rocky shore.
She felt a sense of worthlessness, of insignificance, of helplessness, the sentiment that her life was one big pile of shit. Here she was in her thirties trying to jumpstart a life she never started, and the challenge seemed hopeless. She wasn’t like the other students in her college classes, their eager young brains effortlessly sponging up knowledge while she had to labor for it, their trajectories already programmed for success. She envied their enthusiasm and wished she had felt the same way at their age.
Catching up was a bitch. It seemed all her friends were coasting in early middle age instead of reaching like she was. They were set with families or careers, homes and nice cars, no financial worries like how to pay tuition and next month’s rent. They had people in their lives. Husbands, boyfriends, children. So Suzanne was flying solo, but her job was the only lover she’d ever wanted. Kelly had never had a relationship with someone she could lean on, someone to come home to. She told herself being alone didn’t necessarily mean being lonely. But Kelly was both. Alone and lonely. She wished that life were something to be enjoyed instead of endured.
It was almost humorous that she was studying to be a psychologist. She hated shrinks. She’d spent enough time on their couches after her mother’s death and found most of them to be sanctimonious people with their own problems. She imagined she could do a better job of helping people than they did. That’s why she wanted to be one of them. At least there would be one shrink out there who understood people’s pain.
The cat sidled up to Kelly and regarded her with one-eyed concern. Enough self-pity, Kelly reprimanded herself. You have no one other than yourself to blame for your laggard existence. Don’t let that black cloud put you back where you were. Get out there and run it off. She finished lacing up her shoes and headed out the door.
The early morning sky was a lapis blue dotted with white cotton, the air still cool as she cut through the courtyard and started down the street at her warm-up pace. Before long her body fell into its regular rhythm, her muscles growing more fluid with every stride. But while her body was co-operating, her head still wasn’t right. The dark cloud hovered over her, blocking out the blue sky. It followed her into the park, and she ran faster in an attempt to outrun it. But it refused to be outrun, sinking lower and lower until it was upon her, enfolding her, Angie’s contorted face looming within. It should have been you.
Finding it hard to breathe, she stopped and bent over in search of oxygen, her hands resting on her knees. Anyone watching would have thought she was going to be ill. Her heart was racing in incomplete beats and the world spinning in a way that confused up with down. It was a full-fledged panic attack. Pushing past the feeling she was going to faint, she turned back on unsteady legs and headed for home. Crossing Clark Street was a herculean effort, and the rest of the walk was pure misery. The cat greeted her with a questioning meow when she opened the door. Kelly threw her shaking body onto the pink-flowered sofa.
The panic subsided slowly, taking its hand off her one excruciating finger at a time. If she ever felt like she needed a stiff drink, now was the time. She could handle depression, but the panic was entirely unmanageable.
She couldn’t do this on her own any longer. She needed to talk to someone.
TWENTY
8 Days Until
Friday morning found me wondering why I hadn’t just slept at the office since it had been well after midnight when I left the night before. I glared at the monumental pile of work to be attended to. Sales figures. Reports. Projections. The pile seemed to be growing instead of diminishing, and losing the day of Angie’s funeral had just put me that much farther behind. My period was due, but had yet to present itself. Flynn was getting testy with me for all my avoidance of him. In fact, the backward relief of my workload was being able to use it to avoid my fiancé. My guilt had not diminished one iota in recent days, but rather, had grown stronger, a weed threatening to choke me off. Even more disturbing, uninvited flashes of Steven Kaufman, on the dance floor, in my bedroom, kept popping into my brain. As much as I tried to repress the images, they refused to stay down. During my few restless hours of sleep last night, he had appeared in a dream and asked me not to marry Flynn. Freud said you are everyone in your dreams. Could I be this stranger I never wanted to see again?
I checked my calendar. There was a note to call the bridal shop about the bridesmaids’ dresses. Another to call the florist. Yet another to call Flynn’s mother with a count for the rehearsal dinner. I was so entirely overwhelmed I longed to disappear, to go home and curl up in a corner with a good book. It seemed like years since I’d had time to read for pleasure. My apartment was filled with boxes of unread books, but the recent demands on my life left no time for reading. Much less time to write. I’d always thought there was a book inside me trying to get out and it was just a matter of time. But real life didn’t leave much time. Besides, in order to write, you had to have something to write about.
The phone rang and Sandi, the receptionist, informed me that there was a Kelly Delaney on the line. Did I want to take the call? Not really, I thought, but I took it anyhow.
‘Aren’t you usually out running right now?’ I asked.
Kelly’s voice sounded garbled as if she was talking through water. ‘I didn’t run today. More important things to do like cut my toenails. Do you have a few minutes?’
A few minutes was exactly what I didn’t have. ‘For you, I have plenty of time. What’s up?’
‘I’m in a kind of bad way. I really need to talk. I mean, I could go to an AA meeting, but it wouldn’t be the same as talking to a friend. I was wondering if we could get together some time today. I wouldn’t bug you, but I don’t know who else to call.’
Of all times, Kelly. I checked my schedule. Staff meeting. Luncheon meeting. Sales calls to key customers. I was so slammed, I barely had time to hit the john. The first crack in the day came around three o’clock, time I had counted on to weed through more paperwork. But the desperation in Kelly’s voice couldn’t be ignored. What good is a friend if she can’t throw her own life in the crapper to help out? ‘I can’t get away until this afternoon. How’s three? You OK till then?’
‘Three’s fine.’ She already sounded better. ‘Meet me at the Mayfair Regent. I’ll buy you tea. Or a drink if you want.’
‘The Mayfair? I guess you’re not looking to get lucky.’ The expensive hotel was an outpost for blue-haired ladies and the gay men who accompanied them.
‘I want peace and quiet.’
‘All right. I’ll see you at three.’
‘Thanks, Maggie. Thanks a lot. I know you’re really busy. You don’t know how much I appreciate this,’ said Kelly.
‘That’s what friends are for.’
I hung up and gave work another try, but my mind wouldn’t sit still. A sharp jab in my pelvic area drew my attention. A sign of my period coming? Or a sign of something else? I closed my eyes and prayed for debilitating, painful cramps. Then, I questioned the wisdom of counseling Kelly when my own state of mind was so radically scrambled.
I slipped from the office at 2:45, ignoring the ‘you’ve got to be kidding me’ look Sandi gave me on my way out the door. It was no secret how much work I had to do. I arrived at the Mayfair just before three and hurried past the uniformed doorman into the staid lobby. It was an oasis in the craziness of the city with rich paneled walls, a frescoed ceiling and a young Asian woman playing a calming harp. The room was populated with well-dressed elderly women and much younger men whose ivory silk jackets sported colorful pocket squares. Kelly was watching for me from a sofa in the far corner. Her eyes reminded me of an animal in hiding.
‘You OK?’ I asked as I joined her on the sofa.
She shrugged. ‘When I was a little girl, after Mom got sick, my Aunt Betty used to take me Christmas shopping on Michigan Avenue and we would come here afterwards. We’d sit in this room with all our packages
, and have tea. I always looked forward to that day. It was so special to me. I suppose that’s why I wanted to meet here. Everything bad disappeared for a while when I was here.
‘Aunt Betty died not long after my mom. Heart attack,’ she added. Though her pale blue eyes remained dry, they projected the depth of a thousand tears. ‘I still miss her.’
A white-jacketed waiter rolled over with a cart and laid out plates of finger sandwiches and scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream. We selected a tea and he spooned it into china pots that he covered with quilted cozies before wheeling the cart away. The ritual was so civilized that for the first time in nearly a week I felt almost human. Kelly poured herself a cup of tea and stared at it.
‘Maggie, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Ever since Angie’s murder I feel like I’m falling apart again. I need to talk about it before something bad happens.’ She didn’t need to elaborate what something bad might be. I had a good idea. ‘You know I hate asking for help, so I doubly appreciate you being here for me.’
‘Get a life. I already told you that’s what friends are for.’
‘I mean, it’s been really hard this past year. And all things considered I think I’ve been doing pretty well. But since Angie’s death, well, I feel like I’m walking backwards toward that pit. I just can’t keep her out of my mind. I feel like I was so locked up in my own problems, I wasn’t a good enough friend to her. She used to call me after her breakup with Harvey, but I was so busy with school and work and all that I just never found the time for her. I could tell she was hopped up at Carol Anne’s. I should have said something to her, but I didn’t.’
‘Kelly, you couldn’t have saved Angie. No one could.’
‘Maybe not, but I could have tried. She tried with me. I saw myself in her the other night, the anxiousness, the pacing. Deep down, I knew there was more going on with her than drinking. But I’ve been so dominated by my own recovery, all I was thinking about was myself. Now I wake up every morning seeing her looking at me with blame in her eyes. And sometimes it happens at other times. It’s giving me anxiety attacks. Today was so bad I couldn’t even run.’
The Last Night Out Page 13