I understood the marketing aspect. And I also knew lawyers had to be available for their clients on matters both great and gratuitous. Even more, I needed busy-ness to distract me from thinking about Theo—Theo and HeadFirst, and more important, Theo and me.
Now, I scrounged up a stern look for Johnny Hemphill, then squared my shoulders back to the judge. Raising my right index finger, I made my impassioned plea for one more round of supervision for this kid who simply thought it was funny to pee behind the movie theater on Roosevelt Avenue.
Thankfully, I won. This is the last time, the judge had intoned, looking at me and not Mr. Hemphill.
I thanked him, did a geisha-esque bow and hustled out of the courtroom before he could change his mind, leaving Johnny with his guffawing father.
I took the elevator to the first floor of the courthouse at 26th and California Avenue and ran to the big bulletin board that hung on the wall. There, sheets of paper in rows were tacked, each listing a courtroom and the cases to be called that day. Next to each case number was a description—armed robbery, murder, assault, drug trafficking, etc.—the sight of which made me remember I was far, far away from the civil courthouse where I used to spend all my professional time.
I elbowed and jostled my way toward the front of the small crowd huddled there, everyone craning their necks. Maggie had assigned me four cases to handle that morning, but I’d forgotten to find out what courtrooms they were in. Frantically, I searched the multitude of papers. The 26th Street Shuffle, I’d heard other criminal lawyers call days like this.
As I ran toward the elevator, I paused for a brief second, as I always did, in the old vestibule of the courthouse. And maybe it was that pause that allowed me to feel the faint vibration from my shoulder bag. I glanced at my watch. I had more time than I thought—at least five minutes until I had to be in Judge Johnson’s courtroom. I pulled the phone from my bag.
My father. I hadn’t been able to call him back since he called yesterday while I was at brunch. I hadn’t seen my dad in almost a week, and I knew he had no one in this town. He’d been here only a few months. He’d been in our lives only a few months. And it had occurred to me that when I’d seen him at the diner last week, he had said something to me—You can tell me if you ever want help. If anything isn’t all right. I’d been wondering if he might have been referring to himself, subconsciously or not.
On the far side of the vestibule were marble stairs, each worn sufficiently in the middle from the hundreds who had climbed them in the hopes of justice.
I sat on the first one and was about to answer the phone when a security guard started toward me. “Miss,” he said, “you can’t…”
I knew what he was about to say. The stairs were closed now, part of the old glory of the building, the glory that had mostly given way to ruin.
I gave the guy a pleading smile.
He raised his hand and gave me the you’ve-got- one-minute gesture, then respectfully turned his back.
“Hi,” I said to my dad. “So sorry I haven’t called you back yet, I’ve been running from one thing to another.” And trying to figure out what’s going on with my boyfriend and worrying even more now that I confessed I’d been with Sam. And didn’t exactly tell him the whole story of that night, which had come very, very close to being sex-filled.
“Boo, I’ve got some bad news.”
“Bad news…” My stomach clenched.
“It’s about Theo.”
“Oh.” I hadn’t expected that. My father had met Theo only once, only briefly.
My dad paused. And it was a weighty silence.
“What?” I said.
“Something’s going on with him.”
True. “How do you know that?”
He sighed. “Izzy…” There was a slight layer of irritation in his voice.
“I know. I should stop asking how you know these things. But it’s just—” what was the word? “—off-putting.” My father had disappeared from our lives decades ago. But he had watched us during that time. (I suppose I would say “watched over us,” except that would make him sound angelic, which wasn’t exactly right.)
“It’s not good, Izzy,” my father said.
I’d gotten better over the past year at taking bad news. And things were easier, I learned, if such news was simply laid out flat.
True to form, my father gave it to me. “Theo is being investigated by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”
15
Bristol & Associates was on LaSalle Street near Monroe in an old high-rise, home to a host of criminal defense firms. Like 26th and Cal, you could tell the lobby was once impressive, but now the marble was yellowed and the lighting spotty.
On the tenth floor, Bristol & Associates wasn’t much better. Maggie and her grandfather made more than enough money to afford a sleek office overlooking the Chicago River, but like many criminal defense firms, they didn’t care about image. They cared about the work, the clients and the cash. Q had already started a campaign to get them to move. So far, Maggie and Martin had been impervious.
I walked in and blew by the receptionist, Leslie. Usually, I stopped and talked to her, or at least waved. She called out to me. “You okay?”
“Yeah, thanks,” I lied. I was still replaying the conversation with my father in my mind.
“He’s what?” I had blurted after my dad said those words—Theo is being investigated by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
I knew Theo had financial issues. Or his company did. But how did any of that rise to the level of a federal/criminal investigation? I tried to muster all I’d learned from Maggie over the past few months as I shifted from civil to criminal work, but there were too many layers of feeling and concern for me to sort through them for possible facts.
“We’d better meet,” my father had said.
“Does Theo know this?” As soon as I’d asked the question, I heard its odd nature. Why was I asking my father what my boyfriend might or might not know?
“Doesn’t look like it from what I can tell,” he said.
“Then I have to tell him. I should—”
“No,” my father said forcefully. “I didn’t get this information from…uh…mainstream sources.”
“Do you ever?”
“Izzy,” he said with a cautionary tone like you would with a young kid. Instead of pissing me off, it reminded me of being a kid. When he was still around. When he was still a regular dad.
“Let me tell you what I know,” he said. “Then you can decide how to handle it. I will leave it to you. Do you feel comfortable coming to my place? We’ll have privacy.”
The truth was I’d only been to my dad’s mostly empty studio apartment a few times, and it had mostly depressed me. “I’m in court for a bunch of things,” I told him. “Then I’ve got to get back to the office to drop off orders Maggie will be waiting for. I’ll come right after that?”
“Make it one o’clock,” he said. “I have a few more things to track down.”
The thought had made me woozy. There was more?
Now, as the receptionist hit a button under her desk that unlatched the door to the inner sanctum, I wondered what that more meant. And I feared it. Felt like old demons were coming back to grab me, choke me, make me doubt myself and who I loved.
I tried to push the thoughts away, just as I pushed through the door and began walking the hallway toward my office.
Q popped out of his office as if he’d been waiting for me. This was fairly typical. After I’d been let go from my old law firm, Baltimore & Brown, Q could have worked for another lawyer, but he’d met his wealthy boyfriend by then. For the past year, while I tried a variety of different gigs, Q had lazed and lounged, now leaving him energized and raring to go. Since he’d accepted the manager position—Maggie had been doing it herself before—he’d gotten the law firm an incredible amount of PR and marketing. So much so, that Martin had to tell him to lay off on the press conferences. Q hadn’t exactly listened.
&nbs
p; So when I saw Q waiting for me, I wasn’t surprised that he was wide-eyed and kind of clasping his hands the way a coach might when he was about to talk to a player. One of the things he’d kept from the life he’d led when he was straight (or pretending to be) was a love of football. He would be the first openly gay football coach of an NFL team if someone let him.
Q wore navy pants and a tailored gray jacket that matched his gray eyes and set off his black skin nicely. The lights in the hallway glinted off his bald head.
“I know I’m supposed to tone it down,” he said when I reached him. Per our usual custom, he hadn’t bothered to say hello. “But check this out—NBC needs someone to talk about what it’s like to be a suspect in a case, and they want that person to also be a lawyer. I mean, you’re perfect for this, right?”
“Local NBC?”
“National, girlfriend. You would discuss how horrible it is to be wrongfully accused and explain that’s the reason Bristol & Associates work so hard for their clients. Maggie and Martin already gave it a green light. You know how Martin is about wrongful convictions.”
I nodded. “Is Maggie here?”
“Not yet.”
I wanted to tell Q what my father had said about Theo. I told Q and Maggie nearly everything. But after our discussion last night, after seeing Theo walk away, seeing the hurt on his face, I realized that I had a responsibility to him. I had to find out more and help him. And keep his confidences, what little I had of them, in the meantime.
“Maggie had a hearing in Markham,” Q said. “So, about NBC—will you do it?”
I tried to focus on his question. He was right that I’d be ideal for the interview. A year ago, Vaughn suspected me of killing my friend, Jane Augustine. And as a result, my face had been splashed across TVs and newspapers. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about that time. And I wasn’t sure I could talk about anything, given my distraction about Theo and the U.S. attorneys.
“I don’t know,” I said. “When would this happen?”
“They’d come here. We’ll put you in the library in front of all those books so you look supersmart. It would start about one o’clock.”
I shook my head. “I should leave by one.” I have to go to my father’s to learn why my boyfriend is being investigated.
And then I had to wonder—was this some kind of media trick? Could this interview have anything to do with Theo’s investigation? If so, I should tell Q, No way. Except that wasn’t the way I operated. If there was something to know, I wanted to know, and I didn’t care about the source.
Q raised his hand and snapped his fingers in a Z. “Not a problem.” He looked at his watch. It was eleven-thirty. “I’ll have them here in a half hour, if not earlier, and they’ll be gone in thirty minutes.”
Q turned and, without further discussion, dodged into his office. I kept walking down the hall until I got to my own. It was an old-school office, once inhabited by a former associate of Martin’s. From him, I’d inherited a black bookshelf, towering wood file cabinets, an old, red oriental rug with a blue border and a large wooden table that served as my desk. So far, my only contribution to the place was a white leather-and-chrome office chair that Maggie let me purchase from a furniture store on Franklin Avenue.
I sank into the chair now and stared at the documents on my desk—grand jury transcripts, motions to suppress, rap sheets, mug shots.
I spun around and stood, looking out the window at LaSalle Street. I put my face toward the glass and peered south to the Board of Trade Building that sat at the foot of the street, an art deco building with a carved stone facade. Somewhere down there, Sam was working at a trading firm.
A year ago, at this time, authorities were investigating Sam.
And now Theo. Why was this happening again?
“What’s up, sister?”
I turned around. “Mags.” Relief seeped into my veins, into my body.
Maggie wore a green wool suit that looked vintage, even had a slim felt collar that would have been gauche on most. But Maggie, with her tiny frame and short, retro, gold-blond waves of hair, could get away with it. More than that.
“Cute,” I said, pointing to the suit.
She looked down at herself. “Thanks. Got it at a resale shop in Bridgeport.” She looked back at me. “You’re doing the NBC interview.”
“Yeah.”
She peered at my face, gave a teasing grin. “Are you going to get the flops?”
“Shut it,” I said, channeling Mayburn.
“What?” she said, all fake-innocent like. “Should we tell them to bring a makeup crew to control the sheen?”
“Mags,” I said, warning her, not hiding my irritation.
The truth was, I had a little problem that Maggie and I called the flop-sweats, or, as she had recently dubbed them, the flops. This condition occurred when extreme nervousness set upon me. That first time was during a mock trial in school, the second time during a real trial. Maybe it was a redhead problem? Who knew, but when the flops struck, my insides boiled, the sweat poured and it was mortifyingly embarrassing.
“You know,” I told Maggie, “Grady used to be the one who gave me crap about that, not you.” Grady and I had worked together at my old firm.
“I know,” Maggie said. “And now that you work with me, it’s my duty.”
I glared.
“Not in the mood?” she asked.
“Not in the mood.”
I wanted so badly to tell her about what my dad had said, but I held my tongue. It didn’t matter anyway, because Maggie smiled. And it was a shy kind of smile, one I wasn’t used to from her. “Okay,” she said, “well, I’ll talk about something else, then. I have news. He’s moving here.”
“Bernard?” I didn’t even ask who she was talking about. She was always talking about her long-distance, French-horn-playing boyfriend, Bernard. Had all but papered her office and home with pictures of him—a huge Filipino guy who towered over everyone, especially her. “Is that why you’ve been mysterious lately?” I asked.
The smile went away. “I’ve been mysterious?”
“Yeah, I mentioned it to you.”
“Did you?” She was back to her distracted state.
“Anyway, tell me the details! Bernard is moving in with you?”
“No, no,” she said, “he’s not moving in. That would be too much.”
“Yeah,” I said sarcastically, “and moving to an entirely new city after knowing someone for six months isn’t too much at all.”
She beamed. “It’s not. Thank God. It’s fast, I know. And it’s…challenging. But it feels natural.”
“What will he do here?”
“You know how he substituted for that French horn player last year, the one who had to take a leave from the CSO?”
I nodded.
“Well, they loved him. And then that horn player announced he had to leave the symphony altogether. And I guess it caused all sorts of uproar at the orchestra, but they called him for an audition last week, and he got it.”
“Wow, that’s a big deal.”
“Yeah. It is.” She looked at the ceiling.
Q popped his head in the office. “The TV peeps are here already. I guess they were right down the street.” An exaggerated shrug. “Anyway, they want to hustle,” he said. “Let’s go.” He scrutinized my face in the same way Maggie had. “You’re not going to—”
“No, I’m not going to sweat!” I stood and grabbed my bag. “But I will spackle on the powder, I promise.”
A minute later, I walked into the firm’s library to find a cameraman settling his equipment and a woman in a blue dress speaking into a cell phone.
She clicked the phone off when she saw me, and came toward me, hand out. “Izzy, hey,” she said. “Maggie Cullerton from NBC.” She looked closely at me, and I knew she was remembering when I’d been a favorite suspect of the Chicago Police Department. Even if she hadn’t covered the story, even if she wasn’t here to ask me what that time had be
en like for me, she would have recalled it. Everyone in the media did, since I’d been on-air when a reporter had interrupted the broadcast and commenced to break the news.
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
There was a lull, but then like any good reporter she began to chat to loosen me up. “So I hear you’ve got another Maggie in the office,” she said.
“Yeah, Maggie Bristol, one of the partners here.”
She nodded. “Great, great. And what kind of legal work are you doing now?”
I dredged up my normally friendly demeanor and soon she had me feeling more at ease.
The cameraman directed me to a chair in front of an imposing, colorful array of legal volumes. He handed me the lavalier microphone, and I threaded it through my blouse, attaching it to my collar, the once-familiar movement returning to me. He flicked on the lights over the camera.
A minute later, we were rolling. As the reporter interviewed me, I felt the skills I’d learned at Trial TV coming back. My confidence grew. I remembered that this was something I did reasonably well. And since Q seemed like he wouldn’t be easily deterred from the marketing aspect of Bristol & Associates, I might as well get used to it as part of my new job. I could even thrive. Maybe I’d be the firm’s spokesperson.
But then Maggie stepped into the library.
At first, we all kept going, figuring she was just there to watch. But as soon as I’d answered another question, she stepped in front of the camera and looked at me.
“Mags,” I said, making a move-it gesture.
“I’m sorry, folks,” she said to the news crew with her forehead creased. “We’re going to have to do this another time.”
The reporter shot a glance at her cameraman. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes, yes,” my best friend lied. “Just some emergency firm business that Izzy needs to be a part of.” She apologized for having to cut the interview short, but asked the cameraman to pack up and then ushered them out of the library. “Thank you so much for coming. Please talk to Q in the lobby. He’ll set up a time to reschedule.”
Question of Trust Page 6