I clicked on “images.” And there he was—my boyfriend at some black-tie event with a T-shirt and tuxedo jacket, his arms around a well-known philanthropist; my boyfriend on his Facebook page, a photo from years ago showing him with his arms around two very gorgeous girls; my boyfriend being handed an award, the banner behind him reading, Young Technology Award. He had a life before me, I realized for the first time. He had seemed so young to me—twenty-one when we met last spring—he had seemed so fresh and new that I hadn’t imagined there could be much behind the gorgeous-guy front, but I was wrong. Theo had definitely lived a life before we met. And that’s what worried me.
19
I decided to take a quick walk to refresh my brain. I threw a big sweatshirt of Theo’s over my head and pulled a knit Bears hat over my curls and left the condo. But since I’d been in my office, the hallway on the second floor had become filled with moving boxes. It was like Theo moving in all over again. What the…?
A woman stuck her head out of the second-floor condo. She had shiny, dark brown hair that hung to her chin and a friendly smile. “Hey,” she said. “Sorry about all this. I’ll have it cleaned up soon. I’m Kim. I’m moving in.”
“Oh, hi.” My neighbor Steve had been trying to sublet his condo since he’d moved to the West Coast to be with a new girlfriend. “Welcome,” I said, taking a few steps toward her. We shook hands. I wished I could give her a real smile, but my expression felt false as I parted my dry lips and tried to grin. “Did Steve tell you everything you need to know around here?” I asked, determined to be friendly.
She laughed. “Not really. He seemed so relieved to rent the place that he agreed to my first offer and arranged for the keys to be hand-delivered.”
“Yeah, he’s been trying for a while.”
“Anything I need to know?”
“Just the garage situation and the back stairs. Oh, and the garbage. I can show you. Tomorrow, or…” I drifted off. What would tomorrow be like? Or the day after that?
Kim peered at me. “Are you okay?”
“Sure. Yeah. So the garbage situation…” But again I faltered.
She reached out a hand, lightly put it on my forearm.
And that kind gesture made my bottom lip tremble a little. “I’m sorry,” I said, getting my composure together, right on the edge of crying. “It’s been a bad day.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, too.” She rubbed my arm a little. “I know how those can be.” She gave a laugh. “Do I ever.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh, yeah.”
Why did it feel ever so slightly better to be reminded that the God of Bad Times occasionally visited other folks?
She smiled at me and I smiled, too, feeling the little lift that comes with the hint of a possibility—that of a new friend.
“Hey, could I ask you about the heat in here?” She pointed inside Steve’s condo. “I can’t seem to get it to work right.”
“Sure.” I had the feeling she was just asking to be nice, to get my mind off of my bad day. And I appreciated it.
Inside, I recognized Steve’s furniture from the few times I’d been there, but all his personal effects were gone. A few suitcases and boxes covered most of the living room floor.
I showed her how to deal with our tricky thermostat controls. She offered a cup of coffee, which I didn’t normally drink. Which I didn’t normally like. “It’s decaf,” she said. “It won’t keep you up.”
“Sounds great,” I said. Kim seemed so nice. I could pretend to like one cup of coffee.
She handed me a steaming cup that smelled amazing. It was coffee, sure, but it had the aroma of almonds and a hint of chocolate. I blew on my cup and took a small sip. Coffee, to me, was always bitter and harsh and sometimes sour. She’d clearly put some milk in my mug, and it was smooth and creamy as it filled my mouth and decadently rich as the smell filled my nose. For the first time, I kinda understood the whole coffee thing.
That little lift in my spirits kept moving higher as we sat on Steve’s stools sipping coffee and talking as if we’d known each other awhile.
Kim filled me in on her recent breakup with a local doctor, causing her to move out of his place.
“What kind of doc is he?” I asked.
“Plastic surgeon.” She smiled ruefully and pointed at her chest. “Can’t you tell?”
Her breasts were rather large, now that I looked.
“Yeah, I’ve had just about everything done.” Kim started listing the other products and procedures her ex had only been too happy to provide—Botox, Restylane, an eye lift, tummy tuck, butt lift. As she talked, I wondered how old she was. She had that vague, hard-to-tell-age quality that could range from twenty-seven to forty-seven. “But,” she concluded with a sigh, “it didn’t seem to matter ultimately. Once he was done fixing me, he was bored.”
“And you? How were you?”
She looked at me, blinked her brown eyes a few times. “I loved him. I really did. I would have done anything.”
There was the first lull in our conversation, and I heard the ticking of a clock that hung from Steve’s kitchen wall.
“I’m sorry.” I suddenly realized that even though we felt like friends already, I really didn’t know what would help to make her feel better.
She shrugged. “What about you?”
I told her I used to be engaged to a guy named Sam. Why are you leading with Sam?
I told her about Theo. “You’ll see him around the building,” I said, then my words stopped abruptly. When would that be true? When would Theo get out of the MCC?
“So you’re lucky in love,” Kim said. “You had that Sam guy, and now you have this young hottie who you really like.” She peered at my face like she had earlier, with inquisitiveness, with empathy. “Who you maybe love.”
“Huh. Lucky in love. I never thought about it like that,” I admitted.
A phone rang. Kim moved her tall, perfect body from the stool and picked up a cell phone off the counter. She answered and listened. “Yeah, of course. Stop by.” She looked at her watch. “Yes, I’ll have it. I’ll see you tonight.”
She turned back to me. “Some friends are stopping over to wish me well on my new place. Just a casual thing for an hour or two. Want to join?”
I started to ask for details. I started to think about what Theo would want to do that night. But then I stopped all that. Theo wouldn’t be home.
Still.
“I can’t,” I said. “I’ve had a hell of a day and a lot to do tomorrow.” Find funding to get my boyfriend out of jail. Start telling his friends and family.
“Why don’t you stop by for five minutes?” Kim asked. She reached out and touched my arm again. “Seems like you need a little break.”
I looked at Kim and felt again that warm glow of a new friend. “I’ll try,” I said.
My phone rang. Eric.
“Kim, I’ve got to take this. I’ll try to stop by later.”
20
“Eric, are you in custody?” I said, scrambling to put my lawyer hat on, and scrambling up the stairs to my condo.
I probably couldn’t represent Eric, I figured, since Maggie and I were already representing Theo. But I could help find someone.
“No,” he answered quickly.
“You know about Theo being arrested?” I asked.
“Yeah, I got your messages.”
I used the keypad to open my condo door, looking around now, instinctively asking, Has anyone been here? when I’d only been downstairs for thirty minutes.
“So have you heard anything from the Feds?” I asked Eric. As equal partners, if Theo were accused of fraud, wouldn’t Eric be in some kind of trouble, as well?
“Yeah, I have.” He said nothing else.
“Eric, what’s going on? Do you need to talk about this with a lawyer? I could find—”
“I have someone,” he said.
I walked through my silent condo, feeling a creeping sense of…bad. I tried to find a reasonabl
e thing to say, despite my warring emotions. “That’s good. Who did you get to represent you?”
He paused as if not sure what to reveal. He mentioned the name of a law firm—Heller & Heller—that I’d never heard of. He began telling me how he’d gotten their name from a family friend.
As he was talking, I hurried into my office, leaned over the computer and typed in the name of the firm and found it quickly. Heller & Heller, the home page said, has earned a reputation for providing high quality, aggressive legal representation in Chicago and around the United States. We provide our clients with the highest standards of diligence, knowledge and professional advice and steadfastly protect our clients’ constitutional rights. It went on to list the various types of cases the firm could handle—Mail Fraud, Wire Fraud, Bank Fraud, Hobbs Act Extortion, Possession and Delivery of Controlled Substances, Conspiracy and RICO Violations, Bank Robbery, Tax Offenses, Public Corruption, Embezzlement, Money Laundering.
Eric had, I realized, gone quiet again. I debated what to say. Technically, if someone had a lawyer, I couldn’t speak to them about the case if I was representing another litigant. But I could ask the question I’d called about to start.
“Eric,” I said, “do you think you could help Theo post bond?”
A long inhale and exhale of breath. Still he said nothing.
I slid into the desk chair. “It’s fifty thousand,” I said.
At that Eric seemed to wince audibly. “We can’t afford that.”
“We?”
“The company.”
“I know.” I paused. He didn’t offer any response. “Or I guess what I know is that something is going on with you guys. Theo got turned down for that mortgage. He was turned down because of an unpaid debt at HeadFirst, and now he’s been arrested for some kind of fraud dealing with the company. And he said that you told him the books were messed up. Or something to that effect.”
“Right.”
“What’s going on, Eric?”
A groan. “I’m not entirely sure.”
“Well, then—”
“The attorney I hired said I shouldn’t say anything. To anybody.”
“You lawyered up pretty quick, didn’t you?” I half noticed that I was speaking criminal-legal terminology without so much as blinking.
“Yeah. Don’t you think I had to?” His voice sounded pained.
“I guess.” I didn’t know what to say. Although I’d been getting better at talking to clients (paying clients) about their criminal situation (alleged criminal situation), it was entirely different than talking with your boyfriend’s business partner about something that had landed him in jail.
I decided to round back to the original topic. “Can you help us? Theo, I mean? Could you come up with the bond money?”
Nothing.
“Or part of it?” I said.
“I’m not sure, Izzy. I’ve lost a lot already.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve got to go,” Eric said. “I’m really sorry I can’t help Theo anymore.”
“Can’t help Theo anymore? What does that mean?”
Eric didn’t explain. “Sorry,” he said, his voice a whisper, before he hung up.
21
“Did you know that she’s had problems before?”
As José Ramon walked down Clark Street, he pulled the phone away from his ear, pushing his lips together to suppress his irritation. Then he spoke. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
He liked the phone calls from the kid with the random information, little things above and beyond what he had asked, but these calls with the open-ended questions, calls with no introduction as if the two of them were equals, rather than him being the boss, were grating his nerves.
“Izzy McNeil. She’s been in trouble before.”
He didn’t know that Izzy McNeil was in trouble now except for the fact that she apparently had shitty taste in men, but his irritation waned. “Tell me.”
José’s steps slowed. With the sun long gone, it was really freaking cold out, not that it mattered. Despite where he had grown up, the Chicago weather didn’t bother him. This indifference toward the conditions that he possessed was something he prided himself on. Everyone in Chicago said the weather didn’t bother them—they had to in order to live here—but when it got to be a bleary November day, like today, the sky spitting little bits of hail, everyone’s mood tanked and people showed their real colors. But not him. He could accept anything. Including the shitty fucking weather. He had been hurrying from a meeting back to the restaurant only because he knew there would be more bad news, more to manage. But maybe, maybe, the kid was about to help them, give them some kind of good news.
“You didn’t know this before? It’s easy to find on Google.”
“Know what?” Now he was pissed off again. He increased his pace once more, passing an Irish bar that was blinged-out in more Christmas lights than should be legal.
“She was suspected in a murder not even a year ago.”
His eyebrows rose toward his forehead. “You’re fucking kidding me.”
“I’m serious. Do you remember that broadcaster who died in the spring? Strangled.”
“Hell yeah.” He remembered Jane Augustine not just because she’d been ridiculously hot, and not just because she’d been in his restaurant a bunch of times, and not because she always brought people who spent money, and not even because she’d been murdered, which registered with him about as much as a mugging. He remembered her because after she died it had been revealed that she was a freak show in bed in a really good way, and he regretted not trying to tap that.
“Well, Izzy McNeil found her dead. And then the cops thought maybe she did it.”
“Is that right?” He began to mull this over, but when he reached the door of the restaurant, he decided to throw it back at the kid. “What are you thinking?”
“I think we could use it. Or at least find out as much as we can and then keep it in our back pockets. Just in case. You want me to make some calls? I know some people in the CPD because—” The kid halted, likely recalling that he knew exactly why this knowledge of the Chicago Police Department existed and was none too happy about it.
“Yeah, handle it. And do not fuck it up.” He paused. “Do. Not.” He let the threat hang there, didn’t have to make it known exactly what kind of trouble could follow a mess-up, didn’t have to remind the kid that some already existing fuck-ups was why a debt was owed to him.
He hung up then, pleased that the kid had raised the bar and that if the bar wasn’t met, then the kid knew exactly what could be expected.
22
I like to consider myself the Life of the Party. At least once in a while. But that night, Kim Parkway had a much better shot at the title than I did.
From the moment I walked back into Steve’s place (now Kim’s place, I reminded myself) around eight o’clock that night, she was grabbed in fierce hugs by entering friends. Most of them were male, quickly introducing themselves and their partners to everyone there, and then kissing Kim on her cheeks and hugging her some more. She was asked constantly, How are you doing? And it was usually followed with things like He’s such a jerk. He doesn’t know what he’s lost. Everyone wanted to talk to her, it seemed. She was pulled into conversations in other rooms, only to return to the kitchen and living room, where others were waiting to talk to her.
The guests were garrulous and fun, too. At one point, a couple named Danny and Jeff and two of their friends, Jean Paul and Rudy, began a guessing game with me—What kind of guy would Izzy date?
“Someone ripped, absolutely ripped,” Rudy suggested.
“No, no,” Danny countered. “Someone athletic sure, but more Man of Business. Except that he’d be hot, too.”
“Yeah, but he’d have some flaws,” Jean Paul added. “Because he’s human, too. He’s real.”
They looked at me for my reaction. I had to laugh. “You are on the mark. Precisely.”
I
told them about Theo. I’ll ignore the part about him being in jail. For now.
“And that’s it?” Jeff asked. “No one else?” Disappointment lingered in his tone.
“Well, I did run into my ex-fiancé recently at a nightclub.”
That drew much more interest. “Tell, tell,” Danny said.
And so I told them.
When I was done, Danny took the opportunity to give me a healthy pat on my ass, the way a football coach would a player. “A girl like you, with that body and that hair and that mind… Oh, you should have your pick of those two.”
“You should get more than one pick,” Jean Paul said.
“What is it with straight people and monogamy?” added Rudy.
That was the stumper question apparently, which drew everyone into slow shakes of the head, trying to ponder the heterosexual population and our continued and often failed attempts at faithfulness.
Kim came back into the room again. She had a big smile on her face, her eyes wide. Seeing friends, apparently, was just what she needed. In fact, everyone seemed happier now that she was here.
My phone rang. Brad Jameson.
Earlier, after talking with Eric, I’d found Brad’s number on the internet, but he hadn’t answered when I called. I didn’t know the number for Anna. And my attempts to reach Theo in the jail were patently unsuccessful.
“Did you think you could just phone him up?” Maggie said when I called her.
“He’s my boyfriend,” I reminded her.
“Right. Well. He’s in a federal prison.”
“It’s not a prison,” I said, bristling. “It’s a jail. A holding cell. I thought you would remember that.” I stopped. “Sorry. This whole thing is making me cranky.”
“Who can blame you?” I heard Maggie moving around, then saying, “No, put that in the closet, will you?”
Question of Trust Page 8