Question of Trust

by Laura Caldwell

  “No.”

  She nodded, face still tight. “Keep going.”

  “Also, my dad figured out that Eric was probably working with the Feds for a while.”

  Maggie’s face cleared, like someone who’d seen a white light. “Huh. Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. I can’t believe I missed that. I’m so weird these days, so…”

  I wanted more. “So…what? You’re so weird, and so…”

  She shook her head. “I’m fine. So does Eric have an attorney?”

  I told her the name of the firm he’d hired.

  “They’re good. That’ll make the case easier actually. We work well with them.”

  “Well, that’s some good news,” I said. “I guess. I just can’t wait to talk to Theo. I’ll go see him during visiting hours if he doesn’t get out sooner. I need to find out more about what he knows.”

  “Even if he doesn’t think he knows anything,” Maggie added.

  “Exactly. Here’s the thing, though. I’m his attorney, right?”

  Maggie gave me a brisk nod.

  “So I can’t necessarily push Theo, right? I mean, isn’t that what you and your grandfather have been trying to teach me for a while? That you can’t force your defendant to tell you if he’s guilty or not? Or to give you any more information than he’s willing up front? In fact, sometimes it’s better to know as little as possible.”

  “Yeah. You’re right.” She shifted around, tugged at the neckline of her dress. “But now this is affecting our business.”

  “I know.” I groaned. “This is such Beijing.”

  She peered at me. “Another replacement word for ‘bullshit’?”

  I nodded.

  “They’re getting worse.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Q stepped into the office. “Hey, all, everyone ready for a good day?”

  Since joining the firm, Q liked to give everyone daily pep talks. Like the good coach he was, he rubbed his hands together. “So, Mags,” he said. “You’ve got a prove-up at ten, right?”

  “Yeah,” she said distractedly.

  “You ready?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Okay, Iz. I know we’re waiting for Theo to get out, but you’ve got to keep busy in the meantime.” God love Q. He knew how my mind worked. He knew I could spin into a fit of worry if I didn’t do something other than think about Theo’s case. “So don’t forget you’re handling the Marvin Wills case. We have to file those pleadings today.”

  I pushed a stack of paper at him. “They’re already done. They just need attachments.”

  “Good work, good work. Then move to the Melanie Chambers case.” Q gave a pleased smile. But then he stopped, finally seeming to catch on to our somber mood. “What’s going on, ladies?”

  Maggie told him about the Cortaderos. That left even Q speechless.

  Then I stood. And left.

  27

  Awkward, that’s what it was. Awkward, awkward, awkward.

  Over the course of my relationship with Theo, I’d felt a lot of different emotions, but this discomfiting self-conscious awfulness had never been one of them. He appeared to be so very aware of his own physical state, of how his place in the world had changed.

  He was out of jail. That was the good part. But he didn’t seem to be the Theo I knew. Although he wore the same clothes they’d arrested him in, he carried his other belongings in a paper sack that seemed as flimsy as his mental state.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  “Is my mom around? I want to thank her.”

  Right then Anna walked into the lobby of the MCC. “Honey,” she said, pulling him into a hug. She wore a peach-colored cashmere cape, and with her rosy cheeks and wind-swept hair, she looked a stark contrast to the pallid son who usually bore a carefree, sun-kissed resemblance to her.

  When he tried to pull back a moment later, Anna clung to Theo. I could see that she was fighting tears, that she didn’t want him to see them.

  The whole scene made me want to bawl wildly.

  Instead, I took a huge breath, and held up my phone, told them I was going to double-check on a few things. “I’ll give you a minute.”

  “Thank you, Izzy.”

  By the time I returned a few minutes later, Anna and Theo were talking quietly, their heads inclined. For a moment, I could imagine Anna and her son, when he was younger, when there weren’t such things to worry about. And it felt like a rip in the fabric of my heart. I knew my mom had worried about me at times. How did mothers do such things? Put up with so much for the sake of their kids? I wasn’t sure I could ever do it.

  “Go home and get settled,” Anna said to Theo. “I’ll call you in an hour.”

  He nodded and thanked her again. Then she left.

  “Your mom is a trooper,” I said, as Theo and I pushed through the doors, finally out onto the street.

  “She is. She’s been through a lot. My dad behaved like a jackass to her.”

  “Really?” I asked, wanting to talk about something other than his case.

  “Yeah. Especially when she had cancer and no insurance, and he wouldn’t help her out because he was too busy with his own world. And his collection of twentysomethings.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She told me at lunch that she and Brad were like brother and sister now.”

  Another laugh. “Yeah, the kind that don’t like each other very much.” He shrugged. “I’m lucky she came through for me. With the bail.”

  “Amen to that.”

  Clark Street in the Loop only moved southbound, so we walked to LaSalle and hailed a cab, giving my address on Eugenie.

  Neither of us said anything for a minute. It was freezing and Theo actually seemed to shiver, something I’d never seen him do. I leaned forward and put my face through the space in the Plexiglas toward the driver. “Can you turn on the heat, please?” I asked.

  “It don’t work back there,” was all he said.

  I gave Theo a smile that felt very false. “We’ll be home soon.” I liked using the word home, as his mother had. I hoped it would give him some kind of comfort.

  But home was where the awkwardness intensified. Theo showered, taking a long time, and when he came out of the bedroom in faded jeans and an army-green sweater, he didn’t look much better.

  He sat down next to me at the bar in the kitchen, where I had an untouched tea in front of me. “Let’s not talk about me,” he said, as if sensing impending questions. “How are you?”

  “We got some bad news at work.” I didn’t mention right away that this would, in fact, be a talk about him.

  “Oh, shit. What’s going on?” He looked interested, but then a wary look passed through his eyes, followed closely by—if I read it right—alarm. “Is it about my case?”

  I liked that he could read me like that. “Yeah. Sort of.” I explained to him the phone call Maggie had received from the Cortadero family.

  “How in the hell does this Mexican family have anything to do with my case?”

  “You tell me.” There was a snap to my voice, one that was foreign to me.

  His expression softened, and he moved closer to me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Let’s go into the living room.

  “I don’t do drugs,” he said, when we were on the couch, turned toward each other. My body felt stiff, as if I were bracing for…what? I didn’t know. He kept talking. “I mean, I did shrooms once my freshman year in college, but I was a mess.”

  “Well, just because you don’t do drugs doesn’t mean you don’t sell them.”

  His eyes narrowed. He looked pissed. “I don’t sell drugs, either. God, Iz, I can’t believe you would think that.”

  “I don’t know what to think!” I felt hot suddenly. I put a hand under my hair and lifted it up. “What do you expect me to think when Maggie gets this call and the firm gets fired from a lot of work?”

  He didn’t have an answer.

  “What could the reason be for wh
y we can’t work with them if we work with you?” I asked.

  “I don’t have any idea. None. What did you say their name was?”

  “The Cortaderos.” I spelled it for him.

  “I’ve never even heard of them.”

  We were both silent for a moment.

  “What about Eric?” I said.

  “What about him?”

  “Well, maybe it’s got something to do with him. Maybe he’s somehow involved with this.”

  I expected him to protest right away, to say something like, Hey, Eric is a good dude. But Theo took a moment to think about it.

  “I’ve never known him to do drugs,” he said finally. “Or to sell drugs.”

  “You wouldn’t necessarily know. I mean, what does a drug dealer look like? I’m sure that there are lots of people whom we would never suspect that do drugs and sell drugs.”

  More silence.

  “I suppose that’s true,” he said. He looked so tired then, more exhausted than I’d ever seen him, almost defeated. I scooted toward him, placed a hand on his arm. When the defeated look deepened, I climbed onto his lap. I hugged him, and, like a child needing to be comforted, he put his face on my chest. I squeezed tight. I thought about hugging Eric that morning.

  After a few moments like that, I moved back, and then I braced myself again, because I had to tell Theo that Eric had been working with the Feds.

  The heartbreak on Theo’s face—that face framed by tawny brown hair, soft and thick, those lips that now seemed to have no words—nearly sunk me.

  “He was working with the Feds?” Theo asked, a shocked tone. He’d asked that question twice already.

  And so I told him again. “That’s the reason he wasn’t arrested. That’s also why there was no search warrant.”

  “Okay, but tell me this. What did he give them? I don’t know of anything there is to give. He said he was looking into the issues at HeadFirst, but he also told me he hadn’t found anything.”

  I could only shrug.

  “Does he think I’m guilty?” Theo asked, his tone even more baffled. “Does he think I did something?”

  I tried to hug him again, but Theo was stiff, his body an unyielding mass now. And he was sending out waves of energy, an anxiety that was almost palpable.

  “Iz,” he said, “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  I believed Theo. I did. His reaction to the Cortaderos news? He had seemed as befuddled as I was, as Maggie had been. And his response to Eric’s betrayal? It was shock, nerves. I trusted him. I did.

  But if he were telling the truth about not doing something wrong, then who had?

  28

  The next day at work, I pushed aside everything on my desk, retrieved the file for the coke-on-a-boat case and tried to create a timeline of what might have happened—from the purchase of the boat to the alleged importing of cocaine, the packing of the boat, the planned trip down the Mississippi.

  I stopped there. If they had been successful, if the seizure had not occured, what would have happened with the massive amount of drugs when they reached New Orleans?

  I found Maggie in her office. But instead of the piles of transcripts and motions that usually covered her own desk, she had design magazines lined in rows across the desktop.

  “What do you think about this look?” Maggie said, waving me in and turning a magazine around to face me as I took a seat. The glossy photo-spread showed an Asian-inspired room with red paper screens, stone floors and lots of dragonheads on the corners of the furniture.

  “It looks like a temple,” I said.

  “A temple?” Maggie swung the magazine around and scowled at it. “I don’t want to live in a temple.”

  “What did I miss? Why would you live in a temple?”

  She sighed, looked at me. “Bernard doesn’t like my apartment decor.”

  “Why? He doesn’t like modern?” Maggie’s place in a South Loop high-rise was her haven, completely different from the wood, leather and crap-laden confines of her office. Her home, instead, was white and minimal with low, Swedish-style couches and pristine glass tables.

  “He likes modern, but wants something more Filipino, more Asian.”

  “And what do you think about that?” I crossed my arms across my chest, and settled in for what was hopefully a long and distracting chat about absolutely nothing concerning Theo or his business or his case or drug dealers. I hoped I’d learn more about what had been going on with Maggie lately.

  “I think I don’t like Asian,” Maggie said. “I think I never have.”

  “So you’ll compromise.”

  “I don’t want to compromise.” Maggie voice was getting a little louder. “Not about my house.” She looked down at the magazines on her desk. “I can’t live with dragons.” She returned her gaze to mine, fear in her eyes. “What if we’re doing the wrong thing?”

  “Oh, c’mon, get a dragon lamp instead of a couch and you can always get rid of it.”

  “No! I’m talking about Bernard and me and… What if we’re making the wrong choice?”

  “You’re in love with him,” I reminded her.

  “Yeah, but will I still be next summer? And by then I’ll have…” She shook her head.

  I could only blink and look at her for a moment, surprised at the uncharacteristic show of self-doubt. “You’ll have…” I finally prompted her.

  “An apartment filled with Buddhas and bamboo.”

  “Mags,” I said, “you make good life decisions. You always have.”

  “But what if this is the bad one? The bad one that derails my whole career, my whole life?”

  “Whoa, whoa, Mags.” I reminded her of the way she’d negotiated her life, her career, with total aplomb.

  “Aplomb? What does that even mean?” Maggie scoffed. “Wyatt was a bad decision. One I made at least twice.”

  Wyatt was a lying, cheating charmer Maggie had dated on two disastrous occasions. So she had a decent point there.

  “But!” I said, suddenly striking on an idea that felt like it had a lot of truth to it. “Being with Wyatt made you realize exactly what you don’t want. That’s why you were able to recognize the brilliance of you and Bernard, and the fact that you do want him. You do want a life with him.”

  Her mouth opened as if to respond in protest, but then she fell back against her chair, with a breath of air escaping her. “You’re right.”

  “I’m right,” I repeated, liking the sound of it. If only I could be assured of such rightness in my own life. “So, Mags,” I said, “shifting gears for a sec to work. I’m looking at the coke-in-a-boat case.”

  She sat up, nodded at me to continue.

  “I’m wondering what they would have done with the drugs—”

  “And by they,” Maggie said, interrupting me, “you mean the people who were not Cortadero employees, who were apparently going rogue with this shipment of cocaine?”

  “Uh, right.”

  Maggie took her clients seriously. And since our defense in this case was going to be lack of knowledge, lack of employment of the people involved, she was going to take every opportunity to talk up that defense, even around the office so she could use it, feel more and more confident about it.

  “So,” I continued, “what would they have done with the drugs when they got to New Orleans?”

  “Distribute it.”

  “That much coke? All in one place?”

  “Yeah. Well, sort of. You couldn’t do that everywhere, but it’s really easy in New Orleans. It’s why cruise-ship employees keep getting busted for bringing heroin and everything else there. If you can get it there, it’s one of the easiest places to sell drugs.”

  I thought about that for a second, told Maggie about my timeline. “I’m doing this to try and understand these Cortadero cases.”

  Maggie studied me. “So you can also understand what the Cortaderos might have to do with your boyfriend?”

  “If anything.”

  Maggie said nothing.
And I didn’t like that silence very much.

  “So the next thing in the timeline,” I said, “would be taking the money they made from distributing the drugs and doing what with it? That’s got to be a lot of money.”

  She nodded. “Hell yeah, millions and millions, baby. The truth is I try not to know where the money goes. The prosecutors always want to know the same thing so they can confiscate the money or property bought with drug money. It’s probably in a foreign trust somewhere, but for me—”

  My phone blared, making me jump. At the same time, my mind pulled at something. What was it? “Sorry,” I said, pulling it out of my suit coat pocket. “I’ve had it on loud ever since Theo got arrested.” I looked at the screen. “Theo.”

  I gave Maggie the one-minute sign, and she waved me away, picking up another design magazine with another scowl.

  “What’s up?” I said, taking the phone in the hall.

  “Meet me for a late lunch?”

  It sounded so normal. It sounded wonderful. “Yeah,” I said softly.

  But Theo said, “I just had to fire ten people.” And that brought me back to reality.

  29

  The Gage, a restaurant on Michigan Avenue, was crowded when I arrived. Tourists huddled at the bar, taking a break from the cold, and office workers shared pre-happy-hour drinks. The result was festive—cheerful voices bouncing off the high tin ceilings, smiles and hugs reflected in the mirror behind the long oak bar.

  Festive wasn’t exactly the same mood I was in, alas.

  I managed to find a couple of stools around a small high-top table. When Theo walked in, he appeared stressed. His cheekbones were more prevalent, his eyes bigger, the shadow of his beard darkening the overall effect of Theo Jameson. I was relieved to see, though, that when his eyes searched the room and found mine, he smiled—reflexively, it seemed, but also in a genuine way, as if some relief had entered him.

  He hugged me when he reached our table, squeezing me harder than usual, longer than he often did.

  “So you had to fire people?” I asked, as he shed his coat.

  “Everyone. There was just no way around it. The company isn’t liquid enough to pay them, and I still don’t know why, or if, it can be remedied.” He sighed, rubbed his beard. “I met with everyone personally. I wanted to give each of them a review of their work and thank them for what they’d done for the company.”