Question of Trust

by Laura Caldwell

  He said nothing.

  “If you do, can you please tell me what they have to do with HeadFirst? I mean, they’re not on that list, but we lost business because of them.” I explained they wouldn’t let Bristol & Associates represent them if we represented Theo.

  Brad Jameson sighed deeply. He took the list from my hand, pointed to one business. Barrington Hills Trading.

  “We did investigations on all these names,” I said. “And if I remember correctly, that business was owned by Vince Cort.”

  He nodded.

  I suddenly got it. “Cort,” I said. “Short for Cortadero.”

  64

  Maggie stepped into the office of the A.U.S.A.

  “I’m glad you could stop by,” Anish said with a grin. U.S. prosecutors weren’t usually flirty. Whatever was going on, it was a good sign.

  “What’s up?” She pointed at the chair in front of his desk and he nodded.

  Maggie sat, tried to cross her legs, but it felt weird now that she was pregnant. She wasn’t even showing. There was nothing yet to show! But she felt something solid there. This pregnancy thing was strange. On that topic, she veered from ambivalent to freaked out and back in a matter of seconds.

  “We’ve been thinking about you,” Anish said.

  “About me? Why?” Did he sense she was pregnant? Was this going to cause people to view her differently as an attorney? She broke into a faint sweat thinking about it. Jesus, all the work she had put into her career. Was this—this baby (she had to get used to that word) going to sideline it for her?

  Anish’s black eyes narrowed. “I meant your case.”

  “Oh.”

  “The Jameson case.”

  “Oh,” she said again.

  “What did you think I meant?”

  “Nothing. I’m with you now. You’re talking about those other ‘avenues’ of the case, as you put it?”

  “Yes. And we think they’re important. So we want your help on those avenues. Let me show you first what we’ve done.” He pushed a written document across the desk at her. It was a plea agreement in the case of the United States versus Theodore Jameson. She looked closer. The agreement had been made in the name of Brad Jameson.

  She looked back at Anish, asked a few questions. Then she said, “I need to make a phone call.”

  65

  Maggie called a few times. I went outside Brad’s house and was finally able to get service on my BlackBerry to call her back.

  Her voice rushed, she told me about Brad Jameson’s plea agreement.

  “I can’t believe they would plea-bargain with Brad,” I said, “when he’s the one who created this.”

  “He can’t have created all of it.”

  “That’s what he’s saying right now.” I looked through the sliding doors into the house. Brad Jameson leaned forward, elbows on his knees, looking at his son, who was staring at his phone intently, ignoring his father.

  “Anish would only say it had to do with family.”

  “Family as in organized crime?”

  “I assume so. I don’t know why they’re so intent on using Theo to get to the Cortaderos.”

  “I think I know. Brad just told us that someone named Vince Cort was one of the original investors of HeadFirst.”

  “Vince Cort?” Maggie repeated, like she was sounding out a puzzle. “Sounds a little like Vincente Cortadero.”

  “You got it. You know him?”

  “Nope, but I know of him. His name appears occasionally here and there, but I’ve never worked with him. He’s like the prince of the Cortadero family. They keep him away from the commoners.”

  “So any information I get about his investing in HeadFirst…”

  “We can definitely use. We were never his attorneys. So we can trade that information to get Theo a plea bargain.”

  “I don’t want him to plea-bargain,” I said. “He didn’t do anything wrong except take the wrong advice from the wrong person.”

  How good it felt to say that, and for it to feel true! Except that Brad kept saying he hadn’t caused all the problems at HeadFirst. What did he mean?

  I looked back through the glass. Theo wasn’t there. My eyes moved to the right. He stood at the kitchen sink, just looking out the window, not moving.

  “I hear you,” Maggie said, “I hear you.” I could tell she was thinking. And hard. “I definitely touched a nerve with my argument about the Feds using the little guy to get to the big dogs. They don’t care about Theo or people like him, they just want to take down the bigger players. In this case, I’d guess it’s not just the Cortaderos they’re concerned with.”

  “Who else?”

  “The Cortaderos are a cartel family. Which means they’re one in a group of families from Mexico. That’s probably what Anish was talking about. Not only was Vincente an investor in HeadFirst, but I bet they’re hoping it’ll lead them to other families. Because usually within one cartel, they all steer their money the same direction.”

  “So let me see if I get this. They want to bring down all the families in a particular Mexican drug cartel. So they follow Vincente Cortadero and the money trail.”

  “And then they keep watching until something gets fucked up with the business they put money in,” Maggie said. “White-collar crime is so freaking easy to prosecute these days.”

  “So they can go after the business, but really they’re looking for the way the cartels are laundering money.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t use the term laundering,” Maggie said.

  “Allegedly laundering,” I said, having learned well from her.

  “Exactly. And the judges are attuned to this game of theirs now. I could tell the judge responded well to my argument, and I can tell I have the prosecutors running a little scared.”

  “Keep working on it?” I said.

  “You got it. You guys okay down there?”

  I looked back through the window, seeing Theo still standing, motionless, looking out the kitchen window at an empty yard.

  “I don’t know,” I said to Maggie. Because I knew, just by taking in the way his shoulders sagged, his normally straight posture a little hunched forward, that Theo Jameson was brokenhearted.

  66

  The only good thing about him—the only thing—was that he told her straight out.

  “I killed her,” he said as soon as he sat down across from her. That was a week ago, a day or two before Thanksgiving. She’d been waiting for him, ashamed. She could barely even believe she had hired Manny, or whatever his name was. But now those words were coming from his mouth!

  “You killed her?” Her hand flew to her mouth. Hot tears of regret and anguish sprung from her eyes. “You weren’t supposed to kill her, just hurt her, sideline her, slow her down.”

  “I know but she fought. And hard. Like a street fighter, that girl.”

  “Izzy McNeil?” she said incredulously. “That girl is a lot of things, but there is no way she’s a street fighter!” Her voice had shot up in volume, despite herself. She glanced around, saw other patrons at the restaurant frowning at her.

  She looked back at Manny, the idiot. “What in the hell happened?”

  “I went in, like you said. Had to break the thing by the front door to get in, but the door to their apartment was open when I got there.”

  He’d been hired to find Izzy when she was alone sometime, give her a little hurt. Just a little, that’s what she told him. She rather liked Izzy. She didn’t want her dead.

  “Christ,” she said, but the word was muffled. Both hands were on her mouth now. She hated it when she watched a movie and the character threw up shortly after receiving horrible news. She always thought it a clichéd way to show the character was upset. But now she understood that the gesture was true. She was very, very close to vomiting.

  “The place was dark,” Manny continued.

  He didn’t even look upset. Why didn’t he look upset?

  She shook her head, hands still on her mouth. Su
ch an idiot. And she was an even bigger idiot for hiring him. She knew him because he worked at the Lexus dealership that serviced her car. He always hit on her when she brought her car in, hinting more than once that he had a tough-guy background, telling her he could help her out “with just about anything she needed.”

  What she needed was to get Izzy out of the way for a while. Just for a while! She was too inquisitive, and so were the people she had working with her—her father and some guy named John Mayburn. And although Theo had been relieved when Izzy’s firm got on board to represent him, things had only gotten worse. She knew Theo and Izzy had already had one break-in, so she figured if Manny could stage another break-in and hurt her—just a little!—then the dad and John Mayburn would put their efforts into finding the person who’d done that to her. Take the spotlight away from Theo and HeadFirst and what had happened to the money.

  Once in Izzy’s place, Manny was supposed to deal with her—minimally—then steal a computer and a TV and then trash them somewhere. He said he’d leave no trace of himself, and the police would never be able to connect him to the crime, certainly wouldn’t be able to connect her.

  She removed a hand from her mouth and stared at Manny, trying to hear what he was saying although she was having a hard time focusing. She seemed to have lost her own words as well as her ability to comprehend others.

  “I thought it was going to be an easy job,” he was saying. “Just walk in, take a couple of things, wait for her to get home, pop her a few times and get out.” His casual tone made her find her words.

  “What the fuck happened?” she spat out. She had only said the word fuck a handful of times in her life.

  “She was there when I walked in. The lights were out. I guess because she’d just got home. I walked into the place and wham! She cracked me over the head with a book or something.”

  She listened as he told her how they fought, how he didn’t mean to hurt her or kill her, but Shit, man, she was a fighter.

  She wished she had never started down this road—one that began long before Izzy came into the picture. Izzy wasn’t even in the picture. That was the thing. The situation had to do with the love and support she was entitled to. How many therapists had told her that? And finally she had believed. She had really let herself believe about being deserving. And that had been when she started simply taking what she deserved, what had been sitting there all along.

  She used the money to pay for things he had said he would help her with. Then she kept draining the money for spite, knowing Brad would eventually take the heat, knowing he deserved it. She had no idea that Theo’s business would get so near to destruction. The coward just kept trying to make more, kept losing more. And by the time she realized it—by the time that Theo was arrested—she couldn’t put the money back. The bankers had made that clear. That wasn’t how the trust worked. She was not the founder of the trust. She couldn’t put any money into it. So she let the situation go, thinking it was so absurd that it would have to remedy itself. It would have to go away.

  But it hadn’t left. In fact, it got worse.

  67

  When I walked back into the house on the beach, the air conditioning hit me like a blessed breeze, a respite from the rising humidity outside. And yet, although the temperatures were cool, the tempers inside were something else.

  Theo was pacing now, talking low to his father, not looking at him. “I cannot believe you, Dad. What kind of person does this to their son?”

  Brad was looking angrier and less chagrined.

  “Eric looks up to you like a father, you know that?” Theo stopped to see if this registered to Brad, but as soon as his father opened his mouth, he again kept pacing and talking, not letting him answer. “Eric wasn’t close with his father. And he was so jealous of me when he first met you. He thought we had the best father-son relationship he’d ever seen.” Theo’s face became stricken. “And I agreed with him. I thought we had a great relationship, too. But I thought you were someone different. And now you’re not that person and I—” Then Theo, who had so much to say, stopped suddenly. His mouth just hung open, as if looking at a horrible accident.

  “I didn’t—” Brad said.

  “You didn’t what?” Theo shouted. “You took drug cartel money—illegal money—to put in my business, right?”

  Brad nodded, a firm set to his mouth.

  “And you hoarded that money and you used it for your own…whatever. And now it’s gone.”

  “Theo, I don’t know how to explain it—”

  “Then don’t! Is anything I said untrue?”

  Silence, then a soft “No” from Brad.

  Theo looked at me. “Izzy, I’m sorry you had to see this. Let’s get out of here.”

  I noticed that Theo didn’t look back before he stormed from the house, waving at the driver when he got outside.

  But something about Brad made me halt and look at him. There was so much anguish on his face that I wanted to embrace him. But my loyalties were to Theo. So I turned, and I left.

  68

  Theo’s eyes were above me, his hips slowly moving, hand snaking its way upward, stroking, over my hips, past my ribs, between my breasts, touching, then a pinch, more stroking…stopping there, then upward until ever so lightly his hand was on my neck.

  Outside the French doors of the hotel’s bedroom was a dark beach, lit by a few solitary lamps and a lot of stars. No one was on the beach, and with the door just slightly ajar, we could hear the soothing swoosh, swoosh of the water lapping the shore.

  “Trust me,” Theo said, his hand still light on my neck. Then he repeated the words, but he said them in a different way. “Trust me?”

  There was definitely a question mark there. We had sat on the beach for hours talking about this very issue. Theo had lost faith in his father—the person he’d most counted on in his life. He no longer trusted him. He no longer knew who to trust. But he trusted me, he’d said.

  And now he was asking if I returned the sentiment. Did I trust him? With my love. With my life.

  Then there was incremental pressure, his fingers on either side of my neck, the flat of his palm on my throat.

  “Trust me,” he said.

  Trust me, trust me, trust me, trust me.

  The words resonated in my brain. No longer did he speak them, but I heard them from somewhere, like church bells in distant hills.

  Trust me, trust me, trust me, trust me.

  More pressure. His thumb was feather-soft on my jaw, nearly my ear, but his palm pressed. It didn’t hurt. It felt…strange.

  “Trust me?” Again a question followed by a little more pressure. He moved inside me. Faster. He knew how to get me where he wanted me. He knew how to get me there quickly. My breath came shorter. I moved with him.

  Theo’s eyes didn’t move from mine. The question vibrated around us, entwined with the concept of love. I looked at him. I said yes with my eyes.

  He read the answer, moved faster. I raised my hips to meet him. When I was nearly there, I closed my eyes, felt just enough pressure on my neck to freeze the breath in my lungs.

  An explosion of silver, convulsions of pleasure, another burst of silver, a firecracker blast of gold, all around, shimmering, shaking, making it right.

  69

  Twenty-three hours later, after flying overnight from the Cook Islands to Los Angeles, then L.A. to Chicago, our plane touched down in a cloud of white-gray.

  Outside, past the passport checks, Theo and I pulled our bags into an already dark afternoon. But the sky seemed to glitter with reflective snowflakes. We both took huge breaths. The cool air tamped down the heat we’d collected in Rarotonga, the heat of Theo learning, face-to-face, of his father’s betrayal.

  We stood like that, just breathing for a few minutes, then Theo stepped forward and hailed a cab.

  We were silent on that taxi ride home. There was really nothing left to say at that point. There was a barrier that we’d broken through when we had sex th
e previous night, when I let him put his hands on my neck and let them stay there, trusting him, trusting him in so many ways—trusting him to back off at the right time, to never let me feel for a moment it would go too far. It was a big responsibility in a way. He not only took it, but he also stepped up into it. And it was like I’d let him into me. And me into him.

  My phone rang. Detective Damon Vaughn.

  Oddly, the sight of his name, one that used to bring snarling scorn from my mind, felt like some kind of relief now.

  “Hey, Vaughn,” I said, answering. There was no way I was calling him “Detective.” It was the last passive-aggressive bit I was retaining from the days when I hated him.

  “Where ya been?”

  “How do you know I’ve been anywhere?”

  A pause.

  “You’re watching my house?” I asked.

  “Hell yeah, I’m watching your house,” he said in a defensive tone. “You had a break-in there. You had a murder there.”

  My stomach turned over at the reminders. I felt tears quickly marshal in my eyes.

  “I’m a Chicago police detective,” Vaughn said.

  “I know you are.”

  “And you have an open case. Two of them.”

  “Got it,” I said. “Sorry. It’s been a long couple of days. Learned a lot about HeadFirst and the Cortaderos.” Then I added, “They’re a Mexican drug cartel family.”

  “I know who they are,” he said, still defensive. “Jesus.”

  “I said I was sorry!” Now my voice wore the defensiveness. A pause. “Anyway. What do you know about them?”

  “Something I just found out. The Cortaderos were Kim Parkway’s source.”

  “The Cortaderos were Kim Parkway’s source?” I repeated for Theo’s benefit.

  His eyes went wide.

  “So she got her drugs from them?” I asked. “And then she’d sell them?”

  “Well, she didn’t get anything directly from them, you know? She got them from a guy named Eddie from Ukrainian Village, but if you tracked back a few places where Eddie got his stuff, and that guy got his stuff, then yeah, you learn the Cortaderos and their cartel were the source.”