By now, sitting on the hot seat of a television talk show set was old hat and Chicagoans he had contact with coming and going might recognize him. Might comment on the day’s topic. Tell him about their brother/sister/kid who should be on The Amanda Show. He had become what Temple so aptly called a semicelebrity. A regular on a surviving talk show. Not quite Oprah. Not Ellen. Not The View. But comfortably second tier. When it came to being in the spotlight, Matt liked second tier fine. That was where the fitful public limelight didn’t fry your private life for dinner.
Dignity was not necessarily a requirement for the job but he’d managed to keep his, so far, during his media ramble. Dignity would be the key to getting any kind of honest attention from Brandon, Oakes, and McCall.
And dignity was the reason he was visiting this old established law firm. His mother’s. She wanted to know more about the man who had sired him. A boy, really, from what little she’d told Matt about the circumstances of his conception. A young man determined to volunteer for a foreign war his family had the means to keep him safely out of. Meeting a girl from the wrong side of the WASP tracks in a church on the eve of shipping out.
It was hard for Matt to imagine his timid, conservative mother being young enough to fall into first sex with a stranger she’d met in a church, before the flickering candles at a saint’s station.
But she had. And what came of it? Only him, a fatherless child in a working-class Catholic neighborhood that didn’t forget sins of carnal knowledge.
Matt found himself shaking his head in the back of the cab, which smelled of chewing gum and smoke. Its lurching progress through the rush-hour traffic was making him sick. Or something else was.
His mother was fifty-four now, looking remarkably young yet leading a life circumscribed by her underachieving job and the Church. What good would it do her to know the name of her particular hit-and-run Joseph?
He had died, that privileged boy who’d rejected his get-out-of-war free card. Over there somewhere. The family lawyers bought amnesia from mother and son with the title of a two-flat that would keep them, with a spare unit to bring in steady rent. Matt’s mother had never known more than his father’s first name but he’d been somebody, whoever he was. Any seed he’d sown on the way to annihilation was … so much wildflower along the highway. Unnamed, unnoticed. Unacknowledged.
So much chaff in the wind. Then he thought of his stepfather, Cliff Effinger. Why had she married him when he’d been just a toddler? He’d asked that question at six and he still asked it of himself today, almost thirty years later. Effinger. Now dead, and Matt not sorry one bit. A mean, lesser man than the sainted boy Mira met at the saint’s station in the church.
How could she? How could she have turned them both over to an abusive creature like Effinger? Unless she’d felt she deserved punishment? Unless she’d been so beaten down that she’d needed to marry a permanent punishment. Matt finally had grown old and big enough to banish punishment, but it hadn’t been soon enough. His mother wasn’t to blame; it was the social milieu that said that pain was a fallen woman’s only lot. It was her righteous, callous family and the Church he’d run to himself at the earliest opportunity for ultimate approval. Holy Mother of God. He too had deserted her for his own petty salvation.
Matt probed for the right bills as he paid off the cabby and got out to face a fifties building of pale stone and castlelike crenellations.
He didn’t need this. Want this. His mother did. A bad idea. If he … she … learned nothing, it was another disappointment in a life replete with too many. If they learned something, it was … a slap in the face; they weren’t wanted here, not even Matt with his seminational media profile.
Still. He had his national TV suit on, which was a lot better than Dr. Phil’s, and his new seriously slick briefcase, and his smooth, photogenic media cool. None of it was bedrock real, but then neither were the high-priced lawyers from this firm who had bullied a naive young mother into settling for down-at-the-heels real estate as shabby security instead of real information about the most traumatic, and apparently transcendental, moment of her life.
How much you want to bet a Chicago lawyer even knew what transcendental meant?
Matt walked in, read the tiny white type on the big black plaque by the elevator, and was whooshed, ears quickly blocked, to the forty-fifth floor.
Brandon, Oakes, and McCall offered a reception suite paved in plush plum carpet and furniture upholstered in espresso-dark brown leather.
The receptionist reminded Matt of a high-priced Las Vegas call girl: tall, chic, managing to be both icy and sexy.
He ought to know, thanks to his latest unwanted adventure in the land of neon and sex for sale.
The woman’s demeanor warmed as he neared the desk. She glanced down at the appointment ledger and frowned. “Mr … . Devine? You requested an appointment with a senior partner.”
“Yes.”
A few junior female clerks were dashing in and out of the smooth wooden door beyond the receptionist’s arena that kept the uninvited out. They glanced at him, then looked again, then outright gawked.
Okay. He was getting used to these epiphanies among the female population. Maybe it was his blond Polish good looks. Maybe familiarity from his stints on The Amanda Show. Maybe it was the highlight job from his last bizarre undercover turn in Temple’s Everlasting Carnival of Crime and Detection.
Ms. Fashionista Receptionist smiled intimately at him in recognition of his high profile in the waiting room.
“You may go right in. Miss—” She hesitated before bestowing the honor on just the right one of the paralyzed paralegals. “Miss Hendrix will escort you.”
Miss Hendrix leaped forward, clutching a bouquet of legal-length manila folders to her pin-striped heart.
“Certainly, Mr.—?”
“Devine.” He expected his name to generate references to his latest appearance on Chicago TV, but Miss Hendrix blinked as if confounded, then stuttered forward like a geisha on her four-inch spike heels toward the unmarked, exotic zebrawood door.
Puzzled, Matt followed. Certainly his yellow hair alone hadn’t merited this reception. But if they didn’t recognize his media ties, what else could account for this quick and cordial reception?
The office he was ushered into was the size of a racquetball court and about as welcoming.
Glass winked coldly from a ring of expensive modern prints. Leather and wood was slathered everywhere, enormous distances separating desk and chairs from facing walls of built-in bar and audio-video equipment. Beyond all this, looking like a gigantic print, was the sweep of distant gray skyscraper towers through a window-wall.
“Mr. Brandon will see you shortly,” said Miss Fluttering Legal Briefs. “Please. Be seated.”
He took one of the three tufted brown leather wing chairs placed before the desk, set the silver briefcase beside it, and commenced to wait.
“Mr. Devine!”
The voice from the doorway was both powerful and jocular.
“My wife loves your appearances on Amanda’s show. What brings you to our offices?”
So that was it Mr. Big himself had recognized his name.
The voice advanced on him from behind, its energy bouncing off the window-wall. Matt turned in the wing chair, started to rise.
“Charles Brandon.”
His … host, it sounded like, came into view around the curl of the chair’s obscuring wing.
A chubby hand accessorized with a three-carat star sapphire ring was extended.
Matt rose to take it, then watched shock rinse all the welcome from Charles Brandon’s pink and fleshy face.
It was too late to stop the handshake. Matt kept his grip firm but not pushy. The hand he shook went limp with the surprise the face had registered first.
“Mr. Devine,” the man repeated, as if impressing the name on his memory. “You are the visiting family counselor on The Amanda Show. Aren’t you?”
“Among other things, yes.�
�� Matt studied the man, watching him juggle preconceptions.
“Well, sit down.” Brandon bustled around the desk to install himself on the gray leather behemoth of a chair behind it. His formerly flushed skin tones now matched the ashen hide. “Ah, as I was saying, my wife loves you. I mean, she loves your, ah, point of view, I guess. You know women, always into that relationship stuff. So. What can I do for you?”
While Matt reseated himself, reaching for the briefcase, Brandon kept talking in the way of a man who makes his living by it.
“You must forgive my surprise. You’re not what I expected.”
“In what way?”
“Oh, you know. Dr. Phil. Fat and fifty. I had no idea you were such a … handsome young fellow. No wonder my wife, eh?”
“I’ve been told I’m telegenic. That word always sounds like an exotic affliction to me.”
Brandon chuckled, his face and manner resuming their earlier bonhomie. “Clever fellow too. How’d you get into the TV shrink game?”
“I’m not a shrink. I was a Catholic priest for most of my adult life.”
“Now that surprises me. Also relieves me. Can’t have the wife too enamored of sharp young men on TV. You left, then?”
“Officially, yes, the priesthood. One doesn’t ever leave the Church, I’m told.”
“I’ve heard that same sentiment from Chicago’s most famous priest, Father Greeley. Wonderful man.”
Matt felt he had now been firmly pinned to whatever part of the bulletin board Brandon reserved for such alien life forms as celibate priests, current or former.
“What can I do for you?” Brandon repeated.
“Not for me so much as for my mother.”
“Your mother—”
“She lives here. In Chicago.”
“And you?”
“I live in Las Vegas now.”
“Las Vegas? Really? Quite the switch for you, I imagine.”
“It’s mostly a city that ordinary people live in. That’s where my syndicated radio talk show originates.”
“Syndicated. Indeed.”
Matt hated to use his media connections but they appeared to work.
“Would you like my girl to get you a cup of coffee or tea? Something stronger?”
“No. Thank you. What I’d like is for you to take a look at this … document my mother signed thirty-five years ago. Your firm drew it up.”
“An old document. Quite the mystery. Now you’ve got me curious. Let’s see it.”
Matt lifted the briefcase, unlatched it, and brought out the three-page agreement that bore his mother’s signature.
Brandon lowered his silver-haired head to the pages, skimmed the first page. Flipped the paper back over the staple in the upper-left-hand corner.
“A deed transfer. Straightforward. Your mother was given title to a two-flat.” He hit the third page, where she was required to seek no more “compensation” and to make no further “contact” with the unnamed party who had transferred ownership of the two-flat to her.
“Most … unusual.”
Matt had watched Brandon’s face fade again to gray. He’d heard people described as “going white” with shock but he’d never actually seen the phenomenon before. It was more a grim tightening of the features than actual paling, but there was no doubt that what Brandon saw in those papers disturbed him.
“An unusual deed transfer but quite binding, I’d think.” Brandon held the papers out to Matt, who didn’t take them.
“It was a compensation for my birth. Child support of a sort, if you will. My mother was very young, not even eighteen, and she signed it without legal advice.”
“Still, she signed it.”
“But I didn’t. I’d like to know who the unnamed ‘party of the first part’ is.”
“Impossible. The anonymity is as binding on this firm as your mother’s agreement to seek no further information was, and is, on her.”
“I’m not her. I want to know the name of the family that made arrangements for my domestic life. I want to know my family name.”
“You have a perfectly good, and fairly famous, one now: Devine. I advise you to be happy with it.”
“It’s a phony name, Mr. Brandon. Do you know where my mother got it? From her favorite Christmas hymn, ‘O Holy Night.’ The line goes, ‘O Holy Night, 0 Night Divine …’”
Brandon kept his eyes on his lizardskin desk set. “However it came to be, it’s very … telephonic. Stick with it and forget delving into the dead past.”
“‘The dead past’ involves how I came to be. I’m not going to leave it alone.”
“I can’t help you break the confidentiality of a document this firm constructed.”
“Why not? “The truth shall set you free.’ My mother was a naive teenager in desperate circumstances when she signed that document. Encouraging her to do so might be construed as fraud. Who paid her off to keep her, and myself, ignorant of my father’s identity?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“I have to protect the party of the first part, our client.”
“But it’s my birth, my life, hidden behind these three sleazy little pages buying silence and selling souls.”
Brandon waved the papers at Matt again. His face crinkled with appeal. “That was almost thirty-five years ago, young man! Take my advice. Forget about it. You have a successful life. I assume you can take quite good financial care of your mother.”
“Someone felt guilty, or that paper would never have been drawn up. Guilt doesn’t melt like hailstones. It sits and festers. Whoever wanted that secrecy enough to buy it doesn’t really sleep well at night, thirty-five years down the drain or not. I’m doing him or them a favor. And I won’t give up or go away. Quite frankly, I started this on my mother’s behalf. I tried to advise her against it with the same platitudes you’re now urging on me. But Shakespeare said it best: ‘the past is prologue.’ That’s the story of all our lives, if you think about it, and we all deserve to know our own pasts.”
Brandon jabbed the papers at him one last time.
“Keep that,” Matt told him. “It’s only a copy. I’m after the originals.”
“You’re quite eloquent, you know that? I’m glad you’re not an attorney. But the law’s on my side. I can’t help you, or your mother. I’m sorry. I can’t.”
Matt stood up. “I want to know. I need to know. I intend to know. Maybe other attorneys in this city would like to know too. Maybe Amanda would like a personal story from an expert on her show. Maybe a lot of possibilities are out there somewhere. Like the truth. Thanks for your time. Give your wife my regards.”
It was a long walk to the door. He took it as if he had won, not lost. Hearing Brandon make the same arguments to him that he had given his mother had turned Matt 180 degrees on this whole issue.
She had a right to know. He had a right to know. They had a right to know.
Opening the door, he almost bumped into the lurking paralegal.
“Oh. Mr … . Devine. May I show you out?”
He smiled. “Sure. Thanks. These offices are a rat maze.”
“Don’t we know it? So many junior partners.”
She happily led him through carpeted hallways that turned and twisted, always passing by more paper-filled work cubicles.
“When do you find time to watch The Amanda Show?” he asked as they neared the central reception area.
“Amanda Show? Daytime TV. Oh, I don’t. Ever find time, I mean. I know it’s a Chicago institution. Why do you ask about it?”
“Because it’s a Chicago institution, like Oprah,” he said, shrugging as if he didn’t care.
So her amazing interest in him didn’t derive from his TV appearances. Surely his recent Queer Eye for the Straight Guy hair highlighting job wasn’t solely responsible for these frequent dewy glances?
“Here we are. Reception, Mr. Win—” She glanced, mortified, at the appointment roster in her hand. “Oh, yes. Right. M
r. Devine.”
“Thank you.”
He’d never meant those two words more. Moving through the crowded reception area, barely seeing the blur of briefcase-carrying men and women, he mentally repeated the young woman’s slip of the tongue over and over:
Mr. Win … Winthrop? Winston? Winter? Winterhalter? Winscott. Wingate. The Chicago phonebook would be crammed with enough possibilities to make his vision blur at the tiny type repeating W-i-n into infinity.
So, suddenly, there were possibilities. He had been mistaken for someone. A client. Apparently there was a marked family resemblance. He looked like someone alive in this world besides his mother.
The feeling was weird, and frightening, and infuriating. He would find out who, one way or another. Win is for Winning.
Chapter 31
Kissing Cousins
Matt’s mind was running in circles as he headed to his mother’s apartment in a cab through rush-hour traffic. He’d happened on a hornets’ nest at Brandon, Oakes, and McCall but exactly what variety of wasp had he stirred up? Legal shyster? Loyal attorney protecting a client?
Maybe he should have stayed. Watched the employees leave for the night. He had a hunch someone would be hearing about his visit. But … no one would be showing up until tomorrow. If ever. Let your fingers do the walking, use the phone or e-mail nowadays. Never show your face. Someone might notice your lying eyes.
“Here you are, bub.”
Said pointedly. While Matt had been enacting various scenarios in his head, they’d arrived at his mother’s apartment building. A bland block of windows. Horizontal glass windows, tall vertical exterior columns of stone. Plaid fifties-era urban high-rise.
Matt paid the driver, tipping him way too well. He couldn’t be bothered calculating a few dollars when his whole life was suddenly a million-dollar question. He entered the echoing lobby, so much more pretentious than the Circle Ritz’s music-box proportions. And therefore, so much less homey. And no Temple here to run into.
He was whistling by the time the elevator disgorged him on the twenty-second floor, thinking of Temple. The key his mother had given him on his last visit to Chicago turned in the plain apartment door with its lofty four-digit number. He was already relishing the peace and quiet of an empty apartment—Mom was at her job as a restaurant hostess, miles away. Wouldn’t be back until eleven P.M.
Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit Page 18