Applaud the Hollow Ghost

by David J. Walker

  Then I made two more calls. Casey would save me some of his meat loaf for a sandwich. The Lady would be busy that evening, but we agreed we’d get together the next day. She seemed to think I needed cheering up.

  I took the el to Central Street in Evanston. My recollection being that my pantry was still pretty bare, I stopped for a couple of cheeseburgers with lots of greasy French fries. Then I walked the “back way” to my place, carried another package from the Lady up the rear stairs, and went inside and listened to my two phone messages.

  The first message was brief. “The person you talked to the other day about sliding down chutes wants to talk to you again.” He left no number, but said he’d be in touch. Maybe it was about the paint job on the Fleetwood. The other call was more unexpected, but the message was similar. Someone else wanted to meet with me, too. This someone left a name, Dan Maguire, and a time and a place as well. Said he wanted to confer with me about a certain Dominic Fontana.

  I swallowed a few aspirins and thought seriously about shining my shoes, what with all these conferences coming up. Instead, I poured myself an inch of scotch over one ice cube and sat down at the kitchen table with the book the Lady had left in my back hall, A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. A few years back, when domestic affairs had been going better, Cass and I had taken the Lady to see the staged version at the Goodman Theatre. Cass, ever the English lit professor, claimed it was the world’s most popular ghost story. I told her I thought Casper had greater name recognition. Anyway, the Lady must have decided there was a lesson in the Dickens tale somewhere for me, or she wouldn’t have dropped it at my door. My best guess was she wanted to remind me that even a cynical, miserable Scrooge of a person might wake up some morning transformed into an optimistic and happy old coot—and discover that “the Spirits had done it all in one night.”

  I caught myself nodding before I got much beyond the part right near the beginning about Jacob Marley’s ghost appearing to Scrooge, but that wasn’t Dickens’ fault. I got up and set the timer on the coffeemaker before I went to bed. One musn’t oversleep when one’s been invited to a morning audience with the great Daniel O’Laughlin Maguire, Grand Poobah of Bauer & Barklind, a Partnership of Professional Legal Corporations.

  Well, possibly invited wasn’t exactly the right way to describe that second message on my machine. Summoned, that was more like it.

  Gosh, maybe I really should have polished my shoes.

  CHAPTER

  13

  THE LAW FIRM OF Bauer & Barklind occupied floors thirty-two through thirty-seven of a prestigious marble-clad building west of State Street, on Wacker Drive, across from the Chicago River. On floor thirty-five, I was barely out of the elevator when a young woman with a Miss America smile and a brushed silk suit, teal blue, strode forward to greet me and show me where to hang my hooded parka.

  “I’ll keep the coat,” I said, taking a good look around. “This looks like the kinda place, you know, you don’t keep your eye on things, they disappear.”

  If she had any visible reaction at all, it was on the right side of her upper lip, maybe. “This way, sir,” she said. “Would you care for a cup of coffee, or—”

  “You got any strawberry soda?” The time might come when I’d want her to remember the day Malachy Foley came in. “Oh,” she’d say, “you mean that rather odd man?”

  She left me sinking into one of three identical sofas that were drawn up to three sides of a low, square table—and was back in thirty seconds flat with a cold can of Cherry Coke. “Closest I could come,” she chirped. She was enjoying herself.

  After that I was abandoned for a while. Oddly enough, there wasn’t a piece of reading material in sight, presumably so one could sit undistracted and contemplate one’s surroundings and be put in the proper mood for one’s encounter with power.

  Stated succinctly, Bauer & Barklind had a pretty classy-looking suite of offices. The reception area was spacious and bright, with parquet flooring that would have sneered if you breathed the word oak, or any other tree any of us has ever actually run into. Straight ahead, I looked into the wide space between two banks of elevators. To my left were broad circular staircases leading to the floors above and below, suspended by thin cables that stretched up and out of sight.

  To my right, and just beyond earshot, Miss America sat at a reception desk and answered an apparently ceaseless flow of telephone calls. She kept an eye on the elevators, though, and whenever the need arose, she abandoned her phone without hesitation, helping people stow their coats, steering them in the right directions.

  She never steered anyone my way.

  I killed time first by wondering if she had a way of instantly forwarding calls elsewhere, or if she were just faking all those conversations.

  Then I thought about Dan Maguire, and how the hell he could be involved in this mess. The patriarch now of a family in its third generation of power in Chicago, he had followed a father and grandfather who—with blood-kin and in-laws hanging on tight—had built and maintained an empire on patronage and clout, and a noticeable lack of scruples. Dan Maguire had inherited all the power that money and connections can buy, but managed to shake off the shady reputation of his forbears. He never ran for office, but nearly everybody who did consulted with him. If the Illinois Supreme Court wasn’t asking him to chair committees to dream up ways to improve the state judiciary, the United States Congress was naming him special prosecutor in some heavy investigation. He’d been a member once of the Chicago Crime Commission and, more recently, been appointed to a presidential committee to study the effects of organized crime on international trade. He’d been counsel to politicians and corporate presidents, and was on more boards of directors—nonprofit and Fortune 500 alike—than most people could have kept straight. Everybody had heard about Dan Maguire, and nobody I’d spoken to said anything negative.

  I was getting the feeling, though, that I wasn’t going to like him. It wasn’t just that he’d called and obviously assumed I’d show up on one day’s notice. It’s that he was giving me all this time to sit there and reflect on how being ignored is just about my most unfavorite thing in the world.

  There must be people besides me who notice how often it happens that someone who ought to be paying attention to them … isn’t. Oh, I don’t mean times when I’m struggling at the piano in some bar, and can’t seem to catch the ear of a single soul who isn’t drunk or depressed, or both. That I can take pretty well. In fact, that seems to be one of the rules of that game. But when I’m busting my ass trying to figure out how to keep a guy (a) out of jail, and (b) out of worse than jail, and some Mr. Wonderful calls and says he has a suggestion and I should show up at eleven o’clock sharp, and—even though I’m pretty sure I won’t like his suggestion—I do show up at eleven o’clock …

  Anyway, I have this thing about being ignored.

  At fifteen minutes after eleven, I stood up, tucked my coat under my left arm, and started toward the elevators.

  “Oh, Mr. Foley,” Miss America called, “you’re not leaving us, are you?” Her heels tap-tap-tapped across the floor after me. “I know Mr. Maguire wants to see you. He must—”

  When I whirled around she almost fell over backward. “Great,” I said. “His office is that way, isn’t it?” Pointing to my left.

  “Well, actually, no. It’s that way and around the—” She caught herself, but too late. She was already pointing to my right.

  “Thank you.” I went back for my can of Cherry Coke, then strolled slowly down the wide corridor toward the office of Daniel O’Laughlin Maguire. With a sip of the sweet cold drink to lubricate my own pipes, I was ready.

  “Oh, Danny Boy,” I sang, loud and lilting, my brogue turning boy almost into bye. “The pipes, the pipes are call-all-ling. From glen to glen…”

  My range is a good five tones below a true Irish tenor, but it has a fine carry to it all the same, don’t y’know. Anyway, heads poked out of open doors up and down the hallway.

/>   “… and down the mountainside.”

  People who looked like lawyers were attached to the heads sticking out from the doors. Most wore dark pants and long-sleeved white shirts with ties and multicolored suspenders, and the rest opted for dark skirts and tailored white blouses, adorned with various bright accessories. All the haircuts looked expensive; and all the faces a bit worried. And why not? Seems like once a year some disgruntled client shows up in the Loop and opens fire on his or her lawyer, or an opponent’s lawyer. Which is bad enough, but the shooters are usually deranged and frightened, and tend to shoot at everyone in sight—often including themselves.

  “The summer’s gone, and—”

  “Is that you, Mr. Foley?” A man’s voice—clear and loud and strong. Heads retracted back into their offices. Doors closed.

  “In the flesh,” I said.

  Up ahead, where the corridor made a right-angle turn, were two men. The one I didn’t recognize had a pinched, mean face and a widow’s peak, wore gray pants, a white shirt, and a thin blue tie that hung down and draped over a potbelly the size of a volleyball. The other man was Dan Maguire, looking like he was headed for the plane to his place in Palm Springs, in cordovan loafers, dark blue slacks, and a light blue short-sleeved golf shirt. He was over fifty years old, maybe over sixty, but trim and lean and lightly tanned. Not tall—about five-nine—with curly graying hair that was receding back from his forehead. The closer I got to him, the more he looked like a pleasant, intelligent, self-assured man—a take-charge guy, but someone you could trust.

  As far as I knew, he really was everything he looked like. But then, there’s a lot I don’t know. At any rate, I was determined to dislike and distrust him, no matter how difficult he made it.

  “Glad to meet you, Mr. Maguire,” I said, sticking my hand out toward the potbellied man.

  “Very funny,” the man said. “You know—”

  “Relax, Paul,” Maguire said, and then, to me, “I’m Dan Maguire, Mr. Foley. Pleased to meet you. This is Paul Anders.”

  “Hold this a second, Paul,” I said, shoving the Coke can at Anders. He actually took it, too, freeing up my right hand. Maguire and I shook hands. Anders just stood there. I didn’t know him and I didn’t like him, and the look on his face didn’t make that hard at all.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” Maguire said. “Long-distance call and I couldn’t—”

  “I’m sorry you did, too.” I took the can back from Anders. “Where shall we talk?”

  “I’ve reserved a conference room,” Maguire said, leading Anders and me around the corner and, just a few steps down the hall, into a room with a long table and ten chairs, all in a dark, polished wood. One wall of the room was a panorama of the city, looking north from downtown through blue-tinted glass.

  We settled in, with Maguire seated at the end, naturally, and Anders and I facing each other across the wide table. There was a brief pause, during which nobody offered anybody coffee or wished anybody well.

  “I understand,” Maguire finally began, “that you represent Lambert Flem—”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “You mean you aren’t going to tell me exactly who your buddy Anders here is?”

  Anders didn’t move, just stared at me. Maguire said, “Why sure, Paul’s assisting me in this case, and what we—”

  “Oh, well,” I said, “that explains everything. But as I recall, you said something on the phone about a suggestion.”

  “Yes,” Maguire said. “You see—”

  “Incidentally,” I said, “I don’t represent Lambert Fleming. I’m doing some work for him, or more accurately, for his lawyer. Anyway, what’s the suggestion?”

  If Maguire was insulted that I’d interrupted him in three out of his first three sentences since we sat down, he didn’t show it. “For now, Mr. Foley, let’s call it a request. I’d like you to cease all contact with Dominic Fontana—immediately.”

  “Dominic Fontana? The brother-in-law of Steve Connolly? The Dominic who’s married to the niece of Gus Apprezziano? That Dominic Fontana?”

  “Yes.”

  “My, my, Counselor. How long you been feeding from that trough?”

  Maguire’s eyes looked suddenly sad. “Mr. Fontana is a citizen, Mr. Foley. With the same rights you and I enjoy.”

  “Right,” I said. “The inalienable ones.”

  “Including the right to enjoy his home in peace.”

  “Uh-huh. That’s the request? Stay away from Dominic?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Well, sir, suppose, with all due respect and as a matter of principle, I deny your request. Then what?”

  “Then, regrettably, the request would become a demand. Dominic has directed me to file an emergency action against you seeking a protective order, a permanent injunction, and monetary damages.”

  “That’s hard to believe,” I said, happy that no one was talking about breaking fingers or crushing kneecaps, not yet. “I mean, did Dominic use all those big words?”

  “The suit is being drafted as we speak. As a courtesy, I’ll give you a copy of our proposed complaint against you as soon as it’s completed. You have already caused bodily injury to Dominic.” He paused and took a deep breath.

  But it was Anders who spoke next. “Think over your position quite seriously, friend. Because if we sue you, we’ll take everything you own, and everything you ever will own for the rest of your life.”

  Ah, one of those times that the struggle for total liquidity is so rewarding. I placed both hands on the table in front of me, palms down, and stared straight across at Anders.

  “Listen up. First, I’m not your friend. Second, you and Danny boy here can file your suit against me and I doubt I’ll even file an answer. You could take a fifty million dollar judgment against me by default and it wouldn’t bother me one bit.”

  “You’ll be a ruined man,” Anders said.

  “Maguire,” I said, turning to look at him, “do you have any idea what I’m worth?”

  “We’re working on that, also.”

  “I wouldn’t spend much time or money on it. I own my clothes. Like these nifty leather boots I’m wearing, these khaki pants, this handsome WFMT Chicago Symphony Orchestra Radiothon sweatshirt, and a closetful of stuff pretty much like them. I rent a furnished apartment, up over a garage. Oh, I do own a piano, which I don’t play very well. But then, it’s not a very good piano, either.” That last part wasn’t exactly true.

  “You live well,” Anders said, “without regular employment. That suggests substantial assets.”

  I’d maneuvered them into playing my game. “No real estate, no investments, one bank account—and that’s owned by a trust, not me, and seldom has much in it. Check it out. Take a look at my tax returns.” Something that passed through Anders’ otherwise expressionless eyes suggested they’d already done that. I turned back to Maguire. “If I live well, which is debatable, it’s because I spend what little comes in as fast as I can. Like the Buddha once said, ‘If you ain’t got much, they can’t take much.’ Or words to that effect.”

  “Mr. Foley,” Maguire said, “I’m afraid you—”

  “Something else.” Anders broke in. “If you continue to harass Mr. Fontana, you’ll face criminal charges, and lose whatever assets you have or don’t have stashed somewhere. Plus, there’s your private detective’s license. That can be taken away.”

  “So what’s this? Round two?” I looked back at the man across the table from me. “First, you won’t convict me, or even get my license, not on the testimony of a lowlife hood like Dominic Fontana. Second, I’ve been locked up before, and it didn’t change my behavior much. Third, I hope I never have—”

  “Mr. Foley,” Maguire was talking again, and getting to his feet. “We’ve talked long enough, and I believe we’ve made our position clear. Now what about it? Do you plan to stay away from Dominic Fontana, or not?”

  “That was my third point, Danny boy. My only goal is to see that Lambert Fleming doesn�
��t go down for a nasty crime he didn’t commit. Period. I’ll be ecstatic if I can do that without getting one more whiff of Dominic Fontana. People rut around the pen with a hog, y’know, the stench rubs off on ’em.” I drained the last of my Cherry Coke. “I mean, consider the two of you.”

  CHAPTER

  14

  ONCE IT DEGENERATED TO barnyard talk, my meeting with Maguire and Anders went to hell in a hurry, so it wasn’t long past noon that I was on Lake Shore Drive, headed north in my latest rental car, a white Dodge Intrepid.

  I might hold them off for a while by my claim that I wasn’t really interested in Dominic. But if they knew what I knew—or if they had reason to suspect it—they’d have to figure my best option for getting Lammy off the sexual assault hook was to skewer Dominic firmly on it.

  It didn’t seem likely they’d file a lawsuit against me, though. They’d soon discover it was true that I had little of monetary value to lose. If they brought criminal charges I’d be entitled to a jury, and even with Dan Maguire’s help no state’s attorney would want to try to make Dominic Fontana look truthful to any group of human beings who managed to stay awake.

  I took the Drive to Hollywood Avenue, then Hollywood to Ridge, and on up into Evanston. I’d already called and asked Barney Green’s secretary to check Sullivan’s, the directory of lawyers. There was no Paul Anders listed at Bauer & Barklind, or anywhere else in the state. On the other hand, he didn’t seem much like a mob associate of Dominic, either.

  I’d had the clear impression throughout our conversation that Maguire was wishing he were somewhere else, that he was doing a job someone else wanted him to do. And the more I rolled that around in my mind, the more I wondered what the hell was going on.