“When the article was published Fabian became utterly withdrawn. I found him one day curled up on the floor of the men’s room. I helped him to his feet and told him he was in urgent need of psychiatric help. Although the suggestion wounded him, it also seemed to galvanize him back to life. But since then I’ve wondered whether someone so mercurial was really reliable.”
Naturally Manfred had not mentioned the episode to anyone. It must have been in Fabian’s mind, though, when I told him I’d been to our old professor—it was the thought that Manfred was privy to his most shameful secrets that made him stop arguing with me about Emily.
“You can tell all your colleagues that you’re too shattered by Deirdre’s death to provide a good home for your children right now,” I suggested as I got up to leave.
Fabian started to shiver behind his antique desk. His fury spent, he had dropped with surprising speed into his shrunken, withdrawn state. On my way out I told the nurse who was looking after his sons that Fabian seemed ill, and not to let the boys play around him.
That night I talked with Lotty about Fabian, struggling to understand why he’d encouraged the police to arrest Emily. “The cops and I were fighting over whether he or Emily had killed Deirdre, but I don’t think Fabian saw it that way. He wasn’t trying to frame his daughter to get himself off the hook—he’s so self-absorbed that it never occurred to him he could be a suspect.”
“But he was trying to get himself off a very particular hook,” Lotty said. “Not for Deirdre’s murder, but for raping Emily. He isn’t rational—he didn’t sit down and work this out with a slide rule—but if he could convince himself that Emily killed Deirdre, for the reasons his pet psychiatrist outlined, Fabian could convince himself that he had never touched his daughter. Everything you’ve said about him makes me believe he’s a particular kind of paranoid: he can function well in his professional life—it probably holds him together. But he isn’t pretending to forget the horrible things he does—beating his wife, assaulting his daughter: he really does forget them.”
“Disgusting.” I poured myself another whisky. “And you know, he’s likely to marry again and have another family.”
“It’s not a perfect world,” Lotty agreed. “You can’t get him arrested for complicity in Gant-Ag’s crimes? That would solve the problem.”
I shook my head. “We need him to keep working—he has to pay for day care and school and therapy and stuff. Besides, we’re having enough trouble getting the musketeers arrested for complicity in Gant-Ag’s crimes. Anyway, Fabian wasn’t really a coconspirator, he just provided the senator with some valuable legal advice. He only fingered me in the hopes of staying on Gantner’s good side. He knew about the money coming in, but he didn’t benefit from it: all he wanted was his wretched spot on the federal bench.”
I kept drinking, even after Lotty warned me that I would feel like hell in the morning. But I couldn’t get drunk. Not even Black Label could wipe the taste of Fabian from my mouth.
62
Storyteller
Eva Kuhn and Officer Neely were delighted by my work with Fabian, but once I’d resolved Emily’s problems I sank into a lethargy that I couldn’t shake. I did give a deposition to the state’s attorney on Anton’s assault against Emily and me in the hospital. I talked to endless federal authorities about the illegal Romanian workers, and I wondered, listlessly, why people from the Treasury Department weren’t asking me about the money scams.
Murray came around almost daily, with energetic reports of his efforts to nail the Gantners, big and small. He kept trying to goad me into joining him in his investigations. I felt as though I were being attacked by a jumbo-jet-size mosquito and started hiding out on the lakefront with the dogs.
A few days after Fabian signed my contract, I got a notice of a lawsuit from Gant-Ag, suing me for the cost of the airplane that had gone up in smoke. Depression makes a good protector—I couldn’t feel the fear I might have expected. I studied the paper for a long hour, then phoned Gantner’s Chicago office and asked for Eric Bendel.
“Give Senator Gantner a message from me about his lawsuit.” I cut through Bendel’s efforts to pretend he didn’t know why I was calling. “Tell him this: If that was a Gant-Ag plane, it raises some puzzling questions about what it was doing flying in all that money from the Caymans, without a flight plan or any other acknowledgment of the Chicago area air traffic. Tell him I have the records of the jets registered with the air towers at O’Hare and Aurora for that night.”
That was one benefit of Murray’s frenzied investigations. The morning after the plane blew up, Murray had talked to people he knew at the FAA. No one wanted to acknowledge his questions, but two days later he’d received a bootleg copy of the logs for northern Illinois. Whoever sent it had gone to great pains to keep his identity secret—the controllers were federal employees, after all: an angry senator could see that they lost their jobs.
Bendel hung up without saying anything, but a day or two later I came back from a run to find him waiting for me. His navy sedan was double-parked in front of my building, with the children from the second floor swarming around it—limos were still a rarity on our street, even as upscale as the neighborhood had become.
Bendel got out of the passenger seat when he saw me walk up the sidewalk. “Senator Gantner would like to talk to you.”
I called the dogs to heel—they were far too friendly and I didn’t want them to catch any terrible diseases from licking him. “He can call for an appointment. I’ll see if I can fit him in.”
The back door of the car opened and the well-groomed figure I knew from campaign ads stepped out. “Humor me, Ms. Warshawski. I’m in Chicago on a very brief visit.”
I made an elaborate show of looking at my watch. “Oh, very well. I can give you ten minutes.”
As they followed me into the house Mr. Contreras popped his head into the hall. “Come on up,” I told him. “Your chance to meet a U.S. senator in the flesh. You can be a witness to any threats or bribes he tries on me.”
The old man looked startled, but followed eagerly enough. When we were settled in my living room, me in my sweaty shorts, Gantner and Bendel in perfectly tailored summer worsted, Gantner came quickly to the point.
“I’ve heard from Eric here that you’d had some communication problems with my brother’s company, with Gant-Ag. Gant-Ag is a global concern. You know it’s privately held, but it’s no secret that our annual sales are in excess of thirty billion. My brother, who’s been running the company since I went to Congress, doesn’t always have time to understand the details of the operation. Nor should a CEO bother himself about all the nuts and bolts. When I talked to him this morning he told me he’d been mistaken in thinking that the plane that you helped destroy was one of ours—it belonged to a private company in the Caribbean that isn’t interested in trying to collect damages. Craig will be sending you a letter to that effect—it should go out in today’s mail.”
“That will be a big relief, of course, Senator,” I said, reclining at my ease in the armchair. “To him, I suppose, as well as to me.”
“On the other matters of concern to you, I’m afraid my son got carried away in his zeal to help out a homeless charity here in Chicago. He’s been so used to a life of ease and indulgence that when two of his friends suggested he join the board he went ... well, overboard in his efforts to help them. He’s resigned from the organization and won’t take any further part in its affairs.
“Alec was a little naive. He was especially confused by his lifelong friendship with Don Blakely. Blakely apparently gave a directive to one of the Home Free contractors that ended in the murder of Deirdre Messenger. It’s been a source of great grief to all of us, both my family and the company, to find that the banker whom we all trusted duped us so thoroughly. Donald Blakely apparently was using both the company and his own bank, Gateway, as a front for money-laundering schemes, with Home Free as the focal point.
“When Mrs. Messenger discov
ered that, she should have gone to the police. Instead, she heroically tried to confront Don on her own, with the tragic results we all have seen. I’m urging Clive Landseer to use the full power of his office to prosecute the man immediately responsible, Anton Radescu. We’re having to absolve his boss, Gary Charpentier, of everything but ignorance.”
“Very smart,” I said. “Otherwise he might finger Heccomb, and Heccomb might squeal on naive little Alec.”
Gantner hushed me with an imperious finger. “Under the circumstances, Ms. Warshawski, I think we’re all better off not calling each other names. Eric?”
He was gone so fast I almost had trouble believing he’d ever been there.
When Murray learned of the audacious defense the Gantners were mounting he almost deafened me with his scream of outrage. He had joined me in the backyard with the dogs, where I was watching Mr. Contreras fiddle with his garden. My neighbor put down his trowel long enough to tell Murray about our meeting with the senator—he was relishing the fact that he’d had a front-row seat while Murray was off someplace sweating.
“It’s one giant mother fucking cover-up,” Murray concluded, ignoring a dirty look from Mr. Contreras. “Gantner must have the whole Justice Department by the short and curlies, because they’re willing to buy into this story. And my editor is telling me my trip out to Morris was a freelance job, so he isn’t interested in giving me resources to go after them.”
“Uh-huh.” I played with Peppy’s ears.
“What are you going to do about it, Warshawski?”
“A rain dance, I guess. Bring down the waters of God to drown every Gantner cornfield in the Midwest.”
“Seriously. You cannot sit on your butt while justice is reamed out.”
“You mean you want me to give you free help building the story of your career for you. I’m not doing anything for anyone these days, even when they offer me cash on the barrelhead.”
Murray grabbed my shoulders and shook them. “You can’t, Warshawski. You can’t give up.”
“That’s what I keep telling her,” Mr. Contreras chimed in. “When have you ever let anyone coldcock you, doll?”
“I’m tired. I spent a month risking my life for some abstract concept of justice, and all that happened in the end was my lover left me. Go to one of the big firms. They work for money, so they don’t get broken on the wheel of passion.”
“Come on, Warshawski. You can’t play Achilles—that’s a role for a Greek nobleman, not a Polish gutter fighter.”
I collected Peppy and went inside. I agreed the whole story was heinous, but I was wrung dry.
The ironic thing was, now that I didn’t want to do any work I was turning jobs away. Even a meeting with Phoebe Quirk didn’t inspire me. A week or so after my final conversation with Fabian she invited me to lunch at Filigree’s. She was uncharacteristically subdued, even apologetic.
“What with one thing and another I caused a lot of trouble for you, didn’t I? Maybe Conrad wouldn’t have broken up with you if I hadn’t gotten you involved.”
“I don’t know; Deirdre would still have been murdered. I would still have tried to protect Emily Messenger. What’s going to happen to Lamia, by the way?”
“Home Free is being reorganized with a new board. Tish Coulomb will take over as executive director. She wants to return the organization to providing services to the homeless, but in the meantime, they do have legitimate funds available for one last building, so the Lamia women will get a chance to bid on that. We’re hopeful.”
Phoebe was silent for a bit, fiddling with her wineglass, then she spoke rapidly, without pausing for air. “I know I was pretty shirty the last time we spoke, but would you consider doing some work for me? I’ve got a hot tip on a little biotech company a couple of pharmacy profs have started, but I’ve never heard of them. I’d pay you six hundred a day plus expenses.”
“I’m not interested.”
“Vic, I’ve said I’m sorry.” Phoebe spoke with a flash of her usual arrogance, then remembered she was here as a supplicant and smiled. “No one else we work with is as thorough as you. What would it take?”
I thought it over. “There is something you could do for me: get Tish Coulomb to take Ken Graham on to complete his community service. If she’s reorganizing Home Free she’ll need help. If that works out I’ll think about your problem—but this is definitely not a promise to act.”
The next day Phoebe called to tell me everything was in train for Ken to start work on Home Free’s files. I roused myself enough to make a written presentation for Ken to take to his probation officer. Darraugh was so pleased with the result that he wrote me a check for ten thousand dollars. I tried to turn it down—it seemed excessive for the job.
He spoke with his usual curtness. “I know what you went through on this, Vic. More than you think. A couple of weeks ago some jackass from Gantner’s staff, Eric Bundle or Bindle or something, came to tell me that Ken’s probation would be revoked if I continued to do business with you. I took a very dim view of that threat, very dim indeed. I didn’t bother you with it at the time, but a day or two later when the Gant-Ag story hit the headlines I realized what you’d been up against. You earned this. Cash it. Get a proper office. Take a holiday.”
I cashed the check. I even got Mr. Contreras to accept a thousand to help with his taxes. I still couldn’t summon the energy to work, but maybe I’d follow the rest of Darraugh’s advice and take a holiday, too—lately I’d been studying travel brochures for Reichenbach Falls.
I was mulling it over when Officer Neely surprised me one morning as I returned from a run. She waited in the living room while I took a shower and made coffee.
We talked a little about Emily, then Neely said abruptly, “I’m resigning from the force. I can see that I’m not much good in a hierarchical organization when I don’t agree with the hierarchy. I was lucky that Terry was my commanding officer—he rotated me to other assignments and put Gustavo Galatea in my place on the Messenger case, but he didn’t write me up or tell anyone else that I’d blown up at him. But I can’t go through a situation like that again.
“What I wanted to know ... Why I came to you ... There are a lot of stories going around about you, that you’re quitting. I wanted to find out.” Her face was flushed with embarrassment and she fiddled with her empty coffee cup.
When I told her what I’d been doing lately she took a deep breath. “I have a proposition for you. I’d like to work for you. If you want to take a vacation I could even run your operation while you’re away. I’ve been talking to Emily about her and her brothers living with me. She’s willing to do it, and Eva Kuhn thinks it would be a good fit, especially since Fabian will pay for a nanny for Nathan. Fabian would pay their school fees, too, but I need work—I can’t support them if I resign from the force.”
I laughed. “If you think an operation like mine provides enough income to support two people, let alone three children, you have sadly inflated ideas about it.”
She flushed again but wouldn’t let me mock her into silence. “If there were two of us we could take on more work, and a wider range of it. I’m very organized. You wouldn’t have to worry about the details that bore you. And I wouldn’t mind the dull, repetitive jobs, at least not for a while: it would mean I could keep a regular schedule. I’m twenty-nine, I’m very fit, and you know I’m experienced.”
It was such an unexpected proposition that I couldn’t even decide how I felt about it. I left her with the promise to think it over.
63
It Ain’t Over
Till It’s Over
July 27th was a blisteringly hot day. At Mr. Contreras’s urging I packed the dogs into my car and drove down to the Indiana Dunes for a picnic and a swim. He stayed behind to work on his garden. I left him to a happy afternoon of mulching or mowing or whatever the plants needed.
It was six when we got back. Coming up the walk I thought I heard laughter from the rear of the apartment. The dogs and I went
through the narrow passageway and found the yard full of people. When I appeared there came a great cry of “Surprise!” and “Happy Birthday!”
Someone—I later learned it was Ken Graham—had rigged my name up in lights, with the message, “Life Begins at Forty.” I stood at the corner of the yard with a foolish smile on my face.
Mr. Contreras surged forward with a glass of champagne. “You thought I didn’t remember it was your birthday, didn’t you, doll? Have a happy one.”
Lotty and Max came over to kiss me. Max handed me a Chinese vase, filled with flowers from his own garden. Much touched, I took that inside, out of harm’s way, and returned to greet the rest of the party.
Sal was there, with her current love, a young actress. Mary Louise Neely brought Emily and her brothers. Neely was doing freelance work for me now—we were trying that for six months before considering a more formal arrangement. Emily, her unruly hair sticking out from her head like a giant bush, in jeans and a crimson tank top, looked alert, even young. She had written a joke-filled poem for me, copied out in a careful calligraphy.
Darraugh and Ken arrived together, in a rare display of family harmony. Ken, thinking he might fill the void in my life left by Conrad, had stayed in town to attend summer school. We’d had our promised dinner at Filigree’s, and I’d gone sailing with him a couple of times—I’d even enjoyed myself. But Ken’s calf love was waning—in the fall he was joining the Peace Corps in Eastern Europe. Darraugh had mastered his disappointment with more graciousness than I’d expected.
Bobby Mallory and his wife, Eileen, Phoebe Quirk, Camilla Rawlings, Marilyn Lieberman, and Eva Kuhn and the rest of my basketball squad were there. Even Manfred Yeo showed up. I arched a sardonic eyebrow at Murray when he showed up with Tish Coulomb. He smiled at me sheepishly, but they looked quite happy together.
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