‘How can you talk about leaving, especially after today? Now Zupansky’s got this gig he’ll run with it, look for any angle he can. Trust me, his reputation precedes him. You or me taking off is the only excuse he’ll need. We have to stay a little longer, until people forget. You try to get the hell out of Dodge now and you might as well stand in the middle of Michigan Avenue and announce to the world you’re guilty.’
TWENTY-THREE
An army of people pounded the streets of Chicago, swinging their purchases like well-aimed battering rams.
Following my Zupansky (and Evan) interrogation of four days ago, even the simplest tasks had become a chore. The dawn came too soon in the city where my husband’s life ended. I felt clumsy, burdened with a secret I didn’t want, a secret swallowing me whole. Whatever had been said, whatever I’d believed, with each step Joe still danced in my shadow.
Saturday was hardly a day to trawl the stores of the Magnificent Mile. Under my breath I cursed the pushy assistant at Miu Miu, my feet blistering in the ill-fitting heels. Pausing by the Mulberry store window on East Oak Street, I debated which bag would best fit my summer ensembles. Once again, I was all about the distractions.
‘The Lily every time,’ Nina announced, with an arm around my shoulder.
I smiled, returning the gesture. ‘What are you doing here? You better not be stalking me, Nina.’
‘Stalker? Moi? It is the weekend. What else is there to do but max out Mickey’s MasterCard? Come on,’ she ordered, pulling on my arm, ‘let’s grab lunch. I have a real craving for pickles today.’
Our go-to place, Jodi’s Coffee Shop on East Delaware, was cosy and inviting ‒ vintage chic with a contemporary twist. At our table by the counter, Nina vigorously stirred her latte, ignited by a deceptive smile. Her symmetrical, gazelle-like features had taken on a different hue, lighter than her usual tone, like someone had drained the blood from under her skin.
‘We’re caught in a trap, I can’t walk out . . .’ The waiter with a shaggy mop of hair approached, singing along with the fake retro radio. ‘I love Elvis, don’t you love Elvis?’ he said, arriving at our table after a subtle slide across the floor.
‘He’s okay,’ Nina replied.
‘Okay? He’s more than okay. Elvis is The King. I’ve got tattoos of him everywhere. Want to see?’
He lifted his trouser leg to reveal a large tattoo of Elvis’s head on his lower calf. Nina arched an eyebrow, a half smile curling her mouth as she played with her ponytail.
‘There’re song lyrics on the other leg, in case you were wondering.’
‘There anywhere you don’t have tattoos, honey?’ Nina asked.
Like he wasn’t waiting for that one.
‘There is one place, though I’m not sure I can stand the pain, even for Elvis himself.’
‘Interesting,’ Nina replied, and we both giggled in unison.
He turned away, surely disappointed he hadn’t received Nina’s number. Undeterred, he swaggered away to the next table, populated by three shimmering brunettes.
‘We’re caught in a trap, I can’t walk out . . .’
‘He had Elvis’s head on his leg,’ Nina announced.
‘I know. I was right here.’
‘Who has another person’s face on their calf? Guys always make themselves weird, and it was going so well.’
‘And what about Mickey? You weren’t going to give him your number, were you?’
‘No way. He wasn’t even cute.’
‘Plus he works in a coffee shop.’
‘And Joe drove one of those little brown trucks. Don’t get all high and mighty now you’ve crawled back out of the gutter.’ She let out a sigh. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to take it out on you.’
‘Then what’s with biting my head off?’
Nina paused, flicked her ponytail, scanned the room then returned her eyes, staring me out for a good half-minute.
‘Nina . . . stop being freaky.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, stop staring like that. Now I don’t want to know.’
‘Oh, you’re going to know. The whole world will know what he’s been doing.’
I decided it was best to indulge her. Away from the confines of Faith, it wasn’t like she was falling over herself to ask how I felt about the whole Joe thing. I’d told her about Zupansky, about the real chance I might be thrown in jail, but she’d seemed more disappointed it wasn’t Anton who’d been waiting downstairs. ‘All right, tell me what Mickey’s been doing.’
Dipping her head in true melodramatic Nina fashion, she began. ‘Those bloody shirts of his? He just dumps them in the laundry now. There’s no hiding. And it’s not a few spots, they’re saturated with the stuff, wet to the touch or stiff as a board. I nearly puked watching him pick blood from under his fingernails, but it wasn’t his own. Only his fists were cut, like he’d been punching a brick wall.’
Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer. ‘He beat some guy up? He beat some guy . . .’
‘Why would anyone punch a wall? And now he doesn’t care I wash his blood-soaked clothes. He wants me to find out. He’s not even hiding it.’
Nina’s stare could’ve turned her coffee to ice. There was a crash behind us as the breeze blew open the door, my hands beginning to freeze.
‘He’s becoming more like him every day,’ Nina murmured, again glancing around, probably searching for a guy with eyeholes cut into his newspaper.
‘More like who?’
‘The one who beat the thug into him; Victor, of course.’
Victor. How easily I’d forgotten the comic book villain from Nina’s other life, the aged wise-guy cop with the Mexican bodyguard. Nina’s tales of dishonest cops and killers for hire had excited me once, but that was before I’d lived out my own story of murder and betrayal. Now I remembered Victor, the cloaked figure from the darkness. It looked like he was back, and now more volatile than ever.
‘Have you seen him? Has he been staking out your apartment again?’
‘Mickey promised me things would get better, and they’re still as shitty. I guess once you look past the façade, once you step too far into another person’s life, you start to wish you hadn’t. Love blinds you, lets you see what you want. There’s no room for the truth.’
She was a contradiction in terms, the beautiful, elegant ex-model incessantly tapping the teaspoon on the table top. Mickey was Nina’s ‘Joe’, a healthy dose of poison that’d begun to threaten her mere existence.
I reached for Nina’s arm but she drew her hand away.
‘We need to talk this through, help you decide what to do about Mickey.’
‘You know another thing?’ she replied, blatantly ignoring me. ‘That guy’s been following me.’
I realised she was nodding at a man in his early thirties, sporting a mess of hair identical to Joe’s. A wiry frame sat within a tan trench coat, and a chin of dark stubble hid an unconventionally handsome face. He sat alone at the window table with a coffee in his hand and his attention entirely on the newspaper.
‘What are you talking about? There’s no one following you.’
‘Yes they are. I’ve seen that guy before, I remember Mickey talking to him. He must be another cop. Don’t you see? He’s got guys trailing me. He’s sent his dirty friends to track me.’
If Mickey wasn’t keeping his corrupt business to himself, of course he’d ensure her mouth stayed shut.
‘You think because Mickey asked you to wash his shirts this guy’s been following you?’
‘We’ve got to get out of here. He could have a gun under that coat.’
Back out on the street, I stuttered behind Nina in my heels as she marched ahead like a sergeant major.
Nina reached back and pulled on my arm before turning up her jacket collar. ‘Is he following us? Come on. Keep up, girl.’
Scanning North State behind us, I almost laughed at the absurdity of it all. Refusing to take a step further, I soon brought her to a
halt. ‘Nina, stop a second. This is stupid. There’s no one there. See? You’re being paranoid.’
‘You might be safe now and all, but I’m not. That guy in Jodi’s felt wrong. Really wrong. I think . . . I think Mickey’s going to kill me.’
‘What?’
‘He’ll either do it himself or pay some dirt bag to do it for him.’
‘And you could live until you’re ninety. Nina, stop it. If you weren’t scaring me before, you are now.’
‘You don’t know him. You don’t know what he said.’
‘You should go home. Get some rest,’ I advised.
‘You’re beginning to sound like Mickey.’ She managed a half smile before turning to go. ‘Maybe I am being paranoid, but I just hope you’re right ‒ for your sake, and mine.’
I’d been summoned to Evan’s later that day, Brandi apparently MIA. We needed to talk some more about ‘the whole Zupansky thing’, he’d said on the phone, currently my least favourite topic of conversation.
I’d refused the apartment on Redemption Square. I’d refused them all. I didn’t see the point now I was leaving. Chicago, the secret, the sneaking around, that I’d watched Joe take a bullet to the chest . . . I couldn’t hack it, and all the while praying the police would stay dumb. Of course they would, especially now they had an officer looking after Joe’s file, an officer with a reputation that preceded him.
Once the Zupansky episode was over, so was Chicago, not that I was reminding Evan.
In the West Superior apartment kitchen, we ate dinner in silence. Either Evan had learned to cook or K2 were doing takeaway now. The cutlery scraped the fine bone china as the crystal glasses clinked our teeth. Each time Evan glanced up I was staring at my plate, and when I tried to meet his gaze his eyes were on the window, certainly thinking of other, hidden things.
‘You know that coffee shop you like? It got knocked over last Thursday. What is it, Jodi’s or something?’
‘Yeah,’ I replied, recalling the Elvis waiter from earlier that day.
Again the silence fell like a fog, so thick I felt dismembered from my thoughts. I looked down at my sorry carcass sitting in Evan’s chair, eating Evan’s food, entertaining the notion of normality.
Then Evan’s knife and fork clattered down onto his plate. ‘What is this?’ he asked.
‘What’s what?’
He adjusted his glasses. ‘This silence?’
‘You asked me here. You wanted to talk, so talk. I’m listening.’
Part of me wanted to shout, to scream and bellow and expel all my rage, but it manifested as silence. I looked away, caressing the scratches where the glass had cut me, the still-present battle scars from the alley floor.
Sometimes I dreamt of Joe, of Joe and Evan laughing together, each alive, no one still and silent with flesh rotting in a place in the ground. Sometimes it was Joe’s face instead of Evan’s ‒ different hair, olive skin, the eyes with nothing behind them and the smile that never emerged. There was only the memory of his sneer and the horror of the beatings that bruised my skin and made me bleed.
Eventually Evan’s face returned. It was the face of the murderer, the schemer; the visage of the man who’d buried a body in the earth.
There was no talk of Joe, no strategizing over Zupansky. I was here to be observed, checked up on, to ensure I was still in Chicago and willing to share in Evan’s company. That I was still willing to keep my mouth shut.
TWENTY-FOUR
It was Monday morning, and Joe had been dead for over three weeks.
I’d been distracting myself with work, and a possible vacancy at the New York branch of Faith on 5th Avenue. I’d even spotted a jaw-dropping apartment on The New York Times real estate website. The East 13th Street abode was a glass-walled slice of perfection. It wasn’t a hotel suite, but an actual place to call home. It was another life. A good life. It was an honest life.
But there was a problem. New York was expensive; like, five-million-forbidden-bank-account expensive. Besides, I was trapped in Chicago for the meantime, until the police got tired of looking for Joe. As for London, my old friends and previous life? That girl was now someone else. It was now like looking at a photograph, instead of a mirror.
The idea of New York was enough of a distraction. It didn’t hurt to dream, and it was all I seemed to do anyway. I still hadn’t told Evan I was most likely leaving, not after his last reaction. I’d wait, like he said, but as soon as Joe’s time was up, so was mine.
I was back at work, though had only been in the building for ten minutes before attracting some unwanted attention, and doubted it was due to my Chloé shirt and leather skirt ensemble. People were staring; the hairs on the back of my neck pricked up. I tried burying my head in a pile of work, though couldn’t escape the whispers encircling me like a cloud of venom. They knew, they must; a fresh round of gossip fuelled by Maggie, the prying receptionist. They’d learnt about my interrogation by Detective Zupansky, and discovered Joe was now missing, I’m sure presumed murdered.
The murmuring persisted until I raised my head and dared to notice the smiles. They were cautious grins, but smiles all the same.
Cherry rushed over, nearly pulling my arm from its socket as I launched out of my chair. She was beaming like the Cheshire Cat from ear to ear.
‘I hear congratulations are in order!’
‘What?’ I replied, reclaiming my arm from the wild woman in front of me.
‘Mr Renaud wants to see you, and right away. You’re so lucky.’
My heart sank. ‘Mr Renaud? What’s lucky about that?’ Whereas she was full of the joys of spring, mine had been ripped out from under my feet.
I’d met with Mr Renaud only once before, regarding my transfer from head office in London. He was a stern man with stern clothes and a stare that evoked the fiery pits of hell. Now he was going to send me there; steal my job, my life and put me on trial for murder in the first degree.
‘What about . . .’
‘What are you waiting for?’ Cherry ordered, now guiding me to the far side of the office.
The air was much colder here. It tasted stagnant on my tongue. Travelling the corridor at the workspace boundary was like the walk to the gas chamber. The corridor was institutional white, minimalist to the extreme and illuminated only by a flickering strip light. Each door passed and every numbered room reminded me of the clinic. At room 31, I stopped. Almost reaching for the handle to be sure my old room wasn’t behind it, I scolded myself before continuing reluctantly on.
A smug Detective Zupansky was waiting in Renaud’s office. A strike team of officers had been assembled, carrying the arrest warrant, handcuffs, and a back catalogue of witty put-downs. As I was dragged out of the building in handcuffs, my head down and eyes averted, the swarm of news crews would be ready to grab a sound bite, besieging the police van as I was ferried away to jail.
Harrowing questions awaited in a stuffy room, about why I’d been in a wood in Kane County ‒ the same wood my husband’s rotting corpse had been exhumed from. Asking why Joe’s blood was between the kitchen floor tiles and why so was mine; why there was soil under my heels, guilt in my eyes and why a Herve Leger dress, ripped and bloodstained, had been recovered from behind the bath panel during a search of my suite.
At the end of the hall stood the door. I couldn’t run any longer, from the truth or myself. I may have thought I was back from the brink, but I knew the truth, the real truth.
After knocking too loudly, the heavy footsteps approached, the door was flung open and I was met by the smiling president of Faith’s North American operations.
‘Ah, you’re here. Come in,’ Renaud said.
There had to be a mistake. I was shot a warm smile rather than a fiery stare. A wrinkled hand ran across a scalp as smooth as an egg as I was shown to an orange bucket chair by his desk. There were no police, no questions, just every inch of wall space jammed with rows of books and sizeable journals; a lifetime’s collection of knowledge on display.
‘How are you today?’ With the city as his backdrop, a glass of water rested by his mouth.
I took my springy seat cautiously, ready for Zupansky and his cronies to burst out of the cupboards.
Renaud was not the same man I remembered. Every word was given time to rest, each syllable tongued in turn. The tone was deep and slow, recalling the Santa Claus at Rosencrantz’s, every Christmas of my childhood. I smiled to myself. Renaud would’ve made a good Father Christmas.
‘To be honest, I thought I was in trouble.’
‘Heavens no, what gave you that idea? Did nobody tell you? As of today, you’re promoted to Senior Project Manager, on a temporary basis of course, though there’s no reason not to apply when I put out the vacancy.’
My reaction was bewilderment through the smiles and gratitude, the polite nodding and fervent handshakes. I was expecting the police, not a promotion. ‘What about Quentin?’ I asked. ‘Did he resign?’
‘He’s been on vacation since the start of the week, but I received a backdated letter this morning.’ He pointed to an envelope on his desk. ‘He mentioned a breakdown, stress . . . he spoke highly of you, even suggested you as his replacement, and with the Apple Rosenbaum campaign in full swing, we need someone now. He is my nephew, but if he wants to go I can’t stop him. I’d rather he be healthy than dig himself further into depression. Between you and me he never lived up to expectation, was never the right man for the job, but you can’t say no to family.’
After a little more small talk, we were both on our feet and edging for the door, and after one more handshake, I was out on the road to new opportunity. I’d survived and been promoted. Not bad for a morning’s work.
Now everyone wanted to stand next to me. I’d received recognition, not infamy. It was enough to lift my mood, and for the first time in weeks.
I was already outlining plans, constructing ideas and acquiring acquaintances in the hallways when I spied Nina hunched over her desk.
The Good Kind of Bad Page 22