Rough Trade

by Hartzmark, Gini

  We walked side by side up the broad stairway. From the arched window on the landing we could see the headlights glittering at our feet as the last weary commuters headed out of the city for the night. From the jutting peninsula of Navy Pier the enormous carousel made a slow, luminous circle against the backdrop of the night sky. At the top of the stairs I pushed open the French doors and ushered him into the ballroom.

  “It’s ridiculous, I know,” I said as he just stood there gaping. “It’s almost like keeping a horse and carriage, like trying to hold on to another era—one that’s never coming back. But I love this room. I remember my parents had parties here when I was a little girl, and my brother Teddy and I would sneak out of bed and hide under the tables and watch them dance. Every time I come in here, I can still remember the swirling skirts and the smell of cigarette smoke mingled with champagne.”

  “I didn’t realize that you’d lived here before.”

  “Yes. This apartment was a present to my parents from my grandparents for their wedding.”

  “Gosh. When my sister got married, I think my folks bought her a washer and dryer.”

  “Yeah, but at least she got to live wherever she wanted. As beautiful as my parents’ apartment was, my mother still had to live in the same building as her mother-in-law.”

  “How old were you when you moved?”

  “Six. I was heartbroken when we went to live in Lake Forest. I thought it was the end of the world. It was like being exiled to Gorky. It’s funny how much of this apartment I remember. I’ve always been hopelessly and irrationally in love with it.”

  “Who says there’s anything rational about love?” said Elliott, reaching up and tucking a stray hair that had come down from my French twist back behind my ear. With the simple intimacy of this gesture I suddenly felt as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room. The quiet emptiness of the apartment, my growing irritation with Stephen, the unrelenting loneliness of these last months spent pouring myself into the Avco deal all mingled together. I don’t remember deciding to kiss him, only that I did.

  And then I heard all the other voices, the practical ones that are either women’s salvation or their downfall, the one that said that the floor would be hard and that we’d end up covered with plaster dust and feeling ridiculous. I took a step back.

  “We have to talk,” said Elliott. “Is there someplace where we can sit down?”

  I nodded and led the way into the solarium where Mimi had stacked the discarded fabric samples on the deep ledge that formed the long window seat that circled the room. Inside I felt a sense of foreboding, afraid that I was about to be handed a kind of emotional ultimatum.

  “What do you want to talk about?” I asked.

  “Last night, after you and I got off the phone, I called my friend Marty. He and I were in the corps together. He was originally from some little town in Wisconsin, but he’s with the Milwaukee PD now, working vice. Anyway, Marty owes me a favor.” Elliott had served three tours of duty as a marine helicopter pilot, years spent plucking the wounded from the battlefield until his luck ran out and he was shot down himself. He came home with a Purple Heart and a long list of guys who owed him favors. “I wanted to know what he was hearing around the department on this Rendell thing.”

  “And?”

  “As you’d expect, it’s the talk of the department.”

  “Why? Just because he owned the Monarchs? Old men drop dead of heart attacks all the time.”

  “That’s true, but this old man didn’t.”

  “What?”

  “According to Marty, the medical examiner says he didn’t die of a heart attack.”

  “So it was the fall that killed him?”

  “He was already dead when he went down the stairs.”

  “How do they know that?”

  “Postmortem fractures bleed much less than ones sustained before death. Also, bruising that occurs after the victim’s blood has stopped circulating has an orangy look, not red like you’d expect if the victim had been alive when they suffered the trauma.”

  “Then if it wasn’t his heart and it wasn’t the fall, what killed him?”

  “According to Marty, his hyoid bone was fractured.”

  “Okay. I give up. Where’s your hyoid bone, and how did Beau’s end up broken?”

  “The hyoid is a small bone, very well protected, at the base of the neck,” replied Elliott slowly. “In ninety-nine percent of cases where it’s been broken, the victim was strangled.”

  CHAPTER 11

  “Are you saying that Beau Rendell might have been strangled?” I demanded in disbelief.

  “Not might have, was. Word around the campfire is that the medical examiner has already ruled asphyxia as the cause of death.”

  “By what means?”

  “There were no signs of a ligature or anything mechanical, so my guess is they’re thinking it must have been manual strangulation.”

  “Meaning homicide?”

  “It’s pretty hard to choke somebody to death with your bare hands by accident—unless you’re talking about kinky sex that got out of hand and went too far—”

  “I don’t think there’s any chance of that, not at the stadium in the middle of the day—”

  “So then it’s homicide.”

  “I just can’t believe it,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? Because up until two minutes ago we were all shocked and saddened by the suddenness of his heart attack. Now you’re telling me that he was murdered!”

  “The cops thought it was natural causes at first, too. You sound surprised that somebody wanted to strangle him.”

  “Are you kidding? I’m sure there was no shortage of people who’d mentally had their hands around his throat. I had a meeting with him this past Sunday, and I wanted to strangle him. No, what surprises me is that somebody apparently went ahead and actually did it.”

  “You know, everything I’ve ever heard about Beau Rendell made him out to be a real hard-nosed son of a bitch.”

  “That may be true, but it still doesn’t tell us why somebody strangled him. Who do the police think did it? Do they have any suspects?”

  “The cops like Jeff Rendell for the killer. So far he’s their number one suspect.”

  “Of course he’s their number one suspect. Not only did he argue with his father right before he died, but he also inherits the team. The cops will assume that profit was the motive because that’s the easiest thing to think. The only trouble is that they’re wrong.”

  “What makes you say that? I mean other than the fact that he’s a friend of yours.”

  “You have to promise that what I’m going to tell you doesn’t go beyond these walls.”

  “Scout’s honor,” replied Elliott, summoning up a credible rendition of the traditional two-fingered salute.

  I quickly sketched out the Monarchs’ financial situation for him. When I was finished, Elliott whistled softly under his breath.

  “Do the cops know about any of this?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for one thing, if Beau had died of a heart attack—which is what we all thought-—there was no reason to tell them.”

  “They didn’t ask what Jeff and his father fought about?”

  “They asked, but he didn’t tell them.”

  “So now the cops assume he’s hiding something.”

  “They’re right. He is. The only trouble is it’s not what they think it is.”

  “Then you have no choice but to come clean and tell them the whole story—the debt, the bank, the offer from L.A....”

  “I’m not sure that would be such a hot idea.”

  “Why not?”

  “For one thing, while we might be taking away one motive we’d just be handing the cops another. Beau made it perfectly clear to us on Sunday that he wouldn’t move the team. With him out of the way, Jeff is free to make a deal with L.A.

/>   “Not only that, but the minute we tell the cops, we tell the world. You know that as well as anybody. Think about it. Right now it’s bad enough that Jeff and Chrissy are in this mess. They have to go through the funeral and figure out a way to hold on to the team before the bank comes in and takes it away from them. But as soon as word gets out that they’re even considering moving the team, it will turn into an absolute nightmare. The politicians, the media, they’ll be out for blood. A reporter from Dateline will be waiting for Chrissy behind the lettuce at the grocery store, and the guys from Hard Copy will be trying to squeeze through the laundry chute. Unless the cops have something besides the fact that he’s the obvious suspect, it’s better to keep our mouths shut until we figure out what we’re going to do to get the bank off our backs.”

  “Kate, you don’t understand. This isn’t a game. As soon as it gets out that this Rendell guy was murdered, the cops are going to be feeling the heat to come up with a killer. They’re going to go after your friend Jeff and they’re going to go after him hard.”

  “With what? What have they got?”

  “All I know is what Marty told me. I’m sure there’s more. Like I said, when the uniforms first showed up, they thought Beau had fallen down the stairs and either hit his head or broken his neck. From an investigational standpoint, a fall down the stairs is just like a fall from a window. There are two separate scenes—the place where the victim fell or was pushed from, which in this case was the top of the stairs directly off the backdoor of the dead man’s office, and then there’s the place where the victim landed.”

  “I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Monarchs Stadium,” I said, “but it’s a really funky setup. The team offices are in a series of double-wide trailers suspended from the stadium roof and connected end to end like railroad cars. Every thirty feet or so there’s a metal staircase that connects the office to the concourse level. The stairs are really steep and narrow, like the gangway on a ship.”

  “So who else had an office close to Beau’s?”

  “Jeff’s office is on one side and I think Coach Bennato’s is on the other, but I’m not sure. There may also be a secretary stuck in there somewhere.”

  “There is. But Beau’s secretary was out sick that morning. They brought a girl from accounting up to answer the phones, but she kept having to run back to her own desk.”

  “Did she see anything?”

  “No, but apparently she heard plenty.”

  “From what I gather, everyone did.”

  “But that’s not all. The crime lab found drag marks in the carpeting in the dead man’s office.”

  “What kind of drag marks?”

  “Parallel heel marks, the kind you’d make if you grabbed hold of someone who was either dead or unconscious by the armpits and dragged them along the ground.”

  “So let me see if I can get this straight. The cops think that in the heat of an argument Jeff strangled his own father with his bare hands and then dragged him across the office and threw him down the stairs?”

  “That’s exactly what they think. They figure Jeff must have panicked when he realized what he’d done and decided he’d better toss his old man down the stairs in order to make it look like an accident.”

  “Oh, come on,” I demanded, “don’t you think that’s a little far-fetched?”

  “You’ve got to remember, Kate. This is the Milwaukee Police Department we’re talking about here. They’re the same guys who rang Jeffrey Dahmer’s doorbell and then took a little peek inside his refrigerator. There’s not a whole lot that they’re going to think is too far-fetched.”

  I was already on my way to his apartment when Stephen called me in the car and announced that we needed to talk. I didn’t even bother to ask him what it was about. I was still furious with him for the chickenshit way he’d managed to squirm out of the meeting with Mimi. I didn’t really want to hear what he had to say. I had something to get off my chest, and I figured it was something he’d had coming to him for a long time.

  Our contractor liked to tell stories about other people he had worked for, couples who’d finished building their dream houses just in time to see the divorce papers served. He said it was always the same story: either they ran out of money, or they ran out of love.

  With us it was never going to be a question of not being able to foot the bill; our problem was that there’d never been any love there to begin with. Of course, there’d been a lot of other things—loyalty, shared history, not to mention lust in spades. Still, I hoped that the lack of anything deeper might mean that we could manage a bloodless parting. Of course, as a lawyer, the voice inside my head had long ago grown hoarse berating myself about the foolishness of having bought the apartment with Stephen in the first place. Until he brought me to look at it, I had never so much as left a toothbrush at his house. Now, suddenly, we were bound together by contracts, deeds, and a million dollars’ worth of real estate. “At least,” I told myself as I left my car with the doorman in front of his building, “it won’t be for long.”

  Even so, I felt nervous and uncertain. Unlike Chrissy, I had little experience with the vicissitudes of dating. I’d had too few relationships with men to really have a sense of how to end them. At sixteen Stephen Azorini had been my first boyfriend, and now, more than a decade later, he was still in my life.

  He was waiting for me at the door of his apartment, his briefcase and his overnight bag still at his feet where he’d dumped them when he’d walked in from the airport. He’d loosened his tie, but that was as far as he’d gotten. He was still wearing the same dark suit he’d traveled in.

  Of course, even rumpled he was still handsome. Six foot five, with broad shoulders that all but filled the doorway, he looked much more like a soap opera star than the CEO of a pharmaceutical company. I thought of all the skin we’d shared and found myself feeling a pang of something very much like regret at giving it up.

  “I heard about Beau Rendell on the news this morning,” he said, stepping aside to let me pass. We never kissed hello, even under less strained circumstances. “Have you talked to Chrissy?”

  “I just got back from Milwaukee this afternoon,” I said, slipping out of my coat and laying it carefully over the back of a chair. “I wouldn’t have come back at all if we didn’t have that meeting scheduled at the apartment with Mimi.” I took a deep breath, bracing myself for what I was about to say next.

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “The meeting?” I asked, wondering if he thought he was going to be able to scoot out from under this with some kind of apology.

  “No, the apartment.”

  “What about it?”

  In response he went over to the table that held the pile of mail that had accumulated during his absence and picked up a large manila envelope. “Have you gotten one of these yet?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t been home since Sunday,” I said, my stomach churning at the sight of the familiar return address—Hanrahan & Goldstein, the law firm that handled litigation for Paul Riskoff’s real estate empire. “What is it?”

  “The bastard is suing us,” exploded Stephen angrily.

  Completely taken aback, I took the envelope from his hand and made my way into the living room to sit down. I took a few minutes to skim the multicount complaint. While I read, Stephen went over to the bar and poured me a tall Scotch. I took it without looking up.

  “I’ll say one thing for these guys,” I said when I’d finished. “They demonstrate an imaginative interpretation of real estate law. Destruction of private property, theft, violation of the covenant governing the co-op, fraudulent conveyance of title—Riskoff’s accusing us of everything but incest.”

  “But how can he get away with it?” demanded Stephen, plopping down next to me on the couch. “We’re just trying to recover our costs for taking his damn playground down before it ended up in our living room. How can he sue us when he knows he’s in the wrong?” His voice w
as filled with a scientist’s sense of outrage at the illogic of it all.

  “This isn’t about right and wrong,” I pointed out. “It’s about what you can get away with.”

  “So what can he get away with?”

  “Unfortunately, when you’re Paul Riskoff, you can get away with an awful lot. He’s the most powerful real estate developer in the city. He’s also a vindictive asshole. Every judge, every alderman, every building inspector knows that if they cross him, he’ll make a career out of making ,their lives hell.”

  “Which is exactly what he’s got planned for us,” observed Stephen, who may be a lot of things, but never slow on the uptake.

  “Litigation is a form of war. Riskoff knows that if this ever goes to trial, he won’t win, so he’s going to make it as painful and expensive as he possibly can for us to get him there. His lawyers will insist on deposing every workman, every carpenter, and every laborer who ever lifted a shovel on the job. He wants us to understand exactly whom we’re dealing with. This is just the beginning.” I sighed. Suddenly the implications of what I’d just said occurred to me. What would be the point of breaking up with Stephen now that we were going to be inextricably bound together by a tangle of lawsuits that Paul Riskoff was going to make sure dragged out for the next half century?

  I laid the complaint on my lap, suddenly feeling completely overwhelmed by it all. Stephen reached down and picked up one of my feet and began slowly massaging it with his enormous hands. Without meaning to, I sighed. Perhaps taking this for encouragement he began kissing my leg, beginning with the inside of my ankle and slowly working his way up. By the time he reached my thigh, I’d completely forgotten what I’d come there to tell him.

  What is the worst thing you can say to someone?

  The baby was born dead.

  The biopsy showed cancer.

  Your father was murdered and the police think you killed him.

  As I drove up to Milwaukee the next morning, I wondered how anyone ever found the courage to say any of them.

  It had turned cold overnight, and the roads were iced over in patches and dangerous. I drank coffee out of a Styrofoam cup and drove slowly, thinking about what whoever had killed Beau had managed to accomplish. The embalmer was probably already laying out his supplies— the gloves, fluids, needles, and implements of stainless steel—that mark our final journey from the is to the isn’t. But beyond that I could think of nothing concrete that had been accomplished and certainly nothing that had been gained.