I thought about the cascade of tragedy that had swept through the Rendells and threatened to destroy them. I also remembered the question I’d asked myself earlier in connection with Harald Feiss. What happens when you take away what matters most to a man? What happens is you make him dangerous.
I went off in search of Chrissy and found her in the family lounge adjacent to the ICU. She was sitting in one of the institutional stacking chairs facing Detectives Eiben and Zellmer. Her posture could be best described as finishing-school upright—ankles crossed, hands folded demurely in her lap. On her face was the same ice-queen look that was so familiar from my mother. She was so still, she might have been sitting for a portrait, one titled I'm furious and I think you’re lower than dirt.
“And when was the last time you saw your husband, Mrs. Rendell?” inquired Detective Eiben, loosening his tie and making himself comfortable, no stranger to this part of the hospital.
“I was just with him when you arrived.”
“No, I meant to speak to.”
“Yesterday, we spoke briefly on the phone.”
“Why only briefly?”
“Because he was in Los Angeles on business and he was leaving for a meeting.”
“And how did he sound to you?”
“I’m sure he sounded like a man whose father had died recently,” I interjected. “I’m afraid I don’t understand the point of this line of questioning. What does Jeffrey Rendell’s state of mind have to do with anything? It certainly doesn’t sound as though he was attempting suicide.”
“This is not an adversarial proceeding,” Detective Zell-mer assured me. “We just throw out questions and hope that some of the answers lead somewhere.”
Personally I hoped that homicide investigations were a bit less random than that, but I didn’t say anything. I think under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have felt so snippy, but I was tired and feeling emotionally beaten up, and it wasn’t even my husband who was lying in the next room hooked to enough equipment to launch the space shuttle. I was desperate to protect Chrissy. I’d promised her that everything would be all right and look where we were sitting.
“Did your husband mention anything about returning to Milwaukee today?”
“No,” replied Chrissy. “When the officers came to the door this afternoon to tell us what had happened, I was so surprised. I had no idea.”
“Any idea what he was doing at his father’s house?”
“Absolutely none.”
“Do you think it could have had anything to do with your decision to flee Milwaukee?”
“Oh come on,” I countered, “she didn’t flee. She left. And her husband knew exactly where she was.”
“And you planned to remain with Ms. Millholland in Lake Forest the rest of the day.”
“I don’t know. I didn’t really have a plan; originally I hadn’t even planned to leave Milwaukee. I just... I mean... after what happened I couldn’t stay in my house anymore.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t ask Jack McWhorter to come and stay with you. After all, the two of you are close. Wouldn’t it have made you feel more secure to have a man in the house?”
“Jack is in L. A. with my husband.”
“No he’s not. We just spoke with him at the stadium. He flew back to Milwaukee late last night. Apparently there was a fire in one of the concession areas. He said he flew back into town last night to make sure everything was ready for today’s game. I’m surprised he didn’t call you.”
“He may have,” replied Chrissy, “but I was already in Lake Forest.”
“And you didn’t perhaps call home and retrieve the messages from your answering machine?”
“What, and listen to all the reporters and TV producers urging me to tell my side of the story? No thank you.”
“And where were you earlier in the day?”
“I was at the Millhollands’ house in Lake Forest.”
“You didn’t leave?”
“I went for a walk and had coffee earlier that morning. The baby was napping, and one of the maids said that she would be happy to listen for her if I wanted to do anything. I was feeling restless so I went out for a while.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. As you can imagine, the past couple of days have been very stressful. I went into the village, took a walk, stopped at Starbucks, and read the paper.”
“Did you see anyone you knew?”
“No.”
“Anyone recognize you?”
“No.”
“And what time did you return?”
“I’m not sure. When I got back, Katharine had been fed and was down for another nap. The pregame show was just starting...
Detective Eiben reached inside his jacket and pulled out a Ziploc plastic bag. Inside it was a single sheet of paper that had once been folded into a square but now was smoothed flat. One edge of the page appeared to be covered with brown stains. After a closer look I realized that it was blood.
Chrissy took the offered page and read it, carefully holding the edges of the bag, her hands trembling. I scanned it over her shoulder. It was obviously a fax. According to the routing information that appeared at the top of the page, it had been received at the Regent Beverly Wilshire at nine-forty the preceding evening. I did not recognize the number of the transmitting fax, but it had a Milwaukee exchange. I made a mental note of it.
The message itself was simple. One line, hand-printed in block letters: If you want to catch them at it, try your father’s house tomorrow at 2:00. It was not signed.
“Do you have any idea what this fax might be referring to, Mrs. Rendell?”
“No,” replied Chrissy, “I have absolutely no idea.”
“So it wouldn’t happen to have been you that had a meeting or an assignation at two o’clock today?”
“Absolutely not!” retorted Chrissy indignantly.
“So you deny that you were having an affair with Jack McWhorter?”
Chrissy rose to her feet, her mouth open in an expression of speechless disbelief. I confess I was pretty surprised at this latest development myself.
“Are you now or have you in the past had an affair with Jack McWhorter?” demanded Detective Zellmer again slowly.
Chrissy wheeled around to face the other detective, obviously in the throes of a mixture of strong emotions. “Let me explain something to you,” she said passionately. “Before I met my husband, I ran with a very fast crowd. I did lots of things I would never want my daughter to do. My parents were dead, I was alone in the world, and I went out with a lot of different men. I did a lot of experimenting.
“But when I married Jeff, that ended. Not only did I settle down, but also I understood that there was a certain responsibility that went along with being Jeff’s wife because of his association with the team. I accepted that I would have to be like Caesar’s wife, absolutely above reproach, and I took that obligation very seriously. So, to answer your question, I am not having an affair with Jack McWhorter or anyone else. And I challenge you to offer me one scintilla of evidence that indicates otherwise.”
CHAPTER 22
A hospital cafeteria at 3 A.M. is hardly the best place to get any kind of thinking done, but I didn’t have a lot of alternatives. It was either there or in the patient lounge where the mechanic whose son had tried to kill himself lay slumped across two chairs, snoring noisily. Besides, I was starving. It was a good thing, too. Because only someone truly desperate for nourishment would even think about consuming what lingered on the steam tables at that hour.
Only one counter was open, serving gray and congealing Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, and hamburgers that looked like they’d been sitting out since lunch. I bravely asked for the steak, helped myself to a mug of coffee, and gave my money to the woman with a cumulus of red hair who managed to tear herself away from her copy of the National Enquirer long enough to make change.
I made my way into the nearly deserted cafeteria and set my tray down on
the nearest table. In an effort to save money they’d turned off most of the lights. In some sections the chairs had been set upside down on top of the tables. Somewhere in the gloom I could make out a bored janitor swinging a desultory mop.
As I ate I did my best to take stock of the situation. Jeffrey Rendell had been lured to his father’s house by the fax to his hotel. Had he known who’d sent it? Who did he expect to catch? Obviously the police thought it was Chrissy and Jack McWhorter, but all my instincts told me they were wrong. That Jack had eyes for Chrissy was obvious, but I’d never once seen her return his interest.
For a moment I contemplated the possibility of some kind of a relationship between Chrissy and Fredericks, but immediately dismissed it as being too farfetched. Indeed, the whole thing was ridiculous. I’d been with Chrissy off and on all weekend and she certainly hadn’t acted like someone who’d been planning to sneak off to meet a lover.
I tried to set aside conjecture and instead focus on what was known for certain. With less than forty-eight hours left before the default deadline with the bank, two members of the Rendell family had met with violence. Surely there was something more at work here than the freakish cruelty of coincidence, but what?
On a practical level Jeff’s having been shot inserted an enormous question mark into a situation already fraught with uncertainty. Normally I would have expected the bank to grant us an extension, if only on humanitarian grounds. However, Gus Wallenberg had shown no such inclination after Beau Rendell’s death, and I could see no reason why Jeff’s incapacity would move him further. After Thursday’s leak to the press regarding the possibility of the team’s moving to Los Angeles, there was very little public relations downside to screwing the Monarchs’ new owner even as he lay fighting for his life in intensive care. I cursed myself for not having had Jeff turn over power of attorney to Chrissy earlier.
I was startled from these and other dark thoughts by the sound of a chair scraping against the floor. I looked up and saw a young black woman carrying a cafeteria tray.
“Do you mind if I join you?” she asked.
I looked quickly around at the dozens of empty tables surrounding us. “Be my guest,” I replied, not quite knowing what else to say.
As she set down her tray and sat down, I was able to take a closer look at her. She was closer to twenty than thirty and was dressed in a Miami Dolphins sweatshirt over jeans. Her hair was shiny with brilliantine and swept into an elaborate conch on top of her head. I wondered if she worked for a personal injury firm, making the rounds of hospitals in the middle of the night, chatting up the families of car-crash victims—an illegal but nonetheless widespread practice.
“I don’t know if you remember me from the trial,” she said quietly. “I’m Renee Fredericks.”
“You’re Darius’s sister,” I said as the information clicked into place.
She’d come to the courtroom every day her brother was on trial. My mother always liked to say that good manners prepare you for the unexpected, but even I was unprepared for a conversation with the sister of the person who’d just shot my client.
“I’m one of his sisters, anyway,” she said, managing a shy smile. “The one who still talks to him, at any rate.”
A great deal had been made of Fredericks’s childhood during the trial. We’d learned how he’d grown up in the slums of south central Los Angeles, one of the six children his mother had had with six different men. We’d heard about his ninth birthday spent in the Venice Beach homeless shelter and of the year and a half he and three of his sisters had lived in the back of an abandoned Chevy.
“How is your brother doing?” I asked.
“The doctors have done all they could for him in the operating room,” she said. “They say he’s still got a bullet lodged in the front of his brain. They’re afraid if they take it out, the surgery will kill him.”
“And if they don’t?”
“I’m a nurse, Ms. Millholland. I moved to Milwaukee when my brother signed with the Monarchs. I work downstairs in peds. I’ve seen enough to know that it’s better if he doesn’t live. Darius isn’t coming back, not the Darius we used to know. I hope God sees fit to take him. How is Mr. Rendell?”
“The bullets did a lot of damage. Right now we can only wait and see.” I actually suspected that the surgeons, with their experience with hundreds of patients who’d been as seriously wounded as Jeff, probably had a good idea of what the outcome was going to be. However, their job was sewing people up, not making predictions. “I hope you don’t mind me asking,” I continued, “but do you have any idea what your brother was doing at Beau Rendell’s house?”
“The detective I talked to says they think he broke in to rob the place. They say he was after all of the sports memorabilia that Beau Rendell kept there. I told them they were crazy. Darius had more trophies and signed footballs than he knew what to do with. What would he want with more?”
“Perhaps he intended to sell them,” I offered gently. “Was he strapped for cash?”
“Darius was always strapped for cash, even when he was playing in the NFL. He ran through money like water. Listen, I’m not saying that Darius is perfect. He has his problems, but stealing has never been one of them.”
“So what do you think he was doing at Beau Rendell’s house?” I asked.
“I think Jeff Rendell set it up.”
“What for?”
“I got a call from Darius yesterday. He was all excited. He told me that he had this secret, something big.”
“Do you know what it was?”
“Oh, yeah, Darius never could keep anything from me, especially when he was happy.”
“He was happy?”
“Of course, he was happy. He was going back to play for the Monarchs.”
It was four o’clock in the morning when Jeffrey Rendell died. The reporters had long ago gone home. Chrissy was with him at the end, sitting in the molded plastic chair at his bedside, when the monitors bleated out their flat alarms. She was shoved out of the way when the crash team sprang into action and went through their heroic but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to resuscitate him.
I dozed through all of it in an armchair just outside the double doors. What finally woke me was the screaming, the shrill sounds of the nurses crying out for security, and the sounds of crashing as medical equipment was knocked to the floor.
I stumbled to my feet, propelled by instinct as much as anything else and followed the sounds of shouting. Under the harsh fluorescent lights I got there just in time to see Chrissy Rendell, in her Prada pants and designer sweater, being pulled off the body of Darius Fredericks. In the few seconds that she’d had she’d pulled out every tube and line she could get her hands on, so that sounds of her curses mingled not only with the horrified voices of the nurses, but the sound of the various alarms of the devices that had been monitoring Fredericks’s vital systems.
By the time I reached her, Chrissy’s hair was disheveled, her eyes wild, and the perfect alabaster of her skin was speckled with the blood of the man that she believed had murdered her husband.
CHAPTER 23
We act out what we can’t put into words. Perhaps that is the real explanation of madness, at least the kind that had taken hold of Chrissy. Certainly it was something that Renee Fredericks seemed to understand. Perhaps it was having seen the violence that spilled out of her brother or maybe it was just plain kindness, but in the end it was Darius’s sister who convinced them not to call the cops. No harm, she pointed out, had been done and her status as a nurse in the same hospital also carried considerable weight. For the time being the incident was allowed to go unreported, at least until one of the half a dozen or so witnesses discovered that there was money to be made from selling the story.
I honestly don’t think Chrissy cared what happened to herself. Her rage spent, she now seemed hollowed out and near shock. I put my arm around her thin shoulders and half lifted her out of the chair in order to propel her toward the door.
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As we left Renee Fredericks alone with the rasping of the ventilators I said a silent prayer that her wish would be granted and her brother would be taken.
We walked through the deserted parking lot to the car unmolested. The hospital had promised to give us a half an hour head start before releasing the news of Jeff’s death. However, pulling into Chrissy’s drive I noticed a car parked on the other side of Lake Drive. It probably belonged to one of the more tenacious reporters, but there was nothing I could do about it.
Chrissy was so devastated by grief that even the simple act of retrieving her house key from her purse was beyond her. I had to root through her shoulder bag until I found the ring and then fumbled in the dark until I was finally able to unlock the door. Groping for the light switch, I led her inside and steered her into the rocking chair while I quickly made my way through the house drawing curtains and closing blinds against the intrusions of the outside world.
By the time I got back to the kitchen she was crying—a good sign. I took her upstairs and helped her get undressed and into bed as if she was an invalid. I went into the bathroom and found the envelope of sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet, intending to offer her one.
We had only the smallest window of relative calm before the news broke of Jeff’s death. She needed to get whatever rest she could, but when I returned to her bedroom she was already asleep. I was glad. As bad as today had been, tomorrow was going to be worse.
Elliott Abelman arrived within an hour of my call. I had never been so happy to see anyone in my life. I hugged him as soon as he was through the door, lingering longer in his arms than I ought to have, grateful for the momentary respite from the horrors of the day. I’d put on a pot of coffee while I waited for him, and I poured him out a cup. We sat and drank it at the kitchen table while I filled him in on that night’s events, especially what I’d learned about Fredericks.
“So I take it you think the whole thing was a setup?”
Rough Trade Page 21