Rough Trade

by Hartzmark, Gini

  “Absolutely. Somebody made a deal with Fredericks. Shoot Jeff and you can come back and play in the NFL.”

  “If that’s really the case, then it limits the suspects to people who could credibly make the offer. So who does that leave us?”

  “Harald Feiss. He’s a minority owner of the team, and he called the shots with Beau while he was alive. With Jeff out of the way I’m sure he’s convinced he’ll be able to get Chrissy to do what he wants. The coach could also make a credible contract offer, though I’m not sure why he’d want to. I don’t really know who else. It’s got to be Feiss.”

  “What about Jeff?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you think he could have engineered the whole thing himself?”

  “That’s absurd. Why would he want to do such a thing?”

  “You said yourself he was in financial trouble. Maybe he took out a big fat life insurance policy and then arranged to have himself killed.”

  “I don’t think so,” I replied. “If Jeff was really desperate to get out from under financially, all he had to do was agree to move the team to L.A.”

  “What if it wasn’t the money?”

  “You mean what if he murdered his father.”

  “Exactly.”

  “In that case I’d expect to find him with a gunshot wound to the head and a suicide note, not wrestling with an intruder in his father’s house. The whole thing doesn’t make any sense.”

  “What about Chrissy?”

  “Chrissy? You can’t be serious.”

  “Come on. With her husband out of the way she owns the team. Not only that, but word around the campfire was that she was cheating on her husband.”

  “I know that’s what the cops think,” I said, “but I don’t buy it. They showed up at the hospital and flat out accused Chrissy of having an affair with Jack McWhorter.”

  “And?”

  “She categorically denied it.”

  “And it doesn’t bother you that McWhorter also flew back to Milwaukee on Saturday night?”

  “I heard there was a fire in one of the concession kitchens at the stadium.”

  “He could have had it set.”

  “You’ve been watching too many cop shows on TV. If he’d wanted to come back to Milwaukee, there were ten different excuses he could have come up with, none of which involved arson. Besides, I told you, Chrissy denies having an affair with Jack.”

  “And naturally you believe her.”

  “Listen. Chrissy is not an angel. We are talking about a girl who used to get around. I mean really get around. But the operative term is used to. She could have had any one of a dozen rich millionaires who wanted her for a trophy wife. She married Jeff because she loved him.”

  “Yeah, but did she decide to have him killed when she found out he didn’t have any more money?”

  Coach Bennato arrived practically at first light. He showed up at the door in his boxy black coat, hat in hand as grave as a visiting priest. If he was surprised to find the front door answered by Elliott Abelman, he did not show it. Indeed he looked like a man who was beyond noticing anything. I wasn’t even sure whether he remembered who I was and suspected that he accepted my presence the way you expect to see strangers in a house of bereavement.

  “I heard about what happened on the news this morning,” he said as I took his coat. “I came as soon as I could.”

  I caught sight of Elliott out of the corner of my eye. He looked like a star struck little boy in the presence of the legendary football coach. Suddenly I realized that my impression of Bennato had always been skewed by Jeff’s dissatisfaction with his performance in recent years. Now, what I was seeing in Elliott’s eyes was the other side of the coin.

  I effected an introduction and watched with amusement as Elliott seemed to grow a foot taller on the spot. To his credit, he didn’t make anything further of it, excusing himself quickly to continue his rounds of the property, making sure that all was secure. As he’d been careful to point out, two members of the Rendell family had recently fallen prey to violence. This wasn’t the time to be taking chances.

  “How is Chrissy?” Bennato asked. “It breaks my heart to think of her and that beautiful little baby. My wife Marie says to tell her that she would be happy to come and watch the baby if that would help.”

  “Little Katharine is back in Chicago,” I said. “Chrissy had to leave her there yesterday when she got the news about Jeff.”

  “Is Chrissy up to seeing people? I’d like to talk to her for a minute, if that’s possible.”

  “I don’t know. Let me go upstairs and see if she’s awake.” I found my friend in her bedroom already dressed and putting the finishing touches on her makeup.

  “I couldn’t sleep anymore,” she said. “I kept on hoping that I’d wake up and it would all have been a bad dream, but I guess it’s not.”

  “No. I’m sorry. Coach Bennato is downstairs to see you. What do you want me to tell him?”

  “I’ll come down and talk to him,” she said. “I’m not going to be able to hide in my bedroom forever. I might as well go downstairs and get it over with.” As we walked down the stairs she asked, “Are there a lot of reporters?”

  “Elliott hired a couple of security guards. They’re keeping them off the property. They’ll get tired of staking the house out once they realize they’re not going to get anything.

  “I called Mrs. Mason this morning. She said that Elliott’s sent armed guards to your parents’ house to make sure that the baby stays safe. I was worried about the baby but she says she seems to be doing just fine.”

  “Mrs. Mason is a rock.”

  “That’s a good thing,” said Chrissy, swallowing hard and doing her best to blink back the tears. “Somebody has to be.”

  At the bottom of the stairs Bennato enveloped Chrissy in a warm embrace. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “I only wish that when the judge locked up that animal, he’d thrown away the key.”

  “You mean Fredericks?” I asked.

  “Of course I mean Fredericks. I can’t believe they let him out after what he did to that girl. That judge called and asked me what I thought of him before he sentenced him and I told him exactly what I thought of him. I said that Fredericks was a complete sociopath, that he was capable of anything. If only the judge had listened!”

  “Kate talked to his sister yesterday and she said that he thought he was coming back to play in the NFL.”

  “Darius Fredericks thought he was Jesus, Allah, and Muhammad Ali all rolled into one,” replied Bennato with barely disguised contempt. “That doesn’t make it true. But let’s not talk about him. I don’t want to intrude, but I just wanted to know if there was anything I could do.”

  “That’s very kind, Tony,” said Chrissy, taking his hand and giving it a squeeze, “but right now I can’t think of a thing. I’ll let you know as soon as we have the funeral arrangements made. We’re going to do something quiet, just family and a few close friends. I hope you’ll be there.”

  “Of course,” he said, with a bow of his head.

  “Now if you’ll excuse me,” she said.

  Chrissy withdrew into the front of the house, and I retrieved Coach Bennato’s coat from the front hall closet. “What’s going to happen now?” he asked me in a much more businesslike tone.

  “You mean with the team?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s up to Chrissy. She’s the new owner.”

  “So what’s she gonna do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I have to say that if I were in her situation, I’d move it.” I looked around the room where we stood. “There are a lot of painful memories for her here. You really couldn’t blame her if she decided that what she wanted was a fresh start.”

  CHAPTER 24

  I knew that Elliott couldn’t stay. He had other cases to attend to, not to mention a business to run, but that didn’t make it any easier to see
him go. But once he’d made sure that Chrissy and I were okay and there was no one lurking in the bushes there was no real reason for him to remain. For the time being at least, the press seemed willing to keep their distance. I’m sure it helped that Harald Feiss had been doing nothing but giving back-to-back interviews since the news of Jeff’s death first broke. I confess I felt safer knowing where Feiss was.

  I grabbed a sweater of Chrissy’s off the hook near the back door and wrapped it around my shoulders as I walked Elliott back out to his car.

  “What happened to the Volvo?” he asked as we passed the crushed carapace of what had once been my car. “It looks like you parked it in a Tyrannosaurus rex crossing.”

  “Something like that,” I replied, explaining how my attempt to foil the Jester had netted me not just an assortment of nasty bruises, but a new Jaguar.

  “And you say this guy’s back out on the street?”

  “Yeah. But, hey, if he’d actually raped and abducted either of us, I’m sure they would have kept him in for another five or six hours.”

  “Just promise me you’ll keep the doors locked and won’t let anyone in you don’t know.”

  “I promise,” I said as we stopped beside his car.

  “You know, I’m wondering why the whole thing went down at Beau’s house,” mused Elliott. “I mean, if it was a setup, why not here?”

  “Because whoever set it up didn’t know that Chrissy wouldn’t be here. The whole thing with the Jester just came up out of the blue. No one could have known that Chrissy would feel so unsafe in her own home that she’d leave town.”

  “You know what else I’m wondering?”

  “What?”

  “What about the gun? I mean, I assume that Darius showed up packing, but what about Jeff? How did he end up doing some of the shooting?”

  “There was a gun at Beau’s house,” I said, feeling a wave of remorse and wondering if things would have turned out differently if I hadn’t left the gun where I’d found it in Beau’s bottom drawer. “It was in the study. A 9mm Glock in the bottom drawer of his desk. Jeff probably knew it was there, and when he saw Fredericks, he went for it.”

  “Now you’re making it sound like an interrupted burglary again. Would you please make up your mind?” Elliott fixed me with a long, appraising look, and I suddenly realized I must look like hell. As if reading my mind he reached out and gently tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear.

  “I broke up with Stephen,” I said, without meaning to. It just sort of slipped out.

  “Did you?” he asked quietly, unable to completely suppress his slowly spreading grin. I knew he was going to kiss me and I did not move away.

  “We have a crummy sense of timing,” he said, finally pulling away.

  I pressed my lips together. “I know,” I sighed. “Funerals keep getting in the way.”

  “When will you be back in Chicago?”

  “Not until after Jeff’s funeral. Besides, I have a meeting with the bank and another one with the city.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I’m going to go back home and see if I can’t make sense out of my life.”

  “That sounds like an awfully big job. Maybe you’d like some help.”

  “We’ll see,” I replied shyly.

  “In the meantime I brought you a present.”

  “What is it?”

  Elliott opened up his trunk and pulled out a thick file. “This is a copy of the police file on the Beau Rendell murder investigation. If anyone finds out you have it, you have to promise to take your cyanide pill before you tell them where you got it.”

  “Scout’s honor,” I said. “So what’s happening with the cops?”

  “They think that Jeff killed his father, and now Jeff is dead. They know that it was Fredericks who shot Jeff— whether it was a setup or in self-defense, who cares? If Fredericks lives, he’s going to be a human eggplant. Case closed.”

  “You mean they’re going to stop investigating? Even though there are so many unanswered questions? I mean, who sent the fax to Jeff in L.A.? Who did he think he was going to catch in his father’s house? I mean, come on!”

  “Cops are supposed to close murder investigations, Kate—not look for reasons to keep them open. You should know that.”

  “Great. Now every time Chrissy sees her name in the paper it will say, ‘Mrs. Rendell, who became the owner of the Monarchs after her husband allegedly murdered his father.’ All Beau wanted was to pass the team down to his grandchildren, keep it in the family. Now Chrissy’s baby is going to grow up with everyone whispering that her father was a killer.”

  “Maybe he was.”

  “And maybe he wasn’t,” I shot back, frowning. “But if the cops drop the investigation, we’ll never know, will we?”

  Elliott leaned forward and kissed me again, this time chastely on the forehead. “The police are responsible for a lot of things, Kate Millholland. Providing happy childhoods for millionaires is not one of them.”

  I went back in the house and found Chrissy methodically emptying her kitchen cupboards. I didn’t need to ask her what she was doing. I indulged in similar behavior after Russell died. Sorting, cleaning, and rearranging. Your inner life is in turmoil so you seek to impose physical order on the objects around you.

  I pulled up a chair. “Do you mind if we talk while you do this?” I asked.

  “Not at all,” she replied, separating the wooden spoons and spatulas into different piles.

  “I have to know what you want to do about the team,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “Well?”

  “I just got off the phone with Jack. He said that L.A. is prepared to fax me a commitment letter to take to the bank.”

  “So you want to move the team?”

  “No,” she said, looking up. “Until a few minutes ago I thought I did. But being home, seeing this house, all my things, this is really where I belong, and more importantly this is where the team belongs. I’ve been trying to think of what Jeff would have wanted, what he would have considered to be the right thing, and I’m pretty sure that this is it. Even the idea of taking on a partner, which I know bothered Jeff, actually seems like a good idea now. That way I won’t be making all the decisions alone.”

  “Then let me go ahead and see if I can work out a deal,” I said. “But until I do, you have to promise me you won’t tell anyone about your decision. Right now my best lever is the notion that you can’t decide what to do. As soon as you make a decision it substantially weakens my bargaining position.”

  “I understand.”

  “I especially don’t want you discussing this with Jack. I know you view him as a friend, but believe me, he’s an interested party in this and you need to keep him in the dark just like everyone else.”

  “What do you mean by interested party? Do you think that I’m having an affair with him, too?” she asked in an aggrieved voice.

  “Not unless you tell me you are,” I answered truthfully. “But I have no idea what kind of finder’s fee or deal he may have struck with the people in L.A.”

  “Do you think that there’s really a chance that someone would be willing to make a deal for part of the team?”

  “We’ll know today. I mean, it’s one thing to think about what fun it would be to own a football team. It’s another when you start getting the lawyers involved and it’s time to start writing the check. Personality is an issue, too. When you take on a partner, you have to give some real thought to what it’s going to be like dealing with them day in and day out, year after year.”

  “I understand,” replied Chrissy, “but you also have to understand that right now I’d make a deal with the devil just to be able to put all of this behind me.”

  * * *

  I left Chrissy with the spoons and spatulas and went to call my office.

  “Congratulations on your promotion from word processing,” I told my secretary after she’d picked up the phone.

  “
No thanks to you,” she replied. “I went to the secretarial administrator and told her that I was going to sue the firm for discrimination if they didn’t reinstate me.”

  “And it worked?”

  “Apparently. I have been thinking of changing the way I answer the phone to ‘Good morning, Pariahs R Us.’ It’s catchy and it pretty much sums things up when it comes to your career.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “I’m sure they’ll eventually stop blaming you for losing the firm a quarter of a million dollars.”

  “What’s going on in the rest of my life?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me. Stephen called this morning and started asking me all these weird questions. What’s going on with you two?”

  “We kind of broke up.”

  “So I gathered. Congratulations. It’s about time.”

  “Is that what you told Stephen?”

  “I didn’t tell him anything. I just played dumb. I mean, you can’t expect me to do everything for you. I take it you like the car?”

  “I do, but it’s a big change from the Volvo.”

  “Well, if you decide that it’s too nice for you, you can always pass it along to me. I’m sure if I look hard enough, I could find some decrepit old heap to replace the Volvo.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I replied. “Now, if there are no more areas of my life you desire to make over, can you get Paul Riskoff on the phone for me?”

  * * *

  That night Chrissy went to bed early. She’d spent the day alternately weeping, cleaning, and obsessively calling Mrs. Mason every fifteen minutes to reassure herself that the baby was safe. By nightfall she was exhausted. I was glad. Talks had gone well with our possible white knight, and after a few false starts, I felt that I had finally been able to craft an agreement that was acceptable to both parties.

  However, even someone of tremendous wealth doesn’t keep their millions in their checking account. Even if they were willing to accept our proposal and transmit a letter of intent and a credit letter from their bank by close of business that day, it would take seventy-two hours for the funds to actually transfer—not in time to cure the default with First Milwaukee. Still, I had not come this far to have it not work. I told myself that I would think of something.