However, it had not risen more than six inches before it changed directions and closed again.
Panicked and beginning to cough, I hit the button again. The same thing happened, only this time the door opened only a fraction of an inch before reversing itself and moving down. Frantic, I groped for the doorknob to go back into the house, but was horrified to discover that it would not turn.
“Think,” I told myself.
That’s when I remembered that all automatic garage door openers were required to have a manual override. The one on my parents’ garage door looked like a small red handle on a rope that hung from the chain that controlled the door. Gasping and dizzy, I plunged into the garage, half climbed up the hood of the Lexus, and flailed in the general direction of the ceiling until my hand hit something that felt like string. I pulled as hard as I could and felt the mechanism release.
Then I slid down the passenger side of the Lexus and raced toward the entrance to the garage, scrabbling in the dark for the handle that I knew must be centered near the ground. I found it and I heaved, raising the door and letting in a tide of cold, clean air.
Bent over and coughing uncontrollably, I forced myself back into the interior of the garage, frantic to get Chrissy out of the car. I made my way to the driver’s side of the Lexus. With the light from the open garage door I could now see Chrissy slumped over the steering wheel. Feeling nauseous with fear, I yanked open the handle, sobbing in frustration to find that it was locked. I ran around the back of the car to the other side, noting that the exhaust pipe had been neatly covered over with duct tape. I tried the passenger door, too. It was locked, as well.
I raced to the back of the car and clawed desperately at the tape until I was finally able to pull it off only to receive a lungful of exhaust for my trouble. I briefly contemplated going back into the house to look for an extra car key but immediately discarded the idea.
I had no time.
Instead, I looked frantically around Chrissy’s immaculate garage, searching for something to use to break the windows. Unfortunately, it was not the usual repository of tools or garden supplies, but rather a yuppie car hotel. There were no rakes or shovels, instead a truckload of landscapers arrived for the yard’s weekly manicure and departed again when they were finished, taking their tools with them. I opened cupboards and looked on shelves, searching for a hammer or a brick. Instead I found neatly labeled storage boxes containing flower-arranging supplies and bundles of old clothes labeled for the Salvation Army.
Finally, I spotted Jeff’s golf clubs in the comer, each in its own furry shroud. I grabbed the first one that came to hand, ripped off the ridiculous cover, and swinging it like an ax, brought it down with all my strength on the windshield of the Lexus. I felt the shock of the impact reverberate up my arms, but the window remained intact and Chrissy did not stir. I continued beating against the glass, shouting with frustration. Suddenly the windshield gave way all of a piece and came raining down on Chrissy in a glittering hail of broken glass.
Immediately, I dropped the club and reached back through the shattered windshield to unlock the door. Then I opened the driver’s door and reaching across the body of my unconscious friend I switched off the ignition. Without stopping to think about her still-wet hair or the fact that she was dressed in only a T-shirt and a pair of lace panties, I grabbed her by her shoulders and dragged her from the car and laid her down on the driveway. I pushed the wet hair off of her face and noticed with relief that she was still breathing. I examined her face carefully, struck by something and hard-pressed to decide what it was.
I looked again, closely. There was no doubt about it; there was something funny about her lips. She’d applied her foundation and her lipliner, but that was all. She had not yet begun to fill them in with lipstick. Chrissy Rendell had not tried to commit suicide. No one as disciplined about her appearance as she was would elect to kill herself halfway through her makeup routine. What I was seeing, like Beau’s crumpled body at the bottom of the stairs, was a carefully staged scene.
I stood up and immediately saw Bennato coming at us slowly. He had a gun in one hand and a roll of duct tape in the other. I suddenly realized that I felt no satisfaction in having been right.
All I felt was fear.
CHAPTER 27
“What a shame about the Rendells,” Bennato said, gesturing with the gun for me to step away from Chrissy. “They seem to be dropping like flies.”
“Let me see if I get how you mean this to play out,” I replied, moving slowly, unable to take my eyes off the hole at the end of that gray barrel. “Jeff, thinking that he’s going to find his wife in bed with Jack McWhorter, stumbles upon a homicidal burglar instead. Then, distraught, his wife takes an overdose of pills and tries to take a ride to oblivion.”
“Oh, she’ll do better than try,” he assured me.
“How did you get her to take the sleeping pills?” I asked.
“How does a man with a gun get anyone to do anything?” he replied coolly, waving me back into the house.
“Luckily for you Jeff remembered his father’s gun in the drawer and shot Fredericks,” I pointed out. For some reason the talking seemed to help keep me calm. As long as I was talking I was breathing.
“Fredericks would never have talked. Still, you know what they say. It’s better to be lucky than good.”
“You’re right. This way is less messy. All the loose ends tied up.”
Even with Bennato’s gun trained on me I made my way into the house as slowly as I could. The farther I got from Chrissy the more helpless I felt. Even though I was face to face with an armed man who had already killed twice, so far my fear was all for Chrissy.
Once I got to the middle of the kitchen, Bennato motioned for me to stop. I looked around the room and tried to assess my options. I was quite a distance from the stairs, the door, or the garage. Coach Bennato stood between me and the door into the rest of the house. The telephone was at his back.
“All the loose ends tied up except for you,” he informed me with an elaborate sigh.
“Don’t even think about it,” I said. “Right now the evidence tells your story. It’s doubtful they’d even have enough to arrest you, and if they did, with a good lawyer you’ll walk,” I assured him, trying to sound lawyerlike and reasonable.
“Oh, I think it’ll tell the story I want even after I shoot you,” he replied.
Normally threats like that are easy to speak, harder to honor. But Coach Bennato had already proved himself a killer. I had called it right. I was just another loose end that needed cleaning up.
My breath started coming in shallow, rapid little gasps that didn’t seem to be doing a particularly good job of getting oxygen to my brain. My thoughts ran wildly from one subject to another. I found myself wondering whether it would hurt when the bullets hit me, whether Chrissy had inhaled enough carbon monoxide to cause brain damage, how long it would take her to develop hypothermia lying in her underwear on the driveway, and how many bullets were in the efficient-looking automatic whose barrel I was staring down.
I watched with a sense of horrible fascination as Coach Bennato’s thumb traveled and came to rest on the hammer of the gun. It was a small gesture, less than a quarter of an inch. But if it’s true that all acts of violence are committed twice-—once in intent and the second time in action—I knew that I had just come a great deal closer to dying.
And then everything seemed to slow down. For the first time I knew that I was experiencing real fear. Not the fear of high places or the fear that comes with being alone in the dark. The kind of fear that is born from a thousand years of inbred instinct. The kind of fear that tells you what to do if you want to stay alive. Real fear will sometimes tell you to play dead or to stop breathing, tell you whether to run or stay and fight. What it told me was that there was no way out of that kitchen that didn’t involve getting shot. For some reason I accepted this dispassionately—a fact.
I remembered my roommate’s cou
ntless stories of patients who’d come into her emergency room shot five or six times. The important thing, I told myself, was to be sure to keep Bennato sufficiently off balance to prevent him from controlling where he hit me. I remember thinking that even if I could not take his gun away, I could take away his choice of how and when to use it.
I don’t remember making the decision to charge. I’m sure it wasn’t made consciously. I don’t even remember being shot. All I remember is tackling Bennato around the ankles, his body falling on top of mine, and the two of us rolling around on the floor, scrabbling after the gun.
Somehow I managed to get on top of him and get my hands around his throat. It was then that I realized my entire left side was slick with blood and I was having a hard time making my hand work. I kept on telling it to squeeze, but it wasn’t doing any good.
“Hey!” said Jake Palmer, walking in through the garage, carrying Chrissy, still unconscious, over his shoulder like a spoil of war. “What the hell is going on here?”
“Help... me,” I managed to gasp.
“What the fuck,” was all he said before he stepped up neatly and kicked Coach Bennato in the head. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket, pulled the antenna out with his teeth, and began to dial. “What are you doing here?” I gasped, slipping too rapidly into shock to seem appropriately grateful.
“When Gorman called me back, I tried you at the number out here, but nobody answered so I figured I might as well take a ride, you know. I mean, hey, I heard you say that it was a matter of life or death that you talk to this guy, but I never figured you meant it literally.”
CHAPTER 28
Football season was finally over. The Monarchs had finished out the year in the toilet. The team was in shambles. Coach Bennato was in jail getting ready to stand trial for murder. His wife, Marie, and his daughter, Debra, brought him casseroles every day.
My shoulder had needed surgery. Luckily I drew the same crew who’d tried to patch up Jeff. Chrissy and I were even roommates again, this time in the intensive care ward, but only for one night. Her recovery was quick and complete. She brought baby Katharine to visit me every day.
Stephen came, too, but it was more obvious now than ever that without a business problem to chew on between us there was really nothing to say. He brought flowers and left sheepishly. He only came the one time.
As usual, Cheryl had been right. Not only that it was about time that I broke things off with Stephen, but that my partners would eventually forget about Avco and the $250,000. Gus Rolle, my nemesis on the management committee, was discovered to have embezzled something like $2 million from a client’s trust account in order to feather a love nest for his twenty-two-year-old secretary. By the time the Brandt brothers were finally indicted on charges of selling child pornography, my transgressions had, for the most part, been forgotten.
The shoulder had turned into a real pain. Not only did I need surgery, but I had to wear it in a weird kind of suspension splint that kept my elbow above my ear. Wearing anything but a cape was nearly impossible, and sleeping was a real treat. Eventually it was replaced by an arm cast and now, finally, just a sling. I had reached the point where the temptation to use the arm was practically irresistible, and Cheryl had taken to scolding me whenever she caught me at it.
The new apartment was finished, gorgeous, and empty. While Paul Riskoff and I had become the best of friends, Stephen and I had been reduced to squabbling over the furniture. That’s why I was at the apartment that Sunday morning, enjoying the thin January sunshine as it poured in through my perfectly arched windows. I was going through the apartment matching the furniture that had already been delivered to the checks that had paid for, trying to figure out who owed who what. I was surprised when the house phone rang and the doorman asked me if I wanted him to send Elliott Abelman up.
We hadn’t seen that much of each other in the weeks since I’d been hurt. He’d come to the hospital, of course, and we’d resumed our phone-friend habit, but nothing more. I sensed a certain reluctance in him, a desire not to crowd. I think he was waiting for me to come to him. For the time being, I thought I might as well leave it at that.
Apparently Elliott had been out running. He appeared to be almost totally swathed in Gore-Tex, and his face was ruddy from the cold.
“I brought you a housewarming present,” he said. “I was just planning on leaving it with your doorman, and then I saw your car out front.” He pulled a flat paper bag out of his warm-up and handed it to me.
“Classy wrapping paper,” I remarked.
“It’s for your coffee table,” he said, as I pulled the latest issue of Milwaukee Magazine from the bag. On the cover was a picture of a smiling Chrissy Rendell, her arms thrown around Paul Riskoff’s shoulders. The title ran: MILWAUKEE’S NEW DYNAMIC DUO.
“Thank you,” I said. “I shall treasure it always. Now all I need is a coffee table.”
“You know, that Chrissy is quite a fox,” remarked Elliott with a wolfish grin. “Now that she’s single again I was wondering if you’d mind fixing me up with her.”
I took the magazine and heaved it at him with my good arm. I only missed him by an inch.
A Conversation with Gini Hartzmark
Q: Describe Kate Millholland. How is she different from otherfemale sleuths?
A: Kate is a young Chicago corporate attorney specializing in the kind of fast-paced, transaction-driven law that is only done in large firms like Callahan Ross, the staid and self-satisfied firm of which Kate is now a partner. She is also a Millholland, which means that her family is a big deal in Chicago in the same way that the Kennedys are a big deal in Boston.
Kate is smart, she is strong, and—like most other female sleuths—she is also an outsider. What makes her different is that the worlds that she stands outside of are those of the quintessential insider—old money and corporate law. She is not only independent but difficult. (Some would say impossible.)
Q: Is Kate modeled after someone you know?
A: Yes and no. Kate began life as a construct, a device. I knew that I wanted to write a series character and the premise of the series was that every book would take the reader inside a different business. I also knew I wanted to write a woman, but I didn’t know enough about police work to write a credible cop and I felt uncomfortable with a female P.I., which has been done successfully by so many others. Given my background, a lawyer seemed a natural. Of course, back when I was making these decisions, Scott Turow had yet to write Presumed Innocent and John Grisham was just another plaintiff’s attorney in Oxford, Mississippi. The choice of Kate’s background—great wealth and old money— came directly from my experiences attending an exclusive girls’ prep school. While I didn’t share Kate’s pedigree, I had classmates who did, and I was interested in writing about the narrowness of that world and the contradictory mix of unlimited opportunity and suffocating expectations that characterize it.
I used to reply incredulously to all inquiries about whether Kate and I were alike. After all, I sit alone in my office in a torn sweatshirt writing novels and taking care of a household that includes three school-age children and a husband with a very demanding career, while Kate, dressed in an Armani suit, deals with her glamorous clients and their high-stakes corporate problems. In her spare time she carries on with brilliant and impossibly handsome Stephen Azorini. Yeah, right. We have a lot in common. Of course, the truth is that we do. We share the same cranky outlook and have a similar disregard for what other people think of us. Neither of us has much use for authority, which is why I write books (my characters do what I want them to do or I kill them) and Kate is perennially in trouble with the senior partners at her firm.
Q: Why did you decide to write a series character?
A: I always wanted to write a series because those are the books that I’ve always loved best. I grew up reading about Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, and later Lord Peter Wimsey and George Smiley. As a reader it is wonderful to be able to spend time with a
character you enjoy book after book. As a writer I enjoy having the luxury of having the character grow and change over the course of many stories as opposed to just one.
Q:What are the challenges of writing a series character?
A: For me the hardest thing about writing a series is introducing Kate and the continuing characters in every book. It’s not just that I know that the readers of the previous books are already familiar with them while others are meeting them for the first time, but rather that it is difficult to present the same information (Kate’s background, profession, widowhood, etc.) in a fresh way each time.
There are also weird problems, like the fact that it always works out to be winter in the books. In part it is chronological, because the books follow one after another and the first book in the series, Principal Defense, begins in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, which put me on a certain schedule. After Fatal Reaction, I was determined to write a summer book, but because Rough Trade, the next book in the series, was about the business of major league sports, specifically a football team, it had to be fall. So here I sit in monotonously sunny Phoenix (not a conducive climate for a mystery writer—I crave downright gothic amounts of clouds and rain) with the air-conditioning set at arctic levels, writing about the snowy Chicago skyline.
Q: How do you keep track of Kate’s characteristics and behavior (so you don’t contradict yourself in later books) ? Do you reread the previous books before writing a new one? Do you keep a written record? Or do you have an incredible memory?
A: After five books, a lot of Kate’s characteristics and behavior are second nature to me. After all, when you think about it, I spend a lot more time with her than with my husband. I do reread the previous book before beginning the next one, but that’s more a function of trying to get Kate’s voice back in my head and wanting to avoid repeating myself. From time to time I also flip back through the well-worn copies of the previous books that I keep on a corner of my desk to check details. Still, I make mistakes, especially with names of very minor characters. For example, the name of the wife of the managing partner in Kate’s law firm changes from Bitsy to Betsy from book to book.
Rough Trade Page 25