“Yes, but are there actual stairs?” I couldn’t hide the impatience in my voice, causing her smooth brow to crinkle.
“There is an emergency exit.”
“Where’s that?”
But then the elevator dinged behind me. The doors opened and people flooded out, most of them heading to the memorial.
I dove inside. When the elevator reached the lobby I swiveled my head around, searching for Mick. No sign of him. I ran out into the street, crossing my arms against the late-afternoon chill. And then I saw him-I recognized the gray hair and the blazer he’d been wearing-walking west on Chicago, then taking a right onto Wabash.
Tucking my purse under my arm, I sprinted after him as fast as my high heels would let me. I’d gotten used to heels over the years. I was one of those freaks who said, I actually prefer high heels, and mostly meant it. But running in them was a different story. You simply couldn’t run heel-toe, heel-toe, the way you would with normal shoes. Instead, you had to do a ridiculously silly flat-footed, bouncy jog. And in his flat shoes, Mick was moving much quicker than me.
I turned the same way as him when I got to Wabash. I saw an open door to a bar called Pippins. Was that the arm of his coat, the flash of his gray hair entering the place? I bounced/jogged to Pippins like a lame deer and stepped inside. A bunch of college-age students with about ten pitchers of beer on their table were almost the only patrons. An older man, a professor type in a blazer, was taking a seat at the bar. Definitely not Mick.
I bolted outside, looking both ways. I ran back toward the hotel. I stood in front of the entrance spinning around, hunting for Mick. He was nowhere to be seen.
Just then Q came outside. “Okay, what happened back there?”
I kept looking around. Where had Mick gone? “I don’t know. Zac seems to think I had a thing with Jane.”
“Did you?”
I turned to face him. “Are you joking? You’re questioning me, too?”
He gave an innocent shrug. “Hey, you’re in a free-to-be-you-and-me mood these days. Maybe you tried out some girl-on-girl action, too. Ooh! If you turn gay, you have to give me credit for it. We keep track of that stuff. There’s a point system.”
I smacked him on the arm then spun around, still half hunting for Mick, although he was clearly gone.
Q stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. “Let me drive you home. I think you’ve had enough for a few days.”
I looked at my friend, at his gray eyes the color of ash. Neither of us said anything for a moment. We didn’t have to. In that look, I saw the sympathy. Sometimes it isn’t what you see in yourself, but what you see reflected in the eyes of a good friend. That gaze Q was giving me-one of concern, of compassion, even a little pity-stopped me cold and took all the fire out of me.
“Let me take you home,” he said. “Do you have a coat?”
I realized that I was standing with my arms crossed over my chest, shivering a little. I shook my head. I had stopped off at home and accidentally left it there.
Q flagged a cab and tucked me into the back then climbed in beside me. He directed the driver down Chicago, turning onto State Street. The quiet in the back of that musty cab allowed my grief and exhaustion to return. But I couldn’t go home and sleep. For one thing, I had to work tonight at the Fig Leaf. I thought of calling Mayburn and canceling, but when Sam was missing, Mayburn went above and beyond to help me. I wouldn’t let him down.
I looked at my watch. I had time before I had to punch the clock, and there was someone I suddenly very much wanted to see. As we passed Division, I turned to Q. “I need to see my mom.”
Victoria McNeil and I didn’t have the symbiotic relationship that some mothers and daughters did. She was beautiful in a willowy, reserved, strawberry-blond kind of way, a way that radiated both melancholy and mystery, while I was simply brassy and flashy. She spoke quietly, gracefully, and only when her words were necessary, so we weren’t exactly kindred spirits.
I’d found out a lot about my mom in the recent year, skeletons she never thought another living soul would see. Those secrets had initially separated us, but oddly, over the last few months as we tentatively dipped our toes back in the waters of our relationship, the secrets had bonded us. We never spoke of them, but the fact that I knew, and that I wasn’t judging her for them, brought us closer.
That recent bond was one of the reasons I wanted to see her. The other was that no matter how old you are, sometimes you just need your mom.
The cab pulled up in front of her house on State Street, the one she shared with Spencer, her real estate developer husband. Their turn-of-the-century graystone near the corner of Goethe Street was tall and graceful with a large arched front door. Lights were on inside.
“If it’s okay, I’m coming with you,” Q said.
I smiled at him. “Absolutely. I miss seeing you every day.”
We hadn’t even rung the bell before the door opened. There was my mom, beautiful in cream slacks and a silver raw-silk blouse. “Hi, Boo,” she said.
It was a nickname given to me by my father. After he died, my mother started using it, as if it kept him a little bit alive.
“How was the memorial?” she asked.
I had called her a few hours ago and told her the whole story-finding Jane yesterday, anchoring Trial TV and the fact that the memorial was this afternoon.
“Sad,” I answered. “Awful.”
“Oh, baby.” She looked over my head. “Hi, Q.”
“Hi, Victoria.”
My mother stepped back, and the sound of jazz from inside her house trickled out and enveloped me, relaxing me. I moved inside, and she pulled me into her arms, stroked my hair.
Their front living room was wide with ivory couches and subdued oriental rugs over big-planked, glossy wood floors. It was a beautiful room, but my mother, who suffered bouts of depression, didn’t like how it grew dark in the late afternoon. And so when the living room fell into shadow, like now, everyone headed for the back of the house. By the time my mother and I pulled apart, I could hear Q already in the kitchen, talking with Spence and someone else.
My mother led me to the kitchen. “Sheets!” I said, seeing my brother.
“Hey, Iz.” He hugged me.
Spence, my sweet stepfather, did the same. He was a pleasant-looking man with brown hair streaked with gray. At least that’s how I always thought of him, but I looked closer now and noticed that his hair was mostly white. Funny how people close to you can grow older without you ever noticing.
“C’mere, darling girl.” Spence wore khaki pants and a white shirt over his barrel chest. He guided me toward the round breakfast nook built into a paneled bay window.
On the table was a plate of prosciutto, dried fruit and a parmesan-type cheese next to a half-full bottle of red. Spence and my mom were old school-the cocktails and snacks always came out at five sharp, especially now that Spence was mostly retired. But the red wine, I was sure, was courtesy of my brother, who thought that life should be spent sipping a glass of Barolo or Bordeaux or Merlot.
Charlie poured a glass for Q, then started to pour one for me.
I held out my hand. “I can’t. I already had one today at the memorial, and I have to work tonight at the lingerie store.”
My mom gave me a disapproving glance. “You’re going to run yourself into the ground, Izzy.”
“I took this job, and I promised to be there.” My promise, and my loyalty, were to Mayburn, not the store, but I left that unsaid.
“But you don’t need this job at the store now,” my mom said. “You’ve got Trial TV. You’re an anchor.”
“I’m just the fill-in anchor.” The truth was, once the flop sweating had stopped, and despite the way I’d gotten the job, I loved it. Somewhere over the course of the day, a tiny, furtive hope had grown that they might keep me on in that position.
We tucked ourselves into the breakfast nook, the others sipping their wine.
Charlie studied me. “Not doing
so good, huh?”
“Nope.”
I told them about Zac being so weird around me at the memorial, so suspicious.
“I don’t know what to do or what to think,” I admitted. “He even said he thought Jane and I were together, like a couple, last weekend. He told the police that.”
“Whoa.” Charlie made a face.
Spence waved a hand. “Hey, this is the Chicago PD. They’re not going to be swayed by the outlandish statements of a grief-stricken husband.”
“But what if they are? The detective, this guy named Vaughn, already seems to dislike me and be suspicious of me for some reason.”
Spence shook his head. “You know I’m friends with the police chief, right? Went to school with him. I’ve got his cell. I’ll call him right now and find out the story. I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.”
“You don’t have to do that.” But my protest was weak. The situation with Jane’s death was starting to feel as if it was twisting out of control and just beyond my grasp.
“Call him, Spence,” my mother said in her smooth voice.
Spence rubbed his hands together, then pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. Spence was the kind of guy who loved a good task. He’d started his own company-real estate developing-when he was young. He’d grown it into a successful business that now provided consulting for developments around the country. The company had been bought by a larger one, and then another company, and slowly Spence had stepped out, becoming mostly a figure-head. He was happy being retired, being wealthy, but if you gave him a good task that had immediacy to it, especially one for Charlie or me, he was giddy.
Spence got out of the banquette, dialing his cell phone. A second later, he was booming into it. “George! Spence Calloway calling. How are you?”
He moved into the living room, his voice trailing off. I asked Charlie how his back was doing.
“Hurts all the time,” he said cheerfully.
Charlie had been seriously injured in an accident involving a construction truck shortly after he graduated from college. He was still in physical therapy and still living off the comp settlement, which he viewed, with his bizarrely optimistic attitude, as a lucky break. He had this innate belief that life would work out, one way or another, and it wasn’t worth worrying about. So the back injury, which physically troubled him all the time, wasn’t seen as something to stress over.
We talked about Charlie’s current physical therapy regimen. I asked my mom about the Victoria Project, a charity she had started. Q asked her if he could volunteer, since he had time on his hands now. When Spence came back in the room, we were having a moment that felt blessedly normal, a moment filled with family chat.
And so it wasn’t until my mother stopped talking and instead looked at her husband with a concerned expression that we all stopped.
“Spence?” she said. “Is everything all right?”
Spence gave me a painful look, one of those looks that said, This is going to hurt. “George knew the case, of course,” he said. “Knew you.” He pointed with his head in my direction. He didn’t say anything for a second.
“And?” my mother prompted.
“He said you’ll be hearing from them soon.” Another pause during which I could hear the passing whoosh of a car on the street, the scrape of a tree branch along the side of the house. “You’ve been named a person of interest.”
34
M ick Grenier sat at his desk, staring at the photos of Jane, the news clippings, the notes he’d made.
He arranged the photos on his desktop in a vertical row, starting at the top with photos where Jane appeared youngest. The photos climbed down his desk-Jane over the passage of time, her stunning looks surviving that journey well.
He had left the memorial abruptly. It had been harder than he thought. He would miss Jane Augustine. He hadn’t imagined that would be the case. If you had told him what was going to happen and asked him if he would care that she was gone, he would have said no. He would have looked at the situation calmly, in a cool, detached way (the ability to do so was one worthwhile thing his father had taught him), and he would have said that her death could only be good for him. He still believed that to be true, but staring at the pictures, he had to admit that he’d gotten somewhat emotionally involved.
He placed the final photo on his desk. It was a head shot that Trial TV sent out with its press kit. In the photo, she wore the red scarf.
Jane had also worn the scarf in the photo that appeared in Chicago Magazine. He found that article and placed it at the bottom of a new row. Moving upward, he created another vertical row, this time of news clippings, oldest at the top. One more row then-his notes about Jane. He always dated his notes, so it was easy enough to put those in order.
His father, Beaumont Grenier, the novelist, would have hated the project he was working on. Mick’s father particularly despised “celebrity journalism,” which, when Mick looked back on it, was probably why he had worked for a celebrity magazine in L.A. after college.
He didn’t know exactly why he had always wanted to be different from his father. Maybe it was just typical kid stuff, or maybe it was because his father was in love only with his work, and he never pretended otherwise, not to his wife, not to his kids. Taking the celeb magazine job to spite his father was surely a large part of the reason Mick did it, but as with everything in life, it had a cause and effect.
Because of that celebrity magazine, Mick ended up having a quickie marriage to an actress he fell in love with. And it was because that actress shot a film in Chicago for a couple of months that he moved there with her. The marriage didn’t survive the two months, but Mick got his first book out of it-a tell-all about the ex. And Mick got Chicago, too, which he liked a lot more than the East Coast and a hell of a lot more than L.A. He found it honest and unpretentious.
So he’d stayed, and so it was really all because of his father that he was in Chicago. And if he looked at it now, his latest project was yet another attempt to distinguish himself from Beaumont Grenier. He was a different kind of creative than his father. Reality was his medium. People today were crazier, more fucked up, than any character a mere novelist like his father could create. And it was pure skill to be able to use that reality-all the pretty, gory truth of it-to tell the perfect story; to edit out the commonplace and spit-shine the salacious.
He paused now and looked at the grid of information he’d created about Jane Augustine. This grid was always what he did when he was nearing the end of a research period. This time it was different, of course. This time his subject was dead.
35
T he doorbell rang. Hearing it, my mother stood. “That’s Maggie,” she said.
If I’d been a jealous person, I might have been envious of my mother’s absolute adoration of my friend Maggie. She was delighted by her, charmed by her and impressed with the fact that Maggie was a criminal defense lawyer-a tiny, sweet girl who rumbled with the scary kids and held her own.
As soon as Spence delivered his news that I was a “person of interest,” my mother had opened her eyes wide and murmured, “We must call Maggie.”
As luck would have it, Maggie and her sort-of boyfriend, Wyatt, had been on their way to drinks and dinner downtown and agreed to stop by.
“Let’s adjourn to the living room,” my mother said. “There’s no room in here for all of us.” She really did like Maggie if she was suggesting the living room.
We trooped through the kitchen and dining room, my mother turning on bright lights along the way.
Maggie opened the front door on her own, calling, “Anybody home?” Her wavy, light brown hair with its natural streaks of gold swung away from her face.
My mother, so much taller than Maggie’s short, little frame, swooped her into a hug.
Maggie introduced Wyatt to everyone. He was an undeniably handsome guy in his midforties, almost fifteen years older than Maggie, and a high-ranking exec at a biotech firm. The two originally me
t when Maggie was in law school, back when she thought she should choose an area of law different from her grandfather, a famous prosecutor turned defense lawyer. Even though she had no apparent affinity for it, she picked labor and employment work. She got a summer associate position at a big firm, and there she met one of the firm’s clients, Wyatt Bluestone, who was getting sued for sexual harassment. Maggie was asked to conduct the intake interviews with Wyatt, and so they had to spend a fair amount of time together. He told her what a bunch of crap the claim was. He talked to her about how hard it was to be in his position and to bring your employees along without crossing any lines. Maggie believed him, and they started dating.
They were together for seven months back then. Wyatt was charismatic, but I never trusted him. And yet Maggie was in love. Finally, though, she began to realize that they spent all their time at restaurants eating fabulous dinners or in his bed having fabulous sex. While this wasn’t necessarily bad, it became clear that Wyatt wasn’t interested in spending time with her friends and family, nor was he interested in introducing her to his. One day, Maggie went to his place in the middle of the day to retrieve the cell phone she’d left there, and she found him having sex with his assistant. It hit her then that the sexual harassment thing was probably true. It hit her that, as one of Wyatt’s attorneys, she might have a claim against him. Technically, his assistant certainly did. Technically, Maggie was heartbroken. After that, I had spent many nights watching Maggie cry into a large glass of vodka to get her through the breakup with Wyatt.
But now Wyatt was back. They’d reconnected on Face-book. He was older but still gorgeous-a full head of black hair, big shoulders cloaked with only the most expensive designer clothes.
I shook his hand. “Good to see you.” I tried hard to sound genuine.
Maggie swore that she wasn’t being stupid. She swore Wyatt had changed his dastardly ways. And as they took a seat on my mother’s silk couch, with the streetlights through the front window making halos around their heads, I had to admit that Wyatt seemed more devoted, more calm. He helped Maggie off with her coat; he stroked her arm; he smiled while looking deeply into her eyes.
Red Blooded Murder Page 17