Ms. Simon Says (4 page)
“Excuse me?” she shrieked.
He gave her a look of undisguised disgust, then called across the lobby to Dave, who’d returned to the relative peace and quiet of his desk. “Have the police been here yet this morning?”
Dave shook his head and called back. “No, they haven’t. I’m positive. I’ve been on duty here since seven, so I would’ve seen any sort of police activity.”
The lieutenant pulled out his cell phone, stabbed at it, asked for his captain again, and then inquired about “the bomb guys” just as the big black box of a truck pulled up outside the building, right behind the Mustang. “Never mind. They’re here,” Callahan said, then hung up abruptly.
He turned to Shelby. “Look. I’m sorry I yelled,” he yelled.
She might’ve laughed if she hadn’t been so pissed at him, and at herself, as well, for almost opening a mailbox that could conceivably blow off her hand. Or more. Little wonder he’d accused her of stupidity. “So, what happens now?” she asked.
“The bomb guys will check out the mail room here, and then make a sweep of your apartment. It won’t take too long, assuming they don’t find anything.” He pointed to a little grouping of chairs on the far side of the lobby. “Why don’t you just sit and relax for a minute?”
She looked in the direction of the expensive cream leather club chairs and for a moment she felt so exhausted that she could hardly keep standing. In a matter of a few hours, her entire world seemed to have changed beyond all recognition. She must’ve swayed or something, because she immediately felt a steadying hand on her back and heard Callahan say, “Come on. Let’s get you in a chair.”
Shelby sat, trying to concentrate on the copy of today’s
Daily Mirror
that someone had left on the table beside her chair. The headlines read like old news to her since they didn’t include this morning’s series of letter bomb incidents. Those would be all over tomorrow’s edition.
She turned to the inside pages and read her own column—twice—with a critical eye, trying to figure out if her words were in any way inflammatory or if they could offend anyone to the point that they’d want to blow her up.
There certainly wasn’t anything offensive in this column. She’d written it just a few days ago, advising Over the Hill in Oklahoma to move heaven and earth in order to pursue her dream of a college education despite the fact that Over the Hill considered herself too old at the age of forty-two. In her encouraging reply, Shelby had included phone numbers and Web sites to assist the woman in her quest for tuition money. Also, in a rare personal note, Shelby wrote that her very own mother had started a business—a very successful one—at the ripe old age of fifty-something.
She smiled weakly, wondering if maybe the mysterious letter bomber was her mother, taking issue with her daughter for using her as an example of an old dog capable of learning new tricks. Nah. Her mother was enormously proud of her midlife success and didn’t hesitate to tell anyone about it, sometimes at great length.
This would probably be her last column for a while, Shelby thought. She wondered if her readers would miss her advice. What if they got out of the habit of reading her, or while she was on hold, what if they got used to reading “Ask Alice” instead? Now there was a depressing thought. Alice, despite the matronly picture that accompanied the popular column, was really Alvin Wexler, a sixty-year-old curmudgeon whose “advice” was really just an excuse to parade his numerous alleged degrees in the social sciences. Ms. Simon wrote rings around him, in Shelby’s opinion anyway.
Just then she heard the elevator doors whooshing open, and out stepped her neighbor, Mo Pachinski. He’d traded his electric blue velour outfit for a gray sharkskin suit that was almost iridescent, complemented by a dark purple shirt and matching tie. After he exited the elevator, Mo scanned the lobby as if he half expected somebody with a submachine gun to be lurking behind one of the potted ficus trees. Then he spotted Shelby, smiled the way a piranha might smile at the sight of human flesh, and—after shooting his purple French cuffs—sauntered toward her.
But Mick Callahan got to her first. He practically sprinted across the marble floor to insert himself between Shelby and the oncoming Mo, who looked startled for a second, then grinned.
“How’s it hangin’, Lieutenant?” Mo asked. He shot his cuffs again. It must’ve been a nervous tic, or else some involuntary reaction to a sudden rush of testosterone.
Callahan, whose plaid flannel cuffs were rolled halfway up his rangy forearms and therefore unshootable, merely shifted his shoulders in a macho, John Wayne kind of way. “What’s up, Morris? When’d you get out?”
“Christmas last year. Hey, I’d’ve sent you a card if I thought you cared.”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
The smirk on the mobster’s face seemed to soften just a bit then when he said, “I heard about your wife, Callahan. My condolences.”
Mick Callahan’s face, however, hardened to granite as he responded with a terse “Thanks.”
A wife? Condolences? What was that all about? Shelby was wondering just as Mo turned to her and asked, “You know this guy, Doll?”
“Sort of,” she said.
“Hey, Lieutenant,” someone called from across the lobby. “We’re ready to go up to the residence now.”
“Let’s go,” Callahan said to Shelby. “Take it easy, Morris.”
“What’s the deal here?” Mo asked, looking from Shelby to the lieutenant and back. “What’s going on? You got some kinda problem I oughta know about, Doll?”
She didn’t know how to answer, so it was a good thing that her stick-like-glue bodyguard intervened with, “Nah. No problem. Ms. Simon asked the CPD to check the locks in her apartment. Just one of the little civic services we provide when we’re not hassling you and your associates.”
“Ha ha,” Mo said as his mouth resumed its standard smirk. “You oughta do stand-up, Callahan.” He straightened his tie. “See ya, Doll,” he said to Shelby, then strode to the door.
“How do you know that guy?” the lieutenant growled, his gaze still trained on the sharkskin suit now exiting the building.
“I don’t really
know
him. He lives across the hall. How do
you
know him?”
“I helped put him in jail five years ago. He’s bad news. I’d avoid him if I were you.”
“I try,” she said with a sigh, and then she gasped. “Oh, my God. You don’t think it’s Mo who’s threatening me, do you?”
He shook his head. “Guys like Morris Pachinski don’t make threats. If he wanted you dead, you’d already be that way.”
Shelby didn’t exactly find that a comforting thought. She wanted to ask him about his wife, but when she stood up, Callahan practically rushed her toward the elevator.
They rode up to the twelfth floor with two men in thickly padded jumpsuits and a black Lab that seemed to really enjoy his job. He licked Shelby’s hand and gazed up at her as if to say,
Some fun, huh?
When she patted his sleek black head, one of the bomb technicians said, “Please don’t distract him, ma’am.”
As they walked down the hall toward her apartment, Callahan held out his hand. “Keys,” he said.
“Right.”
Shelby rummaged through her purse. She had so many doodads on her key chain—a flashlight, a whistle, a mini Etch-A-Sketch—that her keys tended to settle rather quickly to the bottom of her bag. The entourage of bomb guys, bomb dog, and bodyguard stood in front of her door, waiting with that sort of masculine patience that wasn’t really patience at all, but a controlled kind of menace.
She laughed nervously. “I know they’re in here.” And then her fingers touched metal, and she plucked the heavy key chain from the depths of her bag. No sooner were they out than Callahan grabbed them from her and tossed them to the bomb guy closest to the door.
“It’s the gold one with the little dab of red nail polish,” Shelby said as she was frantically trying to recall whether or not she’d made her bed this morning, and if there were dirty dishes in the sink, and what was hung up to dry over the shower door. She wasn’t the neatest person in the world, but she usually had time to clean up before company came.
The officer stuck the key in the lock and pushed open the door. Shelby stepped forward, only to be yanked back.
“We’ll wait out here while they check it out,” Callahan said.
“Right.” She’d forgotten again that she was in danger, but surely she’d have noticed any kind of explosive device in her very own apartment. What was in yesterday’s mail? Had she opened everything? Or was there a lethal envelope lurking under this week’s copies of
The New Yorker
and
Ladies’ Home Journal
?
Callahan was leaning against the wall, gazing down as if studying the pattern of the carpet.
“I guess there’s a lot of hurry-up-and-wait in your business,” she said, lowering herself to the floor.
“Enough,” he said.
“How long have you been a cop?”
“A long time.”
Hearing the plaintive note in his voice, Shelby looked up. The lieutenant wasn’t staring at the carpet anymore, but rather gazing down the corridor toward the huge plate-glass window that displayed a big rectangle of bright Chicago skyline. He didn’t seem to be focused on anything in particular. In fact, his gaze seemed to travel beyond anything actually visible beyond the glass. His forehead was furrowed. His mouth bore down at the corners. A muscle twitched in his cheek. He looked so incredibly sad. Just lost. Lost and so terribly, terribly alone.
If he’d been a child on a street corner, Shelby would’ve stopped in her tracks to kneel down and take him in her arms, to whisper, “There. There. Everything will be all right.”
But he wasn’t a child, of course. Far from it. And she hadn’t a clue about the origin of Mick Callahan’s sudden desolate visage, although she wondered if it might have something to do with Mo’s condolences, expressed earlier in the lobby. As someone who made her living giving advice, Shelby wasn’t used to holding her tongue when she encountered obvious sadness or visible depression. A soft and sincere “How can I help?” from Ms. Simon would usually elicit a lengthy tale of woe, and no matter the problem, she was almost always able to make the person feel better, even if only for a while.
But, along with the sadness, there was also something forbidding in Callahan’s expression. Something cold. Something that warned,
Leave me the hell alone.
She was debating whether or not to do just that when one of the bomb techs stepped out into the hallway.
“We’re done in here, Lieutenant. It’s clean.”
Thank God, Shelby thought. That meant she’d probably made her bed.
“Okay. Thanks, guys,” Callahan said, his expression back to its normal severity. “After you,” he said to Shelby, gesturing toward her door.
It was odd, stepping into her own living room and seeing everything just a bit different from the way she’d left it a few hours before. The chairs and sofa weren’t properly centered around the fireplace. Lamps and picture frames looked out of kilter on tabletops. A quick glance into the little kitchen revealed cabinet doors and drawers not quite closed.
She put her handbag and laptop down on a table and immediately began to make adjustments to the decor, realigning a lampshade, sliding a small Waterford crystal vase from one side of an end table to the other, tossing a velvet throw pillow from a chair into a bare corner of the sofa.
“We haven’t got time for that,” Callahan said, scowling at his watch. “Pack a bag and let’s go. I’d like to be out of here in ten or fifteen minutes, tops.”
With her knee, Shelby shoved the sofa a few inches to the right. “Where are we going?” she asked.
He shrugged and said, “That’s entirely up to you, Ms. Simon.”
“Oh.”
Oh, brother.
Ms. Simon didn’t have a clue.
M
ick looked at his watch for the thousandth time while he mentally inventoried his patience only to find it rapidly waning, then decided to give Shelby Simon another five minutes to pack. Assuming that’s what she was doing in the other room. It sounded to him like she was just slamming doors and drawers, rattling hangers, dropping things, and swearing creatively.
He gazed around her living room, wondering what sort of woman paid what must be a small fortune in rent and then chose to furnish the place in a single boring color. Beige. Or maybe sand was a better description of the carpet and drapes and walls. The chairs and the sofa where he sat were a similar neutral shade. The tables were chrome and glass, and the lamps were made of various metals, mostly copper. With the exception of a few brightly colored tapestry pillows, the place looked like the frigging Sahara.
Her bathroom was beige, as well, including the fixtures and the thick terry towels. The only color in there came from an assortment of perfume bottles on the beige marble vanity. Strange. The outfit she was wearing today—black slacks and a white top and a black handbag—was colorless, too, unless he counted the blue swoosh on each of her shoes or the red highlights in her long, shiny hair.
Still, this Simon woman didn’t strike him as colorless or neutral in any way. But what did he know? In his thirty-eight years, he’d really only known one woman well and then it turned out he hadn’t known her nearly as well as he imagined.
“Well, I’m packed,” she announced from the bedroom doorway. “More or less.”
Mick suspected it was more rather than less.
While the lieutenant rearranged the crappola in the trunk of his car to make room for her two big suitcases, Shelby tried once more to contact her parents in Michigan to tell them she would be visiting them for a while. It seemed the logical, the sensible thing to do. Plus she’d been so busy that she hadn’t seen her mother and father for over a year, so she’d managed to convince herself that this exile from work at least had an upside.
Actually, now that she’d had a little time to think about it, Shelby was almost looking forward to spending some time at the old place on Heart Lake where she’d spent every long, lovely summer of her life until she was nineteen or twenty. The huge old Victorian house had been in her family since it was built in the 1880s by her great-great-grandfather, Orvis Shelby, Sr.
