No Show of Remorse (2 page)

“You're right, Renata. I said all along that if they were going to keep on insisting that I ‘express remorse' for the conduct that got my license pulled in the first place—I'd dump the petition.” I paused and watched the yogi stop at another bench, where he chatted with an old black man wearing at least three ragged overcoats and a cap with the ear flaps tied down with a string under his chin. “But it's different now,” I added.

“What are you talking about?”

I took an envelope from my jacket pocket. “Read this.” I handed her a sheet of paper from the envelope. “It was with yesterday's mail.”

She unfolded the paper. “‘Forget your law license, asshole,'” she read, “‘or you'll come apart just as easy.'” She stared for a long time at the paper, then handed it back to me. “That's some sort of bug, right?” She pointed to a chunky black blob near the bottom of the page, held there under a piece of transparent tape.

“A spider, I think, from the number of legs.” Lined up in a row beside the blob, under a separate piece of tape, were what looked like eight crooked spider's legs.

Renata stood up, but I just sat there. She wasn't much over five feet tall and standing put her eyes about level with mine. “I'll file a motion to withdraw the petition,” she said, “first thing in the morning.”

“No. I told you … this note changes everything. Now, whether I want my license or not, I have to stay with it. Otherwise, I'll look like I'm backing down.”

She grabbed her briefcase and glared at me. “That's the most foolish goddamn thing I've ever heard,” she said, “even from you. Whoever mailed that note is probably psychotic. Dangerously unbalanced, for sure.”

When I couldn't think of any response, she turned and stalked away. I watched her cross Michigan Avenue, and kept staring long after she was swept away in a river of pedestrians.

So … do we all back down? Just because the bullies are unbalanced?

CHAPTER

2

B
ESIDES, WHO'S TO SAY WHO'S UNBALANCED
? People who looked perfectly normal were just then lopping the tops off whole mountains in West Virginia and dumping them into the valleys and rivers below, to get the coal that made them millions and able to buy wilderness homes in the Cascades, where others were clear-cutting every last forest in sight. Other people—like Renata herself, for example—worked sixty, seventy hours a week, thinking that's how they'd give the loved ones they seldom saw the best life had to offer. Well-balanced?

Speaking of which, the little yogi with the dreadlocks had reappeared, perched one-legged on the back of a bench again, this one just ten yards to the south of where I sat. He was still smiling, but not looking at the sky now. Looking straight at me.

I couldn't help nodding to him, and when I did he leaped to the ground and danced my way. “Hey, mon,” he said, “got a little change for a square?”

I stood up to dig into my pocket, but found only fourteen cents in change, and nothing below a twenty in bills. “Here,” I said.

He took the twenty without noticeable surprise. “T'ank you, mon.” He turned and started away, then swung back. “They be watchin' you, big mon, y'know?”

“What?”

“They be watchin' you. I see 'em right now. The fuzzies, y'know?”

“Fuzzies?” I looked over and the squad car was still parked where it had been. “Cops?”

“For sure. But not those gumballs, no. You look slow you might see the real ones. Takin' pictures, hey?” Not turning his head, he kept shifting his eyes to his left, toward Michigan Avenue, and back to me again. “Maybe they wanna make friends, hey, big mon?” He grinned and skipped off across the grass.

I shook my head and tried to look as though he'd said something that made me laugh, then casually turned toward Michigan Avenue. A car sat illegally at the curb, about fifty yards away. A dark green four-door Crown Victoria. An unmarked squad car. I'd have bet on it. I couldn't see the driver, but the man in the passenger seat had a camera in front of his face, pointed off to the north somewhere … for now.

I turned my back and, hoisting one foot up onto the bench seat, untied and retied my shoe. When I stood up again and looked around, the Crown Vic was driving away.

*   *   *

I
T WAS THREE-THIRTY
. I had a gig that weekend, at Miz Becky's Tap. I wanted to go home, open a cold one, and sit down at the Steinway upright to work on a couple of Cole Porter tunes. Instead, I retrieved my well-worn Chevy Cavalier from the Grant Park underground garage and headed south toward Hyde Park and the University of Chicago.

I could have taken the note with the dismembered spider to the police, but how could they help me? Even assuming they'd want to, which was always a questionable assumption for me. Funny. I'm a basically law-abiding citizen—within certain personal guidelines—and I know that the majority of police officers must be decent individuals.

So why do I constantly bump up against the minority?

No sense going to the postal inspectors, either, because—contrary to Renata's assumption—the note hadn't been sent through the mail. It was
with
my mail, though, which meant someone had come right up to my door and put it through the mail slot. And not just some innocent delivery person, because the envelope the note came in was blank. There was no name or address on it.

I took Lake Shore Drive, and by the time I got to McCormick Place, was back to wondering how whoever left me the threat even knew I'd filed for reinstatement. The petition was a matter of public record, of course, but that meant only that it was in among the stacks of documents filed every week in the Supreme Court. It hadn't made the papers as far as I knew. Maybe someone just happened to notice it; or maybe someone had been watching for this, for years.

The notepaper and envelope were the sort available at any drugstore or copy shop, the words printed out by an inkjet printer. I'd looked for fingerprints myself. Nothing. The lab I was headed for now probably wouldn't turn up anything helpful, either, but—professional investigator that I am—I'd leave no stone unturned. Especially when I was the client.

It took just twenty minutes to get to Hyde Park, but another half hour to find a parking place within a half mile of where I was headed, which turned out to be a gray stone building that had to be one of the oldest on the U. of C. campus. The late afternoon sun threw a fittingly creepy shadow across the brass plaque beside the door that said:
Center for Entomological Studies.
Inside the lobby I pushed the button beside a card with the handwritten words:
Arachnid Research.

The spider expert was exactly as helpful as I'd expected.

“Nothing exotic here,” he said, looking up from his microscope. “A bit squashed, of course, but I'm sure it's one of a dozen types of common spiders. They're all over the place. Probably a few creeping around your bedroom right now. Wonderful, beneficial animals, actually. Without them, we'd—”

“Thanks,” I said, and took my once beneficial, now a bit squashed, animal with me on my way out.

No stone unturned.

CHAPTER

3

I
DROVE HOME
and checked my refrigerator. Plenty of beer, a few eggs, some bacon, and half a pizza with just a little fuzzy white stuff on one edge. I started a fresh pot of coffee, grabbed a bottle of Sam Adams, and tried to talk myself into going to the Steinway and working on some chord progressions for “Night and Day.”

I didn't succeed.

It was only Tuesday and, although the deposition hadn't been much fun, it was far from the low point of my week so far. Even the note, with its mutilated spider and its sophomoric threat, wasn't the worst thing. That prize went to another letter I'd found in the same pile under my mail slot, this one in an envelope with a postmark and a return address. A letter from Lynnette Daniels, D.V.M.

I'd never owned an animal and might never have met a veterinarian if I hadn't been handed the stiff, mutilated body of a dog a while back, and wanted to find out what killed it. I should have guessed that a relationship that began with an autopsy might not end on any happier note. Lynnette and I had cared for each other, though, and even when it all started to break apart we never got into any raging, angry shouting matches. Instead, we each tried to adjust, doing what we thought would please the other—like her cutting back on her yoga and fitness classes, and me filing for reinstatement to the bar. There were those who said we'd be better off to scream at each other … but I doubt it would have helped in the long run.

The letter said Lynnette was moving to northern New Mexico, where she had—or did I read this part in?—another romantic interest. Not entirely unexpected. But you can study a dark wall of clouds from the time it first takes shape on the horizon and starts to roll in, and still be surprised at how hard the storm hits.

But that was yesterday, right?

I felt suddenly light-headed, and remembered I hadn't eaten since before I'd torn Lynnette's letter into snowflake-sized pieces and flushed it down the toilet—twenty-four hours ago. I popped the cap off another Sam Adams, and fried up some bacon. It was Canadian bacon because Lynnette said it had less fat. Less flavor too. But with her off to Santa Fe or wherever, I put my fat-conscious lifestyle on hold and whipped up some butter and half-and-half in a bowl with three eggs and, when the bacon was done, slid the frothy mixture into the frying pan.

While the eggs cooked, I finished my beer and blamed myself for the break-up. I ought to be less independent and more understanding; less stubborn and more considerate. Less of a lot of this and more of a lot of that.

Two pieces of wheat toast popped up. I loaded them up with butter and homemade strawberry jam, dropped the empty beer bottles in the recycling bin, and poured coffee into a mug that had a quote on its side from someone who liked dogs better than people—thinking I'd have kept my mouth shut about it if I felt that way. I sat down at the kitchen table and ate, and thought about how I
would
change, dammit.

The food was gone before I tasted it. So I made two more pieces of toast and ate them, this time very slowly, with lots more strawberry jam. It tasted so good I decided to call the Lady—she's the one who made the jam—and tell her so, as soon as I finished the dishes.

My “coach house” was an apartment over a six-bay garage beside a crushed stone drive leading to the Lady's mansion by the lake in Evanston, not far from the Northwestern campus. The Lady had come to Chicago from England, planning to stay a few months while her husband, Sir Richard Bower, crisscrossed the country, lecturing neurovascular surgeons about some procedure he'd pioneered. Then, one dark November day, Sir Richard's chartered jet fell out of the sky at O'Hare.

I'd just started practicing law then, and was working with my friend Barney Green for Barney's dad, a very successful personal injury lawyer who made his money the old-fashioned way—chasing cases. One of those cases was the Lady's wrongful-death suit and Barney and I took it over when his dad suddenly dropped dead. We worked the case hard and finally settled it and I dumped my half of a pretty big fee into a trust which was set up so the principal couldn't be invaded, either by me or by anyone I might owe money to. The trust started kicking out regular income and eventually I left Barney and went on my own, mostly criminal defense work—until I lost my law license. These days the trust income was still coming in, but wasn't enough to live on. I had my private detective's license, though, and an occasional paying client; plus the gig at Miz Becky's, which about kept me in beer and paid the piano tuner.

Meanwhile, the Lady—with her inheritance, life insurance proceeds, and the lawsuit settlement—had found herself with more money than she thought she needed. She decided there was nothing for her back home, and plenty she wanted to do right here. She bought the Evanston mansion, leased the coach house to me, and got busy. Now she owned two other big old homes, both in the city, and ran them as shelters for battered women—most of them prostitutes trying to get out of the life. She'd never had children of her own and I sometimes wondered whether she thought of me as a surrogate son, or as simply one more beat-up Chicagoan in need.

When the dishes were stowed away I sat down at the table again and tapped out her number. She wasn't in and the woman who answered the phone said I could either leave a message or be transferred to her voice mail.

“Voice mail,” I said.

“This is Helene…” That's her name, Helene Bower, although most people call her “the Lady,” which she doesn't care for, and the message was the usual one about being out or on another line, and sounded like a BBC announcer reading the news.

“It's Mal,” I said, after the beep. “Just wanted to tell you again how good that strawberry jam is. Everything's fine. Oh, Lynnette's moving to New Mexico. Anyway, let's get together, when you have time.”

I hung up the phone and sat there for a while, then went out to the living room and lay on my side on the sofa and stared into the empty fireplace in the dark.

*   *   *

T
WO HOURS LATER
the phone woke me up. It had to be the Lady. She's very alert—sometimes to a fault—and she'd have known right off that my “everything's fine” was a lie. When I got to the kitchen phone, though, my caller I.D. said “anonymous” and I knew it couldn't be the Lady.

“Hello,” I said.

“Mr. Foley?” A woman's voice. “Is this Malachy Foley?” She pronounced my first name correctly—rhyming the last syllable of mine with the last syllable of hers—but that's not what surprised me. “Well,” she finally said, “are you going to answer or not?”