Rough Trade (27 page)

For a moment I contemplated the possibility of some kind of a relationship between Chrissy and Fredericks, but immediately dismissed it as being too farfetched. Indeed, the whole thing was ridiculous. I’d been with Chrissy off and on all weekend and she certainly hadn’t acted like someone who’d been planning to sneak off to meet a lover.

I tried to set aside conjecture and instead focus on what was known for certain. With less than forty-eight hours left before the default deadline with the bank, two members of the Rendell family had met with violence. Surely there was something more at work here than the freakish cruelty of coincidence, but what?

On a practical level Jeff’s having been shot inserted an enormous question mark into a situation already fraught with uncertainty. Normally I would have expected the bank to grant us an extension, if only on humanitarian grounds. However, Gus Wallenberg had shown no such inclination after Beau Rendell’s death, and I could see no reason why Jeff’s incapacity would move him further. After Thursday’s leak to the press regarding the possibility of the team’s moving to Los Angeles, there was very little public relations downside to screwing the Monarchs’ new owner even as he lay fighting for his life in intensive care. I cursed myself for not having had Jeff turn over power of attorney to Chrissy earlier.

I was startled from these and other dark thoughts by the sound of a chair scraping against the floor. I looked up and saw a young black woman carrying a cafeteria tray.

“Do you mind if I join you?” she asked.

I looked quickly around at the dozens of empty tables surrounding us. “Be my guest,” I replied, not quite knowing what else to say.

As she set down her tray and sat down, I was able to take a closer look at her. She was closer to twenty than thirty and was dressed in a Miami Dolphins sweatshirt over jeans. Her hair was shiny with brilliantine and swept into an elaborate conch on top of her head. I wondered if she worked for a personal injury firm, making the rounds of hospitals in the middle of the night, chatting up the families of car-crash victims—an illegal but nonetheless widespread practice.

“I don’t know if you remember me from the trial,” she said quietly. “I’m Renee Fredericks.”

“You’re Darius’s sister,” I said as the information clicked into place.

She’d come to the courtroom every day her brother was on trial. My mother always liked to say that good manners prepare you for the unexpected, but even I was unprepared for a conversation with the sister of the person who’d just shot my client.

“I’m one of his sisters, anyway,” she said, managing a shy smile. “The one who still talks to him, at any rate.”

A great deal had been made of Fredericks’s childhood during the trial. We’d learned how he’d grown up in the slums of south central Los Angeles, one of the six children his mother had had with six different men. We’d heard about his ninth birthday spent in the Venice Beach homeless shelter and of the year and a half he and three of his sisters had lived in the back of an abandoned Chevy.

“How is your brother doing?” I asked.

“The doctors have done all they could for him in the operating room,” she said. “They say he’s still got a bullet lodged in the front of his brain. They’re afraid if they take it out, the surgery will kill him.”

“And if they don’t?”

“I’m a nurse, Ms. Millholland. I moved to Milwaukee when my brother signed with the Monarchs. I work downstairs in peds. I’ve seen enough to know that it’s better if he doesn’t live. Darius isn’t coming back, not the Darius we used to know. I hope God sees fit to take him. How is Mr. Rendell?”

“The bullets did a lot of damage. Right now we can only wait and see.” I actually suspected that the surgeons, with their experience with hundreds of patients who’d been as seriously wounded as Jeff, probably had a good idea of what the outcome was going to be. However, their job was sewing people up, not making predictions. “I hope you don’t mind me asking,” I continued, “but do you have any idea what your brother was doing at Beau Rendell’s house?”

“The detective I talked to says they think he broke in to rob the place. They say he was after all of the sports memorabilia that Beau Rendell kept there. I told them they were crazy. Darius had more trophies and signed footballs than he knew what to do with. What would he want with more?”

“Perhaps he intended to sell them,” I offered gently. “Was he strapped for cash?”

“Darius was
always
strapped for cash, even when he was playing in the NFL. He ran through money like water. Listen, I’m not saying that Darius is perfect. He has his problems, but stealing has never been one of them.”

“So what do you think he was doing at Beau Rendell’s house?” I asked.

“I think Jeff Rendell set it up.”

“What for?”

“I got a call from Darius yesterday. He was all excited. He told me that he had this secret, something big.”

“Do you know what it was?”

“Oh, yeah, Darius never could keep anything from me, especially when he was happy.”

“He was happy?”

“Of course, he was happy. He was going back to play for the Monarchs.”

It was four o’clock in the morning when Jeffrey Rendell died. The reporters had long ago gone home. Chrissy was with him at the end, sitting in the molded plastic chair at his bedside, when the monitors bleated out their flat alarms. She was shoved out of the way when the crash team sprang into action and went through their heroic but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to resuscitate him.

I dozed through all of it in an armchair just outside the double doors. What finally woke me was the screaming, the shrill sounds of the nurses crying out for security, and the sounds of crashing as medical equipment was knocked to the floor.

I stumbled to my feet, propelled by instinct as much as anything else and followed the sounds of shouting. Under the harsh fluorescent lights I got there just in time to see Chrissy Rendell, in her Prada pants and designer sweater, being pulled off the body of Darius Fredericks. In the few seconds that she’d had she’d pulled out every tube and line she could get her hands on, so that sounds of her curses mingled not only with the horrified voices of the nurses, but the sound of the various alarms of the devices that had been monitoring Fredericks’s vital systems.

By the time I reached her, Chrissy’s hair was disheveled, her eyes wild, and the perfect alabaster of her skin was speckled with the blood of the man that she believed had murdered her husband.

CHAPTER 23

We act out what we can’t put into words. Perhaps that is the real explanation of madness, at least the kind that had taken hold of Chrissy. Certainly it was something that Renee Fredericks seemed to understand. Perhaps it was having seen the violence that spilled out of her brother or maybe it was just plain kindness, but in the end it was Darius’s sister who convinced them not to call the cops. No harm, she pointed out, had been done and her status as a nurse in the same hospital also carried considerable weight. For the time being the incident was allowed to go unreported, at least until one of the half a dozen or so witnesses discovered that there was money to be made from selling the story.

I honestly don’t think Chrissy cared what happened to herself. Her rage spent, she now seemed hollowed out and near shock. I put my arm around her thin shoulders and half lifted her out of the chair in order to propel her toward the door.

As we left Renee Fredericks alone with the rasping of the ventilators I said a silent prayer that her wish would be granted and her brother would be taken.

We walked through the deserted parking lot to the car unmolested. The hospital had promised to give us a half an hour head start before releasing the news of Jeff’s death. However, pulling into Chrissy’s drive I noticed a car parked on the other side of Lake Drive. It probably belonged to one of the more tenacious reporters, but there was nothing I could do about it.

Chrissy was so devastated by grief that even the simple act of retrieving her house key from her purse was beyond her. I had to root through her shoulder bag until I found the ring and then fumbled in the dark until I was finally able to unlock the door. Groping for the light switch, I led her inside and steered her into the rocking chair while I quickly made my way through the house drawing curtains and closing blinds against the intrusions of the outside world.

By the time I got back to the kitchen she was crying—a good sign. I took her upstairs and helped her get undressed and into bed as if she was an invalid. I went into the bathroom and found the envelope of sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet, intending to offer her one.

We had only the smallest window of relative calm before the news broke of Jeff’s death. She needed to get whatever rest she could, but when I returned to her bedroom she was already asleep. I was glad. As bad as today had been, tomorrow was going to be worse.

Elliott Abelman arrived within an hour of my call. I had never been so happy to see anyone in my life. I hugged him as soon as he was through the door, lingering longer in his arms than I ought to have, grateful for the momentary respite from the horrors of the day. I’d put on a pot of coffee while I waited for him, and I poured him out a cup. We sat and drank it at the kitchen table while I filled him in on that night’s events, especially what I’d learned about Fredericks.

“So I take it you think the whole thing was a setup?”

“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.