Rough Trade (5 page)

“Anything else?” asked Sherman, whose other admirable quality was his disinclination for small talk.

“Yes,” I replied. “If you find a stray $18 million salted away somewhere, be sure to let me know.”

I spent the rest of the day fighting over commas with the Brandts, who seemed determined to interject themselves into a process they didn’t understand with the same instinct that drives a dog to mark its territory. While deep down I knew that Stuart was right—they were the client and therefore paying for the privilege of being as irritating as they pleased—it didn’t make it any easier to be lectured on the finer points of syntax by flesh-peddling high school dropouts for whom English was a second language.

By the time I slipped the final pages into the fax machine, it was well past midnight. Naturally, Stuart Eisenstadt was long gone. Exhausted, I put Cheryl into a cab with instructions to sleep in the next morning. Then I began to make my weary way back home.

As a rule I like the small hours of the morning. The darkness softens the edges of the city, and the deserted streets seem to offer up the illusion of freedom. But tonight I felt restless and dissatisfied, unable to savor even the minor satisfaction of having gotten the Avco letter out on time.

No doubt a good part of my disenchantment was personal. There seemed to be a great deal in my life right now that was either unsettled or outside of my control. After Russell died I had drifted, almost without thinking, back into what could best be described as an arid relationship of convenience with Stephen Azorini. No longer the black sheep of North Shore Country Day, Stephen was now the eminently presentable CEO of a successful, high-tech pharmaceutical company that was also my most important client. We accompanied each other to business dinners and charity balls, with most of these evenings ending in Stephen’s bed. This had now been going on long enough and publicly enough that almost everyone assumed there was a level of commitment and affection between us that; frankly did not exist.

Stephen loved his business first and himself second, while I was still in love with my dead husband and in no hurry to offer up my heart again. While hardly the stuff of Hallmark cards, it worked, or at least, it had until recently.

In a moment of weakness Stephen and I had bought an apartment together, a once-palatial Lake Shore residence in one of the city’s premier buildings that had fallen into disrepair. Perhaps I’d mistaken my love for the apartment (which, even in shambles, was almost heartbreakingly beautiful) for affection for the man, or maybe I’d secretly hoped that it would bring us closer together. Instead, the strain of undertaking the massive and expensive renovation had only seemed to etch the empty spaces in our relationship into sharper relief.

Of course, the lawsuits didn’t help. The new apartment occupied the top two floors of a landmark David Adler building on East Lake Shore Drive. Unfortunately, we did not discover until after we’d begun replastering that there was a structural problem with the roof—specifically the thousands of tons of dirt, grass, and trees that our downstairs neighbor had put on top of it to construct a rooftop play area for his children. He’d erected an impressive urban oasis, a sylvan aerie in the very heart of the city. Unfortunately, it was also about to come crashing down through our ceiling.

The downstairs neighbor in question was Paul Riskoff, the abrasive and notoriously combative real estate tycoon. When negotiations broke down, we’d been forced to file a lawsuit against him and obtain a court order allowing us to remove the hazard on the roof. We’d also taken separate actions against the city building inspector who’d initially granted the permit allowing Riskoff to construct the garden (no doubt after his palm had been generously greased), the inspector we’d hired who had failed to detect the problem before closing, and the entire condo board who’d thus far sided with Riskoff. Naturally, none of this had endeared us to our future neighbors.

Since then we’d made steady progress renovating the apartment, and while I still had faith that it would be stunning when all the work was finally completed, I had recently found myself wondering, without any great sense of tragedy, which of us was going to end up moving into it once the last of the paint had dried.

I pulled into the alley behind the Hyde Park apartment I still shared with my roommate and reflected that it had been more than a long day. I was glad to be home. The apartment had originally been Claudia’s, rented the day she arrived from New York to begin her surgical residency at the University of Chicago. It was a huge, rambling wreck of a place, reduced to near tenement status by a succession of student renters and in no way improved during our stewardship. The floor tilted wildly, and there were only three windows that opened and closed in the whole Place. It hadn’t been cleaned since our last cleaning lady quit more than a year earlier.

I unlocked the door and checked the front hall for signs of Claudia’s diminutive sneakers, which she invariably kicked off the instant she walked through the door. Unsurprisingly the mat was empty. Now that she was pursuing a fellowship in trauma surgery at Northwestern Memorial, she’d begun spending nearly all her time at the hospital. Still, I was surprised by how disappointed I was to find her not at home. I was more than just physically tired; I was feeling emotionally exhausted and I really didn’t want to be alone.

I jumped at the sound of the telephone and hurried across the living room to answer it. By the time I reached; the receiver, the adrenaline was already starting to flow. No one calls with good news at two o’clock in the morning.

I picked it up.

“Hi, Kate. It’s me, Jeff. I need a favor.” It was his usual greeting. During the day it was Chrissy who called. These nocturnal communications were Jeff’s specialty.

They’d started almost as soon as Chrissy and Jeff had gotten back from their honeymoon. After all, I was more than just Chrissy’s best friend, I was a well-connected' Chicago attorney who knew how to keep her mouth shut. I could be useful.

Chicago is only an hour’s drive from Milwaukee, even less if you happen to be behind the wheel of a Ferrari. It is also a much better place to party than buttoned-up Milwaukee, especially if you’re a twenty-year-old millionaire with more testosterone than common sense. In the cynical world of pro sports it is a given that boys will be boys, and the Monarchs preferred that their boys did their playing in Chicago, away from the prying eyes of the fine, upstanding citizens of Milwaukee. Unfortunately, it is also axiomatic that semiliterate, unsocialized gladiators will occasionally get themselves into trouble.

“Oh, please,” I groaned, “no more crimes against women, not after last time.”

“Don’t worry,” Jeff replied. “There were no women involved.”

“What is it then? Did some hero wrap himself around a tree and get picked up for DUI? Why don’t you call Glen Morrissey? He usually handles those for you guys.”

“I don’t think he’d come. We haven’t paid him for the last two. Besides, this isn’t a DUI.”

“Then what is it?” I asked, scrabbling through the four days’ worth of unread mail that had accumulated on the table for something to write on.

“A player named Jake Palmer. He’s the offensive lineman they call Jake the Giant.”

“I don’t care what position he plays. Just tell me what he did that makes him need a lawyer in the middle of the night.”

“I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but apparently he and a bunch of special-teams players decided to drive down to Chicago after the game and drown their sorrows over the loss to Minnesota.”

“You guys lost again?”

“Crushed would be a more accurate description. The final score was 27 to 3. I don’t know how Bennato has the balls to call himself a football coach.”

“So tell me about this guy Palmer,” I prodded.

“He and a bunch of special-teams boys drove down to Chicago and hit the bars. I guess somehow or other they ended up at The Baton.”

“At The Baton?” I demanded incredulously. “How do a bunch of football players manage to just somehow end up at the most notorious transvestite bar in the city? I’m surprised they’d even let them in the door.”

“Apparently not as surprised as Palmer.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes. I guess he started buying drinks for some dishy blonde he picked up at the bar. At some point he must have gotten sleepy, because he put his head in her lap. I gather that’s when he discovered that—how shall I put this?—things were not exactly as they seemed.”

“And let me guess,” I practically hooted. “A disturbance broke out.” I imagined a three-hundred-pound Gulliver from the University of Alabama warding off the blows of the assembled homosexual population of Lilliput and burst out laughing.

“It’s not going to be funny if the press gets hold of this,” cut in Jeff. “It’s not like we don’t already have enough trouble on our hands.”

“I’m sorry. What’s he been charged with?”

“So far nothing. They took him to the Eighteenth District, but he hasn’t been booked. One of the cops recognized him and called me. Luckily he’s a fan.”

“I suppose you promised him fifty-yard-line seats the next time you play the Bears....”

“Are you kidding? I’d let him bang the entire cheer-leading squad if I thought it meant keeping this out of the papers.”

CHAPTER 4

The last time I’d made a trip to the Eighteenth District it had almost turned me off not only to football but the entire human race, too, when I realized that people like Darius Fredericks were a part of it. Fredericks had been the Monarchs’ first-round draft pick that season, a talented wide receiver who’d gotten himself into some kind of trouble in college—trouble that had been hushed up as he led his team to a national championship. As a pro he also did not disappoint. His first year as a Monarch he made a record-tying one hundred twenty-six receptions and nearly killed a nineteen-year-old call girl in his hotel room after an away game against the Bears.

It had been snowing that night, too.

I’d driven to the Eighteenth District police station in a blizzard and arrived to find Fredericks cocky, unrepentant, and signing autographs for cops and fellow prisoners alike. He’d treated my arrival as he might a plumber coming to unplug his sink—inevitable and unremarkable. As I explained the arrangements I had made for a criminal attorney to represent him, he’d looked bored. We had been talking for several minutes before I realized that the speckles on his expensive silk shirt were not polka dots, but blood. When I left the Eighteenth that night, for the first time in my career I had felt ashamed of being a lawyer.

The surprising thing isn’t that he did it. Big men beat the faces of women into hamburger every day. The surprising thing is that he ended up doing time for it. It helped that it was an election year, and that he drew a political and feminist judge. And to their credit, both the Rendells and the league refused to pull any strings to help him get off.

Suddenly I felt like the only person awake and working on the face of the planet. Whoever said misery likes company knew what they were talking about. I picked up my car phone and punched in Claudia’s pager number. She called back just as I was passing Soldier Field. I explained my errand and she agreed to meet me at the corner of Fairbanks and Superior. She was already outside and waiting when I got there, a tiny figure in a down parka standing in the light of the emergency room entrance sign, rolling on the balls of her feet to stay awake.

“Don’t you think it would be more efficient if they just kept these guys in jail between games?” inquired my roommate as she slid into the passenger seat. She threw back her hood to reveal a face that was deceptively young looking, as pale and unlined as a child’s.

“Rough night?” I asked.

“Not too bad. Carrelli is in New York delivering a lecture, so it was torturer’s night out.”

Carrelli was the head of Claudia’s training program, and from what little she had told me about him he made the power-hungry partners at my office look like a bunch of nuns. He was a sadistic egomaniac who believed that the trauma of the surgical training program should in no way be limited to what had been suffered by the patients.

“Sundays are usually pretty quiet anyway,” continued my roommate, “though we did have a little bit of excitement this afternoon—a crush injury from a car accident on lower Wacker Drive. A twenty-six-year-old kid spent three hours with his arm pinned under a flipped pickup truck. I got to go out and help with the field amputation. What did you do today?”

“Made the world a better place for topless dancers and dirty old men.”

“I can’t believe you’re
still
working on that strip club deal.”

“Still.Always. Forever. I’ll be trading faxes and wrangling with the SEC when I’m in the nursing home.”

“So what did tonight’s football felon do?”

“He’s not a felon, at least not yet. Hopefully he’s not going to end up being charged with anything.”

“Are you going to answer my question and tell me what this guy did, or are you going to give me a lecture on the finer points of the law?”

“He got into a fight with a bunch of drag queens at The Baton.”

“Wow,” exclaimed my roommate, obviously impressed. “The football players versus the transvestites. It’s a wonder he ended up in jail instead of in the hospital.”

The Eighteenth District police station is a dismal box of a place erected in the architectural style once favored by urban-renewal advocates in the sixties. On Chicago Ave. just east of Dearborn, it sits just beyond the glittering prosperity of Michigan Avenue. Whether it is because real estate is still at a premium here or because its patrons usually arrive in the back of a blue and white, there is no parking lot at the station. Instead I found an illegal spot in the alley that ran behind the currency exchange next door.

Apparently, it was a busy night. As we passed through doors of heavily scratched bullet-proof glass, we made our way past two hookers in matching patent leather halter tops, being released into the custody of their pimp; an old woman, obviously drunk, decked out in a grimy bathrobe, high heels, and a blond fright wig; and a muscle-bound tough with his hands cuffed behind his back, wearing an immaculately white tennis visor in the latest gangland fashion—turned upside down and backward as if he was hoping to collect rain. There were also a dozen or so theatrically sobbing drag queens nursing their wounds with their wigs askew, demanding either their lawyers or a trip to the ladies’ room in disconcertingly deep voices. I hadn’t seen so much running mascara since Tammy Faye Baker went off the air.