The Governor's Wife (7 page)

“This way.” She led me to a pod with the curtain pulled back and pinned against the wall. At first all I saw were two legs kicking in the air. As I moved around the crib, I caught a flash of pink skin and a shock of thick, black hair. Then I
stood over him. Smelling him. The kid made two tiny fists, stretched, and rounded his mouth into a perfect O.

“He just woke up,” Amanda said.

“What’s his name?”

“He doesn’t have one.”

“He should have a name.”

“Is there anything in particular you needed?”

“No, I just came by to see how he was doing.”

“He’s a fine, healthy boy.”

We both looked at the child again. He’d found our repartee boring and fallen back to sleep.

“How long will you keep him?” I said.

“A week, maybe two. They’ll put him into one of the state facilities until they find a permanent home.”

“How does that work?”

“There are a lot of couples who want infants, Mr. Kelly. The state will find him a spot.”

“A spot, huh?”

I could feel Amanda Mason studying me. “You want to sit with him for a while?”

“I can’t stay too long, but sure.”

She pointed her heavy jaw toward an empty chair. “If he starts to fuss, let me know.”

I thought I detected a hint of a smile as she walked off. And then I was alone. The kid opened his eyes and wrinkled his face in another bout of yawning.

“You look like an old man when you wake up,” I said. The kid didn’t offer much in the way of a response, so I watched his heartbeat on a screen. Tiny white waves surfing across a sea of dark blue. One of the machines buzzed once and stopped. I expected Amanda Mason to come running with her hair on fire, but nothing happened. Except the kid gurgled.

“I’m gonna call you Vince,” I said. “You like that?”

He rubbed his toothless gums together and kicked his
legs some more. I took that as a yes. So I found a marker and scratched out
VINCE
on a Post-it Note. Then I stuck it above the crib.

“The real Vince is a hell of a guy,” I said. “Besides, you kind of owe him.”

The kid reached out with both hands, and I found myself bending forward, as if on a string, watching as he squeezed one of my fingers for all he was worth. I pulled back lightly, and his eyes widened.

“You got a good grip.”

He squeezed again. I smiled. He smiled back, and I wondered why anyone would willingly give up even a moment with their child. Never mind stick him in the trunk of a car and walk away.

I gently tugged my fingers free and stood up. Along one wall of the pod was a row of photos. My gaze came to rest on the second to last. Marie Perry was seated, leaning forward slightly and warming her face against the bundle in her arms.

“Those are our volunteers…”

I almost jumped. Amanda Mason stood just behind me.

“Sorry, did I scare you?”

I smiled. “Must be those nurse’s shoes.”

“Do you know Ms. Perry?”

“Just what’s in the papers.”

“Yes, well, don’t believe everything you read.”

“No?”

“She’s a wonderful woman. Comes in three or four times a week to hold the babies. Stays sometimes for hours.”

“No kidding.”

“Absolutely. I know what they wrote about her, but I just wish people could see everything.”

I nodded back toward the crib. “Thanks for letting me get a peek at Vince.”

“Vince?”

I pointed to my Post-it. Amanda’s laugh was surprisingly soft. Almost youthful. “You named him?”

“That’s the name of the detective who found him. You may want to pass it along to the agency.”

“I will, Mr. Kelly. And we’ll do our best to find Vince a good home.”

I said good-bye to the kid and walked past the empty cribs. Then I was in the outer office again, looking back through the glass. Amanda Mason was testing the temperature of a baby bottle by shaking a few drops of formula on the inside of her wrist. She glanced up and caught me staring at her. The nurse nodded and didn’t seem the least bit surprised. Then she bent over and slipped the bottle into the baby’s mouth.

Karen Simone was just coming out of the NICU as I walked back down the hall.

“Sorry,” she said. “Took longer than I thought.”

“That’s all right. I had a look around.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“A pal of mine is a Chicago cop. He found an infant in Lincoln Park yesterday.”

“I heard about that.”

We started to walk toward a bank of elevators.

“They’re keeping the baby here,” I said. “I stuck my head in to see how he was doing.”

“And?”

“He’s healthy. He’s happy. He’s lucky.”

“That was very nice of you to stop by.”

A comfortable silence carried us the rest of the way to the elevators.

“Where are you headed?” I said and pushed the
DOWN
button.

“I was going to grab some lunch. You hungry?”

“I can’t. How about a rain check?”

“Lunch?”

“I was thinking more like a drink.”

Karen cocked her head. “Business or pleasure?”

“Probably an annoying combination of both.”

A crooked smile touched her lips. “Next week might be better.”

“Should I take that as a yes?”

An elevator arrived and the door opened. Karen got on first and held the door for me. “As long as it’s nothing fancy.”

“Are you saying you want to go to a dive?”

“I want to go somewhere that’s not gonna freak out if someone lights up a cigarette.”

“I know just the place,” I said and hit the button for the lobby. Marie Perry and the image of a tumbling silver dollar flashed through my head as the elevator doors closed and the car began to drop.

M
y lunch date was in Old Town, two miles and at least five decades removed from Karen Simone. Billy “Bones” McIntyre worked out of an office above Chicago’s Second City Theatre. I pushed in off Wells Street and groped my way up a dark, twisting staircase. As I climbed, I could hear the patter of garbage cans in the alley and the thump of traffic in the street below. The stairs dead-ended in a landing with a single door made of pitted wood and pebbled glass. The letters on the glass spelled out
DEMOCRATIC COMMITTEEMAN
, except one
A
and a couple of
M’
s were missing. I turned the doorknob and walked in. Bones was sitting on a stage at the far end of a dusty hall. He had a cigar in full boil and was blowing clouds of blue smoke toward a tin ceiling. Bones was on the phone but waved me over. As I got closer, I realized the receiver had a cord that connected to a large black base unit. Then I realized the base unit had a rotary dial. Bones finished up his call just as I arrived.

“If you’ve got a subpoena, just leave it at the door.” Bones
seemed to like his little joke and sucked hard on the cigar. I watched his cheeks pump like tiny gray bellows and wondered when was the last time anyone in the Chicago media had gotten a picture of this guy.

“How you doing, Bones?”

“Like you give a fuck. Sit down.”

Bones still had the voice of a politician—rippling like a cold river over hard stones. His appearance, however, hadn’t fared nearly as well. In the twenty-five years he’d run Cook County, McIntyre had made a habit of wrapping himself in suits made of English wool, ties of Italian silk, and French cuffs all around. Today, he wore a threadbare pair of Dickies work pants, a blue sweatshirt with a hole under the arm, mismatched socks of green and gray, and a battered pair of Nike running shoes.

“What’s with the phone?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s got a rotary dial.”

“So what? They tried to give me one of those push buttons. I told them to keep it.”

Behind Bones was a large-than-life poster for the 1968 Democratic Convention. On the other side of the stage, Bobby Kennedy reached out of a convertible to tousle a small boy’s head. From the phone to the politics, everything in the place reeked of throwback. Nothing more so than Bones himself. The man had once been a king maker, a guy who could get out the vote or kill it, depending on which way the wind was blowing off Lake Michigan. Bones had taken his retirement when the
Chicago Tribune
discovered he kept two women on the county payroll for the exclusive purpose of providing Bones with sex. The women were twenty-five and twenty-three, respectively. Bones was sixty-eight at the time. And happily married for fifty years.

“How’s the wife?” I said.

“Faith? Never better, never better.” Bones took a pull on his cigar and sent another stream of smoke spiraling toward a fan beating overhead.

“I’m here about Ray,” I said.

Bones nodded. I could have said Daffy Duck, and Bones would have nodded like that was what he expected.

“You’ve been to see Marie.” Bones didn’t ask. He knew. And when Bones knew something, he didn’t waste time with competing points of view.

“I talked to her, yeah.”

He licked some old-man crust off his lips and laid the cigar, still smoking, in a cut-glass ashtray. Fifteen years ago, Bones had gone to a doctor who told him he had all five major risks for heart disease, plus a couple more the doctor had never heard of. Bones told the doctor he’d rather die than give up his cigars. The doctor told him that was a distinct possibility. Bones left the office that day looking to strike a deal with himself. According to legend, he never ate another piece of red meat, stopped using butter, and refused to drink any whole-milk products. He started running five miles every morning and hadn’t missed a day in more than a decade. Gray sweats, Bears cap pulled low over his eyes, black socks instead of gloves wrapped over his hands, Bones became a lakefront fixture. And he always ran alone. That was Bones. Cigars and all.

“Why do you care about Ray?” he said.

“Someone hired me.”

“Someone hired you. So you just jump in and start screwing with people’s lives?”

“Your daughter seemed fine with it.”

“Leave her alone.”

“Where’s her husband?”

“How would I know?” Bones flapped a hand around the empty hall. “You think I’m at the top of the food chain here?”

“Why did Ray disappear?”

“Thirty years in prison might do it for me. How about you?” Bones flashed the shark’s-teeth grin of a Chicago pol.

“What do you know about a company called Beacon Limited?” I said.

The grin disappeared, and something even more unpleasant replaced it. “I did some work for them.”

“What kind of work?”

“Consultant. But that was a long time ago. They were just a small outfit back then.”

“And now?”

“Now, they’re not so small. Let me ask you something. You been going around town asking about Beacon?”

“Every chance I get.”

“You should smarten up.”

“Do you know Albert Striker?”

“Beacon’s attorney. Or at least he used to be.”

“I’d like to talk to him.”

“Might be tough. Albert died three years ago.”

“Someone must have replaced him?”

Bones’s cigar had gone cold. He took his time relighting it. “You don’t understand Beacon, Kelly. It’s not a company as much as an idea.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Day-to-day business is handled through the subsidiaries. And they know nothing about the parent company.”

“Someone must make the big decisions?”

“Dig if you want. All you’ll find are more corporate layers. More dead ends.”

“Was Ray involved with Beacon?”

“You know the answer to that. They were heavy contributors to the campaign.”

“How about your daughter?”

Bones pulled the cigar from his mouth and let a little smoke leak out behind it. “Let’s go get lunch.”

He led me back down the stairs and across North Avenue. Bones waved a hand at the Old Town Ale House as we passed by. “Still do most of my drinking in there, but we’re gonna eat at another place.”

We stopped in front of a wooden building with a Hamm’s poster in the window. The place looked abandoned, but Bones pulled at the door and it opened. Inside a young woman with sharp features and small, dull eyes slouched behind the bar. She wore jeans and a Bears T-shirt she’d tied off to expose her pale stomach. The woman was talking to a drowsy-looking guy with three days’ worth of beard and an open Budweiser in front of him. The way she leaned over to talk told me they were sleeping together. But that was probably just me. Too many nights on a barstool at Sterch’s. The guy hopped up when he saw Bones and hurried over.

“Mr. McIntyre.”

“Bones. I told you, Bones.”

“Bones. Great to see you. We were just opening.”

I looked around. A couple of pitchers of stale beer were fermenting on the bar, and the floor was still sticky from last night. Most of the chairs were turned upside down on the tables, and the place smelled faintly of vomit.

“I thought I told you I wanted these women wearing clothes,” Bones said.

The guy with the growth scratched at it. “I’ll talk to her.”

“Tell her to cover up that goddamn belly. What’s your name again?”

“Darryl. Darryl Jones.”

“How old are you, Darryl?”

“Thirty-two.”

“Thirty-two. You like that stuff?”

“What stuff, Mr. McIntyre?”

“Forget it. Where can we sit?”

Darryl showed us to a booth and wiped it down with a dirty sponge.

“Couple of beers, Darryl.” Bones looked at me. “Old Style, okay?”

I nodded. What the hell.

“An Old Style and an O’Doul’s. And give us some soup. You like soup, Kelly?”

“Sure.”

“Couple of bowls of that chicken soup I had yesterday. And some bread.”

Darryl scurried back behind the bar. The girl showed up a minute later with two longnecks. She had her eyes down and midriff covered.

“Thanks, honey. This is for you.” Bones pushed a twenty into her hand, took a long gargle from the O’Doul’s, and thumped it down on the table.

“You got an interest in this place?” I said.

Bones hooded his eyes and winked. “Six months ago they were going to shut the place down. Guy asked me for some help. I paid off what he owed the county in taxes and took over the license.”

“What do you know about bars?”

“What did I know about politics? We’ll be fine.” Bones jerked a thumb behind him. “Just poured a new patio out back. Gonna be a beer garden for the summer. City’s bitching about the licenses.”

“Let me guess, you’re gonna take care of that?”

“I still got a little pull. Neighborhood pull, but what the hell. It’s what I know. It’s fun.”

Darryl showed up with two bowls and a basket of bread. Bones was right. The soup was good—hunks of chicken, rich broth, and lots of rice.

“My daughter,” Bones said and ripped off a crust of bread. His hands were thick and strong. In the barroom light they reminded me of my father, who beat his children sometimes because he liked the sound.

“What about her?” I said.

“We’re not close.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“We did the thing for the press when Ray was governor. Family pictures. Magazine articles. All that happy horseshit. The truth is we haven’t been close in years.”

“Before Ray?”

“The problems go back earlier than Ray, yes. But they got worse once she was married.” Bones used the crust to soak up some soup. It was hot and made the old man’s eyes water.

“Did you and Ray get along?” I said.

“I liked him. I wasn’t part of the inner circle, but we’d talk politics from time to time.”

“Did you want to be part of the inner circle?”

“In 2006, Ray Perry went from never having held public office to governor of Illinois. And did it without breaking a sweat. It was like an old baseball skipper looking down his bench and finding the next Mickey Mantle at the end of it. You bet your ass I wanted to be part of it.”

“But you weren’t?”

“On the political side, no. But Ray was always good to me. Too smart not to be. And we never talked about Marie. Smart there, too.”

“You think your daughter helped him disappear?”

Bones shook his head. “She wouldn’t put herself out like that.”

“Did she love him?”

“Marie isn’t capable of love. At least not how you and I understand it.”

I put down my spoon and leaned in, resting my forearms on the table. “You got something else to tell me, Bones?”

He gestured to my bowl. “The soup.”

“It’s not that good.”

Bones stopped eating and hunched forward so his head hung between his shoulders. “Things happened after my daughter got married. Things the public never saw.”

“The corruption charges? The trial?”

“This was personal.”

An image of Karen Simone flashed before my eyes. “Another woman?”

Bones waved the notion away. “Marie might not have cared about Ray, but he loved my daughter. Almost as much as he loved himself.”

“So what was it?”

“Once Marie got married, she went off the tracks. I mean she was always troubled, even as a kid, but this was different. Withdrawal, paranoia, deep bouts of depression. From what I understand, Ray had her on a heavy dose of meds and considered institutionalizing her.”

“How about now?”

“No idea. She seems stable. At least from a distance.”

“When was the last time you spoke with her?”

“A word hasn’t passed between us since Ray skipped. I called. Left messages. Nothing.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Did Marie hire you?”

“Confidential, Bones.”

“Doesn’t matter. I want you to let this whole thing go. Ray’s not coming back, and we all need to move on. Especially my daughter.”

“Maybe she doesn’t want to move on?”

“So you help her. Make up something. Tell her whatever she needs to hear. Just put Ray Perry to rest. That’s what I want. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

“And why would I help you?”

“It’s Chicago, Kelly. That’s what we do.” Bones ripped off another hunk of bread and dipped it in his soup. I got up to go, then stopped halfway.

“What if I told you your daughter already agrees with you?”

“In what way?”

“She’s convinced Ray’s never coming back. Believes he might be dead.”

The old man shoveled the bread into his mouth and creased his face into a skeleton smile. “Then I’d tell you she’s lying. When all else fails, she’s always been pretty good at that.”