Windy City Blues (12 page)

“You’ve been in my house?” Mrs. Gildersleeve shrieked.

V. I. shook her head. “Not me. Murray Ryerson.” She looked apologetically at the sergeant. “I knew you’d never get a warrant for me, since you’d made an arrest. And you’d never have got it in time, anyway.”

She looked at her coffee cup, saw it was empty and put it down again. Max took it from the table and filled it for her a third time. His fingertips were itching with nervous irritation; some of the coffee landed on his trouser leg.

“I talked to Murray Saturday night from Little Rock. When he came up empty here, I headed for North Carolina. To Havelock, where Griffen and Lewis Caudwell grew up and where Mrs. Caudwell still lives. And I saw the house where Griffen lives, and talked to the doctor who treats Mrs. Caudwell, and—”

“You really are a pooper snooper, aren’t you,” Steve said.

“Pooper snooper, pooper snooper,” Deborah chanted. “Don’t get enough thrills of your own so you have to live on other people’s shit.”

“Yeah, the neighbors talked to me about you two.” Victoria looked at them with contemptuous indulgence. “You’ve been a two-person wolf pack terrifying most of the people around you since you were three. But the folks in Havelock admired how you
always stuck up for your mother. You thought your father got her addicted to tranquilizers and then left her high and dry. So you brought her newest version with you and were all set—you just needed to decide when to give it to him. Dr. Herschel’s outburst over the statue played right into your hands. You figured your father had stolen it from your uncle to begin with—why not send it back to him and let Dr. Herschel take the rap?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Steve said, red spots burning in his cheeks.

“What was it like, son?” McGonnigal had moved next to him.

“Don’t talk to them—they’re tricking you,” Deborah shrieked. “The pooper snooper and her gopher gooper.”

“She—Mommy used to love us before Daddy made her take all this shit. Then she went away. We just wanted him to see what it was like. We started putting Xanax in his coffee and stuff; we wanted to see if he’d fuck up during surgery, let his life get ruined. But then he was sleeping there in the study after his stupid-ass party, and we thought we’d just let him sleep through his morning surgery. Sleep forever, you know, it was so easy, we used his own Harvard necktie. I was so fucking sick of hearing ‘Early to bed, early to rise’ from him. And we sent the statue to Uncle Grif. I suppose the pooper snooper found it
there. He can sell it and Mother can be all right again.”

“Grandpa stole it from Jews and Daddy stole it from Grif, so we thought it worked out perfectly if we stole it from Daddy,” Deborah cried. She leaned her blond head next to her brother’s and shrieked with laughter.

Max watched the Une of Lotty’s legs change as she stood on tiptoe to reach a brandy snifter. Short, muscular from years of racing at top speed from one point to the next, maybe they weren’t as svelte as the long legs of modern American girls, but he preferred them. He waited until her feet were securely planted before making his announcement.

“The board is bringing in Justin Hardwick for a final interview for chief of staff.”

“Max!” She whirled, the Bengal fire sparkling in her eyes. “I know this Hardwick and he is another like Caudwell, looking for cost-cutting and no poverty patients. I won’t have it.”

“We’ve got you and Gioia and a dozen others bringing in so many nonpaying patients that we’re not going to survive another five years at the present rate. I figure it’s a balancing act. We need someone who can see that the hospital survives so that you and Art can practice medicine the way you want to. And
when he knows what happened to his predecessor, he’ll be very careful not to stir up our resident tigress.”

“Max!” She was hurt and astonished at the same time. “Oh. You’re joking, I see. It’s not very funny to me, you know.”

“My dear, we’ve got to learn to laugh about it: it’s the only way we’ll ever be able to forgive ourselves for our terrible misjudgments.” He stepped over to put an arm around her. “Now where is this remarkable surprise you promised to show me.”

She shot him a look of pure mischief, Lotty on a dare as he first remembered meeting her at eighteen. His hold on her tightened and he followed her to her bedroom. In a glass case in the corner, complete with a humidity-control system, stood the Pietro Andromache.

Max looked at the beautiful, anguished face. I understand your sorrows, she seemed to say to him. I understand your grief for your mother, your family, your history, but it’s all right to let go of them, to live in the present and hope for the future. It’s not a betrayal.

Tears pricked his eyelids, but he demanded, “How did you get this? I was told the police had it under lock and key until lawyers decided on the disposition of Caudwell’s estate.”

“Victoria,” Lotty said shortly. “I told her the problem and she got it for me. On the condition that I not
ask how she did it. And Max, you know—
damned
well—that it was not Caudwell’s to dispose of.”

It was Lotty’s. Of course it was. Max wondered briefly how Joseph the Second had come by it to begin with. For that matter, what had Lotty’s great-great-grandfather done to earn it from the emperor? Max looked into Lotty’s tiger eyes and kept such reflections to himself. Instead he inspected Hector’s foot where the filler had been carefully scraped away to reveal the old chip.

PEOPLE BORN NEAR
the corner of 90th and Commercial used to have fairly predictable futures. The boys grew up to work in the mills; the girls took jobs in the bakeries or coffee shops. They married each other and scrimped to make a down payment on a neighborhood bungalow and somehow fit their large families into its small rooms.

Now that the mills are history, the script has changed. Kids are still marrying, still having families, but without the certainty of the steel industry to buoy their futures. The one thing that seems to stay the same, though, is the number who stubbornly cling to the neighborhood even now that the jobs are gone.
It’s a clannish place, South Chicago, and people don’t leave it easily.

When Monica Larush got pregnant our senior year in high school and married football hero Gary Oberst, we all just assumed they were on their way to becoming another large family in a small bungalow. She wasn’t a friend of mine, so I didn’t worry about the possible ruin of her life. Anyway, having recently lost my own mother to cancer, I wasn’t too concerned about other girls’ problems.

Monica’s and my lives only intersected on the basketball court. Like me, she was an aggressive athlete, but she clearly had a high level of talent as well. In those days, though, a pregnant girl couldn’t stay in school, so she missed our championship winter. The team brought her a game ball. We found her, fat and pasty, eating Fritos in angry frustration in front of the TV in her mother’s kitchen. When we left, we made grotesque jokes about her swollen face and belly, our only way of expressing our embarrassment and worry.

Gary and Monica rewrote their script, though. Gary got a job on the night shift at Inland Steel and went to school during the day. After the baby—Gary Junior—was born, Monica picked up her GED. The two of them scrimped, not for a down payment, but to make it through the University of Illinois’s Chicago campus. Gary took a job as an accountant with a big Loop firm, Monica taught high school French,
and they left the neighborhood. Moved north was what I heard.

And that was pretty much all I knew—or cared—about them before Lily Oberst’s name and face started popping up in the papers. She was apparently mopping up junior tennis competition. Tennis boosters and athletic-apparel makers were counting the minutes until she turned pro.

I actually first heard about her from my old basketball coach, Mary Ann McFarlane. Mary Ann’s first love had always been tennis. When she retired from teaching at sixty, she continued to act as a tennis umpire at local high school and college tournaments. I saw her once a year when the Virginia Slims came to Chicago. She worked as a linesperson there for the pittance the tour paid—not for the bucks, but for the excitement. I always came during the last few days and had dinner with her in Greek Town at the end of the finals.

“I’ve been watching Lily Oberst play up at the Skokie Valley club,” Mary Ann announced one year. “Kid’s got terrific stuff. If they don’t ruin her too young she could be—well, I won’t say another Martina. Martinas come once a century. But a great one.”

“Lily Oberst?” I shook my head, fishing for why the name sounded familiar.

“You don’t remember Monica? Didn’t you girls keep in touch after your big year? Lily is her and Gary’s daughter. I used to coach Monica in tennis
besides basketball, but I guess that wasn’t one of your sports.”

After that I read the stories in detail and got caught up on twenty years of missing history. Lily grew up in suburban Glenview, the second of two children. The
Herald-Star
explained that both her parents were athletic and encouraged her and her brother to go out for sports. When a camp coach brought back the word that Lily might have some tennis aptitude, her daddy began working with her every day. She had just turned six then.

Gary put up a net for her in the basement and would give her an ice cream bar every time she could hit the ball back twenty-five times without missing.

“He got mad when it got too easy for me,” Lily said, giggling, to the reporter. “Then he’d raise the net whenever I got to twenty-four.”

When it became clear that they had a major tennis talent on their hands, Monica and Gary put all their energy into developing it. Monica quit her job as a teacher so that she could travel to camps and tournaments with Lily. Gary, by then regional director for a pharmaceutical firm, persuaded his company to put in the seed money for Lily’s career. He himself took a leave of absence to work as her personal trainer. Even now that she was a pro Monica and Gary went with her everywhere. Of course Lily had a professional coach, but her day always started with a workout with Daddy.

Gary Junior didn’t get much print attention. He apparently didn’t share the family’s sports mania. Five years older than Lily, he was in college studying for a degree in chemical engineering, and hoping to go off to Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati.

Lily turned pro the same year Jennifer Capriati did. Since Capriati was making history, joining the pros at thirteen, Lily, two years older, didn’t get the national hoopla. But Chicago went wild. Her arrival in the Wimbledon quarterfinals that year was front-page news all over town. Her 6–2, 6–0 loss there to Monica Seles was shown live in every bar in the city. Fresh-faced and smiling under a spiky blond hairdo, she grinned through her braces and said it was just a thrill to be on the same court with players like Seles and Graf. The city fell in love.

So when it was announced that she was coming to Chicago to play in the Slims in February the tournament generated more publicity than it had ever known. After a year and a half on the pro circuit Lily was ranked eighth in the world, but the pictures of her arrival at the family home still showed an ingenuous grin. Her Great Dane, standing on his hind legs with his paws on her shoulders, was licking her face.

Mary Ann McFarlane called me a few days after the Obersts arrived back in town. “Want to come up to Glenview and watch the kid work out? You could catch up with Monica at the same time.”

That sounded like a treat that would appeal to
Monica about as much as it did to me. But I had never seen a tennis prodigy in the making. I agreed to drive out to Glenview on Friday morning. Mary Ann and I would have lunch with Monica after Lily’s workout.

The Skokie Valley Tennis Club was just off the Edens Expressway at Dempster. Lily’s workout started at eight but I hadn’t felt the need to watch a sixteen-year-old, however prodigious, run laps. I arrived at the courts a little after ten.

When I asked a woman at the reception desk to direct me to Lily, she told me the star’s workout was off-limits to the press today. I explained who I was. She consulted higher authority over the phone. Mary Ann had apparently greased the necessary skids: I was allowed past a bored guard lounging against a hall door. After showing him my driver’s license, I was directed down the hall to the private court where Lily was practicing. A second guard there looked at my license again and then opened the door for me.

Lily had the use of three nets if she needed them. A small grandstand held only three people: Mary Ann and Monica and a young man in a workout suit with “Artemis” blazoned across the back. I recognized Monica from the newspaper photos, but they didn’t do justice to her perfectly styled gold hair, the makeup enhancing her oval face, or the casual elegance of her clothes. I had a fleeting memory of her fat, pasty face as she sat eating Fritos twenty years ago.
I would never have put those two images together. As the old bromide has it, living well is the best revenge.

Mary Ann squeezed my hand as I sat on her other side. “Good to see you, Vic,” she whispered. “Monica—here’s Vic.”

We exchanged confused greetings across our old coach, me congratulating her on her daughter’s success, she exclaiming at how I hadn’t changed a bit. I didn’t know if that was a compliment or not.

The man was introduced as Monte Allison, from Artemis Products’ marketing department. Artemis supplied all of Lily’s tennis clothes and shoes, as well as a seven-figure endorsement contract. Allison was just along to protect the investment, Mary Ann explained. The equipment maker heard her and ostentatiously turned his left shoulder to us.

On the court in front of us Lily was hitting tennis balls. A kid in white shorts was serving to her backhand. A dark man in shabby gray sweats stood behind her encouraging her and critiquing her stroke. And a third man in bright white clothes offered more forceful criticisms from the sidelines.

“Get into the shot, Lily. Come’n, honey, you’re not concentrating.”

“Gary,” Mary Ann muttered at me. “That’s Paco Callabrio behind her.”