Red Hot Lies
At age sixty-eight, he now felt entitled to an occasional bit of solitude. So at a time like this—home early on a surprisingly balmy autumn day with no dinner parties, no date, no work occupying his mind—he planned to take advantage of that solitude.
His Audi hugged the long gravel driveway. At first, only the towering pines lining the drive were evident, but then they cleared, and his house, still far in the distance, came into view. Its style was Greek Revival, the kind Forester used to stare at in awe while growing up. It was made of white stone, the front protected by massive columns. Inside, the house boasted ten bedrooms, eleven baths, two kitchens, a gym and a movie theater. The place would have been ostentatious if it wasn’t in the big-money area of Lake Forest and if it wasn’t surrounded by acres and acres of lawn and trees. Forester had known the house was over the top, but he entertained frequently, and he felt he deserved it. He had never been shy about living a big life.
Forester entered through the garage door and came into the kitchen. His housekeeper stood at the counter, back turned, fixing his meal.
“Hello, Annette,” he said. He remembered when it was Olivia he used to call hello to. He remembered that every day, even though she’d been gone thirteen years now, stolen by ovarian cancer.
Annette turned at the waist and bid him a subdued good-evening, then returned to her work.
Forester walked from the kitchen and through his large marble foyer. In the front living room, he opened the four sets of French doors looking out onto the patio, the vast yard and a small pond. For some reason, Annette liked to keep the house sealed up tight, a habit he couldn’t seem to break. He glanced around the living room. The effect, he hoped, was one of eclectic elegance. The designer had packed it full of expensive rugs, couches and wall coverings that showcased Forester’s unique and odd collection of objects collected on his travels—an oxidized brass bowl he paid two dollars for in Malaysia; the plaster statue of a radio microphone his mother gave him after he bought his first station.
Annette stepped into the room. “Cornish hen tonight,” she said simply.
“Wonderful.”
“They’re in the warming oven when you’re ready.”
“Thank you, Annette.”
In the study, he opened a bottle of DuMol Pinot Noir and poured it into a glass decanter. He turned on Ramsey Lewis. God, he loved jazz. He could still remember arriving in Chicago when he was twenty-one. He would hang out at the Green Mill, seeing every kind of jazz he could. His favorites were the southern, bluesy stuff that made him think of home, and the true Chicago style, guys like Franz Jackson that reflected the big, new, shiny city he lived in. In a way, it was jazz that had brought him everything he owned.
Looking back at his life, Forester was amazed at the apparent organization of it. He believed now that everything had happened for a reason—leading him to the next stage—but while he was busy living that life it had felt, at the time, like a convoluted, random mess. It was random that he had lost his factory job only seven months after moving to Chicago. It was random that a radio-station owner, a guy named Gus Connifer whom he’d met at the Green Mill, offered him a job as a “production assistant” at the jazz station, where he was essentially a glorified gofer. And it was decidedly random that after a year at the station, a year in which Forester had soaked up the world of radio the way the summer ground soaks up rain, he had a chance to buy the station.
Gus Connifer was a smoking, drinking, hard-living man who’d finally been diagnosed with emphysema and a host of other respiratory illnesses. He thought he would die soon, and he was fine with that, except for one little thing—he couldn’t stand his wife, whom he suspected of cheating, and wanted her to inherit nothing. Gus was a Catholic, so divorce wasn’t an option. He wanted to unload the radio station, and he didn’t care for how much. He liked Forester, who over the last year had been a bigger help to him than his ten other employees combined. He told Forester he’d sell the station for exactly a thousand dollars. Forester got a loan and with it his first property. Later, he bought other radio stations, not to mention television stations, cable networks, production companies, newspapers, recording studios and publishing companies, making Pickett Enterprises the largest media conglomerate in the Midwest.
Forester poured wine into a long-stemmed glass. Thank God red wine was considered healthy these days. It gave him an excuse to indulge in one of his few vices. And hopefully it would give him a mellow buzz, maybe take away that vague sense that something was wrong inside his body. He was a fit, strong sixty-eight—that’s what all his doctors said, and he had a few of them. Forester now believed in preventive medicine rather than a reactionary approach. Yet there was still this tiredness, this sense that his body wasn’t exactly right. But he was nearing seventy. What did he expect?
He glanced at the framed pictures above the wet bar. He kissed the tips of his fingers and touched the photo of his late wife, Liv. He would give up everything to have her back. Were Livvie here, he would gladly give up his current preference for solitude.
The photo next to Liv’s was of their only son, Shane. He often wished they shared the bond he saw and envied between many fathers and sons. That envy had worsened with the recent doubts he suffered about Shane—ever since the anonymous letters and peculiar occurrences that had happened over the past few months.
He picked up the photo of Shane. Looked closely at it. Was there any chance he was the source of the threats? Logically, it made sense, because Shane would take over the reins of his empire whenever Forester decided to hand them over. But they both knew and understood Shane simply wasn’t ready yet. He thought they both knew and understood that.
He put the photo back. His doubts sometimes ashamed him. But who else could be behind the threats? He thought of Chaz and Walter, his two right-hand men at Pickett Enterprises. They knew Shane’s limitations, and they knew they could pull his strings if he was CEO. If Forester was out, they could manage the company the way they wanted, which was often different from his way. But that’s why Forester had hired people like them, people who didn’t think exactly as he did. And until he figured out the source of the threats, he wasn’t going to start axing people.
He heard a ding telling him a door had been opened—Annette leaving for the day. With Ramsey Lewis pounding the black and whites on “Limelight,” Forester walked to the kitchen and made himself a plate with the Cornish hen and potatoes she had prepared. He took his dinner and wine through the French doors of his study and seated himself at the iron patio table.
In the deep-blue twilight his lawn took on a silvery hue, the edges of his estate blurring in the distance. He took a few bites of the hen, then a sip of the Pinot Noir. He sighed, anticipating the pleasure he got from such nights. But satisfaction eluded him. Why? He was alone, he had a perfect glass of wine and a delicious dinner, he had his jazz. He had everything he needed for a quiet night of contentment.
Yet that vague discomfort kept command of his body. In fact, it grew, and spread to his mind. Forester felt an overwhelming tiredness, even sadness, while something else—what was it?—caused his heart to race. His eyes swept across the acres of lawn, the old, drooping oaks and the stately pines. For the first time, he wished he had gated his estate. He’d never liked that concept, didn’t like the thought of closing himself off from the rest of the world, but now it would have been a comfort against this strange dread.
He saw no one. He noticed nothing out of the ordinary.
Still, he took his cell phone out of his pants pocket. He hit a speed-dial number, not identifying himself to the person on the other end, and began to speak. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but I’m just confirming that you understand what has to be done if … well, if something should happen to me.” He paused, listening. “No, of course not. I don’t anticipate anything. I just wanted to ensure your help and tell you how much I appreciate it. And I wanted to remind you that discretion, absolute discretion, is required.”
He listened, then gave a short shake of his head. “No, really. It’s nothing. I didn’t intend to startle you. Everything is fine.”
And indeed it was. The sky was turning a sultry blue-black now. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” he said into the phone. “Thank you, and have a pleasant night.”
He picked up his wine again. He speared a bit of scalloped potato. He tried to force himself into the relaxed, almost euphoric state he would usually enjoy on such an evening.
The Ramsey Lewis CD came to an end, throwing his estate into cavernous silence.
Suddenly, he didn’t like being alone. What an odd thought.
For the first time in a very long time, Forester Pickett was afraid.
4
Sam was distracted. I could see it when I walked into the office of Cassandra Milton, Wedding Creator. Sam and I both thought the title wedding creator was pompous, but Cassandra was one of my mother’s best friends, and we’d heard her weddings always went off flawlessly.
“Hi, gorgeous.” Sam got up from his seat on one of the white couches in the waiting room. He was wearing a navy suit over his short but trim, strong body. He was thirty, a year older than me, and he had cropped blond hair and the sweetest olive-colored eyes I’d ever seen. But those eyes were strained today, the faint creases at the corners somewhat deeper.
He hugged me just a fraction tighter than normal.
I pulled back, studied him. “What’s up with you?”
“Just some complications at work.”
“Forester Pickett kind of work?” Sam also worked for Forester Pickett. Specifically, he worked for a private wealth-management firm that handled most of Forester’s investments, and Sam was one of the financial advisors assigned to him.
He nodded.
“Want to talk about it?”
“Not right now.”
“Does Forester know about it?”
“Yeah. But I need to talk to him some more.”
“Sometimes Forester likes determinations rather than discussions.”
“I know. And it makes me nuts.” Sam let me go and sank back into the couch. He dropped his head in his hands for a second, and his gold hair glinted under the muted overhead lights.
I sat next to him. “Are you all right?” Maybe it wasn’t work. Maybe he was suffering the same issue I was—feeling as if the wedding was a speeding train that wouldn’t stop. Hell, I was starting to feel like my life was that train. In a few short years, I’d gone from single girl associate with no responsibilities (except to bill some hours and have a good time on a Saturday night) to a nearly married, almost-partner, lots-of-responsibility woman with a fiancé who, just this past weekend, had started talking about houses in the suburbs.
Sam raised his head and put on the composed smile he used when he wanted to pacify his mother. “I’m fine.”
“C’mon, tell me.” And then I’ll tell you.
I had a happy vision of us blowing off Cassandra and the dinner at the Union League Club. We’d flee to a dark bar on Roscoe near Sam’s apartment. We’d drink beer and talk about how it had all gotten away from us, how we wanted to put the breaks on. We would decide that we wanted to be together, sure, but without all this formality and fuss. I would continue to get my sea legs at work. I would finally feel like I owned that job. And, in a few years, when we were both established and tiring of it all, maybe then we’d get married and think about a house in Winnetka.
Just then Cassandra Milton floated into the room. She was a tall, immaculately dressed woman in her fifties. “Well preserved,” Sam once called her. He was right. All I knew was that when the time came, I needed to have the name of the surgeon who preserved her.
“Ready for a few details?” Cassandra said. She said this every meeting. “A few details” almost always consisted of an hour of excruciating decisions about shrimp forks and frosting.
“Absolutely.” Sam stood and loosely clapped his hands in front of him, as if he’d just been in a huddle and someone had called Break!
I stood, too, telling myself it would all be worth it—eventually. I was just being immature about wanting to slow things down. I was a hundred percent certain I wanted to be with Sam. I’m not going to lie and say it had always been that way. When Sam and I first discussed getting married, I was struck with the enormity of the situation—no sex with anyone else ever again; having to see the same person every morning for as long as my life lasted; having to consult with someone about every major life decision from what blender to buy to what vacation to take. Being in the holy state of matrimony was nothing I’d ever romanticized. I didn’t need it as a notch on my belt. But I was wild for Sam. I adored him in a way I’d never realized was possible. Monogamy required giving a lot up, but I was going to gain a hell of a lot more. I loved Sam in such a way, that my whole body said, God, yes, each time I saw him.
And now here we were at the office of a Wedding Creator. It was all going to be okay.
I glanced at him for the hang in there look he always gave me at Cassandra’s, but he didn’t meet my gaze.
“Sure, Cassandra.” I stood and reached for Sam’s hand, but he just sat there, staring straight ahead.
“Sam?”
He looked up. “Sorry.” He stood quickly. “I forgot something. I mean, I’ve got to check on something. Can you handle this on your own?”
“You want to leave?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll go with you. We can put this off.”
“We cannot put this off,” Cassandra said. “The contract with the restaurant requires we choose our appetizer selections by tomorrow.”
“Can you do it?” Sam said. “Please?” With any other groom, I would assume he was wisely trying to shirk his duties. But Sam actually enjoyed all the planning that went into our wedding.
“Of course, but seriously, are you all right?”
He put on that practiced smile again. “Sure, yeah.”
“Okay. I’ll meet you at the dinner.” We’d talk then. I would get the whole thing out—all my doubts—and the talking would dispel my panic.
He blinked. He seemed to have forgotten about the work dinner. He looked at his watch. “Right, okay. I might be a little late, but I’ll meet you there.”
“Shall we?” Cassandra said, in the voice I knew as her impatient tone, even if it was cultured and low.
I squeezed Sam’s hand and kissed him on the cheek. “I’ll see you at the club.”
Later, I realized Sam hadn’t answered me. He just watched me walk into Cassandra’s office, and when I turned back to give him a reassuring smile, he seemed to be studying me, memorizing my face.
5
I sat in the ballroom of the Union League Club, an empty chair at my side.
“Where’s Sam?” asked Faith McLaney, a woman from Carrington Associates, the wealth-management firm where Sam worked. Faith was ten years older than Sam and, in some ways, a mentor to him. Their boss, Mark Carrington, handled only a few exclusive clients, while Sam and Faith backed him up, dividing the clients between the two of them.
“I’m not sure.”
I texted him again—Where are you? Still no reply.
I watched while a line of speakers from a newly formed venture-capital firm took the dais and eternally praised themselves for raising so much funding. I tried to make small talk with the others at our table—two people from a local accounting firm and their spouses—but because of my increasingly agitated worries about Sam, they were tough to tell apart save one woman’s lazy eye and her husband’s psoriasis.
“Sam’s on his way,” I kept saying to no one in particular, starting to doubt my own words with each second. Had he gotten held up with some emergency with Forester’s work? It was strange for him not to text me and let me know what was happening.
I went to the bathroom, stood at the counter and called Sam’s cell. It went to voice mail.
Q was someone I turned to for help with everything, not just work, so I called him to see if he had any ideas.
I’d been lucky enough to find Q while he was night staff at Baltimore & Brown doing word processing for attorneys, like me, who worked too much and too late. He had simply wanted to make some money until he could figure out what he should do with his life, having realized that his acting career wasn’t exactly taking off. He was conscientious and meticulous, and as soon as he’d handled a few projects for me, I begged him to become my assistant. Yes, he’d be working for someone slightly younger, I told him, and yes, maybe “legal assistant” wasn’t the day job he’d always dreamed of, but I’d get him as much money as I could, I’d let him go on auditions anytime he wanted and we’d have a blast. I told him that I needed him. Desperately. At the time, I was twenty-six. Only a year and half out of law school, and suddenly I’d found myself handling a large chunk of the legal work for Pickett Enterprises—and I knew I was in way over my head.
Q finally caved, and now, three years later, he was, as Sam always joked, my “work husband,” a husband who could and would always make things better.
But oddly, Q’s phone didn’t ring either and went straight to voice mail.
I went back into the dining room and sat staring at my engagement ring, while the speakers droned on. I tried to figure out when it had happened—when the feeling had started that the wedding was getting away from us, didn’t seem like us anymore. I had to talk to Sam about it. So where was he?
Whenever a dinner course was cleared, my eyes darted to my lap, where my cell phone sat, and I stared at the empty display. I texted him a few more times. Again, nothing. Something was wrong.
The desserts—glazed pears that were better suited for a Gerber jar—were served, but I pushed them away.
When the dinner ended I said goodbye to Faith and the rest of the table, then I left and tramped down the stairway that was lined with an eclectic, expensive array of oil paintings. Once in the lobby of the club, I called Q again, but again it went right to voice mail. I tried Sam’s cell phone … and his office … and his apartment number. Nothing.
I jammed the phone in my purse and wondered whether to keep being worried about Sam or move to pissed-off mode. This no-show was completely unlike him. In fact, he’d never done something this inconsiderate, this out of character, so my usual repertoire of fiancé-management techniques seemed inappropriate.
I walked back to my office, through the mostly empty Loop, now lacking its daytime vitality. I found my silver Vespa parked behind the building. My mom had gotten me started on scooters when I was sixteen. We didn’t need a car in the city, and yet she constantly worried about me waiting at public bus stops and El stations. I’d used the scooter through college and bought a new one during law school. I thought that when I started practicing law I’d get rid of it. But then gas prices skyrocketed, and there was something about driving the Vespa I found not only convenient and energy saving, but cathartic. After a day spent in the stale stratosphere of the law firm, I liked the fresh air on my face, the feel of movement, of getting somewhere, sooner than later.
I got on the Vespa and pointed it in the direction of Sam’s office. There was little traffic, so I was able to floor it up LaSalle Street. The dazzling lights of office buildings and restaurants bled past me into streams of colors. The wind tore through my hair, causing strands of orange curls to flick against my eyes and cheeks. I tried not to think of Sam. Instead, I let myself think how grateful I was that Illinois had no helmet law and, as a result, I could let my ears and my head fill up with the rumble and roar of city life.
In the lobby of Sam’s building the security guard called upstairs, at my request, and said no one was answering. Everyone had gone for the night.
“Can I look at the log to see when he signed out?” Sam had told me about how the security in his building was woefully out of date. To make up for it, the building required every person, even employees, to sign in and out each time they left or entered.
The guard, an overweight, middle-aged man with a drooping mustache, shook his head. “Sorry. No one can see the log.”
“Sure, sure.” I flipped my hair over my shoulder. “How do you like the Bears this year?”
The guard waved a hand. “Ah, shit, that kid they got as quarterback doesn’t even have gonads yet. We need somebody good.”
“Somebody like McMahon?” Most Chicagoans had never emotionally recovered from the beauty of the Bears’ mid-eighties victory in the Super Bowl. A reminder of such beauty was a guaranteed way to become best friends with anyone over forty who lived within a sixty-mile radius of Soldier Field. Name-drop a player from the ‘85 team to these guys and they were putty in your hands.
“Exactly!” the guard said.
“And they need a moral leader. Somebody like Singletary.” At this point I was just spouting names I remembered from seeing the Super Bowl Shuffle video after we moved to Chicago.
“Right! Shit, that’s exactly what they need.”
“My fiancé and I are big Bears fans. He was at Soldier Field the day Payton broke the rushing record.”
The guard’s eyes narrowed. “You kidding me?”
“No.” At the time, Sam had only been a kid, visiting a distant relative in Chicago, but he remembered it vividly.
“Wow,” the guard said in a hushed, reverent tone. “Wow.”
“Yeah, I gotta find him.” I straightened up. “Can you check that log and just tell me when he left?”
The guard eyed me. Then he put the logbook on the counter, swung it around and pointed to an entry at the top of the page. There, Sam had signed out of the office ten minutes before I’d seen him at Cassandra’s.
I looked up at the guard. “And he didn’t come back?”
He shook his head then retracted the book.
“Thanks.”
“Sure thing. Go Bears.”
“Go Bears,” I answered and left.
I called Sam’s apartment, then mine. No answer at either. I started my Vespa, but I wasn’t sure where I should go. What was I supposed to do now? Sam, where are you?
I called my best friend, Maggie, but only got her voice mail. Where in the hell was everyone?
As I clicked the Off button, my phone rang. I felt a tiny bit of relief rupture my worry. But it was a Chicago number I didn’t recognize.
“Hello?”
“Izzy, it’s Shane.”
“Oh. Hi, Shane.” Forester’s son rarely called me, but then maybe Sam was out with him for some reason. God, let it be as easy as that.
“Izzy,” Shane said. He seemed to choke, then I heard a snuffle. “My dad is dead.”
6
The first time I spoke to Forester I’d been out of law school for eleven months. After living the student life, with natural built-in breaks of a week here, two months there, I had struggled to get my body and mind on what Grady, my friend at work, and I called the coal-miner’s schedule. To us, it seemed that we labored as hard as coal miners with only a tiny light to illuminate the work ahead of us. As first-years, we were clueless about the law. We were given projects in piecemeal fashion, we worked until the wee hours to finish them, and then we turned them over to demanding partners, crossing our fingers that we hadn’t just prepared a thirty-page memo on the completely wrong topic—something that happened more frequently than one would think. Often, the partners weren’t clear about what they wanted, because they weren’t even sure themselves. Other times, they were pompous jerks who believed that associates should be able to divine precisely what they needed without a lick of direction.