Red Hot Lies

14

John Mayburn followed the navy-blue Mercedes down Hubbard Street and watched as it turned in to the parking lot of the East Bank Club. He drove past the lot, found a spot on the street, threw quarters in the meter and hustled to the club.

When he was a few hundred feet away, he saw Michael and Lucy DeSanto entering the place. For once, he wouldn’t have to sneak around or talk his way into an establishment in order to follow a subject. He was a member of the East Bank Club, although he rarely showed his face there anymore. He’d joined the club, the ritziest gym in the city, eight years ago when he was in his early thirties. The fact was, the East Bank Club, or simply “East Bank,” as its members called it, was also a social club. It boasted a grill, lounge and spa and, in the summer, a rooftop pool that could have been outside a Miami hotel with all the beautiful bodies splayed around it.

Mayburn had joined East Bank when he’d first started out in the world of private investigations. Out of college he had initially started work as a claims analyst for an insurance company. He spent a few years there, then a few more following that as an independent adjuster, digging up evidence about malingering in personal-injury cases. It all bored him. So one day, when a lawyer he’d worked with asked if he did investigations for other types of cases, he lied and said yes. He quickly got his P.I. license and hung up his own investigative shingle. Once he was a P.I., he needed to meet potential clients in a discreet way and, when someone hired him, he needed to buy them drinks and meals in a not-so-discreet way. Which brought him to East Bank.

And now, years later, he’d been hired by Bank Midwest to investigate Michael DeSanto, one of its executives suspected of laundering funds, and Mayburn was pleased to discover DeSanto was an East Bank member. Before the DeSanto case, Mayburn had considered canceling his membership because it seemed he was too busy to use it, yet he carried around a tiny pipe dream that he would find time to start working out again, he would find time to sit in the grill and chat up a gorgeous female exec in high heels. In short, he dreamed of an ordinary existence, but he just couldn’t seem to find the time to live it.

Mayburn ran his membership ID through the kiosk card reader and entered the gym, his eyes firmly on the black, curly-haired head of Michael DeSanto. When Michael and his wife, Lucy, a petite, elegant blonde with short hair, reached the locker rooms, they parted. Lucy called out to her husband as he walked away. She grabbed his arm and pulled him back for a kiss. Michael seemed to suffer through the gesture. Lucy stood for a second, watching his retreating back before she turned and pushed open the door of the women’s locker room.

Mayburn had been watching the DeSantos for over a month now. They were ultrawealthy—definitely wealthier than they should be on DeSanto’s executive salary. Mayburn had been trying to determine where the couple got the money that supported their high-flying lifestyle—a stunning home in Chicago, two others in Aspen and Grand Cayman, memberships on all the glitziest charitable boards and a small yacht they docked at Monroe Harbor in the summer. So far, he hadn’t had a lot of luck finding the source. And Bank Midwest was getting anxious.

Just that morning, he’d gotten a call from Ken Cook, his contact at the bank.

“Look, I’ll get to the point,” Cook had said. “The board had a meeting yesterday. We’re concerned as hell about DeSanto. We want him out, but we can’t let him go without proof. If we fire him and accuse him of laundering funds for organized crime, he’ll sue the hell out of us. We need something on this guy and soon.”

Mayburn had been getting this message from them indirectly for the past few weeks, but now the real call. What Ken Cook was nicely saying was Give us something fast or you’re the one who’s fired.

“I need a little more time,” Mayburn said. “This guy is smooth as hell, and his house might as well have a moat around it.”

“We don’t have the time. With the banking industry the way it is, we can’t take on any kind of scandal, and we all think DeSanto is bad news and we want to cut him out. Quietly. We just need proof.”

Mayburn wondered for a second if he should call it quits on this one. He’d had absolutely no luck getting inside their fortress of a mansion in Lincoln Park, nor had he had any success in getting close to Lucy, who he thought might inadvertently lead him to some piece of information about her husband. She was always at her husband’s side, or else surrounded by women—usually other moms at the playground. Private investigations of this sort—with an intelligent subject who had protected himself like a medieval king—required sitting on one’s hands, waiting and waiting and waiting, until the right moment of opportunistic light shot into your day. Unfortunately, there was little light breaking through the gloom in this case.

But if he quit, he’d have to give back the sizable deposit they gave him and then, most likely, he’d have to give up doing business with the bank ever again. Corporate clients were like that. If you couldn’t produce the goods one time, they forgot your name.

“Ken,” he said. “Just give me a few weeks. I’ll find out what you need to know.”

“You’ve got one week,” Ken said. “That’s it.”

With this on his mind, Mayburn trailed DeSanto into the locker room and went to his own locker fifteen feet away. Using the mirror inside the door, he watched DeSanto change from a charcoal-gray suit into black shorts and a T-shirt. DeSanto had a toned body but for a pair of faint love handles. Mayburn had no real reason to believe this, but he imagined Lucy DeSanto was the type of person who actually liked that extra flesh on her husband’s waist; thought it was sweet somehow, despite how DeSanto treated her—at least in public. In fact, it might be precisely because of how he treated her—like a possession he had little use for anymore—that Lucy probably found those love handles a sign of the humanity her husband no longer evidenced.

“Excuse me,” Mayburn heard someone say.

He shot a quick look to his right, surprised. It was just another member, gesturing to get past him.

“Pardon,” Mayburn said softly. He moved closer to the locker to let the man through. As he did so, he looked in the mirror again, and saw DeSanto glance his way.

Was he recalling that he’d seen Mayburn before? Was he remembering the guy behind him at the Starbucks on Armitage Avenue, near his home? Was he thinking of the man who’d sat two rows behind him while he was courtside at the Bulls game last week?

Mayburn turned his back to DeSanto. He doubted DeSanto could place him at either the coffee shop or the basketball game (or the bar at the Four Seasons or the men’s bathroom at Bank Midwest), even though he’d been in all those places within mere feet of DeSanto. Mayburn had a knack for blending into his surroundings. His medium-size build, nondescript brown eyes and typical forty-year-old face worked perfectly to keep him inconspicuous. There was also his ability to change looks—jeans and a Jordan jersey for the Bulls game, a pin-striped suit and ivory handkerchief for the Four Seasons—that led subjects to occasionally think they’d met Mayburn. But rarely did anyone recognize him outright.

When he allowed himself to think about it, he wondered if this vagueness about him was the reason his personal relationships tended to suffer. His family in Wilmette thought of him as slightly odd, slightly standoffish, if only because he hadn’t truly participated in their world. He hadn’t gotten married despite a girlfriend here and there (he’d been dumped last year by Madeline, a half-Swiss, half-Japanese stunner), he didn’t have children and he didn’t work in the family’s commercial-leasing business.

He left the locker room and followed Michael DeSanto to the cardiovascular room—a massive football field of a space lined with shiny silver treadmills, bikes and elliptical machines. The clientele here wanted a workout for sure—you could see the sweat and the rippling of toned leg muscles—but they were also here to be seen, hence the snazzy workout gear, the makeup on all the women’s faces, the carefully constructed ponytails.

Mayburn trailed DeSanto from a wide distance for the next hour—first on the treadmills, later into the weight room. DeSanto spoke to no one, said nothing that could help Mayburn get into the guy’s head or, even better, into the guy’s house, where it was believed he ran the bulk of his laundering operations.

Mayburn left the weight room and went in search of Lucy, who he saw inside a glass-walled studio, her body held in an awkward V-shape, next to ten other women struggling themselves into the same position. Mayburn checked the class schedule. Advanced Pilates, it read.

Mayburn suppressed a sigh and turned away. Advanced Pilates was not something he was going to be able to fake, and besides, Lucy was once again surrounded by other women. He could usually blend in just fine, but not in Lucy DeSanto’s world.

Something on this case had to give.

Mayburn left the club. As he walked toward his car, his cell phone vibrated. He reached inside his jacket pocket for the phone.

Baltimore & Brown, the display read.

He hit the Answer button, hoping to God it wasn’t that dickhead Tanner Hornsby, who treated everyone who wasn’t a lawyer as if they were distinctly second-rate. “Hello?”

“John, it’s Izzy McNeil.”

“Hey, Izzy.” Now, Izzy McNeil was the rare kind of lawyer—the kind who didn’t think her J.D. made her better than anyone else. And it didn’t hurt that she was hot as hell. He’d worked with her a few times when she was still Tanner’s associate and once when Forester Pickett was courting a well-known editor and Izzy wanted to know if the editor was in talks with other newspapers.

“You got a second?” she said.

“Sure.” He found his silver 1969 Aston Martin DB6 coupe. It was a pain-in-the-ass car, always needing work, and when it got icy in Chicago, it was useless, but he loved the thing.

He slid inside and started the engine. He listened to Izzy’s tales of woe—a fiancé who’d skipped town, apparently with a bunch of corporate shares of stock; the death of Forester Pickett; some business about letters Forester had gotten before he died and a freaky homeless guy.

“I’m really sorry about Forester,” he said. He didn’t meet the man when he’d handled the editor investigation, but he’d heard good things.

“Yeah.” Izzy sounded on the verge of tears, which made Mayburn uncomfortable. He stared through the windshield at two girls, probably high-school students, eating bagels while they walked up the street.

He said nothing to Izzy. He’d found it more helpful to let people say what they wanted on their own terms.

Izzy got herself together and asked if she could hire him to find the fiancé—Sam, the guy’s name was—and if he’d look into the matter of whether Forester Pickett had been killed.

“I thought you said he died of a heart attack.” Mayburn put the car into drive and pulled out of the lot.

“That’s what they say. But he’d been getting those letters. And what the homeless guy said to him—about how he’d join Olivia if he wasn’t careful—I mean, it’s clear someone was threatening him.”

“I don’t know about that.” Izzy was sounding like a conspiracy theorist, and it depressed him that this woman he’d always thought of as sexy with her head screwed on straight was losing it a little.

She made a short growl, like she was irritated with him. “I promised Forester I would look into this if something happened, and now it has. I just don’t think there’s any way Sam would steal outright from Forester.”

“But he logged in to the safe and now those shares are gone, and they’re worth, what, thirty million?” He turned onto Franklin and headed north. “He made off with them in the middle of the night and disappeared. On the same day Forester died.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Yes, but what?” he said.

They both fell into silence.

Lately, Mayburn had found himself simply wanting to do his work and go home. He knew this meant he was growing bored.

He only wanted cases that paid top dollar, or that gave him the street cred to continue building his résumé. Because if he wasn’t personally drawn to the work anymore—and he wasn’t, he was sick of the brain-stultifying effort that mostly involved sitting in a car with an audio surveillance system, listening to people taking a shit and having sex and just generally living their lives the way he wasn’t—then he might as well get paid a heck of a lot of money to do it, and it better not depress the hell out of him. There was no way that Izzy’s case—if he could even call it that—was not going to depress him. He would watch her go from a girl with exuberance and optimism to a bitter, pissed-off woman who’d been dumped and bamboozled.

“Hey, Izzy, I’m sorry this is happening to you, but I don’t handle domestic stuff.”

“This isn’t domestic! It’s not like Sam is screwing around on me, and I’m asking you to take pictures for evidence.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but that’s probably what would happen. If I could locate him, I’d probably find him in bed with some sweet young thing, and I’d have to give you photos of it, in order for you to believe it.”

“Screw you.”

He chuckled, grudgingly. She had a mouth, he had noticed and despite his North Shore upbringing, he liked that in women. “Really, I’m sorry. I’ve got my hands full right now and, even if I didn’t, you couldn’t afford me.” He reached Division, turned left and then right onto Clybourn, headed toward his house just south of Lincoln Square.

“Sorry,” she said. “Look, I’ll pay whatever it takes.”

“I charge a retainer up front, and it’s big.”

“I remember. I approved your bills when you investigated the editor.”

“That was small-time, and my rates have gone up since then. I’ve got more work than I can handle.”

He mentioned a sum, the same he’d charged the bank where DeSanto worked. He explained how he then charged hourly, eating away at the retainer, but how he usually went well over it. He detailed the incidental fees that the client also had to pay—food, gas, copying, phone calls. He told her how his hourly rate soared if he worked nights or weekends, which was often, especially in a missing person’s case. And then just to scare her, he told her how much he’d charged on his last case.

Izzy went silent. “We’re getting married,” she said, “and so we’ve got a lot of money going out the door. I couldn’t afford those fees.”

“Right.” Sad that the girl thought she was still getting married. “I really wish you the best, and if you hire someone else and you want to run things by me, give me a call, okay?”

“Yeah. Sure.” Her voice sounded flat, which was hard to hear, since he’d always thought of her as full of life.

He’d watched her during the editor case. He was good at that—the watching. What he’d observed about Izzy was a quick ability to adapt. You could see her changing her vocabulary, her thinking, to fit whatever she was talking about or dealing with. She didn’t seem like a natural at her job as Forester’s lawyer, but he could also see that she believed she could be good at it if she just tried her ass off.

It would be an uphill battle for her now that Forester was dead. He’d gotten the feeling from everyone at the firm that they thought of her as the pretty girl who’d lucked into the gig.

He pulled into the alley behind his house and then into the garage. “Again, I’m sorry you’re going through this, Izzy. Good luck.”

“Thanks. Okay, thanks.” Her voice sounded far away, fragile.

He hated to do it, but he hung up.

15

Between the meeting with the detectives and Mayburn’s rejection I was feeling scared, my anxiety soaring. I paced my office. I picked up my phone over and over. I couldn’t think of who else to call, and so I kept banging the phone onto the base.

Q opened the door and came inside. “Need anything?”

Behind him, I could see Holly, the assistant of the attorney next door, watching us. “I need you to get Holly to stop staring at me.”

“Oh, ignore her.” He looked over his shoulder and waved a hand. “She’s two bad decisions away from being a crack whore.”

I sat down. “I don’t know what to do with myself.”

“Sounds like what you need is a Halloween party with a lot of gay men.”

I groaned. “I forgot.” Q’s annual party was that weekend.

“Max and his mother have been decorating for days.”

“I don’t think I can do it.”

“I don’t want to do it either. I’m so not in the mood. But you have to come. It wouldn’t be the same without you.”

“Sam was supposed to come with me.” I swallowed. I was supposed to do everything with Sam. For the rest of my life.

“You can still wear the pumpkin costume,” Q said.

I managed half a laugh. “I did not get a pumpkin costume, you pervert.”

Q’s big idea had been for me to dress as a pumpkin and for Sam to stick pumpkin seeds all over his face and wear a name tag that said, Peter the Pumpkin Eater.

“It’s not for a few days,” Q said. “Give it some thought.”

“A few days. That seems so far away.” For a long time, I’d been able to see my entire future before me—my work with Forester, my marriage to Sam. When it was all overwhelming me it seemed that the future was just a postcard—appealing and detailed on the front but flat when you really looked at it. And yet now that I had no idea what the next day would be like, I craved that pretty picture.

I glanced at Holly, then back at Q. “What are they saying? Does anyone know anything new?”

Q sighed. “It’s just Tanner flapping his gums. But nothing new.”

I felt a presence outside my door, I saw two first-year attorneys walking by, pausing for a second when they got to my office. One threw a nervous smile my way. The other glanced around.

“Hi, guys,” I said.

I was usually a favorite among the law clerks, all of whom were stellar students from the local law schools. I was closer to their age than a lot of the other lawyers. I would sometimes drink with them after work, and I would give the straight skinny about whose butt to kiss and who to avoid.

But now they looked at me with curiosity and something approaching pity. “Hi,” they said then kept walking.

I wanted to yell out, Nothing to see here! Instead, I stood, closed the door and grabbed my suit coat off the back of it. I put it on and looked in the mirror. My lightly freckled skin appeared pale with a faint gray hue, and my hair, normally bright and orange-red, looked faded. It was as if, in a twenty-four-hour span, I’d lost some of my luster. The thought only powered me into action.

I looked at Q. “I’ll be back.”

He squinted his eyes, probably sensing I could get myself into trouble. “Why don’t you …”

“I’ll be back.” I turned, opened the door and stormed down the hallway.

I marched to the elevators and pushed the button repeatedly. I rode for two floors then made my way to the last door down the long hallway. Tanner’s office.

Inside, Tanner was on the phone, his chair turned toward his windows so that he didn’t notice me at first. I stood in the doorway, trying for patience, and looked around the place.

Every partner at Baltimore & Brown was encouraged to decorate their office in their own way and each got a small budget, but Tanner had clearly gone over his. His desk was a massive Oriental-teak affair, carved in detail and polished with a rosy, high gloss. His rug was plush, swirled in shades of crimson. Unlike most of the other lawyers who dealt with the overhead fluorescents, Tanner’s office was lit by a trio of antique lamps.

He must have sensed me there, for he turned in his chair. The exhaustion in his eyes seemed to mirror mine.

“I’ve got to go,” he said into the phone. “Hi to Peg. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

He waved me toward the brocade couch across from his desk. I closed the door and took a seat.

Tanner’s eyes moved to the closed door, then to me. No one called the stage directions in his office except Tanner. I was past caring.

“How are you?” Tanner said. He looked as if he cared about the answer, which threw me.

“I’ve been better.”

He nodded. He stared out his window for a moment, then back at me. “What do you need?” He glanced down at his watch.

There it was—the typical brusque tone, the usual attitude that assumed everyone would run around him like obsequious puppies. I was glad for the condescension. It put me right back in the mood.

“You know what I need?” I said, heavy on the sarcasm. “I need you to stop spreading rumors about my fiancé. The whole firm is talking about Sam and the bearer shares and the safe and Forester. And the only way they could be finding this out is from you or Q. And I know it’s not Q. I’d have thought that you’d respect the privacy of another lawyer.”

Tanner didn’t say anything immediately, but his face softened into empathy. This left me feeling off-kilter. Tanner rarely listened or heard or thought about anyone apart from himself. Finally, he said, “I would think that you would appreciate my position.”

“What position is that? This is none of your business.”

His eyes narrowed, and he shook his head as if disappointed. “Izzy.” He paused. It was the first time he hadn’t called me Isabel. “What was I supposed to do here? I found out that the fiancé of one of my associates, one of the firm’s best associates, appears to have stolen a lot of money from one of our biggest clients. I have to tell my partners about that. It is my fiduciary duty to do so. And if those partners tell their associates and the associates tell the secretaries, I cannot control that.”