Red Hot Lies

I blinked. He was right. “I’m sorry.”

He shook his head, brushing off my apology.

“No, really, I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just personal, what with Sam being gone, and then Forester. I’m having trouble seeing things correctly.”

“Yeah. We’re all having a tough time with Forester’s death.”

“I know. I realize you knew him much longer than I did. How … how are you?” I almost stumbled over the last few words. I’d never imagined being so personal with Tanner.

His mouth sagged a little. “Such a great man.”

“He was.”

He nodded. I nodded back. He stood, and I followed suit. It seemed we’d reached an impasse on our little come-to-Jesus moment.

“Izzy!” a woman’s voice screamed. “Where you?”

Back in my office, I moved the phone away from my ear and sighed. On even the best of days, Maria, my weddingdress seamstress, was hard to handle. First there was her energy level, which rivaled that of a Chihuahua on cocaine. Then there was her dual approach to life—one was Hispanic blue-collar, the other patrician elite. Maria only sewed and made patterns for the wealthiest and most fashionable of Chicago’s crowd. I would normally not have been able to afford her, or meet her extremely high taste levels, but our wedding coordinator had railroaded her into making my dress, and my mother had graciously offered to pay. And every other Wednesday for the last few months, Maria and I been making each other crazy.

I looked at my watch. “Shazzer,” I said, one of my replacement curse words for shit. It made no sense, but I liked it. My appointment had been at six o’clock, ten minutes ago, and I’d completely forgotten. Or maybe I’d forgotten on purpose. Yesterday, when the wedding had swamped my mind, I had wanted to forget. I was hit by guilt again now. Was I unconsciously borrowing trouble for myself?

“What you say?” Maria said, indignant.

“Maria, I’m sorry. I forgot our appointment.” I breathed out hard. “This has been a terrible day.”

A stumped silence. “Terrible day? We all have terrible day! I work hard. You work hard. But you go for appointment, you do what you say and you say you be here.”

“Yes, Maria, I know.” I paused. “A friend of mine died yesterday.” There. I’d thrown the highest card. You can’t trump death. Everyone gives you a pass for death.

Except, apparently, Maria.

“I no care that your friend die! You should call me if you want cancel. I have you book for one hour, and do you know what one hour of my time cost?”

“Yes, I do,” I said forcefully.

But the truth was, I didn’t know. Lately, I’d gotten so weighted down with the wedding and my job that I’d been somewhat avoiding my mother, who only wanted to talk about all things bridal. She was so wrapped up in the affair—what I would wear, what she would wear, what the tables would look like, what the place cards would say. She was not normally this frenetic or enthused about anything. She was normally the calmest of women, usually wearing a shawl of melancholy. But the wedding had jump-started her. Even her husband, Spencer Calloway, a well-known, now mostly retired real-estate developer, was surprised by how intense she’d gotten about it. But that’s what mothers were supposed to do, he’d said to me.

Suddenly, with Maria prattling on, I was embarrassed by how strained I thought I’d been by the wedding and my work. I would have given anything to go back to that kind of stress. The kind of stress that had me worrying about what bikini to take on the honeymoon in Costa del Sol, Spain. The kind of stress that left me pondering truly momentous decisions like whether to have a jazz trio for the cocktail hour or a full band. The stress of being the highest-paid associate at the firm.

And how could I have been so dismissive to my mother? My kind, wonderful mother who had raised two kids by herself? I had never really known what she had gone through when Dad died, but now I had an inkling.

Maria railed on about appointments and the importance of keeping them.

“Maria,” I said. She continued. Finally, I yelled, “Maria!”

She stopped.

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” And I called my mom.

* * *

Maria’s studio was on a lonely strip of Clybourn Avenue, north of Fullerton. The sole indication that business was conducted there was a small, neon sign that spelled Maria’s in magenta, cursive letters.

Inside, a team of seamstresses, mostly Hispanic, bent over the sewing machines. They looked up when I walked in. I often wondered what they thought of girls like me, spending so much time and money on one dress. The women quickly turned their gazes down when Maria strolled into the room. Maria was a steely sixty-year-old. She always dressed in timeless dresses—black, brown or navy shifts that could have been made today or forty years ago—and clunky, low-heeled pumps. Her black hair, which was giving way to silver, was pulled back in a chignon.

“You here. Okay,” Maria said, waving me toward the fitting room in the back. “Come, come.”

Just then the front door opened and my mother, Victoria McNeil, entered. The seamstresses glanced up again, but this time they weren’t as quick to return their eyes to their work. They couldn’t help but gawk at my mother. She had that effect on people.

Victoria McNeil was beautiful—in a willowy, elegant, strawberry-blond kind of way—but there were also some other qualities she possessed that drew people to her—that manner of melancholy combined with a hint of mystery. It was bizarre that we were mother and daughter. I was more brassy and flashy and quick to talk to everyone, while my mother was reserved and graceful and spoke quietly and only when needed. Then there were our looks—I’d gotten the bright red hair and freckles, while my mother clearly bore her ancestors’ more Nordic aesthetic.

Even Maria’s prickly face brightened at the sight of my mother. “Ah, Mrs. McNeil!” she exclaimed.

My mother greeted her, then turned to me and beamed. She always beamed when she looked at me or Charlie, but I don’t think I’d ever appreciated that open-eyed, unconditional appreciation as much as I did now.

“Hi, Boo,” she said, calling me by the nickname given to me by my father.

“Come, come.” Maria helped my mother out of her cashmere coat and dumped it in my arms. She took the purse from my mother’s grasp and shoved that in my direction, as well. Then she took my mother gently by the elbow and led her through the workroom, while I trailed behind like a Sherpa.

The fitting room was swathed in white wallpaper and curtains, and contained two slightly worn couches and a carpeted pedestal in the middle of the room.

Next to the pedestal, my dress was hanging. And it was gorgeous. Even now, unsure of whether I would ever wear it, having not wanted to wear it for a while now, I let out a little gasp.

The dress, made of a creamy, ivory Duchess satin, had a strapless top with a bustline that curved gently inward. The gown was A-line with graduated bands of ribbon. The effect, I hoped, was sweet but fashionable. I also wanted it to be sexy, hence the eight hundred fittings so that Maria and I could argue about how low the neckline should be, how tight the waist.

My mother sighed with pleasure when she saw it.

“Oh, Izzy,” she said. “Put it on.”

Maria left the room so I could change.

I stripped off my clothes, lifted the dress off the hanger and slipped it over me. I saw myself in the mirror—a palette of ivory topped with the red of my hair. I saw myself standing like this, in this dress, with Sam in front of an altar. Now, it didn’t seem so overwhelming. Now that he was gone.

The thought nearly flattened me.

I flopped back onto the couch.

“What’s wrong?” My mother sat next to me.

“A lot of things.” I gulped and looked at my mother’s face—smooth but for the faint lines around her eyes and throat. She had gone through so much when my dad died. I didn’t normally confide much in her, not because she couldn’t handle it, but simply because we had different styles of handling stress. Yet now more than ever, I needed advice from someone who had lost a spouse.

“It’s Sam,” I said. “He’s … well, he’s disappeared. And Forester died.”

My mother’s delicate lips formed an O. Her eyes, muted blue with flecks of gray, opened bigger. “What? My God.”

“I know.” I fell into her body and she wrapped her arms around me tight. For the second time in two days, I gave in to the tears lingering like unwelcome party guests. Apparently, the tears heard it was a big bash, because I cried huge gulping sobs. My mother squeezed me hard. I managed to tell her the story.

When I pulled back, she wore the same startled expression, but she was quiet. This was how my mother reacted to bad news—she went inside herself, she gathered evidence, she turned it over like a gem in her hand until she could determine its quality, its clarity.

“I can’t believe this,” she said quietly. “Why didn’t you call me sooner?”

I shrugged. “I guess I thought it would end. But it isn’t ending.”

I told her about the safe and the bearer shares and the cops who’d visited my office.

“Sam wouldn’t steal from Forester,” she said in a strangled voice. My mother loved Sam.

“I know. That’s what I think, too, but with him gone, with no other explanation.” I threw my hands up. “I don’t know what to believe.”

“Oh, Izzy, baby.”

The words were said with such feeling, and my mother’s eyes fixed on me like never before. We sat like that—two women who’d always thought themselves so different from one another, suddenly had so much in common.

My mother opened her mouth to speak again, when Maria stuck her head in the fitting room. “You ready now?” Her irritation was undisguised. She’d had enough of this.

“I don’t know,” my mother said. She grabbed my hand. “Do you want to do this?”

I sucked in a breath and thought about it. The doubts about Sam were starting to flood me, but I hated that. At my core, I believed he was a good man, but the evidence seemed so far the other way. I reminded myself the case wasn’t over. All the evidence wasn’t in yet. And so I would go forward, for now, with the wedding that just yesterday I didn’t think I wanted.

“Yeah, I do.”

I disentangled myself from my mom, gathered the cool, heavy satin skirt in my hands and climbed onto the pedestal.

Maria was already surveying me, pins at the ready on her wrist cushion.

Just then, my cell phone bleated from my purse. I jumped off the pedestal and scrambled for it.

Maria mumbled something in Spanish that I guessed were curse words.

Instead of Sam, cell, the display on my phone read, Unknown.

I answered it.

“Isabel McNeil?” It was a woman’s voice, calm and confident. “This is Andi Lippman with the FBI.”

I sat down hard on the pedestal. I felt bad news looming, large and black.

Maria cursed again and took the pins out of her mouth. My mother mouthed, “What is it?”

“Ms. McNeil? I’m calling about Sam Hollings.”

“Is there any news?”

“The FBI is investigating the matter of the shares owned by Forester Pickett, which are missing from Carrington & Associates.”

I blinked fast. The FBI, I thought. Once again, I was hit with how real this was, how severely momentous. “Have you heard anything new?”

She paused. “Well, I’m not exactly sure what you know and what you don’t. I’d like to meet with you in person.” She mentioned an address on Roosevelt Avenue. “Tomorrow at eleven.”

I rooted in my purse for my date book. Most people I knew kept their calendars on their BlackBerries or computers, but I liked the old-fashioned hard copy. I liked seeing my months, my weeks, my daily appointments laid out and organized in front of me.

I found the date book—thin with a maroon cover embossed in gold. A gift from Forester, I suddenly remembered. “One second, please.” I cupped the phone between my ear and shoulder and rifled through the pages for the end of October. I tried to think whether I had any meetings tomorrow, maybe a court call.

But as I reached the right page, everything blurred in front of me, because I realized it didn’t matter. Whatever I had to do tomorrow wasn’t important, not even a little bit, compared to Sam. And Forester.

I closed the book. “I’ll be there.”

16

Sam Hollings walked down Duval Street, sidestepping a woman sitting on the curb, talking on her cell phone, then one block later a pack of college kids pouring out of a bar, all drunk and happy and loud.

Sam gave the kids a wide berth. He hated how far away from them he felt, how much older. He easily remembered when getting loaded on a Wednesday night was not uncommon. God, the simplicity of those days, so unappreciated at the time. He was grateful for it now, feeling ancient and well past them.

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