Red, White & Dead
When I was younger, she had sent me a card every year for my birthday, beautiful cards with Italian words that she would translate in her tiny penmanship, as if she hoped that from afar she could teach me Italian, that I could share her passion for the country and the language.
There were other cards from her, too—some for graduations and other big life events. The last one I’d received was for my law school graduation. It was hard to believe we hadn’t shared any contact since then, but the years had slipped away, and I hadn’t been good about keeping up my end of things, either.
I stood from the floor, groaning a little at the stiffness in my legs. Holding one of her cards, I moved to my desk and switched on the small light against the encroaching darkness outside. I looked for my date planner. Most of my friends, and nearly all the lawyers I knew, kept their calendars on their BlackBerrys or computers, but I liked the old-fashioned hard copy, liked seeing my days laid out in front of me. Those pages used to be chock-full of meetings, depositions and conference calls. Now there were only a few tragically mundane things. Take Vespa to get headlight changed. Buy tampons. Teeth cleaning.
I found the date book—thin with a maroon cover embossed in gold—which my former client, Forester Pickett, had given me before he died. I kept some contacts written in the back. Flipping there, I found Aunt Elena’s phone number in Rome. Hoping it was still the same, I began to dial, but then I looked at my watch. Eight-thirty. Which meant it was three-thirty in the morning Rome time.
I hung up the phone and sat back, disappointed.
My cell phone rang. Mayburn.
“Meet me for a beer?” he asked.
I looked at my office floor, strewn with cards. “Don’t think so, but thanks.”
“C’mon. Just one. I just need to get out. I’ll come to your hood. Meet me at Marge’s. Half an hour. One beer. Please.”
I’d never heard him say please. He must be in a bad way. “All right. Just one.”
Twenty minutes later, I walked down Sedgwick to Marge’s, a bar that had been in the hood for years and years, but had undergone a recent renovation. Inside, it was clean, the tin ceiling sparkling. Being a lover of dive bars, I missed the atmosphere it used to have.
Mayburn was sitting at the bar. He turned when I came in and gave me a little wave.
Mayburn was in his early forties, although he looked younger and acted older. He was cynical and sarcastic in that way people are when they’re using such traits as a shield. The only person I’d seen penetrate that defense of his was Lucy DeSanto, and now that she was back with her husband, Michael, it was as if Mayburn’s shield had been ripped away, leaving him a little colorless, a little flat.
“Hey,” he said, when I reached him. “Thanks for coming.” His sandy-brown hair, which was usually styled well, was slightly messy. During the week he wore suits and jackets, but on nights and weekends he wore cooler clothes—great jeans, beat-up brown boots, stuff like that. At Marge’s now, he wore old jeans and a black T-shirt that had a skull and crossbones on it.
I pointed at his shirt. “Feeling chipper today?”
“Yeah. Really fucking chipper.”
I sat and ordered a Blue Moon beer with an orange. It was what Sam used to drink, and recently—maybe I was missing Sam—I’d adopted Blue Moon as my beer of choice.
Mayburn turned toward me on his stool. “So. Any other problems?”
He meant the debacle at Gibsons, about being chased. “No.”
“No one lingering around you? No cars tailing you?”
“I don’t think so. I walked around all day and—”
“You walked around all day?” His face was irritated. “Jesus, Izzy, I told you—”
“You told me to keep it low-key, keep a low profile, whatever. But how am I supposed to do that? I’m looking for a job.” I thought of my day, which had consisted of lunch, sitting by a pond and drinking with my family. “Sort of. I mean, I can’t hang out in my condo all day, just because you got me into trouble last night.”
He sighed. “I know. I’m sorry. But you have to be careful.”
“I am. I kept my eyes open. Believe me, I don’t want those guys finding me any more than you do.”
“But you’re hoping someone will find you,” Mayburn said. “You’re hoping your dad will step out of the shadows and introduce himself.”
I hated that I was so transparent, but the tone of Mayburn’s words was kind.
I took a sip of my beer. “I guess you can understand wanting someone to come back to you,” I said softly.
A pause, a pained one. Mayburn turned back to his own beer. “I do understand. But, hey, let’s not lose sight of the fact that my someone is alive.”
I said nothing.
“Izzy, don’t get your hopes up here.”
“Hopes? I have no hopes. Hell, if anything, I hope I’m wrong. Because if he’s really alive, what does that mean? What would that say about him?”
He certainly wouldn’t be the man I knew, the father I thought I’d had. And somehow that would be worse than having him dead for all those years.
“Did you talk to Lucy today?” I asked, changing the subject.
He groaned a little. “Yeah. She isn’t real pleased with me. Michael came home last night, yelling about the friend she brought into the house, the one who sent him away to prison. She knows I sent you to investigate them.”
“Does Michael know that you and Lucy had a relationship while he was in jail?”
“She told him she dated someone when he was inside, but she wouldn’t tell him who. She wants me to back off now. She wants to give her marriage a shot.”
“Even if Michael still seems pretty tight with Dez Romano?”
“He tells her he’s not. Says he just went to see Dez to clean up some stuff, to tell him he’s out for good. I don’t believe that, but she does. Or at least she wants to.”
I patted his hand, and surprisingly he let me. “You have to let her do whatever she thinks is best for herself and her family. If you don’t, you could lose her.”
“She could get trapped again. She could get trapped with this guy forever.”
“It’s her call, Mayburn. Let her make it.”
He pulled his hand away, went silent for a second. “I don’t know what to do with myself.”
“How about helping me look for my father?”
He gave me a smile. “Even though I think you’re a little delusional, sure. Tell me what you need.”
I told him about my dad’s flight instructor being someone from the federal government, someone named R. J. Ohman. “Can you find him?”
“I’ll kick it around.”
My cell phone rang. I looked at the screen. Theo. My pulse picked up. I answered. “Hey,” I said, trying to sound calm. I stood and moved away from Mayburn.
“Girl.” He’d been texting me, but I hadn’t heard his voice in months. And with that one word, I felt a little short of breath.
“Hey,” I said again. I went to the front window. The night sky was a sexy, deep orange from the last bit of the sunset.
“I’m by your house,” he said.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Had a beer with a friend at Border Line.”
“That’s not near my house. It’s in Bucktown.”
“But it’s on North Avenue. And your place is near North Avenue.”
“And so this is what? A booty call?”
“Like you’d let me get away with that.” He laughed. “I had to drink a beer to get up the courage to call you since I screwed things up with you last time.”
“You didn’t screw up. You just didn’t tell me something that I wish I’d known about.”
“Exactly. I wasn’t totally honest, and I don’t feel good about it. Give me another chance.”
I turned away from the window and leaned back against the wall. “At what? Theo, I’m about to turn thirty—”
“When?” he interrupted.
I told him the date. “But that’s not the point. I’m almost thirty and you’re twenty-one.”
“Twenty-two.”
“When was your birthday?”
“May.”
“I cannot believe you were born in the Eighties.”
“You owe me a birthday present.”
“I owe you?”
“Let me say that a different way. You want to know what I want for my birthday?”
“The ability to rent a car by yourself?”
He laughed. That was one thing, among the several, that I enjoyed about Theo. Unlike many men, he had the ability to see himself with a sense of humor. Maybe it was due to the fact that he was gorgeous. And smart. And sexy. And wealthy.
“I want to see you,” he said. “Just see you. Let me stop over and say hi. We can sit on your front stoop if you don’t want me to come up.”
“We never did get to sit on the stoop last time, did we?” When we’d dated in April, my friend’s murder and me being a suspect meant the media had been camped out on my front lawn much of the time.
“So what do you say?”
I walked back toward Mayburn. I decided not to think too long about Theo, but rather to go with what I wanted. A baseline want, maybe, but I really didn’t care. “I’ll see you outside my house,” I told him.
Fifteen minutes later, truly night now, and I was sitting on the stoop with a glass of water, moisture beading on its sides, waiting for Theo. Mayburn had given me crap about dumping him for, as he called Theo, “a twelve year old.”
“He’s not twelve,” I said.
“Sounds like he might as well be.”
“He’s cool. Really.”
“Oh, I’m sure your boy toy is cool.”
“He’s not a boy toy! He’s—”
“Look, Iz, you don’t have to explain it to me.” He pulled my beer toward him. “I’m going to sit here and finish the rest of your beer and then I’m going home.”
“And you’re not going to call Lucy.”
“Right,” he said. Then, again, “right,” as if he needed to convince himself.
I put Mayburn out of my mind when I saw Theo turn onto Eugenie Street, a tall figure, solid and dark with the streetlights behind him. I could see the outline of his muscled shoulders, the rounded dip and curl of his biceps. I pushed my sundress between my legs and closed them.
I waited until he was standing before me—looking down, his chin-length hair falling forward onto his face— then I said hello. I put my water down. He held out a hand and pulled me to my feet. He wrapped his arms around me and I thawed, curving myself around his abdomen, his chest, hugging him tight, surprised at the relief. The feeling was quickly followed by desire—shots of it, stinging through me, hitting my brain, my body.
Theo looked up at the building above us. “Are your neighbors home?”
I looked up with him. The lights were on in all three condos. “Yeah.”
“Think they’ll come downstairs?”
“Why?”
“You think they’ll come downstairs?”
“No. My neighbors usually have to be up early. They both work.” Unlike me.
Theo reached an arm out and pushed the front door, which I’d propped open with a rock. He kicked the rock away and pulled me into the stairwell, a place constantly too dark, a complaint I’d made more than once to the management company. But now, with the door shutting behind us, Theo pushing me against the wall, kissing me deeply, I didn’t mind that the stairwell was shadowy and hot.
Desire turned into frantic craving. I kissed him back hard, threading my hands through his hair, hearing myself pant, gasp.
He lifted me up, legs around him, then pushed me back against the wall. I kissed him deeper, gulping at his mouth. I felt my body temp soar, my mind open.
“Should we go upstairs?” His words were muffled by his mouth on my throat, my collarbone.
“No. No way.” I yanked at the skirt of my sundress, pulling it up, and I wrapped my legs around him tighter.
7
The next morning, Theo was up by six and ready to leave ten minutes later, kissing me on my closed eyes, his soft hair brushing over my face.
“I’ve got to get to work,” he said. “Bunch of meetings today.” Theo had founded a Web design software company while he was in high school. He went to Stanford on a full-ride scholarship, but dropped out after a year. I’d been told he was making millions and millions now. We didn’t much talk about work. Truly, we didn’t talk much at all.
I pulled him toward me and kissed him, then we murmured our goodbyes. When he was gone, I lay in bed, eyes still closed, replaying the night. My bedroom felt thick with heat from the memories.
I fell back to sleep, and when I woke up at eight, my mind drifted to my dad. Or, should I say, to that man in the stairwell.
I called my brother. “How are you?”
“Nervous. I have to go into the radio station today to fill out paperwork and meet with the head producer.”
“Don’t be nervous. Everyone loves you.”
He laughed. “Thanks, Iz, but c’mon, everyone loves me at a party. Everyone loves me at a bar. This is a job.”
“It’s so weird to hear you say the J word. You want to do this, right?”
“I do. I really do. I was up all night thinking about it.”
“You were?” I couldn’t hide the surprise in my voice. Charlie never stayed up all night—not to party, not to be bothered about girls, not to fret about anything. If Chicago were in the grips of a natural disaster, the city being swept into Lake Michigan by a violent, massive tornado, Charlie would land in the lake, find something to use as a raft and lie down for the night, happy to let the jostling waves put him to sleep.
“You’ll be fine,” I said. I told him what I used to look for when I was searching for a new assistant. As I thought of working at the law firm and how I’d eventually hired my amazing assistant, Q, I felt rather misty-eyed about those days in a way I hadn’t when going through them.
Then I asked Charlie about the book, the one our dad used to read to us. “Do you have it?” That book was one of the few objects that reminded me sharply of my dad and made me feel close to him, or the man he used to be. After the other night, I wanted that.
“I think I left it at Mom’s house with a bunch of other books the last time I moved.”
“Perfect.” My mother had other books of my father’s, too. Maybe looking at them would give me some sense of him, tell me something about him.
A pause. “Iz, be careful with all this.”
“All what?” I threw back my sheets and stood up. The image that greeted me in the mirror over my dresser was comical. My long red hair was stringy in parts, extra curly in others, springing from my head and falling around my shoulders in crazed coils. My neck was splotchy from being kissed so many times. I tugged down a corner of the T-shirt I slept in. There was a red spot—a bite mark—on the top of my left breast. I’m scarred, I thought. And I was not unhappy about it.
“You know Dad is dead, Iz,” Charlie said. “Has been for a long time.”
“There was no body.”
“When you crash a helicopter into a huge lake, there’s a good chance the body won’t be recovered. Seriously, Iz, don’t let being out of work and away from Sam make you nuts.”
“I’m not nuts.” I looked at that bite mark. “And right now I’m okay about Sam.”
“I know. But, hey, learn from your brother. Use the time you have when you’re out of work. Go have a glass of wine.”
“It’s 9 a.m.”
“Exactly. You’re already an hour late.”
We hung up, and I walked to the kitchen, opened my fridge. I thought of Charlie’s words and considered a half-full bottle of pinot grigio. The thought made me nauseous. Charlie and I were simply different. We’d always known that. No reason to take my unemployment and turn it into alcohol dependency.
An hour later, I was at my mom’s. It was one of my mother’s greatest pleasures to give or loan her children something, even something mundane, because it meant she was a part of our lives; it meant she was needed.
If I was, for example, on the phone with my mother and casually mentioned I needed lightbulbs, my mother would inevitably say, in a quick voice, which counted as excited for her, “I’ve got lightbulbs. What kind do you need? What wattage?” I would tell her that the hardware store was closer than her house, that I would get them there, and inevitably she would be disappointed.
So that morning, I called and asked if I could borrow a pair of earrings I liked and maybe a book.
“Of course!” she said quickly, before giving me a summary of the three books she’d finished in the last week.
When she opened her door, she was already showered and dressed for the day in a cream skirt and silver silk blouse. She hugged me. “Do you want me to make you some green tea?”
I held up my Starbucks cup. “Already got it.”
“There are four pairs of earrings on the counter in the kitchen. Take all of them. Meanwhile, I have to help Spence with something.” She stopped. “Oh, and take anything you want from the library.”
I walked through her house to the library, a cozy, winter-hideaway room off the kitchen where none of us went in the summer. It was loaded with bookshelves and plump leather chairs. Although it had French doors that looked onto the back garden, they were partially obscured with yellow velvet drapes.
My mother had a desk in there, where she worked on her charity, an organization called the Victoria Project, which helped widowed women with children. A few stacks of paper sat on the desk, but it was the slow time of the year for the project, and so the library was as pristine as the rest of my mother’s house. I drifted to her fiction section and perused some novels, but my eyes kept moving upward, to the shelf at the top right, the one above the autobiographies, the one that required a step stool to reach.
A wooden stool with two steps was tucked to the side of the shelves. I pulled it over and climbed the steps. I felt a little dizzy as I did so, part of me remembering climbing down the dark steps the other night, another part of me woozy with the sense of climbing now into the past.
These were my father’s books. I easily found the one Charlie and I talked about. Poems & Prayers for the Very Young.
I took it off the shelf and stepped off the stool, drawing my fingers over the cover, over the drawing of the two children on the front. I felt flooded by snippets of recollection—my dad’s hands opening that book; me, excitedly pointing to a poem I wanted to hear.
I flipped, reading the first lines. I wake in the morning early. And always, the very first thing …
What did my dad do first thing in the morning these days?
I chastised myself a little for asking the question. What were the chances that he was really alive? Was this something I’d concocted from the recesses of my mind to distract myself from the fact that my life was stuttering?
Yet here I was on a Tuesday morning, when I should have been working (or at least looking for work), idly perusing my mother’s bookshelves, stepping back in time. Later, I told myself. Later I would look for a job, then I would sort through the night with Theo and what it meant, if anything. I would call Sam for the first time in weeks and see how he was doing, how we were doing.
I put the book down on my mother’s desk and stepped back up on the stool. A few of my dad’s textbooks were there, a couple of those novels he used to read and some historical books dealing with the history of Southern Italy and others on uprisings in Italy and Greece.
My father was half Italian on his mother’s side, and he always had a taste for learning about his heritage. I opened the history books one by one, flipping through them. The pages were golden with age. I searched for notes my father might have made, passages he might have underlined, but there was nothing like that.
I looked at a book about urban regeneration in Naples. I flipped through the pages the way I had with the other books. Again, no idle thoughts were scribbled into the margins, nothing that told me what my dad was thinking as he read the lines. But at the end, I found something sandwiched tight between the back cover and the last page. A newspaper clipping, dated February 1970.
The clipping was small, almost ashy to the touch, and like the book pages, it was yellowed. I unfolded it and read the headline. Thieves Kill Man at Shell Station.
I began to read the text and flinched when I saw the name of the victim—Kelvin McNeil. Suddenly, I remembered my dad talking to me one night, telling me a story, but this one wasn’t from a book. It was about his own deceased father, the one who would never meet his grandkids.
You would have called him Grandpa Kelvin, he’d said, and he was a great man. He loved your grandmother very much. He always said the best thing he did was marry her.
Grandma O? I asked.
My father had nodded, smiled. Grandma O was Oriana, my dad’s mom. She lived in Phoenix, having moved out there from the East Coast when it was still a desert and not a suburb. Because of the distance, I only saw her about once a year. She’d died in a car accident a month before my father.
I got down from the step stool, held the article closer and read it.
Kelvin McNeil, it said, had pulled his vehicle, a 1969 F100 truck, into a Shell Station. Five minutes later, a neighbor screamed from an apartment next door. Police arrived at the scene and found McNeil lying dead beside his truck, the victim of a stabbing to his chest and abdomen, his wallet stolen. The keys were still in the ignition.
8
Dez Romano watched Michael DeSanto pace his office.
“We’ve gone over this,” Michael said, “but there’s got to be something I’m missing, you know?”
Dez decided to say nothing.
Michael kept pacing. “When my wife met her last year, she said her name was Isabel Bristol. She said she was a lawyer who moved here from L.A.”
“Did you have someone check the California Bar records?”
“Yeah. No one with that name.”
Dez reached forward to his desk and picked up a program from the Naples opera house, which he’d gotten on his trip there two weeks ago. The opera had been Puccini’s Turandot. He leafed through the program, remembering the heat in the opera house, the women waving fans in front of their faces, the swell of the orchestra’s music, the lone, clear note of the alto that cut through the heat and made everyone think of no one but her.
Michael kept pacing, kept talking about the redhead. Even though he was out on bail for the money laundering he’d done for Dez and the Camorra, the case, from what Dez had heard, was nearly lock solid. Michael would most likely be heading to a federal pen for something like ten years. Dez’s source had also told him that although the authorities could prove Michael had been laundering funds for a company in the suburbs called Advent Corporation, they couldn’t tie the ownership of the company to Dez or anyone in the Camorra. The attorneys Dez had originally paid to structure Advent Corporation had charged him astronomically, but they’d been worth every penny.
As far as Dez could tell, it was only Michael, and his word, that could bring Dez down, and so Dez wanted to keep Michael as happy as possible, until he could pat him on the shoulder and tell him he’d see him after prison. He had promised Michael that he would always have a job with him, a place in Dez’s system, and a hell of a lot of money when he got out. And Michael was happy to be a cog in the wheel.
So now Dez watched Michael stalk and talk in front of his desk. It was tough to take Michael’s energy. Dez tuned him out. He was thinking of that alto, and yes, he was thinking of the redhead. In fact, he’d been thinking of little but her since Sunday night when he’d first seen her at the bar, her head dipped down toward her cell phone, her face grimacing at what she read there, the way the purple silk of her dress had slipped down one shoulder. At that moment, she struck him as exactly the kind of woman he wanted now that he was divorced. She looked educated, well brought up. But she also looked like a hell of a lot of fun.