Cat in a Hot Pink Pursuit (28 page)

For one wild moment, Molina wanted to rip the dessert
from the protective baggie, gobble it down, eat the evi
dence, take two aspirin, and think about it in the morning.

She picked up her cell phone.

Something bad in the neighborhood? Who you gonna call?

What was happening with Mariah, and how could a
mother under siege deal with it? Not to mention Rafi Nadir
stalking out of her past like a mummy brought to life.

Who you gonna call?

The latest number on her instant dial was Larry Paddock's. Paddock. Hip, available, suddenly there and suddenly interested.

Not . . . unattractive. Probably a damn good under
cover cop.

Suddenly there.

Molina hit a pre-programmed number. It was an
swered despite the late hour, thank God, but she'd ex
pected no less.

“
Molina. No, not exactly. Got a minute? Or twenty. Good. Thanks, Morrie.”

Chapter 30

The Extent
of
the
Law

Matt still saw stars, not his fellow guests on today's live
edition of
The Amanda Show,
but from the intense televi
sion studio lights.

The lights made everything beyond the hot, faux living-room set seem unreal. No matter how many times he appeared on the talk show, and this was his seventh or eighth visit, he never lost the sense that everything on camera happened in an overcivilized dreamtime, not unlike the Australian aborigines' mystical cycle.

Nothing mystical about leaving the studio for
Chicago's hyperactive streets. Now he was in a cab on
traffic jammed Michigan Avenue near Water Tower
Place.

New York City soared, a stone forest primeval with
thin tall buildings. Chicago squatted. The city's broad, heavy-set edifices were also high and huge, but Chicago post–Carl Sandburg was more a sumo wrestler of a city. Manhattan was a wirewalker.

Now Matt was trading one thick tower for another,
from the TV studio to an office building a few blocks farther up Michigan Avenue.

He carried a slim aluminum briefcase, accoutered
more as a celebrity dilettante than a legal eagle. He'd
bought it for this one occasion: broaching the law offices of Brandon, Oakes, and McCall. That decades-old name had been on the papers giving his mother title to the old, two-flat residence in the city's decaying Polish section almost thirty-five years ago.

By now, sitting on the hot seat of a television talk show
set was old hat and Chicagoans he had contact with coming and going might recognize him. Might comment on
the day's topic. Tell him about their brother/sister/kid
who should be on
The Amanda Show
He had become
what Temple so aptly called a semicelebrity. A regular on
a surviving talk show. Not quite
Oprah.
Not
Ellen.
Not
The View.
But comfortably second tier. When it came to
being in the spotlight, Matt liked second tier fine. That
was where the fitful public limelight didn't fry your private life for dinner.

Dignity was not necessarily a requirement for the job but he'd managed to keep his, so far, during his media ramble. Dignity would be the key to getting any kind of honest attention from Brandon, Oakes, and McCall.

And dignity was the reason he was visiting this old es
tablished law firm. His mother's. She wanted to know
more about the man who had sired him. A boy, really,
from what little she'd told Matt about the circumstances
of his conception. A young man determined to volunteer for a foreign war his family had the means to keep him safely out of. Meeting a girl from the wrong side of the WASP tracks in a church on the eve of shipping out.

It was hard for Matt to imagine his timid, conservativemother being young enough to fall into first sex with a stranger she'd met in a church, before the flickering candles at a saint's station.

But she had. And what came of it? Only him, a fatherless child in a working-class Catholic neighborhood that didn't forget sins of carnal knowledge.

Matt found himself shaking his head in the back of the cab, which smelled of chewing gum and smoke. Its lurch
ing progress through the rush-hour traffic was making
him sick. Or something else was.

His mother was fifty-four now, looking remarkably young yet leading a life circumscribed by her underachieving job and the Church. What good would it do her to know the name of her particular hit-and-run Joseph?

He had died, that privileged boy who'd rejected his get-out-of-war free card. Over there somewhere. The
family lawyers bought amnesia from mother and son with
the title of a two-flat that would keep them, with a spare
unit to bring in steady rent. Matt's mother had never
known more than his father's first name but he'd been somebody, whoever he was. Any seed he'd sown on the
way to annihilation was . . . so much wildflower along the
highway. Unnamed, unnoticed. Unacknowledged.

So much chaff in the wind. Then he thought of his
stepfather, Cliff Effinger. Why had she married him when
he'd been just a toddler? He'd asked that question at six and he still asked it of himself today, almost thirty years later. Effinger. Now dead, and Matt not sorry one bit. A mean, lesser man than the sainted boy Mira met at the saint's station in the church.

How could she? How could she have turned them both
over to an abusive creature like Effinger? Unless she'd
felt she deserved punishment? Unless she'd been so
beaten down that she'd needed to marry a permanent
punishment. Matt finally had grown old and big enough
to banish punishment, but it hadn't been soon enough.

His mother wasn't to blame; it was the social milieu that said that pain was a fallen woman's only lot. It was her righteous, callous family and the Church he'd run to him
self at the earliest opportunity for ultimate
approval.
Holy Mother of God.
He too had deserted her
for his own petty salvation.

Matt probed for the right bills as he paid off the cabby and got out to face a fifties building of pale stone and castlelike crenellations.

He didn't need this. Want this. His mother did. A bad idea. If he . . . she . . . learned nothing, it was another dis
appointment in a life replete with too many. If they
learned something, it was . . . a slap in the face; they
weren't wanted here, not even Matt with his seminational media profile.

Still. He had his national TV suit on, which was a lot better than Dr. Phil's, and his new seriously slick briefcase, and his smooth, photogenic media cool. None of it was bedrock real, but then neither were the high-priced lawyers from this firm who had bullied a naive young mother into settling for down-at-the-heels real estate as
shabby security instead of real information about the
most traumatic, and apparently transcendental, moment
of her life.

How much you want to bet a Chicago lawyer even
knew what transcendental meant?

Matt walked in, read the tiny white type on the big
black plaque by the elevator, and was whooshed, ears quickly blocked, to the forty-fifth floor.

Brandon, Oakes, and McCall offered a reception suite paved in plush plum carpet and furniture upholstered in espresso-dark brown leather.

The receptionist reminded Matt of a high-priced Las Ve
gas call girl: tall, chic, managing to be both icy and sexy.

He ought to know, thanks to his latest unwanted adven
ture in the land of neon and sex for sale.

The woman's demeanor warmed as he neared the desk.
She glanced down at the appointment ledger and
frowned. "Mr. . . . Devine? You requested an appointment
with a senior partner."

“Yes.”

A few junior female clerks were dashing in and out of the smooth wooden door beyond the receptionist's arena that kept the uninvited out. They glanced at him, then looked again, then outright gawked.

Okay. He was getting used to these epiphanies among
the female population. Maybe it was his blond Polish
good looks. Maybe familiarity from his stints on
The
Amanda Show.
Maybe it was the highlight job from his
last bizarre undercover turn in Temple's Everlasting Carnival of Crime and Detection.

Ms. Fashionista Receptionist smiled intimately at him in recognition of his high profile in the waiting room.

“You may go right in. Miss—" She hesitated before
bestowing the honor on just the right one of the paralyzed
paralegals. "Miss Hendrix will escort you.”

Miss Hendrix leaped forward, clutching a bouquet of legal-length manila folders to her pin-striped heart. "Certainly, Mr.—?"

“
Devine." He expected his name to generate references to his latest appearance on Chicago TV, but Miss Hendrix
blinked as if confounded, then stuttered forward like a geisha on her four-inch spike heels toward the unmarked, exotic zebrawood door.

Puzzled, Matt followed. Certainly his yellow hair
alone hadn't merited this reception. But if they didn't recognize his media ties, what else could account for this quick and cordial reception?

The office he was ushered into was the size of a racquetball court and about as welcoming.

Glass winked coldly from a ring of expensive modern prints. Leather and wood was slathered everywhere,
enormous distances separating desk and chairs from facing walls of built-in bar and audio-video equipment. Beyond all this, looking like a gigantic print, was the sweep of distant gray skyscraper towers through a window-wall.

“Mr. Brandon will see you shortly," said Miss Fluttering Legal Briefs. "Please. Be seated.”

He took one of the three tufted brown leather wing
chairs placed before the desk, set the silver briefcase beside it, and commenced to wait.

"Mr. Devine!”

The voice from the doorway was both powerful and jocular.

“My wife loves your appearances on Amanda's show. What brings you to our offices?”

So that was it. Mr. Big himself had recognized his name.

The voice advanced on him from behind, its energy bouncing off the window-wall. Matt turned in the wing chair, started to rise.

“Charles Brandon.”

His . . . host, it sounded like, came into view around
the curl of the chair's obscuring wing.

A chubby hand accessorized with a three-carat star sapphire ring was extended.

Matt rose to take it, then watched shock rinse all the welcome from Charles Brandon's pink and fleshy face.

It was too late to stop the handshake. Matt kept his grip firm but not pushy. The hand he shook went limp with the
surprise the face had registered first.

“Mr. Devine," the man repeated, as if impressing the name on his memory. "You are the visiting family counselor on
The Amanda Show
Aren't you?"

“Among other things, yes." Matt studied the man, watching him juggle preconceptions.

“Well, sit down." Brandon bustled around the desk toinstall himself on the gray leather behemoth of a chair behind it. His formerly flushed skin tones now matched
the ashen hide. "Ah, as I was saying, my wife loves you.
I mean, she loves your, ah, point of view, I guess. You
know women, always into that relationship stuff. So.
What can I do for you?”

While Matt reseated himself, reaching for the brief
case, Brandon kept talking in the way of a man who
makes his living by it.

“You must forgive my surprise. You're not what I expected."

“In what way?"

“
Oh, you know. Dr. Phil. Fat and fifty. I had no idea
you were such a . . . handsome young fellow. No wonder my wife, eh?"

“I've been told I'm telegenic. That word always sounds like an exotic affliction to me.”