Authors: Gini Hartzmark
They were so completely unapologetic about the delay that I was immediately convinced that it had been deliberate. Obviously the mayor was not the only city employee who was out to punish the Rendells. A week ago the police would have raced to Chrissy’s house if she’d called to say her kitten was up a tree. Today it took forty-five minutes, a call that there was an armed intruder in the house, and even then when they finally arrived, they were barely able to conceal their contempt.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” said the one with the mustache, looking around. His name tag said Grubb. His partner’s name was Schumacher. “Bet you had to sell a lot of football tickets to pay for it,” he said, swaggering up to Chrissy and peering over her shoulder into the house.
“So,” said Schumacher, casually plucking a toothpick from his breast pocket and inserting it into the corner of his mouth. “I understand you claim to be having some sort of problem.”
“A deranged fan broke into the house and held us at gunpoint,” reported Chrissy.
“Now why would a Monarchs fan want to come to
this
house?” demanded Schumacher insolently from beneath his crewcut.
“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” I suggested.
“You mean he’s here?”
“Tied up in the kitchen.”
“Well then, he couldn’t have been particularly
dangerous
if all it took was two
women
to overpower him,” his partner observed condescendingly.
“You’d better believe I’m tough enough to cause you plenty of trouble if you don’t knock it off and start doing your job,” I snapped, mentally drafting my complaint against the Milwaukee Police Department. Deutsch wasn’t the only person who could file a lawsuit in this town.
Grubb walked up to me until he was so close that his chest brushed against mine and I could feel his nightstick against my thigh. I never realized how much easier it was to act tough when you were wearing a badge and carrying a gun.
“What’s your name?” he asked, stretching himself up to his full height in order to better look down at me. I could see the pores in his skin and smell the onions on his breath from lunch.
“My name is Kate Millholland,” I said. “I’m the attorney for the Milwaukee Monarchs. Normally my opinion is very expensive, but I have some advice for you that I’m offering for free.”
“What’s that?” sneered Grubb.
“Go and take a look at your prisoner. We tied him up and took away his gun, but if he croaks at the scene while you’re standing here treating us to the tough-guy routine, it’s going to be your ass, not mine.”
“I’ll take you to him,” said Chrissy. She was still shaken and had no stomach for games.
Grubb spent a couple more seconds exuding testosterone before he decided he’d made his point. I suppressed a yawn. Then we all trooped into the kitchen.
The two officers took one look at the Jester and immediately radioed for the paramedics. I had to admit that he didn’t look very good, though I guessed I didn’t either. A quick peek at myself in the door of the microwave revealed the portrait of a lawyer who looked like she’d just crawled out of a Dumpster. Chrissy, on the other hand, looked infuriatingly perfect. Not only did her new role of damsel in distress suit her perfectly, but she must have found time to put on fresh lipstick while I was busy icing down my bruises.
Of course, the paramedics were there in two minutes flat. While they ministered to the Jester, Detective Schumacher made a desultory attempt at taking down our statements. They say that a lack of outrage is an outrage in itself. For Chrissy, his lack of interest, much less sympathy at what she’d been through in her own home, must have felt like a second violation. It certainly didn’t help that we could hear the EMTs tenderly ministering to our assailant, lifting him onto a stretcher, and assuring him that they would take good care of him.
When they were finished, Detective Grubb came looking for me. He found me in the living room pacing back and forth while Chrissy sucked up the pieces of Herend into the Dustbuster.
“I thought you might like to know that I’ve advised Mr. Koharski that he may want to press charges for assault.”
“Who is Mr. Koharski?” I demanded.
“The gentleman you assaulted with your vehicle, savagely beat, and then tied up.”
“You and I both know that’s ridiculous,” I countered, seething inside. “We’re talking about a man who broke into a private residence and committed felony trespass and assault.”
“That may be your version,” he replied. “But right now it’s your word against his.”
It took under a half an hour for Chrissy and me to pack up everything she and the baby needed and load it all into the back of her Suburban, less if you didn’t count the time I spent stuffing the blown air bags back into their compartments and taping them into place with duct tape. The decision had been reached with almost no discussion. The police had sent their message. Chrissy was not going to spend another hour, much less another night, in that house.
Chrissy called and left a brief message at the Regent Beverly Wilshire for Jeff, strapped the baby into her car seat, and climbed into the seat that had most recently been occupied by the Jester. She confessed that she was still much too shaken to drive, and my car was not just undrivable, but I suspected a total loss.
As I pulled Chrissy’s car out of her own driveway, I saw her turn in her seat to catch one last glimpse of her house and realized that she had no idea when, if ever, she’d be coming back. What Beau had most feared had now come to pass. The Rendells were being run out of town. I wondered if he was in a position to appreciate the irony of it; in the end he was the only one who was going to get to stay.
There was also the issue of where to go. As we passed the cheese shops and the outlet malls on our way to Chicago, I called and made reservations for her at the Four Seasons. It wasn’t until I saw the exit for Lake Forest that I got a better idea. As I hit the off-ramp and turned onto Sheridan Road, I called my mother.
Mother adores being magnanimous, especially when the appearance of generosity can be accomplished with a minimum of effort on her part. She and my father were about to leave for the airport to spend two weeks with friends in St. Bart, so I wasn’t surprised that she expressed herself as delighted to open up the guest wing for Chrissy and the baby. In fact, I knew that she was delighted at the idea.
Mother hated that she had to pay her staff when she and my father were away. Having Chrissy at the house appealed to her perverse sense of thrift. Chrissy would have a cook and hot and cold running maids to help her with the baby while Mother would be spared the anguish of knowing that her servants were slacking off while she was yachting in the Caribbean.
It was a strange homecoming nonetheless, greeted by Mrs. Mason, the same cook who’d fed us grilled cheese sandwiches and her own peculiar brand of Baptist spiritualism as children. I left Chrissy and the baby in her hands to be cooed and fussed over and went upstairs to do what I could to make myself presentable. I washed my face as gently as I could and gingerly brushed the dried blood out of my hair, leaving it down to cover the rapidly spreading bruises on my neck. I took off my blouse and examined myself in the mirror. I couldn’t tell where the Jester’s handiwork ended and the damage from my stunt with the car began. Not that it really mattered.
I found a high-collared blouse in my Mother’s closet and paired it with her favorite red Ralph Lauren suit, taking another minute to try my best to camouflage my swollen lower lip with concealer. Fortunately, the worst of the damage to my mouth seemed to be on the inside. Then I threw my dirty and bloodstained clothes into the trash and headed downtown to my office.
When I arrived back at the firm, the receptionist’s subdued greeting tipped me off that a war party was waiting for me. Whatever had happened was big and I was being blamed.
Walking down the dark paneled corridors to my office, I knew exactly how Jeff Rendell would feel if he took a walk down the street in Milwaukee. It was almost funny— the way the secretaries ducked down into their cubicles to avoid meeting my eye. I had been gone for less than forty-eight hours—long enough to turn into a pariah.
When I opened the door into my office, I found Skip Tillman’s formidable secretary, Doris, sitting at Cheryl’s desk, loading Avco files into a cardboard document box.
“Hello, Doris,” I said. “What’s going on? Is Cheryl sick?”
“She’s been reassigned to the word processing pool effective immediately,” Doris informed me, “and Mr. Tillman is waiting to see you in his office.”
“Are you going to tell me what I did to earn this trip to the woodshed, Doris?” I asked.
“You’d better hurry,” she said kindly. “You know he doesn’t like to be kept waiting when he’s in a bad mood.”
I nodded as she got up and left. Then I took off my coat, hung it carefully in the closet, pausing briefly in front of the full-length mirror that hung inside the door. With my hair down and dressed in her clothes, the resemblance was unmistakable.
“Oh my god,” I thought. “I’m turning into my mother.” Somehow the thought of that was much scarier than the prospect of what was about to happen to me.
CHAPTER 17
Of course, I wasn’t about to make it easy for them. Instead of going straight to Tillman’s office I ducked into the library and slunk down the circular staircase that, hidden in the back of the stacks, connects the forty-second to the forty-first floor. Used exclusively by associates and other lowly library dwellers, I knew that by taking it I insured that I wouldn’t bump into Tillman or any other person of importance.
I braved the furtive glances of the secretaries in the tax department and made my way into the firm’s equivalent of the boiler room—the word processing pool—where Cheryl now toiled in newfound exile.
I walked slowly past the temporary workstation where she labored under a set of headphones, typing the turgid memos of green associates. I was careful not to slow my stride as I passed, but instead merely caught her eye and silently mouthed the words
ladies ’ room
as I continued on my way. The entire exchange was as quick and slick as a drug deal and every bit as subversive.
Only support staff used the lavatory at this end of the forty-first floor, and it reeked of illicit cigarettes and strawberry disinfectant. There was an old tweed sofa in a particularly rancid shade of green with burn marks on the arms and a stack of dog-eared
Cosmopolitans
on the scarred plastic table next to it. It was the favored refuge of sobbing typists who’d been yelled at by their short-tempered bosses.
I paced until Cheryl arrived. She looked rattled.
“What happened?” I whispered, pulling her into the handicapped stall.
“Do you want the long version or the short?”
“Short first.”
“You’re going to get canned.”
“Okay. Now what’s the long version?”
“This morning Stuart Eisenstadt came looking for you,” whispered Cheryl furtively. “Oh, it must have been around ten-thirty. He was so upset, I immediately knew that something was up, but of course, he wouldn’t tell me what it was. He just said that I should get hold of you like yesterday. I tried you up at Chrissy’s house, but the line was always busy and you weren’t answering in your car. I also tried the firm’s Milwaukee office and down at Monarchs Stadium, but no one knew where you were—”
“I was at Chrissy’s. Jeff took the phone off the hook because they were getting so many calls from the media—”
“Well, the shit was hitting the fan here, too. About a half an hour later Skip Tillman and John Guttman came looking for you—the same lynching party that did the deed when they fired Rick Cooper.”
I had no idea who Rick Cooper was, but then, of course, I was as ignorant of the nuances of firm politics as the Jester probably was of portfolio management. Cheryl, on the other hand, kept up. She liked to say it was her favorite spectator sport.
“Naturally, when I told them I hadn’t been able to reach you, Guttman jumped all over me, that asshole. He accused me of lying about where you were to protect you.”
“You were lucky he didn’t break out the brass knuckles and the rubber hoses.”
“I think that’s what they used on Sherman. Poor baby, jjg’s going to be in therapy for at least the next decade.”
“So what’s with being reassigned to word processing?”
“My punishment for conspiring with you, I guess.”
“So any idea why heads are going to roll, specifically miner
“Only that it’s got to have something to do with Avco and it’s big. After they sent me down here, they told me that if I so much as thought about picking up the phone and calling you that it would mean my job.”
“I’m glad you didn’t. You wouldn’t have been able to reach me anyway. Some psychopath broke into Chrissy’s house and tried to abduct her at gunpoint.” I unbuttoned my blouse and craned my neck to show her the rapidly intensifying bruise that spread from collarbone to shoulder where the Jester had gotten me with the pipe.
“Hey. If I were you, I’d just take off my blouse for Tillman. Not only is the bruise impressive, but the sight of your lacy brassiere will send him into cardiac arrest— problem solved.”
“It’s that kind of thinking that’s going to take you far in the legal profession,” I assured her.
“So what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I’ll think of something. In the meantime I have two things I need you to do for me.”
“What?”
“First off, I need you to get me a car.”
“You can use mine.”
“No, no. I need a car. Mine’s totaled.”
“The Volvo? How did that happen?”
“It’s a long story. Anyway, I need a new car.”
“What kind? You know this isn’t exactly like sending out to Marshall Field’s for a change of clothes.”
“I trust your judgment. Pick something. Call Rob Geller at my bank when you know how much it’s going to be, and he’ll see that it gets paid for.”
“Gotcha. What’s the second thing?”
“Promise me you won’t let them force you into quitting. I need you too much to have you fold on me now. If they cut your pay, I’ll make up the difference. Just promise me you’ll hang tough until I’ve got this worked out.”