Best Friends Forever (28 page)

“I’da hit that with candied yams on the side!”

“Got it. Now, can you tel me—”

“I’da hit that,” the man said, shoulders heaving with laughter, “and then three hours later, when the footbal game was over, I’da gone back to the kitchen for a hit-that sandwich with cranberry sauce!”

“Okay,” said Jordan.

“Funny?” asked the doorman, smoothing the braid on his shoulders. “I’m doing openmic night at the Laugh Hut next week. Anyhow, the hot mama left Thursday night, and I haven’t seen Miss Valerie since then.”

“You got a key?”

Carl shook his head. “I’m sorry, man, but Ms. Adler would kil me. She would literal y end my life as I know it. So unless you got a warrant…look, fel a, I’d help you out, but comedy’s not paying yet, and I got kids, you know?” Sure, Jordan thought, thanking the man. Didn’t everyone?

Valerie’s parking spot underneath the building was empty. Her cel phone went straight to voice mail. That left work. Jordan pul ed up in front of the Fox studios on North Michigan Avenue just after eight-thirty in the morning and consulted the printout in his lap. Ten minutes later, the man he was waiting for approached the building. Station manager Charles Carstairs was tal and rangy, with a tartan scarf around his neck and a tweed cap shading his eyes. He carried a slim leather attaché

case in one hand and one of those brandnew smartphones in the other. Beneath his overcoat, he wore a navy-blue suit that appeared to be more expensive by a factor of five than the best thing Jordan owned.

“Mr. Carstairs?” Jordan jumped out of the car and crossed the sidewalk fast, with his badge in his hand. “Jordan Novick from the Pleasant Ridge police department.”

Carstairs scowled down at his telephone’s screen, then up at Jordan. “What can I do for you, sir?” Another glance at the screen.

“Whatever it is, it’l have to be quick. We’re on live at nine.”

“This shouldn’t take long,” Jordan promised. Carstairs frowned and started tapping at his telephone again. Jordan gave him a minute and then, in a voice that was loud enough

to

carry,

he

said,

“Mr.

Carstairs,

I need to speak to Valerie Adler, your employee, with regard to an ongoing investigation. I need your assistance, sir.”

Carstairs put his telephone away. “Fine. C’mon up.”

In his office on the thirty-seventh floor, Carstairs sprawled in his seat, legs spread, arms stretched above his head behind a desk fil ed with framed family pictures. Jordan checked out a handsome Irish setter, two little boys with their father’s sharp features, and a woman whose auburn hair was significantly less glossy and whose expression was marginal y less intel igent than the dog’s. He wondered which one was better behaved. On a wal to the right of the desk, six flat-screen TVs broadcast local and national news; on a wal to the left, three clocks kept time in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Through the windows that looked out on the mostly empty horseshoeshaped newsroom, Jordan could see a few people tapping at computer keyboards. At one desk, a man draped in a barber’s cape was getting his hair trimmed.

“What is this about?” Charlie Carstairs asked, rocking forward and planting his forearms on the desk. “What do you want with Valerie?”

“Right now,” said Jordan, “we just need to find her. She isn’t at her condo, she isn’t answering her cel phone.”

Carstairs turned to his computer, tapped a few keys, and peered at the screen. “She worked Thanksgiving, and she’s scheduled off until Tuesday. Her high school reunion was Friday night, and she cal ed in puffy.”

“Excuse me?”

“Wel , not cal ed in. She asked for the time off weeks ago. She said she’d be drinking, and she didn’t want to be on the air with carb face.”

“Carb face,” Jordan repeated.

“Vanity.” Carstairs al owed himself a smal smile. “Par for the course with on-air talent.

Wish I could help, but I real y couldn’t tel you where she is…and like I said, we’re live at nine.”

I think you can tel me, thought Jordan. You can, but you don’t want to. He stood up and inspected the family pictures. One of Carstairs’s boys was missing his front teeth.

“Did Valerie ever mention any places she liked? Vacations she’d taken? Any friends or relatives in other cities?”

Carstairs twitched in his seat. “None that I recal .”

“Okay,” said Jordan. He lifted a photograph of Charlie Carstairs in a Hawai an shirt with a garish print, posing in front of a statue of a dolphin as big as a city bus. “Where is this, Florida?”

The other man’s voice was waspish. “Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering.” Jordan set the picture down. “Were you the one who hired Valerie?

”

Carstairs shoved his chair away from his desk. “Look, I’ve real y got to get out there.”

“What is she like?”

The other man hesitated, his hand on the doorknob. “What do you mean?”

“What’s she like?” Jordan said. “We’re trying to find her. We need to make sure she’s safe. The more we know about her, the better.”

The appeal to Carstairs’s better nature, the mention of Val’s safety, seemed to work. He stepped away from the door and sat down behind his desk again. “Let’s see. She runs,”

Carstairs said. “Or at least she dresses like she does. She likes sushi. And nice clothes. Her wardrobe budget…” His face softened as he remembered something

…something personal, something tender, Jordan bet. He recognized the look. He was pretty sure he’d felt it on his own face when he’d told stories about Patti—how he’d proposed, for example, by hiding the ring in a box of chocolates, only Patti had been on a diet. She’d thanked him sweetly and set the box by the door to bring to school the next morning, and he’d had to tel her that she might want to take a cruise through the caramels before she dropped it off in the teachers’ lounge with a HELP YOURSELF sign on top.

He pul ed himself back to the present.

“Did you ever see Ms. Adler lose her temper?”

Carstairs shrugged. “She gets annoyed, just like the rest of us.”

“What does she do when she gets angry?

” Jordan asked. “Does she throw stuff? Curse? Sulk?”

“She…plots, I guess,” Carstairs said, surprising Jordan, who’d been expecting more typical y

diva-esque

behavior

—cursing, or ranting, or throwing cel phones and wire hangers at an assistant.

“She doesn’t raise her voice or curse, but the thing about Val, if you cross her once, she never forgets it.”

Cross her once, Jordan wrote. “Did she ever get in any trouble?”

Carstairs sighed and looked longingly out his office window. Through the studio’s open double doors, Jordan could see men pushing cameras on wheeled dol ies, quickstepping over the cables that trailed behind. The anchor desk sat empty, looking smal er and somehow less solid than it did on TV.

“Wel , there was that thing in the dog park.”

“What was that?” Jordan asked.

“A few years back. What Val said was that she was walking her dog and some lady with a German shepherd came along and let her dog off the leash, and the German shepherd at-tacked

Val’s

dog.

This

little

yappy

thing.

Val

was screaming at the woman, and the woman was yel ing back, and they were both trying to pul the German shepherd off of Val’s dog, and then Val…”

Jordan continued to stare at Charlie Carstairs, remembering the headline in the Carstairs, remembering the headline in the Tribune: THE SH*T HIT THE FAN. As it turned out, the German shepherd’s owner, a lady of seventy-eight, had been a longtime Fox Chicago viewer, and she was none too pleased when its star meteorologist had beaned her with a plastic bag ful of dog poop. She’d filed assault charges. The papers and blogs had feasted on the mess for weeks; Val had taken what the station insisted was two weeks’ worth of previously scheduled vacation, and then the whole thing had blown over, with the only lasting consequence being that Val never reported on stories involving dogs for that channel again.

“And the peanuts,” said Carstairs. Jordan remembered that one: how, at the very end of a sweeps week story about area schools going nut-free to accommodate the increasing number of children suffering from al ergies, Valerie, apparently not realizing that her microphone was on, had referred to the afflicted kids as “God’s mistakes.” She’d delivered an apology at the top of the next night’s five o’clock newscast (“I was inappropriately flippant about what I realize is a most serious subject, particularly to the families living with nut al ergies and nut sensit-ivities”), but that hadn’t kept pissed-off al ergy-awareness activists from pelting her with Styrofoam packing peanuts when she’d shown up at a White Sox game that weekend…a move, of course, that had enraged the green freaks, who’d spent the next two weeks waving recycled-paper signs outside the station’s windows.

“Do you like her?”

Carstairs paused before giving a stiff, grudging nod. “We had a good working relation-ship.”

Jordan looked at the man innocently. When Carstairs didn’t blink, Jordan pul ed a frosted Christmas cookie out of his pocket and started to eat it.

The news director’s jaw tightened. “Are you implying something?”

“Nothing.” Jordan wiped his mouth and returned his gaze to the photographs: husband and wife and kids and Irish setter.

“Nice dog. Did you ever hear Valerie mention Dan Swansea?”

Carstairs shook his head no.

“Adelaide Downs? Ever hear that name?”

Another headshake.

“But you knew Val was going to her reunion Friday night.”

“Oh, I knew al about that. ” Charlie Carstairs gave him a humorless smile. “She did the Master Cleanse. Cayenne pepper and maple syrup for a week. Good times.”

He narrowed his eyes at Jordan. “What’s this about? What happened?”

“At this point, we just need to find Ms. Adler.”

Jordan noticed Carstairs’s right hand creeping toward the pocket where he’d stashed his fancy phone. “Valerie’s due in Tuesday afternoon. I can have her cal you when she gets here.

But until then…” He opened the door. “I’ve got a show,” he muttered, and hurried out of his office across the newsroom and through the swinging doors. As Jordan watched, a sign above the door lit up. ON THE AIR, it read. Jordan stared at it, marveling. It was just like on TV.

He ambled out of Carstairs’s office and took a tour of the newsroom. It didn’t take him long

to

locate

Valerie

Adler’s

desk,

which

had photographs of its tenant thumbtacked al over its particleboard wal s and a sliver of a view of the lake.

Jordan sat in Valerie’s seat, took a deep breath of what he guessed was Valerie’s scent, and tapped the touch pad of the computer. The screen bloomed to life. The in-box was closed and password-coded. Jordan didn’t even try. Instead, he sat at her chair, inhaled hairspray and perfume, and inspected her desk. There was a blue glass cup fil ed with pens, a calendar fil ed with cursive notations for Hair and Facial and Trainer and News meeting. Beside the computer was a makeup mirror surrounded by miniature lightbulbs and a rol ing caddy fil ed with more photographs, each one sheathed in plastic.

Jordan twirled the wheel slowly. There were pictures of Val shaking hands with the mayor and Val dancing with the governor, before he’d been removed from office, at what looked like a black-tie fund-raiser (the governor wore a tuxedo, Val wore a dress that seemed to be missing its back). Final y, there was a shot of Valerie in shorts and a bikini top, posed in front of the very same dolphin sculpture from the snapshot on her boss’s shelf. On the back of the

picture

was

written Key

West/Valentine’s Day/2007. Sometimes,

Jordan thought, slipping the picture in his pocket, being a detective didn’t require much actual detection at al .

THIRTY-SEVEN

By the time I was a senior, I’d spent hours thinking about Dan Swansea, but I’d never actual y spoken to him. In real life, as opposed to my daydreams, Dan was part of the larger, amorphous pack of guys who ignored me. Maybe he’d made meep-meepmeep backing-up noises at me in the hal way. Maybe he’d written Addie Downs stinks on a desk or a wal , but he’d never been mean to my face (or directly behind my back, where I could hear it). He’d existed on a different plane, the one reserved for handsome ath-letes, or beautiful girls like Valerie, and even though in my head we had lengthy, sparkling conversations that were frequently interrupted by torrid make-out sessions, in real life, I don’t think we’d ever even said hi.

One Friday afternoon in October, Val bounced over to our workstation in chemistry class.

It was a game-day weekend, so she wore her cheerleader uniform: a short, pleated maroon-and-cream skirt, a matching sweater-vest. Her legs were stil tan from summer, set off by white socks

and

white

sneakers.

“Hey,

Addie.

Want

to hang out tonight?”

I stared at her from my seat, which I’d jammed against the wal , trying to make myself as smal as I could be in my leggings and loose knitted vest. I didn’t want to say yes too eagerly, and I wondered what had motivated this request. Val and I stil sat together at lunch a few days a week—or, rather, I sat next to her silently at the cheerleaders’ table while Val chattered and giggled and sipped her Diet Coke. We stil waited for our rides together in the morning (I’d take the bus, even though Val insisted that her friends would be happy to drive me), but she had another life by now, one where she stayed out late on the weekends and got dropped off by cars with music blaring and laughter drifting from the windows—I knew this because sometimes I’d watch her from my bedroom. Before I could ask why she wanted to spend her Friday night with me, Valerie leaned close enough that I could smel her shampoo and Certs.

“Listen,” she whispered. “There’s a party at Pete Preston’s house tonight. I’m grounded, but I know my mom wil let me go over to your house. We’l tel your parents we’re going to the movies, and we can both go to the party!”