Dead Certain (26 page)

As I walked past Cheryl’s desk she shot out of her seat and began gesturing wildly.

“Don’t go in there!” she exclaimed, pointing at my office door, which was closed.

“Why not?” I demanded.

“Your mother is in there!”

“Oh, my god,” I groaned, collapsing dramatically over the top of Cheryl’s cubicle in self-pity. “What’s she doing here? What does she want?”

“I don’t know. But right now she’s in there interviewing another secretarial candidate.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said, making a half-hearted attempt to pull out my hair. “You’re making this up just to torment me.”

“No such luck. Apparently you never told Mrs. Goodlow that you would be unavailable this afternoon, so she went ahead and scheduled you to interview a job candidate.”

“So what’s this one like?”

“I didn’t really get a chance to talk to him. But he and your mother seem to have really hit it off.”

“He?” I demanded, straightening myself up.

“Three strikes, remember? By the way, have you seen Jeff? I saw him in the elevator, and he looked like he was about to throw up.”

“What did I look like the first time I coordinated a closing?” I asked.

“As I recall, you actually did throw up a couple of times,” conceded my secretary.

“Believe me, you will, too.”

“Okay, Ms. Tough-Guy, you’d better go in there and talk to your mommy before she comes out here and kills us both.”

“How do I look?” I asked, giving my hair an ineffectual pat.

“Approximately the same color as Jeff,” replied my secretary, as I squared my shoulders and prepared to face the music.

I found my mother sitting next to an extremely handsome and well-groomed young man on the leather couch in my office. Their heads were close together, and they were both laughing. Eventually they noticed that I was there, and the man who wanted to be my secretary rose quickly to his feet. He was wearing a charcoal suit tailored to the swooning point, an immaculately pressed white shirt with French cuffs, and a Hermes silk tie. His wing tips had been buffed to a military sheen, as were his fingernails. His teeth were perfect.

I knew immediately that there had to be something wrong with him. Either that, or Cheryl was wrong about Mrs. Goodlow and her three-strikes rule, and in my experience Cheryl was never wrong.

“Kate, I’d like you to meet Tim Lovesy,” declared my mother, as I shook hands with Mrs. Goodlow’s latest offering. “He and I have just had the most amusing chat while we were waiting for you to get here.”

“I’m very pleased to meet you,” he said.

At least I knew that he spoke English. Maybe the problem was that he was illiterate.

I murmured something in reply, completely thrown off guard by the highly presentable Mr. Lovesy.

“I’m sure the two of you will get along famously,” my mother assured him, beaming.

“You mean, provided she wants to give me the job,” he replied.

“Oh, nonsense,” declared Mother. “Of course she’s giving you the job. If you can’t trust your mother’s judgment in these things, who else can you possibly trust?”

As Cheryl took Tim back to Mrs. Goodlow’s office to discuss salary and benefits, I told myself that it was all just a bad dream. With any luck, I’d wake up in my own warm bed, ready to start the day all over again. My mother took a seat in the wing chair that visitors sat in, and crossed her ankles gracefully as she launched into a litany of Mr. Lovesy’s charms. I listened in utter amazement, wondering what on earth my mother was up to.

“So what brings you to the office?” I asked, as soon as she paused for a breath.

“Well, I’ve been doing some thinking about this whole Prescott Memorial mess,” she replied lightly. “I think perhaps we’ve been overreacting.”

“Don’t even think about it,” I cut her off, suddenly understanding the motive for her charm.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she replied, somewhat taken aback.

“Yes, you do. You came here to tell me that you’ve changed your mind, didn’t you? They’ve sued, and now you want to get out of it!”

“I’m afraid it’s a bit more complicated than that,” she declared. “They’ve raked up all those horrible old stories about Great-grandfather, and they’re feeding them to the press.”

Mother handed me a manila envelope. Inside was what appeared to be the draft of a magazine piece entitled “Blood Money.” A note clipped to the front indicated that it was slated for publication in
NorthShore
, a glossy lifestyle magazine that circulated in the city’s affluent northern suburbs. I skimmed it quickly. It was about the purported origins of Chicago’s most famous family fortunes and how many of the city’s most prominent philanthropists owed their good fortune to an ancestor who hadn’t hesitated to rob, smuggle, or even commit murder for financial gain.

While Everett Prescott was featured prominently, his exploits running opium and guns in the China trade were hardly the only misdeeds the article chronicled. I had to hand it to Gerald Packman. There was almost nothing that would mortify my family more than to be pilloried in public, except perhaps knowing that their friends were being subjected to the same treatment on their account.

“Denise says she’s received phone calls from reporters at the
Tribune
and the
Sun-Times
saying that they’re thinking of doing similar articles,” complained Mother.

“I warned you this would happen,” I said, trying my best to sound sympathetic. “You have to see this for what it is, a sign that we’re getting to them. I told you they would never go down without a fight. Well, this is how they’re fighting.”

“If they publish this, it will kill your grandmother,” declared Mother dramatically. “You might as well just go ahead and order the coffin.”

“There is nothing new in this,” I said, pointing to the manuscript. “Every single one of these allegations—that Everett Prescott made his money selling drugs and guns, that he kept Chinese women—every single one of them has been in print before. Hell, how else do you think they managed to dig it all up so fast? Believe me, Grandmother will live through it.”

“That’s easy enough for you to say. You didn’t get this in the mail today.” Mother reached into the Neiman Marcus bag at her feet and pulled out a package just slightly larger than a shoebox and handed it to me. It felt terribly light.

“It’s empty,” I said.

“No, it’s not. Look inside.”

I lifted up the top. Inside was a sheet of white paper on which someone had scrawled in red crayon the single word, BANG!

CHAPTER 19

That night I took Mother’s Neiman Marcus bag along with me to dinner. I was meeting Elliott at Brasserie Jo, the pretty French bistro on Hubbard. He’d called while I was in with my mother, and Cheryl had accepted his dinner invitation on my behalf. Unfortunately, she hadn’t thought to ask him whether the judge had handed down a verdict yet in the fraud case, so I didn’t know if Elliott was back from Springfield for an hour or for good.

A quick call from Cheryl to the personal shopper at Saks solved the problem of what I was going to wear—a dove gray suit with a cropped jacket with a round feminine collar and a short and narrow skirt. There was also a scoop-necked blouse to wear underneath. When I held it up to my shoulders, it looked like it would expose more skin than I usually show at the beach.

I laid it over the back of my chair and took the black Manolo Blahnik pumps out of their box and set them gingerly on top of my desk. They looked so dangerous I was afraid I might hurt myself.

“I’m assuming you’re not supposed to actually wear these on your feet,” I declared. “I mean, they’re really just a form of weird fetishist sculpture—”

“According to what I read in
Vogue
magazine, they are considered the sexiest shoes made,” my secretary informed me. “They’re remarkably comfortable, and they never go out of style.”

I set them down on the carpet and stepped into them. “You’re absolutely right,” I said, doing my best to adjust to the altitude in the stiltlike stilettos. “I’m sure the hookers of ancient Rome wore something similar.” I didn’t like to say it, but they actually
were
comfortable. “What else is there?” I asked as Cheryl dug through the tissue at the bottom of the bag.

She came up holding a lacy black push-up bra and matching panties.

“And who, pray tell, are those supposed to be for?” I demanded.

“Elliott,” replied my secretary as she flashed me a knowing smile.

Elliott was waiting for me at the door, still dressed for court in a dark blue suit. Beneath the soft tousle of his brown hair his eyes looked tired and his shoulders seemed to sag. However, at the sight of me he broke into a grin as big and warm as summertime.

“You look beautiful,” he said, slipping his arm around my waist and drawing me toward him for a quick kiss. Then he stepped back, looked me quizzically in the eye, and then glanced down at my shoes. “My, Little Red Riding Hood, how tall you’ve grown,” he remarked.

“Cheryl’s to blame,” I explained somewhat incoherently. “Did you get a verdict? Are we celebrating tonight or drowning your sorrows?”

“Celebrating,” replied Elliott. “The jury came back for the plaintiff and awarded us $6.7 million in damages.”

I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Ooh,” I squealed in my best chorus-girl impersonation. “I’m going to have to start calling you the six-million-dollar man.”

“Please, the six-point-seven-million-dollar man,” joked Elliott as the hostess came over and showed us to a table for two in a quiet corner of the restaurant. As we sat down he noticed the bag.

“A present for me?” he inquired.

“Actually, it’s a message for my mother. I was hoping you might send it out and have it dusted for prints.” I went on to describe the package that had been sent to my mother’s house and the message scrawled on the single sheet inside it as we took our seats.

“I can’t believe she opened it without knowing who it was from,” remarked Elliott once I’d finished. “If it really was a bomb, she would have been killed.”

“I’m sure that’s what whoever sent it wants her to think.”

“I’ll send it out to our forensics guys and have them take a look at it. But I doubt they’ll turn up anything useful after the thing’s gone through the post office. So who do you think sent it?”

“Who knows? My mother’s been on every TV and radio station in the city the past couple of days. Maybe it’s from some Bolshevik who hates rich people or some disgruntled former servant. God knows, you could populate a small town in Wisconsin with the people she’s fired.”

“That wouldn’t explain why it came now, not unless you’re a big believer in coincidence. It seems to me like a pretty good bet that this was deliberately sent to scare her off her crusade against HCC.”

“In that case it worked. Mother showed up at my office this afternoon to try and wriggle out of trying to block the sale.”

“And I suppose you didn’t let her.”

“You’re damned right I didn’t let her,” I announced, tearing into the warm baguette that had just materialized on our table.

“My mother told me I’d meet girls like you,” reported Elliott gravely.

“Girls like what?”

“Girls who like trouble.”

“It has nothing to do with liking trouble,” I protested. “My mother came to me with this half-baked idea that she wanted to keep HCC from buying Prescott Memorial. I suspected that her motives were truly selfish— she literally didn’t want some company out of Atlanta taking away the Founders Ball and all the other Lady Bountiful accoutrements she enjoys as a trustee of the hospital. I got involved because she’s my mother and I didn’t have the backbone to say no. The only trouble is that the deeper I dug, the more convinced I became that whatever her motives, my mother was right in fighting the sale. There’s no way I’m going to let her back down after we’ve come this far.”

“Even if she’s being threatened?”

“Especially
if she’s being threatened,” I declared. “If you give in to threats, in the end you’re just rewarding bullies.”

“I agree with you one hundred percent,” said Elliott. “But I just love it when you get all riled up like that.” I threw a piece of my bread at him. “I still want to know who you think might have sent it.”

“Well, for starters, HCC.”

“In which case they’ll follow it up with something worse if this doesn’t dissuade her.”

“You’re serious.”

“If you’re going to go around bullying people, you have to be willing to follow through on your threats or else no one will take you seriously. Everything I’ve found out about Gerald Packman says that he means business and he’s not above using force. When he worked for a fried-chicken franchise, he was having trouble with a couple of his food delivery people refusing to unload trucks. Supposedly he was waiting for them at one of the restaurants. As soon as they showed up, he frog-marched the pair of them into the freezer, tied them to chairs, and made them sit there while he unloaded the truck himself. I think one of them ended up with frostbite. Packman fought him tooth and nail in court alleging that the frostbite was his own damned fault, the result of his being too lazy to do his job. Do you think he sounds like a guy who’s above sending threats to socialites in the mail?”