If Lady Helen was disconsolate at her husband’s behavior, she hid it well. She’d been a lively member of the international nightclub scene before her marriage; after Andrew’s birth she took up with her old playmates. The divorce was messy—old Mrs. Banidore tried to claim Andrew wasn’t even Jim’s son, but the terms of the family trust apparently made it important for Jim to have a male child, so he swore an affidavit of paternity.
Lady Helen’s alimony, estimated at a hundred thousand dollars a month, depended on her never breathing a word about her husband’s extracurricular activities. If she remarried, of course, the alimony stopped, but old Mrs. Banidore also got the family lawyers to insert a clause that gave her custody of the kid if the Banidores could prove Lady Helen was sleeping with other men.
This last clause lashed the paparazzi into a competitive frenzy. They staked out her apartment on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré; they followed her skiing in the French Alps and the Canadian Rockies; they zoomed on her nude sunbathing in the Virgin Islands. When she went on safari in Kenya with Italian racer Egidio Berni as part of the group, the photographers followed in a helicopter. That was where Lady Helen died.
The Herald-Star hadn’t paid much attention to Lady Helen, since she didn’t have a natural following in Chicago, but of course they’d covered her death. I flipped through Sherman’s files to read the front-page story.
Lady Helen’s safari was spending a week at a luxury lodge, from which they took day or night trips to study animals. It sounded like fun: they even followed elephants on their nocturnal treks into mineral caves.
In deference to the divorce decree, Berni stayed in one suite, Lady Helen and young Andrew in another. One evening Berni and Lady Helen decided to go for a sunset drive. An enterprising photographer had bribed one of the guides to let him know if Lady Helen and Berni were ever alone; the helicopter caught up with the Land Rover three miles from the lodge. Berni took off, hurtling the Rover across the veldt, and smashed into a rhinoceros. He and Lady Helen were killed instantly.
Some moron brought young Andrew to the crash site, and the Herald-Star had used a photograph of the white-faced boy kneeling by his dead mother, cradling her head on his knees.
I would have to be brain-dead not to know that the boy was my client as a child. And I’d have to be even deader not to figure Hunter Davenport for the photographer in the chopper.
“So Andrew Banidore hired me to find one of the men who drove his mother to her death. Or who he thinks drove her to her death. And then what? He lay in wait like James Bond to—”
I stood up so fast, I knocked half the photos off Sherman’s table. When he squawked a protest, I was already out the door. I shouted “I’ll call you” over my shoulder and ran down the hall to the street.
I’d been an idiot. James Bond. The glimpse I thought I’d had of my client on the L platform two days ago. The guy in the car behind me yesterday morning. My client had tracked me while I located Hunter Davenport. When I’d found Davenport for him, my client breathed threatening messages over the phone until he fled the apartment, then chased him to Uptown, where he ran him over.
V.I. Warshawski, ace detective. Ace imbecile.
6
The Trefoil’s tiny lobby was filled with luggage and travelers. The receptionist on duty was settling bills and handing towels and keys to joggers while juggling two phones. I took a towel with a smiled thanks and slipped into the elevator behind two lean, sweat-covered men in shorts and cropped tops.
On the fifth floor I knelt in front of 508 and probed the keyhole. I was in an agony of tension—if some other guest should come out—the maid—if Andrew Banidore had left and a stranger lay in the bed. The guest doors had nice, sturdy old-fashioned locks, the kind that look impressive on the outside but have only three tumblers. In another two minutes, I was inside the room.
Lying there in bed, Andrew Banidore looked almost like his mother’s twin. The white-gold hair fell away from his face, which was soft with the slackness of sleep.
“Andrew!” I called sharply from the doorway.
He stirred and turned over, but a night spent tracking his subject through Uptown had apparently left him exhausted. I went to the bed and shook him roughly.
When his wistful blue-gray eyes finally blinked open, I said, “He’s not dead. Does that upset you?”
“He’s not?” His voice was thick with sleep. “But I—” He woke completely and sat up, his face white. “How did you get in here? What are you talking about?”
“You were too tired when you got in to lock the door, I guess.” I sat on the edge of the bed. “You’ve got five minutes before I call the cops. Better make good use of them.”
“What are you going to tell them? How you broke into my hotel room?”
“I’m going to tell them to look for the blue Toyota that hit Hunter Davenport early this morning. If you rented it, that’ll be easy, because you had to show someone a driver’s license. If you stole it, it’ll still have your fingerprints on it.”
I went to the bureau and rifled through the documents on top. He was traveling on a British passport. He had a first-class ticket on Air France, with an open return date. He had a rental agreement with one of the big chains for a blue Toyota. His wallet held an American driver’s license issued by the state of South Carolina, a variety of credit cards, and two photos of his mother.
“Put those pictures down.”
I held them between my fingers, as if poised to tear them. “You can always get more. Most photographed woman in the world and all. There are a million pictures of her lying around. I just saw twenty-eight of them.”
“She gave those to me. I can’t get more that she gave me.”
He was out of bed and across the room so fast, I just had time to slip the pictures into my shirt pocket. He tried to fight me for them, but I was dressed and he wasn’t. I stood on his left foot until he stopped punching at me.
“I’ll return them when you give me a few answers. You have lived in South Carolina, and your mother was killed in a car accident in Kenya. Did you happen to tell me anything else true? Is your grandmother dead? What about all those other tobacco-smoking Banidores? You really an orphan?”
He pulled on a pair of jeans and looked at me sullenly. “I hate them all. The way they talk about her, they were so happy when she died. It was as if all their dreams came true at once. The fact that Jim died of AIDS five years after I had to go live in fucking stupid Charleston—I wasn’t supposed to mention that. Poor, dear Jim picked up a virus in Africa when he went out to get Andrew, they told all their friends at the country club. We should never have allowed Helen to keep the boy to begin with. Then all my he-man cousins made my life miserable claiming she was a whore and I wasn’t even one of the family. As if I wanted to be related to that houseful of cretins.”
“Did you kill your grandmother?”
He gave a hoarse bark of laughter. “If I’d thought of it in time. No, she died the old-fashioned way: of a stroke.”
“So what made you decide to go after Davenport?”
“I always meant to. Ever since the day my mother died. Chasing her all over Europe. It was a game to him. She didn’t have a life. She knew she’d lose me to those damn Banidores if she ever got caught with another man, and I was the one person she really loved. I was the only one she cared about losing.
“She was trying to protect our life together, and he—that Davenport—he was trying to destroy it. For twenty-four hours he got a taste of what that was like, how it feels when someone knows where you are and is following you. I missed him when he snuck out of that apartment building last night, but when the lady yelled he wasn’t home, I found him at the bus stop. He got on a bus, and I followed the bus. He got off and went into a bar. I went in behind him. But it wasn’t enough he was scared. I told him who I was, what he’d done, and he tried to tell me it was a job. Just a job. He killed my mother, he ruined my life, and he thought I should slap him on the back and say, ‘T
ough luck, old sport, but a man’s gotta do . . .’ and all that crap.
“That was when I couldn’t take it anymore. I got into the car. He started to go back into the bar and I couldn’t stand it. I just drove up on the sidewalk and—I should have gone straight to the airport and taken the first flight out, but my passport and ticket and everything were still here. Besides, I never thought you’d find out before I left this afternoon.”
I leaned against the door and looked down at him. “You never thought. You are an extremely lucky guy: Hunter Davenport is going to live. But he has very expensive hospital bills and no insurance. You are going to pay every dime of those bills. If you don’t, then I am suddenly going to find evidence that links you to that Toyota. The cursory washing they give it at the rental place—believe me, traces of Davenport’s blood will be on it a long time. Do you understand?”
He nodded fractionally. “Now give me back my pictures.”
“I want to hear you say it. I want to know that you understand what you’ve agreed to.”
He shut his eyes. “I agree to pay Hunter Davenport’s hospital bills. I agree to look after the man who killed my mother. I agree to live in hell the rest of my life.”
I wanted to say something, something consoling, or maybe heartening: let it go, move on. But his face was so pinched with pain, I couldn’t bear to look at him. I put the snapshots on his knee and let myself out.
Note
When Princess Diana died, I thought how horrible it must have been for her sons. I imagined a son who didn’t have a supportive family to help him recover from the tragedy, and so he nurtured his anger against the photographer whom he felt was responsible for her death.
When I wrote this story, around 2000, the Internet was first starting to have commercial uses, but most functions that a detective now does online were still manual—like tracking Hunter Davenport through old phone directories. Cell phones were just becoming ubiquitous, but the first smartphone was still ten years away.
This story was originally published in Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine, Spring 2001.
Publicity Stunts
1
“I need a bodyguard. I was told you were good.” Lisa Macauley crossed her legs and leaned back in my client chair as if expecting me to slobber in gratitude.
“If someone told you I was a good bodyguard they didn’t know my operation: I never do protection.”
“I’m prepared to pay you well.”
“You can offer me a million dollars a day and I still won’t take the job. Protection is a special skill. You need lots of people to do it right. I have a one-person operation. I’m not going to abandon my other clients to look after you.”
“I’m not asking you to give up your precious clients forever, just for a few days next week while I’m doing publicity here in Chicago.”
Judging by her expression, Macauley thought she was a household word, but I’d been on the run the two days since she’d made the appointment and hadn’t had time to do a background check. Whatever she publicized made her rich: wealth oozed all the way from her dark cloud of carefully cut curls through the sable protecting her from the winter wind and on down to her Jimmy Choo motorcycle boots.
When I didn’t say anything she added, “For my new book, of course.”
“That sounds like a job for your publisher. Or your handlers.”
I had vague memories of going to see Cubs star Andre Dawson when he was doing some kind of promotion at the old Marshall Field’s department store. He’d been on a dais, under lights, with several heavies keeping the adoring fans away from him. No matter what Macauley wrote, she surely wasn’t more at risk than a baseball hero.
She made an impatient gesture. “They always send some useless person from their publicity department. They refuse to believe my life is in danger. Of course, this is the last book I’ll do with Gaudy: my new contract with Della Destra Press calls for two personal bodyguards whenever I’m on the road. But right now, while I’m promoting the new book, I need protection.”
I ignored her contract woes. “Your life is in danger? What have you written that’s so controversial? An attack on Kate Middleton?”
“I write crime novels. Don’t you read?”
“Not crime fiction: I get enough of the real stuff walking out my door in the morning.”
Macauley gave a conscious little laugh. “I thought mine might appeal to a woman detective like yourself. That’s why I chose you to begin with. My heroine is a woman talk-show host who gets involved in cases through members of her listening audience. The issues she takes on are extremely controversial: abortion, rape, the Greens. In one of them she protects a man whose university appointment is attacked by the feminists on campus. Nan is nearly murdered when she uncovers the brainwashing operation the feminists are running.”
“I can’t believe that would put you in danger—feminist-bashing is about as controversial as apple pie these days. Sounds like your hero is a female Claude Barnett.”
Barnett broadcast his attacks on the atheistic, family-destroying feminists and liberals five days a week from Global Entertainment’s flagship cable stations, with round-the-clock streaming available for diehard fans. The term he’d coined for progressive women—femmunists—had become a much-loved buzzword on the radical right.
Macauley didn’t like being thought derivative, even of reality. She bristled as she explained that her detective, Nan Carruthers, had a totally unique personality and slant on public affairs.
“But because she goes against all the popular positions that leftists have persuaded the media to support, I get an unbelievable amount of hate mail.”
“And now someone’s threatening your life?” I tried to sound more interested than hopeful.
Her eyes flashing in triumph, Macauley pulled a letter from her handbag and handed it to me. It was the product of a computer, printed on cheap white stock. In all caps it proclaimed: YOU’LL BE SORRY, BITCH, BUT BY THEN IT WILL BE TOO LATE.
“If this is a serious threat you’re already too late,” I said. “You should have taken it to forensics lab before you fondled it. Unless you sent it yourself as a publicity stunt?”
Genuine crimson flooded her cheeks. “How dare you? My last three books have been Times list leaders for eighteen weeks. I don’t need this kind of publicity.”
I handed the letter back. “You show it to the police?”
“They wouldn’t take it seriously. They told me they could get the state’s attorney to open a file, but what good would that do me?”
“Scotland Yard can identify individual laser printers based on samples of output, but most U.S. police departments don’t have those resources. Did you keep the envelope?”
She took out a grimy specimen. With a magnifying glass I could make out the zip code in the postmark: Chicago, the Gold Coast. That meant only one of about a hundred thousand residents, or the quarter-million tourists who pass through the neighborhood every day, could have mailed it. I tossed it back.
“You realize this isn’t a death threat—it’s just a threat, and pretty vague at that. What is it you’ll be sorry for?”
“If I knew that I wouldn’t be hiring a detective,” she snapped.
“Have you had other threats?” It was an effort to keep my voice patient.
“I had two other letters like this one, but I didn’t bring them—I didn’t think they’d help you any. I’ve started having phone calls where they just wait, or laugh in a weird way or something. Sometimes I get the feeling someone’s following me.”
“Any hunches who might be doing it?” I was just going through the motions—I didn’t think she was at any real risk, but she seemed the kind of person who couldn’t believe she wasn’t at the forefront of everyone else’s mind.
“I told you.” She leaned forward in her intensity. “Ever since Take Back the Night, my fourth book, which gives a whole different look at rape crisis centers, I’ve been on the top of every femmunist hit list in the
country.”
I laughed, trying to picture some of my friends taking potshots at every person in America who hated feminists. “It sounds like a nuisance, but I don’t believe your life is in as much danger as, say, the average abortion provider. But if you want a bodyguard while you’re on Claude Barnett’s show I can recommend a couple of places. Just remember, though, that even the Secret Service couldn’t protect JFK from a determined sniper.”
“I suppose if I’d been some whiny feminist you’d take this more seriously. It’s because of my politics you won’t take the job.”
“If you were a whiny feminist I’d probably tell you not to cry over this because there’s a lot worse on the way. But since you’re a whiny authoritarian there’s not much I can do for you. I’ll give you some advice for free, though: if you cry about it on the air you’ll only invite a whole lot more of this kind of attention.”
I didn’t think contemporary clothes lent themselves to flouncing from rooms, but Ms. Macauley certainly flounced out of mine. I wrote a brief summary of our meeting in my appointments log, then put her out of my mind until the next night, when I was having dinner with a friend who devours crime fiction. Sal Barthele was astounded that I hadn’t heard of Lisa Macauley.
“You ever read anything besides the sports pages and the financial section, Warshawski? That girl is hot. They say her contract with Della Destra is worth twelve million, and even though she appeals to the guys with shiny armbands and goose steps, she can write.”
After that I didn’t think of Macauley at all: a case for a small suburban school district whose pension money had been turned into derivatives was taking all my energy. But a week later the writer returned forcibly to mind.
“You’re in trouble now, Warshawski,” Murray Ryerson said when I picked up the phone late Thursday night.
“Hi, Murray: good to hear from you, too.” Murray used to be an investigative reporter until Global Entertainment eviscerated his newspaper. Now he does specials on their cable news show. He’s a one-time lover, sometime rival, occasional pain in the butt, and even, now and then, a good friend.
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