Exposé: First of the Sally Harrington Mysteries (The Alexandra Chronicles Book 5)

by Laura Van Wormer

  "What's that?" Spencer asks during a commercial.

  "A list of the members of our Masonic Lodge in Castleford."

  "My dad's a Mason."

  "Really? How come?"

  He shrugs. "I don't know. It's a club. You know, it's just guys sitting around."

  "But only Christian guys, right?"

  "I don't know." He thinks for a second. "There's the Ancient Order of Hibernians for Irish Catholics and Knights of Colum­bus for Italian Catholics, right?"

  I shrug. "So what do they do at these meetings?"

  "It's a civic group, like Rotary or the Elks or something."

  "Rotary has women in it," I point out.

  "Then it's like the DAR," he counters, referring to the Daugh­ters of the American Revolution. "Anyway, they give scholar­ships and stuff."

  "Do they have secret handshakes?"

  He smiles. "Yeah, I think they do. That's why I wanted to join when I was a kid. I thought they had code rings."

  "Do they have hoods and robes and stuff?"

  "That's the KKK, Sally," he says, kissing my forehead.

  "I don't know," I say, "I have a hard time believing my father belonged to such a group."

  "Your father was an architect!" Spencer says. "The Masons were originally a guild in England somewhere, of all the stone builders—masons, get it? And so if you've got an English name, like Harrington, and you've got an architect, I think you've got someone who's likely to be a Mason."

  I think about this while Spencer returns his attention to the news. I put the list away. "I'm going to crawl into bed and read a bit, okay?"

  Spencer nods, smiling, eyes on the sports scores.

  A week ago we were tearing each other's clothes off in the hotel lobby after knowing each other for only a few hours; to­night we are an old married couple.

  Whatever, I think, sliding under the sheets. One thing I love about this apartment is that Spencer has lamps with brighter bulbs in them than regular people. This is an apartment meant to curl up and read in and not go blind.

  I start reading through the background material I have for to­morrow's interviews and I doze off.

  I awaken when Spencer comes in after Nightline. He turns off the light and slides into bed, the two of us getting settled into a sleeping position on our sides. We are going to sleep.

  I feel something. And I smile. I roll over and whisper, "I thought you were exhausted," and Spencer laughs, he thought so, too. "But I guess you're too much for me, Sally."

  We make love.

  31

  When I return to my hotel the next morning, I find a voice­mail message from Chi Chi Rodriguez. Apparently Michael Cochran is in town and Cassy wants to know if I'd like to see him while he's here. They can fix something up for this after­noon if I have any time. I call West End and leave a message for them—great, I'm at the hotel, let me know what his schedule's like.

  Joe Bix calls at eight-thirty. "How the hell did you find out they made an arrest?"

  "Buddy told me."

  "And why didn't you tell me?"

  "Joe, I called your home and left a message. I left a voice mail at work. You didn't respond to your beeper, what more could I do?" There are some voices in the background on Joe's end and then he says, "Al wants to speak to you."

  "Sally!"

  "Hi, Al."

  "What the hell is this? You called in a two-sentence story for the front page?"

  "Al, I'm not even there. I should think you'd be grateful to have any kind of reference to the arrest in this morning's edi­tion."

  "The first part of that statement is key. You are not even here. That's what's screwing everything up."

  "Why, what's going on?"

  "Why are you looking for the membership lists of the Ma­sonic Lodge?" he says next. "You took a leave to work on that magazine thing, so why do you have time to work on some­thing else in town if you can only call in two-line stories to your own paper?"

  I'm missing something here. Clearly I have a part in a drama that no one has remembered to send me a script for. "You're a Mason, aren't you, Al?"

  "You're not doing one of those white-supremacy pieces, are you?" he says.

  "Yeah, that's you, Al, a white supremacist. Leave me alone and let me talk to Joe, please."

  The man they have arrested, Joe tells me, is no one anyone knows. He's from Russia and is employed as a warehouse worker in Queens. Nobody knows anything else.

  At exactly nine-fifteen, I place a call on my credit card (hotels kill you with toll charges) to Chicago to reach Cassy's son, Henry Cochran.

  He gives me an enthusiastic hello and we go through the pre­liminaries and I tell Henry that the conversation is being re­corded. It is during this chat that I learn that he is sitting in the conference room of one of Chicago's largest architecture firms. He's there, he says, to get the basics down before one day going out on his own. What would he like to design? Buildings. What is he working on now at the firm? He sadly tells me the air-duct system in a new department store that is going up in Evanston.

  "Did you go to Northwestern like your parents?" I ask.

  "No, I went to Yale."

  "Really?" I can't contain my surprise. "My Dad went there. He was an architect, too." And I tell him a little about what he did and Henry says he was lucky and that he hoped he could afford to do what he did, too. "But I've sort of got some upcom­ing obligations. I mean, well, I'm getting married next year and I'm not sure how messing around on my own can contribute to supporting a family."

  I think of what my mother said, about the kind of wife my fa­ther needed to be able to risk what he did. I don't even know this young guy, but I have to resist lecturing him on the impor­tance of marrying the right kind of woman if he wants to be a happy architect.

  Then I remember how well-to-do his mother is, to say noth­ing of his stepfather. "Did you ever consider allowing your family to invest in your own firm?"

  At this, Henry laughs and I like him. "You really just want to know why I haven't let my rich parents support me?"

  "Well, no, I mean, really, invest in your business."

  "Oh, come on," he says. "What would the point of that be? What would that prove about my abilities?"

  "You want to have a family."

  "I don't want handouts!"

  "But if you're talented—"

  "Then I'll have clients," he finishes for me. "No way, Sally. Come on. You know my mom's story, you know my dad's story. They made it on their own, why shouldn't I?"

  This is Cassy's kid all right.

  I ask him how he got to Chicago.

  "It's where I got the best job. And I have an uncle here, and a cousin I used to visit all the time, so I thought, why not? And then I met Marie, my fiancée, and well, I love Chicago." He pauses. "So what do you want to know about Mom?"

  I don't know why, but it is very strange to hear someone call Cassy Cochran “Mom,” even after hearing how much she moth­ers people. Is it an age thing? Or a beauty thing? Or a power thing? That a woman like Cassy is actually somebody's mother? Like mine has been to me, like anyone else's has been to them? This is a very important side to her—I hope Henry's talkative.

  He is. When I ask him to describe his mother, he says, "She is the wisest, kindest person I know," and then he launches into numerous stories about how she was always helping the neigh­bors or taking in strays—including people— or volunteering her time because she thought it would mean a lot to Henry, for example, at his school when he was young.

  "It's not like Mom had a whole lot of time on her hands." He laughs. "I remember one time Dad figured out that it cost a hundred dollars an hour for her to man the PTO bake sale."

  "Was your mother strict?"

  "Oh yeah," he says, surprising me. "Yeah, she was. Mom is very big on schedules, very big on routines. I had a set time to start my homework and I had a specific place where I had to do it. So from like second grade right through high school, there I was—at seven o'c
lock—at the kitchen table and Mom was al­most always sitting right across from me doing what she called her homework."

  He talks about a childhood growing up on Riverside Drive along the Hudson River in Manhattan and spending some weekends in upstate Connecticut.

  "And what was the address of the Manhattan apartment?"

  "Oh, it's the same one—where Mom and Jackson live now. One sixty-two Riverside Drive. At Eighty-Eighth Street." This surprises me. Usually couples start over in a fresh home if they can, and I mention this.

  He laughs again. "Yeah, well, sort of. See, when Mom and Jackson were thinking about getting married, he was living in a hotel in New York—his house was down south. Mom loves the Upper West Side and they didn't see anything they liked any better than where Mom already lived. But of course neither one of them really wanted to hang out where Mom and Dad lived together for so long, so Jackson ended up buying the rest of the entire floor—it was two other apartments, big ones. They made the two other apartments into their living area and then they made a kind of guest suite out of my room, the old guest room and my parents' old room. They use our old living room as a dining room. It's complicated, but really a wonderful place. Kind of an urban mansion, which is what they need because, you know, Jackson has kids who come for holidays and he has what seems like a hundred relatives."

  I am more curious, though, about how Cassy juggled a full­time job and a son and steer him back to that.

  "Mom always had me in some kind of after-school camp. Sometimes it was sports, sometimes art or computer stuff. When I was really little, she used to run over to school and bring me back to WST. She used to pay the janitor to let me hang out with him while he was cleaning and doing repairs around the building. Then she met another lady in the building who had a kid my age. Mom worked out some kind of deal with her—you'll have to ask her, but I think she paid Roddy's tuition at my school—so then Mrs. Steinberg took charge of us both after school."

  When Henry mentions their cleaning lady, Rosanne Di­Santos, who used to pinch-hit for Cassy in any matriarchal crunch, I ask, “Do you have any idea where she is now?"

  "Oh, she's still at Mom's. At least, during the day. She's been Mom's full-time housekeeper since she and Jackson opened up the whole floor. They do a lot of entertaining, for his business and hers, and Rosanne does everything."

  I make a note. I want to talk to this Rosanne DiSantos who has been working for Cassy for over fifteen years.

  Henry has lots of stories about his mother: how she never had time to exercise so she used to make Henry stand on the landing on the building's staircase and read to her while she tried to run up and down a few flights of stairs; how she and Michael sat in Michael's den and ran tapes of their respective stations' newscasts and critiqued them; how she cooked moun­tains of food one Sunday every month and filled the second freezer they had in the pantry, and how Henry, when he was little, thought all food came out of plastic bags, frozen; how good his father was at making up stories at bedtime and how dreadful his mother was at it, borrowing heavily from real life.

  He cracks up. "I swear, Mom used to keep telling me these sto­ries about unhappy subway trains that kept trying to run away, and of course later I realized it was because they were having a lot of problems on our subway line and it was weighing heavily on her mind. But that was Mom. Flights of fancy just were never her thing."

  "If there's one thing you could have changed when you were growing up, what would it have been?" I have asked this as a way of bringing up his father's drink­ing. But Henry fools me.

  "I wish we had a dog."

  "Do you have one now?"

  "Two," he says.

  We talk a little about that. "Henry, if your mother has one fault, what is it?"

  "She tries to do too much," he says without hesitation. "So she gets overextended, stressed-out."

  "Why do you think she tries to do too much? I mean, your mother is a very intelligent, very self-aware person, why wouldn't she have this under control?"

  He thinks so long about his answer, I begin to think he's re­fusing to even acknowledge that I asked it.

  "I think," he finally says, slowly, "Mom is in some way trying to make up for my grandfather. It's like she's trying to live two lives' worth, to make up for what he didn't do, for his dying so young, for never fulfilling his promise."

  This is pretty deep for a twenty-five-year-old guy.

  I ask him about his father.

  "I see him a lot here in Chicago. I like his wife all right."

  When I ask him about his parents' marriage, he says that I should talk to them about that. I thank Henry profusely and we conclude our interview. While I was on the phone, Chi Chi called and left a message asking if I could do a late lunch with Michael Cochran. "I'd also like to talk to Rosanne DiSantos," I say when I call her back.

  "Getting a little personal, aren't we?" she asks me.

  "Well, the story is about a person."

  There is a thoughtful silence. "You'll never believe it," Chi Chi says, "but until you just said that I've never thought of it that way. We think in terms of public consumption around here, day and night."

  Great quote, I think, writing that down.

  "I'll ask," Chi Chi says, "but I can't promise anything."

  Next I put a call into Verity. I promised I'd touch base and now that I can see how the piece is starting to shape up, I don't mind. She takes my call immediately. "Good, I'm glad you called. I've been wondering where you are, what's happening. I said to Corbett just last night, when he asked me how you were doing, that you went off with Spencer Hawes last week and I never saw or heard from you again."

  "It's going very well," I say, deciding to skip over the Spen­cer part. I tell her about the interviews I've had, and that I'm meeting Michael Cochran for lunch this afternoon, and may be able to talk to Cassy's longtime housekeeper.

  "When do you see the mother?" Verity asks.

  "Oh, she wouldn't let me. She gave me a phoner, though. She absolutely refuses to let anyone see her and there is a particular photo she wants us to use."

  There is a quiet chuckle. "Well, we'll see about that. So what is she like?"

  "She is—Verity, oh my—the woman is such a bitch it's un­real."

  She laughs. "That is interesting. But listen, Sally, I'm glad it's going well, but I think we should meet. I don't need anything to read, but I want to know what slant you'll be using, talk it through."

  Part of me can't help but bristle. This is not normal proce­dure; this is a signal that Verity feels she is dealing with a nov­ice who needs supervision.

  "Will you be in Connecticut this weekend?" she asks.

  "Yes."

  "Good. Look, Corbett's going to be in Dallas, so why don't you come over to my house in Litchfield, say one o'clock on Sunday? Can you do that?"

  "Sure," I say. "But are you sure you don't want to wait a week until I have something for you to read?"

  "Quite sure."

  "Fine," I say, writing this down on my calendar.

  "So you haven't used our facilities here at all," Verity says.

  "I haven't needed to yet, but you never know."

  There is a pause. The rustle of papers. I imagine that if Verity is like most editors I know, she is probably reading through her mail or messages while talking to me. "So," she says absently, "you never told me, how was your night out with Spencer?"

  Oh, boy. I wasn't expecting that one. "It was very nice. The play was pretty good and he—well, you know, he can talk about anything and so I had a very nice time."

  "Have you seen him again?"

  I don't know when she might talk to Spencer or what he has told her if they've already spoken. I don't know why, but I don't want people in on this, particularly not someone I'm working for. Still, I have to say something, so I say, "Um, yes. I did see him briefly." (Like a hundred times, briefly.)

  "That's nice," she says lightly. "It's none of my business, of course, but I'm curious. What
about your friend Doug?"

  "We don't have that kind of commitment."

  "Ah," she says, with an inflection that makes me think of someone spying on an old acquaintance strolling in Hyde Park or something. Ah, Lord So-and-So, how are you?

  I don't know what to say next, and perhaps she doesn't, ei­ther, because we're both hesitating. Then she says, "Spencer's a very nice man. He's very bright. Maybe something will become of it. Now, that would be something, wouldn't it?"

  I still don't know what to say, except maybe Leave me alone, I'm overwhelmed enough as it is.

  But Verity does not require a response; she has to go. We con­firm we'll meet at her house on Sunday. When I get off the phone I have to hurry to make it on time to the St. Regis to meet Michael Cochran.

  I walk into the restaurant and spot Michael Cochran imme­diately. He is a tall, big man, in his late fifties—until I remember this can't be; he's supposed to be nearer to Cassy's age, which is fifty.

  He is handsome, a little heavier than I thought he would be; his handshake is firm, his smile very nice, his brown eyes kind. There are the ravages of his drinking, though, a fine net­work of spidery red veins over his reddish nose and a perma­nent spotty blush on his cheeks. Still, he is attractive, more so when he speaks. Within two minutes I can see he's very smart and that he's charismatic, a leader, a swashbuckling teacher.

  "You look very young and attractive and nice," he says right away as we sit down, "a combination I don't think I've ever at­tributed to one of Verity's writers before."

  I shake my head in amazement. "I have heard more about Verity's writers than I have about Cassy."

  "That's because they're infamous," he says. He waits until I get the tape recorder going and then leans in toward the mike. "They think we're bad in TV, but Verity's writers sit at home and sharpen their claws and contemplate the best ways to strip flesh off bones. Our stuff, it runs on TV once and poof! Gone forever. Verity's stuff sits on coffee tables and in waiting rooms for months and months and months."