The Unspoken

by Smith, Ian K.

  One of the guys in the far corner started to move. He was reaching inside his coat. Ice kept his eyes on me but backed down the guy with a small twitch of his hand. He took a sip of some dark-colored liquor in a tumbler on his desk. “What business do you have with my nephew?” Ice said.

  “I’m a private investigator,” I said. “A young woman has disappeared. I’ve been hired to find her.”

  Ice nodded slowly as he evaluated my words. He rotated the cigar in his mouth, then took a long drag. His fingers were long, his fingernails professionally manicured and clear coated. “And what’s Chopper got to do with your missing woman?”

  “That’s what I want to find out,” I said. “Supposedly this missing woman is his girlfriend.” I reached into my pocket to pull out the picture of Tinsley Gerrigan. Before my hand could reach the photograph, four silver-nosed .44 Magnums were conspicuously aimed at my vital organs.

  “It’s just a photograph,” I said, raising my hands slowly. “No need to get antsy, gentlemen.”

  Ice did that finger twitch again, and the guns disappeared. I finished pulling out the photograph and dropped it on the desk.

  Ice picked it up and took a long hard look at it. I watched his eyes. They were a light brown, almost the color of sand. I had never seen a black man with eyes that color.

  He passed the photograph to the guy on his right. “A tall scoop of American vanilla,” he said. “What the hell is she doing messing with Chopper?”

  “I was wondering the exact same thing,” I said.

  “What’s her name?” Ice asked.

  “Tinsley Gerrigan.”

  Ice pulled the cigar out of his mouth and sat up in his chair. “You just say Gerrigan?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “As in the real estate family Gerrigan?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “As in this is the old man’s daughter?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Ice fell back in his chair. “Well, goddamn! Little Chopper done found himself a blue-eyed snow bunny, and a rich one at that. Not bad for a nappy-headed West Side boy. Things in Chicago ain’t what they used to be.”

  7

  I STOOD IN MY office later that morning indefatigably trying to sink five putts in a row from seven feet away while thinking about the meeting with Ice. He was pleasantly surprised that Chopper had reeled in a rich North Shore girl, almost like it was an external validation. At the same time, he was worried that Chopper might be playing too far out of his league. He gave us his blessing to have a chat with his nephew.

  I continued swinging my putter, because after almost an hour now, the most I had gotten was three. I don’t know exactly why, but for some reason I did my best thinking while going through my putting routine. One of my overly intellectual friends had once described it to me as the distraction method. According to his reasoning, thinking too hard on a particular topic could get you trapped in an eddy of inconsequential thoughts; shift concentration onto something else, and what you were thinking about before now came to you in much tighter focus. Distraction method or not, Tinsley Gerrigan was still missing, the retainer check from her mother had cleared in my account, and I had not the damnedest idea where she might be. I hoped my lunch date with Carolina would give me some kind of clue. Meanwhile, I really needed to be doing my best thinking, thus the putting and distracting. I was nicely lined up over the ball and about to swing my putter back when my phone rang.

  “Cayne,” I said, picking up the phone.

  “Solve your case yet, hotshot?”

  It was Burke.

  “The ducks are starting to line up,” I said.

  “Don’t bullshit me,” Burke returned. “You’re still looking for threads to pull. How was your visit with Culpepper?”

  I didn’t have to ask Burke how he had heard about our little tea party. He had eyes and ears everywhere, even in K-Town. “Things were chummy,” I said.

  “Be careful with that crew,” Burke said. “Culpepper will order you killed just as easy as he gets his thousand-dollar shoes shined. The man has absolutely no heart. Life is like one of his old suits. When he no longer has any use for it, he just throws it away.”

  “And thus the name Ice.”

  “For good damn reason,” Burke said. “The thug killed his own brother-in-law to consolidate power over his cartel.”

  “A real family man.”

  “Culpepper has one family—his bank accounts. Just watch your back and front. You ruffled some feathers over there. He put a call in to check on you.”

  I wasn’t surprised. Chicagoans were well versed in how the city really did its business. It was widely accepted that “creative businessmen” like Ice Culpepper had an unwritten understanding of coexistence with CPD. They weren’t friends and they weren’t enemies, but they stayed out of each other’s way and went about their own work. Sometimes they had conflicts of interest and settlements had to be negotiated; other times they relied on each other for information and help. A mutually beneficial barter system. Ice had someone on the inside. They all did. And there were some cops who drove expensive foreign cars and lived in houses way above the means of their city salaries. That was how business was done in Chicago.

  “Ice specifically wanted to know who had your back,” Burke said.

  “And you held the winning ticket.”

  “Let’s just say he knows you’re not a lone ranger.”

  “Your support is overwhelming.”

  “Just move tight on this,” Burke said. “He’s got plenty of friends upstairs. I don’t wanna get fucked. Remember that winning ticket I’m holding is still just a piece of paper. It can be thrown away.”

  The line went dead.

  8

  I WAS SITTING OVER a delectable plate of barbecue baby back ribs and a loaded baked potato at Bandera, one of my favorite lunch spots on the northern part of Michigan Avenue. This was the first time I had eaten here since Julia left me a year ago, breaking off our engagement by running off to Paris with some stockbroker she had met during a spin class at the East Bank Club. This had been one of our favorite restaurants, so I had avoided it in hopes of suppressing the memory of all the great times we’d had here. My therapist said that two years was enough time. It was unhealthy for me to continue blacking out areas of the city that Julia and I had once enjoyed. So, here I was taking another step in my recovery, and positioned across from me was Carolina Espinoza, the administrative supervisor at police headquarters in the Bureau of Investigative Services. She looked equally smart and beautiful in a tapered black pantsuit.

  “You haven’t asked me to lunch in months,” Carolina said. “And when you do, you need a favor. Any other girl might start feeling some kind of way about that.”

  “Guilty as charged,” I said, raising my hands. “Would it matter if I apologized?”

  “Only because you look so damn cute in that shirt.” She winked, then used her fork to separate the bacon bits from the rest of her salad. “Tinsley Gerrigan was quite a busy girl.”

  “A good busy or a bad busy?” I asked.

  “Depends on your perspective,” Carolina said. “I’d be willing to bet that it wasn’t the kind of busy that would’ve met her family’s approval.”

  “That is if they knew about all of her busyness.”

  “Yes, then there’s that.”

  We were at my favorite table in the window tucked into the corner. Julia and I’d always sat here. Now I shared it with Carolina and felt okay with it. I could see the heavy lunch crowd flowing along Michigan Avenue like a giant organism. Street performers beat drums and juggled bowling pins; panhandlers kept one eye on their tattered signs and the other eye on the lookout for menacing cops. This was the Gold Coast, after all, the pride and joy of Chicago’s downtown shopping district. God forbid someone walking out of Hermès be asked for a quarter as they slipped into the back seat of their Bentley with their $35,000 crocodile Birkin bag.

  Carolina reached into her handbag—which was not a Birkin bag
—and produced a large envelope and slid it across the table. I reluctantly pulled myself from the pile of ribs, wiped my fingers carefully, then examined the envelope. Three different groups of papers had been stapled together. There also was a single spreadsheet with several highlighted areas.

  “I took Tinsley’s number and formed a timeline,” Carolina said, leaning over to show me her work. “The spreadsheet groups the calls two ways. First by the caller. Then by the date. It also tells you the time of day they spoke and for how long.”

  She took one of the stapled packets and flipped it to the last page. There was a list of names, some of which I recognized immediately. One of them was a starting forward for the Chicago Bulls. Maybe he had been a previous boyfriend.

  “I don’t have her text messages yet,” Carolina said. “But these are all the people she either called or who called her. I’ve ranked them from the greatest number of calls to the least. And next to their names I’ve put how many times she’s spoken to them over the last three months.”

  I smiled my approval. Some people had minds that naturally gravitated toward organization. It would’ve taken me months to think of a scheme like this. I was struck by the simplicity of the page yet how full it was of information. Everything was so accessible. My eyes, of course, went right to the top of the page. I wasn’t surprised. Hunter Morgan was way ahead of the pack. She and Tinsley had spoken 167 times over that period. Next up was our lover boy, Chopper McNair. They clocked in at 134 times. But it was the third name on the list that caught my attention. Gunjan Patel. Whoever this was, they had spoken 101 times.

  I pointed to the name.

  “She’s a doctor,” Carolina said. “Not a PhD, but a real medical doctor. She practices psychiatry at Northwestern. She’s been there for about ten years. Her husband is also on faculty. He’s an anesthesiologist. They were in the same medical school at the University of Chicago.”

  I sat back and took a healthy pull of lemonade. It was sweet and bitter and cold all at the same time, exactly the way lemonade was supposed to be. Carolina took a delicate sip of her seltzer water. She could make even something as mundane as drinking water a sensual experience.

  “A psychiatrist,” I said, thinking aloud. “Why did Tinsley need to see a shrink, and why so many calls?”

  Carolina shrugged. “Either she has a serious problem that needs a lot of attention, or her shrink has become a friend. Any way you look at it, that’s a lot of calls.”

  “And a lot of dinero if she’s paying by the hour,” I said. “Seems like the head-examining business is a growth industry.”

  “And for her husband too,” Carolina said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Carolina flipped to the second page. She had circled the name Bradford Weems in the middle of the list. Tinsley had spoken to him seventy-five times. But there were two numbers next to his name. The first had seventy-four connections, and the second phone number had only one.

  “So, Tinsley was no stranger to our illustrious Drs. Patel and Weems,” I said, finishing the rest of the lemonade and motioning to our waitress for a refill. “But why seventy-five calls to the husband if the wife was the psychiatrist? And why was one of those calls to a different number?”

  “I knew you’d ask that.” Carolina smiled. “The seventy-four calls were to his cell phone, but the one call to the different number was to a landline in his home. And here’s something even more interesting. That call to his home happened to be the last call she made.” Carolina grabbed the master spreadsheet and traced a row at the bottom of the page. “They spoke at eleven fifteen that night for a total of seven minutes. So Tinsley spoke to either the husband or the wife not long before she disappeared.”

  “Voilà,” I said. “Never a stone unturned.”

  “And the most I get for it is a lunch salad.”

  “Yes, and the handsomest company in the joint.”

  “There’s that too,” she said, leaning over and kissing me softly on the cheek. “Not a bad trade, I guess.”

  I promised myself I wouldn’t wash that side of my face for a year.

  9

  DR. GUNJAN PATEL WAS a slim, attractive woman in her early thirties, with shoulder-length dark hair, warm skin, and a tiny diamond stud in her nose. She wore a smart black pinstriped suit and a gold necklace with a diamond heart charm that rested against her cream-colored silk blouse. Her office was a modern affair, all chrome and glass. She shook my hand firmly when I walked in.

  “Thanks for seeing me on such short notice,” I said, taking a seat in a low-slung leather chair. Rather than go back to the chair behind her desk, Dr. Patel took a seat in the chair next to me. It, too, was leather, but the raised seat and straight back elevated her to a position of authority. Psychiatrists were the most intentional people on the face of the planet.

  “I won’t take much of your time,” I said after we both had gotten settled. “I know you have a busy practice.”

  “You said it had to do with Tinsley Gerrigan,” she said matter-of-factly. Nothing like getting to the point.

  “It does,” I said. “She’s missing.”

  “Missing?” Dr. Patel asked. Her eyes opened a little, but other than that her expression didn’t change.

  “She hasn’t been seen or heard from for five days,” I said. “Her family has no idea where she might’ve gone.”

  “And you’re looking for her?”

  “The family has hired me to do that,” I said. I slipped her one of my business cards, which had only my name and office number. She looked at it cautiously, then calmly set it on the round glass table beside her.

  “So, how can I help you?” she said.

  “Was Tinsley Gerrigan having lots of problems?”

  “I don’t understand your question, Mr. Cayne,” she said. “We all have problems.”

  “Yes, but some more than others. Tinsley’s problems were obviously troublesome enough that she felt the need to have professional help. That must mean something.”

  “Many others could stand to use some professional help too,” she said. “They just don’t seek it.”

  “One of my ex-girlfriends said something like that to me once,” I said. “Maybe that’s why she’s an ex. But that’s a different conversation. Do you like Tinsley?”

  “That’s a rather strange question,” Dr. Patel said.

  “Can’t doctors like people?”

  “I don’t consider my patients in that type of subjective manner. Doing so would introduce my emotional bias. I focus my energies on their problem or problems and what I can do to help them get better and find clarity. It’s not my job to pass judgment.”

  This was going to be a chess match. “Let me try it in a different way,” I said. “Is Tinsley a likable young woman?”

  “Sure,” Dr. Patel said. “But that has nothing to do with the intentions or quality of my services. It doesn’t matter whether someone is a serial murderer or nun, a corporate CEO or homeless. I give all patients the same level of attention and care. That’s my oath as a physician.”

  “Then you must rack up a lot of minutes on your cell phone bill,” I said.

  “I don’t understand the connection,” she said, her brow furrowing slightly.

  “You just said that all of your patients get the same treatment regardless of who they are.”

  “True.” She nodded.

  “Then your phone must be ringing off the hook. You spoke to Tinsley a hundred and one times over the course of three months. Multiply that by your total patient load, and your phone’s battery must be hot enough to melt Lake Michigan in the middle of winter.”

  Dr. Patel cocked her head to the side. Her expression changed to one of impending irritation.

  “A hundred and one times,” she said. It was difficult to tell if she was smiling or smirking. “There’s no standard for how often patients consult with their therapist. It’s on a case-by-case basis.”

  “But you would agree that a hundred and one time
s is outside of the norm,” I said.

  Dr. Patel shook her head equivocally. “Depends on the patient and their needs,” she said.

  “Which leads us back to my original question. It wouldn’t be too much of a reach to conclude that someone speaking to their psychiatrist a hundred and one times in ninety days was having serious problems.”

  “You are certainly free to draw your own conclusions, Mr. Cayne.”

  When you reach a dead end, make a U-turn and try another street. “Why did Tinsley start seeing you in the first place?” I asked.

  “Unfortunately, Mr. Cayne, while I’d like to help in your investigation, I really can’t discuss the details of Tinsley’s case. Patient-doctor confidentiality. I’m sure you understand.”

  “I was wondering how long it would take before that shield came out,” I said, standing. I hadn’t gotten everything I had come for, but I had gotten enough. Dr. Patel knew a lot more than she was willing to let on, and she wasn’t going to make it easy.

  She also stood. We shook hands. There was a sense of relief on her face.

  I turned to her when I reached the door. “I’ve heard that your husband is a physician too,” I said. “Lots of brainpower in your home. Do you and your husband consult on patients together?”

  “Absolutely not,” Dr. Patel said. “Brad is an anesthesiologist. His practice has nothing to do with mine. Patient-doctor confidentiality supersedes marital relations.”

  “That’s what I figured.” I smiled my most understanding smile.

  I opened the door. “Oh, one more thing, Dr. Patel,” I said. “Do you ever give your husband’s number to your patients?”

  She hesitated just slightly. “Never,” she said. “Why would they need his number?” But her jawline had tightened a little. These were tells. She knew the real purpose of my question. I decided to push her a little more but not too much.

  “What if they wanted to contact you after office hours and couldn’t reach you through normal channels?”

  “That’s why doctors have an answering service. The operators take the messages and get them to me in a timely fashion. That’s not my husband’s job.”