Question of Trust

by Laura Caldwell

  The cab got off the highway at North Avenue, which was lit up with store signs and Christmas lights.

  “And she didn’t just sell for them,” Vaughn said.

  “What do you mean? There were other sources?”

  “No. I mean she didn’t just sell for the Cortaderos. She did different jobs, different favors for José Cortadero. He manages Blue Glass, the restaurant. Have you been there?”

  “Yes, it’s excellent.”

  “Well, it’s a legit restaurant, but for José it’s just a front. José lets other people run it while really he’s running the Cortadero business. But apparently, he sometimes needed some minor surveillance and Kim Parkway did that.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  I felt a wave of grief, thinking that Kim and I—despite how different we seemed—could have been friends. We could have bonded about how strange it was to be a girl who looked like everyone else, but who walked around with a secret, who couldn’t let anyone around her know the kind of work she did sometimes—surveillance, investigations…

  But then I stopped the thoughts of Kim. “Surveillance,” I said. “She wasn’t doing surveillance on…”

  “You and your boyfriend,” Vaughn said. “Yeah. Look, we teamed up with the Feds on this, and—”

  “What? You teamed up with the Feds?” It wasn’t usual custom for county police to work with federal agents or prosecutors.

  Next to me, Theo’s eyes grew concerned.

  “Once we got the info that she was a pet detective—” Vaughn said.

  But I cut him off. “A pet detective? What’s that?”

  “That’s what I call private investigators.”

  Vaughn didn’t know that I was a part-time P.I. myself, but on behalf of my sorta profession, I was insulted. “You know what I’ve heard,” I said, “from working in the criminal defense world? I’ve heard that most P.I.’s are way better and way more effective than police officers.” I had, in fact, never heard that.

  “Whatever, McNeil, listen to me for a sec. Once we knew she was a P.I. for the Cortadero’s, we figured that’s a fed thing. One of my guys remembered a piece in the Tribune that mentioned something about the Feds working on your boy’s case.”

  I wanted to say, Don’t call him my boy, but I was too interested in the other things he was saying.

  “So we went to the Feds,” Vaughn said. “And started sharing info. The Feds already have an agent working under Cortadero at the restaurant. They were pretty freaking cool to share the info with us. I guess the guy, the agent, he pretends to be the general manager or some shit. Anyway, yeah, she was watching you guys for the Cortaderos. Guess they had some money in Theo’s business.”

  “You guessed right.” I filled him in on what we’d learned from Brad—the Cortadero family’s investment in HeadFirst and how that investment had grown into hundreds of millions. And eventually into hundreds of millions of losses. I stopped when I got to the part of the story that Brad had drained the foreign account.

  I looked at Theo. And I read his silent request. Don’t tell him. Not yet.

  Luckily Vaughn jumped in for me. “Yep. Makes sense. She was keeping an eye on you to see how much you guys knew about the Cortadero involvement. That break-in was probably their first step—mostly to scare you, but also to see what they could find in your apartment, anything about the Cortaderos being with HeadFirst.”

  “Which they didn’t,” I said. “Theo didn’t keep any business-related documents at home.”

  “I know. But that probably just made them more paranoid. They needed to know more, see if you would mention them, get a better look at the apartment.”

  “So they moved Kim in downstairs.”

  “Sounds like it. We got some info that she suggested it herself. She was trying to make a name with José so she could rise up through his business. She’d already messed that up once by getting arrested. They don’t like when you get arrested, so she owed them. And then she really did get dumped by some doctor and needed a place to live. And it makes sense—the Cortaderos didn’t want anyone finding out that they were laundering their drug money through HeadFirst. They’d do anything to protect that information. Especially if other families had contributed some of the money. Or even if they’d just bragged about it to one of the other families.”

  “So on the day she died, she broke into my condo or something?”

  “Yeah, she had tons of time to work on your keypad when you left during the day. She already had the code to downstairs. She was already in the building. So she would just have to go through a bunch of steps to work out the code to your condo door. All she really needed was some time. Three or four hours. Then, once she knew the code, she could go in when she knew you were out, and check out your place.”

  “What does this mean in terms of Kim’s death?” For some reason, I couldn’t say the word murder.

  “Means she probably pissed them off. Those guys will kill at the drop of a hat. They really don’t give a shit.”

  “Oh, great. Thanks for telling me that.”

  “Hey, here’s the good part—they know the Feds are digging into them. Apparently, Mother and Father Cortadero came into town to figure things out, but then they got wind that the Feds were circling and they fled.”

  “That’s interesting. But I’m not sure why it’s the good part.”

  He sighed, as if I tired him. “Because you don’t have to worry about them messing with you. At least not in the short-term. They know they’re being watched, and there is no way they’ll fuck with you.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. My mind was too confused with sadness and exhaustion to form words. And yet, there was a sliver of relief in there. At least now we knew what happened. Now we’d have to see how we could use this info in Theo’s case.

  The cab turned onto Eugenie and pulled up in front of my condo building. My downstairs neighbor must have been out. No one was in the second-floor unit anymore. Kim wasn’t anywhere now. And of course, my place was dark. The building looked somber, shrouded by the steadily falling snow.

  “Vaughn, I have to go,” I said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” I hung up. As we paid the driver and got our bags from the trunk, I told Theo an abbreviated version of everything Vaughn had said.

  Tomorrow will be different, I told myself. Tomorrow will be better.

  We knew now that the Cortaderos likely ordered the first break-in. They were responsible, too, for Kim being in the building, Kim being in my condo that day. And another likelihood—that they had killed her. The Cortaderos had also put money in HeadFirst, a lot of money, a large portion of which Brad put into a foreign trust, and then he siphoned funds from that trust. Brad’s bleeding of the company led to HeadFirst being unable to pay bills, which led to Theo getting turned down for a mortgage, and to Eric’s suicide attempt. Which led me to think about Kim again.

  I had to stop the circle in my head. “It’ll be better tomorrow,” I said out loud as we began to pull our bags toward the building, the snow a gray slush under our feet.

  “Yeah,” Theo said softly.

  We walked up the three flights of stairs, footsteps thudding one after another. Theo followed, his footsteps even heavier.

  “It’ll be better tomorrow,” I said again, this time under my breath, like a mantra.

  But when I hit the third floor, I knew it. I knew something was wrong. But that was already apparent. Lots of things were wrong.

  So I opened the door, and it was like a flashback. It was like my world had zoomed back—zoomed to that day we opened the door, and Kim was on the floor. It was the same—the same creak of my front door that used to sound comforting to me, when I came home after a long day at Baltimore & Brown. And then another flashback—there was a woman. A woman crumpled on the floor, like the day we found Kim.

  But this time the woman sat up. This time she pointed at Theo.

  “Mom?” Theo said.

  Then she started crying, and she crumpled on the
floor again.

  70

  “Mom,” Theo said, “what are you doing?” Then, as if thinking of a better question, he asked, “You used the code to get in here?”

  She sobbed, then sucked in her breath.

  “When did you give it to her?” I asked softly.

  “After the hearing. She was going to drop off all the documents for her house. The one she put up collateral for my bond.”

  Anna cried. Her head fell onto her arms.

  “Mom, what are you doing on the floor?”

  She pushed herself up to her elbows. “I was just going to…” She started crying again.

  “Mom!” Theo said, as if trying to jar her.

  “I knew you were out of town. I wanted to see things for myself, because I never wanted anyone dead.” Her gaze slid to mine now; her eyes were crazed. “You’re not dead,” she said.

  “No.”

  I said nothing else. I did nothing else. I didn’t know what to do. The Anna Jameson in front of me was not the lovely, elegant woman I’d met at lunch, the one I’d seen again after Theo was arrested. Her face was distorted, as if one side of it sat higher. Or maybe it was her eyes that kept veering from a sneer to wide-eyed horror.

  “Mom,” Theo said, in a sharp tone, “what are you talking about?”

  “I just wanted to hurt her.”

  “What?” Theo screamed the question. He looked on the verge of madness himself.

  “No, no, no,” Anna said. She pushed herself up farther until she was sitting cross-legged on the floor. She wore jeans and a white blouse. The blouse had yellowed stains under the arms. Neither garment appeared recently laundered. “I’m glad she’s not dead,” she said, waving an arm toward me. “So glad…”

  Theo remained silent.

  “Who is dead if you aren’t? Why was she here?” Anna said. “These are the things that are making me insane.” She cackled a laugh. “Among other things!” But the laughter died away. “I never meant for him to kill someone. He was supposed to come in here and hurt her.” She looked at me. “Just a little.”

  “Who is he?” Theo shook his head, as if thinking of a better question. “Why would you want to hurt Izzy?”

  “I didn’t,” Anna said plaintively. “Not really. I just thought if she did happen to get hurt, then those men she worked with—”

  “What men? Who?”

  “Um…” She looked confused. “Mayfield?”

  “Mayburn,” I corrected.

  “And Christopher.”

  “That’s my dad,” I said.

  “I hired someone from the dealership. He said he could take care of anything! And then he told me that those two men were investigating where the money had gone.”

  “What money?” Theo said.

  She sat up straighter, looking suddenly a lot more sober, more sane. “The money I took from the trust. The one in Rarotonga.”

  71

  In the kitchen, I scrambled to make tea, something I’d suggested just to get myself the hell out of that situation, even for a second.

  I heard Theo’s mom talking to him about how Brad had dumped her years ago, left her adrift. Then when she got breast cancer, Brad had totally avoided her, made her deal with it on her own, financially and emotionally.

  “Mom, we’ve talked about this a million times,” Theo said, his voice heavily laced with confusion and frustration. “You have to get over it.”

  “Get over it?” Anna shrieked. “How are you supposed to get over someone turning their back on you—someone you loved—when you are faced with your own death? When you most need a little help and compassion? My cancer was Stage Four, Theo!”

  “I know, Mom. I know.”

  “I had no money. I had to move in with my cousin and her kids.”

  “I know, Mom. It’s one of the reasons I came home from college.”

  “Do you know only twenty percent of women with Stage Four breast cancer survive?”

  Theo said nothing. I felt bad for deserting him.

  I brought mugs of tea to Theo and his mother—mugs I put on the table and which sat there, steaming.

  “You have to remember!” his mother was saying, her voice plaintive. Theo had coaxed her onto my sofa, and they sat next to each other like two characters in a fantastically awkward play I’d seen at the Orchid Theatre. “Once I got better,” she said, “once you came home, your father resurfaced. And not only did he resurface, but he raised millions of dollars for HeadFirst. It hardly took any effort for him, can you believe that?”

  Anna’s gaze was far away, as if she were looking into the past. “I had filed for bankruptcy. I was eighty-five pounds. And he couldn’t even give me a dime.”

  She moved her head in lagging arcs, her neck wobbly.

  Theo looked at me, his eyes pleading.

  I took a breath. “Anna,” I said, “I’m so sorry for all you’ve been through. It sounds like too much for anyone to face. But how does this relate to the money in the Cook Islands?”

  Her gaze swung to mine, loosely focused. “You’re alive,” she said in a whisper.

  Theo put his head in his hands.

  “Anna,” I said, a little louder now. “You said you took the money from the trust. How? Why?”

  “I knew Brad was using some of that money for himself rather than the company.” She scoffed. “I know him so well, he can’t escape. I know him. And it just made me so angry. For years I watched him live Brad Jameson’s high life. The girls, the cars, the trips. I was slowly clawing my way back to health. No thanks to him. And it just made me so fucking angry.”

  “But how did you get the money out of the trust?”

  She blinked a few times. “I was a trustee. I remembered that one day, like the answer was there, waiting the whole time. I remembered when Brad was forming that trust, bragging about all the money he was putting in. He thought we were fine. He thought I’d forgiven him.” That cackle of laughter again. “He had to name trustees. We always used to put each other’s name on legal and estate documents. Even after we got divorced.” Another garbled, distraught laugh. “He was the one they would’ve called if I died of the cancer. Sometimes I wanted to die, just so that something would interrupt his perfect little life.”

  “But even if you were a trustee,” Theo said, “why would you do that to me? Because of you, I lost my business and almost lost my best friend.”

  Anna Jameson began crying again, softly. “I know. I know. I kept the money. I still have it! And when I saw what it was doing to you and HeadFirst, I tried to put it back. But I’m not the settler of the trust, only a trustee! I couldn’t put it back.” She started crying harder then. “I was going to tell you, but then you got arrested. The government had read the situation wrong and thought it was you.”

  Theo sat back in the couch. He ran his hand over his shaved head, his eyes searching for the way things used to be.

  “So, you do still have the money?” I asked, wanting to make sure I got that part right.

  She nodded. “I paid off my medical bills, and then I split it up in a bunch of accounts.”

  “Does Brad know you were the one taking out the funds?”

  She raised her head, her crying stopping abruptly. “He figured it out.”

  I looked at Theo. “That’s why Brad was saying he wasn’t responsible for the whole thing.”

  Anna sat up straighter, like something had jolted her spine, like something just occurred to her. “Who is dead? I have to know! Who died if it wasn’t you? He told me how he came in and you attacked him.”

  “It was my neighbor, Kim,” I said, feeling heavy with the uselessness of Kim’s death, and the responsibility that the violence had been meant for me. “She was in here because she was doing surveillance on Theo and me. Your guy must have come in when she was here.”

  “Kim,” Anna said. “Kim.” She shook her head, looking like she was trying to rid something from her mind. “Kim is dead. Kim is dead. Kim is dead.”

  Theo sat fo
rward. “Mom,” he said.

  “Kim is dead,” she kept repeating.

  Theo put his hand on his mother’s leg. “Mom,” he said again.

  But it was as if some small piece inside Anna Jameson had broken off, had stuck upon the naming of the person she indirectly killed. “Kim,” she said. “Kim, Kim, Kim.” A slight pause, then, “Kim is dead. Kim is dead.”

  Theo looked at me. “Can you call 911?”

  I dragged my eyes from Anna Jameson, whose mantra about Kim had turned almost into a song.

  “Yeah,” I said to Theo. “Do you want to talk to the police?”

  “No,” he said. “I want an ambulance to take her to the hospital.” He looked down, kept his hand on his mother’s knee, ignoring her intoning Kim is dead. “And then I’ll talk to the police.”

  72

  Maggie saw the tirade coming. In response, she composed her face in a serene way.

  “Listen, you little…” José’s face sneered and twisted as he held back whatever profane word he’d really wanted to call her. “Don’t try to fuck with me. Don’t try to fuck with my family. The kind of shit we can do to you, the kind of shit we will do to you if you don’t step aside, is beyond what you can imagine. So much pain.”

  Maggie looked at him. The guy had always scared the crap out of her before. When her grandfather first introduced her, she couldn’t believe he was their client. Sometimes he made her want to run from the room. None of their other clients—even the alleged killers—had scared her before. Because she was their only potential saving grace. They saw that. And there was no way they were going to harm her. She could always feel that. So no fear. But José Cortadero was different.

  To the person outside on the streets, they probably looked like a couple, sitting in the window seats of a diner, having a disagreement. It probably didn’t look like Maggie was meeting with a former client, a man who was, despite his residency in Chicago, essentially a Mexican drug lord.

  But Maggie must have looked like the calm one in that fight. And she was calm. Because she was different now. She let a small smile grow on her small face.