Embroidered Truths

by Monica Ferris

  She finished quickly, then looked up to see Karen looking at her speculatively. “Who is Mr. D’Agnosto, one of the partners here?”

  “Yes, he’s our signatory officer, among other things.”

  “What’s a signatory officer?”

  “He handles certain accounts. Money coming in that will be going out again, for example.”

  Betsy thought a moment. “You mean, when someone sues, the money isn’t paid directly to the client, but goes through here.”

  “Yes, that’s approximately correct.”

  “Does Mr. D’Agnosto also function as an attorney?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “That’s interesting, that you have attorneys doing corporate functions as well as, er, lawyerly things.”

  “Is it? These are people who specialize in corporate law. They are very likely to understand better what they are doing, and how to do it legally, than someone with no legal training.”

  “Yes, of course. What does Mr. D’Agnosto specialize in as an attorney?”

  “He handles the malpractice suits.”

  “You mean the Children’s Hospital and St. Luke’s?”

  Karen raised an eyebrow, a little surprised at the depth of Betsy’s knowledge about the firm. “Yes, that’s right.”

  The door opened then, and two men appeared. One stayed just inside the office; he was a short man with thick, curly white hair and a three-piece suit that fit him so well it must have been custom-made. The other was about medium height, his hair almost as white, but with a hint of tan in it—he’d been a redhead when young, thought Betsy. He had the heavily-freckled and weather-beaten complexion of a fair-skinned sailor, and the deep creases around his light eyes indicated many hours of squinting against sun reflecting on water.

  Karen had risen when the door opened. The sailor looked at her and she looked at Betsy and then at the short man.

  The two men looked at Betsy. “This is Ms. Devonshire,” said Karen. “She would like just a moment of your time, Mr. Kedge. She’s working for Mr. Lebowski, investigating the circumstances of John Nye’s murder.”

  “Really,” said the short man, frowning at her.

  “Well, isn’t that interesting,” said the sailor. “Are you Mr. Lebowski’s partner in his office?”

  “No, sir, I’m actually acting on behalf of Godwin DuLac, who has been charged with Mr. Nye’s murder. Mr. Lebowski has been kind enough to give me official status at present, as an investigator.”

  “Have you a license as a private investigator?” demanded the sailor.

  “No, sir. But I have helped the police in other cases. I would do this in any case, because Godwin is a dear friend and I absolutely know he did not murder Mr. Nye.”

  The sailor made a faint snorting sound, turned, and shook the short man’s hand. “Well, I’m off to a meeting with Doctor Knopf. I think we can settle this before it goes to trial.”

  “Good luck,” said the other. They all waited until Mr. D’Agnosto left, and then the short man came toward Betsy.

  “What did you want to see me about?”

  “I’m looking to talk to anyone who can tell me something about Mr. Nye,” she said. “I’d met him through Godwin, but didn’t really know him.”

  “Here, come into my office,” he said quickly, then looked at his watch. “I can give you perhaps five minutes.”

  “Thank you.”

  His office was not palatial, but it was on a corner, and had two windows. He sat her in a comfortable club chair then hurried behind his desk as if anxious to put something substantial between himself and her.

  Betsy said, “Did you know before this happened that John was gay?”

  “Well . . . yes. It didn’t interfere with his work, and he was not obvious about it, but it wasn’t something generally known, and I preferred it be kept that way. So this happening was rather a blow. We have a number of very conservative clients and it’s been an interesting process soothing them down.”

  “Why should they—” Betsy started, then shut up. It was impossible to direct peoples’ feelings and prejudices, and arguing with them about it never helped.

  Mr. Kedge smiled and nodded at her, reading her mind. “John was a very valuable member of Hanson, Wellborn, and Smith,” he said. “He’ll be sorely missed.”

  “I understand he came up with a solution recently to a golden parachute problem you were having. A particularly clever solution.”

  His brow lifted in surprise. “You’ve done your homework, Ms. Devonshire.”

  “Don’t ask me any questions about the solution, and you’ll not be disappointed in my homework.”

  He laughed, a very pleasant sound.

  “On the other hand,” continued Betsy, “I also understand there is a partner who was not pleased that Mr. Nye showed him up with the cleverness of the solution.”

  That killed the laugh dead on the spot. “What?”

  “I understand that Mr. Shaker was very angry at Mr. Nye.”

  “Oh, that! Well, David is a valuable member, too. It’s just that his talents lie in another plane than John’s.”

  “So you didn’t think he was right to be embarrassed about his failure to grasp the implications of John’s work?”

  “Oh, he could be embarrassed all he liked. David has a very high opinion of himself, and it’s good for him to be taken down a peg or two now and then. John was going to become a partner within six months or so, and then they’d have the same status, and David could stop being uncomfortable about being pecked by someone he didn’t think was his equal.” Mr. Kedge’s tone was dismissive of the whole matter.

  “I’ve heard that one of Mr. Shaker’s responsibilities was to ‘light a fire’ under employees when that was felt necessary, and that he wasn’t one of the more popular partners because of that.”

  Mr. Kedge bit his upper lip and stared at Betsy—a very intimidating stare, which she returned as calmly as she could. He nodded once, and said, “Yes, that’s true. He has a heck of a mouth on him, and he enjoys applying the lash when it’s needed. Since this is a pleasure not everyone appreciates, we sometimes use him as a surrogate. But”—he pointed a stubby forefinger at her—“David could also be a sweet man. There’s many a time he’d lay into someone one day and take the same person to lunch the next.”

  “Yes? A pity he didn’t get a chance to make up with John.”

  “Yes. Yes, indeed, a great pity.”

  “What did you think of John as a person?”

  Mr. Kedge leaned back in his high-backed leather chair and thought about that for a few moments. “He was personable, intelligent, clever, and charming. He worked at least as hard as any attorney here. He could be tough when it was called for, and he had drive, but there was also a human side to him I liked. I think he could have gone much further than he had, if his life hadn’t been cut short.”

  Betsy wrote most of that down. “This is kind of a hard question to frame. There’s the law, I mean like the ‘letter of the law’ and then there’s fairness and balance and values like that. Which side was John on?”

  “Well, my dear, he was a lawyer. It was his job to follow the law. Outside of his office, he might have been all for fairness, as you call it, or balance. Within this place, we’re all for following the law.”

  “I see. I think that’s all. You were kind to give me this much of your valuable time. Thank you.” She stood. “Who was the sailor you were talking with before you talked to me?”

  “Sailor? Oh, you mean D’Agnosto! You are perceptive! He is, in fact, a sailor when he can find the time. His goal was to sail all seven seas, and he finished that last year.”

  “Does he work here, or is he a client?”

  “Oh, a partner, has been for many years—almost as many as me. He handles the money as it flows in and out, and tries to dam up as much as possible on our side. He also has the unhappy job of trying to keep litigants from testifying against our clients at trial by arranging settlements. Another of tho
se little ‘letter of the law’ problems we lawyers deal with.” He gave her a condescending smile.

  “Well, thank you again,” said Betsy.

  “Can you find your way out to the lobby, or shall I call for someone to guide you?”

  “I can find my way. Good-bye.”

  Twenty

  BETSY went back up and across Fourth Street to the Wells Fargo Center Building where Mr. Lebowski had his office. She couldn’t believe it was only 11:47, she was actually going to be a couple of minutes early for her luncheon engagement.

  Yet he was waiting for her in the anteroom to his office. He seemed nervous about something. “Let’s roll,” he said on seeing her, but he paused to glance both ways out the door to the hallway before he hurried her out, and into the stainless steel and marble elevator going down. Once the door closed, he relaxed.

  Betsy didn’t. What if they ran into the person he was clearly trying to avoid down in the lobby? He hadn’t seemed frightened, only a little anxious, and maybe even that was on her behalf—he was probably used to angry clients. Criminal defense attorneys had a lot of clients with a history of not handling anger issues well. Who was this one? What did he look like? What if he was waiting at the bottom? She finally dared to ask, “Who are we running from?”

  “My brother. He’s in town and he’s a leech. He’s on his way over and I don’t want to take him to lunch, too.”

  “Oh.”

  Out front he hailed a cab. “The Polonaise Room, across the river on Hennepin,” he said to the driver. And to Betsy, “It’s a nice little Polish restaurant—have you eaten there?”

  “No.”

  “I haven’t been there in a long while, which is too bad. The food there takes me right back to my grandmother’s house.”

  The cab turned onto Hennepin Avenue, and a couple of blocks later crossed the Mississippi on what was probably the shortest suspension bridge in the world: the two towers were a stone’s throw apart. The Polonaise Room was a block further along; the cab pulled over and they got out.

  It wasn’t a fancy place. It had vertical white siding and a sharply angled roof that shouted, “It was remodeled in the fifties!”

  The interior was from the fifties, too. The entrance led into a long bar, with booths in golden shimmery plastic along one side, and black globular lights suspended from the ceiling with knobs of colored glass in them.

  “Gosh,” said Betsy, suddenly feeling very young—or was it old?

  The maitre d’ was a stocky older man with an Eastern-European face. “Dzien dobry!” said Marvin, adding to Betsy, “That’s Polish for hello.”

  The maitre d’ overheard his explanation and smiled. “I am Lebanese, not Polish,” he said, showing you can’t judge a book by its cover. “My sons own this place. But the food is still the best Polish in town.”

  Marvin looked disappointed and doubtful as they were led to the dining room and seated. “Well, it looks the same,” he said, looking around. The room was paneled in dark wood, with big, rectangular picture frames around black-and-red wallpaper. More of the chunky black globes hung from the ceiling. The tables and chairs were of an early version of imitation wood, with thin, black, v-shaped rods for legs. If there had been a calendar on the wall, it would have featured a wasp-waisted woman in a long, full skirt looking admiringly at a green Pontiac with tail fins. Very, very fifties.

  A nice blond waitress, not at all a fifties relic, brought the menus.

  “Here we are, all right!” said Marvin on opening it, doubts wiped away. “Look at this! Pieroges! Bigos! Golabki!”

  Betsy wasn’t Polish, but she grew up in Milwaukee, which has a large Polish-descent population. But the only Polish item on the menu that she recognized was kielbasa—Polish sausage, a thinner, spicier bratwurst. She’d had a good friend from junior high through high school, Marlene Sobolewski, and had dined at her friend’s house about as often as Marlene had dined at hers. Kielbasa with kraut was a favorite in Marlene’s house, like sloppy joes were in Betsy’s.

  Right there on the menu was hunter’s stew—the “bigos” Marvin happily noted—a combination of kielbasa, beef, and sauerkraut. That sounded a whole lot like a meal Betsy had shared at the Sobolewski table many a time. “The Polish National Dish,” said the menu, which was interesting; Betsy had thought adding kielbasa to beef was Marlene’s mother’s way of stretching Sunday’s leftover roast beef into Monday’s dinner.

  Smiling in nostalgia, Betsy decided that’s what she would have. Marvin ordered it, too, and a beer to drink.

  While they waited, Betsy opened her notebook.

  “What have you found out?” asked Marvin.

  “Well, not much, I’m afraid. John may have had an enemy at his law firm: a partner named David Shaker, who was John’s supervisor. Mr. Shaker is known as the company pit bull, because he’s willing to confront other attorneys about their shortcomings. It seems the upper echelon at the firm are all cowards. They send him to do their dirty work, and he appears to enjoy it. He came to say some hard things to John the day before he was killed.”

  “So far, that’s nothing to get excited about,” said Marvin.

  Betsy raised her right arm and waggled her hand. “I also heard that Mr. Shaker was made to appear a fool in front of a managing partner and an important client by John. John had to be called in to explain a complex legal plan he had drawn up and that Mr. Shaker was willing to claim as his own idea until he had to admit he didn’t understand how it worked. Mr. Shaker was very angry and embarrassed about this. It’s entirely possible he came down to talk to John about that and words were exchanged. David was supposed to work up that plan on his own, but he had been loading John with work he couldn’t do himself and/or was trying to so overburden John that John would quit.”

  “What kind of legal plan?” asked Marvin.

  “It had something to do with executive compensation, and involved foreign currencies. It was probably a way of giving someone a golden parachute. The person who told me about it did some of the research on the plan for John and said she didn’t understand how the parts she looked up fit together, either. The memo on it was thirty pages long.”

  “Only thirty?” said Marvin, smiling. “Must have been a summary. Did this person you talked to write the memo?”

  “No, it was dictated by John and typed by his secretary, Tasha Kravchenko.”

  “But it wasn’t Tasha who told you about this?”

  “No, Tasha was reluctant to say anything bad about anyone at the firm, and she was a big fan of John’s. She did say John was a hard taskmaster, but that he praised her to everyone as the one secretary who could keep up with him. She was very proud of that.”

  “So scratch the abused secretary as a suspect.”

  “Oh, I’d say so, yes.”

  “On the other hand, there’s David.”

  “Yes,” said Betsy. “Of course, maybe he cleared his anger just shouting at John. Certainly if I became angry enough at someone to kill him, it would be because I sit in silence, nursing grudges. Especially I wouldn’t go shouting at him at the office, where people might find out. On the other hand, maybe there was some further provocation.” Even as she said it, Betsy was thinking that over.

  Suppose that was what happened? Suppose that later John had said something to David? Like what? Well, suppose that incident Tasha had talked about, where Mr. Kedge had come in and said how wonderful John was, had happened because of this incident? And suppose John had taunted David with it?

  Tasha might know. She had said something about John never shouting, or “at least not very often.” Maybe Betsy needed to talk to Tasha again.

  “Penny for that thought?” said Marvin, bringing Betsy back to The Polonaise Room.

  “Oh, sorry, just thinking.”

  “About what?”

  Betsy didn’t want to offer a theory with that many supposes in it, so she said, “The person who told me about David and John said she’s willing to act as a spy for me, see if there’s
anything else about John she can dig up for me.”

  Marvin nodded. “Very valuable, informants are.”

  When the food arrived, Betsy found just the smell of it sent her winging back to old times in Milwaukee. She dug in, and when, after a couple of minutes, she looked across at Marvin she saw the same look of happy nostalgia on his face.

  He saw her smiling at him and said, lifting a forkload in salute, “Just like mother used to make.”

  Betsy said, “Where did your mother learn to cook Polish dishes?”

  “From Babushka Lebowski, of course.” Babushka, Betsy knew, was the Polish word for headscarf. Since older Polish women universally wore headscarves, it also meant Grandmother.

  Lebowski continued, “We ate over at her house two, three times a month. Mama refused to make some of it, of course. Blood soup, I remember she wouldn’t even taste it at Babushka’s house. On the other hand, Daddy wouldn’t touch chitterlings.” He made a face. “I didn’t like them, either. But greens and pot likker, black-eyed peas, corn bread and pork chops—now that was a feast!” His accent had broadened just a bit, and he smiled at her. “I got the best of both worlds, and a cholesterol number that scares my doctor.”

  “I believe you.” Ethnic diets like these were designed to sustain men who performed grindingly hard labor in the fields, coal mines, and factories. People who sat at desks but still ate like that found their arteries clogged up.

  From The Polonaise Room Betsy went back to Excelsior, to the shop. A big shipment of books had come in and the volunteers had unpacked them and stacked them on the library table—and looked through most of them. They had been kind enough, however, to only open one of multiple copies, aware that there were customers who insisted on virgin spines. She had ordered three of Carol Phillipson’s Cross-Stitch Designs from China, and five of Herrschner’s 200+ Holiday Quickies cross-stitch charts and projects—one of the latter was already sitting on the checkout desk for Doris to take home. Betsy herself paused to page through a copy of Barbara Baatz-Hillman’s beautiful collection of cross-stitched flowers, birds, and cats. For the sword and sorcery set, there was Cross-Stitch Myth and Magic. There were three copies of Teresa Wentzler’s lush, beautiful—and difficult—cross-stitch charts called Christmas Collection. The cover featured a delectable procession of six angels, so wonderful Betsy was sure she’d have to reorder that title soon.