White Collar Girl

by Renée Rosen

  Honestly, I didn’t know why it bothered me. It wasn’t like I wanted him back, and of course I would have expected him to move on. After all, we had split up more than a year ago. But still it stung because this girl was the first after me. Or at least the first one that I knew of.

  M and I left our drinks on the bar and slipped out of Andy’s undetected. We grabbed a bottle of vodka at the liquor store around the corner and went to her place.

  From the very beginning I considered M a friend. But after everything we’d gone through with her abortion, we had formed an even tighter, almost sisterly-like bond. And yet as close as we were, we both guarded our secrets, refusing to share them with each other. She never told me about Mr. Ellsworth and I never told her about Ahern. She never spoke about the abortion and never questioned who the mysterious Richard was who’d accompanied us that day.

  When we keyed into M’s apartment, she went right over to a little bar cart in the corner and poured us both a healthy splash of vodka. After dropping some ice cubes in as an afterthought, she said, “I know exactly what you need. Come with me.”

  “What are we doing?” I asked, following her into the bathroom, which sparkled with glass shelves filled with perfumes and decorative bottles. A little pink fringe area rug matched the towels.

  “You’ll see.” M opened a drawer and pulled out hairbrushes and combs, clips, bobby pins and God knows what else. She closed the lid on the toilet seat and gave it a pat. “Come over here.” I went and sat while she draped a bath towel around my shoulders. “Trust me,” she said. “A new hairdo will cheer you up.”

  “But I don’t need cheering up.”

  “Nonsense. You just saw the love of your life with another woman.”

  Funny, but I didn’t consider Jack the love of my life. Actually, it was Scott who popped into my mind when she said that. It surprised me. How deep do my feelings for him really go?

  I cleared my head and sat quietly while M slathered my hair with setting lotion, making the bathroom smell like a beauty parlor. I lit a cigarette to keep from choking on that sweet, powdery scent.

  “You had such a cute hairstyle when I first met you,” M said, holding a curl in place while prying open a bobby pin with her front teeth. “Why didn’t you keep it up? Why did you let it grow out?”

  “For the same reason I stopped wearing my new dresses. I wanted the men in this business to stop looking at me like a woman and start treating me fairly.”

  “Well, honey, you still look like a woman.” She scissored her fingers, and I handed off the cigarette to her. She took a puff and returned it with a big red lipstick smear on the filter. “It’s not like you’re Gabby. She’s about as plain as they come.” M wound the last pin curl and secured it with a clip. “That poor girl hasn’t been on a date since I’ve known her.”

  “She probably doesn’t have time for dating. She helps her sister out a lot.” I stood up and looked in the mirror, patting the metal clips and bobby pins in place, making sure they were secure.

  “Well, I think that’s a big mistake, if you ask me. How’s she supposed to meet anyone when she spends almost every Saturday night babysitting her sister’s children?”

  “Maybe she likes doing that,” I said, turning my head to the side. I looked like I was wearing a metal helmet. “I know you’ll find this hard to believe, but a man isn’t always the answer.”

  She didn’t like hearing that and changed the subject. “Oh, before I forget, stay right there. I want to show you the new dress I got.”

  While she went into the bedroom for the dress, I went out to the living room and sipped my vodka as I glanced around. My eyes landed on a pair of crystal candlesticks on her dining room table with wax stalactites hanging off them, suggesting a recent romantic dinner. I looked at the stack of records next to the record player: the recordings of the Everly Brothers, Sonny James and Bobby Darin all pulled from their cover sleeves. I was sure I detected the lingering scent of a man’s aftershave and I knew who the man was.

  A few moments later M appeared in a low-cut black satin dress that hugged her hourglass curves.

  “Ta-da!” She set her hands on her hips.

  “It’s stunning. You look gorgeous.”

  She smiled. She didn’t need me to confirm how she looked in that dress.

  “Did you get that for a special occasion? Do you have a big date coming up with someone?”

  “I saw it at Field’s and just couldn’t resist.”

  “C’mon, you had to have someone special in mind when you bought that.”

  She gave me a coy shoulder shrug and I rolled my eyes in response. I don’t know why it bothered me that she wouldn’t tell me about Mr. Ellsworth, but it festered, and I found myself dropping more and more hints, hoping to make her confess.

  “Wait till you see the shoes I got to go with it.” She disappeared back into the bedroom.

  I called out to her, “How are you affording all this?” She made even less money than I did, and I thought she was tapped out from the abortion. “You told me you were broke.”

  She never replied because the telephone rang. M answered on the extension in her bedroom. “It’s not a good time,” I heard her whisper. “I can’t tonight. . . . I have company over. . . . Don’t worry—it’s a she. . . .”

  When M came back into the living room I asked if everything was all right.

  “Of course.” She reached for a cigarette and a marble and gold lighter.

  Something about that lighter—that lighter that probably cost more than I made in a month—set me off. “Who was that on the phone?” There was an edge to my voice.

  “Just a friend.”

  “Oh, c’mon, M. I know who it was.” I blurted it out. “I know about you and Mr. Ellsworth.”

  She nearly dropped her cigarette. “Who told you?”

  “No one. I just put the pieces together.”

  “I see.” She drew hard on her cigarette and exhaled toward the ceiling.

  “M, he’s a married man.”

  “Yes, thank you. I’m well aware of that.”

  “So what are you doing?”

  “Waiting.”

  “Waiting for what?”

  “For him,” she said matter-of-factly. “He’s going to leave his wife, and then we’ll be together. And don’t look at me like that. He’s my soul mate.”

  “So he’s going to get a divorce? Are you in love with him? Is he in love with you? How old is he, anyway? How long has this been going on? And where was he when you were so sick after the abortion? Hell, where was he during the abortion?”

  M looked at me, exasperated. “Easy with the questions.” She sat down hard and cradled her forehead in her hand. “Yes, he’s going to divorce his wife. Yes, I’m in love with him. Yes, he’s in love with me. And if you must know, we have a plan.”

  “What do you mean, a plan?”

  “A plan. The plan.” She said it louder the second time, as if that would make me understand. “He’s going to get divorced and then we’re going to start courting openly. Then we’re going to get engaged and get married. And then—after we’re married—then we’re going to start a family.”

  “Why didn’t he just get a divorce when he found out you were pregnant?” I had shifted into reporter mode and was prepared to challenge her.

  “He couldn’t do that. Think about it. He’s the managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. He’s an important man. He has a reputation to protect—”

  “So do you.”

  She discounted that with a wave of her hand. “He can’t afford to have a scandal like that on his hands. I know what I’m doing, Jordan. And I don’t need a lecture about married men.”

  “But what about that one guy from Ogilvy? He’s not married and you were seeing him.”

  “We had two dates.” She took a puff and ground out her cigarette. “That was nothing. You know me—I’m a big flirt. Besides, I only went out with him to make Stanley jealous. Sometimes I get angry with him
and so I go out with other men just to get back at him. But they don’t mean anything. He knows it, too.”

  Stanley. I had almost forgotten that was Mr. Ellsworth’s first name.

  Now that I knew about the two of them, it seemed so obvious. I remembered the times he’d slip out of the city room, announcing a bit too loudly that he was heading down to the composing room, and sure enough, five or ten minutes later, M would disappear as well. They’d stagger their returns to the floor, her cheeks still flushed, his hair ever so slightly rumpled. I was aware of the lunch hours when they were both gone, returning one at a time. I saw the joy in her eyes when he walked by her desk or acknowledged her in some small way.

  But I also saw the pain grip hold of her at his slightest rebuff, and I knew all about her restless nights. It had gotten so bad lately that her doctor had prescribed sleeping pills for her. How had I not noticed the two of them before? I was supposed to be observant. It made me question what else I had missed.

  Chapter 27

  • • •

  I was standing in the cold, covering a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new wing of the Michael Reese Hospital. The November winds were gusting while all the reporters huddled together. The mayor was there for the event, proudly saying to the press, “We are here today to commiserate that Chicago is becoming a leading disease center. . . .”

  I watched his press secretary slap the sides of his head while we all chuckled, writing down the mayor’s latest gaffe.

  I was still laughing about that to myself when I went back to the city room. I hadn’t even gotten my coat off when Benny pulled a chair over to my desk. He wanted to finish up a piece we’d both been assigned to the day before on a bridge fire. He leafed through his notes while I did the typing, my fingers still stiff from the cold.

  “Oh, wait—” He’d stop me every few lines to insert a thought or change a fact. “That was the fire commissioner who said that.”

  “I know, Benny. I got it. See?” I pointed to the line. It was a routine story. I could have written the piece with my eyes closed.

  The entire time Benny and I were working, Randy was singing He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands and improvising with bits like, “He’s got the printers and the slot man in his hands / He’s got the printers and the slot man in his hands. . . .”

  That past summer Randy had won a singing contest sponsored by H. C. Schrink & Sons, the owners of Eskimo Pies. Crooner that he was, Randy brought down the house with his rendition of Some Enchanted Evening and walked away with the grand prize, a six-month supply of Eskimo Pies.

  Ever since then he’d been talking about leaving the paper and pursuing a career in music. Not that he didn’t appreciate being able to make a living as a cartoonist. He did. But as he put it, “I’m tired of scraping by. Music is where the money is. I’m talking serious money. So what I’m gonna do now is,” he’d told us all, “I’m gonna go talk to Pendulum Records and I’m gonna sign a record deal with them.”

  “Would you listen to him?” Walter had laughed. “Our boy Randy here’s gonna be a big recording star. A regular Sinatra.”

  “You might not believe this, Walter,” Randy had said, his voice taking on a ferocious volume, “but I’ve got talent. A real God-given gift. And I’m gonna be rich someday. Filthy rich.” He was trembling. I don’t think he’d ever stood up to Walter—or maybe to anyone—before.

  The Eskimo Pies had run out, and as far as we knew, Randy still hadn’t spoken to anyone at Pendulum Records. The last time I asked him about it, he said his wife was having gallbladder surgery, as if that should have explained it. She still hadn’t had the operation, and according to Randy, she was feeling fine.

  I was remembering all that when Henry came rushing into the city room. He twisted out of his overcoat and tossed his hat on his desk. “Ellsworth around?” he asked.

  “You looking for me?” Mr. Ellsworth had been over by M’s desk before he appeared in the aisle.

  Henry rushed to his side. “I got something big. You’re not gonna believe this. I just got an earful from my buddy at the Bureau.”

  “Well, are you going to tell me or just make me stand here and guess?”

  Henry lowered his voice and said, “Can we go somewhere private?”

  The two of them disappeared into one of the conference rooms, and through the glass panels I watched Mr. Ellsworth stop stroking his beard, which probably meant that Henry had given him something good. A few minutes later Henry returned to his seat and started typing, not saying a word to the rest of us.

  My curious nature took over and I couldn’t help but glancing over Henry’s shoulder, reading as he typed: . . . FBI sting operation . . . Probing corruption in the Cook County judiciary system . . . Undercover mole planted inside the system, posing as a corrupt lawyer . . .”

  At lunchtime I slipped out of the city room and went around the corner to call Ahern at the state’s attorney’s office. It was bitter cold, and I could hear the wind whistling through the glass doors on the phone booth.

  “What do you know about the FBI’s sting operation with the courts?” I asked.

  He sighed loudly into the phone, as if I were annoying him. “The Bureau’s handling all that. You probably know more at this point than I do.”

  I gripped the receiver and sighed louder than he had. I knew he was holding out on me. If the FBI was investigating the Cook County judiciary system, Adamowski and the state’s attorney’s office had to be in on it. Hell, Adamowski was probably the one who’d tipped off the Bureau.

  “Well,” I said, before hanging up, “if you hear anything, let me know.”

  • • •

  The next morning I attended a press conference held by the Illinois Department of Transportation. They were presenting plans to reconstruct a bridge feeding into the downtown area.

  The room was small and the radiator heat steamed up the windows and made me groggy. I fought to stay awake while a spokesman boasted about the thousands of vehicles that accessed the bridge daily and the estimated $5 million allotted for repairs. I stifled a yawn and glanced around the room. The reporter next to me was checking his wristwatch while the one on the other side was playing a solo game of tic-tac-toe. It would be another twenty minutes before we’d be out of there.

  Afterward I stopped into a Peter Pan Snack Shop for lunch and sat at the counter. I ordered a burger and a malted, my reward for having sat through the press conference. I reached inside my attaché case for the Tribune. It was the first chance I’d had that day to read the paper.

  I sipped my malted as I read through several articles, one of which was Henry’s story about Operation K, which was what the FBI was calling it—K as in Kangaroo, as in Kangaroo Court. It was clear that the Bureau had strategically leaked information to the press, probably wanting to make people nervous so they’d come forward or else slip up under the stress.

  For some reason Mr. Ellsworth had buried Henry’s piece in the Neighborhood News section. He probably figured that a couple of crooked cops, a bribe here, a fixed parking ticket there wasn’t exactly front-page news for Chicago. More like business as usual. No one paid much attention to that sort of thing.

  But there was something else on that page—something completely unrelated that caught my eye. It was just a three-inch piece that Peter had written about a butcher shop on Ashland Avenue accused of selling horsemeat and passing it off as beef. Just the word horsemeat alone made me stop. I was stunned and reread the snippet. My brother was the only other person I knew who’d been looking into this matter, and I could never understand why the Sun-Times had dropped the investigation. But given what Peter just reported, I figured this racket was still going on.

  I looked at my burger resting on the plate and removed the bun to inspect the meat. It looked normal, like any other burger, but because of Peter’s article, I questioned the color, the texture, the way the fat pooled and congealed on the lettuce leaf. I hadn’t even taken a bite yet, and now I couldn’t. Instead I
pushed it aside, finished my malted and asked for my check.

  When I got back to the city room, I went straight over to Peter’s desk with my newspaper in hand.

  “What do you know about this?” I asked, slapping his article down before him.

  “Oh, that?” Peter adjusted his eyeshade and glanced at the paper. “What about it?”

  “How’d you find out about this?”

  “I don’t know—got a call from some disgruntled customer, I think—”

  “Do you have any more information on this? Do you think there are other butcher shops doing the same thing?”

  “Whoa, slow down there, Walsh. What’s this all about?”

  “I think maybe there’re more butcher shops doing this.”

  “Oh, I doubt that.” Peter adjusted his eyeshade again and squinted at me. “This was just a butcher, down on his luck, looking to cut corners. There’s nothing more to it. The authorities closed down the shop.”

  “How about if we team up on this?”

  “On what?” Peter shook his head. “There’s nothing to team up on. I already told you, it was an isolated case. There’s nothing more to it.”

  “So you don’t want to look into this any further?”

  He laughed. “No. I don’t want to look into it any further.”

  “Then do you mind if I do it myself?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Suit yourself. But wait—” He reached into his drawer and pulled out a file—“you might as well take these with you.” He handed me a few sheets of paper with his notes scribbled down. “Knock yourself out, Walsh.”

  I went back to my desk and read through everything Peter had given me. I immediately followed up with the customer who had discovered the problem.

  “It just didn’t taste right,” she said when I reached her on the telephone. Turns out her son, who taught biology at Francis Parker High School, took the meat down to the lab. “That’s how we found out it was horsemeat.”

  According to Peter’s notes, the butcher said it was his horse, an old mare that he’d recently put down. The butcher, who was falling behind on his bills, had the horse ground up and packaged and sold as beef. That was the end of the story for Peter, but there had to be more to it. I knew Eliot had spent two months investigating this very subject. He’d told me once that he suspected there was horsemeat sold throughout the city, even to school cafeterias and fine restaurants. I was tired of covering bridge repairs and road closures, fires and car crashes. The horsemeat scandal had reinvigorated me. And I thought maybe, if I learned more about it, I would know for sure if that article Eliot had been working on had anything to do with his death.