Red Blooded Murder

by Laura Caldwell

  46

  J ackson Prince walked the underground tunnel that led from his office to Trattoria No. 10.

  Technically, this tunnel was called the Pedway. Its official purpose was to link various El trains with various downtown buildings. Not that Prince ever rode the El train. Each morning, a driver picked him up from his East Erie apartment, where he owned the penthouse, and dropped him off at his office building. To Prince, the best thing about that building was not his massive corner office or the fact that it had a view of Daley Plaza. No, the best thing about his building was that he could access the tunnel and take it right to court, where he pitied the other lawyers who arrived flushed from the summer heat or shivering from the arctic winter and who had to juggle trench coats and umbrellas when they stepped up to the bench.

  The next best thing about the tunnel was that it led him to Trattoria No. 10, a subterranean Italian restaurant and bar that was a favorite among Chicago’s legal crowd.

  But tonight, he wasn’t meeting a lawyer. Tonight was about Jerry Hay and thanking the good doctor. Now that no one was looking over Prince’s shoulder on this matter, he could enjoy it again. He could properly show Dr. Hay his appreciation, which would make them both very happy.

  Dr. Hay was already at the bar, a highball in front of him. Hay was an average-looking guy-medium height and a nondescript face that was probably similar to many of the guys Hay grew up with in Bridgeport. Prince had done his research on Hay, and he knew that Hay had done better than many of the guys in his neighborhood, most of whom had gone the cop or fireman route. At thirty-five, Hay operated his own rheumatology practice. Yes, Hay was successful. Or at least he appeared so to the outside observer. But Prince knew that the early, external success of a young doctor like Hay didn’t translate immediately to financial success. There were the astronomical student loans, the ever-soaring malpractice premiums and the ever-dwindling Medicare payments on behalf of older patients, which made up most of Hay’s practice. Which all meant that Hay’s lifestyle with his Northbrook home, his Lake Geneva summer house, three kids, his stay-at-home wife and his three expensive cars became harder and harder to afford.

  And that was where Prince stepped in.

  He stepped up beside the doctor now and stretched out his hand. “Jerry.” He shook the man’s hand, warmly patting his shoulder.

  Prince liked to call doctors like Hay by their first names. He thought it helped to let Hay know he was above him, that his J.D. had brought many more riches than Hay’s M.D. Not that Prince liked to gloat. He just liked people to know their place in his world.

  “You ready for your trip next week?” he asked Hay.

  The doctor smiled, one of the first lighthearted grins Prince had seen from him. “Very ready. Betsy is already packed. And of course she’s told everyone in the neighborhood that we’re taking a private plane. I can’t thank you enough.”

  Prince patted him on the shoulder again. “I’m happy to do it. It’s nothing.”

  That wasn’t exactly true. Technically he’d already paid Hay for services rendered, and a week at Prince’s home in Palm Springs for Hay’s family, along with the use of Prince’s plane to take them there, wasn’t exactly cheap. But compared to what he’d gained from the assistance Hay and the other docs gave him, it was a drop in a very, very big bucket.

  47

  W hen I rounded the corner, the band O.A.R. on my iPod, I saw him.

  He was on my stoop, leaning against the doorjamb. He looked at his phone, typing something with the thumb of one hand. The sight of him stopped me and at first I felt only elation. But that feeling was short-lived. I stood just looking at him, trying to sort out combative thoughts. One said, I love him. I’ll always love him, while the other said, You can love someone and still not have it be right for you, for right now.

  I didn’t know which was stronger. I called out to him.

  He didn’t hear me, and for some reason, this seemed like a portent. I walked toward him. Still, he didn’t look up. Finally, when I was nearly next to him, he saw me, and his face split into a grin, teeth gleaming.

  “Sam,” I said simply. We hugged tight. “I didn’t even know you were coming.”

  “You would have if you’d checked your messages in the last hour.”

  “I’ve been walking by the lake.”

  “Good.” His olive-green eyes took in my face. “You needed that, huh?”

  “I did.” I stuck my keys in the front door. “What are you doing on the street?”

  He followed me up the stairs, smacking me playfully on the ass like he usually did. “I didn’t have your keys with me.”

  I stopped and turned. “Since when did you stop carrying my keys?”

  He shrugged, the shoulders of his suit lifting up. “I took them off my key ring once when I was going to rugby practice and had too much stuff in my pockets. You know how it is.”

  I didn’t. And this sounded significant-this not carrying his set of my keys. Because, as far as I’d known, Sam had carried my keys every day since I gave them to him five months after we started dating.

  Sam and I had met at the summer picnic of Forester Pickett. I would never forget that day in the June sun, on a lush lawn in Lake Forest, when I first saw Sam. His blond hair shone in the sunlight, and a shy grin pulled at the corners of his wide mouth. Right then, I had the random but distinct thought-I could kiss that mouth. Forever.

  Sam and I started that moment in the sun, and five months later, we were solidly into the era of Us with a capital U-a time when we scarcely remembered what came before each other, when we no longer envisioned a time that we would exist without the other.

  Back then, one of the other condo owners in my building was a woman who often traveled for her job. Her newspapers would collect and litter the stoop, making Sam crazy.

  “It’s such a waste of paper,” he’d say, picking them up.

  So I’d taken one of those old papers one day and wrapped a set of my keys in them. It was waiting by his orange coffee mug when he got up in the morning. He opened it. He beamed. Sam said it was the greatest gift he’d ever received. He had never complained about those papers again. But now here he was, without those keys, unsure when he’d even stopped carrying them.

  Sam looked up at me, standing in the stairway, unmoving. “What?”

  “Nothing. It’s probably nothing.” I turned and kept climbing. As I’d told Mayburn earlier, I had bigger things to worry about.

  “I came to take you to dinner,” Sam said. “North Pond Café.”

  I stopped again, this time for a good reason, and spun around. “Really?” I asked, my spirits returning.

  North Pond Café was a high-end eatery tucked at the other end of Lincoln Park. To reach it, you had to walk through at least part of the park, and as a result, it was closed during the winter months. Sam and I loved it.

  Sam nodded.

  “Is it open?”

  “Just reopened last week. So get ready.”

  I wrapped my arms around his neck. “What’s the occasion?”

  “Us.” He smacked me on the ass again. “Go.”

  An hour later, the cab dropped us off on Lakeview Avenue at Deming. The sky was a splashy mix of dark blue from the east and a mustard gold from the west behind us. We walked on a sidewalk leading away from the street and under a fieldstone footbridge. On the other side of the bridge, lit by discreetly-placed lights, was a long pond that stretched into the distance and was capped at the end by a snippet of the Chicago skyline. Unlike Lake Michigan, with its unprotected shore and its tendency to turn tumultuous, the pond was buffeted by trees-all popping with buds-and was always flat, always smooth. It was what made the café, which sat at one end, so soothing.

  The café was in a Frank Lloyd Wright-ish building. Inside, the dark wood was set off by golden lights, the sparkle of stained glass, white tablecloths and gleaming glassware.

  We were seated at a table that overlooked the pond. I slipped into my chair and gazed ac
ross the table at Sam. “How did you land the best table?”

  “Not important.”

  “Well, then what is?”

  “Me and you, Iz.” His hand slipped across the cloth and offered itself to me.

  I took it, and we looked at each other, grinning, and despite the disastrous week I’d had, I felt the wheels of Sam and me moving and clicking and snapping themselves into place.

  Sam ordered a bottle of French white. As the waiter poured it, Sam looked at me. “I want to hear what’s going on. Everything,” he said. “But nothing serious until we’ve got one glass under our belt. Okay with you?”

  I sighed with happiness. “Great.” As much as I knew myself capable of handling my life, sometimes it felt damned good to have someone else call even the smallest of shots.

  For the next half hour, we talked about the things we used to talk about-Sam’s job, our families, the rugby team, the wedding of a friend that was coming up that summer.

  And when the waiter came back to pour more wine, Sam said, “All right. Tell me.”

  He didn’t have to say about what. I told him about Jane’s memorial, finding I was a person of interest, interviewing Prince and the fact that I would be interviewed by the police the next day. I left out my run-in with Steve (or Tobias or whoever had been driving that van), since I’d promised Mayburn complete secrecy this time around. Ultimately, my omission about Mayburn didn’t matter. Sam and I sipped our wine and ate distractedly, and while we did, we reconnected and we talked and we interrupted each other the way we used to and we finished stories for each other, just like we used to.

  We were biting into a whiskey bread pudding and sipping a glass of dessert wine when a group of professionals in suits passed our table, trailing behind the hostess.

  One of them, a woman, stopped suddenly and pointed at me. “My gosh, are you Isabel? Isabel McDonald or something like that?”

  “Izzy McNeil. Hi.” I held out my hand. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember you.”

  “Oh, we haven’t met. I’ve seen you on Trial TV. I’ve been watching it this week, and I love it.”

  “Thank you!” I had yet to speak to someone who had actually seen the programming and who wasn’t a friend or relation.

  Her face turned stricken. “I can’t believe what happened to Jane Augustine.”

  “I know.” I didn’t mention that I had seen, up close and too personally, exactly what had happened to Jane.

  “I’m sure it must be hard for all of you, but the network is great. You guys are fantastic.” She looked over her shoulder at a younger guy. “Don’t I always say that Trial TV is fantastic?” She gestured at him. “He’s my associate.”

  The guy laughed. “She does. She has you on in her office all day.”

  The woman threw up her hands. “What can I say? I’m one of those lawyers who love the law, and so I love Trial TV.” She pointed at me again. “But you. You’re my favorite.”

  I felt unbelievably flattered. I remembered, again, Jane on the patio, talking about graciously accepting compliments. Because you never know when it’ll be the last.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you very much.”

  “Okay.” The woman crossed her arms. “So tell me, how do you decide what cases to cover? Because I have an insane case for you.”

  She was a U.S. Attorney, she told us. The others were her colleagues. She spoke for a minute, the others jumping in here and there, all telling the story of a conspiracy they’d uncovered on a case.

  Finally, she stopped and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t even introduce myself. I’m Duffy Carey.”

  We shook hands again, and I pointed across the table. “This is Sam, my fia-” I coughed. I looked at Sam. We both laughed. It was impossible to know what to call each other these days.

  Duffy Carey didn’t seem to notice. She shook Sam’s hand effusively, introduced her colleagues and launched into another story about an organized crime case she was working on. But every two seconds, she stopped to tell me how I was the perfect person to cover the case. “With your brains and your looks,” she said, waving a hand at my head, “you can take on any case you want.”

  Thinking of Jane again, I smiled and thanked her once more. I glanced at Sam. He was smiling, too, but it was a stiff kind of smile, the I’m-barely-putting-up-with-this type of smile. The type he gave when one of his sisters thought she was Annie Leibovitz because she had a digital camera in her hand.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, gently interrupting Duffy. “We were just finishing dinner, and-”

  “My gosh, I’m sorry. We’ll let you go. It was so nice to meet you.” She pumped my hand one more time and moved away.

  I turned back to Sam, laughing a little. “Wow, that was funny.”

  “Yeah.” That stiff smile hadn’t budged.

  “What’s up?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You look miserable.”

  He shook his head, as if shaking off a mood he hadn’t realized he had. “Sorry.”

  We fell into a weird silence. We went back to our desserts.

  “So have you been playing a lot?” I asked, meaning his guitar.

  At the same time, Sam was speaking. “Do you think you’re going to be in that business for a while?”

  We both stopped. Laughed awkwardly. “You go,” I said.

  He made a face I didn’t recognize. “I guess I was just wondering how long you’re planning on doing this TV thing.”

  I sat back. “I’m not sure. I took the job because I couldn’t find anything else, but I have to say I like it. The news is exciting. It’s always minute to minute, and it makes you forget everything else except what you’re doing.”

  Sam nodded, frowned. “That’s great. It really is. Sometimes I wish my job was more like that.”

  More silence. He was in some kind of mood, but I seemed to have lost the ability to read him at any second, a realization which sent a hollow pang of dread through me.

  “So…” Sam said, his brow creasing the way it did when he was thinking hard. “If you stay in the news business, then that kind of thing-” he nodded in the direction of Duffy Carey’s table, “-is going to happen all the time. You know, people coming up to you, telling you how much they like you.”

  I shrugged. “Or more likely they’ll come up to me and tell me what a fool I look like, and how I should try harder to control the flop sweating.”

  We both laughed, a natural laugh at last.

  But Sam’s frown returned.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Nothing. Let’s enjoy the night.”

  “Sam, you can’t say nothing. Clearly there’s something.”

  A shake of his head. “It really is nothing. And there’s enough going on in your world.”

  “Yeah, but you are my world.” It was what I used to say. Saying it now, reflexively, felt a little bit off. “Tell me,” I said. “Please. Even if it’s nothing.”

  He sighed, looked at me. “I’m just not sure how I like all that.” He gestured again toward Duffy Carey’s table. “People coming up to us, to you.”

  This surprised me. Sam was one of the most laid-back, friendly people I knew. He could meet anyone, talk to anyone. “Did you not like her?”

  “No, no. She seems cool. Sounds like she’s got an interesting job, and I like that she thinks you’re fantastic. Because you are, by the way. Have I told you that?”

  “No.”

  He grabbed my hand again. Squeezed it. “Well, you are.” He let my hand go. “But I’m not sure I like the public-eye thing.”

  I nodded, slowly, trying to process what he was saying. “I’m not even sure I do, either. I mean, even though I’ve been on TV for a few days, I don’t feel like I’m in the public eye yet.” I waved at Duffy’s table. “That’s the first time something like that has happened.”

  “But it won’t be the last.”

  “It might.”

  “No, it won’t.”

  “Wha
t if it’s not? What are you saying?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s just occurring to me, but I guess…”

  I waited for what he had to say, and it felt like waiting for a guillotine to drop.

  “I guess,” he said, “that I just don’t like it.”

  “But you’ll get used to it?”

  He shrugged. “Could you ever get used to that?”

  “I think so. Are you saying you couldn’t?”

  “No.” A pause. “Maybe.” Another stop. “I guess we’ll have to see.”

  Those words pulled me into something resembling despair. “Sam, you and I have been waiting to see for a while now.”

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice irritated, “we’ve been waiting to see if you can get over what happened six months ago.”

  I said nothing. “And so now there’s something else we have to wait on, this public-eye thing?”

  “I guess there is.”

  “And that’s because of me, too.”

  His lips pressed firmly together. The quiet wound its way around us, feeling like a stalemate. The night of Sam and I snapping back into place had snapped us apart again.

  We paid the bill, walked past the pond and under the fieldstone bridge. The city was dark now, with only the low hum of electricity, the random passing car.

  “My place?” Sam said.

  “I have to be on set at six. Let’s go to my place.” I looked for a cab. I stopped when I realized Sam hadn’t answered. “You can go home before work in the morning, right?”

  “Or we can go to my place now and get my stuff for tomorrow, and then go to your place.”

  My temples started to ache. But this time it wasn’t just from being hit on the head, it was from too many layers of emotions-the fear of losing Sam; despondency at losing Jane; anger that Zac had turned the cops on me in his misplaced rage.

  “Yeah, okay,” I said to Sam. There was defeat in my voice.

  We looked at our watches, started figuring out how long it would take. Meanwhile, it grew chillier on the street, and my headache throbbed. “Sam, what if we just do it tomorrow night? I’ll come to your place or you come to mine, whatever you want.”