I knew that if Maggie could see me now, she would be yelling, No comment!
But I really wasn’t a no-comment kind of girl.
The rest of the reporters shoved their mikes forward.
“I was,” I said, “the one who found Jane Augustine on the night she died. I adored Jane. I know nothing other than what I’ve already told the police.”
Except about Jane’s scarfing games.
The reporters surged forward, blocking me in, yelling more questions. Video and TV cameras surrounded me.
“Izzy, over here!” The voice that cut through the others was familiar. I looked to the right. Mayburn. He pushed through the reporters, grabbed my arm and propelled me through the throng to a navy-blue Mercedes. “Get in!”
He opened the passenger door, practically shoved me inside and slammed it behind me.
Lucy was in the driver’s seat, her ivory-gold sweater matching her blond hair. “Hi, Iz,” she said with a smile.
Mayburn jumped in the backseat. “Go!” he yelled.
Lucy’s face set in a determined line, and she floored the car and squealed out of the Trial TV parking lot.
“Thank you!” I said. “How did you know to get me?”
“I’ve been watching you on Trial TV around the clock,” Lucy said. “When I saw the press conference, I told Mayburn you needed help.”
“Something else, too,” Mayburn said from behind. “I tailed Carina Fariello today-that accountant who used to work for Jackson Prince? She’s at home right now. And considering the press conference about you this morning, I think we better get over there and talk to her. Now.”
As we drove, I told them Trial TV had fired me.
“What?” Lucy was outraged. “You were great on that station.”
“Thanks. They said they had to let me go because of this person of interest thing and the fact that I happened to take over Jane’s job after she died.”
Mayburn grunted. “Yeah, that doesn’t look good.”
I shivered as a chill of fear raced through my body. “I’m scared.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Lucy said.
“I know that, but the cops don’t.”
Silence in the car.
“The upside is…” I trailed off. I always could find an upside to just about any scenario, but what was the upside here? “Okay, new topic. How do we approach Carina Fariello?”
We batted around a few ways to speak with her. Although Mayburn rarely shied away from subterfuge or a little creative license with the facts, we decided that we would be up-front with her and conversational. More than anything we wanted to get her talking.
I turned around and looked at Mayburn. “Hey,” I said, “what’s going on with the Fig Leaf case?”
“I need you to get a pearl thong.”
“I already gave you a pearl thong. Maggie’s. And by the way, I want it back.”
He pulled at the collar of his brown leather jacket and shifted in the seat. “Uh, yeah, it’s kind of been dismantled.”
“Dismantled? Why?”
“I told you I had to have it analyzed. Those pearls are plastic, by the way.”
“Did you really think they were going to be real pearls?”
“Hey, I want one of those thongs.” Lucy stopped at a light and shot a sultry smile over her shoulder at Mayburn.
“Oh, trust me, I’m getting you one in every color.”
“Okay, no sex talk,” I said. “And, Mayburn, now that I’m out of a full-time job, again, I not only expect to be reimbursed for that thong, but I want another one for my friend.”
“I need the other kind of thong. One of the black boxed ones that the guy in the van delivered. From what you told me, Josie is guarding the pearl thongs. And the owner of the store says she only knew about one kind of pearl thong-the silver, like the one you gave me.”
“Why don’t you just get a key from the owner and you go in there and get it?”
“Because she’s in Palm Beach and won’t be back in town anytime soon. Plus she says she didn’t know Josie was keeping things locked up. She doesn’t have a key to that box. Only Josie does apparently.
“I’d have to either steal the lock box where she keeps them, or borrow the key from her when she’s not looking.”
“There’s got to be a way.”
More silence, all of us thinking. Compared to shaking a murder rap, getting my hands on a piece of lingerie didn’t sound that challenging. “I’ll figure it out,” I said.
“Here we are.” Lucy pulled over to the side of the street, pointing.
Carina Fariello’s house was light blue, a single-story family home in a neighborhood where there was lots of parking and moms strolled by with their kids.
We rang the doorbell. A heavyset woman with black curly hair, probably in her late forties, opened the door and peered at us through the screen. She looked at us in the same tense way that I would if three strange people showed up on my doorstep. “Yes?”
“Ms. Fariello, I’m Isabel McNeil. We wanted to see if we could talk to you about Jane Augustine.”
Her face sagged. “I can’t believe what happened to her.”
“I know. We’re trying to find anything we can about her murder. Your name was found on a piece of paper in Jane’s desk. Can we speak with you?”
“Are you the police?” She glanced at our clothing.
“Private detective,” Mayburn said.
“Private detective,” not “private investigator,” was the official term utilized in Illinois statutes, but most people still used the term investigator or P.I. Mayburn threw around the detective word when he wanted to sound more official.
It seemed to do the trick. “Yeah, sure.” Carina Fariello unlocked and opened her screened door. “I don’t have a lot of time, though. I have to get ready for work.”
“We just have a few questions.”
She led us down a narrow foyer covered in fake wood flooring to a living room that looked generally unused. The light blue of the furniture cushions probably had once matched the house paint, but had since been bleached to a light gray.
Carina Fariello pointed to the couch and took a seat on a nearby chair. As Mayburn, Lucy and I sat on the couch, she stood again. “I’m sorry. I should have asked. Can I get you something to drink?”
We all declined. “Ms. Fariello…” I said.
“Call me Carina.” She took her seat again.
“Thanks. Carina, as I mentioned, your name was on a paper in Jane Augustine’s desk. There were also about fourteen other names. All were doctors.” I lifted my purse from the floor and rooted around until I found the list. I read a few of them. “Do you know these doctors?”
Carina’s face was grim, her eyes jumping around now. “Who are you working for?”
Mayburn spoke up. “We’re working on this case for free. We-” he gestured at himself and me “-We don’t believe that the police are doing enough to find out what happened to Jane.”
I was relieved he didn’t mention the term “person of interest.”
“I don’t understand. Why would those names be related to her death?”
“We’re not sure, either,” I said. “We’re just going over some of the stories she was working on. One was about Jackson Prince. Something possibly about class action lawsuits. These names were on the back of research she had. You used to work for Prince, right?”
Somewhere during my explanation, Carina’s eyes had slipped to the floor. They stayed there, and she said nothing for a few seconds.
Then her eyes came back to mine. “I did work for him. Until he fired me. I was the one who called Jane with those names.”
A beat went by. “That’s great,” Mayburn said. His face was bland, almost bored, but I could see an excited glimmer in his eyes. “What kind of work did you do for him?”
Carina’s jaw moved into a firm line. “I was his office manager and bookkeeper. I’m a CPA. I worked for him for years, but he fired me five months
ago.” Her eyes grew a little wet. “I have a job out at O’Hare now.”
“Why did Mr. Prince fire you?” I asked.
“He said it was because he had to lay off some staff. He did have a bad couple of years recently-only a few big verdicts or settlements-but no one else got fired, and the firm was starting to do great again. Especially with the Ladera cases.”
“What’s Prince’s role with those cases?”
“He’s liaison-counsel. He oversees the entire lawsuit and the other lawyers working on it. If the plaintiffs get any settlements or judgments, he’ll get about a third of everything.”
“Did the doctors on the list have anything to do with Ladera?”
“Well, that’s what Prince said, but I don’t know…Do you know anything about class action suits or how they work with the experts?”
“They pool their experts,” I said, remembering what Grady had told me. “Usually, they just have a few for the whole class.”
“Exactly.” Carina nodded emphatically. “We already had a panel of experts for the Ladera, and yet the firm kept paying the doctors on the list, too. Prince told me the doctors were additional experts. I kept asking him about it, because it seemed weird. Each doctor was someone that Jackson had consulted with before the lawsuit went into class action status, but there was no reason to keep them on after that.”
“Is it possible he was just keeping them on the payroll in case they needed additional guidance with the case?”
“That’s what I thought at first. But usually if a doctor acts as an expert-maybe they review records or summarize research-then they submit bills to us. They tell us how many hours they spent. So the bills are always for different amounts. But with these doctors, even before the cases got class action status, Jackson would create an invoice for them, rather than the other way around, and the invoices were always the exact same amount.”
“You said you kept asking him about the payments,” Mayburn prodded.
“I did. He told me the doctors were experts. And he told me to remember what my job was at the firm. And then he told me to pay them.” Her face went stiff. “And I don’t know if you know Mr. Prince, but you really don’t say no to him.”
“Because he’s charming?” I asked.
She laughed, but it had a sour edge. “He’s not that charming when there’s no jury or a camera. He’s a screamer.”
I grimaced. In the legal profession, certain lawyers, despite their perfect suits and their gentleman’s attitude in court, had the reputation of being a “screamer” in the comfort of their law-firm walls.
“He yells at the staff all the time,” Carina said. “That’s one thing I don’t miss about that job.” She pulled nervously at a strand of hair, then seemed to notice and clasped her hands tight in her lap. “It was bugging me, though, those payments, and I felt like it was part of my job to speak up, you know? When I kept asking about them, he wasn’t happy. Then when he started flying those same doctors around on his private plane, and I asked him about that, too, he fired me a few days afterward.”
“Where were the doctors going on the plane?” Mayburn asked.
“They used it individually to go to different places. From what I could tell from the passenger lists we had to provide to the pilots, it was the doctors and their friends or the doctors and their families. And they almost always stayed at one of Prince’s vacation houses.”
“Did Prince always treat his experts this well?” Mayburn asked.
She laughed with that brittle edge again. “Are you kidding? He treats them like they’re paralegals.”
“So why the special treatment here?” I asked. “Why those doctors?”
Carina shrugged. “He would never tell me. Then he fired me.”
“And is that when you called Jane?”
She nodded. “I’ve watched her every night for years, and I know she likes legal stories.” Her mouth pursed. “I guess I should say she liked legal stories. Anyway, there was an ad on her old station. It was Jane asking people to call the station with any legal news. I didn’t know if there was much of a story with Jackson Prince, but I thought I’d try. I was so mad about being fired. I left a message on the tip line. It took a while, but then she called me back.” The tightness to her mouth left, and she smiled. “Jane called me herself, can you believe that?”
I smiled, too. “That sounds like Jane. What did she say?”
“She just asked me some questions. I told her about the lump payments to the doctors, the plane trips, how they were all supposedly on the Ladera case.”
“What did Jane do then?”
“She asked me for the phone numbers of the doctors. I didn’t have them anymore, but I told her where each doctor lived-they’re in different places around the country. She must have found their information because she phoned me back and said she’d called them. Most wouldn’t talk to her, but then she found someone she’d met before, Dr. Hamilton-Wood. And Jane had spoken to her one-on-one.”
“Do you know what the doctor told her?”
“I’m not sure. Jane told me that she was moving to Trial TV, but she was still looking into the story. She said that she was close to putting something together. She asked if I would be interviewed on the air when she was ready, and I told her, yes. Prince didn’t even give me severance pay, and he told the unemployment office that I was fired for cause, so I couldn’t get unemployment. I called a couple of lawyers, but no one seems to think it’s a great employment case. Or maybe they just don’t want to sue Jackson Prince.”
She looked at her watch. “I don’t know anything else. I hadn’t talked to Jane in a while.” She shuddered. “And then she was dead.”
56
R ush hour in Chicago is never fun. Years ago, afternoon traffic used to head northbound, cars full of refugees fleeing the Loop. But now, people worked in every neighborhood in Chicago, and rush hour no longer discriminated against North, South, East or West. It was everywhere.
So there I was, heading home in a cab at rush hour with lots of time to turn over and over in my mind what Carina Fariello had told me. What was going on with Jackson Prince and the doctors he was paying? Did it have anything to do with what happened to Jane? I had to find out. Because not only was Jane dead, and not only was I out of a job, but I could be out of a life if I didn’t stop this person of interest craziness from spinning out of control.
The best place to start, it seemed, was with Dr. Hamilton-Wood, the one doctor Jane apparently had some success with.
The cabbie grunted as he got into another lane and got stopped by a long line of barely crawling cars. Normally the traffic would have made me grit my teeth, but today, I didn’t mind so much. I needed to simply sit and decompress and get my mind around the fact that in the span of a week I’d gone from unemployed to news reporter to anchor and back to unemployed again. I’d gone from upstanding citizen to person of interest. So, in a way, it was good to be alone in a sticky, grungy cab littered with Red Eye newspapers, all of which were at least a week old, none of which had articles about Jane. Or me.
My cell phone rang. Sam.
“Are you all right?” he said. “I’m at O’Hare, about to get on my plane to Cinci.”
“I forgot you were going.” Sam had a meeting with a big client in Cincinnati the next morning.
“Well, I’m not now. I’ve been working all day, but I just saw the news. And heard your name. Iz, this is insane.”
“I know.”
“Where are you?”
“In a cab going home.”
“Good. I’m leaving the airport. I’m walking back down the terminal right now.”
“No, don’t change your trip.”
“Are you kidding? I’m coming to your place. Are you all right?”
“Yeah. Except that I got fired.”
“Trial TV fired you?”
“They did.”
“That’s bullshit!”
“That’s what I told them.” The cab changed lanes aga
in, but the traffic slowed even more. And yet it felt nice to be barely inching along. “Look, Sam, don’t cancel your trip. You’re already at the airport, and you’re only going for a night and there’s nothing you can do. And the truth is I could use a little time to myself. Last night was…” I didn’t know how to put it-awkward, lacking, not “us”?
“Yeah. I know what you’re saying.”
At least we still had the ability to communicate without words. At least we both agreed that last night had not been so wonderful, even if we couldn’t agree on, or even figure out, why.
“When does your flight board?” I asked.
“Five minutes.”
“Just go. Nothing is going to happen. I’m going to hole up at home.”
“I don’t know, Red Hot. I think you need someone with you right now. Even if you don’t want it to be me.”
“I’m fine by myself.”
“Are you sure?”
The cab got off at North Avenue. “I’m almost home. I’m sure.”
He sighed. I could hear the frustration there. “I’ll call you as soon as I land.”
“Perfect. Love you.”
“I love you, Red Hot.”
Twenty minutes later, the cab was turning onto Sedgwick, and I was breathing deeper with relief. But as the taxi approached my condo, things started swirling very fast again.
News vans littered my street. Two of them were from Trial TV. Others were NBC, CBS, even CNN. Reporters stood on my front lawn, chatting amiably. Waiting.
“Shazzer,” I said, under my breath. Then, when the swear replacement didn’t have the right feel I said, “Shit.” How did they get my address? My number and address were unlisted. But then I remembered that as an employee of Trial TV, at least until today, the station had my address. And I knew from working around the news industry for a while that once a certain network or station finds a good shot or a good witness or a good anything, it doesn’t stay secret for long.
“I need to go somewhere else,” I told the cab driver.
“Where to?”
“Um…”
Sam was probably on his plane right now. Q had already left that morning for a trip to Miami with his boyfriend.
Red Blooded Murder Page 26
