by Ian K. Smith
“Tinsley Gerrigan is a very attractive young woman.” I threw it out there like a basketball referee tossing up a jump ball.
“No argument from me,” he said.
“You being of XY chromosomes and she of very attractive XX chromosomes, there’s another good reason why someone would want to spend considerable time in her company.”
Shake the tree.
“It would be a good reason for someone who is interested in her in that way,” Weems shot back. “I’m not exactly sure where you’re trying to go with this, but I’m very happy in my marriage, Mr. Cayne.”
“Happiness in a marriage is not always an antidote to infidelity,” I said.
If nothing falls at first, shake the tree even harder.
“Listen here, Cayne. I’m not sure what theories you’ve concocted about Tinsley, but one thing is certain. She and I were not having an affair. Nothing even close to it. We share a common passion for art. It’s that simple. Whatever else you’re trying to build won’t hold water. And if you think you’re gonna waltz in here and scare my wife and me with wild, unfounded accusations, you’re mistaken.” He pushed his chair back to leave.
“Does your wife know how many times you spoke with Tinsley over the last three months?”
“Of course she does,” he said. “Most of the time when Tinsley called, Guni was either sitting next to me or in the same room. My friendship with Tinsley was completely open and innocent.”
“And it never struck you as a little odd or too coincidental that one of your wife’s needier patients was also coming to you for an artistic apprenticeship?”
“When Tinsley bought that painting, she had no idea that I was Guni’s husband,” he said. “We go by different last names. And besides, my wife’s practice has nothing to do with what I do or with whom I socialize.” He stood and demonstrably buttoned his crisp white coat.
I stood with him. Something about his manner and his answers just wasn’t ringing true with me. He seemed above it all, as if he were too important to field questions like this from someone who didn’t have a PhD at the end of their name. Usually this meant a person was hiding something.
“And what about that late-night call to your house the night Tinsley disappeared?” I said. “The seventy-fifth and last call.”
Weems’s body language visibly changed. It was a question he knew was coming but definitely didn’t want to answer.
“She’d had an argument with a friend that night,” Weems finally said. “She was very upset and calling me to vent.”
Finally, a little fruit from the tree.
“An anesthesiologist, artiste, and relationship counselor,” I said. “You’re one helluva Renaissance man.”
Dr. Weems rolled his eyes in disgust and left me breathing in the smoke of the inveterate lung patient, who with trembling hands but determined eyes lit another cigarette while the other was still in his mouth.
16
IT WAS A SUNNY late afternoon, and I was feeling well exercised and ravenous. After my meeting with Dr. Weems, I’d hit eighteen holes on a short but hilly course in Flossmoor, where I shot a respectable eighty-two. The ravenous part was being handled with a piece of grilled salmon on a bed of cucumbers and succotash and a smattering of fresh tarragon sauce. It was also being handled with an unobstructed view of Carolina Espinoza, who was seated across from me in all her splendor, delicately picking at a tuna Nicoise salad.
The ambience at the Ralph Lauren Restaurant was its typical haughty self.
“Your dining choices never seem to disappoint,” Carolina said. “You move easily from Mexican street food to a place like this. That’s another check mark in my book.”
I looked around the bustling room full of khaki suits, bow ties, and light-colored dresses. Urbane preppy was definitely the dress code. I was defiant in black sweatpants and a long-sleeve White Sox T-shirt. There had been quite a few disapproving stares when I walked in, and I had enjoyed every one of them.
“Despite the unabashedly carnal thoughts going through my mind right now, this would be considered official business,” I said, squeezing some lemon into my glass of still water. “Goes against the expense account.”
“Official business,” Carolina sighed. “And I thought you were asking me out for lunch because you wanted to see me.”
“That’s always the case.” I smiled.
“Your romance cases could use a little help from all those skills you put to use in your investigative cases. You were too willing to do this over the phone had I not protested.”
I nodded. “I had to be sure you were interested in me and not my extraordinary wealth.”
“If it was the money, I certainly wouldn’t be settling for just any old lunch on Michigan Avenue. My mother taught me a lot better than that.”
“Smarts and a phenomenal gene pool. Your mother should be canonized.”
Carolina reached into her tote bag and handed me a large padded envelope. The only thing that had been written on it was a series of numbers and letters. Very official. She slid it across the table. “Your justification for taking this lunch out of your expense account.”
I opened the envelope. Both the small piece of cardboard and the brush were there in separate plastic evidence bags.
“I have three things for you,” she said, putting her fork down. “Let’s start with the fingerprints.”
“Let’s do that,” I said, taking a healthy bite of salmon, cucumbers, and tarragon sauce all at once. Who said gastronomic perfection could be found only on the narrow streets of Paris?
“Only one set of prints,” she said. “The one on the cardboard matches the ones on the brush. Tinsley Gerrigan.”
“Check mark.”
“Next, we have the issue of the words No Brand. This took a little work, but the lab techs nailed it. What’s missing are the words that follow—is more accurate.”
“Doesn’t sound like the most creative advertising slogan.”
“Creativity is not exactly their goal. It’s part of the packaging for the Clearblue home pregnancy test.”
That got my attention rather quickly.
“So Tinsley thinks she’s pregnant and takes a test in her bathroom,” I said. “She removed the box so no one would find it but missed this small piece.”
“Not too uncommon for a twenty-five-year-old with a boyfriend,” Carolina said. “Things happen.”
“Yeah, even if you don’t want them to.”
Carolina cut a bite-size piece of tuna in half. Now it was microscopic. She softly jabbed it with her fork. Even the way her fingers held the fork was something divine.
“There’s more,” Carolina said, after disposing of the speck of tuna. “Just to be sure, I went back over the phone records and checked everything again. This time I focused on the earlier calls, and something grabbed my attention.” She slid a piece of paper to me that had a phone number on it and the name Calderone & Calderone next to it.
“A law firm,” I said.
“Not a bad guess,” she said. “I thought the same thing when I first saw it. Try again.”
I rubbed my chin intellectually. “Got it,” I said. “A solo practicing attorney who has a really bad stuttering problem.”
Carolina smiled, and I couldn’t help but feel like a fool for never letting things advance beyond our mutual flirtation. “You’re impossible.” She laughed. “Calderone & Calderone happens to be the name of a specialty physician’s group. Anita Calderone and Lily Calderone are the principals. Anita is the mother and Lily is the daughter. They’re both obstetricians. It’s a group practice of fifteen docs. All women.”
“Hot damn,” I said. “We’re starting to get somewhere. Maybe Tinsley is with baby, which makes the elite Randolph Gerrigan of great fame and fortune and social standing the grandfather of a new type of mulatto baby. Half WASP. Half ex-thug. A Waspug.”
Carolina shook her head. “Inventive,” she said. “But the real question is whether the very fertile Chopper kno
ws he might have sired a baby.”
“If he does, he wasn’t telling when we spoke. But I have every intention of finding out.”
THAT AFTERNOON I CALLED Chopper on his cell phone. He didn’t answer, so I sent him a text message to call me back. I wanted to ask him about Tinsley’s pregnancy and why he didn’t think it was an important enough detail to tell me about it when we spoke. I spent the better part of the afternoon looking at my notes and writing a timeline on my office whiteboard. It was going to be extremely important to keep track of when things happened and who knew that they were happening. Tinsley’s pregnancy was not just a trivial matter, and it instantly raised the stakes as well as questions about whether that had any critical role in her disappearance. I wrote Tinsley’s name in the center of a circle just like the hubcap of a tire. Then I connected her name to all the players I had learned about so far, spokes labeled with their names and her relationship to them. I stood back and looked at the connections, but all I saw were holes staring back at me. If Chopper hadn’t told me about the pregnancy, then how much other information hadn’t I been told?
17
PENNY PACKER WAS THE wealthiest person I knew. In fact, she was obscenely wealthy. Her family had made billions in the cosmetics business, among other enterprises. Even after dividing the inheritance and business interests among all the cousins and in-laws, Fortune magazine still had her net worth pegged at somewhere around $4 billion. Penny was also the city’s biggest philanthropist and a socialite like no other. It was difficult going more than five blocks in downtown Chicago without seeing the Packer name carved into the front of a building or the wing of some institution. But more importantly, Penny didn’t take her money or her family’s name too seriously. She was just as comfortable talking to a busboy as she was a head of state. Most importantly, she was a fierce competitor on the golf course. That was how we had become friends.
Several years ago, I had been invited to play at a course of which she was also a member. I was chipping on the practice green when a caddie ran up to me breathlessly and explained that my friend who had invited me had called the clubhouse at the last minute to say he had gotten tied up in a business meeting and wouldn’t be able to make it. But Penny Packer’s group was looking for a fourth, because they’d also had a last-minute cancelation. She had one stipulation—the person had to really know how to play so their pace of play wouldn’t be slowed. Would I like to join her? She and I teamed up and rode in the cart together for the next four hours, during which we unapologetically beat the snot out of the other two. An unlikely friendship had been fortuitously cemented.
“Where the hell have you been, Ashe?” she said. She was dressed in one of her trademark black pantsuits with a silk blouse and a string of pearls big enough to choke an alligator.
I had just taken a seat in the kitchen of her limestone mansion in Lincoln Park on the North Side of the city. Refusing to live far out in the suburbs like her fellow billionaires, Penny had bought five lots on a quiet street, torn down the houses, then had an enormous Greek revival mansion arduously built to rigorous specifications. We met every third Thursday of the month, except for November and December, when she wintered in Palm Springs. Just the two of us. I had plenty of work to do, but I always looked forward to our dinner and never canceled.
“I’ve been trying to get my stubborn handicap down before the cold blows in,” I said.
“Then you better get your swing path fixed,” she said, taking a bite of cubed tuna tartare sitting on a thin cracker. “That slice is getting you into too much trouble off the tee.”
Penny was an excellent golfer. She could hit the ball farther than any woman I had ever seen. Her swing mechanics were a work of art. Helps when growing up your grandfather had his own eighteen-hole course in his backyard.
“I can’t get enough rounds in,” I said. “I’m neck-deep in this new case.”
We were seated at a table that could comfortably sit twenty. The cook was on the other side of the kitchen, going about his work quietly. The aromas were making the inside of my mouth tingle.
“What are you working on?” she asked, taking a sip of wine.
“Missing person case,” I said.
“Wouldn’t happen to be the Gerrigan girl?”
I wasn’t the least bit surprised Penny had heard about it. The billionaire’s club was extremely small.
“The mother hired me,” I said. “Not sure what to make of it all yet. What do you know about them?”
“Plenty,” Penny said. “I’ve known Randy and Violet for decades. Violet’s great-grandfather and my great-grandfather were founding members together at the Chicago Golf Club in Wheaton. Violet is a good mother and a strong woman. Randy is nothing short of a genuine ass.”
“Violet was the one who hired me,” I said. “It’s been more than a week. I’ve met her husband too. Interesting man.”
“You’re being uncharacteristically diplomatic,” Penny said. “Randy is downright strange. People like to call him an eccentric. I think he’s just damn weird. Violet deserves a medal for keeping that marriage together. He’s been a disaster.”
“But he’s been a great businessman.”
“Using Violet’s money,” Penny said. “If it weren’t for her father setting him up, he’d be shoveling coal in West Virginia.”
Her cook, Balzac, brought over a plate of beef carpaccio served with arugula and shaved parmesan cheese. He also delivered a plate of warm sweetbreads. My favorite.
“My detecting has taught me that Violet and her daughter have a somewhat complicated relationship,” I said.
“They always have,” Penny said. “Tinsley blames Violet for Randy’s boorish behavior. Let’s just say he hasn’t been the most discreet with his extracurriculars. She ran away several times as a teenager. Always overseas. Each time was connected to the discovery of a different infidelity.”
“Let me get this right. The father’s the one out bopping around, yet she’s mad at the mother?”
“She thinks Violet’s aloofness left him no choice. You’ve met her. She’s not the warmest pebble on the beach.”
“No, but at least she’s making the effort to find her daughter.”
“Violet’s a control freak if there ever was one,” Penny said. “The fact that she’s the one making a fuss doesn’t surprise me at all.”
“You think this disappearance has something to do with one of her father’s mistresses?”
Penny thought for a moment, then said, “Hard for me to call it. If something like this is pissing her off, Tinsley’s old enough now she could just pack up her things and move out on her own. Why would she need to run away?”
“The better question is why she’s still living with a difficult mother and all that drama when she has plenty of other options?”
Penny smiled. “Because down to her core, she’s a daddy’s girl. He’s a strong presence in her life. Like I said before, it’s complicated.”
“You think she was kidnapped?”
“Unlikely. Kidnapped for money? Why now? After all these years when she was a child dependent on her wealthy parents, no one so much as breathed in her direction. So why would they do it now when she’s an adult? Not saying it’s not possible, but it makes the least sense.”
“Then what do you think it is?”
Penny shrugged. “Too many possibilities. What are you thinking?”
I had just taken a bite of the carpaccio and cheese. The lemon vinaigrette dressing perfectly cut the sharpness of the cheese. The beef melted in my mouth.
“I’m not even close to working this all out,” I said. “But I think she ran away.”
“Why?”
“Maybe she’s hiding something.”
“Like what?”
“A little bun in the oven.”
Penny was about to tip her glass, but instead lowered it back to the table. Her eyes widened. “Pregnant?”
I nodded.
“Do you know this as a fact?”
/>
“Not yet, but I’m working on it.”
“And who do you suspect is the father?”
“Chopper McNair.”
“Who the hell is he?”
“The nephew of one of Chicago’s biggest gangsters.”
“My God,” Penny said. “Violet must be torn apart.”
“I don’t think she knows about the pregnancy.”
“Jesus Christ. If it’s true, it will absolutely destroy her.”
18
I HAD GOTTEN HOME late from Penny’s house and had dozed off on the couch, watching a replay of last year’s British Open on the Golf Channel. The last thing I remembered was a group walking up the eighteenth fairway and an aerial shot of the violent wind gusts battering the Atlantic Ocean. Then I felt water trickling down my throat as I struggled to get air through my nose and into my lungs. The pool water cascaded off my face, and I lifted my head back, feeling the warmth of the sun. Marco’s hand was no longer on my head, but his arm was still pressed against my chest. I gasped in a much-needed breath.
I couldn’t make out the faces standing above me, but I could see the color of their shirts. Yellows and bright blues mixed with reds and whites—that was what caught my eye. There were so many colors and so many who just stood there watching me struggle in the water. Strangely, the sound of voices I had heard before my head was pushed into the water was gone. There was only silence, except for the sound of tires grinding on dirt and gravel. A long dirt road outside the pool ran from the entrance of the camp all the way up the hill to the back of the property, ending where the woods started.
Two large pools had been built into the hill, one on top, the other at the base. Marco had gathered all the campers in our group, or tribe, as we called them, and told us to follow him to the lower pool. We thought it strange to be heading there at this time of the day. We swam twice a day, and those times were tightly regulated, because all the tribes shared the same pools, and there were hundreds of campers. We thought we were going for a special swim. It was our favorite activity, especially during these hot summer afternoons when the sun bore down on us uninterrupted for hours. But I should’ve known something was amiss when he told us to leave our towels in our lodge. We never went to the pools without our towels.
