The Ultimate Exit Strategy, page 8
Months later everybody winkingly agreed Starr’s promotion was an incredible jump in prestige for a woman who previously spent half her day working for the likes of me and the other half reading romance novels and buffing her cherry red fingernails into high gloss. Camille Gutierrez was transferred on an afternoon’s notice – traded in, Ellen Borgia had quipped, like an old beater car for a newer, faster model. Camille’s high school-aged daughter, Elana, who had been working as an after-school page in the Whytebread company library, vanished from the payroll the following month after a suspicious weight gain I’d chosen not to report just then to Cassandra who was shaking her head with an indulgent smile.
Apparently Trisha Winslow had been out of town for the last two weeks at a rose-growing convention in Pasadena. “Think a little harder, Virginia, and call me when you do.” Cassandra penciled her number on the back of a business card, a handsome, deeply-embossed piece of heavy stock with a handsome Chicago Police Department crest, carrying her name and star number, a phone and pager, pushing it at me across the table. “This is me at home.” When I didn’t pick up her card immediately from the table, Cassandra reoffered it, turning it over for me on my palm, and pressing: “If anyone can find out what’s going on in that place I’ll bet its you. Think about it,” the matter was in my sole discretion – all I had to do was want to help her badly enough.
I was nodding blankly; too numbed by this barrage of disturbing revelations to appreciate my newly elevated place in Cassandra’s world: first Winslow was dead, then he was dead and murdered; now the Gold Rush deal was maybe on hold, or maybe off, and there remained the tricky issue of Cassandra Hope herself, my new best friend. Of course in one respect, she’d been inarguably right; I was going to think about it. I couldn’t help myself.
Slipping the card into the jacket pocket of my suit, I’d belted my trench coat, already having started to catalogue the possibilities: Camille and her pregnant daughter for whom she’d had such high ambitions, The Irishman, Price, Ellen Borgia. Perhaps Justin was hoping for a more precipitous rise at the firm. Maybe Wes had been in his way. In the glass doors, I could see reflected the furious whirl of concentration in my greedy face, pushing my way into the crush of people on the sidewalk.
“I’ll be in touch, soon.” I could hear Cassandra calling after me. Promises, promises.
VIII
I’d only just stepped away from the office, but when I’d returned there were already signs of senior management circling the wagons, and sealing off the story from the rest of us. Herb Symon was a blur in the corridors barreling down the hall with uncharacteristic speed, first to one big boy’s office, then another. In the lower ranks there was talk too, of the uninformed variety, from all quarters. But for once I thought I knew everything Herb and the big boys knew. For once, I was sure that I knew even more.
“Murder?” Ellen was pushing her tea bag around her mug with her index finger, more incredulous at my gossip than surprised, but it was satisfying enough for once to be able to deliver the news while it was still fresh. Cocking her head at me thoughtfully, Ellen squirted into her tea a few murky drops of the Valerian root she collected and extracted herself for her nerves. I preferred my Valium the old fashion way in the little white pills Naomi’s dentist gave her to stop grinding her teeth. “Someday,” I told Ellen, “that herbal stuff’s going to kill you.”
“Maybe so. But not today.” My news had made her grumpy and pensive, and Ellen went right over my joke to the subject at hand. “I need to find out what this does to my discrimination suit.”
“But it doesn’t matter anymore.” That was just my point, that Winslow had changed his famous List a week before he died – the freshest news of all and I was squealing it in a kind of teenybopper excitement that Ellen inexplicably didn’t seem to share. “We have a lot of stock options.” In fact, the color was draining confusingly from her face. “We have stock options.” I burbled again in case she had misheard me. “Wes changed The List the week before he died.”
Ellen didn’t look good, not happy and certainly paler by the second. “I don’t believe you.” Misunderstanding, it seemed, was not the problem. “I never agreed to the settlement.”
“What settlement?” It seemed the misunderstanding was mine since there was no need to sue anymore.
“Justin.” Ellen shook her head, hands trembling. She was making waves across her tea. “It had to be Justin – that prick or Starr.” But her muttering didn’t make any sense. I said again, we had the money now, which really, really pissed her off.
Ellen flipped a hand at me dismissively. “Do you really think money is what I’m after?” Foamy white spittle was coagulating at the sides of her mouth as she gestured away a fortune as if it were the kind of money she tossed off on a soymilk Latte.
I was talking the zeros that made the difference between a new car, early retirement and the gross national product of a small Third World country – an order of magnitude. “We have so many options.” I’d tried but I couldn’t seem to make myself understood, fairly pleading with her, to entertain some perspective, and alternately wiping at my own lips discreetly, a friendly hint to Ellen that the foam on her mouth was expanding to a kind of nasty colony of spit. Despite my best efforts, she remained unaware that she was frothing, her face was so uncomfortably close to mine that I could smell the Valerian on her breath. “Do you really think this is about those fucking options?”
I’d pushed myself back in my chair, away from the germy spray of air spun saliva. “I was going to put his whole sleazy way of doing business on trial. THAT WAS THE POINT.”
She was staring at me. I was staring at her; still intermittently brushing the side of my mouth, hoping she would recognize at least the grooming issue. I took a long breath, a tentative truce of silence in which our relations had time to become auspiciously calmer.
“Is there something wrong with your face?” she asked me finally. “Doesn’t anyone have a clue here?”
“No.” I said, giving up.
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m the only one around here who isn’t a complete idiot. You know, they call me the Popsicle,” she’d explained, defeated as if this might well be something not everyone in the firm had heard. “They call me the Popsicle. Do you know why?” I shook my head, but she didn’t elaborate. “Wes thought it was funny. At least Maddy Madsen discouraged it. I’m sorry, Virginia,” Ellen said, “but how can you expect a little bit of money to make that kind of thing all right?”
It was, in fact, a lot of money, enough money that if she was modest in her lifestyle she might not have to work at a place where they called her the Popsicle anymore. I said that maybe she should just take the money and let it go, but Ellen rolled her eyes back in disgust. “I wonder why I am ever surprised.” The color was returning to her neck again. “You think Justin Collier’s going to make this place all right for you.” She had raised herself from her chair, leaned over the desk and puffed her swamp-water Valerian in my face again in order to call me a toady. “Well, let me give you a little piece of friendly advice about Justin Collier. He and Wesley Winslow are like taking a piss in a blue suit – you can’t tell the difference. No additional charge, Justin invented the ‘Popsicle’ – not Wes.”
I sat there mutely trying to figure out exactly what that could mean – why Justin had done it and why Ellen was telling me about it. She gave her tea another healthy squirt of the Valerian.
“Someday that herbal stuffs going to kill you.” I made my little joke again. I hoped to remind her that we used to be friends, maybe we still were.
But apparently not today. Ellen stood and walked me around the desk to her office door, which she held open for me to leave. “Do you mind, Virginia? I think I really need some space here.”
The Number 156 bus winds up the Chicago lakefront from State Street just in front of Marshall Field’s department store to practically Evanston. By five-thirty that evening I was on it and still it felt very late in the day. My stop at the corner of Irving Park and the inner drive could not have come too soon. From there I walked the few blocks home to my apartment, past the Catholic girl’s school, now an Islamic College, and the White Hen Pantry convenience store. In minutes the familiar landmarks had reduced me to one of Pavlov’s dogs, my mind filled with nothing but what there was to eat for dinner – not much as my last trip to the Jewel grocery store was a distant memory and the culinary possibilities at my house were neither wide nor particularly appetizing; but just the same I found myself obsessively counting the steps to my third floor flat – my stomach complaining steadily as I mounted the last of them and hustled down the ten feet of maroon carpeted hall that led to my front door.
IX
On a little oak-stained pine table in the entryway, the phone machine flashed three new messages; and just beyond the threshold, in the fringe of my Turkish runner, Sweet Potato had left another hairball con cat chow the size of mainland China.
Since Emily had left, my life had fallen into the perfect rhythms of single living: Sweet Potato preening himself on top of the metal radiator cover in the dining room as I sponged his leavings from the rug, a cloudy jelly glass of red wine and a chocolate Pop-Tart with the sprinkles for dinner. I played back my phone message while I ate: two serial calls from Naomi Wolf, apprising me that, should I care, her death was imminent from nicotine withdrawal; crazy old Spike, apologizing for our tiff at the airport on Monday, if you’re there pick up, pick up, and Emily Karnowski, my ex-lover and current personal accountant. I called Emily back right away.
“Why don’t we talk in the morning? I’m trying to get home.” Her voice was punctuated by the rustle of papers in the background, the crisp efficient sounds that I had always associated with her and her preternatural competence. Em’s impatience rankled me; trying to get home to what? Since we had broken up, it had been a vague source of comfort to me that Em had not had a life. “So please Virginia, tomorrow.” She sighed heavily as if the disorder of my accounts was eviscerating. “Six-thirty p.m. at my office and bring a W-4 withholding form, all right.”
“Hey, you called me.” Habit was making me only too happy to insist, given the provocatively dismissive tone Emily had chosen to take. “So what’s with my withholding? Just give me a taste – you know how I worry.”
Em groaned. “You have under withheld your taxes again, Virginia, and you need to make it up before the end of the year or pay a penalty.” I was sorry I’d asked.
“We both know how you hate penalties.” I was detecting malicious relish. “And so, I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said again, hanging up without saying goodbye.
Another sortie into the refrigerator revealed rancid pasta salad, old orange juice, lite beer, ice cubes and the tuna salad sandwich I had intended as tomorrow’s lunch, so I ate a second Pop-Tart, while I got ready for my run.
Running calmed me almost as much as eating, so I was doing it a lot, hoping to take off the marriage pounds I’d accumulated in my four years with Spike. The good news was I’d lost fifteen without the aid of heroin or diet pills. The bad news was that there was as yet no one to regularly appreciate it. Having Spike as an out-of-town lover mostly meant I worked late, came home to a dinner of Pop-Tarts, which could be conveniently purchased nearly twenty four hours daily at the White Hen Pantry only half a block from my apartment, and ran up my phone bill. Still, I felt my career at Whytebread was starting to reflect the extra time I was spending there. I was ready to believe hard work and demonstrated ability, as opposed to some more cynical equation of race and litigation, had put me on Wes’s last minute update to the Have List. Hadn’t Justin Collier befriended me last year, hadn’t Winslow himself stopped by my office to consult with me the day he died? I was thinking maybe August Madsen would be favorably impressed as well if I helped Cassandra find Winslow’s killer.
I was thinking of a lot of things and nothing at all, all at once and jumbled together – the Choline in both Cassandra’s Fly Agaric and Ellen Borgia’s Daily Diet tea, an Olivia Cruise, Trisha Winlsow, The Irishman, the tropical island I would visit when the Gold Rush deal came through – running south on Halsted towards the fairly well-lit, well-populated strip of Homo bars and knick-knack shops. The sun had already gone down when I’d stepped out into the red brick courtyard of my building. These fall evenings it seemed to set in minutes, but I had grown to enjoy the crisp, companionable darkness and the slap of my shoes on the quiet streets. October had broken pleasantly into Indian summer, moist, balmy nights and unseasonably warm days. At the bus stop strangers were turning to each other, remarking about how under-rated Chicago weather was.
Cutting down Waveland Street, I huffed a path to the lakefront past the cheerfully painted row houses in nice, easy strides. The air smelled like those Halloweens when I was a kid, thick with the scent of wet dead leaves and fireplaces, old pieces of telephone pole rolled close to the bonfire for benches and hot-dogs turning black on the end of a straightened wire hanger. So engrossing was the mixture of memories and endorphins sloshing around my brain that I almost failed to notice the lights of a slow-moving car rolling up beside me. And all of a sudden, disturbingly there wasn’t a soul on the darkened street, not even another car to flag down in the headlights.
I’d picked up my pace such as it was, but the car stayed next to me. The man inside it was shouting my name through the open window. It was Justin.
“Whoa! Slow down little sistah. I’ve been following you for a block and a half.”
I could see as I got closer to the car that Justin was still in his suit from work. “I was just driving and I saw you there.” A lucky coincidence because presented with the alternative of a car I didn’t feel like running anymore. “Do you want to go for a ride?” He was telling me as I opened the door that the police were saying that Wes had been murdered.
The idea seemed to have shaken him even more than it had me. Even so, I couldn’t help but enjoy the authority I was able to put in my voice as I told him I already knew about Winslow, and the way that my knowledge unbalanced him, making my own little dent on events. It proved I mattered.
“I knew Detective Hope many years ago.” I said she didn’t find Whytebread management particularly cooperative.
Justin kept nodding and hunched himself moodily in his seat. “What do they want? Wes was a strange guy. It’s mushroom season. I’ve really told the police all I know about that night. Herb didn’t like it but I told that detective about Wes’s issues with The Irishman. That’s all I can do.”
I thought it was interesting that Justin had been the one to break rank and talk to the police. Instead I said, “You know, Wes changed it at the last minute – his list.”
Justin was watching the road and he didn’t turn. “Wes changed it last week,” Justin said, and I asked why he hadn’t told me.
“What would you have done differently, if you’d known?” Justin considered this idea with a speculative sort of amusement as if I had demonstrated some unexpected precociousness.
“It may be nothing,” Justin said when we had driven several blocks, “but you might tell your policewoman friend, Tom Zemluski never finished college.” He was speaking slowly as if he was just reasoning it out. “It’s no big deal to lose a job if you can get another one, but if you can’t – that’s something else.” The Irishman had quit night school ten credits short of a bachelor’s degree and had never gone back. “It was the summer his first kid was born, almost twenty-five years ago.” His career had taken off with Madsen as his mentor. Time had passed. Justin smiled thinly. “August Madsen always thought it was kind of funny, an oddity, but Wes didn’t think that Tom projected the proper image for Whytebread, especially in the future as part of Gold Rush Investments.”
I said, “So, The Irishman wasn’t just losing a job; he was losing a career.” That made sense of his anger at the shareholders meeting and at lunch that day; he must have felt like Winslow had sprung a trap on him after all those years. It would be difficult for another firm to hire The Irishman at his grade and age, without at least a college degree, even if they wanted to. But the buyout money ought to have been plenty to live on even if he couldn’t work.
Except Justin explained Tom was getting a divorce. “His wife will take at least half the money and probably his house,” but Justin said it was more than that: “Tom felt Winslow had singled him out – engineered the Gold Rush deal and The List to screw him.” Herb was supposed to take care of things with Winslow, but last week when The Irishman heard he was still recommended for termination on Wes’s new List, he’d lost his patience. “He went ballistic. I don’t know,” Justin seemed to consider this as if it were a new thought, “maybe Wes did want to screw him.”
We had nearly reached my house. I said, “So why is it that Wes had decided to give me and Ellen, Borgia options? You were in; we were out.” I wanted confirmation, a little afraid that Cassandra had been wrong or lying about my little bequest.
“I don’t know. He just did. That’s all,” Justin brushed off the question as if it confused him.
I said, “Maybe Winslow explained what he was thinking to you. I thought you were friends.”
But Justin made a puffing sound through his nose. “Wesley Winslow didn’t have any friends – not really. Wes was kind of a dick.” He had pulled the car over by the iron gate in front of my building.
