Bitter Business (27 page)

“That sounds good. I just have to finish up one or two things. Can you pick me up in about half an hour?”

“Sure thing. I’ll meet you out front.”

Thirty minutes later, give or take the time it took me to make sure that Daniel’s secretary, Madeline, had locked up his office and gone home, I found Stephen, good as his word, waiting behind the wheel of his dark blue BMW.

“Did you get a lot of work done?” he asked as he pulled away from the curb. The streets were deserted, the windows of the office buildings on either side of us dark and empty. I was probably the last person to leave work in the loop—just in time to have dinner, catch some sleep, and get up bright and early to begin another week.

“I did, but it’s never enough,” I replied, taking the pins from my hair and rubbing my scalp where it ached from the weight of my French twist. “It doesn’t help that I’m burning all sorts of time on this Cavanaugh thing.”

“You never told me what the funeral was like.”

“It was awful. The worst part is that Dagny was the reasonable one in the family—the peacemaker. With her out of the picture, the Cavanaugh family is like a big driverless bus. I have no idea where it’s headed.” I went on to tell him in mortifying detail about the rapid disintegration of the Cavanaugh family meeting and how I’d resorted to climbing on a chair to restore order.

“Sounds like a load of laughs,” Stephen remarked dryly, turning off of State Street onto Cermak.

“It was so awful I’m seriously considering giving up the practice of law,” I said, groping in my purse for a rubber band and slipping my hair into a loose ponytail. “I’ve decided to work as a ticket taker at Disneyland for a year in order to restore my belief in the essential goodness of human nature.”

“I’m sure your mother has some suggestions about what you could do with your time if you wanted to quit your job.”

I stuck my tongue out at him, but I don’t know if he could see it in the dark.

Chinatown is just two miles south of my office, but to drive there is a lesson in the strange physics that governs the city of Chicago. Offices, lofts, town houses, and rundown but still respectable businesses give way to block after block of abandoned real estate—crack houses, junkyards, and vacant lots that after dark become open-air drug markets. Turning west onto Cermak takes you through some of the meaner streets of this city.

When it was built, the Hilliard Center Public Housing Project was heralded as a model of urban planning and contemporary architecture. But it’s a good bet that none of the dignitaries who traded self-congratulatory smiles at the ribbon cutting have been anywhere near the place since.

Now the concrete walls have been spray-painted with graffiti and most of the windows shot out and boarded over. The little balconies that once had been lauded as a suburbanizing luxury were now covered over with chicken wire in an effort to channel traffic in and out of each building through the metal detectors at the single street-level entry.

This stretch of Cermak is one of the city’s most shameful islands of hopelessness. A place where children play in the dirt in which some idealistic bureaucrat once dreamed of seeing grass, a place where violence is a more commonplace occurrence than employment, and even the most trivial of disagreements is settled by the exchange of gunfire.

Once you pass under the Twenty-third Street viaduct, everything about the landscape changes. At the comer of Cermak and Wentworth, an ornately carved and painted archway canopies the street and welcomes you to Chinatown. The signs are in English letters and Chinese characters and the language spoken in the shops is the same nasal patter you’d hear on the streets of Hong Kong or Beijing. It is a neighborhood known for its hard work and prosperity, a place for the newly arrived and the newly affluent as well as the shopping center for the city’s burgeoning Asian population.

Crime is not tolerated here, at least not the kind that is so flagrantly apparent at the Hilliard Center four blocks away. By tradition, the Chinese gangs concern themselves primarily with gambling and protection. Yuppy round-eyes like Stephen and me, who come for the food, are safe as long as we stay on the right side of the viaduct.

While I was in law school a Canadian physician attending a professional meeting at McCormack Place, the city’s enormous convention center, had grown impatient trying to flag down a cab in Chinatown and had decided to walk the ten blocks back to his hotel. The city that woke up to read about his murder in their Sunday papers the next morning was shocked but not surprised. Chicago neighborhoods form a checkerboard of anarchy and gentrification, well-known to residents, but seldom spoken of in any tourist guide.

Stephen and I always went to a restaurant called the Divine Palace. It was on the second floor, up a precipitously steep and narrow set of stairs in violation of every known fire and safety ordinance. Indeed, the whole place had been gutted in a fire a few years before. Fortunately no one had been hurt and the owners had managed to rebuild, going so far as to duplicate the tacky red vinyl banquettes of the original dining room. It did, however, take a few months after the grand reopening for the smell of smoke and charred plaster to disappear and for the restaurant’s full complement of roaches to return.

We were late enough to miss the worst of the dinnertime crowd. The old Chinese grandma who spoke no English but handled the seating showed us to our table. I didn’t even bother looking at the menu. I always order the same thing: six pot-stickers, which I refuse to share, and an order of shrimp with tomato ginger sauce. Stephen, who is a tremendous food snob, always feels the need to remind me that they make the shrimp sauce with ketchup. That’s probably why I like it. Stephen ordered shrimp toast, a whole sea bass with red chilis, and a Tsing Tao beer for each of us.

“So what did you do today?” I asked, taking a swallow of beer.

“Mostly tried to get caught up,” he answered, holding his glass up to the light. Satisfied that it was clean, he poured his beer into it. “I’ve spent so much time going back and forth with the Swiss that I’m at least two months behind on everything else. I don’t know why I let you talk me into turning the hematology division over to Richard. I still haven’t been able to find anyone to take his place downtown.”

Richard Humanski was Stephen’s former personal assistant, a brilliant young man long overdue for promotion. The fact that I’d suggested that Stephen promote him to head the hematology research division had become a familiar lament. But the truth is, Richard had been turning down offers from Stephen’s competitors for quite a while and it was only a matter of time before ambition overrode loyalty. Stephen knew full well that if he hadn’t given Richard his own division to run, some other company would have. That didn’t keep him from complaining to me about it whenever he felt overwhelmed at work, which was pretty much all the time.

Stephen took a long swallow of beer. “So what do you think is going to happen to that plating company?” he asked. “Do you think that there’s any chance they’d want to unload their specialty chemicals division?”

“Why?” I demanded. “Are you interested?”

“Maybe. They make some very interesting proprietary compounds that we use in some of our hospital supply products. I might be interested if we could pick it up for the right price.”

“If it comes up, I’ll tell them you’re interested,” I answered noncommittally.

“From what I hear, it’s a tidy little operation. But I don’t see how it fits in with plating. Who knows? Maybe they’ll need the cash if they’re going to buy out that one shareholder.”

Part of me felt uncomfortable discussing the affairs of one client with another. On the other hand, Lydia had advertised her intention to put her shares on the market in no less a public place than the
Wall Street Journal.

“I’ve got to tell you,” I said as our appetizers came, “I have no idea what is going to happen with this company. For all I know, Jack Cavanaugh is on the phone right now trying to find another lawyer to replace me. I’m sure my stunt standing on the chair impressed the hell out of him.”

“Maybe he should consider hiring a minor-league hockey official to break up his family meetings. He’d charge a hell of a lot less an hour and he’d even bring his own whistle.”

“Thank you. That makes me feel so much better.” I stirred the soy sauce around on my plate with the end of my chopsticks. “This case depresses the shit out of me. And it’s not just the dead people and the funerals. A week ago I thought I was a pretty competent lawyer. Now I realize that there’s a big difference between the kind of technical knowledge that I have and the—I’m not sure what to call it—the kind of old-fashioned lawyerly wisdom that Daniel Babbage took to the grave with him.”

“I’m sure that he didn’t have it at your age either. In lawyer years, you’re still a baby. You don’t have gray hair or a potbelly or anything yet.” Stephen helped himself to a piece of shrimp toast. It looked ridiculously small in his enormous hand. “I did something else this afternoon. I went looking at real estate,” he said, taking a bite.

“What kind of real estate?” I demanded, chopsticks poised in midair. I knew that Stephen had long dreamed of moving his research facility from the south side out to Schaumberg, but I thought that the money for that was still a long way away.

“An apartment, actually.” He ducked his chin and ran his fingers through the dark waves of his hair.

“Why would you think of moving?” I asked, taken aback. Stephen’s apartment was spectacular: six enormous bedrooms with a view of the lake and a doorman named Randolph who made sure that his dry cleaning got delivered on time.

“I’m not sure that I am,” he replied. “One of my bankers called me last week to tell me about an apartment that might be coming on the market. A big old place that used to belong to a little old lady who just died. Her family all live in California now and they’re thinking of selling.”

“So you went to look at it?”

Stephen lifted his bottle, signaling to the waiter for more beer. “Don’t you ever think about leaving Hyde Park, Kate?”

“No,” I replied. “I’m perfectly happy where I am.” I was also so busy with work I didn’t see where pointless speculation about places to live would fit into my schedule.

“What about after Claudia finishes her residency?”

“She won’t be done until a year from June. I still can’t get over the fact that you’d even think about moving. Your apartment’s gorgeous and you just finished putting in an exercise room.”

“Doesn’t the grunge of Hyde Park ever just get to you? The winos on the street comers, the car alarms going off all night?”

“You didn’t say you were thinking of moving to the suburbs,” I protested, “because that’s the only place you’re going to get away from the winos and the car alarms. As for the grange of Hyde Park, I can’t imagine how much of it you actually see. Randolph brings your car around to the front door of the building every morning and you have everything delivered right to your apartment....”

“I still think you should start thinking about what you’re going to do when Claudia’s gone. Two women living on Hyde Park Boulevard is bad enough, but I don’t think it would be a very good idea for you to stay there by yourself.”

“We’ve never had any trouble,” I shot back, irritated by his Dutch-uncle routine. I felt like I was talking to my father, with whom I was constantly having to defend my choice of residence. The truth is I love Hyde Park. A truly integrated neighborhood, it is the melting pot in microcosm. Within its six-mile border you can find a little bit of everything that is right—and wrong— with America. Black people and white people, welfare mothers and millionaires, Nobel Prize winners and the illiterate, students and professors all stand in line for groceries at the Co-op and go out for breakfast at the Original House of Pancakes.

“The other night when I stayed at your place I got up to go to get a glass of water in the middle of the night and I saw two kids going through a woman’s purse in the alley behind your building.”

“That stuff happens everywhere. Even in the suburbs. My mother told me this afternoon that when Ann Stevens and her husband came back from Palm Springs, they found their housekeeper bound and gagged in the laundry room. A team of thieves had come through and cleaned out the house.”

“It was just a suggestion,” said Stephen, wisely choosing to drop the subject as our food arrived. I wondered what had gotten into him. As a rule, Stephen was better than most men about not offering unsolicited advice. When I was in law school I’d put my name on the squash ladder in order to get some exercise. I found myself playing mostly men. It never ceased to amaze me that even when I was clearly the better player, in the break between games my male opponent would invariably offer me tips on how to improve my game. It must be, I concluded, something to do with the Y chromosome.

23

Monday morning began with a shrill summons to Superior Plating and Specialty Chemicals from Philip Cavanaugh. When I arrived at the plant I was immediately struck by the air of calamity that hung about the place. The reception desk was empty, the administrative wing deserted. Phones pealed unanswered. Finally, I located a single, beleaguered secretary in the tiny alcove outside of Jack Cavanaugh’s vacant office—a heavyset woman with close-cropped gray hair and the studied calm of an air-raid warden during the blitz.

“Superior Plating and Specialty Chemicals, will you hold please?” was her measured refrain.