Red Blooded Murder

8

Jane sat in Zac’s studio in their basement. They always did their best talking while he worked. Her husband’s back was to her. Years ago, he used to be hunched over the wet tray in the dark room. Now he hunched in front of the computer or over his printer, searching for the blackest of blacks, switching papers from Portfolio to Silver Rag to Maestro.

“You want to tell me who it was?” He didn’t turn, his eyes firmly on the screen.

The image there was one of a pink balcony hanging precariously over an orange brick alleyway just off Belden Avenue in Chicago. Back Alleys was the title of Zac’s photographic exhibit at an art gallery here in town. He’d been successful with these photos of alleys in New York and D.C., and he’d finally felt it was time to feature the town he had called home for almost a decade. The show had been so successful, selling hundreds of photos in the three weeks since the opening, that Zac had been working constantly to fill the orders. He’d been on a roll and had been happy lately. But then he’d returned early from meeting his agent in New York and found Jane missing.

It wasn’t that such a thing hadn’t happened before. In days past, sometimes, Zac actually wanted to know a few details—what they did to her, what she did to them. Sometimes the details got him excited. Other times, he was only putting up with her and her dalliances because he loved her.

Today was definitely one of the latter.

She could tell this from the way Zac’s lat muscles tensed under his stylishly worn T-shirt, originally black but grayed from so much washing. She could tell from the way his movements were fast and sharp, rather than relaxed, almost dreamy, the way he usually worked when he was happy.

“Just some—” she started to say.

“Just some guy?” he interrupted, his voice edged with impatience.

“Something like that.” Although that wasn’t true. He was some guy who’d been following her. Some creep who’d been making notations about the most minute, private things in her life. Despite her public job, Jane hated for her life to be made public. And she’d been lucky because her affairs had always existed in a void for her.

Zac cleared his throat, a habit of his that sprang up when he had something to say which he didn’t feel confident about, but something he’d thought about for a long time.

It was so strange how well she knew him. In many ways, she knew him better than she knew herself; she understood the reasons for his behavior so much better than she did her own. For example, she was a wife who cheated, and according to most people she was wanton, immoral and wrong. And although she had her reasons for it, ninety percent of the time she agreed with those people. It was the ten percent she had told Izzy about. The ten percent that got her into trouble.

She’d promised Zac recently that she wouldn’t do it anymore, that she would be a proper wife who never strayed. She meant it, too, but it was harder than she thought. And yet, she had expected him to forgive her. But now there was this edge to his back, this fuming energy that poured off him.

“Are you all right?” she said.

He turned to face her.

He rarely looked at her during these types of discussions. Usually he kept working, as if he were more comfortable to let his words rise from a blank canvas rather than let her see his expression.

But now he was definitely looking, and there was nothing resembling forgiveness there. What she saw was anger, along with something she hadn’t ever seen before. Something like disgust.

9

John Mayburn walked in ten minutes late. I pointed at my watch as he strolled to the table.

“Sorry,” he mouthed, a smile on his face.

It was the smile that threw me.

At his job during the week, when he met with lawyers like me (the lawyer I used to be) who wanted him to dig up dirt on a plaintiff, Mayburn wore a boring navy-blue suit or slacks and a jacket, a button-down shirt underneath that was starched so stiff it could stand on its own. When I got to know him better, I learned that on the nights and weekends, he was rather relaxed. So the stylish jeans, Ramones T-shirt and beat-up brown boots he wore now didn’t throw me. It was definitely the smile.

“What’s with you?” I said, as he slipped into the seat opposite me.

“What do you mean?” He picked up a large, laminated menu. We were at a café on Webster, named John’s Place.

“You’re chipper.”

“I’ve barely said two words. Why would you think I’m chipper?” He glanced at the menu. “The Cobb sounds good, doesn’t it?” He glanced back up at me, then shook his head. “Jesus, that did sound chipper.”

“So, what’s the deal?”

He shrugged. “Sorry I was late. I had to drop someone off.”

“You had to drop someone off? Did you have someone spend the night?” Like I did, I almost added.

“Shut it.” He kept looking at the menu. “I took someone to the hardware store this morning.”

It sounded innocuous, but he still had a faint smile on his lips.

The waiter came over then. Mayburn ordered a club sandwich. I asked for an omelet with red peppers, since I hadn’t gotten to eat the one Theo made that morning.

“Are you dating someone?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Who is it?”

“Someone I’ve known for a while … well, kind of.”

“Is it Meredith?” Mayburn had told me that he’d once dated a gallery owner named Meredith Saga, a woman who lived for art and sex and little else.

“No Sagas for me.”

“So who?”

“Why are you so nosy?”

“Why won’t you tell me?”

Mayburn seemed to be looking at anything but me now. He studied the family at the next table. He frowned at their baby, who was in a stroller as big as an RV and blocking the aisle.

All the while, I stayed silent. It was one of the smartest things I’d learned from being a lawyer—the best way to make someone tell you something is not to badger them with questions but to confront them with silence. And then there were the things Mayburn himself had taught me—when you’re surveying someone, listen to everything, look at everything. Especially look at what people do as much as what they say. Look at what they don’t say, too.

A few seconds ticked by. Then a few more. Finally, Mayburn met my eyes. “You want to know who it is?”

“Yeah.”

“Lucy.”

One of the other things the law had taught me was to never show shock. But it was impossible at that moment.

“Lucy DeSanto?” I blurted so loud that the baby in the stroller began to cry.

“Yeah.”

“The same Lucy DeSanto whose husband you and I caught laundering money for the mafia?”

“Yep.”

Lucy DeSanto was a tiny, lovely, elegant blonde who lived in Lincoln Park. She was married and had two children. Her husband, Michael DeSanto, was not living at home, however. Rather, he was living at a maximum-security holding cell, awaiting his federal trial for racketeering, fraud and money laundering. Due to the nature of the people DeSanto worked with—mafia people who tended to run for parts unknown if they got even a glimpse of sunlight—bail had been denied.

Mayburn had been hired by the bank where Michael DeSanto worked and he’d pulled me into it when he hit a brick wall with the case. As payback for aiding me in my search for my missing fiancé, Mayburn asked for my help because I could fit in the upscale North Side neighborhood where Lucy lived. He trained me on surveillance techniques and had me pose as a neighborhood mom to get close to Lucy and get inside their house. When Michael DeSanto had come home one day and found me in his office fiddling with his computer, I thought that my time on earth had come to an end. But I managed to get out of it, and the evidence I got out of Michael’s computer had sent him away, at least for now. Although Mayburn had never met Lucy during the investigation, he’d spent plenty of hours watching her come and go from the house, and I’d always suspected he had a long-distance crush on her.

“I didn’t think you were supposed to meet your subjects,” I said.

“You’re not. But you know Lucy.”

The waitress delivered our food. The omelet didn’t look as delicious as the one Theo had created. But then again, if Theo had put a pile of dirt on a plate and handed it to me while naked, it would’ve looked good.

“I do know Lucy,” I said, taking a bite. “She’s probably the sweetest person on the planet.”

“Isn’t she?” Mayburn’s voice carried something like awe. “She is such a good person.”

I blinked. I’d never, ever heard Mayburn talk this way. He sounded more like one of my girlfriends than the sarcastic, seen-everything P.I. he was.

“How did this get to the point where you know Lucy DeSanto personally, and you’re taking her to the hardware store?”

“You know how bad we felt for her after they took Michael away?”

“Yes. I even called her to tell her that.”

“Well, I did, too.”

“So you admitted that you were the investigator who was hired to watch her husband?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you tell her that you’d been spying on her for months, trailing behind her when she took the kids for a walk and following her when she drove to the grocery store?”

“I did.”

“That’s not the typical pickup line. How did she take it?”

“You know Lucy.” He smiled with one side of his mouth and then pushed his plate away, as if the thoughts of Lucy had fed him enough. “She was kind about it. She was actually happy that it all happened. She had no idea Michael was into something dirty. She’s filed for divorce.”

“And now she’s got you, apparently.”

That one-sided smile again. “This is it, Izzy.”

“It, like you’re in love?”

“Yeah.”

“It, like you want to marry this girl?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow. I’m jealous. I can’t seem to decide if I want Sam or …” Or Theo. Or Grady. Or someone else altogether. Or no one at all. “Anyway, does Lucy feel the same way?”

“Not sure. It’s a lot more complicated for her.” He pushed his chair back. “All right, enough about me. I need you to eat that omelet fast, because we have to go to the lingerie store.” He turned and pointed through the front windows at a store across the street.

“The Fig Leaf? Don’t tell me you want me to model lingerie so you can pick out something for your girlfriend.”

“Nope. Have you ever worked in retail?”

“No.”

“Well, I want you to work there.”

“You want me to fold panties?”

“And I want you to sell them and ring them up, and mostly, I want you to watch Josie, the manager. My client, Marie, the owner of the store, doesn’t trust her lately, but technically the store is running great, so she doesn’t want to fire her.”

“This doesn’t sound like your usual case.” Mayburn worked for big law firms, monster corporations and international banks.

“It’s not. Marie is a family friend. Maybe she’s being paranoid about her manager. Who knows? But I’m not treating it different from any other investigation.”

“Okay, so what’s Josie up to? Skimming money off the top?”

He shrugged. “The books seem like they’re up-to-date. Inventory seems well-handled. They’re just getting a lot more traffic, which obviously is a good thing, but they haven’t increased marketing efforts or their PR. Marie can’t figure out exactly how it happened. She wants to make sure everything is on the up-and-up, especially since she spends most of her time in Palm Beach now. If there’s nothing to find, everyone’s happy.”

I stared at the Fig Leaf. It was an upscale place I’d been once. The merchandise had been ludicrously expensive, but still I had purchased a white nightie, very short and very sexy, for my wedding night. The nightie still hung at the back of my closet, tags on.

“Since Marie started spending more time out of town, Josie has been telling her they need to hire a clerk,” Mayburn said. “This morning, Marie told Josie she’d found someone—her family friend Lexi, who is attending law school during the day.”