rumble and roar of city life.
In the lobby of Sam’s building the security guard called upstairs, at my request, and said no one was answering. Everyone had gone for the night.
“Can I look at the log to see when he signed out?” Sam had told me about how the security in his building was woefully out of date. To make up for it, the building required every person, even employees, to sign in and out each time they left or entered.
The guard, an overweight, middle-aged man with a drooping mustache, shook his head. “Sorry. No one can see the log.”
“Sure, sure.” I flipped my hair over my shoulder. “How do you like the Bears this year?”
The guard waved a hand. “Ah, shit, that kid they got as quarterback doesn’t even have gonads yet. We need somebody good.”
“Somebody like McMahon?” Most Chicagoans had never emotionally recovered from the beauty of the Bears’ mid-eighties victory in the Super Bowl. A reminder of such beauty was a guaranteed way to become best friends with anyone over forty who lived within a sixty-mile radius of Soldier Field. Name-drop a player from the ‘85 team to these guys and they were putty in your hands.
“Exactly!” the guard said.
“And they need a moral leader. Somebody like Singletary.” At this point I was just spouting names I remembered from seeing the Super Bowl Shuffle video after we moved to Chicago.
“Right! Shit, that’s exactly what they need.”
“My fiancé and I are big Bears fans. He was at Soldier Field the day Payton broke the rushing record.”
The guard’s eyes narrowed. “You kidding me?”
“No.” At the time, Sam had only been a kid, visiting a distant relative in Chicago, but he remembered it vividly.
“Wow,” the guard said in a hushed, reverent tone. “Wow.”
“Yeah, I gotta find him.” I straightened up. “Can you check that log and just tell me when he left?”
The guard eyed me. Then he put the logbook on the counter, swung it around and pointed to an entry at the top of the page. There, Sam had signed out of the office ten minutes before I’d seen him at Cassandra’s.
I looked up at the guard. “And he didn’t come back?”
He shook his head then retracted the book.
“Thanks.”
“Sure thing. Go Bears.”
“Go Bears,” I answered and left.
I called Sam’s apartment, then mine. No answer at either. I started my Vespa, but I wasn’t sure where I should go. What was I supposed to do now? Sam, where are you?
I called my best friend, Maggie, but only got her voice mail. Where in the hell was everyone?
As I clicked the Off button, my phone rang. I felt a tiny bit of relief rupture my worry. But it was a Chicago number I didn’t recognize.
“Hello?”
“Izzy, it’s Shane.”
“Oh. Hi, Shane.” Forester’s son rarely called me, but then maybe Sam was out with him for some reason. God, let it be as easy as that.
“Izzy,” Shane said. He seemed to choke, then I heard a snuffle. “My dad is dead.”
6
The first time I spoke to Forester I’d been out of law school for eleven months. After living the student life, with natural built-in breaks of a week here, two months there, I had struggled to get my body and mind on what Grady, my friend at work, and I called the coal-miner’s schedule. To us, it seemed that we labored as hard as coal miners with only a tiny light to illuminate the work ahead of us. As first-years, we were clueless about the law. We were given projects in piecemeal fashion, we worked until the wee hours to finish them, and then we turned them over to demanding partners, crossing our fingers that we hadn’t just prepared a thirty-page memo on the completely wrong topic—something that happened more frequently than one would think. Often, the partners weren’t clear about what they wanted, because they weren’t even sure themselves. Other times, they were pompous jerks who believed that associates should be able to divine precisely what they needed without a lick of direction.
Tanner Hornsby fell into that second category, and so working for him, as I did, required lots of late nights in the office. But that first time I spoke to Forester, it wasn’t even late. It was about five o’clock, and I’d just run downstairs to the lobby and bought myself a massive green tea with a shot of vanilla syrup to keep me sharp for the next few hours. Tanner had already left for the day. With the weather warming up, I’d heard him on the phone earlier making plans to sit outside at Tavern on Rush, where he and his buddies would no doubt ogle women and drink themselves silly.
I was jealous of Tanner that night. Jealous that he already understood the law, that he had the money and time to hit the town on a Tuesday night.
In my office, I sipped my tea and tried to focus on an option agreement Tanner had asked me to finish.
But it became hard to concentrate because of the ringing phone in Tanner’s office, which was a few doors down from mine (and on the side of the building that actually had windows). Closer to me was the desk of Tanner’s assistant, Clarice, and I could hear her phone chiming, too.
Finally, I got up, walked to Clarice’s desk and picked it up. “Baltimore & Brown,” I said in a quick, what-the-hell-do-you-want kind of tone.
“Tanner Hornsby, please.” The man’s voice was melodic, with a slight Southern accent.
“Mr. Hornsby is gone for the day. May I take a message?”
“Gone for the day? It’s only five o’clock.”
I thought of Tanner, probably already well into his second Bombay Sapphire. “Mr. Hornsby is in a meeting.”
“Is this Clarice?”
“No, it’s Izzy McNeil, one of the associates.”
“Forester Pickett here.”
I coughed involuntarily. Everyone at Baltimore & Brown knew Forester, at least by name, but the associates were typically kept away from the clients. “Hello, Mr. Pickett. May I help you with something?”
“Well, I’m calling about Steven Baumgartner, and I need some assistance ASAP.”
Steven Baumgartner, commonly known around Chicago as “the Bomber,” was the morning shock jock on a radio station Forester owned. We’d been working on his new contract, which he had been expected to sign for millions more dollars than before, but after a recent stunt that resulted in over a hundred listeners jumping into the Chicago River to win concert tickets (many of them ending up with a waterborne virus), the station had considered letting him go.
“I’m familiar with Mr. Baumgartner,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
