Copper River

50

The call came when they were south of Green Bay, in the dead of night. It was Captain Ed Larson calling from Aurora, Minnesota. Dina gave the phone to Cork. Larson told him that Gabriella Jacoby, Lou Jacoby’s daughter-in-law, had been picked up by the Winnetka police and questioned about the death of her husband. They had a lot on her and she’d rolled over and given them her brother, Tony Salguero. She claimed he planned the whole thing and that he was the one who killed Jacoby’s other son, Ben. The Winnetka police were looking for Salguero. He’d disappeared.

“Anybody tell Lou Jacoby this?”

“He knows.”

“Thanks, Ed.”

Cork ended the call.

“So,” Dina said, “that’s it?” She looked straight ahead, eyeing the highway, black and empty in the headlights. Nothing in her voice gave away what she might be thinking.

“No, that’s not it.” Cork tossed the cell phone into the Pathfinder’s glove box. “I want to see Lou Jacoby. I want to get right up in his face.”

Dina shot him a look that might have been approval. “Whatever you say.”

A little before seven A.M., they stopped a hundred yards south of Jacoby’s estate on the shoreline in the exclusive community of Lake Forest. The predawn sky above Lake Michigan was streaked with veins of angry red. They got out and began to walk. The air was cool and still and smelled of autumn and the lake. Their shoes crunched on the loose gravel at the edge of the road with a sound like someone chewing ice. They passed through the front gate onto the circular drive. Jacoby’s house looked like an Italian villa. The windows were dark.

“Motion sensors?” Cork asked quietly.

Dina shook her head. “Not outside. Security system is all internal.”

She led the way to the rear corner, where Cork could see the back lawn, big as a polo field, stretching down to a tall hedge. Beyond the hedge lay Lake Michigan reflecting the red dawn. Dina stopped at a door on the side of the house and took from her jacket the pouch with her picklocks.

“Will you trip the alarm?” Cork asked.

“Relax. I designed the system for him.”

They were inside quickly, staring at a large kitchen hung with enough pots and pans and shiny cooking utensils that it could have served a fine restaurant. Dina tapped a code into the alarm box beside the door. She signaled for Cork to follow her.

They crept down a labyrinth of hallways and rooms and up a narrow set of stairs at the far end of the house, and came out onto a long corridor with doors opening off either side. Dina moved to the first door on the left. She reached down and carefully turned the knob. The door slid open silently. She stepped in.

They found themselves in an anteroom that opened onto an enormous bedroom. The place smelled heavily of cigar smoke. The drapes in the anteroom were drawn against the dawn, but the bedroom was lit with the fire of a sun about to rise. Dina stepped silently through the far door. She turned to her right and spoke. “Up early, Lou.”

Cork heard Jacoby reply without surprise, “No, Dina. I’m just not sleeping these days. I thought you were with…” He paused as Cork limped into the room. “…O’Connor.”

Lou Jacoby stood framed against the window. He wore a dressing gown and slippers, and smoke rose from a lit cigar in his right hand. He was nearing eighty. In the light through the window-the only light in the room-he looked pale and hard, more like the plaster cast of a man.

“Our business is finished,” the old man said.

“You put a contract out on me,” Cork replied.

Jacoby waved it off. “That’s been taken care of.”

“An eye for an eye, you said. You threatened my boy. Another kid I’m fond of was kidnapped by someone looking to collect on that half-million-dollar bounty you put on my head. A lot of other innocent people stood to get hurt.”

Jacoby looked unimpressed. “And you’re here to what?”

“Maybe start by beating the living shit out of you,” Cork said.

“Bloody an old man?” Jacoby opened his arms in invitation.

“I told you it wasn’t me who killed your son,” Cork spit out.

Jacoby almost laughed. “And I was supposed to take your word for it? Hell, I know my garbageman better than I know you.”

“How does it feel having to accept that it was family killing family-your family? And by the way, Salguero’s disappeared. Doesn’t that leave your coffer of vengeance a little empty?”

Jacoby lifted his cigar, took a draw, and said through the smoke, “Does it?”

Dina gave a short, hollow laugh. “They’ll never find Tony Salguero, will they, Lou? You had him taken care of.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jacoby said.

“There’s still Gabriella,” Cork pointed out. “With a good lawyer-”

“She’ll use the lawyer I pay for,” Jacoby said. “And he’ll make sure she rots in prison.”

Jacoby moved away from the window to the side of the great bed. He reached out and pressed a button on the wall.

“And her two boys?” Dina looked at the old man with a kind of sickened awe. “You’ll take them from her, won’t you, Lou?”

“I’ll raise my grandsons to be the men my sons never were.”

Cork went for Jacoby and grabbed a handful of his soft robe. Somebody needed to take this son of a bitch down. Jacoby dropped his cigar and looked startled, then afraid. Cork pinned him to the wall. The old man seemed flimsy as cardboard.

Cork felt Dina’s hand on his arm, gently restraining. She moved up beside him. He looked into her eyes and their calm brought him back to his senses. It would be easy enough to beat the old man to a pulp, and probably not hard to go further. But to what end? His own family was safe. Giving in to anger would only start the trouble all over again.

Sometimes a man had to swallow hard and accept what he could not change.

He nodded to Dina, and she dropped her hand. He let go of his grip on Jacoby and stepped back. The old man smoothed his robe and bent to retrieve his cigar.

Shuffling came from the hallway. A moment later, Evers, the houseman, appeared at the bedroom door. He was almost as old as Jacoby and, like his employer, wore a robe and slippers. His white hair was mussed from sleep. He looked at Dina and Cork with surprise but said nothing.

“See them out,” Jacoby said.

“Yes, sir.”

“And tell Mrs. Portman I’m hungry. I’d like breakfast.”

“Very good, sir.” Evers stood aside so that Cork and Dina could go before him.

They drove to Evanston, to the duplex that belonged to Cork’s sister-in-law and her husband. He’d used Dina’s cell phone to call ahead and let them know he was coming. Dina parked on the street in front but left the motor running.

“I guess this is it,” she said.

“What are you going to do now?”

“Go home, get a little sleep, then head back to Bodine.”

“Charlie?” he asked.

“Charlie,” she answered.

“You’ve only known her a couple of days, Dina.”

She shook her head. “Her, I’ve known my whole life.”

“Back there at Jacoby’s, I was ready to kill him. Thanks for stopping me.”

“You were about to make a mistake I knew you’d regret. And I’d hate to lose you to the Illinois state penal system. It’s a harsh world, and men like Lou Jacoby will always be in it. What keeps things balanced is men like you.”

“Yeah?” He turned to her. Her face in the rising light of morning was soft and bright. “Seems to me not long ago you accused me of being a lot of things that aren’t good. What was that all about?”

She reached out and cupped his cheek with her hand. “Mostly this: You always struggle so hard to do the right thing. Nobody always does the right thing, Cork, not even you. Be easy on people when they disappoint you. And be a little easier on yourself while you’re at it.”

She leaned to him and kissed his cheek.

“Go on.” She nudged him gently. “Time for you to go.”

He got out, walked around the car, and leaned in her window. One last time he looked into her eyes, which were as green as new leaves.

“Let me know how it goes with Charlie, okay?” he said.

“The truth is I’m a little scared.”

“You? That’s a first.”

“Good-bye, Cork.”

She slipped the car into gear and drove away. He watched until she turned the corner and was gone.

He stood on the sidewalk of a street still deep in the quiet of early morning. Behind closed curtains, men and women shared their beds, their fortunes, their lives, and their dreams, and their children were the sum of all these things made flesh. To rise in the morning and watch his sons and daughters stumble sleepy-eyed into the day, to send them out into the world on wings of love, to lie down at night and draw over himself the comforting quilt of the memories he shared with them-batting practice on a softball field or wrestling in the living room after dinner-what more could a man ask for or want?

Cork looked up and a seven-year-old boy appeared in the upstairs window of the duplex. Stevie’s face lit up as if the sun had just risen after a very long, dark night. He smiled beautifully and his lips formed a single word that Cork could not hear but understood absolutely.

Daddy.