Look Closer

34 Christian

With a flourish—her jaw clenched, a small expulsion of air, a shiver—Vicky collapses on me. I wrap my arms around her sweaty body, propping her on my lap. She prefers being on top, I’ve noticed, and likes to keep her heels on, though that’s probably for me. And yeah, the heels are a thing for me. I’m not that original in my kinks. The biggest turn-on for me, by far, is that ring on her finger.

After a moment of catching our breath, she climbs off me and heads for the bathroom, leaving me tired and satisfied on the couch in my apartment.

This is the fourth time we’ve hooked up. After the first time at my office, we’ve come here to my apartment. I’ve come to learn this much about Vicky, my Number 7: She isn’t quiet during sex, far from it, but she’s quiet at the end, when she gets off. She retreats to another place, focuses, concentrates. A lesser man would think she’s thinking of someone else. But I doubt that. I’m what Vicky wants. I can tell.

Which is good, because otherwise, I’d wonder. Vicky doesn’t hand out compliments. She doesn’t moan with satisfaction afterward and tell me how wonderful I was, or how much better it is with me than with her husband.

“What is this?” she calls out from the bathroom.

Uh-oh. What did I do? Did I leave something out for her to see that she shouldn’t—

I rush into the bathroom without acting like I was rushing. She’s holding my toothbrush.

“Oh,” I say.

“What is this? This is, like, some fancy metal—”

“Titanium,” I say.

“You have a titanium toothbrush? And . . .” She looks through my medicine cabinet. “And nail clippers and . . . some trimmer and . . . What is this?”

“It holds dental floss,” I say sheepishly, as if I’m a little bit embarrassed to have a toothbrush made of pure titanium, matte black with a protective, antibacterial coating in the socket, and matching titanium nail clippers, electric razor, nose-hair trimmer, and dental-floss holder.

“How much did this cost, Christian?”

Market value was more than $8,500, or so I discovered after looking it up. It was a gift, actually, from one of my targets—Number 4, in Santa Fe—before she knew she was a target.

At first, I was going to hide it, but Vicky needs to see a thing or two, small things, to show that some massively expensive, over-the-top item is merely chump change to me.

“Seriously,” she says. “This must have cost thousands.”

“Good return on investment,” I say. “They’re built well and last a long time. Amortize it over their life and the per-unit price—well, it’s expensive but much more reasonable.”

“I didn’t know people amortized toothbrushes.” She puts down the toothbrush and puts her hands on my bare chest. “Must be nice to be so rich and smart.”

She puts her lips against mine. I can feel her smile.

She wants more of me. This time, we’ll use the bed.

Afterward, Vicky looks over my apartment, lost in thought.

I don’t own this place. I’m renting, though I’d never tell Vicky that. When I moved back to Chicago last summer, I didn’t see the wisdom in buying. I knew I wouldn’t be staying too long, and besides, I only have about a million dollars saved up, and I want to keep as much of that liquid as possible. Rent a really nice place in an expensive neighborhood, I decided, and even though the rent will be exorbitant, it will be short-term.

Still, as nice as this place is, it doesn’t scream mega-wealthy. My bio suggests that I’ve made hundreds of millions of dollars in my bold investments, so this condo might not seem nice enough. My go-to line is that I tie up most of my money in my investments, so I’m putting my money where my mouth is, I’m in the same investments that I’m putting you in, which is a pretty nice sell job in itself.

On those occasions that my cover story is a man with money, like here, I try to make clear to the target that I grew up humbly (true), learned to be frugal (sometimes true), and those habits have remained. Yeah, I have all this dough, but I’m not going to plate everything in gold or buy more space than I need.

It’s a balance. Wealth is attractive to women. Uber-wealth, in my experience, can be intimidating. So I try to straddle the line, show her an occasional glimpse of my obnoxious wealth—see the titanium toothbrush—but otherwise try to keep a humble, low profile that downplays materialism.

“The condo’s temporary,” I say. “I like the neighborhood, and the property values are still rising around here. It’s a solid investment.”

“Everything’s an investment with you.” She puts on her bra and panties, then her skirt, then her top, in that order. “You think you’re going to settle here in Chicago?”

There it is. I knew she’d ask eventually. She’s wondering about my intentions. I think I know hers: She’s going to leave. I’d bet anything. When she takes that money from Simon after serving her ten-year marital sentence, she won’t want to stick around and see Simon’s sad face. She’s getting the hell out. But where, I don’t know.

New York? No, I don’t see it. I don’t see her as a Manhattan girl. I mean, she’d enjoy the buzz and nightlife, she’d fit right in there, but she doesn’t really strike me as big-city. She doesn’t seem to give one shit about the difference between a four-hundred-dollar bottle of Carruades de Lafite and some bottle of red I’d pick up for twenty bucks in a grocery store. When I’ve brought up theater and music, she doesn’t bite, hardly adds anything to the conversation. But then again, it’s hard to see her settling in some small town and having my babies and baking cookies, either.

Vicky has done an admirable job thus far of keeping her own counsel. And even to me, someone who has staked his life’s work on reading women, the opposite sex remains somewhat of a mystery.

What I know about Vicky Lanier is this: almost nothing. Every time I ask her about herself, she deflects. She mentioned something about an unhappy childhood. She’s made one offhand comment about “West Virginia,” and I did what I could with that last week, some unsophisticated googling. Research is not my strong suit and not something I really need for my purposes, and I can’t bring in Gavin because then he’d know her name; she would be Vicky Lanier Dobias and not “Number 7.” But I did enough on my own to know that a teenager named Vicky Lanier went missing in 2003 from Fairmont, West Virginia.

That must be her. So she didn’t get off to a good start in life. She’s a scrapper, a survivor. She’s had to go it alone. My guess? Simon Dobias gave her stability and comfort more than love and passion. And she saw a meal ticket. She saw all those dollar signs and made a decision based on need. These almost-ten years married to Simon have been an investment.

But now, asking me about my intentions? That’s Vicky’s way of feeling me out about next steps. She’s thinking about a life with me. She’s too cautious to say that outright, but she’s thinking about it. And it scares her. I have to make sure she trusts me.

“The great thing about my job,” I say, “is I can do it anywhere. Here or Manhattan or with my toes in the sand in Monterey. I’ve thought about Paris, I’ve thought about the Tuscany region. I’ll probably stick to the States, so I can keep my eye on trends, which is harder to do remotely. But who knows?”

She’s watching me as I say this, matter-of-factly, while I pull on my pants. I usually leave off my shirt for as long as possible because women love my abs.

“So it wouldn’t have to be in a big city?” she asks.

Yep, she wants to know. She’s fantasizing about places—though which ones, I don’t know—and me with her.

“Not necessarily,” I say. “What about you? Do you always want to stay in Chicago?”

Volleying that serve back in her court, in just the same, low-key, indirect way, not confronting her with the idea of a future together but dancing near it. If she’s going to move slowly, so am I. Don’t rock the boat, like Gavin and I discussed. Keep Number 7 on the steady and narrow until November 3.

When I look over at her, she’s gazing out the picture window that looks onto my patio and far away to the city’s magnificent skyline.

“I’m not staying in Chicago,” she says. “Anywhere but Chicago.”

“Let me take you to dinner,” I say.

“Where?” she asks.

“Wherever. You name it. There are twenty places within walking distance. Or anywhere else.”

She chews on her lip, checks her watch. It’s coming up on seven in the evening. “It’s getting late.”

“Afraid to be seen in public with me?” I laugh.

She looks at me. “Not in the way you mean it, but actually, yes, I am very afraid of that. Wouldn’t you be, if you were me? What if someone saw us?”

“Well, yeah, I suppose.”

“Well, yeah, you suppose? This isn’t a joke, Christian. What if Simon found out?”

“Okay, I—”

“What if Simon found out and filed for divorce?”

I put up my hands. I’ve struck a nerve. Her eyes are on fire.

“What if Simon found out and filed for divorce before November third?” she says. “Did you read that trust language?”

“I did—”

“If he even files for divorce before our ten years are up, I’m done. I don’t get a penny.”

“I know.”

She gets off the couch, grabs her bag. “Okay, I’m glad you know. Do you also know that I don’t have four hundred million dollars in investments or whatever you have? That this money is the only money I have?”

Whoa, whoa, whoa, this is spiraling.

“Yes, and I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t mean to be so casual about that. Hey.” I walk up to her, though she appears to be in no mood for comfort or intimacy right now. “Vicky, I will never do anything that jeopardizes that. Nothing. If it’s important to you, it’s important to me. You’re important to me. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

She’s still fuming, still upset, her eyes turned from mine. I don’t move, following her lead.

But eventually, as I knew she would, she looks into my eyes.

35 Vicky

“I can do the grocery run,” I say.

“Jeez, with what?” says Miriam, my boss, bent down in her office with the safe open, trying to scrounge up whatever petty cash she can. Her “office” is really a converted garage. We’ve tried to maximize every square inch of this property to fit as many people as we can in our shelter.

Miriam is a lifer at Safe Haven, one of the people who started it up thirty years ago after escaping an abusive relationship of her own. She has a severe look to her, rarely smiling, heavy lines on her face and silver hair pulled back tight, trim as a drill sergeant with much the same demeanor, though she has as big a heart as anyone I know.

“Low on funds already?” I ask. “It’s only the middle of the month.”

“We have twenty-two dollars,” she says. “To buy two hundred dollars’ worth of groceries.” She fishes into her jeans pocket and pulls out some cash.

“That’s okay, I have some money,” I say. I think I have maybe forty dollars.

“Don’t start spending your own money,” she tells me. “I don’t pay you enough as it is.”

But people have to eat. These women who come to us, seeking refuge from abuse, often with their kids—we aren’t providing much of a “haven” if we can’t supply them with meals. As it is, we buy as cheaply as we can, cutting out coupons, looking for sales, buying generic. Good thing I have many, many years of practice doing so.

“It’s fine,” I say. “Just drop it. I’ll get as much as I can.”

I go to the shelter’s kitchen, reviewing the stock of groceries we have remaining and putting together a list. Then I debate whether to go to the superstore ten miles away or the local grocery store, with the four pages of coupons. The superstore is usually cheaper; we pay a one-time annual subscription fee—which I assume is how that chain makes its money—and buy groceries at a lower cost. But with coupons for the local grocery store, I might be able to stretch my dollar more. I have the twenty-two dollars that Miriam gave me and thirty-seven of my own, and I have to make it count.

I’m midway through the comparison, clipping coupons and banging on the calculator, when my phone buzzes. It’s from Rambo, of all people, a text message. Why is my private investigator texting me? I open the message, all of three numbers: 911.

I pop out of the chair and head outside. I’ll want good reception. And more importantly, privacy.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say, walking into the parking lot outside the shelter, phone pressed against my ear, my feet crunching gravel. “Please, just—just tell me this is a joke.”

“Sorry, kiddo,” Rambo says to me. “It’s no joke.”

“When?” I say. “When did this happen?”

“They found the body five weeks ago. They identified her through DNA two days ago. The article was in the Register-Herald online. You can read it yourself.”

There’s no way in hell I’m looking up that article. Not on any phone or computer that can be connected to me.

“Where—where was the body found?” I ask, as if that matters.

“Bolt Mountain. You know that place?”

“Never heard of it. I’ve never even been to that part of the country.”

“Me neither,” he says. “It’s about a buck fifty, two hundred miles from where she lived.”

“And you’re sure it’s her?” I ask, flailing.

“I can only tell you what I’m reading, kiddo. ‘The skeletal remains of a woman found in August on Bolt Mountain have been identified as Vicky Lanier, who disappeared in 2003 from her home in Fairmont, West Virginia, at the age of seventeen.’ So that sure sounds right to me.”

God, that poor girl. Somebody killed her and buried her up in a mountain.

But also—poor me.

I look up at the sky. “So the missing person I picked as an alias is no longer a missing person. She’s no longer off the grid.”

“Well, she is in one sense, I suppose.”

“You’re not funny, Rambo. I’m totally screwed, in other words.”

No. No. Not when I’m this close. Not when I’m— This—this can’t be happening. Could my luck be any worse?

“Miss Vicky, Miss Vicky.” Rambo sighs. “I don’t know what you’re up to, and I don’t wanna know. But as of this moment, yes, if you’ve been telling everybody that you’re Vicky Lanier from Fairmont, West Virginia, who left at age seventeen in 2003, then a quick Google search will tell them one of two things. Either you’re lying, or a town of less than twenty thousand people had two girls named Vicky Lanier of the same age who went missing the same year.”

“Well, c’mon, help me out here, Rambo. Is there anything I can do? What would you do?”

“There’s nothing to do. You can’t make this news disappear. You wanna know what I’d do?” he says. “I’d pray nobody looks me up. Or whatever it was I was doing that relied on my alias—I’d stop doing it.”

No. Stopping is not an option. Not when I’ve gotten this far. Not when I’m so close. November is only seven weeks away.

I’ll just to have to pray that I’m not exposed in the next seven weeks. If I am, all of this comes crashing down.

36

Friday, September 16, 2022

Married. I’m getting married again! But where?!?

“Paris,” you said. “I always dreamed of getting married in Paris.”

Venice, maybe. Cabo. Maui. Anywhere. I would marry you anywhere, Lauren. I would marry you in a basement. I would marry you in a tub of ice water.

Vicky and I got married in Mexico on a whim. My parents were both gone by then, and Vicky hadn’t seen her parents since she left West Virginia as a teenager, so it’s not like we needed a big family wedding or anything. But still, I’m a homebody at heart, and I always wished we’d married in Chicago.

Vicky. Oh, Vicky. This won’t be easy. I’ll have to find the right way to break this to her. It will be hard, but eventually she’ll see that it’s for the best.

And I don’t have to tell her immediately, do I? After all, I have to wait to file for divorce until November 3—our tenth anniversary—so she gets her share of the money. Maybe that will be the best way to break it to her.

Bad news, we’re splitting up. Good news, here’s ten million dollars.

Yes, it can wait. Everything will be fine. I don’t know why I worry so much.

37 Simon

When I finish with my latest entry, I put the green journal into my work bag, where it always stays. Not exactly something I want other people reading, right?

Anshu pokes his head into my office. “Hey, give me five minutes.”

“Fine.”

Anshu’s taking me out to lunch today. He’d never say so, but he’s trying to cheer me up. Today is Friday, the sixteenth of September, the deadline day for submitting the application for full professorship. He knows the dean asked me not to submit my application, and he knows I didn’t submit it, though he doesn’t know why.

Yes, it bothers me, but what bothers me even more is that he can tell it bothers me. I pride myself on not showing my emotions.

“Okay, I’m good.” He walks in with his coat over his arm and bag packed.

“Done for the day?” I ask. “At one o’clock?”

“Well, I figured it might turn into a liquid lunch,” he says. “Hey, it’s a Friday afternoon.”

Yeah, he’s consoling me. Anshu really is a good egg. He’s one of the only people around here I can stomach, one of the only ones who doesn’t take himself too seriously. He is probably one of the top ten tort law professors in the country, but you’d never know it to talk to him. He’d rather talk about his wife and kids or the Cubs, who are currently in the midst of another September nosedive.

“I’m fine,” I say. “Really. I don’t need cheering up.”

“Well, I do,” he says. “I want people who deserve the job. I don’t like people clouting their way into a professorship because of their donor father. This school has enough money already. So help me drown my sorrows, okay?”

How can I say no to that?

“Only if you let me buy,” I say.

“Even better.”

The place is just a walk down from the law school, a block south and near Michigan Avenue, a French place that, according to Anshu, has the best monkfish in the world. I’ve never eaten monkfish and probably won’t start today. I’m looking forward more to the well-stocked bar area after lunch.

“Bindra, party of two,” says Anshu when we walk in. “Oh, you gotta be kidding me.”

I glance around the room. It doesn’t take me long.

Dean Comstock and his new protégé, Associate Professor Reid Southern, soon to be full professor, sitting in one of the booths, a bottle of champagne on ice by the table.

You have seriously got to be kidding me. They’re celebrating his ascension to full professor, and I have to be in the same fucking room with them? I mean, why doesn’t someone come over and waterboard me while we’re at it?

“We can go somewhere else,” Anshu whispers. “I really don’t care where—”

“Not at all,” I say, patting his arm. “I’m dying to try that monkfish.”

“Simon, really.”

“They already saw us,” I say. “If I walk out now, I look like an asshole.”

It’s true. They’ve seen us. And now the dean and Reid are whispering something to each other and putting on their good-sportsmanship-pity faces.

“Are we all set, gentlemen?” the woman at the reception podium asks us.

All set! Just don’t seat us next to them, or near them, and maybe I can get through this.

“Professors!” Dean Comstock calls out, Mr. Orange Bow Tie today, his silver cuff link gleaming as he extends a hand to us. I was kind of hoping handshakes would go the way of the dodo bird after COVID-19, but the dean’s an old-school kind of guy, so I shake his hand.

“Good to see you, Reid,” I say, though I’d rather have my fingernails removed with pliers.

As Anshu has pointed out several times, Reid indeed looks the part of a law professor, with his sport coat, circular eyeglasses, salt-and-pepper goatee, and general air of smugness.

“No class today?” Reid asks me, sizing up my usual attire, a button-down shirt and jeans.

Well, that was a little below the belt, wasn’t it, Reid? I mean, you know how I dress, and you know that your buddy Dean Cumstain just bulldozed the field so you could glide into the full-professor spot untouched. You could at least show some semblance of grace, but you can’t help yourself, you have to take me down a peg anyway?

You do know how this all played out, don’t you, Reid? I’d imagine the dean didn’t spell out every detail for you, but I have no doubt that he let you, and your big-bucks daddy, know that he was responsible for “talking some sense” into me or “helping” me “understand” the situation. He “took care of it,” I’m sure he told you, in his faux-diplomatic way.

Yeah, you know that. You’re smiling at me with that patronizing, blue-blood smirk, that aura of cutthroat privilege. You don’t mind that the hierarchical levers were pulled on your behalf. Hell, you’re proud of it, and you’re happy to let me know it. Sure, I didn’t submit my materials, so ultimately I was a good little boy, but how dare I even think of applying for that seat when you applied on the first day and let the world know that REID SOUTHERN wanted that position. How dare I even consider challenging your ascension to the throne. Really, who do I think I am, contemplating that I am even remotely on your level?

Right, Reid?

“Congratulations,” Anshu says to Reid. “I look forward to your joining us.”

“That’s good of you to say, Professor,” Reid replies. “By the way, Simon, I read your blog the other day,” he adds, calling me by name after referring to Anshu by his title. Yeah, I notice things like that. “Something about the Eleventh Circuit and the third-party doctrine?”

“Right.”

“It was a fun piece,” he says.

A fun piece? I dissected that court opinion and exposed it for the circular reasoning that it was.

A fun piece. Our courts are lying down and allowing the government to expand its reach beyond anything anyone would ever have envisioned, and it’s a fun piece?

I smile at him.

Easy now, Simon.

I pat my pocket, pull out my phone like I just got a text. “Will you guys excuse me one minute?”

I step away while they chitchat. I take a breath.

Easy now. Good, clean thoughts. Calming exercises, go.

“Tear” and “tier” are pronounced the same but “tear” and “tear” are not.

“Fat chance” and “slim chance” mean the same thing.

I dig into my email. Not the In-Box or the Sent but the Drafts folder.

“Arkansas” and “Kansas” are pronounced differently.

We drive on a parkway but park in a driveway.

If a vegetarian eats vegetables, is a humanitarian a cannibal?

Fuck it. I’m done being calm. I find the email for Joyce Radler in administration and read it over:

I hit “send.” With three and a half hours to spare.

With the massive attachment, it takes a good half a minute to send. When my phone belches a confirmatory tha-woop, I look up and smile.

So now I’ve applied, Reid. It’s you and me, vying for the slot.

Yeah, I put all the materials together, just in case. I didn’t really think I’d submit them. Especially because now the dean will go with the nuclear option and destroy me and my future with the law school, if not with academia writ large.

Or maybe he won’t.

I would’ve let this go, Reid. I would’ve taken my beating and hoped for a better result the next time a slot opened. But you had to goad me, didn’t you?

I mean, I try to be reasonable. But sometimes, I let things bother me more than they should.

38 Christian

“Let’s go out,” Gavin says when he shows up at my apartment, making a beeline for my booze in the kitchen. “Let’s get some tickets to the Cubs, then hit some clubs.” He seems to like that idea, humming “Cubs and clubs, Cubs and clubs” as he pours himself a bourbon.

“Not sure I’m up for it,” I say.

“Not up for the Cubbies? Okay, just the clubs, then. We’ll grab a steak and then hit the West Loop.”

I moan.

“The Triangle, then,” he says. “Maybe Tavern.”

“I don’t know.”

“What don’t you know? It’s Friday night. What, you wanna stay home?”

“Maybe. I’m tired.”

He shakes his head. “No, no, no. Nicky isn’t tired on Friday night. Nicky gets loaded with his buddy Gavin, then he takes his pick of fillies home—”

“I just don’t feel good, G. Sue me.”

Gavin takes a long sip of the bourbon and eyeballs me. With a wag of a finger, he says, “How’s it going with Number 7?”

“Good. All good. Got her right where I want her.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, we can have a drink or two here before we go,” he says. “Tell me about her.”

“That’s not the deal.”

“Well, not her name, but I mean, y’know, generally. I mean, what’s her story?”

I shrug. “Not much of a story. She was a runaway, best I can tell.”

That surprises him. It surprised me, too, when I looked her up, but then it didn’t. The more time I spend with Vicky, the more I see that she’s a loner, a fighter. Most of the women I target—all six of the previous targets, in fact—had pretty normal, privileged lives. None of them had lives that remotely resembled mine.

“Like she ran away from home when she was a kid?” Gavin says. “What’d she do?”

“I don’t know. She won’t talk about her past. Nothing online I can find.”

“You know what she did,” says Gavin, pouring himself a second bourbon.

“I don’t.”

“What else would she do? She runs away from home, has to fend for herself?”

“Shut up, G.”

“She was a hooker, Nicky. Or a porn actress. Something in the sex trade. She had to be.”

I grab a bottle of water from the fridge.

“Does she fuck like a hooker?”

“I said shut up!” I throw down the bottle of water, the top coming off, the water splashing everywhere.

“Jesus.” Gavin steps back. “What the fuck, pal?”

I grab a towel and mop up the water on the floor. Meanwhile, Gavin goes into the living room and flips on the flat-screen TV.

I toss the wet rag in the sink, pour myself a bourbon, and walk out onto the patio. The nightlife around here is as full throttle as the city gets. I love it here. I always figured I’d end up in Chicago after I’d collected enough from my scams, if things worked out that way. But I’ve always been prepared to leave the country, if that’s what it takes to stay safe. I think I’ve done everything I need to do to stay ahead of the law. Most of these women don’t even bother to chase me after I take them for everything, the sheer embarrassment of what they’d have to admit, and their ex-husbands couldn’t give one shit about them, after they cheated and left them for another man and took lump-sum divorce settlements.

And what could they do, even if they tracked me down? I was their paramour, their dirty hidden secret, so it’s not like their friends met me or anything. And I used a different alias every time—Collin Daniels, Richard Nantz, David Jenner—so all I have to do is deny, deny, deny. Nope, that’s not me. What money? They can’t trace anything. They can’t prove anything.

Vicky? I’m not sure what she’ll do after I take her money. She’s basically going to take her husband for everything, and I’m going to take her for everything. How far can she complain? Can a thief complain about another thief? Oh, probably so. She might try. Vicky seems like the type who doesn’t let go of a grudge. But as I keep telling myself, I don’t really know her.

No, she’ll come after me. That’s what I’d do. And she’s like me.

I make my way into the living room, where Gavin is slouched on the sofa, watching a movie and drinking my bourbon. He points at the screen.

“Spy Game,” he says. “You seen this movie?”

“No.”

“Old movie. Redford, Pitt. Redford, he’s the old-school CIA agent, right? He’s teaching Pitt the ropes. He’s like, don’t ever get attached to anything or anybody, stash away money for retirement and don’t ever spend it, look out for yourself first, right? Then it turns out, for all his tough talk, he has a heart of gold. You know what you and Redford have in common?”

I sit down on the couch. “No, what do we have in common?”

He kills the TV, leaving us in silence.

“Nothing,” he says. “Because that’s a fucking movie, a work of fiction, a fairy tale. And you, Nicky, this is your real life. So do yourself and, more importantly, me a favor, all right?”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t grow a conscience,” he says. “And do not, absolutely do not fall for this woman. Take her fucking money and be done with it. Then go find your princess.”

“All right, one more,” says Gavin, “then we’re getting a steak.”

“I don’t feel like it.”

We’re out on my patio now, the second story, overlooking an alley and nightlife.

“What about there, at least?” Gavin says.

“Where?”

“Right across the alley, Einstein. That patio down there where everyone’s drinking and enjoying themselves, unlike us? The patio with about twenty different hotties that would probably have their legs in the air for you if you so much as winked at them. I mean, if you weren’t in love with Number 7 already.”

“Would you shut up with that?”

“I’ll shut up after November third, when Number 7 takes that money from her husband and you take it from her. Then, I’ll take my cut and shut up. Until then, you’re worrying me.”

“I’m not falling for her, and I won’t fall for her.”

“Good, now how about we have dinner at that place down there? They got any steak?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve got a menu somewhere.”

“We’re not ordering, sunshine, we’re going there. Tell me what they have, if they don’t have steak, for Christ’s sake.”

“The chicken shawarma’s pretty good—”

“Chicken what?”

“—and the kofta kebabs aren’t bad.”

“Kaf-what? Kafka? Jesus, Nicky, what is happening to you?”

I lean forward and lower my voice. “Would you stop fucking calling me Nick? For a guy who’s so worried about me pulling this off without a hitch, you’re shouting ‘Nick’ from this balcony? How about you take out an ad in the Chicago fucking Tribune and announce to the world that my name isn’t Christian Newsome?”

He nods, takes a drink. “Fair point, Christian. I humbly apologize. And I realize that you have to eat frou-frou food to keep that attractive figure of yours. So I will withdraw my previous objection and humbly request that you join me at . . .” He looks down at the patio across the alley. “What’s the name of that place?”

“Viva,” I say. “Viva Mediterránea.”

39 Simon

Monday morning. I wake up alone. Vicky went to Elm Grove for the weekend again to see her nieces. The older one, Mariah, got her first period a few weeks ago and freaked about it, probably more than anything because her mother isn’t there for her, so it was sort of a one-two punch of emotions. Vicky, who clings to the idea that she could have prevented her sister’s suicide had she been more proactive, has been spending a lot of weekends with them lately.

Hey, that’s one of the reasons I love her.

My mother would have liked her. She wouldn’t have minded Vicky’s rough edges. She would have admired her bluntness. Mom always said what she thought, sometimes to a fault, often to her disadvantage. My dad told the story of my mother at the law firm she joined out of law school in 1980, some silk-stocking firm of nine hundred lawyers, only six of whom were women. Mom would organize events for the women—lunches, drinks after work, an unofficial support group. One time early on, the firm’s senior partner held up one of the flyers she had printed out and mused aloud, “‘Women’s Night Out’? Why no men’s night out?” (At this point in the telling, my mother would interject that it was no accident that this comment was made while she was standing nearby in the hallway.) To the surprise of no one who knew my mother, she replied that “Every night is men’s night out.”

“Don’t speak unless you have something to say,” she used to say to me during our talks when she tucked me in. “But when you do choose to speak, say what you mean, mean what you say, and be ready to support your points. If you can’t support your point of view, then it wasn’t much of a point of view to begin with.”

It’s early, just a little past five. I’m not running in the morning these days, no Five at Five for now, as I am now doing nightly runs to Wicker Park. So I go for a long walk, come home, shower, post an essay on my blog, Simon Says, about a new case from the Wisconsin Supreme Court on the good-faith exception to the warrant requirement, and make it into my office at eight.

My mother would have loved having a blog that allowed her to sound off on all matters legal for anyone interested. She had her specialties in the law like any professor, but she would read decisions on any subject matter. She’d devour every opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court on any topic and discuss it over dinner. She’d summarize the facts, argue both sides, the pros and the cons, and then announce to us the correct outcome—which, as the law proceeded through the eighties, usually differed from the one reached by the Rehnquist Court.

Around nine-thirty, I start my walk along the promenade toward the Chicago Title & Trust Building. Yes, every morning when I come here, it makes me think of my father and the law firm he had here. And yes, that brings back many an unpleasant memory. And yes, a shrink might say it’s unhealthy for me to be coming here every day. Then again, the day the St. Louis police tried to ask Dr. McMorrow about a conversation we had the morning after my father’s murder was the day that I stopped talking to shrinks. It tends to chill the candor needed for a good therapist-patient conversation.

I grab a Starbucks and take a seat in the lobby of the building. I power up my phone and text her:

She doesn’t respond. I try again:

Still nothing. Not even bubbles. No indication she even received it.

I kill the phone and remove the SIM card. That was a waste. At least it was a nice morning for a walk.

I don’t obsess about Mitchell Kitchens. I just think about him sometimes.

Mitchell could pick up a hundred pounds in his hands and toss it fifteen feet. I know that because I weighed a hundred pounds my freshman year, and he used to toss me fifteen feet. His record was eighteen feet, three inches.

The gym where the wrestlers worked out was right by the front entrance of the school, where the bus dropped us off. Mitchell would call out to me—“Mini-Me,” that is—and I quickly learned that if I didn’t respond, he’d walk over and grab me anyway.

Into the wrestlers’ gym, where the mats were laid out, red tape laid down for the starting point and blue tape to mark Mitchell’s personal best. One hand on my belt and one gripping my shirt, Mitchell would toss me through the air, and I would land hard on the mats. His buddies would laugh and cheer and measure the distance. Sometimes, if he was unhappy with his first toss, he’d make me come back so he could toss me again.

“You don’t mind, do you, Mini-Me?” he used to say, patting me so hard on the back that I almost fell over. I remember that part, though; the guy had the IQ of a fire hydrant, but he always made sure I told him it was okay, so he could use that as a defense, if need be. He said he didn’t mind. He liked it. We were just having fun.

I did mind, of course. It was humiliating. And sometimes it hurt. But I got pretty good at breaking my landing, protecting my face when I hit the mat, fingers balled into fists so I didn’t break any of them.

I always wondered, Why me? What did I ever do to the guy? Sure, I was a diminutive, nerdy freshman. I was a walking cliché for a bully’s target. But I wasn’t the only one.

Looking back, it’s not hard to see. We had math together. I was in geometry, which was basically an honors class for a freshman, and he was taking it as a senior. I was getting A’s and he could barely pass.

If our before-school time together wasn’t fun enough, he’d find me at lunch, too. He’d walk over to my table in the lunchroom and pat me on the head. I had a bottle of Gatorade in my lunch every day. My mother was trying to put weight on me. “You don’t mind, do you, Mini-Me?” he’d say to me and swipe the Gatorade off the table. One day, to compensate for this daily interaction, I brought a second bottle to keep for myself, but he swiped up that one, too. “Must be my birthday,” he said. The other kids at my table, mostly freshmen like me, just looked away. Nobody ever said anything to me. They knew that they’d do the same thing in my shoes—nothing.

Mitchell was one of the kings of the school. He had colleges coming from near and far to watch him wrestle and recruit him. In the end, it didn’t work out for him. He screwed up at some big meet and later ended up running crosswise of the law, nearly went to prison.

So maybe there’s karma in the world, after all. Maybe I should let it lie there. But every time I trace that scar on my left cheek, he re-enters my mind.

A little after seven at night, I leave the law school and run my five miles to Wicker Park. I stop in the alley between the back patio of Viva Mediterránea and the row of condos on the next street over. There’s been a bit of rain this evening, and the autumn weather is flirting with us, enough to dampen enthusiasm for Viva’s outdoor patio, but a few people are outside in light jackets and sweaters enjoying cocktails and clinging to the vestiges of summer.

At eight sharp, I pull out my green burner phone, insert the SIM card, and type a message:

She replies:

Ah, testy. I text:

She replies:

That’s vivid. Even mentions the husband by name. Oh, well. My response:

She replies:

Ah, that works. I type:

She replies:

Bubbles, and she replies again:

Fair enough. I power down the phone, remove the SIM card, and stuff both into the pocket of my running shorts.

I look up at the row of condos, the rear balconies overlooking this alley. The third one down is empty, but the lights are on inside the apartment.

The third condo down belongs to Christian Newsome, who has been screwing Vicky for the last couple of weeks.

Yeah, I know about that. I’ve even seen Christian out on his patio a couple of times when I’ve come here for my nightly runs. Sometimes Christian sits out there alone. Sometimes he’s out there with his friend Gavin.

Never Vicky, though. No, Vicky would be far, far too cautious to allow herself to be seen in public with Christian.

Am I upset about Vicky having sex with another man? Of course. I’m only human. But one could argue that I lack standing to complain under the circumstances.

I’m trying to be reasonable about this. Sometimes I am a perfectly reasonable man.

Other times, I let things bother me more than they should.