My answering service had texted me that she’d called my office with the same message—I just hadn’t taken time to scroll through my texts this afternoon.
I didn’t know Julia, but I sure knew the name: the Salanter family were power players in Chicago. They had one of those fortunes where you don’t have enough fingers and toes to count all the zeroes in their holdings. I knew a little bit about Chaim Salanter from Lotty, because he’d started the Malina Foundation. I hadn’t paid close attention, but I think she said Salanter came from one of the Baltic states in his teens, made a fortune in scrap metal or commodities or something, and set up the foundation to ease the path for other immigrants.
I did a quick look at the family online. Julia was Chaim’s daughter; she chaired the Malina Foundation. A son, Michael, helped run the trading company. So Julia probably wanted to talk about the foundation’s exposure to liability or publicity from last night’s episode.
The next five messages, in rising levels of intensity, all came from one voice, high, bright, imperious. “Victoria! Are you there? Pick up the phone! We need to talk!”
“Victoria, this is hot, you’re all I’ve got, I need you a lot! My situation’s fraught. If you called me I’d be off like a shot.”
“Victoria, you’re making me crazy. You know who this is, I can’t say my name, but it’s not a game. Answer me, come on, I wouldn’t be begging if they weren’t coming after me.”
I felt a sinking beneath my diaphragm. I did indeed know who that was. There had been a time when I answered Leydon Ashford’s calls on the first ring. Returned the messages as soon as I got them.
Leydon Ashford was the first person I ever encountered who had two last names. We’d both grown up along the shores of Lake Michigan. The difference was, her family owned an eighteen-room mansion backing onto three hundred yards of private beach, whereas the Warshawskis’ five-room bungalow was separated from the lake by a century of cyanide-laced landfill.
In our law school days, just hearing Leydon’s voice on the phone conjured the glamour and excitement she seemed to embody. It was only later that she came to embody trouble—urgent summonses to places where she didn’t appear, tempestuous monologues that started with a point but ended in a bewildering morass, and trips to the emergency room that became more frequent with time.
When I first met Leydon, in our Civil Procedures study group, I’d been prepared to despise her, along with her family, and the Austin-Healy Sprite her father gave her when she graduated from Wellesley. Leydon looked like a fairy-tale princess—she had hair like spun gold, and she seemed to float when she walked, like a feathery ballerina. I wasn’t a ballerina, I was a street fighter, a product of the mills and ethnic wars of Chicago’s Steel City.
Even so, we became friends, sharing the same political meetings, law school study groups, even the occasional family holiday. Leydon held me in her arms the afternoon I’d come from taking my dad to the ER when he’d been drowning in his own lungs. She called me “Victoria,” not “Vic,” because she said it matched my regal bearing.
Leydon had tried to talk me out of marrying Dick Yarborough: “I know that type, Victoria, I grew up with guys like him. He only wants to marry a strong woman so he can wrestle her to the ground and grind the life out of her.” She brought me a case of champagne and a dozen roses the day I called to tell her we were divorcing.
It was I who’d helped her celebrate her appointment to clerk for Justice Brennan—her family thought she was a traitor, that Brennan was a dangerous subversive.
And it was I, not her parents, who got her to the hospital the first time. The week before we took the bar exam, she became convinced that her father was sending a hit man to stop her from becoming a lawyer. Her father had opposed her law school education. He didn’t like women who were aggressive, who tried to do men’s jobs, and more than once, he and I had clashed at the Ashford dinner table.
When Leydon started talking about hit men, I thought she was joking. Then I thought she was short on sleep. It was only after I found her huddled in a corner of the stacks at the law library that I realized she needed help.
She recovered quickly that time, quickly enough to pass the bar in the next exam cycle, which she did brilliantly. Her next episode didn’t occur until she was back in Chicago, on the fast track at one of the big firms, when she started delivering all her reports by hand because the Department of Justice was monitoring her outbound mail. After that, the periods of hospitalization became longer, and the time in between them grew shorter.
I had lost the stamina for Leydon’s universe. I felt like a rat, but I’d stopped returning her calls. It had been over a year since I’d last talked to her, and listening to her frantic messages this afternoon, I knew I wasn’t ready to deal with her again.
I called Julia Salanter instead.
“Ms. Warshawski, I want to talk to you today.”