Whatever damage the summer had done to the corn crop, it hadn’t hurt Boots particularly. The trees here showed full, graceful leaves and the grass beyond them was thick and green. In the distance I could make out a stand of corn. I guess if you’re chairman of the County Board there are ways to get water to your farm.
I turned another bend and found myself at the party. I’d been hearing music blaring in the distance ever since leaving the front gate. Now I could see a big bandstand beyond the main house with a band in straw boaters and navy blazers going full bore. On the other side of the house smoke hovered lazily over what was presumably the barbecue pit. Boots was sacrificing one of his own cows to Roz’s campaign.
A sheriff’s deputy, swinging an outsize flashlight, directed me to a crowd of cars in a big yard northeast of the house. Maybe it was a pasture—I remembered seeing one on a Girl Scout outing when I was eleven. Despite the presence of the deputies—or because of them—I carefully locked the Chevy.
Furey caught up with me as I headed toward the bandstand where most of the party was gathered. “Goddamnit, Vic, what’s making you so shirty?”
I stopped to look at him. “Michael, I paid two hundred and fifty dollars for the doubtful pleasure of coming to this shindig. I’m not your date, nor yet ‘the little woman’ whom you can tuck under your arm and hustle past the guards.”
His good-humored face tightened into a scowl. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“You treated me like a cipher out there—leaving me standing in the road and then telling the deputies to ignore me because I was your appendage. I don’t like it.”
He flung up his hands in exasperation. “I was trying to do you a favor, save you a little hassle with the boys at the gate. If I’d known you were going to treat it like a mortal insult I’d of saved my breath.”
He strode of toward the crowd. I followed him slowly, irritated as much with myself as with Furey. I didn’t like the little trick stunt he’d pulled at the turnoff, but that didn’t justify my retaliating in kind. Maybe frustration over Elena’s disappearance was making me testy. Or my innate bad humor. Or just being at a Cook County political fund-raiser.
The last time I remembered seeing Boots in the news one of his bodyguards had beaten in the face of a man who had come too close to the boss after a County Board meeting. The man claimed Boots had murdered his daughter— heavy accusations, although he had a long history at Elgin—but breaking someone’s nose seemed like an excessive response to insanity. In fairness to Boots, he’d picked up the guy’s hospital tab later on—but why did he need bodyguards at all?
That was only the most recent public episode Meagher had been involved in. He also had fingers in dozens of business ventures in the state, the kinds of deals where everybody gets rich if they know which way the tax breaks are going to land. Meagher was a you-scratch-my-back kind of guy—he wouldn’t be hosting Rosalyn’s find-raiser if she hadn’t made some significant concessions to him.
It wasn’t as though Roz were a close pal. She’d been a community organizer in Logan Square when I was with the PD. I’d worked with her on some seminars on law and the community—some ABC’s to teach the residents their rights in arenas ranging from housing to immigration officers. Roz was bright, energetic, and a skillful politician. And ambitious. And that meant getting into bed with Boots if she was going to rule a wider sphere than Logan Square. I understood that and I knew it wasn’t any of my business, anyway. So why was I getting my tail in a knot?
I skirted my way through the crowd at the bandstand to a bright canopy covering the refreshment arena. Young women in thigh-high minis were threading their way cheerfully through the throng with canapé-laden trays. Just the costume for a feminist activist like Rosalyn, I snarled to myself. I went up to the bar and got a rum and tonic.
Drink in hand, I jostled aimlessly through the crowd. Behind the refreshment tent people were gathered in a thick, noisy clump, loud enough to drown out the band. Beyond that group the throng thinned down rapidly— the land there was hilly and uncultivated, leading into a small wood.
The terrain and lack of chairs notwithstanding, most of the women were wearing nylons and heels. Two of them had come prepared, though—they were sitting on a blanket, stretching their long, tanned legs and taking innocent pleasure in their own beauty. As I passed they cried out to me in an enthusiastic chorus:
“Vic! Ernie told us you might be here. Come sit down. LeAnn’s pregnant and we didn’t want to spend the afternoon standing in the heat.”
I obligingly stopped for a moment. If LeAnn was pregnant it could only be a matter of months before Clara started a new baby as well. The two had been inseparable since childhood and now, adult and married, they lived in adjoining Oak Brook mansions, were in and out of each other’s houses all day long to borrow clothes, share a cup of coffee, or entertain their children together. And while Clara’s light curls contrasted with LeAnn’s straight dark hair, they looked almost indistinguishable in their Anne Klein shorts suits.