I went back to my paying client’s work and forced myself to stay with it, copying numbers into a file, then laying them across a blowup of the area where Continental United’s trucks were coming to grief. I was hard at it when Tessa popped her head around my door.
“Your friend Murray is outside—he rang my bell by mistake. Shall I let him in? He’s brought some talent with him.”
My brows shot up in surprise, but I followed her to the front door. Murray was outside with Alex Fisher. She had on skintight jeans and a big mesh shirt, which revealed not only her Lycra tube–top but the sharp points of her breastbone. As she and Murray came in, I glanced at Alex–Sandy’s feet, but of course if she owned Ferragamos with a missing emblem she wouldn’t have them on.
Murray stopped to talk to Tessa. “Sorry you couldn’t make it to the Glow Tuesday night. You missed a great evening.”
Tessa gave him the kind of polite brush–off she’d learned from her years jetting around the world with her wealthy parents. I always envy someone who doesn’t have to go to the jugular. As I promptly did.
“Sandy—sorry I didn’t recognize you right away Tuesday night. You looked a lot different when you were urging us all to the barricades back in law school.”
She flashed an empty smile. “I’m Alex now, not Sandy—another one of the changes in my life.”
She surveyed my office with frank interest. I’d divided my share of the warehouse into smaller spaces with pasteboard partitions, not because I need a lot of rooms but because I wanted some human scale to the place. Aside from that and good quality lighting, I hadn’t invested heavily in furnishings.
Alex–Sandy seemed to be preening herself, perhaps imagining her own office by contrast, when her eyes widened at a painting on the partition facing my desk. “Isn’t that an Isabel Bishop? How did you come by it?”
“I stole it from the Art Institute. Do you want to sit down? Would you like something to drink?” An elderly woman whose grandson had been stripping her assets gave me the Bishop in lieu of a fee, but that didn’t seem to be any of Alex–Sandy’s business.
“Oh, Vic, you always had a bizarre sense of humor. It’s coming back to me now. Do you have Malvern water? It’s hideously hot out—I’d forgotten Chicago summers.”
“Malvern?” I stopped on my way to the refrigerator. “Did you introduce BB Baladine to that, or the other way around?”
“I didn’t know you knew Bob. I think it’s something we probably both learned from Teddy Trant. He spends a lot of time in England. Do you have any?” It was said smoothly, and it was even plausible.
She sat on a stool next to the table where Peppy was lying. The dog had gotten up to greet her and Murray, but something in my tone must have sounded a warning, because she crawled under my desk.
I offered Alex–Sandy a choice of tap water or Poland Springs, which is cheap and no different from the foreign imports as far as I can tell. Murray took iced tea, which Tessa makes fresh and drinks by the gallon when she’s working. We share a refrigerator out in the hall and write scrupulous notes about who’s taken what from whose shelves.
“Murray says you’ve become a private investigator,” Sandy said when I’d sat at my desk. “It seems like strange work for someone with your education. Did you get tired of the law? I can totally understand that, but my own fantasies run more to retiring to a ranch.”
“You know how it goes, Sandy—Alex—middle age comes on and you revert to your roots. You left the barricades for the boardroom; I couldn’t stay away from my cop–father’s blue–collar work.” I turned to Murray. “Sandy was always on my butt for not joining protest movements with her. She kept telling me that a blue–collar girl—whatever that is—should be in the forefront of organizing struggles.”
“You have to learn to move on from those old battles. These are the nineties, after all. Anyway, Murray suggested your name when we were mulling over how to help Lacey with a sticky situation.”
A crumb from the Global table. Maybe Murray had been as embarrassed as I by our conversation the other night and was trying a subtle amend. I could see him at dinner with Alex–Sandy. At the Filigree, or perhaps Justin’s, the hot new hole on west Randolph, Murray leaning across the table toward Alex’s modest cleavage: You know V. I., you know what a prickly bitch she’s always been. But she did the legwork on a couple of the stories that built my reputation and I hate to leave her standing in the dust. Isn’t there something Global needs that would give her a break?
“Global has a gazillion lawyers, detectives, and strong–armed types to protect their stars.” I wasn’t hungry enough yet for a crumb, I guess.
“It’s a little trickier than that,” Murray said, “at least as I understand it. Since you were at the Glow on Tuesday, maybe you saw the problem.”
“Lucian Frenada,” Alex said briskly. “He and Lacey had a boy–girl kind of understanding twenty years ago, and he won’t accept that it’s over, that Lacey’s moved on and he has to also.”