Laura Caldwell - Red Blooded Murder

Spence got out of the banquette, dialing his cell phone. A second later, he was booming into it. “George! Spence Calloway calling. How are you?”

He moved into the living room, his voice trailing off. I asked Charlie how his back was doing.

“Hurts all the time,” he said cheerfully.

Charlie had been seriously injured in an accident involving a construction truck shortly after he graduated from college. He was still in physical therapy and still living off the comp settlement, which he viewed, with his bizarrely optimistic attitude, as a lucky break. He had this innate belief that life would work out, one way or another, and it wasn’t worth worrying about. So the back injury, which physically troubled him all the time, wasn’t seen as something to stress over.

We talked about Charlie’s current physical therapy regimen. I asked my mom about the Victoria Project, a charity she had started. Q asked her if he could volunteer, since he had time on his hands now. When Spence came back in the room, we were having a moment that felt blessedly normal, a moment filled with family chat.

And so it wasn’t until my mother stopped talking and instead looked at her husband with a concerned expression that we all stopped.

“Spence?” she said. “Is everything all right?”

Spence gave me a painful look, one of those looks that said, This is going to hurt. “George knew the case, of course,” he said. “Knew you.” He pointed with his head in my direction. He didn’t say anything for a second.

“And?” my mother prompted.

“He said you’ll be hearing from them soon.” Another pause during which I could hear the passing whoosh of a car on the street, the scrape of a tree branch along the side of the house. “You’ve been named a person of interest.”

M ick Grenier sat at his desk, staring at the photos of Jane, the news clippings, the notes he’d made.

He arranged the photos on his desktop in a vertical row, starting at the top with photos where Jane appeared youngest. The photos climbed down his desk-Jane over the passage of time, her stunning looks surviving that journey well.

He had left the memorial abruptly. It had been harder than he thought. He would miss Jane Augustine. He hadn’t imagined that would be the case. If you had told him what was going to happen and asked him if he would care that she was gone, he would have said no. He would have looked at the situation calmly, in a cool, detached way (the ability to do so was one worthwhile thing his father had taught him), and he would have said that her death could only be good for him. He still believed that to be true, but staring at the pictures, he had to admit that he’d gotten somewhat emotionally involved.

He placed the final photo on his desk. It was a head shot that Trial TV sent out with its press kit. In the photo, she wore the red scarf.

Jane had also worn the scarf in the photo that appeared in Chicago Magazine. He found that article and placed it at the bottom of a new row. Moving upward, he created another vertical row, this time of news clippings, oldest at the top. One more row then-his notes about Jane. He always dated his notes, so it was easy enough to put those in order.

His father, Beaumont Grenier, the novelist, would have hated the project he was working on. Mick’s father particularly despised “celebrity journalism,” which, when Mick looked back on it, was probably why he had worked for a celebrity magazine in L.A. after college.

He didn’t know exactly why he had always wanted to be different from his father. Maybe it was just typical kid stuff, or maybe it was because his father was in love only with his work, and he never pretended otherwise, not to his wife, not to his kids. Taking the celeb magazine job to spite his father was surely a large part of the reason Mick did it, but as with everything in life, it had a cause and effect.

Because of that celebrity magazine, Mick ended up having a quickie marriage to an actress he fell in love with. And it was because that actress shot a film in Chicago for a couple of months that he moved there with her. The marriage didn’t survive the two months, but Mick got his first book out of it-a tell-all about the ex. And Mick got Chicago, too, which he liked a lot more than the East Coast and a hell of a lot more than L.A. He found it honest and unpretentious.

So he’d stayed, and so it was really all because of his father that he was in Chicago. And if he looked at it now, his latest project was yet another attempt to distinguish himself from Beaumont Grenier. He was a different kind of creative than his father. Reality was his medium. People today were crazier, more fucked up, than any character a mere novelist like his father could create. And it was pure skill to be able to use that reality-all the pretty, gory truth of it-to tell the perfect story; to edit out the commonplace and spit-shine the salacious.

He paused now and looked at the grid of information he’d created about Jane Augustine. This grid was always what he did when he was nearing the end of a research period. This time it was different, of course. This time his subject was dead.

T he doorbell rang. Hearing it, my mother stood. “That’s Maggie,” she said.

If I’d been a jealous person, I might have been envious of my mother’s absolute adoration of my friend Maggie. She was delighted by her, charmed by her and impressed with the fact that Maggie was a criminal defense lawyer-a tiny, sweet girl who rumbled with the scary kids and held her own.

As soon as Spence delivered his news that I was a “person of interest,” my mother had opened her eyes wide and murmured, “We must call Maggie.”

As luck would have it, Maggie and her sort-of boyfriend, Wyatt, had been on their way to drinks and dinner downtown and agreed to stop by.

“Let’s adjourn to the living room,” my mother said. “There’s no room in here for all of us.” She really did like Maggie if she was suggesting the living room.

We trooped through the kitchen and dining room, my mother turning on bright lights along the way.

Maggie opened the front door on her own, calling, “Anybody home?” Her wavy, light brown hair with its natural streaks of gold swung away from her face.

My mother, so much taller than Maggie’s short, little frame, swooped her into a hug.

Maggie introduced Wyatt to everyone. He was an undeniably handsome guy in his midforties, almost fifteen years older than Maggie, and a high-ranking exec at a biotech firm. The two originally met when Maggie was in law school, back when she thought she should choose an area of law different from her grandfather, a famous prosecutor turned defense lawyer. Even though she had no apparent affinity for it, she picked labor and employment work. She got a summer associate position at a big firm, and there she met one of the firm’s clients, Wyatt Bluestone, who was getting sued for sexual harassment. Maggie was asked to conduct the intake interviews with Wyatt, and so they had to spend a fair amount of time together. He told her what a bunch of crap the claim was. He talked to her about how hard it was to be in his position and to bring your employees along without crossing any lines. Maggie believed him, and they started dating.

They were together for seven months back then. Wyatt was charismatic, but I never trusted him. And yet Maggie was in love. Finally, though, she began to realize that they spent all their time at restaurants eating fabulous dinners or in his bed having fabulous sex. While this wasn’t necessarily bad, it became clear that Wyatt wasn’t interested in spending time with her friends and family, nor was he interested in introducing her to his. One day, Maggie went to his place in the middle of the day to retrieve the cell phone she’d left there, and she found him having sex with his assistant. It hit her then that the sexual harassment thing was probably true. It hit her that, as one of Wyatt’s attorneys, she might have a claim against him. Technically, his assistant certainly did. Technically, Maggie was heartbroken. After that, I had spent many nights watching Maggie cry into a large glass of vodka to get her through the breakup with Wyatt.