Laura Caldwell - Red Hot Lies

“So…” Maggie said, trailing off.

“So he came home sometime after he saw me, and changed clothes and left.”

“Not abducted, then.”

“Probably not.”

Maggie and I stood still.

I balled up the suit and hugged it to me.

I sat down hard on the wood floor. And then I started to cry.

“Oh, Iz,” Maggie said, huddling her little form around me. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not,” I said between my tears.

“I know.”

I wept for a few minutes and Maggie said nothing, just holding me.

Finally, I sat up straight. “I am okay,” I said to convince myself.

Maggie sat back and watched me, saying nothing. Maggie always knew when to say nothing.

She hugged her arms around her chest, her black wool coat pooling around her, making her look like a little girl playing dress up. The difference was that Maggie was smarter than most adults I knew.

“The thing is,” I said, “I really can’t believe Sam stole those shares on purpose. He’s the most honest man I know.”

“We don’t always know the people we love. I’ve seen that often enough,” Maggie said. As an attorney specializing in criminal law, very little shocked her anymore.

“I know Sam.” I shook my head. “Or at least I thought I did.”

I closed my eyes and thought of Sam and me sitting on my rooftop deck, drinking Blue Moon, while Sam played guitar for me. He played songs he’d known for years-Buddy Guy and John Hiatt and Eric Clapton and Willie Nelson. He played songs he’d heard on the radio, since he could pick up almost anything by ear. And then he’d play songs he wrote for me. One was called “Wanting You Everywhere.” At the bridge of the song, Sam would look at me with his martini-olive eyes, and he would say all the places he wanted us to go together-Barcelona, Bangkok, Africa, Indonesia, Peru, Iceland, Tibet. Panama had never been on that list.

Maggie pushed herself to her feet. “We’d better look around and see what he took.”

“Is this a crime scene or something like that?”

“Not yet, and you need to figure out if he grabbed anything after he tossed off that suit.”

I went into the bathroom and looked under the sink. “His shaving kit is gone.” I opened a drawer. “And his toothpaste. And his deodorant.”

“What about his clothes?”

Back in the bedroom, I opened the closet. “I can’t really tell. It looks like a few things are gone, but I’m not here that much. Some stuff could be at my house or at the dry cleaner’s.”

“Is there anything he would take if he was going to be gone for a while?”

I stood in Sam’s bedroom and glanced around. I tried to think like Sam. Like Sam standing in his bedroom with thirty million dollars in bearer shares.

I seized on a thought. I opened his nightstand drawer and reached under the small stack of rugby magazines. My fingers searched for the textured top of Sam’s journal, a thin, green leather notebook one of his sisters had given him a few years ago. He wrote song lyrics in there, I knew, and occasionally thoughts about work or whatever else people wrote in journals. I didn’t know for sure because I had never read it. Don’t get me wrong, I’d thought about it a few times-once when Sam was pissed at me and stormed out of his house, another time when he’d been getting a few phone calls from his ex, Alyssa. But I wasn’t a snooping kind of girl.

I knew exactly where he kept the journal, though, because I’d seen him pack it when he went on vacation or long business trips. My hands searched through the drawer. I took out the magazines and a few books until the drawer was empty. The journal was gone.

Maggie offered to stay with me for the day, but I didn’t want to just sit around, staring at the walls of Sam’s apartment or mine, so I went back to work. Forester might be gone, but he wouldn’t want the business of Pickett Enterprises to stop, or so I told myself, not sure if this thinking was for his benefit or mine.

Back at the building, I got off the elevator, ran my key card through the slot and hustled to my office. Was it a little quieter as I strode through the hallways? Were some of the assistants giving me looks?

Q sat at his desk, his bald head gleaming like a black globe under the lights. “Everyone’s talking about it.”

My eyes moved up and down the hall. “Talking about which part of it?”

“All of it. Forester. Sam taking those bonds.”

“They’re called shares.” Why I was making the point, I have no idea. “How did everyone hear?”

“How do you think?”

“Tanner?”

“As far as I can tell. You shouldn’t have had that conversation with him there.”

“But I didn’t really say anything out loud.”

“He knew you were talking to Mark Carrington. Tanner used to be Forester’s number-one guy, remember? He knows the inside circle. And you said something about ‘the safe.’ From what I can tell, he called Mark, who told him the whole story.”

I groaned. Q was right. Talking in front of Tanner was a mistake. One I wouldn’t have made twenty-four hours ago. I looked around. Down the hallway, a twenty-year-old assistant named Sheridan eyed me openly. The mail guy, pushing his cart, looked at me then quickly averted his gaze.

I turned back to Q’s desk. “Where were you last night? I called you a bunch of times, but I couldn’t get you.”

“Out.”

“With Max?”

“We didn’t quite make it. His mother decided to come in early.”

I groaned. “Oh, boy.”

“Yeah. Oh, boy. I had to get the hell out of there.”

“So what did you do?”

“Drank too much.” Q looked down at his desk. “Look, Iz, I’ve got to tell you something. Elliot came down and got the Casey file this morning. Said he would finish the Motion to Dismiss.”

“Great. I’ve been asking him to help me for weeks.”

Elliot Nuster was an associate assigned to me. He had a stick-up-his-butt personality, but who could blame him when he also had to work with Tanner. Since Elliot was a year ahead of me, I often felt awkward giving him work, always having to ask nicely, and usually over and over again. But I simply couldn’t handle all the Pickett work myself. Luckily, many of the projects or cases that came in the door from Pickett could be farmed out to the specialty groups-our intellectual-property people or the tax department-but the rest was mine and it was a struggle to keep on top of it, especially when I had to beg my associate to help.

“Yeah, it sounds good,” Q said. “But it’s weird, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“He never offers to help.”

“No lawyer ever offers to help, but if Elliot heard what happened, he’s probably just chipping in, right?”

“Probably.”

Q and I locked eyes.

“What are you going to do now?” he asked.

I looked at my watch, a Baume & Mercier given to me by Forester. The image of his covered form on the hospital bed made tears tug at the insides of my eyes. Then I thought of something equally unpleasant. “I have to call Sam’s mom.”

As I spoke the words to Lynette, Sam’s mother-gone since yesterday, no sign of him, looks like he took Forester’s shares from the safe-the sky outside my office window grew dark. Rain swooped into the area, bruising the sky with patches of deep gray.

“I don’t understand.” Lynnette said. “What?” Her voice caught. I could tell she was trying not to cry, struggling for an answer. Just like me.

I pressed the phone to my ear, giving her any details I knew, which weren’t many.

“This isn’t right,” Lynette said. “I’m his mother. I brought that boy into the world, and I raised him. He is not a thief. There has to be a reason.”