Laura Caldwell - Red Hot Lies

When he allowed himself to think about it, he wondered if this vagueness about him was the reason his personal relationships tended to suffer. His family in Wilmette thought of him as slightly odd, slightly standoffish, if only because he hadn’t truly participated in their world. He hadn’t gotten married despite a girlfriend here and there (he’d been dumped last year by Madeline, a half-Swiss, half-Japanese stunner), he didn’t have children and he didn’t work in the family’s commercial-leasing business.

He left the locker room and followed Michael DeSanto to the cardiovascular room-a massive football field of a space lined with shiny silver treadmills, bikes and elliptical machines. The clientele here wanted a workout for sure-you could see the sweat and the rippling of toned leg muscles-but they were also here to be seen, hence the snazzy workout gear, the makeup on all the women’s faces, the carefully constructed ponytails.

Mayburn trailed DeSanto from a wide distance for the next hour-first on the treadmills, later into the weight room. DeSanto spoke to no one, said nothing that could help Mayburn get into the guy’s head or, even better, into the guy’s house, where it was believed he ran the bulk of his laundering operations.

Mayburn left the weight room and went in search of Lucy, who he saw inside a glass-walled studio, her body held in an awkward V-shape, next to ten other women struggling themselves into the same position. Mayburn checked the class schedule. Advanced Pilates, it read.

Mayburn suppressed a sigh and turned away. Advanced Pilates was not something he was going to be able to fake, and besides, Lucy was once again surrounded by other women. He could usually blend in just fine, but not in Lucy DeSanto’s world.

Something on this case had to give.

Mayburn left the club. As he walked toward his car, his cell phone vibrated. He reached inside his jacket pocket for the phone.

Baltimore & Brown, the display read.

He hit the Answer button, hoping to God it wasn’t that dickhead Tanner Hornsby, who treated everyone who wasn’t a lawyer as if they were distinctly second-rate. “Hello?”

“John, it’s Izzy McNeil.”

“Hey, Izzy.” Now, Izzy McNeil was the rare kind of lawyer-the kind who didn’t think her J.D. made her better than anyone else. And it didn’t hurt that she was hot as hell. He’d worked with her a few times when she was still Tanner’s associate and once when Forester Pickett was courting a well-known editor and Izzy wanted to know if the editor was in talks with other newspapers.

“You got a second?” she said.

“Sure.” He found his silver 1969 Aston Martin DB6 coupe. It was a pain-in-the-ass car, always needing work, and when it got icy in Chicago, it was useless, but he loved the thing.

He slid inside and started the engine. He listened to Izzy’s tales of woe-a fiancé who’d skipped town, apparently with a bunch of corporate shares of stock; the death of Forester Pickett; some business about letters Forester had gotten before he died and a freaky homeless guy.

“I’m really sorry about Forester,” he said. He didn’t meet the man when he’d handled the editor investigation, but he’d heard good things.

“Yeah.” Izzy sounded on the verge of tears, which made Mayburn uncomfortable. He stared through the windshield at two girls, probably high-school students, eating bagels while they walked up the street.

He said nothing to Izzy. He’d found it more helpful to let people say what they wanted on their own terms.

Izzy got herself together and asked if she could hire him to find the fiancé-Sam, the guy’s name was-and if he’d look into the matter of whether Forester Pickett had been killed.

“I thought you said he died of a heart attack.” Mayburn put the car into drive and pulled out of the lot.

“That’s what they say. But he’d been getting those letters. And what the homeless guy said to him-about how he’d join Olivia if he wasn’t careful-I mean, it’s clear someone was threatening him.”

“I don’t know about that.” Izzy was sounding like a conspiracy theorist, and it depressed him that this woman he’d always thought of as sexy with her head screwed on straight was losing it a little.

She made a short growl, like she was irritated with him. “I promised Forester I would look into this if something happened, and now it has. I just don’t think there’s any way Sam would steal outright from Forester.”

“But he logged in to the safe and now those shares are gone, and they’re worth, what, thirty million?” He turned onto Franklin and headed north. “He made off with them in the middle of the night and disappeared. On the same day Forester died.”

“Yeah, but-”

“Yes, but what?” he said.

They both fell into silence.

Lately, Mayburn had found himself simply wanting to do his work and go home. He knew this meant he was growing bored.

He only wanted cases that paid top dollar, or that gave him the street cred to continue building his résumé. Because if he wasn’t personally drawn to the work anymore-and he wasn’t, he was sick of the brain-stultifying effort that mostly involved sitting in a car with an audio surveillance system, listening to people taking a shit and having sex and just generally living their lives the way he wasn’t-then he might as well get paid a heck of a lot of money to do it, and it better not depress the hell out of him. There was no way that Izzy’s case-if he could even call it that-was not going to depress him. He would watch her go from a girl with exuberance and optimism to a bitter, pissed-off woman who’d been dumped and bamboozled.

“Hey, Izzy, I’m sorry this is happening to you, but I don’t handle domestic stuff.”

“This isn’t domestic! It’s not like Sam is screwing around on me, and I’m asking you to take pictures for evidence.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but that’s probably what would happen. If I could locate him, I’d probably find him in bed with some sweet young thing, and I’d have to give you photos of it, in order for you to believe it.”

“Screw you.”

He chuckled, grudgingly. She had a mouth, he had noticed and despite his North Shore upbringing, he liked that in women. “Really, I’m sorry. I’ve got my hands full right now and, even if I didn’t, you couldn’t afford me.” He reached Division, turned left and then right onto Clybourn, headed toward his house just south of Lincoln Square.

“Sorry,” she said. “Look, I’ll pay whatever it takes.”

“I charge a retainer up front, and it’s big.”

“I remember. I approved your bills when you investigated the editor.”

“That was small-time, and my rates have gone up since then. I’ve got more work than I can handle.”

He mentioned a sum, the same he’d charged the bank where DeSanto worked. He explained how he then charged hourly, eating away at the retainer, but how he usually went well over it. He detailed the incidental fees that the client also had to pay-food, gas, copying, phone calls. He told her how his hourly rate soared if he worked nights or weekends, which was often, especially in a missing person’s case. And then just to scare her, he told her how much he’d charged on his last case.

Izzy went silent. “We’re getting married,” she said, “and so we’ve got a lot of money going out the door. I couldn’t afford those fees.”

“Right.” Sad that the girl thought she was still getting married. “I really wish you the best, and if you hire someone else and you want to run things by me, give me a call, okay?”

“Yeah. Sure.” Her voice sounded flat, which was hard to hear, since he’d always thought of her as full of life.

He’d watched her during the editor case. He was good at that-the watching. What he’d observed about Izzy was a quick ability to adapt. You could see her changing her vocabulary, her thinking, to fit whatever she was talking about or dealing with. She didn’t seem like a natural at her job as Forester’s lawyer, but he could also see that she believed she could be good at it if she just tried her ass off.