Laura Caldwell - Question of Trust

“Boo, I’ve got some bad news.”

“Bad news …” My stomach clenched.

“It’s about Theo.”

“Oh.” I hadn’t expected that. My father had met Theo only once, only briefly.

My dad paused. And it was a weighty silence.

“What?” I said.

“Something’s going on with him.”

True. “How do you know that?”

He sighed. “Izzy …” There was a slight layer of irritation in his voice.

“I know. I should stop asking how you know these things. But it’s just—” what was the word? “—off-putting.” My father had disappeared from our lives decades ago. But he had watched us during that time. (I suppose I would say “watched over us,” except that would make him sound angelic, which wasn’t exactly right.)

“It’s not good, Izzy,” my father said.

I’d gotten better over the past year at taking bad news. And things were easier, I learned, if such news was simply laid out flat.

True to form, my father gave it to me. “Theo is being investigated by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”

Bristol & Associates was on LaSalle Street near Monroe in an old high-rise, home to a host of criminal defense firms. Like 26th and Cal, you could tell the lobby was once impressive, but now the marble was yellowed and the lighting spotty.

On the tenth floor, Bristol & Associates wasn’t much better. Maggie and her grandfather made more than enough money to afford a sleek office overlooking the Chicago River, but like many criminal defense firms, they didn’t care about image. They cared about the work, the clients and the cash. Q had already started a campaign to get them to move. So far, Maggie and Martin had been impervious.

I walked in and blew by the receptionist, Leslie. Usually, I stopped and talked to her, or at least waved. She called out to me. “You okay?”

“Yeah, thanks,” I lied. I was still replaying the conversation with my father in my mind.

“He’s what? “ I had blurted after my dad said those words— Theo is being investigated by the U.S. Attorney’s Office .

I knew Theo had financial issues. Or his company did. But how did any of that rise to the level of a federal/criminal investigation? I tried to muster all I’d learned from Maggie over the past few months as I shifted from civil to criminal work, but there were too many layers of feeling and concern for me to sort through them for possible facts.

“We’d better meet,” my father had said.

“Does Theo know this?” As soon as I’d asked the question, I heard its odd nature. Why was I asking my father what my boyfriend might or might not know?

“Doesn’t look like it from what I can tell,” he said.

“Then I have to tell him. I should—”

“No,” my father said forcefully. “I didn’t get this information from … uh … mainstream sources.”

“Do you ever?”

“Izzy,” he said with a cautionary tone like you would with a young kid. Instead of pissing me off, it reminded me of being a kid. When he was still around. When he was still a regular dad.

“Let me tell you what I know,” he said. “Then you can decide how to handle it. I will leave it to you. Do you feel comfortable coming to my place? We’ll have privacy.”

The truth was I’d only been to my dad’s mostly empty studio apartment a few times, and it had mostly depressed me. “I’m in court for a bunch of things,” I told him. “Then I’ve got to get back to the office to drop off orders Maggie will be waiting for. I’ll come right after that?”

“Make it one o’clock,” he said. “I have a few more things to track down.”

The thought had made me woozy. There was more?

Now, as the receptionist hit a button under her desk that unlatched the door to the inner sanctum, I wondered what that more meant. And I feared it. Felt like old demons were coming back to grab me, choke me, make me doubt myself and who I loved.

I tried to push the thoughts away, just as I pushed through the door and began walking the hallway toward my office.

Q popped out of his office as if he’d been waiting for me. This was fairly typical. After I’d been let go from my old law firm, Baltimore & Brown, Q could have worked for another lawyer, but he’d met his wealthy boyfriend by then. For the past year, while I tried a variety of different gigs, Q had lazed and lounged, now leaving him energized and raring to go. Since he’d accepted the manager position—Maggie had been doing it herself before—he’d gotten the law firm an incredible amount of PR and marketing. So much so, that Martin had to tell him to lay off on the press conferences. Q hadn’t exactly listened.

So when I saw Q waiting for me, I wasn’t surprised that he was wide-eyed and kind of clasping his hands the way a coach might when he was about to talk to a player. One of the things he’d kept from the life he’d led when he was straight (or pretending to be) was a love of football. He would be the first openly gay football coach of an NFL team if someone let him.

Q wore navy pants and a tailored gray jacket that matched his gray eyes and set off his black skin nicely. The lights in the hallway glinted off his bald head.

“I know I’m supposed to tone it down,” he said when I reached him. Per our usual custom, he hadn’t bothered to say hello. “But check this out—NBC needs someone to talk about what it’s like to be a suspect in a case, and they want that person to also be a lawyer. I mean, you’re perfect for this, right?”

“Local NBC?”

“ National , girlfriend. You would discuss how horrible it is to be wrongfully accused and explain that’s the reason Bristol & Associates work so hard for their clients. Maggie and Martin already gave it a green light. You know how Martin is about wrongful convictions.”

I nodded. “Is Maggie here?”

“Not yet.”

I wanted to tell Q what my father had said about Theo. I told Q and Maggie nearly everything. But after our discussion last night, after seeing Theo walk away, seeing the hurt on his face, I realized that I had a responsibility to him. I had to find out more and help him. And keep his confidences, what little I had of them, in the meantime.

“Maggie had a hearing in Markham,” Q said. “So, about NBC—will you do it?”

I tried to focus on his question. He was right that I’d be ideal for the interview. A year ago, Vaughn suspected me of killing my friend, Jane Augustine. And as a result, my face had been splashed across TVs and newspapers. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about that time. And I wasn’t sure I could talk about anything, given my distraction about Theo and the U.S. attorneys.

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