The Big Law

What if, when the time was right, he went back for the money and Ida. Brought her to California and, with his new wealth, turned a plastic surgeon loose on that chin.

God, she’d be unbelievable. Gorgeous.

The power of it nearly threw him off the bed.

He took the last of the wine and went out to his courtyard.

His eyes moistened with emotion, imagining how it would be, slowly removing the bandages from her face.

How grateful she would be. How smooth her new chin would feel, sliding between his naked thighs, as her sweet auburn hair tickled his belly…

Thank you, Danny. Thank you.

And she’d cry, she’d be so happy and she’d raise her face to him and the hot salty tears would trickle down her perfect chin.

49

Late afternoon in the motel room off Highway 36. Last light leaked through the cheap venetian blinds and streaked the wall over the desk. Broker sat, eyed the telephone, sipped from a can of ginger ale, confronted the blank notebook page in front of him, fingered the message that had been waiting for him at the motel desk: Call back Ida Rain. Her work number. Put down the message. Stared at the phone again.

He picked up a ballpoint pen, twirled it, clicked the plunger.

Keith sat in a jail cell buried under an avalanche of lurid allegations, moral condemnation, and some solid evidence.

The federal grand jury would indict. He would be charged.

He refused to defend himself.

He wanted people to think he’d killed Caren and Alex Gorski, had tried to kill James. No remorse. Defiant. Strutting. Dabbling in jailhouse tattoos.

Wanted people to think he was crazy

Everyone except me.

Broker’s hand dropped to the sheet of notebook paper.

He drew a vertical line. Near the top, he added an intersecting horizontal line. Below the first line he added another horizontal, wider, parallel to the first. Farther down the vertical, he drew the short bottom bar. On a slant.

Bottom line.

The bottom line on the Russian cross represented suffering.

What do you want me to see that has to stay hidden from everybody else?

Broker stared at the symbol on the notebook page for a long time. He finished his can of ginger ale and opened another. He reached for a cigar, rolled it lightly in his lips. The phone rang. He reached for it.

“Broker? Dale Halme. I’m at your house.” Halme was a Cook County deputy.

“Hi, Dale, you get in all right?”

“Sitting right here at your kitchen table with one crumbled phone log, shows call information for the eleventh and twelfth of December. Kind of smeared up, but legible.”

“Strawberry jam. Can you make out any calls made between ten and eleven A.M. on the twelfth?”

“Right. Okay. Lessee, there’s one. Made at ten-thirty-three A.M. Short, less than a minute. You want the number?”

“Yeah.” Broker copied it.

“That all?”

“Yep. Thanks, Dale.”

Broker hung up and immediately entered the number. A woman answered. “Barb Luct, East Neighborhoods.”

“Hello, this is Cook County Deputy Phil Broker. I’m down in St. Paul cleaning up some details on the Caren Angland case. You’re familiar…”

“Yes, of course; but you want the City Desk, not Neighborhoods,” she said.

“No, I think I’m in the right place. Did Tom James pick up his calls on this extension?”

“He doesn’t work here anymore,” she said stiffly.

“But this was his phone?”

“Yes, this was his direct line.”

“Thank you, you’ve been very helpful.”

Broker chewed the cigar, was tempted to light it. The FBI had dug into the phone log, determined a call went from Caren’s house to the newspaper. And then they had rested on their shovels. No one took the basic step to verify whether Caren was home.

A ghoulish configuration arose out of Caren’s death and Keith’s silence. Broker had always had a gift for timing, for seeing into people. He moved in step with things, so when life accelerated, became tricky, or monstrous, he didn’t trip.

Whatever came his way, he accepted it at its own speed.

With equanimity, the world produced malignant cancer and beautiful children, like Kit.

These qualities made him a natural for working nights in Vietnam. He’d been the best deep undercover cop in Minnesota. In his time.

If the job was merely charging the Gates of Hell with a bucket of water, send a young dumb guy. But if you needed to penetrate all nine rings, and get down past the sulfur, to the bottom, where Judas Iscariot was buried in the lake of ice-send Broker.

If you can’t send Broker to hell, send Keith.

The second call came as anticlimax.

“Broker? Yeah, J.T.I checked the phone logs with Dispatch.

Keith signed out to his home number between ten A.M. and noon on December twelfth. And the feds never ran a tap on his home line.”

“Thanks, J.T., and ah…”

“Yeah, yeah; we never talked. So long, partner.” Captain Merryweather hung up.

Broker placed the phone back on the cradle and rubbed his eyes. Then he studied the Russian cross he’d drawn on the notebook page. Remembered Keith, holding up his left hand-and now he thought: as if the wounds, the tattoo, the rings, were a shrine he kept to Caren. Broker said it out loud, “Caren didn’t call James. You did. You crazy sonofabitch, you’re… working.”

And it got all fucked up.

50

Broker only had one move. He called Ida Rain.

“Is this business or pleasure?” she asked in a wry tone.

Broker caught her still at work.

“If you’ve something for me, I have something for you,”

he said, being deliberately coy. As he spoke, he wrote in the notebook, under the Russian cross-Question: Help me?

Answer: Find James. Tongue story!

She answered with wry ambiguity, “Gee, and we’ve only just met.”

“You’ll love it, what I’ve got,” he predicted.

“I will, huh? Give me a hint?”