Obviously, the elderly woman expected the clerk to make some sort of fuss.
The clerk just shrugged wide, sloping shoulders. 'Oh. That's nice.'
The old ladies exchanged glances of disappointment.
'Where's Molly today?' the second one said, obviously implying that Molly was more their type.
'She was awake all night pukin' her guts up,' the clerk informed them crudely. 'Musta picked up the flu. Anyway, they called me at home this morning at six-thirty, if you can believe it. My husband was really pissed. This is his day off.'
The prim ladies looked at each other again and sort of shook their heads.
'Vulgar,' Cini could hear them saying. 'So vulgar.'
She felt sorry for the old ladies. The world was such a harsh place these days.
The ladies went out, the tinkling bell announcing their exit.
'I hope I never live to get all pruned-up like that. Yer skin hangin' down in bags 'n stuff. So how can I help you?'
Memories of the bad old days were coming back to Cini now. To an overeater, a Fanny Farmer store is just like a bar to an alcoholic.
She inhaled the various aromas of the rich, dark chocolates. Her eyes scanned row after row of chocolate delicacy.
'You hear me? I said so how can I help you?'
Cini said, 'I want two pounds of those and two pounds of those and two pounds of those.'
The woman whistled. 'You know how much that's gonna cost you? Especially the ones with the pecans?'
'I have plenty of money, if that's what you're worried about,' Cini said. Then, remembering how the clerk had treated the old ladies, she said, 'Anyway, my finances are none of your fucking business.'
The woman looked stunned.
A quiet upper-class girl like Cini, using language like that?
Cini had never spoken to anybody in her life like that. She knew she owed her mood to the terrible demands her body was putting on her.
She thought about apologizing but reminded herself of the bored and abusive tone the clerk had taken with the women.
'And I don't want to wait around all fucking day, either,' Cini said.
The clerk set immediately to work, seeming to be at least a trifle leery of Cini's mental state.
As well she should.
The parking lot was a drab wind tunnel. Cini made her way back to her car clutching the Fanny Farmer bag to her chest, the way she would carry something invaluable and holy.
When she got in the car and turned the key, the WGN news came on. The announcer said, 'Chicagoans are still expressing shock that one of their own most prominent advertising executives was stabbed to death in his Loop office sometime last night.'
She should go to the police.
She should tell them what she saw.
She should be a good citizen.
She put the car in gear and drove off.
In less than half a mile, she had eaten one third of the Fanny Farmer chocolate-covered turtles. The expensive ones with the pecans.
CHAPTER 51
'Mitch Ayers, please.'
'I'm sorry, miss. He's not in at the moment.'
'All right. Thank you.'
'Any message?'
'Just tell him to call Jill as soon as he hears anything.'
'Jill,' the detective repeated. 'Call ASAP when you hear anything. Got it.'
'Thank you.'
'My pleasure.'
CHAPTER 52
An after-dinner speaker once noted that Arthur K. Halliwell was not 'a citizen of the United States, he is a citizen of Chicago.' The audience, knowing exactly what he meant, broke into both laughter and applause.
While other firms had opened branches in Washington, DC to take advantage of the national political set, and others still wanted New York with its international flavor, Halliwell had been content to rule Chicago. Though a patrician from a long line of patricians the Wrigleys, the Palmers and the McCormicks had attended many of his birthday parties Halliwell had always found the vulgarity of Chicago history heady and exhilarating.
And for this reason, many of the city's most powerful players trusted him in the way one would a father confessor. There was no problem Arthur K. Halliwell could not solve; no secret Arthur K. Halliwell would not keep. When a recent Mayor of this city found himself in trouble with a pregnant nineteen-year-old campaign worker who was thinking about going to the press, Arthur sent the young woman a copy of her father's police records on a morals charge (exposing himself to a twelve-year-old girl in 1967) on which he scrawled an anonymous note: 'Would you like to see this in the press?' The young woman came to her senses. She aborted the child.
While the Arthur K. Halliwell law firm, which overlooked the city from its sixty-seventh-floor eyrie, ostensibly handled business and corporate matters for its clients, it was really a Big Brother program for the city's elite. Uncle Walter, as some chose to call him, was never more than a phone call away. As for Uncle Walter himself, he rather enjoyed playing God. He just wished that he were a little more powerful, as powerful as many of his clients imagined him to be but that was probably a normal divine failing, wasn't it? Even gods wanted things a little nicer for themselves.
The offices reflected the firm's status of dignified wealth, with furnishings that lent the air of a sumptuous and elegant home. Beautiful as the secretaries were Walter knew that both men and women appreciated beautiful, elegant women they took care to dress as conservatively as the lawyers themselves, usually in corporate gray or blue. And as for the lawyers no associate ever worked harder than at Uncle Walter's firm. The associate period generally lasted five years, and less than thirty per cent passed muster. Many simply collapsed from the exhaustion of constant eighteen-hour days and enough rules to make Marine boot camp look like Easy Street. If you complained, you always got the same time-honed anecdote about how Arthur K. Halliwell himself, who'd begun life as a trial lawyer, had lost his first fourteen cases and was dismissed by all the legal wags in the city as a lightweight. But he stayed the course and went on to win more than 1,100 cases in a row. Imagine the hours he'd put in. Imagine the sacrifices he'd made to family and frivolity. How could an associate demand any less of himself? In forty-three years, no associate had ever found a way to argue with that.
Halliwell thought of all this as he sat in his office that day. He did not usually engage in this kind of nostalgia recalling his rise to prominence but on mornings when his arthritis was acting up, he had no choice but to recall better days in order to get through the bad ones.
He paced the office now everything cherry wood with leather, brass-studded furnishings that had clawed ball feet and carved legs hobbled slightly by the arthritis that had lately inhibited his left knee, trying to appreciate his new framed map of the Old World (his taste in art came from his wife, to whom he had been unutterably faithful for fifty-one years), and his view of Lake Michigan. On a sunny day such as this one, he always wanted to start his life over, live it not in the hushed mahogany reverence of boardrooms but aboard the tramp steamers and dogsleds of the Jack London stories he'd enjoyed so much as a boy. So many years gone by so quickly…
