Red Hot Lies. Laura Caldwell
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on his way,” I kept saying to no one in particular, starting to doubt my own words with each second. Had he gotten held up with some emergency with Forester’s work? It was strange for him not to text me and let me know what was happening.
I went to the bathroom, stood at the counter and called Sam’s cell. It went to voice mail.
Q was someone I turned to for help with everything, not just work, so I called him to see if he had any ideas.
I’d been lucky enough to find Q while he was night staff at Baltimore & Brown doing word processing for attorneys, like me, who worked too much and too late. He had simply wanted to make some money until he could figure out what he should do with his life, having realized that his acting career wasn’t exactly taking off. He was conscientious and meticulous, and as soon as he’d handled a few projects for me, I begged him to become my assistant. Yes, he’d be working for someone slightly younger, I told him, and yes, maybe “legal assistant” wasn’t the day job he’d always dreamed of, but I’d get him as much money as I could, I’d let him go on auditions anytime he wanted and we’d have a blast. I told him that I needed him. Desperately. At the time, I was twenty-six. Only a year and half out of law school, and suddenly I’d found myself handling a large chunk of the legal work for Pickett Enterprises—and I knew I was in way over my head.
Q finally caved, and now, three years later, he was, as Sam always joked, my “work husband,” a husband who could and would always make things better.
But oddly, Q’s phone didn’t ring either and went straight to voice mail.
I went back into the dining room and sat staring at my engagement ring, while the speakers droned on. I tried to figure out when it had happened—when the feeling had started that the wedding was getting away from us, didn’t seem like us anymore. I had to talk to Sam about it. So where was he?
Whenever a dinner course was cleared, my eyes darted to my lap, where my cell phone sat, and I stared at the empty display. I texted him a few more times. Again, nothing. Something was wrong.
The desserts—glazed pears that were better suited for a Gerber jar—were served, but I pushed them away.
When the dinner ended I said goodbye to Faith and the rest of the table, then I left and tramped down the stairway that was lined with an eclectic, expensive array of oil paintings. Once in the lobby of the club, I called Q again, but again it went right to voice mail. I tried Sam’s cell phone … and his office … and his apartment number. Nothing.
I jammed the phone in my purse and wondered whether to keep being worried about Sam or move to pissed-off mode. This no-show was completely unlike him. In fact, he’d never done something this inconsiderate, this out of character, so my usual repertoire of fiancé-management techniques seemed inappropriate.
I walked back to my office, through the mostly empty Loop, now lacking its daytime vitality. I found my silver Vespa parked behind the building. My mom had gotten me started on scooters when I was sixteen. We didn’t need a car in the city, and yet she constantly worried about me waiting at public bus stops and El stations. I’d used the scooter through college and bought a new one during law school. I thought that when I started practicing law I’d get rid of it. But then gas prices skyrocketed, and there was something about driving the Vespa I found not only convenient and energy saving, but cathartic. After a day spent in the stale stratosphere of the law firm, I liked the fresh air on my face, the feel of movement, of getting somewhere, sooner than later.
I got on the Vespa and pointed it in the direction of Sam’s office. There was little traffic, so I was able to floor it up LaSalle Street. The dazzling lights of office buildings and restaurants bled past me into streams of colors. The wind tore through my hair, causing strands of orange curls to flick against my eyes and cheeks. I tried not to think of Sam. Instead, I let myself think how grateful I was that Illinois had no helmet law and, as a result, I could let my ears and my head fill up with the rumble and roar of city life.
In the lobby of Sam’s building the security guard called upstairs, at my request, and said no one was answering. Everyone had gone for the night.
“Can I look at the log to see when he signed out?” Sam had told me about how the security in his building was woefully out of date. To make up for it, the building required every person, even employees, to sign in and out each time they left or entered.
The guard, an overweight, middle-aged man with a drooping mustache, shook his head. “Sorry. No one can see the log.”
“Sure, sure.” I flipped my hair over my shoulder. “How do you like the Bears this year?”
The guard waved a hand. “Ah, shit, that kid they got as quarterback doesn’t even have gonads yet. We need somebody good.”
“Somebody like McMahon?” Most Chicagoans had never emotionally recovered from the beauty of the Bears’ mid-eighties victory in the Super Bowl. A reminder of such beauty was a guaranteed way to become best friends with anyone over forty who lived within a sixty-mile radius of Soldier Field. Name-drop a player from the ‘85 team to these guys and they were putty in your hands.
“Exactly!” the guard said.
“And they need a moral leader. Somebody like Singletary.” At this point I was just spouting names I remembered from seeing the Super Bowl Shuffle video after we moved to Chicago.
“Right! Shit, that’s exactly what they need.”
“My fiancé and I are big Bears fans. He was at Soldier Field the day Payton broke the rushing record.”
The guard’s eyes narrowed. “You kidding me?”
“No.” At the time, Sam had only been a kid, visiting a distant relative in Chicago, but he remembered it vividly.
“Wow,” the guard said in a hushed, reverent tone. “Wow.”
“Yeah, I gotta find him.” I straightened up. “Can you check that log and just tell me when he left?”
The guard eyed me. Then he put the logbook on the counter, swung it around and pointed to an entry at the top of the page. There, Sam had signed out of the office ten minutes before I’d seen him at Cassandra’s.
I looked up at the guard. “And he didn’t come back?”
He shook his head then retracted the book.
“Thanks.”
“Sure thing. Go Bears.”
“Go Bears,” I answered and left.
I called Sam’s apartment, then mine. No answer at either. I started my Vespa, but I wasn’t sure where I should go. What was I supposed to do now? Sam, where are you?
I called my best friend, Maggie, but only got her voice mail. Where in the hell was everyone?
As I clicked the Off button, my phone rang. I felt a tiny bit of relief rupture my worry. But it was a Chicago number I didn’t recognize.
“Hello?”
“Izzy, it’s Shane.”
“Oh. Hi, Shane.” Forester’s son rarely called me, but then maybe Sam was out with him for some reason. God, let it be as easy as that.
“Izzy,” Shane said. He seemed to choke, then I heard a snuffle. “My dad is dead.”
6
The first time I spoke to Forester I’d been out of law school for eleven months. After living the student life, with natural built-in breaks of a week here, two months there, I had struggled to get my body and mind on what Grady, my friend at work, and I called the coal-miner’s schedule. To us, it seemed that we labored as hard as coal miners with only a tiny light to illuminate the work ahead of us. As first-years, we were clueless about the law. We were given projects in piecemeal fashion, we worked until the wee hours to finish them, and then we turned them over to demanding partners, crossing