Jennifer Gale, as she was known to her television viewers, had come to Rivertown to report the arrest of one of its municipal lizards. Our zoning commissioner, Elvis Derbil, had been caught slapping fake labels on bottles of out-of-date salad dressing, and the symmetry of that was undeniable for television. His was an oily scheme, altering an oily product in an oily town.
Being a good reporter, she’d sought to brighten the odd story with a minute-long color piece on the oddball – me – who lived in a turret across the lawn from city hall. She’d dropped that notion when she’d discovered I was working on a case for one of Chicago’s most prominent socialites. She’d attached herself to my investigation like a limpet mine and led us, on a hot July day, to a fly-covered corpse in a trailer off a dune in Indiana. And that had led to an almost supercharged night back at my turret. But she had been coming off the trauma of her reporter husband’s death in the Middle East and I was descending from the flameout of my marriage to Amanda Phelps. Our ghosts, those who haunted us – hers dead, mine so very alive – had pulled us back.
Jenny left Chicago for better assignments in San Francisco and we didn’t see each other for months. She remained transfixed, though, by the crookedness in Rivertown and when she got tipped off to a Chicago-based Russian gang’s plan to slip their fingers around the greasy necks in Rivertown she took a leave and returned to Illinois, hoping for a career-raising series of reports on new sorts of mob crime in America. Still tethered by our ghosts, we reconnected, warily at first. And then less so.
She returned to San Francisco. I returned to scrambling for insurance company work or, absent that, rounding up semi-coherent sorority alumni to inhale again the vapors of old times.
And I was returned, too, to the periphery of my ex-wife Amanda’s new world.
Her father, Wendell Phelps, had run Chicago’s largest electric utility. Later in his life, he’d sought to build a bridge to the daughter he’d ignored when she was growing up. He’d enticed her to quit teaching at the Art Institute and instead manage big-buck philanthropy through his company. It was an offer to do much good, and one no conscientious person could refuse.
Mindful of his majority stock position in the utility, the company’s need for a ready successor as CEO and her status as his only heir, he’d enticed her to enter his boardrooms as well. It was a prudent, business-like preparation for when the time came.
The time came too soon. Wendell Phelps died. The circumstances of it had brought Amanda and me closer together, and then even more so as she became one of Chicago’s wealthiest and most powerful people. We talked on the phone two or three times each week and shared dinner, usually on Thursday evenings. At first it was business – her business – and her splashdown into Wendell’s Machiavellian world of corporate politics. But then, little by little, we began to let our past return. We began reminiscing over the little things we’d shared in our brief marriage. There’d been much good in those days.
Amanda was, and would always be, my ghost.
I called Jenny two hours north of Los Angeles. ‘Care to have dinner?’ I inquired.
‘Oooh … you’re here?’ She’d dropped her voice to an exaggerated seductress level.
‘Almost,’ I said, adding, ‘I’m on my way to Oregon,’ because I wanted the call to feel more casual.
‘I’m on the TV this afternoon at five. Big expose: someone’s been juicing up pumpkins, making them bigger and brighter on a supposedly organic farm. Say six o’clock?’ She named a restaurant close to her apartment.
I told her that would be just about right, because at the time I believed it.