Leo called me at seven the next morning, out of breath and half out of his mind. He was yelling something about the Argus-Observer’s website. The Argus-Observer was the cheesiest of Chicago’s gossip rags and the fastest at reporting the city’s most torrid news.
‘Speak slowly,’ I said. I was half out of my mind, too, but it was from worrying most of the night that the corpse stuffed in my Jeep had been my client and that I wouldn’t figure out who was coming at me until it was too late.
‘The body they found in the Willahock …’
‘A woman,’ I said. I stuck legs into jeans, arms into a sweatshirt and beat it down barefoot to the second floor to switch on my computer. ‘They have a name?’
He spoke a name too fast for me to understand.
‘Who?’ I asked.
‘Marilyn Paul.’
I didn’t know the name. I told him I’d call him back in an hour. The Argus-Observer website had come up. In its usual big point type, the headline screamed loud: BAGGED BABE BOBBER SLASHED!
Underneath was a grainy black-and-white photo of the dam and beside it Rivertown’s own Benny Fittle lounging against the hood of a police cruiser. The picture had been taken when the body was first discovered, when it was still daylight and there were still doughnuts. His mouth was closed but his cheeks bulged; he’d been snapped mid-chew. Surprisingly often, the Argus-Observer’s photographer caught the essence of any given moment.
The short paragraph that followed was written in the Argus-Observer’s typical, terse, details-to-follow style. The sheriff’s police theorized that Marilyn Paul, fifty-four and wrapped in a large black plastic bag, had been dumped into the river somewhere east of the Rivertown dam and was carried downstream. The police were investigating. The county’s medical examiner was examining. Cause of death was preliminarily thought to have been from a slashed throat. Details to follow.
Google had fourteen listings for Marilyn Paul. Only the Argus-Observer reported her death, which wasn’t surprising since Chicago’s other news sites insisted on double-checking stories for accuracy before posting them. The other thirteen were old mentions of her full-time, professional political work for the Democratic Party, most memorably as a call center manager during the Illinois gubernatorial campaign that elected the mop-haired jackass who was now doing time in a federal prison.
There was one picture of her, taken at a gathering of former workers from that campaign. Two dozen of them, loyal Democrats to a fault, had drafted a letter requesting leniency at an appeal of the mop-head’s sentence. The men were done up well in conservative dark business suits and reasonable neckwear. The woman were done up even better, in bright dresses and glittering jewelry. By the tight look on most of the faces, the event had the frivolity of a wake.
Marilyn Paul was round-faced and had brown, softly spiked hair. She wore a blue business suit, a white blouse, no jewelry and projected no nonsense. She was the only attendee who had not forced a smile for the camera.
I tried to imagine a gray wig, lots of thick makeup, tinted large glasses and cheeks puffed with cotton. It could have been her in that day-rate office. Or it could have been any other woman, disguised just as heavily, backlit so blindingly in such a bright sun.
What I couldn’t imagine was why such a woman would have obscured her identity to hire me.
And whether someone had wanted to kill her for that.