FOUR HOURS LATER I was standing in my kitchen, rinsing the remnants of a bowl of chili into the sink, and talking on the phone with Lammy’s lawyer, a very irate Renata Carroway.
“Hey, slow down,” I said, as soon as Renata paused for breath. “That’s a prosecutor’s typical bullshit threat, and you know it.”
“Call it whatever you want, damn it. But the state’s attorney calls it ‘witness intimidation.’ Claims he’s got four witnesses who’ll testify that you, acting on behalf of Lambert Fleming, barged into property that was clearly marked ‘closed,’ refused to leave when asked, then shouted obscenties and threats against Steve and Patricia Connolly if they don’t, quote, ‘leave Fleming alone.’ He says if anything like that happens again, he’ll charge both you and my client with intimidation of—”
“I heard you the first time. But who is this state’s attorney, anyway?” I stuck the bowl in the cupboard over the sink. “Somebody you can halfway trust?”
“Are you kidding? His name’s Cletus Heffernan, and he’s a full-blown, first-class, certifiable—”
“Asshole?” I tried.
“I was going to say Nazi.”
“Whatever. So … a guy like that, we know he’s bluffing. Three reasons. First, if he thought they’d stick, he’d have filed his charges without wasting time talking to you. Second, neither you nor Lammy has given me any authority to act on Lammy’s behalf. I’m the one paying your fee, but you have no control over what I do. Fact is, you work for me, come to think of—”
“Wrong. Who pays my fee makes no difference, and you know it. I work only for my client.” She paused. “But you’re right about the control part. It’s pretty clear even you don’t have much control over what you do. Anyway, I’ve warned you. Now I have to hang up, because there’s—”
“Wait. There’s a third reason we know Heffernan’s bluffing, and—”
“Good-bye.”
Renata hung up, but I told the phone anyway. “The third reason,” I said, “is that there were five witnesses at Melba’s, not four.”
I dropped two empty beer bottles in the orange recycling bin outside my kitchen door at the top of the back stairs. The Lady was working on improving my dietary habits, so the homemade chili she’d sent over—five quarts of it, frozen, in plastic containers—was vegetarian. I’d added way too many hot peppers, trying to give it some flavor, which had made that second beer a necessity. But I’d finished one whole quart of the chili. For that I deserved a reward.
So I popped the top off a third bottle of Berghoff, thinking maybe I should throw out the rest of the chili—for the sake of my liver. Instead, I called the Lady.
“Could you use a gallon of your vegetarian chili back?” I asked, when she came on the line.
“Why certainly we can. But I was rather hoping you’d learn to like it, Malachy.”
Malachy. The Lady always says Malachy.
Lady Helene Bower, the widow of the late Richard Bower, who’d been a lord of the British Empire—or a knight maybe, I never got it straight—never calls me Mal. Her upbringing makes using nicknames uncomfortable for her and, as far as I can tell, she simply doesn’t want to waste the effort trying. Not that the Lady can’t change. For example, most people, even after I correct them, keep right on pronouncing my name so the last syllable rhymes with “sky.” But just one mention to the Lady that it rhymes with “key,” and she never made the mistake again. I told her once—when she was being especially annoying about something—that it amazed me how quickly she’d made that switch, given how slow she is to change sometimes. “Oh,” she’d said, “I just rhymed Malachy with smart-alecky … and never forgot.” She’d said it with such a straight face, I couldn’t—
“… far too much red meat,” the Lady was saying on the phone. Then, “Malachy? Are you there?”
“Oh. Yes. I guess my mind was wandering. Anyway, I just called to tell you I’m trying to help Lambert Fleming.”
“That’s nice,” she said, “if that’s what you want to do.”
“Well, you sent me the newspaper clipping. So that’s what you think I should do, isn’t it, Helene?” People only call her “the Lady” when she’s not around, because she insists on being called “Helene” in person. I never said she was any more consistent than the rest of us.
“I don’t really have an opinion,” she said, “except that I believe unresolved issues such as that can often—”
“What unresolved—” I started, but then thought better of it. “The point is I’ll do what I can for Lammy, but I have a feeling I might regret getting involved.”
“From what I saw in the papers,” she said, “I’d be surprised if you don’t come to regret it very much—in the short run. But you may eventually find you’re glad you did—in the long run.”
I promised to deliver the rest of the chili back to her, and we said good-bye. I knew she’d want to spend the evening meeting with some of the battered, abused women who live with her, or in one of her other homes.
I took a long pull on the Berghoff and opened the refrigerator. Except for the beer on the bottom shelf, it looked pretty barren in there, with margarine and mustard and a package of generic bologna pretty much covering the food supply. But there were also two twenty-six-ounce cans of coffee. I took the opened one over to the counter by the coffeemaker.
The Lady’s house is just a little north of Northwestern University’s Evanston campus. My wife, Cass, and I helped her find it, back when the Lady decided there was nothing for her to go back home to in England. It’s a mansion, really. And as you drive in, up a curving, very classy crushed-stone drive, there’s a long garage with six sets of very classy folding doors, with windows. The doors had been built tall enough to accommodate carriages in an earlier era. The garage has a not-very-classy second-floor apartment that Cass and I leased from the Lady and called our “coach house.”
From the coach house kitchen windows I could see Lake Michigan as I measured out the Folgers, because the moon was up and it was winter and the leaves had abandoned all the tall oaks and maples between me and the shoreline. The moon, the lake, the leafless trees—even the Krups coffeemaker she’d gotten for ten bucks at a garage sale—all urged me to think about Cass. But thoughts such as those weren’t helpful, because I hadn’t seen or heard from Cass for far too long just then.
So I thought about the Lady, and how odd it seemed that not everyone liked her—at least until they got to know her well. They’d start out suspicious anyway, thinking she sounded too good to be true. Then, at first meeting, she seemed so … well … so British. Stiff, maybe. But the Lady simply was the way she was, and it never seemed to occur to her to care very much anymore about what people thought of her.
As for me, I liked her—very much. I’d given up trying to explain the Lady without sounding sentimental, but to me she was like an eccentric, lovable aunt—often irritating, impossible to ignore. At any rate, she was right about things more often than it was comfortable to admit.
I programmed the timer to start my morning coffee, hoping the Lady was right this time and that I’d be glad about trying to help Lammy in the long run.
The phone rang.
The caller identified herself as a trauma unit social worker, and wasn’t far into her message before I canceled the timer and started the coffee brewing right away. The long run would have to take care of itself.
The short run had just taken a sharp turn down a very steep hill.