Peterson Sportswear’s head office is in a building that would look magnificently ornate in any other context, but appears almost self-effacing when set a hundred yards up North Michigan Avenue from the white terracotta facade and French Renaissance ornamentation of the Wrigley Building. With the Tribune Tower glittering like a Gothic cathedral across the street, it’s hard for a visitor not to stop and stare in awe at the architectural riches of the Magnificent Mile. Unless he’s Danny Brogan, in which case he just pays the cab driver and walks into the lobby of the Ainslie Building and tells the guard at the desk he has an appointment with Gene Peterson. He has to show ID, and sign in, and he gets a clip-on badge to wear, and he walks through a metal-detector gate and takes the glass elevator to the thirty-seventh floor, soaring above the Chicago River. He has already called ahead, of course. He refused to be deflected by his lack of an appointment. ‘Just tell Gene it’s Danny Brogan. It’s about Jackie Bradberry. He’ll agree to see me,’ he said, and of course, Gene did. And here he is, standing inside double doors by the Peterson Sportswear reception desk as Danny comes out of the elevator, arms extended, face all smiles. Danny takes the embrace and returns it. Even now, with all he knows, with all he has to say, he can’t go on the attack straight away. It’s not how he rolls, and it seems like it never will be. After all, Gene is the man who blackmailed him, who helped to ruin him, who lied to him all these years, and still he stands, smiling like a fool. Danny Brogan: if not now, when?
‘How are you, Danny? Good to see you, man,’ Gene says, beaming, no flicker of unease in his expression, and stands back, hands raised in Danny’s direction like a fond uncle, gesturing expansively, including the girls at reception in the fun.
‘Sharp as ever, I gotta say. Peterson Sportswear will never make a dime out of this man; probably wears a neck tie to the gym. No one rocks a three-piece suit like my friend Danny Brogan. It’s Cary Grant here – ask your mother, girls.’
And it’s true. Before Danny went to see Dave over on West Wacker, he changed in the underground parking lot from dove- to charcoal-gray wool, fresh white shirt, black knit silk tie. It doesn’t come without effort, but it’s not affectation, it’s … for better or worse, it’s at the core of who he is. Women understood this better than men, although not Claire, who doesn’t seem to care what she wears, maybe because she has the gift of looking good in anything.
Danny follows Gene down a carpet-tiled, fluorescent-lit corridor. Along the partition wall is a succession of functional modular offices with glass panels in the doors and along the tops of the walls. At the end, a similar door gives on to a slightly larger, strictly non-luxurious room, into which Danny follows Gene. There’s a desk and a few chairs, a glass and to one side, a costume rail with all manner of brightly colored sportswear. It could be a mobile trailer on a construction site.
‘The days of the palatial office are done,’ Gene says as they sit, Danny in front of the desk, Gene to one side of it, perched on the edge. ‘Don’t mistake it for your living room. Not with this employer at any rate. Do your job and go home, that’s what everyone wants. Certainly what I want.’
Gene looks at Danny and smiles a not entirely convincing smile.
‘What can I do for you, Dan? Jackie Bradberry? Jesus. Haven’t thought about that in a long time.’
‘No? I think about it a lot, Gene. As you know.’
‘As I know? I don’t know. Jesus, first Ralph, then you. What is this all about? The past is the past. Over. You’ve got kids, right, two girls, Barbara and, and, Irene, am I right? And so do I. And the duty we owe them is, not to turn into sad old men, drinking to days gone by, thinking the past outshines the present. We’ve got to live in the future, Dan.’
‘Easy for you to say,’ Danny says, his tone sour.
‘Easy for you to say, too, and that’s what you did say, last time we met. Brogan’s Bar and Grill survives and thrives, two beautiful daughters, lovely wife, no doubt in the marriage there’s this and that, what marriage doesn’t have its interesting moments, its phases, its sequences, but hey. Compared to a lot of people … compared to Ralph, you’re a lucky man. Am I wrong?’
‘Yes, you are wrong. I am lucky, compared to Ralph, but then again, so is everyone. But otherwise, I am not lucky.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I lost two hundred and fifty-five thousand dollars. Because I am days, weeks away from ruin. Because someone is trying to destroy my life. And that someone, Gene Peterson, my old friend, that someone is you.’
Gene, with his square jaw, his sandy cowlick hair gelled into a helmet of submission, with his khakis and deck shoes and navy blue blazer, Gene with his golf-club ease and his self-made drive, says: ‘Are you fucking kidding me? Last thing I remember, I got you into Jonathan Glatt, you know how hard it was to get into that fund?’
‘And see what happened?’
‘Didn’t happen to us,’ Gene says, shrugging.
‘It happened to me. You didn’t tell me I needed to get out.’
‘Of course I did.’
‘No, you didn’t. You told Ralph, and Dave, but not me.’
‘Yes I did, I sent you an email.’
‘I never got an email.’
‘I sent you an email. And you replied.’
‘No,’ Danny says. ‘No, that didn’t happen.’
Gene looks at Danny a second, hard, then stands and beckons him over to his desk, where there is a metallic desktop iMac and a MacBook Pro. Gene flips the MacBook open, double clicks the Mail icon in the dock and, when the mail window appears, types Danny’s name in the search field. There are more than twenty results, stretching back months. Gene clicks on the second from the top, message from Gene Peterson. Subject: Jonathan Glatt. Priority: Urgent. It reads:
Danny, get your money out of Jonathan Glatt’s fund, things are not looking good there, cannot expand but trust me, we had a good run, but now it’s all going to hell. You have about forty-eight hours. Otherwise, you can wave goodbye to the cash. Please acknowledge this email – and act on it now!
All best,
Gene
Danny is shaking his head.
‘I never saw that before,’ he says.
‘Well,’ says Gene, and clicks the top email in the list, message from Danny Brogan. Subject: Re: Jonathan Glatt. The text reads:
Gene – received and understood – I will take steps to get the money out today. Thanks for the warning, you’re a lifesaver.
All best,
Danny
‘I didn’t send that,’ Danny says.
‘You didn’t send it?’
‘I never saw the email you sent me; never sent the reply.’
‘Can you think of anyone who might have? Because someone evidently did.’
Danny considers this, doesn’t want to think about it. It’s Gene. It’s Gene.
‘What about Claire Bradberry?’
‘What about her?’
‘I went to see Jonathan Glatt. And he told me that everyone got out of the fund early, except me. And that there was one other person, on top of the four of us. Claire Bradberry.’
‘Yeah. You keep saying that name, Dan, as if, I don’t know, music is gonna start playing, and I’m suddenly gonna know what it means.’
‘Bradberry.’
‘Oh. You mean, like Jackie. It’s a common enough name, Danny.’
‘But there was just the four of us. I mean, the four of us and her, Claire Bradberry. Did that not make connections in your mind?’
‘Not really.’
‘What else in common do we have?’ Danny says, his voice a little strained, a little hoarse now. Gene looks at him as if he’s volatile material.
‘Well. Many things. We were friends for years after. I haven’t seen much of Dave. But I saw you over this thing, we had dinner, drinks, four, five hours, you didn’t mention the Bradberrys once. And I wasn’t waiting for you to.’
‘What about Ralph?’
‘Well, Ralph … Ralph is who I thought of first when the Glatt thing came up. Poor Ralph needed a helping hand, he seemed a bit lost. And I reckoned, make a bit of money, that’ll give him a lift. And when I thought of him, I thought of you guys too. How it would be nice to see you again. How for old times’ sake, I should spread some good fortune around. God, I’m sorry, Danny, how much did you say, two hundred and fifty K?’
‘Two-five-five. Claire Bradberry. Who is she?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know? Jonathan Glatt said you brought her in.’
‘Yeah, but I don’t know who she is. Ask Dave. She’s a friend of Dave’s.’
‘A friend of Dave’s?’
‘That’s right. He asked if she could be included. I didn’t want to, thought it was a bit cheeky on his part. But I let it go.’
‘A friend of Dave’s,’ Danny repeats, wanting to sound ironic, or skeptical, but unable to process this as anything other than news. He’s come to a halt. A friend of Dave’s? Dave said Gene had slept with Claire in Chicago. Now Gene is saying this Claire Bradberry is a friend of Dave’s. Maybe it is a coincidence. But who was blackmailing him? If it wasn’t one of the guys, who could it have been? And what about the email? That’s pretty irrefutable, Gene definitely sent it. Unless you can fake that kind of thing. But even if you can, is it possible in the ten minutes between Danny calling Gene and his arrival at his office?
‘Sorry, a work thing,’ Gene says, waving a hand above the laptop whose screen has suddenly absorbed his attention.
Danny had three killer blows, or so he thought. Two have failed to find a target. He still has one left.
‘Ralph came to see me.’
‘Oh yeah. To talk about his book? No, he abandoned that, didn’t he? In the event that it had ever really existed in the first place.’
‘He had a, a manuscript – I don’t know if you could call it a book. But he certainly did have a story.’
Gene, clicking away at his keyboard, splutters with laughter.
‘Well, that was Ralph. A day late and a dollar short. Ralph always had a story. Beats me why they hung on to him in that school for as long as they did.’
‘Gene. Can you do that later? Because I want you to look at me now when I’m talking to you.’
Gene looks above his laptop.
‘OK, Dan. I do have some breaking stuff here, but …’
Gene does something involving the sound of keystrokes, and then gives Danny his undivided attention.
‘Shoot.’
‘Ralph told me that … that he’d figured it out, basically. And you know, because I saw Dave Ricks, and Dave Ricks mentioned Ralph’s novel, and I think it wasn’t really a novel at all, it was his account of that night, of Halloween night 1976, thirty-five years ago tonight.’
‘It was the Bicentennial, wasn’t it?’ Gene says, a false smile suddenly appearing on his face, his voice a little loud.
‘I don’t think that mattered to us. Anyway, Ralph would have known immediately what to think of a name like Claire Bradbury. Claire being my wife’s name. But then you know that, don’t you, Gene?’
Silent now, Gene tries to hold Danny’s gaze, breaks it, his eyes flickering to his laptop screen and to whatever else is on his desk.
‘Ralph said we’d all agreed it was me who threw the fire bottle at the wall of the house. At your insistence. He said your voice was the loudest, your memory was the clearest, your opinion the surest. You prevailed. And Ralph went along with it for a while. But something just didn’t sit right with him. It began to niggle away at him. See, Ralph was behind me when I ran into the tree, he had shoved me, to get me out of the blazing skull. And he never saw me throw the fire bottle.’
‘What did Dave say?’ Gene snaps.
‘He said he saw me throw it, but it was clear it was by accident, it was because I was trying to keep my balance. But Ralph—’
‘You know what Dave says, and you know what I say, but the one you want to believe is Ralph, who said, what, let me guess, you didn’t throw it?’
‘He said he went back a year or so ago and got access to the report of the original investigation. There was one fire bottle found on the site. We didn’t bring but four. Ralph said he threw his, after he got me out of the fire. By which time I was unconscious and in no condition to throw anything. He said the other two bottles were thrown then, one by an F and one by a P.’
Gene frowns. ‘An F and a P?’
‘We were the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, remember? Fire, Famine, Pestilence and Plague. I was Fire, Dave was Famine, Ralph was Pestilence, and you were Plague. He remembers yours because as soon as he knew you were a P, that’s what he had to be too. Him being your little shadow. And I remember being Fire, so by a process of elimination, Dave was Famine.’
Gene looks at Danny and then towards the window, his mouth opening and closing as if he is having difficulty breathing. He forms his lips into the shape of a word, but Danny doesn’t let him speak.
‘Ralph said the one who threw the bottle, and it looked quite deliberate, had a P on his shirt. It wasn’t him. So it must have been you.’
A phone rings and Gene answers it. ‘Yes. Yes. All right. I’ll be out now.’ He snaps shut his laptop and rises. ‘Danny, I’m sorry about this, I have to … if you want to wait here, it shouldn’t take long.’
‘Now?’
‘It really can’t wait, I’m afraid. But listen to me: Ralph may have got closer to the truth, but it’s still not the final version. I hope I can help you, Dan. I really do.’
Gene’s phone chimes out again and he puts it to his ear as he leaves the office. There’s the sound of voices down the corridor. Danny wanders across to the desk and opens the laptop. Mail, the email program, is the front window on the screen. The message it opens to has the subject line: DANNY BROGAN WANTED, and in the body of the message, a link that has already been clicked. Danny clicks it himself, and arrives at Madison.com, a news source for the city, to find himself today’s top story.
BOLO FOR BROGAN, runs the headline. The intro goes:
MADISON BAR OWNER WANTED IN CONNECTION WITH TWO MURDERS.
Oh, Christ. That was what Gene was reading. Where has he gone, to get the cops? Danny perches on a chair and peers out through the glass panel at the top of the exterior office wall. He can’t see anything, but he can hear men’s voices, and the crackle and beep sound of what could be police or security two-way radios. Danny leaps off the chair, flings opens the door and looks in the other direction. There’s a door at the end of the corridor. He paces out and tries the handle. It opens on to a small room with a sink and a fridge for making tea and coffee. He hears a heavy tread coming from reception and retreats back into the office. The only thing he can think of is the clothes rail. He stands on the wall side of the heavily laden rail with one end nudging up towards the door and waits. Either it will work or it won’t, he thinks, along with how the fuck did things come to this?
The door opens and Danny sees Gene enter at pace, followed by two uniformed cops. Immediately he rams the clothes rail against the opposite wall, blocking the doorway, with himself on the door side and Gene and the cops on the other. Does he have even ten seconds? He doesn’t think, he just runs, along the corridor, through reception, down a couple of sets of stairs. He’s grabbed some sportswear off the rail and he throws it behind him as he goes, partly because it reminds him of something he’s seen in a movie and partly because it might catch someone in the face or under foot. Go. Go.
Three floors down, he bolts along the corridor in the opposite direction from the tea and coffee room side of the building. He can hear the pounding of heavy cop feet continuing on down the stairs as he goes. There must be a service elevator somewhere in the Ainslie building, and there’s nowhere else for it to be. He sees a pair of swing doors at the end of the corridor, and hears another pair smash open behind him.
‘Hold up or I’ll shoot!’
He’ll shoot? Fuck that. Bluffing. Danny flings a couple baseball shirts in the air behind him and powers on towards the door. A shot rings out. Warning. Bluffing. Fuck it. He’s not stopping. A shot? No. It was a door slam, a furniture crash. And he’s through the doors, and there it is, gray doors and a gray metal meal trolley beside it. He leans on the button, down, down, and the footsteps are getting closer, and the elevator is coming, thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four. As it pings and the doors open, he swings the metal meal trolley across and jams it beneath the handles of the swing doors and makes the service elevator door just as it’s closing and hits the lower-ground-floor button.
As he’s going down, his phone rings. He must have left it on after he called Gene to set up the meet. Well, no sense in turning it off again; he’s been well and truly traced by now. He looks at the screen, and answers. ‘Mrs Brogan?’
‘You remembered. Well done. Mr Brogan.’
‘Did you remember?’
‘All the time.’
‘I was there, Claire. The Allegro Hotel. Room four-three-five?’
‘You were in Chicago?’
‘Just … passing through.’
‘Passing through? What does that mean?’
‘It means … Claire, I know we need to talk, but right now, there are cops after me.’
‘You’re in Gene Peterson’s office, right? I’m in Chicago too, in the Old Town? Can you make it over here? You can get the El, faster than a cab.’
‘What station? I’m on North Mich here.’
‘You’re on North Mich … go north one block to Grand Avenue, it runs under so you’ve got to use the steps, then … west two blocks, no, three, Grand and State. It’s the red line, ride north to Fullerton.’
‘Thank you. I’ve done nothing wrong, Claire.’
‘Neither have I, Danny. Neither have I.’
Danny closes the call as the elevator hits the lower-ground floor. If no one has done anything wrong, just how have they managed to land in so much shit?