The Peninsula Hotel stood in all its limestone decadence on East Superior Street, just off the more exclusive section of Michigan Avenue. Tiffany occupied a couple of floors of the same building to the east, and on its western border sat a posh French café aptly named Pierrot Gourmet. When my mother was alive, her sister, Delilah, would visit us once a year, and despite there being plenty of guest bedrooms in our house, Aunt Delilah always insisted on staying at what she regaled as one of the finest hotels in the country. The only one she liked more was the Peninsula in New York City, and that was because she said it was smaller and offered a more intimate experience.
I took the elevator to the fourth-floor Shanghai Terrace, situated outside on the eastern edge of the building with a breathtaking view of the iconic Water Tower building blocks away. Large planters and fresh flowers transformed the space into a Chinese oasis, with red umbrellas and large bronze sculptures dotting the landscape. No more than half of the tables were occupied. I heard my name and turned toward two women seated at a nearby table. One of them wore a turquoise top and oversized sunglasses. She waved me over. I was a little confused at first, because I wasn’t expecting there to be three of us. They both stood as I approached. Emily Kantor was taller than her brother, extremely fit, and attractive in a natural way. Her arms were well-toned and her handshake firm.
“Thanks for joining me on such short notice,” she said. “Meet my partner, Cecily.”
Cecily and I shook hands. She too was tall, with long black hair and olive skin. Her eyes were topaz blue, the same color as her painted nails. She wore a fitted dress that made it very clear she was no stranger to exercise. She had a distinctively South American look about her.
“CC and I are heading back home to Montana tomorrow morning, but I wanted to talk to you before we left,” Emily said.
“I’ve only been to Montana once,” I said.
“How long ago?”
“Exactly twenty-five years ago, almost to the month.”
“How is your memory so precise?”
“My father was turning fifty, and before that happened, he had set a goal of fifty before fifty. He wanted to have visited all fifty states before his fiftieth birthday. He had four left. Both Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana. Big Sky Country was the last state we visited. I don’t remember much about it, other than I had never seen so much open land in my life. Nothing but mountains and wide-open space.”
“That’s why we live there,” Emily said. “No smog, no congestion. I haven’t heard a horn or a siren in ten years. The noises we hear are the winds blowing across the plains.”
“And the animals at night,” Cecily chimed in. “The rumbling of the bison or the coyotes howling.”
Emily placed her hands on Cecily’s, and they smiled at each other.
“Montana is a long way from Chicago,” I said.
“Long enough,” Emily said. “Not too close, not too far. Just right.”
“How did the two of you decide on Montana?” I asked.
“Emily was already living there,” Cecily said. “We were friends at Cal Berkeley. Reconnected after grad school. She invited me to come out for a weekend. I never left.”
“I always wanted a place in Montana,” Emily said. “Growing up under the microscope of Chicago, I felt so closed in and restricted. The pressure was constant, having to go to the right parties and hang around the right crowd. It was exhausting. Even at a young age, I knew that wasn’t how I wanted to live. I was looking through a magazine one day and read this story about a family that had acquired a lot of land in Montana, because they loved how open it was and wanted to prevent developers from building on it. This family lived in New York City, but they wanted to be able to escape outdoors, so they bought hundreds of acres and built a working ranch. I cashed in some of my stock and did the same thing.”
The waiter brought over several plates of dim sum and announced the barbecued pork buns, shrimp spring rolls, spicy beef pot stickers, and vegetable dumplings. I reached for the barbecued pork buns and vegetable dumplings.
“So, is it true what they say about Montana and fishing?” I asked. “It’s illegal for married women to fish alone on Sundays and for unmarried women to fish alone at any time?”
Emily rolled her eyes. “It’s true. It’s arcane. It’s ridiculous. And it’s something we’re working on getting changed.”
“Do you fish?” I asked.
“All the time,” she said. “Any day of the week and with whomever I choose, and I dare someone to say or do anything about it.”
Cecily leaned in and kissed Emily on the cheek.
“I pity the game warden who makes the mistake of approaching you,” I said.
“And so do I.” Emily smiled.
We munched on the dim sum and washed it down with orange-infused iced tea and cucumber-and-lime water coolers.
“You said there was something you felt I needed to know about the investigation into your father’s death,” I said.
“There is,” Emily said. “Simon and I have the same parents, but we couldn’t be any more different.”
“I kinda figured that out already,” I said, smiling.
“I love my brother, but there are many things about him that I don’t love.”
“Such as?”
“His obsession with money. And it’s hard to solely blame Simon, because he got a lot of that from my father. I took after my mother. She grew up a poor Jewish girl in Brooklyn, New York. Money was never important to her. We had it. She enjoyed what it afforded us, but she would have been just as happy had we not had any of it. She always taught us that our last name was something we inherited, not something we earned. She also reminded us that happiness should never be associated with things that others controlled. It’s important to find it through kindness and personal exploration into our purpose. Simon wants to find out what happened to our father because there’s a huge price tag on the outcome. I want to find out what happened because I think he was being taken advantage of, and that pisses me the hell off.”
“Who do you think was taking advantage of him?”
“Who wasn’t?” she said. “My father was a great businessman who made a lot of money. But just because you’re great in business doesn’t mean you’re also great in making the best decisions in your personal life. I think my father became a target of young women who knew he was an easy mark.”
“Do you have any proof of this?” I asked.
“Unfortunately, I don’t.”
“Do you have any names of the women?”
“I don’t, but it shouldn’t be difficult for a good detective like yourself to find out who they were.”
“Any idea where I might start?”
Emily reached into her handbag sitting on the chair next to her, pulled out a folded piece of paper, and handed it to me. “That’s the number for Bernadette Langstrom. She’s been the head caretaker of our house in the Bahamas for the last twenty years. She first called me a little more than a year ago to tell me of her concerns.”
“What were they?”
“That my father was hosting a new crowd at the house that came and went as they pleased, people that never would’ve been allowed access had my mother still been alive.”
“Did she say what they were doing that made her so suspicious?”
“According to her sources on the island, they were doing lots of drugs and having sex parties, two things I had never known my father to be involved with. After the death of my mother, my father became a man I didn’t know.”