The next morning, I called Carolina and asked for help. Her position as the administrative supervisor at the police headquarters in the Bureau of Investigative Services meant she had access to files and information that otherwise would’ve been near impossible for me to access from the outside. She agreed to run Jenny Lee’s license plate number if I agreed to make a sweet potato pie that weekend. I used a recipe that had been handed down from my great-aunt Dora B., who had learned it from her mother and passed it on to her only daughter, who taught it to my mother when she was a little girl.
This spring I had committed to an hour hitting lesson every Friday morning with a man named Eddie “Smooth” McAdoo, who still held the low-round record at Jackson Park at eleven under par. Climbing into his mid-seventies, he didn’t hit the ball as long, but his swing was still a work of art. I was already noticing a difference in my ball flight after just three sessions.
Today we would be working on my short game around the green.
Smooth had me hitting short ten-yard chip shots in the grass when my phone rang. It was Burke.
“Are you close to downtown?” he said.
“Not at all. It’s Friday. I’m out at Marquette Park hitting balls.”
“How do you keep clients when you’re always on the damn golf course?”
“They know about my near-perfect close rate. Can’t say the same for your men.”
“That’s a bullshit comparison, and you know it. You get to handpick your cases. We have to take everything that comes across the radio. Anyway, we just got the labs back. Extremely high levels of MDMA, synthetic cathinones, methylone, and mephedrone.”
“Kantor was popping Molly?”
“According to the ME.”
“That’s a kid’s drug. What’s an old man like Kantor doing popping ecstasy? Who was this guy?”
“Had something else in his system, a sedative called midazolam. Some kind of surgical anesthetic.”
“Had he been in surgery?”
“His family and assistants say he had not. His internist says that he never prescribed him anything like that. No one knows what to make of it.”
Sometimes the mysterious just gets more mysterious until you dig hard enough to make sense of it all. And if you’re lucky, sometimes the answers get tired of hiding and finally show themselves. That, in this business, is the definition of luck. I finished the last fifteen minutes of my lesson, paid Smooth, then jumped into my car. Kantor Textiles occupied the entire thirty-sixth floor of a gleaming skyscraper at 401 North Michigan. After passing through two different layers of security, I was shown to a waiting area adjacent to a row of high-top tables lined with computer monitors. The offices were located in the center, while most of the floor was open space with chairs and meeting areas arranged along the perimeter. There weren’t any walls; rather, everything was glass, and the floor-to-ceiling windows offered the most spectacular panoramic views of the city that I had ever seen. A young woman approached me with a bottle of Evian and offered to take me back.
We walked down toward the other end of the floor and turned into an enormous office whose blinds had been closed. Two identical glass-and-chrome desks sat across from each other. A tall, swarthy young man sat at one desk, and an extremely thin young man who was well on his way to losing most of his hair sat at the other. They were dressed casually in jeans and T-shirts. Both had enormous computer monitors in front of them. They stood and shook my hand. The tall one introduced himself as Javier. The shorter one was Pedro. I took a seat in a chair between the desks. Several framed photographs of Elliott Kantor and various professional athletes hung on the walls between framed, autographed sports jerseys. Another attractive woman knocked on the door, walked in, and dropped a folder on Javier’s desk, then left.
“Nice place to work,” I said. “Everywhere you turn there’s a view.”
“You get used to it,” Javier said, winking.
“I don’t want to take up too much of your time,” I said. “So I’ll get right to it. I read where you both have been with Elliott for ten years.”
“Eleven for me,” Javier said. “Pedro ten.”
“You guys start working right out of high school?” I asked.
“I did,” Javier said. “Pedro did a couple years of college before joining us.”
A phone started ringing, and Pedro pushed a button to silence it.
“How was Elliott as a boss?” I asked.
“The best ever,” Pedro said. “He could be cranky sometimes and talked rough, but he had a great heart and took care of everyone.”
“Did everyone get along with him?”
“Who’s everyone?” Javier asked.
“Here in the office?”
“Absolutely,” Pedro said. “Elliott was like our grandfather. He had his quirks, but that was just him. He liked making money and having fun. He wanted everyone else to have fun also.”
“A real party guy,” I said.
“Party how?” Javier said.
“Party like men party,” I said. “Girls, drinks, lots of laughs. Maybe hit a club now and then.”
They both laughed. “Elliott didn’t go to nightclubs,” Javier said. “He was almost eighty. That wasn’t his scene.”
“What was?” I asked.
“Elliott was a sports nut,” Pedro said. “He worked every day and then went to a game at night. That’s what he liked to do most.”
“Did you guys go with him?”
“Sometimes,” Javier said. “But mostly he took his grandkids or friends in the business. Bulls, Bears, White Sox, Cubs—I love all of ’em, but there are only so many games I can go to.”
“You didn’t mention the Blackhawks,” I said.
“Elliott didn’t like hockey,” Javier said. “He still had season tickets every year. Went to a couple of the games when they were playing for the Stanley Cup. But he bought the tickets mostly to give away to other people.”
“Girlfriends?”
They both smiled.
“Elliott didn’t have girlfriends,” Pedro said. “He had friends.”
I immediately thought of Jenny Lee.
“What kind of friends?” I asked.
“Just because Elliott was old doesn’t mean his eyes didn’t work,” Javier said. “Take any five guys my age, and Elliott had more energy than all of them combined. He was always on the move.”
“I heard that about him,” I said. “Did he have one special friend or maybe a couple?”
“We weren’t involved in Elliott’s social life like that,” Pedro said. “We kept his schedule, ran errands, handled things around here in the office. But the girls and stuff like that? Elliott handled that himself.”
I half believed him.
“Maybe you remember some names of people he bought special gifts for, someone he took to dinner on Valentine’s Day.”
“Elliott didn’t discuss that with us,” Pedro said. “We set up dinners and arranged the plane, but we didn’t get into the names of his guests.”
“He flew them on his plane?”
“He flew everyone on his plane,” Javier said. “Friends used his plane all the time.”
“Like who?”
“Name it. Ball players, actors, politicians. Elliott had friends everywhere, and he was good to all of them. He had a hard time saying no to people he liked.”
“How did he keep track of his evening activities?” I asked.
“We kept his schedule, printed it out every morning, and gave it to him right before he left the office.”
Javier opened a desk drawer, pulled out a stapled packet of papers, and handed it to me. “This is what a typical day looked like.”
I scanned the pages. He was busy from seven in the morning until his dinner meeting at nine thirty. Phone calls, in-person meetings, reminders to choose birthday gifts for one of his grandchildren—there was barely any time for him to go to the bathroom.
“Who was with him at night?” I asked.
“Manny,” Javier said. “His night driver.”
I thought about the surveillance video and his driver letting him out that night at his building.
“Where’s Manny now?” I asked.
“Manny only works nights,” Javier said. “He’s probably home sleeping or doing something with his family.”
“Does he have a new job now that Elliott is gone?”
“No,” Pedro said. “He still works for the company. We all do.”
“Who is he driving?”
“He got reassigned,” Javier said. “He worked for Elliott the last ten years, but now he’ll drive some of the other executives when they have evening appointments or need rides to the airport.”
“How long was Elliott doing drugs?” I asked.
“Whoa, what are you talking about?” Pedro said. “Who said anything about drugs?”
Javier’s face tightened.
“C’mon, guys,” I said. “Let’s not bullshit each other. You both know Elliott messed around with drugs. I’m not being judgmental about it. I’m just trying to find out if it was occasional or if he had a serious problem.”
“We didn’t party with Elliott like that,” Javier said. “He did his own thing at night. That was none of our business. But we never saw or heard Elliott talk about drugs.”
“That’s well and good,” I said. “But you’re still not answering my question.”
They looked at each other as if trying to decide their next move.
“I’m gonna be perfectly honest,” Javier said. “Elliott went through a depression when his wife died. We were really worried about him. He wouldn’t eat. He was missing days at the office. He didn’t have his usual energy. It got so bad, we thought he might do something to himself. Finally, we convinced him to go down to his place in the Bahamas. He had a big estate on the water in Albany. He flew down there and stayed for two months. When he came back, he was a totally different person. He was happy again, barking orders, going to games. He was fixed.”
“What fixed him?”
“We don’t know,” Pedro said. “He just said he was ready and needed to go on with his life. Said he couldn’t be sad forever, or he would die.”
“So everything just returned to normal?”
“Just like old times,” Javier said. “He still got sad when he saw pictures of his wife or someone mentioned her name, but he didn’t break down like he used to. He traveled a lot, went out almost every night. He said he was feeling thirty years younger.”
“Do you have his schedule from the night he died?” I asked.
Javier reached behind him, pulled out a thin folder, and handed it to me. I looked it over, then said, “Have you ever been to the apartment in Lincoln Park?”
“Many times,” Pedro said. “We helped with the redesign after he bought it.”
“In what way?”
“He bought the apartment on spec before they had rehabbed the building. The architect drew up the plans, but Elliott didn’t like them. We talked to the architect and the general contractor to make sure he got what he wanted. Elliott was really particular about how he wanted things done. Cost was never an issue as long as he got what he wanted.”
“Did you guys have a key to his apartment?”
“No one had a key,” Javier said. “Elliott could never use a key. Just another thing he’d lose. The door has a digital lock that’s opened by a code.”
“Do you both know the code?”
“Of course,” Pedro said. “We needed to be able to get in if he needed us to do something.”
“Anybody else have the code?”
“I don’t think so,” Javier said. “Maybe Simon. I’m not sure.”
“What about Manny?”
“He wouldn’t have the code,” Pedro said.
“And his friends? The girls?”
They both shrugged. “We wouldn’t know about that,” Javier said. “But it’s unlikely he would’ve given it out.”
“What did he say he was doing that night?”
“He had dinner with one of our manufacturers who had flown in from China,” Javier said. “They went to eat at RPM Steak. Mr. Min always likes to have steak when he comes to town. There were no games that night, so they were just having dinner.”
I looked down at the schedule. He had dinner with Huan Min at eight o’clock. The rest of the evening was blank.
“Did he tell you he was planning on staying at the apartment that night?”
“He didn’t say,” Pedro replied. “Sometimes he’d make up his mind at the last minute and tell Manny where to take him.”
I thought back to the video with him refusing Manny’s help from the car, then him walking toward the apartment building’s door and Manny pulling off.
“Can you print out his schedule for the following day?” I said.
“No problem,” Javier said, quickly tapping his keyboard and bringing the printer to life. He stapled the pages, then handed them to me as I stood to leave.
“So, what will the two of you do now that he’s gone?” I asked.
“Simon is going to keep us on,” Pedro said. “There’s still a lot of things Elliott was involved in that need to get done. We’ll keep helping out, and they promised they’d eventually find us new positions in the company.”
Javier stood and walked over to a small filing cabinet. He pulled open the drawer and said, “What games do you like?”
“Bulls and Sox,” I said.
The entire drawer was full of tickets, organized by teams and bunched together by rubber bands. He pulled out a couple of wads and fingered through them. He counted out eight tickets, then handed them to me.
“Two Bulls games and two Sox games. Two tickets to each. Elliott always had the best seats in the arena. He’d want you to have them. If you need more, let us know.”
I looked down at the tickets and saw $3,500 stamped in the corner of each one. The average man had absolutely no idea how lavishly the rich really lived.