A Picture of Guilt Read online

I smiled, too, remembering our very undisciplined activities the night before. As if reading my mind, Abdul’s grin widened. Mine faded. I felt like I’d been hit by a bus, and I was nursing a headache the size of Montana. “Abdul, I want to apologize for my behavior last night.”

  He sat down. “Think nothing of it.”

  “I was ugly.”

  “You were refreshing.”

  “You are charming.”

  He pulled out a chair and sat down. Unfolding a pink linen napkin, he placed it on his lap, then reached for the syrup, drenching not only the French toast but the sausages and the grits in a sea of maple. My fruit cup looked Spartan in comparison.

  He speared his sausage and swallowed it in two bites. If he was Muslim, he wasn’t all that devout. “You are from Chicago, David tells me?”

  “Born and bred.” I braced myself, waiting for the inevitable comment about the Windy City, or “my kind of town,” or other inanity non-Chicagoans feel compelled to express. As if we run around all day humming Sinatra, thrilled to live in a place with razzmatazz.

  But all Abdul said was, “I am very impressed with your… your…”

  “David.”

  “Yes. He has keen observations on the relationship between currencies and markets.”

  As much as I try, I can’t summon up much enthusiasm for currency trading. Admittedly, I don’t really understand it, and I keep wondering what I’m supposed to understand. As David explains it, it’s a service that banks provide to their customers. The bank doesn’t want to lose money, but they’re not in it to make a killing. Except for the occasional scandal, which often turns out to be the result of poor judgment rather than deceit, currency trading just isn’t very sexy. Which is fine by me. My ex-husband played the market. Badly. I have the debts to prove it.

  But Abdul was clearly a man of wealth—and a member of the Saudi royal family. I should be polite. “I don’t understand currency trading very well, but I imagine you need dollars because—well, why do you need dollars?”

  A waitress in green and pink filled our coffee cups. He waited until she glided away. “You’re a curious woman.”

  I shrugged.

  He studied me closely, as if registering every detail of my appearance. I found it unnerving. I’m usually the observer.

  “It is not that complex.” He lowered his fork. “The price of oil is quoted in U.S. dollars, and most of my business is transacted that way. I use the proceeds to purchase currencies for my other investments.”

  “And what would those be?”

  He hesitated. “I am always looking for new ideas and technologies to bring back to my people. For example, I have invested in a genetic engineering company which is experimenting with drought-resistant seeds. Also an Internet search engine that teaches children how to retrieve information more easily.”

  “Really?”

  “It may be your David Linden and I will have more to discuss.” He laughed, scraping up a mouthful of grits. “But enough business. You seem more—how do I say it—anchored this morning.”

  “Nicely put,” I smiled. “The rafting…well, it isn’t anything I plan to do again.”

  He laughed again and went back to his food. When he’d finished, he pulled out a copy of the Journal. “You don’t mind?” He motioned to the paper.

  I held up the Chicago Tribune I’d bought earlier, and we settled back to read in companionable silence. I’d been surprised to find a Chicago paper in the mountains of West Virginia. But then, this was the Greenbrier. They probably had their own printing press in the back.

  As I scanned the paper, a story on page nine caught my eye. A murder trial was about to get under way at criminal court downtown. The accused, a man named Johnnie Santoro, allegedly beat up and then shot his girlfriend at Calumet Park on the Southeast Side. He was pleading not guilty, but according to the article, there was a wealth of incriminating evidence. The last weeks of summer are usually the dog days in terms of hard news, so in the absence of anything more newsworthy, the case had been heavily covered by the media, the local stations promising all the legal maneuverings and high drama of the O.J. trial. I’d paid scant attention until now, figuring that whatever local TV wants me to watch is exactly what I should avoid.

  Today, though, there was a grainy newspaper picture of Santoro in the paper. He was twenty-six, the article said, but he looked older. His eyes were hooded, and his hair was cut close to his skull. He was looking off camera, but his eyebrows were so overgrown and bushy they met over his nose, which gave him a simian look.

  I stared at the picture and felt my skin grow clammy. I reached for a glass of water.

  “Something is wrong, Ellie?” Abdul asked.

  I gulped down a swig, then held up the paper. “This man who’s on trial? He…looks familiar. I think I know him.”

  His eyebrows shot up.

  “Good morning, troops.” Strong hands squeezed my shoulders. I glanced up. David leaned over and kissed my cheek.

  “It’s the face,” I said to Abdul. “I’ve seen it before.”

  David pulled out a chair. “What did I miss?”

  I passed him the paper. “Look at this.”

  “What am I looking at?”

  “The man in the picture. Who’s on trial for murder.”

  David studied the article.

  “I think I know him,” I said. “But I don’t know how.”

  I felt Abdul’s eyes on me.

  “Guy beats up his girlfriend and shoots her to death.” David handed me back the paper. “What a nice person for you to know.”

  Chapter Three

  Rachel was right, I am terrified of flying. I always have been, even before September 11. Going home, I put up a brave front, but by the time we landed at O’Hare, having bounced around one thunderstorm and flown through another, I was a quivering, quaking mass of Jell-o. And that was an improvement over the flight out.

  I tripped over Rachel’s bag as I came through the front door—she was already on the phone, her newest CD blasting. I lugged our bags in the house, for once not minding the stains in the carpet, the nicks on the wall, and all the other imperfections and flaws. A modest three-bedroom on the North Shore of Chicago, I managed to hang onto it after the divorce, and it looks like I’ll be there forever; I can’t afford to move. Tonight I was grateful.

  I dumped our dirty laundry in the basement and went upstairs to my office. It used to be the guest room, but I appropriated it when Barry moved out. My computer, scanner, and printer fill most of the space, but I’d invested in an ergonomic chair last year, and I happily swiveled from side to side as I downloaded my e-mail. There was something reassuring about the clicks, bells, and blue bars that accompanied the unspooling of my messages. All was right in my little corner of cyberspace. It hadn’t always been.

  After I trashed the usual spam, only a few messages remained, none of them urgent, so I decided to unpack. As I was digging through the canvas bag that doubles as my briefcase and overnighter, I came across yesterday’s Trib. It was folded to the page with Johnnie Santoro’s picture. I studied it again and felt the same sense of familiarity.

  I entered Santoro’s name on a news database, and after a few seconds, more than a dozen articles popped up. I started scanning them. Santoro had been indicted for the murder of Mary Jo Bosanick, a young woman in her twenties. Mary Jo went to the Lakeside Inn, a tavern on the Southeast Side, to meet Santoro after a night-school class, but Santoro didn’t show up until two hours later. A fierce argument erupted, and they both stormed out.

  Mary Jo’s body was found the next morning a few feet from Santoro’s Chevy at the boat launch in Calumet Park. She’d been viciously beaten and shot twice in the head. Apparently, she tried to put up a fight; scrapings of Santoro’s skin were found under her fingernails. The next day the cops arrested Santoro at the docks where he worked as a longshoreman.

  I leaned back in my chair. There isn’t much left of the dock life in Chicago—at least not on the same
scale as Newark, Houston, or New Orleans. Back during the Fifties and Sixties, countless ships plied the Great Lakes, but traffic has since dried up. Competition from rail and trucks is one reason. The construction of larger, more efficient freighters is another. Weather also plays a part. Though they did dredge a terminal that operates year round, there’s still only a nine-month season along the St. Lawrence Seaway linking Chicago to the Atlantic.

  What little shipping remains, mostly steel and steel products, is centered on Calumet Harbor, not far from the park of the same name. On the rare day a ship does tie up, longshoremen queue up at waterfront warehouses for day jobs, like they’ve been doing for forty years. Most of the men are well past their prime, forced by meager pensions to take whatever work is available, but a few youngsters hang out there, too. That’s where the cops found Santoro, stamping his feet in the morning chill, hoping for a few hours’ work.

  I looked through the window at the locust tree in my front yard. Its lattice of leaves, silvered by the moonlight, danced gently in the night breeze. Somewhere in the distance I heard the plaintive honk of a goose. Santoro might be a dock rat, but that didn’t tell me how I knew him. I shut down the computer and went into my room.

  Rachel had gone to bed, but I was still wired. I turned on the TV. The end of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries was running on cable. Ostensibly about a professor who confronts the void of his life, the film opens with one of the best dream sequences ever filmed: boarded up windows, a clock with no hands, a hearse disgorging a coffin, the creepy, outstretched hand of a corpse.

  Okay. Bergman is not what you’d call warm and fuzzy, but what can you expect from a Swede? His work even looks a little stagey now, but that’s because every filmmaker in the world has copied his style. The way he works with light and shadow. The nuances of his camera moves. The way he imbues his characters with personality through one simple but perfect gesture. In the journeyman work I do for a living, I might set up a pretty shot or a smooth pan, but there’s no emotional investment. No fusion of form and function. Even Bergman’s outtakes are works of art.

  As good as the film was, my eyelids began to droop. I forced them open a few times, but it was hopeless. I snapped off the tube and burrowed under the covers—and then sat bolt upright in the dark. The water. Nighttime. Outtakes. I knew where I’d run into Johnnie Santoro.

  Chapter Four

  For a month or so each fall, the mums take over Chicago. It’s as if the Big Florist in the Sky has commanded, “Thou shalt have chrysanthemums and plant them everywhere.” Huge planters of the red and yellow flowers, their spiky petals irrepressibly cheerful, flanked the door to Mac’s studio as I headed inside.

  When we started working together, MacArthur J. Kendall III had a tiny studio crammed with camera gear and editing equipment. Ten years later, his studio boasts two nonlinear editing suites, a soundstage, and one of the best editors in the galaxy.

  Some people’s bodies are made for the work they do. Michael Jordan. Martha Graham. Hank Chenowsky. With long, supple fingers, a lanky torso, and eyes that blink in sunlight like a mole’s, Hank was destined to be either a concert pianist or a video editor. He chose editing, but to watch those fingers fly over the console is to watch a virtuoso perform.

  He and I have spent more than a few late nights working, and he alone is responsible for the magic that makes our shows a cut above. I’m grateful to Mac, who appreciates what a talent he has and has managed to keep Hank happy. Though with Hank, happiness is more or less a permanent state of being. I’ve never seen him cranky.

  I remember once asking him about his idea of heaven on earth.

  “You first,” he’d said.

  “Okay.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “A box of warm Krispy Kremes waiting for me…on a bed at the Four Seasons Hotel.”

  He cocked his head. “The Four Seasons?”

  I opened one eye. “You ever been on one of their beds?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “First of all, they’re huge. Soft and firm at the same time. Perfect for sitting, and lying, and—well—they sell over two hundred beds a year, you know.”

  “And you know about beds at the Four Seasons because…”

  “Um—uh—”

  “Right.” He cut in. “Okay. What flavor?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “The Krispy Kremes.”

  “Oh.” I considered it. “Doesn’t matter.”

  We exchanged nods.

  “Your turn.”

  He bent over the keyboard to finish an edit. “Heaven on earth, huh?” He laced his fingers together and flexed them backward. “That’s easy. Playing with Clapton.”

  “Where?”

  “Shea Stadium.”

  “Instrument?”

  “Bass, of course.”

  “Not piano?”

  “That’s my backup.”

  “What?”

  “Playing with Count Basie at Carnegie Hall.”

  See what I mean about destiny?

  But on this morning, garbled noise spewed out of the editing room door. It sounded like a flock of angry pigeons had taken up residence. I skirted the door and headed to Mac’s office.

  “Hey.”

  With his crewneck sweaters and khakis, Mac looks like an aging preppie, but it’s dangerous to underestimate him. He’s an excellent director and a shrewd judge of character. He looked up from a pile of paperwork. “What brings you here? A new client?”

  I shook my head. “Things are slow.” In my experience, industrial video production is an economic bellwether. When my work slows down, the economy isn’t far behind. “I need the elements of the show we started for the water district.”

  “How come?”

  “There’s something I need to check.”

  He brightened. “They want to reedit?”

  “You’re slow, too.”

  He stood up. “It hasn’t been this bad for years.”

  I followed him down the hall to a closed door, where he punched in a four-digit code on a wall panel. The door opened into a windowless room with gray walls and hundreds of gray cassettes on gray shelves.

  “You’ll be okay,” I asked. “Won’t you?”

  “We’ll survive.” He started scanning the shelves. “You?”

  “It’s a little scary.”

  He tossed long brown hair back from his forehead. “I know that tune. Now…what were you looking for?”

  “The Chicago water district.”

  “Our unfinished symphony.”

  “That’s the one.”

  Last summer we’d started a video for the water district that showed how water travels from Lake Michigan to people’s faucets. The journey begins at two intake cribs a few miles from shore. The cribs, anchored forty feet down on the lake bed, suck up enormous amounts of water, which is then piped through underwater tunnels to one of two treatment plants onshore. After the plants process and filter the water, it’s piped through another series of underground channels to distribution centers at strategic points around the city as well as a hundred suburbs. These centers then pump it into homes. A simple concept; an engineering marvel.

  Unfortunately, halfway through production, September 11 happened, and the water district cancelled the video. Given the situation, a how-it-works video on Chicago’s water supply didn’t seem prudent. Happily, they paid us for the time we’d already put in. Which is probably more than Schubert got.

  “Found ’em.” Mac motioned to a group of cassettes on the top shelf. “Which ones do you want?”

  “The B roll we shot during the reenactment.”

  Mac climbed up a stepladder. “That was one of your better ideas.”

  I smiled. We’d set out on the city tug from Navy Pier to scout one of the cribs. The Carter-Harrison crib is really two cylindrical structures joined together by a small suspension bridge. One cylinder has limestone and red-brick walls; the other has a white surface with pinkish stripes running down its sides. Except for a small tower ris
ing through its center, it looks like a giant wedding cake. Although we wouldn’t be shooting inside for security reasons, the Deaver crib, or candy striper, as boaters call it, is where the actual pumping takes place.

  We’d disembarked at the limestone and brick cylinder, which houses living quarters for dozens of men. Before the pumps were automated, crews actually lived on the cribs to operate the machinery, and the facility, originally built around 1900, was equipped with bedrooms, a kitchen, and a dining area. Now, though, men bunk there only a few weeks each summer while they do maintenance and repair work. We’d planned to get some shots of them when the weather warmed up.

  I remembered entering through a heavy iron door, half expecting to see a drawbridge slam shut behind us. But once inside, I was surprised. The cribs had been rehabbed, and the interior was all white walls and bright lights. At one end was a large, high-ceilinged kitchen and eating area; at the other, a series of bedrooms. A suit from the water district’s PR department explained that during remodeling, some of the larger bedrooms had been divided up to accommodate more workmen.

  As we passed one of the larger rooms, I saw a large wooden rolltop desk against a wall.

  “What’s that doing here?” I asked.

  “Now, that’s a great story.” The PR guy glanced at the desk, then back at me. “But it’s off the record.”

  I shrugged. I don’t pretend to be a journalist; in no way does anything I do qualify as objective. In a pinch, you could call my shows infomercials, but—bottom line—if the client doesn’t like it, it doesn’t go in.

  “It turns out that the cribs had quite a reputation. During Prohibition, this place was a speakeasy. And brothel.”

  I remember feeling my eyes widen. “No way!”

  He laughed, clearly enjoying my astonishment. “You’ve heard of Big Bill Thompson?”

  I nodded. Big Bill Thompson, aka William Hale Thompson, was one of Chicago’s more avaricious mayors. A friend of gangsters, a taker of bribes, he’d amassed two million dollars in assets during the Twenties, almost twenty million by today’s standards. However, he’s remembered most not for his shady dealings—he had plenty of company there, anyway—but for his famous advice to his citizenry: “Vote early and often.”