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Theo was the one who finally spoke. He gestured at the table. “Can I get you something to drink?”
“No, I’m cool. Thanks.” Sam looked at me. “I should find R.T.”
“Right. Yeah.”
Theo looked between the two of us, giving me an expression I couldn’t read, then excused himself and left.
Sam and I just smiled at each other. “So how’s …” I stopped. I couldn’t say it. How’s Alyssa?
But Sam, apparently, could still read me. “I’m not sure.”
“You’re not …?” I glanced down at his left hand. No ring.
“Alyssa and I broke up. After we …” He pointed between himself and me.
After we almost got back together this past summer.
I felt bad at how happy I was that he wasn’t with Alyssa anymore—perfect, tiny, blonde Alyssa, his high school sweetheart, who seemed to love Sam even more than I had.
Sam glanced behind him. “I should see if R.T. needs any help.”
“Sure. I’ll come back there later and say hi.”
But when I did, there was no sign of Sam.
13
When Theo and I got home from the club, Theo turned on his Xbox to play Madden NFL Football. He played against people around the country and won a lot. Still, it was almost one in the morning.
“You’re playing now?“ I asked him.
“Yeah, I just need to blow off a little steam.” Theo scrolled through the Xbox menu, trying to find an opponent at his level.
I sat in my favorite yellow-and-white chair, yet it failed to comfort me as it often did. “Did you have fun with your dad?”
After Sam had left, I’d spent an hour trying to listen to LaBree and Brad, who were talking about the patent LaBree was working on and that Brad was helping her with—some kind of invention to hold bra straps in random places. The product actually sounded rather smart, but I couldn’t focus. Kept replaying over and over my run-in with Sam. Then Theo and his dad began having what looked like a serious discussion, and soon after that he had been ready to leave.
“Fun probably isn’t the word for it,” Theo said now.
“Right,” I said. Then, “What is the word for it?”
He didn’t reply, just clicked a button to enter a game.
I put my head against the back of the chair for a minute. Then I lifted it again. “Hey, have you ever given anyone the code for the door?” I asked him. “Talking to Vaughn yesterday made me think about it.”
“I haven’t given it to anyone.” Theo mashed a few buttons. “If you think about it, anyone from the street could watch and see us using the code, then use it to get in when we’re not around.”
“But why not steal something if you’re going to all that trouble?”
Theo stayed silent, his jawline set.
“What about people you’re with when you come in the front door?” I asked.
“Like who?”
“Well, didn’t you meet Eric here before that show at the Congress the other night?”
“Yeah, that’s true.”
“Did you come here from work together?”
Theo nodded, tucked a lank of light brown hair behind his ear.
“So he could have seen you entering the code downstairs.”
“What about people who’ve been here with you?” Theo said leaning toward the TV.
“Spence was with me a few months ago. Other than that …” I gave a one-shouldered shrug. “My mom was with me once, too, but she already has the code.”
“What about Sam?” There was a little something bristly in Theo’s tone.
“What about him?”
“Does he have the code?”
“No, I’m sure I changed it since we broke up. But wait … There was that time that we hung out.” I shook my head. “But no, that wasn’t here.”
“What do you mean, you hung out?”
My stomach clenched, as if I had something to hide. And I guess I did. “Last summer. We met up. He’d gotten engaged …”
“And he said he’d get back together with you if you wanted.”
“Yeah.”
He focused on his game.
“What?” I said to his back. “What’s wrong?”
He kept playing for a moment or two, then paused the Xbox. He turned around from his seat on the ottoman, and now we faced each other. “There’s something between you guys,” he said.
“Oh, is there?” I started thinking about it. He was right. Even though we’d hugged like fishing buddies, I’d seen the way Sam looked at me. “I mean, there will always be something, right? We were sorta family, you know? Almost sorta married.” It sounded sorta brainless and deranged.
“When’s the last time you saw each other?” Theo asked. “Before tonight.”
“Hmm.” I thought to myself. “Maybe at the hotel? No, no, it was after that. In court.” I focused back in on Theo. “Yeah, in court during Valerie’s trial.”
“What hotel are you talking about?”
“Oh, you know. What’s it called? The one right off of Michigan Avenue? The Peninsula, that’s what it is!” I sounded way too enthusiastic, and I was talking faster than normal.
“So you guys went to the bar at the hotel, right?”
“Yes,” I said with assuredness. So far I hadn’t lied. I just hoped he didn’t ask any more questions.
“And then did you go upstairs?” The hope got shot out of the sky. “Like, did you get a room?”
Oh, this was not good. Not good. Not good. “Here’s the thing …” How to explain this?
Theo crossed his arms and looked at me with something approaching disappointment on his face.
“Here’s the thing …” I tried again. “We did get a room, but we didn’t use it, if you know what I mean. We didn’t sleep together.”
We had, in fact, made out in a major way, and there was some nudity, but no sex.
“You never told me that,” Theo said, the disappointment apparent.
“There was nothing to tell. We wanted to see if there was anything left between us to rekindle. There wasn’t. We weren’t right for each other.”
Silence.
“We aren’t,” I said, liking the present tense of that word better. “We aren’t right for each other.”
“Whatever.” Theo turned and picked up the game controller.
“Are you mad?”
Nothing.
“Jealous?” I was oddly flattered at the thought, but I didn’t want him to feel bad. I stepped behind him and began to rub his shoulders. He shrugged me off.
“Look,” Theo said without stopping his game, “we’re not married. You can do what you want…. And so can I.” He started mashing the buttons harder and harder until he growled in frustration and tossed the controller to the floor. “Damn it,” he blurted as Game Over flashed across the screen.
“I’m going to bed,” he mumbled with a gruffness I wasn’t ready for. Then he strode purposefully to the bedroom and slammed the door.
14
If I thought that once I joined Bristol & Associates my life would be one big, rollicking murder trial after another, I was wrong.
“Your Honor,” I said, “the defense requests supervision on this matter. As you know, Mr. Hemphill—” I gestured to the fourteen-year-old kid on my right “—does have one other obscene-conduct offense involving public urination. However—”
I heard a little snort. I glanced at Johnny Hemphill, Maggie’s cousin’s kid, who tried to conceal a laugh. He’d told me when we first met that he couldn’t help it. He found the term public urination funny. It hadn’t helped when Johnny’s father, sitting next to him, also guffawed.
Johnny shot me an apology shrug.
I tried to muster a glare, but these kinds of cases didn’t inspire me enough to do so.
Since we’d started working together, Maggie insisted that handling criminal defense matters that were small and mundane was good for me. She said I had to learn the ropes of Chicago’s criminal legal world, and the only way to do that was to start from the ground floor. So when her neighbor’s brother’s boss got a speeding ticket or Maggie’s grandfather’s dry cleaner was accused of stealing a pearl button from someone’s coat, Maggie assigned me as the go-to girl. Maggie said that criminal defense warriors like her had to take a lot of these little cases because your brilliant handling of them put you on people’s speed dial. Then the dry cleaner would call you from jail after a hit-and-run accident and the boss might give you a quick jingle when he was arrested for sexual harassment or when some other large-ticket, moneymaking, cunning-intelligence-required case emerged.
I understood the marketing aspect. And I also knew lawyers had to be available for their clients on matters both great and gratuitous. Even more, I needed busy-ness to distract me from thinking about Theo—Theo and HeadFirst, and more important, Theo and me.
Now, I scrounged up a stern look for Johnny Hemphill, then squared my shoulders back to the judge. Raising my right index finger, I made my impassioned plea for one more round of supervision for this kid who simply thought it was funny to pee behind the movie theater on Roosevelt Avenue.
Thankfully, I won. This is the last time, the judge had intoned, looking at me and not Mr. Hemphill.
I thanked him, did a geisha-esque bow and hustled out of the courtroom before he could change his mind, leaving Johnny with his guffawing father.
I took the elevator to the first floor of the courthouse at 26th and California Avenue and ran to the big bulletin board that hung on the wall. There, sheets of paper in rows were tacked, each listing a courtroom and the cases to be called that day. Next to each case number was a description—armed robbery, murder, assault, drug trafficking, etc.—the sight of which made me remember I was far, far away from the civil courthouse where I used to spend all my professional time.
I elbowed and jostled my way toward the front of the small crowd huddled there, everyone craning their necks. Maggie had assigned me four cases to handle that morning, but I’d forgotten to find out what courtrooms they were in. Frantically, I searched the multitude of papers. The 26th Street Shuffle, I’d heard other criminal lawyers call days like this.
As I ran toward the elevator, I paused for a brief second, as I always did, in the old vestibule of the courthouse. And maybe it was that pause that allowed me to feel the faint vibration from my shoulder bag. I glanced at my watch. I had more time than I thought—at least five minutes until I had to be in Judge Johnson’s courtroom. I pulled the phone from my bag.
My father. I hadn’t been able to call him back since he called yesterday while I was at brunch. I hadn’t seen my dad in almost a week, and I knew he had no one in this town. He’d been here only a few months. He’d been in our lives only a few months. And it had occurred to me that when I’d seen him at the diner last week, he had said something to me—You can tell me if you ever want help. If anything isn’t all right. I’d been wondering if he might have been referring to himself, subconsciously or not.
On the far side of the vestibule were marble stairs, each worn sufficiently in the middle from the hundreds who had climbed them in the hopes of justice.
I sat on the first one and was about to answer the phone when a security guard started toward me. “Miss,” he said, “you can’t …”
I knew what he was about to say. The stairs were closed now, part of the old glory of the building, the glory that had mostly given way to ruin.
I gave the guy a pleading smile.
He raised his hand and gave me the you’ve-got-one-minute gesture, then respectfully turned his back.
“Hi,” I said to my dad. “So sorry I haven’t called you back yet, I’ve been running from one thing to another.” And trying to figure out what’s going on with my boyfriend and worrying even more now that I confessed I’d been with Sam. And didn’t exactly tell him the whole story of that night, which had come very, very close to being sex-filled.
“Boo, I’ve got some bad news.”
“Bad news …” My stomach clenched.
“It’s about Theo.”
“Oh.” I hadn’t expected that. My father had met Theo only once, only briefly.
My dad paused. And it was a weighty silence.
“What?” I said.
“Something’s going on with him.”
True. “How do you know that?”
He sighed. “Izzy …” There was a slight layer of irritation in his voice.
“I know. I should stop asking how you know these things. But it’s just—” what was the word? “—off-putting.” My father had disappeared from our lives decades ago. But he had watched us during that time. (I suppose I would say “watched over us,” except that would make him sound angelic, which wasn’t exactly right.)
“It’s not good, Izzy,” my father said.
