Chapter 4 - THE BOILER ROOM WALL AND THE CHILD'S DRAWING
"Do not let them leave that basement, Hector," I said into the phone, grabbing my car keys and my mother's wool coat from the hall tree. "Lock the heavy iron fire door from the outside if you have to, and call the nineteenth district police."
"Already dropped the iron bar across the bulkhead, ma'am," Hector replied over the grinding roar of a bulldozer idling on Diversey Parkway. "Wait—Mrs. Callahan, little Leo is still upstairs in 2C with his grandmother. Mrs. Morales refuses to come out until she talks to you."
My heart jumped into my throat. Seven-year-old Leo and his grandmother, Rosa Morales, were the last two tenants left in the building. I had moved the other sixteen families into temporary corporate housing across town at my own expense over the last month to keep them safe from Graham's intimidation tactics, but Rosa had stubbornly refused to leave the apartment where her late husband had died.
"Tell Rosa I'm twenty minutes away," I told Hector.
I turned to Clara Vance. "Are you coming with me, or are you going to The Burnham Club to rescue your daughter?"
Clara snapped her alligator briefcase shut, her jaw set. "Tiffany walked into that restaurant with two federal whistle-blower attorneys sitting at Table Four. She can handle Graham. If Thomas Whitaker is in that basement right now, he’s after the cedar chest from 3B."
Twenty-two minutes later, having pushed my SUV well past the speed limit down the Kennedy Expressway, I skidded to a halt behind a yellow Caterpillar excavator blocking the curb on Diversey Parkway.
Flashing amber work lights painted the red-brick facade of my mother's building in harsh, jagged shadows. Up on the second floor, a warm yellow lamp still burned in the bay window of Apartment 2C.
Before I could even reach the courtyard gate, a sleek black Mercedes S-Class screeched to the curb behind us.
Graham jumped out from the passenger side, his tuxedo jacket unbuttoned, his silk bow tie hanging loose around his collar. Tiffany was right behind him, having kicked off her designer heels in the car, walking barefoot on the cold October asphalt in a five-thousand-dollar gown.
"Helen!" Graham roared, storming toward me beneath the glare of the halogen floodlights. "Call off your rent-a-cop! You're insane! Do you have any idea what happens to our net worth if that wrecking ball doesn't swing by dawn? The syndicate has a four-million-dollar penalty clause!"
I stood directly in front of the iron courtyard gate, my hands buried deep in the pockets of my mother's old gray wool coat. Up close, Graham didn't look like the titan of Chicago real estate who had mocked me over bourbon an hour ago. He looked like a panicked carpenter who had sawed through the beam he was standing on.
"Our net worth, Graham?" I said calmly. "At eight-thirty tonight, you told seventy men that I spent twenty-nine years playing house while you built an empire. You gave me the guesthouse, remember?"
"I was talking to investors!" Graham shouted, grabbing the iron bars of the gate on either side of my shoulders. "It's theater, Helen! You know how those sharks operate—if you look soft, they eat you alive! Everything I did—every cut corner, every deal—was so we'd never have to scrub paint off our fingernails at midnight again!"
For a split second, his voice cracked with the desperate sincerity of the twenty-five-year-old boy I had married at St. Alphonsus Church.
Thirty days ago, that crack in his voice might have broken me. Tonight, my fingers brushed something stiff folded inside the lining of my mother's coat pocket.
"And Tiffany?" I asked quietly, looking past his shoulder at the thirty-one-year-old woman standing beside Clara Vance. "Was making her Vice President of Callahan Properties theater for the sharks, too?"
Before Graham could lie, the front entrance of the apartment building opened. Seven-year-old Leo Morales stepped out onto the concrete stoop in his Spider-Man pajamas and winter boots, clutching a rolled-up piece of blue construction paper. His grandmother stood anxiously behind him in her housecoat.
"Mrs. Helen!" Leo called out, running down the walkway toward the gate. "Abuela said don't let the big trucks push down the cellar! The nice old man with the white hair used to give me five dollars to keep the brick loose!"
Everyone by the gate froze.
I knelt down by the iron bars so I was at eye level with Leo. "What nice old man with white hair, sweetheart? Mr. Whitaker?"
Leo shook his head vigorously, his dark curls bouncing. "No, not the grumpy man in the basement right now. The man with the shiny scale on his necktie. He comes every month with a big brown envelope for Mr. Graham."
My blood turned to ice. The shiny scale on his necktie.
Arthur Pendelton. My mother's attorney. The man who had spent the last eight months "helping" me prepare my legal ambush against Graham.
"Leo," I said gently, keeping my voice warm so I wouldn't frighten him. "What did you draw on your paper there?"
Leo unrolled the blue construction paper and pushed it through the gate bars into my hands. "I drew the secret mailbox behind the hot pipes! See? The lawyer man told me it was a pirate treasure spot, and if I ever saw anybody open it, I should draw a picture for Mr. Graham."
On the blue paper, drawn in thick red and black crayon, was the old cast-iron boiler in the basement. Beside it, Leo had drawn a stick figure in a suit taking a small tin strongbox out of the brickwork—and standing right next to the lawyer with the scale tie clip was a woman with long blonde hair and blue earrings.
Leo pointed a stubby finger at the blonde stick figure. "That's the pretty lady right there," he said, pointing directly at Tiffany. "She came with the lawyer man last Tuesday when you were buying groceries for Abuela!"
I slowly stood up, holding the child's crayon drawing between my fingers.
Clara Vance stared at her daughter in horror. "Tiffany? You told me you didn't know Arthur Pendelton! You told me you were working with the federal whistle-blower unit!"
Tiffany didn't look like a victim anymore. Standing barefoot on the pavement, she smoothed down the skirt of her evening gown and looked at her mother—then at Graham, and finally at me—with chilling composure.
"Oh, Mother, grow up," Tiffany said softly. "Dad didn't go to prison because he was framed. Dad went to prison because he was greedy enough to get caught. And Arthur Pendelton didn't help Helen tonight to save her marriage or her mother's precious building."
Tiffany pulled a sleek smartphone from her clutch and tapped the screen.
May you like
"Arthur had you break that seal on live television, Graham, because the moment Helen invoked the 1997 reversion clause, Callahan Properties went into technical default—which just allowed Arthur and me to buy your forty-six-million-dollar bank note for thirty cents on the dollar."
Down below the courtyard, a muffled metallic thud echoed from the basement bulkhead, followed by the unmistakable smell of smoke drifting up through the iron sidewalk grates.
