The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [45]
Kloska thought he saw the professor twitch. “Of course. The Gold Completion of Mozart’s requiem is legendary among mathematicians. A piece of music alleged to have been written from divine equations. We talk about it in class. Why?”
“You don’t read the Chicago papers every day, do you, Professor?”
Cepeda shook his head.
“Dr. Falcone was killed with the same gun used to murder Solomon Gold.”
Cepeda’s eyes became white circles with tiny black bull’s-eyes. He started to say something and stopped. Started and stopped again. Picked up the paper on which Dr. Falcone had written his phone number. It was so quiet, Kloska could hear a mini-fridge door slamming shut in the next office and Traden pursuing an itch on his right arch by squeaking his foot inside his shoe.
“My God,” Cepeda said finally.
And then he whispered, “You have to leave.”
15
EVEN IN THE MIDDLE of the busiest days, when he was trying one case at Twenty-sixth and California, filing a motion in another at the Dirksen Federal Building downtown, and prepping a third case to be tried later in L.A., Reggie would always make a few minutes to be alone with the manuscript, a few minutes behind his locked office door, his assistant, Kate, left to wonder if he were napping or lighting a joint or meditating or “psyching up” or looking at pornography or playing solitaire on the computer or phoning a mistress (or some “quality law school skirt” in the similarly active imagination of Bobby Kloska). Reggie explained everything in his schedule to Kate except for what he did when he locked that door, and as a result, she suspected Reggie of keeping an untold number of secrets. Suspicious but always loyal, the most desirable skill set on a secretary’s CV.
On the other side of the wall, Kate was no doubt speaking calmly into her phone. “Mr. Vallentine isn’t taking new clients right now…. No, you cannot speak with him…. Do not come down to this office; you will not be permitted to meet with him….” The desperate and accused petitioned Reggie night and day, by phone and e-mail and courier. Kate protected him. She was his moat, his pikeman, a pot of boiling oil poised over his castle wall. She kept the world outside from getting in.
Kate didn’t know it, but the most precious thing she protected was under his desk in a safe, along with Reggie’s will and insurance papers and ten thousand dollars in cash. Although Reggie managed a dozen different accounts—checking and savings and brokerage and mutual funds and IRA—the stacks of fifty-dollar bills were a tribute to his parents, who trusted no one, not even banks, to be caretakers of their hard-earned money.
A safe protects but also conceals, and this safe concealed one thing in particular. One thing from Kate and from Steph and especially from Bobby Kloska.
Reggie should have destroyed it years ago. But to a man who had been taught to respect history, the fact that it might incriminate him in a murder seemed like a poor reason to run something so precious through a shredder, even as the attorney part of him had whispered urgently in his ear every day for ten years to do just that.
“Many believe God once took the form of man,” Solomon had said. “What if I told you He could take the form of music?”
Ten years after his client’s death, the Gold Completion had become a legend in classical circles, a lost masterpiece that, for many critics, was a metaphor for every problem that plagued the industry.
“Classical music has been dying for years because we are the only community in all the arts that assumes our golden age is in our past and not our future,” a Chicago Tribune critic declared on the five-year anniversary of Solomon’s death. “Attendance at classical performances declines each year, and why should anyone be surprised? We who are supposed to be experts are always telling the public there’s no longer any reason to pay attention because every great symphony has already