The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [47]
Looking through the window, he stared down LaSalle Street, across three blocks of early-twentieth-century skyscrapers, toward the magnificent Deco façade of the Chicago Board of Trade. Futures market to the world. Inside that building, traders were paying today’s prices for tomorrow’s corn, placing bets whose outcomes depended on so many variables—supply, demand, rain, drought, oil prices, trade with China, whatever.
The week before, the hour before, the minute before he shot Gold, Reggie never would have bet he was capable of doing it. As he sat in Gold’s leather chair holding the requiem manuscript for the first time, the idea that he would soon hold a gun in his hands and fire a bullet into Solomon Gold’s face was, like the prospects of war in a distant galaxy, too alien and remote for sane men to consider. And so long as it never occurred to anyone that Gold’s own attorney might have fired the shot that killed him, Reggie’s secret was safe. But there were variables that needed to be accounted for.
The private line on Reggie’s phone blinked and he recognized his home number on the caller ID. He didn’t pick up. His wife didn’t know about the requiem, either. Reggie knew he had become a different man the night he killed Gold, and he wondered if Steph had a right to know that. If he had an obligation to tell her. He often wondered, Is a murderer someone who has killed, or is a murderer someone who might kill again?
Reggie returned the requiem to the safe and then stood and unlocked his door with a turn of the handle and stuck his head outside to let Kate know he was available. Sitting on a small chair next to Kate’s desk was one of the few people Kate would let inside his sanctum unannounced.
“Hey, boss,” she said as she stood.
“Della.” Reggie nodded at the containers and blue folders she had stacked on a wheeled catalog case—a “lawyer bag,” Reggie called it—with a long handle and a bungee for holding document boxes. “Got anything good?” He waved her inside his office.
Della Dickey said, “Nope. Every single one of them guilty.” She sat down again and lifted a folder off the top and waved it in the air. “If they asked me, I’d stick the needle in this one myself.”
Reggie laughed. He had known Della for only eighteen months and yet he saw a potential in her he couldn’t describe. A confidence without arrogance. A wisdom that remained curious. An earnestness that retained a sense of fun. He trusted her so completely that he often let her study alone at night in his office after they were through working on the Believers Project. He wouldn’t even let half of the firm’s senior partners into his office when he wasn’t there.
“I thought you were a pacifist,” Reggie said.
“Screw that,” Della said. “I’d buy a ticket from a scalper to poke this guy with pancuronium bromide. I’d stick it right in his eye.”
Della was one of those law student sirens Kloska was always going on about. The second-year DePaul student was plenty young and pleasant to look at and she knew how to dress. Textures, Reggie thought. Sexy dress is all about textures, about wearing clothes that not only flatter the body but make you want to touch. Still, he never imagined sex with Della except in the fleeting Darwinian way in which men consider all women a potential mate.
Not until Kloska kept bringing it up anyway.
Reggie noticed the safe at his feet hadn’t shut all the way. Della couldn’t see it from the other side of the desk, but when he kicked the door with his foot, it locked with a loud clang. “We have some new petitions. Some drafted by attorneys, and a few more interesting ones written by the inmates themselves.