The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [48]
“Always.”
Reggie handed her a slip of paper, the only one on his immaculate desk.
“Any of these especially promising?”
“All pretty guilty,” he said. Della replied with a stare. “I said a few of them were interesting, not necessarily innocent,” Reggie said.
Della sighed ironically. “I hoped to dedicate my summer to freeing the oppressed victims of our flawed legal system, you know.”
“We get to do that sometimes. This week just freeing them from my inbox will have to be enough.” Reggie remembered something, another piece of the ongoing deception. “Bobby Kloska has a file for me, but I need to get it discreetly. Could you drop by Area Three and pick it up?”
Della nodded. “Let me guess. Info on that doctor’s murder up in Andersonville?”
“On the advice of counsel, et cetera,” Reggie said.
“Give him my cell and have him tell me when I can get it.” Della stood and volunteered her plans for the weekend—study, a rock show, study some more—as she packed her files and loaded them on her cart.
“You forgot one,” Reggie said, pointing to a small box, the kind in which you might expect to find an expensive fountain pen, on the edge of his desk.
“That’s not mine,” Della said.
“It’s not?”
“Kate handed it to me just before I came in here. It’s got your name on it.”
Reggie stood up and walked around his desk. It was taped shut and hand-addressed. It had a Chicago postmark. No zip code. No return. Only:
MR. REGGIE VALLENTINE, ESQ.
VALLENTINE, SISSMAN, HOLLY AND CARLIN
CHICAGO
PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL!
He pinned it under his bad arm and sliced into it with a barely used letter opener.
“Don’t you have people who open suspicious packages for you?” Della asked, halfway out the door. “You know, first-year associates. Expendable ones.”
“Har,” Reggie said without looking up. Della said good-bye and walked out of his office suite, toward the elevator.
He lifted the lid. A necklace that was immediately familiar even after ten years and a half sheet of paper, torn by hand. He lifted it, started to read it.
What the hell? “Kate!”
The narrow face of his assistant appeared in the open door.
“Yes, Reg?”
“Where did this come from?”
“Reception said it came in the mail,” she said without eye contact. “No return address. The label said it was personal. I didn’t think I should open it.” As usual, Kate had made herself his accomplice in an affair he wasn’t having.
Reggie nodded. “Thanks.” Kate returned to her cube. Reggie read the note again.
It began: “The police have been here. If I have to, I will tell them what you really are.”
He didn’t know right away who had written it, but he knew exactly what it meant. Is a murderer a man who has killed, or a man who might kill again? Reggie did not panic. Panic was not in his repertoire.
He only swallowed through a dry mouth and thought, Variables. Goddamn fucking variables.
16
MONDAY, JULY 19
THE PROFESSOR backed into the room, arms full of books and papers and an old leather bag with a soft handle hanging by a few stubborn threads. He didn’t see them until he turned around, and then the high-pitched sound from his mouth and the frightened expression on his face and the way all those books and papers and the satchel dropped into a messy pile on the floor made the detectives laugh out loud.
“Jesus Christ,” Cepeda said as Kloska and Traden bent down to help restore some order to his day’s work. “What are you doing here?”
“I didn’t like the way our last meeting ended, Professor,” Kloska said. “I usually decide when these interviews are over.”
“How did you get in here?”
Kloska smiled. “Your janitor has apparently done some things he regrets. Some people cooperate with the police a little too eagerly.”
“I told you I have nothing else to add about Marlena.”
“That didn’t strike me as being exactly true,” Kloska said. When he had assembled the dozens of papers and blue books into a rough stack in his arms, Bobby transferred them to Cepeda’s already-overwhelmed desk.
“I don’t know what else to tell you.” Cepeda