The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [82]
A common interest in little green men had granted Peter some extra face time with the boss over the years. Enough that Wayne noticed, but not enough to make him feel threatened. When Rhodes wanted to show someone his new toy—the Patty Hearst gun—he’d chosen Wayne, after all.
Coffee depleted, Wayne picked up his phone and walked out onto the floor. He could hear waitresses and dealers talking in whispers about the murders the night before. He realized, with a little bit of guilt, that he was glad he didn’t know these Beaujons. He hated funerals, even when they came at the end of a long illness and nobody was especially shocked or sad. He couldn’t imagine what you’d say to the family of someone who’d been brutally stabbed to death on page one of the Journal-Review.
Then, as he was picking up a plastic cup that someone had dropped on the carpet outside the theater, he had the horrible feeling that maybe he did know Beatrice Beaujon. The Phillip Truman rape case had been a sustained source of conversation and gossip as well as schadenfreude in the office, since the crime had happened in a nearby hotel. Wayne thought he might have heard the name in passing or on the news. Nada’d even mentioned Truman a couple of times. She was pretty worked up about the crime.
Had Nada mentioned her? Had she been working with Beatrice Beaujon? He tapped through the contact list in his phone. Searched his e-mails. No mention of that name. Nothing triggered a memory.
Wandering out by the pool, where an army of men and women in black polo shirts were setting up tables on the slate tile for a private party, he ran the name through a loop in his head, hoping the repetition would solve the mystery. Beatrice Beaujon what? Beatrice Beaujon where? Beatrice Beaujon who?
He watched a party planner chattering into his wireless headset, the man’s legs covered in white linen pants and moving quick as a coastal bird’s. Wayne quickly and indifferently assessed him as gay. He wondered if the aggressively heterosexual David Amoyo was a rarity in that business and he recalled Amoyo’s plea to put in a word with the catering department, which Wayne, of course, hadn’t done.
“She rarely mentioned anybody except a friend in the DA’s office.” Amoyo had said that at the Puma. “I think her name was Bea.”
27
SHE HAD TAKEN A WALK down hazy and hot Michigan Avenue, clearing her head of the awful images she’d imagined on the tiles, trying to replace them with window displays—Gucci and Tiffany and Ralph Lauren. It frightened her to have thoughts that didn’t seem to originate in her head. She couldn’t imagine where such awful images had come from.
I’m not going crazy. I’m not going crazy.
Nada had an ache in the middle of her forehead that she assumed was from caffeine withdrawal, so she picked up a free Chicago Reader in a coffee shop and scanned the club ads over an iced latte. Jameson had said he thought Burning Patrick’s band, Bat Wing Vortex, was playing this weekend. She noted the particulars and her spider filed them away.
She idly tuned in and out of half a dozen conversations around the shop. In many cases she could only monitor half the discussion because one or more participants