LITMIR.BIZ

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us know, okay?” Vaughn said. He stood. The meeting, apparently, was finished.

      Schneider shifted his heft to one side and fished a business card out of his pocket, handing it to me. It had the Chicago skyline on it. “Be careful if you see him.”

      “The homeless guy?”

      “No, your fiancé.”

      “What do you mean, ‘be careful’?”

      “You didn’t expect him to do something like this, right? Take off with those shares?”

      “I’m not even sure he did.”

      “Well, you didn’t expect him to disappear, right?”

      “No.”

      “And he has. Apparently.” Schneider opened his big hands wide. “So who knows what else he’ll do. Maybe it’s of his own volition, maybe not. Until it’s all settled, keep your eyes open, be careful, and call us if anything changes.”

      I am rarely a speechless girl, but his warning had hijacked my words. Be careful of Sam?

      Schneider stood with his partner. “Thanks, Ms. McNeil.” His expression softened. If I read it right, it was one of pity. “And good luck.”

      14

      John Mayburn followed the navy-blue Mercedes down Hubbard Street and watched as it turned in to the parking lot of the East Bank Club. He drove past the lot, found a spot on the street, threw quarters in the meter and hustled to the club.

      When he was a few hundred feet away, he saw Michael and Lucy DeSanto entering the place. For once, he wouldn’t have to sneak around or talk his way into an establishment in order to follow a subject. He was a member of the East Bank Club, although he rarely showed his face there anymore. He’d joined the club, the ritziest gym in the city, eight years ago when he was in his early thirties. The fact was, the East Bank Club, or simply “East Bank,” as its members called it, was also a social club. It boasted a grill, lounge and spa and, in the summer, a rooftop pool that could have been outside a Miami hotel with all the beautiful bodies splayed around it.

      Mayburn had joined East Bank when he’d first started out in the world of private investigations. Out of college he had initially started work as a claims analyst for an insurance company. He spent a few years there, then a few more following that as an independent adjuster, digging up evidence about malingering in personal-injury cases. It all bored him. So one day, when a lawyer he’d worked with asked if he did investigations for other types of cases, he lied and said yes. He quickly got his P.I. license and hung up his own investigative shingle. Once he was a P.I., he needed to meet potential clients in a discreet way and, when someone hired him, he needed to buy them drinks and meals in a not-so-discreet way. Which brought him to East Bank.

      And now, years later, he’d been hired by Bank Midwest to investigate Michael DeSanto, one of its executives suspected of laundering funds, and Mayburn was pleased to discover DeSanto was an East Bank member. Before the DeSanto case, Mayburn had considered canceling his membership because it seemed he was too busy to use it, yet he carried around a tiny pipe dream that he would find time to start working out again, he would find time to sit in the grill and chat up a gorgeous female exec in high heels. In short, he dreamed of an ordinary existence, but he just couldn’t seem to find the time to live it.

      Mayburn ran his membership ID through the kiosk card reader and entered the gym, his eyes firmly on the black, curly-haired head of Michael DeSanto. When Michael and his wife, Lucy, a petite, elegant blonde with short hair, reached the locker rooms, they parted. Lucy called out to her husband as he walked away. She grabbed his arm and pulled him back for a kiss. Michael seemed to suffer through the gesture. Lucy stood for a second, watching his retreating back before she turned and pushed open the door of the women’s locker room.

      Mayburn had been watching the DeSantos for over a month now. They were ultrawealthy—definitely wealthier than they should be on DeSanto’s executive salary. Mayburn had been trying to determine where the couple got the money that supported their high-flying lifestyle—a stunning home in Chicago, two others in Aspen and Grand Cayman, memberships on all the glitziest charitable boards and a small yacht they docked at Monroe Harbor in the summer. So far, he hadn’t had a lot of luck finding the source. And Bank Midwest was getting anxious.

      Just that morning, he’d gotten a call from Ken Cook, his contact at the bank.

      “Look, I’ll get to the point,” Cook had said. “The board had a meeting yesterday. We’re concerned as hell about DeSanto. We want him out, but we can’t let him go without proof. If we fire him and accuse him of laundering funds for organized crime, he’ll sue the hell out of us. We need something on this guy and soon.”

      Mayburn had been getting this message from them indirectly for the past few weeks, but now the real call. What Ken Cook was nicely saying was Give us something fast or you’re the one who’s fired.

      “I need a little more time,” Mayburn said. “This guy is smooth as hell, and his house might as well have a moat around it.”

      “We don’t have the time. With the banking industry the way it is, we can’t take on any kind of scandal, and we all think DeSanto is bad news and we want to cut him out. Quietly. We just need proof.”

      Mayburn wondered for a second if he should call it quits on this one. He’d had absolutely no luck getting inside their fortress of a mansion in Lincoln Park, nor had he had any success in getting close to Lucy, who he thought might inadvertently lead him to some piece of information about her husband. She was always at her husband’s side, or else surrounded by women—usually other moms at the playground. Private investigations of this sort—with an intelligent subject who had protected himself like a medieval king—required sitting on one’s hands, waiting and waiting and waiting, until the right moment of opportunistic light shot into your day. Unfortunately, there was little light breaking through the gloom in this case.

      But if he quit, he’d have to give back the sizable deposit they gave him and then, most likely, he’d have to give up doing business with the bank ever again. Corporate clients were like that. If you couldn’t produce the goods one time, they forgot your name.

      “Ken,” he said. “Just give me a few weeks. I’ll find out what you need to know.”

      “You’ve got one week,” Ken said. “That’s it.”

      With this on his mind, Mayburn trailed DeSanto into the locker room and went to his own locker fifteen feet away. Using the mirror inside the door, he watched DeSanto change from a charcoal-gray suit into black shorts and a T-shirt. DeSanto had a toned body but for a pair of faint love handles. Mayburn had no real reason to believe this, but he imagined Lucy DeSanto was the type of person who actually liked that extra flesh on her husband’s waist; thought it was sweet somehow, despite how DeSanto treated her—at least in public. In fact, it might be precisely because of how he treated her—like a possession he had little use for anymore—that Lucy probably found those love handles a sign of the humanity her husband no longer evidenced.

      “Excuse me,” Mayburn heard someone say.

      He shot a quick look to his right, surprised. It was just another member, gesturing to get past him.

      “Pardon,” Mayburn said softly. He moved closer to the locker to let the man through. As he did so, he looked in the mirror again, and saw DeSanto glance his way.

      Was he recalling that he’d seen Mayburn before? Was he remembering the guy behind him at the Starbucks on Armitage Avenue, near his home? Was he thinking of the man who’d sat two rows behind him while he was courtside at the Bulls game last week?

      Mayburn turned his back to DeSanto. He doubted DeSanto could place him at either the coffee shop or the basketball game (or the bar at the Four Seasons or the men’s bathroom at Bank Midwest), even though he’d been in all those places within mere feet of DeSanto. Mayburn had a knack for blending into his surroundings. His medium-size build, nondescript brown eyes and typical forty-year-old

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