Embroidered Truths (22 page)

“Yes. Yes, indeed, a great pity.”

“What did you think of John as a person?”

Mr. Kedge leaned back in his high-backed leather chair and thought about that for a few moments. “He was personable, intelligent, clever, and charming. He worked at least as hard as any attorney here. He could be tough when it was called for, and he had drive, but there was also a human side to him I liked. I think he could have gone much further than he had, if his life hadn’t been cut short.”

Betsy wrote most of that down. “This is kind of a hard question to frame. There’s the law, I mean like the ‘letter of the law’ and then there’s fairness and balance and values like that. Which side was John on?”

“Well, my dear, he was a lawyer. It was his job to follow the law. Outside of his office, he might have been all for fairness, as you call it, or balance. Within this place, we’re all for following the law.”

“I see. I think that’s all. You were kind to give me this much of your valuable time. Thank you.” She stood. “Who was the sailor you were talking with before you talked to me?”

“Sailor? Oh, you mean D’Agnosto! You
are
perceptive! He is, in fact, a sailor when he can find the time. His goal was to sail all seven seas, and he finished that last year.”

“Does he work here, or is he a client?”

“Oh, a partner, has been for many years—almost as many as me. He handles the money as it flows in and out, and tries to dam up as much as possible on our side. He also has the unhappy job of trying to keep litigants from testifying against our clients at trial by arranging settlements. Another of those little ‘letter of the law’ problems we lawyers deal with.” He gave her a condescending smile.

“Well, thank you again,” said Betsy.

“Can you find your way out to the lobby, or shall I call for someone to guide you?”

“I can find my way. Good-bye.”

Twenty

BETSY went back up and across Fourth Street to the Wells Fargo Center Building where Mr. Lebowski had his office. She couldn’t believe it was only 11:47, she was actually going to be a couple of minutes early for her luncheon engagement.

Yet he was waiting for her in the anteroom to his office. He seemed nervous about something. “Let’s roll,” he said on seeing her, but he paused to glance both ways out the door to the hallway before he hurried her out, and into the stainless steel and marble elevator going down. Once the door closed, he relaxed.

Betsy didn’t. What if they ran into the person he was clearly trying to avoid down in the lobby? He hadn’t seemed frightened, only a little anxious, and maybe even that was on her behalf—he was probably used to angry clients. Criminal defense attorneys had a lot of clients with a history of not handling anger issues well. Who was this one? What did he look like? What if he was waiting at the bottom? She finally dared to ask, “Who are we running from?”

“My brother. He’s in town and he’s a leech. He’s on his way over and I don’t want to take him to lunch, too.”

“Oh.”

Out front he hailed a cab. “The Polonaise Room, across the river on Hennepin,” he said to the driver. And to Betsy, “It’s a nice little Polish restaurant—have you eaten there?”

“No.”

“I haven’t been there in a long while, which is too bad. The food there takes me right back to my grandmother’s house.”

The cab turned onto Hennepin Avenue, and a couple of blocks later crossed the Mississippi on what was probably the shortest suspension bridge in the world: the two towers were a stone’s throw apart. The Polonaise Room was a block further along; the cab pulled over and they got out.

It wasn’t a fancy place. It had vertical white siding and a sharply angled roof that shouted, “It was remodeled in the fifties!”

The interior was from the fifties, too. The entrance led into a long bar, with booths in golden shimmery plastic along one side, and black globular lights suspended from the ceiling with knobs of colored glass in them.

“Gosh,” said Betsy, suddenly feeling very young—or was it old?

The maitre d’ was a stocky older man with an Eastern-European face.
“Dzien dobry!”
said Marvin, adding to Betsy, “That’s Polish for hello.”

The maitre d’ overheard his explanation and smiled. “I am Lebanese, not Polish,” he said, showing you can’t judge a book by its cover. “My sons own this place. But the food is still the best Polish in town.”

Marvin looked disappointed and doubtful as they were led to the dining room and seated. “Well, it looks the same,” he said, looking around. The room was paneled in dark wood, with big, rectangular picture frames around black-and-red wallpaper. More of the chunky black globes hung from the ceiling. The tables and chairs were of an early version of imitation wood, with thin, black, v-shaped rods for legs. If there had been a calendar on the wall, it would have featured a wasp-waisted woman in a long, full skirt looking admiringly at a green Pontiac with tail fins. Very, very fifties.

A nice blond waitress, not at all a fifties relic, brought the menus.

“Here we are, all
right
!” said Marvin on opening it, doubts wiped away. “Look at this! Pieroges! Bigos! Golabki!”

Betsy wasn’t Polish, but she grew up in Milwaukee, which has a large Polish-descent population. But the only Polish item on the menu that she recognized was kielbasa—Polish sausage, a thinner, spicier bratwurst. She’d had a good friend from junior high through high school, Marlene Sobolewski, and had dined at her friend’s house about as often as Marlene had dined at hers. Kielbasa with kraut was a favorite in Marlene’s house, like sloppy joes were in Betsy’s.

Right there on the menu was hunter’s stew—the “bigos” Marvin happily noted—a combination of kielbasa, beef, and sauerkraut. That sounded a whole lot like a meal Betsy had shared at the Sobolewski table many a time. “The Polish National Dish,” said the menu, which was interesting; Betsy had thought adding kielbasa to beef was Marlene’s mother’s way of stretching Sunday’s leftover roast beef into Monday’s dinner.

Smiling in nostalgia, Betsy decided that’s what she would have. Marvin ordered it, too, and a beer to drink.

While they waited, Betsy opened her notebook.

“What have you found out?” asked Marvin.

“Well, not much, I’m afraid. John may have had an enemy at his law firm: a partner named David Shaker, who was John’s supervisor. Mr. Shaker is known as the company pit bull, because he’s willing to confront other attorneys about their shortcomings. It seems the upper echelon at the firm are all cowards. They send him to do their dirty work, and he appears to enjoy it. He came to say some hard things to John the day before he was killed.”

“So far, that’s nothing to get excited about,” said Marvin.

Betsy raised her right arm and waggled her hand. “I also heard that Mr. Shaker was made to appear a fool in front of a managing partner and an important client by John. John had to be called in to explain a complex legal plan he had drawn up and that Mr. Shaker was willing to claim as his own idea until he had to admit he didn’t understand how it worked. Mr. Shaker was very angry and embarrassed about this. It’s entirely possible he came down to talk to John about that and words were exchanged. David was supposed to work up that plan on his own, but he had been loading John with work he couldn’t do himself and/or was trying to so overburden John that John would quit.”

“What kind of legal plan?” asked Marvin.

“It had something to do with executive compensation, and involved foreign currencies. It was probably a way of giving someone a golden parachute. The person who told me about it did some of the research on the plan for John and said she didn’t understand how the parts she looked up fit together, either. The memo on it was thirty pages long.”

“Only thirty?” said Marvin, smiling. “Must have been a summary. Did this person you talked to write the memo?”

“No, it was dictated by John and typed by his secretary, Tasha Kravchenko.”

“But it wasn’t Tasha who told you about this?”

“No, Tasha was reluctant to say anything bad about anyone at the firm, and she was a big fan of John’s. She did say John was a hard taskmaster, but that he praised her to everyone as the one secretary who could keep up with him. She was very proud of that.”

“So scratch the abused secretary as a suspect.”

“Oh, I’d say so, yes.”

“On the other hand, there’s David.”

“Yes,” said Betsy. “Of course, maybe he cleared his anger just shouting at John. Certainly if I became angry enough at someone to kill him, it would be because I sit in silence, nursing grudges. Especially I wouldn’t go shouting at him at the office, where people might find out. On the other hand, maybe there was some further provocation.” Even as she said it, Betsy was thinking that over.

Suppose that was what happened? Suppose that later John had said something to David? Like what? Well, suppose that incident Tasha had talked about, where Mr. Kedge had come in and said how wonderful John was, had happened because of this incident? And suppose John had taunted David with it?

Tasha might know. She had said something about John never shouting, or “at least not very often.” Maybe Betsy needed to talk to Tasha again.

“Penny for that thought?” said Marvin, bringing Betsy back to The Polonaise Room.

“Oh, sorry, just thinking.”

“About what?”

Betsy didn’t want to offer a theory with that many supposes in it, so she said, “The person who told me about David and John said she’s willing to act as a spy for me, see if there’s anything else about John she can dig up for me.”

Marvin nodded. “Very valuable, informants are.”

When the food arrived, Betsy found just the smell of it sent her winging back to old times in Milwaukee. She dug in, and when, after a couple of minutes, she looked across at Marvin she saw the same look of happy nostalgia on his face.

He saw her smiling at him and said, lifting a forkload in salute, “Just like mother used to make.”

Betsy said, “Where did your mother learn to cook Polish dishes?”

“From Babushka Lebowski, of course.” Babushka, Betsy knew, was the Polish word for headscarf. Since older Polish women universally wore headscarves, it also meant Grandmother.

Lebowski continued, “We ate over at her house two, three times a month. Mama refused to make some of it, of course. Blood soup, I remember she wouldn’t even taste it at Babushka’s house. On the other hand, Daddy wouldn’t touch chitterlings.” He made a face. “I didn’t like them, either. But greens and pot likker, black-eyed peas, corn bread and pork chops—now that was a feast!” His accent had broadened just a bit, and he smiled at her. “I got the best of both worlds, and a cholesterol number that scares my doctor.”

“I believe you.” Ethnic diets like these were designed to sustain men who performed grindingly hard labor in the fields, coal mines, and factories. People who sat at desks but still ate like that found their arteries clogged up.

From The Polonaise Room Betsy went back to Excelsior, to the shop. A big shipment of books had come in and the volunteers had unpacked them and stacked them on the library table—and looked through most of them. They had been kind enough, however, to only open one of multiple copies, aware that there were customers who insisted on virgin spines. She had ordered three of Carol Phillipson’s
Cross-Stitch Designs from China,
and five of Herrschner’s
200+ Holiday Quickies
cross-stitch charts and projects—one of the latter was already sitting on the checkout desk for Doris to take home. Betsy herself paused to page through a copy of Barbara Baatz-Hillman’s beautiful collection of cross-stitched flowers, birds, and cats. For the sword and sorcery set, there was
Cross-Stitch Myth and Magic
. There were three copies of Teresa Wentzler’s lush, beautiful—and difficult—cross-stitch charts called
Christmas Collection
. The cover featured a delectable procession of six angels, so wonderful Betsy was sure she’d have to reorder that title soon.

She was relieved to see that four copies of
Stitch ’n Bitch
had arrived. This was the second time already this year she’d had to reorder this “book with attitude,” and last time it had gone on back order.

She helped Nikki shelve the books, then went to call Jill at work.

“I wonder if you can do me a favor as soon as you get off.”

“Probably. What’s up?”

“I need to go to Vera’s Coffee House in Uptown, on Lyndale. I’m looking for the young man who was at John Nye’s house the day he was killed. I have his name and a description, and Goddy says he hangs out at Vera’s—but he also said I should go there with a female companion.”

“All right. I’ll have to go home and change out of these clothes. I’ll pick you up at six, okay?”

“Thanks, Jill.” She hung up and ignored the inquiring glances of her employees the rest of the day.

Jill turned up at six wearing chinos, walking boots, and a flannel shirt open over a T-shirt that advertised Buzzard Billy’s Armadillo Bar-N-Grillo. She had also pulled her hair back into a tight braid down her back and wiped her face clean of makeup.

Betsy looked at her own more dressy outfit of new gray sandals, light wool slacks, and a sweater, also gray. Her purse was gray, her jewelry gold.

“Should I change?” she asked.

“No, you look great.”

“But you . . . uh.”

“Didn’t you know I’d play the butch?” Jill held up her left hand to show that she’d replaced her wedding band with a ring shaped like a horseshoe.

Betsy began to giggle, and she giggled off and on all the way into town. Jill called on all her reserves of ice to maintain her cool expression, but her eyes twinkled and one corner of her mouth twitched. Neither trusted herself to say a word, and Betsy had her giggles under control by the time Jill turned off Lake onto Lyndale.

Vera’s was a modest place, one story of redbrick with two big plate-glass windows. Right inside was a dilapidated couch marking the entryway. The room had a collection of tan Formica tables and brown wooden chairs. A young man sat in a corner with his laptop open and operating. A counter at the back featured a chill box with a selection of salads and sandwiches. A big menu was written on a collection of wood-framed blackboards on the wall behind it. Betsy selected a chicken salad and sparkling water; Jill ordered a sandwich on a hard roll and a double latte. They saw an open door on the side and went to look out.