Chapter Eleven #3
“Sure you didn’t.” Remi let the smile back into his voice, because he had a feeling needling her would rapidly become one of his favorite pastimes. “Walls are thin in that house, Anja. Sleep well last night?”
The line went dead.
Remi chuckled as he pocketed the phone.
#
Leo had barely regained his equilibrium when a knock came at the door, and then it opened to the one face in the building that could loosen the knot in his chest.
“Hey there, Leo.” Curtis Lennox appeared in the doorway with the warmth he filled every room with.
He was silver-headed with reading glasses pushed up into his hair.
He held coffee in each hand and extended one to Leo.
“Brought you the genuine stuff, not that break-room sludge. Got a few minutes before your day eats you alive?”
“Always.” Leo took the cup. Of all the thoughts crowding his head right now, the one he most needed to keep off his face was that somebody had stood in this office over the weekend and gone through his clients’ files.
He set his coffee down so Curtis wouldn’t see his trembling hand.
“Curtis, this is Remi. He’s shadowing me for a couple of weeks. ”
“The veteran. Marcy told me.” The older man shook Remi’s hand with both of his, the full Lennox treatment. “Son, thank you for your service, and welcome. I’m sorry I didn’t bring you a coffee.”
“No apology necessary,” Remi insisted.
Curtis nodded. “Anything you need while you’re here, my door’s open. Leo will tell you it actually is.”
“It is,” Leo confirmed.
“Nice to meet you, sir.” Remi excused himself, ostensibly to get oriented with the front desk, giving Leo and Curtis the office and putting Remi working the floor while Leo kept the senior partner occupied.
The older man dropped into the chair across the desk, just as he had on a thousand prior mornings.
“So,” Curtis sipped his coffee, “your Anja. I’ve been thinking about her since Saturday.”
Hearing her name gave Leo an unexpected thrill. “Have you?”
“I have. I run a thousand people through that ballroom every year, Leo, and I shake every hand. Ninety-nine percent of them blur together by the end of the evening.” He pointed his cup at Leo.
“She didn’t. There’s a stillness about that woman.
She watched the entire room without appearing to.
Where on earth did you find someone like that? ”
“Through Chloe,” Leo answered, which was the cover and also the truth. “It’s been a few months. I wasn’t ready to trot her out until I was sure.”
“And now you’re sure.” Curtis lifted his cup in a toast. “About time. You work too hard and you don’t let people in. I’ve been saying it for years.”
“You have. Repeatedly. In writing, once.”
Curtis laughed. “And I was right, also repeatedly.” His smile turned reflective, and he spun his coffee slowly on the desk.
The kindness in him was real. That was the quality Leo loved in the man who had hired him and served as his mentor.
Curtis asked because he wanted to know, not to gain an advantage or keep score.
And that, more than anything, was what made the morning sit so badly in Leo’s chest. He was running the nicest man he knew through a filter built for suspects, and he hated himself a little for it, even if he couldn’t stop.
“She’s good for you. I could see it on you Saturday before I’d shaken her hand.
Lydia mentioned the same thing in the car on the way home, and she’s never wrong about these things, which she reminds me of often. ”
“Tell Lydia she has excellent judgment.”
“She knows. It’s unbearable.” Curtis chuckled, then let it fade.
“It’s been a strange stretch, though, hasn’t it?
The whole industry’s off-balance. I keep coming back to Vic, if I’m honest. I’ve been carrying it around all weekend.
” Curtis exhaled, and genuine sorrow moved across his face.
“Vic was relentless and funny as hell at a closing dinner.” He paused.
“But he’d been in a dark place a long while.
The drinking and gambling, not to mention that ugly divorce.
Some men carry the weight and some get crushed by it, and Vic just kept piling more on.
I’m not surprised by how it ended. I’m only sorry. ”
“Me too,” Leo agreed, and hated that he was studying Curtis’s face for cracks. There were none.
Curtis’s phone buzzed against the desk where he’d set it. He glanced at the screen. “Sorry, son, let me grab this. It’s one of my golf buddies. He’s probably calling to bail on our weekly game.”
He took it standing. “Walt, what’s up?” A pause, and then the color drained out of Curtis’s face. “Wait. Slow down. Say that again. When?”
Leo set his coffee down and watched the older man’s free hand find the edge of the desk and hold it.
“My God.” Curtis lowered himself back into the chair as though his legs had stopped being entirely reliable.
“No, of course. Of course. Have they told Deb? Is somebody with her?” He listened, nodding to no one.
“All right. Wednesday? I’ll make the notifications on this end.
You stay with the family. Thank you for calling.
” He lowered the phone slowly and sat staring at nothing before he remembered Leo was in the room.
“Curtis, what is it?”
“That was Walt Stuart, Tim Hargrove’s father-in-law.” Curtis pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose. “Tim died yesterday.”
Leo’s mouth gaped. Tim Hargrove was a senior partner going on thirty years with the firm. He’d argued contract structure with Leo over bad scotch at three different holiday parties and won every time. “He’s barely sixty.”
“Sixty-one.” Curtis’s voice had gone rough.
“His wife found him in the garage last night. They think his heart, or God, I don’t know what they think yet.
He’d been complaining about chest pains for a week and wouldn’t see anyone about it.
You know how he was. Stubborn as a fence post.” He shook his head slowly.
“I just had lunch with him on Thursday. We talked about his daughter’s wedding. ”
Leo came around the desk without thinking about it and placed a hand on Curtis’s shoulder. The surveillance, the files, and the circled photograph all fell away, and it was just two people absorbing the fact that one of their colleagues was gone. “I’m so sorry, Curtis.”
“Two in a week.” He seemed to be speaking to himself more than to Leo.
He gave a hollow, disbelieving laugh. “Vic, and now Tim. I’m getting to the age where the phone only rings with news like this.
” He patted Leo’s hand on his shoulder, then squeezed it, gathering himself with visible effort.
“The wake’s Wednesday. They’re doing it quickly with no fuss.
It’s what Tim would’ve wanted. It’ll be held at Bremen’s on Lindell. ”
“I’ll be there.”
“Good. Tim thought the world of you.”
Curtis stood again, steadier this time, though the morning had aged him five years in as many minutes.
“Be good to yourself, son. Bring Anja around properly sometime for dinner that’s not in a ballroom.
Lydia’s already planning the menu, which means it’s no longer optional.
” He paused at the threshold, and the wink he managed was a tired ghost of the usual one.
“Resistance is futile. Ask anyone who’s married into this firm. ”
Then he was gone. Leo sat alone with a cooling cup of genuinely excellent coffee and the deeply unwelcome awareness that the warmest, kindest segment of his morning had also been the one he’d spent the hardest scanning for a lie.
He hadn’t found one.
That should have been a comfort. Somehow it wasn’t. And the news about Tim sat beside it, heavy and sad and entirely separate. A thing that belonged to ordinary mortality, to failing hearts and stubborn men who wouldn’t see a doctor.