The Big Score Read online

  “Sometimes.”

  “That’s why you left him.”

  “I didn’t leave him, Matt. He threw me out. I gave him cause. You might as well know everything. I had an affair.”

  He thought upon the women in his own life. “In this day and age, that ought to be a forgivable offense.”

  “Would you forgive me, Matt?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was with your brother Christian.”

  Matthias’s hands jerked on the steering wheel, causing him to veer toward the curb until he snapped the car back on course. He took a deep breath, steadying himself.

  “You weren’t here,” she said. “You were a million miles away.” She started to say something else, but her voice caught and then broke. She began sobbing.

  For a long while, there were no more words between them. He could think of nothing adequate or useful to say—not to her, not to himself. Who hadn’t Christian slept with? Their mother? Annelise? Hillary? Christian had made several passes at her. He’d gone after Jill, too, though she’d firmly rejected him.

  “How did he treat you?” he asked.

  “My husband?”

  “Christian.”

  “He was very kind. I think that’s how it happened in the first place.”

  “He’s manic-depressive, you know. It goes with creativity. Vincent Van Gogh.”

  “There’s no need to trash Christian like that.”

  “No?”

  “Van Gogh’s whole family was like that, after all. It runs in families.”

  It was true. The remark was very pointed, and deeply wounding.

  She fired another shot. “You weren’t very faithful to your own wife, were you? Christian told me about you and that girl who worked for you.”

  Christian. He never passed up an opportunity to seize advantage. No wonder Sally hadn’t felt disloyal.

  “Is it over?” he asked.

  “Christian’s still my friend.”

  “Is it over now?”

  “Yes. Now.”

  She was staring at him. He tried turning on the car radio, but it didn’t work.

  The road wound on through less pretentious suburbs, passing through a section of Evanston lined with brick apartment houses, then following a curve of the shoreline into the northern districts of the city and turning ultimately onto the Outer Drive.

  Sailboats dotted the lake horizon to their left. The crowded playing fields and picnic grounds of Lincoln Park stretched away to their right. Passing Belmont Harbor, he caught sight of a slim green tower nestled among a huddle of larger, cruder structures.

  “There’s your building,” she said, so softly he could barely hear her.

  “I’m amazed it’s still there,” he said. “I half expected some big new condo with lots of balconies to be sitting in its place.”

  “Yours is the most beautiful building in Chicago,” she said. “It ought to be set out here on the lake, where everybody could see it.”

  “That’s the last thing I’d want,” he said. “No damned buildings on the lakeshore. This is Chicago, not Miami.”

  His words came out sharply, sounding too much like a rebuke. She turned away. They were rapidly approaching the Gold Coast. She lived in the west part of it, over near Dearborn Street. With so little traffic, they would be there soon.

  He took her hand.

  “It’s all right,” he said.

  “What’s all right?” She was hurt and angry.

  He curved his fingers tightly around her palm. “Everything. Everything will be all right.”

  How could he know that? He’d been with her less than two hours after an absence of years. She might be about to lose her job. Her child might be seriously ill. Her ex-husband might be plotting to ruin her life. When they’d parted, Matthias had promised his woman in France that he would return. What was he doing?

  They were approaching the North Avenue exit. He took his hand from Sally’s and returned it to the steering wheel.

  “Have you come back for good?” she asked. There was a plaintive tone to her voice.

  “I’m not really sure. I’ll be here for a while, perhaps a long while. The family affairs are a mess. There’s a lot to put back in order, especially at my father’s firm.”

  Earlier he would have said “my firm.”

  “Do you think you’ll go back to being an architect?”

  At their slower speed, moving along the busy street, Matthias noticed that people stared at his car. “I’ll do whatever has to be done.”

  His answer didn’t satisfy her.

  “You wanted so badly to be an artist,” she said. “A painter. Like Christian.”

  “The kind of painter Christian could be. Not the kind he is.”

  “Did you succeed?”

  He’d never lied to her before, not really. “No.”

  Her apartment building was old and small, but had an awning and a doorman. She was at least keeping up appearances. Matthias pulled into an open space next to a fire hydrant. He wouldn’t be able to accept an invitation to come upstairs parked there, not that he was prepared for that.

  He got out and went around to her side, gently opening the door and taking her hand to help her out.

  “Do you think you might be free tonight?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to check with Annelise.”

  “There’s a party at Bitsie Symms’s. I don’t think you know her. She’s become quite the big deal around town, very social. In Town & Country and W magazine all the time. It’s supposed to be quite a big party. The mayor may even come.”

  “I’d forgotten about such parties.”

  “I go to them all the time.”

  He wondered why. Old habits? Augmenting an otherwise meager diet? Looking for a husband? He felt so sorry for her.

  She took an old calling card from her purse and a pen, hastily putting down her telephone number. “Call me.”

  “All right.”

  She leaned forward, hesitated, then kissed his cheek. He put his hand on her shoulder, then dropped it as she stepped back.

  “It’s so good to see you again,” she said. “I was so sad this morning. I feel lots better now.”

  She gave him a wisp of a smile, then turned. As she disappeared into her lobby, Matthias wondered if he could get away with smashing his brother in the face.

  Peter Poe had his breakfast on the terrace of his penthouse facing Lake Michigan. He’d sent his man Krasowski out early to fetch some yachting magazines from the newsstand at the Drake Hotel, and looked through them while he ate. Then he had a telephone brought to him and got busy.

  Poe had three lawyers on retainer. One, with solid experience in criminal law, was in Indiana, his principal function that of keeping every aspect of Poe’s casino operations—on the surface, at least—within the bounds of state and federal law. The second was a stuffy and well-pedigreed old fellow who was a senior partner at one of Chicago’s more decrepit if eminently respectable law firms. Poe used him mostly as his front man when dealing with the city’s elite, and liked to have him at his side at the press conferences he called to announce new projects.

  Poe’s third and principal attorney, Bill Yeats, was a tax and money man who knew Chicago’s power structure inside out—knew it the way the city’s garbagemen knew all its alleys and gangways. He worked mostly for Poe now, and had become one of his most trusted advisers. Poe trusted him mostly because he had so thoroughly bought him. Yeats’s considerable retainer included a small percentage of Poe’s casino receipts.

  Yeats’s office was just up the street, on one of the lower floors of the Hancock Center. His apartment, a large, sprawling place, was on one of the higher residential floors of the same building. He was usually to be found in one or the other on most mornings, as Poe liked him on hand in case he worked up an idea during the night. He summoned Yeats now for just that reason. The lawyer was at Poe’s penthouse in eleven minutes. Poe timed him.

  Ye
ats had thinning, pale-red hair and a slight paunch; and had put the Southwest Side Irish-Catholic parish of his childhood far behind him. He was in summer Sunday morning clothes, including a light-blue Lacoste polo shirt, a navy blazer, lightweight gray flannels, gray socks, and Sperry Topsider boating shoes. He wore half-glasses, which, perhaps calculatedly, gave him the look of an erudite WASP.

  As requested, he had brought what he and Poe simply referred to as The Book. It was an inexpensive ledger of the kind commonplace in office supply stores before the age of computers. It contained not a single word. Its entries consisted entirely of numbers and dollar amounts, identified only by the page line they occupied. The first set of two columns, for example, represented the reported and actual monthly receipts from Poe’s casino in Michigan City. Another set was for his gambling riverboats operating out of Dubuque, Iowa. Sometimes the parallel columns of figures were exactly the same. Whether they were or not depended on the final entry on each page—indicating whether Poe’s various operations were showing an overall profit after payment on his huge debts or a loss. For the last five months, this bottom line had indicated loss.

  “I want to buy a boat,” said Poe, after his housekeeper had poured Yeats some coffee and gone back to her kitchen.

  “You already have a boat,” Yeats said. “One of the biggest on Lake Michigan.”

  “I mean a sailboat. A big one, with two masts.” Poe turned one of the yachting magazines toward Yeats, laying his index finger on a quarter page advertisement for a black-hulled sixty-five-foot ketch that was listed for $305,000.

  “You want to sell the one you have now? It’s a rough market for big tubs like that. The banks are still stuck with that one of Donald Trump’s.”

  “The day I sell the Queen P is the day I’m washed up. No, I want a second boat.”

  “For down in Florida or something?”

  “No. For here.”

  “Why?”

  “All the big players in the yacht club own sailboats. Including you.”

  “Most of them race.”

  “I know. I want to race. Like Ted Turner.”

  “Peter. You’ve got to know something about sailing.”

  “No, I don’t. I’ll hire somebody who does to race it for me. Maybe I’ll have him teach me.”

  Yeats tapped his foot, his only sign of exasperation. He had planned to devote the next week to persuading Poe to drop his plans for trying to buy the White Sox. Now this.

  “You can’t write off two boats; only one. And even that’s hard nowadays.”

  “I want to buy a sailboat, with two masts. There are some others in here for even less. Two hundred large. Maybe two fifty.”

  Yeats shook his head.

  “These are cruising boats, Peter. Too slow for racing. If you want to race, get a sloop rig.”

  “Two masts?”

  “Just one. But they’re fast. Here’s one. A fifty-one-footer, built for racing. Perfect. And only $145,000. The commodore of my yacht club has one a lot like it.”

  Poe stared at Yeats, expressionless, reminding the lawyer of a lion studying something he might want to eat.

  “One mast. And it’s small.”

  “It would be a gentleman’s boat, Peter. The America’s Cup racers are sloop-rigged, after all. And the accommodations would be ample for a small party. This one has two private staterooms.”

  More silence.

  “Do you want me to find one like this for you?” Yeats said. “Is that why you called me over? To help you buy a boat?”

  “One of the reasons,” Poe said quietly, but sounding friendly—Peter Poe, the “nice guy” billionaire once again. “You know sailboats. Find one. Big but fast. I want to sign a purchase agreement this week. And I want to enter it in a race this summer.”

  “This summer?”

  “Yes. Maybe the Mackinac.”

  “The Mac? That’s very big league, Peter. And I don’t think you’d be able to get a crew put together and trained in time. Do you plan to be aboard?”

  “Yes. I want to be in the picture at the finish.”

  “They won’t take your picture unless you win.”

  “That’s right, Bill. I want to win. I’d like to be in the papers as a big winner at something this summer.”

  “You might be able to get into the Chicago–Menominee. That’s up the lake, around the Door County peninsula, and across Green Bay. It’s a rough race, but not so many top skippers. Not so many boats. In late July.”

  “Do it.”

  “You want me for your skipper?”

  “No. You have your own boat.”

  Yeats shrugged. When Poe said nothing more, he started to reach for his briefcase, which contained The Book.

  “Get it out, Bill. I want to know if I can buy this thing for cash.”

  “Not if you’re going to press on with this White Sox thing,” he said, opening the case. “My fees alone could run you as much as a boat.”

  “I have no intention of buying the White Sox.”

  Yeats blinked. “What do you mean? You’ve been all over the TV news this week acting like you already own them.”

  Poe looked at him as if he were an utter fool. “Everyone thinks I’m all set to buy the Sox, that I’ve got the money to buy the Sox, the Cubs, the Bulls, anything I want. The Trib had an editorial comparing my fortune to old A. N. Pritzker’s. They’re wondering where I’m going to stop. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all I wanted out of this. Now I can go to the bank on the Cabrini Green deal. They’ll open their vault and hand me a wheelbarrow. Right?”

  “Which bank? Continental Illinois? First National? They’re not in a mood to hand anyone a wheelbarrow with this recession. Maybe a small shovel. Maybe a spoon.”

  “The new bank. Inland Empire. They’re not as big, but they’re players, and they’ve got a Japanese connection. They see me on a roll. They want to get the city moving again. They want to be a part of it. We’ll score. It means a lot of their eggs in my basket, but I’m the only action in town right now.”

  It was a correct assessment.

  “I was going to talk to you about them,” Yeats said. “If Continental or the First turned you down.”

  “Bill,” Poe said with an amiable smile. “That’s bullshit.”

  Yeats looked at his Sperry Topsiders. They were brand new. He wore a very old pair when he was actually on his boat.

  “What I want to know is this, Bill. Will Inland Empire want my casino or the riverboats for collateral? Everything else I’ve got is leveraged.”

  “Sure they will. They may be players, but they’re bankers.”

  “All right,” said Poe, nodding to The Book. “Starting now, I’m putting everything into the till. One set of figures.”

  “Everything?”

  “Every two-dollar chip.”

  “For how long?”

  “Until I say otherwise.”

  “What about all your debt service?”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “How?”

  “You don’t need to know that.”

  “What about Bobby Mann?”

  Mann was Poe’s casino manager. Poe had hired him at the request of some of the investors who had backed his Indiana operations. Mann had managed a casino in Atlantic City. He scared Yeats more than anyone in Poe’s organization, more than Poe himself sometimes.

  “I’ll deal with him.”

  “And your partners?”

  “They’re silent partners.”

  “They won’t stay that way.”

  “They will if they think the IRS is sniffing around. I know somebody in the U.S. Attorney’s office. I’ll have him give me a call—when I’m out at the casino. Or send an official letter. That should keep my partners very quiet for a while.”

  “You say you can take care of the shortfalls?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “And you still want to buy a boat?”

  “I’ll ha
ve the money,” said Poe. “You just get me the boat.”

  “Whatever you say.” Yeats stood up. He started to put the ledger back into his briefcase.

  “No,” said Poe. “Leave that.”

  “I’ve always had that.”

  “Things change, Bill. After we’ve got a deal on Cabrini Green, we’ll start a new system.”

  Yeats frowned. “Somehow I don’t think I know all that’s going on here.”

  “You’re a perceptive guy.”

  “If you can’t trust your lawyer, who can you trust?” Yeats said. He smiled, to show it was a joke.

  Poe didn’t smile. “If I didn’t trust you, Bill, you wouldn’t be here.”

  He walked his guest to the penthouse elevator.

  “Have a nice day,” he said, as the doors opened. “Why don’t you go sailing? Maybe you’ll run across a nice boat for me.”

  “With this recession, it shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “I don’t like problems, Bill.” The words were his farewell.

  After the doors closed, Poe went into his study and made a phone call to Mango Bellini. It rang four times, and he began to get angry. Finally she answered.

  “This is the third time I’ve called you this morning,” Poe said. “Why didn’t you answer my messages?”

  “I just walked in, Peter. The phone was ringing as I was opening the door. Honest. I’m sorry.”

  “Where were you?”

  “In church. At mass. He was there. He always goes to mass when he’s getting itchy. I guess it cleans the slate. Makes room for new sin.”

  “Wasn’t that a little risky?”

  “It’s a big church. I came late. Sat in the back. Left before it was over. It felt right, Peter. I think he’ll be coming out to play tonight.”

  “You sound a little nervous. Are you sure you’re up to this?”

  “I’m not nervous. Just getting psyched up.”

  “Anything from our guys?”

  “There were some paintings on your yacht, but not the one you’re looking for.”

  “And the girl? Jill Langley?”

  She paused to cough. He’d have to get her off cigarettes.

  “Nothing yet,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “Let me take care of this thing tonight.”

  “Okay, okay. Call me when it’s over. We’re going out tonight, but I’ll be back by midnight.”