Chapter 3 - The Geometry of Elm Street
The house on Elm Street was not an estate. It was an eight-thousand-square-foot brick Georgian built in 1994 by an associate justice of the Illinois appellate court who had gone to federal prison for taking kickbacks from concrete contractors.
My father, Julian Castellin, had purchased it at a sheriff’s auction in 2002 for sixty cents on the dollar, using cash he had accumulated through three decades of owning eight dry-cleaning plants on the South Side of Chicago.
Julian had been a man who understood steam, perchloroethylene, and legal titles. He had never owned a tuxedo. He drove a brown Buick LeSabre with crank windows until the day he died, and he kept his real estate records in five steel fireboxes buried beneath the floorboards of his workshop in the basement of the plant on 47th Street.
At six-fifteen on Sunday morning, eight hours after the country club had been scrubbed of crystal and amniotic fluid, a private towing flatbed with hydraulic outriggers backed across the manicured lawn of the Elm Street house.
The grass was Kentucky bluegrass, cut to precisely two and a half inches by a commercial service that Renata billed to an LLC named Castellin Properties. The dual rear tires of the forty-ton Peterbilt truck sank three inches into the damp sod, tearing two parallel troughs of black peat through the perimeter border of white petunias.
Renata came out onto the limestone porch in her dressing gown.
It was an antique Chinese silk robe, embroidered with silver herons, that Julian had bought her in Hong Kong in 1988 when they were still pretending that his business success could purchase her entry into the Lake Forest social registers. Her hair was unbrushed, falling in thin, peroxide-bleached strands around her throat. Her face was bare of makeup, revealing the mottled gray-yellow undertones of sixty-four years of gin and social panic.
"What is this?" she screamed down the driveway.
The driver of the flatbed, an enormous man named Stanislav who wore a fluorescent orange safety vest over a faded Bears sweatshirt, did not look at her. He pulled the lever on the hydraulic console mounted behind the cab.
The steel bed groaned, sliding backward with a deafening, metallic shriek that echoed off the brick porticos of the adjacent houses.
Behind the flatbed sat Theo’s Audi.
Its left front fender was crumpled, the headlight hanging from its wiring harness like an unseated eye, the radiator grille smeared with white paint from the Mercedes SUV.
Theo stepped out of the car.
He had not slept. He had not changed his shirt. The white pleated front of his tuxedo shirt was still stained with my blood across the lower buttons, the dark red crust having turned the color of dried liver in the morning mist. His hair was damp from the hospital sink where he had washed his hands up to the elbows before driving north on the Edens Expressway.
He held a thin, red-rope legal folder under his left arm.
"Renata," he said.
My mother stopped at the bottom step of the limestone porch. She drew the heron robe tighter across her collarbones, her chin lifting with that ancient, instinctual arrogance that had kept her creditors at bay since my father’s funeral.
"You had no right to come here with this machinery," she said, her voice shaking slightly before she managed to drop it into her standard register of imperious irritation. "You damaged Mason’s car. Do you have any idea what an AMG package costs to repair? He’s calling his insurance adjuster from the club right now."
"Mason does not own an AMG Mercedes," Theo said.
He walked past her, his boots making a clean, hollow sound against the wet limestone steps.
"The vehicle is leased through Castellin Logistics Incorporated," Theo continued, not turning his head as he reached the front door. "A corporate entity whose charter was revoked by the Secretary of State eighteen months ago for failure to file annual franchise tax reports."
Renata froze. Her left foot was suspended two inches above the wet brick walkway.
"What are you talking about?"
Theo reached into his pocket and produced a key.
It was not the brass Schlage key that Renata had distributed to the cleaning service and the pool maintenance crew. It was a heavy, four-sided Medeco key made of nickel silver, the kind used on commercial vaults and pharmaceutical cabinets.
He inserted it into the secondary deadbolt that sat six inches above the ornamental handle—a lock that Renata had lived with for fifteen years without ever knowing its cylinder was pinned to a master key held in a safe-deposit box at the Northern Trust.
The cylinder turned with a heavy, oiled thunk.
"Julian purchased this parcel in November of 2002," Theo said, stepping into the two-story foyer.
The house smelled of stale lilac potpourri, expensive air-conditioning, and the faint, bitter tang of vinegar from the cleaning crew’s damp mops.
"He used funds from the liquidation of the 35th Street plant," Theo continued, walking across the black-and-white marble tiles toward the library. "He did not title the deed in his personal name. He did not title it in joint tenancy with his spouse. He placed it in an irrevocable spendthrift trust designated as The Claire Julian Settlement."
Renata was behind him now, her slippers slapping against the marble with a wet, frantic rhythm.
"Julian left everything to me! The lawyer in Skokie... Mr. Geller... he read the will at the dining table! You were there, Theo! You sat right in that chair and you didn't say a word!"
Theo stopped in the center of the library.
The room was paneled in American walnut, with eight hundred linear feet of custom shelving containing three thousand leather-bound volumes that Renata had purchased by the yard from an estate liquidator in Milwaukee to match the forest-green velvet draperies.
On the desk sat a framed photograph of Bianca at her debutante ball in 2018, wearing forty thousand dollars’ worth of rented diamonds and smiling with the vacant, unearned confidence of a child who had never seen an electric bill.
Theo laid the red-rope folder on the green leather blotter.
"Mr. Geller was a probate attorney who specialized in simple estates under five hundred thousand dollars," Theo said, unscrewing his fountain pen. "He read the holographic will that you provided to him from the nightstand drawer—the one you had Julian sign forty-eight hours after his second craniotomy at Rush Presbyterian."
Renata’s fingers flew to her throat, catching the silver embroidery of the herons.
"Julian was of sound mind! The doctor signed the attestation!"
"The doctor was your second cousin, Arthur Vance," Theo said. He didn't look up from the folder. He laid out three documents side by side: a certified deed from the Cook County Recorder of Deeds, a seventy-page trust agreement executed in the Chicago offices of Sidley Austin in 1998, and a twelve-page bank statement from the Cayman National Bank in George Town.
"Julian knew what you were, Renata," Theo murmured. "He spent thirty years watching you use his dry-cleaning routes to buy your way into the auxiliary committees of women who wouldn't let you use their guest bathrooms. He knew that the moment he was in the ground, you would strip Naomi down to the marrow to keep Bianca’s nails painted."
"Naomi was capable!" Renata shrieked, her voice finally breaking into the raw, screeching register of a cornered shoplifter. "Naomi had a scholarship! Naomi had her father’s brain! She didn't need the money! Bianca is soft... Bianca needs protection!"
"Bianca is twenty-six years old and has thirty-four thousand dollars in unpaid revolving credit debt across five cards that you have been servicing using the escrow accounts from Naomi’s trust," Theo said.
He lifted his eyes. They were cold, black, and completely devoid of human light.
"The baby was born at three-fourteen this morning," he said.
Renata stopped breathing. Her chest hitched under the Chinese silk.
"Is... is it a boy?"
Theo picked up the desk lamp—a heavy bronze banker’s lamp with an emerald glass shade—and set it down on the floor by his left heel.
"Her name is Claire," he said. "She weighs four pounds, two ounces. She is currently intubated in an isolette in the neonatal intensive care unit with a subdural hematoma caused by the impact of your hips against the table edge."
He leaned forward, his knuckles resting on the green leather blotter.
"If that child has a neurological deficit when she turns twelve months," Theo whispered, "I will not file a civil suit against you, Renata. I will take this binder to the State’s Attorney for Cook County, and you will spend your seventy-fifth year in the Dwight Correctional Center for attempted voluntary manslaughter."
May you like
He pointed toward the front door.
"The movers are outside," he said. "You have until twelve noon to remove your personal clothing. Anything purchased after October twelfth, twenty-nineteen, remains on the inventory."
