Chapter 6 - The Forensic Ledger
On Thursday morning, the sun broke through the gray haze of Cook County with that brilliant, brittle clarity that only comes in late October.
The air off the lake was forty-eight degrees, smelling of dying leaves and the bitter, metallic tang of the steel mills thirty miles to the south.
I was discharged from the hospital at ten o'clock.
I did not go to our house in Evanston. I did not go to the nursery where the white crib with the hand-painted gold leaf—the crib Theo had spent three weekends assembling with an Allen wrench—sat empty beneath the window.
We drove south down Lake Shore Drive in a rented Lincoln sedan that smelled of brand-new upholstery and commercial carpet shampoo.
Theo drove with both hands on the wheel at ten and two, his eyes tracking the mirror every thirty seconds, checking for the white Mercedes that he knew was no longer on the road.
We pulled up to the curb outside the six-story limestone building on West Monroe Street that housed the offices of Chapman and Cutler.
The conference room on the fourteenth floor had twenty-foot ceilings of coffered oak, six tall windows that looked down into the canyon of the financial district, and a thirty-foot table made from a single slab of Honduran mahogany that had been polished until it reflected the recessed halogen downlights like dark, liquid molasses.
Renata was already there.
She sat at the far end of the mahogany slab, three feet from the window, as if she were trying to maintain an escape route toward the fire escape.
She was wearing a black wool St. John knit suit that Julian had purchased for her in 2012 for the opening of the Lyric Opera season. It was three sizes too large for her now; the shoulders drooped, the gold buttons hanging loose from their threads, the skirt pinned at the waist with an enormous brass safety pin that she had tried to conceal beneath the lapel of her jacket.
Her hair was dyed, but the roots were two inches long—a stark, dead white that showed against the platinum like lime dust on concrete.
Beside her sat an attorney named Leonard Gold.
Gold was seventy-two years old, with the watery, rheumy eyes of a lawyer who had spent forty-five years handling uncontested divorces and simple real estate closings in the strip malls of Niles. He had his battered leather briefcase open on the table, two dry saltine crackers resting on an open napkin beside his yellow legal pad.
Theo and I sat down.
I moved slowly, the staples across my hip pulling against my woolen slacks with a sharp, dragging ache that made me sit on the edge of the leather chair with my weight tilted onto my left hip.
Theo did not sit down.
He stood behind my chair, his hands resting on the high back of the mahogany frame, his knuckles white against the dark leather.
On the table between us lay three black binders, each three inches thick, embossed with gold lettering: THE ESTATE OF JULIAN CASTELLIN — PRELIMINARY RECONSTRUCTION OF ACCOUNTS.
"We have a quorum," Theo said.
The voice was not loud, but it made Leonard Gold jump, his hand knocking his saltine cracker off the napkin onto the polished mahogany.
"Mr. Castellin," Gold began, his voice thin, quavering, smelling of old tobacco. "My client... Mrs. Castellin... she is in an extremely delicate medical state. Her physician in Highland Park has certified that she is suffering from acute reactive depression following the tragic events of last Saturday. We are requesting a thirty-day continuance of these proceedings to allow for a comprehensive medical evaluation."
Theo didn't look at Gold. He looked at Renata.
My mother was staring at the corner of my black wool coat. Her eyes were sunken, dark purple rings circling her sockets like grease smudges on a porcelain plate.
"Renata," Theo said.
She didn't move. Her fingers were twisting a gold charm bracelet—the one Julian had given her for their twentieth anniversary, bearing eight small gold charms representing the eight dry-cleaning plants—until the links cut into the loose skin of her wrist.
"In November of 2020," Theo said, opening the first binder with a sharp, dry snap of the three-ring mechanism, "you executed a deed in lieu of foreclosure on the property located at 4722 South Martin Luther King Junior Drive."
Renata’s fingers stopped moving.
"The plant was closed," she whispered. Her voice was hoarse, down in the bottom of her throat. "The environmental people... they said there was perchloroethylene in the soil. They wanted eighty thousand dollars for a phase-two environmental study. Julian was dead. Where was I supposed to get eighty thousand dollars?"
"You didn't get an environmental study, Renata," Theo said.
He turned the page.
"You sold the parcel to an LLC named Horizon Land Group for two hundred and ten thousand dollars," he said. "A sum that was wired directly to an account at the Chase Bank in Evanston under the name of Bianca Castellin."
Leonard Gold blinked, his mouth opening slightly. He turned his head forty-five degrees to look at his client.
"Mrs. Castellin... did you disclose that transaction to the probate court?"
Renata didn't look at him. She looked at the mahogany table.
"Bianca needed a down payment for the condo," she said, her voice dropping into that stubborn, petulant whisper she had used to explain away her credit card bills for thirty years. "Bianca couldn't live in that apartment in Rogers Park. The neighborhood was changing. There were people... there were people on the sidewalk at night."
"The Rogers Park apartment was twenty minutes from the university where she wasn't attending classes," I said.
My voice was very quiet, but it made the old lawyer flinch.
Renata’s head snapped toward me.
"You have no idea what it was like!" she hissed, the old venom flaring for half a second in her sunken eyes. "You had your father’s brain! You could sit with a book for six hours and get an A! Bianca was sensitive! Bianca had feelings! When Julian died, he left me with sixty thousand dollars in checking and four hundred thousand dollars in tax liens from the IRS! What was I supposed to do? Let his daughter live on food stamps?"
"You had one point four million dollars in the commercial accounts, Renata," Theo said.
He didn't raise his voice. He reached into the second binder, pulled out a certified bank statement from the Northern Trust, and slid it six feet across the mahogany table.
The paper stopped against Leonard Gold’s water glass.
The lawyer picked it up, adjusted his bifocals with his thumb, and began to read.
His face didn't go pale; it went the color of an old ash tree that had been struck by lightning in nineteen-eighty.
"Oh, my God," Gold whispered.
"That account," Theo said, "was not listed on the probate inventory you filed under oath on January fifteenth, twenty-twenty-one."
He pointed a finger at the blue signature line at the bottom of the fourth page.
"That signature," Theo continued, "purports to be the mark of Julian Castellin, executed on December second, twenty-twenty."
He looked at Leonard Gold.
"Julian Castellin was pronounced dead at Northwestern Memorial Hospital on November twenty-eighth, twenty-twenty," Theo said. "Four days before that signature was notarized in the drive-through lane of the bank on Dempster Street."
The conference room went so quiet that the sound of the traffic fourteen floors below—the faint, rhythmic hiss of air brakes on Monroe Street—sounded like someone breathing through an oxygen mask.
Leonard Gold took off his glasses. He laid them on his yellow legal pad, folded his hands over his napkin, and pushed his chair back three inches from the table.
"Mrs. Castellin," the lawyer said, not looking at her. "I cannot represent you in this meeting."
Renata didn't move.
She sat in her oversized St. John knit suit, the gold safety pin gleaming beneath her lapel, looking at the two men and the woman who held thirty years of her life in three black three-ring binders.
"What do you want?" she whispered.
Theo looked down at me.
He didn't speak. He stepped back half an inch, yielding the floor to the woman who had thirty-two staples in her hip and sixteen inches of living girl in an incubator three miles to the north.
I looked at my mother.
I looked at the woman who had watched me study by the light of a twenty-watt bulb in the kitchen on Elm Street while Bianca had private tutors; the woman who had told me my wedding wine was cheap; the woman who had shoved my eight-month pregnant body into a table of crystal flutes because she wanted to see a pearl-white Mercedes with a silver ribbon drive through the gates of a country club.
I didn't feel rage.
I didn't feel that hot, burning desire to see her led away in handcuffs down the center aisle of the church in Highland Park.
I felt only the cold, mechanical detachment of my father, Julian, standing over his steam presses at five o'clock in the morning, looking at an ink-stained shirt that could never be cleaned, and simply throwing it into the rag bin behind the boiler.
"The Elm Street house," I said.
Renata’s eyes lifted, small, wet, and desperate.
"It will be deeded to the Claire Julian Settlement this afternoon," I told her. "The corporate shares will be voted to approve the complete liquidation of the remaining dry-cleaning assets to satisfy the back taxes on the South Side plants."
"And me?" she whispered, her chin quivering with that ancient, pathetic plea for special dispensation. "Where am I supposed to go, Naomi? I am sixty-four years old. I have no pension. I have no social security of my own."
I reached into my purse, pulled out a small, rectangular brass key with a stamped number on the tag, and laid it on the Honduran mahogany.
APT 2B — 4722 S. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DR.
"The efficiency above the boiler room is empty," I said.
She stared at the brass key as if it were a scorpion that had crawled out of the air vent.
"You can't do that," she choked out. "That’s... that’s the South Side. There’s no doorman. There’s no garden."
"There is an iron radiator that works three days a week," I said. "And the manager will give you two hundred dollars a month if you help him fold the industrial towels on Saturday mornings."
I stood up.
My staples pulled, but I didn't wince. I didn't reach for Theo’s arm. I stood on both feet, my wool slacks straight, my hands at my sides, looking down at the woman who had spent twenty-six years pretending that cruelty was simply an excess of maternal love.
"The movers will have the rest of your clothes at the curb by five o'clock, Renata," I said.
May you like
I turned toward the oak double doors.
Theo didn't look back. He closed the black binders, picked them up under his arm with a single, coordinated movement, and walked beside me through the carpeted lobby toward the elevators, leaving the old lawyer and the woman with the heron robe sitting alone in the middle of thirty feet of dead wood.
