Page 34 of The Lie Maker

Like, what was the fucking point of it all?

Was this the life he’d always dreamed of? Running Gartner Linens? A thriving company that supplied sheets and towels to several hundred motels and hotels in the Chicago area and beyond? Was that anything to be proud of? Was this the path he would have chosen had his father not died? Had taking over the family business ever been his ambition when he was young? That’s a hard no, my friend. Sure, these days, it provided a good living for him and his family, for his wife, Cecilia, and their daughter, Cherie. It had bought them a nice house here in the Highland Park suburb of Chicago. A Lexus and a Jaguar sat in the driveway. He belonged to the local Rotary Club and had won a couple of distinguished business awards.

But for the love of God, the hassles.

It had been hard enough hiring people before the pandemic. Spending your day in a sweatbox running hundreds of industrial washers and dryers, prepping towels and bedding stained with God knows what from dozens of motels and hotels in the Chicago area for a measly fifteen bucks an hour? Oh, yes, please, pick me! And now it was even more difficult to find laborers to put in eight hours a day at his plant.

So what was a boss to do? Look south, that’s what.

Turned out there were plenty of people streaming into the country every day willing to do the kinds of jobs the locals wanted no part of. Only problem was, these workers weren’t, technically speaking, in the country legally.

So you got them authentic-looking IDs so they could get driver’s licenses, bank cards, shit like that. And when your friendly neighborhood immigration inspector came snooping, you put some money in an envelope so he’d look the other way. It was the cost of doing business. And then his kid needs braces.

It was always something.

Kyle had people to handle these things, but some days he wanted all these problems to go away. His discontent, which had been evident before Valerie’s death, was growing.

There were two things he wanted:

Justice for Valerie, whatever that might be.

A new life.

He imagined himself in his eighties, thinking back with regret to his forties, realizing that that was the time he should have made some bold moves. That was the time he should have—

“Kyle?”

He was so deep in thought he hadn’t heard his wife enter the home office. She must have tiptoed in. He’d had his back to the door, and slowly turned the plush Eames chair around to face her.

“Yes?” he said.

“You’ve been in here for an hour,” Cecilia said.

“You got a stopwatch or something?”

She spotted the container of pain medication on his desk. “You have a headache?”

“You figured that out?” he asked. “Just by looking at the bottle?”

She looked at him with sadness in her eyes. “I’m going to bed.” She turned and left the room, closing the door behind her.

There needed to be so many changes. Things needed to be set right. It was a time for new beginnings. There were scores to be settled.

Twenty

Jack

“I’ve put together a lunch,” Bill said.

We’d stepped into one large room that was a combined living area and kitchen, more dated than I expected it to be. No woodstove or icebox, but the stove and fridge, in avocado green, dated back to the seventies. The large pine dining table was surrounded by six wooden chairs, not one matching any other. A large quilt hung over the back of the brown couch, and probably the only modern item was the flat-screen TV resting atop an old blanket box shoved up against one wall.

At one end of the kitchen counter was an old fan, the kind you might see on a private detective’s desk in a 1940s movie. The blade spun around noisily inside its thick wire enclosure. Tickety tickety tickety tickety tickety. It did a not-bad job of moving the air around in here, which was nice, because it was unusually warm for a late-September day, the temperature hovering in the mid-eighties. This place was definitely not equipped with air-conditioning.

“Just a bit of this and that,” Bill said, gesturing to the food he’d put out on the table. “Gwen had her people do a grocery run for me in town.”

“What town is that?” I said, unsure of my bearings.

Bill smiled. “Now that would be telling, wouldn’t it, Gwen?”