And now, years later, he’d been hired by Bank Midwest to investigate Michael DeSanto, one of its executives suspected of laundering funds, and Mayburn was pleased to discover DeSanto was an East Bank member. Before the DeSanto case, Mayburn had considered canceling his membership because it seemed he was too busy to use it, yet he carried around a tiny pipe dream that he would find time to start working out again, he would find time to sit in the grill and chat up a gorgeous female exec in high heels. In short, he dreamed of an ordinary existence, but he just couldn’t seem to find the time to live it.
Mayburn ran his membership ID through the kiosk card reader and entered the gym, his eyes firmly on the black, curly-haired head of Michael DeSanto. When Michael and his wife, Lucy, a petite, elegant blonde with short hair, reached the locker rooms, they parted. Lucy called out to her husband as he walked away. She grabbed his arm and pulled him back for a kiss. Michael seemed to suffer through the gesture. Lucy stood for a second, watching his retreating back before she turned and pushed open the door of the women’s locker room.
Mayburn had been watching the DeSantos for over a month now. They were ultrawealthy-definitely wealthier than they should be on DeSanto’s executive salary. Mayburn had been trying to determine where the couple got the money that supported their high-flying lifestyle-a stunning home in Chicago, two others in Aspen and Grand Cayman, memberships on all the glitziest charitable boards and a small yacht they docked at Monroe Harbor in the summer. So far, he hadn’t had a lot of luck finding the source. And Bank Midwest was getting anxious.
Just that morning, he’d gotten a call from Ken Cook, his contact at the bank.
“Look, I’ll get to the point,” Cook had said. “The board had a meeting yesterday. We’re concerned as hell about DeSanto. We want him out, but we can’t let him go without proof. If we fire him and accuse him of laundering funds for organized crime, he’ll sue the hell out of us. We need something on this guy and soon.”
Mayburn had been getting this message from them indirectly for the past few weeks, but now the real call. What Ken Cook was nicely saying was Give us something fast or you’re the one who’s fired.
“I need a little more time,” Mayburn said. “This guy is smooth as hell, and his house might as well have a moat around it.”
“We don’t have the time. With the banking industry the way it is, we can’t take on any kind of scandal, and we all think DeSanto is bad news and we want to cut him out. Quietly. We just need proof.”
Mayburn wondered for a second if he should call it quits on this one. He’d had absolutely no luck getting inside their fortress of a mansion in Lincoln Park, nor had he had any success in getting close to Lucy, who he thought might inadvertently lead him to some piece of information about her husband. She was always at her husband’s side, or else surrounded by women-usually other moms at the playground. Private investigations of this sort-with an intelligent subject who had protected himself like a medieval king-required sitting on one’s hands, waiting and waiting and waiting, until the right moment of opportunistic light shot into your day. Unfortunately, there was little light breaking through the gloom in this case.
But if he quit, he’d have to give back the sizable deposit they gave him and then, most likely, he’d have to give up doing business with the bank ever again. Corporate clients were like that. If you couldn’t produce the goods one time, they forgot your name.
“Ken,” he said. “Just give me a few weeks. I’ll find out what you need to know.”
“You’ve got one week,” Ken said. “That’s it.”
With this on his mind, Mayburn trailed DeSanto into the locker room and went to his own locker fifteen feet away. Using the mirror inside the door, he watched DeSanto change from a charcoal-gray suit into black shorts and a T-shirt. DeSanto had a toned body but for a pair of faint love handles. Mayburn had no real reason to believe this, but he imagined Lucy DeSanto was the type of person who actually liked that extra flesh on her husband’s waist; thought it was sweet somehow, despite how DeSanto treated her-at least in public. In fact, it might be precisely because of how he treated her-like a possession he had little use for anymore-that Lucy probably found those love handles a sign of the humanity her husband no longer evidenced.
“Excuse me,” Mayburn heard someone say.
He shot a quick look to his right, surprised. It was just another member, gesturing to get past him.
“Pardon,” Mayburn said softly. He moved closer to the locker to let the man through. As he did so, he looked in the mirror again, and saw DeSanto glance his way.
Was he recalling that he’d seen Mayburn before? Was he remembering the guy behind him at the Starbucks on Armitage Avenue, near his home? Was he thinking of the man who’d sat two rows behind him while he was courtside at the Bulls game last week?
Mayburn turned his back to DeSanto. He doubted DeSanto could place him at either the coffee shop or the basketball game (or the bar at the Four Seasons or the men’s bathroom at Bank Midwest), even though he’d been in all those places within mere feet of DeSanto. Mayburn had a knack for blending into his surroundings. His medium-size build, nondescript brown eyes and typical forty-year-old face worked perfectly to keep him inconspicuous. There was also his ability to change looks-jeans and a Jordan jersey for the Bulls game, a pin-striped suit and ivory handkerchief for the Four Seasons-that led subjects to occasionally think they’d met Mayburn. But rarely did anyone recognize him outright.
When he allowed himself to think about it, he wondered if this vagueness about him was the reason his personal relationships tended to suffer. His family in Wilmette thought of him as slightly odd, slightly standoffish, if only because he hadn’t truly participated in their world. He hadn’t gotten married despite a girlfriend here and there (he’d been dumped last year by Madeline, a half-Swiss, half-Japanese stunner), he didn’t have children and he didn’t work in the family’s commercial-leasing business.
He left the locker room and followed Michael DeSanto to the cardiovascular room-a massive football field of a space lined with shiny silver treadmills, bikes and elliptical machines. The clientele here wanted a workout for sure-you could see the sweat and the rippling of toned leg muscles-but they were also here to be seen, hence the snazzy workout gear, the makeup on all the women’s faces, the carefully constructed ponytails.
Mayburn trailed DeSanto from a wide distance for the next hour-first on the treadmills, later into the weight room. DeSanto spoke to no one, said nothing that could help Mayburn get into the guy’s head or, even better, into the guy’s house, where it was believed he ran the bulk of his laundering operations.
Mayburn left the weight room and went in search of Lucy, who he saw inside a glass-walled studio, her body held in an awkward V-shape, next to ten other women struggling themselves into the same position. Mayburn checked the class schedule. Advanced Pilates, it read.
Mayburn suppressed a sigh and turned away. Advanced Pilates was not something he was going to be able to fake, and besides, Lucy was once again surrounded by other women. He could usually blend in just fine, but not in Lucy DeSanto’s world.
Something on this case had to give.
Mayburn left the club. As he walked toward his car, his cell phone vibrated. He reached inside his jacket pocket for the phone.
Baltimore & Brown, the display read.
He hit the Answer button, hoping to God it wasn’t that dickhead Tanner Hornsby, who treated everyone who wasn’t a lawyer as if they were distinctly second-rate. “Hello?”
“John, it’s Izzy McNeil.”