Final Option

months after it was completed, Bart Hexter mortgaged the house and used the proceeds to buy a seat on the Chicago Board of Trade.
    In less than two years’ time, with a one-year-old son and a daughter on the way, Hexter repaid the mortgage and leveled the house that had been his wedding present. In its place he erected another house, this one in the same Tudor style of his in-law’s, only four times as large. When construction was complete, Pamela’s ample girlhood home stood dwarfed behind it, literally in its shadow.
     
    The drive to Lake Forest from my apartment in the city is a depressing trek up the chain of expressways— the Dan Ryan, the Kennedy, and the Edens—that, feeding into each other, form the suburbanite’s daily escape route from the city. Once you’re free of the jumble of construction near Wrigley Field, past the tidy bungalows of Skokie, there’s a strange stretch, as barren as the moon. Farmland has been asphalted into parking lots, and sleek office buildings sprout like poisonous mushrooms from the flat, empty plain.
    But once you leave the expressway and turn onto Route 41, you get to the country as abruptly as turning on a light—at least the expensive and manicured version of the country that passes as Chicago’s lush northern suburbs. The ancient elms are huge, meeting above the road in a dark, leafy canopy. There is a muted murmur of vast lawns being mowed in the distance, and if you listen hard enough you can imagine the faint ping of golf balls being hit deep behind the trees.
    It was especially warm for April. When I rolled down the window of my car, the air smelled damp and rich with the progressing spring. I turned onto Deerpath Road and made my shady progress into the bastion of quiet privilege that is Lake Forest. On my right, I passed the city offices, set back from the road like a small college, then past the three blocks of cloyingly cute and shockingly expensive shops that comprise the business district. I crossed the train tracks—the station is so quaint it always makes me think of gingerbread— and turned right onto Parkland Avenue. After a mile or two, I slowed to watch for the twin pillars of red brick that mark the entrance to the Manderson estate.
    Hexter’s secretary had faxed me detailed directions to the great man’s home, including a carefully drawn map, but I’d left them at the office. I didn’t need them. I’d grown up less than a mile from his home.
    I found the gateposts easily enough and turned onto the drive that was newly paved and deliberately winding. The house, as I recalled, was set quite a distance from the street in what was considered, even by Lake Forest standards, to be a rather grand park.
    As I rounded the first turn I was startled to see a car nose down in a gully a little distance from the drive. A whisper of exhaust trailed from the tail pipe. I slowed to a stop.
    Everyone knew Hexter’s car, a custom-made Rolls Royce Phantom—black with a white top. The license plate read, simply, BART. But what was it doing in the underbrush, with its back wheels cocked absurdly on the bank of a gully and its front butted up against a young birch tree? I got out of the car and squelched my way down the gently sloping bank.
     
    * * *
     
    We may have had a meeting that morning, but Bart Hexter certainly wasn’t dressed for business. He waited for me behind the wheel of his Rolls clad only in a pair of red silk pajamas. The window was rolled all the way down on the driver’s side and I called his name through it softly. I didn’t expect any answer. I was close enough to see clearly the cruel damage of two bullets in his head.
    The impact of the shots had knocked him toward the passenger side of the front seat where he sprawled, his head tilted absurdly so that one eye stared up at me with a disquieting mixture of entreaty and astonishment. Below his left temple there was a neat red hole with another larger and more ragged wound beneath it. His arms were limp, with one flung straight back behind his head and the other hanging down from the seat of the car, twisting his neck at an angle that would have been uncomfortable to maintain in life.
    Beyond the body the passenger side window was a crimson mess. The white leather of the car’s interior was splattered with blood and flecked with what I took to be bits of brain and bone. In a few places, black hairs clung to the goo. Black Irish, I remembered with a shudder, my breath suddenly coming in