Rough Trade

begin her surgical residency at the University of Chicago. It was a huge, rambling wreck of a place, reduced to near tenement status by a succession of student renters and in no way improved during our stewardship. The floor tilted wildly, and there were only three windows that opened and closed in the whole Place. It hadn’t been cleaned since our last cleaning lady quit more than a year earlier.
    I unlocked the door and checked the front hall for signs of Claudia’s diminutive sneakers, which she invariably kicked off the instant she walked through the door. Unsurprisingly the mat was empty. Now that she was pursuing a fellowship in trauma surgery at Northwestern Memorial, she’d begun spending nearly all her time at the hospital. Still, I was surprised by how disappointed I was to find her not at home. I was more than just physically tired; I was feeling emotionally exhausted and I really didn’t want to be alone.
    I jumped at the sound of the telephone and hurried across the living room to answer it. By the time I reached; the receiver, the adrenaline was already starting to flow. No one calls with good news at two o’clock in the morning.
    I picked it up.
    “Hi, Kate. It’s me, Jeff. I need a favor.” It was his usual greeting. During the day it was Chrissy who called. These nocturnal communications were Jeff’s specialty.
    They’d started almost as soon as Chrissy and Jeff had gotten back from their honeymoon. After all, I was more than just Chrissy’s best friend, I was a well-connected' Chicago attorney who knew how to keep her mouth shut. I could be useful.
    Chicago is only an hour’s drive from Milwaukee, even less if you happen to be behind the wheel of a Ferrari. It is also a much better place to party than buttoned-up Milwaukee, especially if you’re a twenty-year-old millionaire with more testosterone than common sense. In the cynical world of pro sports it is a given that boys will be boys, and the Monarchs preferred that their boys did their playing in Chicago, away from the prying eyes of the fine, upstanding citizens of Milwaukee. Unfortunately, it is also axiomatic that semiliterate, unsocialized gladiators will occasionally get themselves into trouble.
    “Oh, please,” I groaned, “no more crimes against women, not after last time.”
    “Don’t worry,” Jeff replied. “There were no women involved.”
    “What is it then? Did some hero wrap himself around a tree and get picked up for DUI? Why don’t you call Glen Morrissey? He usually handles those for you guys.”
    “I don’t think he’d come. We haven’t paid him for the last two. Besides, this isn’t a DUI.”
    “Then what is it?” I asked, scrabbling through the four days’ worth of unread mail that had accumulated on the table for something to write on.
    “A player named Jake Palmer. He’s the offensive lineman they call Jake the Giant.”
    “I don’t care what position he plays. Just tell me what he did that makes him need a lawyer in the middle of the night.”
    “I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but apparently he and a bunch of special-teams players decided to drive down to Chicago after the game and drown their sorrows over the loss to Minnesota.”
    “You guys lost again?”
    “Crushed would be a more accurate description. The final score was 27 to 3. I don’t know how Bennato has the balls to call himself a football coach.”
    “So tell me about this guy Palmer,” I prodded.
    “He and a bunch of special-teams boys drove down to Chicago and hit the bars. I guess somehow or other they ended up at The Baton.”
    “At The Baton?” I demanded incredulously. “How do a bunch of football players manage to just somehow end up at the most notorious transvestite bar in the city? I’m surprised they’d even let them in the door.”
    “Apparently not as surprised as Palmer.”
    “Oh, no.”
    “Oh, yes. I guess he started buying drinks for some dishy blonde he picked up at the bar. At some point he must have gotten sleepy, because he put his head in her lap. I gather that’s when he discovered that—how shall I put this?—things were not exactly as they seemed.”
    “And let me guess,” I practically hooted. “A disturbance broke out.” I imagined a three-hundred-pound Gulliver from the University of Alabama warding off the blows of the assembled homosexual population of Lilliput and burst out laughing.
    “It’s not going to be funny if the press gets hold of this,” cut in Jeff.