Rough Trade

coffee, and gave my money to the woman with a cumulus of red hair who managed to tear herself away from her copy of the National Enquirer long enough to make change.
    I made my way into the nearly deserted cafeteria and set my tray down on the nearest table. In an effort to save money they’d turned off most of the lights. In some sections the chairs had been set upside down on top of the tables. Somewhere in the gloom I could make out a bored janitor swinging a desultory mop.
    As I ate I did my best to take stock of the situation. Jeffrey Rendell had been lured to his father’s house by the fax to his hotel. Had he known who’d sent it? Who did he expect to catch? Obviously the police thought it was Chrissy and Jack McWhorter, but all my instincts told me they were wrong. That Jack had eyes for Chrissy was obvious, but I’d never once seen her return his interest.
    For a moment I contemplated the possibility of some kind of a relationship between Chrissy and Fredericks, but immediately dismissed it as being too farfetched. Indeed, the whole thing was ridiculous. I’d been with Chrissy off and on all weekend and she certainly hadn’t acted like someone who’d been planning to sneak off to meet a lover.
    I tried to set aside conjecture and instead focus on what was known for certain. With less than forty-eight hours left before the default deadline with the bank, two members of the Rendell family had met with violence. Surely there was something more at work here than the freakish cruelty of coincidence, but what?
    On a practical level Jeff’s having been shot inserted an enormous question mark into a situation already fraught with uncertainty. Normally I would have expected the bank to grant us an extension, if only on humanitarian grounds. However, Gus Wallenberg had shown no such inclination after Beau Rendell’s death, and I could see no reason why Jeff’s incapacity would move him further. After Thursday’s leak to the press regarding the possibility of the team’s moving to Los Angeles, there was very little public relations downside to screwing the Monarchs’ new owner even as he lay fighting for his life in intensive care. I cursed myself for not having had Jeff turn over power of attorney to Chrissy earlier.
    I was startled from these and other dark thoughts by the sound of a chair scraping against the floor. I looked up and saw a young black woman carrying a cafeteria tray.
    “Do you mind if I join you?” she asked.
    I looked quickly around at the dozens of empty tables surrounding us. “Be my guest,” I replied, not quite knowing what else to say.
    As she set down her tray and sat down, I was able to take a closer look at her. She was closer to twenty than thirty and was dressed in a Miami Dolphins sweatshirt over jeans. Her hair was shiny with brilliantine and swept into an elaborate conch on top of her head. I wondered if she worked for a personal injury firm, making the rounds of hospitals in the middle of the night, chatting up the families of car-crash victims—an illegal but nonetheless widespread practice.
    “I don’t know if you remember me from the trial,” she said quietly. “I’m Renee Fredericks.”
    “You’re Darius’s sister,” I said as the information clicked into place.
    She’d come to the courtroom every day her brother was on trial. My mother always liked to say that good manners prepare you for the unexpected, but even I was unprepared for a conversation with the sister of the person who’d just shot my client.
    “I’m one of his sisters, anyway,” she said, managing a shy smile. “The one who still talks to him, at any rate.”
    A great deal had been made of Fredericks’s childhood during the trial. We’d learned how he’d grown up in the slums of south central Los Angeles, one of the six children his mother had had with six different men. We’d heard about his ninth birthday spent in the Venice Beach homeless shelter and of the year and a half he and three of his sisters had lived in the back of an abandoned Chevy.
    “How is your brother doing?” I asked.
    “The doctors have done all they could for him in the operating room,” she said. “They say he’s still got a bullet lodged in the front of his brain. They’re afraid if they take it out, the surgery will kill him.”
    “And if they don’t?”
    “I’m a nurse, Ms. Millholland. I moved to Milwaukee when my brother signed with the Monarchs. I work downstairs in peds. I’ve seen enough