Chrysalis, p.18
Chrysalis, page 18
“It’s still here!” she says triumphantly, waving a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels for me to see.
She’s just shown me her liquor stash and I laugh. I walk to her vanity, which is mostly clear on top, save for a dozen or more bottles of perfume. She follows me and I can see she’s smiling as she picks up a bottle. She opens the lid and takes a whiff then offers it to me. I haven’t smelled this in fifteen years, but I remember the once-popular scent: Calvin Klein Escape. Now we’re both grinning, content to be together on this trip down memory lane.
“Close your eyes,” she says, and I do. I hear a drawer open and close. “Brownie points if you can guess this one.”
I hear the soft hiss of a sprayer being depressed and a masculine fragrance fills the room. I recognize it immediately.
“Is that Cool Water?” I laugh as I open my eyes. “What are you doing with that one?”
“Benji used to wear it. He thought he was hot shit.”
“Apparently, you did too,” I point out. We’re quiet for a beat before we both burst into laughter.
“I’ve always loved perfumes,” she offers after our laughter subsides. I’m following her out of her room and down a long hallway that will lead us to a different wing. “When I was little—like, Ella’s age—when we would visit my grandmother, I’d always disappear off to her bedroom and try on all her perfumes. They were always in fancy bottles—you know the ones, with those big tasseled bulbs you squeeze?”
I nod.
“I would play up there for hours—I’d get into her makeups and powders, too. Whenever I resurfaced, she’d joke that I looked—and smelled—like a French whore.”
I like the joy I see in her eyes as she tells the story. It reminds me that her childhood had happy moments, probably many when her mother was still alive. I’ve agonized over the dark parts, but it does me good to remember there were light parts too.
As we walk through the hallways, the one thing I find that I love is the well-curated collection of paintings and sculptures. They’re not famous pieces—most art in private collections aren’t known. But I can recognize from the distinctive artistic styles that there are some huge names adorning these walls. I understand better why elements of her father’s estate can’t simply be auctioned off to the highest bidder. She wants to know that it won’t fall in unappreciative hands.
She slows as we reach a certain door, and from her hesitation, I’m guessing it has to do with her mother. I take her hand, and she squeezes mine. I let her lead me in and her reaction reminds me of the one she had when I took her to the Art Institute last year. She is transported and I give her the space she needs. We spend a few minutes inside—sometimes, she’s just standing, lost in thought. At other times, she approaches the adornments, lets her hands touch her mother’s things. The smell of cedar assaults us as she opens the door to the enormous closet in which her mother’s clothes and shoes are preserved. Once inside, she walks to her mother’s dressing table.
I’m not surprised now when she’s drawn to the perfume. Unlike Darby’s vanity which had many perfume bottles, her mother’s has only one. She picks it up, but doesn’t smell it. And just when I think she’s lost in memories once again, she turns her eyes to me and, with perfect clarity, holds it out.
“Will you put this in your pocket please? I want to take this one home.”
When we return downstairs, I’m surprised by how much progress has been made and a glance at my watch tells me that Darby and I have been gone for two hours. I don’t mind that Darby’s taking her time. She’s much stronger than she was a few weeks ago, but there’s still a lot of emotional bullshit to work through. Taking it slow confirms that she’s letting herself process a few things.
We set up a system. Anita created two piles for Darby and me. One are things she is almost sure are insignificant—things that I should be able to screen—and another that she thinks might have sentimental value. That pile is for Darby. Her third pile—the pile of papers she believes relate to government business and should be shredded—is being placed in bins. We only have Anita for half a day, a detail that was deliberate on my part. I want Darby to have privacy as she starts wading through all of this.
“Miss Christensen?”
Mr. Adjani calls her a few minutes after we enter. I don’t know much about lock breaking, but apparently her father has a difficult vault. The older man who looks like he’s been doing this job for fifty years sits in front of what must be a 1,000 pound safe with instruments fanned around him. As we approach, he informs us that he’s about to make the final tweak that will crack the safe.
He has a system, too. Since there are a number of safes in the house, he will allow Darby to personally witness him opening them one-by-one. She must then transfer their contents to a set of new lock boxes he’s brought. Because there’s not enough time for him to reconstruct all of the safes and give them new combinations, the focus right now is on getting the contents out.
I’m surprised by the emphasis on maintaining her privacy, but I suppose it makes sense. The vaults of powerful people are full of secrets, and discretion is part of the job. When Adjani places a fine instrument in some critical spot on the disassembled lock, the heavy door opens with a dull thud. The man collects his instruments swiftly and steps away. The new lock box has been placed on the cabinet over top.
“Anita…” Darby asks calmly. “Would you mind showing Mr. Adjani the safe in the dining room?”
The two of them leave us, and it’s just Darby and me. We look at each other.
“I mean…what could he have been hiding, right?” she asks shakily. Her voice sounds appropriately unconvinced. Because this is Frank Christensen. And we both know he’s probably hiding a lot more.
She steps forward to open it. Its walls are six inches thick, and the space inside is around two by two by one. It’s huge for a vault, and what’s inside isn’t a total shock. Piles of cash, some envelopes and folders that clearly contain documents, and a couple of guns.
Darby surprises the hell out of me by going straight for one of the two pistols. In a second, she’s released the clip and begins emptying the magazine of what look like 9mm bullets into her hand. She places a palm full on the desk next to her, pops the final bullet out of the chamber, and puts the clip back in. All of this is done in less than 30 seconds. That unloaded pistol is the first thing she places into the new lock box.
“That was hot as hell.” The words spill out of my mouth before I have time to remind myself what a serious moment this is. She looks back and cracks an impish smile, then picks up the second pistol that’s buried in the vault.
“Want to make yourself useful?”
I nod. She hands me the gun, which I don’t handle nearly as elegantly as she did. This one’s a .22 revolver and even though it’s loaded and ready to be used, it’s finely made with a pearl handle and intricate details carved on the barrel. It looks more like a collector’s item than a deadly weapon. Unloading it, I place the smaller bullets next to the ones Darby has already set on the desk and place the pistol gingerly in the box.
She’s already loading stacks of hundreds and I quickly do some math in my head. A stack of hundred dollar bills adds to $10,000 and if I’m eyeballing it right Frank had about $250,000 in cash just lying around. It’s more money than I’ve ever seen in one single place and it’s difficult for some part of me to comprehend. But Darby seems unfazed. I think about all the things she must have seen growing up. If nothing else, being a bystander is helping me see her more clearly. She herself has been a bystander to white collar crime and political dealings at a level that few people can fathom. She said nothing Frank did could surprise her. I believe that now.
Two hours later, I’ve learned that the Christensen home has an astounding number of safes. They’re behind paintings and in closets. There’s even one behind a bookshelf that conceals a hidden wall. It’s as if Frank had expected that at some point his house would be raided and searched. Then I remember the police came just over a month before. All day, I’ve been chalking up Darby’s mood to being forced to remember an unhappy childhood. Now I realize she’s been anticipating something I’m not. Today, we may discover something she doesn’t want anyone else to find.
We’ve been at it for three hours. It’s tedious work that yields very little, mostly ancient files related to maintaining the house. We reduce them to several folders of things that would be financially prudent to keep. Purchase receipts and appraisals for valuables. Insurance documentation. Years and years worth of tax returns. Deeds to the houses Frank owned and proof of authenticity for the art.
When we’re through sorting the papers, it’s time to start in on the lockboxes. The first three are full of expensive jewels. Darby chooses a few pieces she remembers her mother and grandmother wearing, as well as a few pair of cufflinks that she remembers as her grandfather’s, and puts the rest aside. It’s starting to get confusing, so she finds Post-It notes and labels three of the ones she’s sorting the items into. The first says “Darby”, the second is “Cousins”, the third says “Auction”.
There’s something peculiar about the contents from each of the smaller safes, however. Most of them hold heirlooms but every single one has a manila envelope with a different name. Darby recognizes them as the surnames of some of Frank’s closest associates. I even recognize a few. I raise my eyebrow when I see Darby putting them in a pile. She shrugs.
“It’s evidence against them.”
I shake my head.
“I’m sorry…what?”
“That’s the reason why there are so many safes. So that if he ever got arrested and wanted to take someone down with him, he could direct investigators to a specific hidden vault. That way, he’d be able to give up one of them without giving up all of them. It’s the oldest trick in the book.”
For as much as I hate Frank, I’m impressed.
More family heirlooms and smaller stashes of cash reveal themselves from the smaller lock boxes, and what we find in unmarked folders ranges from turn of the century photographs of her great-grandparents to records of her family’s accomplishments. She finds everything from her great-grandfather’s college degree, to purchase receipts for early issue shares of U.S. Steel, to a hand-drawn family tree that began in Denmark and ended a generation before Darby was born. These heirlooms tell the story of how the two families she came from emigrated to the U.S. and built their fortunes.
As she inspects each item slowly, I see something inside her open up. She’s told me before that she dislikes the way both sides of her family made their money. The first generations pulled themselves up from their bootstraps, but later generations hoarded money and built wealth on the backs of others. On her mother’s side, they’d been slumlords. Her father’s family owned factories during the industrial revolution. Darby wasn’t ashamed of how they’d gotten rich—she was ashamed of how they’d stayed that way.
But right now, she’s touching things that belonged to those from the generations before. We chat about it a little. She tells me stories about these people—what she knows from what she’s been told. Even if it’s ancient history, I’m glad she’s finding something to admire about her family.
Soon, a fourth box is marked. On the Post-It, she writes “Duplicate”.
“Things I’ll have copied for all of my cousins,” she explains quietly.
“I’m sure they’d love to see these,” I say with a small smile.
When we open the cylinders that had been hidden in the vault behind a bookcase, we find some truly amazing, and quite valuable, paintings on canvas.
“How did the cops miss all this?” I ask as I put the second-to-last lock box away. Right now, we have only the boxes we’re sorting into—and the one with the important stuff—open.
“There’s a decoy safe,” she says as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “Everyone knew that if the cops ever came, to take them to the one over there,” she says motioning behind her head. I open a cabinet that is the twin of the one concealing the safe that we just had cracked. This one is unlocked and empty.
“What was in this one?”
“Money. Jewelry. Birth certificates and shit. Everyone in the family knew the rule: righty, tighty, lefty loosie. It meant the one on the right was the one to keep tight and the left one was the one they were allowed to know about.”
This explains it. I say what I’ve been suspecting. “You thought of telling the cops about this.”
“Yup,” she says unapologetically, popping her ‘p’.
“But you didn’t.”
“Nope.”
It’s at times like this, I’m reminded that my woman is shrewd. I think back to her interview with the detectives and know that, once again, I’ve underestimated her.
“Easiest one first?” I ask.
She nods and picks up the one labeled ‘Cavendish’. It’s one of the manila envelopes that was found in the smaller safes. What’s inside are items we can’t decipher. Documents that mean nothing to us, but that align with Darby’s theory that they’re Frank’s insurance policy.
“God forbid Frank Christensen go down alone,” she mumbles as she replaces what we’ve found. We go through the next set of manila envelopes until we reach the final five from the big safe. She picks up the one labeled ‘McCormick’
“Do you have any idea what that means?” I ask as she uses her fingers to pinch the tiny metal closers together, allowing the nine by eleven manila envelope to open.
“I’m pretty sure it was the shell company he used to move money he wasn’t supposed to have to places it wasn’t supposed to go,” she says drily, turning the envelope upside-down to slide papers out. “Since he held office, his tax returns and business interests were public. Anything he needed to do that wasn’t above board had to be done some other way.”
“Sounds like he was pretty open about it.”
“You can’t imagine the shit he used to teach me with the idea that one day, I’d go into the family business. He took pride in teaching me how to be corrupt. The man taught me how to count cards in single-deck blackjack when I was six.”
We both smile at that.
“And anything he didn’t tell me, I figured out on my own. I was an only child with no one to play with,” she points out. “I hid everywhere, and overheard everything. How do you think I know where all the safes are?”
She turns her attention to the papers in her hands. I try to be patient as she scans her eyes over whatever she’s looking at. After she finishes the first page, she hands it to me.
It’s some sort of org chart. As I keep reading, I see that it’s a roster for the Board of Directors. Frank is named, and the other names I see are those of his lackeys. Some of them are identical to the names of the men on the envelopes from the other safes. I scan for Charlie Sweeney’s name, but I don’t find it. Just as I finish scanning this first document, she’s handing me a key vendor list. The final two papers she gives over are an annualized grid of Board Director earnings and a similar chart showing a year-by-year account of each vendor’s Tax ID number, and how much each was paid.
“Is this…?” I can’t even finish. If I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing, Frank has created a file of evidence that would incriminate himself and everyone he knows for money laundering in the hundreds of millions.
Darby nods. “It’s legal for companies to pay their Board members a salary for lending their expertise to the business. But their Board salaries came from whatever revenue was earned from illegal acts.”
“What does McCormic Corp do?” I ask.
“Financial services and consulting.” This earns me an ironic look.
“Which is probably code for insider trading—”
“And a ton of other shit we probably don’t want to know about,” she says.
“And the vendors?”
“Probably fixers, hit men, people like that, with shell companies of their own.”
Holy shit.
By the time we finish, it’s nine at night and both of us are exhausted. She’s gotten what she came here for. There’s such a pandora’s box of evidence against various characters, that Darby decides against giving these files to the cops. But she has taken a liking to Avi, and she wants to see whether he can comb through any of it and get more dirt on Sweeney. Even if he can’t, she likes the idea that he’d use the information in other ways she would approve of. Before we head to the car, she hands me the bin with all these files.
“And you say I’m the one who’s obsessed with vigilante justice…” I tease.
She shrugs, but I see something in her eyes. “I guess not.”
“I think Bex is pregnant.”
Darby looks sideways at me as we drive up Lake Shore Drive. We spent the night having a steamy reunion in my waterbed and now we’re on our way to Bex’s house for dinner. Since it’s almost Christmas, we’ve decided to stay up north for the next couple of days. Bex lives closer to Evanston than either of us do, and Evanston is where Darby is still busy going through her father’s house.
Being away from Bex and Ella is something I’ve been thinking about lately. Darby wasn’t the only one I’ve been missing. The more I think about where I belong, the more I know that Sydney—or any place as far away from my family as Sydney—is not where I should be long-term. Darby and I are no closer to resolving the “where” and the “when” of living together, but there has been some basic relief in knowing that we’re both committed to a plan.
“Isn’t that what Ella wants for Christmas?” Darby asks smiling.
“It is,” I say. “Did I tell you I knew Bex was pregnant with Ella before anyone else?”
Darby laughs. She thinks the twin thing is adorable and I know that she loves Bex. They’re on track to become great friends. Bex already thinks of Darby as a sister.
When we arrive, all it takes is a look to know my theory is correct. Bex looks tired and she nods when I look at her stomach, confirming what I’ve suspected before I have to say a word.
