Chapter 8 - The Price of Paper
The holding cell in the basement of the Daley Center was forty feet below the pavement of Dearborn Street. It smelled of carbolic soap, stale gray bread, and the cold, unwashed wool of two hundred people who had been processed through the municipal bond courts since sunrise.
I stood in the narrow consultation alcove behind the reinforced glass partition, wearing my service trench coat over my dress blues.
Across the stainless-steel counter sat Julian.
They had taken his Italian blazer. They had taken his leather belt, his gold chain, and his silk-blend socks. He wore an oversized pair of orange cotton trousers and a gray sweatshirt that had the words COOK COUNTY DOC stenciled across the chest in black industrial paint.
His hands were cuffed to an iron ring anchored into the concrete floor between his knees.
"Audrey," he whispered. His voice was hoarse, his vocal cords stripped from four hours of screaming at the intake deputies. "Audrey, you have to talk to Uncle Alistair. You have to tell him I didn't know."
"You knew, Julian," I said. My voice was quiet, muffled slightly through the circular perforations in the acrylic screen.
"I didn't know about the trust!" he wept, his face wet with tears that left pale streaks through the gray holding-cell grime. "Mom told me it was her money! She told me grandfather left it to her in a private account! She said you didn't need it because the army was paying for everything!"
"The army didn't pay for everything, Julian," I said. "I paid for it. Three hundred and forty-two dollars a month from my cadet stipend. The rest came from scrubbing the kitchen grease out of the exhaust hoods behind the mess hall."
He looked at my collar—at the silver bars catching the yellow light of the wire-caged bulb above our heads.
"They're going to put me in Division Nine, Audrey," he choked out, his shoulders heaving with a sudden, violent spasm of panic. "Rossi’s people... they’re in the tier. The deputy who brought me down here... he asked me if I had my sixty thousand ready. He said if the balance wasn't paid by the morning lock-up, they’d move me to the south annex."
I looked down at the paper in my hand.
It was a certified copy of the restitution order signed by Judge Vance twenty minutes ago.
"The trust is gone, Julian," I said. "The money is already in the state depository. Not one dollar of grandfather's estate will ever touch your hands, my hands, or Richard’s hands. It’s over."
"Then what am I supposed to do?" he screamed, lunging against the steel ring, the chain snapping taut with a harsh, metallic rattle that brought the guard to the alcove doorway. "How am I supposed to pay Rossi? He’ll kill me, Audrey! He’ll kill me in the shower!"
"You're twenty-two years old, Julian," I said, leaning closer to the glass until my breath fogged the surface. "You have two arms. You have two legs. And for the first time in your life, you are going to find out what twenty dollars is actually worth."
I stood up.
"Audrey! Don't leave me!" he howled, his hands thrashing against the chrome handcuffs, the metal biting into his wrists until the skin broke. "Audrey! I’m your brother! We’re Vance! We’re the Vance family!"
I looked at him through the glass.
I remembered the summer of 2018, when I had worked sixty hours a week at the municipal pool to save nine hundred dollars for my first laptop, and I had come home to find the box open and Julian sitting on the back patio with three of his friends, laughing, while they used the screen as a target for their air rifles.
My mother had told me then: “Julian has a sensitive nervous system, Audrey. He needs release. Don't be so provincial about your things.”
"There is no Vance family, Julian," I said softly. "There was only a grandfather who worked himself to death in the shipyards, and three parasites who thought his grave was an open checkbook."
I turned my back on the partition.
The heavy steel door of the consultation room buzzed, the solenoid clicking back with a dull, hydraulic clunk, and I walked out into the gray corridor where Captain Miller was waiting with my duffel bag.
"How is he?" Miller asked, falling into step beside me as we climbed the concrete stairs toward the street level.
"He's twenty-two," I said.
"Will he survive the county?"
"He has three years to learn how to keep his boots clean," I replied. "The army would have done it in six months, but he preferred private education."
We stepped out through the brass revolving doors of the Daley Center into the cool, sharp air of a Chicago evening.
The sun had dropped behind the towering silhouette of the Civic Opera Building, casting long, purple shadows across the plaza where the great rusted steel Picasso sculpture rose forty feet into the sky like a giant iron bird frozen mid-flight.
A crowd of four hundred people had gathered around the fountain—commuters heading toward the subway stations, office workers holding evening broadsheets, and three television camera crews with their heavy tripods planted in the brick paving.
On the front page of the Chicago Tribune late edition, held by a man in a gray raincoat three feet from me, the headline was printed in three-inch black wood type:
May you like
LAKE FOREST DYNASTY CRUMBLES IN VALEDICTORIAN TRUST FRAUD
Beneath it was a photograph taken six hours earlier on the parade deck at Westbridge: my cap flying through the sunlight, my father’s palm frozen at the completion of its arc, and the red wax seal glowing like an ember against the white wool of my sash.
