Chapter 6 - The Cannibal Feast
The municipal holding facility at 26th and California in South Chicago smelled of floor stripper, unwashed wool, and old copper pipes.
In the subterranean attorney consultation booths on the third level, the scratched Lexan partition was three inches thick, separating the lawyers from the men in bright-orange jumpsuits who had discovered that the city did not care about their last names.
Ryan sat on the bolted steel stool, his hands bound to a leather belly chain that rattled against the metal counter every time his shoulders heaved with a shallow, ragged breath.
He had spent forty-eight hours in the maximum-security intake dormitory. His dark hair was greasy, unwashed, standing up in erratic tufts around his temples; his lip was split where an inmate had elbowed him during the midnight meal line; his eyes were sunken, shadowed by deep, black rings of sleepless terror.
On the other side of the Lexan partition sat Walter and Kyle.
The transformation in the two remaining Mercer men was catastrophic.
Walter was wearing an off-the-rack brown corduroy sport coat that was missing two buttons, his silver hair uncombed, his hands trembling so violently he could barely hold the plastic telephone receiver against his ear. His executive pinstripe suits were locked inside the company headquarters in Gary, currently guarded by armed private security contractors from Vanguard.
Kyle sat beside his father, wearing a faded gray sweatshirt and jeans, his face sallow and greasy, his leg bouncing in a manic, terrified rhythm against the steel partition.
"Did you get the bail money?!" Ryan shrieked through the receiver, his voice cracking into a high, hysterical sob that turned the heads of two corrections officers standing by the heavy door. "Dad! Tell me you got the hundred thousand! The public defender told me that if the bail isn't posted by four o'clock today, the judge remands me to the state diagnostic facility in Joliet!"
Walter swallowed hard, his throat clicking like a dry hinge, his watery, bloodshot eyes refusing to meet his son's gaze through the scratched glass.
"There is no hundred thousand, Ryan," Walter whispered, his voice trembling like a dry leaf in an autumn wind.
Ryan froze. His face went entirely blank. "What... what do you mean there's no money? The house equity—"
"The house is gone, Ryan!" Kyle yelled into the secondary telephone, his voice laced with an ugly, venomous hatred that made Ryan recoil against his stool. "The sheriff threw Mom onto the pavement on Monday morning! She’s living in Aunt Cheryl’s spare sewing room in Skokie! She has two suitcases of clothes and forty dollars in cash!"
Kyle slammed his flat palm against the Lexan glass, leaving a greasy smear.
"And your company accounts?! Bennett Capital filed an emergency forensic audit with the federal grand jury yesterday morning! Every single account associated with your name, my name, and Dad’s name has been frozen under a federal sequestration order! We don't have a hundred thousand dollars, Ryan! We don't even have twelve hundred dollars to hire a private defense attorney!"
"Sell the cars!" Ryan cried out, tears streaming down his face, his chains clanking violently against the steel counter. "Sell the Porsche! Sell Dad’s Mercedes!"
"The cars were leased under the commercial fleet, you idiot!" Kyle screamed, his face contorting into an expression of pure, murderous rage. "The repo company hauled them out of the driveway on Tuesday afternoon! Dad and I had to take the Pace bus to get to this jail! The Pace bus, Ryan! While your wife sits in her sixty-fourth-floor penthouse on Wacker Drive, drinking fifty-dollar coffee!"
Walter slowly took the telephone receiver from Kyle’s hand.
The seventy-year-old patriarch leaned forward, pressing his forehead against the cold plastic glass, his eyes dead, hollowed out by the sheer, incomprehensible magnitude of their destruction.
"Tell me the truth, Ryan," Walter rasped, his voice dropping into a register that sounded like an executioner reading an autopsy report.
"Did you hit her?"
Ryan stopped weeping.
His eyes darted frantically toward the corner of the consultation booth, looking at the ceiling, looking at the concrete walls, looking anywhere except his father's broken face.
"Dad... she disrespected Mom," Ryan stammered, his words tumbling out in a frantic, pathetic rush of justification. "Mom brought down the laundry... like Grandma did... like all the Mercer wives did... and Claire laughed in her face! She told us she wasn't our maid! She refused to wash the clothes! I was trying to correct her! I was trying to establish order in our house!"
Walter didn't shout.
He didn't slam the phone.
He slowly lowered the receiver from his ear, let it dangle by its reinforced steel cable against the metal counter, and looked through the glass at the eldest son he had spent thirty years grooming to inherit his world.
"A bucket of dirty underwear," Walter whispered into the empty air, the words carrying no anger, only an infinite, bottomless disgust.
He turned his head slowly, looking at Kyle.
"Your brother destroyed a forty-million-dollar logistics company, threw away an eight-thousand-square-foot estate, and handed our family’s throat to the largest private equity firm in Illinois... because his mother wanted an heiress to wash my dirty socks."
Walter stood up from the bolted stool.
His joints popped with a dry, mechanical sound. He didn't look back through the glass. He didn't pick up the receiver to say goodbye.
He pulled his worn corduroy coat tight around his chest and walked toward the heavy steel exit door.
"Dad! Dad, wait!" Ryan screamed through the glass, pounding his cuffed hands against the partition, the heavy chains clanking violently against the metal. "Kyle! Don't leave me in here! Call Aunt Cheryl! Call the country club! Dad!"
Kyle stood up, picked up his leather jacket, and looked through the glass at his brother with an expression of such pure, frozen contempt that Ryan’s voice died in his throat.
"I hope the prison laundry is warm, Ryan," Kyle sneered into the hanging receiver.
May you like
"Because from what the public defender told us... you’re going to be washing dirty clothes for the next four years."
The heavy steel door clicked open, and the last members of the Mercer family walked out into the cold Chicago rain, leaving their golden boy screaming into the silence of an empty booth.
