Applaud the Hollow Ghost by David J. Walker

you talked to the other day about sliding down chutes wants to talk to you again.” He left no number, but said he’d be in touch. Maybe it was about the paint job on the Fleetwood. The other call was more unexpected, but the message was similar. Someone else wanted to meet with me, too. This someone left a name, Dan Maguire, and a time and a place as well. Said he wanted to confer with me about a certain Dominic Fontana.
    I swallowed a few aspirins and thought seriously about shining my shoes, what with all these conferences coming up. Instead, I poured myself an inch of scotch over one ice cube and sat down at the kitchen table with the book the Lady had left in my back hall, A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. A few years back, when domestic affairs had been going better, Cass and I had taken the Lady to see the staged version at the Goodman Theatre. Cass, ever the English lit professor, claimed it was the world’s most popular ghost story. I told her I thought Casper had greater name recognition. Anyway, the Lady must have decided there was a lesson in the Dickens tale somewhere for me, or she wouldn’t have dropped it at my door. My best guess was she wanted to remind me that even a cynical, miserable Scrooge of a person might wake up some morning transformed into an optimistic and happy old coot—and discover that “the Spirits had done it all in one night.”
    I caught myself nodding before I got much beyond the part right near the beginning about Jacob Marley’s ghost appearing to Scrooge, but that wasn’t Dickens’ fault. I got up and set the timer on the coffeemaker before I went to bed. One musn’t oversleep when one’s been invited to a morning audience with the great Daniel O’Laughlin Maguire, Grand Poobah of Bauer & Barklind, a Partnership of Professional Legal Corporations.
    Well, possibly invited wasn’t exactly the right way to describe that second message on my machine. Summoned, that was more like it.
    Gosh, maybe I really should have polished my shoes.

CHAPTER
13
    T HE LAW FIRM OF Bauer & Barklind occupied floors thirty-two through thirty-seven of a prestigious marble-clad building west of State Street, on Wacker Drive, across from the Chicago River. On floor thirty-five, I was barely out of the elevator when a young woman with a Miss America smile and a brushed silk suit, teal blue, strode forward to greet me and show me where to hang my hooded parka.
    â€œI’ll keep the coat,” I said, taking a good look around. “This looks like the kinda place, you know, you don’t keep your eye on things, they disappear.”
    If she had any visible reaction at all, it was on the right side of her upper lip, maybe. “This way, sir,” she said. “Would you care for a cup of coffee, or—”
    â€œYou got any strawberry soda?” The time might come when I’d want her to remember the day Malachy Foley came in. “Oh,” she’d say, “you mean that rather odd man?”
    She left me sinking into one of three identical sofas that were drawn up to three sides of a low, square table—and was back in thirty seconds flat with a cold can of Cherry Coke. “Closest I could come,” she chirped. She was enjoying herself.
    After that I was abandoned for a while. Oddly enough, there wasn’t a piece of reading material in sight, presumably so one could sit undistracted and contemplate one’s surroundings and be put in the proper mood for one’s encounter with power.
    Stated succinctly, Bauer & Barklind had a pretty classy-looking suite of offices. The reception area was spacious and bright, with parquet flooring that would have sneered if you breathed the word oak, or any other tree any of us has ever actually run into. Straight ahead, I looked into the wide space between two banks of elevators. To my left were broad circular staircases leading to the floors above and below, suspended by thin