Daughter of Darkness by Ed Gorman

a section of books on Chicago society, and if it was kept up-to-date. Her answer was yes to both questions.
        Coffey spent his first hour in the stacks, thumbing through books that referenced the Stafford family. In 1918, George Stafford, the founding father, brought a good deal of his oil money-he was a good friend of John D. Rockefeller's-back to Chicago. He had grown up here, one of six children born to an immigrant and impoverished family of Irish Catholics. Like many poor boys, he wanted to impress the city of his birth. He impressed them immediately. He went into investment banking with an almost religious zeal. He soon became great friends with the Wrigley folks.
        His son Robert continued on in investment banking. Between world wars, Robert began to take great interest in European markets. He put the firm in a good position to take advantage of key European investments following World War II.
        But it was Tom Stafford who brought the firm to true dominance. He took an early interest in computers. His roommate at Harvard, in fact, would become a major player in developing mainframe computers for IBM. This was at a time, the late fifties, when Wall Street and its allies in Chicago and Los Angeles still had doubts about the relevance of computers to their particular kind of work. Could you really trust computers? Tom Stafford believed you could, and this got him an extraordinary jump on his competitors. Stafford Investment Bankers became one of the most important players in contemporary investment banking.
        Socially, Tom Stafford was also a noted figure. He spent his early twenties breaking the hearts of several beautiful debutantes. He also dated a few movie stars. Not many investment bankers found themselves in the pages of both Esquire and GQ . Stafford watchers were thus surprised when he settled his attention and fondness on a young woman he met working behind the counter of a small jewelry store near the Drake Hotel. Her name was Molly Davis and while her father, who owned the jewelry store, was a successful merchant, he certainly wasn't in the Stafford league. There was another unlikely aspect to the tale as well; though Stafford was handsome, charming, and rich, Molly Davis took no particular interest in him. She thought he was nice, she thought he was amusing, but when he asked her to marry him, she thought he was kidding. She said no. Nobody had ever said no to Tom Stafford. It was, at least to Tom Stafford, unthinkable. He redoubled his efforts. He courted her for nearly a year before she finally gave in. The wedding was one of the most lavish ever staged in Chicago. They day they married, Tom Stafford was thirty-eight (he'd had a long run as an eligible bachelor) and his Molly was twenty seven.
        Seven months to the day of their wedding. Jenny came along. This was 1973. According to press reports, she was just about the perfect child-beautiful, joyful, and hypnotized by her parents, just as they were hypnotized by her. She spent seventh grade in Sweden, trying out a very tony private school. She didn't quite make it through the year. She was lonely for her parents, and they were miserable without her. She stayed in Chicago from then on, attending a private Catholic school and quite seriously studying ballet. The local press loved her as much as they'd loved her father. And she was even more photogenic than he'd been. She was an impossibly lovely seventeen-year-old when her Porsche convertible was back-ended by a truck and knocked down a steep ravine. The bets were she wouldn't make it. The Chicago news establishment held a death watch. The story had everything. People who didn't give a damn about high society-indeed, resented it-stayed fixed to their TV screens. Would the young heiress make it? Could the fates be so cruel as to snatch her life away?
        She lived. But it was not easy. She spent two months in the hospital slowly and painfully learning to walk again. She