Company Man (17 page)

The brand-new Fenwick Elementary School auditorium was fancier than a lot of college theaters: plush stadium seating, great acoustics, professional sound system and lighting. It was called the Devries Theater, a gift from Dorothy Stratton Devries, in honor of her late husband.

When Nick had gone to Fenwick Elementary, there hadn't even been an auditorium. School assemblies had been held in the gym, all the kids sitting on the splintery wooden bleachers. Now it seemed like the fourth-grade class was doing its annual play in a Broadway theater.

Looking around, Nick was glad he'd come. All the parents were here, grandparents too. Even parents who rarely came to any of their kids' school events, like Emily Renfro's plastic-surgeon dad, Jim. Jacqueline Renfro was a class mom or something, but her husband was usually too busy doing face-lifts or screwing his receptionist to show up. A number of the parents had mini videocams, ready to film the production on compact digital tape that no one would ever bother to watch.

He was late as usual. Everywhere he went, he seemed to arrive late these days. Marta had dropped Julia off an hour ago so she and the rest of the fourth-graders could get into their handmade costumes, which they'd been working on in art class for months. Julia was excited about tonight because
she got to play the Wicked Witch of the West—her choice, a role she'd auditioned for and then pleaded for. Not for her Dorothy, which all the other girls wanted. Nick's little tomboy had no interest in playing a wimpy character wearing a braided wig and a gingham dress. She knew that the witch part was the scene-stealer. He liked that about her.

She didn't expect him to be here. He'd already told her a couple of times that he had a work dinner he had to go to and couldn't get out of. She was disappointed, but resigned. So she'd be all the more excited when she saw her daddy here. In truth, of course, Nick considered sitting through the school play one of those unpleasant parental obligations like changing a poopy diaper, or going to “The Lion King On Ice” (or
anything
on ice, for that matter), or watching the
Teletubbies
or
The Wiggles
and not letting on how creepy they were.

The back sections of the theater had been cordoned off, and there didn't seem to be any available seats in the front. He peered around, saw a few spaces here and there, a sea of averted glances, a few unfriendly faces. Maybe he was being a little paranoid. Guilt burned on his face as visibly as a scarlet letter. He was convinced people knew what he'd done just by looking at him.

But that wasn't it, of course. They hated him for other reasons, for being Slasher Nick, for being the local hero who'd turned on them. He saw the Renfros, caught their icy glares before they looked away. Finally he saw one friendly face, a buddy of his from high school days whose son was in Julia's class.

“Hey, Bobby,” he said, sitting down in the seat Bob Casey had freed up by moving his jacket. Casey, a bald, red-faced guy with an enormous beer gut, was a stockbroker who'd tried to hit Nick up for business several times. He was a wisenheimer whose chief claim to fame since high school was his ability to memorize long stretches of dialogue from Monty Python or any of the
National Lampoon
or
Airplane
movies.

“There he is,” Casey said heartily. “Big night, huh?”

“Oh, yeah. How's Gracie?”

“Doin' good. Doin' good.”

A long, uncomfortable silence followed. Then Bob Casey said, “Ever see anything like this theater? We never had anything like this.”

“We were lucky to use the gym.”

“Luxury!” Casey said in his Monty Python voice. “Luxury! We had to walk thirty miles to school every morning in a blizzard—uphill, both ways. And we loved it!”

Nick smiled, amused but unable to laugh.

Casey noticed Nick's subdued response and said, “So, you've had a hard year, huh?”

“Not as hard as a lot of people here.”

“Hey, come on, Nick. You lost your wife.”

“Yeah, well.”

“How's the house?”

“Almost done.”

“It's been almost done for a year, right?” he gibed. “Kids okay? Julia seems to be doing good.”

“She's great.”

“I hear Luke's having a hard time of it.”

Nick wondered how much Bob Casey knew about Luke's troubles—probably more than Nick did himself. “Well, you know. Sixteen, right?”

“Tough age. Plus, only one parent and all that.”

The production was about what you'd expect for a fourth-grade play—an Emerald City set they'd all painted themselves, the talking apple tree made out of painted corrugated cardboard. The music teacher playing sloppily on the Yamaha digital piano. Julia, as the Witch, froze up, kept forgetting her lines. You could almost hear the parents in the audience
thinking
them out loud for her—“Poppies!” and “I'll get you, my pretty!”

When it was over, Jacqueline Renfro seemed to go out of her way to find Nick and say, “Poor Julia.” She shook her head. “It can't be easy for her.”

Nick furrowed his brow.

“Well, only one parent, and you hardly ever there.”

“I'm there as much as I can,” he replied.

Jacqueline shrugged, having made her point, and moved on. But her husband, Jim, lagged behind. He wore a brown tweed jacket and a blue button-down shirt, looking like he was still a Princeton undergrad. He pointed a finger at Nick and winked. “Can't imagine how I'd get by without Jackie,” he said in a confiding tone. “I don't know how you get by. Still, Julia's a great kid—you're very lucky.”

“Thanks.”

Jim Renfro was smiling too hard. “Of course, the thing about family is, when they get to be too much, you can't exactly downsize them.” A cheery, self-satisfied wink. “Am I right?”

Any number of responses occurred to Nick—too many. None of them nonviolent. He had this strange feeling of a lid coming off, the bleed valves blowing.

At that point, Julia came running up, still wearing her pointed black construction-paper hat and her green face makeup. “You came!” she said.

He threw his arms around her. “I couldn't miss this.”

“How was I?” she asked. There wasn't a drop of concern in her voice, no awareness that she'd messed up. She was bursting with pride. He loved this little girl.

“You were great,” he said.

In the car on the way home, Nick's cell phone went off, a weird synthesized, symphonic fanfare that he'd never bothered to reprogram.

He glanced at the caller ID, saw that it was Eddie Rinaldi. He picked it up from the cradle, not wanting Julia to hear whatever Eddie had to say over the speakers. She was sitting in the backseat of the Suburban, poring over the
Wizard of Oz
program in the darkness. She still had the green zinc-oxide face makeup on, and Nick could see a bedtime struggle ahead when he made her clean it off.

“Hey, Eddie,” he said.

“There you are. You had the phone off?”

“I was watching Julia's school play.”

“Okay,” he said. Eddie, who had no kids, no plans to have any, and no interest in them, never asked about his kids beyond the bare minimum required. “I was thinking of dropping by.”

“Can't it wait?”

A pause. “I think not. We should talk. Only take five minutes, maybe.”

“There a problem?” Nick was suddenly on edge.

“No, no. No problem. Just, we should talk.”

 

Eddie sprawled in the easy chair in Nick's study, legs splayed wide as if he owned the place.

“A homicide detective came to talk to me,” he said casually.

Nick felt his insides go cold. He leaned forward in his desk chair. Here they sat, just a few feet from where it had happened. “What the fuck?” he said.

Eddie shrugged, no big deal. “Standard operating procedure. Routine shit.”

“Routine?”

“She's just covering all the bases. Got to, sloppy if she didn't.”

“It's a woman.” Nick focused on the anomaly, avoiding the main issue:
a homicide detective was on the case, already?

“Negro lady.” Eddie could have put it much more crudely. His racism was no secret to anyone, but maybe he'd learned over the years that it wasn't socially acceptable, not even around his old buddies. Or maybe he didn't want to antagonize Nick at the moment.

“I didn't know the Fenwick police had any.”

“I didn't either.”

A long silence in which Nick could hear the ticking of the clock. A silver clock, engraved
FENWICK CITIZEN OF THE YEAR
, awarded to him three years ago. When everything was going great. “What'd she want?”

“What do you think? She wanted to ask about Stadler.”

“What
about
Stadler?”

“You know, what you'd expect. Did he make any threats, whatever.”

Eddie was being evasive, and Nick didn't like it. Something didn't sit right. “Why was she talking to you?”

“Hey, man, I'm the security director, remember?”

“No. There has to be some more specific reason she went to talk to you. What are you leaving out, Eddie?”

“Leaving out? I'm leaving nothing out, buddy. I mean, look, she knew I asked some guys on the job about Stadler.”

So that was it. By doing his background check on Stadler, he'd in effect tipped his hand to the police. “Shit.”

“Come on. I never talked to the guy.”

“No,” Nick said, one hand cupping his chin. “You call the cops, asking about some downsized employee who slaughtered your boss's dog, then the guy turns up dead a couple days later. This doesn't look good.”

Eddie shook his head, rolling his eyes in contempt. “Like this is, what, the Mafia or something? Get real. The guy goes off the deep end, doing sick shit, matter of time before he pisses off the wrong guy.”

“Yeah.”

“In the dog pound, I mean, come on. Look, they got nothing tying Stadler to me—or to you.”

“Then what was she asking about?”

“Ah, she wanted to know if you'd ever talked to Stadler, had any contact with the guy. Told her you probably didn't even know who the guy was. Pretty much true.”

Nick inhaled slowly, tried to calm himself, held his breath. “And if I did? What's the assumption here, that I went after the guy,
killed
him?” Nick heard the aggrieved tone in his own voice, as if he were actually starting to believe himself innocent.

“Nah, she's just looking for scraps. Anyway, don't worry, I handled her fine. Believe me, she left knowing she's barking up the wrong tree.”

“How do you know?”

“I can tell, come on. Get serious here, Nick. The CEO of Stratton murdered one of his employees? I don't
think
so. No one's going to believe that for a second.”

Nick was silent for a long while. “I hope so.”

“I just wanted to keep you in the loop. In case she comes to talk to you.”

Nick, his chest tightening, said, “She said she was going to?”

“No, but she might. Wouldn't surprise me.”

“I'd never even heard the name,” Nick said. “Right? You tell her otherwise?”

“Exactly. Told her you're a busy guy, I do my job, you don't get involved.”

“Right.”

“So you figured maybe some downsized employee went wacko, killed your dog, but you called the cops, figured they'd handle it, you had no idea who it mighta been.”

“Right.”

“Guy turns up dead, mighta been the same guy, mighta been different, you have no idea. Like that.”

Nick nodded, rehearsing the answer in his mind, turning it over and over, poking at the soft spots. “There's nothing tying me to this thing?” he said after a few moments.

A long silence. Eddie replied with a kind of smoldering indignation. “I did my job, Nick, you clear?”

“I don't doubt it. I'm asking you to think like a cop. Like a homicide cop.”

“That's how I think, man. Like a cop.”

“No prints, nothing like that, on the…body? Fibers, DNA, whatever?”

“Nick, I told you, we're not going to talk about this.”

“We are now. I want to know.”

“The body was clean, Nick,” Eddie said. “Okay? Clean as a whistle. Clean as I could get it in the time we had.”

“What about the gun?”

“What about it?”

“What'd you do with it? You don't still have it, do you?”

“Like I'm a stupid fuck? Come on, man.”

“Then where is it?”

Eddie let out a puff of air, made a sound like
pah
. “Bottom of the river, you really want to know.” Fenwick, like so many towns in Michigan, was built on the shores of one of the many waterways leading into Lake Michigan.

“Shell casings too?”

“Yup.”

“And if it turns up?”

“You realize how unlikely that is?”

“I'm saying.”

“Even if they do find it, they got no way to connect it to me.”

“Why not? It's your gun.”

“It's a goddamned drop gun, Nick.”

“A what?”

“A throw-down. A piece I picked up at a scene in GR. Some crack dealer, who the hell knows where he got it? Point is, there's no record anywhere. No paperwork, no purchase permit, nothing. Clean.”

Nick had heard of cops picking up guns they found at crime scenes, keeping them, but he knew you weren't supposed to do that, and it made him nervous to hear Eddie admit to it. If he did that, what else did he do?

“You sure?” Nick said.

“Sure as shit.”

“What about the security cameras?”

Eddie nodded. “Hey, I'm a pro, right? Took care of that too.”

“How?”

“Why do you need to know?”

“I need to know. My own fucking security cameras recorded me killing the guy.”

Eddie closed his eyes, shook his head in irritation. “I reformatted the hard drive on the digital video recorder. That night's gone. Never happened. System started recording next day—makes sense, right? Since we just put it in the day before.”

“Not a trace?”

“Nada. Hey, don't worry about it. The lady comes to talk to you, you cooperate, tell her everything you know, which is a big fat zero, right?” Eddie gave his dry cackle.

“Right. I know she talked to you?”

Eddie shrugged. “Play it either way. Let's say, no, I didn't get around to it. Got nothing to do with you, right?”

“Right.”

Eddie got up. “Nothing to worry about, man. Get some sleep. You look like shit.”

“Thanks.” Nick got up, to walk Eddie out, then thought of something. “Eddie,” he said. “That night. You said it was your gun, tied everything to you, right? That's why I didn't have a choice.”

Eddie's eyes were dead. “Yeah?”

“Now you tell me the gun was clean. No connection to you at all. I don't get it.”

A long silence.

“Can't take chances, Nicky,” Eddie finally said. “Never take chances.”

Nick walked Eddie out of his study, heard footfalls on the carpeting. Saw a jeans-clad leg, a sneaker, disappear up the stairs.

Lucas.

Just getting home? Was it possible that he'd overheard their conversation? Nah, he'd have had to have stood outside the study door, listening. Lucas didn't do that, the main reason being that he had no interest in what his dad was up to.

Still.

Nick wondered, a tiny wriggle of worry.