Company Man (35 page)

Bugbee was gobbling Cheetos out of a small vending machine bag. His fingers—which Audrey had noticed were usually immaculate, the nails neatly clipped—were stained orange.

“Makes sense,” he said through a mouthful of Cheetos. “Rinaldi picked up a piece in Grand Rapids when he was working there.”

“Or here. Those guns travel.”

“Maybe. So where'd he toss it?”

“Any of a million possibilities.” She was hungry, and he wasn't offering her any, the jerk.

“I forget who the poor slobs were searched the Dumpster, but nothing there.”

“There's probably hundreds of Dumpsters in town,” Audrey pointed out. “And the dump. And sewer grates, and the lake and the ponds and the rivers. We're never going to find the gun.”

“Sad but true,” Bugbee said. He crumpled up the empty bag, tossed the wad at the metal trash can against the wall, but the bag unballed in the air and landed on the floor. “Shit.”

“Did you have a chance to talk to the alarm company?”

He nodded. “Fenwick Alarm's just an office downtown. I don't know what the hell they do—they install, but not in
this case. They don't even do the monitoring themselves. That's done by a joint called Central Michigan Monitoring, out of Lansing. They keep all the electronic records.”

“And?”

“Nada. Just confirms what we already know. That Wednesday morning one of the perimeter alarms at Conover's house got triggered. Alert lasted eleven minutes. Big fucking deal. You got the hard drive—that ought to give up what the cameras recorded, right?”

She explained what she knew about Conover's digital video recording system. “I've asked Lenehan to look again. But Noyce has him doing all kinds of other things ahead of us.”

“Why does that not surprise me?”

“Speaking of cameras, one of us should check out whatever they have at Fenwicke Estates security for that night.”

Bugbee shook his head. “Did already. They use a central station downtown. Nothing special—Stadler climbs a perimeter fence, that's it.”

“Too bad.”

“I say we poly the guy. Both of those assholes.”

“That's a tough one. It may be early. We may want to wait until we have more. I know that's what Noyce would say.”

“Screw Noyce. This is our case, not his. You notice the way he's been breathing down our necks?”

“Some.”

“He must smell something big about to pop.”

She didn't know how much to say. “I think it's more that he wants to make sure we don't slip up.”

“Slip up? Like we're rookies?”

Audrey shrugged. “It's a big case.”

Bugbee said, with a crooked grin, “No shit.”

Audrey responded with a rueful smile as she turned to go back to her cubicle.

“That thing about the shell casing or bullet fragment or whatever,” Bugbee said.

She turned. “What shell casing?”

“That bluff?”

“Yes?”

“Not bad,” Bugbee said.

Nick was beyond weary. All the shit that was going on with Todd and Scott, all the crap he didn't understand: it was draining. And that on top of Eddie and his warnings about Cassie: check yourself before you wreck yourself. And: What do you think she's after? Could there be something to what Eddie was saying?

Was it possible, he'd begun to wonder, that, on some subconscious level, he
wanted
to be found out?

And worst of all, so awful he couldn't stand to think about it, was this fragment of a shell casing the police had discovered on his lawn.

He'd always prided himself on his ability to endure pressure that would crush most other guys. Maybe it was the hockey training, the way you learned to find the serene place inside you and go there when things got tough. He never used to panic. Laura, always on the high-strung side, never got that. She thought he didn't care, didn't get it. And he'd just shrug and reply blandly, “What's the use in panicking? Not going to help.”

But since the murder, everything had changed. His hard shell had cracked or turned porous. Or maybe all the stress of the last few weeks was additive, the worries heaped onto his back until his muscles trembled and spasmed. Any second now he'd collapse to the ground.

But he couldn't, not yet.

Because whatever Todd and Scott were up to—all this maneuvering, the secret trips and the phone calls and the encrypted document—it had ignited a fuse in him that crackled and sparked.

You want to take a little sabbatical, a little break, might be a good thing
.

Like Todd gave a shit about his emotional well-being.

Todd wanted him to take time off. Not resign: that was interesting. If Todd and the boys at Fairfield wanted to get rid of him, they'd have fired him long ago. So why hadn't they? Was it really the huge payday, the five million bucks they'd have to pay to fire him without cause, that was stopping them? Given how many billions Fairfield had under management?

He tapped at his keyboard and pulled up the corporate directory, clicked on MARTIN LAI. A photo popped up—a fat-faced, phlegmatic-looking guy—along with his direct reports, his e-mail, his phone number.

He glanced at his watch. Thirteen-hour time difference in Hong Kong. Nine-thirty in the morning here meant ten-thirty at night there. He picked up the phone and dialed Martin Lai's home number. It rang and rang, and then a recorded message came on in Chinese, followed by a few perfunctory words in heavily accented English. “Martin,” he said, “this is Nick Conover. I need to speak to you right away.” He left the usual array of phone numbers.

Then he spoke into the intercom and asked Marge to locate Martin Lai's cell phone number, which wasn't on the Stratton intranet. A minute later, a long number popped up on his screen.

 

He called it and got a recorded voice again, and he left the same message. He checked Lai's Meeting Maker, his online corporate schedule, and the man appeared not to be away from Stratton's Hong Kong office.

Todd's words kept coming back to him:
You want to take a little sabbatical, a little break, might be a good thing
.

What the hell were Todd Muldaur and Fairfield Equity Partners up to, really? Who, he wondered, might know?

The answer came to him so swiftly that he wondered why he hadn't thought of it before. A “cousin” in the extended Fairfield family, that was who.

He opened his middle desk drawer and found a dog-eared business card that said
KENDALL RESTAURANT GROUP,
and underneath it,
RONNIE KENDALL, CEO.

Ronnie Kendall was a sharp entrepreneur, a quick-witted bantam with an impenetrable Texan accent. He'd started the Kendall Restaurant Group with a little Tex-Mex place in Dallas and turned it into a thriving chain and eventually a prosperous restaurant holding company. It was mostly a chain of Tex-Mex restaurants popular in the Southwest, but his company also owned a cheesecake chain, a barbecued-chicken chain that wasn't doing so well, a lousy Japanese-food chain where chefs dressed like samurai sliced and flipped your food right at your table, and a “good times” bar-and-grill chain known for its baby back ribs and gargantuan frozen margaritas. Ten years ago he'd sold to Willard Osgood.

Nick had met him at some business conference in Tokyo, and they'd hit it off. Ronnie Kendall turned out to be a big hockey fan and had followed Nick's college career at Michigan State, amazingly. Nick had confessed he'd eaten at the Japanese restaurant chain that Kendall's group owned and didn't much like it, and Kendall had shot right back, “You kidding? Every time I set foot in there I get diarrhea. Never eat there, but people
love
it. Go figure.”

Nick was put on hold several times before Ronnie Kendall picked up, sounding exuberant as always, speaking a mile a minute. Nick made the mistake of asking how business was, and Ronnie launched into a manic monologue about how the barbecued-chicken chain was expanding in Georgia and South Carolina, and then he somehow shifted into a rant on the low-carb craze. “Man, am I glad that fad is over, huh? That was
killing
us! The low-carb cheesecake never went over, and the low-carb diet Margaritas—
forget
it! And then just when we signed up our new celebrity en
dorser”—he mentioned the name of a famous football player—“and we'd even taped a bunch of fifteen-and thirty-second spots, then out of the blue he gets hit with a
rape
charge!”

“Ronnie,” Nick finally broke in, “how well do you know Todd Muldaur?”

Ronnie cackled. “I
hate
the slick bastard and he loves me just the same. But I stay out of his way, and he stays out of mine. He and his MBA buddies were trying to muck around in my business, got so bad I called Willard himself and said, you put a choke collar on your little poodles or I'm gone. I quit. I'm too old and too rich, I don't need it. Willard must have taken Todd to the woodshed, because he started backing off. 'Course, he had his hands full, what with the chip meltdown.”

“Chip meltdown?”

“Isn't that what you call them things? Microchips or whatever? Semiconductors, right?”

“Yeah?”

“You read the
Journal,
right? The semiconductor industry bubble, the way all those private-equity guys overinvested in chips, then the bubble burst?” He cackled again. “Gotta love it, the way all those guys took a bath.”

“Hold on, Ronnie. Fairfield Equity Partners overinvested in microchips?”

“Not the whole of Fairfield, just the funds our boy Todd runs. He made a massive bet on the chip business. Put all his chips on chips, right?”

Nick didn't join Ronnie's laughter. “I thought there's some kind of limit to how much they can invest in one particular sector.”

“Todd's an arrogant guy, you know that, right? You can smell it on him. He figured when the semiconductor stocks started sinking, he'd pick up a bunch of companies cheap, turn a big fat profit. Well, he's sure gettin' his. His funds are sucking wind. Willard Osgood has got to be madder 'n a wet hen. If Todd's funds collapse, the whole mother ship goes down.”

“Really?”

“I imagine Todd Muldaur should be makin' nice to you these days. I know Stratton's going through some hard times, but at least you're solvent. Compared to some of his other investments, you're a cash cow. He could take you guys public, make some real money. Of course, given how long that takes, it might be too late for him.”

“That would take a year at least.”

“At least. Why, they talking about spinning you guys off?”

“No. Nothing about that.”

“Well, Fairfield needs what they call a liquidity event, and real soon.”

“Meaning they need cash.”

“You got it.”

“Yeah, well, they're up to something,” Nick said. “Really pushing hard to cut costs.”

“Forget that. You know what I always say, when your house is on fire, you don't hold a garage sale.”

“Come again?”

“I mean, Todd's so deep in the shit that he's probably desperate to make a quick buck, sell Stratton quick-and-dirty just to save his ass. I were you, I'd watch Todd's moves
real
close.”

The instant he hung up, another call came in, this one from Eddie.

“The small conference room on your floor,” Eddie said without preface. “Right now.”

Ever since they'd had it out at Eddie's condo, there had been an acute chill in their already frosty relationship. Eddie no longer joked around as much. He avoided Nick's eyes. He often seemed to be seething.

But when he entered the conference room, he looked as though he had a secret he couldn't wait to share. It was a look Nick hadn't seen in a while.

Eddie closed the conference room door and said, “The piece of shell casing?”

Nick's voice caught in his throat. He was unable to speak.

“It's bullshit,” Eddie said.

“What?”

“The cops never found any fragment of a shell casing on your lawn.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“What was it, then?”

“It was bullshit. A pressure tactic. There never was any metal scrap.”

“They
lied
about it?”

“I wouldn't get on my high horse if I were you, Nick.”

“You're certain? How do you know this for sure?”

“I told you. I got sources. It's a fake-out, dude. Don't you recognize a fake-out when you see one?”

Nick shrugged. “I don't know.”

“Come on, man. Remember when we were playing Hillsdale in the finals, our senior year, and you made that great deke to your backhand at the blue line before you fired a rocket behind Mallory, sent the game into overtime?”

“Yeah, I remember,” Nick said. “I also remember that we lost.”

Nick put his briefcase down in the front hall. Its antique, reclaimed pumpkin-pine flooring—the strip oak that had been there didn't make the cut, as far as Laura was concerned—glowed in the amber light that spilled from soffits overhead. Without thinking about it, he expected to hear the
click click click
of Barney's dog toenails on the wood, the jangle of his collar, and the absence of that happy sound saddened him.

It was almost eight o'clock. The marketing strategy committee meeting had run almost two hours late; he'd called home during a break and told Marta to make dinner for the kids. She'd said that Julia was over at her friend Jessica's, so it would just be Lucas.

He heard voices from upstairs. Did Lucas have a friend over? Nick walked upstairs, and the murmur resolved into conversation.

It was Cassie's voice, he realized with surprise. Cassie and Lucas. What was she doing here? The staircase was solidly mortised, no squeaks and creaks like the old house, or like the house he'd grown up in. They hadn't heard him come up. He felt a prickling sensation as he paused at the top landing and listened. Lucas's door was open for a change.

“They should have assigned this in physics class,” Lucas
was complaining. “Why would a poet know how the world's going to end anyway?”

“You think the poem is really about how the world is going to end?” Cassie's husky voice.

He was relieved. Cassie was helping Lucas with his homework, that was all.

“Fire or ice. That's how the world will end. It's what he's saying.”

“Desire and hate,” Cassie said. “The human heart can be a molten thing, and it can be sheathed in ice. Don't think outer space. Think inner space. Don't think
the
world. Think
your
world. Frost can be an incredibly dark poet, but he's also a poet of intimacy. So what's he saying here?”

“Thin line between love and hate, basically.”

“But love and desire aren't the same, are they? There's the love of family, but we don't call that desire. Because desire is about an absence, right? To desire something is to want it, and you always want the thing you don't have.”

“I guess.”

“Think about Silas, in the last poem they gave you. He's about to die, and he comes home.”

“Except it's not his home.”

“In that one, Warren says, ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.' One of the most famous lines Frost ever wrote. Is that love or desire? How does
his
world end?”

Nick, feeling self-conscious, took a few steps down the hall toward his bedroom. Cassie's voice receded to a singsong murmur, asking something, and Lucas's adolescent baritone rose in impatience. “Some say this, some say that. You feel, like, Make up your friggin' mind already.”

Nick stopped again to listen.

Cassie laughed. “What's the
rhythm
telling you? The poem's lines mainly have four beats, right? But not the last lines, about hate: ‘Is also great.' Two stressed syllables. ‘And would suffice.' Clear and simple. Like it's funneling to a point. About the ice of hatred, how potent that is, right?”

“Mad props to my dawg Bobby Frost,” Lucas said. “He could flow, no doubt. But he starts with fire.”

“A lot of things start with fire, Luke. The crucial question is how they end.”

Nick debated whether he should join them. He wouldn't have hesitated in the old days, but Lucas was different now. What was going on was a good thing, yet probably a fragile thing too. Lucas wouldn't let him help with his homework anymore, and now that he was in the eleventh grade, Nick wasn't much use anyway. But Cassie had somehow figured out a way to talk to him, and she knew that stuff—she was a natural. A goddamn valedictorian.

Finally, Nick walked past Lucas's bedroom, which let them know he was home, and made his way to his own room. Removed his clothes, brushed his teeth, took a quick shower. When he came out again, Lucas was alone in his room, sitting at his computer, working.

“Hey, Luke,” he said.

Lucas glanced up with his usual look of annoyance.

Nick wanted to say something like, Did Cassie help? I'm glad you're focusing on work. But he held back. Any such comment might be resented, taken as intrusive. “Where's Cassie?” he said.

Lucas shrugged. “Downstairs, I guess.”

He went downstairs to look for Cassie, but she wasn't in the family room or the kitchen, none of the usual places. He called her name, but there was no answer.

Well, she has the right to snoop around my house, he thought. After she caught me going through her medicine cabinet.

But she wouldn't do that, would she?

He passed through the kitchen to the back hallway, switched on the alabaster lamp, kept going to his study.

Unlikely she'd be in there.

The door to his study was open, as it almost always was, and the lights were on. Cassie was seated behind his desk.

His heart thumped. He walked faster, the carpet muffling
his footsteps so his approach was silent. Not that he was intending to sneak up on her, though.

Several of the desk drawers were ajar, he saw.

All but the bottom one, which he kept locked. They were open just a bit, as if they'd been open and then shut hastily.

And he knew he hadn't done it. He rarely used the desk drawers, and when he did, he was meticulous about closing them all the way, otherwise the desk looked sloppy.

She was sitting back in his black leather Symbiosis chair, writing on a yellow legal pad.

“Cassie.”

She jumped, let out a shriek. “Oh, my God! Don't ever do that!” She put a hand across her breasts.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Oh—God. I was in my own world. No, I should apologize—I shouldn't be in here. I guess I'm just a low-boundaries gal.”

“That's okay,” he said, trying to sound as if he meant it.

She seemed instantly aware of the drawers that had been left slightly ajar and began pushing them all the way closed. “I was looking for a pad and a pen,” she said. “I hope you don't mind.”

“No,” he said. “It's fine.”

“I had this idea, and I had to write it down right away—that happens to me.”

“Idea?”

“Just—just something I want to write. Someday, if I ever get my shit together.”

“Fiction?”

“Oh, no. Nonfiction. Too much fiction in my life. I hope you don't mind my coming over tonight. I did call, you know, but Marta said you were at work, and Lucas and I got to talking, and he said he was busting his head over some poem. Which turns out to be one of the poems I actually know something about. So I…”

“Hey,” Nick said. “You're doing God's work. I'm afraid my arrival broke things up.”

“He's going to write the first few paragraphs of his poetry term paper. See where it's heading.”

“You're good with him,” Nick said.
You're amazing,
is what he thought.

Maybe that's all it was. She came over to help him figure out some Robert Frost poem.

“You ever teach?”

“I told you,” Cassie said. “I've pretty much done everything.” The pinpoint ceiling lights caught her hair, made it sparkle. She looked waiflike, still, but her skin wasn't so transparent. She looked healthier. The dark smudges beneath her eyes were gone. “‘He thinks if he could teach him that, he'd be / Some good perhaps to some one in the world.'”

“Come again?”

Cassie shook her head. “It's just a line from
Death of the Hired Man
. It's a poem about home. About family, really.”

“And the true meaning of Christmas?”

“You Conovers,” she said. “What am I going to do with you?”

“I have a few ideas,” Nick said, attempting a leer. “God, you're good at everything, aren't you?”

“Coming from
you
? The alpha male? Jock of all trades?”

“I wish. I may be the most math-challenged CEO in the country.”

“Is there a sport you can't do?”

He thought a moment. “Never learned to ride a horse.”

“Horseshoes?”

“That's not a sport.”

“Archery, I bet.”

“I'm okay.”

“Shooting?”

He went dead inside. After a split second, he gave a small shake of his head, looking perplexed. For a second his eyes went out of focus.

“You know,” she said. “Target shooting, whatever it's called. On the range.”

“Nope,” he said, hearing the studied casualness in his
voice as if from a distance. He lowered himself onto a rush-seated Windsor chair that invariably threatened to leave splinters in his backside. Laura had banished his favorite old leather club chair when they moved. Frat house furniture, she called it. He rubbed his eyes, trying to conceal the flush of terror. “Sorry, I'm just wiped out. Long day.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“Not now. Sorry. I mean, thanks, but another time. I'd rather talk about anything else than work.”

“Can I make you dinner?”

“You cook?”

“No,” she admitted with a quick laugh. “You've had one of my three specialties. But I'm sure Marta left something for you in that haunted kitchen of yours.”

“Haunted?”

“Oh yeah. I met your contractor right when I got here, and I got the lowdown from him.”

“Like why it's taking his guys forever to put in a kitchen counter?”

“Don't blame them. You're driving them crazy, is what I hear. He can't get signoffs when they need them. Things like that.”

“Too many goddamn decisions. I don't really have the time for it. And I don't want to get it wrong.”

“‘Wrong' defined as what?”

Nick was quiet for a moment. “Laura had very definite ideas of what she wanted.”

“And you want everything to be just the way she'd planned. Like it's your memorial to her.”

“Please don't do the shrink thing.”

“But maybe you're afraid to finish it too, because when it's over, something else is over too.”

“Cassie, can we change the subject?”

“So it's like Penelope, in the
Odyssey
. She weaves a shroud during the day, and unravels it at night. That way it's never finished. She staves off the suitors, and honors the departed Odysseus.”

“I don't even know what you're talking about.” Nick took a deep breath.

“I think you do.”

“Except, you know, it's reached a point where I really do want the damn thing finished already. It was her big project, and, okay, maybe as long as it was under way, it was like she was still at work. Which doesn't make any sense, but still. Thing is, now I just want the plastic draft sheets out of here, and I want the Dumpster gone, and the trucks, and all that. I want this to be a goddamn
home
. Not a project. Not a thing in process. Just a place where the Conovers live.” A beat. “Whatever's left of them.”

“I get it,” she said. “So why don't you take me out to dinner somewhere?” A smile hovered around her lips. “A date.”