Hard Feelings (16 page)

I had started reading the rest of the paper when Paula entered the dining room in her nightgown.

“Are you feeling okay?” she asked.

“I’m feeling great. Why?”

“You’re eating fruit for breakfast,” she said. “You never eat fruit for breakfast.”

“I told you—I’m a new man.”

She eyed me suspiciously, then she exited to the kitchen.

I realized how odd my rapid mood swing must seem to Paula. Yesterday, her husband was depressed on the couch; today he was acting like Jack La Lanne. She probably thought I was becoming manic-depressive.

For most of the day, Paula did her best to ignore me. She went up to the roof deck to work on her laptop, then she went out shopping.

Meanwhile, I decided to catch up on some work. I dialed in to the network at the office and worked on a couple of proposals that I needed to get out next week. On the Internet, I found a listing for an A.A. meeting tomorrow evening in a church on Seventy-ninth Street.

Around four o’clock, I went down to a florist on Second Avenue and bought a bouquet of twenty red, white, and pink roses. When I arrived back at my apartment the light in the foyer was on so I knew Paula was home. I went into the kitchen and saw her standing in front of the open refrigerator. She turned to look at me, showing no reaction to the flowers, and then she took out a bottle of Evian from the fridge.

“These are for you,” I said.

“I saw. Thanks.”

She poured a glass of water, drank it quickly, then walked by me, on her way to the bedroom.

“If you feel like going out to dinner tonight—”

“Stop it,” she said, turning around suddenly. “All right— just stop it. I didn’t move out, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to just pick up where we left off, like nothing happened. You’ve done a lot of damage and buying me some bullshit flowers isn’t going to make things better.”

She marched into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

On the six o’clock news, I found out that Michael Rudnick was dead. According to the brief news item, his condition had worsened overnight and he had died at around four in the afternoon, at just about the same time I was buying Paula the flowers.

At first, the news upset me, not because Rudnick had died— the world was a better place with one less scumbag in it—but because I had kind of liked the idea of Rudnick living the rest of his life in pain and in fear of me attacking him again. But then, after a while, the news settled in and I decided that Rudnick living for a little over a day, then dying, was probably the best thing that could have happened for me. If Rudnick had died right away, in the parking lot, the police definitely would have questioned me and I might have been arrested. But by setting the police on a wild-goose chase for a teenager, Rudnick had almost guaranteed that I would get away with his murder.

During dinner, Paula still wouldn’t speak to me. I tried to start a conversation several times, but she kept looking down at her food, pretending I wasn’t there.

Finally, I said, “So I’m going to an A.A. meeting tomorrow night.”

“So?” Paula said, still staring at her plate.

“So . . . so I thought you’d be happy,” I said.

She swallowed a bite of chicken chow fun then said, “Well, I’m not.”

Monday morning, I headed to work in the windswept rain. On the corner of Forty-eighth and Park, a gust tore apart my umbrella, and I walked the rest of the way, drenched but still cheerful by the time I reached my office.

There was one message on my voice mail—from Don Chaney, the MIS manager who had been disappointed when we couldn’t do his web server project last week. Chaney said he had gotten the okay from his CFO on the proposal I’d sent him for the larger, more lucrative project, and that he was going to fax over the signed contract right away. A few minutes later, I went to the fax machine and, sure enough, the signed contract was waiting.

For at least a minute, I stared at the sheet of paper in semi-shock. For months, I had been struggling to make a sale with no success, and now, with zero effort, a deal had fallen right into my lap.

I went into Bob Goldstein’s office, where he was sitting at his desk, reading a newspaper.

“Don’t you know how to knock?” he said, without looking at me. I dropped the fax in front of him, watching him start to smile as he read it.

“Son of a gun!” He stood up to shake my hand. “See? I knew you had it in you. Congratulations,
mazel tov!
This is really great news—really great. But this is just a start—I want you to keep pumping away. I want two more big sales this week. But I’m proud of you, Richard—I really am proud.”

Word of my sale spread quickly around the office. During the next half-hour or so, several people stopped by my cubicle to congratulate me, including Martin Freiden, the CFO, and Alan Wertzberg, the director of marketing.

To see if I had just been lucky, or if I really was back in my old groove again, I called Jim Turner, the guy who had practically thrown Steve and me out of his office last Monday. If I could close a sale with Jim Turner, I could close a sale with anyone.

Turner’s secretary said he was on another call and I said I didn’t mind holding. She came back on the line, saying that he was “still on,” and I said, “That’s all right, I’ll wait.” Finally, Turner picked up. After I said hello and reminded him who I was I didn’t give him a chance to speak. Instead I said:

“Look, I know we didn’t have a great meeting the other day, but I wanted to give you a call anyway just to apologize for any false impression of our company you may have gotten, and to ask you to seriously consider our proposal before you make a final decision. I can guarantee you right now that no consulting company in the city can give you the service and reliability that Midtown offers. You can check our references, talk to anybody you want. I’ll tell you what—I’ll even have a technician come down to your site, just to prove that we have the absolute best staff—”

“Okay.”

I held the receiver up to my ear for three solid seconds before I said, “Excuse me?”

“I said okay, I’ll give you guys a shot. What do I have to do, sign that quote you gave me?”

Fifteen minutes later I was by the fax machine, holding a signed quote for an eighty-thousand-dollar job from Jim Turner. When news of my second big success of the morning made it around the office, people started gathering around me like I was a sales messiah. Even I was in awe of myself. I imagined being promoted, or moving on to a new, higher-paying job. Paula and I would work out our problems and we’d move with our two children—a boy and a girl—into a huge house, no, an
estate
in Connecticut.

Bob came by my cubicle and rested a hand on my back. He said, “Two for two, you’re batting a thousand today, huh? This is incredible—just incredible. You’re on a roll, kiddo.”

I knew I would be really pushing my luck, but I decided to call another prospect that I had been trying to close for weeks—the CFO at an accounting firm on Seventh Avenue. The proposal had been for a small job, to update the company’s Citrix remote-access software, and the last time I talked to him, a couple of weeks ago, he was still reviewing proposals from other consulting firms. Using my same “no-effort” approach, I began my pitch, then he interrupted and said that his budget for the fall just came through and he was going to fax the signed contract over to me right away.

At the first sales job I’d ever had, at an electronics store at a mall near the campus at Buffalo during my senior year, I had once sold three TVs and one stereo in less than a hour. The feeling of closing was so exhilarating that I decided that day that I wanted a career in sales. Since then, I’d closed much bigger sales for much more money, but nothing had ever been as exciting as my first success—until now. Seeing the signed contract in the fax tray gave me a huge head rush, and I wanted to soak up every second of it.

Just about all the employees at Midtown Consulting crowded around my cubicle, including secretaries from other departments who had never seemed to notice me before. Finally, the crowd thinned, but the office was still buzzing with talk of my success and a few more people came by to congratulate me. My mouth was dry from all the talking I’d been doing, so I went to the concession area to buy a can of soda.

“You’re so hot I don’t want to get too close to you—I might get burned.”

I didn’t have to turn around to know that Steve Ferguson was behind me.

“Guess so,” I said casually.

I retrieved my Pepsi and started to walk away, then I stopped, unable to resist a parting shot.

“Oh, and, by the way,” I said, “if you ever need any sales tips, or just want me to go to a meeting with you or listen to your pitch, just stop by and I’d be happy to help you out.”

Smiling, I walked away, trying to imagine Steve’s expression.

The rest of the day was incredibly hectic. I spent most of the morning setting the start-up dates for three projects, meeting with Recruiting to make sure we had the right personnel in place, and arranging meetings for later in the week for myself with staff at the three companies to discuss various details. I ordered lunch—pastrami on rye with extra pickles—and ate in my cubicle while I worked. I didn’t have time to make any additional sales calls and I probably wouldn’t have wanted to push my luck anyway. Three for three was good enough for me and I didn’t want to do anything that might taint the memory of a perfect day.

I checked my watch, surprised to see that it was a quarter to six. I stopped what I was doing, figuring I’d log on to the network later on from home to continue working, then I dashed down to the street and hailed a cab. I made it to the auditorium of St. Monica’s church on East Seventy-ninth Street near First Avenue just as the A.A. meeting was beginning. I sat down in one of the fold-out chairs arranged in a circle and exchanged hellos with the ten or so people who were there. I was extremely uncomfortable. The other “alcoholics” were mostly men—there were two or three women— and, except for one older guy who was wearing a suit, they looked working-class in jeans, sneakers, T-shirts, and hooded sweatshirts. I listened as one man—his face and hands were dirty and I figured he was probably a carpenter or a garbage man—talked about how he used to “beat the living shit” out of his son every time he got drunk. Then another guy chimed in about how he once broke his girlfriend’s nose in three places. Then one of the women—she seemed like she was fairly new to the group—said that one time, after a night of heavy drinking, she woke up in bed naked next to a strange man and had no idea how she got there. The woman started to cry and other people in the group consoled her.

The leader of the discussion asked me if I had anything to say and I said I was fine “just listening.”

A couple of other people shared their experiences of how they were “better people” now that they had quit drinking, then the meeting ended. The man who used to beat up his son came right over to me and offered to be my sponsor. I said, “Maybe,” then I left the church alone and headed home.

I knew I didn’t belong in A.A., with a bunch of abusive, low-class alcoholics. I definitely didn’t have a “drinking problem”—I had just gone through a rough stretch and had used alcohol to help me through it. But I knew that quitting A.A. would upset Paula, so I decided I would keep going to the meetings—for the time being, anyway.

The rain had stopped and it had become a clear, cool night. I walked down Third Avenue with my suit jacket slung over my shoulder, savoring the fumes, the honking cabs, the noise of teenagers yelling, and the aroma of Thai food. I decided that from now on I was going to live my life to the fullest. I was going to work hard at my job, repair and strengthen my marriage, and turn the misery of the past few months into a distant memory.

I turned the corner on Sixty-fourth Street and was approaching my building when I saw, through the glass doors, two serious-looking men in suits standing by the doorman’s desk.

13

“ARE YOU THE Richard Segal who once lived on Stratford Road in Brooklyn?” the taller of the two men asked.

They had already shown me their badges and explained that they were detectives with the West Windsor Township Police Department in New Jersey. I had no idea where West Windsor was, but I assumed it was somewhere near Princeton. Before answering the tall detective’s question, I glanced at the shorter detective, who had a deadpan look, and then over at Raymond, the doorman, who was eavesdropping.

I was trying not to act panicked.

“Yes, that’s the street I grew up on,” I said. “Why? What’s going on?”

“We’ve been trying to track you down since yesterday,” the tall man said. “You know how many Richard Segals and R. Segals there are in Manhattan? A lot. And that’s only the ones who spell it like you do—s-e-g instead of s-e-i-g or s-i-e-g. But I’m glad we finally found you. By the way, I’m Detective Sergeant Roy Burroughs. This is my partner Detective Jim Freemont.”

I took a closer look at Burroughs, getting the sense that he was the hard-ass of the team. He looked like he was in his fifties, about ten years older than Freemont, except he had artificial-looking jet-black hair while Freemont was bald except for messy tufts of curly brown hair around his ears.

“Can you please tell me what this is all about?” I asked.

“Sorry—of course,” Burroughs said, his gaze shifting briefly toward Raymond, who was still eavesdropping. “We have some questions to ask you relating to a case we’re working on.”