JM02 - Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home (4 page)

“Tell me these guys have nothing better to do than nurse their grudges,” I said.

Neary gave a rueful laugh. “Don’t kid yourself. We got special training in that, down at Quantico.”

“Still, I find it hard to believe all your sources are dry.”

Neary shrugged. “I’ve got some friends of friends who tell me that Pace is just one of several firms the SEC is looking at. Apparently, no decision’s been made on who or when.”

“Have they been talking to Danes?”

“Not that I’ve heard.” The waitress refilled our cups and Neary’s belt chimed again. He pulled the wireless out, peered into the tiny screen, and read. He shook his head and sighed.

“Fuck it, John. How about we give up the investigation shit and go halves on an eatery someplace. Maybe a bistro in Murray Hill or a tapas bar in the East Village. It couldn’t be more aggravation than this.” He drank some coffee. I smiled.

“Has Pace filed a missing persons?” I asked him.

Neary ran a big hand through his hair. “Not yet. So far they’ve convinced themselves it’s not their responsibility. And it’s not like they’re in a big hurry to have him back. Besides, they don’t relish police attention or the kind of publicity that goes with it.”

He reached into an inner pocket of his suit jacket.

“A present for you,” he said. It was a small paperbound book with yellow covers. On a gray square on the front were the letters PLS in black capitals. “Pace-Loyette phone directory. I marked the names that might interest you.” I looked at Neary. He looked back.

“You’re awfully helpful today,” I said. “And you know a lot of Pace-Loyette gossip, considering they’re not a client yet.” Neary smiled enigmatically and drank more coffee.

“I like to look before I leap,” he said. Wheels within wheels.

It was late afternoon by the time we picked our way across Union Square toward the subway station. The crowd was light at the farmers’ market in the square, and the vendors were restocking for the evening rush. The yeasty fragrance of baked goods, the scent of cut flowers, and the earthy smells of produce and potted plants masked the less appealing city odors. The sky was full of high thin clouds and pink light. We walked slowly, looking through the stalls as we passed. Neary’s wireless chimed a few times along the way, but he ignored it. We crossed 14th Street and stopped outside the station and shook hands.

“You still seeing that neighbor of yours— what was her name?” Neary asked. The question took me by surprise.

“Jane. Her name is Jane,” I said.

He nodded. “You look … better.” His belt chimed again and almost simultaneously his cell phone trilled. He shook his head. “Fuck this,” he said, and disappeared into the subway.

It was a short walk home, and I went back through the farmers’ market. I stopped at a flower stall for some tulips for Jane.

Winter had taken hold early— well before Christmas— and it had held on tight till April Fools’. Nearly every week had brought a storm, and in between the blizzards and the frozen rain there had been long stretches of head-cracking cold and breathtaking wind. It seemed that I’d been running through ice and sleet and blackened city snow forever. So these last few weeks had been a gift.

Overnight, the plow shavings and dirty rinds of ice had vanished from the curbsides and intersections, and a drenching rain three weeks ago— the day we’d changed the clocks— had sluiced away the sand and salt and flotsam that remained. Feathery blossoms had appeared on the trees, faintly at first, like tentative green sketch marks, and then with more color and conviction. Grass was coming in on the dirt patches in the parks. Even now, the sidewalks and buildings had a scrubbed, surprised look— like a drunk, waking up sober and in his own bed for the first time in a long time. I picked up my pace.

I turned west on 20th Street, and ran between Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town. I headed south at First Avenue, and west again at 17th Street, past some Beth Israel Hospital buildings and over to Stuyvesant Square. I had five miles behind me. I checked my watch. It was after seven and there was still some light in the sky. I felt loose and limber, and my breathing was easy. I was good to go for another two. I dodged around a pair of dog walkers on Rutherford Place and went west on 15th Street. Thoughts jumped and skittered in my head as I ran, like a ball over a roulette wheel.

Nina Sachs was an edgy, prickly woman, and she emanated a tension that seemed to permeate her household. It was there in her son— in the painful twist of his shoulders as he shrank from his mother’s touch and in his thin, angry voice. And it was there in Ines Icasa, too— in her quick movements about the apartment and in her face that was like a smooth dark-eyed mask.

There was something about Nina’s story that didn’t sit quite right. Maybe it was her reluctance to call the police— and risk upsetting the ex-husband she so obviously disdained— that didn’t make sense. I’d seen enough of divorced couples, though, to know that sense only rarely entered into things— and particularly not when kids were involved. And I’d had few clients whose stories hadn’t raised at least an eyebrow.

I turned north onto Irving Place. The street was quiet and yellow light came from the windows of the town houses and old brick apartment buildings. The block was lined with spindly trees, studded with white blossoms. A gust of wind sent some drifting, like fat snowflakes, as I passed. My thoughts turned to Jane Lu.

We’d met last November, when Jane moved into the loft apartment above mine, and fate— in the form of my younger sister, Lauren— had made our meeting inevitable. Lauren owns the apartment I live in, and she works at the dot-com that Jane has been nursing back to health for the last year. Lauren also takes a touching, if sometimes invasive, interest in the state of my social life. But in this case I had no complaints. My attraction to Jane was immediate and powerful and like nothing I’d felt in a long time.

Jane and I were lovers by New Year’s, and in the brief hours that we weren’t working— in the odds and ends of late nights and early mornings and rare weekends off— we fell into a sort of intimacy. We slept together and ate together, and we walked the city and talked at length about work and politics and the sad, sorry state of the world. It wasn’t a lot of time as the clock told it, but in the years since my wife had died it was more time than I’d spent with anyone besides myself. It was also a precarious thing.

By tacit agreement, we kept our relationship balanced in the present tense— with few references to our pasts and none at all to any prospects beyond the most immediate. And when anything threatened that equilibrium, we would retreat to the familiar security of our jobs. I’d had some practice at this, and so had Jane.

Jane didn’t often withdraw, though she had ample reason to be wary. In fact, she had ample reason not to touch me with a ten-foot pole. Not long after we’d met, Jane was swept up— and almost swept away— in the violent currents of one of my cases, the same one that had run me afoul of the Feds downtown. Her injuries had been slight, but only by a hairsbreadth, and she’d seen firsthand the ugliness that could erupt in my life, that was a part of it. Jane herself never mentioned the violence, and I never asked, but she knew how close she had come— closer than inches— and she knew how my wife had died. I came to the top of Irving Place, and looped twice around Gramercy Park. The sky was reddening, and purple shadows lay on the square.

It would be four years in August— four years since Anne was murdered, the final victim of a man I’d suspected in a long string of killings. Four years since my own arrogance and stupidity had put her in harm’s way. I’d stopped being a cop— or much of anything else— right after the funeral, though it was another few months before I got sober enough to resign. After that, I was alone with a ravenous, angry grief that I’d been certain would swallow me whole.

As it happened, it didn’t— at least, not entirely. It left some scraps behind, bits and pieces, some threads and a few shards, and from them I pasted together a life— a half-life, my sister Lauren would say— of work and running and solitude. It was sparse, but it was manageable. It was what I had and what I knew, and I wasn’t sure that I could handle much more.

I turned north on Lexington Avenue and ran faster.

It was nearly seven-thirty by the time I got back to 16th Street. The arched windows that run across the front of the converted factory building that I live in were dark. I took the elevator to the fourth floor and flicked on some lights. My place isn’t half the size of Nina’s, but it’s big enough, with high ceilings, bleached wood floors, and a wall of tall windows. There’s an open kitchen in cherry and granite at one end, and a bedroom area and bathroom at the other, and in between a few pieces of comfortable furniture, mostly in leather and dark woods.

I drank water from a bottle in the refrigerator. Then I stretched for ten minutes and peeled off my running clothes and stepped into the shower. When I stepped out again I smelled curry and cilantro and coconut milk, and I heard faint guitars. I wrapped a towel around my waist and walked out of the bathroom.

Jane waved at me across the loft. She was sitting at the head of my long oak table, a cell phone at her ear, a pen in her hand, and a thick sheaf of documents in front of her. Farther down the table was dinner— chicken satay, pad thai, vegetables simmered in curry and coconut milk, and crab rolls— all from the Thai place around the corner. Caetano Veloso was singing soft Portuguese from the stereo. I picked a crab roll from its white cardboard box and took a bite.

“Shit,” Jane said into the phone. “We sent them the audit papers three weeks ago, Roger. They’re only getting to them now? What lazy bastards.” She was wearing a white MIT T-shirt and snug blue jeans. Her small feet were bare, and there were two black loafers under her chair. Her left leg was tucked beneath her, and she brushed the ball of her right foot lightly against the floor.

Jane was about five-foot-four and slim, with a shapely layer of muscle on her arms and legs and on her flat belly. Her cropped jet-black hair was damp just now, and I figured she’d stopped upstairs to shower and change. She listened to Roger talk and said “uh-huh” and jotted notes in the margins of a page, and there was an intent look on her heart-shaped face. Her small mouth was pursed, and the pout in her bottom lip was more pronounced. Her fine brows were furrowed as she scanned the pages. She looked much younger than her thirty-four years.

Jane made some final notes and put aside the document. Roger spoke, and she drummed her short glossy nails on the tabletop. She took up another document and flicked through the sheets.

“I’m on page seven of the memorandum of understanding, third paragraph. You with me?” She waited. “They screwed up the revenue targets for year two… . Yeah, all four quarters.” Roger talked some more, and Jane looked at me and rolled her eyes. She made a one minute gesture. “And the same thing with the head-count projections on the next page. You see that? … All right, I’ve got to eat now. I’ll call you when I’m back in the office.” She laughed. “Yes, I actually eat, Roger.” She closed her phone and sighed heavily. She looked me up and down.

“Nice outfit,” she said, smiling.

I smiled back. “Glad you like it. How’s your deal going?”

“Lurching is the word that comes to mind. Par for the course with law firms and investment banks, I guess; lots of well-credentialed people billing lots of time while avoiding much actual work. Pass me those noodles, will you?” I handed Jane a container and a pair of chopsticks. She ate from the box. I sat down next to her with the container of crab rolls.

Jane is a CEO-for-hire, a kind of über-consultant called in by the boards of companies in deep trouble to save their sinking ships— or at least to get a good price for the scrap. Her gigs are strictly short-term, two years or less, and she demands— and gets— a piece of the action for her efforts. Jane was brought into the dot-com about a year ago, by the venture capital firm that held a majority stake in the company. Her mandate was to get the business back on its feet, make it profitable, and find a buyer, and through a combination of scary intelligence, relentless energy, and icy political savvy wrapped in irresistible charm, she was three-for-three. For the last six weeks, she’d spent most of her time on closing the deal.

“You’re really going back in?”

“I have to. They’re reviewing our contracts tomorrow, and I’ve got people getting ready. They’ll need help.”

“So it’s going to happen?”

Jane picked a crab roll from my container. “It’ll happen. It may age me by ten years— but it’ll happen. It’s a great fit for the buyers, a great price for us, and the best thing for the company. It’s a win all the way around. Slide those veggies down here.”

I did, and helped myself to a skewer of chicken satay. “Are they still asking you to stay on?”

Jane winced and shook her head. “It’s just a crush,” she said. “They’ll get over it.” She got up and gathered her papers and stacked them on the kitchen counter. She saw the tulips there. “These are pretty.”

“They’re for you,” I said.

Jane smiled. She opened a cabinet beneath the counter and came up with shears and a blue glass vase. She slit the wrapping on the tulips and snipped an inch from the bottom of the stems. Her movements were quick and sure. She ran water in the vase and put the tulips in.

“Nothing they can do to make it worth your while?” I asked.

“Nope. The buyers are okay, but it’s still a big company and way too much of a boys’ club. There’s no way I’d sign up for that again.”

After B-school, Jane had done time at a prestigious investment bank and at a big management consulting firm, and both experiences had filled her with a fierce resolve to be always self-employed.

“Besides,” she said, “it’s been a long year. I’ve got another few weeks on this deal, and all I want afterward is to ride into the sunset.” Jane looked up at me. “Have you thought any more about riding along?” she asked, and the air seemed to thicken between us.

In the brief reprieves she granted herself from the office and the culmination of her deal, Jane had been planning a very long vacation, and she’d invited me to join her. Guidebooks and travel magazines had been turning up in my apartment for weeks now, and we’d been tiptoeing at the edges of this conversation for almost as long. Each time we did, it was a cautious tug-of-war, a wary testing of resistance and balance over suddenly unstable terrain. And each time left us both a little edgy.