The Heaven Trilogy (48 page)

“And I'll tell
you
that that is the most ridiculous suggestion I've ever heard. You come walking in here, spouting these absurd accusations of fraud. How dare you!”

Kent stared Bentley down for a full ten seconds. He turned to his old boss. “Borst, will you please tell Mr. Bentley here that he's starting to get under my skin. Will you tell him that I already have enough hard evidence to have him put in the slammer for a few years, and if he doesn't back off, I might do just that. And tell him to cool down. He really is looking more and more like a tomato, and I'm afraid I might just walk over there and bite into him by mistake. Go on, tell him.”

Borst blinked. He was obviously completely out of his league here. “Come on, Price. Settle down, man.”

Bentley snorted, but he did not attack.

“Good.” Kent turned back to the president. “Now, I'll tell you what, Bentley. I really did not come all the way from the Far East to slap your wrists over a couple thousand dollars. If that were the case it would be local security in here, not me. No sir. I'm after much bigger fish. But now you've hurt my feelings with this big talk of yours, and I'm not sure I want to bring you in on my little secret anymore. I'm tempted to just walk out of here and file a report that will nail your hide to the wall. And I could do it too.”

He drilled Borst with a stare and returned to Bentley. “But I'll tell you what I'm willing to do. I'm willing to let the small deposits slip and tell you what I really need from you if you'll just apologize for your nasty attitude. How's that? You put your hands together as if you're praying and tell me you're sorry, and I'll forgive this whole mess. Both of you.”

They looked at him with wide eyes and gaping mouths. Borst put his hands together and looked at Bentley. The president appeared to have frozen solid.

“Come on, Price,” Borst whispered.

The humiliation of the moment was really too much for Kent himself. Two grown men, begging apologies without just cause. At least none they knew of. They had nothing to do with those small deposits, and all three of the men in the room knew that. Still, Bentley was no idiot. He could not know
what
“Bob” knew.

It took a good thirty seconds of silence before Bentley slowly clasped his hands as if in prayer and dipped his head. “I'm sorry. I spoke in haste.”

“Yes. I'm sorry too,” Borst echoed.

Kent smiled. “Well, that's much better. I feel so much better. Don't you?”

They were undoubtedly too stuffed with humiliation to respond.

“Good, then. And please keep this attitude of contrition about you as long as I am present. Now, let me tell you why I'm really here. Last week, someone stole one million dollars from the bank through a series of ghost transactions. Transactions similar in nature to the deposits made to your accounts. And quite frankly, I'm really quite convinced that you two did it. I think you two have a bunch of money stashed somewhere and that you've used some variation of AFPS to do it.”

Their faces went white together, slowly, as the blood slowly vacated. Their mouths gaped.

Kent spoke before they could. “Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that I just told you differently not two minutes ago. You're thinking that I just promised to let things slide if you made that silly apology. And you're absolutely right. But I was lying. You two are quite the liars yourselves, aren't you? You really should have seen it coming.”

They sat woodenly, thoroughly seized by shock. Kent firmed his jaw and glared at them. “Somewhere in the deepest folds of cyberspace there's a lot of money hiding, and I guarantee it; I'm gonna find that money. And when I do, I'm going to find your grimy fingerprints all over it. You can bet your next twenty years on that. I figure it'll take me about two weeks. In the meantime, I'll get you a number in case your memory improves and you suddenly want to talk sense.”

He walked past them to the door and turned back. Borst was moving his lips in horrified silent protest. Bentley's head had swelled like a tomato again.

Kent dipped his head. “Until then, my fat friends. And I don't mind telling you, that apology really was a special moment for me. I will remember it always.”

With that Kent shut the door behind him and left, hardly able to contain himself. He slipped on the dark glasses while still in the lobby, nodding to Sidney Beech as he passed. Then he was through the revolving glass doors and facing Broadway.

Man, that had felt good. Time for a drink.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

THE HOLE in Kent's chest had returned shortly after noon on Monday, just three hours after his little victory over the porky twins. He was not done with them, of course, but it would be two weeks before he walked back into their lives. Two weeks with nothing to do but wait. Two weeks of empty space.

He could return to the island and live it up with Doug and friends. But the idea felt like death warmed over. Why retreat to solitude? Why not try to shake this emptiness by filling his life with a few things here? Maybe he ought to take a drive up to Boulder.

What was he thinking?

Kent decided to catch a flight to New York. He made the decision impulsively, with a slug of tequila burning his throat. Why not? Money was no object. He could hop the
Concorde
to London if he so desired. And sitting around Denver beating back memories of his past would drive him to the grave.

He checked out of the Hyatt, paid cash for a thousand-dollar ticket to New York, and was airborne by four that afternoon.

The Big Apple was just another clogged city, but it did offer its advantages. Bars, for instance. There were pubs and lounges on virtually every corner around Kent's Manhattan hotel. Kent settled for the one in the hotel— O'Malley's Pub—and retired in a daze at 1 A.M. Tuesday morning.

He woke just before noon, lost in a dark room, wondering where he was. New York. He had flown to New York. Only God knew why. To escape Denver or some such nonsense. He rolled over and shut his eyes. He imagined there would be a dozen messages on the phone number he'd called over to Bentley's assistant before leaving Denver. The president and his cohort were probably coming apart at the seams trying to get hold of him. Yes, well he would let them sweat. Let them die a few deaths, see how it felt.

Kent forced himself out of bed at one, determined to find a distraction beyond the bottle. Goodness, he was chugging alcohol as if it were a runner's water. He had to get hold of himself here.

The bellboy told him that the opera was always a stretching experience.

He attended the opera that night. The sound of the lead vocalist's crooning nearly had him in tears. For some ungodly reason the woman became Lacy in his mind's eye, mourning the loss of her lover. That would be him. He could not follow the plot, but that the play was a story of death and sorrow could hardly be missed.

Kent woke Wednesday to a refreshing thought. Refreshing, not in the sense that he particularly enjoyed it, but refreshing in that it pulled him out of the doldrums— like a bucket of ice water tossed into a hot shower. It was a simple thought.

What if they're on to you, my friend?

He bolted up in bed and grabbed the bedspread. What if, back there in Denver, someone had put a few things together? Like that cop who'd interrupted his reading time at the bookstore. What had become of him? Or Bentley himself, sitting there wheezing like a camel, what if he'd seen something in his eyes? Even Borst, for that matter. No, not Borst. The man was too stupid.

He rolled out of bed, his stomach churning. Or what of Lacy? He had actually told her, for heaven's sake! Most of it anyway. Coming here to the United States had been idiotic. And going back to the bank, now, there was a move straight off of Stupid Street. What had he been thinking! Had to get the nasty boys, yes sir. Extract a slice of revenge.

Kent dressed with a tremor in his bones and headed for the bar. Problem was, the bar hadn't opened yet. It was only 9 A.M. Back to the hotel room to down a few of those small bottles in the cabinet. He spent the day watching golf in his hotel room, sick with anxiety and bored to death for the duration.

He managed to slap some sense into himself the next day by reviewing each and every step of his plan. The simple fact of the matter was that it had been rather brilliant. They had buried Mr. Brinkley's charred body, convinced it belonged to Kent Anthony. Unless they exhumed that body, Kent was a dead man. Dead men do not commit crimes. More important, there had been no crime. Ha! He had to remember that. No theft and no thief. No case. And he was the rich fool who had masterminded it all. A very wealthy man, dripping in the stuff.

It was that day, Thursday, in the bustling city of New York, that Kent began to understand the simple facts of a wealthy life. It all started after a two-hundred-dollar lunch down the street from the hotel, at Bon Appétit French Cuisine. The food was good; he could hardly deny that. For the price, it had better be good. But it occurred to him while stuffing some cupcake-looking pastry into his mouth, with his stomach already stretched far beyond its natural limits, that these French morsels, like most morsels, would come out in much worse shape than they went in. And in all honesty, they did not bring him much more pleasure than, say, a Twinkie at twenty cents a pop. It was a little fact, but it left the restaurant with Kent.

Another little fact: No matter how much money he carried in his wallet, individual moments did not change. Hopes and dreams might, but the string of moments that made up life did not. If he was walking down the hall, placing one foot in front of the other, he was doing just that, regardless of what his wallet packed. If he was pushing the call button for the elevator, it was just that, no more and no less, regardless of the number of bills in his back pocket.

But it was that night, approaching the midnight hour while drinking in O'Malley's Pub, that the full weight of the matter presented itself to him in one lump sum. It was as though the heavens opened and dropped this nugget on him like an ingot of lead. Only it didn't come from the skies. It came from the mouth of a fellow drinker, ready to impart his wisdom.

Kent sat next to the man who called himself Bono—after the U2 singer, he said—an ex-Orthodox priest, of all things. Said he left the Greek church because it left him dry. The man looked to be in his forties, with thick eyebrows and graying hair, but it was his bright green eyes that had Kent wondering. Since when did Greeks have green eyes? Together they knocked back the shotglasses. Actually, Kent was putting them away. Bono contented himself with sipping at a glass of wine.

“You know, the problem with those Wall Street yuppies,” Bono offered after a half-dozen shots, “is that they all think there's more to life than what the average man has.”

“And they'd be right,” Kent returned after a pause. “Average is lazy, and lazy is not much.”

“Whoa, so you are a philosopher, are you? Well, let me ask you something, Mr. Philosopher. What's better about busy than lazy?”

It was a simple question. Even awkwardly simple, because everyone knew that busy was better than lazy. But at the moment, Kent was having difficulty remembering why. It was possibly the booze, but it was just as possibly that he had never really known why busy was better than lazy.

He did what all good fools do when presented with a question they cannot answer directly. He raised his voice a tad and threw the question back. “Come on! Everybody knows that being lazy is stupid.”

“That's what you said. And I asked you, why?”

Bono was no fool. He'd been here before. “Why? Because you cannot excel if you're lazy. You will go nowhere.”

“Excel at what? Go where?”

“Well, now. How about life? Let's start with that. I know it's not much, but let's start with excelling at that little event.”

“And tell me what that feels like. What does
excelling at life
feel like?”

“Happiness.” Kent raised his shotglass and threw it back. “Pleasure. Peace. All that.”

“Ahh. Yes, of course. I had forgotten about happiness, pleasure, and peace and all that. But you see, the average man has as much as the Wall Street yuppie. And in the end, they both go into the same grave. That
is
where they go, isn't it?” The man chuckled.

It was then, at the word
grave,
that the buzzing had first started again in Kent's skull. “Well, most have a good eighty years before the grave,” he said quietly. “You only live once; you might as well have the best while you do it.”

“But you see, that's where you and the yuppies on Wall Street are mistaken,” Bono insisted. “It makes a fine fantasy, no argument there. But when you've had it all—and believe me, I have—wine still tastes like wine. You might drink it out of a gold chalice, but even then you realize one day that you could close your eyes and honestly not know whether the cold metallic object in your hand is made from gold or tin. And who decided that gold is better than tin anyway? In the end we all go to the grave. Perhaps it is beyond the grave where life begins. You know anyone who's gone to the grave lately?”

Kent swallowed and flung back another shot. Lately? His vision doubled momentarily. He leveled a rather weak objection. “You're too pessimistic. People are full of life. Like that man laughing over there.” He motioned to a man in a far booth, roaring with his head tilted back. “You think he's not happy?” Kent smiled, thankful for the reprieve.

Bono gazed at the man and grinned. “Yes. Today Clark looks quite happy, doesn't he?” He turned back to Kent. “But I know Mr. Clark. He's a pig-head. Recently divorced and rather smug with the notion because he no longer has to deal with his brats. He's got three of them—six, ten, and twelve—and he can hardly stand them. Problem is, he spends most of his waking hours feeling guilty for his remarkably selfish disposition. He's been trying to wash it all away with the bottle for a year now. Trust me. He will leave this place tonight and retreat to a wet pillow, soaked in tears.” Bono took a sip from his glass, evidently satisfied for having made his point. “Look under any man's sheets, and you'll find a similar story. I guarantee it, certifiable.”