The Last Good Day (26 page)

“Lynn Stockdale’s husband came up to me at Starbucks this morning and said you were by the house yesterday bothering his wife.”

“That what he said?”

The drop fell off the end of his nose and landed at Harold’s feet.

“You want to tell me your side of it?” The chief looked down at the spot it made.

“I came by the house to clear up a couple of details.”

“After I told you Paco was the primary.
Twice.
”

“There are certain kinds of information he might not be able to get, being from outside the community.” Mike dabbed sweat out of the groove in his lip. “Sometimes people are more comfortable talking to somebody they’ve known all their lives. Sets off fewer alarm bells.”

“Well, that worked like a charm, didn’t it? What’d you do, whip your dick out?”

“Nothing she hasn’t seen a hundred times. She used to be all over me, in case you forgot.”

“
We are in the middle of a murder investigation.
”

The chief’s voice echoed off the cinder-block walls and died in the middle of the room. On the television, a former presidential candidate was talking about erectile dysfunction.

“Look, nothing happened,” said Mike. “Absolutely nothing. She gave me a little peck on the cheek when I was leaving.”

“And that’s it?”

“Oh, come on. You know how it is when you see somebody you used to be into. There’s still a kind of energy. It doesn’t all just dry up. So she wanted to give me a good-bye kiss. It wasn’t any big deal.”

“Then why’d she tell her husband about it?”

“Who the hell knows? Maybe she felt guilty afterward. Or maybe somebody saw me leaving and asked her about it later. Whatever. Listen, it’d be the exact same way if you saw Sharon Carson again.”

With the mention of his first white girlfriend, the chief’s eyebrows relaxed and his features softened. It had taken him a good six months to get over the way Sharon’s mother broke them up senior year, determined that her Bryn Mawr–bound daughter wasn’t going to throw her life away dating one of the local black boys who washed dishes at the Copperhead Diner after school.

“You still put my back against the wall, Mikey,” the chief said, renewing his determination. “I told you to step off.”

“What’re you gonna do, Harold? Wrap me up in Tyvek and fiberglass insulation? I live in this town. I’m still supposed to be running day-to-day operations for this department.”

“And I am your chief,” Harold told him coldly. “I already saved your career once. I can’t do it again.”

“And I saved your life when Brenda Carter came at you with a butcher knife. I didn’t hear you complaining when I pumped a round into her.”

Almost unconsciously, Harold’s hand went to the right side of his abdomen.

“I haven’t forgotten,” he said. “I owe you a lot, but if I have another problem with you in this investigation, I’m gonna have to ask you to take more than a step back.”

“Understood. I hear you.” Mike stood up, wiping his face again. “You the big man now, Harold.”

The chief squinted, trying to decide whether he’d been dissed with his own father’s line.

“By the way,” said Mike, playing it light and casual, “you ever get the tox results back from the state crime lab?”

Harold’s face got small, as if he was going to start barking again. “You said you’d keep me in the loop,” Mike reminded him.

The chief looked down at the hand still hovering near the old entry wound, notice of a debt outstanding.

“Yeah, we did,” he said reluctantly. “She was eight weeks pregnant. But do me a favor and keep that under your hat, will you?”

25

AN IVORY-WHITE
BMW 525i sat glowing in Sandi’s driveway, looking as if her big white house had somehow given birth to it.

Lynn parked the Explorer behind it and got out with three full Corning Ware bowls of food that she’d spent the morning cooking for Jeff and the children. The BMW had to belong to Sandi’s father, she realized. Every time she saw him, he had a different car, much in the same way other well-to-do men always had a new wife.

She heard his familiar phlegm-and-gravel voice as she walked up to the door and rang the bell.

“Oy,
Gottenyu,
Lynn.” He flung open the door and stood before her, shaking his head. “What did they do to my baby?”

“Saul, I’m so sorry.”

She put the food down and threw her arms around him. He was a short, blunt, unreflective cigar-smoker, who most people took to be a self-made millionaire. In fact, his own father had amassed a small fortune in the carpet business just after the Depression, most of which Saul lost on bad investments in the late sixties after his first wife died. But he’d found his touch in the seventies, snapping up Manhattan properties in decline, fixing up the lobbies, slapping faux-European names on the canopies, and charging exorbitant rents as soon as the market turned and people were desperate for two-bedrooms.

“Look at you.” He closed the door and stood back, appraising her. “You look just like you did when you got out of high school.”

“It’s very kind of you to say that, Saul.”

“I always said if my Sandi had half your poise, she’d be beating the boys off with a stick.”

She cringed a little, remembering how Saul had been a bit of a lecher for as long as she’d known him.

“She was a beautiful girl, Saul. I’ll never have another friend like her.”

He nodded his great white mane sagely. “She looked fantastic when she lost all the weight before the summer,” he said. “‘Pretty as a shiksa,’ I told her.”

Okay,
thought Lynn,
that would have been worth five years of psychotherapy right there if Sandi were still alive.

“Is Barbara here?” She asked after the second Mrs. Feinberg.

“Upstairs, taking a nap. This has been very hard on her too. She was very close with Sandi.”

Actually, Sandi always despised her stepmother and referred to her as Queen Botoxica. Barbara had been serviced and overhauled more often than a nuclear submarine, and if Saul had had a mind to do it, he could’ve made himself a third wife out of all her cast-off parts.

“How are the kids doing today?” Lynn asked, wondering if Jeff had finally got up the nerve to break the news to them.

“Who knows?” Saul raised his great bushy eyebrows. “I don’t think it’s even sunk in yet.”

She heard clattering and yelling from deeper in the house and peered down the hall to see Dylan and Isadora back by the stairway, wailing on each other and their baby-sitter, Inez, with wooden swords and plastic baseball bats. To the casual eye, they were just children playing wildly. But then Lynn saw Dylan take his sword with both hands and smash it as hard as he could against the flimsy cardboard shield Inez was holding. This was the fury of a little boy who understood perfectly well that he would never see his mother again.

“See what I mean?” Saul waved a weary hand. “They’re okay.”

Lynn looked askance, thinking what an old obtuse dope he was and how Sandi must have suffered growing up with him. No wonder she’d always been throwing herself at men, trying to get attention.

On the other hand, Saul was
here,
wasn’t he? He’d managed to raise Sandi and her two brothers mostly on his own, and now he was here to help keep an eye on his grandchildren. The man had lost a wife
and
a daughter in one lifetime, but he was in far better shape than Jeff was yesterday. So maybe obtuse and insensitive wasn’t such a bad thing to be.

“What about Jeff?” Lynn asked. “Is he around? I didn’t see his car by the garage.”

“Ach, he’s off making
arrangements,
” said Saul, his face etched in craggy contempt. “What arrangements do you have to make? Pick up the phone, call the rabbi. Get the body in the ground and say the Kaddish. You’re not rebuilding downtown. You’re trying to make a funeral.”

“Is he using Harold Baltimore’s funeral home?”

“I don’t know
what
he’s doing.”

Lynn realized she’d never really sounded the depths of Saul’s true feelings about his son-in-law before.

“You don’t sound happy,” she said.

“Hey, what’s it my business? She was only my daughter.”

In his bitterness she heard an invitation to pry.

“Saul,” she said cautiously, “had you got the impression that Sandi and Jeff weren’t getting along?”

“You think they tell me anything? I’m just the father who writes the checks. That’s all …”

He closed his mouth, appearing to masticate on his words for a few seconds.

“I’ll tell you one thing, though,” he said, deciding to spit the rest of it out. “If I thought he wasn’t treating her like an absolute princess, I would’ve cut him off years ago.”

“What do you mean, ‘cut him off ’?”

“Who the hell do you think helped pay for this house?” He turned his palms up. “You’d think they’d at least be able to furnish it themselves.”

“Wait a second.
You
paid for this house?”

“That’s my name on the deed. Unless my brilliant son-in-law has decided to change his name to Feinberg as well.”

“But I thought Jeff’s business was
good.
” She put her hands on her hips.

“Sure it is. And I look just like Cary Grant.”

He grunted like an old garbage disposal, and for a moment she’d felt sure that he was about to spit on the onyx floor.

“Then who paid for the old house?” Lynn asked. “Didn’t they sell that before they moved here?”

“Mine too. Picked it up for thirty thousand less than its asking price and sold it for almost twice as much. You think I went into real estate so I could lose money?”

“But I still don’t understand.” She blinked as if a fly had just gone past her face. “What about Jeff’s company? I thought they were making ten, twelve million dollars a year.”

“My love, do you know what the first great lesson of the Bible is?” He looked at her with a kind of fatherly indulgence. “It’s not Do unto others. It’s If something looks too good to be true, it probably is. For five years, I’ve been helping float this kid and telling him his business plan doesn’t make sense on paper. I keep asking him, ‘Where does the profit come in? What’s your revenue stream?’ And he keeps telling me that I’m out of it, that I don’t know what I’m talking about, that there’s a new—he crooked his fingers to make quotation marks—‘paradigm’ with the Internet. Ha!”

“So you’ve been helping to underwrite Jeff’s company this whole time?”

“You call it
underwriting;
I call it
bloodletting.
By this spring, I told him enough is enough. I said he had to cut his overhead by fifty percent and come up with a new plan to take this company public in a year or I was pulling the plug on him.”

“Oh.” Lynn swallowed. “I guess that’s understandable.”

She wondered how Barry and she would handle having their backs up against the wall this way. She told herself that they’d be strong and stick together. But then again, she’d noticed the way Barry seemed to get quiet and tense lately whenever she asked him how Retrogenesis’s stock was doing.

“Listen,” said Saul, “I loved my daughter, but I have other children and grandchildren and a wife with stepchildren I have to try and help support. My name is not Warren Buffett, and my pockets are not the Grand Canyon. You have to set limits, even with your children. Otherwise, they never learn to do things for themselves.”

“Of course. You’re right, Saul.”

She listened to the sounds of the kids’ swords and bats beating against the baby-sitter’s shield, noticing how much emptier the house seemed now that she had this information. Almost like a movie set deserted by the cast and crew.

She saw Inez retreat from the force of the blows, each one seeming to say,
You’re not my mother; you’re not my mother.
The baby-sitter backed into the kitchen and let the door flap shut after her, a light breeze ruffling the children’s hair. Dylan and Isadora looked at each other and then gazed toward the front of the house.

“Grandpa, come play with us!” Dylan raised his sword, the little warrior beckoning. “I’ll be the bad guy.”

“Can you believe I gotta start this shit all over?” Saul sighed and reluctantly started to take his jacket off. “At
my
age.”

26

“WHAT’S UP?” ROSS
Olson asked as Barry walked into his office. “I’m sorry I wasn’t around to return the call yesterday. Chiropractor appointment in the afternoon and Curriculum Night at Dalton. The perils of being an old husband with a young wife.”

Kara, honey-haired, golden-thighed, and thirty-two, grinned from a picture on a side shelf next to framed finger paintings by the kids and a photo of Ross with his old artillery unit in Vietnam.

“I went to see Mark Young,” said Barry.

Instead of sitting down, he stood before Ross, hands deep in his pockets, flexing slightly at the knees as if he was getting ready to jump on top of the desk.

“And what was on his feeble mind?” Ross swiveled sideways in his black leather office chair.

“We got problems.”

“Do tell.”

“He knows how badly we’re stuck in Phase Two trials for Chronex. I think I scared him off using any more information about the Monkey Suit, but there’s nothing I can do to move our drugs through the pipeline faster. If the FDA moves up our deadline for filing results to December fifteenth, like they’re threatening to, we’re not going to be ready, and he’s gonna be all over us again, saying we misled our investors.”

“I’ll call Paul Fleming down in Washington,” said Ross, referring to the former Florida congressman who’d done lobbying for Retrogenesis. “Maybe he can buy us a few more months.”

“There’s something else.” Barry cocked his head to the right, looking past Ross for a moment to the exact spot where he’d seen the American Airlines plane coming in low.

“Okay.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you sold four thousand shares of your stock this summer?”

Ross’s face became taut in the middle and wrinkled on the sides, like a tarpaulin stretched by a baseball ground crew on a rainy day.