The Last Good Day (27 page)
“Who told you that?” he asked.
“Young did. His researchers caught it.”
“And why is it any of
your
business?”
“Ross, I just made a speech to the executive officers of this company, telling them why they shouldn’t abandon ship. And now I see the captain’s already in the lifeboat.”
“Oh, that is just a pile of thoroughbred shit.” Ross’s chair gave a small insulted squeak. “You knew I was buying a summerhouse on the Vineyard.”
“I thought you’d already closed on it.”
“Kara and I agreed that we should lay out a bigger down payment and reduce the monthly mortgage. Nothing wrong with that, is there?”
“Of course not.” Barry put his shoulders back. “But I just want to remind you that there are a lot of people risking almost everything they have on this enterprise staying afloat. And they have a right to know if the ship’s going down.”
“The ship is not going down,” Ross said. “We’re going to be outlining a new ‘Path to Profitability’ report to the investors in the next six months. Coridal is coming on three new Asian markets in January. And I didn’t want to say anything premature, but I just set up a meeting with one of the major pharmas next week, who might be interested in giving us some extra support to finish off our R-and-D work on Chronex.”
“These aren’t the same guys Steve’s been talking to, are they?”
“Shit, no.” Ross gave a barbed chuckle. “He’s got a friend at Pfizer who he thinks is going to put him in my seat. That boy’s got more ambition than sense.”
“Then who are you talking to?”
“Well, I don’t want it getting around, but you know Bill Brenner and I are still close …”
“Oh, come the fuck on.” Barry winced. “Brenner Home Care? Bill Brenner’s a psychopath. I worked on that pesticide case for five years with you, Ross. I know how he works. He’ll surround himself with yes-men and ease the rest of us out one by one …”
“I’ve already made it clear to Bill that he wouldn’t be the Grand Pooh-bah of this particular lodge. I told him we were envisioning more of a supporting role.”
“You mean, he’d become one of our creditors?”
“That’s one possibility.” Ross angled his chair. “But I wouldn’t make any definitive moves without consulting the rest of the executive committee.”
“Look”—Barry found himself fingering the coins in his pocket like worry beads—“all I’m asking is that you give the rest of us a little heads up if you’re seriously considering a move like that. It’s going to be hard as hell finding another job in this economy.”
“Barry”—Ross stood up—“it’s like I told my men in ’Nam. I may ask you to take risks, but I’ll never ask you to do anything I wouldn’t do myself.”
“Keep me in the loop,” Barry said tersely.
But as he walked out of the office and headed down the hall, he remembered that Ross’s company had lost more than half its men in a firefight near Da Nang.
LYNN WENT INTO
Sandi’s kitchen to put away the lasagna, apple pie, and salad she’d made and found Inez, the baby-sitter, leaning against the counter, trying to catch her breath.
“Hoo, boy.” Inez put her cardboard shield down and wiped her brow. “They wear me out.”
“It’s a good thing you’re here for them.” Lynn opened the Sub-Zero and shoved the food in. “They must need a lot of attention right now.”
“Please, God,
tell
me about it. I was here all day and all night Sunday and then all day Monday until
midnight,
please, God, when Jeff came back from the police station,” Inez said, emphatic Jamaican accent bobbing and weaving among her words. “Then I had to get my granddaughter ready for school and go by Jeanine at
ten
the next day, please, God, because I’m only supposed to be here
three
days a week. Then I had to come back here at
four
yesterday so Jeff could go out. Do you know I’m beginning to wonder if I ever get back home?”
Inez was the Holy Grail of suburban nannies, a fabulous cook with a driver’s license. She was a compact woman in her midforties with quick darting eyes in a round pleasant face. A woman who could keep her own counsel but never miss a thing. Lynn had met her while she was baby-sitting Jeanine’s kids and always found her a gas to talk to, not only because she was wise about children but because she was tart, discerning, and undeluded in a way that most white middle-class people in the suburbs couldn’t afford to be about themselves.
“And in the meantime, Jeff needs all his shirts
with
starch on a hanger, not folded, in the drawer. Do you know he needs
all
his suits back from the dry cleaner so he can look at them and
then
decide which one to wear to the funeral?”
“Hmm.”
Lynn watched dry ice vapor tumble out of the freezer, still thinking about the conversation she’d had with Saul. So odd that he’d been carrying Sandi and Jeff financially for such a long time. What must that have done to their marriage? She remembered Sandi confiding to her right before the wedding that one of the things she loved most about Jeff was that he’d given her a way to stop being so dependent on her dad.
“Inez”—she turned around—“were Jeff and Sandi fighting a lot right before she disappeared?”
“What do you mean
a lot?
” Inez busied herself, folding dish towels. “He was always after her for spending too much money on the house, and she was always after him about those
nasty
habits he has. Please, God. I hate to talk about
some
of the things I’ve bundled up in the trash.”
Good old Inez. You could always rely on her to come across with the dirt. A couple of years ago, Jeanine had gone back to work part-time and Inez had matter-of-factly told Lynn that she was the one personally providing the clean urine so Jeanine could pass the company’s drug test.
“What kinds of things?” asked Lynn.
“Oh, you know,
man things.
” Inez wrinkled her nose. “They have their
nasty
ways. I hate to tell you about some of the videos up on the shelf in his study.”
Though how Inez would know what was on the tapes if she hadn’t looked at them pretty carefully herself, Lynn wasn’t sure.
“Do you think he ever hit her?” she asked instead.
“Oh”—Inez turned on the sink and started washing glasses by hand—“
I
never saw
that.
”
“Well, had anything changed between them?” Lynn looked around, realizing there was no dishwasher in the kitchen.
“You know? I’ll tell you
the truth
what I saw happen,” said Inez, never one to resist the chance to tell a story. “Sandi was always asking him to clean those rain gutters outside the house. You know? But he was
always
upstairs watching his sports. And then one day, a few weeks ago, she wouldn’t leave him alone, and so he finally got high up on a ladder to do it and he
slipped.
I was in here, and all of a sudden I hear all kinds of bangin’ and yellin’ and cursin’ from outside. Because he’s hanging on to one of them aluminum gutters to keep from falling, and she’s standing under him, yelling for him to let go before he tears the gutter off the house.”
“Really?” asked Lynn, the image of Jeff dangling by his fingertips burning directly into her visual imagination. “So, what happened?”
“So he let go and fell in her rosebushes, and then all that yelling started up again. He comes in this house, limping and cursing
the hell
out of her because she loves the house more than she loves him. And she’s rushing around, telling him that’s not true and trying to get him ice for his leg. And the kids are upstairs covering their ears. Oh, Lord, that was
something.
”
Lynn shook her head, still framing the scene in her mind. Portrait of a marriage under pressure.
“So have the police talked to you about this already?” Lynn asked.
“Ye-
esss,
” said Inez, trapping the word in her teeth. “They’ve been by last night and again this morning.”
“I didn’t realize that.”
“Yup. I talked to a couple of them. Big white one and a little bald Spanish one.”
“I guess they must’ve asked you if either Jeff or Sandi was seeing other people.”
Inez cut the water off with a quick muscular turn of the wrist and stood there watching suds circle the drain. Lynn had the sense that a faint but unmistakable social boundary had just been transgressed.
“Mrs. Schulman, I
need
this job,” Inez said evenly. “My family
needs
me to make this money. I’ve got one daughter on public assistance and another who’s HIV positive and won’t take her drugs. I’ve got
four
grandchildren I’m helping to take care of. I
don’t need
to have a problem with the police or the people I work for up here.”
Lynn looked down and saw Inez squeezing a Brillo pad so hard in her fist that pink soap oozed out between her knuckles.
“I’m sorry,” Lynn said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Inez turned the sink on again, letting the water run hot enough to make vapor clouds rise toward the ceiling.
“So who was it?” asked Lynn.
“I don’t know. Mrs. Pollack already asked me about this.”
“Did she?”
“Oh, I tell you, she give me
the third degree!
”
Lynn snorted, remembering how critical Jeanine had been yesterday.
Let the police do their job.
Sure. Now it turned out she’d been snooping herself. And she called Sandi competitive?
“So you told her you don’t know anything,” said Lynn, not above doing a little scorekeeping of her own.
“I
don’t
know anything.” Inez rinsed out a highball glass and a Pikachu juice cup. “It’s none of my business.”
“I don’t believe you. I know all the extra hours you gave Sandi. I saw you out there sword-fighting just now with the kids. So I know this isn’t just a job to you.”
She could see Inez fighting with herself as she started drying the glasses with a dish towel more vigorously than she needed to, the drain slowly pulling the remaining suds toward the middle of the sink.
“You didn’t hear anything from me,” she said finally, opening the cupboard to start putting the glasses away. “Please, God.”
“What is it?”
“I came home early one day with the kids because the library was closed, and I saw the man who put up the deer fence had his truck in the driveway but no one was working in the backyard. I started to come in the house, and then I heard
these noises
from upstairs in the bedroom …”
Inez turned over a wineglass and looked at it from the bottom, leaving no doubt about the kind of noises she meant.
“So, what’d you do?”
“I took the kids and went to the supermarket for a half-hour.” Inez carefully placed the glass on the shelf above the children’s cups. “And when I came back, the truck was still there. So I took them to the video store until it got dark, and then I called to make sure it was okay to bring them home.”
“And did Jeff ever find out about it?”
Lynn felt a little electric surge up the back of her legs as she heard Jeff’s voice right outside the kitchen door, talking patiently to the kids. He must’ve just got home.
“I don’t know.” Inez dropped her voice. “
I
never said anything.”
She shut the cupboard and wiped her hands on a dish towel.
“So who was he?” whispered Lynn, determined to grab any last scrap before the baby-sitter fled. “The deer fence guy. Was his name on the side of a truck?”
“He was a cop,” Inez muttered as she slid past her to start setting the dinner table. “One of the same ones who talked to me. He didn’t know I’d seen him that day.”
JUST AS THE
train pulled out of Grand Central that night, Barry looked over and saw a familiar figure come chuffing and staggering red-faced up the aisle. His guy. His traveling companion. The keeper of the cubicle, the lord of the saltbox, the ignorer of the river. His doppelgänger, who he hadn’t laid eyes on since the Eleventh. At that moment, Barry was so elated to see him alive that he actually blurted out, “How you doing?” after the guy collapsed in his usual seat and caught his breath. The man froze with his laptop half-opened, slightly aghast that a stranger was trying to pick him up, and then quickly turned away.
By the time he reached Riverside Station just after eight, Barry’s relief began to evaporate as he seriously considered the future of Retrogenesis. A CEO secretly selling four thousand shares of his own stock did not inspire confidence. But thinking about going back into corporate litigation brought back memories of those blinding migraines. Something had shorted out in him in the five years the Brenner Home Care case dragged on. It wasn’t idealism that kept him from doing it all again; he’d never been afraid to throw a few sharp elbows under the boards. It was the sense that he was dedicating his working life to running around making sure all the lights were off.
He found the Saab in the darkened parking lot and thought about sending Lisa Chang an Instant Message. Long-term options needed to be mulled over. Too many lab hours, late-night pizza party / bull sessions, disputed patent applications, and brain-damaged monkeys had been poured into this project for it all to come to naught. And in the back of his mind, Barry quietly had to admit to himself that he’d started to like the way Lisa looked without her glasses.
He gunned the engine and swung out of the parking lot, hoping Lynn would still be eating dinner with the kids. When he spoke to her on the cell phone this afternoon, she was over at Sandi’s with the children and their grandfather, waiting for Jeff to get home. Again, he’d heard that tiny hitch in her voice, that little pause that let the static in, suggesting all manner of disturbance going on in the background.
He made the left onto Prospect and started up into the hills, still wondering what else she was holding back. It bothered him that she’d waited so long to tell him this whole tortured story about her high school boyfriend. On the one hand, who cared what happened twenty-five years ago? On the other, the story didn’t quite gel. It sounded like an awful lot of emotion to be stirred up by a bunch of old pictures. Maybe a key detail or two had been cropped out.