The Last Good Day (5 page)

“They’re gorgeous,” she said with almost audible relief. “I have two of my own. So I guess we’ve both been very lucky.”

“I guess,” he said flatly.

The doors to the ME’s van closed with a rude
thunk.
Harold Baltimore pocketed the phone and came over, his tie slightly askew, a little twitch already visible under one of his brown eyes.

“Hey, pretty lady.” He kissed her lightly on the cheek. “How you doing?”

“Better than some, I guess.”

She pointed toward the back of the white van and saw his eyelids droop even more than usual.

“How’s Emmie?” she asked.

“Lots of deals, no closings. It’s how it is.” He turned to Mike. “I’ve gotta get back to the base. Phones are going crazy over there.”

“Okay, boss man.” Mike gave him a little two-fingered salute that stopped just short of outright mockery. “I’ll be right behind you.
As usual.
”

Was this just the way men talked to each other? Even after all her years on the press barriers, she’d never quite understood this kind of brass-knuckled masculine affection. If one of her girlfriends teased her the way Barry razzed his buddies, she’d burst into tears.

The chief clapped her lightly on the arm. “Good to see you again,” he said. “You still haven’t aged a day.”

“Well, there’s a lie I can live with,” she called after him.

The engine of the ME’s van groaned and then kicked to life, a veil of gray-black smoke curling up into the blue sky.

“You know you’re getting old when the people you went to school with start getting put in charge of things,” she said. “Especially looking after the dead.”

Mike studied her with a mild consternated frown, as if he was about to wipe a smudge of dirt off her chin.

“So I guess you’d better get a move on,” she said as the white van pulled out of the lot. “Looks like you’ve got a lot of mopping up.”

He shrugged and looked at his watch, and for a few awkward seconds she imagined she heard it ticking.

“You know, Lynn, I still feel kind of bad about the way we left things,” he said finally.

“Oh?”

Her heart sank, knowing this had all been a little too painless and easy.

“I’d really like to clear the air one of these days.”

“Uh, Michael, I don’t know.” She reached into her jacket pocket for a lens cap. “I mean, that was such a long time ago, and I’m sure you’ve got a lot on your plate at the moment.”

He nodded. “Of course. But I was just thinking maybe we could catch a cup of coffee sometime at the Copperhead.”

Her stomach made a sound like a boot squelching in mud.

“Oh my God, is that still there?” She smiled.

“And they still have the little jukeboxes at the tables. ‘Year of the Cat.’ That was your favorite song, right?”

“Was it?”

How humiliating, to be reminded of her half-formed mall-rat tastes before she went off to the city and discovered the Velvet Underground and the Kronos Quartet. It was like seeing an old yellowing Polaroid of herself with stringy hair, braces, and thick ugly glasses.

“Give us a chance to catch up a little,” he said. “I know
I’ve
had a lot of things on my chest.”

“You have?”

She realized that they were about to pick up right where they left off.

“Oh, I don’t know, Michael,” she said, watching the other officers get into their squad cars. “I’m sure you’re going to be really busy, and I’ve got a lot of things that I …”

“It’s
a cup of coffee.
” He gave her a baleful look. “Don’t you think you at least owe me that much?”

His silence cornered her, reminding her of a dozen things she’d managed to delete from the hard drive of her memory until this moment.

“Well, look”—she swallowed—“maybe we could get together another time, with the families. I’d love you to meet my children and my husband. He’s a great guy. I think you’d really like him.”

She saw his small blue eyes dart back and forth, considering.

“Well, I guess that could be fun,” he said after a few seconds, in a voice that made her think of a coin spinning on its side.

“We could do a barbecue or something,” she offered brightly.

“Yeah, we’re supposed to get one or two decent weekends before the weather really turns.” He nodded, the knob of tension between his eyes shrinking slightly. “We’re still down in the Hollow, on Regan Way, believe it or not.”

“No kidding,” she said.

“Yeah, just about the last white family on the block. You should see me coaching baseball in the summer with all the little Mexican and Guatemalan kids in the neighborhood.”

“Is that right?”

The image warmed her unexpectedly.

“Oh, sure.” His shoulders started to relax—a man talking about sports. “They call me Mark McGwire because he had the home run thing with Sosa a couple of years ago. And I’m coaching the kids from up the hill in soccer this fall. Either of yours play?”

“My son’s just finally starting to get into sports. Strange it took so long because my husband was a big jock before he hurt his knee.”

“Oh, yeah? Maybe we’ll get him out there one of these days as an assistant coach.”

She wondered if she’d been a little quick on the draw with him. People change. Maybe marriage and children had softened him. He wouldn’t be the first. She’d once read that humans replace all their cells once every seven years. That meant each of them had been at least three and a half different people since they went out.

“Okay, so I’ll call you,” he said. “What’s your number?”

She patted her pockets, not wanting things to lose this slender thread of civility. “Um, I don’t know if I have a pen on me.”

“I do.” He tried to hand her a ballpoint and a small black notebook still warm from his back pocket.

She half-smiled. “Maybe it would be better if I called you. I should check with Barry about our schedule anyway.”

“Oh, okay.”

His face didn’t fall. It slowly descended, the weight moving from his eyes down into his grinding jaw.

“I can get you down at the police station, right?”

“Fine.” His eyes appeared to retract into his head a little.

“Good to see you again, Mike.” She hoisted the camera bag back up onto her shoulder. “Take care of yourself.”

“Yeah.” He nodded as she turned away. “Don’t be a stranger.”

4

“I’M THINKING ONE OF
us should call in a bomb threat,” said Steve Lyons, director of corporate communications, kicking off the morning meeting at Retrogenesis, the biotech company where Barry had become vice president in charge of legal affairs eighteen months ago. “About a half-hour before the shareholders arrive. They’ll clear the whole Grand Hyatt, there’ll be thousands of people out on the street milling around, news crews will show up, and that will be the story instead of our earnings report.”

“Why not go for the big enchilada and report a full-scale nuclear attack?” Barry snapped. “That way, we’ll all get locked up for causing a panic and never have to come back to the office.”

Six other executives sat around a conference table the size of the famous Indian canoe at the Museum of Natural History, thumb-typing Instant Messages to one another on little BlackBerry interactive pages. A stream of natural light that hadn’t reached this room until two weeks ago poured in through the windows overlooking Battery Park and New York Harbor. Barry stared at the wide blue gap in the skyline, thinking this, in fact, must be what Alzheimer’s is like. The Twin Towers were here a minute ago, weren’t they? He used to orient himself every morning coming up out of the subway by looking for them. Instead there was just a smoldering valley of rebar, concrete, and human remains down the block.

“I was serious,” said Steve, a thin fretful guy with pale, almost translucent, eyebrows and the mannerisms of a lifelong chain-smoker condemned to live in a smoke-free world. “Well, I was half-serious. We’re gonna get slaughtered at the meeting in January. We’re looking at the third quarter in a row where we missed our numbers. The guys from Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch are gonna be like the villagers in
Frankenstein
with the torches and pitchforks, yelling for our blood.”

“Bharat?” said Ross Olson, the company’s CEO, seated at the head of the table like the tribal chief, with his silver-fox hair, craggy patrician face, and yoga-master posture in a dark Paul Stuart pinstripe. “What’s our main line going to be?”

“I think we have to say that our business model was correct but that some of the basic drivers in the market have changed,” said Bharat Singh, the earnest twenty-nine-year-old Princeton-educated chief financial officer. He was sitting halfway between Barry and Olson, a thick lock of black hair falling across his brow. “If you look at some of our early top-level assumptions from two years ago, the costs required to get our product to market seemed like a very attractive mountain. But when you bring in some of the current exogenous factors like the current economy, the anti-Alzheimer’s drugs Merck and Pfizer are developing, and the lawsuit about the monkey, I think we have to model out a longer time frame for penetration.”

“We’re gonna be like the Dunk-a-Clowns at the county fair,” Steve Lyons moaned. “They’re gonna be throwing rotten oranges at us.”

“Well, how are sales for Coridal?” asked Barry.

Even with development stalling on Chronex, the anti-Alzheimer’s drug the company was working on, Coridal, a cheaper version of Prozac without the libido-killing side effects, was supposed to save the year for them. But Bharat was shaking his head.

“We just found out we lost the contracts in Pakistan and Indonesia,” he said. “The generics are killing us. They’re able to produce the pills for one dollar on every six we spend.”

“And how are things going in the Monkey Suit?” Ross Olson, the CEO, turned to Barry.

“I was about to send everyone an e-mail. Judge Horgan turned down our motion to dismiss.” Barry stretched and swiveled, his six-foot-three-inch frame feeling cramped in his small leather chair. “It looks like this baby is moving forward. We’re going to start taking depositions next month.”

Everyone in the room gave an audible groan; even Lisa Chang, aka Mrs. Spock, the company’s petite bespectacled chief science officer, who usually communicated only on her thumb computer. The $50 million Monkey Suit had been brought by two former Retrogenesis scientists who claimed to own the exclusive patent on the genetically altered breed of squirrel monkeys used in the company’s Alzheimer’s experiments.

“That’s going to do wonders for our stock,” said Steve Lyons.

“Well, that’s not even our most immediate concern.” Ross Olson raised his craggy eyebrows. “Did anybody see Mark Young on CNBC this morning?”

“I was on the train; I missed it,” said Barry.

He thought of mentioning the headless body he’d seen on the riverbank and the vomiting woman in the Donna Karan. But what did they care? They were already sitting a few blocks from a massive graveyard. They didn’t need to hear about another corpse.

“You’re talking about the short seller?” he said, trying to stick to the subject. “With the hedge fund uptown?”

“The one and only.” Ross sighed. “He was using phrases like ‘managerial brain cancer’ and ‘absurdly overvalued’ about our modest little enterprise.”

“Ah, fuck him, he’s just trying to drive our stock price down.” Barry rolled back in his chair and crossed his long legs.

Lately, he’d come to think of short sellers the same way he thought of the degenerate gamblers who sat behind the basket at Rutgers, cheering every time he missed. The whole concept of betting on stock going down instead of up seemed like the ultimate cheap shot. Especially since short sellers never actually owned the stock they were trading but merely paid a nominal commission to “borrow” it from brokers in the hope of buying it back later at an even lower price. No wonder there were rumors the terrorists had shorted airline stocks right before launching the attacks.

“Well, he’s doing a helluva job.” Ross’s eyes roamed past him. “We opened at nineteen this morning. We’re trading at sixteen now.”

OH, THE PAIN! THE PAIN! SOMEBODY SAVE MY BABY!
An Instant Message from Lisa Chang flashed on the BlackBerry in Barry’s lap, even as Lisa herself remained calm and impassive behind her black-rimmed glasses at the far end of the table.

“And how many shares of ours is he holding?” Barry asked.

“About sixty thousand.” Bharat dipped his head shyly.

Barry gave a dry whistle and felt his blood pressure slowly rise.

“The thing is,” said Bharat, “some of his information is accurate and some of it isn’t. We
have
been stuck in Phase Two trials for our Alzheimer’s drugs for a long time. We
didn’t
nail that contract with Pfizer. The Monkey Suit
is
a problem. Our stock
did
go from fifty-one to nineteen in less than a year. But then a lot of what he’s putting out is just scurrilous rumors.”

“Like what?” asked Barry.

“Oh, all kinds of crap on the message boards, like we had a couple of our monkeys die during the clinical trials and that some of the volunteers are getting sick. And then he says we’re hiding recurring expenses as one-time capital spending and our management is unstable and about to get the boot.”

“And is it?” asked Barry, whipping the question down to Ross Olson at the other end of the table like a bounce pass.

“Not as far as I know.” Ross blinked with clear Nordic-blue eyes. “I met with the board in Aspen last week, and they told me I had a total vote of confidence to keep sailing, head winds or not.”

The words
DEAD MAN!!
lit up on the pager in Barry’s lap, an Instant Message sent from Bharat three seats to his left.

“We’re gonna get totally shit-bombed at the shareholders meeting.” Steve Lyons drummed his fingers on the conference table. “I’ve seen how Mark Young and his guys operate at these open-mike forums. They do these sneak attacks to undermine confidence in the company. They just humiliate you in public to keep driving the price down. It’s like better investing through intimidation. I’ve seen some of the top CEOs in the country walk out literally red and shaking with rage.”