Joy plopped down on that couch, and on her portable phone punched in the number of the advertising agency, getting put through to C.W. Kafer, the Gray Fox himself.
“I’m sorry to bother you, sir,” she said.
“On the phone it’s ‘Chuck,’ dear.”
“Chuck, I’ll let Stephanie in Human Resources know, but I thought I should tell you I’m taking a week of personal time. I know you were counting on me for that confab on Wednesday, but I’m afraid I’m really terribly stressed out over this awful news about Susan—”
“I can understand that,” Kafer said, his voice touched with sadness. “You get close to the people you work with—workaholics like us, Joy, those are the relationships we forge … that we value.”
“Thank you for being so considerate….”
“Don’t be silly. Of course, you’re aware that Susan didn’t have any family, so the company is arranging the interment. There will be a small memorial service in the company chapel.”
“Oh … of course.” Joy hadn’t really thought about a funeral or anything for Susan—events had been such a tumbling ongoing jumble. She also was unaware there was such a thing as a “company chapel” at Kafer. Live and learn.
Kafer was saying, “The service will be Thursday afternoon, at two p.m. I hope you will be able to come in for that.”
“Oh, definitely.” Unless she and Jack were already long gone …
“Would you like to say a few words, dear? You were her closest friend in the world.”
“No … I don’t think I’d be up to that.”
“Of course. We have a retired Presbyterian minister on our advisory board—he’ll handle the service. It will be brief, dignified. Do you know what faith, if any, Susan practiced?”
“No … no I don’t.”
“That’s life in the modern world for you—we can’t even ask an employee’s religious ‘persuasion’ on our applications now. So how the hell are we supposed to bury them properly?”
“It, uh, is a problem.”
“So you wouldn’t know what kind of music she might have liked to have played?”
Joy thought back to the old L.P.s on Susan’s dresser.
She said, “This may sound kind of weird, but … why don’t you have them play ‘Daydream Believer’ on the P.A. system.”
“I don’t believe I know that hymn.”
“It’s not a hymn. It’s by the Monkees.”
She hung up and began to cry. She wasn’t sure why she was crying, or whether it was for Susan, or herself, or just the very idea that that tiny relationship she and her secretary had “forged” had made Joy the dead woman’s “closest friend in the world.”
For the rest of the day Joy—in Lakers T-shirt and jeans, hair pinned up under a bandanna—busied herself packing as much as she could into her two Vuitton suitcases, then cleaned the bungalow one last time so no one could say she was a slovenly housekeeper, even if she had disappeared without paying the last month’s rent.
With the California sun streaming in the windows, and the sounds of young children at play floating in through the screens, the terror and, yes, adventure of the night past seemed to fade, like the memory of a bad dream—had there really been a boogeyman under her bed?
This thought had barely danced through her mind when a knock came at the door—two knocks, actually, crisply businesslike.
She gazed through the peephole and saw someone from Joyce Lackey’s life on her doorstep.
And she wasn’t surprised, really—after all, Jack had said that her house was bugged, her calls monitored. And consciously, or unconsciously, she had counted on that.
Jason Larue had come calling, impeccable in another black designer suit with black-and-gray tie and pale gray shirt, hands clasped before him in fig-leaf fashion, dark curly hair tipped with bronze, his boyish, stubble-bearded Brad Pitt good looks only mildly undercut by tired-looking eyes. Even in Chicago those pale blue eyes had been bloodshot; but now dark circles hugged them and he frankly looked a little wasted—evidently the stress of his key role in such a profitable and ever-expanding business was taking its toll.
She opened the door.
“Sorry to drop by announced,” he said.
“Not a problem,” she said, gesturing. “Come in. Please.”
Bloodshot eyes or not, he still had an ingratiating smile. “Why, thank you. Joy, you look terrific. Like a movie star.”
Closing the door, she laughed humorlessly, pointing to her pinned-up hair. “Yeah, Hattie McDaniel … but that’s before your time, isn’t it?”
“Not really. I have Gone With the Wind on DVD. In my business, it pays to have a … sense of history.”
She said nothing for a moment, then gestured toward the gold couch. “Can I get you something? Sparkling water? Starbucks?”
“No … no, thank you. I’m not here to impose.”
“Why are you here, Jason?”
“I think you know.”
“And I think you know I know. Shall we skip the bullshit, this time?”
He frowned. Was he going to bawl her out for her language, like that fucking Tyler Hurst back at Ballard?
“Joy,” he said, sitting on the gold couch, “what’s the matter?”
She stood in front him, arms folded, quietly defiant. Why wasn’t she afraid?
“Are you unhappy at work?” he asked gently. “Kafer would seem absolutely tailored to your considerable talents.”
“Kafer’s fine.”
“Sit down, please.”
Swallowing, she sat on the couch, but not next to him, leaving space, like a high school girl warning her date not to get fresh.
Larue shrugged one shoulder. “I would think you would be very pleased with the placement we arranged.”
“Kafer is fine, I said…. I love it at Kafer.”
And, out of nowhere, emotion swelled within her, tears were beginning to fill up her eyes, spilling out, sliding down her cheeks.
“What is it?” he asked quietly, something like compassion in his tone, turning toward her. “You can tell me, Joy.”
“No …” She was dabbing her eyes with the sleeve of her T-shirt.
His voice was soothing: “You’re my very best client, Joy, did you know that? One of X-Gen’s proudest placements. And your satisfaction … your happiness … is important to X-Gen … and to me.”
She looked at him through her tears, forced her voice past the lump in her throat. “You know ‘what’s the matter.’ It’s Susan…. It’s Don…. It’s … it’s Jack. It’s everything….”
“Jack Powers,” he said, voice calm, reasonable, “is a dangerous man. An unbalanced man.”
“He says you had Susan and Don and a lot of people killed…. He says you’re killing us, when we’ve … worn out.”
Now it was out in the open. Tears dry, she gazed at him coolly, waiting for his reaction, his response.
Larue sighed, rubbed the tired eyes.
“Joy,” he said as if he had some affinity for her, “before you make any more of these accusations, would you do me one favor? Would you think back for me? And try to remember what your life was like—just before I called you? You had no job, no money, no prospects. When we first met, I sensed you were moments away from suicide. Isn’t that true?”
After a moment, she swallowed and admitted, “Yes.”
“So in a sense, X-Gen saved your life—in a way, I saved your life … or am I overstating?”
She had never thought about it that way, but she guessed they had caught her at the edge of the precipice.
“No,” she said, “you’re not overstating.”
Larue continued, his voice as placid as the sunny afternoon outside her bungalow windows. “We have saved many lives, Joy, in our company’s short existence … and we want to continue to rescue those deemed unjustly worthless by society, giving unfortunate people like yourself, abandoned by society, betrayed by the world of business, a renewed reason for living.”
He leaned toward her, without invading her space. “A win-win-win situation, remember? And, if a few of those people have to be dropped from the program in order for others to benefit, well, it is unpleasant, but necessary.” He paused, then added, “Am I making sense?”
“You’re killing people.”
“When clients come to X-Gen, they are … at the end of their ropes. They have, in a sense, already lost their lives—we’ve given them new ones. Occasionally, we have to …”
“Send the grim repo man?”
He sighed. “People like Susan, like Jack, are a handful that endanger thousands … thousands like yourself. They represent a small statistic.”
With a sneer, she almost spat, “Is that what Don Hanson was to you? A small statistic? He was your teacher, too, wasn’t he? Your guru …”
Larue lowered his head, and his face seemed gripped with something genuinely like … regret. Even sorrow.
“We did not … eliminate … Mr. Hanson. We revered him. Venerated him. He killed himself…. We must take partial responsibility, because when Jack Powers filled Mr. Hanson with these … vile exaggerations, it added to the grief he’d been carrying for his wife’s death, and …”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“I hope you will. Your classmate, Rick—he took his own life, as well.”
“Is this where you tell me Susan strangled herself?”
“No…. Susan was in fact terminated. So was the woman who held your job before you—I’m not here to lie to you, Joy. When serious health problems crop up unexpectedly—rarely—in one of our clients, we may in extreme cases make the decision to terminate.”
“Business is business, you mean.”
“You say that as if it’s a bad thing.”
“All Susan had was arthritis! She could have worked for years with that, particularly with the experimental meds you people have at your fingertips!”
“Susan’s health was not the only issue…. She told several people, yourself included, about X-Gen.”
Joy frowned. “Who else did she tell?”
“Jack Powers, for one. Or possibly, Powers manipulated her into telling him. He’s a man obsessed with bringing us down.”
“So I suppose he’s next on your list? Or am I?”
“Joy, you are not on any such list. Nor is there any truth to the ridiculous accusation that we murder our clients once they have been ‘drained’ of any usefulness. Could any business exist in such a … psychotic manner?”
“But you don’t deny what you did to Susan.”
“No. And others, a small handful whose sacrifice protects the greater number.”
She covered her face with a hand. “If I could even bring myself to accept your twisted logic … how could you justify being so … brutal about it?”
Larue sighed, his eyes clouding. “I could not agree with you more. That is exactly what I have been saying to my partners, that this kind of thing is way out of line…. They insist that these eliminations, terminations, must be carried out in varied manners. But I have insisted—and Dr. Green, who thinks very highly of you, by the way, agrees with me—that we’ve been inhumane, that these were our clients and we need to have a little compassion and decency about our practices.”
“Yeah, I guess I would call strangulation inhumane. You may be onto something there, Jason.”
“I don’t blame you for being sarcastic. You see, we sub-contracted this work through a militia group out of Montana—reasoning being that, should they be caught, their own militant agenda would take any blame, and heat. But I have maintained that they were enjoying the job a little too much. Anyway, that’s all about to change now … we’re about to fire their sorry asses— excuse the language.”
“And now what? Replace the militia with a street gang? Mafia rejects, perhaps?”
“We deserve that. No … no more brutality.” Larue dug into his suit-coat pocket. “And we’ve come up with a new procedure that’s virtually painless, thanks to Dr. Carver.”
Joy looked at his open palm, which held a clear capsule.
“Our pills?” she asked. “I don’t understand….”
“Looks like your pills, but it isn’t,” he said.
He put the pill back into a bottle filled with identical capsules. And placed the bottle on the couch cushion between them.
“You have a decision to make, Joy. Do you understand?”
She understood.
He was saying, “Jack Powers is a threat to us—to you. He is, I repeat, a dangerous, unbalanced man. He has manipulated you, used you…. He’s convinced you, hasn’t he, that we have ‘bugged’ your house, tapped your phones….”
“I know that’s true. I saw as much at Susan’s place.”
Larue shook his head, smiled faintly. “Jack put those there— that’s his business, after all.”
“Why on earth would he do that?”
“To sway you, Joy—you and Susan … to bring you over to his side, his distorted way of thinking. You know what his plan is? To expose us—to be the great detective who brought an evil empire down … and regain what he thinks is his proper place in society.”
“That doesn’t sound like Jack.”
“X-Gen is a business and Jack Powers is a liability. You, Joy, are an asset—one of our greatest successes. Are you aware that you are C.W. Kafer’s chosen successor?”
“No … I had hoped….”
“Well, you are. And he will be retiring within five years, if his chronic heart condition doesn’t take him out of the game earlier, of course. You are aware of the kind of money a CEO generates, even factoring in our commission—and you can easily see how you and X-Gen stand to mutually benefit from your ascension to that rarefied position.”
Head of Kafer Advertising … was that really possible?
“And,” Larue continued, “you have years … possibly decades … ahead of you—at the top. Of your game. Of your profession. Choose.”
And Larue stood, nodded in a priestly fashion, and saw himself out, leaving the deadly pills behind.
The next afternoon, with still no word from Jack, Joy—nerves jangled, exhausted after a sleepless night—drove to the motor lodge at Sunset and LaBrea. No one seemed to be following her.
Jack’s white compact wasn’t in any of the stalls.
Joy drove around the block several times, trying to see if the motel was under surveillance. It didn’t seem to be. Letting herself in his room with the spare key, she breathed in air that smelled of his aftershave, which was sitting on the edge of the bathroom sink, next to a travel kit containing his shaver and toothpaste and pill bottle.
She waited, sitting on the edge of the made-up bed, waiting for Jack to show up to give her an update of the evidence he was mounting. She’d had no way to warn him that X-Gen was so thoroughly onto him.
How she needed to hear his voice. Needed to talk to him. How could she be expected to know what to think if she couldn’t hear his side of it?
But two o’clock came and went without him showing, and after an endless hour, she darted into the bathroom where— among other things—she threw up. Then she wrote him a note on a little pad by the phone, saying she’d been there, and telling him how much she loved him.
Then she slipped out, driving home, numb, a zombie behind the wheel of a Jag.
The following morning—with no word from Jack either yesterday or on this, the day they were to go to the FBI and the media, the day they would begin a new life together—Joy was eating a breakfast of fresh fruit on her tiny back patio under an overcast, hazy sky, reading the paper.
The front page had an interesting story. A neo-Nazi militia in Montana had blown themselves to kingdom come, their very illegal and well-stocked secret ammunition dump somehow detonating, destroying itself and most of their membership.
Fired their asses was right.
It was on an inside page, local news, where Jack’s name jumped out at her, straightening Joy in her chair. So fast, so soon �
� she’d thought tomorrow maybe, but …
She clutched the newspaper, hands shaking as she read the sad news of the successful private investigator, in charge of the local office of a prominent Denver firm, found dead in a motel room, struck down in the prime of life, the victim of an apparent heart attack.
The newspaper floated to the cement patio floor as Joy folded her arms on the table, and put her head down on them, like a child at a school desk. She didn’t cry; she just stared—her stomach ached, though. Maybe she’d eaten the fruit too fast. That stapled stomach did give her fits….
She stumbled into the living room and looked at the gold couch where they’d made love. She could imagine Jack was sitting there, grinning at her, the big goof, the tousled dark hair, big dark eyes—or was that an accusing expression?
“I had to do it,” she told him.
Jack had already been doomed by his own actions—he was a liability, as Larue had said. His defiance against X-Gen’s rules had sealed his fate—she didn’t have anything to do with that. With or without her actions, even if she hadn’t switched Jack’s pills with the ones Larue had left her, Jack was a dead man—right?
Then she collapsed onto the couch and buried her head in her hands and wept. And when she could cry no more, she stood and staggered to her bedroom, where she flung herself onto the rumpled covers, making pitiful, whimpering sounds.
She attended Susan’s funeral that afternoon and sat in the back of the tiny, well-attended chapel and wept. Mr. Kafer comforted her, afterward, commenting on the nice things the board-member minister had said about a young woman he hadn’t known; Joy agreed that it had been very nice, but of course she’d heard none of it.
That night, tossing and turning in bed, sleep beyond her grasp, she tried to figure out at what point she had decided she couldn’t go with Jack into a new life, and she wasn’t quite sure. She knew the thought had been forming before Larue appeared on her doorstep.
Perhaps it had been Jack’s mention of Boulder. She liked the Colorado town well enough—but the last time she was there, as Joyce Lackey, conspicuously consuming along Pearl Street Mall, her arms laden with packages, she had spotted a homeless woman, sitting on a bench in the cold. The woman had asked for a dollar. Joyce had given her a quarter, and, disturbed, hurried on by.
Regeneration Page 21