Hard Stop sahm-4

by Chris Knopf

  When I thought it was safe to take the floor, I told her that Amanda and I were getting along reasonably well. Better than ever. I told her before she had a chance to ask, voluntarily sharing intimate emotional information. Something else I’d been taught by Rosaline. Both the content and delivery were pleasing to Allison. She adored Amanda, and the feelings were returned. This was a total, joyful mystery to me. Maybe some day Rosaline could explain it all.

  When we were back on the sidewalk she actually hugged me for the first time since I’d left her mother.

  “If you mess this up with Amanda I’ll knock you on the head,” she said into my shirtfront before letting me go, and without another look headed back to her messy apartment and big crappy job.

  Eisler, Johnson occupied the top fifth of a glassy skyscraper on Madison Avenue. I breezed past the airtight security in the building’s lobby and took the elevator, which opened directly into a starkly appointed reception area—all sharp-edged metal furniture, pale grey walls and Pop Art.

  The receptionist was a reedy little guy with a shaved head and a complexion that matched the decor. Eisler, Johnson must have hired a first-rate interior designer. I walked up to him and asked for Iku Kinjo. What I got back was a blank stare. I asked for her again.

  “She’s not here,” he said.

  “When will she be back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then please call someone who does.”

  “Do you have an appointment?” he asked, still looking colorless and blank.

  “Yes. And I expect someone here to honor it.”

  “Can I have a name?”

  “Burton Lewis. Lewis and Shanley.”

  Dropping Burton’s name always had a predictable effect. He was a big deal in the City, running a gigantic law firm and sitting at the top of everyone’s society shortlist. Though I didn’t drop it too often. I hated exploiting our friendship, especially since he was always so eager to help out. But at least I knew I wouldn’t get arrested for impersonating a very important person.

  The receptionist was wearing a thin black headset, so all he had to do was hit a button on the console in front of him to connect with the offices behind a set of massive grey doors.

  He spoke in hushed tones I had trouble making out. My hearing had never quite recovered from the effects of a big explosion I’d lived through a few years before. Lived to reach deep into my fifties, an age when even people who hadn’t almost been blown up or repeatedly socked in the head had a little hearing loss. I leaned over the top of the desk to get a better angle with my good ear, causing the guy to look up at me with a touch of alarm, the first honest expression I’d seen him make.

  He stuck his index finger into the console and said someone would be out to see me. I leaned farther over the desk, forcing him to lean back in his chair, increasing his alarm.

  “Good,” I said, then went and sat in a square chair that felt like a solid block of upholstered wood.

  A few minutes later a tall, slim man with a head shaped like a lightbulb came through the big grey doors. He was wearing a dark green rayon shirt and black trousers that flowed when he walked. He was about my age, with close-cropped white hair that exaggerated the lightbulb effect. When he got closer I could see his eyes were a brilliant fluorescent lavender. Contacts.

  When he saw me he turned and went back to the reception desk.

  “Where’s Mr. Lewis?” he asked.

  “Probably at the Gracefield Club having a beer and a tuna sandwich,” I said to his back. He turned. The pasty guy behind the desk shot me a look.

  “You asked for a name. You didn’t ask for mine,” I said, getting up and walking back to the desk. I offered my hand to Lavender Eyes. “Floyd Patterson.”

  He took my hand, studying my face.

  “That name rings a bell,” he said.

  “That was somebody else’s job. You got a name?”

  “Jerome Gelb. What is it you want?”

  “I want to know if you’ve heard from Iku Kinjo.”

  He raised both eyebrows and pulled back his head, as if trying to get me in better focus.

  “Your interest?”

  A perfectly reasonable question. I just hadn’t worked out an answer. I wondered what my friend Jackie Swaitkowski would do in a situation like this. She was great on improvisation.

  “I have to serve her papers,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “Eisler, Johnson’s named, too, but I’m supposed to give them directly to her to make it official.”

  “Really.”

  “Those are the rules.”

  “Who’s the plaintiff?”

  “Where’s Miss Kinjo?”

  I smiled at him. He smiled back and reached out his hand.

  “Maybe if I could just take a look.”

  “So you haven’t seen her or heard from her.”

  He dropped his hand.

  “No. Not for about four weeks. Officially, she’s no longer employed here. So if there’s some sort of action against the firm, tell whoever sent you to change the name of the recipient.”

  “She have any friends here? Anyone who might know where she went?”

  Gelb shook his head, then frowned, caught giving me an ounce more information than I deserved.

  “I’m not in a position to discuss this any further,” he said. “Do you want the name of our attorneys?”

  “Sure.”

  While he wrote out their names on the back of his business card I asked him, “Was she a friend of yours?”

  He handed me the card.

  “I was her boss. There are no friends at Eisler, Johnson.”

  “But you must be a little worried about her. I’d be, if one of ours went missing.”

  “Maybe I’ll try a little worry when I finish digging out of the hole she left me in with our clients.”

  “When I find her I’ll let her know that,” I said, as I stuffed his card in my shirt pocket, turned and headed back to the elevator. He was still standing there as I watched the elevator doors close on Eisler, Johnson’s cheerful reception area, a lanky, coutured centurion, off-balance but alert. Poised for battle.

  FOUR

  WHEN I GOT BACK TO Southampton I drove right past the turn off Route 27 that led up to Oak Point—the peninsula in North Sea I shared with Amanda—and headed east. It was about four in the afternoon, so I thought I’d just catch Jackie Swaitkowski at her office above the shops that lined Montauk Highway in Watermill. I probably could have stopped at the cottage and switched back to my Grand Prix, but I was reluctant to let go of the zippy little station wagon.

  Jackie was nominally my lawyer. I’d never paid her anything and she hadn’t done much for me but keep me out of jail at a few critical junctures, for which I was sincerely grateful. Actually, I owed Jackie a lot more than simple gratitude. So I didn’t think it would hurt to toss a few more items on the bill.

  I jogged up the outside stairs and tried the door to her office. It opened only partway. So I gave it a shove and pushed a bankers box clear of the passageway.

  “Hey. I wanted that there,” she said from somewhere behind the piles of paper on her desk.

  There were a half dozen more bankers boxes on the floor, since there was no room to put them on the desk, or the sofa and chairs, or work tables, or any other horizontal surface in the room, all of them already groaning under a year’s accumulation of professional detritus, indispensable possessions, objects d’art, flotsam, jetsam and the unimaginable heaps of worthless junk that gathered around Jackie like the drifting snow of an arctic blizzard.

  “If you can’t get out the door you’ll starve in there,” I said to her. “Unless you’ve put up survival rations.”

  Jackie stood up so I could see it was actually her. She was a medium-sized, curvy thing with a lot of freckles and a head full of kinky strawberry-blonde hair. It was only the second week of September, so she was still in her summer wardrobe—a scoop-necked cotton dress and flip-flops. H
er glasses were pushed up into her hair, where she also stored a pair of number two pencils. An unlit cigarette bobbed between her lips when she spoke.

  “No, but if you could find my lighter, I’d really appreciate it.”

  I tossed her mine.

  “Keep it. I don’t need it anymore.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m giving it up. After I have one of yours.”

  “In other words, you’re giving up buying and moving on to mooching full-time.”

  I scooped the piles off the two easy chairs that faced the loveseat and waved her over. I found an ashtray under a wet beach towel and balanced it on the last six months of The Economist.

  Jackie flung herself over the arm of the chair and landed with her knees already tucked up under her butt. We lit our cigarettes.

  “Where’s the mutt?” she asked.

  “With Amanda. I left him with her so I could go into the City.”

  “Biz or pleasure?” she asked.

  “A little of both. Though mostly manipulation, extortion and threats of violence.”

  She blew a lungful of smoke up at the ceiling.

  “I hope that’s just the amusing way you express yourself.”

  I disappointed her by telling her the whole story, beginning with the visit from Ackerman straight through to my conversation with George Donovan. I filled in as many details as I could remember. I was starting to appreciate the concept of free and full disclosure. It was liberating. Rosaline Arnold was right. If you just open yourself up to people you care about, you get so much back in return.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. You’re out of your fucking mind.”

  I tossed her the micro-recorder.

  “Download it for me, will you? I’ll probably never need it, but you never know.”

  “Sure, why not. Anything else I can do for you?”

  “Yeah, a bunch of things, actually.”

  Her shoulders dropped.

  “Goddammit, Sam.”

  “Come on, Jackie. What’s so bad about tracking down a missing management consultant? How hard can that be? I’m not asking you to do anything illegal.”

  “Not yet.”

  “I need her background information. Her parents’ names and where they lived. Her address in the City, which I don’t even have for Christ’s sake. The boyfriend, Robert Dobson. All those vital statistics. You just have to climb back over to your computer and look it up.”

  “Or you could buy a computer.”

  “Donovan said she was heading for a weekend in the Hamptons right before she disappeared.”

  “We’ve heard that one before.”

  “I need to know where she stayed. Who she stayed with.”

  “Sure. I’ll just do a search—‘Iku Kinjo weekend Hamptons.’”

  “You can do that?”

  She sighed.

  I remembered something Donovan had told me.

  “Let’s look at her,” I said.

  I coaxed her back to her desk and watched her call up Eisler, Johnson’s website, click on the annual report and scroll through the pages until we came to a photo of a half dozen bright-looking young professionals sitting around a conference table pretending to be engaged in earnest and penetrating deliberations. One of the women had an Asian cast to her features, and the caption confirmed it was Iku Kinjo, EJ associate and specialist in the energy and chemical-processing industries.

  “Can you isolate her face, blow it up and print it out?” I asked.

  “This is a basic office PC. It’s not Industrial Light & Magic.”

  “What can you do?”

  “I can put the whole group shot on a disk and give it to you, and you can take it to a guy I know in the Village who can isolate her face, blow it up and print it out.”

  Ten minutes later she was still trying to figure out how to capture the image. It was all pure alchemy to me, so I wasn’t much help beyond offering cheerful words of encouragement. I could smell her starting to smolder.

  “How urgent is all this?” she asked, glowering up at me. “Believe it or not I have people who pay me to do things for them. Quite a few at the moment.”

  “It’s pretty urgent to George Donovan. Enough to risk a loaded gun at his head with my finger on the trigger.”

  She frowned, but kept at it until she had what I needed transferred to a disk, which popped out of a little door on the front of the computer.

  “He must really want her back,” she said, handing me the CD in a flat plastic case.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “You know why? Beyond the obvious?”

  “Mostly fear. Maybe love. Those are good enough ‘whys’ for starters.”

  “Good enough for you?”

  “Sure. I’ve seen what fear and love can do. You have any other theories?”

  I could almost see the imperceptible tug as the hook caught. It was hard to know all the forces that drove Jackie’s busy, chaotic brain, but I knew one of them was curiosity. And its co-conspirator—the fear of boredom.

  “Do you think Donovan will hold up his end of the deal with you? If you find Iku?” she asked.

  “I’m wondering the same thing. I want you to take a look at my severance agreement and the settlement of the intellectual rights suit. Let’s see if Donovan’s as omnipotent as he thinks.”

  “Could be a lot of money.”

  “That’s what Donovan thinks.”

  I spent another half hour making sure Jackie had what she needed to do whatever she did on the Internet. The potency of the Web was just starting to take hold about the time I evolved from divisional vice president to finish carpenter, and I’d seen my friend Rosaline Arnold pull off some astounding online research. I promised I’d learn how to do it myself someday. After I evolved a little more.

  I left Amanda’s Audi Avant back in her driveway before sunset, which was just starting to heat up over on the western shore of the Little Peconic Bay. Clumps of luxuriant clouds were getting into formation, bathing in the first golden wash that radiated from the horizon. Eddie ran up to me just long enough for me to rub his head, then darted back toward Amanda’s. A true loyalist.

  I peeled out of my clothes and put on a pair of swim trunks. The September air was only slightly cooler than late August, but the bay was still warm. I walked gingerly over the pebble beach and dove through the miniature waves, feeling the salty grey-green water scrub off a coating of City grit, startling disruptive revelations, and unexpected possibilities.

  I’m not a great swimmer. My body’s too dense to float, though as a little kid I’d mastered a sort of hybrid dog paddle–Australian crawl that would keep me from drowning as long as my stamina held up.

  I swam out as far as I dared and looked back at the tip of Oak Point. My cottage and Amanda’s stood side by side a few hundred yards apart, two Foursquare testaments to the power of hope, forbearance and weathered cedar. My father built mine during the Second World War. Amanda’s had also been raised by her father, though not with his own hands. He built about thirty other houses along with it, most of which she still owned, along with a big piece of abandoned industrial property at the base of the lagoon that bordered her lot. This alone would have made Amanda a very wealthy woman, even without the bulging portfolio of investments she’d inherited along with the real estate.

  Besides the cottage, all I inherited was a debt from the nursing home that looked after my mother during the last years of her life. I was able to pay it off before taking my career, my marriage and my financial wherewithal off a cliff, leaving me with just enough to live on for a while before I had to reacquaint myself with finish hammers, nail sets and miter saws.

  I wanted to think the financial discrepancy between us didn’t matter, but it always does. I didn’t feel I had to match her net worth to be worthy of the relationship, but having nothing versus having enough to underwrite a small country was a pretty big gap. Not a rich girl growing up, it had taken Amanda a little while to get used to fathom
less resources, but she was getting there. She’d never be extravagant, but she had a right to have as full a life as her means would allow. It had never been an issue between us, but I wasn’t about to let it become one. I’d never let her let me hold her back.

  So it wasn’t only concern for my daughter that caused me to drop for Donovan’s offer. Sitting there in his library—funded by the river of technology royalties that had flowed daily into his company, technology I’d had a major hand in developing—I felt an unfamiliar tug of self-interest. It wasn’t until I was out there trying to float around the Little Peconic Bay that I fully understood what it really meant.

  I wanted some of my past back. A past I’d shed like a suit of flames. I didn’t want my job back, and surely not my ex-wife. I didn’t want the icy, faux-modernist house we had in the woods above Stamford, or the garden parties on the velvet lawns of Fairfield and Westchester Counties. I didn’t want the crushing responsibility or nerve-searing professional stress. I didn’t want to stand in front of the Board of Directors and sell them on the need to preserve one of the few assets they owned that actually contributed to the long-term health of the corporation—an asset they then threw away for eighteen months of stock lift. All I wanted was something I had truly lost all hope of ever having again.

  I wanted the money.

  The next evening Amanda and I hit the nightclubs.

  It was more like late afternoon, since I wanted to talk to the bartenders and waitresses before things heated up. Not long ago all the clubs would have been closed by mid-September, but seasonal boundaries in the Hamptons were steadily blurring. There was still a big drop in population after Labor Day, but not like the old days when everyone from the City and beyond—renters and owners alike—would suddenly vanish and the locals would have the South Fork to themselves again. The socioeconomic Left Behind, and happy for it.