by Chris Knopf
It wasn’t exactly the male fantasy Amanda referred to, but it served to transport my mind through the balance of the evening, allowing me to postpone another confrontation with uncontrollable forces set loose on the world by the usual concoction of ardor, cupidity, ego and fear.
SIX
I WAS HOLDING A PIECE of crown molding over my head when my cell phone rang. I had three finish nails stuck in my mouth and one half-nailed through the molding, which I was about to pull out, unhappy with the coping job I’d done at the corner joint. I had to keep the twelve-foot-long piece of trim jammed in place with my left hand while I slipped the hammer in its holster and fished the cell phone out with my right. The phone’s persistent ring tone lent a lunatic accompaniment to the maneuver. I flipped it open and pushed the talk button.
“Wha’,” I said into the phone, or something like it as I spat out the nails.
“Drinking on the job?”
“Hey, Jackie. Can I call you back in a minute?”
“What’s the matter? You sound strained.”
“That’s why I need to call you back,” I said through my teeth.
As she started to ask another question I flipped the phone shut and stuffed it back in my pocket. My next trick was to dig a small block of soft pine out of my shirt pocket to stick between the hammer head and the expensive molding so I wouldn’t ding it when I pulled out the nail. All with one hand. Another lesson on the advisability of coping miter joints properly the first time.
The phone started ringing again.
I pulled the nail and lowered the molding safely to the scaffold a few seconds before my left shoulder and challenged temperament both gave up the fight.
Throwing the phone at the masonry fireplace on the other side of the room would have been the easy thing to do. Instead I answered it.
“Jesus Christ I said I’d call you back.”
“Are you alright?” asked Jackie. “You sound terrible.”
“From now on I’m leaving this thing in the car.”
“You’re supposed to have it with you at all times. That’s the point. And you can’t get mad at me when I’m doing you a favor.”
I shook out my shoulders, dropped my jaw and took a deep breath. “I’m not mad. I’m always glad to hear from you, no matter what the circumstances,” I said softly.
“Especially when I’m calling with interesting information.”
“Especially. What is it?”
“George Donovan is getting ready to do what he said he would do. Maybe. The original severance documents were prepared by the general counsel, a guy named Mason Thigpen. What did you do to him?”
“I’m not sure. I vaguely remember a lot of blood and really big security guards.”
“Donovan has yanked your agreement out of Thigpen’s office and given it to an outside lawyer, on the basis that the general counsel’s interest in this is adverse to the corporation’s.”
“You lost me at ‘yanked.’”
“Outside counsel has been retained to examine your agreement and make the necessary modifications, if corporate management deems it appropriate, to allow you to participate in the ongoing settlement of the intellectual property suit brought by a group of plaintiffs. Most of whom worked for you, by the way, a fact Donovan is telling the board warrants some careful consideration.”
“How the hell did you get all this?”
“What the hell do they pay administrative assistants and what the hell gender are they, usually?”
“Can you get a copy of my agreement?” I asked.
“I thought you had a copy. Silly me.”
“I did at one point. But it was probably in that car I lost in downtown Bridgeport. Long story.”
“I don’t want to hear it. My guess is there’s a clause that says for consideration you waive all employment claims, including any compensation beyond the amount of the severance, which includes royalties or the proceeds from civil litigation, which would likely include the intellectual property action. All they have to do is rewrite that clause to specify your agreement doesn’t include settlement money, and because they went to the trouble to be so specific about every other form of payment, you’re in. Of course, somebody could still contest that exclusion, but as you know, everything is contestable by everybody all the time, which is how we in the legal profession like it, thank you very much.”
“I can think of people who might want to do that.”
“Contest it?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Not the nice lady who heads up Human Resources. She’s all for it.”
“You talked to her? Jesus.”
“I’m your attorney. I’m allowed. They’ve been fielding these inquiries full tilt since the settlement got under way. I made it all sound very routine. I didn’t push anything, just asked simple questions. Nobody got wiggy. Not to worry.”
“I’m worried about this coming unglued.”
“I know,” she said. “But I couldn’t do what you wanted me to do without talking to the people who have the information. Next I’m talking to Tucker, Blenheim, the outside counsel, to see what they have to say.”
I’d seen Jackie in action. If she said it was low key, it was low key. And I knew how isolated and overlooked they were in HR. George Donovan probably couldn’t find their offices without a map of the building. But Marve Judson was another story. A legitimate threat.
I told Jackie about Ackerman’s visit.
“Judson can do that?” she asked. “Hire somebody who’s been fired by the big boss?”
“Not exactly. Which is why he’s working the fiddle with his buddy’s PI firm. But he’s making the right calculation. If Donovan found out he’d have to weigh the risk of canning a senior guy like Judson—who wouldn’t go quietly—against whatever damage Ackerman might cause by staying in the picture. I’d say pretty minimal as long as I keep my mouth shut, which Donovan trusts me to do, given my vested interest.”
“Holy crap that’s Byzantine.”
I unsnapped my tool belt and lowered it slowly to the floor. Then backed against the wall and slid down until I was sitting on my butt. All around me was the clatter of construction—the snap-pop of pneumatic nailers, the high-pitched whir of circular saws, thumping hammers and the brainless blather of talk radio.
But I wasn’t listening, as recollection dislodged my mind and sent it off to some other place. A place of cowed silence, acreages of office space enclosing a vast checkerboard of work stations and cubicles, where the only mechanical sound was the low hum of copiers and fluorescent lights and desk phones trilling like captive birds.
Glass-walled individual offices lined the periphery of the building where I’d worked. Aquariums with the aerators turned off. That’s why I lived in a lab office on the ground floor that for some reason had a huge corner window looking out on a broad, green lawn that appeared to extend out to the horizon, though in fact stopped at a band of trees planted to dampen the noise blowing up from Interstate 287.
My official office was eight stories above my head. Same corner location, more toxic atmosphere. In the basement I could stay close to the design engineers and research scientists who produced the intellectual foundation for the products and services applied by the people sitting above. Applications in the service of rapacious machinations that reached full flower on even loftier floors at company headquarters in Manhattan.
“I’ve got a little more on Iku Kinjo,” said Jackie, regaining my attention. “Not a ton.”
“What?”
“She was adopted by a pair of academics. An historian and a sociologist. Lived in Brooklyn, taught at Manhattan College. Lifetime political activists. Both busted in the Chicago riots of ’68. Did the pacifist lecture circuit, started a soup kitchen near campus, gave heavily to worthy social ventures. I’d want to meet them if they were still around.”
“Dead?”
“Fifteen years ago. Car accident.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Also Jewish.”
“The parents?”
“Hyman and Naomi Rothstein?”
“Probably.”
“Pretty secular household, though, is my guess. Kept Iku’s birth name. No bat mitzvah I can dig up. No connection to any synagogues within forty miles of their apartment. In fact, I don’t think they were part of a religious community. Probably too radical.”
I wondered what Iku thought of the whole thing. The Rothsteins undoubtedly leveled with her from the outset about her origins and identity. Probably showered her with love and support. And prayed, despite their secular ways, for her to adopt their beliefs and proclivities. None of which, I guessed, included corporate management consulting.
“Fifteen years ago. Where was Iku?”
“Fresh out of Princeton and on her way to Harvard Business School, natch, before a fast run up the consulting ladder from Arthur Little, to Bain, to Eisler. We can stipulate the girl’s wicked smart.”
I could testify to that myself, from direct experience. I’d also say assertive, bordering on aggressive. And direct, which I’d take any day over oblique or subtle or disingenuous. Donovan said she didn’t like me, so I guess she didn’t. She had a lot of company. Though I always thought she appreciated the way I dished it back at her as fast as she could dish it out, without being patronizing or calling attention to our difference in age and experience. Or gender.
“Maybe it’s good her parents didn’t live to see her become a running dog of American capitalism,” said Jackie, reading my mind.
“How did it happen?”
“Crushed by a semi on the way back from dropping their daughter off at Harvard,” she said.
“That’ll teach her to go to business school.”
“They say Jewish guilt is even worse than Irish Catholic, though my mother could give them a run for their money.”
“Not an issue if they weren’t religious.”
“My mother wouldn’t go to Mass. Blamed God for my father’s personality.”
“We’re getting way ahead of ourselves,” I said.
“You’re right. We don’t know the dynamic in the Rothstein household.”
“But her roommates at Princeton, or Harvard, might.”
There was a brief moment of silence on the other end of the line, followed by a sigh.
“I’ll let you know what I find out,” she said, and hung up the phone. I turned the phone off before going back to the crown molding. I also tried to turn off the speculation that kept percolating up from the dark hole that was Iku Kinjo’s life. I hated obsessing over quandaries made so principally by the absence of serviceable fact. I remembered the process engineer who first hired me, a born troubleshooter, standing in the control room of an oil refinery smashing his fist on the plant manager’s desk and hollering, “Data, data, data!”
I made it to the end of the work day without lousing up the job and embarrassing myself, but I was glad to unhook my tool belt and dump it with my pneumatic nailer into the trunk of the Grand Prix. On the way home I turned on the public jazz station, WLIU, and smoked my third cigarette of the day, the definition of a blessing and a curse. I still had to concentrate on keeping the ten-ton Pontiac from drifting into a tree, but that didn’t stop Iku Kinjo from jumping into my brain like an irrepressible child, demanding attention for attention’s sake.
That’s probably why I didn’t notice the dark grey Ford Crown Victoria with the wailing electronic siren and flashing blue light on the dashboard until it was halfway up my ass. I reflexively hit the brakes, which made things worse. I braced for impact, but instead the Crown Vic shot out into the oncoming lane, sped by the Grand Prix, and then swung back in front of me. His brake lights flashed on but I was already heading for the shoulder, wondering what the hell I’d done this time.
The driver’s door of the unmarked car swung open and Joe Sullivan jumped out. He hiked up his camouflage pants and adjusted his sunglasses as he strode back to my car.
“You going deaf?” he yelled, when I lowered my window. “I been on your tail for five miles.”
“Sorry. Preoccupied.”
“Thinking about dinner?”
“And maybe a cocktail, just for a change of pace.”
We agreed to meet at Paul Hodges’s place in Sag Harbor after I showered and scooped up the pup. The Pequot overlooked one of the last commercial marinas on the East End. Lobster boats and day charters, men and women in high rubber boots and wool knit sweaters. Scarred hands and beer bellies, some courtesy of the Pequot’s generous operating hours. Hodges had been a fisherman himself, among other things, so he knew the off-time habits of the trade. He ran the place with his daughter Dorothy and a dour stork of a Croatian named Vinko. It wasn’t exactly the career Dorothy had planned after graduating from Columbia, but the day-to-day management of the place had been thrust upon her after Hodges fell through a rotting deck. He’d recovered since then, but admitted the months of convalescence had made hanging around the sturdy old sloop he lived on a hard habit to break.
“Dotty grew up workin’ the tap and tossing clams in the fryolator. It’s in her blood,” he’d tell me, trying to convince himself.
Among the many charms of the joint was its liberal policy regarding dogs on the premises: restricted only when the health inspector was scheduled to visit. For his part, Eddie kept a low profile, lying quietly by my feet and suppressing his social instincts.
When I got there Sullivan was already halfway through a pitcher of beer and a mound of fried calamari.
“You know, some of those things get as big as a city bus,” I told him, pointing at his plate.
He studied the breaded wad of tentacles stuck to the end of his fork. “Yeah, and the Loch Ness Monster’s been munchin’ blues offa Jessup’s Neck.”
Dorothy already had an Absolut on the rocks and a bowl of water for Eddie on their way over. She was wearing gloves that ran all the way to her biceps. They had all the fingers cut out—a sensible practicality. Her hair color was in constant rotation. Tonight it was a simple everyday jet black, drawn and pinned at the back tightly enough to look painted on. Her face, powdered into a lovely funereal pallor, lent a stark backdrop to her lips—tonight red enough to stop traffic out on Noyac Road.
“I hear you serve food here. Principally fish,” I said to her as she dropped the vodka in front of me.
“That’s what my father claims, though I’ve never actually seen it come out of the water.”
“Really.”
“I hate fishing. Never go near a boat.”
“Seasick?”
“I feel sorry for the fish. Don’t want to know about it. When they show up in the kitchen I pretend they’ve been manufactured out of protein pulp and formed in little fish molds to look like the real thing.”
“There’s a way to whet the old appetite,” said Sullivan, as he put away the last of the calamari.
“In that spirit, bring me a bacon cheeseburger,” I told her. “And a plain one for the dog.”
“I know. No bun, just a few fries.”
“Too much potato makes him fart.”
“And don’t think about the cow,” said Sullivan.
When she left I asked Sullivan if he’d been able to chase down Robert Dobson. He looked a little offended.
“You gave me his plate number. Believe it or not, the police know how to obtain an ID from just that one little thing. As long as we’re able to use the radio and speak without slurring our words.”
“Great. Where’s he live?”
“Manhattan. Where’d you think?”
“I was hoping out here.”
“Manhattan’s his official residence. But I thought to myself, maybe that’s not his only address.”
He leaned into the table. I sat back to give his story a little room.
“This is why they made you a detective,” I said.
“I went back to HQ and started searching the tax rolls for a similar name within a fifty-mile radius of Southampton. There�
�re more Dobsons than you might think, though not too many to pick up the phone and call.”
“You’re kidding.”
“The direct approach. Unpopular with today’s technology, but cops find it very handy and effective.”
“So you found him.”
“On the fifth try. His parents have a house in a gated community in Southampton Village, just inside the incorporated limits. On the east side, near the ocean. Five houses in their own private Idaho. They got a guy who sits at the gate all day letting people in and out pretty much as they please, but I guess it makes the owners feel special. I felt special just driving in there, flashing my badge at the hero in the little house and telling him to stick his head back up his ass and open the gate.”
“It’s the softer touch that gets the results.”
“I located the place, saw a Volvo in the driveway, and that was that. I didn’t think you’d authorized the Southampton Police to break down the door, put a black hood over the guy’s head and drag him to the Pequot.”
“Might’ve expedited things.”
“If Ross finds out about half the off-the-books shit I been doing I’ll be busted back to patrol in the time it takes to put on the uniform.”
As he talked he wrote addresses and phone numbers out on a napkin. He slid it across the table and I stuffed it in my pocket.
“You’d love that.”
“Fact is, I would. But the wife is getting used to the pay.”
Soon after, Dorothy brought out the burgers and Sullivan’s porterhouse steak, which I didn’t even know the Pequot served. After that, the place started to fill up in earnest, first with a gaggle of local kids that Dorothy put through a rigorous ID process, then some crews fresh off the day charters, people whose occupation even a blind man could identify if his olfactories were still intact.