by Chris Knopf
The day did its part by being brightly lit and well ventilated. I know there are a lot of beautiful places in the world, but this was the only one I knew that felt as good as it looked. As if to dramatize the thought I hit a band of cool, hazy air blowing in off the ocean over a field where you could pick your own strawberries. Some of the Latinos who had been bent over the ground hugging green mounds stood and looked toward the sea. The others held their focus, plucking and tossing the fruit to rows of children held reluctantly in tow.
The park I’d suggested to Donovan encompassed the easternmost tip of the South Fork, hence the lighthouse that in the old days kept ships from losing themselves on the treacherous shoals, with limited success.
Donovan was there waiting for me on a park bench at the base of the sandy path that led to the lighthouse.
I pulled the pickup into a raised parking lot where I could look down on where Donovan was sitting. He wore white slacks, a blue blazer, soft leather slip-ons without socks and a pink and white pinstriped shirt. He still didn’t look very good, even at that distance.
The park was nearly empty, with only a small herd of tourists halfway up the path to the lighthouse and a couple sitting on a blanket on the lawn leading down to the sea. No Venezuelan assassins, at least within view.
I waited another five minutes before shutting off the engine, then walked down to the park bench. He didn’t see me until I was almost on top of him.
“Hi, George.”
“Sam.”
“I almost brought a friend along, but I didn’t think you wanted the extra company.”
I sat next to him on the park bench. Up close, he looked even worse. Thin and drawn, as if he’d partially evaporated, and a death-grey pallor that added ten years to the way he looked when we last met in Greenwich. Circumstances had finally caught up to him, cancelling his exemption from the penalties of old age.
“This friend of yours, what have you told him,” Donovan asked, “about my situation?”
“Everything I could think of.”
“Which he’ll undoubtedly only discuss with you.”
“As long as I’m alive,” I said.
“Then I wish you a long life.”
“I’m depending on that.”
He leaned back in the bench and crossed his legs, putting his arm up on the backrest. He looked out across the park, as if assessing the quality of the groundskeeping.
“Did you know there’s an inverse corollary between an exceptional IQ and the likelihood of professional success?” Donovan asked.
“I’ve heard that. More mediocritist propaganda.”
“Not if you look at the two of us. I’d say we’re proof positive.”
“My carpentry career’s clicking right along. So you must be right.”
“You know the difference between the brilliant and the merely accomplished?” he asked.
“Net worth?”
“Perspective. Smart people see too much, know too much. They’re too easily distracted by insight and revelation. The thoughts pile up until there’s too much to filter. Perceptive people are ultimately crushed under the weight of their own comprehension. They know the merciless realities of life.”
“Can’t accuse me of that. All I have are happy thoughts,” I said.
“This is what I seem to have lost. Perspective. And predictably enough, my financial prospects are suffering the consequences. Yet I’m no wiser. If anything, I feel as if my intelligence is leaking out of my ears. Doesn’t seem fair.”
“Your brain’s not the only organ you’ve been thinking with lately.”
Donovan uncrossed his legs and sat up straight on the bench. His hand was only a few inches from mine. Like his face, it was the color of rotting dough, covered in tan age spots and etched with veins more black than blue.
“I suppose I deserve that, but I don’t care what you think about me. A typical aging narcissist falling prey to a beautiful young woman. It might have been that, but felt like more. Up until the moment she stopped calling me, I was sure she felt the same way. And I still do. If I’m a fool, so be it. Now that she’s gone, my mind’s a cloud, a blur of outlandish emotion, and all I want to do is run, as fast and as far away as I can.”
“So do it, George. You got the money. Go sit on the porch in Montauk and watch your grandchildren dominate each other out on the front lawn. You’ve got nothing to prove to anyone.”
“If it were that easy.”
“Oh, right. You’ve lost perspective. I’d help you get it back but I’m too busy underachieving.”
Donovan grunted and tried to get more comfortable on the wooden bench.
“Not quite,” he said. “From what I hear you’ve been both busy and productive.”
I tried to look modest.
“I’ve done a few things,” I said.
He looked at the sky, then directly into my eyes.
“It all needs to stop.”
“Who got to you, George? What did they say?”
“You know what they said. The worst possible thing. An offer is on the table. I have the opportunity to choose among an array of potential catastrophes.”
“Let me help you, George.”
He shook his head.
“The only way you can do that is go back to your cottage and forget any of this happened. I’m holding up my end of the arrangement. Our outside counsel is preparing to contact your attorney. A stroke of the pen and you’re a wealthy man.”
“They know about Iku?”
He made a low, humorless sort of laugh.
“Know? They know everything. In intricate detail. Every correspondence, every assignation. I’ve seen the evidence. Damning is too tame a word.”
“Who killed her, George?”
He leaned forward in the bench and put his face in his hands. When he spoke his words were muffled, but I heard what he said.
“One proviso attached to every option I’ve been given is that I force you to cease and desist your efforts in that area.”
“What do they want from you?”
He took his face out of his hands.
“One would think a man who gave up on a nearly perfect life would be a little less persistent,” he said.
“I’m a late bloomer.”
“They want my company. Nothing more than that.”
“I didn’t think that was up to you. The Mandate of ’53 and all that.” He put his head back in his hands. It looked like a comfortable position, and I considered trying it myself. Instead, I lit a cigarette. Without looking up, Donovan moved slightly away from me. Health nut to the end.
“The Mandate of ’53 became moot the day you turned our board meeting into a brawl.”
“Hardly a brawl. One punch. Well deserved.”
“I’d say misplaced,” said Donovan. “You should have saved it for your financial director. Far more deserving.”
“Ozzie Endicott? You asked me about him at your house. You wanted to know if I still talked to him.”
Donovan flicked errant bits of wind-borne tree fluff from his bright white pants.
“Back before you left the company, Marve Judson came to me with an interesting bit of information about Mr. Endicott. He’d been held by the Stamford police for questioning in regard to a drug transaction. Subsequently released, but Marve had an acquaintance on the police force who alerted him. At Marve’s suggestion, we mounted a discreet internal investigation.”
“Discreet for sure. I never heard a thing.”
“Endicott was, in fact, a rather committed drug user. Amphetamines, which are apparently highly addictive. And expensive, especially if your goal is to keep your habit under wraps.”
I finally had a firm picture of Ozzie in my mind. A little wild-eyed, a little frantic, but usually good humored. I’d known the type for years. Driven by the job to go way beyond the job’s requirements. That’s all I thought it was. I never made the effort to know any more than that about Ozzie, or any other employee.
“H
e embezzled money,” I said.
“Oh yes. Quite a bit. Very clever scheme. The man was remarkably capable. You can achieve a lot if you never go to sleep.”
“Like destroying your job. How come he didn’t?”
Donovan smiled something like a genuine smile.
“I always said you were the smartest guy in the company. Don’t disappoint me now.”
I stood up and shook out my joints, trying to get a little extra blood to flow up into my brain. I tried to picture Marve Judson talking to Donovan, then sitting down with Ozzie. Relishing the moment of omnipotence. Wielding the delicious power of dangerous information. Ozzie’s beloved career in the palm of his hand. What pleasure. What delightful leverage.
I snapped a look at Donovan, who was waiting calmly on the park bench for me to catch up.
“You had him by the balls. He’d do anything you wanted. What did you bastards do to him? Ah, Jesus,” I said, as the jolt of realization thrilled across my mind. “I know what you did. Holy crap.”
I sat down on the grass, unable to move any closer to Donovan at that moment. Afraid of what I might do.
“You had him cook the books so you could sell off my division without seeming to violate the Mandate of ’53,” I said. “All he had to do was hide enough revenue to keep TSS under a certain size. Fontaine got the bargain of the century. You and the other insiders got a tidy jump in stock value and the worst that happened was Mason Thigpen got a sock in the nose.”
Donovan looked a little like a proud parent.
“See? I knew you could do it,” he said. “Unfortunately, that wasn’t the worst that could happen.”
I lay back on the grass and looked at the sky. It had been blue, but was beginning to haze over. I could hear seagulls, but they weren’t in view. I pictured them circling above the north shore, plucking up bivalves to smash on the rocky beach below.
“Somebody found you out,” I said, propping back up on my elbows so I could see his reaction. “How did that happen? Iku?”
His face stayed in neutral.
“How no longer matters,” he said. “The fact is, there are people who know that the sale of your division was not only based on intentional fraud, but that it has exposed the entire company to hostile takeover. You can imagine how my wife and her family will take the news.”
I stood up and brushed off my blue jeans. Not as neatly pressed as Donovan’s white slacks, but more resistant to messy tree life or the salt mist coming in off the sound, which had begun to condense on the park bench. The sun was over my shoulder, so Donovan had to squint to look up at me.
“So what are you planning to do?” he asked.
“Find out who killed Iku Kinjo.”
“If you continue down that path it will cost you a tremendous amount of money. If you’re lucky, that’s all it will cost.”
He said that last part to my back, since I was already heading down that path, walking back under the greying sky and through the freshening breeze, with one eye on a nearby stand of trees and the other on Amanda’s pickup. My hope was to make it all the way back to Oak Point, home of the little bay and the dog, the fading light and a brighter life than I deserved.
The conversation had still left a lot of things unresolved, but at least one burden had been lifted from my already overburdened heart.
I was done with George Donovan. This time for good.
TWENTY
“BUT WHY, SAM?” said Jackie. “Why when I’m so overbooked and tired and in need of personal hygiene, starting with a soapy shower and dental floss?”
“It’s way too early to be in bed,” I said. “You still have that old computer at home, right?”
I was on the landline back at the cottage. Before she could fill the phone with complaint I caught her up on the past few days. It was enough to revive her attention, if not her spirits. I told her I really needed her to find some things on the Web. She asked me for the millionth time why I didn’t get a PC of my own and look it up myself. I told her I could do that, but then she’d miss out on all the fun.
“What a doll.”
I waited for her to go to the back porch and boot up the good old HP. Through her portable phone I could hear the sound of keys tapping, ice in a glass and a match being struck.
“No dope until you do the search,” I called into the phone.
“I’m not even going to dignify that,” she said, coming back on. “What am I looking for?”
“Not what. Who. Oswald Endicott. Located somewhere in Connecticut.”
“Westbrook, according to Tucker.”
“Okay, Westbrook,” I said.
I waited through another minute of key taps.
“Whoa,” said Jackie, in a barely audible voice.
“What?”
“We’re too late,” she said.
“We are?”
“He’s dead.”
“He is?”
“Give me a second to read.”
I gave her a few minutes, which I used to light the first of the next day’s Camel ration.
“This from the online edition of Shoreline News,” said Jackie. “Oswald Endicott, sixty-one, was found at four a.m. in a car parked at West Beach in Westbrook with a fatal bullet wound to the head. Police are investigating what they say is an apparent suicide, but have not released additional details. Endicott, a native of Flint, Michigan, has lived in Westbrook since the late nineties. He retired there following a nearly thirty-year career as a financial manager for Consolidated Global Energies in White Plains, New York. Divorced in 2000, Endicott has no living relatives. A memorial service will be held at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Stamford.”
She read the time and date.
“That’s tomorrow.”
Jackie was quiet on the other end of the line, but I could hear the keys rattling like machine-gun fire.
I took the phone with me out to the screened-in front porch and sat at the pine table so I could look at the bay. The sun was barely angling above the line of mist on the eastern horizon, just below the tree tops, so I didn’t see it, but saw the effect on the surface of the water. The air was clear enough to see the North Fork lit up along the horizon. I liked looking at it better than the images forming in my head of the table in some airless, joyless conference room where Ozzie and I would go through the monthly financials, him patiently explaining the numbers and teaching me for the hundredth time the accrual method of accounting and the difference between labor and material inventories.
“This from the archives of The Wall Street Journal,” said Jackie, coming back to life. “Con Globe announced on Monday the early retirement of another key executive within its Technical Services and Support business unit, which was spun off last month in a sale to the European oil giant Société Commerciale Fontaine. Oswald Endicott had been Director of Finance at the division for more than a decade. His follows a series of similar departures, beginning with TSS Divisional Vice President Sam Acquillo, whose resignation immediately followed announcement of the TSS sale to Fontaine. According to Con Globe spokespeople, Acquillo’s decision to resign was for personal reasons unrelated to the sale … Wasn’t the reason you personally socking Mason Thigpen in the jaw?”
“In the nose. Important distinction.”
So Ozzie had bailed out with the rest of the old TSS hands. Not surprising, since we all knew what Fontaine would do with our operation—essentially chop it up and scatter it across their organization, which was even more global than Con Globe, and probably three times the size. There might have been some nice opportunities in playing on a bigger stage, so it might not have been the smartest thing to do, but it didn’t surprise me. We’d built TSS from next to nothing, operating with relative autonomy outside the attention, and thus meddling, of corporate management. The better of our people would never stomach working for people they hadn’t chosen. They were too independent and obstinate.
Of course, Ozzie probably had a few other incentives. Probably a whole bucketful of c
arrots and sticks.
I asked Jackie what he did post–Con Globe.
“As far as I can tell, nothing,” she said.
“No jobs, no hobbies, no charities?”
“No nothing. If I didn’t have his address in Westbrook, and the news clip, I wouldn’t know he even lived there.”
I ask her to look up his ex-wife, admitting, to my regret, that I didn’t know her name. I probably never knew her name.
“I can find it by checking genealogical records. Or it might be on the title to his house, since they were still married when he bought it.”
“Great. I’ll wait.”
“Gee thanks.”
While I waited I tried to remember the names of the secretaries we shared. There were a lot of them, so I should have recalled at least one. But I didn’t really see the need for a secretary, so I didn’t give them much to do. There was a typing pool in the sales department that took care of my letters and I didn’t want anyone answering my phone. I was perfectly capable of saying hello all on my own.
Ozzie gave them too much to do, so it should have balanced out, but it was really too much. He was always respectful and polite, but with the exception of an ex-cop who was going to night school for accounting all of them quickly succumbed to the tidal wave of work flowing from his office.
“How does Priscilla sound?” asked Jackie.
“Like it goes with Oswald.”
“Until 2000.”
“Who got the house?” I asked.
“He did, apparently, since it’s still his address. You didn’t tell me he had money.”
“He does.”
“Well, the place cost him over five million dollars in the mid-nineties,” said Jackie. “You can triple that now.”
I switched on the light beside the pine table and pulled a yellow pad out of the magazine rack. I sat down and started to draw boxes and arrows. I couldn’t help it. Next to looking at the Little Peconic Bay, nothing worked as well to organize my brain.
“What do we do now?” Jackie asked.
“We take a trip.”