Thick as Thieves

by Peter Spiegelman

  Valerie looks at Carr and coughs discreetly. “I’m sure we know hardly anything,” she says, “but I’m hoping you can educate us. What made Howard tick? What led him to Wall Street?”

  Holland holds the beer bottle against the side of her neck and sighs. “He wasn’t typical. Not one of those people who always had their sights set on a Wall Street career. Basically, most of Howard’s trust fund was gone by the time he left college. He needed to work, and he didn’t think he could get a job anywhere else.”

  “It’s not like bagging groceries at the supermarket,” Valerie says. “There was a lot of competition for those jobs.”

  “There still is. But Howard didn’t have to worry about that—he had family connections at Melton-Peck.”

  “So it was the only firm that would hire him?”

  “So Howard thought. He also thought it was the only thing he was cut out for.”

  “Banking?”

  “He said he wasn’t enough of a quant to be a trader, and that he didn’t have enough energy to be in sales. He said that catering to the whims of people richer than he was was the closest thing to planning parties for his fraternity, and that was all he was ever good at. Hence private banking.”

  Valerie nods slowly. “Sounds like he gave it a lot of thought.”

  Tracy Holland sighs again, more deeply this time. “Another way Howard wasn’t typical. Wall Street people aren’t much given to self-reflection, not the ones I knew anyway. Howard was different that way.”

  “Introspective?”

  “Enough to know his own failings, though not enough to do anything about them. Does that make him better or worse than the guys who never give it a thought?”

  “Doing something is always the hard part,” Valerie says. “What were they—his failings?”

  “Jesus—where to begin? Always taking the path of least resistance? No impulse control? Chronic self-pity? How about his sense of entitlement? Or his whining about the burdens of growing up with the appearance and expectations of wealth, but without the actual money to back them up?” She takes another sip of Sam Adams and sighs. “You don’t have the time, and I don’t have the energy.”

  “Doesn’t sound particularly appealing,” Valerie says. “Or easy to live with.”

  “He wasn’t.”

  “So why did you?”

  “I found Howard kind of cute, at first—like a blond, blue-eyed teddy bear. He was funny and self-deprecating—more the class cutup than the quarterback types I usually went with, and I liked that. He was sweet, and easy to be with, and if I’m being honest, there was the economic factor too. Fading trust fund or not, Howard seemed to be at the start of a good career when I met him. And where was I then—a pre-K teacher at a private school, and filling in part-time at Sotheby’s. That’s what a fine arts degree got me—that, and my house painting skills.”

  Valerie nods. “So cute and funny didn’t do it in the long haul?”

  “They never had a chance: the longer he worked at the bank—the more time he spent with those people—the more drinking and whining there was, and the less there was of cute and funny. And having a baby just made it worse. He was useless as a father—well-meaning, I guess, but useless.” Holland pauses and laughs bitterly. “Of course, the gambling, the drugs, and the hookers didn’t help much.”

  “Are you serious?” Valerie asks, and Tracy Holland nods.

  “Who do you mean by those people?” Carr asks. “Who was he spending time with?”

  Another frown from Holland. “His clients, his colleagues—all those people.”

  “Was Curtis Prager in that group?”

  The frown deepens, and an icy silence settles on the porch. When Holland speaks again, her voice is tight and low. “I’m the wrong person to talk to about him. Maybe I’m the wrong person to talk to altogether.”

  The silence expands until Valerie clears her throat and points at Holland’s beer bottle. “You have another of those around?”

  Holland is surprised, but after a moment she stands. Valerie raises a hand. “Brian can get it, if you tell him where.”

  Holland pauses and nods uncertainly. “In the kitchen, in the fridge.”

  Carr takes his time, going back through the dining room and down a hall. The kitchen, when he finds it, is another work-in-progress: new cabinets and countertops, raw wallboard where tiles will go, the smells of sawdust and paint still strong in the air. The old refrigerator is forlorn in a slot that’s sized for a larger model. There are layers of paper stuck to it with magnets, and Carr flicks through them. Bills from a dentist, an electrician, a plumber, an invoice from a fuel oil company. There’s a calendar too, with drawings of lobster traps and fishing buoys on it, and a dense scrawl of appointments in red ink. Beneath all these there are photographs of a boy.

  They are badly rippled by the salt air, but still his resemblance to Howard Bessemer is plain. The same blond hair, though considerably more of it, the same round face and benign, guileless smile. The photos cover a range of ages: at six or seven he is dressed as a colonial soldier, trick-or-treating with a tricorn hat and plastic musket; at eight he’s at the helm of a sky-blue sunfish; and at nine and ten and eleven, he’s playing soccer—blond hair flying amid clouds of dust and turf. His face is a mask of concentration and resolve. And then a door slams, and there are knobby footsteps behind Carr, and the boy himself is there.

  He’s twelve now, small and solid and still a soccer player. His cleats and knees are muddy, and his jersey is stained with grass and sweat. His cheeks are red and his thick blond hair is matted. His head is canted as he stares at Carr, and his face and eyes are without expression.

  The eyes are dark and wide-spaced, like his mother’s, and Carr thinks the camera missed what’s important in them: the wells of suspicion, the watchfulness, the deliberation, and the stillness—the sense that the boy is always preparing for the ground to shift beneath him, or to fall away altogether, always waiting for another shoe to drop.

  Carr smiles. “You must be Simon,” he says. “I’m Brian.”

  The boy nods slowly, weighing Carr’s words and his own reply. “Where’s my mom?” Simon Bessemer asks eventually.

  “On the porch, with my boss. I’m supposed to bring beer. What position do you play?”

  The boy pauses again, considering. “Defense.”

  “Fullback?”

  “Defensive mid.”

  “You must be fast,” Carr says. The boy nods, and Carr points at his soccer jersey. It’s blue, with a broad gold band across the chest. “Boca Juniors?”

  Simon Bessemer raises an eyebrow and nearly smiles. “The home jersey.”

  Carr nods. “I’ve been to some of their matches.”

  The near smile turns skeptical, and the boy looks suddenly like his mother. “In Argentina?” Carr nods again, but the disbelief doesn’t fade. “I watch them on satellite,” the boy says, “on the soccer channel. You’re a friend of my mom?”

  “We’re doing research, my boss and I, for a documentary about Wall Street. About banking.”

  The boy’s forehead clouds with questions, but he doesn’t ask any. “My dad worked in banking,” he says finally, “when we lived in New York.”

  Carr nods again. “You must’ve been pretty young then. You remember much about it?”

  Simon Bessemer studies Carr for another moment and shakes his head. “I don’t really know him,” he says. “I haven’t seen him in a while.” And he turns and leaves the kitchen.

  His footsteps recede down the hall and up a flight of stairs. Carr looks again at the pictures on the fridge. Something in the boy’s eyes is familiar, though he cannot say what at first. Something about the watchfulness, and the suspicion. Something about the deliberation. Later, after he has delivered a beer to Valerie and brought another one for Tracy Holland and excused himself again, it comes to him. He is in a hallway powder room, sluicing water on his face, and he looks up, into the mirror, and there it is.

  19

>   “Portland to JFK at eight,” Carr says as he comes down the wharf. “Then we pick up a rental and drive to East Hampton.”

  Valerie grimaces. “Eight a.m.? Do we have to be such fucking early birds?”

  Carr smiles at her. She takes his hand, and they walk farther out. “There’s a worm waiting for us,” he says. “At least, I hope there is.”

  Valerie nods. “Tracy was pretty clear about it,” she says. “The date it went from merely intolerable with Bessemer to call-in-the-lawyers bad. She knew when it was, and where he’d been, and she knew that whatever he was doing, he’d been doing it with Prager. Of course, the fact that it was the weekend of their fifth anniversary, and Howard was supposed to have been at home with her, probably helped it stick in her mind.

  “Before that weekend—according to her—he was just a middling-to-bad husband and dad, out drinking with clients too often, paying no attention to her or the kid when he was at home, whining all the time. After that weekend was when it went south in a big way: the gambling and drugs and whores—usually with Prager as his wingman. Or vice versa.”

  “Sounds like a worm to me,” Carr says.

  What’s left of daylight is sputtering out in the low brick skyline of Portland. The sodium lights along the wharf cast an amber glow on Valerie’s face. Her hand is warm in his. She leads Carr to the railing, and they look out at the swaying boats.

  “She didn’t like you,” Valerie says after a while.

  “Yeah, I got that.”

  “You shouldn’t take it personally—she doesn’t like men. She’s permanently angry.”

  “I got that, too. Is it all thanks to Howard?”

  “He just finished the job. Her dad started it, and there were others in between.”

  “You got all that from a beer?”

  “It was six beers, each, and it helped that you made yourself scarce.” Valerie unwinds her hand and slips it around his waist. “Besides,” she says, “I’m a good listener. People open up to me.”

  “So I’ve seen.”

  “Most people, anyway.” She looks at the harbor again and starts to whistle something Carr almost recognizes.

  He is fairly certain she isn’t drunk—he’s seen her drink much more than the beers she had with Holland and the bottle of wine he and she shared in the hotel lounge, and with no discernible effect. No, this evening she’s something different—something open and unguarded, and seemingly without calculation. A Valerie he hasn’t seen before? A performance he hasn’t seen, anyway. She leans against him at the rail, and her scent mixes with the smells of diesel and low tide.

  “You like the water, don’t you?” she asks. “Diving, sailing—all of that.”

  “I do.”

  “You grew up around it?”

  “I learned to sail when I was a kid.”

  “Who from?”

  “My father.”

  “You were close to him?”

  Carr looks at the bobbing lights and the water, nearly black now. He shakes his head. “I liked it in spite of him.”

  “An asshole?”

  “Like Tracy Holland—permanently pissed off.”

  “At you?”

  “At life; at the world; at my mother. I was a convenient proxy.”

  The wind picks up, colder now, and Valerie shivers beside him. Carr takes off his blazer and hangs it around her shoulders. Valerie rubs her hand up and down his forearm. “Poor baby boy,” she says, chuckling.

  “Are you making light of my troubled childhood?”

  “Did they smack you around? Or each other?”

  “No.”

  “Then we have different definitions of troubled.”

  “You have that kind of trouble?”

  She looks up. Her face is flushed from the wine, and Carr can feel the heat rising from her. “I was too cute to get mad at.”

  “Even then?”

  She nods. “Still, it sucks having an asshole for a dad. Probably sucks worse for a guy. Role models, and all that.”

  “You’re watching too much daytime television down in Boca.”

  Valerie wraps his jacket around her and laughs. “It explains so much, though—Deke’s appeal to you, his big, bluff paternal thing, why you’re still picking at what happened in Mendoza like it’s a scab.”

  Carr steps back from the rail. “Definitely too much television.”

  “Oprah can’t tell me shit, babe. You think I can do what I do without knowing what makes people tick? Now tell me Declan wasn’t a father figure to you.”

  “I can’t say I’ve given it much thought.”

  Valerie laughs. “Of course not.”

  Carr takes another step back, and puts his hands in the air. “Deke had big plans, he ran a good crew, and he was a good soldier—disciplined, focused, a good motivator. He kept his head in the game, and he made us all rich. That’s what I know.”

  “You’re remembering a different guy,” she says. “Yes, he thought big, and he ran a good crew—but disciplined? Focused? C’mon, Carr—that’s what he had you for. And half the time, he didn’t want to listen. Deke liked any excuse to light it up, and you know it. He got bored too easy, and deep down he was a fucking cowboy. Toward the end, it wasn’t even down that deep. Personally, I think it was some sort of midlife crisis.”

  “That’s bullshit. Besides Mendoza—”

  “I’m not just talking about Mendoza, and you know it. There was César, and before that the Russians in Nicaragua. Before that, there was—”

  “That’s enough, Vee,” Carr says, and his voice is icy.

  “Don’t go all Eastwood on me now—we were almost having a conversation.”

  “You were doing the talking.”

  She smiles at him, and there’s a little pity in it. “Okay,” she says softly. “But you’re remembering a different guy.”

  She takes his hand again and leads him down the wharf, past a yellow cigarette boat, a chrome-heavy sport fisher, and a big white catamaran. She’s whistling again, softly, and Carr sighs.

  “What about you?” he asks. “No lingering mommy and daddy issues?”

  She laughs. “You don’t know anybody more mentally healthy than me.”

  “Most of the people I know are borderline sociopaths. Your parents stay together?”

  Her laugh is sharp, and it echoes like a shot on the water. “They were both military, so they knew how to fight. It was like a nonstop cage match.”

  “But you have no issues.”

  She shakes her head and slips her arm around him. “It doesn’t always have to be like that, you know—like my parents, and yours. Like the battling Bessemers.”

  “I haven’t seen many examples to the contrary.”

  Valerie moves in front of him, and slides her hands under his shirt. They’re cold and smooth against his ribs, and a shudder runs through him. “Maybe that’s what we’ll do afterward,” she whispers. “You and me. We’ll conduct a little research to find some happy couples. We’ll be like archaeologists.”

  “You think we’ll have to dig them up?”

  Valerie laughs, and her mouth is hungry on his. “Early morning tomorrow,” she whispers. “We should call it a night.”

  20

  Carr arrives at the workhouse at three p.m. on Friday. He has swum, showered, shaved, and dressed in a blazer, jeans, and dark glasses. No one inside the house looks as good.

  Bobby is bristled and fragile, and he’s working slowly though a liter of Coke and an egg sandwich. Latin Mike is also unshaven, vaguely jaundiced, and unconcerned with anything beyond the cup of coffee on the table before him, the cigarette burning in his ashtray, and the bottle of Advil in his hand. Dennis is green, shaking death. Carr lets the door slam behind him and smiles when they wince.

  “I see you’ve been busy while I was away,” he says loudly. Mike ignores him, and Bobby flips him the bird over his sandwich. Carr chuckles. “How’s our man Bessemer doing?” he asks.

  Dennis wipes sweat from his forehead. �
�Pickled. He was at the gin again last night, and didn’t get up until noon. Hasn’t been out of the house yet today. Stearn called him an hour ago, to check that his party was still on for tonight.”

  “And?”

  “Howie told him nine o’clock.”

  “Has he spoken to Prager again?”

  “He’s tried twice—yesterday and the day before—and got nowhere.” Carr nods. “And Amy Chun? How’s she coming along?”

  Dennis taps on his keyboard. “Good. I pulled some stuff from her laptop—her personal one, not the Isla Privada equipment.”

  “And?”

  Dennis manages a smile. “She’s been e-mailing Val—Jill, I mean. She talks about how she misses her, how much she enjoys hanging out with her.”

  “Fuckin’ Vee,” Bobby says through a mouthful of egg.

  “Chun’s also been searching for anything and everything about Jill Creary on the Web,” Dennis says.

  “No more stalking Janice Lessig?”

  “Not for a while now.”

  “What’s she finding on Jill?”

  “Everything we put out there, everything Val asked for. Footprints in New York and in Boston. Modeling, PR, cooking school.”

  “Chun does all the looking herself? No professional help?”

  “All by herself,” Dennis says, and scrolls through some e-mail. “Her last note to Jill, she talks about the two of them going on vacation together.”

  Carr shakes his head. “That’s fast.”

  Mike rouses himself from his coffee to smile bitterly. “A real heart-breaker, that Vee.”

  Bobby laughs, takes a bite of his sandwich, and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He looks at Carr. “You gonna say how your trip went?”

  “It went fine, Bobby.”

  “Fine as in you had a nice little vacation, or fine as in you found something out about Bessemer?”

  Carr smiles, but says nothing.

  “Asshole,” Bobby says, and he takes a long swallow of Coke. “What time do we set up at Howie’s tonight?”

  Carr’s smile widens. “I’m thinking six.”

  Latin Mike scowls. “Why the hell we need to get there so early? Stearn won’t show till nine, and the pimp’s people won’t be any sooner.”