It's a Crime: A Novel

by Jacqueline Carey

  “I remember you telling me about Gibbs and Culp lending themselves a lot of company money,” said Pat.

  “I didn’t have anything to do with that!”

  “Rose thinks it’s about the gum ashtray guys in Paterson.”

  “That was rompers,” said Frank. “That was diapers. That was baby formula. Oh, we proved ourselves that way. But no one cares about uncollectible receivables. Not even the SEC. This is the big leagues.” He was refilling his glass every time he took a sip.

  “I’ll tell you exactly what happened,” he said. “The company needed to keep expanding. Our financial strategies depended on it. And to expand at the rate we required we had to keep buying other businesses. Remember when we bought this house? That was because the stock soared when LinkAge took over such a big competitor. Everybody made out like a bandit. But then the SEC nixed the Orbex acquisition. And for no good reason, either. You know Neil’s motto—”

  Actually Pat couldn’t quite place it.

  “If you don’t like reality, make a new one,” said Frank impatiently. “The Swat Team would tell us where the numbers were soft, and then we’d go to work. Maybe Neil went too far too fast; it’s possible. But you have to be able to control your financials, otherwise you can’t control your company. Oh, the risks we took! And it was all for the good of LinkAge.” He shrugged. “Everything would have been fine if the economy hadn’t gone south.”

  On the vast glass-topped coffee table between them was a stylized suggestion of domestic life: pink coasters, a tray of paperwhites forced in gin and water.

  “But why did they arrest you? Why not Neil?”

  Frank held up the bottle to gauge the level of the spirits: still one quarter left. He said, “You know that Ellen circulated a document she wasn’t supposed to.”

  Pat did remember something like that. “What document, exactly?”

  “It was a memo with the real numbers. When I found out what she’d done, I e-mailed some of the High Risk boys, saying, ‘Where do I go to sign my confession?’”

  Pat must have winced because Frank was practically shouting when he said, “It was a joke!”

  He gulped down the rest of his champagne. “The trouble is, the SEC got hold of the memo, too. And then they went sniffing around and found my e-mail. I could have quit. But I was too loyal to Neil.”

  “Really? You were thinking of quitting your job?” said Pat.

  Frank shrugged again. He never used to shrug. “It’s not like what we did was a crime,” he said. “It was more like a gamble. I may be just a guy who works for a phone company, but I tell you, sometimes I felt like Jimmy the Greek. Sometimes I felt like I was playing in the highest-stakes poker game in the world.” Frank had a vaguely animal smell, as he did after running.

  “Well,” said Pat, recovering some of her buoyancy. “I’m sure you have nothing to worry about.”

  He patted her hand. “I know you always thought accountants were boring. I don’t blame you for it. You didn’t think the company that fed and clothed you all those years was worth the time of day, did you? And that bought you this huge house on Douglas Point as a birthday present.”

  “It’s funny,” said Pat. “Oliver was telling me today what a great life I had.”

  “Oliver?” said Frank, perking up as if sniffing the air. “Did he call?”

  Pat shook her head and decided not to tell him that she hadn’t been able to reach anyone.

  A piercing scream from above: Ruby. Pat leapt up as if this were what she’d been waiting for all along. The scream trailed off before she reached Ruby’s room. And there she was, staring at her computer screen. In the center of the blue window for the Internet portal, above the news from Afghanistan, was the LinkAge corporate logo. “More arrests in the telecom industry” read the caption. The logo blinked into a photo of Frank, evidently taken earlier. His hands were cuffed behind his back. His face was in shadow. Then he was transformed back into the LinkAge logo. Photo, logo, photo, logo. Pat watched, mesmerized.

  Frank spoke from behind her: “Just a guy who works for the phone company.”

  CHAPTER

  3

  Pat felt sorry for anyone without a real past. She was proud of having had a youth she wouldn’t want to describe to her children. It could make her smile in the unlikeliest settings—the dullest fund-raiser or sit-down company dinner: “This is not me, I have a wild core, I am in disguise.”

  Pat had been so spirited and friendly as a teenager that no one noticed how eccentric she was. She barely noticed her parents’ divorce. She had money to spend because her mother paid her to iron her own clothes, and she could have a cheerful conversation with anyone. She was the only person who could make Ginny Howley giggle. Most kids were afraid of Ginny, because her mother had killed herself years before, and because she could spend a whole evening sitting in a corner and frowning, a feat Pat wished she could pull off but had never been able to. What the other kids didn’t seem to realize was that Ginny’s severity meant she mattered. Sometimes when classmates said idiotic stuff, it was easier for Pat to nod and agree. Ginny’s face would darken, and she would tell Pat later what was wrong with the stupid comment she had agreed with or been amused by. Pat didn’t mind. Ginny never thought that what Pat said was stupid, although a lot of it was.

  The two girls read mysteries all the time. Their tastes were surprisingly similar, given how finicky Ginny was in the rest of her life. She didn’t like anything regular—“nice” boys, for example, or girl singers or trips to the beach. Pat didn’t expect her to like the books of Scott Fein, creator of the first counterculture detective; he seemed a bit too pop for her taste. But Ginny liked them so much she put a newspaper photo of the author up on her wall. He was young and curly-haired.

  It was Ginny’s idea to go to Fein’s book signing at The Black Cat in the city. In fact, she insisted. Then they decided to tell their parents they were going to be at each other’s houses that night. They figured out that between them they had enough money for a room at the Chelsea Hotel, a place they’d read about in Rolling Stone. Ginny was going to contribute the most. Although her allowance was minimal and she’d never been paid for ironing clothes, she always seemed to be able to find an extra twenty. Pat gave her what she had to make up the difference.

  Pat tried to straighten her hair with an iron, and Ginny curled her hair by weaving dozens of little wet braids all over her head. Ginny’s attempt was the more successful. She was undoing the braids when she bought one-way tickets from the conductor on the train, and by the time they reached Penn Station, she had a puff of zigzagged hair. It shivered a little as they walked uptown.

  Pat and Ginny had spent endless hours at Hart Ridge Books, where the mysteries had their own metal racks. But The Black Cat was different, a hybrid of bookstore and club. Two writers sat at a long cafeteria-style folding table at one end of the store. Customers lined up in front of each to get their books signed. Scott Fein, Ginny’s baby-faced poster boy, was even cuter in person than he was on her wall. His eyes sparkled; his smile lit up the ordinary words that Pat managed to overhear as she slid by. “Aren’t you going to go up there?” she asked Ginny covertly, opening a mystery by the other author—a red herring. When Ginny shook her off, Pat couldn’t help a quick glance around to see if anyone had noticed.

  The other writer was Lemuel Samuel, a name with vague but intellectually exotic associations for Pat. Maybe she’d read about him in Rolling Stone, too. All she could see of him was a knee, a calf, and a boot sticking out from the end of the table. The knee was bent, the calf was covered in dirty black denim, and the boot had a strap at the ankle that was fixed in place with a steel triangle. She passed on his new book, which was still in hardback, but bought his first, a paperback called Follow Me.

  “Great title!” she enthused when she got to the head of his line. He was a big man, tall, with large hands and heavy features.

  “Follow me,” he said. It was a practiced joke, or Pat might have been t
empted to say, “Okay.” Instead she said, “What I like is when I delve so deep into a story that I’m surprised when I’m interrupted and then I look back at the page and see just type. Just words, I mean. When a minute before, I was seeing these wonderful colors in my head. You have to have real suspense in a story to produce a spell like that. Don’t you think?”

  Lemuel’s face was wide, shadowy, enigmatic. His lips were pulled back in a half smile or maybe a grimace. Pat continued at a higher pitch. “Not that that’s the only thing,” she said. “You need a really wild setting. You need to stretch right into a different mind. You need a truly black night or a truly green jungle or a really red pool of blood.”

  “Sure,” said Lemuel. He left it at that, so Pat rejoined Ginny, who hadn’t moved from her spot at the end of one aisle, her newly crinkly hair obscuring her averted face. Pat pretended to leaf through a sequence of books, but she glanced up often enough so that Lemuel could catch her looking at him.

  The lines in front of the authors were gradually disappearing. “You’re going to miss Scott Fein if you don’t hurry,” Pat whispered to Ginny. Pat’s next glance caught both authors with mouths agape, laughing mirthlessly. “No one’s with him,” she said. Her last glance unexpectedly ricocheted off Lemuel Samuel, who was sauntering in her direction.

  “You like to read about serial killers?” he asked.

  Pat backed up against a bookcase. “What?” she said. Then she realized they were standing under a sign saying just that.

  Ginny threw them a brief, hard look and turned back down to the book she was holding.

  “You old enough to go get a drink?”

  “Of course I am,” said Pat, insulted despite the fact that she was lying.

  “Well?”

  Pat’s heart leapt. This must be an invitation. “Ginny?” said Pat. “Shall we go?”

  “Which book are you looking at, Ginny?” asked Lemuel, his tone almost sickish-sweet.

  Ginny was furious at the use of her name, Pat could tell. “I’m not looking at anything,” said Ginny to her book. It came out almost as a hiss.

  “Oh,” said Pat. “Okay.”

  “You want to come, then?” asked Lemuel.

  “No,” said Ginny.

  “I’ll meet you back at the hotel room,” said Pat, so proud to be uttering this phrase in front of Lemuel that she felt as if she were lying once again.

  “No,” said Ginny. Another of her abrupt, all-dismissive, closed-faced nos.

  “Oh,” said Pat, now uncertain.

  After a pause, Lemuel wandered back toward the folding table, and Ginny spat out, “I’m going to go back.”

  Scott Fein had disappeared. Lemuel was picking up a small army pack. This quotidian burden made him more familiar to Pat and made his imminent departure more real. When he returned and said “Well?” once more, he was clearly just pausing, already half gone. Pat said to Ginny, “Okay, I guess I’ll see you later.” She could feel Ginny’s eyes on her back as she left.

  “You’re up for anything, aren’t you?” he said. “Unlike your friend.”

  “She has something to do,” said Pat.

  “Yeah, she looked like the sort who would have something to do.”

  What did that mean? Pat was the one who was always busy. She looked behind them but couldn’t see Ginny.

  They walked in silence to a bar called Jimmy’s. Lemuel let her go first, so she got the full brunt of the patrons’ skeptical glances. When she hesitated at the first stool, Lemuel parked right there. He placed a couple of bills on the bar and tapped them with his index finger. It occurred to Pat that Ginny had all their money, but it didn’t seem to matter.

  “Where are you from?” he asked, as if trying to determine what drink to order from the information she provided.

  “New Jersey,” said Pat promptly and then wished she’d offered up “Los Angeles,” home of the hard-boiled detective, instead. But Lemuel accepted the state with his imperturbable half smile. Because his lips were usually pulled back in this smile, you didn’t realize at first how full they were. They looked swollen, maybe bruised. His hair was thick and dark.

  “You need a beer,” said Lemuel, fingering the inside of his empty breast pocket. “You don’t have a light, do you?”

  Of course she had matches. At high school, even people who didn’t smoke carried them. Plus they were from the Watering Hole, which was a pretty tough bar for suburban New Jersey. She hadn’t believed it when she’d spotted them on a shelf in the local drugstore. Not that that meant a whole lot here, she realized. Still, it was a shock to see the matchbook, which suddenly seemed so little, in his hands, which were so large. Hair sprouted from the fingers, the skin was pitted, the knuckles raw and red. Oh, to feel that rough grip.

  “You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?” he said with his half smile.

  She was still looking at him expectantly as the bartender put a beer down in front of her.

  “That’s yours,” said Lemuel.

  “I know,” she said, blushing. She made no attempt to lift the mug. “So…you live around here?”

  “I have a place I stay when I’m in town,” he said, downing his shot. “In the Village.”

  “The Village,” she sighed. “That’s great.”

  “So you like mysteries,” he said.

  “Of course I do!” Pat enthused. She was slightly handicapped in that she hadn’t read any of his books yet, but she forged ahead anyway. “It must be great to be a writer. I mean, to think up all these people and watch them track each other down. No one, absolutely no one, is cooler than a private eye. ‘Down these sun-blinded streets,’ right?”

  “How about a private eye writer?” said Lemuel. “How cool would he be?”

  “Even cooler than a private eye!” said Pat. “Really!”

  “You wouldn’t believe the shit I get sometimes,” he said. “One old bag actually called me up to nag at me.”

  This seemed to be the extent of their conversation—Lemuel was already turning away—and the beer really was awful. “You know what I hate,” Pat said quickly. “Clues.”

  “Oh?”

  When he shook another couple of cigarettes loose from his pack, he offered her one, which she accepted. She was lucky Ginny wasn’t here, as this opinion had originally been hers. “I hate alibis, train schedules, floor plans.” Pat frowned, trying to remember. “Slips of the tongue!” That had been Pat’s addition. “Riddles in verse.”

  “You’re a funny girl,” said Lemuel. “What’s your name, again?” And when she gave it to him, he said, “Well, Pat, it’s time to go. How about I drink your beer if you’re not going to?”

  “Oh,” she said, a little crestfallen, fearing the night was about to end. But out on the street he seemed to expect her company. The air was cool, and the buildings were deep in shadow. Curlicues of neon letters were beginning to emerge from the gloom. At the next intersection the sky was thick, dark, and radiant, as if the smog were reflecting the city’s light back upon itself.

  Lemuel stopped in front of a bank of revolving doors, indicating with even more showy gallantry than last time that she should precede him. As he waited for her to comply, he looked her up and down and said, “You’re so…untouched.”

  Pat found herself in a hotel lobby. Clerks sat behind flaking gilt cages. A monkey-faced bellboy in a red cap stood beside a luggage cart heaped with mismatched suitcases. The marble walls were grainy, dull, important. Pat could feel her breath come shorter as Lemuel Samuel, mystery novelist, author of Follow Me and many other books that you could buy in real bookstores, lit another cigarette with her matches and pushed the button for the elevator.

  She had not expected an elevator man. He turned his wheel with a wide, air-filled clunk, as if steering a boat. When he glanced around for floor numbers, Pat saw that he was ruddy-faced and black-eyed, like her runaway father. But Lemuel was standing between them with his shoulder hunched and his hands in his pockets, which made him look especially l
arge. There was no way to avoid her awful, delicious fate.

  The elevator doors opened on a huge arch, where a flock of women with clipboards hovered. “Mr. Samuel, we’re so pleased that you could come,” said one.

  “This is Lydia Bunting,” said Lemuel, indicating Pat roughly with a thumb.

  Oh, God. Lydia Bunting’s amateur sleuth was an old lady who rode a bicycle. Pat feared some lurking cruelty. She blushed red.

  “Miss Bunting?” said the woman with confusion. She looked as if she could have been Lydia Bunting, actually.

  Pat coughed, dry-throated. “How nice to meet you,” she said.

  Behind them a man snickered.

  “I don’t see what’s so funny,” said Pat, letting her real annoyance show through her faked annoyance.

  This was too much for the woman with the clipboard, who mechanically handed out name tags.

  “I don’t see what’s so funny!” repeated Lemuel, striding through the arch. “God, you are priceless!” He was heading straight for the bar set up at the far end of the room. Pat heard his name called a couple of times as they wove through the crowd. Most of the men were in black tie; the women were in evening gowns. Lemuel’s dirty black jeans and oversize scuffed boots made him look like a gate crasher.

  He stopped only when people actually got in his way. Usually they ignored Pat, but one woman did say, “Lydia Bunting? I pictured you so much older,” and her companion said, “That’s not Lydia Bunting. That’s just Lemuel up to his usual tricks.” At which point they didn’t seem to expect Pat to be able to talk, so she didn’t.

  Someone brought Lemuel a drink. Soon someone else brought him two, one of which he passed on to Pat. She didn’t know what it was, but she sipped at it gamely, anyway. It tasted as if the setting sun had been caught and put in a glass. The men gathered around him were the guests not wearing tuxes, or even suits. An arm snaked around Lemuel’s chest, from behind. Lemuel crouched and turned roughly, elbow out. “Hey, man, hey, man,” the owner of the arm gasped, either in propitiation or because he could get nothing more out.