It's a Crime: A Novel

by Jacqueline Carey

  “Pat Foy,” said Bobby, putting down an inventory sheet. “You’re looking good. How have you been keeping yourself?”

  Wine didn’t seem quite enough then. Pat’s eyes lit on some poire, and she decided to buy that, too.

  “Couldn’t be better,” she said.

  “You should come in more often and say hello.”

  “Oh, I’ve been so busy,” she said. “You know.”

  “And how is Frank?”

  “Fine,” she said. She had been in and out of the store for years and had chatted with Bobby about their kids and their increasingly tenuous mutual acquaintances, eventually just recycling decades-old information. She did not feel she knew him. But she suspected that Frank did—or at least that both men considered themselves friends without ever having talked about much more than she and Bobby ever had. Men’s friendships were so much simpler. Frank had never had any trouble getting Bobby on the phone in those two months after his sentencing—despite the fact that Bobby LaConte had bought a lot of LGT stock. Pat couldn’t believe she had forgotten. Shortly after the LinkAge takeover he told her to tell Frank that he’d cashed in some and taken his family to Bermuda. With LinkAge employees Pat could entertain the illusion that everyone had profited and then suffered together. This was the first time she knowingly found herself with someone on the outside who’d lost money. Faced with Bobby LaConte’s pleasantly jowly face, his thick ex-athlete’s neck, and front hairs lying askew, like leftover wires, her normal exuberance faltered a little.

  “Oh, dear,” she said. Then she blurted out, “I’m sorry you lost money on the LinkAge stock.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said, twitching his meaty shoulders.

  “How much was it?” she said. “Was it a lot?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said again while ringing up her sale: The subject was closed.

  “But Bobby,” she cried, “I can’t believe it! It’s all so horrible! Please, please tell me how much you lost.”

  Bobby ran her platinum AmEx card through the machine, then examined it reverently as he said, “Pat, I never bought any stock. I didn’t have the money. I told Frank I did because, well, I was a friend, and I would have if I could have. I mean, I really would have, it wasn’t just talk. But then later I had an opportunity to buy this building, and obviously I couldn’t pass that up, which thank God I didn’t.”

  Pat was perplexed. “But didn’t you say you went on vacation somewhere from the sale of some of your stock?”

  “I don’t know what I said.” His tone was still pleasant. “But I didn’t buy any stock.”

  “I guess that’s good then,” said Pat, wanting to believe him, but not daring to. “So you bought a little and then you sold it? Or what?”

  “No, I never had any,” he said. “Frank is a good customer, and we go way back. I always liked him.”

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” said Pat.

  “Would you say hi to him for me?”

  Pat nodded dumbly.

  “Look at it this way,” said Bobby LaConte. “I’m probably the only one in town who didn’t buy stock.”

  Pat’s voice dropped to her feet. “Really?” she said. “People all over town are broke?”

  “Well, not broke.” Bobby’s face was pained. “My aunt lost some money. She got sort of upset. She’s a widow, you see.”

  Oh. The very word squeezed Pat’s swollen heart. Widows’ peaks, widows’ weeds, widows’ walks. All bleak and lonely terms. Was Pat a “grass widow,” or was that just if your husband took off of his own free will and wasn’t hauled away in handcuffs?

  “She lives here in town?” said Pat dully.

  “No, no,” said Bobby, as if this somehow made it all better. “In Darnley.”

  When Pat got into the car she felt like opening the poire right then and there. Then she thought longingly of her nice bed, with its periwinkle comforter, its heap of fruit-colored pillows, its pile of ready mysteries. But instead she took out her cellphone. She would at least try to get the address of Bobby’s widowed aunt from information. Sure enough, when she offered an imaginary address in Darnley, the efficient voice at the other end of the line corrected her.

  Pat wondered how you approached a woman who had suffered at the hands of the convicted felon you were married to. The aunt might not even let her in. Pat thought fondly of the maniacally escalating ruses from Ginny’s story “The Red Door”: flowers, a radio contest, a janitor’s jumpsuit. Come to think of it, the purpose was as obscure. You never knew what Ginny’s detective was up to, and Pat could not imagine what she was going to say to this aunt. What was she supposed to do—give her a check, as well? That would be too much.

  She was surprised that she had not heard from Ellen Kloda yet. Ellen may have been embarrassed that she’d told her about the lost deposit. She still may not have made up her mind whether to accept the replacement. Or maybe she was disappointed that it wasn’t more, closer to the total of what she’d lost. This last seemed the most unlikely. People tend to appreciate any amount of money that appears out of the blue. And Ellen did not seem to harbor any resentments—quite the contrary.

  AnneMarie Mikulsky née LaConte lived in a town not far from Hart Ridge. Separating them was a curious stretch of warehouses, self-storage units, and “dealer services.” Pat was not familiar with AnneMarie’s street, but did not have much trouble finding it. It was one of the major thoroughfares running east-west—narrow and residential, but highly trafficked. The houses were set back unusually far, so Pat did not realize how big most of them were until she got stuck in traffic, horns honking randomly around her. The mature shrubbery also made it hard to tell where the houses began and ended. Paths to the front doors meandered around cypress and fir, giving the lawns an oddly woodland look, considering the glut of vehicles in front of them. Eventually she followed the lane of cars around the cause of the delay, a pint-size school bus, the type that private schools use, and the same type that Ruby had ridden to the academy before the Foys moved to Douglas Point.

  That move had been slow in coming. Frank and Pat told the kids they didn’t have time to look for a house when in fact they didn’t yet have the money to finance Frank’s grandiose vision. Young Ruby, impatient to be with her friends, slipped out of her bus one day long before her stop. A crisis ensued, with Pat tearing through phone conversations with the school secretary, the gym teacher who coordinated the buses, and the dean of students. It turned out that Ruby had gone house-hunting herself and picked out “the biggest one of all.” When she pointed it out for her mother, Pat didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was an apartment building, with dozens of tenants.

  AnneMarie’s house was a twenties Tudor with three gables, two chimneys, and a slate roof in various shades of pinky beige and gray. Long narrow casement windows echoed the decorative black trim on the door. All the evergreen shrubs were as perfectly shaped as fortune-tellers’ crystal balls. To the right was a covered pool and a small pool house, an adorable but unsuccessful imitation of the Tudor. Six-foot-high grasses must mask it in the summer. Now you could see through the shrunken brown blades. Pat was no expert but the house was worth several million, anyway.

  The Mikulskys must have been one of the wealthier branches on the complicated LaConte family tree. Pat doubted that AnneMarie could have been affected much by the slide of LinkAge stock, but of course looks were sometimes deceiving. Bobby had said she lived with her brother. They could be trapped in the heavily mortgaged family home, forced to cling to each other for economy’s sake. Pat managed to park in front, although you would have thought several cars behind her had suddenly developed malfunctioning horns (stuck on). But no, the Mikulskys couldn’t be hurting. In the driveway, pulled up beside the post-and-beam fence, was a red Porsche. Say what you like about the decline in quality of manufactured goods, it was fortunate they didn’t make victims like they used to. Sympathy was wasted on people who’d lost money in the stock market if they’d made plenty, too. M
aybe AnneMarie could give Pat some of hers.

  Pat had enormous empathy. Her generosity and kindness were spontaneous and sincere. But her mind did not move in a straight line any more than a cow crops grass as a lawnmower does. The cow grazes a little here, a little there. As soon as she decided to drive home without getting out of the car, Pat forgot about the Mikulskys. She thought about 1) where to wire money for Frank’s telephone account, 2) whether she should hire a personal assistant, which she’d occasionally done in the past, with varying results, 3) what vegetables she might cook with cheese, to trick Ruby into eating them, 4) where Ruby might be wandering off to these days, 5) why the flavor had gone out of life, 6) what had happened to Lemuel Samuel.

  When she got home she Googled “Lemuel Samuel,” and up popped an article in an online mystery zine entitled “Crime Writers Pick the Worst True Crimes.” In it a dozen mystery novelists cited crimes ranging from the assassination of JFK to the Son of Sam murders. Lemuel Samuel couldn’t decide between Enron and LinkAge.

  CHAPTER

  11

  Pat had read very little about LinkAge. Once Frank was arrested, she felt much more at home with stories like “Man Drowns in Jell-O” and “You Are What You Watch: Your Personality Revealed by Your Choice of Talk Show.” Occasionally when Pat turned on the TV, revealing further insights into her personality, she’d see a clip of a perky newscaster looking straight and hard into the camera and rattling off a few vague sentences about one of the many companies that had been plagued with accounting irregularities recently. These stories would often be anchored with an incomprehensible statistic or two about the loss to shareholders. When Pat came upon the article that mentioned Lemuel Samuel’s condemnation of LinkAge, she printed it out and then looked for others. In an interview with a local independent paper upstate, Lemuel referred to former CEO Riley Gibbs as “another unindicted scumbag struggling by on hundreds of millions of dollars a year.” A blog also quoted from him: “No one is saying that Gibbs and Culp didn’t pocket millions from their company. What’s bizarre is that we have to go to trial to prove that it was wrong.” Pat read articles online until late into the night.

  At six she sat down to breakfast—coffee and a slice of cantaloupe. This followed her no-carbs-before-dinner rule, although she’d got so little sleep that maybe it still counted as after dinner. Ruby wasn’t up yet, because it was Saturday, but Pat had set the table with ceremony. In the center was a fire orchid in a funky old cracker tin lined with sphagnum moss. A blue beaker held a soy substitute for cream. Her Wedgwood plate showed a blue lover strumming a blue mandolin at his mistress’s blue feet.

  Back at the computer off the kitchen, she did an address search for Lemuel, who fortunately had an extremely rare name. For the first time the leaps in perspectives offered by MapQuest made sense. To find a man like Lemuel Samuel you would of course start with the whole of North America and of course you’d eventually zero in on a single, mysteriously bending road amid a lot of blank space that could have been anything at all. What was hard to believe was that he lived less than an hour from the house in Lenox.

  The phone rang, and when she answered, the prison announcement whirred to life with its usual You are receiving a call from the United States federal prison system blah blah blah, and then Frank’s voice emerged as if from a tube, sounding even more agitated than during her last visit.

  “I miss you so much. I hope you miss me, too. You couldn’t possibly miss me as much as I miss you. I think about you all the time. I picture what you’re doing. The hardest part of being here is being separated from you and the kids. Sometimes I think I can’t go on, and then I think of you. I think of that great house I bought you. You forget how wonderful it is when you’re in it. I can’t believe I fell for the FBI’s line of bullshit. Why did I trust anything they said? I turned myself in and out, and it made no difference at all. If only I’d been smarter. You don’t see Neil in jail, unable to enjoy the wife he just bought and paid for. Do you think the kids miss me? I keep remembering that first time I saw you at the train station. You were so beautiful. Your hair was kind of fluffy from the heat. I can’t get it out of my mind. It hurts to think about, but I don’t want to stop. My roommate can’t believe I have such a beautiful wife. I’m such an ordinary guy. Yeah. An ordinary guy caught in another dimension. There are some guys in here that you don’t want to mess with, but mostly you’d never know these people were criminals. I don’t think anyone will be able to tell when I get out. I try not to think about that, but it won’t be too long before I can be with you again. Oh, how I love you.”

  Pat interjected remarks now and then, but this was Frank’s call, and she was happy to go along for the ride. He never would have expressed such sentiments if he’d been home. The situation was heartbreaking, and as romantic as the Wedgwood, if you looked at it the right way. The forced separation, the unjust incarceration, the lovelorn cries. It was unfortunate that Frank’s avowals sounded like so much whining and complaining. Pat decided it was time to go to the country.

  Guests expected elaborate plantings up there, but Pat considered it the one place where she did not have to put on a show. She constantly moved single plants around to compare various combinations; there was never any sense of a harmonious whole. No matter what she did, though, Frank said it looked pretty. He really was a good person, even if he’d become more overbearing in the last few years. His job had made him believe that he could—in fact, that he should—throw his weight around. Certainly it was better than hanging back. Still, Pat did not miss the way he always seemed to smash the back door shut rather than simply close it.

  The lightning that had struck the house in Lenox the year before had given it a piquancy it otherwise might have lacked. Every successful country house has a raffish air; that is its point. Cooking utensils are haphazard and largely impractical. Linens disappear. Random aesthetic impulses rule in the bookcases: A long forgotten bestseller about terror on the high seas molders beside a collection of funny stories about dogs.

  Pat could feel herself happily unravel as soon as she pulled into the dirt driveway, tires crunching on all the little stones. “What are we going to do here?” said Ruby, and Pat said, “I’m going to see an old friend, and then you and I are going to do something fun tonight.”

  “Hooray,” said Ruby lifelessly.

  Rose had called Pat the other day and said that Ruby had IM’ed her to ask why no one had ever told her what a rotten place the world was. Pat had been very interested, of course, but she was not about to tell Ruby that Rose had betrayed her confidence. Rose had always been a bit of a tattletale, anyway.

  “Oh, honey,” said Pat. “We’ll be all right. It’s not like your father is a real criminal.”

  “Then why is he in jail?” asked Ruby.

  “It’s complicated,” said Pat.

  Pat was wearing her skinny sunglasses, jeans, a black cashmere sweater, and a brown barn jacket. Her landscaping work had kept her fit, if not exactly youthful. She pivoted out of the car, flexing her calves and thighs as if to prove this to herself. Her legs were strong, her shoulders square, her upper arms firm. At least Lemuel would recognize her. Once she’d left Ruby in the company of her laptop and she was on the road again, Pat felt free to imagine Lemuel Samuel’s house but got nowhere. She did better with his yard, which would be neglected. She could take him out to lunch. She could meet him for a drink. They could see what happened.

  The county road was pleasantly familiar. There was a gas station bordered with white painted stones, icy in the sharp air. The sign for the KwickCuts hairdresser had a scissors-shaped K. A garden store desperately offered half off blow-up Santas. But it was hard to find Lemuel’s street, which was supposed to go off to the left after Elm and before Bridge. Once she’d driven back and forth a couple of times, she figured out the only road it could be, although it appeared to be a continuation of another one with a different name.

  All of this difficulty seemed fitting as Pat had neve
r seen Lemuel in any domestic setting. When they had known each other they’d met at her place or in bars. She was at an apartment of his only once, maybe twenty-five years ago, on Jane Street. It was a mess—every single dish was dirty—but no one worried about stuff like that back then, certainly not a rolling stone like Lemuel. He never entered a restaurant, unless you counted a pizzeria or a falafel stand. He bought all his clothes at an Army Navy store, even his underwear. He complained about “fern” bars, although he had probably never seen a fern in his life (and certainly never the fabulous staghorn fern).

  His house was a small green ranch, with a couple of neglected thuja in the front, branches breaking under the weight of the snow, and some scrappy-looking pines invading from the woods beyond. The bottom branches were dead, which was supposed to happen because no light reached them, but here the trees were all by themselves out in the lawn, there was plenty of light, and the bottom branches were still dead. Almost any kind of landscaping would be an improvement.

  A man in a red checked hunting jacket was shaving off the top layer of snow on the driveway with a shovel, evidently trying to prepare it for the more formidable snowblower splayed out in the road. He straightened up when Pat stopped and leaned his stacked hands, icon-like, against the squared-off handle of the shovel. His clean pink face looked open and guileless because it was wider than it was high. His hair sprang up from his forehead and then fell down on either side with a regularity that suggested either luck or a natural fastidiousness.

  “I’m looking for Lemuel Samuel,” called Pat from her car, window rolled down, letting in the heavenly smell of smoke from woodstoves. She always spoke to gardeners, no matter how foreign, and this one was cute.

  He didn’t answer right away, which was no surprise to Pat. She chattered on: “I’m a very old friend. I haven’t seen him in ages. But we were very close. I wanted to talk to him about LinkAge, you know, the company that went bankrupt? I understand he was pretty angry.”