Suicide Season

by Rex Burns

  Initial security was the familiar brightly lit information desk and a uniformed attendant strategically placed to survey the single street entry and the banks of elevators that formed the building’s core. Out of sight below the counter, I knew, a newly added series of TV monitors surveyed the building’s other accesses: the garage doors, the loading dock, the fire doors along the alley. The rest of the lobby was open space with no seats or potted plants to impede surveillance. It wasn’t a very warm and comfortable lobby, but visitors who entered were supposed to have business and to waste no time getting where they wanted to go.

  “Is Mr. Bartlett in, please?”

  “I think so.” The man studied me as he picked up a telephone that required no dialing. “Mr. Bartlett? A gentleman to see you.” He hung up. “He’ll be right out. You looking for work?”

  “I probably will some day.”

  “You look like the kind of guy he likes to hire. He likes them big and clean cut.”

  Which pretty much fit his description. “Are you short of people?”

  “We’re always looking. There’s a lot of turnover in this business, but the money can be good if you get into management. I’m planning on setting up my own business when I get some more experience. You might keep it in mind—I’ll be looking for people, too.”

  “Thanks.”

  Behind the attendant, Bartlett opened his door and nodded shortly, his blue eyes unwarmed by recognition or anything else. “Hello, Kirk. What can I do for you?”

  “Mr. McAllister authorized me to look at some records.”

  Bartlett hesitated a moment. “Come into the office.” He shut the door and walked deliberately around to sit behind his desk. I chose one of the two leatherette chairs placed carefully to face strong lights that shone down from a corner behind Bartlett. On the wall in back of me, a second set of TV monitors flickered, and, half-hidden by a recess, another wall showed a battery of switches and indicators that connected to alarm systems all over the building. It was a standard security layout using the latest electronics, and Bunch and I had done a good job for McAllister when we designed it. But fundamentally it was similar to systems in use since some unknown caveman put up the first pile of branches as a defensive perimeter: deterrence devices, monitors, and response techniques.

  Bunch had recommended most of the changes in physical security, and I had gone over the defenses against industrial espionage. Bartlett had seen each recommendation as an accusation against his abilities, and, McAllister once told me, he had to do some hard talking backed by a substantial raise to get the man to stay. Nonetheless, no security system was stronger than the individuals who made it up, and the clearance of personnel was one of the weakest spots in any defense. The use of an inside man—a patsy—was the least fallible and most favored technique for espionage, and since there was no foolproof protection against human nature, there was no foolproof protection, period. In a large corporation such as this one, the patsy could be anyone from a low-grade secretary or word processor to a vice president in charge of development.

  “What kind of records?”

  “Everything on the Columbine and Lake Center projects. And anything left on Austin Haas.”

  Bartlett’s flat blue eyes blinked once; then he picked up a telephone and pressed a series of buttons. “This is Bartlett. Would you ask Mr. McAllister if he authorized a Mr. Kirk access to certain records?” His eyes never left my face as he waited. “Okay—thanks.” He hung up. “I wondered how long the old man would wait.”

  “Wait for what?”

  “To investigate Haas. I’ve heard the rumors.” Bartlett’s smile said there wasn’t much that got past his ears.

  I smiled back and nodded; what Bartlett didn’t know, he couldn’t gossip about. Although I doubted that the man gossiped with anyone, including his wife. There was a sense of prickly isolation that must have stayed with him in the bedroom as well as in his office.

  “All right.” Bartlett stood and holstered his radio-pack. “What Mr. McAllister wants, he gets. Come on.”

  I followed the lean man, who was only an inch or two shorter than I, to the elevator. Bartlett pressed the down button—”We moved the records office to the basement”—and when the elevator opened again under the fixed eye of a remote TV monitor, turned right down a softly lit hall to a door marked RECORDS.

  The move had been one of my recommendations. Computer transmissions can be easily intercepted, and the old records office—on the building’s top floor—was akin to a broadcast tower. At least down here the windowless walls and the surrounding earth helped to block random radiation of the signals.

  The door opened to a small reception room walled off from the rows of desks and computers—another recommendation. A supervisor wearing a clip-on photo identity card hurried to the service window to smile hello.

  “This is Mr. Kirk. Mr. McAllister’s authorized him access to the complete file on this ex-employee. He also wants the tapes and disks for the Columbine and Lake Center projects.” Bartlett filled out a request slip and initialed it before turning to me. “It’ll be a few minutes. You know your way back, right?”

  I smiled. “I should by now.”

  “Yeah.”

  I sat on one of the padded benches and leafed through an old copy of U.S. News. Finally the woman came back with a sheaf of printouts and a pair of floppy disks in their square, white envelopes. “This is everything we have, Mr. Kirk. I remember reading about his death. I didn’t know him that well—we said hello a few times—but it still came as a shock.”

  “Did he visit Records very often?”

  “Oh, no. Someone from his office would usually come by to pick up what he wanted. That was when we were up on the top floor, you know. But he seemed like a very pleasant man when we spoke on the telephone. If you’ll sign here, please.”

  The form gave the document codes and page numbers; I verified them and signed.

  “All of our personnel records are confidential information.”

  “I understand. Can you tell me who cleaned out his desk?”

  “Cleaned out …? Oh, you mean after his death. That would have been Mr. Bartlett. He does that personally.”

  Once again, I had to get past the attendant on desk duty before being admitted to Bartlett’s electronic fortress.

  “You get everything you need?”

  I showed him the printouts and disks. “Almost everything. Did you clean out Haas’s desk after his death?”

  “That’s right. I pull all proprietary documents. We do it for all forms of termination and severance.”

  I could picture the expression on an employee’s face when he found Bartlett waiting for him at the door and then was escorted to his desk and watched by those cold eyes as the employee—pink slip a bright mark of humiliation on the desk’s blank surface—went through each drawer to take only his personal effects: a coffee cup, perhaps, or a photograph, a few personal letters (read first by Bartlett), perhaps a few books or pamphlets of his own—all placed in the envelope thoughtfully provided by the director of security. In case of a death, the rest of the contents would be locked in the desk and later sifted for information sensitive to the company. It was cruel, but necessary. The employee who wanted to get even was a prime candidate for sabotage and theft, and a dead man’s desk could hold a lot of sensitive details about company business.

  “What happened to the other stuff—the memos, notes, appointment books, and so on?” The detritus that every desk accumulated.

  “Personal effects are sent to the survivors, in this case Mrs. Haas.”

  Bartlett would help because McAllister said to. But anything I didn’t specifically ask for he wasn’t going to give. “Do you have a record of what you found?”

  Without answering, Bartlett reached for a logbook and began turning pages. He stopped and slid a finger down the sheet, “Seven classified documents all properly checked out.” He read their call numbers. “Five incoming letters, one drafted response, four
teen in-house memos, one desk calendar with notations, one daily appointment book with notations.” He looked up. “That was the proprietary material. The rest is listed as personal effects. They were sent on eighteen October by registered mail.”

  “Do you still have the calendar and appointment book?”

  “We keep them on file for one year.”

  “May I have them?” I reminded the man, “Mr. McAllister said ‘everything.’”

  “Sign this form.”

  As I filled in the “Received by” line and dated it, Bartlett went to a large metal filing cabinet and pulled out one of the lower drawers. It moved heavy and silent like a morgue slab and the man, deliberate as ever, thumbed through the labeled brown envelopes until he came to Haas’s.

  “Here they are.”

  On my way out I resisted the impulse to smile at the TV camera mounted high in a dim corner which, I knew, led to one of the small screens in front of Bartlett’s cold eyes. Instead, I returned the desk man’s friendly nod and picked my way back through the fast-melting remnants of snow.

  The printouts were only a little more complete than the ones I had searched earlier, but I didn’t expect too much new. Their main purpose was to refresh my memory about the details of the man and the case, and to complete the financial records up to the date of final payment. They also detailed the death benefits to his survivors. I jotted down the amounts and the methods of payment. Haas had arranged distribution so that Margaret’s life would be comfortable if not extravagant, provided she managed the money well; and the children had separate reserve funds for college or their maturity. It wasn’t the document of a reckless man or one who was counting on a sudden and large windfall from some outside source. But of course it may have been drawn up long before the proposals were stolen—if Haas was the one to steal them.

  The appointment book held an hour-by-hour list of the meetings, calls, cryptic names, and memory cues that a busy man used to organize his time. His secretary would have kept the more formal log of those who made their appointments in advance, and that’s what all those slanted lines must have been that blocked out time by fifteen-minute units. If it wasn’t an office visit, a name was written in and presumably Haas went there. Gradually, as I studied the pages, the routine of the man’s office life took hazy shape: the first hour, from eight thirty to nine thirty, was always blank—time for assimilating the previous night’s work or for organizing the day to come. Then the office visits, appointments with whoever the secretary introduced over the intercom. On Tuesdays and Fridays, regularly scheduled meetings were held at eleven; these were marked out with a line and initialed “Mac.” The afternoons were much less organized, and here were the more personal notes of meetings outside the office, trips to sites or to manufacturers’ showrooms, of an occasional afternoon marked “Tee-off: 2:10” or “dentist.”

  I began entering the names and initials of the visited and the visitors into my computer, coding each one with a recall number and programming the machine to seek first the sequence and then the frequency of the visits. Here, too, a vague pattern began to emerge. The in-office lists showed an increasing number of meetings with “Don” which started with one in February and then became nine in the two weeks before Haas’s death. A number of random singles filled in a lot of space, and several short names or initials had consistent meetings, usually one every week or two. The afternoon list, those where Haas apparently left the office, were less indicative of a pattern. Even the golf times were scattered, and I was left with a long list of single meetings, a shorter one of a lot of meetings, and the shortest list of all—those names and initials he met with only three or four times at the most.

  I ran the display one more time, then ordered a printout and, while the machine chattered rapidly to itself, telephoned McAllister’s assistant once more.

  “Mr. Haas’s secretary? Carrie Busey. Yes, she’s still with us.”

  I dialed the number given and identified myself.

  “Miss Busey, you were Mr. Haas’s secretary?”

  The voice came back without nervousness or surprise. “I was.”

  “I have some questions about a few items that have come up concerning his daily office routines, and I wondered if I could take you to lunch and pick your brain.”

  “We’re not supposed to discuss company business, Mr. Kirk.”

  “I understand. But as I said, I have clearance—you may verify that with Mr. McAllister’s office. And what I’m interested in is not so much the company’s business as his. Who the meetings were with, what some of the rather cryptic entries in his appointment book might be, what you might remember about some of the people he saw.”

  “I suppose that’s harmless enough.” The cool voice added, “Though I will, of course, ask for written approval from Mr. McAllister’s office.”

  “Of course.” Written approval. She knew how to protect herself in the corporate jungle. “How about tomorrow at Gianelli’s?”

  The voice warmed a bit. “That sounds very nice.”

  “Is eleven thirty too early? We can get a quiet table then.”

  “I can manage.”

  Bunch, closing the door on the last of the conversation, raised his eyebrows. “Gianelli’s? What’s this one look like?”

  I hung up. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? You’re taking her to a place like that and you don’t know?”

  “It’s Haas’s secretary. I wanted to impress her a little.”

  “That’s more than a little. How come you get to take broads to Gianelli’s and the best I get is Wendy’s?”

  “Oh, now, Bunch—you wouldn’t enjoy it. You’d have to wear shoes, and you know what that does to the hair between your toes.”

  “Right. Silly me to forget. Here.” He tossed a thick envelope on the desk and set a small stack of tape boxes beside it. “This envelope’s the printout on the AeroLabs bid; I think we got a good chance with it. The tapes are everything you wanted on Haas—all the conversations, pickups, whatever we had on file. You name it, I put it all in chronological order on these.”

  I showed him the printout from my computer. “This is a list of his official contacts for six months prior to his death.”

  “And you want correlations with what we already have?”

  “If it can be done. And if you think it’s worth the time.”

  Bunch got that little frown which always came when he puzzled out a new twist for his machines to struggle with. For all that he liked to act the hairy and unwashed cowboy, he had a magical skill with electronic devices, and he always enjoyed a new challenge. “Let me think about it a little. Maybe I can rig something up.”

  Dialing again, I waited five or six rings before the telephone was answered by a child’s voice. “The Haas residence.”

  “May I speak to Mrs. Haas?”

  “Who’s calling, please?” It sounded like the boy’s thin voice—Austin, Jr.

  “Devlin Kirk.”

  “Just a minute, please.”

  The phone went blank, then was picked up and the woman said “Hello.” I heard the click of the extension as it hung up. “This is Devlin, Margaret. I’d like to know if you still have the envelope of personal effects from your husband’s desk. I understand it was mailed to you last October.”

  “I think so—I’m sure I do.”

  “Can I come over and pick it up?”

  “The children and I were just leaving. I promised them the afternoon at the zoo.” She offered, “We should be back around six or seven. After dinner at McDonald’s.”

  “I’ll be by about seven. I may have to ask you a few things about some of the items. A lot of the abbreviations and phrases don’t make much sense to a stranger reading them.”

  “All right. But perhaps you should come a bit later then. After the children are in bed. Say around eight thirty?”

  “Better yet, if you can arrange for a sitter, I can arrange for a quiet place to have a drink and something to eat.
You’ll need it after a day at the zoo.”

  When she finally replied, I could hear the surprise lingering in her voice. “That does sound good.”

  “At seven, then.”

  I hung up and Bunch, shaking his head, caught my eye. “So it’s ‘Margaret’ now? Lunch with Haas’s secretary, dinner with his widow. Devlin, you’re moving right into the man’s life.”

  “It’s a client, Bunch. Business.”

  “And I know what kind of business. Devlin Kirk, the widow’s comforter. You have absolutely no shame, my lad. It’s the only redeeming virtue I’ve ever found in you.”

  “Well I try not to pay my debts and I’m never on time.”

  “True, there may be hope for you yet.” He gathered up the printout of Haas’s lists of appointments. “Run yourself another one of these. I’ll take this home and see what I can come up with. Susan sends her regards. Though if she heard you lining up all those women, she wouldn’t bother.”

  “She’d start analyzing it.”

  “She analyzes everyone but me, Devlin. She just can’t help herself.”

  “And you can’t be analyzed?”

  “That’s what she says—I’m too integrated. An indivisible mass.”

  “In other words, a blockhead.”

  “No, an elemental force of irreducible masculinity.” The elemental force quivered the landing as it went downstairs, and I began listening to the old tapes relate their fragmented account of a life whose end I already knew.

  CHAPTER 6

  MARGARET MET ME at the door. She wore a skirt and jacket of muted plaid and a cashmere sweater that set off her eyes and emphasized the softness underneath. She seemed more girlish than when I saw her in the office, and certainly far less strained and tense, and as I stared, a tinge of color came to her cheeks, an echo of that vulnerability I had seen so nakedly the night her husband shot himself. “Is this all right? I wasn’t certain what to wear.”