by Jane Haddam
“No,” Gregor said, “I can see it isn’t. But then what is? What is going on with the McAdam investigation that makes you want to ask me about Jon Baird? Or about the death of Donald McAdam at all.”
“It’s not just Jon Baird we’re looking at,” Jeremy said, “it’s all of them, because they were the people we know McAdam spoke to on the day he died. You see what I mean?”
“Not exactly. You just said McAdam wasn’t murdered.”
“I said we didn’t think McAdam was murdered.”
“Has Steve gotten this convoluted in his old age? Does he talk in circles about this thing, too?”
“Yeah,” Jeremy Bayles sighed. He looked into his coffee cup, pushed it away from him, and said, “Could I have a glass of milk? I’ve got an ulcer and coffee sort of gets to me sometimes.”
Gregor got up, went to his refrigerator, and hunted around for milk. He found an aluminum-foil covered pan with a pile of yaprak sarma inside it that hadn’t been there when he’d left for old George’s in the morning. He got the milk from the door shelf, smelled it to make sure it hadn’t died, and handed it over.
“Donald McAdam,” Gregor urged Bayles, reaching into the cabinet for a clean glass.
“Donald McAdam,” Jeremy agreed. “You know what happened to him? He was this guy liked to mix a little strychnine in his cocaine—if you ask me, all druggies are nuts—and so he came home after signing this agreement with Baird Financial and decided to toot up in celebration except the celebration got out of hand and he got poisoned—”
“You don’t get poisoned by strychnine,” Gregor said. “It’s not that kind of a substance. It’s a drug that magnifies your body’s response to external stimuli. If you could lie absolutely quietly in a room without light or sound—and I mean without, some kind of scientifically engineered environment—if you could do that, you could swallow all the strychnine you want and not die from it. What you die from with strychnine is convulsions caused by stimulus overload.”
“Wonderful,” Jeremy said, “that must be why the druggies took a shine to the stuff. Let me tell you, though, whatever you die from, you definitely do die. When we were doing the paperwork on this, I got the NYPD stats on deaths of this sort and they’re incredible.”
“Donald McAdam.”
“Donald McAdam,” Jeremy said. “Right. Well. He goes home, he takes this stuff all stoked with strychnine, he’s out on his balcony, he has a series of convulsions and goes flipping over the rail and falls splat, all because of the strychnine in the cocaine, right?”
“Right,” Gregor said.
“Wrong,” Jeremy Bayles said.
“Wrong?”
Jeremy Bayles took a swig of milk as if it were liquor and tapped the bottom of his glass against the kitchen table. The glass hitting the wooden table made a hollow bell-like sound that was oddly pleasant.
“Wrong,” Jeremy Bayles said, “because there were traces of the coke lines he’d done on the table where he’d set them out and there wasn’t any strychnine in them. There wasn’t any strychnine in the food in the refrigerator, either, or in any of the bottles in the medicine cabinet or in any of the rest of the cocaine in his stash. There wasn’t a single grain of strychnine anywhere in that apartment.”
Three
1
JULIE ANDERWAHL GOT SEASICK for the first time standing on the corner of Willow and Wall, five blocks north of the World Trade Center, at four o’clock on the afternoon of Friday, November sixteenth. It was one of those bright-cold days in New York. The air was as thin and brittle as glass, and the thick waves of exhaust that rose from the buses and cars that were trying to maneuver through the twisting streets were self-contained, as if they’d been born in bubbles. In spite of the lateness of the hour, Julie had just eaten lunch. She’d gone through a long day of work on the public relations campaign for the Europabanc merger thinking of nothing but shrimp with lobster sauce, and then, when the calls from Brussels and Geneva had all come in and her secretary had retired to the ladies’ room in a storm of tension tears, she’d taken off for Chinatown. It had even felt like a good idea, in the beginning. The walk up had cleared her head. Julie always found it hard to sit for hour after hour in canned air. The food had been good, too. Like a lot of people who worked on Wall Street and in the Trade Center, Julie had a little list of perfect Chinatown restaurants in her head. She knew where to go for Szechuan and Hunan and Cantonese, and which places were “authentic” because they promised pickled chicken feet in Chinese characters on strips of paper hung along the walls. Today, she hadn’t been prepared for chicken feet. She’d gone to Madame Lu’s, which was decked out for Westerners in fake black leather upholstery and paper satin wallpaper of gold. Madame Lu’s served shrimp with lobster sauce on lo mein noodles instead of rice. Julie had eaten a ton of it, so much she began to feel like a balloon blown up to the bursting point, ready to pop.
Later, going back downtown, Julie began to wonder if she should have left the office at all. This was an important day. There were a million things to get done, and she was dealing with a lot of Europeans, who still thought a woman’s place was in the typing pool. Every last one of them was looking for an excuse to complain about her to Calvin. She could already hear them in her head, their voices drawling and low in the way only speaking French could make them, saying, “Of course, she has no concentration. Women never do.”
At the corner of Willow and Wall, Julie stopped, put her hand against the street signpost, and closed her eyes. People swirled past her, paying no attention. She was an expensive-looking young woman in a red suit with a very short skirt. There were hundreds like her spread through the law firms and brokerage houses and consulting companies that filled this part of town. She opened her eyes and closed them again and opened them again and closed them, wondering why she was so dizzy. It took hours for food poisoning to work, but food poisoning was just what she felt like she had. Underneath her feet, the pavement seemed to be rippling. The air around her had begun to feel too cold at just the same instant when her skin began to feel too hot. Even her suit felt wrong, and it was one of her best, raw silk, imported from France, made by Dior. She gripped the signpost tightly and began to heave. Her ribs expanded and contracted against the rough thread knobs that held the buttons on her blouse. Nothing’s coming up, she thought. That’s good. And then, of course, something did come up. Everything came up. Great gobs of undigested Chinese food. Thin streams of brown that were probably cups of coffee. The hard-edged remnants of fortune cookies. Julie leaned as far into the street as she could and let it happen. Her body felt possessed by demons and her mouth felt full of fire.
Less than a minute later, it was over. Julie straightened up and looked around. There was a puddle of goo in the street she couldn’t bear to look at. There were people passing back and forth as if she weren’t there. Only one woman had stopped to watch. She was thin and black and standing better than an arm’s length away, as if Julie might turn out to be crazy or angry or full of drugs and not worth bothering with.
“Are you all right?” the black woman said.
“Fine,” Julie told her, looking down at her suit. The suit was clean. At least she hadn’t thrown up on that.
“You ought to have that taken care of,” the black woman said. “Whatever it is.”
“I will,” Julie said. “I will.”
“I just hope it’s not that AIDS,” the black woman said. “If it’s that AIDS, you’re as good as dead.”
“It’s not AIDS,” Julie said.
“If it’s not AIDS, you’re probably pregnant,” the black woman said. “That’s why I stopped to ask. You look pregnant.”
“What?” Julie said.
The black woman was gone, vanished, as thoroughly disappeared as if she had been a shade or a telepathic premonition in a novel by Stephen King. Julie looked into the crowd to see where she might have gone, but it was useless. That was when the light changed to “Walk” in front of her, and Julie decided it was
time to go. The puddle was still there in the gutter at her feet, but there was nothing to connect her to it. The people around her now had not been around her then. They had no idea she had anything to do with the mess. They probably never imagined she could. Julie crossed the street and began to pick her way carefully along the cracked and curving sidewalks that led to the Trade Center, picking up speed as she went.
Ten minutes later, she came out of the elevator on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center, leaned against the metal ashtray sticking out of the wall there, and closed her eyes again. The elevator from the 45th floor was an express. It traveled so fast and went so high it made your ears pop, and at right about that point Julie had thought she was going to be sick again. She hadn’t been, miracle of miracles, and if she just stood here for a moment longer she wouldn’t be now.
The second miracle of miracles came to pass. Her head cleared. Her stomach settled. She straightened up and brushed herself off and marched through the hall to the glass doors that led to the reception desk. Since Baird Financial rented this entire floor, it could have had its reception desk directly in front of the elevator doors—and it had, in the beginning. Then there had been a bomb threat and a client so angry he threatened to use a gun, and the firm had decided that the 1980s were roaring a little too loudly to do without security.
Julie went through the glass doors and around the corner and found Lindsay at the desk. Lindsay was a pleasant-faced straight-haired blond with bones so fragile she looked like she’d have osteoporosis by the time she was twenty-three.
“Hi,” Julie said. “I’m back in for the day. Any messages for me?”
“You look really awful,” Lindsay told her, ignoring the part about the messages. Julie had a private secretary to take her messages. “Are you sure you want to go back to work? You look like you ought to lie down.”
“I’m fine. I’m just a little tired. Is Mark in?”
“He’s been in the main conference room drawing up subsidiary employment contracts for the past hour. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine. And I’m going on vacation tomorrow. What about Europabanc? Any wild-eyed Europeans calling up to say how I did everything they wanted me to do wrong?”
“No wild-eyed Europeans at all. No Europeans. Just bankers.”
“Bankers?”
“To see Mr. C and Mr. J. About the loans and the cash and the stock and the rest of it so we can close after Thanksgiving. I think I’m going to hate it when we close.”
“Everybody will.”
“Sukie in accounting says there’s going to be wads and wads of actual cash lying around the morning of.”
“There won’t be. It’s two hundred million dollars we’re talking about here. It’ll be done by computer.”
“That’s too bad,” Lindsay sighed.
Julie was about to say it wasn’t too bad at all, having that much cash around the office would just be inviting a robbery, but instead she backed away from Lindsay’s desk and began to retreat down the hallway that led to the offices. Her stomach had begun to roll again and her vision had begun to blur. It was much worse than it had been in the elevator. It was almost as bad as it had been at Willow and Wall.
“Damn,” Julie said, not quite to herself, not quite under her breath, so that a typist passing her in the hall looked up, stepped back, and stared. “Damn, damn, damn.”
There was a communal washroom that the secretaries used right around the corner from where Julie now stood, but she knew she couldn’t use it. She had to get to the back hall and the private lavatories she had the keys to. Then she had to throw up again, and then she had to think. At the moment, that list of chores looked long enough to take up the rest of her life.
She was moving as quickly as she could without running, pumping along the thick carpet in her fashionably high and wretchedly uncomfortable heels, when the feeling passed. She came to a full stop, surprised and a little suspicious. She took a deep breath and found she didn’t feel dizzy any more. She looked around and found that she was standing with the Divisions Comptroller’s office on her left and one of the doors to the main conference room on her right. Since the main conference room was in the center of the block and had doors that opened into every perimeter hallway, this was not surprising.
“Mark,” Julie said to herself.
She opened the door to the main conference room and looked inside. Her husband was at the far end of the conference table, surrounded by three assistants and entranced by a stack of papers. Other stacks of papers were laid out along the table in front of the seats that would be occupied on the day they closed. They were laying out the documents the principals would need to have and making sure they had enough copies. At least, if Lindsay was right, they were doing that for the subsidiary employment contracts.
Julie came in, shut the door behind her, and said, “Mark?”
Mark looked up, nodded to the young women around him, and hurried to Julie. “Are you all right?” he asked her, as soon as he was close enough to whisper. “I just had a call from Lindsay at reception. She said you were white as a ghost.”
It was really a cold day, one of the coldest so far this year. Julie could feel that even standing in the center of the building like this, where no wall of the room bordered on the outside. She wrapped her arms around her body and tried not to shiver. She’d always thought there was something unprofessional about showing the effects of temperature. She’d always thought there was something inherently wrong with being unprofessional. She looked over at the table and the piles of papers on subsidiary contracts and almost came over ill for a whole new set of reasons altogether.
“Jesus Christ,” she told her husband. “What would you say if I told you I was going to quit work?”
2
Calvin Baird had always been one of those people who believed in details. Even as a child, his difference from his brother Jon was clear. Jon would climb trees and plan grand strategies for the conquering of neighborhoods. Calvin would calculate the exact number of foot soldiers they would need to successfully storm the Ackmartins’ back lawn. It was that way in life, too, on every front but the emotional one. Calvin was of a generation, and a temperament, that didn’t think men were required to have emotions. What this led to was a kind of superficial schizophrenia, professional perfection and personal chaos. Calvin’s business life was full of neatly drawn lines and exactly totaled sums, while his home life was a roiling mass of confusion and resentment. He had had two wives so far and six children, and they all hated him. He wouldn’t have cared except that they kept dropping into the real part of his life and forcing disruptions. His first wife wanted more money. His second wife wanted him to spend more time with their children. His oldest son from his first marriage was in drug rehab and threatening to escape. His oldest daughter from his second marriage was plain and dumpy and cried every time she had to go to dancing class. It was enough to make any sane man crazy.
It had been a bad fall for personal problems, culminating in his second wife’s demand for a divorce, but by the time Calvin reached five o’clock on the sixteenth of November, he thought he was just getting a break. There was nothing like real work to take your mind off things. He’d had real work all day, combined with the nagging last-minute details of getting ready for the ride on the Pilgrimage Green. Calvin had found the combination irresistible. Even the typists’ feeble attempts to “celebrate” the holiday on office time gave him an emotional jolt, pathetic though they were. Calvin thought if he had to see another hollow chocolate turkey wrapped in badly colored tinfoil, he’d pop a blood vessel. He wanted to pop a blood vessel on general principles. On one side of his desk he had long sheets of computer printout full of columns of numbers, showing every possible permutation of the deal they were doing with Europabanc. There was a column for the stock Baird Financial would hand over to Europabanc’s officers and another column for the stock Europabanc would hand over to Baird. There was a column of figures represen
ting cash on hand in the various accounts Baird Financial kept in various banks all over the world. There was even a column of figures representing office supplies, right down to boxes of pencils and cases of typewriter ribbons. These last figures were not necessarily accurate—they wouldn’t do a complete inventory of the two companies until the merger was finished and the two were one—but they made Calvin deliriously happy nonetheless. When they also made him tired, he turned his attention to the other side of his desk, where he had the list of things his secretary had packed for him to take on the Thanksgiving break. Jon’s Thanksgiving parties were the only exception Calvin had ever found to his distaste for out-of-office life. In spite of Jon’s fevered reveling in their status as descendents of men who had sailed on the Mayflower—which Calvin thought was silly—Jon’s parties were always better than tolerable. They sometimes even made Calvin think he was having a good time.
The discrepancy came in a cross-reference between the column of figures indicating cash on hand and the column of figures representing the cash infusion from the sale of the McAdam Investments junk bonds. The junk bond sale had gone off a little more than a week ago, and they had just this morning received word from the bank that the checks from the various participants had cleared. Calvin wouldn’t even have noticed the discrepancy except for the fact that he had been bored. As the day wound to a close and the vacation loomed, he seemed to be slowing down. He punched the cash-on-hand numbers into his hand calculator, added the junk bond infusion numbers, and checked the total against the number on his sheet marked “total available liquid funds.” And came up short.