Castelar glanced yet again at the door while I concentrated on burning holes through him with my eyes, at the same time tugging on my gloves. He faced me again. No holes, but he did raise a hand and pluck once or twice at the lower of the pouting lips.
“You’re right,” he said suddenly. “I’ve been thoughtless—inexcusably thoughtless. I hope you understand, my brother’s death has upset me enormously. We were very close. I still think this is something the police can and should handle, but of course I want to do anything I can to help find Kate. Please …” He gestured toward one of the wooden desks in a far corner of the room. Shrugging inwardly, I went and sat in one of the plush blue-and-chrome guest chairs while Castelar edged toward the door behind him. “Give me one minute to explain to this person and I’ll be right with you,” he said before disappearing into the office.
Maybe I should go into real estate, I thought glumly; all of a sudden I had become amazingly persuasive.
I scooted around in my seat and caught the eye of my friend Donna, who had retreated to a discreet point when Castelar and I started up. I shrugged. She pointed a forefinger to her ear and spun it—the finger—clockwise a few times.
She cut it out when Castelar zipped out of his office and over to the desk and, with a speed and fluid grace I would not have guessed him capable of, into the chair opposite me.
“Now then,” he said briskly. “What can I tell you? I should say first that Kate and I have never been particularly close, and I doubt I’ll be able to help you much. Not that there’s animosity between us, but we are separated by the years and, perhaps because I have no children of my own, I’m not especially good at relating to others’. Particularly not the girls. I get on pretty well with Vince, I always have. But Kate, and Amy …” He ended the sentence with an oral shrug.
His confession made my standard question about Kate and her hangouts redundant, but I asked it anyhow and got the expected answer: I don’t know. Castelar pleaded ignorance concerning Kate’s interests, attitudes, and associates. He knew about Walt Jennings, of course, because it concerned his brother and the bank, but as far as details went, he could provide nothing. He had been unaware of the blow-up between Kate and her mother the day before, and of Kate’s subsequent disappearance. As for her most recent vanishing act, he knew—yes!—zilch.
Unhelpful as he was, I still stretched out the interview a bit longer; after having made such a big deal about his reluctance to hear my questions, I was damned if I was going to let those questions occupy only three or four minutes. “What happens to the bank now?” I asked blandly.
Castelar frowned. “What does that have to do with anything?”
I lifted my shoulders. “Nothing, I suppose, but it’s frequently helpful to have the big picture, as they say, just to help keep things in perspective.” Bullshit.
But he seemed to buy it, if not wholeheartedly. “As far as policy and management,” he began slowly, “nothing happens. At least not immediately. I am hoping to find someone to manage in the short term, but his job will merely be to keep the operation on course and running smoothly.”
“And in the long term?” Donna Avery had already given me that answer, but I could hardly believe what she had predicted.
It was true, however: “It had always been my brother’s plan to bring Vince into the bank and, eventually, turn it over to him entirely. Vince was to start here next summer, and Jack was going to prepare him, groom him, over the next eight or ten years. By that time Jack would have been ready to retire and Vince would have been ready to take over for him.” Castelar leaned back in the desk chair and it squealed mildly. “I don’t see any reason to change the plan. Vince is eager to learn the ropes, he’s bright and dedicated, and I don’t think it’d take him any ten years to figure the place out. My plan is to get someone with experience to look after the place and teach Vince the job, and then turn it over to him in a year or two.”
“That’s a lot of responsibility for someone so young, isn’t it?”
“Have you ever checked the ages of the directors of some of the multimillion-dollar computer companies? Age isn’t the issue, ability is; and I think Vince will prove able. Besides, he won’t be much younger than I was when I took over the place.”
I looked at him questioningly and he smiled slyly, eyelids drooping, giving him a faintly Oriental look.
“That’s right,” he said sleepily. “When I was not much older than Vince, I, too, was heir apparent. As the eldest Castelar male—in fact, the eldest Castelar, my brother and I being the only two—I was the obvious choice, as far as the Major was concerned.”
“The Major?”
Another small smile. “My uncle—great-uncle, actually—the founder of the bank. He was a lifelong bachelor, as I am, and very much determined to keep his corporate offspring in the family. Since my father died before the Major was ready to retire, I was appointed successor. I even served, for just over two years—the worst two years of my life. Finally I abdicated. I thought the Major was going to have an attack, but he adjusted, especially when Jack proved adept in financial matters. Jack did more with this bank than I ever could have. With this farm economy and all … and I think I see your next question coming. But after all these years I doubt I’d be competent to manage the place anymore, even if I wanted it. Which I do not. I’m all in favor of having a bank in the family, but I have no wish to be saddled with it.”
“So Vince is the boy, just like that,” I said wonderingly. Why couldn’t my old man have left me a bank instead of a ’59 Buick with bad springs?
Castelar made a deprecatory gesture. It, like all his gestures and other movements, had seemed peculiar, and now I realized why: His motions included only the part actually in motion, nothing more. When he smiled, his eyes remained unmoved. When he raised his hands, palms up, as now, the rest of his large body remained stationary. Like the robot gunslinger in a drug store.
“Technically,” he said a little impatiently, “it has to be approved by the board. But inasmuch as Emily now holds some eighty percent of the voting shares—I assume Jack left all his shares to her—I doubt Vince will encounter much opposition.”
Corporate annals are filled with cases of mothers and fathers squeezing out sons and daughters, and vice versa, but given what I knew about Emily Castelar, it didn’t strike me as too likely she had killed her husband in order to take over the bank. “Who else sits on the board?”
He sighed—gently, but I still caught it—and thought about it a few seconds. I waited, dimly aware of a half-remembered tune falling softly from a speaker imbedded in the ceiling, trying to put a name to it. It was a pop-rock thing from the late sixties, but it had been sanitized and homogenized and Simonized, for all I know, until it was nothing but lilting strings and sexless horns, completely untainted by character or personality or, indeed, identity. Generic music. Before I could draw a bead on it, Castelar spoke again:
“Myself, of course.” His face was distorted with the look of someone studying a hastily prepared mental list. “I still own a few shares, though I sold most of them last year …”
“What for?”
He looked up sharply. The man did not like to be interrupted. “I needed to raise some capital,” he said primly.
“Business trouble? Incidentally, you didn’t tell me what business you’re in …”
The look grew long, evaluative. “Television, if you must know. I’m a partner in a UHF station in Papillion. And when you look into it, as you undoubtedly will, you’ll find that the station is doing nicely. I needed money for personal reasons.”
I raised my eyebrows and smiled expectantly.
Castelar sighed theatrically. “I don’t see what it has to do with anything, but all right: I had some investments go bad and I needed cash immediately to cover them. Happy?”
“Why didn’t you borrow the money?”
“Obviously I didn’t want to.”
“Well, surely the bank, this bank, would’ve loaned you th
e cash. Don’t corporations always make low-interest money available to their top people? And what good is it having a bank in the family if you can’t get money from it? …”
His pink face deepened perhaps a shade. “I didn’t say I couldn’t; I said I didn’t want to. I preferred to liquidate some assets rather than go into debt at this time. It better fit my financial plans. All right?”
“It’s okay with me. Who’d you sell to?”
“Jack bought most of them. I sold a few to one of my partners, and some to an uncle in Oregon, who already held a few. He’s my mother’s brother, not a Castelar, and Mother left him a handful of shares. Then we have three or four cousins in the South with token shares that the Major left in his will, and that accounts for the stock.” He bent his mouth into a smirk but, again, the rest of his pink face remained steady, as if molded of smooth, shiny plastic. “Any good motives there?” he wondered with mild derision. He laughed brusquely. “None of us would stand to gain from my brother’s death, if that’s what you were thinking.”
Was it? Probably, on some level. Mainly, however, I was just stirring the pot to see if anything interesting floated to the surface. Nothing had—nothing outside of Castelar’s sudden change of heart, mind, strategy, whatever. His impatience was beginning to show again, but he had been just as nice as pie, as helpful as could be—in an unhelpful sort of way—a real prince.
I wondered why. I had spent most of my adult life poking into other people’s business—for the army, for the paper, for anyone with the cash and a halfway decent reason. My suspicious nature had long since become second nature, and Castelar’s about-face made me suspicious. Real suspicious. All kidding aside, I knew I wasn’t such a swell salesman that I could get someone turned around 180 degrees inside of ten minutes. If I were, I’d’ve gotten out of this line ages ago and into something worthwhile, like getting girls.
Was it possible that I had nicked a nerve with my impassioned God-country-and-family speech? Yes … just. But to these jaded old eyes it looked like the attitude adjustment occurred when I alluded to the man, woman, or child waiting in the private office, and that piqued my curiosity. Was it someone who shouldn’t have been there, someone Castelar feared I might begin wondering about if he kept up the big stall? Why? And, more to the point, who? Did he, she, or it have anything to do with my business, or was it a case of Castelar playing around with somebody’s wife? (Or husband; these “lifelong bachelors” …)
I could have jumped up, crossed the small room, and yanked open the door before Castelar could have stopped me. But it would have paid off only if I knew by sight whoever waited on the other side—not a likely possibility. Besides, that kind of stuff’s for amateurs. We pros have more subtle—and more fun—ways to find out things like that.
So I just went on smiling emptily, as I had been since Castelar’s last statement, and let the silence lengthen into the uncomfortable range until, finally, Castelar interrupted it. “Well, if that’s it, then,” he said, placing his palms flat on the desktop, preparing to launch himself to his feet, “I do have work to get back to …”
I stood, and so did he. I thanked him for his trouble and turned again toward the front door.
“By the way,” he said as I reached it. “I meant what I said before. About your services not being needed, about talking to Emily about discharging you. While I’m at it, I think I’ll try to convince her to get rid of your friend Kennerly too.”
“Kennedy,” I said, and pushed open the door.
CHAPTER NINE
The place was dark and empty. And hot. Jen has the charming habit of coming out of a bath soaking wet and stark-naked, and deciding that the apartment is cold. So she throws the little lever on the thermostat all the way to the right, dresses … and leaves. When I came through the door at about five-thirty, it was like walking into a clothes dryer. The needle on the thermostat hovered at around eighty-five. I don’t much trust the accuracy of those things, but I trusted the senses that told me it was bloody warm in there. I nudged the plastic indicator down toward the seventy mark, deposited my winter wear in an easy chair that was seldom employed as anything other than a coat rack, and snaked a can of Falstaff out of the back of the fridge. It’s my firm if unsupportable conviction that Falstaff doesn’t taste as good since they closed the Omaha brewery, but it’s still my drug of choice, out of habit, nostalgia, loyalty, parsimony—you call it. The top popped with a satisfyingly sharp snak! and I poured the contents into an oversized glass mug, letting the head rise to the very rim. Just like in the commercials.
Jen had accepted a dinner invitation from some friends, her note read, and she expected to be out late. I was more than slightly relieved, and more than slightly ashamed because of it, but I just wasn’t in any kind of mood for whatever round we were now in. We had gone at it again yesterday afternoon and evening and on into the night, and made about as much headway as we had all the other times, all the other years. She accused me of being afraid of growing up, of going out and testing my mettle in the wide world. I accused her of being afraid of herself and obsessively seeking constant outside distraction to mask an emptiness at the very core of her life.
Like the song says, we both can’t be wrong—so I must be right.
True, I was reluctant to leave Omaha for the bigger, glitzier metropolises—metropoli?—of the world. Omaha was home, was comfortable, and there’s nothing wrong with comfort as long as it doesn’t become stagnation. Jen equated this with a fear on my part of sinking in deeper and faster-moving waters, and I seemed unable to find the words to express my feelings and beliefs. Yes, I was afraid of failure—what sensible man isn’t?—but not failure as in success-and-. I feared failing myself. I was afraid of running away, because I knew what an easy out that became. Christ, I had done enough of it in my time. Changing jobs. Changing careers. Changing directions. Looking for something. Hiding from something. I didn’t know. All I knew, ultimately, was that I was stuck with me whether I lived in Omaha or London or Athens or Mudslide, Montana, and that I had better start dealing with that reality instead of subscribing to the attractive fantasy that the emptiness, the purposelessness, and the anger I felt were all due to external factors that I could easily elude, by flight.
That’s why I had to stand my ground. Literally and figuratively. Perhaps at some future time, when I was certain, absolutely certain, I wouldn’t be running away, I would leave this Paris of the Plains and lay siege to some other unsuspecting dot on the map. But not now, not just now.
A couple of telephone messages and a small stack of mail rested near the phone. The calls didn’t look too urgent, and neither did the mail. The usual assortment of bills, an invitation to subscribe to a magazine I’d never heard of, an offer to take advantage of mind-boggling savings on meat prices if I bought a quantity sufficient to feed a small nation, and the latest in a seemingly growing number of pamphlets, catalogues, and flyers from purveyors of surveillance equipment. I didn’t need any parabolic microphones, voice-activated tape recorders, or bug-detectors—the most sophisticated piece of equipment I own is a little black suction-cup microphone that sticks against the earpiece of a telephone to make tape recordings of conversations, and I’ve never used it except when doing interviews for an article—but they’re fun to look at, and it’s flattering to think that someone somewhere believes I could be in the market for such things.
I threw away half of the mail and set aside the other half to look at later. Then I turned off the fluorescent doughnut over the sink and stood in the dark, savoring the coldness of the beer, thinking.
The drive home had been a bitch and a half. It was like driving with blinders on—or, more accurately, an eye patch—and making right turns was largely a matter of guesswork and good luck. But by keeping to the right-hand lanes, keeping a healthy distance between me and my fellow motorists, and keeping a close eye or two on the mirrors, I didn’t feel like a menace; merely a threat.
What had seemed menacing was the dark blue
Thunderbird that appeared to be dogging my trail almost to my front door. I noticed it, a few car lengths back, shortly after turning onto the Blair High Road. It was one of the new, scaled-down T-birds, and I was admiring its sporty lines. Then, probably because I was relying so heavily on the mirrors, I began to notice that the driver never let himself get too near, and neither did he let more than one car ever separate us.
He stayed with me down the High Road, down Military Avenue, down the Northwest Radial Highway.
When I turned off the Radial and onto Decatur, he continued straight down the highway. I drove partway up the Decatur hill, past my place, until I was certain the T-bird was out of sight. Then I backed down the hill and parked across the street from the building.
Paranoid, sure. If I had ever paid attention before, I’d’ve probably been amazed at the number of times other drivers’ routes duplicated my own. And every road I took was a major artery in its area.
One little thing did gnaw at me, though: The Thunderbird’s front license plate had been obscured by snow. But it hadn’t really snowed for a few days now, not the wet, sticky stuff that would cling like that, that would hide a license plate below a bumper.
Beyond a certain point, paranoia becomes good sense.
License plates reminded me … I carried the phone into the living room, where cold silvery light filtered in from the street, and dialed as I fumbled through my parka’s pockets in search of my notepad. I found it, flopped on the couch and, while I waited for the switchboard to connect me, wondered why we persist in “dialing” numbers on push-button phones.
A few years ago I did a small and discreet favor for a fellow in the DMV, and occasionally I call up to make him regret the if-I-can-ever-do-anything-for-you that he thought was his parting shot. I was hoping he hadn’t yet left for the day—and I was in luck for once, though not by much, judging from his tone. And this was before he knew it was me. He didn’t warm up much after he found out, and you’d’ve thought I had mortally wounded him when I told him I had four license plates to check out—one for each of the cars standing in the bank lot when I’d left. But he didn’t say anything except that he’d have to call me back in a few minutes.
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