“I can’t say whether he used the stuff,” I said. “I never saw him, but I couldn’t rule it out.”
Manelli gave me a sideways glance and slight smile to show that he didn’t believe me.
“So, nothing to say about Mr. Carlson’s drug use, nothing to say about the car. And yet you were his friend. I just don’t know what to think.” He gave me a helpless look.
“I’ve told you what I know,” I said.
Manelli opened the attaché case and took out some papers. “Take a look at these.” He handed me half an inch of paperwork.
Their agenda on the table at last.
They were vehicle registration documents for a McLaren F1. They were very recent and, more important, they had my name on them. According to these papers I was the owner of a million-dollar car.
“What the fuck,” I said involuntarily.
“Like to tell us more?” said Manelli’s partner.
“It isn’t true,” I said. “I didn’t own that car. I’ve never owned a car in New York. I’ve already told you. I don’t understand it.”
“Where would you get the kind of money to buy a car like that?”
“I couldn’t, I mean I didn’t. The question’s academic. I didn’t own the car so I didn’t need the money.”
“That paper says you did.”
“The paper’s wrong. It’s a mistake.”
“Pretty big mistake, I’d say.”
“JJ must’ve arranged it, something like that.”
“You’re kidding me, right? Your buddy buys a fancy car, registers it in your name, and takes a dive onto the FDR.”
“I told you, I simply don’t have that kind of money. I would never be able to buy that car.”
“These guys think you have the money,” said Manelli.
I found my hand accepting another piece of paper. It was a letter from a company called Delaware Loan. It looked like a very respectable company, apparently established in 1978 and specializing in prestige car finance. The letter was addressed to me at the apartment and it went on to congratulate me on becoming a valuedcustomer of the company and confirmed that they had wired nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars to the account of a car dealer in Boston.
My thoughts ground to a halt. “This is addressed to me,” I managed.
Manelli sighed like a weary teacher. “You’re quick.”
“I’ve never seen it. It isn’t real. Where did you get it?”
“The tooth fairy.”
I looked at the letter again. It referred to a schedule attached, which outlined the repayment timetable. Apparently I had signed a loan agreement two days earlier.
The schedule was missing. A part of me was intrigued to know what a nine-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar unsecured loan would cost to service every month. I felt as if I was tied to the tracks, trying to make out the insignia on the front of an oncoming train.
“This has nothing to do with me,” I said indignantly. “I have never signed a loan agreement. I’ve never even heard of Delaware Loan and I doubt that they would ever lend me such a large sum of money. This is all a breathtaking fabrication.” I threw the letter back at them.
“You had the fifty-thousand-dollars down payment.”
I had about sixty thousand dollars in my Chase Manhattan savings account and my stomach crawled as I was handed another piece of paper. It was the statement from a bank account. My bank account. Giving it a reluctant, sideways glance, I caught the solitary occupant of the debits column. Fifty thousand dollars. In the margin it said the entry related to a wire transfer.
I had been robbed. Somebody had made a down payment on my destruction—with my money.
“It must have been JJ,” I whispered.
“Now why would he do that to his good buddy, do you suppose?” sneered Manelli. “You had a fight, maybe. You were screwing his wife, maybe. You’d spilt beer on one of his suits. You’d called him a faggot. You forgot his birthday.”
“I don’t know.” I wished they would stop using the wordbuddy.It had lost all meaning and its consonants drilled into my head.
“You don’t know because it’s fucking horseshit. It was your car andyour loan. It was him driving, we know that, and he took aim at the FDR quite deliberately. We don’t know why, but we reckon you do. You could be looking at a charge sheet that runs into several pages.”
A charge sheet saying what? Owning a car, borrowing money? But I didn’t own the car, hadn’t borrowed the money.
“Did you take out insurance on the car?” Manelli asked.
“Why would I insure a car that I don’t own?”
“Wiseguy. There’s fifteen dead and a lot more injured. There’s going to be plenty of people fishing for plenty of money.”
“My money’s gone, Manelli,” I said. “And I don’t think that fifty thousand would have done much good, anyway. The fishhooks will be dangling over Lake Carlson, not my wretched pond.”
“You’re the attorney, Border.” Manelli said. “But I reckon before long there’ll be a hundred of your kind taking a long, hard look at this pool of shit.”
He was right; the rods would be primed for a legal fishing frenzy.
“Am I under arrest?” I asked.
“No, but I wouldn’t bet on that state of affairs lasting, and anyway, we have a few more questions for you.”
“I have to get to work now,” I said, standing up. “Please leave. You know where I am if you need me. I won’t be running anywhere.”
“So you still maintain that the car wasn’t yours?” He affected incredulity at my brazen denial in the face of his bits of paper.
“I will say it again, in case I wasn’t clear the first time around. That wasn’t, isn’t, my car.” I indicated that I wanted them off my couch and out of my apartment.
“We will find out what happened, with or without your help, and then we’ll nail you,” said Manelli.
“I hope you do find out what happened,” I said. “Because I’ve already been nailed. I’ve been robbed of fifty thousand dollars. That fact seems to have become obscured in this conversation.”
“Sure, Mr. Border,” said Manelli. “We’ll get a twenty-man team on it right away.” He and his companion walked to the door. I watched them stride down the hallway toward the elevator. I could hear the uniformed cop’s handcuffs, holster, and club squeak and clack as he went.
I realized that more than just my client list was hanging by a thread now. Everything was at stake.
Shuffling back into the living room, I pulled up the window blinds. The rain swept past in gusts. Four floors below, I could see a police car, presumably Manelli’s, parked a little ways down along the sidewalk. Fifty yards the other way was another car, an anonymous sedan. A man leaned against it, seemingly oblivious to the rain swirling around him. He was bald, the rain battering his smooth wet pate. If he was a cop, he was plainclothes: A gray sodden suit hung loosely from his stick-insect body.
Was it my imagination? He seemed to look up at me.
Suddenly, he pushed himself out of his slouch against the car, opened the door, and drove off at high speed. A moment later, Manelli and his partner came out and got in their car and cruised away in the other direction.
ELEVEN
Think. I needed to think. Space for thinking: my apartment. Silence for thinking? No. A sounding board. Carol? Not yet. Ernie Monks? Nobody from the office; there’d be enough buzzing from them soon enough. Who then?
The message light winked on the phone. My finger hovered over the “play” button.
“I’ve called three times now and you haven’t given me the courtesy of a . . .” Mother. Talk about timing.
I was her joy, I was her sorrow. I was her lifeboat when the ship that was my father went down. I was her despair when I deserted her for New York. I was the empty chair at the dining table of her Cotswold cottage. I was the treacherous gap. I’d be back, I’d told her. Later. A traitor’s later.
I hit “delete” and stroked the bump th
at would speed dial me to the center of the Cotswolds. It would be 4:00P.M.there: teatime, in the garden if it was fine, our dog Chuff standing sentinel over a Victoria Sponge cake, certain of the wedge that would be his reward.
The familiar English tone rang about ten times and I was near to giving up—of course she didn’t have an answering machine—when there was a click and the sound of someone out of breath.
“Mrs. Elaine Border speaking.”
“Hi, it’s me,” I said.
There were a few more wheezy breaths.
“Findlay? I’m sorry I took so long to come to the phone, but I was in the garden and one of those infernal jets whizzed overhead as the telephone rang. They should come up with silencers for those things.”
“What time is it there?” she asked.
“Eleven,” I said.
“Morning or evening?” She could never work it out.
“Elevenses eleven.”
She laughed.
“There’s something I want to talk to you about,” I said.
“You’re coming home. A New England lass in tow. A summer wedding. How marvelous.” Her laughter was brittle, suggesting she already knew there was bad news on the way. She’d had more than her fair share of bad news, my mother.
“A friend of mine killed himself, and fifteen others, in a car that the police now say I owned.”
Silence.
“Are you there?” I asked.
“Yes, Findlay.” Her voice was empty; she was listening to the impact of a rocket launched into her otherwise tranquil rural idyll.
“There was something in theTelegraphabout an accident in New York,” she managed.
“If it looked serious then that would be the one,” I said. “It was in all the papers and all over the TV here.” A small window on the carnage would have opened into her Cotswold retreat, as unreal as famine in Africa or a plane crash in central China.
“My God. I don’t know what to say.”
“Nor do I. And Charles Mendip will be in the office by now, expecting me to say something.”
“Surely Charles won’t believe it was your car. He’ll see them off.” Gallant Charles, champion of the mop-up and cover-up, smoothingover the barbed and dangerous bones of my father. Wrapping his capacious arms around the sorry remnants of the Borders.
“Yesterday,” I said, “Charles sanctioned the rape of my client base. He pulled me off the merger too.” My mother didn’t really understand the merger, but I knew that she had been indiscreet enough to boast of my pivotal role in it.
“Charles did that?”The voice of outrage that my mother was so practiced at. That’s why I’d called her. It was good to hear unfeigned, unalloyed indignation at my predicament.
“His mouthpiece was Sheldon Keenes,” I said. I could hear the audience hiss at the villain.
She was playing her role to perfection.
“You don’t believe that Charles would really do that?” she asked at last.
“I don’t want to believe it, Mum.”
“Have you been charged with anything?” she asked.
“No.” But that wasn’t the point—wind the tape forward and the position would be different. Failing to have insurance? Allowing a cokehead in the cockpit? Leaving the scene? Could any of that be extrapolated into manslaughter, murder even? My knowledge of US law was pretty much confined to the securities industries.
“I will be charged with something,” I said. “I can count on it. I need a good attorney right away.”
“Can I send you some money?” Bless her. She’d have in mind the sort of sum to draft a basic will. She never believed my father when he told her his hourly rate. She’d throw her head back, waves of brown hair shaking with her laughter. Her naïveté was enchanting, and my father rarely disabused even the most improbable of her assumptions.
But she wasn’t stupid or weak. She had merely wanted to believe the best of everyone. Five years earlier her worldview had undergone the severest of tests, and her neck was now unbending, the hair no longer brown. Nevertheless an ember of optimism still glowed feebly, deep inside her.
“Clay & Westminster will have to pay.” The certainty in my voice was counterfeit. “I’ll choose the firm. They’ll pay.”
“Are you sure?” She’d detected the bravura; she was testing it.
“No.” But that had to be the objective: Get bankrolled, keep control—normally mutually exclusive aims.
“Why do they think you own the car?”
“Registration documents in my name. A loan too. Good forgeries by the looks of it. Christ knows how he did it.”
“But . . .” She was struggling with the monstrous injustice done to her child; there had to be a mistake. “They have tests, don’t they? Chemicals, people who can detect forgeries, that kind of thing. I’ve read about it. Surely, in America . . .”
“Time, Mother,” I interrupted. “My career could be reduced to rubble before they unravel what JJ has done. I could be up to my neck in litigation, bankrupted, unemployable.”
“That’s rather gloomy, isn’t it?”
That’s right, Mum. Optimism. Fan those flames. However unrealistic, fan them. Just like you did before. It kept us going until the truth was an undeniable rash that covered our whole bodies, but by then I’d hardened myself. Against my father, against the world. And now the intervening five years had made me complacent, blunted my edge. I needed to reclaim that edge.
“You could come home,” my mother said.
“I don’t think so, Mum.” For the second time in as many days the thought of going back to England wasn’t repugnant to me. Pubs, the BBC, Wimbledon. Rose-tinted stuff. But the smell would cross the Atlantic with me, cling to my clothes. The Law Society would smell it and strike me off.
“I think the only place to sort this out is in New York,” I said. “If I came back I would be damaged goods.”
“Do you have any friends there?” she asked. “In New York, I mean. The sort of person you could confide in and depend on? I know so little of your life, your circle, your interests outside work.”
What could I say? I had just slept with a friend, her fragrance still clung to me—but I didn’t know what it really meant, its significance or otherwise hadn’t had time to form a meaningful shape.
The rest of my friends were just points of acquaintance; they hardly formed a circle. In my quest for partnership I had foregone a life and now it looked like the partnership was shot to hell too.
“I have a few friends,” I said. “It remains to be seen how fair-weather they turn out to be.”
“I think you’re very alone, and I think you should come home.”
“I need to stay here.” Here was the only place I could be innocent; everywhere else I was guilty, condemned by my flight.
My mother was quiet for a while. “You could tell me, you know,” she said gently.
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me that youdidbuy that car. In a fit of madness or something. You could tell me and I would bite my tongue. It would have been an act of supreme folly and even sillier to let your friend have a go at the wheel. But I wouldn’t say so. Well, not in so many words.”
“I didn’t buy the car, still less let JJ drive it. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“And you’re still in the wrong place.” Beside her in the garden, turning compost or deadheading rose bushes, would be the only right place as far as she was concerned.
“Mum, please.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I should be glad, I suppose, that you rang me and told me.”
“Of course I’d tell you. I may take my time, but I tell you everything.” Except for one thing. If she knewthatabout my father, it would kill her.
“Do you want me to speak to Charles Mendip?” she said. “Your father always said he respected me.”
“No Mum,” I said gently. “I just wanted you to know what was happening, not hear it from another source. I won’t say don’t worry, that
would be dumb, but I don’t want you to get in a state.” Like before, Mum. Don’t visit that place again.
“I haven’t taken those little pills for three years now,” she said. I sensed the swell of pride, tinged by a fear of relapse.
“Don’t start again, for Christ’s sake.” Those little pills were cannon balls; artillery that didn’t discriminate which brain cells were obliterated.
“Fin.” Cracks were showing in the voice. “I won’t be a passive onlooker at another catastrophe in our much reduced family. Ineedto help if I can.”
“You weren’t passive last time, Mum.”
“I wasn’t in my right mind then.”
Sometimes one needed to be in the wrong mind to do the right thing. Another of Ernie’s epigrams.
“We don’t have to sit back and take this, you know,” she said, it was her umbrella-wielding voice, the one she used for obdurate officialdom. “We don’t deserve this. I’m sure it will be all right.”
That’s why I called you, Mum. To hear just that: emphatic, heartfelt, but utterly irrational optimism.
TWELVE
No e-mails to speak of,” Paula declared, as I bounced into my office at around noon. The bounce was a manifestation of the irrational optimism that I would need to get through the day.
It was a dead cat bounce.
“Keenes took most of the mail,” Paula continued. “He left a few flyers for seminars and courses, said you might like to choose a few, highlighted the ones he was speaking at. Keep your hand in, he said. That some Brit expression? Anyway, I didn’t tell him to stick them up his ass, but I think he got the message. A new messenger came by and took your files. His name’s Kevin, a real dweeb. You got no meetings, no conference calls. Charles Mendip’s in town. His secretary told me he would be seeing you later, but didn’t give a time. HisLondonsecretary, for Christ’s sake. The nerve. A guy called Myers from Myers Myerling called to say that hedidn’tneed to speak to you and that he’d be sending draft statements direct to Keenes and Mendip. So, I guess that means that you can join me for solitaire on the PC for the rest of the day. Peachy. I hope you’re not feeling sorry for yourself, counselor. You know how I feel about that kind of thing.”
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