“Negro lady.” Eddie could have put it much more crudely. His racism was no secret to anyone, but maybe he’d learned over the years that it wasn’t socially acceptable, not even around his old buddies. Or maybe he didn’t want to antagonize Nick at the moment.
“I didn’t know the Fenwick police had any.”
“I didn’t either.”
A long silence in which Nick could hear the ticking of the clock. A silver clock, engraved FENWICK CITIZEN OF THE YEAR, awarded to him three years ago. When everything was going great. “What’d she want?”
“What do you think? She wanted to ask about Stadler.”
“What about Stadler?”
“You know, what you’d expect. Did he make any threats, whatever.”
Eddie was being evasive, and Nick didn’t like it. Something didn’t sit right. “Why was she talking to you?”
“Hey, man, I’m the security director, remember?”
“No. There has to be some more specific reason she went to talk to you. What are you leaving out, Eddie?”
“Leaving out? I’m leaving nothing out, buddy. I mean, look, she knew I asked some guys on the job about Stadler.”
So that was it. By doing his background check on Stadler, he’d in effect tipped his hand to the police. “Shit.”
“Come on. I never talked to the guy.”
“No,” Nick said, one hand cupping his chin. “You call the cops, asking about some downsized employee who slaughtered your boss’s dog, then the guy turns up dead a couple days later. This doesn’t look good.”
Eddie shook his head, rolling his eyes in contempt. “Like this is, what, the Mafia or something? Get real. The guy goes off the deep end, doing sick shit, matter of time before he pisses off the wrong guy.”
“Yeah.”
“In the dog pound, I mean, come on. Look, they got nothing tying Stadler to me—or to you.”
“Then what was she asking about?”
“Ah, she wanted to know if you’d ever talked to Stadler, had any contact with the guy. Told her you probably didn’t even know who the guy was. Pretty much true.”
Nick inhaled slowly, tried to calm himself, held his breath. “And if I did? What’s the assumption here, that I went after the guy, killed him?” Nick heard the aggrieved tone in his own voice, as if he were actually starting to believe himself innocent.
“Nah, she’s just looking for scraps. Anyway, don’t worry, I handled her fine. Believe me, she left knowing she’s barking up the wrong tree.”
“How do you know?”
“I can tell, come on. Get serious here, Nick. The CEO of Stratton murdered one of his employees? I don’t think so. No one’s going to believe that for a second.”
Nick was silent for a long while. “I hope so.”
“I just wanted to keep you in the loop. In case she comes to talk to you.”
Nick, his chest tightening, said, “She said she was going to?”
“No, but she might. Wouldn’t surprise me.”
“I’d never even heard the name,” Nick said. “Right? You tell her otherwise?”
“Exactly. Told her you’re a busy guy, I do my job, you don’t get involved.”
“Right.”
“So you figured maybe some downsized employee went wacko, killed your dog, but you called the cops, figured they’d handle it, you had no idea who it mighta been.”
“Right.”
“Guy turns up dead, mighta been the same guy, mighta been different, you have no idea. Like that.”
Nick nodded, rehearsing the answer in his mind, turning it over and over, poking at the soft spots. “There’s nothing tying me to this thing?” he said after a few moments.
A long silence. Eddie replied with a kind of smoldering indignation. “I did my job, Nick, you clear?”
“I don’t doubt it. I’m asking you to think like a cop. Like a homicide cop.”
“That’s how I think, man. Like a cop.”
“No prints, nothing like that, on the…body? Fibers, DNA, whatever?”
“Nick, I told you, we’re not going to talk about this.”
“We are now. I want to know.”
“The body was clean, Nick,” Eddie said. “Okay? Clean as a whistle. Clean as I could get it in the time we had.”
“What about the gun?”
“What about it?”
“What’d you do with it? You don’t still have it, do you?”
“Like I’m a stupid fuck? Come on, man.”
“Then where is it?”
Eddie let out a puff of air, made a sound like pah. “Bottom of the river, you really want to know.” Fenwick, like so many towns in Michigan, was built on the shores of one of the many waterways leading into Lake Michigan.
“Shell casings too?”
“Yup.”
“And if it turns up?”
“You realize how unlikely that is?”
“I’m saying.”
“Even if they do find it, they got no way to connect it to me.”
“Why not? It’s your gun.”
“It’s a goddamned drop gun, Nick.”
“A what?”
“A throw-down. A piece I picked up at a scene in GR. Some crack dealer, who the hell knows where he got it? Point is, there’s no record anywhere. No paperwork, no purchase permit, nothing. Clean.”
Nick had heard of cops picking up guns they found at crime scenes, keeping them, but he knew you weren’t supposed to do that, and it made him nervous to hear Eddie admit to it. If he did that, what else did he do?
“You sure?” Nick said.
“Sure as shit.”
“What about the security cameras?”
Eddie nodded. “Hey, I’m a pro, right? Took care of that too.”
“How?”
“Why do you need to know?”
“I need to know. My own fucking security cameras recorded me killing the guy.”
Eddie closed his eyes, shook his head in irritation. “I reformatted the hard drive on the digital video recorder. That night’s gone. Never happened. System started recording next day—makes sense, right? Since we just put it in the day before.”
“Not a trace?”
“Nada. Hey, don’t worry about it. The lady comes to talk to you, you cooperate, tell her everything you know, which is a big fat zero, right?” Eddie gave his dry cackle.
“Right. I know she talked to you?”
Eddie shrugged. “Play it either way. Let’s say, no, I didn’t get around to it. Got nothing to do with you, right?”
“Right.”
Eddie got up. “Nothing to worry about, man. Get some sleep. You look like shit.”
“Thanks.” Nick got up, to walk Eddie out, then thought of something. “Eddie,” he said. “That night. You said it was your gun, tied everything to you, right? That’s why I didn’t have a choice.”
Eddie’s eyes were dead. “Yeah?”
“Now you tell me the gun was clean. No connection to you at all. I don’t get it.”
A long silence.
“Can’t take chances, Nicky,” Eddie finally said. “Never take chances.”
Nick walked Eddie out of his study, heard footfalls on the carpeting. Saw a jeans-clad leg, a sneaker, disappear up the stairs.
Lucas.
Just getting home? Was it possible that he’d overheard their conversation? Nah, he’d have had to have stood outside the study door, listening. Lucas didn’t do that, the main reason being that he had no interest in what his dad was up to.
Still.
Nick wondered, a tiny wriggle of worry.
35
Driving to work the next morning, Nick was in a foul mood. The news that a homicide detective was poking around the corporation had sent him spiraling into a tense, sleepless night. He thrashed around in the big bed, got up repeatedly, obsessed about that night.
What Happened That Night—that was how he thought of it now. The memory had receded to attenuated, kaleidoscopic images: Stadler’
s leering face, the gunfire, the body sprawled on the ground, Eddie’s face, carrying the body wrapped in black trash bags.
He was out of pills, which was just as well; any more of them, he figured, and he was headed for the Betty Ford clinic. He tried to think about work stuff, anything but that night. But that just meant the board meeting in the morning. Board meetings always made him tense, but this time he knew that the shit was about to rain down.
On the way into work he stopped at a light next to a gleaming silver S Class Mercedes. He turned to admire it and saw that the driver was Stratton’s VP of sales, Ken Coleman. Nick rolled down his passenger’s side window, tapped on his horn until he got Coleman’s attention. When Coleman—forty-one, a good seventy pounds overweight, a bad hairpiece—rolled down his window, his face lit up.
“Hey, Nick! Looking pretty slick.”
“Board meeting. New car, Kenny?”
Coleman’s grin got even wider. “Got it yesterday. You like?”
“Must list for a hundred grand, right?”
Coleman, always hyper, nodded fast, up and down and up and down like some bobble-head doll. “Over. Fully loaded. Like, AMG sports package and, I mean, heated steering wheel, you know?” The top sales guys at Stratton made more than Nick did. He didn’t resent it; someone had to do the soul-destroying shit they did.
The light turned green, but Nick didn’t move. “Buy or lease?” he asked.
“Well, lease. I always lease, you know?”
“Good. Because it’s going back to the dealer.”
Coleman cocked his bobble head, a movement like a terrier, almost comic. “What?”
Behind him, someone honked a horn. Nick ignored it. “We laid off five thousand workers, Ken. Half the company. To cut costs, save Stratton. Pretty much wiped out the town. So I don’t want a member of my executive management team driving around town in a fucking hundred-thousand-dollar Mercedes, understand?”
Coleman stared in disbelief.
Nick went on, “You take that back to the dealership by close of business today and tell ’em you want a fucking Subaru or something. But I don’t want to see you behind that heated steering wheel again, you understand?”
Nick gunned the engine and took off.
The five members of the board of directors of the Stratton Corporation, and their guests, were gathered in the anteroom to the boardroom. Coffee was being served from vacuum carafes, and not the institutional food-service blend that was served in the Stratton employee cafeteria, either. It was brewed from Sulawesi Peaberry beans fresh-roasted by Town Grounds, Fenwick’s best coffee place. Todd Muldaur had complained about the coffee at the first board meeting after the buyout, poked fun at the Bunn-O-Matic. Nick thought Todd was being ridiculous, but he ordered the change. That, and little cold bottles of Evian water, melon slices, raspberries and strawberries, fancy pastries trucked in from a famous bakery in Ann Arbor.
Todd Muldaur, in another of his expensive suits, was at the tail end of a joke when Nick arrived, holding forth to Scott, the other guy from Fairfield Partners, Davis Eilers, and someone Nick had never seen before. “I told him the best way to see Fenwick is in your rearview mirror,” Todd was saying. Eilers and the other guy laughed raucously. Scott, who’d noticed Nick’s approach, just smiled politely.
Davis Eilers was the other deal partner, a guy who had a lot of operational experience. He’d done his time at McKinsey like Todd and Scott, only he’d played football at Dartmouth, not Yale. He later ran a number of companies, sort of a CEO-for-hire.
Todd turned, saw Nick. “There he is.” He tipped his cup at Nick. “Great coffee!” he said expansively and gave a wink. “Sorry to miss you last night. Busy being a dad, huh?”
Nick shook Todd’s hand, then Scott’s, then Eilers’s. “Yeah, couldn’t get out of it. My daughter’s school play, you know, and given—”
“Hey, you got your priorities straight,” Todd said with an excess of sincerity. “I respect that.”
Nick wanted to toss the cup of hot Sulawesi Peaberry in the guy’s face, but he just looked straight in Todd’s too-blue eyes and smiled appreciatively.
“Nick, I want you to meet our new board member, Dan Finegold.” A tall, handsome guy, athletic-looking. A thatch of dark brown hair starting to silver over. What was it with Fairfield Equity Partners? It was a fucking frat.
Dan Finegold’s handshake was a crusher.
“Don’t tell me Yale football too,” Nick said cordially. Thinking: Our new board member? Like, were they going to tell me? Just spring it on me?
“Yale baseball, actually,” said Todd, clapping both men on their shoulders, bringing them together. “Dan was a legendary pitcher.”
“Legendary, my ass,” said Finegold.
“Hey, man, you were,” Todd said. He looked at Nick. “Dan’s got twenty years’ experience in the office-supply space, with all the scar tissue. I’m sure you know Office-Source—that was his baby. When Willard bought it, he grabbed Dan for Fairfield.”
“You like Boston?” Nick asked. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. He couldn’t say what he was really thinking, which was: Why are you here, and who invited you onto the board, and what’s really going on here? Fairfield had the right to put whomever they wanted on the board, but it wasn’t exactly cool for them to just show up with a new board member in tow. They hadn’t done it before. It wasn’t a good precedent, or maybe that was the point.
“It’s great. Especially for a foodie like me. Lot of happening restaurants in Boston these days.”
“Dan’s part owner of an artisanal brewery in upstate New York,” said Todd. “They make the best Belgian beer outside of Belgium. Abbey ale, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Welcome to the board,” Nick said. “I’m sure your expertise in Belgian beer’s going to come in handy.” Something about Belgian beer and Abbey ale sounded familiar, but he couldn’t place it.
Todd took Nick by the elbow as they walked to the boardroom. He spoke in a low voice. “Bummer about Atlas McKenzie.”
“Huh?”
“Scott told me last night.”
“What are you talking about?”
Todd gave him a quick, curious glance. “The deal,” he said under his breath. “How it fell through.”
“What?” What the hell was he talking about? The Atlas McKenzie deal was all but inked. This made no sense!
“Don’t worry, it’s not going to come up this morning. But still, a major bummer, huh?” In a louder voice, he called out, “Mrs. Devries!”
Todd turned away and strode up to Dorothy Devries, who had just entered the boardroom. Todd clasped her small hand in both of his large ones and waited until she turned her cheek toward him before he kissed it.
Dorothy was wearing a Nancy Reagan burgundy pants suit with white piping around the lapels. Her white hair was a perfect cumulus cloud with just a hint of blue rinse in it, which brought out the steely blue of her eyes. Fairfield Partners had left Dorothy Stratton Devries a small piece of the company and a seat on the board, which was a condition of hers that Willard Osgood had no quibble with. It looked good to have the founder’s family still connected to Stratton. It told the world that Fairfield still respected the old ways. Of course, Dorothy had no power. She was there for window dressing, mostly. Fairfield owned ninety percent of Stratton, controlled the board, ran the show. Dorothy, a sharp cookie, understood that, but she also understood that, outside the boardroom at least, she still possessed some moral authority.
Her dad, Harold Stratton, had been a machinist for the Wabash Railroad, a tinsmith’s apprentice, a steeplejack. He worked as a machinist at Steelcase, in Grand Rapids, before he started his own company with money provided by his rich father-in-law. His big innovation had been to develop a better roller suspension for metal file cabinets—progressive roller bearings in a suspension-file drawer. His only son had died in childhood, leaving Dorothy, but women didn’t run companies in those days, so eventually he turned
it over to Dorothy’s husband, Milton Devries. She’d spent her later years in her big, dark mansion in East Fenwick as the town matriarch, a social arbiter as fearsome as only a small-town society queen can be. She was on every board in town, chairwoman of most of them. Even though she liked Nick, and made him the CEO, she still looked down on him as being from a lower social class. Nick’s dad, after all, had worked on the shop floor. Never mind that Dorothy was but one generation away from having machinist’s grease on her own fingers.
Nick, reeling from Todd’s casual revelation, saw Scott sitting down at his customary place at the oval mahogany board table. As Nick approached him, put a hand on his shoulder, he heard Todd saying, “Dorothy, I’d like you to meet Dan Finegold.”
“Hey,” Nick whispered, standing immediately behind Scott, “what’s this about Atlas McKenzie?”
Scott craned his neck around, eyes wide. “Yeah, I just got the call on my cell at dinner last night—Todd happened to be there, you know…” His voice trailed off. Nick remained silent. Scott went on: “They went with Steelcase—you know, that joint venture Steelcase has with Gale and Wentworth—”
“They called you?”
“I guess I was on Hardwick’s speed-dial, all those negotiations at the end—”
“You get bad news, you tell me first, understand?”
Nick could see Scott’s pale face flush instantly. “I—of course, Nick, it was just that Todd was right there, you know, and—”
“We’ll talk later,” Nick said, giving Scott a shoulder squeeze too hard to be merely companionable.
He heard Dorothy Devries’s brittle laugh from across the room, and he took his place at the head of the table.
The Stratton boardroom was the most conservative place in the headquarters—the immense mahogany table with places for fifteen, even though there hadn’t been fifteen board members since the takeover; the top-of-the-line black leather Stratton Symbiosis chairs, the slim monitors at each place that could be raised and lowered with the touch of a button. It looked like a boardroom in any big corporation in the world.
Nick cleared his throat, looked around at the board, and knew he was not among friends anymore. “Well, why don’t we get started with the CFO’s report?” he said.
Company Man Page 16