Better Than This (25 page)

Ten minutes later we were heading towards the bridge. I drove as fast as I dared without running the risk of getting stopped by the traffic cops on the way out to San Leandro. On the way I had a little time to think ahead and I parked several blocks away from Hoffman’s apartment building. Marcus shot me a puzzled look.

“Why are we stopping here?”

I had my reasons, but I didn’t give them. Instead I said something about not wanting to have to pay those hoodlums a hundred bucks not to steal my car.

We passed plenty of people on the way to the building but nobody paid us any special attention. Marcus’s dress code fitted right in with the area, and I didn’t look too out of place in black jeans and a white polo shirt. When we reached the corner I saw the steps where Pepe and the other two Latino kids had lounged on our previous visit were empty. As we entered the building I checked to see if anyone had noticed us, but it appeared that nobody had. When we reached the second floor I knocked several times, but there was no answer. Along the hall a door opened a crack, and then closed again. I supposed it was the nosy girl neighbour we’d seen before but I didn’t think she could have got more than a glimpse at us, and it was gloomy on the landing. I tried the door one more time, then I took out a Swiss Army Knife and opened the biggest blade. Marcus stared at it.

“I keep it in the car,” I said casually. “I’ve always thought it would be useful one day.”

“You’re going to break in?” he said.

“Unless you want to do it?”

He didn’t answer, so I went ahead and worked the blade into the space between the doorjamb and the door, then slid it down to the lock. I don’t know what I expected to happen, except that in the movies it looked easy. But nothing happened except that the blade met solid resistance. I worked away at it for several minutes while Marcus looked on wearing a disapproving frown, until finally I acknowledged that it wasn’t going to work. I opened up all the tools on the knife, and there was one that was a long spike of steel. I’d often wondered what it was for. Whatever its real purpose, it worked well as a lock pick. It took me fifteen seconds of wiggling and fiddling to trip the lock, and a moment later we were inside the apartment. I closed the door quietly behind us.

I think by then Marcus had figured out what I was thinking, and the moment we were inside we both knew I was right.

“Christ!”

He covered his mouth and nose with his sleeve, and I did the same. The weather had been warm over the past few days, and the smell of disease and death was thick in the air. Out on the landing the sulphurous stench of animal urine mingled with the heavier cloying smells of cooking, not that I ever wanted to taste whatever ingredients combined to produce such a stink, but inside the apartment the air was steadily putrefying. I breathed through my mouth as we went along the passage and paused at the bedroom door. The window that opened onto the alley was open a little, enough to let in the flies that had been attracted to the corpse. Perhaps a dozen of them, big fat and black, took to the air and buzzed lazily. One of them smacked drunkenly into my face and careered off as I slapped at it in disgusted horror.

Hoffman lay face up on the bed, his face caved in, a brown stain on the bedspread and rug which I assumed was some bloody mess he’d coughed up. The medicine bottle he’d freely glugged from lay on its side on the floor in the corner where I suppose it must have rolled. The flies we’d briefly disturbed returned to their feast and one walked across an open eye. Something tiny wriggled near the corner of his open mouth and I looked away and stepping back pulled the door to.

I took a deep breath. Marcus looked white. We all know that we’re going to die some day, and all we can hope for is that when we do we’ve lived a long and satisfying life and that we haven’t caused too much misery to others along the way. To be faced with what we will become, just rotting meat to feed the maggots and foul the air is an unpalatable truth.

Marcus started towards the living room and I went after him. I

went into the kitchen and repeatedly rinsed out a cup. I wouldn’t drink from it until I was certain I had sluiced it thoroughly as if I feared death was a communicable disease. When I returned to the living room Marcus was just about to pick up the phone.

“What are you doing?”

“Calling an ambulance.”

I went over and disconnected the line and then took the receiver off him and replaced it. “He doesn’t need an ambulance.”

“We have to tell someone,” Marcus protested. I looked around at all the equipment in the room and then we stared at each other. He knew what I was thinking.

“Why?” I said.

“Dead?” Sally echoed when I told her that night about Hoffman. “Oh that’s terrible. How?”

“His cancer I guess.”

I tossed a salad while Sally paused in the act of serving broiled chicken stuffed with goat’s cheese. She looked at the food on the table, the open bottle of wine.

“It doesn’t seem right somehow does it? I know it’s silly. People are dying all the time, but still…”

I knew what she meant. I assumed Brinkman would have become worried about his client and by then Hoffman would have been discovered. He was probably lying in cold storage somewhere, a hollowed cadaver with a toe tag, and we were about to sit down and eat. The endless rhythm of life. Babies are born, people die and for the living the world turns just the same. We remain consumed with the trivia of our existence. The lawn still needs mowing, the car washing, and so on and so on. When we’re gone we leave an empty space and nobody even notices. Unless we have children to carry our genes forward into new generations. Is that what it’s all about I wondered?

“Nick?” Sally said, giving me a strange look.

“I was just thinking about what you said.” I shrugged and carried on with what I was doing. It was only then that Sally started thinking about the implications of Hoffman’s demise for Carpe Diem.

“Wait a second, you were signing the contract this morning…”

“Didn’t happen,” I completed the thought. “He’d been dead a day or two. Apparently.”

“What does that mean?” Sally asked. She hadn’t begun eating yet, though a combination of hunger and the need to do something distracting made me take a bite of the chicken. It was good.

“I guess the trust Hoffman’s lawyer set up owns the program now. Which Brinkman administers.”

“So, as far as Carpe Diem’s concerned nothing’s changed,” Sally reasoned, relief creeping into her voice.

“In theory.” I forked more chicken into my mouth.

“You don’t sound sure.”

That’s because I’m not.” I told her about the conversation that took place in Brinkman’s office while we were waiting for Hoffman to show up. “He’d been digging around for information about us. And I didn’t like what he was inferring about Hoffman’s state of mind.”

“What are you saying?”

“I don’t trust him, Sally. Think about it. Here’s a lawyer in a downtown firm who has a client who wants to give away a fortune, which is what this amounts to. That program is worth a lot of money, and Brinkman knows it. What Hoffman had planned goes against Brinkman’s natural instinct.”

“But surely he has to do what Hoffman wanted. Won’t that be in the terms of the trust?”

“I don’t know exactly what the trust stipulates, but my guess is that it lays out Hoffman’s intent, not the mechanics. I don’t think there will be anything in there that requires Brinkman to use Carpe Diem, for example. That part was a separate contract.”

“You mean he could use another agency? But why would he want to do that?”

I stopped eating and put down my knife and fork. I wanted to explain this carefully because it was important that Sally go along with my reasoning. “What if he wanted to change the whole deal? Maybe he decided to claim that Hoffman was mentally unfit to reach the kind of decisions he was making. He might want to try to alter the terms of the trust, and he might decide it was a good idea to appoint himself in some kind of consulting role to work with the agency. I don’t know. I’m just saying that I think Brinkman never liked this deal in the first place, but now that Hoffman is dead he’ll try to find a way to change it so that he benefits in some way. In which case it’s almost certain he’ll find an excuse to cut Carpe Diem out. He’ll probably claim we were not the best choice. That we’re financially unstable. He’ll think of something so he can appoint people who don’t have any preconceived notions about Hoffman’s original intent. That way he has more control, and nobody to dispute whatever he does.”

I had figured all of this out between leaving Brinkman’s office and driving back to the city from San Leandro. Much of it out loud with Marcus, so I’d had practice as well as time to hone my rationale. I’d been persuasive enough to get Marcus to agree not to say anything to anybody until the morning at least, though he’d acceded only reluctantly in the end. The hard part with Sally was coming, and I still hadn’t figured out a way to tell her what so far I had left out.

She considered what I’d said. I started eating again, though she still hadn’t touched either her meal or the glass of wine she’d allowed herself. Her brow was creased as she thought through what I’d said.

“Surely if Brinkman did try to do any of these things, you could challenge him in court,” she said at length.

“Possibly,” I said, sounding patently unconvinced. “But he’s a lawyer, Sally. He knows what he’s doing. I don’t even know what the terms of the trust state for sure, and maybe nobody else does. Who’s to say he wouldn’t just alter it and nobody would be the wiser.”

Now it was Sally’s turn to be sceptical. “Isn’t that being slightly paranoid? I know how important that contract is to you, but you’re making Brinkman sound like some kind of crooked smalltime attorney.”

“Just because a guy has a downtown office and wears a thousand-dollar suit doesn’t automatically mean he’s honest.

The biggest crooks of all are lawyers, they just use words to steal money instead of guns. And a lot less of them get caught.”

I set down my cutlery, and refilled my wine glass. “The chicken was great.”

Sally looked at her own untouched plate then back at mine. “You’re taking all this very calmly,” she remarked, sounding puzzled.

“Am I?”

“Yes. If you’re so concerned that Brinkman might try something that cuts you out, how come you can sit there and talk it over this way?”

I avoided her eye. “You can see it’s a possibility?”

She didn’t answer right away and when she did she sounded suspicious. “Is there something I don’t know? What did Brinkman say when you found out Hoffman was dead anyway?”

“He didn’t say anything.”

“Nothing?”

“I mean I haven’t spoken to him since then.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Brinkman doesn’t even know that we’re aware that Hoffman died,” I said. “When he didn’t turn up for our meeting Marcus and I left. We were supposed to go back later but I called and left a message to say that something had come up and we’d be in touch in the morning.”

Sally appeared baffled. “But I assumed it was Brinkman that told you. If it wasn’t him, then how did you know… ?”

That Hoffman was dead? We went to his apartment. It was Marcus and I who found him.”

“But didn’t you tell Brinkman after you reported it? I don’t understand, Nick. What are you trying to tell me?”

“I’m saying that we found Hoffman dead, and we thought the best thing to do was not let anyone know we’d been to his apartment.”

“You mean you found him and you left again… But how did you get inside if he was dead? Nick, what did you do?” Sally stared at me. “For God’s sake, will you please tell me what’s going on?”

I took a breath, and I related how we’d driven over to San Leandro and how we’d broken into Hoffman’s apartment when nobody answered the door. “I thought he might be hurt and couldn’t come to the door or something.”

“But he was dead?”

“Yes. And the reason we didn’t call the authorities is because we had just been talking to Brinkman. You have to understand, Sally. I don’t trust him. I knew if we didn’t do something he would find a way not to sign the agreement. Without this deal Carpe Diem is finished. The bank isn’t going to wait around while Brinkman ties us up in legal knots and takes his time. I couldn’t take that chance.”

Sally stared at me as all this sunk in, then she said, “What did you do, Nick?”

I took a deep breath. “We took the program. Marcus copied it onto a disc and erased the original off the hard-drive on Hoffman’s computer.”

Her eyes widened. “You stole it?”

“No.” I shook my head. “We took it into safe keeping.”

“Please, at least have the honesty to call it what it is. You stole it, Nick.”

“No,” I insisted. “Hoffman wanted his program on the net, and he wanted us to make sure people knew about it. He didn’t care about money, all he cared about was getting his revenge on Morgan. But do you honestly believe Brinkman is going to think the same way? There isn’t a chance. You weren’t there today, you didn’t see the way he was talking, how he’d figured out that Morgan was expecting to make sales of a hundred and fifty million dollars or more from the Spectrum program. There’s no way he’s going to let an opportunity like this slip by without trying to figure a way of making money from it.”

“But you don’t even know that any of that is true. You have no idea what Brinkman will do.”

“But what if I’m right? At least if I have the program we have some negotiating power.”

“And what if Brinkman insists you hand it over? If the trust is the legal owner he’s entitled to do that isn’t he?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I haven’t thought that through yet.”

“Don’t you see, even if you’re completely right about Brinkman, it doesn’t matter. There’s nothing you can do. You can’t just go ahead without a contract. The bank won’t give you the finance you need without it. And Brinkman will find out anyway. He’ll stop you. You could go to jail.”

She was right. Marcus had come up with the same arguments. But even so I knew we weren’t completely lost. “So long as we have the program, we have the upper hand,” I said. “We can negotiate. You know what they say. Possession is nine tenths of the law.”