Company Man (14 page)

Scott nodded sagely, chewing his lower lip, twirling a few strands of his hair behind his right ear. “I get what you're saying, and I think I've got some interesting ideas.”

“What I like to hear. I mean, hell, there's no reason for you to have all your components made in the U.S. when you can get 'em at half the price from China, you know?”

“Actually,” Nick said, “we've considered and rejected that, Todd, because—”

Scott broke in, “I think it's worth taking up again.”

Nick gave him a black look.

“I knew I could count on you guys. Well, who's up for dessert? Let me guess—the dessert trend that swept Manhattan in 1998 has finally made it to Fenwick: molten chocolate cake?”

 

After they said goodbye to Todd and watched him drive away in his rented Lincoln Town Car, Nick turned to Scott. “Whose side are you on, anyway?”

“What are you talking about? You've got to keep the boss happy.”

“I'm your boss, Scott. Not Todd Muldaur. Remember that.”

Scott hesitated, seemingly debating whether to argue. “Anyway, who says there's sides? We're all in this together, Nick.”

“There's always sides,” Nick said quietly. “Inside or outside. Are you with me?”

“Of course, Nick. Jesus. Of course I'm on your side, what do you think?”

Leon was watching TV and drinking a beer. That was pretty much all he did these days, when he wasn't sleeping. Audrey looked at her husband, slouched in the middle of the couch, wearing pajama bottoms and a white T-shirt that was too tight over his ever-expanding beer gut. The thirty or forty pounds he'd put on in the past year or so made him look ten years older. Once she would have said he was the hardest-working man she'd ever met, never missed a day of work on the line, never complaining. Now, with his work life taken away from him, he was lost. Without work, he retreated into a life of sloth; there was no in-between for him.

She went over to the couch and kissed him. He hadn't shaved, hadn't bathed either. He didn't turn his head to kiss her; he received her kiss, his eyes not even moving from the screen. After a while, Audrey standing there, hands on her hips, smiling, he said, “Hey, Shorty,” in his whiskey-and-cigarettes voice. “Home late.”

Shorty: his term of endearment almost since they'd started going out. He was well over six feet, she was barely five, and they did look funny walking together.

“I called and left you a message,” she said. “You must have been in conference.” He knew she meant asleep. That was how she dealt with Leon's newfound lifestyle. The idea of his sitting around watching TV and sleeping during the
day, when they had a mortgage to pay—it was infuriating to her. She knew she wasn't being entirely reasonable about it. The poor guy had been laid off from his job, and there wasn't a company for hundreds of miles around that was looking to hire an electrostatic powder-coating technician. Still, half the town had been laid off, and plenty of people had managed to get jobs working for Home Depot or bagging groceries at the Foodtown. The pay was lousy, but it was better than nothing, and certainly better than sleeping on the couch all day.

He didn't answer. Leon had deep-set eyes, a large head, a powerful build, and once, not that long ago, he would have been considered a fine-looking man. Now he looked beaten down, defeated.

“You…get my message about dinner?” Meaning, of course, that she wanted him to make dinner. Nothing complicated. There was frozen hamburger he could defrost in the microwave. A package of romaine hearts he could wash for salad. Whatever. But she smelled nothing, no food cooking, and she knew the answer before he spoke.

“I ate already.”

“Oh. Okay.” She'd left him a message around four, as soon as she knew she'd be staying late, way before he ever ate supper. She suppressed her annoyance, went into the kitchen. The small counter was stacked so high—dirty plates, glasses, coffee mugs, beer bottles—that you couldn't even see the swirly rose Formica surface. How, she marveled, could one person create such a mess in a day? Why did he refuse to clean up after himself? Did he expect her to be breadwinner and wife and housekeeper all at the same time? In the plastic trash bucket was a discarded Hungry-Man box and plastic compartmented tray, crusted with tomato sauce goo. She reached down, felt it. It was still warm. He'd just eaten. Not hours ago. He'd been hungry and just made himself dinner, didn't make anything for her even though she'd asked him to. Well, exactly
because
she'd asked him to, probably.

Returning to the living room, she stood there, waiting to
get his attention, but he kept watching the baseball game. She cleared her throat. Nothing.

She said, “Leon, honey, can I talk to you for a second?”

“Sure.”

“Could you look at me?”

He muted the TV, finally, and turned.

“Baby, I thought you were going to make us both supper.”

“I didn't know when you were getting back.”

“But I said…” She bit her lip. She was not going to yell at him. She was not going to be the one to start the quarreling, not this time. She softened her voice a bit. “I asked you to make dinner for us, right?”

“I figured you'd eat whenever you got home, Shorty. Don't want to make something's gonna get cold.”

She nodded. Paused. By now she knew the script by heart. But our deal, our agreement, was that you make dinner, clean up, you know I can't do everything. And he says, How come you can't do what you did before? You had time to do that stuff before. And she says, I need help, Leon, that's the point. I get home exhausted. And he says, How do you think I feel, sitting here like a good-for-nothing piece of shit? At least you got a job.

That worked for a long time, that guilt thing. But then he began to take it to another level, talking about how cooking and cleaning, that was woman's work, and how come all of a sudden he's expected to do woman's work, was this all because he wasn't bringing home a paycheck? And by now she wants to scream, woman's work? Woman's work? What makes this woman's work? And can't you at least pick up after yourself? And so it would go, tedious and mind-numbing and pointless.

“Okay,” she said.

 

She was working six cases, three of them active, one a homicide. You couldn't really focus on more than one at a time; tonight was Andrew Stadler. She placed the accordion file on the couch next to her, and while Leon watched the Tigers and drank himself into a stupor, she read over the files. She
liked to read case files just before she went to sleep. She believed that her unconscious kept working on things, poking and prodding, turning things over with its gimlet eye, saw things more clearly than she did awake.

How Andrew Stadler's body ended up in a Dumpster on the five hundred block of Hastings baffled her. So did the fake crack. His diagnosed schizophrenia—did that fit in anywhere? Obviously she'd have to talk to his boss at Stratton, and the Employee Relations director too. See if there'd been any indication of drug use.

She was tempted to ask Leon about Stratton, about the model shop, if he knew anything about it. Maybe he'd even run across Stadler in the factory some time, or knew someone who knew him. She was, in fact, just about to say something when she turned to look at him, saw his glazed eyes, his defeated face, and decided not to. Any little thing she mentioned about the job these days was like probing a bad tooth for him. It reminded him of how she had a job she was involved in, and how he didn't.

Not worth the pain, she decided.

When the game was over, he went to bed, and she followed. As she brushed her teeth and washed her face, she debated whether to put on her usual long T-shirt or a teddy. They hadn't had sex in more than six months, and not because she didn't want it. He'd lost all interest. But she needed it, needed to regain that physical closeness. Otherwise…

By the time she got into bed, Leon was snoring.

She slipped in beside him, clicked off her bedside lamp, and was soon asleep.

She dreamed of Tiffany Akins, dying in her arms. The little girl in the SpongeBob pajamas. The girl who could have been her own. Who could have been herself. She dreamed of her father, of that moment when Cassie Stadler called her father Daddy.

And then her gimlet-eyed subconscious kicked something upstairs, and her eyes came open. She sat up slowly.

It was all too clean. An
absence
of evidence.

Not just the daubs of pharmaceutical-grade starch on the
plastic bags wrapped around the body. This indicated that the body had been moved by someone wearing surgical gloves, someone who was careful about not leaving fingerprints. That in itself revealed a degree of caution not often found in drug murder cases. But neither was there any particulate matter on the body, no fibers, none of the normal trace evidence you always found on the body of a victim. Even the treads on the victim's shoes, where you always found dirt, had been brushed clean.

She remembered, too, how clean the body was at the autopsy. She remembered the pathologist saying, “He looks more like a house case than a police case.”

That
was it; that was the anomaly. The body had been fastidiously cleaned, gone over by an expert. By someone who
knew
what the police looked for.

Andrew Stadler's body hadn't been disposed of by some crack dealer in a panic. It had been carefully, methodically placed in a Dumpster by someone who knew what he was doing.

It took her a long time to fall back asleep.

“This stuff tastes like twigs,” Julia said.

Nick couldn't stop himself from laughing out loud. The front of the box had a photograph of two smiling people, a little Asian girl and a blond Nordic-looking boy. They weren't smiling about the cereal, that was for sure.

“It's good for you,” he said.

“How come I always have to have healthy cereal? Everyone else in my class gets to have whatever they want for breakfast.”

“I doubt that.”

“Paige gets to have Froot Loops or Cap'n Crunch or Apple Jacks every morning.”

“Paige…” Normally the parental responses came quickly to him, autopilot, but this morning he wasn't thinking very clearly. He worried about taking the sleeping pill so many days in a row. It was probably addictive. He wondered whether Julia or Lucas or Marta had heard anything two nights before. “Paige doesn't do well in school because she doesn't start off her day with a healthy breakfast.” Sometimes he couldn't believe the crap he said aloud, the shameless propaganda. When he was a kid, he ate whatever the hell he wanted for breakfast, sugary shit like Quisp and Quake and Cocoa Puffs, and he did just fine in school. He didn't know, actually, if all kids were forced to eat healthy break
fasts by their parents these days, or if it was just Laura who'd insisted on it. Whatever, he observed the Law of Healthy Breakfast as if it were the Constitution.

“Paige is in my math group,” Julia countered.

“Good for her. I don't care if she eats chocolate cake for breakfast.” The TV had been set up on a table in this temporary corner of the kitchen. The
Today
show was on, but right now there was a local commercial for Pajot Ford, always an annoying ad. John Pajot, the owner, was also the pitchman—hell, he paid for the ads, he could star in them if he wanted to—and he always did them wearing a hunting outfit. He made puns about saving “bucks” and “racking up” savings.

“Where's your brother?” he asked.

She shrugged, staring balefully at the cereal. It actually did look like stuff gathered from the ground in a forest. “Asleep, probably.”

“All right, just have some yogurt, then.”

“But I don't like the kind we have. It doesn't taste good.”

“It's what we have. That's your choice. Yogurt or…twigs.”

“But I like strawberry.”

“I'll ask Marta to get more strawberry. In the meantime we have vanilla. It's good.” Marta was doing laundry. He'd have to remember to ask her to add strawberry yogurt to her shopping list. Also some healthy cereal that didn't taste like twigs.

“No, it's not. It's the organic kind. Their vanilla tastes funny.”

“It's that or string cheese, take your choice.”

Julia sighed with bottomless frustration. “String cheese,” she said sullenly.

The local news segment came on, and the anchorman, a lean-faced, slick-looking guy with shoe-polish black hair, said something about “found brutally murdered.”

“Where's the remote?” asked Nick. When Julia was in hearing range, he normally muted any TV stories about murders or gruesome crimes or child molestation. She reached for it between the carton of organic one-percent milk and the
sugar bowl, handed it to her father. He grabbed it, searched for the tiny mute button—why didn't they make the damned mute button bigger, and a different color?—but as he was about to press it, he saw the graphic on the screen. A photograph of a horribly familiar face, the words “Andrew Stadler.” He froze, stared, his heart pounding.

He heard: “Dumpster behind Lucky's Restaurant on Hastings Street.”

He heard: “Thirty-six years at the Stratton Company until he was laid off last March.”

“What's the matter, Daddy?” Julia asked.

He heard something about funeral arrangements. “Hmm? Oh, nothing. One of our Stratton employees died, baby. Come on, get yourself some string cheese.”

“Was he old?” she asked, getting up.

“Yeah,” Nick said. “He was old.”

 

Marge was already at her desk when he arrived, sipping coffee from a Stratton mug and reading a novel by Jane Austen. She flipped the paperback closed apologetically. “Oh, good morning,” she said. “Sorry, I was hoping to finish this before my book group meets tonight.”

“Don't let me stop you.”

A copy of the
Fenwick Free Press
had been placed on his desk next to his keyboard. A front-page headline read: “Longtime Stratton Employee a Probable Homicide.” Marjorie must have placed it there, folded so that the Stadler article faced up.

He hadn't bothered to look at the paper this morning before leaving the house; it had been too hectic. Luke hadn't gotten up, so Nick had gone to his room to awaken him. From under his mound of blankets and sheet, Luke had said he had study hour first period and was going to sleep in. Instead of arguing, Nick simply closed Luke's bedroom door.

Now he picked up the article and read it closely. Once again his heart was drumming. Not much here in the way of details. “…body discovered in a Dumpster behind a restaurant on Hastings Street.” Nothing about it being wrapped in
plastic; Nick wondered whether Eddie had, for some reason, removed the trash bags. “Apparently shot several times,” though it didn't say where the man had been shot. Surely the police hadn't released to the paper everything they knew about the case. As nerve-wracking as it was to read, Nick found it oddly reassuring. The details formed a convincing picture of an unemployed man who'd been murdered in a rough part of town, probably having been involved in some street crime. There was a photo of Stadler taken at least twenty years ago: the same glasses, the same tight mouth. You'd read the article, shake your head sadly over how the loss of a job had caused an already troubled man to spiral into drugs or crime or something, and you'd move on to the sports.

Nick's eyes filled with tears. This is the man I killed. A man who left behind one child—“a daughter, Cassie, twenty-nine, of Chicago”—and an ex-wife who'd died four years earlier. A modest, quiet-living man, worked in a Stratton factory for his entire adult life.

He was suddenly aware of Marge standing there, looking worriedly at him. She'd said something.

“Excuse me?”

“I said, it's sad, isn't it?”

“Terribly sad,” Nick said.

“The funeral's this afternoon. You have a telcon with Sales, but that can be rescheduled.”

He nodded, realizing what she was saying. Nick usually attended the funerals of all Stratton employees, just as old man Devries had done. It was a tradition, a ceremonial obligation of the CEO in this company town.

He'd have to go to Andrew Stadler's funeral. He didn't really have a choice.