Company Man (9 page)

Standing in the shadowed recesses of the front porch, Nick sipped from a mug of instant coffee and waited. Apart from physical sensations—the chill of the night air, the warmth of the mug against his palms, the gusts of wind—he felt nothing. He was beyond numb. He was a husk, an empty body standing on a porch at night while above him hovered Nick Conover, watching in disbelief. This hadn't happened. This was a nightmare that, even as he experienced it in real time, he told himself was merely a bad dream that he'd awaken from, soon enough, but not before he moved through the twisting, steadily more awful script. At the same time, he understood that it wasn't a dream. Any minute now, Eddie's car would pull into the driveway, and Nick, by telling another person, seeking his advice, would make it real.

As if on cue, Eddie's Pontiac GTO coasted quietly up the driveway, headlights extinguished. Eddie got out, shut the door quietly, jogged up to Nick. He was wearing sweatpants and a tan Carhartt jacket.

“Nicky, tell me exactly what happened?” Eddie's face was creased, unfamiliarly, with concern. His shoulders were hunched. His breath stank of stale booze; he looked like he'd been asleep.

Nick chewed the inside of his cheek, looking away.

Eddie twisted his head to one side. “All right. Where is he?”

 

“Okay,” Eddie said. “Okay.”

His hands made strange, resolute chopping motions in the air. “Okay.” He stood over the crumpled body. The floodlights at his back cast a long, spindly shadow.

“Do you think anyone heard?” His first question. A strange one, it seemed to Nick. Not “What happened?”

Nick shook his head. He spoke in a low voice, hoping Eddie would do the same. “Marta or the kids would have gotten up if they did.”

“Neighbors?”

“Hard to say. The security guys down at the booth normally drive up if they think there's a problem.”

“No lights went on at any of the neighbors' houses?”

“Look for yourself. Our nearest neighbor is hundreds of feet away. Trees and everything between us. I can't see them, they can't see me.”

Eddie nodded. “The Smith and Wesson's a .380. Makes kind of a loud popping noise.” He leaned over to peer more closely at Stadler. “Did he enter the house?”

“No.”

Eddie nodded again. Nick couldn't tell from his expression whether that was good or not.

“He see you?”

“Sure. I was standing right here.”

“You told him to stop.”

“Of course. Eddie, what the hell am I—”

“You did the right thing.” His voice was low, soothing. “You had no fucking choice.”

“He kept on going. He wouldn't stop.”

“He would have attacked your kids if you didn't stop him.”

“I know.”

Eddie let out a long, slow breath, a little quaver in it. “Shit, man.”

“What?”

“Shit.”

“It was self-defense,” Nick said.

Eddie drew closer to Stadler's corpse. “How many shots?”

“I think two.”

“Chest and the head. The mouth.”

Nick noticed that the bleeding had stopped. It looked black in the artificial light. The man's skin was white and waxen, his eyes staring.

“You must have a tarp here, all the construction.”

“A tarp?”

“Canvas. Or plastic, better.”

“A tarp?”

“A tarpaulin, Nick. You know. A big heavy plastic sheet. Or contractor bags if you have them. You must have those around.”

“What for?”

“The hell do you think? Any idea how hard it is to carry a dead body?”

Nick felt a spasm of fear in his abdomen. “We got to call the cops, Eddie.”

Eddie looked at Nick incredulously. “You are fucking kidding me. You think you even have a choice here?”

“What the hell else are we going to do?”

“Then what'd you call me for, Nick?”

“I—” He had a point, of course. “This is bad, Eddie. Really bad.”

“You just used my fucking gun. To kill a guy, okay? Are you hearing me? My gun. We really don't have a choice.”

Nick stared, didn't know what to say, went back into the study, Eddie right behind him. Nick sat in one of the side chairs, rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes.

“It was self-defense,” he repeated.

“Maybe.”

“Maybe? What are you talking about, maybe? This guy was dangerous.”

“Did he have a gun?”

“No. But how the hell could I have known that?”

“You couldn't,” Eddie conceded. “Maybe you saw something glint, a knife or a gun or something, you couldn't be sure.”

“I saw him reach in his pocket. You told me the guy has a gun—I figured he was reaching for a weapon.”

Eddie nodded, turned grimly toward the doors, and stepped back into the inky blackness. He returned a minute or so later, some objects in his cupped hands. He dumped them onto the coffee table. “Wallet, key ring. No knife, no gun, no nothing on the guy.”

“I didn't fucking
know
that,” Nick said. “He kept saying, ‘You're not safe.'”

“Nick, of
course
you didn't know. Jesus, I mean, you were dealing with a fucking psycho, a guy's gotta do what a guy's gotta do. That's not it.”

“The truth is, you lent me your gun as protection,” Nick said. “Temporarily. You said it's a misdemeanor.”

Eddie slammed his fist into his palm. “You still don't fucking get it, do you? You killed the dude outside the house, not inside.”

“He was trying to get in, believe me.”

“
I
know that. You're allowed to use physical force to terminate attempted commission of criminal trespass.” The words sounded unnatural, halting, coming out of his mouth, as if he'd memorized them during his cop days. “But not deadly physical force. That's the premises law. See, Nick, the law says deadly physical force can only be used in the face of deadly physical force.”

“But given the guy's record—”

“I'm not saying you wouldn't have a chance of beating this. But what the hell you think's going to happen to you, huh?”

Nick finished his mug of coffee. The caffeine only went so far in counteracting the sleeping pill; it was adrenaline and fear that were keeping him functioning. “I'm the CEO of a major corporation, Eddie. I'm a respected member of the community.”

“You're fucking Nick the Slasher!” Eddie hissed. “What the fuck do you think's going to happen to you? And to your family? Think about it. You think the cops are going to cut you any slack?”

“The law's the law.”

“Shit! Don't talk to me about the law, Nick. I know the law. I know how it gets twisted and bent if the cops want it to. I've done it, okay?”

“Not all cops,” Nick said.

Eddie flashed him a look of barely concealed hostility. “Put it to you this way. The locals'll have no choice but to charge you, right?”

“Maybe.”

“For absolute fucking sure. And when it comes to trial—and it will, you can be sure of that—yeah, you might beat it. Maybe. After ten months of a
nightmare
. Yeah, you could
get lucky, get a reasonable prosecutor, but even they're going to face all sorts of pressure to string up Nick the Slasher. You're going to be facing a jury of twelve people who all hate your guts—man, the thought of locking you up…I mean, in a town this size, there isn't going to be a juror in the pool who doesn't know someone, a friend or a relative, that you fired, right? You saw what that jury did to Martha Stewart for a little insider trading. You fucking murdered an old man, are you with me yet? A sick old man.”

“The bottom line is, I'm innocent.” Nick was feeling ill again, thought he might throw up, looked around for his metal wastebasket in case he did.

“You don't get to say what the bottom line is, okay?”

“But it was fucking
self-defense
!”

“Hey, don't argue with
me
! I'm on
your
side. But it's homicide, Nick. Manslaughter at a minimum. You say it's self-defense, but you got no witnesses, you got no injuries, and you got a dead guy who was unarmed. I don't care how much money you spend on a lawyer—you get tried here, in Fenwick. And what the hell you think's going to happen to your kids during this goddamned media circus, huh? You have any fucking
idea
what this is going to do to them? You think it's hard for them, dealing with Laura and the layoffs and everything? Imagine you on trial for murder. A fucking lynch mob, Nick. You want to put your kids through that?”

Nick didn't reply. He felt frozen in the chair, completely at a loss.

“They're probably going to send you away, Nick. Five, ten years if you're lucky. Sentence like that, you're going to miss your kids' childhood. And they grow up with a jailbird father. They don't have a mom, Nick. All they got is you. You gonna play Russian roulette with your kids, Nick?”

Eddie's stare was unrelenting, furious.

Finally, Nick spoke. “What are you suggesting?”

Audrey Rhimes's pager shrilled in the semidarkness.

She jolted awake, out of a blissful dream of her childhood, a warm summer day, going down a Slip'N Slide that went on and on and on, in her family's steeply canted backyard. Ordinarily 6:30
A.M.
wasn't early at all, but her shift had ended at midnight, and after that came the usual unpleasantness with Leon, so she'd gotten maybe four hours of sleep.

She felt raw, vulnerable like a freshly hatched chick.

Audrey was a woman who liked routine, schedule, regularity. This was a personality trait that didn't go well with her job as a detective with the Fenwick Police Major Case Team. Calls could come at any time of day or night. Though she could no longer remember why, this was a job she'd wanted, a job she fought for. She was not just the only African-American member of the Major Case Unit but the only woman—the real difficulty, it turned out.

Leon groaned, rolled over, buried his head beneath a pillow.

She slipped out of bed and moved silently through the dim bedroom, narrowly avoiding a cluster of empty beer cans that Leon had left there. From the kitchen phone she called Dispatch.

A body discovered in a Dumpster on the five hundred
block of Hastings. A section of town where all of the town's vice seemed to be concentrated, all the prostitution and drugs and violence and shootings. A dead body there could mean any of a number of things, including drugs or gangs, but the odds were that it meant very little. Was this hard-hearted of her? She preferred not to think so. At first she'd been shocked at the reactions of the survivors, even the mothers, who seemed to be almost resigned to losing a son. They'd already lost their sons. Few of them pleaded their sons' innocence. They knew better.

When Audrey learned who'd be picking her up this morning, who she'd been partnered with on this case—the loathsome Roy Bugbee—she felt her body go rigid with annoyance. More than annoyance, she had to admit to herself. Something stronger. This was not a worthy feeling, not a generous impulse.

Silently, as she dressed—she kept a clean outfit in the parlor closet—she recited one of her favorite verses of scripture, from Romans 15: “Now the God of patience and consolation grant you to be likeminded one toward another, according to Christ Jesus.” She loved this line, even as she realized she didn't yet fully understand it. But she knew it meant that the Lord first teaches us what is true consolation and true patience, and then He instills this in our hearts. Reciting this to herself got her through Leon's recent sulking fits, his drinking problem, lent her a much-needed serenity. Her goal had been to re-read the entire Bible by year's end, but the irregularity of her schedule made that impossible.

Roy Bugbee was a fellow detective in Major Cases who had an unaccountable loathing toward her. He didn't know her. He knew only her outward appearance, her sex, and the color of her skin. His words cut her, though never as deeply as Leon's.

She gathered her equipment, her Sig-Sauer and her handcuffs, rights cards and IBO request forms and her PT, her handheld radio. While she waited, she sat in Leon's favorite chair, the worn rust BarcaLounger, and opened her old leather-bound King James Bible, her mother's, but there was
barely time to find her place before Detective Bugbee pulled up in his city car.

He was slovenly. The car, which he was lucky enough to have at his disposal—she hadn't been given one—was littered with pop cans and Styrofoam Quarter Pounder boxes. It smelled of old French fries and cigarette smoke.

He didn't say hello or good morning. Audrey said good morning to him, however, determined to rise above his pettiness. She sat in uncomfortable silence, amid the squalor, observing the scattering of ketchup packets on the floor around her feet and hoping that none of them was on the seat beneath her plum business suit. The stain would never come out.

After a few minutes he spoke as he flicked the turn signal at a red light. “You got lucky, huh?” Bugbee's blond hair was slicked back in a pompadour. His eyebrows were so pale they were almost invisible.

“Pardon me?”

His laugh was raucous. “I don't mean with your husband. If Owens wasn't drunk on his ass when Dispatch called, you'da been assigned to him. But lucky you, you get me.”

“Mm hm,” she said, her tone pleasant. When she first arrived at Major Cases, only two of the men would talk to her, Owens being one of them. The others acted as if she wasn't even there. She'd say, “Good morning,” and they wouldn't answer. There was no women's bathroom, of course—not for one woman—so she had to share the men's. One of the guys kept urinating right on the toilet seat just to make it unpleasant for her. Her fellow detectives thought it was hilarious. She'd heard it was Bugbee, and she believed it. He'd done “practical jokes” on her she didn't like to think about. Finally she'd had to resort to using the bathroom downstairs in the warrant unit.

“Body found in a Dumpster on Hastings,” Bugbee continued. “Wrapped up like a burrito in Hefty bags.”

“How long has it been there?”

“No idea. You better not go blow your cookies on me.”

“I'll do my best. Who found it, one of the homeless looking for food?”

“Trash guy. You lose it like you did with that little black girl, you'll get yanked off the case, I'll see to it.”

Little Tiffany Akins, seven years old, had died in her arms a few months earlier. They'd got her father cuffed, but her mother and her mother's boyfriend had already died of their gunshot wounds by the time Major Cases showed up. Audrey could not keep herself from weeping. The beautiful little girl, wearing SpongeBob pajamas, could have been her own child if she'd been able to have kids. She didn't understand what kind of father would be so blinded by rage and jealousy that he'd kill not only his estranged wife and her lover but his own daughter too.

She recited to herself:
Now the God of patience and consolation grant you to be likeminded one toward another…

“I'll do my best, Roy,” Audrey said.