Hard Stop (16 page)

“Are you going to talk to my wife?” he asked.

“I don’t think so. And if I do, we won’t be talking about Marla. Though we could.”

“That sounds like blackmail.”

I shook my head.

“I’m not threatening you. I’m just looking for some information. And a favor.”

“Oh?” he asked.

“Yeah. I want to talk to Angel. I need an introduction.”

His eyebrows rose, accentuating the lightbulb shape of his skull.

“Angel Valero?” he asked.

“Yeah. Iku’s Angel,” I said, hoping I had the right one.

“She consulted for him. Though I wouldn’t exactly say he was hers. Even if she did help him get a nice piece of the big oil deal.”

He went on to specify which deal. Big indeed.

“So he’s with Phillip Craig,” I said.

“Officially. Though he rarely leaves his house in the Hamptons. Why would he if he didn’t have to?”

I asked him to give Valero a call and tell him I had an opportunity worth listening to. He was welcome to improvise from there as long as he told me the story line. As I escorted him back across the street I said I couldn’t promise he’d never hear from me again, but I’d try to leave him alone after I got the introduction. Then I told him to call me on my cell phone, and gave him the number.

I didn’t know if he’d follow through, though nothing about him said he wouldn’t.

When I handed him back to Marla she shook my hand.

“It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Patterson. I must say retirement from the ring has had a surprising effect.”

“Remarkably well-preserved?”

“Remarkably white.”

Before checking into my hotel I found another bar where I could have a drink and call Amanda. I gave her a cleaned-up version of my meeting with Gelb, skipping minor details like the stakeout, the cab chase and the girlfriend at the SoHo bar. This wouldn’t have met Rosaline’s standards for full and free dis closure, but it did make for a less tense and sober conversation.

In turn, Amanda told me about her day sanding floors at one of her rehab houses. It sounded like more fun than I’d been having, only dustier.

“It’s not nearly so difficult as one would think,” she said.

“That’s because of the floor guy lobby. They’re very powerful.”

“I’m finishing it tomorrow.”

“Watch out for bubbles and don’t walk on it till it’s dry,” I told her.

“Excellent advice. Think of the trouble you just saved me.”

After that I called my daughter and asked her out to dinner. She delighted me by saying yes. So I got myself out of the monkey suit, cleaned up and took her to her favorite place, which was a few blocks from her apartment. We had a meal and a nice talk with not a single discouraging word from either of us. I was so afraid of breaking the spell I hardly said anything on the way back to her place. I just hummed something from Thelonius Monk, who’s just about unhummable, and then hugged her again, though not too hard like I did when she was a little girl.

So when I was trying to get to sleep, listening to the street noise leaking in through the old windows, I was elated to mark the second discord-free engagement with my daughter since she reached puberty. I’m sure she wasn’t
aware of the occasion, though I wanted to think she noticed something as well.

And that even now she could sense my heart soaring high over New York City, leaving a temporarily unencumbered mind behind to fall into sleep.

I
HAD TO SPEND THE NEXT
two days in the little shop I built for myself in the basement of the cottage, to catch up on all the work I owed Frank Entwhistle. It was barely adequate to the tasks he’d normally assign: architectural details like mantelpieces, built-in bookcases and corner cabinets, and garden gates. I’d bought all the heavy equipment, like the table saw and lathe, and most of the smaller tools, from tradesmen I worked with on various job sites. The wear on some of those tools meant a fair amount of maintenance and repair, but I didn’t mind. In fact, I liked the chance to mix a little mechanical and electrical tinkering into all the sawdust.

I was ambivalent about the construction boom that had been going on in the Hamptons since about the time I wandered back home. Lucky for me, it provided a living. Enough to pay the taxes on the cottage, buy dog food for Eddie, parts for the Grand Prix—not an easy or inexpensive
proposition—keep the lights on and fuel oil flowing, and sustain frequent forays to the Pequot.

My new woodcraft career bore some resemblance to the job I once had with the company. Design and fabrication, problem solving, enabling technology and a fair amount of trial and error. The only differences were the pay scale and the level of complexity.

And the management demands. At the company I had about four thousand people working in my division. Half of them were at headquarters in White Plains, the others scattered in field offices and operating plants all over the globe.

Nobody worked for me on Frank’s jobs, so I marked that as definite progress.

The equipment I once maintained and repaired was also more elaborate, with some petrochemical plants in the U.S. sprawling over an area the size of a small city. We built even bigger ones for the Saudis, Kuwaitis and Malaysians. All shiny new and run by automated control systems that reduced operating personnel from a few hundred to maybe two dozen. What a world.

The pay was a lot better at my old job, of course, I’d made a startling amount of money before losing most of it to Abby when we got divorced. I don’t know what she’s done with it because I haven’t spoken to her since the last time I saw her. If I can preserve that record till the day I die, it will have been a worthwhile investment.

It’d be nice to say my interest in engineering came from my father, who was a car mechanic his whole life and never designed a flue gas scrubber or optimized a single ammonia plant. For me, every faulty device was a little puzzle that was fun to solve. For him, it was a battle against evil, intransigent machines possessed by demons whose sole purpose was to frustrate his every honest effort.

As I moved into designing the devices themselves, the puzzle became making things that had never been made before. My reward was more than a favorable outcome, it was the thing itself, something I could look at, touch, contemplate in three dimensions. Tangible manifestations of imagination, of dreams.

People think things of substance are where legitimate value lives, where wealth is created. I learned wealth actually comes from manipulating the consequences of having material things. It’s the financial side of the house that ultimately matters. Since finance is based more on assumption and belief than empirical reality, it’s far closer to the world of imagination than the steel, gears and wiring of a complex process application.

So who am I to beef? It wasn’t the company’s fault I wanted my imagination to produce something more tangible than a number in the middle of a ledger column.

I don’t know where Iku Kinjo stood on this question. I know she had little difficulty absorbing the technical information I threw at her, never looking intimidated or knocked off balance. This was a woman who lived entirely in the world of the immaterial, the theoretical. The consultant’s world of genius, smoke and mirrors.

If the young Iku thought my operation could stand as a model for the rest of the company, I’m sure it pained her to admit it, but that was what her research and judgment yielded, and that was what she was going to report. No matter her personal feelings toward me.

Thoughts like this set my mind adrift as I worked alone in the shop. Mostly alone. Eddie would hang around when the power tools were off and I was drawing or noodling out a design. That’s why he was down there when I heard a gentle knock on the hatch door. Like the valiant watchdog he was,
he looked up half interested. When Burton Lewis came down the stairs it was a different story.

“Quit sucking up,” I said, watching Eddie’s fawning attentions. “You’re already in his will.”

“You and your heirs,” said Burton.

“The ones we can find.”

“That’s what DNA is for. How about a beer?”

Despite the best efforts of visiting cops and intruders, I still had some of the good stuff. Burton dug one each out of the basement fridge and pulled a stool over to my drawing table.

Burton was about ten years younger than me, but still managed to look at least as weathered and roughed up, in a boyish, handsome sort of way, if all those things can be present in a single individual. It wasn’t because of a hard life, though Burton certainly worked as hard as anyone I knew. His great-grandfather had established one of the notable American fortunes in the early part of the last century and Burton had built it up from there. He was unquestionably a rich guy, though with little interest in pampered indolence.

He once said, “Spending the precious hours of one’s life pursuing leisure and entertainment, or obsessed by self-glorifying avocations—what could be more abhorrent? What are you if you aren’t contributing to the economic advancement of the community at large? A silly, emasculated contrivance whose sole purpose is the redistribution of someone else’s hard-earned treasure.”

Before building his tax law business he’d founded a free criminal defense practice that operated out of a storefront in the City. Over the years it continued to expand and command a large portion of his precious hours and concentration. Everyone assumed this was standard noblesse oblige, but the
truth was Burton loved the challenge and access to lives lived far closer to the bone than he’d otherwise ever experience. Along the way, he’d made a home for the idealists and misfits of the legal profession, and provided first-class defense to any and all, the less deserving the better.

He was able to work at whatever he wanted to work at, when he wanted to work, but I didn’t begrudge him that.

“So,” he said, “I’m holding two beers. Why loiter in a woodshop when the Little Peconic awaits just outside the door?”

On the way to the Adirondacks I started to brief him on current events, which I continued through two more rounds of beer.

He listened carefully throughout, then said, “The promise to modify your severance agreement offers some intriguing possibilities.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it. Anyway, it’s not about that now. It’s about the dead girl.”

“Not your obligation. You found her. There was no proviso concerning dead or alive,” he said.

“What do you know about the Phillip Craig Group?”

“The company reflects the personality of the founder: deranged by ambition and greed. Talented investors, though, I have to say. Creative. Our firm has managed the tax particulars on their major acquisitions. Most of the work had been done for us by their own excellent counsel. Anticipated nearly everything.”

“Iku was involved with them on the big oil deal,” I said.

“Big is right.”

“You know Angel Valero?”

“Nominally. The name comes up in relation to Craig. I see him at fundraisers, the Financial Roundtable. Nothing beyond that.”

“Reputation?”

“Deranged by ambition and greed. I thought we covered that.”

“We did.”

This time of the season most of the big powerboats had emptied out of the Little Peconic Bay. There were still small fishing boats hugging the buoys and rocking in the turbulence above the shoals, and a scattered fleet of sailboats responding to the better wind and lighter traffic. Again, I felt a pull as I watched the sails angled to the wind glide across the green coast of the North Fork.

“Getting out on the boat much?” I asked Burton.

“A cruise or two. Club racing. Enough to satisfy the impulse.”

“Is that impulse a lifetime thing?” I asked.

“Begins in utero,” said Burton.

“Hm.”

We studied the approach and subsequent disorganized tack of a small sloop. Neither of us wanted to break the spell by criticizing the maneuver.

“I need to talk to Angel Valero,” I said. “I think I have an introduction, but I need a shtick. Something to get him talking.”

Burton always looked slightly in need of a haircut. A thing he drew notice to by frequently using his fingers to comb his hair off his forehead, a futile gesture when sitting at the edge of the breezy Little Peconic Bay.

“Large-scale investments are at once dauntingly complex and simple as it gets,” he said. “The complexity is all in the targeting of opportunity, the valuation and subsequent number crunching, the accounting and regulatory contortions, conflicts in corporate structures, tax implications—our bailiwick—and personnel considerations, mostly as it relates to management, though sometimes middle management and
unions come into play. To say nothing of core business practices and strategic planning.”

“What’s the simple part?” I asked.

“The motivation.”

“Ambition and greed?”

“Natural economic evolution. The formation and reformation of corporate enterprise, a necessary function of a dynamic free market system. Anyway, people like to buy and sell things, and when those things are worth billions of dollars, it calls for robust capital markets. It also breeds people like Angel Valero.”