Hard Stop (5 page)

“If there was I could get him to clean up the place.”

She pulled me along quietly before asking the usual questions.

“Are you alright?”

“I’m great,” I said. She looked suspicious. “Honestly. Everything’s great.”

“Everything’s always great. You sure there’s nothing you need to tell me?”

“Such trust.”

She trusted me enough to stop asking, though she didn’t look entirely convinced. I couldn’t blame her.

She brightened considerably after her first cup of coffee. I listened attentively while she told me about her big job. I held eye contact and asked questions to help propel the narrative and demonstrate how well I was listening. These were things I’d learned from my friend Rosaline Arnold, a psychologist. Things that hadn’t come naturally to me when Allison was growing up, when she really needed them. But Rosaline had convinced me that late was better than never, and based on how things were going with Allison, she was right.

When I thought it was safe to take the floor, I told her that Amanda and I were getting along reasonably well. Better than ever. I told her before she had a chance to ask, voluntarily sharing intimate emotional information. Something else I’d been taught by Rosaline. Both the content and delivery were pleasing to Allison. She adored Amanda, and the feelings were returned. This was a total, joyful mystery to me. Maybe some day Rosaline could explain it all.

When we were back on the sidewalk she actually hugged me for the first time since I’d left her mother.

“If you mess this up with Amanda I’ll knock you on the head,” she said into my shirtfront before letting me go, and without another look headed back to her messy apartment and big crappy job.

Eisler, Johnson occupied the top fifth of a glassy skyscraper on Madison Avenue. I breezed past the airtight security in the building’s lobby and took the elevator, which opened directly into a starkly appointed reception area—all sharp-edged metal furniture, pale grey walls and Pop Art.

The receptionist was a reedy little guy with a shaved head and a complexion that matched the decor. Eisler, Johnson
must have hired a first-rate interior designer. I walked up to him and asked for Iku Kinjo. What I got back was a blank stare. I asked for her again.

“She’s not here,” he said.

“When will she be back?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then please call someone who does.”

“Do you have an appointment?” he asked, still looking colorless and blank.

“Yes. And I expect someone here to honor it.”

“Can I have a name?”

“Burton Lewis. Lewis and Shanley.”

Dropping Burton’s name always had a predictable effect. He was a big deal in the City, running a gigantic law firm and sitting at the top of everyone’s society shortlist. Though I didn’t drop it too often. I hated exploiting our friendship, especially since he was always so eager to help out. But at least I knew I wouldn’t get arrested for impersonating a very important person.

The receptionist was wearing a thin black headset, so all he had to do was hit a button on the console in front of him to connect with the offices behind a set of massive grey doors.

He spoke in hushed tones I had trouble making out. My hearing had never quite recovered from the effects of a big explosion I’d lived through a few years before. Lived to reach deep into my fifties, an age when even people who hadn’t almost been blown up or repeatedly socked in the head had a little hearing loss. I leaned over the top of the desk to get a better angle with my good ear, causing the guy to look up at me with a touch of alarm, the first honest expression I’d seen him make.

He stuck his index finger into the console and said someone would be out to see me. I leaned farther over the desk, forcing him to lean back in his chair, increasing his alarm.

“Good,” I said, then went and sat in a square chair that felt like a solid block of upholstered wood.

A few minutes later a tall, slim man with a head shaped like a lightbulb came through the big grey doors. He was wearing a dark green rayon shirt and black trousers that flowed when he walked. He was about my age, with close-cropped white hair that exaggerated the lightbulb effect. When he got closer I could see his eyes were a brilliant fluorescent lavender. Contacts.

When he saw me he turned and went back to the reception desk.

“Where’s Mr. Lewis?” he asked.

“Probably at the Gracefield Club having a beer and a tuna sandwich,” I said to his back. He turned. The pasty guy behind the desk shot me a look.

“You asked for a name. You didn’t ask for mine,” I said, getting up and walking back to the desk. I offered my hand to Lavender Eyes. “Floyd Patterson.”

He took my hand, studying my face.

“That name rings a bell,” he said.

“That was somebody else’s job. You got a name?”

“Jerome Gelb. What is it you want?”

“I want to know if you’ve heard from Iku Kinjo.”

He raised both eyebrows and pulled back his head, as if trying to get me in better focus.

“Your interest?”

A perfectly reasonable question. I just hadn’t worked out an answer. I wondered what my friend Jackie Swaitkowski would do in a situation like this. She was great on improvisation.

“I have to serve her papers,” I said.

“Oh?”

“Eisler, Johnson’s named, too, but I’m supposed to give them directly to her to make it official.”

“Really.”

“Those are the rules.”

“Who’s the plaintiff?”

“Where’s Miss Kinjo?”

I smiled at him. He smiled back and reached out his hand.

“Maybe if I could just take a look.”

“So you haven’t seen her or heard from her.”

He dropped his hand.

“No. Not for about four weeks. Officially, she’s no longer employed here. So if there’s some sort of action against the firm, tell whoever sent you to change the name of the recipient.”

“She have any friends here? Anyone who might know where she went?”

Gelb shook his head, then frowned, caught giving me an ounce more information than I deserved.

“I’m not in a position to discuss this any further,” he said. “Do you want the name of our attorneys?”

“Sure.”

While he wrote out their names on the back of his business card I asked him, “Was she a friend of yours?”

He handed me the card.

“I was her boss. There are no friends at Eisler, Johnson.”

“But you must be a little worried about her. I’d be, if one of ours went missing.”

“Maybe I’ll try a little worry when I finish digging out of the hole she left me in with our clients.”

“When I find her I’ll let her know that,” I said, as I stuffed his card in my shirt pocket, turned and headed back to the elevator. He was still standing there as I watched the elevator doors close on Eisler, Johnson’s cheerful reception area, a lanky, coutured centurion, off-balance but alert. Poised for battle.

W
HEN I GOT BACK TO
Southampton I drove right past the turn off Route 27 that led up to Oak Point—the peninsula in North Sea I shared with Amanda—and headed east. It was about four in the afternoon, so I thought I’d just catch Jackie Swaitkowski at her office above the shops that lined Montauk Highway in Watermill. I probably could have stopped at the cottage and switched back to my Grand Prix, but I was reluctant to let go of the zippy little station wagon.

Jackie was nominally my lawyer. I’d never paid her anything and she hadn’t done much for me but keep me out of jail at a few critical junctures, for which I was sincerely grateful. Actually, I owed Jackie a lot more than simple gratitude. So I didn’t think it would hurt to toss a few more items on the bill.

I jogged up the outside stairs and tried the door to her office. It opened only partway. So I gave it a shove and pushed a bankers box clear of the passageway.

“Hey. I wanted that there,” she said from somewhere behind the piles of paper on her desk.

There were a half dozen more bankers boxes on the floor, since there was no room to put them on the desk, or the sofa and chairs, or work tables, or any other horizontal surface in the room, all of them already groaning under a year’s accumulation of professional detritus, indispensable possessions,
objects d’art
, flotsam, jetsam and the unimaginable heaps of worthless junk that gathered around Jackie like the drifting snow of an arctic blizzard.

“If you can’t get out the door you’ll starve in there,” I said to her. “Unless you’ve put up survival rations.”

Jackie stood up so I could see it was actually her. She was a medium-sized, curvy thing with a lot of freckles and a head full of kinky strawberry-blonde hair. It was only the second week of September, so she was still in her summer wardrobe—a scoop-necked cotton dress and flip-flops. Her glasses were pushed up into her hair, where she also stored a pair of number two pencils. An unlit cigarette bobbed between her lips when she spoke.

“No, but if you could find my lighter, I’d really appreciate it.”

I tossed her mine.

“Keep it. I don’t need it anymore.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m giving it up. After I have one of yours.”

“In other words, you’re giving up buying and moving on to mooching full-time.”

I scooped the piles off the two easy chairs that faced the loveseat and waved her over. I found an ashtray under a wet beach towel and balanced it on the last six months of
The Economist
.

Jackie flung herself over the arm of the chair and landed
with her knees already tucked up under her butt. We lit our cigarettes.

“Where’s the mutt?” she asked.

“With Amanda. I left him with her so I could go into the City.”

“Biz or pleasure?” she asked.

“A little of both. Though mostly manipulation, extortion and threats of violence.”

She blew a lungful of smoke up at the ceiling.

“I hope that’s just the amusing way you express yourself.”

I disappointed her by telling her the whole story, beginning with the visit from Ackerman straight through to my conversation with George Donovan. I filled in as many details as I could remember. I was starting to appreciate the concept of free and full disclosure. It was liberating. Rosaline Arnold was right. If you just open yourself up to people you care about, you get so much back in return.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. You’re out of your fucking mind.”

I tossed her the micro-recorder.

“Download it for me, will you? I’ll probably never need it, but you never know.”

“Sure, why not. Anything else I can do for you?”

“Yeah, a bunch of things, actually.”

Her shoulders dropped.

“Goddammit, Sam.”

“Come on, Jackie. What’s so bad about tracking down a missing management consultant? How hard can that be? I’m not asking you to do anything illegal.”

“Not yet.”

“I need her background information. Her parents’ names and where they lived. Her address in the City, which I don’t even have for Christ’s sake. The boyfriend, Robert Dobson.
All those vital statistics. You just have to climb back over to your computer and look it up.”

“Or you could buy a computer.”

“Donovan said she was heading for a weekend in the Hamptons right before she disappeared.”

“We’ve heard that one before.”

“I need to know where she stayed. Who she stayed with.”

“Sure. I’ll just do a search—‘Iku Kinjo weekend Hamptons.’”

“You can do that?”

She sighed.

I remembered something Donovan had told me.

“Let’s look at her,” I said.

I coaxed her back to her desk and watched her call up Eisler, Johnson’s website, click on the annual report and scroll through the pages until we came to a photo of a half dozen bright-looking young professionals sitting around a conference table pretending to be engaged in earnest and penetrating deliberations. One of the women had an Asian cast to her features, and the caption confirmed it was Iku Kinjo, EJ associate and specialist in the energy and chemical-processing industries.

“Can you isolate her face, blow it up and print it out?” I asked.

“This is a basic office PC. It’s not Industrial Light & Magic.”

“What can you do?”

“I can put the whole group shot on a disk and give it to you, and you can take it to a guy I know in the Village who can isolate her face, blow it up and print it out.”

Ten minutes later she was still trying to figure out how to capture the image. It was all pure alchemy to me, so I wasn’t much help beyond offering cheerful words of encouragement. I could smell her starting to smolder.

“How urgent is all this?” she asked, glowering up at me.
“Believe it or not I have people who pay me to do things for them. Quite a few at the moment.”

“It’s pretty urgent to George Donovan. Enough to risk a loaded gun at his head with my finger on the trigger.”

She frowned, but kept at it until she had what I needed transferred to a disk, which popped out of a little door on the front of the computer.

“He must really want her back,” she said, handing me the CD in a flat plastic case.

“Oh, yeah.”