Death's Little Helpers

by Peter Spiegelman

  Pratt’s office was similar to Turpin’s, but with more evidence of actual work being done in it. There was more technology on her desk— three big flat-panel screens— and more paper, too— wobbly stacks of spreadsheets, prospectuses, research reports, and trade rags— and no room for knickknacks. Pratt was at her desk, talking into a telephone headset and scanning one of her monitors, when I stepped in. She looked up.

  Disheveled chestnut hair fell past her shoulders and framed her pale oval face. Round wire-framed glasses sat askew on her short straight nose; the eyes behind them were large and dark and intelligent. Her mouth was small and skeptical and partially obscured by the headset microphone. Her pink blouse had a square neck and a coffee stain down the front. If not for the headset and the speed at which she spoke, it would’ve been easy to imagine Irene Pratt as an academic— a Beowulf scholar, perhaps, or an expert in medieval textiles— something dusty and far from the world of commerce. A fragment of her conversation dispelled the thought.

  “I’m telling you, they’re full of shit. They’re shading the costs, and their pension assumptions are solidly fucked.” The high nasal voice was as I remembered it.

  Irene Pratt tilted her head and looked at me. There was no alarm in her gaze and not much curiosity, just a mild annoyance. She nodded as she listened through the headset and turned back to her monitor. She started speaking again but I never heard what she said.

  “Excuse me, sir, can we help you?” It was a stern, skeptical voice— a cop voice— from the hallway behind me. They were faster than I expected. I felt an adrenal surge and turned.

  There were two of them, both well over six feet, in ill-fitting blue blazers, sagging gray pants, and thick cop shoes. They wore equipment belts under their jackets, a radio on the left hip, a telescoping baton on the right; the cuffs and mace were probably in back. The older one was broad and balding and sleepy looking. The younger one had a blond crew cut and a thick face and big hands he couldn’t keep still. The cop voice belonged to the older one.

  “Could you step over here, sir, and show us some ID?” he said. He gestured to his younger partner to flank me, but their rhythm was disrupted by Dennis Turpin, rounding the corner with a full head of steam. Standing up, he was no more than five-foot-six, and his rolling bandy-legged gait and long arms accentuated his chimplike qualities.

  “I knew it!” he said. He was huffing and somehow pleased. “I knew I couldn’t trust you. What the hell do you think you’re doing here? Did you think I wasn’t serious when I told you to stay away? Did you think I was just blowing smoke?” He jabbed his finger in my chest. I smiled down at him.

  “That’s the problem with playacting— too much of it and people don’t know when you’re blowing smoke and when you’re not. Like that nonsense about creative tension. What was I supposed to make of that?” I stopped smiling. “And please keep your hands off me.” Turpin sputtered and glanced at his security guards and at the people who stood staring from their cubicles. The balding guard still had his sleepy look, but his brow was furrowed, as if he’d forgotten something. The younger one looked eager.

  “You’ll see how serious I am when I have these men toss you out of here, and I have you up on trespass charges.”

  “Trespass?” I smiled again. “I took a wrong turn on my way out, and when I found myself in the Research department I thought I’d drop in on Ms. Pratt. That’s pretty thin grounds for trespassing, Turpin— especially when I came here at your invitation.” I looked back at Pratt’s office. She was watching from her doorway, but her expression was hard to read. Turpin sputtered some more. He shook his head fiercely and poked me in the chest again.

  “Throw this bastard out on his ass,” he said. The older guard started to speak, but the young guy couldn’t hold his water any longer. His voice was nervous and excited and surprisingly high-pitched. Probably the steroids.

  “You heard the man, shithead, you’re gone,” he said.

  “No, Jimmy—,” the balding guard said, but it was too late; Jimmy had already gripped my arm, just above the elbow, and was reaching for my wrist to complete the come-along hold. I took a step forward and Jimmy followed, off balance and leaning into me. I took a quarter pivot and drove my free elbow into his ribs. He gasped and loosened his grip, and I pivoted again, jerked my other elbow loose, and popped it into his nose. His head snapped back and his hands flew up and I spun away, adrenaline dancing through my arms and legs.

  “Fuck!” he yelped. Blood trickled between his fingers. “My fucking nose!” Turpin looked— open-mouthed— from Jimmy to me and back again.

  “Jesus,” he said. The older guard shook his head ruefully. Jimmy wiped his nose with the back of his hand and winced. He stared at the blood and then at me, and his eyes got small.

  “Bastard,” he hissed, and he reached for his baton. The older guy put a hand on Jimmy’s wrist and stopped him in his tracks.

  “Okay, Jimmy,” he said softly, and he looked at me. His eyes were hard and shiny, like blue marbles, and there was nothing sleepy left in them. “This fellow is just leaving, and he’s doing it quietly and right away. And he knows, if he does that, then nobody has to lay hands on nobody anymore. Isn’t that right, sir?” I nodded slowly, and something relaxed in the old guy’s shoulders. He tensed up again when Turpin spoke.

  “He’s not going anywhere, goddammit. He assaulted this man, and we’re holding him for the police.” Turpin rocked from one foot to the other and the older guy shook his head.

  I took another deep breath and managed a small laugh. “That’s your story. Mine is that you incited this guy to attack me and I defended myself. I’m happy to stick around and let the cops and the press sort it out; I’m happy to leave, too. It’s your choice.”

  Turpin’s face was an odd mauve color, and his lips all but disappeared. The balding guard looked at him sadly, but Turpin didn’t notice. He just stood there— red-faced, silent, and shaking with anger. I looked over at Pratt’s office. She was still in the doorway, watching, and her expression was still a mystery. After a moment, I headed for the elevator.

  6

  I slouched in the back of the cab and cursed myself all the way to 34th Street. Mixing it up with Turpin and his security thug had been stupid and pointless, and I was angry with myself for doing it. He was a posturing little martinet and I didn’t like being poked, but that was no excuse— nor was the fact that he’d been so easy to bait. Screwing around with him hadn’t bought me anything, and it could have landed me in some time-wasting trouble.

  The rest of the way home, I thought about the little I’d learned at Pace-Loyette. As Nina Sachs had gathered, Pace management had no better idea of Danes’s whereabouts than she did, but they were definitely interested— enough to have made some discreet phone calls, anyway, and to have had a meeting with me. But I didn’t think their curiosity— or worry— had led them to dispatch any errand boys uptown to grease palms and ask questions. And it hadn’t been sufficient to get them to call the cops. Or maybe, as Neary had suggested, the imperative to keep a low profile trumped all. Which left them little else to do with the question of Gregory Danes, it seemed, than to wrap some lawyers around it.

  It was after three when the taxi dropped me at home. The building was quiet except for my footsteps. I opened windows and soft air worked its way around my apartment. It stirred a faint surprising trace of Jane’s scent and I wondered what she was doing just then. I poured a glass of water and let my messages play. Lauren’s voice came over the speaker.

  “Just reminding you about Ned’s, on Saturday. Keith and I will be there at two. See ya.” I’d seen more of my family in the past few months than I had in years— at brunches, birthdays, an anniversary, and even a second cousin’s bar mitzvah. But the rapprochement was a tentative one for all concerned, and Lauren and her husband, Keith, had decided that I should be chaperoned at these events lest I cut and run, or worse. They’d appointed themselves to the job.

  After Lauren came the hu
shed schoolmarm tones of Mrs. Konigsberg, my brother’s assistant. She was about three hundred years old and, before my brother, she had worked for my uncles and my grandfather at Klein & Sons. Besides ancient, Mrs. K was precise, rigid, and entirely humorless, and she couldn’t have disapproved of me more if she’d been my own mother.

  “Mr. March, this is Ida Konigsberg calling from Klein and Sons,” she said, as if I might not recognize her voice or her name or might think she’d changed employers after all these centuries. “I’m confirming your meeting tomorrow afternoon, at two o’clock, here at our offices.” She recited the address and I laughed out loud, fully expecting her to follow with directions. “You’ll be interviewing Mr. Geoffrey Tyne, whose curriculum vitae you should already have received. The interview will take place in Mr. Ned March’s conference room, next to his office on the seventh floor. Mr. March would like to meet with you afterward for about fifteen minutes, to discuss your impressions of Mr. Tyne. Please call me to confirm.” I didn’t dare do otherwise.

  Mrs. K’s call ended in a discreet click, and then Jane’s voice was there. There was noise on the line and other voices in the background.

  “I’m with the lawyers again, and it looks like I’ll be here late.” I heard the rueful smile in her voice. “Leave a message, tell me what you’re up to. Maybe we can have dinner, if you don’t mind waiting.” I heard someone call her name. “Got to jump. Call me.”

  I’d learned that, to Jane, late could mean anything from nine till after midnight, and I called to tell her voice mail that tonight I couldn’t wait. Tonight I’d be working. I’d made two failed attempts to speak with Irene Pratt; the third time, I figured, would be the charm. I opened up my laptop and started my browser.

  There were three Irene Pratts in the metropolitan area, but only one in Manhattan— on the Upper West Side. I dialed her number, and an answering machine picked up. I recognized the quick talk and the Long Island accent. I didn’t leave a message. I couldn’t count on finding Pratt at home for at least a couple of hours, so I heated some coffee and returned to the court records databases and my list of the complaints against Danes and Pace-Loyette.

  The list of the aggrieved was long and varied— from pension funds in the Midwest to coupon clippers in the Sun Belt and day traders on both coasts— and their allegations ranged from plain old negligence and conflict of interest to elaborate conspiracy and fraud. Most, though not all, involved Piedmont Science. Some of the claims had been resolved, settled out of sight for undisclosed sums and with all concerned silenced by nondisclosure agreements, and some were still pending, drifting slowly through a limbo of depositions and discoveries, but none of them had yet made it to an actual judgment.

  Mixed in with the investor suits were others, unrelated to Danes’s job as an analyst. There was a six-year-old action— ultimately dismissed— against Danes and every other shareholder in his old 90th Street co-op, brought by a bicycle messenger who’d sprained his ankle in the building’s lobby. And there was an eight-year-old claim, brought by Danes, which involved chipped granite countertops, a broken sink, and an unrepentant contractor. It had dried up after five months. At the bottom of my list was the ten-year-old case of Sachs v. Danes, the divorce proceedings. Seeing it there reminded me that I owed Nina a progress report, and I called her before I headed uptown. She answered on the eighth ring, and she was distracted and barely civil.

  “I’m working, for chrissakes,” she muttered, and I heard her lighter snap. “You can come over tonight if you want to talk.” I told her I would.

  Irene Pratt lived in the upper seventies, on a leafy street of brownstones between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues. It was nearly six when I got there, and the narrow sidewalks were crowded with people walking dogs and toting groceries and heading for expensive workouts. Pratt’s building was a Romanesque town house of rough, tobacco-colored stone. It was five stories tall, with narrow arched windows, a cavernous entryway, and lots of decorative masonry. There was a video intercom system at the door. Judging from the buttons, there was only one apartment per floor. Pratt was on the third. I buzzed and waited and nothing happened. It was still early and I wasn’t surprised. I walked down the street.

  There was a bar on the corner of Columbus, with small tables out front. I found one with a clear view of Pratt’s building and ordered a ginger ale. I stretched out my legs and worked my way through a bowl of cashews while the soft air grew dark. Noise and smoke and the smell of liquor thickened around me, and with them— suddenly— came a strong and acrid nostalgia.

  It could have been the light that set it off— the ripening purple sky and the swelling shadows, the sense of recklessness and promise that seemed to fall with evening— or it could have been the jumble of voices— laughing, flirting, boasting and arch, eager to please, studiously bored, and all a little slurred. It could have been the tiny buzz of danger as the customers grew louder and less cautious, or the possibility of violence— however remote— that rode with every jostling arm and elbow. It could have been the anonymous feel of being alone in the midst of a raucous crowd that did it, or my own incipient restlessness, scratching in my head like a low-grade fever. Whatever the cues, the memories— of other bars and other evenings, years ago— were powerful and close enough to taste. Columbus Avenue was a world away from Burr County, and from the dives I’d haunted in the months after Anne’s death. But the jagged, angry feeling that was always with me then was abruptly back again, lodged in my chest like a hunk of broken glass.

  Back then it was broken glass and a head full of static, a furious buzzing that I could never silence but could only distract. And every night, for four blurry months, I did just that, trading grief and guilt for motion, for drink and drugs, for violence and sex. I crashed along the back roads with my headlights dark and a chemical fire in my brain, and I made the rounds of places like the Rind and Buddy’s Fox and every other bucket of blood in the county. When I paused it was only to pass out, and when I came to I was often bruised and battered, or else I was sprawled alongside women whose names I never knew and who were never pleased to see me in the light of day. After a while, I took my act to the neighboring counties, to spare my colleagues the bother and embarrassment of cleaning up after me. It was only luck that no one got killed.

  I swallowed some ginger ale, and for an instant it tasted smoky and bitter and my throat closed up. These were long-absent feelings, but they were more than familiar. They dwelled someplace below conscious recall and were bound in me like muscle memory. Like riding a bike. And they scared the hell out of me.

  A shudder ran through me and I looked up the street and saw Irene Pratt, walking east from Amsterdam. She had a purse and a big leather tote bag on her shoulder and a plastic grocery sack in her hand, and her gait was awkward. Her head was down, but I recognized the thick chestnut hair and the pink blouse.

  I watched her fumble for her keys and disappear inside. I gave her twenty minutes— time enough to sort the mail, put the groceries away, check messages, change clothes; then I took out my cell phone and punched her number. When she answered, I spoke fast.

  “Ms. Pratt, this is John March. We spoke yesterday morning, and I stopped by your office this afternoon—”

  She cut me off. “Jesus Christ, what the hell are you calling me at home for? What do you want from me?”

  “I want to talk about Gregory Danes, Ms. Pratt. I’m trying to find him, and I thought maybe you could help.”

  She heaved an exasperated sigh. “I told you, we can’t—”

  It was my turn to cut her off. “I know what your orders are, Ms. Pratt. I’m at the bar on the corner, sitting at a table outside. I’ll be here for another half hour if you want to talk.” I clicked off.

  It took her forty-five minutes, and her steps were tentative. She’d changed into jeans and sneakers and a blue T-shirt from an electronics trade show in Las Vegas. She was small-breasted and slender, and her arms were soft looking. There was a gold watch on her wrist and a p
lastic clip holding back her heavy hair. She stood near my table and looked down at me.

  “You’re still here,” she said. There was a dark shine to her eyes and more color in her face. A light perfume wafted toward me, something with lilac. I nodded.

  “Sit,” I said, but she didn’t.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I told you, I’m trying to find your boss. And I’m trying to find someone who cares enough that he’s missing to help me out. I thought that might be you.” Pratt squinted at me but did not speak. “Sit,” I said again. I pulled out the metal chair next to mine. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

  She rested her hand on the back of the chair and shook her head. “Why do you say missing?”

  “I don’t know what else to call it. The guy’s gone away— no one knows where— and he hasn’t come back when he said he would. And no one has heard from him since the day he left. What do you call it?”

  Pratt bit her lower lip. “There’s nothing I can tell you. I don’t know where he is, and the last I heard from him was his voice mail, telling me he was taking time off.”

  A waitress orbited the table; I caught her eye and she came closer.

  “Another ginger ale for me, and …” The waitress and I looked at Irene Pratt, who looked irritated, and then resigned.

  “I don’t know … a Bud, I guess.” The waitress went away, and Pratt looked down at me.

  “Sit,” I said. Pratt pulled the chair out and sat at its edge. “Nuts?” I offered her the bowl. She ignored them.

  “I don’t know where the hell he is,” she said softly. She played with the clasp of her gold watch. Her hands were small, and her nails were clipped short and unvarnished.

  “How long have you worked with him?” She looked up at me and I noticed the lines around her eyes and mouth. I put her age at thirty-five.