Death's Little Helpers

by Peter Spiegelman

  Ines brought out coffee and a big bowl of cut fruit, and when these were gone I did the clearing. Billy surprised Ines and Nina by volunteering to help. We were in the kitchen when he asked, in a low voice, about his father.

  “You know where he is yet?”

  I shook my head. “Not yet,” I said. “You have any thoughts about it?”

  He was scraping food into the trash and he didn’t look up. “Not a fucking one,” he said softly.

  Billy finished loading the dishwasher and I went into the living room. Ines and Nina were on the sofa, leaning into each other and laughing at something. Nina trailed a finger up the curve of Ines’s bare calf, and Ines closed her eyes.

  “We should talk,” I said. Nina and Ines disengaged. Ines stood and gathered up some stray glasses.

  “I need smokes,” Nina said. “Walk with me.”

  The sun was gone and the tropical-chemical colors had bled from the sky, and only the pinkish city glow remained. But it was still mild outside and the streets were still benign. There was a cluster of people down the block, standing outside a chic-looking bar. They were drunk and cheerful, and they assumed everyone else was too. They were wrestling with the question of what to do next and confusing each other deeply in the process. One of the girls called out to us.

  “Hey, what do you think? Williamsburg? Or do we go to the new place on Smith Street?” We didn’t answer, but Nina shot them a sloppy salute and they all laughed. We went around the corner, and our heels made a knocking sound on the cobblestones. Nina was wobbly on the uneven paving and she steadied herself on my arm. She bought Benson & Hedges at a twenty-four-hour grocery and slit the pack open as soon as we got outside.

  “Want to sit by the ferry landing?” she asked. She didn’t wait for an answer but headed toward the river. I followed.

  There were a lot of people in the little park by the water— packs of teenage boys and girls looking for each other and something to do, couples strolling hand in hand, dog walkers, tourists, and more than a few photographers, trying hard to capture the dizzying view. The Manhattan skyline rose, glittering and wet, from the black river, and the office towers seemed to lean toward us. My eyes were drawn to the empty patch of sky downtown, and I felt my throat close up and my teeth clench.

  We found a bench. The seating slats were badly splintered, and we perched on the back rests. Nina smoked in silence, and after a while I gave her my report. I told her about my meeting with Lefcourt and about my futile attempts to track Danes to the Hamptons, the Berkshires, and Bermuda. I didn’t have much to say and it didn’t take long to say it, and when I was done Nina kept quiet.

  “Have you thought any more about the cops?” I asked eventually.

  She sighed heavily and took a last drag on her cigarette and flicked it into the darkness. It landed far off, in a burst of orange cinder. “Yeah, I’ve thought about it.” Her voice was tight.

  “And?”

  She sighed again. “And I don’t want to do it.” I drew a breath to speak, but Nina kept on going. “I don’t want to do any of this anymore.” She looked at me and I looked back. “You know what I’m saying? I want to stop. I want you to stop.” She turned away and popped another B&H out of the pack and lit it. The smoke vanished in the night air.

  “You want me to stop looking for Greg?”

  She stared at the black water and the cityscape and nodded. “I appreciate what you’ve done, but—”

  “What’s this about?” I said. Nina looked at me again. Her mouth was tight and her eyes were narrow. She ran a hand through her hair and looked down at her clogs.

  “I didn’t realize I had to explain myself to you,” she said, and the nasty familiar edge came up in her voice.

  “I’ve been working hard on this thing for nearly two weeks now, Nina— and getting poked at and threatened and tailed in the process— and all of a sudden you tell me to drop it. I think you owe me some explanation of where the hell this is coming from.”

  “Don’t throw that crap about threats and being followed my way,” she snorted. “It seems to me all that shit comes with your job description. And as far as what I owe you, I owe you what’s on your fucking invoice, pal, and nothing more.”

  She blew out a big cloud of smoke and glared at me. Then she held up her hands and shook her head.

  “Christ, we really push each other’s buttons, don’t we? I haven’t gone at it like this with anyone since Greg.” She puffed some more and rubbed the back of her neck. “Look, this isn’t out of nowhere, March. I told you up front I didn’t want to sink a lot of money into this, and you said yourself you’ve done almost everything you can without it costing me a lot more. I decided I don’t want to spend a lot more.” She took another pull on her cigarette and it sizzled and shrank noticeably.

  “So it’s just the money?”

  Nina shook her head. “It’s the money … and the fact that I’m tired of this back-and-forth about the cops. I know what you think and you know what I think and I doubt either one of us is going to change. Am I way off base about that?” She wasn’t.

  “There’s something wrong, Nina,” I said quietly. “There’s something wrong about Greg. The fact that he stopped calling, the fact that other people are out there looking—”

  “Jesus, again with this!” She massaged her forehead with her fingertips. “I don’t want to hear it, okay?” Her voice was loud, and a couple of dog walkers looked at us. She traded stares with them but took the volume down a notch. “I don’t give a damn about whatever else he’s involved in. I’m not going to the cops, and I don’t want you to either. Can I be any clearer than that?” I didn’t answer. “You promised me confidentiality,” she said. “And that’s what I expect.”

  “That’s what you’ll get,” I said.

  Nina sighed and climbed down from the back of the bench and stood before me. “You’ll send a bill?” I looked at her and nodded. She flicked her cigarette away and put her hands in her pockets. “For chrissakes, don’t take it so personal.”

  I took a deep breath and started to speak. And stopped. Why bother? “Tell Ines thanks for dinner,” I said. “And tell Billy good-bye.” Nina nodded and walked away, already fishing for another smoke. I heard her lighter spark behind me.

  18

  Warren Bradley was saying something about the CIA, but my mind was wandering. In fairness, it wasn’t Warren’s fault. He was an excerpt from a job interview textbook: well groomed, well spoken, confident, and poised. His dark hair was going gracefully gray at the temples and was expensively cut, and if he were any more distinguished-looking, he’d have to run for office. His white shirt was spotless and his blue suit was pristine. Even the racehorses that galloped on his necktie did so with calm assurance. And as far as I could tell, he was entirely sober. I was the one having problems.

  “… of course, that was before counterterrorism became a growth industry,” Warren said. He looked at me expectantly, an uncertain smile on his handsome face.

  I wrenched my thoughts away from Nina Sachs and the ferry landing, and back to the conference room at Klein & Sons and the interview with Warren. I was pretty sure he’d been making a joke, and I smiled back at him. I guessed right, and he looked reassured and kept on talking.

  I read through Warren’s résumé again. Like him, it was perfect: Ivy League college, law school, a stint in the air force, another with the Bureau, and ten years at a big Wall Street firm, where he’d risen steadily through the ranks to the number-two spot in their internal security department.

  “Tell me about your assignment in London,” I said. That kept him going for another ten minutes.

  Warren was my second interview of the day. Alice Hoyt had been my first, and she too had been sober and confident and eminently presentable, though that’s where the similarities ended. Alice was medium height and broad-shouldered, and there were a lot of laugh lines around her full mouth and dark eyes and a lot of gray in her short Afro. She had graduated public high school
in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, and although she had served in the military too, it had been in the army as a lance corporal. From there she’d joined the NYPD and attended Queens College at night for a BS and, later, an MS in criminal justice. She’d spent over twenty years on the job, fifteen as a detective and five as the boss of a detective squad in Midtown North. From there she’d gone private, to a DC firm that did a lot of corporate consulting and, as Alice told it, employed at least as many publicists as it did operatives. After five years, she was tired of the travel and of the time away from her husband and three kids.

  “I’ve been away from Brooklyn too long,” she’d said, with a wry smile.

  Warren’s deep voice wound down. It was my turn to talk again.

  I went back and forth with him for another twenty minutes, and I mostly paid attention. We exchanged firm handshakes and Mrs. K showed him out, swooning only slightly as she did. I went into Ned’s office.

  Ned wasn’t there, but my sister Liz was. She was sitting on Ned’s sofa, her shoes off and her long legs propped on the teak coffee table. She looked up from a sheaf of papers and pushed narrow reading glasses onto her forehead.

  “Where’s your boss?” I said.

  “Lunch meeting. You do more interviews?” I nodded, and Liz grinned. “Any bodily fluids spilled in there?”

  “Not today.”

  “Off your game, huh?” Liz dropped her glasses back on her nose and returned to her papers. I took off my suit jacket, loosened my tie, and sat. I put back my head and closed my eyes. I heard Liz turn some pages, and after a while she spoke.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  I answered without moving. “I didn’t sleep much last night.”

  “I take it there was no upside to that.”

  “Not that I could tell.”

  “What was the problem?”

  I opened an eye. She was still scanning her papers. “I got fired yesterday.”

  She looked up. “Surely not for the first time.”

  “It doesn’t happen so often that I’m used to it,” I said. “And this time I’m not even sure of the reason.”

  Liz stared at me for several moments without expression. “Well … you can always reconsider Ned’s offer. We’ll find you a nice little office down the hall, maybe a cute assistant …” I flipped her the bird and she went back to her papers. I closed my eyes, and thoughts of Nina Sachs and her case spun in my head.

  An hour of sitting at the ferry landing and another few spent turning in my bed hadn’t improved my understanding of why Nina had given me my walking papers, or brought me any closer to figuring out where Danes had gone to or why he hadn’t come back. I’d gone over and over what I knew about him and what I could only guess at, and no matter how many times I did, it never amounted to much.

  I had come to know that Danes was an unpleasant and difficult man, with a knack for putting people between a rock and a hard place. I knew also that his basic orneriness had been salted in recent years with anger and resentment over his damaged career and his thwarted attempts at salvage. I knew that on his last day at Pace-Loyette, that anger had been on the boil. He’d argued with Linda Sovitch at lunch and argued some more with Dennis Turpin, and then he’d stormed out. And gone home. And packed a bag. And stopped his mail and maid service. And the next morning he’d gotten in his car and driven away.

  After that it was all question marks and conjecture. Where had he gone? Why had he stopped calling for his messages? Why hadn’t he returned? Who else was looking for him, and why? The big questions swirled with a host of smaller ones. I was fairly certain that Danes had had an affair with Linda Sovitch, but I didn’t know for how long or how it had ended, if indeed it had. The only version I had of their lunchtime argument was the story Sovitch had told me— and it was not one I had a lot of faith in, any more than I had in the little show that her husband had staged for me.

  The door opened and Ned came in, my brother David trailing behind.

  “They want twenty percent,” David said, “but I think they’ll go for—”

  Ned cut him off. “We’re overpaying as it is. If they’re trying to hold us up, then I say wish them luck and show them the door.” Ned’s voice was tired and impatient. He went behind his desk and scrolled through his e-mail. David stopped in the center of the room and looked irritable. Then he saw me, and his irritability became scorn.

  “Sorry I’m late, Johnny,” Ned said. He looked over Liz. “Am I late for you too?”

  “I’m early,” she said.

  He nodded and went to his wall of shelves and produced a glass of ice water from somewhere. “Want some?” he asked us. I raised my hand and Ned brought me a glass. Then he sat next to Liz and looked at me. “How did it go?”

  “Yes, do tell,” David said, perching on the edge of Ned’s desk. “I hear such interesting things about your interviews.” His eyes sparkled meanly. Ned frowned.

  I drank some water. “Bradley looks better on paper, and you’d probably feel more comfortable with him at first, but Hoyt will do a better job for you.” Ned’s brow was creased and he pursed his lips. I reached over and handed him the two résumés, and we were quiet while he scanned them. David interrupted.

  “How can that be?” he said. “I looked at those CVs. Bradley has just the kind of experience we want.”

  “Bradley’s an empty suit,” I said, too quickly.

  Ned looked up, his face blank. “Is that why you assume I’d be more comfortable with him?” he said. David grinned nastily. Shit.

  I shook my head. “No, that’s why I think he appeals to David. But the reality is that Bradley’s cut from more or less the same cloth as a lot of the people around here.”

  “And that’s a bad thing?” David said.

  “I’m not going to debate that with you. But one thing it doesn’t mean is that he’s the best person for this job.”

  Ned looked at the résumés some more. “And you don’t think he is?”

  “In my view, he’s strictly a hands-off guy. Most of his Wall Street experience seems to be in self-promotion and empire building; it sounded to me like he delegated everything else. I didn’t think that’s what you were after.” I looked at David. “Of course, I could be wrong.”

  “And Hoyt?”

  “She’s less buttoned down— a little rougher around the edges— but she’s a whole lot more hands-on. She’s run a detective squad, she’s run high-profile cases, and she’s run task forces too. And after twenty-plus years in the NYPD, I think you’ll find her political skills are up to snuff.”

  “But she’s never done this kind of job before,” David said.

  “Neither have I, but you were ready to give me a shot.” Liz snorted behind her papers, and I thought I saw Ned smile.

  David colored and looked at me. “He was ready; I didn’t get a vote.”

  My eyes were hot and I was suddenly very tired. I got up and pulled on my jacket and headed for the door. “You have my opinion,” I said to the room. “Do what you want with it. Hire Bradley; I’m sure he’ll work out fine. Better yet, hire that Tyne guy. With him you get a floor show.”

  “Johnny … ,” Ned said, but I didn’t stop. I closed the door behind me and didn’t glance at Mrs. K on my way out.

  “It sounds to me like she gave you her reasons for calling it off,” Jane Lu said. “You just didn’t like them.” She walked across my bed and sat cross-legged next to me and didn’t spill a drop of what she carried on the tray. There were two mugs of coffee, a bowl of quartered oranges, croissants, and a crock of jam. Jane was wearing one of my sweatshirts and nothing else. It was Saturday morning and it was pouring rain outside. I rolled over and rested my cheek against her thigh. It was warm and smooth and I would’ve been happy to spend the day there, but it was not to be. Jane was going into the office.

  “It’s not a question of like,” I said to her thigh, “it’s that her reasons don’t make sense.”

  “Not wanting to spend mo
re money isn’t an unreasonable thing,” Jane said, biting into an orange slice.

  “If that’s what she’s worried about she could go to the cops; they do this work for free.”

  “You didn’t like her explanation for wanting to steer clear of them?”

  “That it would piss Danes off? I don’t know. I’ve learned never to underestimate just how twisted things can get between exes, but even so …”

  I ran my palm across the sole of Jane’s foot. She laughed and tore a croissant in half and spread some jam on it.

  “Even so, what? What’s the problem?” The smell of coffee merged with Jane’s perfume and made me hungry. I nibbled gently at her thigh and she giggled.

  “The problem is, she could’ve decided this a while ago and saved herself a lot of money. So why pull the plug now, right after I find out about Sovitch and about Danes’s phone calls? Why stop when I’ve finally found things that could be substantial?” I moved my mouth up to Jane’s hip, and she shifted on the bed. I slid my hand along the inside of her thigh. She laughed and brushed it away.

  “I guess this opens up your schedule a little,” she said.

  I propped myself on my elbow and looked at her. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you don’t have a case right now, and you have time on your hands— time to go somewhere, maybe.” Her eyes held mine, and after a while her smile began to fade.

  “I guess so,” I said, and sat up. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “No?”

  “Besides, Sachs is volatile. There’s a chance she’ll cool off over the weekend and rethink things.”

  Jane swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat on the edge. Her back was stiff and perfectly straight. Her voice was soft and full of sarcasm. “Hope springs eternal,” she said, and she went into the bathroom and shut the door.

  It was past noon when I awoke again, and I was alone. The breakfast tray was on the floor and breakfast was still on it. It was dark outside, and rain fell against the tall windows in a hectic clatter. It slid down the glass in sheets and cast twisting shadows on the walls. I rolled on my back and watched them and tried not to think about Jane.