Hooked

by Matt Richtel

  One of the biggest drivers in reducing these costs would be supply chain management software. Corporations were just starting to use it to automate procurement of parts, relationships with manufacturers and customers, and internal management of employees.

  Vestige wasn’t sexy, but it was going to make billions. And the real financial winners would be the earliest investors—venture capitalists like Kindle Investment Partners and its limited partners. They were in a position to enjoy spectacular growth.

  Annie said early-stage investment was not just something her father was very good at—he was one of the best.

  “He wants you to follow in his footsteps,” I said.

  “I might have,” she said playfully. “Until I met you.”

  The next day, after spending lunch in Central Park, we took a cab to the third tallest building in New York. We stood on top of the Empire State Building, about to lock lips.

  “Why do you do it?” I said.

  She kissed me. “Because you taste like pizza and bubble gum.”

  “This work,” I said. “It always sounds like it makes you miserable. Then I see you making goofy faces at the zoo, and I think: Why not choose a life with more peace—whatever that might be?”

  I felt a surge of wind and I pulled the collar of her jacket around her ears.

  “Nat, make a funny monkey noise for me,” she said play- fully.

  I eeped.

  “I admire your decision to quit medical school, to take yourself off the beaten path. To take regular naps. I love it about you,” she said, turning serious. “But just because my path isn’t precisely serene the way you think of serenity doesn’t make it wrong. I can thrive in this environment, build great companies, create a lot of opportunities for people, and make a fortune. Then I can come home and have plenty of time to spend at the petting zoo.”

  We never made it to dinner. I had showered and gotten dressed up. Annie was in the bathroom for an eternity. Finally, I knocked.

  “Come in.”

  She was sitting on the toilet, fully dressed, in a short skirt and black stockings. She would have looked stunning, except there was a smudge of red lipstick that tapered off from the right corner of her lips. It looked clownlike and intentional, a defacing.

  “Make another funny monkey noise,” she said, trying to sound upbeat.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “You don’t really love me,” she said.

  “What?”

  “This isn’t real.”

  I snagged a tissue. “That’s the smeared lipstick talking.” I wiped off her lips and chin. “I love you completely,” I said. “I have never felt anything like this for anybody.”

  Annie closed her eyes, lost in thought, opened them, then told me a story. When she was sixteen, her father arranged for her to spend a summer working for a local Republican congressional candidate. She volunteered instead to work for the Democrat. Her father walked into the Democrat’s campaign headquarters and started yelling at her, humiliating her. Later, he showed her a newspaper clipping in which the Democrat had been discovered to have had an affair years earlier with the family’s illegal-immigrant nanny. Annie said she suspected her father had leaked the affair to the paper himself.

  “He’s a maniac,” I said.

  Annie let the words sink in. “We did a thousand things together when I was little. We went to the zoo, we traveled. But my absolute favorite was when we went skiing. Not the skiing part, but the chairlift. It was just me and Dad suspended in the air and he would ask me question after question, what I thought about this, and what I thought about that. I hated when the ride was over and I skied as fast as I could down the mountain so we could do it again. Then I got older and independent.”

  She wiped the makeup off her chin.

  “He feels like he’s losing you?”

  “Maybe. My father is a pragmatist. Relationships to him are important, but they are things to be temporarily sought, like consumables, then attained, checked off, and rejected if they get too unstable. He has his own definition of . . . love. To him, emotional pursuits have the same essence as materialism, entertaining and fun to a point but then a distraction if they get out of control.”

  The softness had drained from her.

  I told her what he’d said about the SkyMall catalog, eliciting a thin smile. She said the basement was filled with gimmicky catalog items, like a dish that provided cats with fresh, aerated water, suitcases with ergonomically correct handles, and a remote-controlled shark. Her father was fascinated by capitalist seduction.

  I started laughing. “If he ever figures out the channel for the Home Shopping Network we’re all doomed.”

  “It’s why my mom left him. He thinks of love the way he thinks of the solar-powered cooling safari hat. It’s an illusion, and something to desire and sacrifice for, so long as it isn’t too much trouble.”

  She turned away from me, to the mirror, and looked at me in the reflection. I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t, and she didn’t respond to gentle follow-up questions.

  I surmised that she wanted to be alone, so I left her and sat on the bed and waited. Finally, the bathroom door opened. Annie had removed her clothes. What followed was ferocious lovemaking, which was nearly derailed when Annie, for the first time, started to talk dirty, uttering explicit instructions. I was getting into it, but something snapped in the mood, and Annie giggled, and then we both started laughing.

  The next day was her big meeting. Annie’s job was to convince some investment bankers to take the company public, which meant huge returns for Kindle Investment Partners. The meeting was down in a conference room in the hotel where we were staying. Moments after Annie rushed out the door, I noticed she’d left a manila folder with her presentation. I found the glass-walled conference room easily. Inside, I could see Annie holding court. Five men in suits listened rapt—one of them was Dave Elliott, the lawyer for Annie’s father.

  I rapped on the window, and Annie beckoned me inside. I handed her the envelope. “Nathaniel Idle, everybody,” she said, eliciting bored nods. She took the manila envelope and looked inside it. She continued to exude professionalism. “Thanks,” she said. “This looks to be in order.”

  I tried to catch her eye, but she looked back to the group and I unceremoniously departed.

  Two months later, I got a ringside seat to the dynamic between Annie and her father.

  We were at the Atherton house. Her father and his third wife—a thirty-something who was wiser and gentler than the clichés about rich guys and their blonde mates would have you believe—were supposed to be away. Annie and I were in the kitchen, blackening fish. We heard the garage door open.

  Glenn Kindle was in an ebullient mood. He promptly took us to the garage and showed us why. Rather than go away for the weekend, he had had a change of heart and gone to the car dealership and bought a Mercedes convertible. He handed Annie the keys.

  “NotesMail goes public next week, and thanks in no small part to our new junior partner,” he said. He grinned.

  The keys sat in Annie’s open palm. She didn’t say a word. She looked bewildered at first. Her father winked at me as he ran his hand along the beautiful metallic blue machine. Then he started walking toward a door leading back into the house.

  “Shotgun!” I said.

  I looked up to see Annie following her father. He turned and smiled at her. Almost like an afterthought, he said, “Ted won’t know what hit him.”

  “What did you do?” she asked.

  “I cut him out,” he responded matter-of-factly. “He deserved it. We did the work. He was not, to say the least, pleased. He called me a ruthless cunt. No one’s ever called me that before.”

  Annie seemed to smirk. “So unbelievably cold.”

  “Big fishes eating little fishies,” he said. He held up his soda as if toasting, and walked out.

  Annie turned back to me. She tossed the keys in my direction in a big arc. I dipped to my left to catch
them before they hit the pavement.

  “He’s out of his mind,” I said, recovering.

  “It’s a payoff.”

  “For keeping you quiet about Ted?”

  “Junior partner is a euphemism. For lackey.” Her lip seemed to quiver. “I put the deal together. I earned us millions by convincing NotesMail to let us be their lead investor.”

  “And Ted?”

  “My father doesn’t appreciate what I’m bringing to the table.”

  I took a step toward her. She continued her thought.

  “There is so much competition to find viable companies and get them to agree to fair valuations. The other big firms would have killed for the position that I put us in. I put the projections together and I sold the founders on this and I shouldn’t be treated like a second-class citizen.”

  I grabbed Annie by the shoulders as if to shake her and whispered, “Stop!”

  She looked at me and took a step back.

  “Annie Leigh Kindle. I love you. I’m going to marry you someday. I’m going to give you children, and dogs, and fish. I’ll be the breadwinner. You can be the family vet. It doesn’t matter, so long as we’re together.”

  First Annie smiled, thinly. Then, for the first time I could remember in a long time, Annie cried. A single tear became a gathering. When she finally spoke again, it was in a whisper.

  “I need out,” she said.

  “Sounds good. You’ll quit. We’ll go far away—to Italy or Brazil. Someplace like that. We’ll move into a château.”

  Annie wiped her eyes. She pushed back from me and looked away.

  “Out of us.”

  I was sure I’d misunderstood her. “What are you talking about?”

  “Out,” she whispered again, looking so distant.

  “Where is this coming from?”

  Annie turned her head and looked at me—square in the eyes. She tipped her face forward and pinched her nose with her thumb and forefinger. She held the pose for a long time. Then she put her hand to her forehead and laughed.

  “Annie?”

  The laughter continued.

  “I’m kidding. Who am I kidding?” she said.

  She took my hand.

  “What am I talking about?”

  She shook her head, like some spell had been broken.

  “Annie, did you just try to break up with me?”

  “Tell me about the château,” she said. “Please.”

  “Why did you say that? What would cause you to say something like that?”

  Annie took the keys out of my hand. She kissed my cheek.

  “I know how you feel about me. You can’t imagine how it makes me feel. It’s so powerful. So incredible,” she said, smiling. “I’m a woman. I’m temperamental. Can I fall back on that just once?”

  I wasn’t feeling playful. I wasn’t smiling.

  “I promise,” Annie said.

  “You promise?”

  “I promise I will never ever break up with you as long as I live.”

  19

  Annie was an experienced sailor—and she wasn’t alone. Five of us had gone out on the boat. Friends of Annie’s I’d come to like, including Sarah, from the night I fell in love at first sound.

  It really wasn’t raining that hard. It was a relatively warm day, but the deck was icicle slick. We were a little more than a mile off the coast of Santa Cruz, in Craft Kindle.

  Annie went aft. She was tying down a rope when we got hit with a swell. I wasn’t even watching, but I heard her call out my name. When I moved around to the front, we got hit with another wave. I caught her eye, just as she went overboard. At the exact moment, it didn’t seem like a big deal. The waves weren’t that high. It’s not that we were calm, far from it; we just weren’t completely panicked. I grabbed a life preserver and headed to the side, but when I looked over, there was no Annie. I called out. I saw nothing, heard nothing. I dove in.

  The waves were ugly but manageable. Where could she have gone? Had she hit her head on the side and gone under? I did circles around the boat—as deep as I could swim. I held tight to a rope I’d been thrown, to keep me from drowning myself.

  I almost lost my own life. I swam myself ragged. I had to be pulled from the water, anguished and inconsolable.

  We’d dropped the anchor, of course, then an inflatable boat, and spent hours searching, the Coast Guard by our side. Her father hired a veritable army. They searched the water for days.

  They found nothing.

  20

  I was still lost in the past when Officer Sampson delivered me to the San Francisco Police Department, filled out some paperwork, and set me down on a bench to wait for Lieutenant Aravelo. I tried to avoid eye contact with the passing cops, consumed with the idea that they knew what I’d done to Aravelo’s brother and would relish an obnoxious comment or leer.

  What could I hope to get out of this situation? Aravelo would doubtless be in full grill mode. He wasn’t likely to tell me a damn thing. Not intentionally. Could he be convinced to trade information?

  While waiting, I checked my voice-mail messages. There were two. My editor, Kevin, had called. “Wondering how the story is going,” he said. “Call when you have a sec to chat.” He hung up without saying good-bye. Typical. The other message was from Samantha, who wanted to remind me to visit her the following day for acupuncture. “I sense you need intensive work on your gallbladder meridian.”

  Anxious for distraction, I scrolled down the stored numbers file on my phone. I discovered one number I hadn’t called in years. I wondered if it was even still valid. Louise Elpers, licensed marriage and family counselor. In my phone book, she showed up as “braindoc.” I’d talked to her for a few sessions after Annie’s death, and she helped me with the basic approach to processing grief. I remember her saying that I was glorifying Annie, that it was perfectly normal, and that, as she put it, knowing that didn’t help a goddamn bit.

  I did manage one reality check in the week just after Annie died. I’d gone to Costco, bought beef jerky in the industrial size, a four-pound bag of peanuts, and a case of Dr Pepper. I just didn’t want to feel obliged to stop. I drove for nine hours due east, away from the ocean. I landed in Litham, somewhere in Nevada, population 814. There was a gas station beside a diner. They were connected, or co-owned, as denoted by the sign, “Gas-n-Steak.”

  Two teenagers, a boy and a girl, were flirting, wrestling in a light romantic way. The boy went to his waistband, pulled out a bright green water pistol, aimed, and fired. The girl covered her eyes and squealed with delight. She charged toward the boy and wrapped her arms around him. Started kissing his face. I began to sob, and I didn’t stop even when the gas station attendant asked me to move the car away from the full-service island.

  A cop approached me. “Lieutenant Aravelo is ready for you.”

  As a journalist, I’d always been in the power position when it came to interviews. I was the one asking the questions. I may not have been equal in wealth or power to the person I was interviewing, but the threat that I might write a story gave me a kind of clout in almost any interview situation. Not with Lieutenant Aravelo.

  He was dressed in uniform with his crisp white shirt tucked in smartly. He was asking me to take a seat when a loud buzzing came from what looked to be an alarm clock on his desk. He shut it off, opened a desk drawer, and pulled out a bag of almonds and a banana.

  “Small, regular meals,” he declared.

  He put a picture on the table. It was grainy, but in color, like it had been taken from a convenience store camera.

  “Who is this?” Aravelo asked.

  She was blonde, with angular cheekbones and a blouse that came high up onto her neck. I felt a spasm of adrenaline, but I wasn’t sure why.

  Lieutenant Aravelo seized instantly on my hesitation.

  “What can you tell me about her?” he said. “I want to know everything you know, Dodo.”

  Even if I had seen the woman before, it would be tough to recognize
from an image of such poor quality. The eyes seemed distant, foggy.

  “How about cutting out the offensive and not very clever nickname.”

  “Tell me what you know, Mr. Idle.”

  “I can’t help you. I have no idea who that is.”

  I must have sounded genuine enough. Aravelo paused. He took deliberate bites of his banana, chewing almost comically slowly, like it was part of a regimen.

  “How about this one?” The lieutenant held out another photo.

  This time my surge of adrenaline was justified. This time, I held it in check. On the table, he set down a photo that I guessed from the relatively smooth skin around the subject’s eyes to be about a decade old.

  “She’s Erin Coultran,” Aravelo explained. “Waitress at the Sunshine Café.”

  I held my breath.

  “I recognize her.”

  He sat lightly on the edge of the table and waited. I paused, trying to make it look like I was searching. “The paper said she survived because she was in the bathroom?”

  When I looked up, I found the lieutenant searching my face. If he knew that I knew Erin, he wasn’t letting on. Had Weller not told him?

  “Did you see her go into the bathroom?”

  I shook my head.

  “Did you order coffee from her?”

  “I had water.”

  He wasn’t amused.

  “No.”

  “Did you remember her from the café?”

  “Is she a suspect, Lieutenant?” I asked, trying to sound properly reverent.

  Aravelo ignored me. “Tell me about the Saab.”

  I remembered what Sergeant Weller had told me earlier. The police had found a red Saab in the water near Half Moon Bay. Maybe this was why I had been on Lieutenant Aravelo’s invite-only list to the police station. They’d found the Saab and wanted more details. After all, I was the one who had given them the tip in the first place. Could I recall anything else?