by Peter Israel
But I am not a religious man. Nevertheless, and appearances to the contrary, I do not commit murder every day.
As suddenly, the spell passed. I could and did force myself to dry my body and dress again. Had I actually noticed something? Some change in the ambience—an animal perhaps, or the silhouetted shadow of one of his staff crossing a kitchen window? I think not.
I knelt, still shivering a little, to tie the laces of my Reeboks, my eyes on the lit windows across the pool. Then I wrapped the bathing suit in the towel and made my way silently back through shadows to my car.
I never looked back. I heard nothing, saw no one, and I was home in time to bring Kitten her breakfast on a tray.
“Good morning, Kitten” was what I said. “You’re looking at the new Trustee of Stark-Thompson.”
“What are you talking about? I thought you said your cousin would have to die before that happened.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Well? Is he dead? How did you find out so early?”
I looked down at her. Sleepy-eyed, she was lying against her propped pillow, the covers pulled up, her dark hair a little frizzy.
“Because I saw to it myself,” I told her.
“You …? You what?”
“That’s right, Kitten. I just joined your club.”
She sat up abruptly, clutching the covers to her breasts.
“You what?” she repeated, her eyes now wide. “Joined what?”
“I only carried out orders, remember? You yourself told me to deal with it. So? So, I’ve just dealt with it.”
“You …?” she started to say. “Oh, my God! Look, Tommy …” She dropped the covers, leaving herself bare-breasted because her hands were gesturing. “Look, darling, I just can’t deal with this. Not now. Not on top of everything else.”
Her voice was suddenly harsh and a little frantic.
“What everything else?” I asked.
“Never mind.” Then, her voice softening as she seemed to focus back on me: “Oh my God, Tommy. Why at least didn’t you tell me about it?”
“It hardly seemed necessary,” I answered, feeling some stirring of pleasure at the fact.
She covered her mouth with one hand, as though the reality of it was just dawning on her.
“You’d better sit down,” she said. “Please.” She moved over under the covers. “You’d better tell me about it.”
I sat on the edge of the bed and described what I’d done. She played devil’s advocate, questioning certain details: the possibility of evidence (I saw none), and how did I know Corky was dead (because I had looked into the question of how long even expert swimmers could hold their breath), and how could I be sure there’d be no autopsy? I saw no reason why there would be. He was eighty-three, with a bad heart, had even been advised against overexercising. But even if there were an autopsy, what could it prove? That he died of drowning instead of heart failure? There would, I was sure, be no sign whatsoever of a struggle.
She shook her head when I was done. Her eyes closed, and she rubbed at one of them. Then a trace of a shudder.
Goodness, I thought, why such horror at someone else’s crime? I remembered her telling me she had thrown up after she killed Thorne. And then I remembered something else as well—as unseemly then, at five A.M., as it would be now.
Yet since when had unseemliness ever held us back?
“When will it become official?” Kitty said. “The Trustee business?”
“There you go,” I said lightly. “That’s more like my Kitten.”
“But when?”
“I don’t know. It can’t be left vacant for very long. Probably they’ll call a special meeting of the Council—”
“But when?”—with some urgency.
I savored the change in her, from the shock of murder, the appropriate horror and dutiful dismay, to the practical consequences. Her eyes widened and took on a glaze, stimulated, I surmised, by thoughts of dollars.
Whereas for me:
“Let’s worry about that later,” I said. “Right now, if you absolutely insist, I’ll let you have one sip of coffee. But just a sip. Then I have other things in mind for you.”
“What on earth …?” she said, not reading my intent until I pulled the covers away from her hands. The sight of her bare flesh, her full and luxurious body, intoxicated me beyond belief. “Tommy, for God’s sake! I don’t believe you!”
“Don’t,” I said with an urgency of my own. “Don’t believe me. Believe this instead.” At which, taking her hand, I circled it around my sudden erection.
“My God, Tommy, I …”
“Remember? You did it to me, remember? After Thorne? Now I want you the same way.”
I will say this for my wife: taken aback she may have been (and I believed she was), but she could ready herself for sex in an instant. And so, that morning. Soon she was talking away—to me, to us:
“You did it for me, didn’t you? Tell me you did it for me, even if it isn’t true. Did you? Did you?”
“Yes,” I replied, breathing hard, “for you.”
“Oh, my Tom, my darling man, my …”
I held her there, though. I wanted the words. Yes, the clawing, yes, the arching, drawing me deeper inside her, but the words more than anything, the desperate words. Because I saw another mirror image of that other night, or morning, after Thorne, and yes, I wanted her afraid of me for the first time, as I had been then, and I wanted her babbling to cover her fear. And yes, she babbled as she came, arching and flattening, and I spurted into her, riding our waves.
I loved her, just then, in a new way, loved her as she lay back, alabaster skin and dark dripping muff against the pale sheets, eyes exhausted, loved her in the way of the master, he who, having long been seduced, turns seducer, he who, having been worked, manipulated, coerced, and otherwise cajoled, now emerges, full-blown, heart pounding, the consequence.
How hilarious it now seems to talk of it this way!
Yet Kitty saw it, too.
“A monster,” she murmured, eyes half closed. “I think I’ve created a remorseless monster.”
She reached for me again.
Only later did we talk about the money, my access to it, the when and the how of it.
21
Corcoran Stark had asked to be buried in the small Connecticut town to which the founders had for some reason repaired after having made their money in Pennsylvania. Over half its graveyard, behind the white-steepled church, was inhabited by my ancestors, and although many years had passed since any Stark or Thompson had actually lived in the community, that was where we, his mourners, went, on one of those wet, dark days in early October, under umbrellas, with a chill drizzle dripping intermittently and a steady mist in the air.
The turnout was surprisingly small for a man of eighty-three whose passing had earned a headline on the obituary page. But Corky Stark’s wife had predeceased him, they’d had no children, and while a few other relatives showed up, much the largest contingent was from the Council, some eight of us, plus my father, plus Cranny Fly Sr. Corky’s own minister officiated, and Hall Thompson, our Chairman, made a brief speech.
I had talked to Hall Thompson several times by phone in the immediately preceding days. In fact it was he who’d called to inform me of Corky’s death. At Kitty’s prodding, and though, as I’d told him, I hated to bring up matters of business in the midst of our loss, I’d pushed him on the Trusteeship. His suggestion was that I become Acting Trustee, pending our January meeting. I pointed out to him, though, that in the absence of certain formal acts required of the Council—empowerments, authorizations, and the like—I would be effectively hamstrung if we waited until January, and the markets were too volatile for us to leave our assets dormant for three months. Of course what was on my mind, and Kitty’s, was that if I pushed now, in the vacuum created by Corky’s sudden death, I could get anything I wanted out of them.
Hall Thompson agreed with everything I said, and to his question
of how to accomplish it, I suggested we meet immediately after the funeral, those of us who attended, and that he poll the absentees by phone to obtain their consent to whatever we decided.
We went then, in the rain, in a short cortege of limousines and expensive cars, to the dining room of a local motel a few miles from the town. We were, as I recall, the only people there. I had prepared all the documents myself, the delegations of authority, the rights to buy and sell and handle monies in the Funds’ behalf, all subject to the Council’s (later) approval, plus my own compensation plan, and in the margin, as it were, of a spate of reminiscences about Corky and the drinking of toasts to his memory, I presented them, reviewed them, explained them. I circulated copies for all. No one, however, posed a question or raised an objection. Motions were made, seconded, passed by voice vote, and Hall Thompson signed on the dotted lines.
The atmosphere was strangely and, for a funeral, atypically convivial—due, it appeared, to the presence of my father and his hail-fellow-well-met style. You’d never have guessed, from my father’s anecdotes about him, that Corky Stark was the dour and curmudgeonly old man we had all known. The Senator even managed to make a distinctly elderly assembly feel good about the “lottery” of life and death. He’d learned during the war, he said, that survival in combat was a lottery. So, he realized in his old age, was life. Today we put Corky in the ground, the latest loser. Who would be next? In a way, he said, it didn’t matter, because in the lottery of life, where everybody lost, what really did count was “how you played the game.” At which he lifted his glass not to Corky Stark but to all us survivors.
I’d have thought, as noted, that remarks of this sort would have depressed the group. Not so, however, and in the midst of their high-spirited camaraderie, my own tawdry business passed through unnoticed.
In other words, the Senator won the popularity contest that day at the Connecticut motel, while I walked off with the money. And all he said to me was (his arm around my shoulder, within sight but not earshot of the others): “Do you see, Starkie? I can’t be all bad. Look at what I’ve done for you.”
Yes.
In any case, I had pulled it off. This realization made me euphoric, and all the way home in the windblown drizzle I anticipated holding the mood, with the help of a few glasses of good Scotch malt, until Kitty returned. As it happened, though, she was already there. I found her in the solarium, the large glassed-in room, furnished in nineteenth-century wicker and chintz, which had become where we spent most of our time.
“What are you doing here?” I said, bending to kiss her. She was stretched out on a couch, pillows in large floral designs behind her head, thumbing through some magazines.
“I thought you might need me, poor darling,” she said, tossing the magazines aside and kissing me back. “Besides, I’m a little played out. How did it go?”
“It’s done,” I said. “Corky Stark is in the ground, and I’m the new Trustee.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Would I kid about something like that?”
She smiled at me with her eyes.
“You really pulled it off?”
“I really pulled it off.”
She stood in her stocking feet, eyes wide, arms around my neck.
“Well, Stark Thompson, I think we’d better drink to that! What will you have? Champagne, this once?”
I laughed at that. Neither of us particularly liked champagne, but to a traditionalist, and in her tastes that’s what Kitty was, the great occasions—such as, I suppose, a gathering of successful murderers—called for champagne.
So champagne it was, an excellent Dom Perignon, brought by Kitty in an ice bucket with a towel wrapped around the bottle’s neck, and accompanied, on a black lacquered tray, by a mound of black caviar, in crystal, on an ice nest, surrounded by lemon wedges, chopped onions, and little squares of toast. (And why should I spoil the moment by pointing out that it couldn’t all have been prepared spontaneously?)
We toasted each other in silence.
“When do you get access?” she asked, eyeing me across the top of her flute.
“Access? I already have access.”
“No, I mean, full access to the money.”
“That’s what I said,” I answered, grinning at her. “Full access to the money. I already have it. Does Katherine Goldmark Enterprises need capital for expansion? How much do you want? Ten million? Fifty million?”
I laughed at her evident incredulity, and she laughed too, her high-pitched giggle. Somehow, she said, she hadn’t really believed it. There would be further delays; something would have gone wrong.
I reminded her that I’d drawn up the papers myself. Arthur Hallandale Thompson had signed them, with a blanket waiver from the absentees.
“So you have full powers?”
“Yes, as of this minute. In fact, as of a couple of hours ago. And I haven’t so much as spent a nickel yet.”
“And what about the million?”
“What million?”
“The million you were going to pay them back. The Senator’s loan.”
“Nobody so much as brought it up,” I said. “The trouble is, now that you mention it, I’ve got no one to give it to, do I? Except, of course, to myself? The Trustee pays the Trustee?”
“Well, don’t be in any rush,” Kitty said. “We may need the money.”
“What on earth for?”
Even before she put the champagne flute down, though, I saw the change in her. Ah, yes, Kitten had something on her mind. The mirth left her countenance, replaced by a calculating look. I was sitting now on the couch where I’d found her, my legs crossed, and she standing, only her eyes in motion.
“Look, Tommy,” she said, and inhaled, exhaled. “There’s something I have to talk to you about. I may as well be up front about it and say I don’t think you’re going to like it, not one bit. But I’ve got no choice.”
I smiled at the thought that I hadn’t heard a woman talk like that in years. Not since college, in fact, when I’d been hit up for money for an abortion.
“Your word is my command, Kitten,” I said fliply. Then, when she didn’t react: “Well? Out with it, my dear! What in God’s name is it?”
“My brother,” she answered. Suddenly that sharp, chiseled look, eyes small, lips taut.
“What’s wrong with your brother? He’s not going to jail, is he?”
“He might be. Unless he can come up with a great deal of money in a short time.”
“Ahhh,” I said, it being my turn to stiffen. I uncrossed, recrossed my legs. “So the eminent Mr. Goldmark comes with outstretched hand?”
“It’s not funny, Tommy. It’s real.”
“I didn’t mean it to be funny.”
“I can’t explain it all—it’s too complicated—but hear me out, please.”
She sat down next to me, facing me sideways on the couch, her arm along the back of it, and filled in the seamy story for me, the parts, that is, that I didn’t already know.
The firm of Braxton’s, the benighted Braxton’s, crème de la crème of the Wall Street houses, was, as I’ve said, under investigation. Apparently it was open season. Everybody was in the act, from the U.S. Attorney to the SEC to the various stock exchanges to, in point of fact, Braxton’s itself. Braxton’s, in other words, wasn’t going to let anyone out-Braxton Braxton’s, and in the time-honored tactic of the accused turned accuser, the firm was conducting its own internal audit, ahead of the outsiders and under the leadership of … guess who? The Senior Managing Director, Mr. Theodore Goldmark.
What was more, according to Kitty, or so at least her brother had told her, Braxton’s stood every chance of beating any charges. The entire firm, she said, had rallied behind Teddy. Even the old guard among the partners. Even old Charlie Braxton, whom they’d pulled from retirement to give a fiery press conference against “the witch hunters out there who are hell-bent on destroying our company and our industry.” Maybe on some minor points at issue Braxton�
�s had acted inappropriately (though never illegally), but on the major issues—principally insider trading and attempts to rig the market on certain securities—Ted Goldmark said they’d win.
There was a rub, though.
What none of the investigators, outside or inside, had yet discovered—although the insiders were allegedly close—was that Ted Goldmark was personally on the hook himself. From Kitty’s description, it involved what would legally be called the misappropriation of funds, or diversion of funds. Practically it meant that for some time, through a series of adroit jugglings involving the firm’s accounts, Goldmark had been using other people’s money for his own purposes. Apparently my old friend Henry Angeletti was also in the thick of it—had there perhaps been another reason Goldmark had hired him and his weird computer brain away from Thatcher?—and though Goldmark (or Goldmark and Angeletti) knew how to cover the traces so that nobody could find out what had happened, he had to come up with a very considerable amount of cash in order to do it. Short-term cash, that is, until the internal audit was complete. But he had no more than a week at the outside to do it.
And if he didn’t?
Then not only he himself but all of Braxton’s was going to blow sky-high.
“You mean he’ll take them all down with him?” I said.
“He says he’d have no choice, once he’s put under oath.”
“Sounds to me like he’s got a pretty strong basis for hitting up the partners. Why doesn’t he go to them direct, say, ‘Sorry, boys, but either we all swim together or we all sink together’?”
“Because he says they’d crucify him.”
It would be a close call, I thought, but possibly he was right. The ultimate revenge of the Charlie Braxtons? Yes, I could imagine that.
“Wait a minute, though,” I said to Kitty. “Before you go any further, there’s something I don’t understand. I always thought your brother was a rich man. Even a very rich man.”
“I think he was,” she answered. “But he got carried away.”
“A hundred and eighty million dollars carried away?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“One hundred eighty million dollars, remember? At least his share of it? That, according to Henry Angeletti, was the total profit on the insider trading. And Henry, by his own admission, didn’t have everything.”
