The Extinction Event

by David Black

  Caroline Wonder, one of the firm’s new hires, rushed past the gossiping clerks into Jack’s office.

  “Speaking of virgins…,” the second clerk said, following Caroline with his eyes.

  Caroline, twenty-eight years old, was a thoroughbred, a Dutch-Knickerbocker bluestocking with a character as straight and strong as the whalebone reinforcing the corset she would have worn a hundred years ago. Even without the corset, she had a waist you could span with two hands, a face like an ivory cameo, and hair as pale as heated tungsten.

  Ever since she started working at Milhet & Alverez, Jack called her Five Spot.

  When she asked him why, Jack shrugged.

  Caroline didn’t trust Jack. She slammed Jack’s door behind her.

  “When God handed out brains,” she said, “you thought he said rain and ran for cover.”

  “The woman on the phone,” Jack explained, “said Frank was in trouble.…”

  “And Frank asked her to call you? Jack, you know that’s an old scam.”

  “The boss was in trouble.”

  “And now he’s dead. And you’re up the creek. Given your reputation. I’m surprised they didn’t shoot first.…”

  From a bottom drawer, Jack took a few files, a penknife, an antique silver letter opener, and an old wooden desk nameplate, which Caroline picked up.

  “Put it down, Five Spot,” Jack said.

  Caroline examined it.

  “Hand carved,” she said.

  “I said, put it down.”

  “What is it? Walnut?”

  Jack made an unsuccessful grab for it.

  “Jack Slidell, Attorney at Law,” Caroline read.

  Jack grabbed it.

  “What’s the big deal?” Caroline asked.

  “I made it when I was a kid,” Jack said. “Sixth grade. A gag.”

  Caroline studied Jack, who dropped the nameplate into the banker’s box.

  “From the first day I was here,” Caroline said, “you never did like me.”

  “I like people who earn what they get.”

  “So do I. That’s why I’m working here, not in the city, at my uncle’s office.”

  “I heard when you passed the bar, your uncle dropped Frank a note.”

  “That’s called a reference.”

  “That’s called a free ride.”

  “You always believe rumors, Jack? I heard a rumor, one going around the office. Something about your saying going to bed with me would be like making love to a bicycle.”

  “Maybe it was icicle?”

  “No, it was bicycle.”

  At the door, Caroline half-turned back to Jack and said, “I’m a twelve-speed.…”

  And slammed out.

  2

  With its red-flocked wallpaper, greasy in spots, couches lining the walls, and crystal lamps, Saul’s Grill evoked one of the brothels that populated Mycenae ever since the War of 1812, when all the other whaling ports in the Northeast were blockaded by the British. The walls were covered with pictures of notorious local madams, including a late-nineteenth-century engraving of Kate Church, an early-twentieth-century photogravure of Rae Ann Best, and the faded snapshot of Eleanor Fitzpatrick, called Fizz by everyone in town, who died at ninety-seven in 1976.

  Jack sat in a banquette with a law-firm colleague—a former colleague now that Jack was no longer employed by Milhet & Alverez—Robert Flowers.

  “She’s been in the firm, what … three months?” Jack said. “I’ve been there five years. And she’s telling me what’s good, what’s not good for business.”

  Robert wasn’t paying attention to Jack. He was gazing at a beautiful woman with red hair and long legs.

  “Robert,” Jack reached across the table and tapped a finger in front of his friend. “Robert…”

  “Why don’t I ever date women with seams on the back of their stockings?”

  “You’re lucky to date women with seams on the back of their legs.”

  Robert, who was thirty-one, nearly half Jack’s age, had the square jaw and slicked-back hair of a model in a Forties Arrow Collar ad. The old-fashioned aristocratic look of a Berkshire boy, raised over the Massachusetts border in Great Barrington, who prepped at a third-tier school, not Choate or Andover, but Wilbraham Academy, and was educated at Amherst; who, in Mycenae, set himself apart by emphasizing his Congregational roots and, in Great Barrington where he still lived in his ancestral home, a forty-minute commute to Mycenae, played up his New York style. A kind of patroon superciliousness compared to his hometown, Indian-pudding, down-home, Minuteman Massachusetts ways.

  Robert set himself apart chronologically, too, wearing old-fashioned clothes: blousy shirts that made him look as if he were one of Paul Revere’s Sons of Liberty, large turn-of-the-century bohemian floppy bow ties, and his great-grandfather’s moth-eaten frock coats. He could have been a character from one of Washington Irving’s tales or, on alternate days, from a story written during Melville’s Pittsfield days.

  Jack was eating deep-fried scrod—today, as usual, cod—his daily lunch, which daily Robert noted by telling the old joke about the Bostonian in San Francisco who asked a cop where he could get scrod and the cop replied, “That’s the first time anyone asked in the pluperfect tense.”

  But today Robert missed his cue. He was eating sausage, white boudin, and drinking heavily, rye and bitters.

  “Jack, getting caught in a motel that charges by the hour with your boss’s corpse, an unconscious hooker, and a roomful of drugs … Maybe Caroline’s got a point.”

  Robert spotted a diner at the next table who was about to fork an oyster into his mouth.

  “Don’t eat that oyster!” Robert cried.

  The diner lowered his fork. Robert leaped to his table and shook the oyster off the fork back into the shell.

  “You’re not from here…?” Robert asked the stranger.

  “I was born here,” the stranger said.

  “Then it’s time you learn how to do this thing right,” Robert said. “Mycenae’s a seaport! Though,” he muttered, “you’d never know it today.” He doused the oyster with Tabasco and raised the shell. “Pepper sauce and no fork. Open your mouth.”

  The stranger opened his mouth, into which Robert tilted the oyster. As the stranger, gasping because of the Tabasco, reached for water, Robert sprinkled the hot sauce onto the other eleven oysters.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Robert said to the stranger, who was gulping water. “See?”

  Robert took one of the oysters from the man’s plate and swallowed it, then returned to his own table, where he caught the waiter’s eye and pointed at his empty whiskey glass.

  “The boss sure liked the ladies,” Robert said.

  “Robert…,” Jack started.

  “One night, Frank took me to Angie Carmen’s house,” Robert said. “We were having a cocktail, chatting to the girls—Frank was waiting for his favorite kid to come back to the line-up—and there was this salesman there from down south, Pittsburgh, Detroit—”

  “Detroit’s not south,” Jack said.

  “—who kept asking one of the girls to do a somersault.” Robert ignored Jack. “The girl says, A somersault? The guy from down south says, You know, you put your head between your knees. And she says, Mister, if I could put my head between my knees, I wouldn’t have gotten married four times.”

  The waiter delivered the rye and bitters, which Robert slugged back.

  “I assume the cops are going through Frank’s files,” Jack said. “For leads.”

  “You mean who’d want to kill a lawyer?” Robert asked. “Who wouldn’t?”

  “I wish you weren’t leaving the firm,” Jack said. “With both of us gone—” Jack shrugged. “Until I get back, Five Spot needs all the help she can get.”

  “If you get back,” Robert said. “Why do you call Caroline Five Spot?”

  Ignoring the question, Jack said, “The ink on her diploma isn’t dry. She’s never had a case on her own.”


  “You had most of the interesting work,” Robert said. “Most of what I was doing were little fix-me cases. Someone’s brother gets busted, drunken driving, someone’s kid gets a speeding ticket…”

  “You won’t reconsider?”

  “As my daddy says, only the captain goes down with the ship. Frank was the captain. He’s gone. You were first mate. I’m in the lifeboat. Jack, the mess you’re in, you’ll be lucky if they let you into court for your own trial.”

  3

  Caroline stood in the high double doors of her uncle’s Hudson River mansion, Tabletops, her eyes closed, her face raised to the mild breeze. Up the river, the Rip Van Winkle Bridge lights looked like a leftover Christmas decoration strung across the Hudson. The lights of Mycenae, half a mile downriver, cast a sulfurous glow in the sky. Clouds were massing over the Catskills. A storm was brewing. Caroline remembered the stories about how thunder was caused by the ghosts of Hendrick Hudson’s men bowling in the mountains.

  Behind her, the parlor was filled with Empire furniture. In front of her, the French doors led to a colonnaded gallery with an ironwork balcony. Beyond the gallery was a formal garden. The statuary in the garden, satyrs and nymphs, voluptuous goddesses and priapic gods, was pocked and chipped. The immortals had seen better days.

  Caroline said, “Hibiscus.” She took one last deep breath before turning back into the room. “That smell always makes me feel sixteen years old. My first dance. Willie Jerome sent me a hibiscus corsage. A big red blossom. He was so nervous when he put it on, he stabbed me with the pin and stained the dress, that beautiful organdy dress, with blood.”

  Caroline’s uncle, Devitt Wonder, called Dixie, was mixing a drink at a wicker bar cart. Dixie was a healthy eighty-six. Tall, thin, vigorous, although deceptively fragile looking, in his white linen suit, he had an almost ghostly appearance, a specter from the Gilded Age.

  Dixie said, “The secret of a Ramos gin fizz is—”

  “—cold egg whites,” Caroline said. “Dixie, every time you whip up one of those concoctions, you say the same thing.”

  “And every time I say it, Sweetpea, you tell me I’ve said it before.”

  Caroline’s sister, Nicole, swept in. She was a darker, more sultry version of Caroline. The folded inner canthus of her eyes gave her face an oriental cast. Her hair hung below her waist.

  “Come on, you two,” Nicole said, “dinner’s waiting.”

  “Wait on us a moment, Nicole. I have to quiz your sister on something.”

  Nicole glanced from Caroline to Dixie.

  “She’s not going to quit her job and go to work for you, Uncle Dee.”

  “One of our ancestors must have married a witchy woman,” Dixie said. “You two girls are always reading my mind.”

  “It doesn’t take magic to guess what you’re thinking, Dixie,” Caroline said.

  “Caroline,” Dixie said, “the firm you’re in, word around town is a storm’s coming and no one’s taped the windows.”

  “You’re the one who taught me not to be a quitter, Dixie,” Caroline said.

  “I hope,” Dixie said, “I also taught you not to be foolish. I can offer you a good job.”

  “I already have a job, Dixie,” Caroline said. “And I’m going to make a go of it, even if I have to run the place alone.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  1

  Jack walked into Samaritan Hospital with a detective, Al Sciortino, a childhood friend. Even in the air-conditioned lobby, Sciortino had sweat stains under his arms and on his collar. He had a Marine haircut the color of iron filings, eyes that registered so little emotion they looked like pinpoint cameras, and fingers so stubby they seemed to be missing a joint. As usual, he smelled of cigars and Bay Rum.

  “Coke laced with cyanide?” Jack asked.

  “If the glass didn’t crack,” Sciortino said, “if they’d cooked it up into a rock, most of the poison would have precipitated out.”

  “And smoking it?”

  “There wouldn’t have been enough cyanide in the vapor to kill him.”

  “But Frank got impatient, huh?”

  Sciortino nodded. “Snorting the coke.”

  “If someone wanted to kill him.” Jack said, “how could he be sure Frank wouldn’t wait?”

  “Lucky for the girl,” Sciortino said, “as far as drugs go, Frank wasn’t a gentleman: No ladies first.”

  2

  In the hospital intensive care ward, Jack and Sciortino stood by Gaynor’s bed, looking at her, unconscious, her face a mass of bruises the blue-black of eggplant. The fluorescent ceiling lights reflected off the tubes going into and out of her body. Monitors chirped.

  The attending doctor, Peter Rodaheaver, unhooked a clipboard from the foot of the bed.

  “Mr. Slidell, your boss was dead before he had a chance to say hallelujah!”

  “He must have had time to tell the girl to call Jack,” Sciortino said.

  “So he knew he was in trouble,” Jack said.

  “You snort cyanide, I think you know you’re in trouble,” Rodaheaver said. “For a second. Before trouble don’t matter anymore. You figure beaten like that the girl knew she was in trouble, too.”

  “If Frank took off on her,” Sciortino asked, “why would she call Jack for help?”

  “Frank wouldn’t have hit the lady,” Jack said, “let alone whale on her.”

  “So,” Sciortino asked, “you got any idea who played her like a snare?”

  “You find anything in his files?” Jack asked.

  “Yeah,” Sciortino said, “just like on tee-vee, we got six people looking at every single memo he ever wrote.”

  “You think anyone would mind—”

  “If you went snooping? Aside from the department, the troopers, and the DA?”

  Jack nodded at a floral arrangement, a cluster of white blossoms with fringed petals.

  “The blooms for her?” Jack asked.

  “They came a couple of hours ago,” Rodaheaver said.

  “Any note?” Sciortino asked.

  Rodaheaver shook his head no.

  “An order form?” Jack asked. “The florist’s name?”

  “Nothing,” Rodaheaver said. “They were left at the desk.”

  “We’ll check it out,” Sciortino said.

  “Is she going to make it?” Jack asked Rodaheaver.

  “You better hope so,” Sciortino said to Jack. “She dies, there’s no one to say you didn’t kill her.”

  3

  Caroline and Nicole strolled through Mycenae’s Court Square, past the cottages with their Dutch-style second-floor front doors and double front stairs. From an open window came a recording of Sidney Bichet’s “Preachin’ Blues.” Caroline swung a wide-brimmed straw hat from its pink ribbon. Too colorful to be wearing under the gusty, lead sky.

  “I can’t believe you won’t take Uncle Dee’s job,” Nicole said.

  Caroline didn’t answer.

  “If you want to prove yourself,” Nicole said, “do it in a business that’s not going out of business.”

  Caroline still didn’t answer.

  “Caroline,” Nicole said, “sometimes I think you’re as crazy as a chameleon on plaid.”

  Caroline turned onto Roscoe Conkling Street, nicknamed in the late-1880s Skunk Alley by a disgruntled Democrat. Nicole gestured in the opposite direction.

  “Where are you going?” Nicole asked.

  “The bus stop,” Caroline said.

  “You know what they used to say: Good girls don’t take the bus.”

  “They also used to say: A lady doesn’t wear panties in the summer. It’s bad for the hygiene.”

  “Caroline, ever since you were a girl you’ve made things hard for yourself.”

  “A guy at the office thinks I had the job handed to me. Because of Dixie.”

  “So you’re going to ruin your career because of a guy, what a guy said?”

  Caroline didn’t answer.

  “Who is this guy?” Nicole asked.
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br />   “No one,” Caroline said. “No one special.”

  Nicole studied her sister. Caroline stood in the humid night, backlit by a streetlamp, her body showing through the thin fabric of her dress, as she thought of Jack.

  “Yeah?” Nicole said. “He must be something to get to you that much.”

  “What are you talking about, Nicole?”

  The bus, maroon with gold trim, designed to look like a trolley, ground up, stopped. Caroline stepped on it.

  “He didn’t get to me,” Caroline said.

  The bus moved off.

  “I can see that,” Nicole said to herself. “Didn’t get to you at all.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1

  The clerk at the Dutch Village Motel stood behind the counter, a stack of paid bills in front of him. He glanced at one, then impaled it on the old-fashioned iron desk spike. Near his elbow was the button that rang a buzzer in the back of the house. When the door opened, he looked up. A man wearing cowboy boots and a cowboy hat entered, the turned-up collar of his blue nylon windbreaker muffling his voice.

  “Last night,” the man asked, “you were on duty?”

  The clerk nodded, trying to get a look at the man’s face.

  “An older man with a young woman,” the man asked. “He checked in?”

  “Yeah,” the clerk said, “then checked out. Permanent.”

  “Someone visited them?” the man asked.

  The clerk nodded, this time wary.

  “Would you recognize him,” the man asked, “this other fellow?”

  The clerk hesitated, looking a little too hard at the man.

  “What’s the matter, boy?” the man asked.

  The clerk went to hit the buzzer button with his palm, but the man grabbed his wrist, stopping him.

  “Who you going to call?”

  “I … I wasn’t.”

  “You were going to hit the button.”

  “No, I…”

  “Only one other thing you could’ve been reaching for.”

  Holding the clerk’s wrist, the man lifted the clerk’s hand over the desk spike.

  “This,” the man said.

  And he slammed the clerk’s hand onto the spike, impaling it.