Long Way Down

by Michael Sears

  McKenna. I needed to warn him. The number Spud had given me to contact him was compromised. He had to get rid of it.

  “You have reached the offices of Information Studies outside of normal business hours. Please call back between ten and four, Monday through Friday. If you wish to leave a message for Lydia Sharp, please press one at the prompt.”

  I pressed one.

  “Ms. Sharp. This is Jason. This number is no longer safe. Please contact me when you can.”

  McKenna would understand. So would anyone pursuing either of us. All I had really gained with being circumspect was a juvenile level of deniability. I tossed the phone across the room.

  I sat and stared at the laptop, wishing it gone and out of my house. I could spend the day getting drive-wiping software, saving all my sensitive files to a CD, cleaning the computer, and reloading the entire operating system and still have a computer I would not be able to trust. Or, I could take a sturdy screwdriver and bust the thing up into component parts and feed them to the incinerator. There was a good screwdriver in one of the kitchen drawers.

  20

  Skeli and I were sharing a precious hour together. Such hours were available to us less often, as I struggled with the Kid, and Skeli’s Total Wellness clinic took as much time from her life as she permitted—and then some. We had taken to meeting at an anonymous little bar in the neighborhood—the Emerald Inn, recently relocated to the space that had once been the All-State Café—and what it lacked in romantic milieu it made up for in privacy. It was habituated by solitary drinkers, their eyes on the TV or the Post, and some neighborhood regulars who came for the hamburger special. It was close to, but just far enough from, our regular haunt that we had a low probability of running into anyone we knew.

  “You’re back to drinking beer,” she said. “Does that mean this case you’re working is going well?”

  “Not necessarily?” It was my first beer all week, since I had started working out. I would greatly have preferred that Skeli notice the awesome improvement of my physique than which poison I was pouring into the temple of my body.

  “I have noticed that when you need to shed stress, you drink vodka. Otherwise you barely drink at all.”

  A fair assessment—and the last few months I had been “going clear” more often than not.

  “I’m beginning to believe that the rich are different than us. They’re more nuts. Maybe money chips away at their inhibitions. They can afford not to have them.”

  “Virgil’s not like that.”

  “No. Virgil is so sane he’s scary. But Virgil’s not in the same league as these people. He works for a living. Mrs. Haley’s idea of work is showing up for a board meeting. She seems totally indifferent to the fact that her husband may go to prison and their business could go right down the tube.”

  “Maybe she thinks she can buy him out of trouble.”

  “Not a long-term winning strategy. And these others? One likes pretending he’s sitting around the cracker barrel sipping moonshine and the other made me kill half a day just to demonstrate that he’s some kind of family man. Hell, you could say Saddam Hussein was a family guy—both his sons worked in the business. One was in charge of murder, the other ran torture.”

  “You’re not in danger, are you?”

  “Me? No. That was a bad comparison. Sorry. I’m just feeling frustrated. The sanest one I’ve talked to so far is Haley, and he believes he’s going to walk away from this for the simple reason that he’s innocent. And as soon as he gets his chance to tell people that, it will all be settled.”

  I looked up. The bartender was doing his best to pretend he wasn’t eavesdropping. His best wasn’t good enough.

  “Do you have any peanuts?” Skeli seemed to burn calories at the same rate as a platoon of marines. She was always hungry, and always in perfect shape.

  The denizens all gave her a look of mild surprise, as though the idea of actually consuming a salted nut while sipping a beer had never occurred to any of them.

  The bartender pried the plastic lid off a gallon-sized metal can and poured a few grams of peanuts into a rocks glass. He placed it in front of us. “You ready for another?” he said, squinting at me in what might or might not have been a disagreeable manner.

  I had finished half of my lite beer. Skeli had taken two sips of her white wine. I wondered if we were not maintaining the correct pace for drinking at his bar.

  “Not just yet,” I said, sliding a twenty across to pay for the first round. He took it, smoothed it over the rounded edge of the rail on his side, and retreated to the register.

  “You know,” I began as soon as our privacy was restored, “if we are going to have a child, we need to spend more time actually making one.” I found that the thought of making love without any form of birth control was joyously erotic.

  “I know. But we’re both incredibly busy.”

  “True. But—”

  “Somehow I get the feeling that this conversation has more to do with libido than with babies.”

  “Unfair!” I cried. “I want time to recite poetry in your ear, while massaging warm, scented oil into your aching feet and feeding you chocolate-covered strawberries.”

  “All at the same time? You’re a wonder. But how will the baby benefit?”

  “We’re talking chocolate here. How can you even ask?”

  “Well, don’t get the massage oil on the strawberries. I hate that.”

  “I’m afraid that you are not taking the problem seriously.”

  Skeli choked on her wine while stifling a laugh. “All right. I’ll give you a choice. You can take me back to your place”—she checked her watch—“for twenty minutes of naked, or near-naked, intimacy, or you can take me to that Chinese-Latino place where the Kid doused me with a plate full of ketchup last year, and buy me an order of that crackling chicken salad.”

  “Can we get the chicken to go?”

  “I don’t think I’ve got that much self-control.”

  “Twenty minutes?” If she agreed to forty, we had a chance to accomplish both dinner and—

  “I’m meeting Debra, the lighting designer, at seven. She’s giving up a cooking demonstration to meet me. ‘Mushrooms Make Romance—Light His Fire with Shiitakes.’ She made a point of telling me all about it.”

  There was a sudden blast of cold air as the door opened. Everyone at the bar turned and gave the intruders an unwelcoming hard stare.

  Roger and Savannah came in, shedding warm coats and knit hats, and bringing with them a hint of the freezing weather outside.

  “How ya doin’?” Roger greeted us.

  “This can’t be coincidence. How did you find us?” Two minutes later and we would have been out the door.

  “And nice to see you, too. I hear you already met Savannah. My new assistant.”

  “At the gym,” I said, still hoping that someone would comment on my one-week results. “Hello, Savannah.”

  “Hey.”

  Skeli and Savannah touched cheeks.

  “My god, you are cold,” Skeli said. “Let’s get something to warm you up. How about an Irish coffee?”

  Savannah shook her head. “Diet Coke. With a lemon.”

  Roger gave a What can you do with these kids today shrug. “She’s branching out. Usually she only drinks Tab.”

  The bartender placed a Rémy in a mini snifter on the bar and Roger took a deep draught.

  “How did you know we’d be here?” I asked. The moment where I got to say We’re just leaving had never arrived, or if it had, I had missed it.

  “PaJohn told me.”

  PaJohn was another member of the regular crowd at our usual watering hole. I thought of asking how he knew where Skeli and I were meeting in private, but gave up. New York is a very small town sometimes.

  “What’s wrong with Tab?” Skeli asked.

/>   “Who drinks Tab?” Roger scoffed.

  “Me, for one. Well, not anymore, but back when I was dancing. I didn’t just count calories, I parsed them out like they were gold bars.”

  “Where do you buy Tab?” I said.

  The three of them looked at me like I had just started speaking in tongues.

  Roger answered. “Whaddya talking? This is New York.”

  “They still sell it? In stores? I haven’t seen a can of Tab in twenty years. Thirty. More.”

  “‘In stores’? Of course in stores. Whaddya think? They sell it off the back of a truck out on Highway Nine?”

  “Don’t tell me you drink it?”

  “Pff. Stuff is poison, you ask me.” He swallowed another half ounce of cognac.

  Roger was short enough, or Savannah was tall enough, that when they stood too near each other, her magnificent breasts were just above his eye level, which caused his eyebrows to twitch furiously. I’m sure it worked well in the act, but in private it was a constant distraction.

  “Roger, pull up a barstool and sit. Your eyebrows are going to fly off your face in a minute.”

  He gave a final leer and sat next to Skeli. Savannah sat down next to me.

  I did not leer. “As I’ve often said. He’s my friend, but he is an acquired taste.” I had not run into her at the gym again all week. My schedule could be best described as erratic.

  “I don’t mind him. I thought this was just a job, you know? It’s easy money and it’ll pay for my acting classes. But I’m learning so much. The guy has incredible timing. Brilliant. And great delivery. He gets a laugh and immediately tops himself. I’ve seen him lay out four toppers in a row, keeping the single laugh going until people are almost hurting. He’s a pro.”

  Savannah was something of a surprise. Her blond good looks combined with her physique made one assume she was a total airhead. I had not made all the connections in her past until Skeli had pointed out the fact that “interning in the theater program at A.R.T. in Cambridge, Massachusetts,” meant that she had been attending Harvard University at the time.

  “You’re working your way into the act?”

  She shrugged, already all talked out on the subject. “Roger said you were on Wall Street.”

  “Yup.”

  “So was my father.”

  “He’s not there now?”

  “He walked away. He says he escaped.”

  “It’s not for everybody,” I said.

  “Roger said you went to prison.”

  Roger had a big mouth. “Yup. What does your father do now?”

  “Plays a round of golf and then drinks expensive scotch until he falls asleep.”

  “Hmm. The sleeping part sounds good,” I said.

  “You don’t golf?”

  “I have enough bad habits.”

  She laughed. It was more polite than amused, but I gave her points for diplomacy. “Roger says you’re a ‘fixer.’”

  “Sometimes I find things. Other times I uncover things. I like to think I help people.”

  “On Wall Street?”

  “It’s the world I know.”

  “What have you found lately?” she said.

  A missing billion dollars. “Right now I’m trying to save the planet.”

  “So you’re a superhero.”

  “I’m trying to keep somebody out of jail so he can finish creating the next green revolution—in energy.”

  She nodded. “Solar something?”

  “Solar, yes, I guess. It’s all about algae.”

  “Algae? Nope. It doesn’t work. Biofuels from algae release more carbon dioxide than the algae takes out of the air. You get fuel, but you don’t get sustainability.”

  She was so sure of herself. Did Harvard instill that or did you need it to get there? “Sustainability,” I said, letting the word roll out syllable by syllable.

  “Sustainability,” she repeated. “I took a course in it. It was a soft science credit. All the English majors and drama majors took it.”

  I was glad to hear that one of America’s finest universities still provided a rounded educational experience, even to drama majors. “Then you’re way ahead of me. Say what you said again. Or different.”

  “Algae needs water, sunlight, and carbon dioxide to grow. That’s good. It takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Like a baby rain forest.”

  “But?”

  “But when you turn it into fuel and burn it, it puts more CO2 back into the atmosphere than it took out in the first place. Lots more.”

  “How does that work?”

  “How does what work?”

  “How can it be negatively efficient? Doesn’t that violate some law of conservation of matter or something?”

  “How do I know? It was science for theater majors, for the love of Pete. I took it pass-fail.”

  “Suppose you could turn that around? Create a fuel that really was efficient that way.”

  “It would be like turning carbon into gold.”

  “The client claims to have done it.”

  “Really? Who’s this?”

  I saw no harm in telling her. If it was already on the front page of the Journal, it wasn’t exactly private. “A company called Arinna.”

  She shrugged again and shook her head.

  “Philip Haley is the CEO.”

  She laughed. “Philip Haley? Are you kidding?”

  “You’ve heard of him?”

  “If it’s the same guy, everybody has.” She took an iPad out of a leather shoulder bag the size of a pillowcase and tapped at the screen for a minute. “Same guy?” she said, turning the screen so that I could see it.

  It was the same guy. But the guy that I’d met had been wearing his tie around his neck rather than around his forehead and he had not been guzzling from a bottle of Dom Pérignon. The picture was at least two years old. Philip Haley, a married man, a successful businessman, and something of a genius in the field of genetics according to the caption, had been the paparazzi’s Man of the Month.

  She tapped again and swiped her finger a couple of times. “Here you go.”

  It was embarrassing to look at. Haley out and about, getting his picture taken while leaving various New York and L.A. clubs, always with a different, and much younger, woman on his arm. I scrolled through shots from all the scandal sheets and celebrity magazines. It was a midlife crisis acted out on an operatic scale. All the pictures were from the same period.

  “Where did you find this stuff?” I said.

  “This is all real old—like two years ago. He was all over the tabloids.”

  Of course. I had searched the financial press and the mainstream media. Savannah had gone straight for the dirt.

  “I’m an idiot,” I said. “I missed all of this.”

  “Keep going,” she said.

  Phil the Party Boy came to an abrupt end on the next few pages.

  Philip Haley was named as the “mystery man” in the breakup of Hollywood’s sweetheart couple, LeJo—LeMar Tilles and Jolene Harris. As kids, they had played next-door neighbors with a mutual kiddie crush on the Disney Channel’s most popular show. Twenty years and two perfect children later, they could still guarantee two hundred fifty million dollars in worldwide first-run ticket sales on a remake of Beach Blanket Bingo. There were pics of Jo and Haley kissing on a beach in Eleuthera, holding hands across a table in South Beach, Haley helping her out of a limo in Paris. And no sooner did Jolene serve papers on LeMar and move out of the mansion two doors down from Oprah, than the “baby bump” pictures began showing up. They went on for a month or so until the player announced that he was returning to his wife in New York. Much farther down in one of the articles, it was mentioned that the wife was the single largest shareholder in Arinna.

  Jolene went into seclusion an
d “lost” the baby.

  “He’s a creep!” I said.

  “Who’s that?” Skeli asked, turning from her conversation with Roger.

  “Haley. He’s every bit as nuts as the rest of them.”

  “You don’t remember any of this?” Savannah asked.

  Two years before, I had been in prison. The reading matter had been strictly limited. What was truly frustrating was that, in all my Internet research on Haley, I had ignored the scandal sheets and thereby missed the more revealing story.

  “No. And how come you remember it so well?” I asked.

  “I was a junior in college. I ate this stuff up.”

  “Thank god for the free press.” I scrolled through more of the noxious headlines. “And what the hell was this Jolene thinking?”

  “I’d say that thinking had very little to do with it.”

  21

  I woke from a recurring dream—the one where I have to go back to prison—and knowing that I wasn’t going to get back to sleep until the adrenaline rush subsided, I got up for a glass of water. New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Broadway at three in the morning, midweek, looks at least a bit drowsy.

  Philip Haley was not a nice man. But that didn’t make him a criminal. And what did I care if another man was unfaithful to his wife. It wasn’t jealousy. It wasn’t anger or regret over my first wife’s infidelity. No, it just indicated that the man was not entirely reliable. That what you see might not be exactly what you get. Deeter was right. Haley may have been brilliant, but it was best not to be blinded by the glare of his self-assurance.

  I rinsed the glass and put it in the dishwasher. Carolina, our invaluable undocumented housecleaner from Central America, emptied the dishwasher whenever she came—that was once a week. Who emptied the damn thing the rest of the week? I couldn’t remember the last time that I had done it. If ever. Or did the Kid and I use only one load’s worth of dishes in a week? I doubted that Heather, the Kid’s justifiably expensive shadow, would have done it, but maybe I wasn’t giving her enough credit. I was too much a coward ever to ask her, however. Suppose she had been doing it and stopped when I asked?