And go we did. We hiked up Broadway, found a non-chain diner-type place where Paul could get generous servings of pigs’ bellies along with our eggs while we lingered over coffee and the Times, and then worked our way over toward Central Park. We weren’t quite there yet when my mobile phone rang. Noting that it was Mendoza’s number, I braced myself.
“Say it, Jake,” were the first words out of his mouth. “‘You were right, Mendoza.’ Come on, I wanna hear you say it.”
“You were right, Mendoza. You were absolutely right. There was danger here that I wasn’t equipped to handle. You were right about everything except that crack about having a novelist watch my back. My novelist gave the burglar a dose of premodern muscle that sent the miscreant off with his or her tail between his or her legs.”
Mendoza made an exasperated sound that didn’t really qualify as a word. Then he said something in Spanish.
“We did get some useful information, though,” I said, “even if we haven’t tracked down a physical address for Learned yet.”
“Yet? Yet?”
“That word may have been ill-chosen.” I intended this concession as a tactical retreat. Mendoza took it as surrender.
“I want your butt on the next flight back to Pittsburgh, Jake. I should never have let you talk me into this. No more Agatha Marple stuff. We’ll hand off that ‘useful information’ you stumbled over to a pro and he’ll carry the ball from there.”
“Look, Mendoza, it’s two minutes to noon. We’re stuck with the hotel bill for today anyway, and there’ll be a change fee for an earlier airline ticket. I won’t do anything adventurous, I promise. I’ll head back Monday as scheduled and—”
“I don’t care about no stinking hotel bill! Screw the change fees! You get back here pronto! I haven’t smacked an employee in ten years and I was married to that one, but I still remember how! Andele, chica!”
He punched out of the call. I gave Paul a quick blow-by-blow while I scrolled for the US Airways site on my Droid.
“He threatened to hit you?”
“That was just hyperbole. He and Sigmund Freud are working on sort of a daughter-he-never-had thing with me in Mendoza’s superego.”
“Hyperbole? You’re rationalizing. Fathers don’t hit their daughters.”
I flashed him my how’s-the-weather-on-Planet-Trustfund look and then quickly flicked my eyes back to my Droid because he hates that look. My discretion paid off. Instead of getting pissed off at me, Paul stayed pissed off at Mendoza.
“So now,” he said disgustedly, “we have to hustle back to the hotel and kill the rest of Sunday afternoon trucking out to LaGuardia and looking for an earlier flight?”
“No. There’s a three-oh-five, but we’d have to be in a cab in a little over half-an-hour to have a real shot at it, so screw that one. The seven thirty is more like it. Here’s what we do. We take our own sweet time wending our way back to the Hilton. I’ll use my magic little digital friend here to get the ticket switched while we’re walking. Ten minutes in the Business Center to print out a boarding pass, fifteen minutes to pack, and we should still have more than three hours together before you give me a passionate kiss at the cabstand and send me on my way to the airport.”
“I’m coming to the airport with you.”
“That’s sweet, but no. We’d only have two minutes together before I got in line for security, and then you’d have to head back to the hotel.”
“The hotel?”
“Sure. We’re stuck with the room charge for today anyway so you might as well enjoy the room tonight. I know, I know, it will seem empty without me—but you’ll have the postmodern adventures of Henry Widget to keep you company.”
“What about checking out tomorrow morning, though?”
“Piece of cake,” I said. “They’ll slip the bill under the door sometime tonight. PDF it to me so that I can get partial reimbursement from Mendoza and a tax write-off for what he doesn’t reimburse. When you’re ready to leave tomorrow morning, drop the two key-cards in the box they have near the desk and be on your way.”
Paul’s a smart guy—dummies don’t get into Harvard unless they can play hockey—but he went from being too rich to have to do stuff like this for himself to being too poor even to think about it. His grandparents had set up a trust fund that threw off enough every year to cover Harvard’s costs and provide comfortable walking around money. Then came the crash, and the trust fund portfolio took a dive even more nauseating than the one by Harvard’s endowment. Now he’s lucky to get $700 a month.
“You’re really being incredibly wonderful about this, aren’t you?” he said then, softly.
I turned toward him and caressed his stubbled cheek with the backs of my fingers.
“It’s just a little money, Paul. It’s not even very much money. Enjoy the room for an extra night instead of wandering around LaGuardia trying to cadge a ride back to Philly. Chisel eight hundred more carefully chosen words into your hard drive.”
“Okay,” he said. “But I won’t do room service. I’ll duck out for a burger or something.”
“Bullshit. Dial yourself a steak.”
Things went according to plan, except that the time I spent at the Hilton Business Center was closer to forty-five minutes than ten. I used the extra time laboriously talking the Hilton out of another copy of the infamous fax. First they claimed it was technically impossible to retrieve the transmission, which was a crock, and then they said they just couldn’t find it, which even they didn’t pretend to believe. Only after I played the trump card with an icy I’d like to speak to your superior did they finally manage to print out another copy and hand it over to me.
The time for the pseudo-event matched my recollection. I figured that retrieving a fax from a major hotel chain didn’t qualify as “Agatha Marple stuff,” so I scanned the thing into my laptop and emailed it to Mendoza with a suggestion that he have Becky the Techie do a reverse phonebook search on the transmission number. At 5:30 (I stole an extra half-hour) Paul gave me a bear hug and a love-pat on the fanny and saw me into a cab. Less than an hour later I was sitting at the gate, hoping and praying for an on-time departure.
Naturally, though, I couldn’t let go of the eight-hundred-pound gorilla question looming like a near-term trial date over this weekend: two burglaries and nothing taken except a fax—what’s the deal with that? As I methodically reconstructed everything printable from the time I hit the room until Paul and I left for Damp Squib, I came up with nothing. Then I decided that I might as well update my blog.
Update my blog. Update My Blog!
It took me a few frenzied minutes to put it together. I was already in my seat on the plane when I punched Mendoza’s number into my mobile phone.
“Jake,” he answered, “this better not be a message saying you missed the last flight and are going to have to stay over ’til Monday anyway.”
“The burglars didn’t come to take anything.” I was talking at two hundred words a minute to get the message out before they ordered me to turn the phone off. “They came to leave something. Or at least one of them did.”
“Leave what?”
“Don’t know. What I do know is this: Do not open that e-mail I sent you! Don’t open another e-mail from my computer until Becky has checked it.”
Chapter Sixteen
“Good catch on the computer, Jake,” Mendoza said around a Monday-morning, death-warmed-over scowl. “Becky found the bug.”
“He got into your computer and imported some pretty sophisticated spyware.” Becky the Techie, sitting next to me in front of Mendoza’s desk, shot me a glance through glasses in the kind of stainless steel frames that Mr. Spock on Star Trek wore before the Federation sprang for contacts. “Once you logged on with that thing in there, if anyone who was hooked up to the office network had opened an e-mail from you, whoever
planted that bug could have taken every byte of data we have. No firewall this side of the Pentagon could have stopped it.”
“Had to be Learned,” I said.
“Do you know how he got in?” Mendoza asked.
“I had the computer open on the table when he came to our room. He probably spotted the password when I typed it in after my finger-swipe wouldn’t work. I don’t know how he managed to block the finger-swipe, but he obviously did.”
“Dab of Vaseline on the bar would have done it,” Becky said.
“If he got the password, all he needed was fifteen minutes alone with the computer and he could have installed anything he wanted.” I hooded my eyes as I puzzled it through. “Especially after I obligingly showed him the wi-fi setting.”
“So the question is why he went to all that trouble to penetrate our pleasant little shop here,” Becky said.
“Let’s think out loud about that.” Mendoza pursed his lips. “Theory: Learned was up to his eyebrows with Thomas Bradshaw in whatever was happening to the loot from the Gardner Museum heist. Or maybe he was up to some other part of his anatomy with Ariane Bradshaw. Either way, he might want to find out if we know enough to put his neck in a noose.”
“Heavy shit.” This was Becky’s idea of a compliment. She landed two knuckles as she tried to punch my bicep.
“Jake, give Cesario every scrap of information you wrote down about those apartments Learned touted to you.” Mendoza was referring to Cesario Lopez, Becky’s fellow investigator in the office. “Also everything we have on Vera Sommers. We’ll see if Cesario can spend two or three days in the Big Apple without getting his face creased.”
“Will do.”
“Speaking of which, how’s that nose and fat lip you brought back as souvenirs? And don’t tell me your mother used to hit you harder than that for ditching school.”
“No, mom never drew blood. It’s nothing Tylenol can’t handle.”
“Good. Plastic surgery would raise the hell out of my group insurance premium.”
Translation: “Welcome back, well done.” Winning a fight was the best way to gain credibility in Mendoza-land, but taking a punch and then not quitting was a close second.
Chapter Seventeen
“I checked out all four of the apartments.” Paul was telling me this a little after midnight Tuesday morning, and he was back in giddy-mode. “Sorry about calling at this ungodly time. Is it too late for you to talk?”
“Is that a trick question? Staying up ’til two a.m. is great practice for Calder & Bull.”
“Anything new on that front, by the way?”
“Not really.” I stood up to pace while I talked. “‘Above the Law’ is running with a rumor that C & B is expected to fall two places on the AmLaw one hundred profit-per-partner list when the new rankings come out in January. They’ll still be in the top quartile, though, so that shouldn’t be any big deal.”
“Hmmmm.” Paul followed this elongated syllable with a worried silence.
“Don’t sweat it. Nothing to fret about.”
“It’s just that I’ve heard, I mean, people say that if a firm does a second deferral, that means it’ll end up not hiring at all.”
“What people are those, the Author’s Guild? Look, you worry about dependent clauses and I’ll handle the Greed-is-Good brigade. Tell me about the apartments.”
“They are fan-tas-tic.” Suddenly his voice was all bunnies-and-butterflies again. “Even the cheapy. Limited space, but I didn’t see cockroach-one and the toilets flushed on the first try.”
“Maybe we should go ahead and grab one.”
“Something to think about, all right.”
“You sound as happy as I’ve heard you on the phone in a long time, Paul.”
“It’s New York, baby. Writer’s heaven. I’m in a New York state of mind.”
Chapter Eighteen
I really believed my brave words to Paul about Calder & Bull, but even so I felt a belly-drop when I saw the e-mail from [email protected]. I comforted myself with an axiom: bad news comes by snail mail. I closed my eyes and breathed a quick prayer. Then I clicked it open:
Welcome to the Calder & Bull Class of 2011!
We hope you will be able to join us for a preorientation on the morning of Thursday, December 16, 2010, beginning at 10:00 a.m. Travel and overnight lodging for new hires living more than one hundred miles outside New York City will be covered by the Firm. Using the voting buttons above, please confirm your attendance.
The signature—Walter Lincecum, chair of the recruiting committee—required a suspension of disbelief: the e-mail had come from nonlegal staff, and Lincecum’s well-manicured fingers hadn’t contributed a keystroke to it. Who cares? I moved the cursor to ACCEPT up at the top and clicked. Then I warned myself not to gloat too much when I talked to Paul that night.
Chapter Nineteen
Ken drove in from Erie early on Friday morning to say Mom’s memorial Mass. It wasn’t anything special. Just the regular weekday morning Mass at eight o’clock, with a well-done-good-and-faithful-servant shout-out to Mom in his homily and a prayer for her added to the intercessions. It wasn’t a student Mass, so there were only about forty non-Jakubeks there. Lainie Banacek came, and after a delicate little hesitation waltz, I managed to get Vince sandwiched between me and her.
After Mass we went to the cemetery to say familiar prayers under a leaden sky while a bitchy little wind whipped tears from my eyes. I added a silent prayer to Mom to figure out some way to get it through Vince’s thick skull that the Lainie thing was okay. I’m a little shaky on the theology of how that works, but I figured that part was above my pay grade anyway.
Back home from the cemetery I put out some pastry and whipped up toast, bacon, and scrambled eggs. I stuck with toast except for nibbling on some Slavic delicacy that Lainie contributed to the pastry mound. Light frosting, with raisins inside. Not bad. I didn’t think she stood much chance of weaning Vince off glazed donuts with it, but I gave her credit for trying.
As the post-breakfast talk got under way I policed up glasses and cups, trying not to make too much of a production out of it. Lainie gave up without too much of a fight when I shooed her out of the kitchen while I tackled the fifteen-minute cleanup job. Ten minutes into it, though, Ken joined me just in time to dry a couple of plates. I figured that meant he wanted to talk. I hoped it was about Lainie instead of Paul. It was.
“So this thing with Ms. Banacek looks pretty serious.” He ran a dish towel sedulously over bone-dry china.
“Yep.”
“I hope he has it in him.”
I turned the faucet on full blast into the empty sink in case Vince or Lainie wandered past the kitchen door. “It’d be a great way for him to get past Mom’s death.”
“Do you think it might be the other way around?” This is priest-speak for, “It’s the other way around, you moron.”
I turned my head to look at him, half-a-foot taller than I am and radiating that mysterious calm that voluntary celibates often seem to have. The pale winter light streaming through the window four feet behind him emphasized his solidity by its evanescence. I noticed a chipped spot on the turquoise sash that I hadn’t seen before.
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Maybe Lainie Banacek isn’t a way for Vince to reach closure. Maybe she’s a sign that he already has.”
“What I saw the Monday before Thanksgiving didn’t look like closure to me.” I gave him a quick recap of Vince’s performance before and during Monday night football.
“What that sounds like to me is the last bad night before closure.” Ken shot his left hand reflexively through his coal black crew cut. “He must have stumbled over a pretty talented counselor that night.”
I felt my mouth puckering. I have a problem with compliments
sometimes.
“All I did was make a joke and recycle some Sunday school bromides.”
“Talented and modest on top of it.” Ken said this as if he were musing to himself. “Are you taking the whole day off?”
“Just this morning. Vince plans on getting on his route by eleven, so I’ll catch a bus for downtown around noon and get in an afternoon at my cubicle.”
“That’s okay, sis, I can give you a lift downtown.”
“Thanks. That’d be great.”
Like a mischievous eight-year-old who thinks he’s fooling someone, Ken reached casually for a baggie with four leftover strips of bacon that I hadn’t gotten into the fridge yet. I slapped the back of his hand.
“That’s for Vince’s BLT, and more concentrated sodium is about the last thing you need anyway. A stroke in your thirties would be a pretty harsh punishment for gluttony.”
“You’re absolutely right,” he said with surprising mildness. “‘Thou shalt not’ is often just a way of saying, ‘Bad things could happen if you do this.’”
Then he smiled. For close to an hour I actually thought he’d conceded a point.
I mean, talk about delayed reaction. I made Vince’s BLT. I gave it to him in a brown paper bag with an apple so that he could eat lunch on the road as he drove from one stop to another. I helped see Lainie off. I waved to Vince as he pulled his step-van out of the driveway and headed down the street for a hard afternoon of hustling tools and shaking weekly installment payments out of mechanics. I rode downtown with Ken to Mendoza-land. He wasn’t traveling in clerical garb and anyone who knew he was a priest would also know I was his sister, so there wasn’t much risk of scandal. I got out of his car and walked across the sidewalk into the building. And I was all the way into the elevator, a good fifty minutes after his ‘thou shalt not’ line, when I finally got it.
“That sneaky little monk!” I sputtered at the elevator’s ceiling. “That slick-talking Jesuit! He was busting my chops about Paul!” And I laughed.
But Remember Their Names Page 13
