by Chris Knopf
“How’s work?” I asked her after we’d been underway a while.
“S’okay I handed off most of my cases. No client complaints.”
“Except for me.”
“No, you’re a keeper. Especially since you never ask me to do anything.”
The South Ferry was doing a brisk business. The guys directing the boarding cars sandwiched the Grand Prix between a Land Rover and a tradesman’s step van. Jackie and I squeezed out into the air so we could stand by the gunwale and watch the cormorants dive-bomb into the chop. Jackie’s hair unfurled against the wind. I held her around the waist so I could give her an occasional squeeze.
“You never ask me to do anything and you never tell me anything,” she said.
“It’s the law. Discovery is part of the process.”
She was quiet the rest of the way to Riverhead, so I just smoked and listened to afternoon jazz on WLIU and thought about how to gang cut the rest of the rafters for my addition. Jackie’s mood still threatened to breed gloom within the capacious cabin of the Grand Prix, but the light that continued to flow down through the abundant Shelter Island foliage was undaunted and unrestrained.
SIX
JONATHAN ELDRIDGE’S OFFICE was on the second floor of a two-story building cobbed on to the end of a row of storefronts on Main Street in Riverhead. Downtown extended a few blocks in either direction, and was decorated by the retail iconography of mid-twentieth-century America. In other words, it was thoroughly beat up and godforsaken. We parked in the back and walked up a rear outdoor stairway to the separate entrance.
“It’s open,” a woman yelled from inside after we pushed the buzzer.
Eldridge hadn’t overextended himself on office appointments. It was basically a single room carved up by waist-high cubicle dividers into a loose arrangement of workstations, each with at least one computer terminal and keyboard. Sitting at a command post at the center of the room was a young woman identified by an enormous nameplate mounted to the front of her desk. It said she was Alena Zapata, Jonathan Eldridge’s assistant, though the visual evidence was less persuasive.
Her hair was a rooster shock of brilliant magenta, or maybe a light purple, depending on the way the light hit it. The color confusion was exacerbated by her brilliant red lipstick and the pale, bluefish tint of her complexion. She had a huge mole on her gaunt right cheek, what I thought was a Marilyn Monroe beauty mark, but discovered later was a tiny tattoo of Eve Ensler.
Jackie had already staggered back a few steps as the overall effect hit her, so when the purple-haired woman said, “Holy cow, what happened to you?” I couldn’t see her reaction.
“Are you Alena?” I asked.
“At’s what the sign says.”
She crammed a rounded O into the word “sign.”
“I’m Sam, this is Jackie. Did the Southampton police tell you we were coming?”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t matter. I got an open door policy. Sit down where you want.”
I dug a pair of chairs out of the other workstations and sat us in front of her desk.
“So, what can I do you for? Sorry about the reaction,” she said to Jackie, without taking a breath. “It was, like, a shock and all.”
“Shocks all around.”
“I know you’ve already told the police everything,” I said, jumping in, “so I hope you don’t mind going over the same stuff.”
She shook her purple plume.
“Nah, not at all. What else I gotta do? I’m all caught up here. You want coffee or something? I don’t get a lotta company. The FedEx guy, the mail guy. The deli downstairs delivers. You had lunch? It’s cheap.”
“We’re all set. Coffee sounds great. Black for me. A little milk for Jackie.”
Standing, she had to be about five-ten, excluding heels. She poured the coffee from a slimy old Krups coffeemaker, but it wasn’t bad if you had a wide tolerance.
“So, it was just you and Jonathan?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, stirring in Jackie’s milk, “when he was here, which wasn’t all that much. Maybe a third of the time. He was always outta town.”
“Doing fieldwork.”
“Yeah, that’s what he called it. Are you a cop?”
“An investigator,” I said, and then immediately felt deceptive and asinine. “Kind of. Just a friend of a cop who asked for some help.”
“Just a co-victim of a vicious, wanton act of murderous cruelty,” said Jackie.
“Yeah, don’t I know it. Co-victim?”
“We were the only survivors,” said Jackie. “That’s where, like, the face came from. It was, like, blown up and shit.”
I shifted in my chair so I could take Jackie’s hand. I gave it a hard squeeze.
“Wow. That’s intense,” said Alena.
“How was Jonathan to work for? Good boss?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah. A peach. I really did like the guy. He was very good to me. Very generous and polite. It sorta made up for being, like, in solitary confinement all the time.”
“So, you handle the administrative stuff”
“I got a broker’s license, buddy. Series 7. I handled whatever Jonathan wanted me to handle.”
“You just dissed her, Sam.”
“Sorry Did you buy and sell? I thought Jonathan was strictly analysis.”
“Well, yeah, sort of,” said Alena, a little defensively, “but we did trades, too. I cleared them through a broker in the City. We’re full service. Coulda traded a lot more, if Jonathan wanted to. He liked the straight fee approach. Percent on assets. Said it was less stress. He didn’t like stress.”
She shook her head, remembering.
“Was he tense a lot?” I asked.
“No, never. That’s the point. He used to say that people ought to ascertain their personal level of stress tolerance, then engineer their whole lives around staying right there, right below what they can take. It was a theory of his. Only, he could afford to live pretty good and stay clear of his personal best, stress-wise. To stay that calm I’d have to, like, not work and lie around in bed all day, and eventually starve, which can be pretty stressful in its own right.”
Alena sat back in her office chair, which gave into a partial recline. She tapped her nails on the armrests.
“You mind if I smoke?” she asked us, looking at Jackie, who was already smoldering a bit herself. I pulled out my lighter and lit her cigarette and one for myself.
“Jonathan never woulda let me smoke in here in a million years. I suppose I still shouldn’t, in honor and all, but there’s not much else to do.”
“When do you leave?”
“End of the week. I got a gig in the City. No biggie. It was time for me to head out anyway. This is just a really shitty way to terminate employment.”
It was stuffy in the office, even with a window AC unit running on high. The smoke didn’t help. The ceiling was drop-acoustic panels and fluorescent lights. The carpet a smudged beige, indifferently vacuumed. Only the PCs looked new and alert, at the ready. Plugged directly into Jonathan’s lifeblood, the hemorrhage of information available off the Web. If it wasn’t for the communal impulse wired into most people’s genes, maybe everyone would run their careers like Jonathan’s. Separate, but jacked-in. Efficient, lucrative and stress free.
“So, no ideas?” asked Jackie, hackles still firmly in place.
“Beg pardon?”
“About the bombing. Your boss. The sweetheart.”
“Not my sweetheart, sweetheart. Strictly business. Anyway, I called him a peach. Not a sweetheart. Not that there’s a difference, semantically speaking.”
Alena glowered at Jackie over the top of her CRT. The situation took me back to running a huge corporate enterprise, where so much precious time was wasted mediating a particular flavor of institutional conflict my friend Jason Fligh, the president of the University of Chicago, privately characterized as bitch shit.
“You’re a smart young woman,” I said to Alena, bracing for Jackie�
��s snort. “You probably have a theory on what happened to Jonathan. Few knew him better. Nobody better, if you’re talking about his business.”
Alena pulled her eyes off Jackie and refocused on me. Approvingly, as if to say, now we all know who the sensitive one is in this team. Erroneously. She sat back and touched the outer crust of her purple hair.
“To me, the business here is basically research. We research companies people might want to invest in. We sell opinions. That’s really what this is all about. Opinions, not proclamations. Jonathan wasn’t a theater critic, he just told people what he could figure out about a company. That’s it. Sure, I bet some of the companies weren’t too happy about what he said, but that was their fault. And mostly, I think, the companies should all feel okay about him, because he was such a straight shooter. He told it like it was, which most of the time was pretty good for those guys. Frankly, I think he was overall pretty optimistic, and if you look at his record, you know, how these companies ended up performing, it was pretty much the way he had it scored. Where’s the beef in that?”
I was sitting there feeling some sort of odd warmth for Alenas simple loyalty and frank appraisal of her boss when Jackie went and spoiled the mood.
“Bullshit.”
“Excuse me?”
“Bullshit,” she repeated. “Jonathan Eldridge was a financial adviser of the first rank. Specializing in high tech, the most volatile and capricious market segment. Billions of dollars could be made or lost through decisions based on his analysis. You talk about it like he ran a local beauty pageant.”
Alena looked at me.
“Is she with you?”
“You bet, toots,” said Jackie. “Actually he’s with me.”
“What my colleague means,” I said, as I draped an arm over Jackie’s shoulders, “is there must have been occasional disappointments felt by Jonathan’s clients when certain recommendations inevitably missed the mark. Some people might’ve had some serious losses, which might’ve caused a little rancor.”
“He means thoroughly pissed off,” said Jackie, helpfully.
“I know what he means. Yeah, sure, not everybody loved everything we did. Though only a couple had a beef. People like Ivor Fleming.”
“Ivor Fleming?”
“Investor. Nasty stubby little jerk from up island. Made it in scrap metal, for Chrissakes. Pissed off at the world, I think. Anyway, only guy Jonathan ever fired. You know, stopped working for. Said he caused too much stress. You got that right.”
“Lost money on Jonathan’s recommendations?” I asked.
Alena looked down at her CRT, then off toward the one lonely, dirty window in the lightless office.
“Yeah, though I couldn’t entirely hundred percent tell you why. I managed the office stuff, ran the trades, made nice nice to clients when Jonathan was out of town, did research online. I said I handled everything, but there were things Jonathan did on his own. He didn’t exactly report to me on every conversation. I usually knew what was what, but I wasn’t always privy.”
Which hurt her feelings, obviously. Even Jackie let a little sound of sympathy escape her lips.
“Anyway” she said, rebounding, “he did his shit, I did mine, everybody was happy. Hard to believe, maybe, seeing this dump, but we were, you know, actually happy here in our little world.”
The canned air in the office sat heavily for a few moments, then Jackie struck out on a new tack.
“Are all his records still here?” she asked.
Alena looked around the room, as if for an answer.
“No, I don’t think so. After he got blown up the cops, serious cops in suits and earphones, came in here and swept everything away. All I got is the same administrative stuff I always had.”
“Names of clients?”
“I still got that. Names, addresses and phone numbers. I copied it all for the cops. Everything I had. Including stuff on Ivor, though they never asked me about him. They spent a lot of time messing with my computer, but finally gave it back to me. Good thing, since it’s all I had to settle everything out.”
“Can you copy that for me?” I asked. “The names, addresses, phone numbers?”
“And email addresses? You bet. Why the hell not.”
Jackie jerked her head toward the other computers in the room.
“What about those?”
Alena shrugged.
“If you want to anchor your boat, or need a doorstop. Cops took out the hard drives. You can knock, but nobody’s home.”
“For good?” asked Jackie.
“I don’t know. Ask the cops. I’m heading for the City. You can take it from here.” Alenas attention was back on to her computer screen. “Where should I send the information?”
Jackie slid her business card across Alenas desk. She knew I didn’t have a computer.
“What about phone records?” I asked, suddenly remembering my ostensible purpose for the visit. “Cell phone records? Calls to and from?”
“Fascinating,” said Alena.
“Really.”
“Yeah. Nobody ever asked me for Jonathan’s personal phone records. I kept expecting it. You’d think.”
“Probably didn’t need to. Get everything directly from the phone company.”
“Probably,” said Alena, unconvinced.
She opened a deep drawer and pulled out a stack of phone bills.
“Good old paper. All in chronological order, of course, cross-tabbed to accounts payable and the general ledger. Just like Jonathan wanted them.”
She used the stack of bills to point to a copier machine in a far corner. Jackie took the hint and went to make copies. While the machine whirred I sat there wondering whether to admire or be depressed by the drab orderliness of Jonathan Eldridge’s office, his profession and his life. I respected anyone who had a zeal for research and analysis—like Appolonia said, engineering and finance weren’t all that different when you thought about it. Lots of data, fundamental formulas, tricky little puzzles. Though never entirely controllable, both ultimately manageable pursuits. Maybe that was what troubled me about Jonathan. It seemed as if control was the prime objective. Financial analysis was merely the medium, the vehicle.
I always knew my edge as an engineer was a taste for chaos, for the unruly aspects of problem solving, a prejudice toward intuition over methodology. I knew how to crunch numbers. I just didn’t like it very much. Made me edgy, irritable.
“If you could sort those client names by friendly and unfriendly, it’d help,” said Jackie.
Alena looked at me as if to validate the request. I nodded. She nodded back. Transaction complete. Jackie sighed.
“That’ll take a little longer, but it’ll be in your email when you get back to the office,” said Alena. I sensed in her an air of poised competence. I wondered how Jonathan regarded the obvious. I wondered what he thought looking at her across the broad desktops. Did he recognize that appearance was irrelevant in a world run on email and voice messaging?
“How’d Jonathan get along with his wife?” I asked, as abruptly as the question occurred to be. Alena pulled her eyes away from her screen.
“Mad about her. Just mad. Never said one word to me on the subject, mind you, but you could tell when he talked to her on the phone. Friendly, nice, not all gooshy but kind. That’s really what I always thought. Kind. Not like you’d normally describe a lovesick couple. But it was there. Real grown-ups.”
She turned her head back to the computer.
“I don’t like to think about it,” she said.
“Sorry. Had to ask.”
“I know. Co-victims and all that.”
Jackie had already thanked her and was gathering to leave the office when I had one more thought.
“Do you know the names of the cops who took the hard drives? Feds, Staties?”
She spun around in her chair and pulled open the top drawer of the adjoining desk. She took out a business card and handed it to Jackie.
“Take it. I
already wrote down the info. In case I need it again. In my next reiteration.”
“If you think of anything else,” Jackie started to say.
“I know,” said Alena. “Heard it all before. Will do. No prob. Even if you aren’t the nicest co-victim I ever met. No offense,” she added, looking at me.
“Sorry” said Jackie. She pointed to her head. “Brain damage.”
“No prob,” said Alena, again, though by now she was engrossed in whatever was playing across her computer screen. Back swimming in the stream of data, negotiating currents, shooting the rapids. I escorted Jackie out the door while the fragile peace was still intact.
“Sorry, Sam,” said Jackie when we got outside. “I don’t know what got into me.”
“A little of the old Irish fire, by my accounting.”
“Old Irish idiot.”
She swung open the Grand Prix’s gigantic door and dropped into the passenger seat. Wet heat poured out of the car and washed over me. I was glad I’d left Eddie home again, though I feared it was starting to piss him off. Hard to explain the dynamics of heat exhaustion to a gung ho mutt like Eddie. Maybe if I showed him a video.
“All right. But you feel better for it. Admit it.”
“Picking a fight is good therapy? You’d think that.”
“As long as you win the fight.”
“You’re a peach, Sam.”
“So what’d we learn?”
“We’re ridiculously over our heads and have no business prying into this investigation.”
“That’s what I told Sullivan.”
“It’s one thing to chat with people like Ms. Fright Wig in there, or poor Mrs. Eldridge, it’s another to search through the guy’s client records for material evidence, or ask the FBI to share the fun with us. They’ll think you’re a dangerous lunatic and try to get me disbarred.”
“Both propositions have been advanced before to little effect.”
