The Dead Man

by Joel Goldman

  I wouldn't take the odds that Wendy had mailed me a confession and treasure map but neither would I bet against it. There were several possible explanations why her envelope was the one piece of stolen mail that was found opened. The seal was old and may have given way. Walter Enoch could have decided after all those years of hoarding the mail to start reading it and chose Wendy's as his first. I knew that neither of these was likely.

  The most plausible explanation was also the simplest. Whoever opened that envelope knew where to find it and was willing to kill Walter Enoch to get it. Dolan and Kent had a long way to go to prove that I knew the envelope existed or that I knew that Enoch had stolen it. None of that mattered because they knew the one thing that mattered most of all. I was the only person they could think of who wanted to know what was inside it more than they did.

  Ammara pulled up in front of the institute. Her shoulders were hunched over the wheel, her hands still strangling it. She knew the score as well as I did, her conclusions and mine no doubt the same. This morning's session had been well orchestrated, complete with her assignment as my return driver. She was the ultimate good cop, my friend and former colleague, the one who would soften me up with appeals to old times and reason. She was supposed to tell me to make it easy on myself and give Kent and Dolan what they wanted, even if it was my head. I liked that she couldn't bring herself to do it.

  "It's okay," I told her. "I get it. You're just doing your job too. The difference between you and Kent and Dolan is that you don't like it. It's what gets those guys out of bed in the morning. Tell them that you gave it your best shot but that I'm the one who is an asshole. And tell them I don't know what happened to the money and I didn't kill Walter Enoch."

  She nodded, staring through the windshield. "I'll tell them but it won't do any good."

  Chapter Eighteen

  "Sherry is waiting for you in the private dining room," Leonard said when I got back to my office.

  I looked at my watch. It was one-fifteen. "Really?"

  "Totally. It's on the other side of the elevator. Double door."

  The dining room was actually several rooms fronted by a small lobby whose walls were paneled in teak and hung with important art. I knew the art was important because each piece was illuminated with a strategically placed light and accompanied by a brass plate announcing that it was on loan from the Milo Harper Collection of Contemporary Art. I studied one piece that was all wild color painted with wilder brush strokes and splattered with globs of black, deciding that I had a greater appreciation for the artistry of converting on third and long than for anything in Milo's collection.

  A woman in a sleek-fitting green dress greeted me. Her porcelain makeup and high swept blond hair belonged on a runway.

  "It's one of a kind," she said, pointing to the painting.

  "Me too. I'm Jack Davis. Sherry Fritzshall is expecting me."

  "Of course. Right this way."

  I followed her down a corridor until we reached a door at the end of the hall. She knocked once, waited a beat, then held the door open, closing it behind me, sealing the windowless room like an air lock. More teak paneling, more important art, thick plush carpet, and padded walls made it a soundproof inner sanctum with a privileged intimacy that screamed I was lucky to be invited inside these walls.

  Sherry was seated at a round table that was draped in ivory-colored linen, empty, food encrusted china and silver shoved to one side, reading from a stack of papers in front of her. She set the papers down, giving me a disappointed look as if I was her teenage son dragged home by the cops in the middle of the night.

  "I'm sorry you missed lunch. It was salmon. The chef made a superb sauce."

  I took a seat opposite her. "Something came up."

  She chewed her lip, rearranged her papers. "Let me give you some advice. Don't underestimate me."

  "I don't have an estimate of you."

  "Oh, but you do. You think I don't know what I'm doing because I scheduled the meetings with the project directors without consulting you. And you think I resent that you took my place as director of security."

  "Okay. I do have an estimate of you. Why am I wrong?"

  "I have an MBA from Wharton and a JD from Harvard. I was Milo's chief operating officer before he sold his company. I know how to make things run efficiently."

  "And I have a PhD from the FBI. We do security differently than they do at Harvard and Penn."

  "Business and organizational management principles have universal application, including for security. There has to be a plan and a system to implement the plan and accountability for execution of the plan."

  "All the business systems and management principles in the world won't do a bit of good if you don't have an advanced degree in crimes and criminals. Milo Harper knows that or he wouldn't have hired me."

  "My brother is a romantic. He likes to dramatize everything from his perch thirty thousand feet above the rest of us. I operate on the ground where things happen, running this institute and protecting my brother."

  "Protecting him from what?"

  "From anyone and everything that might harm him."

  "You can't do that. No one can."

  "I'm his only family. No one will do a better job than I will."

  "Which is reason enough for you to resent me."

  "That's where you underestimate me. I grant that you have expertise that I lack. It's obvious that you lack what I have to offer, which is an encyclopedic knowledge of this place and my brother's complete trust. If Milo wants you to direct security, then direct it you shall, but you will not shut me out and you will not succeed without my help."

  "Why do you think Milo hired me?"

  She stiffened in her chair and straightened the papers in front of her. "He's afraid of Jason Bolt. We had to pay him off once before and he's worried we'll have to do it again."

  "Have you read the police reports on Delaney and Blair?"

  "Detective McNair showed them to my brother and me."

  "That's not the same as reading them."

  "I'm sure I did but I didn't memorize them," she said, shuffling her just straightened papers.

  "Anything jump out at you in the Delaney report?"

  She raised one eyebrow. "Apart from the fact that it was suicide?"

  "Suicide is a conclusion, not a fact. That report is full of facts that support another conclusion—that Delaney was murdered. And if he was murdered in a way to make it look like his nightmare came true, I've got another conclusion for you. The killer may be someone who works for you and your brother. If I'm right, Jason Bolt is the least of your worries. Thanks for lunch."

  I left Sherry picking her chin off the linen tablecloth. I'd tell her about the missing videos and Walter Enoch after I had a better idea where she fit in this universe.

  I closed the door to my office, making it to my chair as the shakes claimed me. My back arched and my neck hyperextended over the top of the seat, giving me plenty of time to count the ceiling tiles if my eyes had been open. I gripped the armrests while my abs convulsed, crunching me forward then back, grunting like I was chasing Dante through the Inferno. The tremors eased, my choppy breath catching up and slowing down. I had made it through the day without shucking and jiving in front of Agents Dolan and Kent and, now, Sherry Fritzshall but I'd wound the spring so tight something had to give.

  Leonard burst through my door. "What the hell was that? You okay?"

  "Never better. I shake sometimes. That's all."

  "Are you kidding me? You sounded like a remake of Halloween."

  "I'll try to keep it down. I'm okay."

  "Next time, give me some notice. I'll sell tickets."

  People don't know whether to laugh, hide their eyes, or call 911 the first time they are exposed to my physical and vocal contortions; the more profound my outburst, the more intense their discomfort. Leonard's permasmile was upside down and his eyes were wide with concern that felt real. His joke harbored none of Agent Kent's
malice. I returned his smile and waved him away.

  "As long as I get ten percent of the gate."

  "I'm cool with that," he said and left me alone.

  In the old days, I would have spent the rest of the afternoon and evening knocking on doors, catching the project directors off guard, digging up what I could, stirring up the rest until I could sift it out. I wouldn't have started with Anthony Corliss and Maggie Brennan because I didn't want them to think I was focused on them. I would work my way around to them, letting word of my interrogations filter through the hallways, goosing the anxiety that might make them slip—if there was reason for them to slip.

  These weren't the old days. I couldn't make it through a day with this much in-your-face face time without getting wobbly and I didn't want to take someone on when the brain fog was rolling in. It wasn't three o'clock and I was done, frustrated that I couldn't even keep banker's hours. Lucy was right. I needed help from someone who knew how to ask the right questions and could go the distance. I left her a message on her cell phone to come and get me.

  My body settled and the synapses in my brain reopened for business while I waited, giving me time to make a mental to-do list. My ex-brothers and sisters in the FBI were building a murder case against me constructed out of fear and loathing. All I had to do to exonerate myself was give them the five million dollars they thought Wendy stole while convincing them that I'd known where the money was all along so they would believe that I had no reason to kill Walter Enoch. At least they wouldn't charge me with murder.

  None of this made much sense, and some of it wouldn't make sense even when it was all over. That was the trouble with murder. It made things weird.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Milo Harper opened my door without knocking, the interruption finishing my to-do list. His sweater hung tentlike from rounded shoulders, his cargo pants sagged from his waist to the floor. He had a slight sheen on his forehead as if he'd ran up three flights of stairs but his gray pallor made it more likely that he was fighting a fever.

  "Busy?" he asked.

  "Not for you."

  He took a seat across from my desk. "You look like you've taken a punch that you didn't see coming."

  I laughed. "It's the shaking and it doesn't matter if I see it coming. You don't look so good yourself."

  He sighed. "Three hours of sleep will do that to you after a while."

  "So dial it back. You must have people who have people who can do whatever it is you're doing between midnight and six A.M."

  He ran one hand through his hair. "Actually, I've got more people than that but none of them are on my clock. You know what I see everyday when I look in the mirror? I see the light in my brain getting dimmer. I'm not going to waste any of the time I have left before it goes dark."

  "I've got to say it again. You don't look or act like anyone I've ever seen with Alzheimer's. You don't miss a trick."

  "I can still navigate but I know what's coming and I'm not going there. I won't end up lying in bed, weighing eighty-five pounds with a feeding tube waiting for a nurse to wipe my butt not knowing who or what I am. I'll check out on my own terms long before then."

  I had no answer to that and no idea why he was in my office. I waited for him to tell me.

  "Sherry came to see me."

  "I was late for lunch. She didn't like that."

  "No, she wouldn't like that. She says you think one of our people murdered Tom Delaney. Is that true?"

  "It's possible," I said, running through the anomalies in the Delaney report.

  "You've got to go to the police with this."

  "I did that. McNair likes his closed cases to stay closed."

  "Go over his head. I'll call the chief of police."

  "He'll back up his people unless we've got something better. Plus, Jason Bolt will scream cover-up if he finds out you pressured the department."

  "So what do we do?"

  "You do your job and I'll do mine."

  "I can do mine a lot better if Sherry isn't in my office every five minutes complaining about you. Do me a favor, work with her."

  "I can do that as long as I know where she fits in."

  "She's my older sister. Practically raised me. She's smarter than me and she's my eyes and ears. When you have as much money as I do, someone always wants something. She keeps all that away from me."

  "But, you didn't tell her that you've got Alzheimer's. Why not?"

  He grinned. "Because she would drive me absolutely, fucking nuts. She'd make me go to every doctor on the planet who could spell Alzheimer's."

  "I never had a big sister but I get the picture. It's not because you don't trust her?"

  "Hell, I love her but that doesn't mean I trust her with everything in my life. The first lesson in the billionaire's manual is to know what to give up and to who and what to keep to yourself."

  "What's the second lesson?"

  "Do what has to be done. Don't look back and don't second-guess. You've been on the job half a day. What else have you got for me?"

  "I logged onto the dream project to look at the videos of Tom Delaney and Regina Blair describing their nightmares. Their videos are missing and their names don't show up on the list of participants. It looks like they've been erased from the project records."

  He nodded, processing the information without a visible reaction I could detect. I wished I had mastered Kate Scranton's talent for dissecting the involuntary facial flickers she claimed shined light on our true selves.

  "What else?"

  "You heard about the mailman who stole the mail?"

  "Yeah. It was all over the news."

  "Except for the part about him being a participant in the dream project."

  His face remained flat while he absorbed the additional data as if an internal algorithm suppressed his emotions, keeping him focused on the problem, not the people. "How did you make the connection?"

  "The mailman's name was Walter Enoch. I ran across it when I was searching for Delaney's and Blair's names on the list of project volunteers."

  "The paper said he died of a heart attack."

  "He had help."

  Harper looked away for an instant, hiding his face, then came back to me, his eyes narrowed. "He was murdered? If you're right about Delaney, he's the second dream project volunteer to be killed. My God, what if Regina Blair's accident was staged too? How do you know about Enoch?"

  "People I used to work with at the FBI told me this morning."

  "Will they help us?"

  "No."

  "Then why would they tell you?"

  "That's my business."

  "Not as long as I'm paying you."

  "You hired me, you didn't buy me. I'll tell you what I can when I can."

  He stared at me, waiting for me to fold. When I didn't, he stood and reached for the phone on my desk. "Let's get Anthony Corliss and Maggie Brennan up here and find out what's going on with those files."

  "Not so fast. I'd rather get to them on my schedule. No point in letting them know what we know until we're ready."

  "Corliss's computer has software that tells him whenever anyone at the institute goes into his files. You were logged on to the system. Believe me, by now he knows that you were on and what you were looking at."

  "Then I'll go see him. I don't want him to think he's been called to the principal's office."

  "I'll go with you," he said making it a decree, not an offer.

  I stood. "That's okay. I'd rather talk to him alone."

  "Why? He'll know that you're going to tell me whatever he says."

  "I can't help what he thinks. If you're there, it will change the dynamic. He'll be more concerned about you than me."

  "He damned well better be more concerned about me than you. I sign his check and yours for that matter. Both of you work for me, something you keep overlooking."

  His impassive façade gave way, his face coloring from pale to pink to red. Kate's belief that he was trying to ruin her
business as revenge for her refusal to work for him didn't seem so far-fetched. I had warned him when we first talked about the job that he and I would get to this moment. There was no reason to duck it.

  "Your sister tried to run me as soon as I walked through the front door. I don't know whether that was her idea or yours. When she couldn't, she ran to you. I get that. Now you have to decide what you want to give up and to who and what you want to keep to yourself because you're not going to run my investigation or me. I'll tell you when I've got something or when I need something. Until then, this stays between you and me so just sign my check or get someone else."

  We measured one another across my desk; neither backing down until he conceded with a cracked grin.

  "We've got the same problem, you and me," he said.

  "What's that?"

  "We're both losing the one thing we can't afford to lose—control. You over your body and me over my mind. I don't know why you won't tell me about the FBI but I gather you've got something else at stake, something personal. I could get anyone I want to do this job but I like having someone with a lot on the line. I'll stay out of your way but I want results or I will get someone else."

  "What if you don't like the results?"

  "That's tomorrow's problem. The question is whether you can do this today."

  More than the shaking or the brain fog, I resented that my condition compromised my choices, forcing me to accept weakness as normal, walking away instead of pushing on as unavoidable. If I was going to give in, I might just as well quit. The FBI forced me to do that and the bitter taste hadn't gone away.

  Simon Alexander was wrong when he told me that this would be an easy gig, a job I could do on my own schedule, and I was right when I told Milo Harper that something like this doesn't want to be controlled. Neither mattered now. What mattered was whether I was going to answer the bell or pack it in, taking the rest of the day off because I felt like I'd gone ten rounds or rattle Anthony Corliss's cage, knowing that the surest way to chill an investigation was to wait until it was convenient for me.