Killer Instinct

by Joseph Finder

  We didn’t like each other very much, but we were good at reading each other, the way a couple of wolves size each other up in a few seconds. There was nothing outwardly competitive about the way I asked, but he got what I was really asking: Did you land the deal? You going to be my boss now?

  He looked at me blankly.

  “The demo,” I reminded him. “This morning. At Fidelity.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “You were demo’ing the sixty-one-inch, right?”

  He nodded, watching me the whole while, his nostrils flaring. “The demo flopped.”

  “Flopped?”

  “Mm-hmm. The monitor wouldn’t even turn on. Total dud.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, Jason, I’m not kidding.” His voice was cold and hard. “I’m not kidding at all.”

  “Of course. Jeez, I’m sorry. So what happened—you lose Fidelity?”

  He nodded again, watching my face closely. “Naturally. No one wants to spend ten thousand bucks per unit on a bunch of plasmas that are questionable. So, yep, I lost ’em.”

  “Crap. And you forecast Fidelity as a ‘commit,’ right.” That meant as close to a sure thing as you could get in this world.

  He compressed his lips. “So here’s the thing, Jason. Me and Brett, we’ve had a run of real bad luck recently. My car gets a flat tire, then some kind of electrical problem. Brett’s computer gets wiped out. Now I somehow get a bad monitor, after having it tested. Both of us lose major deals as a result.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What do Brett and I have in common? We’re both in the running for Crawford’s job. Against you. And nothing happens to you. So I can’t help but wonder how and why this is all happening.”

  “You’re looking for a reason? An explanation? I mean, it sucks, and I’m sorry about it, but you guys have both been unlucky lately. That’s all.”

  Maybe it wasn’t just a matter of bad luck. Two competitive guys, Gleason and Allard. Rivals for a job that paid a lot more and put them on the management track. Was it possible that they’d been sabotaging each other? Guys could be like that. Even buddies like those two. Scorpions in a bottle. Maybe it was like a frat hazing? Stranger things happened in high-pressure companies like ours. I made a mental note to start backing everything up, all my files, and taking copies home.

  “Unlucky,” he repeated. His nostrils flared again. “See, I’ve always been the kind of guy who has great luck.”

  “Oh, I get it now. You’ve been dropping deals all over the place, but it’s my fault. That’s sad. Listen to me, Trevor. You make your own luck.”

  I was about to let loose—I was really fed up—when there was a scream from down the hall. We looked at each other in puzzlement.

  Another scream, female, and then someone else shouted, and we both went to see what the matter was.

  A small crowd had gathered outside the Plasma Lab. The woman who’d screamed, a young admin, was screaming even louder and clutching the doorjamb as if to keep from sinking to the floor.

  “What is it?” I said. “What happened?”

  “Meryl kept knocking and knocking, and Phil didn’t answer, so she opened the door to see if he was in,” said Kevin Taminek, the manager for inside sales. “I mean, he’s always there, and it’s late morning. And Jesus.”

  Gordy came up, short of breath, shouted, “What goes on here?”

  “Somebody call Security,” said another guy, who did inside sales with Taminek. “Or the police. Or both.”

  “Oh, good God almighty,” Gordy said, his voice loud and trembling.

  I came a few feet closer so I could see what they were all looking at, and I gasped.

  Philip Rifkin was dangling in midair, hanging from the ceiling.

  His eyes were open, bulging. He wasn’t wearing his glasses. His mouth was partly open, and the tip of his tongue protruded. His face was dark, bluish. A black cord cut deeply into his neck, knotted at the back of his head. I recognized it as component cable, which he kept in giant spools. A chair was tipped over a few feet away. I could see that he’d removed one of the drop ceiling panels and had tied the other end of the cable around a steel joist.

  “My God!” Trevor said, turning away, gagging.

  “Jesus,” I breathed, “he hanged himself.”

  “Call Security!” Gordy shouted. He grabbed the door handle and pulled it shut. “And get the hell out of here, all of you. Back to work.”

  18

  My muscles were burning, but Kurt wouldn’t let me stop. He had me running up and down the steps of Harvard Stadium. He called it the “Stairway to Heaven.”

  “Time for a rest,” I said.

  “Nope. Keep going. Body relaxed. Swing those arms all the way back, right up to your shoulders.”

  “I’m dying here. My muscles feel like they’re on fire.”

  “Lactic acid. Outstanding.”

  “Isn’t that bad?”

  “Keep moving.”

  “You’re not even winded.”

  “It takes a lot to get me winded.”

  “All right,” I said, “you win. I surrender. I confess.”

  “Two more.”

  When we were done, he made us fast-walk along the banks of the Charles River as a way to cool down. I thought a Starbucks Frappuccino would work better.

  “Was it as good for you as it was for me?” I said, still gasping.

  “Pain is just weakness leaving the body,” Kurt said, punching me lightly on the shoulder. “So you guys had an ugly incident up there yesterday, I hear. Someone took a swing, huh?”

  “Horrible,” I said, shaking my head, panting.

  “Scanlon told me he used a wire or something.”

  “Yeah. Component cable.”

  “Sad.”

  “Scanlon tell you—if Rifkin left a note?”

  Kurt shrugged. “No idea.”

  We walked for a few minutes until I was able to talk almost normally. “Trevor thinks I’m trying to wrongfoot him. Screw him over. You know that big demonstration he had? In front of Fidelity—one of our sixty-one-inch plasmas? Thing was dead when he switched it on. Of course he lost the account.”

  “Bad for him, good for you.”

  “Maybe. But he thinks I sabotaged the monitor.”

  “Did you?”

  “Come on. Not exactly my style. Plus, I wouldn’t know how to do it even if I wanted to.”

  “Couldn’t the monitor have gone bad on the truck?”

  “Sure. There’s all kinds of ways a plasma monitor can go out of whack. Couple of months ago Circuit City said six of our flat-panel TVs came in dead. It turned out some dimwit janitor at our Rochester warehouse had been cleaning the toilets with some mixture of toilet-bowl cleaner and Clorox. Didn’t know it releases chlorine gas. Which corrodes the microchips or the printed circuits or something—totally fried the monitors. So it could have been anything.”

  “All you can do is ignore the guy. No one’s going to take his accusations seriously, right? It just sounds like he’s trying to make excuses.”

  I nodded. Walked for a bit. “I’m going to have to miss our workout Thursday morning,” I said. “I’m having breakfast with Letasky.”

  “Gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse, huh?”

  “Do my best. Thanks to you.”

  “Glad to help. Anything I can do, just ask.”

  I paused. “Listen, I read through the file you gave me. That intel is going to be a huge help. Huge.”

  He shrugged modestly.

  “And I really appreciate all the work you did to get it for me. Some of it—well, I don’t want to know how you got hold of it, but—you need to be really careful with that stuff. Some of that crosses the line. And if either of us is caught with it, we could get in some serious trouble.”

  He was silent. The morning was starting to warm up, and his tank top was starting to soak through. My T-shirt was already dripping wet.

  A minute went by in silence, then
another minute. There was a flock of geese waddling along the riverbank by the Lars Anderson Bridge. A pair of early morning joggers, a man and a woman.

  “You’re the one who asked me to get a backgrounder on Letasky,” he said, sounding almost defensive.

  “I know I did. You’re right. But I shouldn’t have. I’m just uncomfortable with this.”

  Another minute of silence. A car roared by along Storrow Drive.

  “So I guess you’re not interested in another tidbit about James Letasky that just came in.”

  I stared down at the sidewalk. Exhaled slowly. I wanted to say yes, but couldn’t quite bring myself to do so.

  Kurt went on, without waiting for a reply. “Last couple of years the Letasky family’s spent their vacations camping. Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, places like that. But the place James and his wife really love is Martha’s Vineyard. That’s where they honeymooned. They keep wanting to go back, but it’s too far from Chicago.”

  “Interesting,” I said. Martha’s Vineyard was a lot closer to Boston than to Chicago. “How did you—” I saw Kurt’s expression, and stopped. “Right. NTK.”

  Kurt looked at his watch. “We both got to get to work,” he said.

  “You playing softball tonight?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” Kurt said.

  19

  The hotshot from NEC, Jim Letasky, was a plump, round-faced guy in his midthirties with blond hair cut in a pudding-basin, Franciscan friar haircut. He had a ready smile and couldn’t have been more charismatic and winning. He was blunt and straightforward—no mind games, no coyness—and I liked that. He knew we wanted to hire him, and he knew why, and he made no secret of the fact that he wasn’t much interested. Still, he hadn’t slammed the door shut, since after all he was sitting here at breakfast with me at the Hyatt Regency on Memorial Drive in Cambridge.

  We exchanged the usual chitchat about the business, and I congratulated him again on the Albertson’s deal, and he was suitably modest about it. I pried a little about his connection at that middleman company, SignNetwork, but he got a little evasive. Trade secrets and all that. We talked about Amarillo, Texas, his hometown, and I told him about my weakness for Big Red soda, which he loved too.

  When he’d finished his third cup of coffee, Letasky said, “Jason, it’s always great to see you, but can we speak frankly? Entronics can’t afford me.”

  “Top talent costs,” I said.

  “You don’t know what I make.”

  I tried not to smile. “Your comp package is only one small part of what we can offer you,” I said.

  He laughed. “Not too small a part, I hope,” he said.

  I told him what we’d offer. It was exactly twenty-five percent higher than he made at NEC, and it didn’t require him to bust his balls as much. I knew from his private complaints to his boss—Kurt’s dossier even included some of Letasky’s private e-mails—that he was trying to cut back on the travel, spend more time with his kids. Given the kind of numbers Letasky drove, and our bonus structure, Entronics would still end up ahead.

  “See, we want our salesguys to have a life,” I said. That was so bogus, I couldn’t believe the words were tumbling out of my mouth. “The way the package is structured, you can make a lot more than you make now by working significantly fewer hours. I mean, you’d still be logging the miles and all, don’t get me wrong, but this way you get to watch your kids grow up. You get to go to Kenny’s hockey practice and the twins’ ballet recitals.”

  “How do you know—?” he began.

  “I’ve done my homework. I’m telling you, my orders are not to let you get up from this table until you say yes.”

  He blinked, momentarily silenced.

  “These are precious years in your kids’ lives,” I said. Just about word-for-word what he’d e-mailed his boss, in fact. “And they go fast. Sure, you’re the breadwinner, but do you really want to get home every night too late to tuck them in? I want you to think about what you’re missing.”

  “I’ve thought about it,” he conceded in a small voice.

  “See, you can make a better living and also be there for your wife and kids. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to spend three weeks in the Grand Tetons instead of one?” That one hit home, I knew. He’d e-mailed that to his boss too.

  “Yeah,” he said, his brows jutting up, the smile gone from his face. “It would.”

  “And why should you spend forty-five minutes commuting to work? That’s time you could be spending with your kids. Helping them with their homework.”

  “We’ve got a great house.”

  “Have you ever seen Wellesley?” I said. “Didn’t Gail go to school there?” Gail was his wife, and she’d gone to Wellesley College. “It’s a fifteen-minute drive from Framingham, a straight shot down 135.”

  “It’s that close?”

  “For what you could get for your house in Evanston, you could be living in this house.” I took out a photo that I’d printed out from a Wellesley real estate website that morning. “Over two hundred years old. An old farmhouse that’s been added to over the years. Nice, huh?”

  He stared at the photo. “Man.”

  “Cliff Road is the most exclusive neighborhood in Wellesley. See the size of that property? Your kids can play in the yard, and you and Gail don’t have to worry about the cars. There’s a great Montessori school not too far away—don’t the twins go to a Montessori school?”

  He exhaled. “The hassle of moving,” he began.

  I slid another piece of paper across the table at him. “This is the relocation and signing bonus we’re prepared to offer you.”

  He read the number and blinked twice. “It says the offer expires today.”

  “I want you to have time to talk this over with Gail. But I don’t want you using this as leverage within NEC to negotiate a better package.”

  “They’d never match this,” he said. I really liked his honesty. It was refreshing. “It wouldn’t do any good.”

  “You’re not the top performer there. Here, you would be. So we’re willing to pay.”

  “I have until five o’clock today to decide?”

  “Boston time,” I said. “That’s four o’clock Chicago time.”

  “Wow, man. I don’t—this is so sudden.”

  “You’ve thought about it for quite a while,” I said. I knew he’d just turned down an offer from Panasonic. “Sometimes you just have to close your eyes and jump.”

  He looked at me, but his eyes were focused on some point in the middle distance. I could see he was thinking hard.

  “Plus, do you know how close we are to the Vineyard?” I said. “A hop, skip, and a jump. Ever been there? Your family would love it.”

  I suggested he go back up to his hotel room and call his wife. I told him I’d wait down in the lobby, making calls and doing e-mail on my BlackBerry. I told him I had all the time in the world, which wasn’t true.

  Forty-five minutes later he returned to the lobby.

  Gordy’s jaw dropped. I mean, you hear the expression, but how often do you ever really see someone’s jaw drop? Gordy’s mouth came open, and for a few seconds he was speechless.

  “Holy shit,” he said. He kept looking at Jim Letasky’s signature on the agreement, and then back at my face. “How the hell did you do that?”

  “You approved the package,” I said.

  “I’ve offered him damn good packages before. What did you promise him?” he said suspiciously.

  “Nothing you don’t know about. I guess we just finally broke down his resistance.”

  “Well,” he said, “good job.” He put both hands on my shoulders and squeezed hard. “I don’t know how you did it, but I’m impressed.”

  He did not look happy.

  20

  When I got back to my office after lunch on Friday, there was a voice mail from Gordy. He wanted me to come by his office at three o’clock.

  I called right back, talked to Melanie, and confirmed.
/>   Managed to get through an hour and a half of calls and paperwork, all the while replaying Gordy’s message in my head, trying to read his inscrutable voice, figure out whether it was bad news or good.

  At a few minutes before three I walked down the hall to his office.

  “Booya,” Gordy said. He actually stood when I entered his office. Next to him stood Yoshi Tanaka, eyes dead behind thick lenses. “The better man won. Our new Vice President of Sales. Congratulations.”

  Gordy extended a hand and gave what seemed to me a pretty damned grudging shake. His giant gold monogrammed cuff links glittered. Yoshi didn’t shake my hand. He bowed, ever so slightly. He didn’t know how to do handshakes, but then again, I didn’t know how to bow. Neither man smiled. Yoshi apparently didn’t know how to do that either, but Gordy struck me as unusually subdued, as if someone had a gun to his back.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Sit down,” Gordy said. We all took our places.

  “I wish I could say this is a tribute to your own success,” Gordy said, “but that’s only part of it. You’ve had some good wins. Some big wins. You really seem to be getting your shit together. Getting Letasky was a major coup, and I frankly didn’t think you could pull it off. But the main thing is, I can’t have a bumbler in this job. I need someone totally reliable. Not like Gleason, spacing out on appointments. Even Trevor, dropping the ball on Fidelity. Playing golf and blowing off Pavilion.”

  “Well, I look forward to the challenge,” I said, which, when I heard the words come out of my mouth, almost made me barf.

  “And challenge it will be,” said Gordy. “You have no idea. You’ll be doing Joan’s job and Crawford’s job now. Anyway, I think Yoshi-san wants to say a few words.”

  Tanaka bowed his head solemnly. “My most congratulation—to you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You have very—imposu—job to do.”

  “What kind of job?”

  “Imposu—impo—sent.”