It's a Crime

by Jacqueline Carey

  “I’m sure it’s a mistake,” said Pat. “The High Risk boys are so…simple.”

  CHAPTER

  2

  The town of Hart Ridge was set against a large hill, with the four main streets running in tiers. The lowest street was commercial, and the immediate area was shabby: two-family houses, old brick apartment buildings, several rows of Cape Cods. As the elevation increased, so did the size of the houses and lots. The next strip was of beautiful old four-bedroom Colonials surrounded by rhododendrons and dogwoods and magnolias. This was a middle-class buffer zone, looking as if it had been elbowed in, although its roots were deep. Another notch up was a mix of grand old Victorians and real mansions of many odd styles—Federalist, Italianate, château, hacienda. Once you had money, you could let your taste run riot.

  The town had consisted of these three levels for over a hundred years. As late as the 1950s the fourth and highest road did not exist. There were just a few houses scattered among the bluffs of Douglas Point, dwellings known for their eccentricity and inconvenience. That all changed with the construction of Douglas Road in the sixties. A soap opera diva moved there. Then a retired football star. Suddenly, in the eighties, everyone, it seemed, hankered after a secluded new house on virgin land with a splendid view of the Manhattan skyline. (Create your own fantasy! With a city backdrop!) Douglas Point came to stand for extravagance and excess.

  The Foys weren’t living in Hart Ridge at that time, although both had grown up there, Frank near the Record & Radio on the first tier and Pat more snugly in one of the solid Colonials the next level up. In the late eighties Rose was still a preschooler, and they lived in a little brick house in a valley to the north, separated from their next-door neighbors by banks of forsythia, which Pat never, ever complained about, because it was such a useful early bloomer, but she did sometimes wish it would be useful somewhere else, so she’d have an excuse to try a more unusual hedge.

  “I’m beginning to realize that the phone company is not the place to be if you want to make money,” said Frank after a day spent back in Hart Ridge visiting his parents. Pat could not help but receive this statement with mild contempt. How could he possibly have thought it was? Ma Bell was the most tedious company in the world to work for. Everyone knew that. Certainly that was the point of those jobs: You could ignore them and get on with your life.

  But new phone companies had begun sprouting up everywhere, and AT&T was forced by law to provide them with deeply discounted long-distance minutes for resale. Frank jumped from AT&T’s broad back to one of these upstarts, LGT Communications, whose initials stood for nothing but were intended to imply that calls placed through the company were completed at the speed of light. “Guess where the CFO lives?” said Frank his first day. “Douglas Point.” And when this talented CFO, Neil Culp, took an interest in Frank, even Pat was stirred.

  LGT Communications was located in an industrial park near Basking Ridge, not a bad commute from the little brick house, but when telecommunications giant LinkAge bought out the company in the mid-nineties and made all the employees a hefty paper profit, Frank began to find excuses to swing back through the tier of roads in Hart Ridge. Symbolism required a move up to the third rung, higher than either he or Pat had started. (Frank was big on symbolism. He wouldn’t let the girls leave the house in their pajamas, for instance, although they were far less revealing than their clothes.)

  Rose was dubious about the third-tier mansions, most of which were fabulously out-of-date. “Is that house haunted?” she would ask. Or, “Why do you always like houses that look as if witches lived in them?” Sometimes Frank would drive higher, to Douglas Point, where he’d slow to a crawl for a glimpse of Neil Culp’s cedar deck Most of the houses on Douglas Point were equally hidden, so his excursions were usually confined to the third tier. There the mansions were all forthright and stately, easily visible perched high atop huge swelling lawns that were underlined rather than concealed by the formal front hedges.

  Although LGT Communications was still run pretty much as a stand-alone company, Neil soon became the CFO of LinkAge—of the whole shebang, in other words. His genius had been recognized. He worked closely with CEO Riley Gibbs, and everyone had heard of Riley Gibbs, whose management skills and keen foresight had transformed a local enterprise into a Fortune 500 company. Frank couldn’t believe his luck. He followed Neil to LinkAge headquarters in Meadowlands Center, which had been fashioned out of a swamp near New York City that used to hold nothing more than a few dozen Mafia victims. No one admired Neil more than Frank did. When Pat turned forty-one, he took her to the Manor for dinner on Neil’s recommendation and told her how Neil had recently engineered LinkAge’s acquisition of the fifth-largest long-distance company in the country. “A goldfish swallowed a whale!” he repeated happily. “Now we’re really going to be rich!” “Money” for Frank did not mean just a bigger check; it meant luster and excitement.

  On the way home, he drove through the usual mix of mansions in upper Hart Ridge, saying maniacally, “How about that one, dear? What do you think?” and “Forget it! Where would we put your collection of winter-blooming cacti?” (such plants probably being the sole type she did not own) and “No way could I learn to live with only one swimming pool!” (when there wasn’t a single one in sight). Finally he said, “No, none of those are good enough for us,” and made the right up toward Douglas Point. Pat was still laughing when he turned up again, this time into a driveway that went straight through the trees and looped by the front door of one of the more conventional houses on the Point, a huge new white neo-Georgian. The two and a half stories of the place towered like four, a couple of mansard roofs rippled back from three equally elevated front gables, and a Palladian arch above the door was intended to aggrandize it as if it were a throne. Between roofs and front walk, on the other hand, wasn’t much: white paint, ten-foot unshuttered windows. The house itself could have been a barren expanse of cliff; the only visual interest was in its acme.

  “We’re here! We’re here!” he said as he always did when he had to turn around in a strange driveway—although of course never before on Douglas Point. Then he got out of the car, a bit of a surprise to say the least, and spread his arms in front of a smudge of pink mums, crying, “It’s all yours! Happy birthday, honey!”

  “My goodness,” said Pat, playing for time, looking around. Frank was so pleased and proud. Evidently symbolism required a leap to the very top of the ladder. Which of course she should have known.

  “That’s all you can say? I bought you a whole house!” he said.

  “Wow,” said Pat. She’d have preferred it if he’d consulted with her, of course. But what the hell.

  “No old boyfriend of yours could buy you a house on Douglas Point!” crowed Frank. “Now matter how famous he is!”

  They were in the middle of moving to this pinnacle of existence when Frank learned that Neil Culp was moving, too—down to the even grander town of Rumson, where an eighty-year-old estate and a new wife half that age (Yolande) awaited him. Frank was uncharacteristically silent after he told Pat the news. He looked quizzically around the nearly empty living room. Then he jumped up and said, “We need a sofa that can sleep a football team!”

  Four years later, most of the largest rooms in the Foy house were still nearly empty. The foyer was as big as a two-car garage but contained only an abstract tapestry that Frank had purchased from the previous owners. The lone occupants of the dining room were a huge, vaguely Gothic trestle table, which sat twelve, and a sideboard the size of a Dumpster. In the cavernous living room was a similarly oversize coffee table flanked by a couple of olive green couches that could sleep at least part of a football team. Even so, they were dwarfed by the curtainless floor-to-ceiling windows and their view of Manhattan. Frank liked the spaciousness and thought that the whole house was clean if there was no clutter in these few rooms.

  The kitchen was Pat’s. Topiary magnets affixed innumerable school papers to the refrigerator. On t
he wall were three botanical illustrations of hollies, one so tenaciously crooked that it didn’t matter how many times she straightened it. On the marble countertop was an Edgar Allan Poe action figure, a collection of bobbleheads (Jack the Ripper, Pope John Paul II, etc.), a huge spill of CDs with morbid covers, and the handset of a phone. The room was L-shaped; at its foot was Pat’s home office, where nursery catalogs and garden magazines were stacked.

  A red light blinked on the answering machine when Pat returned from the flower show: Frank’s secretary, Ellen Kloda, had left a message saying not to worry, Frank would call soon. She did not mention the arrest, and the panic in her voice was such that if Pat hadn’t got the news from Oliver already, she’d have assumed that Frank was dead at the very least.

  She called Ellen and got her voice mail. Then she tried the Culps in Rumson, and she got the housekeeper. Pat hesitated, then called two wives of the High Risk boys and got machines. This sense of stasis was reassuring; nothing really could have happened.

  Then she realized she’d better try Rose at Princeton. Although Pat was sure that nothing would come of all this, she didn’t want Rose to hear about it from anyone else. Rose’s reaction, however, was a bit unexpected. Pat had barely started before Rose cut her off: “I knew it. I knew it.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Pat, alarm sending her high voice even higher. She had called Rose’s cellphone, so Rose could have been anywhere, sitting in a lecture hall waiting for the teacher, walking to the library with her serious-minded friends—or dissecting some animal with a blade that could cut off her finger as if it were Jell-O. Frank used to say he was going to will his body to science as long as medical school students were required to play pranks with it. Pat began to pace across the kitchen with the handset of her phone.

  “Jesus, Mom, what do you think the point of all those stories of his was?” said Rose.

  “What stories?”

  “The gum ashtray and all those.”

  “Oh,” said Pat. “Those were just funny stories.” Or not funny exactly, but Frank had told them in a funny way. When Frank first started at LGT, it sold a lot of its telephone time to small companies that made phone cards. LGT gave them generous terms, and there wasn’t much overhead, but these operations were always welshing on their debts, anyway. In fact, they tended to disappear before paying anything at all beyond the startup fees. When Rose was in elementary school, she was particularly taken with the tale of an office in Paterson, where one guy read the comics on a chair tipped against the wall and the other pushed a piece of gum back and forth in his mouth and contemplated the ashtray in front of him. It was lined with chewed-up gum. “If you lifted it carefully out of the glass, you’d have another, smaller ashtray made entirely of old gum,” Frank explained with delight. “You wouldn’t believe this place. Garbage everywhere. Papers, boxes, burlap bags piled in the corner. The guy with the gum ashtray kept swearing he had no money, but you know what, every single one of those burlap bags was filled with cash.”

  Frank’s early run-ins had all been like that, involving men with tics, men with “cousins,” men with short blond hair and long black roots.

  “I told him they were criminals,” said Rose.

  “Oh, honey,” said Pat. “You know what your daddy is like. He just thought they were interesting. And he had to collect the money. That was his job. But he was the good guy.”

  Rose wasn’t listening. “What does he say?”

  “I haven’t been able to get hold of him yet. Neil, either.”

  “Big surprise there.”

  “I’m sure the place is a madhouse. All the High Risk boys were arrested.”

  It was hard to imagine the High Risk boys restrained at all. They were wild. They came to the house as a group for parties, and they moved as a group, jumping up to shout an opinion or racing to the ice bucket or fighting over a spurting garden hose at a barbecue. Their hair fell over their eyes in carbon copies of Frank’s; their guffaws echoed his. Fads swept through them. After Frank moved to LinkAge headquarters, the High Risk boys formed a Swat Team that reported back to him from all over the country. In the field they would push the numbers. Then they would get together and compare their finds: a fish-shaped beer mug from a bass tournament off the Carolinas, a bullet-riddled plaque for “perfect attendance,” a restored Indian motorcycle.

  “Those guys were always obnoxious,” said Rose.

  After getting off the phone Pat looked out the back bank of windows at the border lining the stockade fence. The dusting of snow had melted. It was time to prune the red bark dogwood and the thigh-high fountains of perennial grasses. As she picked up the clippers in the mudroom, however, she heard someone upstairs. Ruby was home from school awfully early.

  When she knocked on Ruby’s door, she couldn’t quite tell if Ruby said “Come in,” but she decided to take it on faith. So much in Ruby’s room was mysterious. Take the riot of fabric amid the other litter on the floor, for instance. The dark red velour could be hat, sweatshirt—or theatrical curtain. The off-white cotton canvas could be chair back, spring jacket—or sail. And what could that chrome rod be, with the rubber tip? Baton? Crutch? It was hard to believe that as a first-grader Ruby had once cleaned out the cellar to make a bomb shelter, thanks to some anachronistic children’s literature. Pat picked her way across the floor, saying, “I’m so glad you’re home. I want to talk to you.”

  Ruby was listening to music, IM’ing her friends, and talking on the phone at the same time. She looked up from her laptop to say, briefly, “Pep rally.”

  Pep rallies in middle school! Kids grew up so fast these days.

  “Honey, I don’t want you to worry about this, because I’m sure it’s all a mistake,” Pat began. “God knows governments make millions of them, everyone agrees, no matter who you are or what your political beliefs, so much so that I can’t believe anyone supports the death penalty. Entrust life and death to the same people who figure out your property tax? Or at least the same sort of people—”

  Ruby watched her mother with an impatient expression, eyeing the clippers. “What are you doing with those?”

  Pat looked down at the unwieldy item in her hand as if not sure how it got there. “Nothing,” she said, trying to fit her thoughts back into their proper order. “There’s been a problem at LinkAge. A whole bunch of people have been arrested, and I think your father was one of them.”

  Ruby froze for a moment as she looked wildly into her mother’s eyes; then she jumped up, shot into the hall, and raced down the back stairs, calling, “Did you lock the door?”

  “Oh, honey, you’re not in any danger,” Pat shouted, following her.

  “How do you know?” cried Ruby. The dogs began to bark. “At least Foster is here to protect us. He’s pretty fierce.”

  Foster, the Lab, was bigger than the other two. But as he yelped away he looked more like he was going to have a nervous breakdown than go for the jugular.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” said Pat, she wasn’t sure to whom.

  Frank Foy’s wife and daughter had just finished locking the door against him when he climbed the last of the forced-stone back steps. Already there was something foreign about him. He looked leaner, harder, crazier. The dogs did not stop barking when they realized who it was. “I think we’re going to need this,” he said, handing Pat a bottle of champagne with a spill of blue curling ribbon at the neck.

  “What a wonderful idea!” said Pat. Frank was a nice man. Last summer he wouldn’t let anyone turn on the back floodlights for fear of frying the nest of mourning dove eggs perched on top of one.

  “So let me sit down already,” said Frank. “It’s not every day I get arrested.”

  “Were you really arrested?” asked Pat.

  “Unless I’m dreaming,” he said. “Let’s have some glasses out here. Get the new crystal.” As she left, she heard him say to Ruby, “Aren’t you going to give your old man a hug?”

  At first Pat picked out three matching wine
glasses, one apparently for twelve-year-old Ruby, clearly a sign of hysteria. Or maybe an arrest was like transubstantiation; everybody got to taste the result. Pat looked at the third glass dumbly, then returned it to its glass-fronted cabinet. If necessary, Ruby could have a sip of hers. As usual with kids, however, Pat’s decision was totally irrelevant. Ruby had left the room by the time she returned.

  “So where did they take you?” Pat asked Frank. “To…jail?”

  “No, no, we were just put in an office down at the courthouse,” said Frank, popping the cork. “They even gave us coffee. Worst I ever had. It tasted like stomach acid. I thank the Lord for inventing champagne.” In one smooth motion he poured with his right hand and drank with his left.

  “I’m out on bail,” he said. “Two million dollars’ worth. Can you believe it? This is one expensive arm.” He lifted the elbow, the custom-made shirt masking the very male disjunction of forearm and upper arm.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “It will all blow over. Everyone massages their earnings. Neil just did it smarter and better than anyone else. We went to some new places that most people just don’t get. No one expects an accountant to have any imagination.”

  “And they should!” cried Pat loyally. “They should!”

  “You think LinkAge would have got where it is today without Neil’s ideas?” said Frank. “In the old days Gibbs acquired companies to try to save money! It’s laughable!”

  “It’s all so confusing,” said Pat.

  “That’s because you’re not drinking.” He topped off her glass. “It’s not like any of this was a secret. Everyone knew.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Yes you did.”

  “I did?”

  “You knew how important the stock price was to the company. You knew the gyrations everyone went through every quarter to hit our targets. And you knew that we always did it, no matter what.” It was true that he’d told her far more than she was interested in.