Company Man

by Joseph Finder

  “Well, we live in this, you know, gated community.”

  “Yes, sir, I can see that. Lot of good it does, keeping out the wing nuts.”

  “Point taken.” Nick almost smiled.

  “Sounds like the burglar alarm isn’t on very often, sir, that right?”

  “Officer, why so many cars here today for a routine—”

  “Mind if I ask the questions?” Officer Manzi said. The guy seemed to be enjoying his authority, pushing around the boss man from Stratton. Let him, Nick thought. Let him have his fun. But—

  Nick heard a car approaching, turned and saw the blue Chrysler Town & Country, Marta behind the wheel. He felt that little chemical surge of pleasure he always got when he saw his daughter, the way he used to feel with Lucas too, until that got complicated. The minivan pulled up alongside Nick and the engine was switched off. A car door opened and slammed, and Julia shouted, “What are you doing home, Daddy?”

  She ran toward him, wearing a light-blue hooded Stratton sweatshirt and jeans, black sneakers. She wore some slight variant of the outfit every day, a sweatshirt or an athletic jersey. When Nick went to the same elementary school, more than thirty years before, you weren’t allowed to wear jeans, and sweatshirts weren’t considered appropriate school attire. But he didn’t have time in the mornings to argue with her, and he was inclined to go easy on his little girl, given what she had to be going through since the death of her mother.

  She hugged him tight around his abdomen. He no longer hoisted her up, since at almost five feet and ninety-something pounds, it wasn’t so easy. In the last year she’d gotten tall and leggy, almost gangly, though there was still a pocket of baby fat at her tummy. She was starting to develop physically, little breast buds emerging, which Nick couldn’t deal with. It was a constant reminder of his inadequacy as a parent: who the hell was going to talk to her, get her through adolescence?

  The hug went on for several seconds until Nick released her, another thing that had changed since Laura was gone. His daughter’s hugs: she didn’t want to let him go.

  Now she looked up at him, her meltingly beautiful brown eyes lively. “How come there’s all these police?”

  “They want to talk to me, baby doll. No big deal. Where’s your backpack?”

  “In the car. Did that crazy guy get in the house again and write bad stuff?”

  Nick nodded, stroked her glossy brown hair. “What are you doing home now? Don’t you have piano?”

  She gave him a look of amused contempt. “That’s not till four.”

  “I thought it was three.”

  “Mrs. Guarini changed it, like, months ago, don’t you remember?”

  He shook his head. “Oh, right. I forgot. Well, listen, I have to talk to this policeman here. Marta, you guys stay here until the police say it’s okay to go in the house, okay?”

  Marta Burrell was from Barbados, a mocha-skinned woman of thirty-eight, tall and slender as a fashion model with an air of sultry indifference, or maybe arrogance, her default mode. Her jeans were a little too tight, and she customarily wore high heels, and she was vocal about her disapproval of Julia’s daily uniform. She expressed disapproval of just about everything in the household. She was ferociously devoted to the kids, though, and was able to make both of them do things Nick couldn’t. Marta had been a superb nanny when the kids were little, was an excellent cook, and an indifferent housekeeper.

  “Sure, Nick,” she said. She reached for Julia, but the girl scampered off.

  “You were saying,” Nick said to the cop.

  Manzi looked up, fixed Nick with a blank look, bordering on impertinence, but there was a gleam in his eyes; he seemed to be restraining a smile. “Do you have any enemies, Mr. Conover?”

  “Only about five thousand people in town.”

  The policeman’s eyebrows shot up. “Excuse me.”

  “We laid off half our workforce recently, as I’m sure you know. More than five thousand employees.”

  “Ah, yes,” the cop said. “You’re not a popular man around here, are you?”

  “You could say that.”

  It wasn’t that long ago, Nick reflected, that everyone loved him. People he didn’t know in high school started sucking up to him. Forbes magazine even did a profile. After all, Nick was the youthful blue-collar guy, the son of a guy who’d spent a life bending metal in the chair factory—business reporters ate that stuff up. Maybe Nick was never going to be beloved at the company like Old Man Devries, but for a while at least he’d been popular, admired, liked. A local hero in the small town of Fenwick, Michigan, sort of, a guy you’d point out at the Shop ’n Save and maybe, if you felt bold, walk up to and introduce yourself in the frozen-foods section.

  But that was before—before the first layoffs were announced, two years ago, after Stratton’s new owners had laid down the law at the quarterly board meeting in Fenwick. There was no choice. The Stratton Corporation was going down the crapper if they didn’t cut costs, and fast. That meant losing half its workforce, five thousand people in a town of maybe forty thousand. It was the most painful thing he’d ever done, something he’d never imagined having to do. There’d been a series of smaller layoffs since the first ones were announced, two years ago. It was like Chinese water torture. The Fenwick Free Press, which used to publish puff pieces about Stratton, now ran banner headlines: THREE HUNDRED MORE STRATTON WORKERS FACE THE AXE. CANCER VICTIM SUFFERS LOSS OF STRATTON BENEFITS. The local columnists routinely referred to him as “the Slasher.”

  Nick Conover, local boy made good, had become the most hated man in town.

  “Guy like you ought to have better security than that. You get the security you pay for, you know.”

  Nick was about to reply when he heard his daughter scream.

  3

  He ran toward the source of the screaming and found Julia beside the pool. Her cries came in great ragged gulps. She knelt on the bluestone coping, her hands thrashing in the water, her small back torquing back and forth. Marta stood nearby, helpless and aghast, a hand to her mouth.

  Then Nick saw what had made Julia scream, and he felt sick.

  A dark shape floated in cranberry red water, splayed and distended, surrounded by slick white entrails. The blood was concentrated in a dark cloud around the carcass; the water got lighter, pinkish as it got farther away from the furry brown mass.

  The corpse wasn’t immediately recognizable as Barney, their old Lab/Golden Retriever. It took a second glance, a struggle with disbelief. On the bluestone not far from where Julia knelt, keening, was a blood-slick, carbon-steel Henckels knife from their kitchen set.

  Many things immediately made sense, now: the unusual police presence, the questioning, even the absence of Barney’s usual barked greeting when Nick arrived.

  A couple of policemen were busy taking pictures, talking to one another, their low conversations punctuated by static blasts from their radios. They seemed to be chatting casually, as if nothing unusual had happened. Business as usual to them. No one was expressing sympathy or concern. Nick felt a flash of rage, but the main thing now was to comfort his daughter.

  He rushed to her, sank to his knees, put a hand on her back. “Baby,” he said. “Baby.”

  She turned, flung her arms around his neck, let out a wail. Her gasping breath was hot and moist. He held her tight as if he could squeeze the trauma out of her little body, make everything normal again, make her feel safe.

  “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry.” Her gasps were like spasms, hiccups. He held her even tighter. The copious flow of her tears pooled in the hollow of his neck. He could feel it soak his shirt.

  Ten minutes later, when Marta had taken Julia inside, Nick spoke to Officer Manzi. He made no effort this time to contain his fury. “What the fuck are you guys going to do about this?” Nick thundered. “What the hell are you waiting for? These break-ins have been going on for months already, and you haven’t done a damned thing about it.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” Manzi sa
id blandly.

  “You haven’t assigned a detective to the case, you haven’t done any investigation, you haven’t gone through the lists of laid-off Stratton employees. You’ve had months to stop this fucking madman. What are you waiting for? Does this lunatic have to murder one of my kids before you take it seriously?”

  Manzi’s detachment—did Nick detect a smug sort of amusement, was that possible?—was infuriating. “Well, sir, as I said, you might want to think about upgrading your security—”

  “My security? What about you guys? Isn’t this your goddamned job?”

  “You said it yourself, sir—you laid off five thousand Stratton employees. That’s going to create more enemies than we can possibly protect you against. You should really upgrade your security system.”

  “Yeah, and what are you going to do? How are you going to protect my family?”

  “I’ll be honest with you, sir. Stalking cases are some of our hardest.”

  “Meaning you pretty much can’t do shit, is that right?”

  Manzi shrugged. “You said it. I didn’t.”

  4

  After the police left, Nick tried for a long while to console his daughter. He called to cancel her piano lesson, then sat with her, talking a bit, mostly hugging. When she seemed stable, Nick left her in Marta’s care and returned to the office for a largely unproductive afternoon.

  By the time he returned home, Julia was asleep and Marta was in the family room, watching a movie about a baby who talks with Bruce Willis’s voice.

  “Where’s Julia?” Nick asked.

  “She’s asleep,” Marta said sadly. “She was okay by the time she went to bed. But she cried a lot, Nick.”

  Nick shook his head. “That poor baby. This is going to be hardest on her, I think. Barney was Laura’s dog, really. To Julia, Barney…” He fell silent. “Is Lucas upstairs?”

  “He called from a friend’s house, said they’re working on their history projects.”

  “Yeah, right. Working on a nickel bag, more like it. Which friend?”

  “I think Ziegler? Um, listen—Nick? I’m kind of nervous being alone in the house—after today, I mean.”

  “I can’t blame you. You lock the doors and windows, right?”

  “I did, but this crazy person…”

  “I know. I’m going to have a new system put in right away so you can put on the alarm while you’re inside.” Stratton’s corporate security director had told Nick he’d drop by later, see what he could do. Anything for the boss. They’d gone too long with a rudimentary security system; it was time to put in something state-of-the-art, with cameras and motion detectors and all that. “You can go to sleep if you want.”

  “I want to see the rest of this movie.”

  “Sure.”

  Nick went upstairs and down the hall to Julia’s bedroom, quietly opening the door and making his way through the darkness by memory. Enough moonlight filtered through the gaps in the curtains that, once his eyes adjusted, he could make out his daughter’s sleeping body. Julia slept under, and with, an assortment of favorite blankets, each of which she’d given names to, as well as a rotating selection of stuffed animals and Beanie Babies from her vast menagerie. Tonight she was clutching Winnie the Pooh, who’d been given to her when she was a few days old, now frayed and matted and stained.

  Her choice of sleeping partner was a pretty reliable indicator of her mental state: Elmo when she was feeling sprightly; Curious George when she was feeling mischievous; her little Beanie Baby koala, Eucalyptus, when she wanted to nurture someone needier than herself. But Pooh always meant she was feeling especially fragile and in need of the ultimate comfort of her longest-serving pal. For several months after her mommy’s death, she slept with Pooh every night. Recently, she’d traded in Pooh for some of the other guys, which was a sign that she was starting to feel a little stronger.

  Tonight, though, Pooh was back in her bed.

  He touched her sweaty curls, breathed in the sweet baby-shampoo aroma mixed with the slightly sour smell of perspiration, and kissed her damp forehead. She murmured but did not stir.

  A door opened and closed somewhere in the house, followed immediately by the thud of something being dropped to the floor. Nick was instantly alert. Heavy, bounding footsteps on the carpeted stairs told him it was Lucas.

  Nick navigated a path through the minefield of books and toys and closed the door quietly behind him. The long hall was dark, but a stripe of yellow light glared through the crack under Lucas’s bedroom door.

  Nick knocked, waited, then knocked again.

  “Yeah?”

  The depth and timbre of his son’s voice always startled him. That and the surly edge to it, in the last year. Nick opened the door and found Lucas lying back on his bed, boots still on, iPod earbuds in his ears.

  “Where’ve you been?” Nick asked.

  Lucas glanced at him, then found something in the middle distance that was more interesting. “Where’s Barney?”

  Nick paused. “I asked you where you’ve been, Luke. It’s a school night.”

  “Ziggy’s.”

  “You didn’t ask me if you could go over there.”

  “You weren’t around to ask.”

  “If you want to go over to a friend’s house, you’ve got to clear it in advance with me or Marta.”

  Lucas shrugged in tacit acknowledgment. His eyes were red and glassy, and now Nick was fairly certain he’d been getting high. This was an alarming new development, but he hadn’t yet confronted his son about it. He’d been putting it off simply because it was one more mountain to climb, a showdown that would require unwavering strength he didn’t have. There was so much going on at work, and there was Julia, who was frankly a hell of a lot easier to console, and then there was his own sadness, which sapped his ability to be a good and understanding dad.

  He looked at Lucas, could hear the tinny, percussive hiss coming from the earphones. He wondered what kind of crappy music Lucas was listening to now. He caught a whiff of stale smoke in the room, which smelled like regular cigarettes, though he wasn’t sure.

  There was a baffling disconnect between Lucas on the inside and Lucas on the outside. Externally, Lucas was a mature sixteen, a tall and handsome man. His almost feminine prettiness had taken on a sharp-featured masculinity. His eyebrows, above blue eyes with long lashes, were dark and thick. The Lucas inside, though, was five or six: petulant, easily wounded, expert at finding insult in the most unexpected places, capable of holding grudges to the end of time.

  “You’re not smoking, are you?”

  Lucas cast his father a look of withering contempt. “Ever hear of second-hand smoke? I was around people who were smoking.”

  “Ziggy doesn’t smoke.” Kenny Ziegler was a big, strapping blond kid, a swimmer who was Lucas’s best friend from when he was still on the swim team. But ever since Lucas had quit swimming, six months or so ago, he hadn’t been hanging out with Ziggy nearly as much. Nick doubted that Lucas had actually spent the afternoon and evening at Ziggy’s house. Somewhere else: some other friend, probably.

  Lucas’s stare was unwavering. His music squealed and hissed.

  “You got homework?” Nick persisted.

  “I don’t need you to monitor me, Nick.” Nick. That was something else new, calling his father by his first name. Some of Lucas’s friends had always called their own parents by their first names, but Nick and Laura had always insisted on the traditional “Mom” and “Dad.” Lucas was just trying to push his buttons. He’d been calling him Nick for the last month or so.

  “Can you please take those earphones out when I’m talking to you?”

  “I can hear you just fine,” Lucas said. “Where’s Barney?”

  “Take off the earphones, Luke.”

  Lucas yanked them out of his ears by the dangling wire, let them drop on his chest, the tinny sound now louder and more distinct.

  “Something happened to Barney. Something pretty bad.”

 
; “What are you talking about?”

  “We found him…Someone killed him, Luke.”

  Lucas whipped his legs around until he was perched on the edge of the bed, looking as if he were about to launch himself toward Nick.

  “Killed him?”

  “We found him in the pool today—some nut…” Nick couldn’t continue, couldn’t relive the gruesome scene.

  “This is the same guy who keeps breaking in, isn’t it? The spray-paint graffiti guy.”

  “Looks that way.”

  “It’s because of you!” Lucas’s eyes widened, gleaming with tears. “All those people you fired, the way everyone in town hates you.”

  Nick didn’t know how to answer.

  “Like half the kids in school, their parents got laid off by you. It’s fucking embarrassing.”

  “Lucas, listen to me—”

  Lucas gave him a ferocious look, eyes bulging, teeth bared, as if Nick were the one who’d killed Barney. “Why don’t you get the fuck out of my room,” he said, his voice cracking.

  Nick’s reaction surprised himself. If he’d talked that way to his father, he’d have had the shit beaten out of him. But instead of flying into a fury, he was instead overcome by calm, patient sorrow—his heart ached for the kid, for what he’d had to go through. “Lucas,” Nick said, so softly it was almost a whisper, “don’t you ever talk to me like that again.” He turned around and quietly closed the door behind him. His heart wasn’t in it.

  Standing in the hallway just outside her adored older brother’s room was Julia, tears streaming down her face.

  5

  It wasn’t long after Nick had finally gotten Julia back to sleep—picking her up, hugging her, snuggling with her in her bed—that there was a quick rap on the front door.

  Eddie Rinaldi, Stratton’s corporate security director, was wearing a tan fleece jacket and a pair of jeans, and smelled like beer and cigarettes. Nick wondered whether Eddie had just come over from his usual hangout, Victor’s, on Division.