Company Man

by Joseph Finder

  “I’m sorry about that,” Noyce said under his breath.

  Audrey didn’t entirely understand what he was sorry about. “He’s got a unique sense of humor,” she said, taking a stab.

  “Owens was intoxicated, according to Dispatch. Bugbee was next on the call list. I wouldn’t have partnered you two, but…” He shrugged, his voice trailing off.

  Noyce waved at someone. Audrey turned to look. Curtis Decker, the body mover, was getting out of his old black Ford Econoline van. Decker, a small man of ghostly pallor, had a funeral home in Fenwick and was also the town’s conveyance specialist. He’d been transferring bodies from crime scenes to the morgue at Boswell Medical Center for twenty-seven years. Decker lighted a cigarette, leaned back against his van, chatting idly to his assistant, waiting his turn.

  Noyce’s phone chirped. He picked it up, said, “Noyce,” and Audrey silently excused herself.

  Bert Koopmans was painstakingly brushing powder on the rim of the battered dark-blue Dumpster. Without turning his head from his work, he said, “Morning, Aud.”

  “Good morning, Bert.” As she drew closer to the Dumpster, she caught a whiff of a ripe stench, which mingled with the odor of bacon that wafted from the open service entrance door.

  The asphalt was littered with cigarette butts. This was where the busboys and short-order cooks smoked. There were a few jagged shards from a brown beer bottle. She knew there wasn’t likely to be any evidence here, no shell casings or anything, since the body had been dumped.

  “Partnered with Bugbee on this, I see.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “The Lord trieth the righteous.”

  She smiled, her eyes straying to the body in the Dumpster, wrapped tightly in black trash bags. It did look a little like a take-out burrito. The bundle lay atop a foul mound of slimy lettuce heads and banana peels, a discarded submarine sandwich, next to a giant empty tin of Kaola Gold All-Vegetable Solid Griddle Shortening.

  “Was it right on top like that?” she asked.

  “No. Buried under a bunch of trash.”

  “I assume you haven’t found anything, shell casings or whatever.”

  “I didn’t really look that hard. There’s eight cubic yards of garbage in there. I figure that’s a job for the uniformed guys.”

  “You already print the bags?”

  “Huh,” Koopmans said. “Hadn’t thought of it.” Meaning: Of course, what do you think?

  “So what’s your take, smart guy?”

  “On what?”

  “You unwrap that package up there, Bert?”

  “First thing I did.”

  “And? A mugging? Did you find a wallet or anything?”

  Koopmans finished dusting a patch, carefully replaced his brush in the kit. “Just this.” He held up a plastic sandwich bag.

  “Crack cocaine,” she said.

  “Off-white chunky material in a Baggie, to be precise.”

  “Which looks like crack. Like eighty dollars’ worth.”

  He shrugged.

  “A white guy in this part of town,” she said, “has to be a drug deal.”

  “If the deal went bad, how come he got to keep the crack?”

  “Good question.”

  “Where’s your partner?”

  She turned, saw Bugbee smoking, laughing raucously with one of the uniforms. “Hard at work interviewing witnesses, looks like. Bert, you’ll get this stuff tested, right?”

  “Standard procedure.”

  “How long does it take to get back results?”

  “Few weeks, given the MSP’s work load.” The Michigan State Police lab did all the drug testing.

  “You happen to have one of those field test kits with you?”

  “Somewhere, sure.”

  “Can I have a pair of gloves? I left mine in the car.”

  Koopmans reached into a nylon rucksack beside him and pulled out a blue cardboard box, from which he yanked a pair of latex gloves. She snapped them on. “Could you hand me that Baggie?”

  Koopmans gave her a questioning look but handed over the bag of crack. It was one of those Ziploc kinds. She pulled it open, removed one of the individually wrapped chunks—five or six in there, she noticed—and peeled off the plastic wrap.

  “Don’t start doing my work,” Koopmans said. “Leads to worse things. Pretty soon you’ll be squinting into a microscope and bitching about detectives.”

  With one gloved index finger she scraped at an edge of the off-white rock. Strange, she thought. A little too round-looking, too perfect a formation. Only one side was jagged. Then she touched her forefinger to her tongue.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Koopmans said, alarmed.

  “Thought so,” she said. “Didn’t numb my tongue like it’s supposed to. This isn’t crack. These are lemon drops.”

  Koopmans gave a slow smile. “Still need me to get the test kit?”

  “That’s okay. Could you help me up the side of this Dumpster, Bert? Of all the days I picked to wear my good shoes.”

  17

  Another ordinary morning at the office. Arrive at the Stratton parking lot at seven-thirty. Check e-mail, voice mail. Return a few calls, leave voice mails for people who won’t be in their offices for at least another hour.

  You have killed a man.

  Just another ordinary day. Business as usual.

  The day before, Sunday, he’d even fantasized about going to church, to confession, which he hadn’t done since he was a kid. He’d never do it, he knew, but in his mind he rehearsed his confession, imagined the dark confessional booth, that musty cedar-vanilla smell, the scuffling footsteps outside. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” he says. “It has been thirty-three years since my last confession. I have committed these sins. I have taken the Lord’s name in vain. I have gazed lustfully upon other women. I have lost patience with my kids. And, oh yeah, I killed a man.” What would Father Garrison say about that? What would his own father have made of it?

  He heard Marge’s voice, intercepting the early morning calls like the pro she was. “He is in the office, yes, but I’m afraid he’s in conference just now…”

  How much had he slept in the past two days? He was in one of those weird, wobbly all-nighter states poised between calm and despair, and despite the coffee he’d had, he felt a sudden surge of weariness. He would have been tempted to close his office door and lay his head on his desk, except there was no door.

  And it wasn’t an office, really, at all. Certainly not what he used to imagine a CEO’s office would look like. Which wasn’t to say he’d ever spent much time thinking about being CEO of Stratton, or CEO of anything for that matter. As a kid, sitting at supper at his parents’ Formica kitchen table, inhaling the acrid must of machine oil that emanated from his dad’s hair and skin even after his father had taken his post-shift shower, Nick used to imagine one day working alongside Dad on the Stratton shop floor, bending metal at the brake machine. His father’s gnarled stubby fingers, with the crescents of black grime still lodged under his fingernails, fascinated him. These were the fingers of a man who knew how to fix anything, could open a Mason jar that had been rusted shut, could build a fort out of spare lumber, nestled securely in the oak in their tiny backyard, that was the envy of all the neighbor kids. They were the hands of a worker, a guy who came home from the factory exhausted but then went right to work again, after his shower, around the house, tumbler of whiskey in one hand: fixing the dripping sink, a wobbly table leg, a lamp whose socket had a short. Dad liked fixing things that were broken, liked restoring order, getting things to work right. But more than anything, he liked being left alone. Working around the house was his way to get what he really wanted: a cone of silence around him, his thoughts kept to himself, not having to talk to his wife or son. Nick Conover only realized this about his dad much later when he saw it in himself.

  He never thought one day he’d be running the company his father spoke of, the rare times he did speak, with such awe
and disgruntlement. They barely knew anyone who didn’t work for Stratton. All the neighbor kids, all the grownups his parents ever saw or talked about, they all worked at Stratton. Dad always groused about fat old Arch Campbell, the nasty round-shouldered factory manager who tyrannized the day shift. Complaining about Stratton was like complaining about the weather: you were stuck with whatever you got. It was the big annoying extended family you could never escape from.

  When he was around fourteen or fifteen, Nick’s junior-high class took the obligatory tour of Stratton—as if any of the kids needed a close look at the company that dominated their parents’ supper conversations, the company whose logo was sewn in red on their white baseball caps, on team uniforms, emblazoned in neon over the arched entrance to the high school stadium. Walking through the chair factory, cavernous and thundering, deafeningly loud, might have been fun if most of the kids hadn’t already been taken there at one time or another by their dads. Instead, it was the headquarters building that fascinated the rambunctious eighth-graders, finally intimidated them into a respectful awed silence.

  At the climax of the tour they were crowded into the anteroom of the immense office suite of the president and chief executive officer, Milton Devries. This was the inner sanctum, the beating heart of the company that they realized, even as kids, ruled their lives. It was like being taken into King Tut’s tomb; it was that alien, that fascinating, that intimidating. There, Devries’s frightening mastiff-faced secretary, Mildred Birkerts, gave them a grudging little memorized talk, punctuated by the occasional dyspeptic scowl, about the vital function of the chief executive officer at Stratton. Craning his neck, Nick caught an illicit glimpse of Devries’s desk, an acre of burnished mahogany, bare except for a gold desk set and a perfectly neat pile of papers. Devries wasn’t there: that would have been too much. He saw huge windows, a leafy private balcony.

  When, years later, Milton Devries died, Nick—who’d become the old man’s favorite vice president—was summoned by Milton’s widow, Dorothy, to her dark mansion on Michigan Avenue, where she told him he was the next CEO. Her family owned Stratton, so she could do that.

  With great discomfort, Nick had moved into the old man’s Mussolini-size office, with the floor-to-ceiling windows, the Oriental rugs, the immense mahogany desk, the outer office where his executive assistant, Marjorie Dykstra, would guard his privacy. It was like living in a mausoleum. Of course, by then, Stratton had changed. Now everyone wanted to stuff as many employees as possible into a building, and Stratton had gone to the open-plan system, that fancy term for cubicles and all the furnishings that went with them. No one really liked the cube farm, but at least Stratton’s designs were elegant, cool, and friendly, 120-degree angles, the panels not too tall, all the computer cables and electrical wires and stuff hidden in the floors and panels.

  One day a visitor looked around Nick’s office and made a crack. He was head of worldwide purchasing for IBM, a harried-looking guy with a sharp tongue, who’d surveyed Nick’s mahogany chamber and muttered dryly, “Oh, I see—you get the fancy digs while everyone else gets the ‘open plan.’”

  The next day Nick had ordered the executive floor completely remodeled, switched to the open plan too, over the howls of protest from his entire executive management team. They’d busted their humps for years to finally land the big office with the private balcony and now they were all getting cubicles? This was a joke, right? You couldn’t do this.

  But he did. Of course, everyone on the fifth floor got the best of the best, the elegant, high-end Ambience Office System with its silver mesh fabric panels on brushed aluminum frames, sound-absorbing panel walls, and the top-of-the-line leather Stratton Symbiosis chairs, the harp-back beauties that had pretty much taken the place of the Aeron chair in fancy offices around the world, much coveted, just added to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

  Eventually people got used to the new arrangement. The complaints stopped. It got a little easier when Fortune did a big spread on the Stratton executive offices, on how they were walking the walk as well as talking the talk. It got easier still when delegations of design-school students started coming to gape at the executive offices, marvel at how edgy they were.

  The new offices were pretty damned cool, it was true. If you had to work in cubicles, this was the best damned cube farm money could buy. So now, Nick had often reflected, you had guys sitting in cubicles thinking about…cubicles.

  Of course, there really wasn’t any privacy anymore. Everyone knew where you were, when you went out to lunch or to work out, who you were meeting with. If you yelled at someone on the phone, everyone heard it.

  The bottom line was, when Steve Jobs from Apple Computer came in for a meeting, or Warren Buffett flew in from Omaha, they could see that the top executives of Stratton weren’t hypocrites. They ate the same dog food they were selling. That was the best sales pitch of all.

  So now Nick Conover’s office was a “workstation” or a “home base.” The new arrangement was less grandiose, suited him more. It wasn’t a big sacrifice. Most days he liked it a lot more anyway.

  Only this wasn’t one of them.

  “Nick, are you all right?”

  Marjorie had come over to make sure he had the stapled agenda for Nick’s 8:30 meeting of his Executive Management Team. She was dressed elegantly, as always; she was wearing a lavender suit, the short string of pearls he’d bought as a gift for her a few years before. She wafted a faint cloud of Shalimar.

  “Me? Oh, I’m fine, Marge, thanks.”

  She wasn’t moving. She stood there, cocked her head. “You don’t look it. Have you been sleeping?”

  Rough couple of nights, he almost said. Immediately he could hear her repeating back the words in a courtroom. He said he’d had a couple of rough nights, but he didn’t elaborate. “Ah, Lucas is driving me crazy,” he said.

  A knowing smile. She’d raised two boys and a girl pretty much by herself and rightly considered herself an expert. “Poor kid’s in a tough place.”

  “Yeah, called adolescence.”

  “Anything you want to talk about?”

  “I’d love to, later on,” Nick said, knowing that would never happen; he’d make sure of it.

  “Right, the EMT meeting. You all set for that, Nick?”

  “I’m all set.”

  Was it possible to look like a murderer? Was it visible on his face? It was stupid, it made no sense, but in his dazed, scrambled egg–brain state, he worried about it. In the EMT meeting, he barely spoke, because he could barely concentrate. He remembered the time when the family was camping in Taos, and a snake got into their cabin. Laura and the kids screamed, and she begged Nick to get a shovel and kill the vile thing. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. It wasn’t a venomous snake—it was a Western coach-whip—but Laura and the kids kept demanding that he get the shovel. Finally he reached down, picked it up, and threw it, twisting and wriggling, out into the desert.

  Couldn’t kill a snake, he thought.

  Some irony in that.

  He strode out of the room as soon as the meeting was over, avoiding the usual post-meeting entanglements.

  Back at his desk, he went on the Stratton intranet and checked Eddie Rinaldi’s online Meeting Maker to see what his schedule was. They hadn’t talked since Eddie had driven away with the body in the trunk of his car. Every time the phone rang, all Saturday and Sunday, he flinched a little, dreading that it might be Eddie. But Eddie never called, and he never called Eddie. He assumed everything had gone okay, but now he wanted the assurance of knowing. He thought about e-mailing Eddie to tell him he wanted to talk, but then decided against it. E-mails, instant messages, voice mails—they were all recorded somewhere. They were all evidence.

  18

  The only reason Audrey attended autopsies was that she had no choice. It was department policy. The Medical Examiner’s office required that at least one detective on a case be present. She told herself she did
n’t see the need, since she knew she could ask the pathologist anything she wanted, anything that wasn’t in the path report.

  In truth, of course, it made perfect sense to have a detective there. There were all sorts of things you found out at an autopsy that didn’t appear in the sterile lines of a report. Even so, they were the part of her job she most disliked. The dissection of bodies made her queasy. She was always afraid she might have to vomit, though she hadn’t done so since her first one, and that was a terribly burned female.

  But that wasn’t what she hated most about autopsies. She found them deeply depressing. This was where you saw the human body devoid of its spirit, its soul, a carapace of flesh meted out in grams and liters. To her, on the other hand, homicide cases were about setting things right. Solving the crime didn’t always heal the wounds of the victim’s family—often it didn’t—but it was her way of restoring some kind of moral order to a deeply messed-up world. She’d taped a sign to her computer at work, a quote from one Vernon Geberth, whose name was well known to all homicide investigators, the author of a classic text, Practical Homicide Investigation. It said, “Remember: We work for God.” She believed this. She felt deeply that, as much as she was troubled by her work—and she was, most of the time—she really was doing God’s work here on earth. She was looking for the one lost sheep. But autopsies required a detachment she preferred not to have.

  So she uneasily entered this white-tiled room that stank of bleach and formaldehyde and disinfectant, while her partner got to make phone calls and do interviews, though she wondered just how hard Roy Bugbee was working to solve this case of what he called “a shitbird crackhead.” Not too hard, she figured.

  The morgue and autopsy room were located in the basement of Boswell Medical Center, concealed behind a door marked PATHOLOGY CONFERENCE ROOM. Everything about this place gave her the heebie-jeebies, from the stainless-steel gurney on which the victim’s nude body had been placed, head a few inches higher than the feet to facilitate drainage of bodily fluids, to the handheld Stryker bone saw on the steel shelf, the garbage disposals in the stainless-steel sink, the organ tray whose plastic drainage tube, once clear, was now discolored brown.