Company Man

by Joseph Finder

  The assistant medical examiner, one of three attached to the department, was a young doctor named Jordan Metzler, strikingly handsome and he knew it well. He had a head of dark curly hair, great brown eyes, a strong nose, full lips, a dazzling smile. Everyone knew he wasn’t long for this job, or this town: he’d recently been offered a job in pathology at Mass General, in Boston. In a matter of months he’d be sitting at some fancy restaurant on Beacon Hill, regaling a beautiful nurse with tales of this backwater town in Michigan where he’d been stuck the last couple of years.

  “Audrey’s in the house!” he crowed as she entered. “’S’up, Detective?”

  What was it with white guys who felt compelled to use black slang when African-Americans were around? Did they think it made them seem cool, instead of ridiculous? Did they think that made black folks connect with them better? Did Metzler even notice that she didn’t talk that way?

  She smiled sweetly. “Dr. Metzler,” she said.

  He found her attractive; Audrey could tell by the way he grinned at her. Her antennae still worked, even after eight years of marriage to Leon. Like most women, she was adept at reading males; sometimes she was convinced she knew them better than they knew themselves. Eight years of marriage to Leon hadn’t knocked the self-esteem out of her, not even the terrible last couple of years. She knew that men had always been drawn to her, because of her looks. She didn’t consider herself beautiful, far from it, but she knew she was pretty. She took care of herself, she exercised, she never went without makeup and she was adept at choosing the right lipstick for her skin tone. She liked to think that it was her deep abiding faith that kept her looking good, but she had seen enough women of equally deep abiding faith at church, women whose looks only God could love, to know better.

  “Have you found any bullets?” she asked.

  “Well, we’ve got two in there, X-ray shows. No exit wounds. I’ll get ’em. You don’t have an ID on this one yet, do you?”

  She found herself avoiding looking at the body, the wrinkled flesh and the yellow-brown toenails, which meant she had to keep looking at Metzler, and she didn’t want to send him the wrong signals. Not a horn-dog like him.

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky and score a hit on AFIS,” she said. The crime scene techs had just finished fingerprinting the victim, having collected whatever trace evidence they could find on the body, scraping and clipping the fingernails and all that. Since the body was unidentified, they’d run the prints right away through the Michigan Automated Fingerprint Identification System in Lansing.

  She asked, “Evidence of habitual drug use?”

  “You mean needle marks or something? No, nothing like that. We’ll see what tox finds on the blood.”

  “Look like a homeless guy to you?”

  He jutted his jaw, frowned. “Not based on his clothes, which didn’t smell unusually bad. Or grooming or dental care or hygiene. I’d guess no. In fact, the guy’s pretty clean. I mean, he could take better care of his cuticles, but he looks more like a house case than a police case.” That was what the pathologists called the autopsies they did on hospital patients, whose bodies were always clean and well scrubbed when they got here.

  “Any signs of struggle?”

  “None apparent.”

  “The mouth looks sort of bashed in,” she said, forcing herself to look. “Broken teeth and all. Is it possible he got hit with, say, the butt of the gun?”

  Metzler looked amused by her hypothesis. “Possible? Anything’s possible.” He probably sensed that he’d come off as too arrogant, so he softened his tone. “The teeth are chipped and cracked, not pushed in. That’s consistent with a bullet. And there’s no trauma to the lips—no swelling or bruising you’d find if there was a blunt-force injury. Also, there’s the little matter of the bullet hole in his palate.”

  “I see.” She let him enjoy his moment of superiority. The fragile male ego needed to be flattered. She had no problem with that; she’d been doing that all of her adult life. “Doctor, what do you estimate as the time of death? We found the body at six—”

  “Call me Jordan.” Another dazzling smile. He was working it. “We can’t tell. It’s in full rigor at this point.”

  “At the crime scene you said there was no rigor mortis, and since rigor doesn’t really start setting in until three, four hours after death, I figured—”

  “Nah, Audrey, there’s too many other factors—physique, environment, cause of death, whether the guy was running or not. Doesn’t really tell you anything.”

  “What about the body temperature?” she pointed out, careful to sound tentative. She wanted answers from the pathologist; she had no interest in showing him up.

  “What about it?”

  “Well, at the scene, didn’t you take a body temperature reading of ninety-two? That means it dropped around six degrees, right? If the body temperature drops one point five to two degrees per hour after death, I estimate the victim had been killed three or four hours before the body was found. Does that sound about right to you?”

  “In a perfect world, sure.” Dr. Metzler smiled, but this time it was the look a parent might give a five-year-old asking if the moon was made of green cheese. “It’s just not an accurate science. There are too many variables.”

  “I see.”

  “You seem more versed in forensics than a lot of the cops who come in here.”

  “It’s an important part of my job, that’s all.”

  “If you’re interested, I’d be willing to teach you a little, help you out. No sense me having all this information in my head if I can’t share it with someone who so clearly wants to learn.”

  She nodded, smiled politely. The burdens of being so smart, she wanted to say.

  “I wonder whether they really appreciate you on the Major Case Team.” He pretended to adjust the perforated stainless-steel tubing around the perimeter of the examination table, which washed the fluids off the body during the autopsy.

  “I’ve never felt unappreciated,” she lied. For the first time she noticed the toe tag on the body’s left foot. It said “Unknown John Doe #6.” Wasn’t that, what was the word? A “John Doe” was unknown, wasn’t it?

  “Somehow I doubt your beauty helps you in your line of work.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Doctor,” she said, casting around desperately for a question in order to change the subject, but her mind had gone blank.

  “Not kind at all. Accurate. You’re a fine-looking woman, Audrey. Beauty and brains—not a bad combination at all.”

  “Why, you sound just like my husband,” she said lightly. He’d never actually said anything remotely like that, but she wanted the pathologist to get the message without hammering him over the head about it, and that was the first thing she thought of.

  “I saw your ring, Audrey,” he said, giving her a smile that seemed more than playful.

  The man was cutting up a dead body, for heaven’s sake. This wasn’t exactly a singles bar.

  “You’re too kind,” she said. “Doctor, do the gunshot wounds give you any sense of the distance from the shooter?”

  Metzler smiled to himself awkwardly as he studied the body on the table before him. He took a steel scalpel from the metal shelf attached to the table and, with maybe a little too much force, carved a large Y-shaped incision from the shoulders all the way down to the pubic bone. He was clearly trying his best to accept defeat gracefully. “There’s no stippling, no powder burns, no tattooing, no soot,” he said. His voice had changed; now he was all business.

  “So they’re not contact wounds?”

  “Neither contact nor intermediate range.” He began trimming back the skin and the muscle and tissue below.

  “So what does that tell us distancewise?”

  He was silent for a good thirty seconds as he worked. Then he said, “Actually, Detective, that tells us nothing except that the muzzle was more than three feet from the wound. Certainly not without determining the caliber of the bullet,
the type of ammo, and then test-firing the gun. It could have been fired from three feet away, or a hundred feet. You can’t tell.”

  The glistening rib cage exposed, he positioned the round jagged-toothed blade above the bone and flicked the switch to start it. Above the high-pitched mechanical whine, he said, “You might want to stand back, Detective. This can get a little messy.”

  19

  As badly as he wanted to, Nick couldn’t easily cancel the weekly number-crunching lunch with Scott McNally, not with the big quarterly board meeting coming up. He felt feverish, clammy, nauseated. He felt, unusually for him, antisocial. His normal ebullience had been tamped down. He felt the beginnings of a raging headache, and he hadn’t had a headache in years. He felt hung over, his stomach roiling. Coffee upset his stomach now, even though he needed it to stay awake and alert.

  A chef from the corporate cafeteria had set out lunch for the two of them at the small round table adjacent to his home base. It was the usual—an eggplant Parmesan sub and a salad for Scott, a tuna sandwich and a cup of tomato soup for Nick. Folded linen napkins, glasses of ice water and a glass pitcher, Diet Cokes for both of them. Nick normally just ate a sandwich at his desk unless he had to do a working lunch. And until Laura’s death, she always packed his lunch—a tuna fish sandwich, a bag of Fritos, carrot sticks—and put it in his briefcase. It was a little tradition that went back to their earliest days, when they had no money, and he’d gotten used to it. It was one of those little things Laura liked to do for him, even when she was teaching college and barely had time in the morning before class to make his lunch. She always put a little mash note in the paper lunch bag, which always made him smile when he came upon it, like the prize in a Cracker Jack box. There’d been times when he’d been having an informal lunch with Scott or another of his executives and one of Laura’s notes had fluttered out, to Nick’s embarrassment and secret pride. He’d saved every single one of her notes, without telling her. After her death, he’d come very close to throwing them away or burning them or something, because it was just too excruciating to have them around. But he couldn’t bring himself to do that. So a neat pile of yellow Post-it notes in Laura’s beautiful handwriting lay in the bottom drawer of his desk at work, secured with a rubber band. Sometimes he’d been tempted to take them out and look through them, but in the end, he couldn’t. It was too painful.

  “You look wiped out,” Scott said, tucking right in to his sub. “You getting sick?”

  Nick shook his head, took a careful sip of ice water, its coldness making him shiver. “I’m fine.”

  “Well, this ought to help,” Scott said. “I know how you feel about the numbers. You might want to grab a pillow.” He produced a couple of Velo-bound documents, slid one in front of Nick, next to his lunch plate.

  Nick glanced at it. Income statement, cash-flow statement, and balance sheet.

  “Check it out,” Scott said. “Man, I love the way they toast the bun. Grill it, maybe, I don’t know.” He took a slug of Diet Coke. “You’re not eating?”

  “Not hungry.”

  Nick skimmed through the statements without interest while Scott examined the Diet Coke can. “I hear the artificial sweetener in this stuff can cause mood disorders in rats,” he said.

  Nick grunted, not listening.

  “Ever seen a depressed rat?” Scott went on. “Curled up in a ball and everything? Some days they just don’t feel the maze is worth it, you know?” He took a large bite of his sub.

  “What’s Stratton Asia Ventures?” Nick asked.

  “You read footnotes. Very good. It’s a subsidiary corporation I’ve formed to invest in Stratton’s Asia Pacific ops. We needed a local subsidiary for permitting and to take advantage of certain tax treaties with the U.S.”

  “Nice. Legal?”

  “Picky, picky,” Scott said. “Of course legal. Clever doesn’t mean illegal, Nick.”

  Nick looked up. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Our earnings are up?”

  Scott nodded, chewing his huge mouthful, made some grunting noises indicating he wanted to speak but couldn’t. Then he said, mouth still half full of food, “So it appears.”

  “I thought—Jesus, Scott, you told me we were in the toilet.”

  Scott shrugged, gave an impish smile. “That’s why you’ve got me around. You know I always come to play. I’m bringing my A game, huh?”

  “Your ‘A game’? Scott, did you ever play a competitive sport in your life?”

  Scott tilted his head to one side. “What are you talking about? I was point guard on the Stuyvesant math team.”

  “Wait a second.” Nick went back to the beginning of the booklet, began reading over the numbers more closely. “All right, hold on. You’re telling me our international business is up twelve percent? What gives?”

  “Read the numbers. The numbers don’t lie. It’s all there in black and white.”

  “I just talked with George Colesandro in London last week, and he was pissing and moaning all over the place. You telling me he was reading the numbers wrong? Guy’s got a fucking microprocessor for a brain.”

  Scott shook his head. “Stratton UK reports in pounds, and the pound’s way up against the dollar,” he said with his Cheshire-cat smile. “Gotta use the latest exchange rate, right?”

  “So this is all hocus-pocus. Foreign exchange crap.” Nick’s nerve endings were raw, and it felt good somehow to think about something besides Friday night. At the same time, though, what Scott seemed to be doing was unbelievable. It was smarmy. “We’re not up at all—we’re down. You’re—you’re juggling the numbers.”

  “According to GAAP, we’re supposed to use the correct exchange rates.” GAAP stood for Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, but bland and jargony as it sounded, it had the force of law.

  “Look, Scott, it’s not apples to apples. I mean, you’re using a different exchange rate than the one you used last quarter. You’re just making it look like we did better.” Nick rubbed his eyes. “You did the same thing in Asia Pacific?”

  “Everywhere, sure.” Scott’s eyes were narrowed, apprehensive.

  “Scott, this is fucking illegal.” Nick slammed the booklet down on the table. “What are you trying to do to me?”

  “To you? This isn’t about you.” Red-faced, Scott was looking down at the table as he spoke. “First of all, there’s nothing illegal about it. Call it pushing the envelope a little, maybe. But let me tell you something. If I don’t pretty these numbers up a little, our friends from Boston are going to come down on you like Nazi storm troopers. They are going to parachute in and tear this place up. I’m telling you this is a perfectly legitimate way to spin the numbers.”

  “You’re—you’re putting lipstick on a pig, Scott.”

  “Well, a little lip gloss, maybe. Look, when company comes over for dinner, you clean house, right? Before you sell your car, you take it to the car wash. None of the board members are going to look this close.”

  “So you’re saying we can get away with it,” Nick said.

  Scott shrugged again. “What I’m saying, Nick, is that everyone’s job is at risk here, okay? Including yours and mine. This way, at least, we buy ourselves a little time.”

  “No. Uh-uh,” Nick said, drumming his fingertips on the clear plastic cover. “We give it to ’em straight. You got me?”

  Scott’s face flushed, as if he were embarrassed or angry, or both. He was clearly straining hard to sound calm, like it was taking enormous effort to keep from raising his voice to his boss. “Gosh, and I was hoping to have a corporate tax loophole named after me,” he said after a pause.

  Nick nodded, dispensed a grudging smile. He thought of Hutch, the old CFO. Henry Hutchens was a brilliant accountant, in his green-eyeshade, bean-counting way—no one knew the intricacies of the good old-fashioned balance sheet the way he did—but he knew little about structured finance and derivatives and all the shiny new financial instruments you had to use these days to stay afloat.


  Hutch would never have done anything like this. Then again, he probably wouldn’t have known how.

  “You told me we’re having dinner tonight with Todd Muldaur, remember?”

  “Eight o’clock,” Nick said. He was dreading it. Todd had called just a few days ago to mention he was passing through Fenwick, as if anyone ever “passed through” Fenwick, and wanted to have dinner. It couldn’t be a good thing.

  “Well, I told him I’d get him the updated financials before dinner.”

  “Fine, but let’s make sure we’re on rock-solid foundations here, okay?”

  “In accounting?” Scott shook his head. “No such thing. It’s like that story about the famous scientist who’s giving a lecture on astronomy, and afterward an old lady comes up to him and tells him he’s got it all wrong—the world is really a big flat plate resting on the back of a giant turtle. And the scientist says, ‘But what’s that turtle standing on?’ And the old lady says, ‘You’re very clever, young man, very clever, but it’s no use—it’s turtles all the way down.’”

  “Is that meant to be reassuring?”

  Scott shrugged.

  “I want you to give Todd the real, unvarnished numbers, no matter how shitty they look.”

  “Okay,” Scott said, looking down at the table. “You’re the boss.”

  20

  Audrey’s desk phone was ringing as she approached her cubicle. She glanced at the caller ID and was glad she did, because it was a call she didn’t want to take.

  She recognized the phone number. The woman called her every week, regular as clockwork, had done so for so many weeks Audrey had lost count. Once a week since the woman’s son was found murdered.

  The woman, whose name was Ethel Dorsey, was a sweet Christian woman, an African-American lady who’d raised four sons on her own and was justifiably proud of that, convinced herself she’d done a good job, had no idea that three of her boys were deep into the life of gangs and drugs and cheap guns. When her son Tyrone was found shot to death on Hastings, Audrey recognized right away that it was drug-related. And like a lot of drug-related murders, it went unsolved. Sometimes people talked. Sometimes they didn’t. Audrey had an open file, one less clearance. Ethel Dorsey had one less son. But here was the thing: Audrey simply couldn’t bring herself to tell poor devout Ethel Dorsey the truth, that her Tyrone had been killed in some bad drug deal. Audrey remembered Ethel’s moist eyes, her warm direct gaze, during the interviews. The woman reminded Audrey of her grandmother. “He’s a good boy,” she kept saying. Audrey couldn’t break it to her that her son had not only been murdered, but he’d been a small-time dealer. For what? Why did the woman need to have her illusions shattered?