Company Man

by Joseph Finder

  “The Fenwick police have any idea who did this?” the guy said.

  “No idea.”

  “Does Mr. Rinaldi get involved in your personal security, outside the corporation?” the black detective asked.

  “Informally, yeah,” Nick said. “Sometimes. After this last incident, I asked him to put in a new security system.”

  “So you must have discussed the incident with him,” she said.

  Nick hesitated, a beat too long. What did Eddie tell them, exactly? Did Eddie tell them he came over to the house after Barney was slaughtered? He wished he’d talked to Eddie longer, found out everything he’d said. Shit. “A bit. I asked his advice, sure.” He waited for the inevitable next question—inevitable to him, at least: did Eddie Rinaldi come to his house after Barney had been discovered in the pool? And what was the right answer?

  Instead, the black detective said, “Mr. Conover, how long ago did you move into Fenwicke Estates?”

  “About a year ago.”

  “After all the layoffs were announced?” she went on.

  “About a year after.”

  “Why?”

  Nick paused. “My wife insisted.”

  “Why was that?”

  “She was concerned.”

  “About what?”

  “That our family might be threatened.”

  “What made her so concerned?”

  “Instinct, mostly. She knew there were a few people who might want to do us harm.”

  “So you did hear about threats,” the black woman said. “But you just said you didn’t know about any—you didn’t want to know about them.”

  Nick folded his hands on the table. He was feeling increasingly frantic, trapped like some cornered animal, and he knew the only way to respond was to sound both reasonable and blunt. “Did I hear about specific threats? No. Did I hear that there were threats—that a few isolated fringe cases might have it in for me and my family? Sure. People talk. Rumors spread. I wasn’t going to wait to see if there was any basis in these rumors. And I can tell you my wife sure as hell wasn’t going to wait.”

  The two detectives seemed to accept his answer. “Before you moved to your new house, Mr. Conover, did you have any break-ins?”

  “Not till we moved to Fenwicke Estates.”

  The blond detective smiled. “Guess the…gated community…didn’t give you much protection, huh?” He put a surly spin on the words “gated community,” made no attempt to conceal a note of smugness.

  “Just takes longer to get in and out of,” Nick admitted.

  The blond guy chuckled, shook his head. “Costs a lot more, though, I bet.”

  “There you go.”

  “But you can afford it.”

  Nick shrugged. “Wasn’t my idea to move there. It was my wife’s.”

  “Your wife,” said the black woman. “She—she passed away last year, isn’t that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Nothing suspicious about her death, was there?”

  A pause. “No, nothing suspicious,” Nick said slowly. “She was killed in a car accident.”

  “You were driving?” she asked.

  “She was driving.”

  “Nothing—was alcohol involved?”

  “The other driver, yeah,” Nick said. “A semi. He’d been drinking.”

  “But not you.”

  “No,” he said. “Not me.” He compressed his lips, then looked at his watch. “I’m afraid—”

  The blond guy stood up. “Thanks for taking the time.”

  But the black woman remained seated. “Just a couple more things, sir?”

  “Can we continue this some other time?” Nick said.

  “Just—just another minute, if you don’t mind. We don’t want to leave any stone unturned. Do you own any guns, Mr. Conover?”

  “Guns?” Nick shook his head. He hoped his face hadn’t reddened.

  “No handguns at all?”

  “Nope. Sorry.”

  “Thank you. And last Tuesday night, where were you?”

  “At home. I haven’t traveled anywhere in ten days or so.”

  “What time did you go to sleep, do you remember?”

  “Last Tuesday?”

  “A week ago.”

  Nick thought a moment. “I went out for dinner Wednesday night. Tuesday I was at home.”

  “Do you remember what time you went to sleep?”

  “I can’t—well, I’m normally asleep by eleven, eleven-thirty.”

  “So you’d say by eleven-thirty you were in bed?”

  “That sounds about right.” She was smart, Nick realized. Smarter, he saw now, than the blond guy, who was all posture and attitude.

  “Sleep through the night?”

  “Sure.” Jesus, he thought. What was she implying?

  “Okay, great,” she said. She got up. “That’s all we need. We appreciate your taking the time to talk to us.”

  Nick rose, shook their hands. “Anytime,” he said. “Just next time, give me some notice.”

  “We will,” the black woman said. She stopped, appeared to hesitate. “I’m sorry to take up your time, Mr. Conover. But you know, our victims aren’t just victims—they’re human beings. Whatever their problems, whatever their difficulties, a man is dead. Someone who mattered to someone. We’re all beloved by someone, you know.”

  “I’d like to think so,” Nick said.

  38

  As soon as Nick showed the two homicide cops to the elevator, he returned to the boardroom, hoping to catch Todd Muldaur, but the room was empty. Todd and the others had left. He returned to his office area—hell, his cubicle—taking an indirect route, past Scott’s area.

  “Afternoon, Gloria,” he said to Scott’s admin, a small, hypercompetent woman with a broad face and blond hair cut in bangs. “Scott in?”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Conover. Scott’s right—”

  “Hey, Nick,” Scott said, emerging from behind his panel. “Man, that was a rough ride today, huh?”

  “Tell me about it,” Nick said blandly. He kept on going, toward Scott’s desk, to the round table where Scott held his conferences.

  “That put root canals in a whole new perspective,” Scott said. He began lifting piles of papers off the round table, moving them to a credenza next to his desk. “So what’d you think of that new guy, Finegold?”

  “Seems nice enough,” Nick said guardedly, standing at the table, waiting for Scott to finish clearing away the papers.

  “That guy’s rolling in it, you know. I mean, totally loaded. You know he hired that boy band ’N Sync to play at his daughter’s bat mitzvah a couple of years back, when they were still hot?”

  “He’s a hot spare,” Nick said.

  “A what?”

  “A hot spare. Disk drive fails, you swap it with a spare, all ready to go. Plug-’n’-play. Ready to go.”

  “Dan? Oh—no, I’m sure they’re just trying to strengthen the bench. Is that the right sports term? He’s a great guy, actually—tell you a funny story, when he was at—”

  “I had to learn about Atlas McKenzie from Todd?” Nick broke in. “What the hell’s up with that?”

  Scott’s face colored; he examined the tabletop. “I told you, I got the call from Hardwick on my way over to dinner,” he said. “I tried you on your cell, but I guess it was off.”

  “You didn’t leave a message.”

  “Well, it’s—it wasn’t the sort of thing you want to leave in a voice mail, you know—”

  “And you didn’t e-mail me? You didn’t call me this morning before the board meeting? You let me find out from Todd fucking Muldaur?”

  Scott’s hands flew up, palms out. “I didn’t have a chance—”

  “And you didn’t have a chance to tell me they wanted to put you on the board?” Nick said.

  Scott stared at the white Formica tabletop as if he’d just seen something alarming there. “I didn’t,” he began, falteringly.

  “Don’t
tell me you didn’t know that was going to happen. Why the hell didn’t you mention it to me? You couldn’t reach me on my cell, that it?”

  “It—it wasn’t my place, Nick,” Scott said. He looked up at last, face gone burgundy, eyes watering. His voice was meek but his expression was fierce.

  “Not your place? The fuck are you telling me? You knew they were going to put you on the board and it wasn’t your place to tell me that? You kept their little secret, embarrassed me in front of the board?”

  “Hey, come on, Nick, calm down,” Scott said. “All right? It was complicated—I mean, maybe I should have said something, in retrospect, but Todd wanted me to keep it—Nick, you should take it up with Todd.”

  Nick got up. “Yeah,” he said. “I just might do that.”

  Don’t fuck with me, he thought. Almost said it, but at the last second something stopped him.

  As he returned to his desk, Marge stopped him, holding up an envelope.

  “This just came in from HR,” she said. “That check you requested.”

  “Thanks,” he said, taking the envelope as he resumed walking.

  “Nick,” she said.

  He stopped, turned around.

  “That check—for Cassie Stadler?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s a lot of money. It’s for her dad’s severance pay, isn’t it? Which he lost when he quit?”

  Nick nodded.

  “The company isn’t obligated to pay that, right?”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “But it’s the right thing to do. It’s—that’s nice, Nick.” There were tears in her eyes.

  Nick nodded again, returned to his desk. He immediately picked up his handset and called Todd Muldaur’s cell phone. It rang three times, four, and just as Nick was about to hang up, Todd’s voice came on. “This is Todd.”

  It sounded like a prerecorded voice-mail message, so Nick waited a second before saying, “Todd, it’s Nick Conover.”

  “Oh, hey, Nick, there you are. You bolted before I had a chance to say goodbye, dude.”

  “Todd, are you trying to squeeze me out?”

  A beat. “What makes you say that?”

  “Come on, man. What happened in there, in the board meeting. Bring in Finegold, your hot spare, putting Scott on the board without giving me a heads-up. The monthly board meetings, the weekly financials. Changing the rules of the game like that. Taking away my ability to change my team the way I see fit. What, you think I’m an idiot?”

  “Nick, we don’t need to squeeze you out,” Todd said, his voice gone steely. “If we wanted you gone, you’d be gone.”

  “Not without a pretty damned huge payday.”

  “A rounding error at Fairfield Partners, buddy.”

  “Five million bucks is a rounding error to you guys?”

  “Nick, I meant what I said. We want to bring more to the table. Strengthen the team.”

  “You don’t trust me to run the company, you should just come out with it.”

  Todd said something, but the signal started to break up “…the way,” he was saying.

  “Say again?” Nick said. “I lost you there.”

  “I said, we trust you, Nick. We just don’t want you getting in the way.”

  “In the way?”

  “We need to make sure you’re responsive, Nick. That’s all. We want to make sure you’re on board.”

  “Oh, I’m on board,” Nick said, deliberately ambiguous, insinuating. He didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, exactly, except that he hoped it sounded vaguely threatening.

  “Excellent,” Todd said. His voice got all crackly again as the signal weakened. A fragment: “…to hear.”

  “Say again?” Nick said.

  “Man, do you guys have, like, one cell tower out here in cow town? I swear, the reception sucks. All right, I better go. I’m losing you.” Then the line went dead.

  For a long time, Nick stared at the long blue Stratton check he’d had the treasurer’s office cut for Cassie Stadler: a payoff, pure and simple. Andrew Stadler had quit before being laid off; legally, he wasn’t entitled to any severance. But what was legal, and what the courts might decide—if Cassie Stadler decided to press the issue—were two separate things. Better to pre-empt, he’d decided. Be generous. Show her that her father’s employer meant well, that Stratton was willing to go above and beyond what it was required to do.

  That was all there was to it, he told himself.

  Keep the woman happy. No one wanted a lawsuit.

  And he remembered what that black woman detective had said as she left. “We’re all beloved by someone,” she’d said. She had a point. As crazy, as deranged as Andrew Stadler was, he’d been loved by his daughter.

  He hit the intercom button. “Marge,” he said. “I need you to call Cassie Stadler for me.”

  “I believe she’s living in her father’s house,” came Marge’s voice over the speakerphone.

  “Right. Tell her I want to stop by. I have something for her.”

  39

  Sergeant Jack Noyce pulled Audrey into his glass-walled office, which was not much bigger than Audrey’s cubicle. He had it outfitted with an expensive-looking sound system, though, a top-of-the-line DVD player and speakers. Noyce loved his audio equipment, and he loved music. Sometimes Audrey would see him with his headphones on, enjoying music, or listening to the speakers with the office door closed.

  As head of the Major Case Team, he had all sorts of administrative responsibilities and more than a dozen cops to supervise, and he spent much of his day in meetings. Music—Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans, Art Tatum, Charlie Mingus, Thelonious Monk, all the jazz piano greats—seemed to be his only escape.

  A piece was playing quietly on Noyce’s stereo, a beautiful and soulful rendition of the ballad “You Go to My Head,” a pianist doing the melody.

  “Tommy Flanagan?” Audrey said.

  Noyce nodded. “You close your eyes, and you’re back in the Village Vanguard.”

  “It’s lovely.”

  “Audrey, you haven’t said anything about Bugbee.” His sad eyes, behind thick aviator-framed glasses, shone with concern.

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  “You’d tell me if it wasn’t, right?”

  She laughed. “Only if I couldn’t take it anymore.”

  “The practical jokes seem to have stopped.”

  “Maybe he got tired of them.”

  “Or maybe he’s learned to respect you.”

  “You give him way too much credit,” she said with a laugh.

  “And you’re the one who’s supposed to believe in the possibility of redemption. Listen, Audrey—you guys went over to Stratton?”

  “Now don’t tell me he’s filling you in on every step we take.”

  “No. I got a call from the security director at Stratton.”

  “Rinaldi.”

  “Right. You talked to him, and then you both went over to talk to Nicholas Conover.”

  “What’d he call you for?”

  “He says you just showed up and waited for Conover outside a board meeting? That true?”

  She felt a prickle of defensiveness. “That was my decision. I wanted to avoid any prepared answers, any coordination.”

  “I’m not following.” Noyce took off his glasses and began rubbing at them with a little cleaning cloth.

  “I’d already talked to Rinaldi, and something didn’t sit right with me. I can’t explain it.”

  “You don’t need to. Gut instinct.”

  “Right.”

  “Which ninety percent of the time doesn’t pan out. But hey.” He smiled. “You take what you get.”

  “I didn’t want Rinaldi talking to his boss and getting his story straight.”

  “So you just ambushed the CEO outside the boardroom?” Noyce laughed quietly.

  “I just thought if we set up a meeting with him in advance, he’d call his security director and say, What’s this about?”

 
; “Still not following. You telling me you think the CEO of Stratton’s got something to do with this case?”

  She shook her head. “No, of course not. But there may be some connection. A couple of days before Stadler’s death, there was an incident at Nicholas Conover’s house. Someone slaughtered the family dog and dumped it in the swimming pool.”

  Noyce winced. “My God. Was it Stadler?”

  “We don’t know. But this was just the latest of a long series of incidents at the Conover house since they moved in, about a year ago. Up till now it’s been graffiti, nothing stolen, no violence. But each time, our uniformed division was notified—and we haven’t done a thing. They didn’t even print the knife that was used to kill the dog. From what I hear, there wasn’t a lot of motivation to do anything about it, given the way people feel about Conover.”

  “Well, yeah, but that’s not right.”

  “So just before Stadler’s death, Rinaldi got in touch with our uniformed division to ask about this guy Andrew Stadler and find out if he had any priors.”

  “And were there any?”

  “A long time ago Stadler was questioned in connection to the death of a neighbor family, but nothing ever came of it.”

  “What got Rinaldi interested in Andrew Stadler?”

  “Rinaldi said he went through the list of people they laid off—and it’s a long list, like five thousand people—to see who might have exhibited signs of violence.”

  “Stadler did?”

  “Rinaldi was evasive on that point. When I interviewed Stadler’s supervisor, at the model shop where he worked, the guy said Stadler wasn’t violent at all. Though he did quit in anger, which meant he lost the severance package. But Rinaldi said he found that Stadler had a history of mental illness.”

  “So he suspected Stadler of being Conover’s stalker.”

  “He denies it, but that’s the feeling I got.”

  “So you think Conover or Rinaldi had something to do with Stadler’s murder?”

  “I don’t know. But I do wonder about this Rinaldi fellow.”