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.