46
Should I have told Kate right then and there?
Maybe so. But I knew how upset she’d be when I told her my suspicions.
Neither one of us wanted to jeopardize the pregnancy. Maybe it was too late in the pregnancy for stress to cause her to lose the baby-I had no idea-but I wasn’t going to take that chance.
Kurt had denied it, of course. But I knew.
At some point soon I’d have to tell her. Or she’d find it out. But I wanted to get myself together, tell her in the right way. Calmly, reasoned. Having thought everything through. Sounding in control, a protector.
“Was that you throwing up?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Do you think the food was bad?” Susie said. “Like the chicken or something? I thought it might have tasted funny.”
“No, the food’s fine. Just a case of nerves, I guess.”
“Stress,” Susie said. “Craig throws up every time he has to present a pilot to the network execs.”
“Yeah?” I said, wishing she’d leave already.
“Where’s Kurt?” Kate asked.
“He had to take off.”
“Did you guys have a fight or something? I thought I heard an argument.” She looked at me closely.
“No big deal. Yeah, we sort of had it out on something at work. Nothing important. Can I put the food away?”
“Jason, you look really upset. What happened? Who was that on the phone?”
“Really,” I said. “Nothing important.”
“Well, in the meantime, I just called Marie and told her about the gallery. And do you know what she said to me? She said something in Creole, I don’t really remember how it goes, but it means something like, You must remember the rain that made your corn grow. That was her way of saying she owed it all to me. Isn’t that just the sweetest?”
“I’m proud of you, baby. You did a good thing.”
“You don’t look right, Jason,” she said. “Are you sure everything’s all right?”
“Everything’s fine,” I said.
I barely slept.
I got up at my usual, ridiculously early, five in the morning, my body trained to grab a cup of coffee and head out to Kurt’s gym. But then, as I slipped silently out of bed, I remembered.
I made coffee and checked e-mail in my study. Wrote an e-mail to all employees of the Framingham office telling them the news. Was it “sad” news or “tragic”? I finally decided to open with “It is my sad duty this morning to tell you of the tragic deaths of Trevor Allard and Brett Gleason…”
At around six, I went down to get the Herald and the Globe from the front porch. I scanned them quickly, looking for articles on the accident, but I found nothing. The Herald lived to report that sort of thing-the print equivalent of “if it bleeds, it leads”: two young men, top employees of one of the largest corporations in the world. A Porsche spinning out of control, both occupants killed. But the news hadn’t made it into either paper yet.
I drove to the office in silence-no books on tape, no General Patton, no music, no talk radio-and thought.
When I got to the office-the first one there-I opened my Internet browser and Googled “Massachusetts State Police” and “homicide” and seeing if any of the names that turned up were familiar. The first thing that came up was the Massachusetts State Police web page with a welcome message from a scary-looking dude in full state trooper dress uniform, a colonel who I guessed was the superintendent of the state police. On the right was a column of “News & Updates,” and the first line jumped out at me: WALTHAM FATAL. I clicked on the hyperlink. A press release came right up, headed, “State Police Respond to a Single-Car Fatal Crash in Waltham.”
Trevor’s name in boldface, and Gleason’s. Phrases: “pronounced deceased at the scene” and “traveling north on Interstate 95 in Waltham south of Exit 26.”
It said, “Preliminary information collected in the investigation by Trooper Sean McAfee indicates that a 2005 Porsche 911 Carrera 4S veered off the road into the median and struck the guardrail and an abutment before rolling over. The vehicle was towed by J & A Towing.” It said, “The cause of the crash remains under investigation with the assistance of the State Police Collision Analysis and Reconstruction Section and the State Police Crime Scene Services Section.” And: “Though the crash remains under investigation, speed is believed to be a factor in the crash.” And: “No further information is available for public disclosure. Please do not contact the barracks directly.”
Man, everything and everyone has a website these days. I was amazed that the news was already public. When I Googled Trooper Sean McAfee, nothing came up. But it wouldn’t be hard to find his phone number by calling the state police.
And then what? What did I have besides suspicion? Was I going to call Trooper McAfee and tell him that I thought my colleague and friend Kurt Semko had done something to the Porsche to cause the crash? He’d ask why I thought so, what reason I had to suspect Mr. Semko.
No, that would be stupid. The crash was under investigation. Maybe they’d find something in the wreck of the Porsche that would tell them what really happened. Until I had something concrete, though, there was no sense in dropping the dime.
I didn’t know what Kurt would do if he heard that I’d reported my suspicions to the cops, but I could imagine it wouldn’t be good.
Still, I had to do something. I’d come to my senses. It had taken me too long to realize that Kurt was a dangerous man, that he was out of control, that I had to stop him. He’d helped me in all sorts of ways, big and small. Maybe in ways I wasn’t even aware of. And I’d silently gone along with the things he’d done for me, even though I knew they were wrong.
Ambition only went so far, though. Should only go so far, anyway. I’d crossed a line, yes. I wanted to do the right thing.
But what?
47
The guys started gathering in my office around nine-first Letasky, then Festino and Forsythe, until I had a small crowd. Whether or not they liked Trevor Allard or Brett Gleason, they’d worked with the two, seen them every day, bantered with them in the break room, talked sports and women and cars and business, and they were all in shock. They spoke quietly, trying to puzzle out what had happened. Letasky told them what he’d heard from the basketball team member who’d been driving behind the Porsche-how the highway curved to the right but the Porsche drove straight into the guardrail and then a concrete bridge-support column, and then the car had flipped over. The emergency medical technicians who arrived and realized that no ambulance was needed: Both men were dead. How the left lane was closed down for hours.
“Was Trevor drunk or something?” Forsythe asked. “I don’t remember Trevor as a big drinker.”
No one knew, of course.
“The pathologist usually tests for blood alcohol,” Festino said. “That’s what you see on, like, CSI, anyway.”
“I doubt it,” Letasky said. “I mean, I didn’t know Trevor as well as you guys, and I barely knew Gleason at all, but they were on their way to play basketball. They weren’t going to get plowed before a game. After, maybe. Not before.”
“Gleason was a big drinker,” Festino said. “Big party animal.”
“But still,” said Letasky.
There was nodding all around. Allard couldn’t have been drunk; it didn’t figure.
“I know he drove fast,” Forsythe said. “Really fast. But he knew how to drive. How could he lose control of the car? It didn’t rain last night, right?”
Letasky shook his head.
“An oil slick or something?” Forsythe asked.
“I took 95,” Letasky said, “and there wasn’t any kind of oil slick that I saw.”
“Ever meet his wife?” asked the youngest sales rep, Detwiler.