“Henry?”
“Amanda, what the hell are you doing?”
“Bowling. What does it look like I’m doing?”
“You’re aware that this apartment was about thirty seconds from being on the eleven o’clock news.”
“What?” she said, wiping suds from her face.
“I saved your mystery meat dish just in time before it burned down the neighborhood.”
“No way. The timer was supposed to go off after half an hour. I didn’t hear anything.”
“You are in the shower, you know.”
“No way. I have a keen sense of hearing.”
“When you pressed half an hour,” I said, “what exact buttons did you press?”
“I held the button until it read three zero minutes and zero seconds.”
“Really,” I said. “You’re sure about that?”
“Sure. Why?”
“There’s no seconds on the oven. It’s just minutes and hours. You set the timer for three hours and zero minutes.”
“Oh. Crap. Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Just…never cook again. And apologize to the fish in there.”
“It was supposed to be orange chicken,” she said.
“Well it’s probably got the texture of volcanic rock right now. You feel like pizza?”
She offered a sheepish grin, and said, “Let me finish up in here and we’ll order.”
“Sure you don’t want me to join you?”
“No, the toaster is on, too. Would you mind checking on it?”
“The toaster? Are you ser…”
“Just kidding. Give me five minutes.”
She closed the door and I collapsed on the couch. I turned on the television and clicked through a hundred and fourteen channels before deciding that there was nothing worth watching. It was just as entertaining to sit there and go through the events of the day, and prepare for the next.
Hopefully Brett Kaiser could fill in much of the information that was missing. Somebody had to be paying
Kaiser’s firm’s share of the lease money, and with any luck that person would have intimate knowledge of just who my brother was working for and why he was killed. I still didn’t buy that it was totally a power play.
Stephen came to me because he was scared of something. If you work in a company and have problems with underlings, there are ways to circumvent any actions. Now when somebody above you wants you gone, that’s when you have a problem. If you feel that your termination-pardon the term-is inevitable, you begin planning an exit strategy. In the workplace, maybe you look for another job, prepare a lawsuit, something so that you’re not thrown from an airplane without a parachute. When Stephen came to me that night, scared out of his mind (a mind already addled), he was looking for his exit strategy. Granted the actions you take are a little different when you led a life of crime as opposed to life in a cubicle, but the principle still stood.
What I needed to know was who set Stephen on the path to his eventual exit. Even though he didn’t make it, he had something to say. A story to tell.
Amanda came out of the shower. She was wrapped in a towel, and over the towel she wore a pink bathrobe.
Above this contraption she was tousling her hair with another towel. The combination of towels and thick bathrobe made Amanda look about twice as thick as she normally did, and I couldn’t help but laugh.
“This is my routine,” she said. “You should be used to it by now.”
“I am,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean you don’t look a little silly.”
She took a seat on the couch, wrapping the towel into a turban where it sat perched a whole foot above her head.
I’d bought the couch at an apartment sale for about a third of what it would cost at a department store. It was brown leather, with big cushions that I constantly rotated to change up the stains. Made me feel like it was a little less worn.
“How was your day?” she asked, absently flipping through the stack of the day’s newspapers I kept on the coffee table.
“Still working on this story with Jack,” I said. “It’s interesting, working with him for the first time.”
“In what way?”
“Jack was in pretty bad shape my first few years at the
Gazette. I hate to admit it, but there was a moment or two when I wondered if this was really the same guy I grew up wanting to be. Not many kids dress up like a journal-88
Jason Pinter ist for Halloween. It was important to me that he was who
I thought he was.”
“You did not dress like a journalist,” Amanda said.
“You bet your ass. Had a row of pens in my shirt pocket, a camera and notepad and everything. Everyone assumed I was Clark Kent.”
“I would have paid to see that,” Amanda said.
“There aren’t a whole lot of photo albums back in
Bend. My dad wasn’t exactly the sentimental type.”
“How do you feel about how things are going?” she asked. I took a seat next to her, thought for a moment.
“When I found out Stephen was dead, I felt numb. Like someone was prodding me with a stick I could see but couldn’t feel. I was supposed to feel remorse, but it didn’t come at first. Someone can tell you that you lost a family member, but if you didn’t even know the person it’s not the same. It should be, I guess. Blood is blood, but in a way it isn’t. Now, it feels different. Like maybe I did lose someone who could have- should have -been closer to me.” I looked at Amanda, saw she was listening to every word. “Without you, I’d have no one.”
“Don’t say that,” she said, looking away. “That’s not true.”
It was true, but I didn’t want to argue. I’d made mistakes during our time together. Knowing when to shut up was an important lesson.
She went back to reading the paper. Her fingers were still a little wet, and I could see the print rubbing off on them. She went to wipe her hands on the towel, then smiled and thought better of it.
“You see this?” she said, holding up a copy of that morning’s Dispatch.
I shook my head. I rarely read the Dispatch. Not because I held a grudge against them-though I did-it’s because they never had much I felt was worth reading. It was the kind of paper that rarely presented an even story.
It was all about eliciting a reaction, stoking a fire, presenting a story so biased in one direction or the other that readers would either be incensed or infatuated. I had all the major New York City papers delivered to my door in one bundle. I could care less about the Dispatch, but it didn’t cost anything more and every now and then I enjoyed reading the sports section.
“I must have missed it,” I said. “What’d you see?”
“Paulina Cole,” Amanda said. “Says here her column will be suspended until Thursday while she deals with a personal matter.”
“Really?” I asked. That surprised me. Paulina Cole was the kind of woman who didn’t take personal leaves.
If my mental image of her was accurate, she stayed in her office while darkness crept in, waiting for some scoop to brighten her desk. And if she didn’t get one, it would only fuel her fire to make the next scoop even juicier.
I wondered what could be so important that she’d suspend her reporting, even just for a few days. It would take either an act of nature or a revolt by the paper’s shareholders to get rid of Paulina. Which meant somewhere a storm was brewing. Not to mention I’d be lying if I didn’t hope, after everything she’d done to Jack and me, that it made her life a living hell.
No doubt Paulina would come back on Thursday with a story that would open some eyes.
11
Wednesday
Paulina Cole glanced over her shoulder. Still nobody there. The Mercedes was empty when she climbed in, empty when she started the engine, and empty when she pulled onto the FDR Drive toward I-95. She even checked the trunk-nothing-but wondered if there had been enough time for someone to climb in during the split second when she closed the trunk and climbed into the driver’s seat.