“No?” asked Stern, sitting beside her now on the bed, where she waited sunny-side up to face him. “Who is that?”
“Ol’ you-know-who. They won’t never catch him. All he had to do was call the order desk to put on these positions that ended up in the error account. He only does that twenty times a day. Nobody’s gonna remember him doin it. And there isn’t one piece of paper in this mess with so much as his initials on it. He’s gonna point to forty other people coulda done it instead of him. Phone clerks. Customers’ reps. Coulda been me.” Margy smiled then. “They may think it’s him. They may know it’s him. But they ain’t gonna prove it’s him.” Margy had watched television, heard these lines; perhaps she was imitating Stern. She had certainly convinced herself. Dixon was confident too, Stern thought, recalling Dixon’s predictions of vindication on the phone. His client was fortified by his prior successes with the IRS and his knowledge that the government had run off to ransack his checking accounts when the money had never really left the company. Stern, however, was hardly as sanguine. The Assistant U.S. Attorneys were often adroit financial investigators. They might blunder about at first, but if Margy was right in her suspicions about how Dixon had handled his ill-gotten gains, the prosecutors would find them eventually, in his hands, and draw the same conclusions as she had about who was responsible. Dixon remained at substantial risk.
“I should speak to the MD employees in Kindle who received these orders on the desk to be certain their memories are as vague as you suppose,” said Stern. It would be wise to remind whoever might have dealt directly with Dixon of how long ago these events occurred, and the confounding volume of orders received each day; Stern would have to do that promptly, before the FBI unearthed contrary recollections. Margy promised to recall the order tickets from storage and have them sent to Stern; he could identify the order takers and contact them directly. She would send a memo to Kindle, asking all employees on the desk to cooperate with their lawyer.
“Course, this still isn’t what I’d call comical,” said Margy. “The Exchange’ll bang the bullpucky out of the company. They’ll give us a whole bunch of fines and censures and make a big stink. Then they’ll hand it over to the CFTC and let them make some stink, too. But ol’ you-know-who, he’ll be okay. He’ll be fussin and stinkin along with the rest of them, makin out like how’d this awful thing happen right under my nose. And then he’ll turn around and fire someone to cover his hillbilly fanny.” Margy inclined her head slightly so that she was more or less eye to eye with the excited area of Stern’s shorts. Looking back, she gave him a little knowing grin, which he thought was at his expense, but it was not. She was still thinking about whom Dixon would fire. “Prob’ly me,” she said with a sad little buttoned-up smile. “Probably me,” she repeated, and laughed then, laughed and raised her arms to Stern again and pulled him down to her for comfort.
Parting at the hotel-room door, he promised to call her. “That’d be nice,” Margy answered simply. Clearly, she did not believe him; men said that all the time. As soon as the cab had deposited him at O’Hare, he thumbed through the yellow pages and sent an enormous bouquet, without a card, to her office. Seated in the cramped booth, behind the perforated stainless-steel partitions, he was visited by images of the night and morning and he almost shivered with the staggering thrill of it all. Had that truly been he, Alejandro Stern, gentleman lawyer, child of a Catholic country, humping his brains out a few hours ago? Yes, indeed. His spirit was on alert, his flag unfurled. He had Margy’s smoky taste on his lips, the touch of her silks in his palm. When was he returning? He laughed out loud at himself, so that a woman in a booth across the way actually looked straight at him. Slightly shamed, he found suddenly the splinter of something more abiding buried closer to his heart. Gratitude. Oh yes, he was grateful to Margy, to the entire race of women, who, unbelievably, had seen fit to take him in once more. With his hand still on the telephone, he pondered the sheer blessing of another human being’s embrace.
At the gate, the attendant announced that the plane for his short flight back to the tri-cities was delayed. “Equipment problems.” As usual! Stern, even in his buoyant mood, could not pull free of his hatred for this airport, with its endless corridors and sickly light, its teeming, hurtling bodies and worried faces. He located the airline’s executive lounge, all black leather and granite, and telephoned his office.
“Claudia, please call Ms. Klonsky and schedule an appointment for Friday. Tell her I wish to deliver the documents she has subpoenaed from MD.” Stern had not spoken with the prosecutor in a month now. Raphael had called to beg an additional week on the return date, and reported that Klonsky sounded on the verge of rage. Stern did not like to beard the Assistants—it was not his style, and more to the point, enmity among lawyers complicated a case. He would have to make amends somehow with Klonsky. The lawyer’s life, he thought, always toadying. Judges. Prosecutors. Certain clients.
“You want your messages?”
Stern was seated on a sofa; the telephone console was cleverly inserted in the granite top of a cocktail table. Claudia reported a call from Remo Cavarelli, an old hustler under indictment, who wanted the status date for his next appearance before Judge Winchell. There was also a message from a Ms. Helen Dudak, who wanted to speak to Stern: a personal matter. And Cal Hopkinson had phoned. Developments, he thought with a sudden surge of something undefined, interest or apprehension, when he heard Cal’s name. He had Claudia put him through, but Cal’s secretary said he was on another call. Stern held a bit, then decided to call back and punched in the number Helen had left. She had told him she worked at home, with a headset plugged into the phone—connected earpieces and a tiny suspended mike, smaller than a thimble. He imagined her like that.
“I’m picking up on the end of our conversation the other night,” said Helen.
“Yes, of course,” he answered, not truly certain what she meant.
“I wanted to invite you to dinner here. Two weeks from Saturday. The two of us.”
“Ah,” said Stern, and felt his heart palpably squirm. Now what? Helen meant well, he thought. And she was charming. But could he manage these complications? Yes, said some voice suddenly. Yes, indeed.
Yet, having accepted, he dwelled on Margy and quarreled with himself as he put down the phone. Eating, after all, was not a form of sexual intercourse. But then again, he slyly thought, he was becoming quite a fellow. In the crowded airport lounge, with the stalled travelers murmuring around him, he once more laughed aloud.
This time he got through to Cal.
“Sandy!” Cal cried. “Where are you?” Cal told him the story of his most recent unscheduled layover at O’Hare. Stern eventually asked about the bank.
“That’s why I was calling,” said Cal. “Just to let you know the story.” River National, Cal said, was being perfectly neurotic about this transaction in Clara’s investment account. Any time a will was involved, the bank worried over everything: the probate court, the Attorney General’s Office. They insisted on retrieving every single piece of paper before they would meet. Cal was pressing for a conference in the next week. He spoke with the self-congratulatory air that Stern himself often assumed with clients, describing his communications with the bankers and file clerks as if it were mortal combat.
“Really, Cal,” said Stern. He did not want to be one more complaining client, and ended the conversation rather than speak his mind. Cal was too fussy to be forceful—he, too, would want to see each paper—and besides, he was probably in no position with the bankers, who in all likelihood sent him business—wealthy customers who needed trusts drawn, wills updated. But it was unfair, Stern decided in a moment, to blame Cal for the complications Clara had made. Stern had lived decades never wholly knowing what was occurring behind Clara’s composed and gracious façade. And still the wondering went on. All that old simmering frustration was boiling up in him again.
He redialed his secretary’s number.
“Claudia, did Dr.
Cawley return my call?” Following his evening at Kate and John’s, Stern had chased Nate about, leaving word at the office, the hospital, at home, asking Nate to call the lab. It was not clear that Nate had even gotten the messages, and Stern remained unsure that he would follow through, in any event. Nate, after all, had other worries.
“Should I try someone at his office?” asked Claudia.
Stern drummed his fingers on the tabletop and did not answer. Out the window, the view was obstructed by a 747 which was being washed by workers mounted on a series of movable scaffolds—Stern was reminded of zookeepers and a giraffe. He certainly could venture to Westlab himself—wherever it might be. As Clara’s executor, he had a legal right to inquire. But if the administrators at Westlab were sticklers about privacy, as Nate suspected, Stern would need credentials, which would mean involving Cal. Better patience, Stern thought. Nate would get to it eventually.
But there was a soreness here, more persistent than his curiosity about Clara, which seemed to rise and fall with the tide of his grief. It took Stern an instant to fix upon it: Peter. The suspicion born at Kate and John’s that he had been outdone by his son had not proved easy to put aside. Oh, he knew it was unfair, unlikely, unbecoming to believe that Peter in his great anguish had had the presence of mind, or the cunning, to manipulate his father about the autopsy. But Peter, to Stern’s memory, had been so insistent—he could still recall his voice resounding down the corridors at its wailing pitch as he upbraided that poor bewildered cop, the frantic glint in Peter’s eyes. Questions lingered. With Peter, Stern supposed, questions always would.
“Claudia, connect me, please, with the general switchboard of the Kindle Municipal Police.” As soon as Stern said it, he knew it was probably an error. Throughout his professional career, he had been alert for any opportunity to avoid the police. They always made trouble in the end. He gave the operator who answered the name and precinct he wanted and comforted himself with the thought that the old policeman was probably not there. As the saying went, they never were.
“Ray Radczyk.”
“Alejandro Stern, Lieutenant.”
“I’ll be damned. How are you, Sandy?”
“Continuing.” He heard the beep on the line then, over the usual tumbling of the police station in the background. The old cop sounded positively alight to have heard from him. For the life of him, Stern could still not recall the connection. He had puzzled on it once or twice, a vagrant thought that came along with many others when he remembered that late afternoon. “Do you still have that file with my name on it, Lieutenant?”
“Hey, come on,” said Radczyk, and laughed. “I got a job, just like you. Never was a file. You know that.”
“Of course,” said Stern. This Radczyk, he recalled, was not really a bad fellow. Minding his profession, naturally.
“Say, where you at? Sounds like we’re talkin over two tin cans.”
Stern explained: O’Hare. Stuck.
“Oh, sure,” said Radczyk.
“Lieutenant, there is a question with which I would probably never bother you were I not waylaid with a moment on my hands.”
“No bother,” said the cop. “Shoot.”
Stern paused.
“I was wondering if the coroner reported anything unusual in connection with his examination of my wife?”
“Huh,” said Radczyk. Listening to himself, Stern realized how extraordinary this question would sound, arriving out of the blue. Radczyk took his time. “I know he ruled it suicide, a’ course. I was gonna give you a call, then I thought, hell—”
“Certainly,” said Stern. Neither of them, for an instant, spoke. Stern waved off a waiter in white coat who approached to offer him a drink. “I realize this is a peculiar inquiry—”
“No problem. Lemme dig up the case report. Just come back from dictation a week or two ago. Gimme a number. I’ll be back to you in two shakes.” Stern read the number from the console. What would Radczyk do? Perhaps he would motion for someone else to pick up the other extension; or check to be sure the call-taping system was functioning.
A woman passed by, tall, near fifty, dressed entirely in red—she wore a silk suit with a tight straight skirt and a black-welted bolero hat which matched her outfit; her hosiery was black; a handsome figure. She looked vaguely in Stern’s direction, then turned away, but even the instant of contact with her dark eyes somehow reminded him of Margy, and he fell back fully into her grasp, as if her suddenly had passed through the doors of a movie and was flooded over by the light and images of the screen: Margy, as she stood by the light switch, bare-legged and heavy-bottomed, her blouse undone, the black triangle visible below; her bright fingernails roaming to certain of his parts; the way her mouth lolled open, and her hue, in the profuse light of the morning, increased even across the frail skin of her closed eyes as she traveled along the channels of sensation.
A peculiar sound arose, a beeping: the telephone, he realized.
“Here we are,” said Radczyk. “Let’s see. Now wha’dya need?”
“It is merely curiosity, Lieutenant. I thought there may have been something unusual the coroner remarked on.”
“Not much here. No autopsy. That’s what you wanted. I told him there was religious objections. Couldn’t figure out anything else.”
Stern realized then that Radczyk had called back on a private line. No beeping signal; no tape. Supposedly, at any rate. Stern made no response.
“It’s short and sweet, Sandy. Blood test with a C.O. level. And a copy of the note. And the coroner’s ruling. Nothin’ in the police reports. I looked at them when they come through.”
“I see.”
Radczyk took a breath. “Mind if I ask what’s up?”
“A minor matter, Lieutenant. It’s unimportant.”
“Sure,” said Radczyk. “What kinda matter?” With these questions, he assumed a certain authority. He was, after all, a policeman, and this was, after all, his case. Stern cursed himself and then launched into a concertedly tidy explanation: a medical-laboratory bill had arrived and could not be accounted for. It was, Stern said again, no doubt unimportant.
“I could go over there and check for ya,” Radczyk said.
Stern found the idea startling—particularly its appeal. In theory, medical records were not to be disclosed without a subpoena. But most hearts knocked at the sight of a policeman’s star. Records clerks would tell a cop most anything, if not surrender the paper. Radczyk could learn as much as Nate, perhaps more. But Stern was too much on edge with the policeman, especially his peculiar would-be intimacy. “I could not trouble you, Lieutenant.”
“No trouble,” said Radczyk, then lowered his voice somewhat. “I still owe ya, you know.”
Stern hung on the line.
“Westlab, right?” asked Radczyk. “I’ll go over there myself, Sandy. Keep it between you and me that way. I’ll find out what’s doin. Gotta get all the loose ends tied up for the case report, right?”
Stern waited. “Certainly,” he said.
“Sure,” said Radczyk. “Should have something Friday, Monday latest. I’ll call. Good trip back.”
Stern cradled the phone gently. There was a sharpness to the objects—ashtrays, lamps—he saw about the lounge. He had the congested feeling he had known all the way back to childhood.
He was certain he had just done something wrong.
11
THE RECEPTION AREA of the U.S. Attorney’s Office was shabby. From the looks, one would have thought he was visiting a solo practitioner down on his luck. The shag carpet was reminiscent of an animal afflicted with the mange; the wooden arms of the rectilinear furniture had begun to splinter; and the inhabitants were the usual town-square gathering. A nut or two sat huddled in the corners, glancing about furtively and writing out lengthy, incomprehensible complaints about various politicians or the FCC’s plot to lobotomize them through the airwaves. Witnesses and prospective defendants, too poor or too untutored to be accompanied by lawyers, sat wi
th grand jury subpoenas in their hands, awaiting the Assistants who would make use of them. Now and then federal agents, or an occasional defense lawyer, looking hangdog and disappointed, would emerge from the offices. And of course today Mr. Alejandro Stern, prominent member of the federal criminal bar, sat here as well, surrounded by two ponderous document cases as he awaited Ms. Klonsky, who the receptionist said was on the phone.
This office had always struck Stern as a happy place. The lawyers were young and inspired, and almost all of them knew they were merely passing through. They did not remain AUSAs for long—five years, six was the average. Enough time to learn to try a jury case, for each to feel she or he had made a sincere effort to improve community well-being, before the greener glades of the private sector, of what Stern still thought of as real practice, beckoned. It was a good job, Stern thought. He had lost the best younger lawyer he’d ever had, Jamie Kemp, to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, where Kemp had gone to try cases on his own and work on a rock musical which resurrected certain songs Kemp had composed two decades before when he had briefly been some kind of musical star.
Kemp was quite nearly not the only one to join federal employment. Before the present United States Attorney, Stan Sennett, had been returned here from San Diego by the Justice Department, Stern had been approached about taking the job. The top aide of the state’s senior senator had invited Stern to breakfast at one of the downtown clubs. This young man, who looked something like the singing star Garfunkel, with a head of shocked whitish hair that stood erect like a dandelion gone to seed, had thrown around every corny platitude known to man; it was worse than an obituary. This offer was a compliment to Stern’s abilities, the young man insisted, and to the wisdom, Stern knew, of a life in which he had never been politically aligned. While Mayor Bolcarro was not allowed by the senator to reward his retainers with federal appointments, his known enemies were rarely elevated.