Bad Business

63

We had ourselves arranged in the living room. Hawk was leaning against the wall near the door with his raincoat still on but unbuttoned. I was on a straight chair, turned around so I could lean my forearms on the back of it, like the cops in film noir movies. Ellen and Bernie were on a couch. Darrin and Lance sat in matching wing chairs set at a slight decorator's angle on either side of the window through which you could see such a great view over the Common where not long ago Marty Siegel had explained special purpose entities to me. I was more comfortable now. I understood this kind of thing better.

"Here's an interesting thing," I said. "Hawk and I have consistently acted in a high-handed, indeed, quite probably illegal manner, both at the O'Mara home earlier this evening, and here in your lovely condo high above the city."

No one said anything. Lance was giving me the death stare with his little reptilian eyes. The stare would have made me more nervous if Hawk hadn't taken his gun.

"And no one has mentioned calling the cops," I said. "Seems odd."

No one said anything.

I had Lance's scrapbook in a manila envelope. I picked it up off the floor by my feet and opened it and took out the scrapbook. I opened it to the pages devoted to Rowley and Gavin, leaned around the back of my chair, and placed it faceup on the coffee table where all of them could look at it. Everyone looked at it. No one spoke. Lance licked his lips once.

"We found that in Lance's shirt drawer, which, incidentally, Hawk, who is clearly fashionable, tells me is filled with handsome shirts."

"What is it?" Ellen said.

"A scrapbook filled with press clippings about murders dating back some years, of which our particular case is only the most recent."

"Who would have such a thing?"

"The murderer might, if he was sufficiently creepy."

The Eisens looked at Lance. Lance kept his obsidian stare on me. There was a trace of saliva showing at the left corner of his mouth. O'Mara sat very stiffly, and didn't appear to be looking at anything. Hawk was motionless as he often was. His expression was pleasant. He didn't look interested, but he didn't look bored. He looked like he might be reviewing a highly successful sex life.

"And," I said, "I gotta tell you that Lance seems to me sufficiently creepy."

L ance spoke for the first time. "Fuck you," he said.

"Well, that's a valid point," I said. "But let me remind you that we have your gun, and I'm betting that the slugs match up."

"Fuck you."

"Well," I said to the group, "Lance has made his position clear, but let me expand on mine a little."

Bernie was still trying to be a ballsy executive. After all, he belonged to a health club. He had a trainer.

"Nobody here is interested in your damn position."

"I know, Bernie, that you and Rowley were manipulating mark to market accounting and SPEs in a criminal manner." I managed to do things when I said it: to sound like I knew what I was talking about, and to do it with a straight face. It made me proud to be me.

"You're fucking crazy," Bernie said. "You know that?"

"I know that you and Ellen were wife-swapping with Marlene and Trent Rowley," I said.

"You're disgusting," Ellen said.

I looked at Hawk.

"You like me, don't you?"

Hawk's expression didn't change.

"Honky bastard," he said.

"See?" I said to the group.

"You're not funny," O'Mara said.

"I am too," I said. "But we'll let that go. I know you and Lancey Pants are involved in this criminal affair with Bernie and the late Trent, because you are listed as owners of some of the SPEs. I know that you, Darrin darlin', supply black women to Bob Cooper through the good offices of your seminar scams."

"My seminars are not scams," O'Mara said.

I ignored him.

"In return for which, I suspect, but can't prove yet, he turned a blind eye to what was going on with Rowley and Eisen."

"We were doing nothing illegal," Bernie said.

"Meanwhile, in my theory, Gavin, being Cooper's keeper, so to speak, got wind, because getting wind was his job, of some problems. Something was wrong in the company's cash flow, some of the company's top executives were living sort of exotic sex lives."

"Our sex life is our private business," Ellen said.

"There is nothing illegal about it," Bernie said.

The little dab of saliva was still there at the corner of Lance's mouth. But he wasn't saying fuck you to me at the moment, which seemed progress. O'Mara was quiet too, but his shoulders had grown more rigid. He was probably the smartest of the group, and he might have known, while the rest of them were still denying it, that the jig was up.

"And his own beloved Yale buddy and CEO was exercising some sexual bad judgment of his own. Now, it would have been one thing if Gavin hadn't cared about Cooper. And it would have been something else if Cooper didn't want to get elected senator, and, later, president."

"I'm not going to listen to any more of this," O'Mara said, and stood up stiffly.

I t was an empty gesture, and it was almost as if he knew it. "We won't let you leave until we're finished," I said.

O'Mara looked at me for a moment and then at Hawk. Hawk smiled at him and gave a little what-can-I-say shrug. O'Mara shook his head wearily and sat back down.

"But Cooper did want to be senator, and did want to be president; and Gavin did care about him, and maybe about being close to a guy who was president. So he hired a couple of private eyes to follow some wives around and see what he could learn about the wife-swapping. Meanwhile, Marlene Rowley came to believe that Trent and Ellen had stepped out of bounds in the wife-swapping deal, and Marlene decided to secure her position in case of divorce proceedings, so she hired me to follow Trent in case he and Ellen decided to walk into the sunset together. Incidentally, clever devil, he told each of the private eyes he was the aggrieved husband so he wouldn't blow his position and bring shame to Coop and Kinergy."

They had all given up posturing. They seemed if not actually interested, at least accepting of the proposition that they had to listen to me.

"Now here's what I don't know, but seems a good guess. Things are going swimmingly for Eisen and Rowley. They know that Kinergy is going to implode pretty soon. But they are successfully keeping stock prices up, and unloading their stock in smallish batches so as not to cause a stir on Wall Street."

I paused and looked at them. Then I looked at Hawk.

"I always hoped," I said to Hawk, "that I'd have a case where one day I could use the phrase `cause a stir on Wall Street.' "

"Not much left to live for," Hawk said.

"So," I said to the group again, "it's a kind of race to get their money out before the company went bankrupt. And they're winning the race, but Rowley gets an unfortunate case of conscience. We're destroying a great company, he says, employees will lose their pensions, he says, we can't do this, he says."

I stopped and looked at Eisen. "Something like that?" I said.

E isen didn't speak. He just shook his head, trying to look bemused and disgusted. He looked scared to me.

"So he says he's going public, going to tell the SEC, whatever, and, Bernie, you find that unacceptable. It'll cost you millions of dollars. It might cost O'Mara and Devaney millions of dollars, in any case, you have to do something. My guess is that you went to O'Mara, and O'Mara turned to his in-house serial killer, and Lance, of course, is about to wet himself at the prospect of indulging his hobby and pleasing his lover at the same time."

When I said "lover" Ellen Eisen's head jerked around toward O'Mara. I looked at Hawk. He raised his eyebrows and nodded. He'd seen it too.

"You didn't know that Darrin and Lance are a couple?" I said.

E llen looked at O'Mara.

"Darrin?" she said.

"Matters of the heart know no restrictions," O'Mara said.

I t was limp, but the best he could do. I think he knew it was limp. I think he knew it was all going to go south, and take him with it. And I think he had given up, and most of what he did now was reflexive motion. Ellen stared at Lance.

"Him?" she said.

O'Mara didn't bother to answer.

"And just what was going to happen to us when the time came?" Ellen said.

This time Bernie's head jerked around. "What time came?" he said.

I looked at Hawk. He grinned. It was beginning to boil.

"When you got the money," she said.

"Money?" Bernie said.

"Ellen," O'Mara said.

"Fuck you, you goddamned fairy," Ellen said.

I t was going great.

"What was going to happen when we got the money?" Bernie said.

"I was leaving you." "With him?" Bernie said.

"Yeah, isn't that fun, I was going to troll off into the sunset with a fucking queer."

"I think I proved to you, Ellen," O'Mara said, "that I could love you as well as any man."

This time it was Lance's head that jerked around.

"You didn't say anything about fucking her," Lance said.

Better and better.

"I had to," O'Mara said. "It was just until . . ." He made a little trailing-off flourish with his hand.

"You were fucking my wife?" Bernie said. "You son of a bitch."

"Until the money?" Lance said.

His voice bubbled with something more complicated and much nastier than anger.

"What money?" Bernie said.

O'Mara pressed his head against the back ofliis ch:cir und tilted his chin up and closed his eyes. Ellen sat beside him on the couch. Her face was white. Her eyes looked sunken and dark.

"When you finished cleaning out Kinergy we were going to take the money and go away," she said.

Her voice was thin and flat and tinny.

"Take the money? How the fuck were you planning to take the money?"

E llen turned the dark sunken stare to O'Mara, who still sat with his eyes closed, his face toward the ceiling.

"Darrin said he'd arrange so I'd inherit the money."

I smiled at Lance.

"And we'd get married."

I shot at Lance with my forefinger. "That be you?" I said to him.

"You motherfucker," Lance said to O'Mara. "Have me kill her old man so you could fuck her and get the money?"

With his eyes still closed, O'Mara spoke in a voice without affect.

"It would have been only temporary," he said.

Bernie was rigid on the couch. His eyes were wide. There was a small twitch near his left cheekbone. His hands lay on his thighs, the fingers splayed stiffly.

"My God," she said. "You were going to have him kill me." Her voice had gotten higher and she was pressing her hands against her stomach as if she were in pain.

"And you were going to have him kill me," Bernie said.

Y ou could barely hear his voice. No one else said anything. I glanced at Hawk. He seemed peaceable, leaning against the wall, his lips slightly pursed, so that I knew he was whistling something quietly, to pass the time. The silence expanded. Time to prime the pump.

"So Gavin came to you, Bernie, and raised the issue of financial problems at Kinergy," I said. "And you told O'Mara."

I saw no reason to mention Adele if I didn't have to.

"I told Ellen," he said. "That's what Trent did too, the poor dumb bastard. He told her he was going to turn himself in."

"Ah," I said. "Of course, and, in both cases, she told O'Mara and," I shot my forefinger at Lance again, "who ya gonna call?"

"Him," Bernie said softly.

"Correct," I said. "Lancelot de le pistolet."

"I don't like you calling me funny names," Lance said.

"I don't give a rat's ass what you like," I said. "You shot Trent because O'Mara asked you to and you shot Gavin for the same reason."

The saliva at the left corner of Lance's mouth began to trickle down his chin. He started to make the wordless reptilian hissing sound again. I sat back a little in my chair and was quiet, while they all contemplated where they were. Lance looked at O'Mara. O'Mara looked at the inside of his eyelids. Bernie didn't look at anything, and Ellen looked at O'Mara.

"I think it should be Lancelot du pistolet," Hawk said.

"Like Lancelot du lac," I said.

"Oui."

"You fucking prick," Lance said to O'Mara. He managed to make the words hiss without any sibilants. "You used me to kill people for you."

With his head tipped back and his eyes closed, O'Mara said, "You like to kill people, Lance."

"You never cared about me," Ellen said to O'Mara.

O'Mara was silent for a time, and when he answered his voice was very hoarse.

"I never cared about anybody," he said.

No one seemed to have anything to say about that.