Death's little helpers

7

It was a long run- two miles up, six miles around, and two miles back home- and I was right in the middle of it, at the north end of Central Park, on the steep climb up one side of Great Hill. It was five-fifteen, just past dawn, and the thin clouds that had brought showers overnight had begun to fray. The pavement was still wet and traffic was light: a few cabs, a few black cars, an aggressive peloton of racing bikes, and some other solitary runners, cocooned in thoughts and breath. I leaned into the hill and tried not to gasp. My own thoughts turned to Nina Sachs and her family.

It had been close to ten last night when I’d walked from Clark Street down Old Fulton to Water Street. Brooklyn was cooler, and the breeze off the river had sent a chill through me. Lights were burning in Sachs’s loft and also at street level, in the I-2 Galeria de Arte, Brooklyn branch. I stood at the big glass door and looked inside.

It was a huge space, as large as Sachs’s loft, with bleached wood floors and a wall of sidewalk-to-ceiling windows. The other walls were white, and a dense constellation of lights hung from the ceiling. Also hanging- from ceiling-mounted tracks- was a platoon of room dividers, movable walls of various widths presently arranged to divide the gallery into three exhibition bays. In the foreground, about ten yards inside the door, was a long mahogany counter, chest high and elaborately paneled.

There were people in the gallery, a skinny young woman with bleached hair, camo pants, and a T-shirt that let her midriff peek through, and an even skinnier young man with shiny blue bellbottoms and a steel ball through his nose. They were sealing and hauling wooden crates with impressive speed and skill. There were two opened wine bottles on the long counter, and three glasses, and an ashtray with a smoldering cigarette. I heard music through the glasssomething thudding and techno.

Ines Icasa came through a door at the back of the gallery. Her hair was pulled back and she paused in mid-stride when she saw me. She was perfectly still for a moment, and then she moved again, walking to the counter, plucking her cigarette from the ashtray, and waving me in.

I pushed open the heavy door. The music got louder and I felt the bass in my gut. I smelled tobacco and sawdust and wood polish. The skinny people looked up from their crates and eyed me speculatively. Ines called me over.

“A?QuA© tal? Just passing through the neighborhood, detective, or are you shopping for some art?” I smiled. Ines took a deep hit off her cigarette and reached for a wineglass. She poured some red wine, showed me the bottle, and raised her nice eyebrows. I shook my head. Ines frowned melodramatically and poured herself some more. I heard a noise from the end of the counter, and a foot, wearing something like a bowling shoe, slid into view. I walked over and looked down. It was Billy.

He was sitting on the floor on a huge paisley pillow, his back against the end of the counter. There were earphones on his head that snaked off to a sleek MP3 player hooked to his belt, and there was a spiral notebook and a thick text-Trigonometry: An Introduction- open in his lap. He raised his head and looked at me, blankly at first and then with recognition, but without discernable interest. He had a pencil in his teeth and a bottle of Sprite at his side. He was wearing baggy pants and a T-shirt again, but he’d swapped the Talking Heads lyric for a blowup of a Dr. Strange comic book cover. I raised a hand in greeting. Billy looked at me for a while and nodded minutely. I pointed at his shirt.

“Master of the Mystic Arts,” I said. “One of my favorites- though he’s no Batman, of course.”

Billy winced theatrically and let the pencil fall into his lap. “Batman’s a pussy,” he said softly, and turned again to his book.

I laughed. “I’ll let him know you said that.”

“He is working, detective, and he is very focused,” Ines said. She put a hand on my arm and led me back down the counter. “Are you sure I cannot get you something? Something stronger than wine, perhaps.” I shook my head. There was a moist sheen to the smooth skin of her face, and her big almond eyes were gleaming.

“Trig’s advanced for a twelve-year-old, isn’t it?” I asked. “It seems to me I studied it in high school.”

Ines smiled proudly and nodded. “Guillermo has always been many years advanced in maths. He takes most of his classes in the upper school.” She glanced at the skinny man and woman, who had gone back to sliding wooden crates around. “We are packing up the last of an exhibition,” Ines said. “Iguacu, we called it- the work of five painters from the ParanA? region of Brazil. They are very talented, and the show was well received.”

“I’m sorry I missed it.”

“I will add you to our mailing list. You will never have to miss another.” She drank some more wine. Her glass was nearly empty.

“Nina upstairs?” I asked.

“She is expecting you,” Ines said.

“Then I’d better not keep her waiting.” Ines nodded, and I started for the door. Halfway there I stopped and turned back to her. “You have any thoughts on where he might be?” Ines looked at me. She shook her head slowly and blew out a cloud of smoke.

Upstairs, Nina Sachs was still working. I’d rung twice and waited several minutes for her to answer. She wore a paint-splattered T-shirt and jeans, and she was barefoot. She had a smoke in one hand and a paintbrush in the other and her hazel eyes were jumpy, but she’d smiled when she opened the door.

“Back here,” she said, and walked quickly across the loft to her studio. The place was a mess again, as if Ines had never cleaned it, and the smell was back. I followed Nina’s smoke trail to her easel. Her little stereo was pounding out The Subdudes.

“Pull up a chair.” She pointed to the beat-up armchair in the corner. “I’m doing busywork now, so I can talk.” I turned the stereo down a notch and dragged the chair closer and sat. Nina paced back and forth before her canvas, and occasionally daubed at it, and sang along with The Subdudes as I spoke. She never interrupted and she never glanced in my direction. I told her about my trip to Pace-Loyette and my discussion with Irene Pratt, and about the long list of lawsuits and arbitration claims that Danes was involved in. When I was through, she stepped away from the easel, lit another cigarette, and leaned her hips against the utility sink.

“So, basically, you haven’t found out anything.” She said it matter-of-factly.

“I haven’t found out much. But we know that the people at Pace are worried-”

“I knew that before,” Sachs interrupted.

I nodded. “We know that someone else is looking for him-”

“But not who it is.”

“And we know that Irene Pratt is genuinely concerned about him. As far as I can tell, she’s one of the people closest to him, and she has no clue of where he went or why he hasn’t returned.”

Nina laughed nastily. “What did you think of Pratt? She’s like a frustrated librarian, isn’t she? Or the nun who secretly lusts for the priest.”

“You think she and Danes had a thing?”

Nina shook her head and chuckled. “She’s not his type. She’s smart enough, but Greg likes a jagged little pill- he likes them edgy. Pratt’s too much of a schoolgirl. But she was interested, God only knows why. No accounting for taste, I guess.”

“I guess not,” I said. “Though you must have thought he had something going for him- once upon a time.”

She snorted. “Sure I did- back when I was fresh out of art school and fighting with my parents over the dump I was living in and the shithole where I waited tables. Back then I thought Greg was a hoot. He was smart and he knew it, and he had no time for people who weren’t. And unlike most of the wannabe bohemians I hung with back then, he actually liked what he was doing, he made good money doing it, and he planned to make a lot more. Plus, he was fucking funny, too. He’d say anything to anybody, and he didn’t give a damn who he pissed off. He was a real poke in the eye back then, and so was I. Maybe I still am.”

Nina looked at her high ceiling and blew out a long cord of smoke.

“’Course, all that gets old fast when you live with it every day and he decides he’s smarter than you are and you’re just there to fetch and carry while he’s out conquering the universe.” She ran a hand through her hair and crossed her arms and looked at me. A fleck of ash floated past her ear. “You really are a nosy bastard.”

I shrugged. “Like I said, it’s part of what you’re paying for.”

She rubbed her chin with the back of her hand and puffed on her cigarette. “Yeah, well… what else do I get? What’s next?”

“Next Monday I get into his apartment. That should tell us something. Between now and then, I keep an eye out for whoever else might be looking for Danes, and I try to talk to Linda Sovitch.”

“Isn’t that risky?” Sachs said. “Talking to her is kind of… public.”

“Sure. She gets wind that he’s missing- and for how long- and it could be all over cable the same night. And there’s not much I can do to finesse it. But he did have lunch with her on the day he walked out of the office, and according to Pratt she was one of his few friends, so it’s hard to ignore her. Besides, some press coverage might not be a bad thing. If he’s near a TV, it might flush him out. And maybe he won’t find out who broke the story- or how.”

Sachs looked skeptical. “He’d be so pissed-”

“Assuming he’s in a position to be.” She squinted at me. “I want you to think about the police, Nina,” I said.

“No fucking way. I told you, I’d never hear the end of it.”

“Nina, his employers are worried, the closest thing to a friend of his that I’ve been able to find is worried, even I’m worried- and I’ve never met the guy. You should be worried too.”

She looked at me and sucked on her cigarette and shook her head slowly. “Okay, okay, talk to Sovitch- but be discreet, for chrissakes. Give me some time to think about the cops.” I wasn’t sure how much discretion was possible, but I had nodded anyway and left.

The grade eased as I neared the top of Great Hill, and I backed off my pace a little. My heart was pounding and my breathing was fast and shallow. I lengthened my stride and inhaled slowly and deeply. A well-muscled woman in Rollerblades, spandex, and a helmet like a shark fin passed me going in the opposite direction. She was pushing off smoothly, her face lit with anticipation of the downhill glide.

By the time I reached the Loch and the 100th Street entrance, I no longer felt as if my heart would explode. The North Meadow was to my left. They were laying sod there, and I could smell the mulch and the wet earth and the grass. The sky was lighter now, and sunlight touched the crenellated line of buildings along Central Park West.

I passed the 97th Street transverse and wondered if Irene Pratt was awake yet. She’d been only slightly wobbly when I’d dropped her at her door last night, but she’d been awash in an anxious silence. Today she would have a bad case of regrets.

My heart rate was steady as I came to the Reservoir. I shook out my arms and breathed deeply, and my thoughts shifted again- this time to Jane.

It was near midnight when I’d gotten back from Brooklyn, and my head had been full of Nina and Billy and Ines. There’d been lights in Jane’s windows, but I hadn’t gone to her apartment. I went to mine, instead, and poured a glass of water and stood in the kitchen. There was a travel magazine on the counter, open to an article about Venice. I turned the pages as I drank and looked at pictures of the Piazza San Marco and the Ponte di Rialto and the exquisite windows of exquisite shops near the Ponte dell’Accademia. I wondered what it would be like to go there with Jane, and walk with her on the bridges, and sit with her in the cafA©s into the wee hours. And then- from nowhere- I thought of my Proustian moment on Columbus Avenue, and my wondering turned to how long we might stay in Venice, and whether it was a runner’s town, and how I would get in my miles with all that water and all those crowds. A surge of annoyance rushed up my spine and I pushed the magazine away.

I went into the living room and pulled a book from the shelf and sat with it in my lap and didn’t read. I listened for half an hour to Jane’s kickboxing workout- the thump-thump-whump of her beating crap out of the heavy bag that hangs in a corner of her loft- and when the pummeling stopped I listened to my telephone ring. I sat for a while after it went quiet, and then I peeled off my clothes and got into bed. I lay there, watching the play of lights across the ceiling, listening to the rain, until about four-thirty, when I’d pulled on my running clothes.

I still didn’t know why I hadn’t called her or answered her call, or why it had taken so long for my irritation to subside, or why there was a trace of fear in its wake. I didn’t know why I couldn’t sleep.

I was covered in a skin of sweat, and my joints were loose and springy now. A lot of oxygen was bubbling around in my brain. The Museum of Natural History was on my right, bathed in yellow light. I shortened my stride and picked up the pace.

It was nearly six when I got home, and nearly seven by the time I’d stretched and showered and shaved. I came out of the bedroom and there was a note under the front door. The stationery was heavy ivory-colored stock and the printing was angular and precise, like an architect’s. It was from Jane.

Dinner? Call me.

I put the card on the kitchen counter, by the tulips that were shedding their petals. I flicked the coffee machine on and spooned yogurt into a bowl with a sliced apple and some granola. And then I thought about how I might get in touch with Linda Sovitch.

Sovitch was a star of sorts, the most recognizable of BNN’s talking heads and the host of its most successful show. As such, she would be attended by a cadre of PAs, flacks, and other assorted minders, wrapped around her like the skin of an onion and paid to keep riffraff like me at arm’s length. If I wanted to wait a few days, I could root around for some friend of a friend of a friend who might know one of Sovitch’s gatekeepers and might arrange a proper introduction. But I didn’t want to wait a few days. I wanted to talk to Sovitch soon, and that required something more direct. I called Tom Neary.

“You know anybody who deals in celebrity cell numbers?” I asked.

“And hello to you too. Somebody have a little too much coffee today?”

“Somebody hasn’t had nearly enough. Surely a fancy outfit like Brill must have a few gray-market contacts for stuff like this.”

“Surely we do. And they’re so useful we don’t waste them on free agents like you.”

“I’m not asking you to waste anything, I just want a number.”

“Whose?”

“Linda Sovitch’s.”

“From TV?”

“Is there another?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Neary said. “I hear you had a nice visit with Dennis Turpin, by the way.”

“It had a certain entertainment value,” I said, “but I’m not sure how useful it was. I did have an interesting chat with Danes’s doorman, though.” I told Neary about it, and he was quiet for a while, thinking.

“Not cops,” he said finally.

“And not Turpin’s people, either- at least, not according to him. And I assume you’d tell me if they were yours.”

“They’re not mine,” he said.

“Then whose are they?”

“I don’t know,” Neary said. “Not without more coffee, anyway. I’ll call if I get a brainstorm, or if I can find Sovitch’s number.”

While I waited, I read through Geoffrey Tyne’s CV, in anticipation of interviewing him that afternoon. As I’d gathered from his name, Tyne was a Brit, though he’d spent much of his twenty-five-year career overseas. His background was in the right ballpark: university, some military service, a stint with a big UK security consulting firm, doing “personal security”- bodyguard- work before graduating to the corporate side of the shop. And then came a succession of jobs abroad, mainly with banks, in capacities of branch or country or regional security director. But he hadn’t stayed at any of the companies longer than a few years, and he’d never managed to secure a top spot. I was wondering why when the phone rang.

It wasn’t Neary. It was Gregory Danes’s lawyer, Toby Kahn, returning my call. He was on a cell phone, on his way to court. His voice was deep and local, and his rushed words were half swallowed by a bad connection.

“You’re who?” he asked, and I explained it to him again.

“I get paid to handle securities cases for Greg, and that’s it,” Kahn said. “I’m not qualified to do family law, and I get no brownie points for mixing it up with his ex-wife or her hired hand- which I guess is what you are. I got to go inside now- sorry I can’t…” His words grew fainter and the static grew louder, and then the line was dead. I put the phone down.

When it rang again, Neary was on the other end. He had no ideas about who else might be looking for Danes, but he did have a telephone number for me.

“It’s supposed to be her supersecret, private, family-and-close-friends-only number, so use it wisely.”

Linda Sovitch’s supersecret, private, family-and-close-friends-only number was answered by her supersecret, private, family-and-close-friends-only personal assistant, a single-minded young man named Brent.

“How the hell did you get this number?” he demanded.

I suppressed the urge to say something about a bathroom wall. “I’m a PI, Brent, I do this kind of thing for a living. And if I can get a little time with Linda to talk about a case, I’ll happily go away.”

“How the hell did you get this number?” We went on like this for a while. Finally, my patience ran dry.

“Just tell her I need to talk about Gregory Danes, okay? It won’t take more than a half hour of her life, and we can do it at a time and place of her choosing.”

“How the hell did you get-”

“Tell her, Brent.” I hung up.

I wasn’t sure when, or if, I’d hear back from Brent- much less from Sovitch- and I had a few hours until my interview with Geoffrey Tyne. I opened my laptop to research the last items on my list of Danes lawsuits. I turned on the television for background noise. It was tuned to BNN, and after twenty minutes of half-bright market commentary, Linda Sovitch came on the screen.

It was a short blurb, no more than fifteen seconds, pitching that night’s segment of Market Minds. Sovitch’s hair hung in a graceful blond bell, framing her face and long neck. Her flawless understated makeup accentuated the blue of her eyes, the curve of her high cheeks, and the fullness of her mouth. She was babbling something about her scheduled guests when my phone rang. It was Brent.

“You know the Manifesto Diner?” I didn’t. “It’s on Eleventh Avenue, between Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth. She’ll meet you there this afternoon at three-thirty- exactly- and you’ll have exactly fifteen minutes.” He hung up. It had been easier than I thought.

I changed channels and went back to my laptop and the lawsuits. I stayed there for about an hour, and then I changed into a navy suit, white shirt, and tie and caught a subway downtown. But my mind was not on the interview with Geoffrey Tyne, or even on my meeting with Linda Sovitch. Instead, I was thinking about the last of the court records that I’d read and about making another trip to Brooklyn later that night.

The offices of Klein amp; Sons are downtown, just off Hanover Square, a short walk from the Exchange, a slightly longer one from the Fed, and a stone’s throw from the two cramped rooms my great-grandfather had leased when he founded the firm one hundred years ago. Though it was early afternoon, the narrow street was already in shadow.

The Klein building is a minor Deco masterpiece, with elaborate chevron designs in green and gold around its base and a tower clad in stylized bronze fronds. The lobby is a vaulted cave of polished black stone, inlaid with gilded zigzags. Being there set my teeth on edge.

I didn’t visit the office much as a kid. I was bored and cranky whenever I went, and I annoyed my uncles and was in turn annoyed by them. My father, I suspect, shared many of my feelings about the place and rarely invited me down. And as an adult, I visited even less. So besides my relatives, there were few people there who recognized me. My name was a different matter.

The guards were deferential and apologetic as they waited for word from above to let me pass. And the pale young man who escorted me through the hushed teak-paneled maze of the seventh floor- the managing partners’ floor- was overawed and tongue-tied. Only the sturdy Hispanic woman who led me through the double doors of the conference room and offered me coffee was unimpressed. I said yes to the coffee, and she left me alone.

It was a long high-ceilinged room, with doors at one end and a white marble fireplace at the other. The walls were mahogany panels below the chair rail and plaster above. The ceiling was heavy with molding. Two brass chandeliers hung gleaming above the mahogany oval of the conference table and were flawlessly reflected in its flawless surface. Sixteen green leather chairs surrounded the table, and a pair of matching leather sofas ran along one wall, beneath four tall windows. Along the opposite wall were the photographs.

They were portraits of individuals and groups, expensively mounted and gilt-framed- Klein amp; Sons partners down through the ages. For the first few decades, it was all blood family: Morton Klein, his younger brother Meyer, and their male offspring. As the firm grew and the Klein daughters married, sons-in-law began to appear in the pictures, and by the forties there were a couple of unrelated partners. By the sixties- Klein being rather ahead of its time- it was possible to spot some nonwhite faces in the crowd and even a few women. And the recent photos were of as diverse a group of executives as one could find anywhere on the Street. But evolution has its limits. Klein progeny and their spouses have always held the topmost spots and a controlling interest in the firm.

I walked along the wall until I found my father. He appeared only in the group portraits and only in the back- a pale distracted-looking figure, tall, with straight black hair, a widow’s peak, and an angular sharp-featured face- looks my sister Lauren and I had inherited, down to the green eyes. For a dozen years he’d occupied a spot my grandfather had made for him at Klein, and then one day he didn’t. He never explained why he stopped going to the office, and his in-laws never pressed.

The doors opened and the Hispanic woman returned, carrying a silver tray with a china coffee service on it. Behind her was a gray switch of wood, wearing a blue Chanel knockoff and patent-leather flats: Mrs. Konigsberg. Her cold eyes inspected the coffee service, shifted to me, and narrowed.

Her hair was battleship gray and lay in flat curls against her head. Her precise features were close on her face, and her skin was paper-white. The shoulders beneath her suit jacket were thin as wires, and her tiny hands were veined and spotted like dry leaves. She didn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds, and it had been many years since she’d been five feet tall. She perched half-glasses on her nose and approached.

“Good afternoon, Mr. March. Nice to see you again.” Her voice wasn’t quite a whisper, but it somehow encouraged restraint.

“Always a pleasure, Mrs. Konigsberg.” She examined me and the picture I’d been looking at. Her mouth became a sliver of disdain and she made a tiny clicking noise.

“Well, then… Mr. Tyne is on his way up. Is there anything else you require?”

“No, thank you, Mrs. Konigsberg.”

She nodded. “Then I’ll just show him in.” And she did.

I haven’t gone on many job interviews- not the rA©sumA©, what’s-your-greatest-strength, where-do-you-want-to-be-in-five-years kind. Maybe half a dozen apathetic attempts all told while I was in college, maybe fewer. But despite my limited experience and my apathy, there was one bit of wisdom I did acquire about the process: the one about not showing up drunk. Not obviously drunk, anyway. Not extravagantly drunk. Not slurring-your-words, bumping-into-furniture, spilling-coffee, cackling-wildly, pissing-down-your-leg drunk. Not throwing-up-on-your-shoes drunk. Geoffrey Tyne had missed this lesson.

My first clue was the look on Mrs. K’s face as she ushered him into the room- as if someone had simultaneously goosed her and lifted her wallet. Tyne was a medium-sized doughy guy in his fifties, with shiny hair that looked twenty years younger than the rest of him. His face was heavy and flushed, and his small eyes jumped around beneath unkempt brows. His nose was shot with broken capillaries, and his mouth was full of gray teeth. He brushed the lapels of his suit jacket and tugged at his shirt cuffs, and Mrs. K backed away quickly.

My second clue came when he wrapped a moist hand around mine, breathed a gin cloud at my face, called me Mr. Marx, and commented that I didn’t look Jewish. It went downhill from there.

Tyne sat long enough to spill my coffee and tip the sugar bowl; then he rose, to careen around the room and babble. From what I could follow, his rantings had mainly to do with his assignments overseaswhich, as he made it sound, had taken place sometime during the reign of Victoria, in locales he described as the back of beyond and the Fourth effing World. They were peppered with phrases like our little brown brothers, and they went on for a long twenty minutes. For his grand finale, Tyne turned a khaki color, ran trembling hands down his face, and puked on his brogues. Then he collapsed on one of the sofas. I’m not sure when he wet his pants.

I checked his pulse and loosened his tie and made sure that his airway was clear. Then I left quietly. I never asked a single question. Ned was in his office.

As offices of the second-in-command go, his was a modest affair, barely a thousand square feet. It was half-paneled in mahogany, like the conference room, and the upper walls were painted a pale yellow. To my left was a miniature version of the conference room table, with seating for six, and to my right, a living room: sofa and chairs upholstered in yellow silk, spindly end tables, brass lamps, and a few English landscapes on the walls. The long wall to my right was floor-to-ceiling shelves. One section, I knew, hid the door to a washroom, and another opened into a kitchenette. The desk was at the far end of the room by the big windows, a carved black reef in an ocean of yellow carpet. There was a console table beside it, covered with silver-framed photographs. Ned was on the phone when I came in. He turned around and a smile lit his square face.

Like most of my siblings, Ned favors the Kleins in his looks: wavy ginger hair, ruddy complexion, small blunt features. He’s approaching forty-five, though the running of Klein amp; Sons has put more miles than that on him. Behind his reading glasses, his pale eyes were lined and tired-looking, and there were new creases on his forehead and at the corners of his mouth. His stocky build had edged a little closer to fat. He put his hand over the telephone mouthpiece.

“Five minutes,” he whispered. He smoothed his tie down on his bright white shirt and made an affirmative noise into the phone. I wandered to the console table and looked at his photos.

It was not a collection of vanity shots, no pictures of Ned gripping and grinning with the great and near-great; that’s not his style. Rather, it was family. The largest photo showed a smiling woman sitting erect in a Napoleon armchair, with two small boys standing beside her. The woman was blond, blue-eyed, and hollow-cheeked, with the sort of finely crafted good looks you see a lot of on the Upper East Side, the sort that could be anything from thirty-five to fifty and are unmistakably rich. Her slender hands rested comfortably- rings gleaming- in her small lap, and her smile was cool and practiced: Ned’s wife, Janine.

The boys at her side were grade-school age and had full round-featured faces and thick ginger hair- plastered down for the occasion. They were dressed identically in blue blazers and white shirts, and with identically hideous madras ties around their necks. Their smiles were artificial and inert, but their eyes were full of wild scheming. Derek was the older one; his brother was Alec. I knew the look in my nephews’ eyes well, and I smiled to myself. I was willing to bet the photo session hadn’t lasted long after that shot.

Not all the pictures were posed. There were snapshots of the boys playing soccer in Central Park, of Janine on a chestnut mare, and of the boys with both parents atop a ski slope somewhere, leaning on their poles and squinting in the glare. And not all the photos were of Ned’s brood. There was a nice shot of Lauren and her husband, Keith, outside the laboratory building at Rockefeller University where Keith does arcane things with DNA. They stood against a brick wall, and orange leaves fell all around them. Next to that was a picture of my older sister, Liz, seated at the trading desk she runs for Klein amp; Sons. She was talking on the telephone, surrounded by monitors and keyboards and stacks of paper. Her thick blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail, her dark brows were drawn together, and she scowled menacingly at whoever was behind the camera. Beside her picture was another posed portrait, a man and a woman standing at the foot of a curving marble staircase. The man was slender and had the same wavy, gingery hair as Ned but more of it. His pointy features were crowded together on a narrow face that seemed on the verge of some rebuke. The woman beside him was skinny and pale, with odd wiry hair, and dark over-large eyes full of tension and envy. My older brother David and Stephanie, his wife. I worked my jaw around, to loosen it.

At the end of the table were two pictures I hadn’t seen in a long while. The smaller one was in color, though the color had faded over time. It was taken on a beach and showed a tanned fair-haired young man and a dark-haired boy pulling a dinghy out of the surf. The man was stocky and the boy was skinny and pale, and white foam swirled around their knees. The man was laughing, and muscles stood out in his arms and legs as he hauled on a dripping line; the boy gave the camera a surly stare as he tugged- halfheartedly, I recalled- at his own rope. Ned was barely twenty-four then, fresh from B-school and just starting work at Klein amp; Sons. I was no older than Billy Danes. I put the photo down and picked up the one next to it.

It was black-and-white and brittle-looking under the glass. It was of a man and woman, and they were very young. They were outdoors, walking hand-in-hand down stone steps that I knew were not far from here. The woman was small and compactly built and wore a light-colored skirt and a white sleeveless blouse. Her thick fair hair was bound behind her with a scarf. The man was tall and trim, and he wore dark trousers and a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves. He had black hair, combed straight back, and his widow’s peak was pronounced. The woman’s face was full and pretty and there was nothing cold or reproachful in it. The man’s face was pale and angular and not at all remote. In fact, they were both smiling and their eyes were lit with… I’ve never been sure what. Happiness? Anticipation? The thrill of having kicked over all the traces? Whatever it was, they made it look glamorous and sexy and somehow conspiratorial, like they’d just swiped the Hope Diamond and were making their getaway in broad daylight. Actually, they were heading for a friend’s car, a ride to the airport, and a plane to Rome. And the job they had just pulled wasn’t a jewel heist but a City Hall wedding that neither of their families would learn about for several days to come. Her name was Elaine, his was Philip. My parents.

I heard Ned say good-bye and hang up the phone.

“It’s a great picture, isn’t it?” he said. “Janine found it a couple of weeks ago, tucked away in a drawer somewhere. You remember it?”

“I remember.”

“I didn’t. They look happy there, don’t they?” I nodded and put the picture down. Ned came around the desk, gripped my shoulder, and looked me over. He had to look up a few inches to do it. “You finished with Tyne already?” he said. “That was quick.”

“He was very forthcoming,” I said.

Ned smiled and ran a hand through his hair. “That’s great. Well, have a drink and give me your read.” He went to the wall of shelves and pushed on something and a wet bar was revealed. He fixed a cranberry and club soda for me and poured a ginger ale for himself. He carried the glasses over and looked at me expectantly.

“Mostly I think that all his other interviews were scheduled before lunch,” I said. Ned looked puzzled, and I told him my story. His expression went from disbelief, to alarm, to disgust and settled finally in astonished amusement. He shook his head.

“You think he’s still in there?” he asked.

“I’m sure Mrs. K has had him carted away by now.”

“To sleep it off with the fishes, no doubt.” Ned laughed, and looked ten years younger when he did. “You sure you won’t reconsider, Johnny? It’s really a pretty good job, you know.” I held up my hands and shook my head.

“Mrs. K would never approve,” I said. Ned smiled and nodded and rose to refill his glass. He started to say something, but his phone chimed and Mrs. K’s disembodied voice filled the room.

“Your three o’clock is early, Mr. March. They’re in the lobby.”

Ned grimaced. “Shit,” he said softly. The lines deepened around his small mouth and he looked ten years older again. “Sorry to waste your time with this Tyne guy. I’ll make sure the other two are vetted better than he was.” I nodded. “We appreciate your help with this, Johnny- it’s great working with you on it.” I nodded again. “See you Saturday, right?”

“Saturday,” I said, and left.

The conference room doors were open and I looked inside. It was empty and, but for the faint bouquet of an air freshener, you’d never know that Tyne had been there. I passed Mrs. K’s desk on my way out. She made another clicking noise and eyed me warily.

Peter Spiegelman

JM02 – Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home