Hard Stop

NINETEEN

HALFWAY THROUGH THE NEXT DAY I was outside working at a folding bench, hoping to put a few hours into the teak planters I’d promised Frank Entwhistle. And maybe take advantage of the fair weather and the recuperative qualities of manual labor to regain my senses.

So even though I was getting ready to make the call myself, I was disappointed when the little screen on the cell phone told me George Donovan was on the line. I looked out toward the bay, wondering if I still had the arm to go the distance. Then I answered the phone.

“I thought you would have contacted me by now,” he said.

Not if I’d been doing my best to avoid you, I said to myself.

“I was about to.”

“We need to talk,” he said.

“We do.”

“It’s happened.”

“What?”

“I’ve been approached.”

“Where are you?” I asked.

“In Montauk. You can’t come here. Arlis is out with the dogs. We need a place to meet.”

I thought about it.

“You know the park at the bitter end, the one with the lighthouse? Find a comfortable place. I’ll find you.”

“You’re still honoring the deal?” he said. “I need your assurance.”

“I already honored it. I found Iku. We’re now in the ‘find-the-one-who-killed-Iku’ phase.”

“That wasn’t part of the deal.”

I thought he might say that.

“I know it wasn’t, George, but now it has to be.”

More painful silence.

“I’m afraid not. I will see you in an hour.”

Then he hung up.

Montauk always felt like what it was, an outpost at the end of the known universe. There used to be a little downtown, like the ones lining the highway to the west, but the hurricane of 1938 wiped it out. The subsequent reconstruction came mostly after the war, so a lot of the commercial buildings had that spare, expedient, post-war look. But the people living there retained the pride of frontier survival, and managed to express in their endurance an obvious love of place.

The day did its part by being brightly lit and well ventilated. I know there are a lot of beautiful places in the world, but this was the only one I knew that felt as good as it looked. As if to dramatize the thought I hit a band of cool, hazy air blowing in off the ocean over a field where you could pick your own strawberries. Some of the Latinos who had been bent over the ground hugging green mounds stood and looked toward the sea. The others held their focus, plucking and tossing the fruit to rows of children held reluctantly in tow.

The park I’d suggested to Donovan encompassed the easternmost tip of the South Fork, hence the lighthouse that in the old days kept ships from losing themselves on the treacherous shoals, with limited success.

Donovan was there waiting for me on a park bench at the base of the sandy path that led to the lighthouse.

I pulled the pickup into a raised parking lot where I could look down on where Donovan was sitting. He wore white slacks, a blue blazer, soft leather slip-ons without socks and a pink and white pinstriped shirt. He still didn’t look very good, even at that distance.

The park was nearly empty, with only a small herd of tourists halfway up the path to the lighthouse and a couple sitting on a blanket on the lawn leading down to the sea. No Venezuelan assassins, at least within view.

I waited another five minutes before shutting off the engine, then walked down to the park bench. He didn’t see me until I was almost on top of him.

“Hi, George.”

“Sam.”

“I almost brought a friend along, but I didn’t think you wanted the extra company.”

I sat next to him on the park bench. Up close, he looked even worse. Thin and drawn, as if he’d partially evaporated, and a death-grey pallor that added ten years to the way he looked when we last met in Greenwich. Circumstances had finally caught up to him, cancelling his exemption from the penalties of old age.

“This friend of yours, what have you told him,” Donovan asked, “about my situation?”

“Everything I could think of.”

“Which he’ll undoubtedly only discuss with you.”

“As long as I’m alive,” I said.

“Then I wish you a long life.”

“I’m depending on that.”

He leaned back in the bench and crossed his legs, putting his arm up on the backrest. He looked out across the park, as if assessing the quality of the groundskeeping.

“Did you know there’s an inverse corollary between an exceptional IQ and the likelihood of professional success?” Donovan asked.

“I’ve heard that. More mediocritist propaganda.”

“Not if you look at the two of us. I’d say we’re proof positive.”

“My carpentry career’s clicking right along. So you must be right.”

“You know the difference between the brilliant and the merely accomplished?” he asked.

“Net worth?”

“Perspective. Smart people see too much, know too much. They’re too easily distracted by insight and revelation. The thoughts pile up until there’s too much to filter. Perceptive people are ultimately crushed under the weight of their own comprehension. They know the merciless realities of life.”

“Can’t accuse me of that. All I have are happy thoughts,” I said.

“This is what I seem to have lost. Perspective. And predictably enough, my financial prospects are suffering the consequences. Yet I’m no wiser. If anything, I feel as if my intelligence is leaking out of my ears. Doesn’t seem fair.”

“Your brain’s not the only organ you’ve been thinking with lately.”

Donovan uncrossed his legs and sat up straight on the bench. His hand was only a few inches from mine. Like his face, it was the color of rotting dough, covered in tan age spots and etched with veins more black than blue.

“I suppose I deserve that, but I don’t care what you think about me. A typical aging narcissist falling prey to a beautiful young woman. It might have been that, but felt like more. Up until the moment she stopped calling me, I was sure she felt the same way. And I still do. If I’m a fool, so be it. Now that she’s gone, my mind’s a cloud, a blur of outlandish emotion, and all I want to do is run, as fast and as far away as I can.”

“So do it, George. You got the money. Go sit on the porch in Montauk and watch your grandchildren dominate each other out on the front lawn. You’ve got nothing to prove to anyone.”

“If it were that easy.”

“Oh, right. You’ve lost perspective. I’d help you get it back but I’m too busy underachieving.”

Donovan grunted and tried to get more comfortable on the wooden bench.

“Not quite,” he said. “From what I hear you’ve been both busy and productive.”

I tried to look modest.

“I’ve done a few things,” I said.

He looked at the sky, then directly into my eyes.

“It all needs to stop.”

“Who got to you, George? What did they say?”

“You know what they said. The worst possible thing. An offer is on the table. I have the opportunity to choose among an array of potential catastrophes.”

“Let me help you, George.”

He shook his head.

“The only way you can do that is go back to your cottage and forget any of this happened. I’m holding up my end of the arrangement. Our outside counsel is preparing to contact your attorney. A stroke of the pen and you’re a wealthy man.”

“They know about Iku?”

He made a low, humorless sort of laugh.

“Know? They know everything. In intricate detail. Every correspondence, every assignation. I’ve seen the evidence. Damning is too tame a word.”

“Who killed her, George?”

He leaned forward in the bench and put his face in his hands. When he spoke his words were muffled, but I heard what he said.

“One proviso attached to every option I’ve been given is that I force you to cease and desist your efforts in that area.”

“What do they want from you?”

He took his face out of his hands.

“One would think a man who gave up on a nearly perfect life would be a little less persistent,” he said.

“I’m a late bloomer.”

“They want my company. Nothing more than that.”

“I didn’t think that was up to you. The Mandate of ’53 and all that.” He put his head back in his hands. It looked like a comfortable position, and I considered trying it myself. Instead, I lit a cigarette. Without looking up, Donovan moved slightly away from me. Health nut to the end.

“The Mandate of ’53 became moot the day you turned our board meeting into a brawl.”

“Hardly a brawl. One punch. Well deserved.”

“I’d say misplaced,” said Donovan. “You should have saved it for your financial director. Far more deserving.”

“Ozzie Endicott? You asked me about him at your house. You wanted to know if I still talked to him.”

Donovan flicked errant bits of wind-borne tree fluff from his bright white pants.

“Back before you left the company, Marve Judson came to me with an interesting bit of information about Mr. Endicott. He’d been held by the Stamford police for questioning in regard to a drug transaction. Subsequently released, but Marve had an acquaintance on the police force who alerted him. At Marve’s suggestion, we mounted a discreet internal investigation.”

“Discreet for sure. I never heard a thing.”

“Endicott was, in fact, a rather committed drug user. Amphetamines, which are apparently highly addictive. And expensive, especially if your goal is to keep your habit under wraps.”

I finally had a firm picture of Ozzie in my mind. A little wild-eyed, a little frantic, but usually good humored. I’d known the type for years. Driven by the job to go way beyond the job’s requirements. That’s all I thought it was. I never made the effort to know any more than that about Ozzie, or any other employee.

“He embezzled money,” I said.

“Oh yes. Quite a bit. Very clever scheme. The man was remarkably capable. You can achieve a lot if you never go to sleep.”

“Like destroying your job. How come he didn’t?”

Donovan smiled something like a genuine smile.

“I always said you were the smartest guy in the company. Don’t disappoint me now.”

I stood up and shook out my joints, trying to get a little extra blood to flow up into my brain. I tried to picture Marve Judson talking to Donovan, then sitting down with Ozzie. Relishing the moment of omnipotence. Wielding the delicious power of dangerous information. Ozzie’s beloved career in the palm of his hand. What pleasure. What delightful leverage.

I snapped a look at Donovan, who was waiting calmly on the park bench for me to catch up.

“You had him by the balls. He’d do anything you wanted. What did you bastards do to him? Ah, Jesus,” I said, as the jolt of realization thrilled across my mind. “I know what you did. Holy crap.”

I sat down on the grass, unable to move any closer to Donovan at that moment. Afraid of what I might do.

“You had him cook the books so you could sell off my division without seeming to violate the Mandate of ’53,” I said. “All he had to do was hide enough revenue to keep TSS under a certain size. Fontaine got the bargain of the century. You and the other insiders got a tidy jump in stock value and the worst that happened was Mason Thigpen got a sock in the nose.”

Donovan looked a little like a proud parent.

“See? I knew you could do it,” he said. “Unfortunately, that wasn’t the worst that could happen.”

I lay back on the grass and looked at the sky. It had been blue, but was beginning to haze over. I could hear seagulls, but they weren’t in view. I pictured them circling above the north shore, plucking up bivalves to smash on the rocky beach below.

“Somebody found you out,” I said, propping back up on my elbows so I could see his reaction. “How did that happen? Iku?”

His face stayed in neutral.

“How no longer matters,” he said. “The fact is, there are people who know that the sale of your division was not only based on intentional fraud, but that it has exposed the entire company to hostile takeover. You can imagine how my wife and her family will take the news.”

I stood up and brushed off my blue jeans. Not as neatly pressed as Donovan’s white slacks, but more resistant to messy tree life or the salt mist coming in off the sound, which had begun to condense on the park bench. The sun was over my shoulder, so Donovan had to squint to look up at me.

“So what are you planning to do?” he asked.

“Find out who killed Iku Kinjo.”

“If you continue down that path it will cost you a tremendous amount of money. If you’re lucky, that’s all it will cost.”

He said that last part to my back, since I was already heading down that path, walking back under the greying sky and through the freshening breeze, with one eye on a nearby stand of trees and the other on Amanda’s pickup. My hope was to make it all the way back to Oak Point, home of the little bay and the dog, the fading light and a brighter life than I deserved.

The conversation had still left a lot of things unresolved, but at least one burden had been lifted from my already overburdened heart.

I was done with George Donovan. This time for good.