Peter Spiegelman - Death's little helpers

The rest of the way home, I thought about the little I’d learned at Pace-Loyette. As Nina Sachs had gathered, Pace management had no better idea of Danes’s whereabouts than she did, but they were definitely interested- enough to have made some discreet phone calls, anyway, and to have had a meeting with me. But I didn’t think their curiosity- or worry- had led them to dispatch any errand boys uptown to grease palms and ask questions. And it hadn’t been sufficient to get them to call the cops. Or maybe, as Neary had suggested, the imperative to keep a low profile trumped all. Which left them little else to do with the question of Gregory Danes, it seemed, than to wrap some lawyers around it.

It was after three when the taxi dropped me at home. The building was quiet except for my footsteps. I opened windows and soft air worked its way around my apartment. It stirred a faint surprising trace of Jane’s scent and I wondered what she was doing just then. I poured a glass of water and let my messages play. Lauren’s voice came over the speaker.

“Just reminding you about Ned’s, on Saturday. Keith and I will be there at two. See ya.” I’d seen more of my family in the past few months than I had in years- at brunches, birthdays, an anniversary, and even a second cousin’s bar mitzvah. But the rapprochement was a tentative one for all concerned, and Lauren and her husband, Keith, had decided that I should be chaperoned at these events lest I cut and run, or worse. They’d appointed themselves to the job.

After Lauren came the hushed schoolmarm tones of Mrs. Konigsberg, my brother’s assistant. She was about three hundred years old and, before my brother, she had worked for my uncles and my grandfather at Klein amp; Sons. Besides ancient, Mrs. K was precise, rigid, and entirely humorless, and she couldn’t have disapproved of me more if she’d been my own mother.

“Mr. March, this is Ida Konigsberg calling from Klein and Sons,” she said, as if I might not recognize her voice or her name or might think she’d changed employers after all these centuries. “I’m confirming your meeting tomorrow afternoon, at two o’clock, here at our offices.” She recited the address and I laughed out loud, fully expecting her to follow with directions. “You’ll be interviewing Mr. Geoffrey Tyne, whose curriculum vitae you should already have received. The interview will take place in Mr. Ned March’s conference room, next to his office on the seventh floor. Mr. March would like to meet with you afterward for about fifteen minutes, to discuss your impressions of Mr. Tyne. Please call me to confirm.” I didn’t dare do otherwise.

Mrs. K’s call ended in a discreet click, and then Jane’s voice was there. There was noise on the line and other voices in the background.

“I’m with the lawyers again, and it looks like I’ll be here late.” I heard the rueful smile in her voice. “Leave a message, tell me what you’re up to. Maybe we can have dinner, if you don’t mind waiting.” I heard someone call her name. “Got to jump. Call me.”

I’d learned that, to Jane, late could mean anything from nine till after midnight, and I called to tell her voice mail that tonight I couldn’t wait. Tonight I’d be working. I’d made two failed attempts to speak with Irene Pratt; the third time, I figured, would be the charm. I opened up my laptop and started my browser.

There were three Irene Pratts in the metropolitan area, but only one in Manhattan- on the Upper West Side. I dialed her number, and an answering machine picked up. I recognized the quick talk and the Long Island accent. I didn’t leave a message. I couldn’t count on finding Pratt at home for at least a couple of hours, so I heated some coffee and returned to the court records databases and my list of the complaints against Danes and Pace-Loyette.

The list of the aggrieved was long and varied- from pension funds in the Midwest to coupon clippers in the Sun Belt and day traders on both coasts- and their allegations ranged from plain old negligence and conflict of interest to elaborate conspiracy and fraud. Most, though not all, involved Piedmont Science. Some of the claims had been resolved, settled out of sight for undisclosed sums and with all concerned silenced by nondisclosure agreements, and some were still pending, drifting slowly through a limbo of depositions and discoveries, but none of them had yet made it to an actual judgment.

Mixed in with the investor suits were others, unrelated to Danes’s job as an analyst. There was a six-year-old action- ultimately dismissed- against Danes and every other shareholder in his old 90th Street co-op, brought by a bicycle messenger who’d sprained his ankle in the building’s lobby. And there was an eight-year-old claim, brought by Danes, which involved chipped granite countertops, a broken sink, and an unrepentant contractor. It had dried up after five months. At the bottom of my list was the ten-year-old case of Sachs v. Danes, the divorce proceedings. Seeing it there reminded me that I owed Nina a progress report, and I called her before I headed uptown. She answered on the eighth ring, and she was distracted and barely civil.

“I’m working, for chrissakes,” she muttered, and I heard her lighter snap. “You can come over tonight if you want to talk.” I told her I would.

Irene Pratt lived in the upper seventies, on a leafy street of brownstones between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues. It was nearly six when I got there, and the narrow sidewalks were crowded with people walking dogs and toting groceries and heading for expensive workouts. Pratt’s building was a Romanesque town house of rough, tobacco-colored stone. It was five stories tall, with narrow arched windows, a cavernous entryway, and lots of decorative masonry. There was a video intercom system at the door. Judging from the buttons, there was only one apartment per floor. Pratt was on the third. I buzzed and waited and nothing happened. It was still early and I wasn’t surprised. I walked down the street.

There was a bar on the corner of Columbus, with small tables out front. I found one with a clear view of Pratt’s building and ordered a ginger ale. I stretched out my legs and worked my way through a bowl of cashews while the soft air grew dark. Noise and smoke and the smell of liquor thickened around me, and with them- suddenly- came a strong and acrid nostalgia.

It could have been the light that set it off- the ripening purple sky and the swelling shadows, the sense of recklessness and promise that seemed to fall with evening- or it could have been the jumble of voices- laughing, flirting, boasting and arch, eager to please, studiously bored, and all a little slurred. It could have been the tiny buzz of danger as the customers grew louder and less cautious, or the possibility of violence- however remote- that rode with every jostling arm and elbow. It could have been the anonymous feel of being alone in the midst of a raucous crowd that did it, or my own incipient restlessness, scratching in my head like a low-grade fever. Whatever the cues, the memories- of other bars and other evenings, years agowere powerful and close enough to taste. Columbus Avenue was a world away from Burr County, and from the dives I’d haunted in the months after Anne’s death. But the jagged, angry feeling that was always with me then was abruptly back again, lodged in my chest like a hunk of broken glass.

Back then it was broken glass and a head full of static, a furious buzzing that I could never silence but could only distract. And every night, for four blurry months, I did just that, trading grief and guilt for motion, for drink and drugs, for violence and sex. I crashed along the back roads with my headlights dark and a chemical fire in my brain, and I made the rounds of places like the Rind and Buddy’s Fox and every other bucket of blood in the county. When I paused it was only to pass out, and when I came to I was often bruised and battered, or else I was sprawled alongside women whose names I never knew and who were never pleased to see me in the light of day. After a while, I took my act to the neighboring counties, to spare my colleagues the bother and embarrassment of cleaning up after me. It was only luck that no one got killed.