Peter Spiegelman - Death's little helpers

I swallowed some ginger ale, and for an instant it tasted smoky and bitter and my throat closed up. These were long-absent feelings, but they were more than familiar. They dwelled someplace below conscious recall and were bound in me like muscle memory. Like riding a bike. And they scared the hell out of me.

A shudder ran through me and I looked up the street and saw Irene Pratt, walking east from Amsterdam. She had a purse and a big leather tote bag on her shoulder and a plastic grocery sack in her hand, and her gait was awkward. Her head was down, but I recognized the thick chestnut hair and the pink blouse.

I watched her fumble for her keys and disappear inside. I gave her twenty minutes- time enough to sort the mail, put the groceries away, check messages, change clothes; then I took out my cell phone and punched her number. When she answered, I spoke fast.

“Ms. Pratt, this is John March. We spoke yesterday morning, and I stopped by your office this afternoon-”

She cut me off. “Jesus Christ, what the hell are you calling me at home for? What do you want from me?”

“I want to talk about Gregory Danes, Ms. Pratt. I’m trying to find him, and I thought maybe you could help.”

She heaved an exasperated sigh. “I told you, we can’t-”

It was my turn to cut her off. “I know what your orders are, Ms. Pratt. I’m at the bar on the corner, sitting at a table outside. I’ll be here for another half hour if you want to talk.” I clicked off.

It took her forty-five minutes, and her steps were tentative. She’d changed into jeans and sneakers and a blue T-shirt from an electronics trade show in Las Vegas. She was small-breasted and slender, and her arms were soft looking. There was a gold watch on her wrist and a plastic clip holding back her heavy hair. She stood near my table and looked down at me.

“You’re still here,” she said. There was a dark shine to her eyes and more color in her face. A light perfume wafted toward me, something with lilac. I nodded.

“Sit,” I said, but she didn’t.

“What do you want from me?”

“I told you, I’m trying to find your boss. And I’m trying to find someone who cares enough that he’s missing to help me out. I thought that might be you.” Pratt squinted at me but did not speak. “Sit,” I said again. I pulled out the metal chair next to mine. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

She rested her hand on the back of the chair and shook her head. “Why do you say missing?”

“I don’t know what else to call it. The guy’s gone away- no one knows where- and he hasn’t come back when he said he would. And no one has heard from him since the day he left. What do you call it?”

Pratt bit her lower lip. “There’s nothing I can tell you. I don’t know where he is, and the last I heard from him was his voice mail, telling me he was taking time off.”

A waitress orbited the table; I caught her eye and she came closer.

“Another ginger ale for me, and…” The waitress and I looked at Irene Pratt, who looked irritated, and then resigned.

“I don’t know… a Bud, I guess.” The waitress went away, and Pratt looked down at me.

“Sit,” I said. Pratt pulled the chair out and sat at its edge. “Nuts?” I offered her the bowl. She ignored them.

“I don’t know where the hell he is,” she said softly. She played with the clasp of her gold watch. Her hands were small, and her nails were clipped short and unvarnished.

“How long have you worked with him?” She looked up at me and I noticed the lines around her eyes and mouth. I put her age at thirty-five.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” she said.

“It has to do with how well you know him, which has to do with how much help you might be to me.”

Pratt wrinkled her brow and the waitress came. I drank some ginger ale. Pratt drank her Bud from the bottle.

“I’ve worked for him since I got out of B-school- almost a dozen years,” she said. “And I guess I know him as well as anybody- better, maybe.”

“You knew him when he was married?”

She smiled sourly and nodded. “And during the divorce,” she said.

“You know his wife?”

Another sour smile. “The Brooklyn Frida Kahlo? I met her once or twice, before the bullets started flying.” She drank some more Bud and picked a nut from the bowl.

“Their breakup was ugly?”

Pratt laughed. “Like you wouldn’t believe.” She took another drink and shook her head. “I’m amazed they got through it without somebody being dead. ’Course, I’m amazed they got together in the first place, or ever had a kid.” Another drink and more head shaking. “I don’t know why people do it.” I wasn’t sure what it was exactly, but I didn’t ask. Her beer was gone, and I waved to the waitress for another.

“He fool around?”

She frowned. “Is that why you want to talk to me? You think we had something going?”

The thought had occurred to me, but I didn’t say so. The waitress brought another beer, another ginger ale, and a fresh bowl of nuts. Pratt took a swallow.

“Well, that’s bullshit,” she said. “Old bullshit, too. Jesus, I’d have to be crazy… His wife tried to make something out of that in the divorce, but it didn’t fly. And she had plenty more to sink her teeth into.”

“Meaning he did fool around?” Pratt nodded. “A lot?” Another nod. “With anyone in particular?”

“Back then? With no one in particular, and everyone he could.” She drank some more Bud and looked at the bottle and then at me. “Not that Greg was some kind of sex machine. In fact, I always thought there was something… I don’t know… kind of neutral about him- sexually, I mean.” Pratt picked another nut from the bowl. “But what the hell do I know? I guess what I’m saying is I think the fooling around was more an ego thing than a sex thing for him.”

I nodded. It usually is. Pratt hitched her chair closer to the table and put her bottle on the tabletop. It was nearly empty.

“Was the divorce rough on him?”

“Oh, yeah, it was a big ego bruise. Losing the kid, and a big pile of dough, and his wife- to another woman- he was a goddamn mess.”

Pratt sat back and crossed her ankle over her knee. A strand of hair had worked itself loose from her clip and fell across her cheek, and her eyes were unfocused behind their glasses. She looked young and bookish in the fading light. She had hold of a thread now, and I didn’t want her to lose it.

“Was he as bad then as he has been lately?” I asked.

She shook her head slowly. “No… that was different. That was just one thing- just one part of his life, I guess. And even though it pissed him off something fierce, the rest of his life- the work- was going fine. Better than fine. Now it’s all turned to shit.”

“I guess it’s been a rough few years for everyone in your department,” I said. I pushed the nut bowl toward her. She took a handful and looked over my shoulder at the crowds- heavier now- that passed along the sidewalks. The bar was packed, and the voices and the music and the traffic sounds ran together in a blur of white noise. The sun was all but gone, and sodium lamps and neon tinted the faces around us. Pratt killed the Bud, placed the bottle carefully on the table, and looked at me.

“A nightmare,” she said softly. “You wouldn’t-”

The words caught in her throat and she looked down and swallowed a couple of times. Our waitress spun by, and I motioned for another round. Pratt looked up at me.

“For a while there, you couldn’t escape the stories- in the papers, on TV, all over the Web- it was fucking open season on stock analysts.” A bitter smile crossed her face and faded to a grimace. “If you read enough of them, you’d think all we did was sit around and dream up lies to tell the widows and orphans- when we weren’t busy sucking up to CEOs and cashing our bonus checks, that is. They died down finally, the stories and the bad jokes, but it’s a different world now. The department’s not even half the size it used to be, and the pay…” Pratt shook her head and picked up her empty beer bottle and put it down again.