Richard Greener - The Knowland Retribution

Carol Ann liked sitting at poolside reading the paper, lifting her eyes to catch the moment when Billy Mac rose like a god, or an angel. On this particular morning she was looking at the new issue of Fortune and her eye caught a story she figured might interest him. Depending on the look in his eyes, the look that told her how much of a good time he was having, she might mention the story when he got out, or wait until he was done for the day.

When she lifted her eyes from the magazine to see him jump, she saw that Billy Mac lay on his side, along the length of the diving board, left leg dangling, something dripping into the water. She screamed, and as though the vibration launched a hideous wind that pushed him off, he rolled over and hit the water, making a sickening splash. Carol Ann fought to bring his leaden form to the side. Once she had him out of the water, white and floppy, on his back, she saw the walnut-sized hole in his chest and the rivulet of blood creeping across the smooth terra cotta surrounding the pool. The blood was coming from what proved to be a ragged crater beneath his left shoulder blade.

The last thing on Carol Ann’s mind as she yelled for the servants and fumbled at her cell phone was the name she’d heard Billy mention more than once before, or the unhappy fate of Christopher Hopman, whose story had caught her eye a scant ninety seconds before.

A month after Christopher Hopman’s murder, Isobel Gitlin found herself preparing an obit for Billy MacNeal, the baby billionaire. Also shot to death. Also by high-powered rifle, from a distance. Also taken in silence, the crime absent any trace of perpetrator identity, possible motive, or useful physical clues. Absent, in any case, evidence the police admitted to having. Hopman on a golf course, MacNeal on a diving board. The two of them tied together by a billion dollars.

Isobel snatched the glasses from her nose as though they threatened her view of the truth. What magnitude of coincidence could possibly account for a thing like this? She shook her head and replaced the specs. At seven thirty that morning, Isobel began reviewing the histories of companies comprising First and Second Houston Holding from their inceptions. Now, midway through her third container of coffee, she noticed that Second Houston, which, she remembered, had been sold to Hopman’s Alliance Inc., was also parent to the villainous Knowland amp; Sons. Isobel felt the kind of thrill she imagined her hairy ancestors experiencing with the mind-shaking revelation that the sharp stone embedded in their heels might do the same to a rabbit’s belly. The caffeine did not calm her down.

She told her editor that she had discovered a link between the killings of MacNeal and Hopman, and therefore a possible story. He told her she was suffering from the heat. She outlined the facts she had, but he only heard her out; he did not listen. “Jesus!” he thought, as Isobel talked, “doesn’t she know this is the fucking obituary page.” Then he shook his head and said, “Very hard case to make off what you’ve got. Really. Not worth pushing further.” He wanted nothing more to do with it, or her, for that matter. When he considered Isobel Gitlin, which was hardly ever, Ed Macmillan had only contempt for what he figured was her free ride. He had worked to get where he was. Macmillan was New Irish, very much in favor at the Times . He was not the red-nosed, hard-drinking Fordham product native to New York newsrooms in nostalgic yesteryears. He was in his early forties, Cornell, health-club fit, a white wine drinker. No spots on his one- hundred-dollar tie. He did, however, affect a manner that he believed echoed an earlier, ballsier day. He imagined himself a menacing Lou Grant. Isobel knew him to be a complete asshole.

“Look,” he said to her, “if it’s news, we have news people working it. If it’s an obit, it’s you. That’s what you do. You write obituaries. So go do one.” She pushed back, starting her pitch all over again until Macmillan interrupted her.

“Dog days of summer,” he told Isobel, with a cold, dry chuckle. Then he sought to end the matter by saying, “The heat’s getting to you. We don’t sell the New York Times at the supermarket checkout. Why don’t you try a weekend at the beach?”

Isobel watched Ed’s little smirk spread and become a chaste, hence pointless, leer. His undistinguished, knob-nosed face turned into a caricature of adolescent self-regard.

“Do you know where the term comes from?” Isobel said. “‘Dog days of summer’? Do you know what that means?” She stuttered severely on “do” and “dog.”

He shrugged, condescension rising with sweet cologne. “Sweetie, even the dogs can’t take the summer heat. They walk around with their tongues hanging out, huffing and puffing and beat to hell. It makes their little doggy minds go whacko. Watch out it doesn’t happen to you.”

“No,” replied Isobel. “It’s from the da-da-Dog Star. It’s how the Indians knew it was the height of summer. The da-Dog Star is the brightest object in the night sky in August.”

She paused, attempting to follow that up with her most ferocious, cobra-snaky stare.

He rolled his eyes and waved her away.

Isobel Gitlin’s byline topped Billy MacNeal’s obituary, but nowhere in it was she permitted to mention Hopman’s name.

Tom Maloney thought it was a very strange thing for Nathan Stein to say. “That could have been me,” he said the day after Hopman was murdered. “Hopman was always asking me to play golf with him. ‘Come up to Boston and bring your clubs.’ Shit, I hate golf.” And then Nathan said it once again: “That could have been me.” The little man had entered Maloney’s office seconds before, shoulders hunched, shuffling. He leaned over the front of Tom’s desk, gray eyes moist behind silver-rimmed spectacles, voice subdued, mouth showing no tension, almost at rest. Tom said nothing, but it struck him that Nathan Stein obviously believed Christopher Hopman’s killing had been a random act of violence, that Hopman was murdered purely by chance. No such possibility ever occurred to Tom. Why, he asked himself, did he think it might not be? A man like Hopman, he reasoned, a man who played under the boards with elbows flying, had enemies. It was only a thought, and Maloney quickly relegated it to a far corner of his perpetually crowded mind. “You know, Nathan, many people think there’s a reason for everything.” In rare moments Tom’s better nature got the better of him and he could not deny or conceal his continued affection for Nathan Stein. Somewhere in the daily strain of minding, handling, nursing, he could actually experience sympathy for the small man around whom his life revolved. This was such a moment. He wanted to give it oxygen.

“You really think so?” Nathan looked at him with a curious, sentimental expression.

“At times I do believe that,” Tom said, nodding benignly.

“Well, I guess you may be right. Thanks for being here, Tom.”

Maloney didn’t think about Hopman’s killing again until a month later when reviewing a proposal by the Whitestone Broadcast Group, which desired to compete with the industry giants and required $465 million to do it. Tom liked the package. Broadcast ownership fascinated him. You get your license, your exclusive franchise, straight from the federal government and pay nothing for its asset value. Not much different from getting a driver’s license. You make money-often a fortune-using the public’s airwaves, and when you’ve grown tired of it, or for any other reason that strikes your fancy, you sell the now inflated asset value of the very same license you got for nothing. “What a racket,” Tom thought. The Whitestone people didn’t have a chance in hell of achieving their goal, and with a flicker of regret Tom tossed it on his pile of deals he’d have nothing to do with. CNBC was droning from one of the lineup of monitors on his wall. Tom heard the cute anchor, the one with the tiny waist and the collagen puffed lips, announce that Houston whiz-kid Billy MacNeal had been murdered. It happened at his home, she reported, right in front of his wife. On his diving board. Maloney was astonished. Mother of God! “In his own fucking house!” he thought. Jesus Christ!