Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

“Oh, right.” He wrestled with a big metal spatula. “Nick, the cops have any idea who did it?”

Nick hesitated, then shook his head. “They’re guessing it’s a downsized employee. But I could’ve told ’em that.”

“That narrows it down to five thousand and sixty-seven. You don’t have a security system?”

“Not good enough, obviously. I mean, we’re in a gated community.”

“Jesus, that could happen to us too.”

“Thanks for being so sensitive.”

“No, I mean — sorry, but as the CFO I’m just as responsible as you are for the layoffs, and — God, you must be spooked as shit.”

“Of course I am. But most of all I’m fucking pissed off.”

“The cops aren’t going to do anything, are they?”

“They all know someone we laid off. Alarm goes off at my house, they’re not going to get off their stools at Dunkin’ Donuts.”

Spencer ran across the lawn with a bottle of beer in one hand and a glass in the other. “Here you go, Mr. Conover,” he said, handing the beer and glass to Nick.

“Thanks, Spencer.” Nick set down the glass and struggled with the complicated top of the Grolsch. He’d actually never had a bottle of the stuff outside of a bar, where they poured it for you.

Spencer circled his pudgy little arms around his dad’s waist. Scott reached out his free hand and grabbed his son back, made a grunting sound. “Hey, sweetie,” he said. His face was red from the heat, and he blinked the smoke out of his eyes.

“Hey, Dad.”

Nick smiled. So Spencer was a little kid, too, not just a Jeopardy champ.

“Shit,” Scott said, as one of his burgers slipped through the grate and into the fire.

“Do this often?”

“It’s my only hobby. Understand, my idea of a good time is filling out my tax return using Roman numerals.” He fiddled some more with the metal spatula. “Shit,” he said again, as another burger dropped into the flames. “You like well done?”

The architect who was doing the renovations to the Conovers’ kitchen was a stodgy but affable man named Jeremiah Claflin. He wore round black glasses of the sort that some of the famous architects affected — that Japanese guy, that Swiss guy, Nick forgot their names if he ever knew them — and his white hair contrasted pleasantly with his ruddy face and curled over his shirt collar. Laura had interviewed him and several other architects from Fenwick and the surrounding towns as intensively as she’d interviewed nanny candidates years ago. It was important to her that the architect she hired not only had a portfolio of projects she admired, but also wasn’t too stubborn, too much of an artiste that he wouldn’t do exactly what she wanted.

Nick got along with Claflin, as he got along with just about everyone, but he realized early on that the architect found Nick frustrating. Sure, he was pleased to be working on the house that belonged to Stratton’s CEO — that gave him certain bragging rights — and since Laura had chosen nothing but the most high-end, most ridiculously expensive appliances and cabinets and all that, Claflin was making a boatload of money for not that much design work. But Nick wasn’t all that interested in the fussy little details that Laura had had such patience for, and there sure as hell were a million fussy little details. The decisions never seemed to end. Did he want the kitchen counters to have a full bullnose or half bullnose or an ogee edge? How much of an overhang? How tall did he want the backsplash to be? A self-rimming sink or an undermount? What about the height of the countertop? Jesus, Nick had a company to run.

Claflin was forever faxing him drawings and lists of questions. Nick would inevitably tell the architect to just do whatever Laura had told him to do. He really didn’t give a damn about what the kitchen looked like. What he cared about — was obsessed about, really — was that it be done precisely the way Laura wanted. The renovations had been Laura’s last big project, pretty much all she thought about, talked about, in the months before the accident. Nick suspected that part of the reason she’d poured so much of herself into it was that the kids were getting older, and being a mom was no longer a full-time job. After Lucas was born, she’d quit her job teaching art history at St. Thomas More College. She tried to get her teaching position back when the kids were older, but she couldn’t. She’d been mommy-tracked. She missed teaching, missed the intellectual engagement.

Laura was by far the smarter one in the marriage. Nick had gone to Michigan State on a full-boat hockey scholarship, busted his hump to get C’s and B’s, while Laura had breezed through Swarthmore summa cum laude . It was like she had a deep well of creative energy inside her that needed to be tapped or she’d go crazy, and the renovations filled a need for her.

But there was more to it: Laura had wanted to knock down the sterile old kitchen, which looked like no one ever used it, and turn it into a hearth, a great room where the whole family could gather. Laura, who was an excellent cook, could make dinner while the kids did their homework or hung out around the kitchen island. The whole family could be together comfortably.

The least Nick could do to honor her was to make sure the damned kitchen was done the way she wanted.

Their marriage had been far from perfect — hell, they’d been arguing the night she was killed, as he’d never forget — but Nick had learned you choose your battles. You made unspoken deals sometimes, ceded turf. Laura, who’d grown up in a shambling Victorian on the Hill, a pediatrician’s kid, wanted to live a certain way, namely better than the way in which she’d been brought up. She wanted the elegance and style she never had growing up in a house that was always in some state of chaos and disrepair. She subscribed to Architectural Digest and Elle Decor and half a dozen other magazines that all looked the same, and she was always tearing out photos and two-page spreads and adding them to a steadily thickening file folder that she might as well have labeled DREAM HOUSE. To Nick, having a house with more than two bedrooms and a backyard and a kitchen you didn’t eat in already bordered on unimaginable luxury.

Claflin was waiting for him in the kitchen when he arrived, twenty minutes late. From the family room Nick could hear Julia and her best friend, Emily, playing a computer game called The Sims in which they created their own creepily real-looking human beings and bent them to their will. Julia and Emily were shrieking with laughter over something.

“Busy day?” Claflin asked. His tone was jovial, but his eyes betrayed annoyance at being kept waiting.

Nick apologized as he shook the architect’s hand, and then his eye was immediately caught by something. The countertops were in. He went up to the island and realized that, even to his untrained eye, something looked wrong.

“I see they’ve put a new alarm system in,” Claflin said. “Fast work.”

Nick nodded. He’d noticed the white touch pads on the wall as he entered. “The island,” he said. “That’s not what Laura wanted.”

She’d designed a big island in the center of the kitchen around which the whole family could gather, sitting on stools, while she made dinner. But you sure as hell couldn’t sit at this thing. It had walls of black granite that came up about two feet, no overhang, no place for stools.

Claflin beamed. “None of your guests will have to see the cooking mess from the dining table,” he said. “Yet it works perfectly as a food-prep station. Clever, don’t you think?”

Nick hesitated. “You can’t sit at it,” he said.