Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

Returning to the living room, she stood there, waiting to get his attention, but he kept watching the baseball game. She cleared her throat. Nothing.

She said, “Leon, honey, can I talk to you for a second?”

“Sure.”

“Could you look at me?”

He muted the TV, finally, and turned.

“Baby, I thought you were going to make us both supper.”

“I didn’t know when you were getting back.”

“But I said...” She bit her lip. She was not going to yell at him. She was not going to be the one to start the quarreling, not this time. She softened her voice a bit. “I asked you to make dinner for us, right?”

“I figured you’d eat whenever you got home, Shorty. Don’t want to make something’s gonna get cold.”

She nodded. Paused. By now she knew the script by heart. But our deal, our agreement, was that you make dinner, clean up, you know I can’t do everything. And he says, How come you can’t do what you did before? You had time to do that stuff before. And she says, I need help, Leon, that’s the point. I get home exhausted. And he says, How do you think I feel, sitting here like a good-for-nothing piece of shit? At least you got a job.

That worked for a long time, that guilt thing. But then he began to take it to another level, talking about how cooking and cleaning, that was woman’s work, and how come all of a sudden he’s expected to do woman’s work, was this all because he wasn’t bringing home a paycheck? And by now she wants to scream, woman’s work? Woman’s work? What makes this woman’s work? And can’t you at least pick up after yourself? And so it would go, tedious and mind-numbing and pointless.

“Okay,” she said.

She was working six cases, three of them active, one a homicide. You couldn’t really focus on more than one at a time; tonight was Andrew Stadler. She placed the accordion file on the couch next to her, and while Leon watched the Tigers and drank himself into a stupor, she read over the files. She liked to read case files just before she went to sleep. She believed that her unconscious kept working on things, poking and prodding, turning things over with its gimlet eye, saw things more clearly than she did awake.

How Andrew Stadler’s body ended up in a Dumpster on the five hundred block of Hastings baffled her. So did the fake crack. His diagnosed schizophrenia — did that fit in anywhere? Obviously she’d have to talk to his boss at Stratton, and the Employee Relations director too. See if there’d been any indication of drug use.

She was tempted to ask Leon about Stratton, about the model shop, if he knew anything about it. Maybe he’d even run across Stadler in the factory some time, or knew someone who knew him. She was, in fact, just about to say something when she turned to look at him, saw his glazed eyes, his defeated face, and decided not to. Any little thing she mentioned about the job these days was like probing a bad tooth for him. It reminded him of how she had a job she was involved in, and how he didn’t.

Not worth the pain, she decided.

When the game was over, he went to bed, and she followed. As she brushed her teeth and washed her face, she debated whether to put on her usual long T-shirt or a teddy. They hadn’t had sex in more than six months, and not because she didn’t want it. He’d lost all interest. But she needed it, needed to regain that physical closeness. Otherwise...

By the time she got into bed, Leon was snoring.

She slipped in beside him, clicked off her bedside lamp, and was soon asleep.

She dreamed of Tiffany Akins, dying in her arms. The little girl in the SpongeBob pajamas. The girl who could have been her own. Who could have been herself. She dreamed of her father, of that moment when Cassie Stadler called her father Daddy.

And then her gimlet-eyed subconscious kicked something upstairs, and her eyes came open. She sat up slowly.

It was all too clean. An absence of evidence.

Not just the daubs of pharmaceutical-grade starch on the plastic bags wrapped around the body. This indicated that the body had been moved by someone wearing surgical gloves, someone who was careful about not leaving fingerprints. That in itself revealed a degree of caution not often found in drug murder cases. But neither was there any particulate matter on the body, no fibers, none of the normal trace evidence you always found on the body of a victim. Even the treads on the victim’s shoes, where you always found dirt, had been brushed clean.

She remembered, too, how clean the body was at the autopsy. She remembered the pathologist saying, “He looks more like a house case than a police case.”

That was it; that was the anomaly. The body had been fastidiously cleaned, gone over by an expert. By someone who knew what the police looked for.

Andrew Stadler’s body hadn’t been disposed of by some crack dealer in a panic. It had been carefully, methodically placed in a Dumpster by someone who knew what he was doing.

It took her a long time to fall back asleep.

“This stuff tastes like twigs,” Julia said.

Nick couldn’t stop himself from laughing out loud. The front of the box had a photograph of two smiling people, a little Asian girl and a blond Nordic-looking boy. They weren’t smiling about the cereal, that was for sure.

“It’s good for you,” he said.

“How come I always have to have healthy cereal? Everyone else in my class gets to have whatever they want for breakfast.”

“I doubt that.”

“Paige gets to have Froot Loops or Cap’n Crunch or Apple Jacks every morning.”

“Paige...” Normally the parental responses came quickly to him, autopilot, but this morning he wasn’t thinking very clearly. He worried about taking the sleeping pill so many days in a row. It was probably addictive. He wondered whether Julia or Lucas or Marta had heard anything two nights before. “Paige doesn’t do well in school because she doesn’t start off her day with a healthy breakfast.” Sometimes he couldn’t believe the crap he said aloud, the shameless propaganda. When he was a kid, he ate whatever the hell he wanted for breakfast, sugary shit like Quisp and Quake and Cocoa Puffs, and he did just fine in school. He didn’t know, actually, if all kids were forced to eat healthy breakfasts by their parents these days, or if it was just Laura who’d insisted on it. Whatever, he observed the Law of Healthy Breakfast as if it were the Constitution.

“Paige is in my math group,” Julia countered.

“Good for her. I don’t care if she eats chocolate cake for breakfast.” The TV had been set up on a table in this temporary corner of the kitchen. The Today show was on, but right now there was a local commercial for Pajot Ford, always an annoying ad. John Pajot, the owner, was also the pitchman — hell, he paid for the ads, he could star in them if he wanted to — and he always did them wearing a hunting outfit. He made puns about saving “bucks” and “racking up” savings.

“Where’s your brother?” he asked.

She shrugged, staring balefully at the cereal. It actually did look like stuff gathered from the ground in a forest. “Asleep, probably.”

“All right, just have some yogurt, then.”

“But I don’t like the kind we have. It doesn’t taste good.”

“It’s what we have. That’s your choice. Yogurt or... twigs.”

“But I like strawberry.”

“I’ll ask Marta to get more strawberry. In the meantime we have vanilla. It’s good.” Marta was doing laundry. He’d have to remember to ask her to add strawberry yogurt to her shopping list. Also some healthy cereal that didn’t taste like twigs.

“No, it’s not. It’s the organic kind. Their vanilla tastes funny.”