Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

Koopmans, who seemed surprised to see Roy Bugbee, placed two sheets of copy paper on the counter in the long narrow lab room where they fumed for fingerprints. He slit the bottom of each little envelope with a disposable scalpel and tapped out the contents onto the paper.

“Like I said, green dirt,” Koopmans said. He and Audrey both wore surgical masks so that their breath wouldn’t blow away the dirt. Bugbee did not.

Audrey peered closely. “Would it help to put it under a binocular microscope?”

“Happy to. But I’ve already done it, and there’s nothing more to see.” He sifted the tiny pile with a wooden applicator. “Sand, some kind of fine green powder, some fragments of what looks like pellets, maybe. Take it over to the state lab, if you want, but they’re just going to tell you what I’ve just said. And it’ll take ’em six weeks to tell you.”

“Christ,” said Bugbee, “you don’t need a microscope for this shit.”

“Oh, is that right,” said Koopmans, giving Audrey a quick look.

“You don’t have a lawn, obviously,” Bugbee said. “That’s hydroseed.”

“Hydroseed,” said Koopmans.

“Which is what, exactly?” Audrey asked.

“It’s grass seed and, I don’t know, ground-up newspaper and shit they spray. To start a new lawn. Hate the shit, myself — full of weed seed. I call it ‘hydroweed.’”

“But it’s green,” Audrey said.

“That’s the dye powder,” Koopmans said. “And the pellets — that’s the mulch.” He pulled at his chin with his thumb and forefinger.

“Well, you saw the Stadler home,” Audrey said. “I didn’t see any hydroseed, did you?”

“Naw,” said Bugbee, cocky. “A shitty lawn. All crabgrass and broadleaf weeds. Guys notice stuff like that.”

“If you’re lawn-obsessed,” Koopmans said. “Is it possible your guy had some part-time job doing landscaping work or something?”

“No,” Audrey said. “He could barely hold on to his job at Stratton. No, I suspect he got that stuff under his fingernails from wherever he went. Maybe — probably — the night he was killed.”

The Mount Pleasant Cemetery was not the biggest burial ground in Fenwick Township, nor especially well tended. It sat on a high bluff above a busy highway and seemed forlorn, even for a cemetery. Nick had never been here before. Then again, he hated cemeteries and avoided them whenever possible. When he had to attend a funeral, he went to the church or funeral home and missed this part. Laura’s death had made burials harder, not easier.

But he was late. He’d missed the service at the funeral home, having been unable to reschedule a major teleconference with the CEOs of Steelcase and Herman Miller to discuss a lobbying effort against an idiotic bill before Congress.

He parked his Suburban along a curb near where a ceremony was going on. There was a small clutch of people in dark clothing, maybe ten or twelve people in all. There was a pastor, a black woman, an elderly couple, five or six guys who might have worked with Stadler, a pretty young woman who had to be the man’s daughter. She was petite, with big eyes and short, sort of chopped-looking punk hair. The paper had said she was twenty-nine and lived in Chicago.

Nick approached tentatively, heard the pastor, standing beside the casket, say: “Bless this grave that the body of our brother Andrew may sleep here in peace until You awaken him to glory, when he will see You face to face and know the splendor of the eternal God, who lives and reigns, now and forever.” The roaring traffic obliterated some of his words.

A couple of the mourners turned to look at him. The Stratton guys recognized him, their eyes lingering a moment longer. Nick thought he saw surprise, maybe a flash or two of indignation, though he wasn’t sure. The beautiful daughter looked dazed, like a deer caught in the headlights. Near her stood the black woman, who was quite attractive as well. She looked at Nick, her glance piercing, tears running down her cheeks. Nick wondered who she was. There weren’t that many blacks in town.

He wasn’t prepared for the sight of the burnished mahogany casket, sitting atop the lowering device, Nick remembered from Laura’s burial, which was hidden behind drapes of green crushed velvet. It jolted him. Somehow it was even more brutal, that tall, rounded mahogany coffin, than seeing Andrew Stadler’s dead body crumpled on his lawn. It was more final, more real . This was a man with a family — a daughter, at least — and friends. He might have been a dangerous, unmedicated schizophrenic — but he was somebody’s daddy too. This lovely young woman with the spiky hair and porcelain skin. Tears sprang to Nick’s eyes. He was embarrassed.

The black woman glanced at him again. Who was she?

The Stratton guys looked at him again, no doubt noticing his tears and inwardly rolling their eyes at the hypocrisy. Slasher Nick weeping at the grave of a guy he laid off, they had to be thinking.

When it was over, and the coffin was lowered smoothly and silently into the grave, the mourners began tossing clods of earth and flowers onto the coffin. Some of them embraced the daughter, clutching her hand, murmuring condolences. When the moment seemed right, he approached her.

“Ms. Stadler, I’m Nick Conover. I’m the—”

“I know who you are,” she replied coolly. She had the tiniest stud on the right side of her nose, a glint of light.

“I didn’t know your father personally, but I wanted to tell you how sorry I am. He was a valued employee.”

“So valued that you fired him.” She spoke in a quiet tone, but her bitterness was obvious.

“The layoffs have been difficult for all of us. So many deserving people lost their jobs.”

She sighed as if the subject wasn’t worth discussing any further. “Yeah, well, everything started to fall apart for my dad when he got forced out.”

He’d steeled himself against anger, given how often he met former Stratton employees, but this he wasn’t quite prepared for, not here in a cemetery, from a woman who was burying her father. “It’s a terrible thing he had to go through.” He noticed the black woman watching the exchange with interest, though she was far enough away that she might not have been able to hear what they were saying.

Stadler’s daughter smiled ruefully. “Let’s get one thing straight, Mr. Conover. As far as I’m concerned, you killed my dad.”

Leon’s oldest sister, LaTonya, was a very large woman with an imperious way about her, adamant in all her opinions, though maybe you had to be to raise six kids. Audrey liked being around her — she was everything Audrey wasn’t, bawdy where Audrey was respectful, profane where Audrey was polite, stubborn where Audrey was compliant. Things might not have been so good with Leon, but that didn’t affect their friendship. Sisterhood was stronger. LaTonya didn’t have much respect for her younger brother anyway, it seemed.

Fairly often Audrey babysat the three younger Saunders kids. Most of the time she enjoyed it. They were good kids, a twelve-year-old girl and two boys, nine and eleven. No doubt they ran roughshod over her, took advantage of her good nature, got away with stuff their drill-sergeant mother would never let them. But that, she figured, was what aunts were for. It didn’t escape her, either, that LaTonya herself took advantage of Audrey, asking her to sit way more than she should, because LaTonya understood what was never said aloud, that her kids were the only kids Audrey would ever have.

LaTonya arrived home an hour later this evening than she’d said she would. She was taking a motivational training seminar at the Days Inn on Winsted Avenue, learning to start a home business. Her husband, Paul, managed the service department of a GMC dealership and usually worked late, didn’t get home until eight. Audrey didn’t mind, really. She’d just come off a long shift, which included attending the Andrew Stadler funeral, and would rather spend a few hours with her niece and nephews than at home with Leon, to be honest. Or thinking about poor Cassie Stadler. You had to take a break sometimes.