Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

LaTonya was lugging a huge cardboard box heaped with white plastic bottles. Her moon-shaped face was beaded with sweat. “This here,” she announced as the screen door slammed behind her, “is going to liberate us from debt.”

“What is it?” Audrey asked. Camille was practicing her piano in the den by now and the two boys were watching TV.

“Hey, what’s this? What the hell is this ?” LaTonya hollered at her sons as she dropped the box on the kitchen table. “I don’t care how much of a pushover your Auntie Audrey is, we have a rule about the TV. Turn that goddamned set off, and get to your homework, right now!”

“But Audrey said we could!” protested Thomas, the younger son. Matthew, experienced enough to know never to argue with their mother, scampered upstairs.

“I don’t give a shit what Audrey said, you know the rules!” she thundered. She turned to Audrey, her voice softening. “It’s weight-loss supplements. In a year or two, I’m not going to need Paul’s salary. Not that there’s much of that.”

“Weight-loss supplements?”

“Thermogenic,” LaTonya said. It was clear she had just learned the word. “Burns the fat off. Stokes up your metabolism. Blocks carbs too. And it’s all natural.”

“Sistah, you got to be careful with those make-money-at-home schemes,” Audrey said. It was funny, when she was around LaTonya she found herself talking black, the rhythms of her speech changing. She was acutely aware that LaTonya considered Audrey saditty, or conceited.

“Careful?” LaTonya gasped. “This is the wellness industry we’re talking about. In five years it’s going to be a trillion -dollar industry, and I’m getting on the elevator at the ground floor.” She opened a new box of Ritz Crackers, offered it to Audrey, who shook her head. LaTonya tore open the wax paper on one of the cracker rolls and grabbed a handful.

“LaTonya, can I talk to you for a second?”

“Mmmph?” LaTonya replied through a mouthful of cracker.

“It’s the way you talk to your kids. The language. I don’t think children should hear that kind of language, particularly from a parent.”

LaTonya’s eyes widened in indignation. She put her hands on her hips. She chewed, swallowed, then said, “Audrey, baby, I love you, but they’re my kids, you understand? Not yours. Mine.”

“But still,” Audrey said, regretting she’d said anything, wanting to take it back.

“Honey, these little buggers respect strong words. If you had kids, you’d understand.” LaTonya saw the wounded look in Audrey’s face. “I’m — I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it the way it came out.”

“That’s okay,” Audrey said with a dismissive shake of the head. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

LaTonya was holding up one of the big white plastic bottles. “ This you need,” she said.

“ I need?”

“For your no-good, lazy-ass husband. My brother. Least he can do while he’s sitting on his butt is take some of these thermogenic supplements. Twenty-four ninety-five. You can afford it. Tell you what: I’ll give you my discount. Sixteen fifty. Can’t do better than that.”

Audrey didn’t much like the security director of the Stratton Corporation, an ex-cop named Edward Rinaldi. For one thing, there was his initial unwillingness to meet her, which she found peculiar. She was investigating the death of a Stratton employee, after all. How packed could his schedule really be? On the phone, after she’d told him what she wanted, he’d said he was “raked.”

Then there was his reputation, which was a little hinky. She always did her homework, of course, and before coming to Stratton headquarters, she called around, figuring that the security director of the biggest company in town had to be known to at least the uniform division of the police. She learned that he was a local boy, went to high school with Nicholas Conover, Stratton’s CEO. That he’d joined the force in Grand Rapids. His dealings with the Fenwick police were limited to pilferage cases and vandalism at Stratton. “That guy?” a veteran patrol cop named Vogel told her. “He never woulda made it here. We’d have kicked him out on his ass.”

“How come?”

“Smartass. Got his own rule book, know what I’m saying?”

“I don’t think I do, no.”

“I don’t want to spread rumors. Ask around in GR.”

“I will, but you’ve dealt with him yourself, haven’t you?”

“Ah, he was all over us on some vandalism deal at the CEO’s house like it was our fault, instead of some whacked laid-off employee.”

“All over you how?”

“He wanted the priors on this employee.”

“Who?”

Vogel seemed surprised. “What’re you talking, your guy, of course, right? That Stadler guy, isn’t that why you called me?”

Suddenly Edward Rinaldi was becoming more interesting.

When she called Grand Rapids, she had a harder time finding someone who’d talk to her about Edward Rinaldi, until a lieutenant there named Pettigrew confided that Rinaldi was not missed. “Put it this way,” the lieutenant said cagily, “he lived pretty good.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning his income wasn’t necessarily limited to his salary.”

“We talking bribes, Lieutenant?”

“Could be, but that’s not what I mean. I’m just saying that not all the evidence from drug busts made it to the property room.”

“He was a user?”

The lieutenant chuckled. “Not so far as I know. He seemed a lot more interested in the shoeboxes full of cash. But he was booted out without a formal IA investigation, so that’s just rumor.”

It was enough to make her wary of the man.

But most of all she didn’t like Rinaldi’s manner — the evasiveness, the shiftiness in his eyes, the quick and inappropriate grins, the intensity of his stare. There was something vulgar, something scammy about the man.

“Where’s your partner?” he asked after they’d chatted a few minutes. “Don’t you guys always work in teams?”

“Often.” He and Bugbee would have hit it off just fine, she thought. Cut from the same bolt of polyester fabric.

“You’re Detective Rhimes? As in LeAnn Rimes?”

“Spelled differently,” she said. “Did Andrew Stadler vandalize your CEO’s house, Mr. Rinaldi?” she asked, coming straight to the point.

Rinaldi looked away too quickly, searched the ceiling as if wracking his brain, furrowed his brow. “I have no idea, Detective.”

“You wanted to know his priors, Mr. Rinaldi. You must have had some suspicion.”

Now he looked straight at her. “I like to do a thorough job. I investigate all possibilities. Same as I’m sure you do.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t quite understand. You did suspect Mr. Stadler, or you didn’t?”

“Look, Detective. My boss’s house gets vandalized in a particularly sick and twisted way, first thing I’m gonna do is go through the rolls of people who got the ax here, right? Anyone who made any threats during their outplacement interviews, all that. I find out that one guy who got laid off has a mental history, I’m gonna look a little more closely. Make sense?”

“Absolutely. So what did you find when you looked closely?”

“What’d I find?”

“Right. Did he make any threats during his outplacement?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. People do, you know. People lose it, time like that.”

“Not according to his boss at the model shop, the fellow who conducted the outplacement interview along with someone from HR. He said Stadler quit, but he wasn’t violent.”

Rinaldi guffawed. “You trying to trap me or something, Detective? Forget it. I’m telling you this guy was in and out of the loony bin.”