Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

“I was mad at Stratton,” Cassie said. “Mad at you, is the truth. Maybe because I’m a girl, I take these things too personally. But it might have had a bad effect on him. Someone with a thought disorder, it’s hard to know.”

“Cassie,” Nick started, but whatever he was going to say died in his throat.

“That was before I met you, though. You didn’t want to do this. The people in Boston made you. Because, end of the day, Stratton is a business.”

“Right.”

“But it’s never just a business to you, is it? See, I just realized something. Being a Stratton employee in the past couple of years must have been like being the daughter of a schizophrenic. One day you’re a beloved family member, the next you’re a unit, a cost center, something to be slashed.” She leaned against the counter, her arms folded.

“I’m sorry about your dad,” Nick said. “More sorry than I can tell you.” With more to be sorry about than I can tell you .

“My daddy...” Cassie’s voice was hushed, halting. “He didn’t — he didn’t want to be the way he was. It would just take over him. He wanted to be a good father like you. He wanted...” Cassie’s breathing started to become ragged, and Nick realized that she was weeping. Her face was red, bowed, and she put a hand over her eyes. Tears rolled copiously down her cheeks.

Nick got up suddenly, his chair scraping against the linoleum floor, and put his arms around her.

“Oh, Cassie,” he said softly. “I’m sorry.”

She was tiny, birdlike, and her shoulders were narrow and bony. She made a sound like she was hiccupping. She smelled like something spicy and New-Agey — patchouli, was that it? Nick was ashamed to realize he was getting aroused.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“Stop saying that.” Cassie looked up at him and smiled wanly through her tears. “It’s got nothing to do with you.”

Nick remembered a time when he was trying to fix a lamp socket he’d thought was switched off. An eerie, hair-erecting, tingling feeling had swept through his arm, and it had taken him a second to identify the sensation as house current that was leaking through the screwdriver. He felt something like that now, guilt washing through his body like an electrical flux. He didn’t know how to respond.

But Cassie said, “I think you’re a good man, Nicholas Conover.”

“You don’t know me,” he said.

“I know you better than you think,” she said, and he felt her arms squeezing against his back, pulling him toward her. Then she seemed to be standing on tiptoes, her face close to his, her lips pressing against his.

The moment for refusing, for backing out, came and went. Nick’s response was almost reflexive. This time he kissed her back, her tears sticky against his face, and his hands moved downward from her shoulders.

“Mmm,” she said.

The teakettle started whistling.

For a long time afterward, she lay on top of him in the slick of their perspiration, her mouth pressed against his chest. He could feel her heartbeat, fast as a bird’s, slowing gradually. He stroked her hair, nuzzled her porcelain neck, smelling her hair, a conditioner or whatever. He felt her breasts against his stomach.

“I don’t know what to say,” Nick began.

“Then keep silent.” She smiled, lifted herself up on her elbows until she was sitting upright on him. She lightly scratched her fingernails across his upper chest, tangling them in his chest hair.

Nick shifted his butt against the coarse-textured couch in the living room. He rocked upward, enfolded her in an embrace, leaned forward until he was sitting up too.

“Strong guy,” she said.

Her breasts were small and round, the nipples pink and still erect like little upturned thumbs. Her waist was tiny. She reached across him to the table next to the couch, and as she did, her breasts brushed against his face. He gave them a quick kiss. She retrieved a pack of Marlboros and a Bic lighter, took one out of the pack and waved it at him, offering.

“No, thanks,” Nick said.

She shrugged, lighted the cigarette, took in a lungful of air and spewed out a thin stream of smoke.

“‘Let me live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man,’” Nick quoted.

“Yep.”

“Needlepoint by Grandma?”

“Mom got it in some junk store. She liked what it said.”

“So how long has it been since you left this place?”

“I just turned twenty-nine. Left when I was around twelve. So, a long time. But I came back to visit Dad a bunch of times.”

“School in Chicago, then.”

“You’re trying to piece together the Cassie Stadler saga? Good luck.”

“Just wondering.”

“My mom remarried when I was eleven. An orthodontist. Had a couple of kids of his own, my age, a little older. Let’s just say it wasn’t the Brady Bunch. Dr. Reese didn’t exactly take to me. Neither did the little Reese’s pieces, Bret and Justin. Finally shipped me off to Lake Forest Academy, basically to get me out of the way.”

“Must have been tough on you.”

She inhaled, held a lungful of smoke for several seconds. Then, as she let it out, she said, “Yes and no. In some ways, they did me a favor. I actually flourished at the academy. I was a precocious kid. Got a Headmaster scholarship, graduated top of the class. Should have seen me when I was seventeen. A real promising young citizen. Not the head case you see before you.”

“You don’t seem like a head case to me.”

“Because I don’t drool and wear bad glasses?” She crossed her eyes. “Fools them every time.”

“You talk about it like it’s a big joke.”

“Probably it is a joke. Some cosmic joke that’s just a little over our heads. God’s joke. Nothing to do but to smile and nod and try to pretend that we get it.”

“You can go pretty far in life doing that,” Nick said. He sneaked a glimpse at his wristwatch, saw it was after two already. With a jolt, he realized he had to get back to the office.

She noticed. “Time to go.”

“Cassie, I—”

“Just go, Nick. You’ve got a company to run.”

Dr. Aaron Landis, the clinical director of mental health services for County Medical, seemed to wear a permanent sneer. Audrey realized, though, that there was something not quite right about the man’s face, a crookedness to the mouth, a congenital deformity that made him look that way. His gray hair resembled a Brillo pad, and he had a receding chin that he tried to disguise, not very successfully, with a neatly trimmed gray beard. At first Audrey felt a bit sorry for the psychiatrist because of his homeliness, but her compassion quickly faded.

His office was small and messy, so heaped with books and papers that there was scarcely room for the two of them to sit. The only decoration was a photograph of a plain-looking wife and an even plainer son, and a series of colorful scans of a human brain, purple with yellow-orange highlights, on curling slick paper, thumbtacked along one wall.

“I don’t think I understand what you’re asking, Detective,” he said.

She had been as clear as day. “I’m asking whether Andrew Stadler exhibited violent tendencies.”

“You’re asking me to breach doctor — patient confidentiality.”

“Your patient is dead,” she said gently.

“And the confidentiality of his medical records survives his death, Detective. As does physician — patient confidentiality. You know that, or if you don’t, you should. The Supreme Court upheld that privilege a decade ago. More important, it’s part of the Hippocratic oath I took when I became a doctor.”

“Mr. Stadler was murdered, Doctor. I want to find his killer or killers.”