Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

“Hydroseed. Yep, that’s what we did.”

“Well, I’ve got to tell Leon. He’s always calling it hydro weeding because he says you get way too many weeds in the grass, but this looks just perfect to me.”

“That Leon sounds like a real card.”

“Oh, he is,” Audrey said, feeling a prickle. “That he is.”

The front door looked like something out of Versailles, ornately carved wood in a honey color. A quiet high-pitched tone sounded when Conover opened the door: an alarm system. He led her through an enormous foyer, high vaulted ceilings, really breathtaking. So this is how rich people live, she thought. Imagine being able to afford a house like this. She tried not to gawk, but it was hard.

She heard the sound of someone playing a piano and thought of Camille. “Is that one of yours?” she asked.

“My daughter,” he said. “Believe me, it doesn’t happen often, her practicing. It’s like a total eclipse of the sun.”

They walked by the room where a young girl was practicing, a lanky dark-haired girl around Camille’s age wearing a baseball shirt. The girl was playing the first prelude from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, one of Audrey’s favorite pieces. She played it haltingly, mechanically, clearly not yet grasping how fluid it had to be. Audrey caught a quick flash of a baby grand piano, a Steinway. She remembered how long LaTonya and Paul had scrimped to buy the battered old upright, which never stayed in tune. Imagine owning a Steinway, she thought.

She was briefly tempted to stop and listen, but Conover kept going down the hall, and she kept up. As they entered an elegant sitting room with Persian rugs and big comfortable-looking easy chairs, she said, “Oh, they never like practicing.”

“Tell me about it,” Conover said, sinking into one of the chairs. “You pretty much have to put a—” he began, then started again. “They fight you on everything at this age. You have kids, Detective?”

She sat in the chair alongside his, not the one directly opposite, preferring to avoid the body language of confrontation. “No, I’m afraid we haven’t been blessed with children,” she said. What was he about to say — You have to put a gun to their heads? What was interesting was not the figure of speech but that he’d caught himself.

Interesting.

She casually glanced at an arrangement of family photographs in silver frames on a low table between them, and she felt a pang of jealousy. She saw Conover and his late wife, a son, and a daughter, Conover with his two children and the family dog. An extremely handsome family.

This house, these children — she was overcome by envy, which shamed her.

Envy and wrath shorten the life, it said in Ecclesiastes. Somewhere else it said that envy is the rottenness of the bones — was it Proverbs? Who is able to stand before envy? Who indeed? Behold, these are the ungodly, who prosper in the world; they increase in riches . That was in Psalms, she was quite sure. Surely thou didst set them in slippery places: thou castedst them down into destruction .

Her entire house could fit into a couple of these rooms.

She would never have children.

She was sitting next to the man who was responsible for laying Leon off.

She took out her notebook and said, “Well, I just wanted to clear up a few things from our last conversation.”

“Sure.” Conover leaned back in his chair, arms folded back, stretching. “How can I help you?”

“If we can go back to last Tuesday evening, ten days ago.”

Conover looked puzzled.

“The night that Andrew Stadler was murdered.”

He nodded his head. “Okay. Right.”

She consulted her pad, as if she had the notes from their last interview right in front of her. She’d already transcribed them and put them into a folder in one of the Stadler file boxes. “We talked about where you were that night,” she prompted, “when your memory was maybe a little fresher. You said you were at home, asleep by eleven or eleven thirty. You said you slept through the night.”

“Okay.”

“You don’t remember getting up that night?”

He furrowed his brow. “I suppose it’s possible I got up to pee.”

“But you didn’t make a phone call?”

“When?”

“In the middle of the night. After you went to sleep.”

“Not that I recall,” he said, smiling, leaning forward. “If I’m making calls in my sleep, I’ve got even bigger problems than I’m aware of.”

She smiled too. “Mr. Conover, at 2:07 A.M. that night you placed a call to your security director, Edward Rinaldi. Do you remember that?”

Conover didn’t seem to react. He seemed to be examining the pattern on the Oriental rug. “We’re talking after midnight, early on Wednesday?”

“That’s right.”

“Then I must have my days wrong.”

“I’m sorry?”

“One of those nights I remember the alarm went off. I’ve got it set to make a sound in my bedroom so it doesn’t wake up the whole house.”

“The alarm went off,” Audrey said. That was checkable, of course.

“Something set it off, and I went downstairs to check it out. It was nothing, as far as I could see, but I was a little anxious. You can understand, I’m sure, with what had just happened.”

She nodded, compressed her lips, jotted a note. Didn’t meet his eyes.

“Eddie, Stratton’s security director, had just had one of his guys put in this fancy new alarm system, and I wasn’t sure if this was a false alarm or something I should be concerned about.”

“You didn’t call the alarm company?”

“My first thought was to call Eddie — I asked him to come out to the house and check it out.”

She looked up. “You couldn’t check it out yourself?”

“Oh, I did. But I wanted to make sure there wasn’t something faulty in the system. I didn’t want to call the cops for what was sure to be a false alarm. I wanted Eddie to check it out.”

“At two in the morning?”

“He wasn’t happy about it.” Conover grinned again. “But given what I’ve been through, we both agreed it was better safe than sorry.”

“Yet you told me you slept through the night.”

“Obviously I got the days mixed up. My apologies.” He didn’t sound at all defensive. He sounded quite casual. Matter-of-fact. “Tell you something else, I’ve been taking this pill to help me sleep, and it kind of makes the nights sort of blurry for me.”

“Amnesia?”

“No, nothing like that. I don’t think Ambien causes amnesia like some of those other sleeping pills, Halcion or whatever. It’s just that when I pass out, I’m zonked.”

“I see.”

He’d just altered his story significantly, but in a completely believable way. Or was she being too suspicious? Maybe he really had mixed up the days. People did it all the time. If that night hadn’t been unusual or remarkable for him — if, that is, he hadn’t witnessed Andrew Stadler’s murder that night, or been aware of it whether before or after the fact — then there was no reason for him to have any special, fixed memory of what he’d done. Or not done.

“And did Mr. Rinaldi come over?”

Conover nodded. “Maybe half an hour later. He walked around the yard, didn’t find anything. Checked the system. He thought maybe a large animal had set it off, like a deer or something.”

“Not an intruder.”

“Not that he could see. I mean, it’s possible someone was out there, walking around on my property, near the house. But I didn’t see anyone when I got up, and by the time Eddie got here, he didn’t see anything either.”

“You said you took Ambien to go to sleep that night?”

“Right.”