Hard Stop (4 page)

“What’s her name?” I asked.

“Iku Kinjo. You may remember her. She remembered you.”

I did. Like he said, brilliant and compelling. I could see her sweeping into my office on slender legs and an abundance of confidence. Trying to knock me off balance with the first question of the interview. Smiling at me, like we’d been assigned seats across from each other at the company barbecue, but intent on getting the answers she was looking for.

Instead of answering her question I lit a cigarette, contrary to office policy, and winked at her. She held up her forearm and looked at me over the top of her watch.

“My next interview is at two p.m.,” she said, “which means
this meeting has a hard stop at one fifty-five. That gives us exactly forty-eight minutes.”

Consultant-speak like that usually makes me sit up and square my shoulders. But I couldn’t help liking her. She got her forty-eight minutes’ worth, and as it turned out, eventually held up my division as a model on which the rest of the corporation might consider basing itself, which did a lot for her standing with me.

I said as much to Donovan.

“She respected the way you ran your division,” he said. “You and your man Endicott, the financial fellow. Have you two stayed in touch?”

I remembered our divisional CFO, though his name hadn’t passed through my mind since I left the company. Ozzie Endicott. It didn’t surprise me that Donovan remembered. It was one of his political gifts.

“Haven’t seen him or talked to him. You recall the severance agreement. No fraternizing with Con Globe employees. Not that I wanted to.”

“Ah. Of course. Iku liked Endicott. But she didn’t like you very much.”

“Like you said, smart girl. What do you mean you lost her? In what way?”

“She’d been spending weekends in the Hamptons. That’s where she was the last time I heard from her, by email, nearly a month ago. I haven’t heard from her since.”

Despite myself I suddenly felt something akin to sympathy for Donovan. Not for losing a lover, but for the pain he clearly felt in having to discuss it with me. Or anyone else. Now I understood why he wanted to extort my help. It would be easier to control the embarrassment from a position of strength.

“I’m going to ask you a lot of personal things,” I said. “Don’t expect me to be good at it.”

“If it was tact I needed, believe me, you wouldn’t be my first choice.”

“How were things going with the relationship when she disappeared?”

“I thought they were going fine, but something was a little off. Nothing overt. Nothing apparent. She was distracted. Maybe a little distant. I might have imagined it. Conjured the memory after the fact.”

“How secret is this thing?”

He thought that was amusing.

“You’re now the third person in the universe who knows. Unless there’s a God or Iku has a confidante she’s hidden from me. I pray she doesn’t. Exposure would be ruinous.”

He read my expression.

“You know Arlis,” he said. “My wife.”

I pictured a small woman with iron-grey hair and a face that looked unnaturally young for her years. She was formal, but in a gracious, kindly way, and always looked me in the eye and smiled when I tried to make idle chitchat.

“Sure. I guess you don’t want to lose her either.”

“The loss would be total. You’re probably unaware her family holds a significant share of Con Globe’s voting stock. Enough to compel the board to review the chairmanship.”

Now I understood why he wanted a stick to go with the carrots. Better yet, a hammer.

“I might’ve known that back then,” I said. “Not the kind of thing I’d pay much attention to.” I was probably the only VP in the place who could’ve said that, but that was one of my career specialties. Political myopia.

“Arlis Cuthright is her maiden name. Back in ’38 her grandfather sold off his coal mines and cargo ships and needed to reinvest the proceeds. Hydrocarbon processing seemed a good bet on the future. The dot-com of its time. The family
never thought much of me. Just another shanty Irish in their eyes. So the connection did little to help me on the way up. But it would surely grease the slide in the other direction.”

I looked around the room and breathed in the aroma of leather and oiled furniture. I once thought people who lived like Donovan had discovered a secret tunnel that led from aching nervous want to a paradise of eternal security. Until I got to actually know people like George Donovan.

“I know I’m taking a monstrous risk involving you,” he said. “But it’s no worse than having this thing just hanging there. I couldn’t possibly trust a private investigator. I’m even afraid to do a computer search. Afraid of leaving a trail. I know you’re a capable man. The best troubleshooter the company ever had. And even if you hate me, I believe you’ll honor a deal.”

Now that I had a chance to focus on him, he didn’t look so good, even in the dim light of the study. Older, wan. He prided himself on physical fitness, showing off his straight posture and knuckle-grinding handshake. But no exercise routine could counter this stew pot of uncertainty, loss, embarrassment and dread.

“What about family and friends?” I asked.

He looked around at the ersatz erudition that surround ed him.

“I don’t think she has any friends. Just a boyfriend. Ostensibly. A man named Robert Dobson. She calls him Bobby, of course. I have no idea what he knows, or where he lives, or what he does. Just the name.”

“Do you have a picture of her?”

He nodded with a half smile.

“Not in a frame on my desk. But she’s part of a group photo in Eisler, Johnson’s annual report. You can see it on their website. It’s not very big, but you can make out her features.
I visit the site as often as I dare. Rather wretched of me, but there you are.”

“Parents?”

“She was the product of an army officer’s liaison with a woman on Okinawa. Adopted by an American couple as an infant. Raised in Brooklyn. Parents now dead, reportedly. Again, that’s all I know. No other details.”

“I don’t remember much about Eisler, Johnson,” I said.

“Management consultants or legal extortionists, depending on what you think of their reports.”

“No word from them?” I asked.

“Her most recent assignment with us concluded several months ago. She and I continued. With all the lust and romantic fervor of addled adolescents. And then suddenly, no word. After a few days, I asked my assistant to get in touch with Eisler, Johnson on a simple pretext. The people she spoke to said Iku had left the firm, but to have her contact them if we heard from her. That’s when I started to worry in earnest.”

I tried to fix Iku Kinjo in my mind. I thought she’d be in her late thirties by now. A little older than Allison, my daughter, another princess of New York City, working hard in the graphic arts, the right brain division of the professional community. Talented and willing to wreck herself over vast, meaningless projects, though not the best at yielding to authority. Cursed with genetically determined behavior.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay?”

“I’ll do it. The deal I laid out. If you don’t remember the terms, I’ll send you a copy of the transcript.”

I pulled a small digital recorder out of my backpack and held it up. It was an exotic, highly sensitive device Allison had
given me to record messages to send her over the computer. Not having a computer, I was glad to have a chance to finally put the thing to use.

“How thoughtful,” said Donovan.

“Only one other condition.”

He raised an eyebrow, waiting.

“All I have to do is find her.”

“Of course,” he said.

“No matter what I find.”

I moved the little recorder closer to his face. He paused, catching the implication.

“I understand.”

I downed the last ten-dollar gulp of scotch and got up to leave.

“You have a hole in one of your basement windows,” I said. “Better get somebody to reglaze it before the critters start crawling inside.”

Donovan stared back at me from his lustrous leather chair.

“With all the dust stirred up when you left the company, I wasn’t able to express to you what I truly felt,” he said.

I held up my hand to ward him off. This wasn’t part of the deal.

“You don’t have to. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Yes it does. I’m sorry about what happened. I know it was partly my fault. I didn’t realize all the implications at the time. If I had, I might have chosen a different course.”

I could feel two balls of something forming somewhere around my midsection. One fury, the other regret, leavened with a strange, brainless kind of concern for George Donovan. Loathsome emotions all.

There were things I could have said to him at that moment, but none of them sounded right in my head, so I kept my mouth shut and just left, with Donovan watching
me go—pale, thin and alone in his silent house, his stone and mortar fortress home.

I half expected to be pulled over by the Connecticut State Police on the way down the Merritt Parkway, George Donovan having had a sudden change of heart. But I made it all the way to the border without incident.

From there I went into the City and booked myself into a hotel I used to stay at when I had an early meeting at Con Globe headquarters on Seventh Avenue. It was a stubby little place sandwiched between high-rises, a real City hotel with Italian doormen, Nigerian desk clerks and twelve-inch baseboards groaning under two inches of off-white paint. The radiators rattled and the carpets smelled of cigars and the elevator still had a guy working the sloppy brass controller, sitting on a milk crate, his belly stuffed inside a pair of grey polyester pants, his nails chipped and yellow, his breath a dank, sweet tribute to cheap liquor.

I slept until the sun came up, then I called Joe Sullivan on his cell phone. He was at the twenty-four-hour diner in Hampton Bays having breakfast with Ackerman.

“What did you do with him all night?” I asked.

“I took him over to Hodges’s boat and cuffed him to a handhold inside the quarter berth. I took the salon. The wind was up and the boat rocked like a cradle. We slept like babies.”

“I need you to let him go.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

I told him about my discussion with George Donovan, including everything about his involvement with the missing Iku Kinjo, and his attempt at extorting my help in finding her, but leaving out the preceding B&E. No sense further
straining his already strained sense of propriety. Instead, I worked on persuading him that Ackerman posed little threat to the community.

“He’s not a criminal, just criminally stupid,” I said. “Anyway, you like it when I owe you a favor.”

That tipped the scales. Sullivan kept me on the line while he told Ackerman he could go, as long as he left behind his gun and a promise to stay clear of Eastern Suffolk County for the next twenty years. I didn’t hear Ackerman’s reply, but I guess he’d agree to anything to get out from under Sullivan’s baleful glare.

After I hung up I called Amanda and told her everything that had happened. Every detail I could remember. She almost seemed convinced that I was being fully candid and forthcoming. Which I was, almost. I diverted her by asking about the morning walk she took with Eddie and what she was making for breakfast. She didn’t fall for it.

“Can I ask you to take care of yourself, even if I don’t believe you truly will?” she asked.

“I will. In fact, I’m going back to bed for a few hours. Try to catch up on my sleep.”

Which I did, with surprising success. Then I showered, shaved and put on jeans and a black T-shirt under the blue blazer. And black shitkickers. City garb. Then I called Allison, waking her up.

“Time to get up, honey. It’s the crack of eleven-thirty,” I said.

She said something like “mumph-umph” and coughed into the phone.

“Hold that thought,” I said. “I’ll be there in a half hour with coffee and bagels.”

“You can’t get here that fast,” she squeaked out.

“I can if I’m only thirty blocks away.”

Allison had a studio up on the West Side where she lived and designed on her own computer after recognizing she couldn’t manage a regular full-time job. She didn’t want it and full-time employers didn’t want her. Luckily, graphic arts was the kind of thing you could do as a freelancer and still do pretty well.

I visited her place whenever I could. I always fed her lunch, which would take about the time needed to catch up and stay clear of the big emotional bear traps that would open in front of us if we lingered too long in one place.

But that was fine. Compared to where we used to be, this was paradise.

I was always glad to see her. I’d be glad to see anyone for whom I feel blind, unconditional love and devotion. Even when she met me on the sidewalk outside her apartment, red-eyed, with her dirty blonde hair looking like her mother’s did when I first saw her walking across Kenmore Square, clutching her books to her chest as if expecting someone to leap out of a manhole and snatch them out of her arms.

“I can’t let you see the place right now,” she said, grabbing my arm and moving me down the sidewalk. “I’ve been cranking on this big crappy job all week and there’s crappy stuff all over everywhere. And no, there’s no boy in there.”