Mount Pleasant (27 page)

“I don’t think anything. But I have seen everything. And I just want to prepare you for the possibility, no matter how remote …”

“That he took the money.”

Bladdock was silent for a few seconds. Harry visualized him taking off his glasses and cleaning them on a polo shirt that advertised a corporate golf tournament. Harry calculated the cost of this gesture to be roughly two dollars.

“Look—for me, personalities don’t enter in,” Bladdock said. “I’m numbers. I go where they lead me. I’m a scientist. If the numbers say Gandhi stole the cash, then … I don’t have any evidence it was your father. But if I was a cop, I would say that at this point Dale is a person of interest.”

If his father had taken the money, where was it? What if he had taken it, then was too addled by dementia to remember where he put it? Harry tried to imagine his father arriving at this decision. What was it Ebbetts had said? That you stay too long in this business and one day you wake up in a foreign country. Did Dale suddenly feel he was no longer moored to that world, that he no longer owed fealty to his colleagues and investors? It would have been a repudiation of everything he had lived by. But if Dale was a criminal, then surely
any money that was legitimately his would go toward fines or reparations.

“Either this is a train wreck,” Bladdock said, “or it’s genius. Could their CEO have put this together?”

“Press is essentially a fraud,” Harry said. “Maybe too much of a fraud to execute this kind of fraud. August, who knows? Where’s the motive? He doesn’t have kids. He dies in the trunk of a Honda.”

“Who does that leave?”

“In the company? Dick Ebbetts is a candidate. He’s leaving the company. Maybe this is his severance package.”

“We’ll find it,” Bladdock said.

“The money?”

“We die alone, but we leave paper.”

The sound of Harry’s debt was an annoying buzz, a fly moving quickly through a windowed room, crashing repeatedly into the glass. He called Ebbetts. A voice other than Ebbetts’s instructed him to leave a message. “Dick, it’s Harry. Call me back. I miss our little chats.”

Gladys came in the front door, carrying groceries in a canvas bag with the name of a defunct magazine on it.

“August Sampson is dead,” Harry said. “He was found in the trunk of a car. Murdered.”

“That poor man. Murdered? Wasn’t he already dying of cancer? What could be the point?”

“Maybe he was going to confess.”

“To what? You think August took that money?”

“He must have been involved somehow.”

Gladys put the bag on the counter and began placing groceries in the refrigerator and on the pantry shelves.

“I have to go and check on my mother,” Harry said.

“Fine. I’ll make some dinner.”

Harry drove north in his dependable car. Felicia was back in her apartment, though there were residual effects from her episode. Fear was one of them. When Harry visited her the day she got back from the hospital, he noticed a subtle hitch in her movements, a wavering motor control. It was something she worked to conceal. That was why they drank their tea from mugs instead of the delicate cups and saucers she preferred. They would have rattled tellingly. She had to recalibrate specific movements, finding compromises with her physical self. Messages that had been instantly relayed now arrived through more complicated channels. Her hands didn’t do exactly as they were told, and her memory sought names and words, some part of her brain opening cupboards to find them empty.

Today, she greeted Harry at the door, smiling. She offered him a glass of wine and he accepted. They sat and talked for a time about the cottage. It had been a happy place for her, and she liked to retreat to that memory. It was part of the mnemonic spectrum that was vivid and accessible; her short-term memory was now suspect. But she recalled sitting on the dock at sunset with precision—the taste of the air, the sound of Harry and Erin in the water, a final swim before dinner, the call of loons.

They hadn’t had a television at the cottage. Instead, there were board games stained with the faint red circles of wineglasses. The days began slowly. Felicia swam every morning, a curative after a night of cocktails and stale stories with the neighbours.

Harry had measured his growth on the kitchen door frame there, several lines bunched together each summer with
satisfying gaps over the winters. The simple worry Will I grow tall enough? soon gave way to the more complicated Will I have sex? Will I know what to do?

It was at the cottage that all the mysteries unfolded. The adults reeled through the evenings, while the teenagers stole liquor from the cabinets and mixed it with Coke or orange juice and experimented with one another in the boathouse.

Harry told Felicia about August.

“A good man. Lonely. An odd life and an odder death. I wonder how he got mixed up in all that.”

“He must have been working with someone. Ebbetts? Press?”

“Press is certainly a candidate,” Felicia said. “He was all appetite. He took lovers because he needed a witness for all that he admired in himself. He purposely slept with the wives of men he knew. A form of score-keeping, I suppose. Press felt inadequate among some of those men. So he fucked their wives. Not an original idea.”

“Do you think he and August did this together?”

“If August was involved, then someone like Press or Ebbetts would have to be. Someone who is evil enough to take the initiative. I can’t imagine all of them working together, though.”

They chatted for a while longer, then Harry got up to leave.

“You’re fine, though, aren’t you?” he asked his mother at the door.

“Of course, dear.” Though she put a hand on his arm to detain him a moment, something she would never have done in the past.

Harry drove home thinking that he would need to hire someone to spend some time with his mother, a nurse who came by and played cribbage with her and monitored her health and alcohol intake. Felicia’s money would likely last
exactly as long Felicia did; she would leave a net worth of zero, a perfect balancing of the books.

Harry was inching toward the idea that they would need to sell the house. It was the only real option. Gladys would be mortified to let it go, the most sustaining emblem of the middle class, their anchor.

Two days later, Harry read in the newspaper that Devonn Isis, twenty-three, and Wayne Jewkes, twenty-six, had been charged with the murder of August Sampson. Jewkes had confessed that the two of them had driven a brown 1993 Honda Accord that had belonged to Jewkes’s mother’s long-departed ex-boyfriend, Andrew Wortham, to Lombard Street at 5:30 a.m. on December 9, and in that darkness, shared a joint.

The reason they found themselves sitting in a borrowed shit brown Honda at 5:30 a.m., discussing the merits of August Sampson’s Mercedes 5.5 E-Class, was that they had been approached by a guy who said an elderly man would be arriving there at 6:00 a.m., and that the man was dying and so it wasn’t even murder really, and when they were done, they could have the man’s $87,000 Mercedes.

Wayne and Devonn had a fledgling drug business, and they saw the Mercedes as a fundamental building block, Wayne told the reporter.

Wayne had seventeen prior charges. It was discovered by the reporter that the last four movies he’d rented from Action Video were
The Terminator, Dirty Harry
and two Charles Bronson movies. Wayne was the randomness of modern life, his past a muddied line of failure that stretched to small northern towns and seasonal work and the reliable alcoholism of his mother’s boyfriends.

August Sampson arrived, as predicted, at 6:00 a.m. and got out of his Mercedes. Wayne grabbed him and attempted to stuff him into the trunk of the Honda. Sampson resisted and Wayne hit him on the head with a handgun and, with difficulty, managed to get him into the trunk.

He looked up to find that his partner had chosen that moment to leave Wayne with a body in the trunk of a car that didn’t have any keys in the ignition. Devonn had driven away in the Mercedes.

What the two constables—Jane Hudek and Wilson Claimant—saw through the window of their patrol car at 6:10 a.m. was Wayne Jewkes standing in the middle of the road, holding a gun and screaming. When he saw the patrol car, he yelled, “You do not know who you are fucking with,” and walked toward them, firing at the windshield. Hudek threw herself below the dash, took her weapon out, opened the passenger door, leaned into the small V defined there, steadied herself and fired two shots at Wayne, one of them hitting him in the shoulder and stopping him. Wayne slumped onto the asphalt, and Hudek and Claimant approached slowly. They kicked his weapon away and Hudek called it in.

The Honda, which was sitting two streets over, was towed away, and seventeen hours later, August Sampson emerged from that trunk on a bitter, cloudy afternoon.

The question was, why did a very low-level drug dealer kill a very successful money manager who was dying of cancer?

Over the next three days, the picture failed to get any clearer. There was an interview with Devonn’s grandmother, who said Devonn had a good head for numbers, for business, but that patience wasn’t his strong suit. An interview with one of the women he’d had a child with was merely a transcription of her negotiation to sell her interview to the reporter:

“I want 5,000 or f*** you.”

“My newspaper doesn’t pay for access.”

“You gonna f***ing start or you don’t get s***. This is a one-time, limited, do-not-f***-with-me offer.”

A reporter traced Devonn’s background, followed the trail to the feral red hills outside Kingston, the secret Jamaica that could be found at the end of a steep goat path among the lignum vitae trees. There were small wood-framed homes that ringed a gorge, and Devonn’s mother lived in one of them. The sound of Marley moved nostalgically through the valley, and on a porch Devonn’s mother sat and described the trajectory of her son’s life for the reporter, the arc that had taken him from perfect child to a young man she didn’t know.

Over the next two days, Dixie called six times, but Harry didn’t pick up. He called Ebbetts six times but didn’t leave a message. Bladdock called to tell him that August had given $7 million to charity before he died. Gladys told him that they had to consider their options, and Harry wholeheartedly agreed. Christmas was approaching, with its expectations and woe.

TWENTY-TWO

I
N THE GREY
,
PESSIMISTIC
,
PRE
-
DAWN LIGHT
, Harry told Gladys he was going to the BRG offices to talk to Press.

“What are you going to say?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I should just slap him around until he spills the beans.”

“You think he has beans to spill?”

“Either he does or Ebbetts does. Or both. I think Ebbetts is gone. I’ve left a dozen messages for that little bastard.”

“Think about what you’re going to say. Try to draw him out. Don’t just go in there and vent.”

Before he got into the Camry, Harry stood outside for a time in the brittle cold. He noticed his overcoat was fraying at the cuffs. The sun looked like a melted pat of butter behind the cloud. Harry drove to BRG and strode quickly past the receptionist.

“You can’t go in there,” she said as he went by. “Mr. Lunden isn’t—”

Harry entered Press’s office to find him at his desk, wearing a rumpled navy suit and a striped shirt with a few buttons undone. He was unshaven. It was possible that he’d been here all night. His face had once looked craggy and adventurous, but it sagged now, a mudslide. His eyes were red. Harry sat in one of the chairs facing Press.

“Harry,” Press said dully. He didn’t get up to shake Harry’s hand.

“What happened to August, Press?”

“August.” Press repeated.

Harry wondered if he was drunk. There was an empty highball glass on his desk. It was ten a.m.

“My father’s money is gone, August is dead, I can’t reach Ebbetts. What the fuck happened, Press?”

Press stared at his pristine desktop for a few moments. He was either drunk or medicated—or both. “August Sampson was my friend. We worked together for almost fifty years. In the trenches. Through Black October, through dotcom, 9/11, through peak oil and subprime. August was dying.”

“And BRG was dying,” Harry said.

“People got nervous out there.”

“And no one gets more nervous than old money, do they, Press?” Harry said. “Because it isn’t just money with them; it’s the essential architecture of existence. It’s Darwin and Adam and Eve and compound interest all rolled into one.”

“When did it become ‘them,’ Harry?” Press said softly, looking up.

“When the money disappeared.”

“You know we were never in the business of making money. We were in the business of protecting our friends. For years, for decades, we protected them from downdrafts, from Japanese meltdowns, from bubbles and shit decisions by the Fed, from
currency manipulators, hedge funds, derivatives and every kind of godless paper that came down the pike.” Press’s voice gained force and volume. “We protected them from emerging markets and junior oils. What you don’t understand is that this is a war. Men doing battle every day in six languages. There is no Geneva Convention. There is horror and brutality, and every day some poor bastard lies bleeding in the gutter and there isn’t a damn thing we can do for him. He’s gone, he’s spilled milk. You move on. Our clients, our friends, we protected them from this. You spend your whole day wrestling with Satan, you’re going to get dirty. Just ask God.”