The Second Time Around (11 page)

Maybe they had been, I thought. Maybe there was no redheaded man.

“Casey, you're a good thinking post for me,” I told him as I began to concentrate on the shrimp. “Maybe you should have been a psychiatrist.”

“All doctors are psychiatrists, Carley. Some of them just haven't discovered that yet.”

I
t felt good to be at
Wall Street Weekly,
to have a cubicle of my own, a desk of my own, a computer of my own. Maybe there are some people who long only for the open road, but I'm not one of them. Not that I don't love to travel—I do. I have done profiles on famous or at least well-known people that have taken me to Europe and South America, even one to Australia, but after I've been away for a couple of weeks, I'm ready to go home.

Home for me is the great, marvelous, wonderful piece of real estate called Manhattan Island. East side, west side, all around the town. I love to walk through it on a quiet Sunday and feel the presence of the buildings that my great-grandparents saw when they arrived in New York, one from the Emerald Isle, the other from Tuscany.

All of the above ran through my head as I put a few
personal items in my new desk and went over my notes for the meeting that would take place in Ken's office.

In the world of deadlines and breaking news, there's very little waste of time. Ken, Don, and I exchanged greetings and got down to business. Ken settled behind his desk. He was wearing a sweater and an open shirt and looked for all the world like a retired football player. “You first, Don,” he said.

Don, small and neat, flipped though his notes. “Spencer went with the Jackman Medical Supply Company fourteen years ago after getting an MBA at Cornell. At that time it was a struggling, privately owned family company. With his father-in-law's help, he ended up buying the Jackman family out. Eight years ago, when he founded Gen-stone, he folded the medical-supply business into it and went public to finance the research. That's the division he's been looting.

“He'd bought the house in Bedford and the New York apartment,” Don said. “Bedford initially cost three million, but with renovations and the escalation of prices in the real estate market, it was worth a lot more when it was torched. The apartment was purchased for four million, and then some money went into it. It wasn't one of those astronomically priced penthouses or duplexes, which is what some of the articles about him painted it out to be. Incidentally, both house and apartment had mortgages that were eventually paid off.”

I remembered Lynn had told me that she had been living in his first wife's home and apartment.

“The looting of the medical-supplies division started
years ago. A year-and-a-half ago he started borrowing against his own stock. Nobody knows why.”

“To keep this in sequence, I'll jump in here,” Ken said. “That was at the time when, according to Dr. Celtavini, problems started to turn up in the laboratory. Subsequent generations of mice that were getting the vaccine were beginning to develop cancer cells. Spencer probably realized that the house of cards was about to fall and began to really loot the company. The feeling is that the meeting in Puerto Rico was just a step on his way to fleeing the country. Then his luck ran out.”

“He told the doctor who bought his father's house that he didn't have as much time as he thought,” I said. Then I told them about the records that Dr. Broderick claimed he had given to a man with reddish brown hair who said he was from Spencer's office.

“What I found hard to swallow,” I said, “is that any doctor would hand over research files without checking to be sure the request was valid, or at least getting a signed receipt for them.”

“Any chance that someone in the company was getting suspicious of Spencer?” Don suggested.

“Not according to what was said at the stockholders' meeting,” I said. “And it certainly was news to Dr. Celtavini that the files even existed. I think that if anyone might be interested in the early experiments of an amateur microbiologist, it would be someone like him.”

“Did Dr. Broderick tell anyone else about the records being collected?” Ken asked.

“He said something about talking to the investigators. Since he volunteered to tell me, I would say no.” I realized that I had not directly asked that question of Dr. Broderick.

“Probably the U.S. Attorney's Office was up to see him.” Don closed his notebook as he spoke. “They're the ones trying to trace the money, but my guess is that it's in a numbered Swiss bank account.”

“Is that where they think he was planning to end up?” I asked.

“Hard to say. There are other places that welcome people with big bucks, no questions asked. Spencer liked Europe and spoke fluent French and German, so he wouldn't have a hard time adjusting wherever he chose to settle.”

I thought of what Nick said about his son, Jack: “He means the world to me.” How did he reconcile abandoning his son by leaving this country and then not being able to return unless he wanted to end up in prison? I threw that issue on the table, but neither Don nor Ken saw it as a conflict.

“With the amount of money he took, the kid can hop on a private plane and visit Daddy anytime. I can give you a list of people who can't come back here but are real family men. Besides, how often would he have seen the kid if he was in the slammer?”

“There's still an unknown,” I pointed out. “Lynn. If she's to be believed, she had no part in his scheme. Was he planning to leave her high and dry when he took off? Somehow I don't see her living a life in exile. She has wormed her way into being part of the chic crowd in
New York. She claims she now has virtually no money.”

“What is no money to people like Lynn Spencer is probably a lot different from what the three of us consider no money,” Don said dryly as he stood up.

“One more thing,” I said quickly. “That's exactly the point I'd like to touch on in this story. I've gone over the press coverage about corporate failures, and the emphasis always seems to be on how lavishly the guy who was taking the money was living, usually with planes and boats and a half-dozen homes. We don't have that kind of story. Whatever Nick Spencer did with the money isn't visible to us. Instead, I want to interview the little people, including the guy who has been indicted for setting the fire. Even if he's guilty, which I doubt, he was frantic because his little girl is dying of cancer and he's going to lose his home.”

“What makes you think he isn't guilty?” Don asked. “It looks like a slam-dunk case to me.”

“I saw him at the stockholders' meeting. I was practically shoulder to shoulder with him when he had that outburst.”

“Which lasted how long?” Don raised one eyebrow, a trick I've always envied.

“For about two minutes, if that,” I admitted. “But whether or not he set that fire, he's certainly an example of what's happening to the real victims as Gen-stone goes bankrupt.”

“Talk to some of them. See what you come up with,” Ken agreed. “Okay, let's all get busy.”

I went back to my cubicle and went through the file I
had on Spencer. After the crash, quotes had been given to newspapers by people close to him at Gen-stone. The one from Vivian Powers, his secretary of six years, had praised him to the skies. I put in a call to her at the Pleasantville office and kept my fingers crossed that she was at work.

She took my call. She sounded young, but told me firmly that she would not be able to agree to an interview either by phone or in person. I jumped in before she could hang up. “I'm part of a team at
Wall Street Weekly
writing a cover story on Nicholas Spencer,” I said. “I'll be honest. I'd like to put in something positive about him, but people are so angry about losing their money that it's going to be a very negative portrait. At the time of his death you spoke very kindly of him. I guess you've changed your mind, too.”

“I will never believe Nicholas Spencer took a dime for himself,” she said heatedly. Then her voice broke. “He was a
wonderful
person,” she finished, almost in a whisper, “and
that
is my quote.”

I had the sense that Vivian Powers was afraid of being overheard. “Tomorrow is Saturday,” I said hastily. “I could come to your home or meet you anywhere you want.”

“No, not tomorrow. I'll have to think about it.” There was a click in my ear and the line went dead. What did she mean that Spencer wouldn't take any money for himself? I wondered.

Maybe not tomorrow, but we're going to talk, Ms. Powers, I vowed. We are going to talk.

W
hen Annie was alive, she wouldn't let him have a drink because she said it interfered with his medicine. But on the way home from Greenwood Lake yesterday, Ned had stopped at a liquor store and bought bottles of bourbon, scotch, and rye. He hadn't taken his medicine since Annie died, so maybe she wouldn't be mad at him for drinking now. “I need to sleep, Annie,” he explained when he opened the first bottle. “It will help me to sleep.”

It did help. He had fallen asleep sitting in the chair, but then something happened. Ned couldn't tell whether he was dreaming or remembering about the night of the fire. He was standing in that clump of trees with the can of gas when a shadow came from the side of the house and rushed down the driveway.

It was so windy, and the branches of the trees kept moving and swaying. He had thought at first that was
what caused the shadow. . . . But now the shadow had become the figure of a man, and in his dream he sometimes thought he could even see a face.

Was it like his dreams about Annie, the ones that were so real he could even smell the peach body lotion she wore?

It had to be that, he decided. Because it was just a dream, wasn't it?

At five o'clock, just as the first light of dawn was pushing past the shade, Ned got up. His body ached from having fallen asleep in the chair, but even worse was the ache in his heart. He wanted Annie. He needed her—but she was gone. He went across the room and got his rifle. All these years he'd kept it hidden behind a pile of junk in their half of the garage. He sat down again, his hands wrapped tightly around the barrel.

The rifle would bring him to Annie. When he was finished with those people, the ones who had caused her to die, he would go to her. He would join her.

Then suddenly he flashed on last night. The face in the driveway at Bedford. Had he seen it or dreamed it?

He lay down and tried to fall asleep again, but he couldn't. The burn on his hand was getting messy, and it hurt a lot. He couldn't go to the emergency room of the hospital. He'd heard on the radio that the guy they arrested for the fire had a burn on his hand.

He was lucky he had met Dr. Ryan in the hospital lobby. If he had gone to the emergency room, someone might have reported him to the police. And they would have found out that last summer he had worked for the landscaper who took care of the grounds at the Bedford
house. But he had lost the prescription Dr. Ryan gave him.

Maybe if he put butter on his hand it would feel better. That's what his mother had done once when she burned her hand lighting a cigarette from the stove.

Could he ask Dr. Ryan for another prescription? Maybe he could phone him.

Or would that merely remind Dr. Ryan that hours after the fire in Bedford Ned had showed him a burned hand?

He couldn't make up his mind what to do.