Foursome (18 page)

I moved around the foot of the bed and saw the beer cans. Michelobs, they were on their sides on the black carpet, one having gurgled most of its contents into the rug fibers, slicking them down. I ticked the other three cans. Empty before they hit the floor.

I looked in the bathroom, switching on the overhead light. Shower curtain yanked back, water pooled on the tiles underneath it. No bath mat, but two heavy black bath towels were wadded up in a corner like so much toilet paper.

Coming back into the bedroom, I noticed that the little infinity sign on the VCR glowed a neon orange. On Nancy’s machine, that meant a tape was still in it. I went up, hit the “Eject” button, and got nothing. Tried the “Power” twice and got the same. I felt a brain flash and went looking for a remote control device. It was mixed up in the comforter. I managed to find the black dot/white dot sign for “Tower” and got a welcoming “glump” and orange glows from several more points of the VCR. I touched “Play.” No response. I hit “Rewind,” let it chug for twenty seconds, then “Stop” and “Play” again. It didn’t take twenty seconds for me to know that the title of what I was watching would alliterate like
Debbie Does Dallas
. I pushed “Fast Forward” and, when the tape ended, the power button again, replacing the remote where I found it but leaving the tape in the machine.

Even though it was the Shea/Newberg house, I had the feeling I’d discovered where Nicky Vandemeer and Blanca Quintana enjoyed breakfast in bed.

The rest of my tour was anticlimactic. I went back downstairs and through the den. No threatening letters from the in-box on the desk, no obvious preparations for a massacre in the woods. Next to the den was a staircase to a basement, where the functional guts of the house were walled off in one corner, the rest of the place devoted to a game room with art deco bistro furniture.

Everywhere you looked in the game room, there was a photo of The Foursome, striking different poses in different settings, but each person sending out a respective, surprisingly consistent message. Hale Vandemeer wore a half grin, not showing any teeth. Vivian Vandemeer had her arm around her husband’s waist, her free hand waving to the camera. Sandra Newberg looked politely tolerant, as though her thoughts were elsewhere.

And Steven Shea was always flogging his wholesale smile, leaning toward the lens to get that extra edge.

Leaving my client’s house, I tried both bell and knock on the Vandemeers’ front door. Still no answer, and still no noise from inside.

Back in the Prelude, I wound out of Calem and toward Route 128. After driving about six miles north, I took the exit that eventually would lead me to Defense Resource Management. Along the way, I found myself on a main road that thirty years ago was probably a farmer’s cart path through not-too-productive fields. Now the road was forty feet wide and the fields paved over with strip malls and generic eateries of various price ranges, whose menus you could predict without ever being in the places.

A big breakfast, like mine with Paul O’Boy, tends to whet my appetite for lunch, and I anticipated a long afternoon at Shea’s employer. About a mile from DRM, I picked a restaurant that had a liquor license to go with its green walls and red-checked vinyl tablecloths. A sign by the hostess desk told me that if I’d been there the day before I could have had my picture taken with Bosco the Clown. Darn the luck.

The hostess, wearing a dress that looked like it came from one of the tablecloths, asked if I’d like a table for one. A man who sounded a little under the weather was booming a raucous speech to a makeshift banquet table of twenty people, so I asked her if I could get food at the bar. She said certainly, but led me to an empty stool anyway, setting the menu on the mahogany surface in front of the too-high brass rail and murmuring that the bartender’s name was Dan, as though it were a secret we now shared.

The stool had padded seat, armrest, and back, but it wouldn’t swivel without more torque than was comfortable to manage. I could still hear the speech—or more accurately, speeches, since a new voice was booming from the other room. A youngish guy with clean-cut good looks, carroty hair, and a college ring appeared in front of me. He wore a white, billowy shirt and, what do you know, a red-checked vest. He said, “Something to drink, sir?”

“What do you have on tap?”

“Miller, Miller Lite, Bass, Watney’s, and Guinness.”

“You’re kidding?”

“I’m sorry?”

“No. My fault. I just didn’t expect such a selection.”

The keep smiled. “No offense taken. It’s a plastic dive, but I have some say in the draughts, and as long as business points toward beer and ale, I—”

“Dan!”

We both looked down the bar at a waitress who seemed frantic.

Dan said, “Think about what you’ll have. I’ll be right back.”

I liked the way the guy had finessed that, attending to her probably bigger order first without giving me the impression I was being bypassed. I watched him draw half a dozen assorted brews into frosted mugs, while she wicked cocktail napkins onto her tray and used the spritzer hose to do three or four nonalcoholic drinks into iced tea glasses. Within a minute, she was off balancing ten drinks at shoulder height.

Dan came back to me. “Decided?”

“A pint of the Watney’s.”

“The big ones are just for sodas. Mugs are ten ounces, though.”

“That’ll be fine.”

As he drew the red ale for me, I said, “I wouldn’t think Bosco the Clown’d sell a lot of beer.”

Dan laughed, using his left hand to position a napkin in front of me, then setting my drink on the napkin. “Only way to make it these days is to appeal to everybody. So we have the clown once a week for the young mommas and kids, the different taps for the business crowd who can nurse a two-dollar beer better than a four-dollar martini. Even started early-bird specials from five to seven for the senior citizens.”

I nodded toward a third voice giving a speech. “Business crowd seems kind of concentrated.”

Dan clouded a little. “Yeah. An El-Oh party.”

“El-Oh?”

“Layoff. Three guys are getting the ax, so the men and women in their section are taking them out for a hoot.”

“Seriously?”

“You bet.”

“I mean, it happens often enough, you have a nickname for it?”

Dan leaned onto his elbows, lowering his voice even though nobody was close enough to hear us. “Five years ago, when things were rolling, this place’d be packed. There were fifty thousand people in the defense contractors within a three-mile radius of where you’re sitting, and that’s just the white-collars. Then came the cutbacks. Remember the last election, everybody railing about how Dukakis had turned the Massachusetts Miracle into the Massachusetts Debacle?”

“Tough to miss it.”

“Okay, let me tell you, Dukakis wasn’t any more responsible for the downside than he was for the up. It wasn’t who was governor, it was Reagan Administration deficit spending on defense contractors in Tip O’Neill’s home state that made the miracle, and it was the cutoff of federal spending that shitcanned it. Today, there’s maybe,
maybe
, twenty, twenty-two thousand of the fifty still in their jobs, and most of them are holding on by their fingernails, praying God that a rich Arab country with more oil wells than generals wants some fancy hardware can bring down their neighbors’ missiles like a falcon on a pigeon.”

“You sound like you’ve been tuned into the conversations around you.”

Dan clouded some more. “I don’t have to eavesdrop.” He rapped his ring on the mahogany bar like West Pointers used to do in Vietnam, then made a fist and showed me the inscription. “Tufts Engineering, Class of ’eighty-five. When DRM cut me loose last year, this is where they threw my El-Oh party.”

“I see.”

I ordered a mushroom burger and fries, biding my time while Dan put the order in and helped the frantic waitress again. When he wasn’t looking, I downed most of the Watney’s quickly.

When Dan turned back toward me, he saw the depleted mug. “Another?”

“Please.”

Fresh napkin, fresh mug.

As he served me, I said, “How’s DRM doing these days?”

A shrug. “Depends on who you talk to. Or overhear.” A sheepish smile. “Sorry. Still a little touchy on that, I guess.”

“Forget it, my stupidity. It’s just that DRM isn’t one of the companies you tend to mention in the same breath as Raytheon or Teledyne or—”

“Or General Dynamics or Northrup or any of them. It’s one of the reasons I went with DRM out of school, tell you the truth. The president is this guy Davison from the South, mega-military contacts. The place was small enough when I started, you actually got to talk with him as part of the interview process. Then things got bigger, people brought on laterally from other companies, and somewhere along the line, it got too big to move quick enough, and like half of us got pink slips. What I hear, they’re coming back a little, but not enough.”

“Not enough?”

“For me to get asked back.”

I nodded, at which point a little binger went off and Dan said my lunch was ready. He brought it out, disappeared while I ate, and reappeared only to leave my tab.

Stepping off the stool, I said to him, “Wasn’t the guy on those murders up in Maine from DRM?”

Dan’s face clouded again. It hurt you to see it. “That’s right. He was one of the laterals, brought on from some computer outfit where he was a hotshot sales guy. I never met him, far as I know, but it sounds like he’s in deeper shit than an El-Oh party lands you.”

Agreeing with him, I took the tab and settled it with the hostess, who hoped I’d have a really good day, now.

D
EFENSE
R
ESOURCE
M
ANAGEMENT WAS
a slate building three stories high that looked like the lower half of a capital “H.” The parking lot between the two legs was only about one third full. Unless a lot of folks took very late outside lunches, things weren’t any better than bartender Dan suggested. I left the car in a
“
Visitor” space and walked to the main entrance in the middle of the crossbar, the initials of the company emblazoned in a white and yellow starburst just over my head.

The double, glass doors were reinforced with hexagonal chicken wire, like an old elementary school. Just inside the entrance was a cockpit desk with two people as captain and copilot, a battery of video cameras above their heads, sweeping the reception area. The captain was a middle-aged woman in a polka-dot blouse wearing a headset of tiny earphones and mouth mike. The copilot was a young black man in a powder blue security shirt with impressive shoulders and biceps. When the woman asked my name, I gave it, the security guy consulting a sheet in front of him. I felt as though I were voting in the basement of the Boston Public Library, where an election board volunteer takes your name and a Boston cop checks you off on a registration list.

The copilot found my name. “Can I see some identification, please?”

I showed my Massachusetts private investigator identification holder.

He said, “Something with a photo on it?”

I got out my wallet and gave him the driver’s license. I wasn’t carrying, so I left my gun permit in the little pocket where most people kept a credit card or two.

The guard noted something in a logbook. “This still your home address?”

“What difference does it make?”

He stopped writing and very deliberately handed back my license. “Stand still for just a moment, please, sir.”

I did.

The woman pushed a button, then a part of their cockpit area made noises like an auto shredder for about twenty seconds. She reached a hand over to the far side of the desk, and a photo dropped into her hand. She took the photo and placed it under a pump handle that belonged next to the well on an old farm. After pressing down on the handle, she lifted up and produced a laminated holder with a plastic string around it, like a pendant on a chain. She handed me the thing, a depressingly accurate likeness of me next to some kind of iridescent hologram. The pendant part was still warm.

As the woman pushed another button and spoke quietly into her mike, the guard said to me, “Please wear that badge around your neck at all times, photo out. Please be sure to return the badge to this desk upon exiting the building.”

I put the plastic chain over my head, feeling vaguely foolish. “What do I do now?”

He inclined his head to the woman. “Someone will be out shortly, sir. Please have a seat.”

There were a couple of comfortable chairs around a Plexiglas table. Two spartan conference rooms with open doors and empty Plexiglas tables were to my left. The only other door was to my right, a heavy, metal affair with a small porthole of glass and wire. I took one of the chairs and looked at the magazines fanned like a canasta hand on the Plexiglas in front of me. Three covers showed fighter planes, some sleek, some plug-ugly, with summaries of the stories inside. One cover had a missile angled at about sixty degrees from the horizontal on a launcher with bulbous truck tires holding it up. Another displayed a submarine breaching through what looked like ice floes. “Mr. Cuddy?”

I looked up. I hadn’t heard the inner door open, but it was just closing in the far wall. The woman standing in front of me was slim, about five-six in a tweed suit and maize blouse. She had green eyes that turned down just a little at the corners, making her appear slightly sad. The eyes took you away from the rest of the face, both nose and chin small and pointy above and below full lips. If she were a fighter plane, she’d have been one of the sleek ones. She also was wearing a pendant, but hers had a nametag on it that read ANNA-PIA ANTONELLI. I got up, stretching out my hand. “Ms. Antonelli.” “Call me Anna-Pia. Same number of syllables, but it comes out shorter.”

Nice smile between the lips. “And I’m John.”

“If you’ll come with me, John, we can get started.”

I followed Antonelli to the heavy door, a click preceding her reaching for the handle. It opened onto a large room, another security guard by himself behind a smaller desk. We walked through a cornfield of computer terminals and drafting boards, maybe half of each occupied by a man or woman lost in thought, staring at screen or drawing. The dress code seemed pretty casual, a lot of jeans on both genders. The security pendants all had name labels.