Graveland: A Novel (8 page)

“I doubt it,” he says eventually. “Too much exposure. It’s the
name
. If she was still a Pendleton, then maybe, but I figure the old man’s going to let her fry.”

“Yeah,” Vaughan says, “but if she fries, he’s finished anyway. In fact, he’s
already
finished. Connie screwed her old man over years ago by marrying Ricky. I mean, what, we’re going to elect a governor who’s got an ex-son-in-law with ‘Icepick’ for a middle name? Please.”

“I don’t see why not,” Howley says. “These days? It’d take a lot more than
that
to crush Gene Pendleton.”

“Maybe, but it’s not over yet. I think there’s still a bunch of stuff to come out. That campaign funds thing, for instance, with Meeker … the missing checkbook.” He pauses, then coughs. “There’s also this guy at the moment, the doorman, what’s his name?”

Howley hasn’t seen enough of the coverage and is out of his depth here. A missing checkbook? The doorman? He has no idea what Vaughan is talking about.

He shakes his head.

“Mrs. R?” Vaughan then says, turning awkwardly. “The doorman, the guy on at the moment, what’s his name?”

Mrs. Richardson looks up from the sink and clicks her tongue. “Joey Gifford.”

“
Thank
you. Yes, of course.” He takes another old-man slurp of chowder and quickly wipes his chin with a napkin. “And let’s not forget the question of method, the carving knife.” He pauses, looking up. “Not exactly an icepick, but hey.”

Howley remains silent and gazes at the tiny splashes of cherry soda on the countertop. Sticky and crimson, they look like speckles of blood.

“Anyway,” Vaughan says, “Ray Whitestone is going to have a ball working the various angles.” He puts his spoon into the bowl and pushes it aside. “Case is made for him.” He reaches into the pocket of his robe and takes out a silver pillbox. “It’s got everything,” he goes on, more slowly now, concentrating, his mind fixed on getting the box open. “Politics, sex, the mob … Wall Street, grand opera. You couldn’t make it up. Right, Craig?”

Howley nods. What else is there to do?

The old man clears his throat. “Get me a glass of water, Mrs. R, would you?”

She does.

Over the next couple of minutes, and in silence, Vaughan takes his various tablets. When he’s done, he stands up, ties the sash of his robe, and nods at the door. “Come on, Craig, let me walk you out.”

Walk him
out
? He just got here.

Resigned, Howley nods at Mrs. Richardson, who’s standing at the counter now, scrubbing at the soda stains with a spiral wire brush.

On the way out, Vaughan starts coughing. It escalates, and to get it under control he has to pound his chest with the palm of his hand. Howley finds this alarming.

“You okay?”

“Do I
sound
it?”

After he’s regained his composure, and as they’re crossing the foyer, Vaughan turns and says, “So, Craig, tell me, what do you make of these shootings over the weekend?”

Howley exhales loudly. He doesn’t know, and at this point he doesn’t really care. He’s more concerned—or, at any rate, baffled—by Vaughan’s behavior. It’s clear that the old man is unwell, and very frail, but also that he’s as sharp as ever, and as calculating. The fact that they haven’t discussed either the succession question or the proposed IPO is no accident as far as Howley is concerned. This other stuff, the Carillo trial, the shootings … Howley sees it all as smoke and mirrors, a form of misdirection.

Sleight of hand.

Or
is
it?

In truth, he can’t be sure. Because the thing is … could Vaughan have actually forgotten what he’d called Howley up here to discuss?

It can’t be discounted as a possibility.

“I don’t know, Jimmy,” he says, eyeing the old man warily now. “I refuse to believe any of this conspiracy stuff in the papers. There’s no mystery about it, really.” He shrugs. “It’s simple. The murder rate goes up in a recession.”

Vaughan shakes his head. “I think you’ll find the most recent stats contradict you on that one, Craig.” He starts coughing again, but manages to contain it this time. “Big drop in violent crime, five, almost six percent last year alone.”

Okay, whatever, Jesus.

“Well, Jimmy, what do
you
think?”

This is what he wants, isn’t it?

Vaughan presses the button for the elevator and the door whispers open. “Whatever this is,” he says, “I think it goes pretty deep.” He holds his arm against the elevator door to keep it open. “It could be some form of, I don’t know … bloodletting.” He looks very weak all of a sudden, and a little spaced. “I don’t think we’ve seen an end to it.”

Howley nods and steps into the elevator cab.

It goes deep? Bloodletting? An
end
to it?

He’s not quite sure what the old man is talking about. But maybe—it occurs to him—just
maybe,
the old man isn’t sure either. In fact, maybe he’s losing his marbles. Maybe this is the end of an era, or the start of a new one. Howley has a quick vision of himself steering Oberon to a successful IPO, and then beyond, to his own rightful place at the table, CFR, Trilateral, Bilderberg, whatever—the old man, meanwhile, stuck here in the apartment coughing his lungs up, fumbling with tablets, sucking his food out of a straw, and watching endless coverage on TV of some tawdry celebrity murder trial …

Howley turns around.

Maybe he
should
think about rearranging the furniture in Vaughan’s office, because chances are this decrepit old bird in front of him now won’t be leaving home anytime soon.

Unless it’s in a box.

“Okay, Jimmy,” he says, looking out from the overly ornate interior of the elevator cab. “Good night.”

“Yeah, Craig, old sport,” Vaughan says, but quietly, a sudden and unexpected glint in his eye. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

5

A
T THE COUNTER IN HER LOCAL DINER,
sipping coffee, waiting on a bagel and cream cheese, Ellen flicks through her notebook, the most recent few pages of it. But there’s nothing there. It’s all doodles and arrows and mini-mindmaps and word lists—hieroglyphic shit in her own handwriting that soon even
she’ll
be unable to decipher. This is what happens when you lose the thread of a story, or can’t find the shape of one in the first place.

She puts the notebook down and stirs her coffee. There’s no reason to, it’s black and unsweetened, but she does it anyway.

One of the little diner-y things people do.

Like shaking the packet of sugar before you open it, or chewing on a toothpick.

She glances up and down the counter.

Skinny guy in a business suit perched on his stool at one end, burly construction worker spilling off his at the other.

Where’s Norman Rockwell when you need him?

The bagel arrives, and she starts into it, eyeing the notebook, unwilling to let this go. Since expounding her theory yesterday to Max Daitch, Ellen has made little or no progress. Probably because it wasn’t much of a theory to start with. What was it she said? Different perps, no connection, same perps, bunch of clowns?

Something like that?

Or
that
specifically.

The counter guy is passing, and she holds out her cup for a refill.

The official line hasn’t changed in the last twenty-four hours either. Maybe there’s hard evidence somewhere that she’s unaware of—or maybe it’s a carefully engineered consensus, or maybe it’s just intellectual laziness, she doesn’t know—but the continuing and remarkably consistent media assumption seems to be that a group of domestic terrorists, as yet unidentified, was responsible for the two killings. Within those parameters, there is a modicum of theorizing, and the usual lingo is deployed—jihad, radical, global … battlefield … threat level. Repeated reference is now also being made to that earlier report about intel analysts picking up noises in Yemen relating to possible targeting of Wall Street executives.

But what strikes Ellen most is that there hasn’t been a single mention anywhere, at least not that she can see, of the differing methods used in the two shootings, and of how weird that is, and of what it implies—

Quick sip of coffee.

—namely, that the shootings may well have been separate and unconnected, which would also mean they were random and coincidental, thus rendering all of that speculative Homeland Security–speak in the papers and online pretty much irrelevant. The alternative scenario is that the shootings were indeed connected, at least circumstantially. For the moment, the how and why remain unknown, but what the differing methods would seem to imply is that maybe there
was
no method, or very little method, and that the perps were simply amateurs.

As far as Ellen is concerned, if it’s the first, there’s no story here worth pursuing. It’d just be two routine homicides. But if it’s the second—

She takes her last mouthful of bagel.

—there is.

So she’s going with the second.

With the amateurs, the clowns.

The lone wolves, the stray dogs.

Because if that’s what these guys
are,
amateurs, and not a highly organized terrorist cell—not pre-installed units, not strings of code in some elaborate phase of video gameplay—then there’s no reason why she or any other moderately intelligent person shouldn’t be able to get inside their heads, work out what they’re up to, second-guess them even.

She twirls the coffee spoon between her fingers for a moment.

Is that being overly ambitious? Perhaps. Wouldn’t be the first time, though.

She looks around.

Regrouping.

Okay, most parties with an interest in this—Homeland Security, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, the NYPD, CNN, Fox, the
WSJ,
the
Times,
half the blogosphere—are just assuming that these perps are experienced professionals, possibly with a background in the military or in special ops. Little Ellen Dorsey, on the other hand, and based solely on a fucking hunch, has decided otherwise—that they’re newbies, isolated, and largely clueless.

It’s not much of a competitive edge, and maybe she’s deluding herself, but it’s all she’s got.

She pays and leaves.

And there isn’t much of a window here, because if she’s right about this, it’s bound to become apparent to everyone pretty quickly—one more development is all it’ll take, and that could happen at any time.

Walking back to her apartment, she decides that with the lack of any intel on the perps, the only other likely route into the story is through the vics. Why them? Who were they? What did they have in common? Did they ever meet, or cross paths professionally? And if so, does this tell us anything?

She gets home, clears some space on her desk, and settles down to work.

Over the course of the day she trawls through dozens of business websites, gathering and collating references to the two men. She reads profiles, magazine articles, blog posts, anything she can find. She prints out some of this stuff, pinning loose pages of it onto various corkboards around the apartment and laying others out on the floor. She moves quickly from one spot to another, highlighting passages with a red marker as she follows a line of thought, swirling and daubing red streaks on paper like a hopped-up Jackson Pollock. She spends a good deal of time on the phone and writing e-mails, putting out feelers, questions, requests for information.

She doesn’t eat anything. She drinks a lot of coffee.

But none of this really gets her anywhere. Because although it turns out that Jeff Gale and Bob Holland had quite a lot in common, there’s a predictability to it all, and a banality. They both served, for instance, on a couple of the same boards; they were both members of the same golf club for a while; and they both had former wives who went to the same high school. She finds gala charity events that they both attended and infers a certain degree of casual social contact between them, at lunches, openings, the occasional weekend in the Hamptons.

But what she doesn’t find, or stumble upon, is any kind of sinister nexus between Northwood Leffingwell and Chambers Capital Management. She finds a nexus, alright, but it’s the bigger one—the one that links them all together, the banks, the hedge funds, the private equity shops. She knew this—of
course
she did, it’s axiomatic now—but it still comes as a shock to see it laid out like that in such unequivocal terms.

And it’s no help really.

Because it doesn’t tell her anything.

By late evening she’s tired, addled from too much caffeine, her brain engorged with terabytes of useless information. In an attempt to reverse this, or at least to calm it—to calm what she considers her attention surplus disorder—she takes a long, hot, fragrant bath. Lying there, in the flickering candlelight, she listens for the weird sounds that her building occasionally tends to make, or that tend to ripple through it—bumps, thuds, muffled voices—and that for some reason she can only ever seem to hear at all clearly from here, from the bath.

Not that she wants to particularly.

But it has become a routine, a little ritual for unwinding, for emptying her brain after too many hours at the keyboard.

Delete, delete, delete.

Ten minutes in, however, and she’s
thinking
again, speculating, unable to help herself. If these guys aren’t jihadis—and she doesn’t for one second believe they are—then what are they?
Who
are they? The Tea Party? Occupy Wall Street?

She shakes her head.

The Tea Partiers want to
be
the bankers, not to kill them, and the Occupiers are too wooly and amorphous for anything as decisive and proactive as an assassination program.

So she keeps coming back to her first instinct on this.

They’re amateurs.

Stray dogs.

Doing their own thing.

And where do people like this find inspiration? Where do they get their ideas from? Where do they meet, and hang out, and exchange information, and
chat
? Her heart sinks.