It's a Crime (10 page)

And it worked. Oh, he knew she was putting on a show, but so what? Shows work because performers and audience members all want them to. The audience cries out to be tricked. As Pat delved into her next package of wings with dogged cheerfulness, Frank finally went back to the last of his own and asked for pizza. Ruby frowned and again said,
“Daddy—”

“Yes?” said Frank.

Whatever she’d been about to say she changed to “I don’t know how you can eat that stuff,” but neither Pat nor Frank paid much attention. The show had prevailed, so Ruby’s words, however cutting, must have been indicative of her own misery rather than any acknowledged truth.

When Pat returned with the pizza, she said, “I caught a glimpse of Oliver the other day. Why, exactly, didn’t you promote him?”

Frank’s agitation returned. “Is he still angry at me? After I kept him out of that mess? My problem was, I wasn’t a big enough criminal.”

Pat could not see the logic behind the conjoining of those two ideas—the protection of Oliver with the insignificance of the crimes. Probably Frank thought his behavior was “wrong” in the way he’d know it was “wrong” to ski a trail that had been posted. It’s the sort of thing you regret only if it fails. You can get down a dangerous trail—and then scoff at why it had been closed at all. You can continue to inflate your earnings—and then scoff at the rules that try to put a brake on a market that goes up as surely as a flood tide. You don’t necessarily lose your way and put would-be rescuers in the hospital. You don’t necessarily get caught and end up impoverishing your secretary.

“I ran into Ellen, too,” said Pat.

“You know that she cried when I called her,” said Frank.

Pat did not point out the many times Frank had already mentioned this. Instead she said, “Wouldn’t it be nice to help her out in some way?” There was no point in telling him that she’d already sent a check; it would only upset him.

“Oh, yes,” said Frank. “That’s a great idea. Do something for Ellen. It wasn’t her fault.”

“Whose fault was it?” asked Ruby in a small voice.

“I don’t know who was worse, Riley or Neil,” said Frank. “In the two years before LinkAge went bankrupt, Riley Gibbs made seventy-eight million dollars. Neil Culp made thirty-nine million. And that isn’t counting their unsecured loans. The shareholders lost a hundred and forty billion dollars. It was all rigged.”

“One hundred and forty billion,” Pat repeated slowly.

“I was a moron,” said Frank. “They used me just the way they used everybody. The first quarter that LinkAge’s numbers were bad, word came down from Gibbs: The Swat Team was to fly coach and stay in budget motels. Then he turned around and bought himself a horse farm in Hunterdon County. I thought Neil was so great, but he would do anything for Gibbs because whatever Gibbs got, Neil got half. I’m surprised he didn’t get a half a horse farm.”

“Why aren’t they in jail?” asked Ruby.

“Too rich, I guess,” said Frank. “Maybe if I’d worked harder and made more money, I’d have gotten off, too.”

“Why didn’t you do something about it before you got put in jail?” Ruby persisted.

“Maybe the government didn’t have enough evidence,” said Pat quickly. “It isn’t always possible to change everything that’s wrong.”

“I don’t see why,” said Ruby, her eyes narrow and her lips tight.

“What shall we have next?” said Pat. “A cheeseburger?”

“Pizza for me,” said Frank.

Pat came back with just the pizza, saying, “I changed my mind at the last minute.”

Later, on their way out, as they stepped gingerly down the concrete steps into the wide-open world, Pat noticed tears streaming down Ruby’s face. She tried to put an arm around her shoulders. But Ruby shrugged her off, saying, “Why were you such a pig in there? Maybe if you could stop stuffing your face for two minutes in a row, people like Neil Culp wouldn’t get away with everything.”

CHAPTER
10

P
at had been rereading Lemuel Samuel’s books for a while. She was surprised at how crude they seemed now; like early Technicolor, their effects were lurid and clumsy and heavy-handed. Bud Caddy actually cuts off a guy’s foot in
The Fleabag Massacre
and leaves it lying in the road. But the roughness was the point.
Mallow
was the smoothest and most sentimental of the books, also the most lucrative. Pat had saved it for last, hoping to find clues about who she was. Instead she found the same joy present in all the books. You might mistake it for anger or righteousness or knight errantry. Bud Caddy often seemed to. But at the core of his every thought and action was a very American and very physical joy—in excess, in ferocity, in endurance. Halfway through
Mallow,
Pat decided she needed a drink. It was better that than look for a fight, which she would not have known how to do for fun, anyway.

Because she had thrown away all the half-full wine bottles, she decided to pick up a nice burgundy at the liquor store. She slipped on a pair of skintight black pants and a pair of sunglasses so narrow that they would have let in tons of light, had there been any on this gray day. Reconnoitering the stairway wasn’t too hard, because there was a window at each landing, but she could hardly see as she picked her way across the shadowy kitchen.

“So what’s with the shades?”

“My goodness!” cried Pat, her voice soaring.

At first she thought Ruby was referring to the shades on the kitchen windows, which had been drawn for some no doubt nefarious reason. She was sitting in the dark, possibly on some kind of drug that made the pupil take over the iris and thus be more sensitive to light. Hadn’t there been a drug like that? Pat couldn’t remember. If not, science and technology had probably come up with it in the last couple of decades.

“Pretty groovy slash embarrassing,” said Ruby. This was the usual puzzle. She was already making fun of Pat in the choice of the word
groovy,
so how was
embarrassing
a twist? Ruby’s disposition had not been improved by her father’s absence.

“Yes,” agreed Pat absently. “Why aren’t you in school?”

“It was a half day. Testing slash torturing.”

Pat wondered if this could possibly be true. “I’m sure you did very well,” she said.

LaConte Liquors was not on the main commercial street of Hart Ridge, but in a less frequented shopping arcade nearby. On one side was an unpopular deli; on the other, a dry cleaners that still had aging sixties-style cardboard advertising in the window. In the window of LaConte Liquors, Christmas lights illuminated a little glowing Santa with an inflatable bottle of gin in his sleigh. Pat paused in front of it, ambushed by memories of happier times.

When she was growing up, the LaConte brothers were everywhere. LaConte & Company was the largest real estate office in town. The LaConte Funeral Home was prosperous, too, even though it didn’t dominate its market in quite the same way. LaConte Liquors was the poor relation, covering the shabbiest section of the town’s first tier. But Frank was friends with the son, Bobby, in high school, and when Bobby eventually took over the family business, Frank started buying all his liquor there. It was a store that Pat liked to shop in, too, because it sold grittier, more atmospheric stuff like forty-ouncers you wouldn’t see in shops that specialized in fine wines. Not that Bobby passed up luxury items. He was the one who’d ordered Frank the cartons of reds and the carton of single malts. She took a deep breath and pushed open the door.

“Pat Foy,” said Bobby, putting down an inventory sheet. “You’re looking good. How have you been keeping yourself?”

Wine didn’t seem quite enough then. Pat’s eyes lit on some
poire,
and she decided to buy that, too.

“Couldn’t be better,” she said.

“You should come in more often and say hello.”

“Oh, I’ve been so busy,” she said. “You know.”

“And how is Frank?”

“Fine,” she said. She had been in and out of the store for years and had chatted with Bobby about their kids and their increasingly tenuous mutual acquaintances, eventually just recycling decades-old information. She did not feel she knew him. But she suspected that Frank did—or at least that both men considered themselves friends without ever having talked about much more than she and Bobby ever had. Men’s friendships were so much simpler. Frank had never had any trouble getting Bobby on the phone in those two months after his sentencing—
despite the fact that Bobby LaConte had bought a lot of LGT stock.
Pat couldn’t believe she had forgotten. Shortly after the LinkAge takeover he told her to tell Frank that he’d cashed in some and taken his family to Bermuda. With LinkAge employees Pat could entertain the illusion that everyone had profited and then suffered together. This was the first time she knowingly found herself with someone on the outside who’d lost money. Faced with Bobby LaConte’s pleasantly jowly face, his thick ex-athlete’s neck, and front hairs lying askew, like leftover wires, her normal exuberance faltered a little.

“Oh, dear,” she said. Then she blurted out, “I’m sorry you lost money on the LinkAge stock.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, twitching his meaty shoulders.

“How much was it?” she said. “Was it a lot?”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said again while ringing up her sale: The subject was closed.

“But Bobby,” she cried, “I can’t believe it! It’s all so horrible! Please, please tell me how much you lost.”

Bobby ran her platinum AmEx card through the machine, then examined it reverently as he said, “Pat, I never bought any stock. I didn’t have the money. I told Frank I did because, well, I was a friend, and I would have if I could have. I mean, I really would have, it wasn’t just talk. But then later I had an opportunity to buy this building, and obviously I couldn’t pass that up, which thank God I didn’t.”

Pat was perplexed. “But didn’t you say you went on vacation somewhere from the sale of some of your stock?”

“I don’t know what I said.” His tone was still pleasant. “But I didn’t buy any stock.”

“I guess that’s good then,” said Pat, wanting to believe him, but not daring to. “So you bought a little and then you sold it? Or what?”

“No, I never had any,” he said. “Frank is a good customer, and we go way back. I always liked him.”

“This doesn’t make any sense,” said Pat.

“Would you say hi to him for me?”

Pat nodded dumbly.

“Look at it this way,” said Bobby LaConte. “I’m probably the only one in town who didn’t buy stock.”

Pat’s voice dropped to her feet. “Really?” she said. “People all over town are broke?”

“Well, not broke.” Bobby’s face was pained. “My aunt lost some money. She got sort of upset. She’s a widow, you see.”

Oh. The very word squeezed Pat’s swollen heart. Widows’ peaks, widows’ weeds, widows’ walks. All bleak and lonely terms. Was Pat a “grass widow,” or was that just if your husband took off of his own free will and wasn’t hauled away in handcuffs?

“She lives here in town?” said Pat dully.

“No, no,” said Bobby, as if this somehow made it all better. “In Darnley.”

When Pat got into the car she felt like opening the
poire
right then and there. Then she thought longingly of her nice bed, with its periwinkle comforter, its heap of fruit-colored pillows, its pile of ready mysteries. But instead she took out her cellphone. She would at least try to get the address of Bobby’s widowed aunt from information. Sure enough, when she offered an imaginary address in Darnley, the efficient voice at the other end of the line corrected her.

Pat wondered how you approached a woman who had suffered at the hands of the convicted felon you were married to. The aunt might not even let her in. Pat thought fondly of the maniacally escalating ruses from Ginny’s story “The Red Door”: flowers, a radio contest, a janitor’s jumpsuit. Come to think of it, the purpose was as obscure. You never knew what Ginny’s detective was up to, and Pat could not imagine what she was going to say to this aunt. What was she supposed to do—give her a check, as well? That would be too much.

She was surprised that she had not heard from Ellen Kloda yet. Ellen may have been embarrassed that she’d told her about the lost deposit. She still may not have made up her mind whether to accept the replacement. Or maybe she was disappointed that it wasn’t more, closer to the total of what she’d lost. This last seemed the most unlikely. People tend to appreciate any amount of money that appears out of the blue. And Ellen did not seem to harbor any resentments—quite the contrary.

AnneMarie Mikulsky née LaConte lived in a town not far from Hart Ridge. Separating them was a curious stretch of warehouses, self-storage units, and “dealer services.” Pat was not familiar with AnneMarie’s street, but did not have much trouble finding it. It was one of the major thoroughfares running east-west—narrow and residential, but highly trafficked. The houses were set back unusually far, so Pat did not realize how big most of them were until she got stuck in traffic, horns honking randomly around her. The mature shrubbery also made it hard to tell where the houses began and ended. Paths to the front doors meandered around cypress and fir, giving the lawns an oddly woodland look, considering the glut of vehicles in front of them. Eventually she followed the lane of cars around the cause of the delay, a pint-size school bus, the type that private schools use, and the same type that Ruby had ridden to the academy before the Foys moved to Douglas Point.

That move had been slow in coming. Frank and Pat told the kids they didn’t have time to look for a house when in fact they didn’t yet have the money to finance Frank’s grandiose vision. Young Ruby, impatient to be with her friends, slipped out of her bus one day long before her stop. A crisis ensued, with Pat tearing through phone conversations with the school secretary, the gym teacher who coordinated the buses, and the dean of students. It turned out that Ruby had gone house-hunting herself and picked out “the biggest one of all.” When she pointed it out for her mother, Pat didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was an apartment building, with dozens of tenants.

AnneMarie’s house was a twenties Tudor with three gables, two chimneys, and a slate roof in various shades of pinky beige and gray. Long narrow casement windows echoed the decorative black trim on the door. All the evergreen shrubs were as perfectly shaped as fortune-tellers’ crystal balls. To the right was a covered pool and a small pool house, an adorable but unsuccessful imitation of the Tudor. Six-foot-high grasses must mask it in the summer. Now you could see through the shrunken brown blades. Pat was no expert but the house was worth several million, anyway.

The Mikulskys must have been one of the wealthier branches on the complicated LaConte family tree. Pat doubted that AnneMarie could have been affected much by the slide of LinkAge stock, but of course looks were sometimes deceiving. Bobby had said she lived with her brother. They could be trapped in the heavily mortgaged family home, forced to cling to each other for economy’s sake. Pat managed to park in front, although you would have thought several cars behind her had suddenly developed malfunctioning horns (stuck on). But no, the Mikulskys couldn’t be hurting. In the driveway, pulled up beside the post-and-beam fence, was a red Porsche. Say what you like about the decline in quality of manufactured goods, it was fortunate they didn’t make victims like they used to. Sympathy was wasted on people who’d lost money in the stock market if they’d made plenty, too. Maybe AnneMarie could give Pat some of hers.

Pat had enormous empathy. Her generosity and kindness were spontaneous and sincere. But her mind did not move in a straight line any more than a cow crops grass as a lawnmower does. The cow grazes a little here, a little there. As soon as she decided to drive home without getting out of the car, Pat forgot about the Mikulskys. She thought about 1) where to wire money for Frank’s telephone account, 2) whether she should hire a personal assistant, which she’d occasionally done in the past, with varying results, 3) what vegetables she might cook with cheese, to trick Ruby into eating them, 4) where Ruby might be wandering off to these days, 5) why the flavor had gone out of life, 6) what had happened to Lemuel Samuel.

When she got home she Googled “Lemuel Samuel,” and up popped an article in an online mystery zine entitled “Crime Writers Pick the Worst True Crimes.” In it a dozen mystery novelists cited crimes ranging from the assassination of JFK to the Son of Sam murders. Lemuel Samuel couldn’t decide between Enron and LinkAge.