Resurgence (19 page)
“This scenario they’ve come up with—as I was about to say—they now theorize that the drugs were contained somewhere within the house and—”
“Somewhere? They can’t come up with better than that?”
“Apparently not, and as I was about to say, they theorize that Rayce retrieved the coke from wherever, stuck it in his pocket, leaving those trace amounts they jumped on, while he went for the glass of water used as the means of ingestion.” She glances up from her second cup of coffee, “Before I go on, don’t hold me to this word for word. Keep in mind I’ve seen only David’s notes on the report, and I’m probably letting my own opinion creep in.”
“You don’t have to issue
me
a disclaimer. Don’t you know that by now?” He tries for a term of endearment that would soften his remark and can’t think of one that wouldn’t comment on her prettiness or her exhaustion. Another apology is the most he can offer. That, and a weak promise to stop interrupting.
“Okay,” she says and rubs her eyes for a moment. “This is what else they’re saying—he mixed the potion in the study, drank all but a few drops, and was able to make it to the bathroom, urinate, and flush before the dose hit him.”
“Yeah. Right. That’s exactly what I’d do if I were intent on killing myself—take a leak, then be sure to flush before I crashed to the floor.”
“I know what you’re saying. I have a
huge
problem with that and with this other thing. Because they didn’t find any packaging anywhere, they’re theorizing he must have flushed it when he did the deed. I mean, who needs to destroy evidence in a situation like that? Why not just toss the baggie in the trash, why go to all that trouble? Have you ever tried to flush a baggie? They tend to fill up like a . . . a condom.”
He’s closer to coloring than she is when she reveals at least a passing acquaintance with inflatables. He only nods to her rhetorical questions before posing one of his own.
“What if the coke was packaged in something else? Rolling papers, glassine envelopes, maybe?”
The words just hang there until she shrugs and enunciates the same resignation he feels.
“I doubt there’d be any difference if the stuff turned out to have been gift wrapped. They’ve made up their collective minds and I’m compelled to say the same thing I did when I first found out—that this is just plain
wrong
.”
Reminding her of his original assessment would be just plain cruel, and there is no satisfaction to be gained from his having predicted from the get-go that Rayce’s death would be ruled a suicide.
Still stumped for a verbal means of showing support, he considers other possibilities. He could reach over and take her hand, hold it for a while. Or he could reach across and pat her arm, maybe stroke her wrist in a soothing way, and run the risk of sending a mixed message. Clouding the issue. Blurring intentions. Confusing her. Confusing him.
“If there was anything I could do, I would. I hope you know that,” he says in a rush of inadequacy.
“Yeah, I know. Colin said basically the same thing when I told him last night and here
I
should be the one lending support, not the other way around.”
“That sounds like Colin took it well, though.”
“I don’t know about well, but I know he wasn’t surprised.”
“I don’t want to come off insensitive or anything, but I have to wonder—”
“You’re wondering what impact this news will have on the concert. Don’t think that hasn’t been heavily debated ever since we heard yesterday. That’s another reason I’ve become short-tempered and foulmouthed.”
“Amanda . . . listen to me. First of all, don’t let this bring you down. It’s beyond your control. Second of all, you’ve got to focus on the positives, on the good. What you’ve accomplished so far is off the charts. You’re essentially managing a major rock star, and you’ve almost single-handedly pulled together the greatest assemblage of talent since last year’s Prince’s Trust concert. Since Live Aid, I could believe. As though that’s not enough, you’ve brought Verge back together, something they said would never happen, and I’m in fucking awe. No other word for it, and trust me, I am
not
easily awed.”
He has her full attention when he runs propositions by her that have nothing to do with coroner’s reports or rock concerts. As he elaborates, her eyes go round and her cheeks develop spots of color like the Amanda of yore.
“When your commitment to David is ended, I want you with me—what I mean to say, I want you to
work
with me. Something in research and development, I’m thinking. We can arrive at a title and more precise job description after we see how things . . . develop. You don’t have to decide right this minute,” he tacks on, “but I would like an answer before I return to New York.”
She frowns at the remains of her coffee, pokes around inside her handbag without saying anything. She produces a tattered tissue that suggests what she’s up against. Now he’s the one on thirty-second delay for belatedly grasping that she’s struggling not to cry. If he were the gentleman he pretends to be, he’d be doing something about it.
He rifles though the pockets of his blazer and khakis and the best he can come up with is a crumpled boarding pass. In desperation, he grabs a wad of paper napkins from a neighboring table and hands them over like a bedraggled bouquet. That makes her smile a little, but her eyes are still round and gleaming with unshed tears.
“I’m sorry. I had no idea I’d upset you or I wouldn’t have brought this up in a public place,” he says.
“No,
I’m
sorry.
I
had no idea. I mean, I knew you might want to hire me some day, you already said that, but I never thought in a million years you’d want me to—”
“I think we need to get out of here. Do you have to go back to work right away?”
“Yes, I do,” she says, her voice cracking, “I shouldn’t have been away this long.”
He can’t go with her. He can’t even walk her to the door of David’s offices, a few blocks away. Not at this stage in the game.
“Okay . . . I think I’ll drop in at my own office. Probably give the weekend staff heart attacks, saying they even recognize me. When can we get together again? Tonight? Tomorrow?”
“I really can’t say. There’s never a time when I’m not on call, and I can’t chance being seen with you once Colin comes to town.”
“Yeah, don’t I know.”
“I’ll work something out, though. Promise.” She wipes her nose on the paper napkin bouquet, manages a shaky smile. They leave separately, as though constraints were already in place.
Although Nate was only joking about being recognized at an office he hasn’t visited in weeks, the pared-down weekend staff does do a double take when he walks in unannounced.
Daily fax updates and twice-weekly document transfers keep the Manhattan office in the loop, so the surprise visit is not apt to uncover any deficiencies. He nevertheless requests an on-the-spot summary of the past week’s activities—just for the hell of it, or maybe because the situation with Amanda combined with the onset of jetlag is bringing out the taskmaster in him. At the end of the impromptu briefing, he sends the three retainers home, locks himself in and retreats to his private office with no particular plan in mind.
The desk is foreign to him; he can’t remember the last time he sat at it. The chair is the wrong height, he’s unfamiliar with the desk accessories, he doesn’t immediately recall how the intercom works, and, for a nanosecond, is unable to identify the muted double trill as coming from the phone when it rings.
He picks up hoping Amanda is calling to say she’s cut herself some slack. But it’s Laurel, calling to say she’s just been told of his arrival and can meet with him as soon as Monday. They agree on a time that he jots down as though he’d otherwise forget about an appointment ostensibly the main reason for the London trip. Laurel attempts friendly small talk that he rebuffs by fibbing that he has someone waiting on another line.
The office needs airing. It’s too small. It’s in the wrong part of London; this part of Chelsea’s become bourgeois while he wasn’t looking. King’s Road is not what it used to be, and probably hasn’t been for longer than he’d care to recognize. To be current, he should migrate to the more bohemian Camden Town or consider the opposite: operating out of some staid old mansion in Belgravia or a sleek floor-through in the burgeoning St. Katherine Dock area—something with a boat slip and an open view of the anchorage. He should be paying more attention to the financial services district under development on the Isle of Dogs—Canary Wharf, they’re calling it—or be looking into office space development within the boundaries of The City. He should be doing anything other than what he is doing, which is stagnating.
Even the material on the desk is stagnant. The collection of prospectuses has been picked over multiple times, with recommendations already phoned or faxed to him in New York. He leafs through a tray of memos, most of them investment-related, and all of them marked as having been transmitted. Some are over a month old. The one describing Anthony Elliot’s bogus fax to the Wish Upon a Star Foundation goes back at least that long. Another, outlining ideas for a confab with like-minded venture capitalists, is from mid-March. A standout dated April 13, 1987—the day he was found dead—details what was then known of Rayce Vaughn’s death. That would be the memo received over a payphone outside the Sea Grill in New York, the one stating that Rayce had taken a massive amount of unusually potent product by mouth.
Nate separates this memo from the pile, rereads key words that didn’t fully impact until now because, at the time of the announcement, all the emphasis was being put on the means of intake.
“Jesus,” he says softly, almost reverently. Is it any damn wonder he reverted to the practice of linking coincidences and stretching similarities upon hearing how Rayce died. And could he be more appalled for now having to admit—even if only to himself—that the most critical part of the memo must have registered on an intuitive rather than intellectual level. This admission is far more disturbing than viewing himself as out of step with current London real estate trends and fallen behind on the investment front.
Suddenly he can’t get out of the office fast enough. When he hits the street, afternoon traffic is such that the quickest way back to the hotel is on foot.
When he enters the hotel suite this time, he takes in more than the location of the nearest phone. The understated décor is to his liking: Walls, draperies, and upholstery rendered in taupes, greys, and ivories; dark polished wood, gleaming glass, and chrome furnishings accented by calla lilies, moth orchids, and globular Asian pears. But the atmosphere is better suited to meditation than seduction. And probably just as well.
Even though he finishes with a cold rinse, a long shower is more sapping than revitalizing. He takes his time shaving, then dresses as though he has someplace to go when he might be wiser to forget about merging with the time zone and just give in to sleep. He’s on the way out the door when the phone rings. He chooses not to answer. Amanda won’t be available anytime soon and no one else knows he’s staying here. He’s left the suite and locked the door behind him before he spots the flaw in that thinking.
“Shit!” He fumbles the keycard into the lock, but the phone stops ringing before he can get to it. He picks up anyway, listens for a moment as though for an echo, fixes on the message light as though willing it to activate. Still behind the beat, unsure which of Amanda’s numbers to call first, he draws a blank when he finally decides it should be the one for her service. It’s written down somewhere and damned if he can remember where. Then, when he does surface it from memory, it’s the procedure for getting an outside line he can’t remember. The very instant he replaces the receiver and squints into a bound directory of calling instructions and in-house numbers, the instrument trills to life.
Breathing like he just ran up three flights of stairs, he clamps the phone to his ear. He may or may not have said hello when she starts talking.
“I probably shouldn’t have arrived here unannounced but I couldn’t very well announce myself when I couldn’t track you down by phone so I thought I’d take my chances but you must have been in the shower when I called earlier or taking a nap or something because neither the concierge nor the doorman saw you come out and they both said they know who you are and what you look like when I asked them,” Amanda says.
“Concierge? Doorman?”
“Yes.”
“Here? Here at my hotel?”
“Yes, your hotel, if your hotel is the one just down Park Lane and around the corner a ways where you said it was and if you are, in fact, staying at the Westerly on Willow Place instead of the Dorchester as you explained before we parted, and if you’re registered here under your own name and answering your own—”
“Amanda,” he interrupts a partial reprise of the vaudeville routine that prefaced their earlier phone conversation. “Slow down. You’re in the right place. There’s no rush, I’m not going anywhere. Stay right where you are, I’ll come find you.”