Ride a Cockhorse (26 page)

“His name is Howard Brouillette.” Bruce was intent on presenting his findings in logical sequence. “One of the girls in my salon learned about it.”

“About what?” Mrs. Fitzgibbons's pupils darkened. “What did he do?”

“It isn't like that.” Bruce shook his head. “Nina, who works for me, went to school with Mr. Brouillette's wife. They went to the Metcalf School together. His wife's name is Dolores. She and Mr. Brouillette have been married about two years.”

“I know, I know,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons snapped impatiently.

From the inner pocket of his suit jacket, Bruce extracted a folded newspaper clipping. Mrs. Fitzgibbons took it in hand at once. With everyone watching, she opened it. It was a printed photo of a naked woman, her face obscured by a black bar of ink across her eyes and nose. The caption below the picture read “The Queen of Kink.”

“Her name is Dolores,” Bruce repeated unnecessarily. If he had expected an amused response from Mrs. Fitzgibbons, he was rapidly disabused.

“This,” she said, “is Mrs. Brouillette? This is his wife?”

“I'm afraid so.”

The anger in Mrs. Fitzgibbons's face discouraged the others from reacting. “Do you have any idea what this could do to me? My vice president in charge of secondary financing is married to a whore?” In an access of fury, Mrs. Fitzgibbons shouted at Bruce. “Where did you find this?”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons got to her feet before he could answer. “I'll be a laughingstock! This slut could destroy me.” She looked about herself in frustration. When she got this way, Julie and the others shrank into their seats.

“I hadn't thought of that,” Bruce muttered.

“My name and reputation will be dragged through the mud in every paper and news broadcast from here to Hoosac Tunnel.”

Emil, the barman, was so riveted by what he saw, as Mrs. Fitzgibbons clenched and flexed her fists and flung acid remarks about, that he ignored the ringing telephone.

The man in question, Howard Brouillette, was an individual whose behavior bordered on eccentricity. Known to his coworkers as a young man who wore the same cheap suit of clothes to work every day, Howard talked incessantly to anyone who would listen and employed a technical jargon that bewildered the uninitiated. He talked about his triumphs in the secondary market in terms like “inverted yield curves,” “Euroyen,” “basis points,” and about “segmented markets” and “globality.” At his most loquacious, his face took on the glassy-eyed expression of a fanatic. Until now, Mrs. Fitzgibbons had looked upon the skinny, bespectacled man as nothing more than a harmless specialist who had found his place in life at the refinancing desk of the Parish Bank; she had never liked standing close to him, though, for there was something repellant to her in the combination of his bug-eyed appearance and the constant nervous agitation he generated.

As quickly as it had begun, Mrs. Fitzgibbons's harangue came to an end. She told Eddie to get her raincoat, and then signaled for Matthew to get up. Before anyone realized what was happening, Mrs. Fitzgibbons was in her coat and headed for the door. In fact, Bruce and the others were still sitting at the table when the sound of a car engine starting up gave them to realize that she was leaving.

As Matthew drove through South Hadley, past the college, Mrs. Fitzgibbons sat very austerely in the back seat and railed away in a harsh undertone on the unluckiness of her fate. “I could have been a social worker or a schoolteacher,” she said. “This is what I get. This is my fate. I'm going to be chopped up and spiced and fried in my own fat. This is what you get for showing courage, for doing what has to be done. I could have left it to others! I'm going to be lambasted in public. I'm going to be butchered. Here is this disgusting little geek, an absolute gem if ever there was one—a pimp!—because that's what he is—and I'm going to take the fall. This is what I get. A knife in the back.”

With blanched temples and a grim, fixated expression, Mrs. Fitzgibbons cited her grievances in an eerie monotone, all the way home.

The effect of the startling news concerning Mr. Brouillette's wife was evident the next morning in Mrs. Fitzgibbons's manner. When Matthew drove her to work, she was surly and uncommunicative. Bruce noticed the change also when he saw her coming through the mall toward his salon, in the rigidity of her posture and the humorless set of her face. At the bank, Julie must have sensed the change; she gave Mrs. Fitzgibbons a wide berth that morning. Even Mr. Zabac himself got a taste of Mrs. Fitzgibbons's harsh tongue when he telephoned down to ask if she had seen Mr. Daviau humiliate himself on the Channel 6 news the night before.

“What did you expect?” she snapped at the chairman. “You were surprised?”

It was obvious by now that Mr. Zabac saw his new chief officer as a sort of miracle worker, an indomitable figure who had sprung full grown from the pavement at Maple and Main. Consequently, when she was short with him, Mr. Zabac made allowances. He had no desire to rock the boat.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons hung up on him. As far as she was concerned, the bumbling man on television could as easily have been Louis Zabac as the other fellow. At the moment, Mrs. Fitzgibbons's thoughts were focused obsessively on persons nearer at hand, on subordinate officers among her staff, like Mrs. Wilson, Neil Hooton, and Brouillette; persons under her own roof who thirsted after her ruin. At one point, Mr. Hooton stepped soundlessly past her office door and glanced in at her with a look of disgust on his fleshy face. He was wearing wide yellow suspenders over his ample belly; his little gold glasses rested far down on his nose. Of them all, he was the arch renegade. The mere sight of the man set Mrs. Fitzgibbons's stomach shaking. In the back of her mind, however, an obscure plan was already forming, a secret scheme by which she would endeavor to link the fates of Mr. Brouillette and Mr. Hooton.

At noontime, she sent Julie to get Howard Brouillette. But when the girl returned to report that he had gone to lunch with Elizabeth Wilson and Neil Hooton, Mrs. Fitzgibbons's paranoid fears were confirmed. This piece of intelligence was the culminating provocation.

“So, there it is,” she said.

“They've gone to Schermerhorn's Sea House,” said Julie.

“Now it's out in the open. I'm not in power here four days, and the three of them go marching down Suffolk Street, big as life, just like that, to a secret lunch. They know that I know they're there,” chanted Mrs. Fitzgibbons, “and it doesn't mean a thing to them. And I'll tell you why. Because they know exactly what's going to happen, and when, and in what form, and how it's going to happen, because they're the ones making it happen. They're not in hiding,” she chanted on. “They're sitting at a table down at Schermerhorn's.”

Emily Krok came into the office while Mrs. Fitzgibbons was expatiating on the mind-set of traitors. Emily was carrying a stack of computer printouts. She worked for Julie now, and held Mrs. Fitzgibbons in such awe that she was chary of addressing her directly. “Where would Mrs. Fitzgibbons like me to put these?” she asked.

“Keep quiet!” Julie snapped at the homely, misshapen girl.

“You work like a Chinaman for fourteen years to get where you are,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons went on with her recriminations, “you do what you're supposed to do, you do it better than anyone else this side of J. Pierpont Morgan, and before the Thursday lunch bell rings, you've got a full-fledged conspiracy on your hands. My hours are numbered,” she said. “Because nobody is that dumb. Anyone else would meet in secret—at
night
,” she said, “in some lonely, out-of-the-way place. But not these little killers. They're down there dining on brook trout and caviar. They're washing it down with champagne. Because I'm finished. It's a
fait accompli
. It's a done thing. I'm kaput.”

Emily was staring at her with alarm when Mrs. Fitzgibbons turned on her and ordered her to search Mr. Brouillette's desk.

“Turn it inside out,” she said. “Close the door behind you, and lock it, and turn that desk inside out. I want the goods. Smutty newspapers, personal notes, letters, sex paraphernalia, everything.”

“I'll find it, Chief.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons was already commanding Julie on what to do. “Get a roll of that yellow-striped packing tape from the mailroom, and when Emily is finished, tape shut his desk drawers.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons was in an excited, agitated state, as she called after them. “If you don't find anything, invent it. I want results.”

While waiting for them to return, Mrs. Fitzgibbons was called on to discuss a delinquent home mortgage loan. Connie McElligot came in person to Mrs. Fitzgibbons's big office with the pertinent paperwork. Connie herself wished to extend the sorry couple an additional month of grace.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons was in no mood for softheartedness today. “Get them out!” she said.

“What with winter coming —” Connie began.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons cut the air with her hand. “I want that house. I want it today.”

“Mr. Sadakierski has just been called back to his job,” Connie explained.

“Do you understand English?” Mrs. Fitzgibbons grabbed the papers from Connie McElligot's hands, planted them on her desk, and scrawled her signature in big red ballpoint letters at the bottom of the page. “I don't care if they freeze to death! Those deadbeats owe me money!”

Connie McElligot's fingers and jowls shook as she returned to her desk. Mrs. Fitzgibbons frightened her.

Within ten minutes, Mrs. Fitzgibbons was holding in her hands a species of evidence that was so damning, she could scarcely credit the sight of it. Julie and Emily stood on either side of her desk chair, leaning over her and watching in breathless fascination, as Mrs. Fitzgibbons went methodically through a stack of glossy, eight-by-ten, black-and-white photos that depicted Dolores Brouillette in various poses of undress. Most of the photographs were candidly pornographic. Each time that Mrs. Fitzgibbons moved one of the big black-and-whites to the bottom of the stack in her hands, revealing still another naked shot, the girls behind her gasped anew.

For her part, Mrs. Fitzgibbons was not herself visibly moved by Emily's dramatic discovery, but maintained something more of the air of a judge or police official who had long ago seen everything illicit and was merely mulling over the value of the evidence at hand. When she was finished, she tapped the stack of photos on her desk, straightening them, and returned all to the white envelope in which Mr. Brouillette had concealed them in his desk.

“You did good,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons.

“Did I?” Emily was thrilled.

“Very,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons.

“I can't believe that woman is Mr. Brouillette's wife,” said Julie.

“She's really good-looking.” Emily was impressed with the photos.

“She's not bad-looking,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons allowed pleasantly.

“Mrs. Brouillette must have a couple of bolts loose,” said Julie.

“What a body,” Emily said. “I wish I had a body like that.”

Julie turned on her. “She's a lowlife! What are you talking about?”

“You can be a lowlife and still have a tremendous body on you.”

“She looks like a streetwalker!” Julie spat back.

“Not to me she doesn't,” Emily persisted. “She's expensive. Did you see that fur jacket and the jewelry on her? I'll bet she charges an arm and a leg.”

While the two girls argued over her head, Mrs. Fitzgibbons thought. She tapped her pencil. Oddly, the big stack of pictures had had the effect of dissipating her agitation. She felt much better. She was not listening to Emily Krok and Julie.

“I'll bet she makes videos, does shows, things like that,” Emily said. “If she doesn't, she should.”

“I suppose you would.” Julie was tiring of Emily's impertinence and sneered at the girl's cheap Indian blouse and strange shoes.

“I didn't say that,” Emily replied. “I can't imagine what it'd be like to look like that.”

“You wouldn't feel any different.”

“Ho! That's what
you
think!”

“I'm trying to think,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons remarked. “Will you two stop chattering?”

“I'd feel
very
different,” said Emily. “To see myself in the mirror in a body like that? I wouldn't feel different? Are you loco?”

“Don't speak to me like that,” Julie reproached her. “You work for me.”

“But Mrs. Brouillette doesn't. That's my point.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons broke in on them, but was clearly in a much-cheered frame of mind. “This isn't a bank, it's a bordello. We just pretend to be bankers. Our securities portfolio is down about three million, the typists are stealing every supply that isn't nailed down, and the vice president for secondary financing is running an escort agency. I thought we were the fastest-growing bank in the world. Not at all. I'm running a whorehouse.”

Emily continued to argue with Julie. “Mrs. Brouillette is a professional.”

“Oh, shut up,” said Julie.

“I pay this ding-a-ling fifty thousand a year to spread our risks, peddling mortgages to the secondary market, and his wife's home spreading her legs to supplement the family income.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons had worked herself into a surprisingly happy state of mind. “Julie,” she said, “tell Mr. Donachie to post himself in Howard Brouillette's office and to bring him straight to me the moment he returns.”

While Mrs. Fitzgibbons was denied the satisfaction of witnessing Howard's shock at seeing his desk drawers sealed shut with the garish tape, and of the bank guard staring at him with a lascivious look from beneath the black bill of his cap, the spectacle of Mr. Brouillette being marched through the auto loan department was observed by many, not one of whom was likely to forget it; for if death ever walked the earth on two feet, it could not have imparted its nature more spookily than that writ on the face of Mr. Brouillette.