Foursome, page 15
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.
13
DEFENSE RESOURCE MANAGEMENT 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.
I said to Antonelli, “How come my badge doesn’t have ‘John Cuddy’ on it?”
She twisted her neck to speak over her shoulder. “If nobody’s expecting you, you’d be seen in one of those unsecure conference rooms in the lobby. If you are expected, that person already knows who you are.”
We reached the end of the large room, where a bank of three elevators waited for us. Antonelli hit the button for the middle one, causing it to light up and the doors to open. The buttons on the others didn’t follow suit.
As we stepped into the mirrored box, I said, “Private elevator?”
“Yes. To Mr. Davison’s office suite.”
“The president?”
“Yes.”
As the doors closed, I looked back toward where we’d come from. “Kind of a hike for him to save a couple of flights.”
Antonelli gave me the smile again, one that could grow on you. “Mr. Davison believes he should see the staff every day and they should see him. From his military service, I think. So he walks—”
“The parade ground while the troops are doing calisthenics.”
Antonelli didn’t quite turn off the smile. “Something like that, I suppose.”
The doors opened, a secretarial cluster in front of us, two women, one older, one quite young, bustling around desks for three. Indirect lighting shone on slate-colored carpeting that mimicked the outer walls. Large green plants, their pots on casters, reached skyward.
Antonelli said, “This way, please.”
We turned right and entered a conference room with no interior windows and a view of the parking lot through the exterior ones. There were three men seated in admiral’s chairs around an elliptical Plexiglas table on steel trestles. Two rose as we walked in.
One of the risers was a white male in his mid-forties wearing an olive drab poplin suit, white shirt, and rep tie. He had sandy hair cut short and brushed across, even features, and a raccoon look around his eyes and cheekbones, as though he wore aviator sunglasses outdoors and needed no corrective lenses indoors. His jaw seemed to be having spasms back near his ears, and I sensed that he resented me at first sight.
The second riser was a black male in his early thirties wearing a navy blue blazer, gray slacks, a collar-stayed shirt and twill stripe tie. His cropped black hair was thinning, giving his crown a slightly satanic widow’s peak. The nose was broad, as were the lips as he smiled and buttoned his blazer, showing what appeared to be a Rolex Oyster beneath the cuff on the left wrist.
The man who stayed seated could have doubled for the actor Glenn Ford in his late fifties. The salt-and-pepper hair was combed forward to a point just onto his forehead. Floppy ears, a jutting chin, and half-moon glasses under hawking eyes. He wore a flannel shirt, tatty blue jeans, white socks, and some kind of moccasins crossed behind one of the trestles supporting the conference table. I saw him nod almost imperceptibly toward Antonelli, acknowledging some silent signal she’d sent him while I was watching the other two men.
Antonelli introduced them in the order I’d thought of them. “John Cuddy, this is Dwight Schoonmaker, our head of security.”
Olive drab just lowered his eyelids to me.
“And this is Tyrone Xavier, who’s been subbing for Steven.”
The blazer leaned forward with a continuing smile and shook my hand.
“And this is Keck Davison, our president.”
Davison said, “Cuddy.”
I thought, What, the janitor have another commitment? “Good of you all to see me on such short notice.”
Schoonmaker and Xavier sat back down as Antonelli touched a seat for me and herself took an empty chair with a legal pad and two sharpened pencils in front of it. Nobody else had anything in front of them except their attitudes.
I moved to the chair she’d designated, which put me in the center of the long axis of the elliptical table, Davison at the head. The effect was I could look at just one person at a time. I decided to pick Keck Davison.
Antonelli said, “We thought that it would be more efficient for you to be able to interview all of us together.”
Still watching Davison, I said, “And why is that?”
Antonelli paused for a moment, as though not sure she should stick to the script of her running the meeting. Then she said, “Why, in case one of us doesn’t know the answer to a question, perhaps one of the others will.”
“That’s not the impression I get.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I get the impression somebody’s seen Apaches, and you’re busy closing the gates.”
One corner of Davison’s mouth went up.
Antonelli said, “Mr. Cuddy, we really are doing our best to cooperate—”
An aggressive voice from Schoonmaker’s direction rode over her. “Cuddy here isn’t interested in cooperation. He’s interested in firebombs.”
The corner of Davison’s mouth went down.
Antonelli said, “Dwight, perhaps if we—”
Schoonmaker said, “Cuddy thinks—”
Keck Davison didn’t have to ride over him. The president’s hand went up in a stop sign, and Schoonmaker’s voice quit as though he’d been vaporized.
“Anna-Pia, I wonder if you and the boys could excuse us while Mr. Cuddy and I have a little talk, see how he can help us with our business?”
Davison’s accent came out more hillbilly than southern, with “Anna-Pia” sounding like “Aunt Pee-yah,” “help” like “hep,” and “business” like “bid-ness.”
If it weren’t for the deadening effect of the carpet, I think all three chairs would have scraped back in unison. They filed out, Antonelli first, Xavier second, Schoonmaker hovering for a stutter step behind me as he joined them and somebody closed the door gently.
14
KECK DAVISON TUGGED ON one of his earlobes. “Now just what am I supposed to make of you, son?”
I didn’t say anything.
“You see that brain trust we just shooed out of here? They spent yesterday afternoon and all this morning preparing themselves for this ‘joint interview,’ as Anna-Pia called it, and you go and shoot it all to shit in about a minute-five.”
I still sat quiet.
Davison grunted what might have been a laugh. “Kind of tough to get a rise out of you, is that it?”
“Mister Dav—”
“Keck, long’s we’re one-on-one here.”
“That short for something?”
“No. I had me a momma, she was long on the letter ‘K.’ Her daddy had been Klan down in Alabama before she come up to West Virginny, so she figured she’d name each of her boys with a K, get her ‘KKK’ after a while? So my oldest brother was Kevin, and the next one Kyle, and the third one Kurt; but then my daddy and her didn’t stop having fun, but she did run out of names she knew, and so I got ‘Keck,’ and my littlest brother, he got ‘Kemp.’ ”
“Sorry I asked.”
A real laugh this time, a little braying in it. “You never served in the diplomatic corps, am I right?”
“And you never pronounce it ‘West Vir-ginny’ in your head, do you?”
Davison tugged on the other earlobe. “You’re seeing through all my defense mechanisms, son.”
“Not in this lifetime.”
He let go of the ear and squared his shoulders. “All right, Cuddy. In the clear, or at least what I remember about how to talk that way. What do you need?”
Very little of the hills in that last. I said, “Somebody cut down three people very methodically, very cleanly, but with just enough muff around the edges to put Steven Shea in the middle of what looks like a bungled multiple murder. If he is being set up, then somebody with resources probably did the killing.”
Davison’s eyes got bright. “Go on.”
“Now, it’s possible that the target was one or more of the people actually killed, the others included to blur things and implicate Shea as a convenient husband-gone-berserk.”
“Granted.”
“It’s also possible that Shea was the real target.”
“They’re so good at everything else on this, be awful sloppy not to notice he wasn’t there when the arrows started flying.”
“No, I mean Shea as the one they wanted to get out of the way without it seeming that getting rid of him was the reason for the killings.”
One nod. “Which brings you to DRM.”
“Right.”
Davison blew out a breath. “I just don’t see it, but that don’t make it so. I take it you’re going to be wanting to see everybody separately, poke and prod some.”
“Yes.”
“Who do you want to start with, son?”
