The Ultimate Exit Strategy, page 19
“How goes it, Harry?” I said to the night garage attendant. He grunted back a marginal greeting, barely looking up to determine that I wasn’t a dangerous thug.
As I pulled out onto the street, a red BMW cut me off, putting down what sounded like a good thick layer of rubber as it squealed out of the alley by the White Hen Pantry, and roared into the turn to Inner Lakeshore Drive.
I pulled onto the Drive behind it and fifty minutes later arrived at the garage under Whytebread’s offices with my spanking new security card, an unimpressive piece of white plastic with a magnetic credit card strip on the back.
I’d made a stop at the late night dry cleaner on my way into the office, so I was a little late for my meeting with Camille, but I figured if she wanted her money back she would wait. I’d just parked my car into a little compact stall close to the elevator, as this time of night Whytebread’s garage was already desolate when the red Beamer squealed up again beside me. I’d felt a momentary glimmer of pleasure to be running into Justin, but Rupert Dean was in the car.
“I want those checks,” he was hanging out of his open window, baptizing me with unflattering names. “Bitch.” Rupert pushed open the car door looking more capable, bigger, stronger, and nastier in sweat pants and a polo shirt, than when I taunted him that afternoon. Out of a suit and tie he was faster too. I thought if I could just get to the lobby where a security guard could help me, or to the elevator where I could ring the emergency call. But before I could formulate a clear idea of what was happening, Rupert had practically flown around the side of his car and managed to put all hundred and ninety pounds of himself between me and any escape. “Why don’t you just give me the money, all right?” The checks were there in my pocket and I was beginning to see Rupert’s point when the elevator opened behind him.
“Justin,” I was overjoyed to see my protector. “Hold that door; will you?”
Rupert looked from me to Justin, gauging his options for a moment before he let me pass. “I’ll see you later,” he told me as if he were making a dinner date.
“Not if I see you first,” I said as Rupert slunk off to his car.
“Want to tell me what that was about?” Despite the convenient timing of his arrival Justin seemed vaguely unsettled to have met me there.
I said I’d tattled to The Irishman that Rupert had planned to vote with Wes on the buyout. “Apparently Rupert promised his votes at least twice.”
“Lucky for you I had some reports to get out,” Justin held the door to the elevator vestibule. “Just on my way up from Parking Level 3.”
“Filing,” I touched my chest lightly, lying. I thought with all of this cloak and dagger, I was getting pretty good at it. “The cops made such a mess of my office that I can’t find a thing. Camille said she’d help me. She really wants the overtime,” I’d embellished the story, pleased with my own cleverness at anticipating any bothersome questions Justin might have asked when Camille showed up.
“You must be moving up in the world, Virginia,” Justin consulted his watch and raised his eyes. “I don’t think she even worked this late for Wes.”
The security guard at the desk waved at us like old friends. “Back again?”
“Can’t stay away,” Justin shook his head. He pulled an access card from his jean pocket and raised it for the guard to see.
“I’ve left mine in my car,” I confessed to the guard and he bent over his clipboard disapprovingly, signing me in as plus one next to Justin’s name in the log. Justin swiped his card in the reader to unlock the elevator.
“I just need to knock a few things out,” Justin pressed the buttons of the cipher lock on the 25th floor and pushed open the door off the side of the lobby. “Call me when you’re ready to leave.” He turned off down the maze of half-lit cubes towards his office and I followed the hallway past the lunchroom towards mine.
From my office phone, I called in the security code, pressed #### for the lights and then, looking down the hall towards Wes’s area, I could see someone had already hit them; they made an eerie fluorescent glow in the distant offices.
From the computer status trick that Jeremy Bennett had taught me, I’d learned that Rupert Dean was logged on, but I couldn’t even begin to guess how he had managed to beat Justin and me into the office. We had just left him in the parking garage, he hadn’t been in the elevator lobby, and his office, only a few doors from mine, had been dark and empty when I passed.
All I knew was that Rupert would have to be pretty mad to have sprinted up the stairwell, all twenty-six flights from the garage, and I didn’t think I wanted to run into him again anytime soon. Still he was somewhere in the office, or at least logged on to his computer along with Justin, The Irishman, and strangely, Starr, who couldn’t possibly have been physically present. There was, however, no sign at all of Camille.
“Hey, Justin,” I shouted experimentally, just to see if he was within earshot should I need some help. I wasn’t quite shouting, but my voice sounded unnaturally loud in the dark quiet office.
He shouted back, “Hey.” The sound carried reassuringly.
In my e-mail there were three new messages from that afternoon. The first was a bulletin to the entire firm regarding the refrigerator in the lunchroom. It would be cleaned out on the last Friday of the month and the contents discarded.
“PLEASE REMOVE ANYTHING YOU DO NOT WANT TRASHED!!!!NO EXCEPTIONS!!!!”
I could fairly hear Herb Symon banging those four exclamation points into his keyboard as I surfed my mouse down to the second and then the third message, which were both hate mail from Spike. Again there was nothing from Camille and no flashing messages on my phone machine.
“I’m ready to get out of here,” Justin called out wearily from the other side of the building and I would be leaving with him.
If Rupert were still lurking, I wouldn’t have to walk out alone. Closing in on nine o’clock, Camille had not turned up, nor had she e-mailed or called in her regrets, but I still had her money. To get it, I hadn’t any doubt that she would find me eventually. But then, as we were leaving the office, there in the elevator lobby, Justin and I found Camille.
She was flat on her butt having slid down the wall and out the doors when they had opened, legs first and then the rest of her, on the floor of the elevator like an overdressed rag doll. Her legs splayed out between the rubber bumper doors revealing, dark patterned stockings in low lace-up walking shoes.
As the doors tried to close, they bumped her calves and rebounded, bouncing back again and again against her dead legs. The buzzing doors complained of the obstruction. Camille’s face looked out with open-eyed surprise at the elevator trying to amputate her feet.
“Shit,” said Justin. The cipher lock clicked, and the door handle turned at the side of the receptionist desk. All the time I could barely take my eyes off the elevator doors, opening and then trying to close around Camille’s swollen ankles. Ellen Borgia stepped out into the lobby.
“Oh my God,” she said, then Ellen fainted.
* * *
Downstairs, the security cop had rounded up three well-scrubbed, brown-skinned children and a bewildered looking young Latino man who I presumed was Camille’s nephew, Miguel. The security guard had Miguel by the collar, pushing him along against his protests toward the uniform cop. The kids were clinging to his pants legs, bawling. As near as I could tell from the shouts that passed across the lobby between the security guard and the uniform cop, Miguel and the kids had been parked in the loading zone on Michigan Avenue with the engine running in a Subaru station wagon loaded down with luggage.
After the police brought Ellen downstairs it didn’t take long to get everyone sorted out, and in a few minutes more Cassandra Hope had blown in on the faint smell of a swanky cocktail party, demanding a report of events from the uniformed cop.
“So, officer, what happened here?” Cassandra was smartly decked out in a sleek brown suit and suede pumps outfit that suggested she’d had other, more exciting plans for her evening.
I would have liked a report from her, but somehow it didn’t seem prudent to inquire.
* * *
As I lay in my bed that night, I thought of my interview with Cassandra who had declined rather firmly to accompany me home. I’d wanted comfort more than sex – most of all, I wanted someone to ask how I was doing with all this, but Cassandra only had professional questions.
“Who was there with you?” she’d asked, her tape record rolling impersonally again.
It was me, Justin, and Ellen Borgia; one happy shell-shocked family in the elevator lobby. Although the status report said Justin, Rupert, The Irishman, and unbelievably Starr of all people were logged into their computers, Ellen was not. I’d listed off the names, and Cassandra dutifully wrote them in her notebook while I went on explaining that someone had been logged into Starr’s account. She recorded my run in with Rupert.
But the police had been all over our floor, up and down the building and the only other person they’d found was one very confused Polish cleaning lady – Rupert, The Irishman and of course Starr weren’t there aside from their cyber presence. The police thought that Camille had been deposited in the elevator at a little after 8:00 p.m. She’d been riding up and down for about an hour before we had found her and the after hour key car log showed only my card and Ellen’s.
At one o’clock in the morning I had considered calling Cassandra on the slim excuse that she might be interested enough to come over and discuss my ruminations in person, but I couldn’t even say if she was at home. Where she’d come from and where she was going to so dressed up was a mystery. I was just too tired and broken to let it keep me awake much longer.
XXII
In the days that followed, Whytebread suffered a massive epidemic of the blue flu. I might have called in sick myself if I hadn’t been quite so paranoid about my continued employment or if the alternatives to a day at work had been any more attractive than sitting around my house, cleaning up cat puke and feeling like shit, because I couldn’t help wondering if Camille and Starr would be dead if they hadn’t been talking to me.
Of course none of that unshakable, free-floating guilt made very much sense as the only legitimate threat I’d received had come from Starr herself. Fact was, none of it made much sense; and the more I considered what had gone on, the less sense it made, so there seemed no rational alternative, beyond just marching forward day to day, a depressing undertaking that I was managing through continuous phone support from Naomi Wolf. Cassandra might as well have dropped off the face of the earth for all I was seeing of her.
I’d been sitting in my office, perseverating, about a week after Starr had died, with my eyes aimed in a general and unfocused way at the smoky glass wall between my office and the hall when a tall, weedy-looking mailboy rolled his wire pushcart past my field of vision. Mailboy wore a big retro-seventies, white man’s afro, and canary yellow, grudge bell bottoms, which prompted a sudden connection of all the little pieces of things that had been floating around in my creaky mind since the night Starr had died. It was a sudden forehead-slapping realization like when your brain stumbles onto the answer to those word and figure puzzles. My grandfather used to make them out of scrap wood for the people in his church, jig-sawed and glued on a little plaque. Look first and there was only a mishmash of random wooden blocks, look harder and you can read the word, “Jesus.”
I must have been staring purposelessly in his direction for some time, as if goings on outside my office were a show whose action moved past me while I sat still, before I realized that I was looking at the tall, thin, after-hours mystery man. That unmistakable hair had given him away.
“Hey you. Thief.” He bolted as I shouted the complaint that seemed most likely to get someone to help me head him off. But I was able to catch up to him half-way down the hall as he tried to vault over the side of the cart and his big high-top tennis shoe caught in the handle, making him stumble and slow just enough for me to push the mail cart hard into the back of his knees. Then he fell.
His foot tangled up in the cart again, Mr. Bushy Hair went down with a gratifying thud on the low nap carpet, looking up at me dizzily and in apparent knee pain as I began to interrogate him. “I know you’ve been sneaking around here at night, so you’d better tell me why.” Even flat on his back he was a big guy, but I rattled the wire cart threateningly enough to intimidate. “I’ve seen you coming out of Winslow’s office at night,” I said, “and I’ll tell the police.”
“Lady, I’m just delivering the mail.” Having gotten himself up on all fours, he was trying to stand, so I slammed the cart back into his legs again. He had tried the wrong girl; I was viscious, heartbroken, and tired and unwilling to be toyed with.
“Aw fuck.” The mailboy was floundering on a bed of correspondence, his arms and legs inextricably tangled. “All right, lady. What do you want me to say?” He blinked up at me in whimpering defeat.
According to Bushy Hair, Ned Couteau had been running a little side business in stolen office supplies. Clients requested equipment and Ned would arrange for it to disappear from Whytebread. Some of the mailroom clerks took turns sneaking the stuff out of the building. Ned had security paid off, so there was never any problem.
The story was threatening perilously to shatter my august illusions about Mister Couteau senior. In my own twisted little way, I had looked up to him and I was resenting the disappointment. “Did Alcee know about this?”
Bushy nodded diffidently. “He didn’t help us or nothing, but Mister Couteau, he always looked the other way when Ned was shipping stuff out of the mailroom.”
Now that the mailboy seemed to be thoroughly subjugated, I let him pick himself up off the floor and went to go look for Mister Couteau. “Don’t go anywhere, young man,” I warned. It was peculiar, if effective, to be getting to an age where I could call someone “young man” with conviction. “I know who you are and I can get your name from human resources.”
“Yes ma’am,” Bushy, the mail punk sang out gratifyingly as I walked away.
I found Alcee Couteau in the mailroom, surveying his workers from his usual seat, a low, wooden stool in the corner. His cane was leaning against the wall beside him and in my second patently nasty act of the day, I took it. Then I stepped back about two feet and swung the cane at the legs of his chair, feeling much less like a playground bully than I would have expected. I was a little worried that some of his minions might try to stop me, but they didn’t seem to care how I abused the old man.
“Hey.” The clatter of the cane on his chair had woken Alcee from his supervisory reverie. “Give that back.” His hand made a grab at the cane, fingers grazing the wood fruitlessly – not fast or strong enough.
I shook my head, stepping maliciously out of reach. “I just wanted to ask you about the little office supply resale business Ned’s been running down here. If you don’t tell me what’s going on,” I insisted, “I’m going to get the police in here and then you can talk to them. I think you’d rather talk to me. I can keep you out of it if this little side business doesn’t have anything to do with Winslow’s murder. Don’t let anyone say I don’t respect my elders.”
With the last little cut I was starting to feel unnecessarily mean, but not enough to stop, especially since Couteau’s disapproval didn’t seem to suggest any of the appropriate elements of fear.
“Don’t do me favors. No need to leave me out of it.” He was scowling at me with that same indifferent contempt I should have been used to. “You just go to the police,” he was goading me, “and I’ll tell ’em Ned didn’t have a thing to do with it. But I’ll make sure your boss Herb Symon is in up to his ears.”
“Herb Symon is stealing office supplies?” I wondered if my face looked as clueless as I sounded.
“Yep. Knock and it shall be opened unto you.” Alcee Couteau bobbed his head. “If you want to send the police after me, you’ll have to send them after him.”
Herb Symon had been supplementing his presumably adequate income for years now, signing requisitions for office equipment that Whytebread didn’t need and then having it stolen by Ned’s henchmen as soon as it arrived. They were stealing deliveries straight from the mailroom, but Couteau said he’d put a stop to that.
I gave him back his cane, on that note, feeling a little silly. “You wrote those Post-it Notes around the firm and the one on Winslow’s obituary didn’t you?” I guess I was hoping to be right in at least one allegation.
“Only wrote the last one – Winslow’s.” Mr. Couteau accepted his cane although he didn’t seem to need it really. “Herb Symon did the other ones to make Winslow stop my Bible group and push me out.”
“So, all right.” I asked him, “vengeance for what?”
“Vengeance is for God.” Couteau was eyeing me pityingly, as if the smallness of my understanding saddened and astonished him. “Don’t you know anything? It’s all right there in Romans 12:19. Why don’t you get a Bible, young woman and read it.” He raised himself from the stool, found his hat, put it on his small gray head, and walked out to the hall. “Young people today don’t read enough.”
I was still trying to think of what I ought to have replied to that, when Alcee handed me a small, but very thick hardcover book, Hally’s Bible Handbook. “Go on.” He held it out to me. “Take it. It’ll give you an education.”
* * *
“Hey there.” I still had Alcee’s Bible book in my hand when I looked into Ellen Borgia’s office. She was sitting idly at her desk with an expression as broken down as I felt – maybe (probably) worse as she was older and I’d noticed her face had started to line. “How’s it going?” I might have kept walking, but I’d been worried about Ellen. Since Starr had died, she’d been crying, not episodically, but as a habit.
“How does it look like it’s going?” She was still loading up her tea with valerian but I thought it was encouraging that Ellen seemed to have found the energy to be testy. “I’ve already talked to the police about your friend, Justin. So, there’s no news for you to carry back. I’ve told them Justin was sleeping with Starr.”
