Glass House (4 page)

Hanley rose. He sorted through a handful of
Egyptian pound notes and dropped some of the money on the
table.

“That’d work,” he said, slipping the rest
beneath his robe. “But I’m not thinking we’ll get him back in a way
that’ll matter.”

They moved to the café door and into the
sunlight, squinting at its brightness. Hanley looked left and
Saifee right. They studied the movements of the crowd.

“Get down there,” Hanley said. “You’ll be
missed otherwise.”

“I will.” Saifee gave a final glance at the
other man. “And you’ll come?”

Hanley didn’t hesitate. “Yes,” he said.
“This time I’ll come.”

Talking to Anthony

Anthony long ago lost track of the time. He
knew it was at least three days since being pointed away from the
exit and down the hall at Laurentian, but he was still coherent
enough to realize it was probably more like four or five. That was
only a guess, though, since he didn’t have anything to work
from.

He was in the room he’d been led to, and
he’d never left it. It contained only the bolted-down chair he sat
on. Beyond that, the things surrounding him were the bare walls,
the single door, and the wooden floor.

The few people he’d seen revealed nothing
that suggested a day or time. They didn’t wear watches. They didn’t
mention anything not touching directly on their own questions. They
made no notes.

When he needed to use the bathroom, Anthony
knocked at the door to let someone know. They’d open the slot in
the door and order him to stand back. An attendant would pass a
bucket in, and someone would collect it afterward.

He’d received seven meals, at intervals that
were far enough apart that his stomach ached from the hunger. All
the meals were the same – a single, small sandwich on stale
bread, a piece of cheese, a paper cup filled with water. There were
no utensils. There was nothing breakable.

When he could manage it at all, he slept on
the wood floor. The discomfort from that was simple and plain, the
feel of it almost nonexistent in the shadow of the rest of his
pain, which cut through his head like a nail in his temple. His
eyes were swollen, his ears crusted with blood, and his jaw creaked
and popped now when he opened his mouth.

At any hour of the day or night or whenever
it may have been, regardless of whether he was sleeping or eating
or waiting, they would come and talk to him. They would smile
warmly and ask the same questions each time, he would answer, and
they would strike him at each reply.

The most common of those people – the
first and the latest in fact – was the mine superintendent,
who was standing before Anthony. The super had woken him, rousing
Anthony from a fitful sleep on a cold floor and directing him to
the chair. Anthony had struggled into it, his movements slow.

The super stood perhaps five and a half feet
tall, and he was thick across the middle, built strong. His face
was ruddy, wrinkled, and shining. Freckles marked it heavily
enough, up and down his arms and across his face, that the tone was
blotched and mottled, like a poorly-painted tan.

His name was Peter Rupert, and he sweated
profusely, no matter the weather. Despite the room’s cool air, dark
circles grew under the man’s arms, staining his khaki uniform. He
was chain-smoking Rothmans and on occasion paced calmly. The light
dusting of sand and dirt on the floor would grate and grind as he
walked.

Anthony didn’t look directly at Rupert.
Sitting on the chair, he studied the walls or the door or the slat
floor, the lengths and heights of spaces and the number of bolts
and scuff markings. He focused on measuring and counting anything
he could find, trying to keep his mind attentive and clear as he
waited for the questions to start again. He thought, as he had
before,
There shouldn’t be a slot at the bottom of that
door
. And,
There shouldn’t be a wooden floor in a mining
building.

Anthony looked at anything but the boss’s
face. It wasn’t fear that kept him from looking as the man started
to pace his way around the small room. He just wasn’t looking
because he
shouldn’t
be. It wouldn’t be a black shift
supervisor’s place to do so.

“What were you doing?”

Rupert spoke in English, with the blended
British and Dutch inflections of an Afrikaner. He stopped moving
for a moment. He backed to the wall in front of the chair, leaning
against it. He sucked at the cigarette and blew an angled column of
smoke.

“Wasn’t doin’ nothing, boss.” Anthony had
given the same blunt, dead answer each of the repeated times the
question was asked.

“We’ve had some losses, you know,” Rupert
said. “No big ones, I suppose. Little stuff, mainly. But it’s
enough that we noticed, and we’ve been looking for who’s at it ever
since.”

“Didn’t take no diamonds, boss.”

“I think you did.” Rupert pushed himself
away from the wall.

“Don’t got diamonds.” Anthony risked a
glance up at him. His head was tipped and turned with a shying,
deferential tilt.

“True enough.” The super dropped his
cigarette and crushed it out before leaning back once more. He
folded his arms, his shirt tightening across his chest.

“We searched your apartment at the
dormitory,” he said. “Same with your girl’s flat in town. They’re
still looking over whatever they took from there, but I don’t know
it’ll get us anything. Ran a check on your accounts, too, such as
they are.”

“Nothing there, boss.”

“That’s what I hear,” Rupert nodded. “But
we’ve been watching you a little, too. Not much reason at first, of
course. We’re just always looking, like I said. Then we saw
this.”

Rupert pulled a folded picture from his
breast pocket. He opened it and moved a step forward. He held it
out to Dikembé.

The photo was four inches by five. Anthony
was in one corner, clear as could be. He was bending at a truck’s
tire. The picture was taken in the evening, the sky a dark band in
the background, but Anthony’s face was visible, and his hand was
reaching into the rear wheel well.

For a moment, Anthony thought it could have
been the plant the other day. It could have been when he placed the
pink. But it wasn’t. This was one from before, which meant they’d
known for some time.

“Couldn’t have been nothing all too big,
mind you,” Rupert was saying, examining the picture himself. “One
piece or two. A few carats is all, I’d guess. Enough for you,
though, I’d warrant. But we can’t find the cash, and I’m baffled by
that.”

The super folded the photo and tucked it
into his pocket again. “What’re you doing with the cash,
Anthony?”

Dikembé was silent.

“You sending it out to your mom or a sister
somewhere?”

No answer.

“Got a friend we don’t know of? Another
girl? Boy, maybe?”

Anthony was counting the bolts in the door.
He didn’t move.

“Got no diamonds, boss,” he said again.

“Maybe not. But that’s not exactly the same
as not taking any diamonds. Is it.”

“Boss?”

Rupert’s hands found his pockets, and he
wedged them in. He strolled a slow circle around the man on the
chair. He stopped in front of him again. He looked down on
Anthony.

“We get tire smugglers every so often,” he
said softly, as though sharing a secret. “They’re trouble enough,
but they never get anything big.” He withdrew a hand and held it
out, his palm up and open.

“Till now.”

The pink was in the center of Peter Rupert’s
sweating red hand.

“Who are you working with?”

Bucephalus

“Who’s the heavy?” Megan asked. She had
fresh coffee that was a peace offering of sorts from her secretary,
for having allowed Waldoch in.

She removed the cup’s cap. She blew on the
coffee and sipped, eyeing the firm’s waiting area through her
office door as the secretary left. Waldoch’s man had positioned
himself so he could keep an eye on Waldoch, and he was casually
flipping through a magazine that he wasn’t reading.

Megan glanced at Waldoch, her eyebrows
raised.

“The heavy’s name is Russell Haas,” he told
her. “He’s my driver.”

“Your driver,” Megan repeated doubtfully.
“This is Kansas, Jeremy. People in Kansas don’t have drivers.”

“He’s a bodyguard, too.”

“Again …
Kansas
. No bodyguards,
either.”

Waldoch smiled. He tasted his own
coffee.

“Russell is a hard-luck case,” he said.
“He’s twenty-six, which puts him nine years out from a juvenile
assault record and a stint on probation. It puts him seven and a
half years out from an adult charge as well, also on assault. He
did a year on that, went back in on burglary six months later and
did two more years after that.”

“You should choose nicer drivers.”

“He’s been fine since he’s come to work for
me at DMW.”

DMW was a mid-sized firm that supplied
security officers, the kind that people invariably labeled
“rent-a-cops.” They ran security for a couple dozen businesses in
town, with another ten in Topeka and five in Kansas City.

Waldoch had started the business himself ten
or eleven years before. He nursed it through bad times and a
near-bankruptcy, not to mention the lawsuit that Megan had handled,
which almost crushed DMW before the successful trial erased that
particular cloud. But they grew more solid after that. It was as if
the win had pushed DMW in a different direction altogether.

“So you’re in the rehab field now.” Megan
sounded skeptical.

“I’ve taken on people like Russell before,”
Waldoch said. “I’ll do it again. It’s an opportunity they wouldn’t
normally get. Besides, it hardly would be right for a security
business not to provide security to its own people.”

“I’m sure.”

“Does Russell Haas relate to my case?”

“I’m assuming he doesn’t, by the tone of the
question.”

“You’d assume correctly,” Waldoch assured
her.

“The claims are against DMW?” Megan
asked.

“And me. Personally.”

“Brought by?”

“An employee,” Waldoch answered. “A former
employee, more precisely.”

“A woman?”

Waldoch didn’t hesitate. He’d been on this
road before, and he knew the questions well enough.

“Yes. Vice president of sales for the
company. She was based here in Lawrence.”

“What’s this former vice president’s
name?”

“Kathleen Landry.”

Megan retrieved a legal pad and a pen. She
wrote the name on the first line, then added the names of the
defendants, DMW and Jeremy Waldoch, below that.

“And what’s Ms. Landry saying?”

“She’s saying I had sex with her.”

“Against her will?”

“No.”

“With her consent, then?”

“That’s the way she pled it.”

The questions hopped out quickly, the
answers coming just as fast.

“The way she pled it?”

“Exactly.”

“And the
but
is?”

“That it’s untrue.”

Megan made a note. “She maintains in her
complaint that you had a consensual sexual relationship with
her?”

“Correct.”

“Which you say never occurred.”

“Also correct.”

“And your evildoing in all this?”

“I supposedly fired her when I got tired of
the relationship.”

“That has a familiar ring to it.” Megan put
the pen down and slid the pad aside. “It wasn’t that long ago that
you were sitting in that same chair,” she said. “You were telling
me a similar story, about a similar lawsuit –”

“Which we won,” Waldoch interrupted.

Megan nodded as she went on. “Yes, which we
won. But it was similar all the same, and I know even now that I
can file a bunch of motions saying no one should be able to mention
that case, because the first case doesn’t matter. And I know just
as well that we’ll hear about both cases again … and again … and
again. Like I said, it has that familiar ring.”

“And no more basis.”

Megan didn’t respond.

“You proved I wasn’t liable,” Waldoch said.
“Remember that?”

“I remember.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong the first time,
and I didn’t do anything wrong this time.”

“Was she fired?”

“She was. There were some issues regarding
her performance and her responsiveness to board direction. Those
issues were addressed within DMW management, which included three
people besides me, and Ms. Landry was then terminated for full-time
incompetence, not to mention part-time theft.”

“What kind of theft?”

“The taking kind.”

“Big or little?” A note of impatience from
Megan in that.

“Little,” Waldoch answered with a sigh.
“Petty cash. The accounts never matched, but it wasn’t more than
two hundred dollars overall.”

“How much was she making?”

“A hundred fifty thousand.”

“She’s getting a hundred fifty K, and she
takes a couple hundred bucks? That’s small change.”

“It’s never too small for some people.”

“Is the theft documented?”

“I have the account records, and I have two
people in the office who say they saw her take it.”

“Was she ever subject to performance
reviews?”

“About two years ago. They were fine. People
had quibbles here and there, and they sometimes noted them in
written reviews, but that mainly was so they’d have something to
write down. No one likes giving real criticism. So most people
don’t. It makes them feel bad.”

“But they’ll testify to their impressions of
her performance over any relevant period?”

“They already have.”

Megan had dragged her notes back in front of
her and was reading over the few things she’d written. She looked
up at Waldoch’s statement.

“What do you mean they already have?”