Suicide Season (2 page)

“What kind of rumors?”

McAllister hesitated. “I don’t want to say too much if you’re not interested.”

Bunch had told me he’d wad me up like an outhouse catalogue if I let this one get away. “We specialize in company security and executive protection. Is this a security issue?”

“Security? It sure as hell is a security issue. Yes, sir.”

“Then it sounds like our kind of job. We’re interested.”

“All right.” He lifted his glass in a brief toast. “That’s fine. Now, what’s happened—and if I leave anything out, Mike, you tell me—is that in the past six months, two major proposals have been torpedoed. The Lake Center development project, and the Columbine Industrial Park project. These were big deals, Kirk, even for me. Each one was a hundred-million proposition. It cost a hell of a lot just to get the proposals done, let alone what the start-up costs would have been. Of course McAllister Enterprises would have made a bundle or two once the projects were rolling, but that’s what America’s all about, right? Or damn well should be. Anyway, the damned things never got off the ground.” His eyes turned to mine, telling me to ask what happened.

So I did.

“Each proposal had a major computation error. The result was that the costs were underestimated by a couple million each. That would have been all right—we would have caught it soon enough and factored it in later in the project. You work on deals this involved and mistakes get made, computers or no computers. Right, Professor?”

“That seems to be the case, Owen. Though it’s not my field of expertise.”

“Right. But what shot us out of the saddle, Devlin, was an outfit called the Aegis Group. Each time, exactly one day after our proposals were submitted, they stepped in with theirs—and without the computation error. Their final figures were higher, but they—or somebody—pointed out the errors in ours. Aegis got both those projects. They’ve already broken ground on both of them. Each one’s going to make a fortune—a bunch of fortunes!” McAllister dipped his head to the glass and sipped and I saw that he was pressing his arm against the chair to keep it from quivering. He turned his eyes from the fire to me, the reflection of the flame still in them. “I don’t know where those people came from. But I know goddamned well where they got their data. After it happened a second time, I managed to get a copy of their Columbine proposal, Kirk. It’s ours. Our figures, touched up here and there. Our categories, our numbers, our everything except that goddamned error. They stole our work, and the bastards stole our projects.”

A proposal that complex would be as individual as a fingerprint, and McAllister was right to suspect espionage. “How did you get their proposal?”

“Never mind. I got it, that’s all.”

“And you think the false figures were fed in on purpose?”

“Don’t you? When I saw the Aegis proposal, I had a team of accountants go over our own with a microscope, and it still took us two days to find it. Aegis knew where to take it out and where to plug in the right figures and run off a new computation. And somebody knew enough to tell the lenders where to look. Hell yes, it was on purpose—it was sabotage!”

“I take it the proposals were drawn up on your corporate computers?”

“Right. Combine the best equipment and the best people, you get the best work.”

“The copyright laws on intangible property—and that includes software—are pretty vague, Mr. McAllister. Even if we do find something, that’s no guarantee you’ll have a court case.”

“Let’s leave that part of it to my lawyers, Kirk. You find the evidence of Aegis poking around in my business and who the hell let them poke around. I’ll take care of the litigation end.”

“Don’t forget the telephone call, Owen.”

“Yeah. Right. This morning I got a call—my assistant got a call—saying that one of my division directors, Austin Haas, had been approached by an Aegis representative about six months ago.”

“And?”

“And nothing. That’s all. Christ, what else do I need?”

“No time of meeting or evidence? Nothing more than an anonymous call about Haas?”

“That’s why I’m hiring you—to find out if there’s anything to it. But do it in a way that doesn’t rock the boat. Loyalty’s a two-way street; my people know I expect it and they know I give it. But this … Damn it—if there’s nothing there, I don’t want Haas to get his feathers ruffled. He’s a good man and I don’t want to ruin his reputation or lose him to somebody else because of an anonymous tip. And I don’t want the rest of my people to find out that I’m … spying on one of them, goddamn it. But if Haas is on the Aegis payroll, I’ll by God kill him!” McAllister leaned back against his chair and the corners of his mouth clenched into something close to a smile. “Or at least figure a way to make him wish he was dead.”

“How many people besides Haas had access to the completed proposals?”

“Uh huh. Good. You’re right: only a handful. Each section worked on its part and then a few of us pulled the whole thing together and ran a final check of the figures before drawing up the proposal’s narrative. Haas was one of that few.”

“I’d like a list.”

“You only investigate Haas. I told you I don’t want my people upset.”

“Suppose he’s not the one? Suppose someone else on that list wants you to think he is?”

“I’m not that stupid, Kirk—somebody could be setting Haas up. But I’ll worry about that when and if you clear him. If I wanted my whole damned staff screened, I’d use my own security people. But I want this kept quiet and narrowly focused. I don’t want Haas’s reputation shot down for no reason, and I don’t want my people to think I’m running a general inquisition. That’s why I’m bringing in an outsider. The only person who’ll know what you’re really after is me. Nobody else is to know what you’re doing. Any questions about that?”

“No, sir.”

So Kirk and Associates had the big break. Beside me, Professor Loomis gave a muffled grunt of satisfaction, and, at the edge of hearing and beneath a gust of rain on the glass, the flames fluttered in a soft, furry chuckle.

W
E SPENT ANOTHER
hour on the details, and McAllister handed me a thick folder holding Haas’s life as viewed by McAllister Enterprises. The usual material was there—dates and places, assignments and achievements. The man himself, of course, would escape his paper profile. But that undefined part was the most interesting. In a lot of ways, the work was like trying to define a thing by saying what it wasn’t—you could come close; sometimes you could even draw a circle around it. But the thing itself waited secretly until finally you found the right word or only the right metaphor, perhaps, to state what it was. And sometimes that never came.

But Bunch and I tried, buoyed by the fact that a healthy portion of our fee had come up front. We fondled the money briefly as it went through our fingers to pay off debts that loomed larger and larger as Kirk and Associates nickel-and-dimed its way toward a bankrupt’s early grave. Taking Uncle Wyn’s investment with it as well as the monument I secretly wanted to build—the thing I could point to in my mind and say, “See, Dad? I didn’t let you down.”

It was the kind of work where you could spend a lot of time looking out the window, and that tended to make the chief backer nervous. Uncle Wyn wasn’t happy to see me or Bunch swiveled around to prop our feet on the iron rail that fenced off the office’s large, arched window while we stared out across the flat roofs of neighboring warehouses and office buildings toward the gleam of snowfields in the distant mountains. But he wasn’t happy, either, at the thought that Bunch and I occasionally looked into windows from the outside. We had tried to convince my uncle that what we did had some redeeming social value and was worth the money he’d invested. But neither Bunch nor I could make him believe that our occupation wasn’t slightly pornographic.

“Hey, listen, some porno I like.” Bunch sat on the tired stenographer’s chair in front of the glass, his hams spilling over the Naugahyde and pinched by the cuffs of running shorts that on anyone else would have been baggy.

“That’s the kind we call erotic.”

“You call it erotic. Susan, she calls it dirty. Me, I call it fun.” He scrubbed with a towel at the mat of hair on his chest and then sniffed it. “God I smell good. Sweat. Sunshine. A light coat of carbon monoxide. I love it.”

“You jog through that traffic, you’ll lose more years of life than you save,” said Uncle Wyn. Like Bunch, he was in the middle of his morning routine. Which, today, meant a visit to the office to check on his investment.

“No, no—I’m contributing to evolution. Five, six more generations, and my descendants will have these carburetors instead of lungs. And it all started with me.” He hocked something out of his throat and stood to spit through an open window panel into the street three floors below. “They’ll think it was a pigeon. Speaking of which, did you tell your uncle about our big client?”

I told him about McAllister.

“The McAllister? Carnival Ball Owen McAllister—the guy that’s into movies and oil and real estate and whatever?”

“That’s the one.”

“He wants to hire you two?”

“Has hired us, Uncle.” I held up the check with its string of numbers. “If things go right, Kirk and Associates is on its way.”

Uncle Wyn, his arthritic leg stiffly out in front of the chair, leaned forward to read the check. “Jesus H. It’s for real.”

“That’s just the retainer,” said Bunch. “Wait till he gets our final bill.”

“I never met the man, but he’s solid. His name’s worth a lot on the street,” Uncle Wyn said. “How did Loomis know him?”

“I’m not sure. But they call each other Mike and Owen.”

Uncle Wyn grunted. “I was surprised you’d even talk to that guy.”

“It wasn’t his fault. And he lost money, too.”

“Crap,” said Uncle Wyn.

“Loomis didn’t lose as much as your old man, Dev. And he got it back damned fast. And he didn’t blow himself away, either.”

“You want to talk about this case or not?”

“Sure, Dev. But you know what Susan says?”

“What makes you think I give a damn what Susan says?”

“Mr. Kirk, you know what Susan says about your nephew? She says he keeps it inside too much. He never talks about it, you know? She says it’s going to blow up some day—that he’s got to ventilate it.”

“Ventilate?”

“Yeah. It’s psychology talk for mental farting.”

“Susan has enough patients without worrying about me. Or about my flatulence.”

“Don’t get huffy. You always use big words when you get huffy. And then our communication, as they say, breaks down.”

“Let’s communicate about McAllister.”

Uncle Wyn heaved to his feet, levering his stiff leg up neatly with the cane. “For a change, you boys got real work to do—congratulations. Me, I got the Cubs game coming on. So good luck with your big chance.”

“Hey, when your lenders wish you luck, you know they mean it.”

I closed the door behind my uncle; his uneven tread on the landing was a pale echo of the years he had spent sprinting across the grass of a baseball diamond.

“He’s a tough old bird, your uncle.”

“He keeps an eye on his investments, that’s for sure.”

“Naw, he just wants to look after his favorite and only nephew.”

“You tell him that when we miss a payment.”

“I hope I never have to. Fill me in on McAllister.”

After Loomis dropped me off last night, with a final reminder of how important this account could be toward establishing the reputation of Kirk and Associates, I spent an hour going through Haas’s personnel file and then following up with some time in the library on points that the official documents only hinted at. Of course all I found in the newspapers was what received public notice at the time—a biographical note when Haas served as a director of the United Way drive a few years back, a squib from a social column about one of his trips to the Caribbean with his attractive wife Margaret and his two lovely children Austin, Jr., and Shauna. These are little things, but they help fill in the background; and, on very rare occasions they can turn into something important. But after a lot of reading, I didn’t see how.

“And this guy Haas is the one who did it?”

“That’s what we’re supposed to find out. Very quietly.”

Bunch, who couldn’t stay in one place more than five minutes when he was awake, moved to the office window and gazed down at the semis and vans and delivery cars that choked Wazee Street this time of day. “We’ll want a twenty-four-hour on Haas.”

That meant hiring some freelancers for routine surveillance, and I began listing the p.i.’s that could be trusted to do decent work. It was a short list. “McAllister gave me permission to tap Haas’s office phone.” I spun a key across the desk to Bunch. “Here’s a pass key; might as well do it this afternoon after the offices close.”

“How about his home phone?”

“That too.”

“How hard is it going to be?”

“I’m glad you asked.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.” Bunch began pulling on his soaked sweat shirt, the muscles of his arms knotting as he shrugged into it. “All right—I’ll check it out. You want me to go ahead and make the plant if I can?” The sleeves had been cut off, and the waist, so that the thick, hard flesh of his belly showed.

“Yeah. McAllister might give us twenty-four hours before he starts calling about results.”

“I never met one of those rich guys who didn’t want things done yesterday.”

“When did you ever meet someone like McAllister?”

“That’s what I said: I never met one.”

He left me trying to puzzle that out. The tread of his large running shoes made the ancient floor of the remodeled warehouse creak as he started down the metal stairs. In the office above, a piano began thumping deliberately up and down the scale, its muffled chords like a final shred of summer: open windows on a hot afternoon and some kid in the neighborhood pinned under the eyes of a piano teacher. And the day outside looked like it still had some summer in it, too; the sky’s blue was bleached by heat, and the hard, cloudless glare made the worn brick of the warehouses and factories in the district seem sharp and brittle. But beneath the appearance of heat, the sun had a lower angle—a shorter intensity, a longer shadow, something that hinted at how brief these bright days would be and how soon winter would close around the city. My father had liked this time of year; it reinforced his melancholy, he said, with a sort of visual carpe diem. Then he’d apologize for being morbid. “Some people find greater happiness in being unhappy, Dev. Don’t let an old man’s self-indulgent gloom rub off on you.” But I suppose that it already had. I couldn’t remember a time since my mother’s death when I was eleven that my father hadn’t carried around the faint aroma of sadness. Even in the midst of hilarity—one of my birthdays, for example—a moment would always come, no matter how brief or secret, when his laughter had a forced note and the thought deep in his eyes was how much my mother would have enjoyed seeing this. That sadness must have increased especially when I left him to go away to college and, later, to Treasury School and then to Bellesville and all the assignments the Service likes to ship its agents to. But I had been too busy too notice. My father’s scorn for suicide—”We’re in this life to do penance, and a man shouldn’t quit on a duty just because he doesn’t like it”—and the busy pace he kept telling me about when we’d talk on the telephone made me ignore the little hints that must have been there. He did not want to burden me with his sadness, and I did not want to be burdened. It was that failure to him that Susan wanted me to “ventilate” and which I was still trying to understand—the feeling of guilt for being too blind when he must have been asking me for help; the feeling of unclean selfishness for having been too wrapped up in my own life to see what was happening to his. It was a lousy way to repay a father for all that he’d done for his son.