Graveland: A Novel Read online

  Which suits Frank just fine.

  Not because he can’t do the job, or he’s lazy, it’s just that dealing with people, customers, members of the public … he’s not cut out for it. Heavier foot traffic than the store gets and he’d more than likely crack up. It might take a while, a few weeks, a month or two, but he wouldn’t last—there’d be an incident with someone out on the floor, he’d raise his voice, they’d file a complaint, and who’d end up with their second pink slip in as many years?

  For the moment, though, this position he’s got at ghostly, creepy Winterbrook Mall seems secure enough.

  Which is a big relief.

  He finishes the drink and orders some food.

  Because as long as he’s able to meet his basic financial obligations, as long as he’s able to—

  Phone.

  Vibrating in his pocket.

  He pulls it out and looks at it. Lizzie. Pretty much on cue. “Hi there.”

  “Hey Dad.”

  Tone alert.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m … I’m fine.”

  Lizzie’s at Atherton, and even though she got a scholarship it’s still costing him a fortune. She wants to be a Web … something, he can’t remember what exactly. He finds it hard to keep up, to stay in the loop, especially the tech loop. When she was starting out, he was all over it, but that was two years ago.

  “So … what’s happening?”

  “Not a whole lot. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

  Frank looks up, slowly, and out over the dusty, wood-paneled expanse of Dave’s Bar & Grill.

  Hear my voice?

  “You can hear my voice anytime you want, sweetheart, you know that.”

  He swallows. Was that the right thing to say? Lizzie is extremely smart, but she’s hard work sometimes, and you have to know what you’re doing. When she was small, he and Deb had to choose their moments with her. She could be charming, too, of course, and some of the stuff she came out with would blow your socks off. Unfortunately, Lizzie’s teenage years are a bit of a blur to Frank, because after the divorce he burrowed down and didn’t do much else besides work. Then, a year or so before he was laid off, things changed again, and he started making more of an effort to see both her and John. It seemed like a new phase, a new era—college looming, Deb married to someone else, their early lives together as a family in the house in Carroll Gardens receding like a brittle dream. Lizzie hadn’t changed, though, not really, and her renewed presence in his life, her occasional attentions—e-mails, phone calls—sustained him in a way that he hadn’t expected.

  “I know, Dad.”

  Silence.

  Well, at least that’s settled.

  “So,” he says, trying again. “Saturday night. What are you up to?” But why does he want to know that? Doesn’t he worry enough about her as it is? With nothing at all to go on? Now he’s fishing for ammo?

  “No plans. Just working. I’ve got a paper due.”

  He’ll settle for that. Moving his empty glass around the table like a chess piece, he proceeds to tell her about his day, the LudeX upgrade, the early torrent of excited geeks, the subsequent stream of disappointed ones. Trying to make it funny. But at a certain point he realizes she’s not laughing, and then guesses she’s probably not even smiling. Which is when he remembers that Lizzie hates hearing about his job. It freaks her out. She thinks of her old man as an architect who works in Manhattan, not as some loser sales guy in a suburban mall. Either that or she’s racked with guilt about what he has to do to keep her and her brother in their good schools.

  Actually, he doesn’t know what she thinks. They’ve never really talked about it. It’s what he imagines she thinks, what he’d think.

  What he thinks.

  “Have you heard from John?” he asks, interrupting himself, changing the subject. John’s at grad school in California doing a master’s in genetics and microbiology and only surfaces every few months for a little air.

  “Yeah, I spoke to him last week. He’s good. Still seems to be with that German girl, Claudia, is it? They’ll be getting married before you know it and moving to Frankfurt or Berlin or someplace. You up for some German-speaking grandkids?”

  This is news to Frank, though it makes sense. John was always the quiet one, straight as an arrow. “Sure. Why not? Though it’s a pity he didn’t hook up with someone Spanish or Italian. Better food and weather.” Stupid joke. He pauses. “There’s the Bauhaus stuff, I suppose. Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, and Le Corbusier, although I think Le Corbusier was Swiss.” He’s rambling here. He stops. In the silence that follows there’s a strange—

  “Lizzie?”

  Nothing for a second, and then, “Yep.” But it’s more of a gulp.

  She’s crying.

  “Lizzie? What is it?”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Frank sees the waitress approaching with a tray. He doesn’t look at her directly but holds up a hand, to wave her away.

  “Lizzie? Sweetheart. What is it?”

  He holds his breath, to hear better.

  “Oh, it’s nothing … I’m just…” She snuffles loudly and clears her throat. “You know.”

  Does he? He looks at his watch. He could be up there in two hours. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, just a stupid hormonal bitch.” More recovery noises. “I’m sorry, Dad.”

  “Oh, Lizzie, don’t…”

  Even though she’s not there—in front of him, physically—Frank’s need to reach out for her right now and hold her is overwhelming. It even makes him feel a little sick. Any display of vulnerability on Lizzie’s part has always cut through him like a knife.

  When she was four years old, or maybe five, she—

  Jesus, Frank.

  “Lizzie, do you want me to come up there?” he says. “I could easily make it in a—”

  “No, Dad. Come on.” She’s laughing now, or at least pretending to.

  And so it goes.

  Later, driving along the back roads to where he’s renting an apartment near West Mahopac, Frank replays the conversation in his head, looking out for clues, a reason, something to explain why Lizzie was so upset. He spins various theories out, elaborate ones, simple ones, but in the end he just doesn’t know.

  And, sadly—experience tells him—he probably never will.

  * * *

  All through the afternoon and early evening Ellen Dorsey works on the Ratt Atkinson profile, trawling through his eight-year gubernatorial record and clacking out three and a half thousand words of boilerplate magazine prose. At about nine o’clock she decides she’s had enough, that she can do the rest tomorrow. She then switches her focus to the Jeff Gale story. She’s had the TV on in the background the whole time and for the last hour or so has been checking Twitter—and semi-psychotically, every three or four minutes at least. But there don’t seem to be any developments, none that she can see from the screen in the corner of her living room at any rate. On Twitter, predictably, there’s plenty of the usual idiotic comment and meaningless bile to keep things ticking over.

  She flicks around a few of the news websites, but it’s the same everywhere.

  TOP BANKER SHOT IN CENTRAL PARK.

  That’s it, no details, no explanations, no theories even.

  The thing about instant news is that it’s, well, instant … but nowhere near fast enough. It’s addictive, but you’re never satisfied. Ellen works hard at what she does—but the inescapable fact here is that she works for a monthly publication.

  A periodical.

  Both of which terms sound like Victorian euphemisms for something else entirely.

  Parallax magazine has been around for more than forty years and has a reputation—it’s known for its investigative reporting, its long-form pieces, and its uncompromising, ballsy attitude. Max Daitch, the latest in a long line of the magazine’s fearless editors, and the one Ellen has mostly worked with, is indeed fearless, but even though he’s young—younger
than she is by three or four years—he’s been heard to quote H. L. Mencken and is really just a couple of sandwiches short of wearing a bow tie. Which means that her habits in recent years have been shaped by this traditionalist, analog regime, even though her instincts remain resolutely progressive and digital. Her MO for Parallax, for example, has been to burrow, slowly, patiently, sifting through mountains of information with a view to building a “case.” But these days, no longer in her thirties, what she’d prefer to be doing, and got to do briefly with Jimmy Gilroy back when the John Rundle story broke—and felt she was maybe trying to do earlier today when she went down to Central Park—is identify a breaking story … find a curve, get out ahead of it, and stay there.

  A change of pace.

  You can’t force it, though.

  She tidies her desk for a few minutes, rearranging stuff and clearing a little space. Then she sits back, puts her feet on the desk, and phones her sister. Michelle lives in a beautiful split-level colonial in the suburbs of Philadelphia, is married to the financial controller of a fair-trade import company, and has two exceptionally bright kids. Which is fine, for Michelle … but the thing is, every once in a while Ellen needs a vicarious hit of all this, of the supposed normality of her sister’s domestic setup, so she gets Michelle on the phone and pumps her for information, stuff about the house, about her and Dan, about the kids—what they’re doing at school, what medications they’re on, how many boxes in the pages of the DSM they’re currently checking off. But when Michelle tries to turn the tables on big sis, Ellen clams up, declaring same old, same old.

  Same apartment, same obsessive workload.

  Same lack of social skills, same monthly subscription to Bad Mood magazine.

  It’s become a routine, but a curiously comforting one.

  After she gets off the phone with Michelle, Ellen orders up Thai food. While she’s waiting, she grabs the remote and surfs around the cable news channels. The only thing giving the Jeff Gale story a run for its money today, in terms of high-end prurience, is the Connie Carillo murder trial. At the moment, some MSNBC talking head is reviewing the week’s evidence. “Look, it’s simple,” he’s saying, “she clearly needs a lifeline, because even though no motive has been established yet, she just, I don’t know, radiates guilt…”

  The she here is Constance “Connie” Carillo, daughter of Senator Eugene Pendleton and ex-wife of mob boss Ricky “Icepick” Carillo. A powerful soprano, Connie was about to make her debut at the Met in Salome when her husband of the time, investment banker Howard Meeker, was found naked on the kitchen floor of their Upper East Side apartment with a carving knife stuck in his chest. Connie was immediately charged with his murder, and since the trial started a couple of weeks ago, the court proceedings have been broadcast live every day, with updates, highlights, commentary, and wall-to-wall analysis. In media terms, it’s been pretty much full-spectrum dominance.

  But this being a Saturday, there’s something of a vacuum to fill.

  So Jeff Gale’s timing couldn’t have been better.

  And although Ellen, like most people, has been following the trial pretty closely, she has no difficulty now in dropping it for this. She presses the mute button and throws the remote onto the sofa. She goes back to her desk and starts digging up anything she can find on the “gunned-down” banker.

  As she reads, she jots down notes on a loose sheet of graph paper.

  Born in Carthage, North Carolina, forty-seven years ago, Jeff Gale majored in psychology and economics at NCSU and then got an MBA at Harvard Business School before going on to do stints at Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo. After five years at Citigroup he was appointed vice president of the New York Federal Reserve, and then, just in time to see the company clock up losses of nearly $4.2 billion, he took over as CEO of Northwood Leffingwell. Amid embarrassing lawsuits over the bank’s foreclosure practices, as well as SEC claims that statements he made to Congress may have misrepresented Northwood’s health, Gale’s tenure at the bank was not an easy one. More recently, however, things seemed to have been looking up, with the bank’s share price finally crawling out of the single digits.

  Gale was married and had two teenage daughters. A Forbes profile describes him as obsessive and detail oriented. Standard stuff, then, and fairly tedious, but it’s a brand of tedium that Ellen has grown used to over the years. It’s part of her stock-in-trade—wading through data and looking for patterns, glitches, the one thing no one else sees.

  She goes through some photos of Gale now, on Google Images, but doesn’t see anything of any interest at all. Apart from the fact that he was about five-ten, pale, and balding.

  She looks over at the TV. They keep going back to the crime scene in Central Park, recycling the few precious, banal facts that are known about the case. Ellen finds all of this frustrating. If she were working on the story herself—for a paper, say, like Val Brady is—what would she be doing now? Would she be on the phone to this or that contact? Would she be camped outside Jeff Gale’s house?

  Maybe.

  But if so, wouldn’t she need a little more to work with, a lead, something concrete?

  When the food arrives, Ellen gets a beer from the fridge and sets up at the kitchen table.

  She eats in silence, staring over at her desk.

  Something bugging her.

  What is it?

  Ever since she did that piece on John Rundle with Jimmy Gilroy a year and a half ago, nothing has been the same. He called her up out of the blue one afternoon, this diffident, inexperienced Irish journalist, and within a couple of days she was involved in the fastest-moving, most exciting story she’d ever worked on. Senator John Rundle, sniffing out the possibility of a party presidential nomination, was found to have lied about a trip he made to the Congo on behalf of his brother, Clark, CEO of engineering giant BRX—a trip on which a private security contractor just happened to “go postal” in a tiny village and massacre nine people. As if that wasn’t enough, Clark Rundle was subsequently indicted for murdering the owner of the private security company by bashing the man’s brains in with a fucking laptop.

  She and Gilroy led on every aspect of the story, scooping all other news outlets, and then drawing the whole thing neatly together for the next issue of Parallax. It was a thrilling time in her professional life, a definite high point, but these days she can’t shake off the suspicion, even the fear, that she was perceived to have gone too far—and that she’ll never be permitted to go that far again.

  Why, and by whom, remains a mystery, but she’s been around long enough to know that certain people just don’t like people like her. Over the years she’s been harassed, followed, and offered money and had her various accounts hacked into. This feels different, though, more subtle. Recession notwithstanding, Parallax has lost a lot of advertising revenue recently, and for his part Max Daitch hasn’t seemed quite as fearless as he once did. Maybe it’s her imagination, maybe not, but the atmosphere around the office has had a weirdly muted feel of late.

  As for Jimmy Gilroy, Ellen doesn’t know. He sort of disappeared into the story in a way she’s rarely seen. He was of the opinion that what they did together only scratched the surface, and from what she understands he has spent the last eighteen months immersed in a follow-up piece, excavating the background to the original story, but sinking ever deeper into it, traveling to London, Paris, and the Congo.

  Getting lost, chasing ghosts.

  She pushes the remainder of her food aside and finishes what’s left of the beer.

  But does she envy him this for some reason? Maybe. She certainly envies someone something. What that is, or might be, exactly, she doesn’t know. On consideration, though—and looking over at her desk again—she knows it probably isn’t the Jeff Gale story.

  Or shouldn’t be.

  And as if to confirm this, her phone rings.

  She picks it up and looks at the display.

  Val Brady.

  She hesitates, but lets it rin
g out. Then she waits for a moment and checks to see if he’s left a message.

  He has. “Hi, Ellen, Val Brady here. Er … nothing really, I just thought I’d check in with you, seeing as how we were, you know … talking today. Funny thing about this story, it’s … it’s flat, there’s nothing there. I’ve talked to a lot of people since this morning, associates of Gale’s, people who knew him well, people who could even be classed as adversaries of his, in a business sense, but it all comes across as so fucking boring, you know? He does, they do, that whole world. I mean, these people don’t go around shooting each other, that’s for sure. So maybe it was just one of those random things.” He pauses. Ellen looks over at the window, out at the darkening, orange-washed street. “Hey,” Brady goes on, “I just feel bad that that hard-on of yours had to go to waste, you know. Maybe next time.” Another pause, during which she can feel the recoil from his brain exploding. “Listen, Ellen”—this quickly—“I’ll talk to you again, okay? Take it easy.”

  Poor bastard, he couldn’t resist it. Or make it sound like he was one of the boys.

  But—

  Something weird.

  She walks over to the window and stands there looking down, thinking … what if he’s wrong? What if he’s wrong about all of it?

  His approach, his conclusion.

  Some people walk by on the other side of the street, huddled into their coats, laughing.

  A yellow cab passes.

  What was it he said … the story was flat and they were all so boring?

  And then it hits her.

  Of course.

  None of that is the point, is it?

  She turns back around and glances at the TV, where for the hundredth time today they’re showing the scene down in Central Park—the yellow tape, the guys in baggy white suits, the photographers, the media pack, the onlookers.

  That’s the point.

  She walks toward the corner of the room, staring directly now at what’s on the screen.

  Calculating … extrapolating.

  And suddenly she’s sure. It’s as real as a headache.

  This is going to happen again.