Graveland: A Novel Page 6

  Vaughan is seated on a high stool at a long counter. He looks small and frail. There’s a bowl of something in front of him. He glances up.

  “Craig.”

  Howley approaches and nods at the bowl, which contains some kind of soup or chowder. “Getting a head start there, Jimmy, are you?”

  Vaughan shrugs. He’s wearing a bathrobe and hasn’t shaved. Howley has never seen him like this before, never seen him out of a suit before.

  “Yeah,” he says. “What are you gonna do? Sue me? Mrs. R there will fix you something if you’re hungry.”

  Howley looks at him. If he’s hungry? Of course he’s fucking hungry. He’s been working all day and was expecting dinner. He glances to his left. Mrs. Richardson, Vaughan’s longtime cook, is busy over at the sink scrubbing something, a baking tray or a pot. Howley looks back, hesitates, and then says, “You know what, I’m good, thanks. I’ll eat later.”

  “Suit yourself.” Vaughan indicates a stool on the other side of the counter. “But sit with me, will you?”

  Howley pulls out the nearest stool and sits down. A little farther along the counter, an open copy of the New York Post is lying next to a can of Dr. Thurston’s Diet Cherry Cola. Meredith slides onto the stool in front of the paper, hunches forward, and starts reading.

  “So, Jimmy, how are you feeling?”

  Vaughan makes a face. “Lousy. I’ve got ten different things wrong with me.” He takes a slurp from the bowl, then looks up at Howley. “Believe me, you don’t want to know.”

  And he’s right. Howley doesn’t.

  But at the same time it’d be useful to know what they’re dealing with here. Vaughan looks pretty awful, it has to be said—pathetic, really … stooped, unshaven, pale, dribbling chowder. It’s hard to imagine a route back from this, and to something like a vigorous investment committee meeting or a tricky client lunch at the Four Seasons. It’s shocking how rapid the deterioration has been. The old man seemed fine on Friday.

  “Are we going to be seeing you back at the office anytime soon?”

  The moment Howley says this, he regrets it.

  “Jesus, Craig.”

  Because it’s not as if Vaughan has been out sick for weeks. He’s missed a single day. It just felt like a very long day.

  “No, I meant…”

  “Ha,” Vaughan says, his spoon suspended over the bowl, “either you can’t handle the pressure or you’re itching to rearrange the furniture in my office. Which is it?”

  Howley tenses. He isn’t comfortable having a conversation like this in the kitchen, with Meredith there, and the cook listening in. “Jimmy—”

  “Just tell me, should I be worried?”

  “Look, I, er—”

  Vaughan cracks a smile, a sour one. “Oh, relax, Craig, would you?” He shifts his focus back to the spoon. “I was just kidding.”

  “Right.”

  The next mouthful of chowder Vaughan takes has a chunky piece in it that requires chewing. The chewing goes on for quite a while, and Howley becomes exasperated. He’s just about to ask why he was summoned up here in the first place when Meredith slaps her hand down loudly on the countertop.

  They both turn to look at her.

  “These people.”

  Howley tilts his head to get a glimpse of what she’s reading. It’s a two-page spread covering the Connie Carillo trial. In between blocks of text, he can make out pictures of Judge Roberts, of Ray Whitestone, and of Connie herself.

  Vaughan puts his spoon down. “What’s the matter, sweetheart?”

  She flicks the back of her hand against the spread.

  “This. I’ve had enough of it. They’re like vultures.” She shakes her head. “Poor Connie.”

  Vaughan shrugs. “What do you want? It’s a murder trial.” He turns back to Howley. “You been following this, Craig?”

  “As much as anyone, I guess. It’s hard to avoid.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it. Meredith here was at Brearley with Connie. Isn’t that right, Mer?”

  She tenses. There is silence for a moment. “Just because I was at school with her doesn’t mean—” She stops and slides off the stool. “Oh, what would you know? Finish that slop there and take your medication, would you?”

  She grabs her soda roughly, spilling some on the countertop, and storms out of the kitchen.

  “My word,” Vaughan says, picking up his spoon again. “What’s eating her?” He takes another sip of chowder. “So, Craig. What do you think? Is Senator Pendleton going to take the stand?”

  Howley can’t quite believe the way this is shaping up. It’s certainly not what he had in mind. Nevertheless, he looks around, thinking … Connie Carillo, Pendleton. He heard something about the trial this morning. People were discussing it in the elevator.

  “I doubt it,” he says eventually. “Too much exposure. It’s the name. If she was still a Pendleton, then maybe, but I figure the old man’s going to let her fry.”

  “Yeah,” Vaughan says, “but if she fries, he’s finished anyway. In fact, he’s already finished. Connie screwed her old man over years ago by marrying Ricky. I mean, what, we’re going to elect a governor who’s got an ex-son-in-law with ‘Icepick’ for a middle name? Please.”

  “I don’t see why not,” Howley says. “These days? It’d take a lot more than that to crush Gene Pendleton.”

  “Maybe, but it’s not over yet. I think there’s still a bunch of stuff to come out. That campaign funds thing, for instance, with Meeker … the missing checkbook.” He pauses, then coughs. “There’s also this guy at the moment, the doorman, what’s his name?”

  Howley hasn’t seen enough of the coverage and is out of his depth here. A missing checkbook? The doorman? He has no idea what Vaughan is talking about.

  He shakes his head.

  “Mrs. R?” Vaughan then says, turning awkwardly. “The doorman, the guy on at the moment, what’s his name?”

  Mrs. Richardson looks up from the sink and clicks her tongue. “Joey Gifford.”

  “Thank you. Yes, of course.” He takes another old-man slurp of chowder and quickly wipes his chin with a napkin. “And let’s not forget the question of method, the carving knife.” He pauses, looking up. “Not exactly an icepick, but hey.”

  Howley remains silent and gazes at the tiny splashes of cherry soda on the countertop. Sticky and crimson, they look like speckles of blood.

  “Anyway,” Vaughan says, “Ray Whitestone is going to have a ball working the various angles.” He puts his spoon into the bowl and pushes it aside. “Case is made for him.” He reaches into the pocket of his robe and takes out a silver pillbox. “It’s got everything,” he goes on, more slowly now, concentrating, his mind fixed on getting the box open. “Politics, sex, the mob … Wall Street, grand opera. You couldn’t make it up. Right, Craig?”

  Howley nods. What else is there to do?

  The old man clears his throat. “Get me a glass of water, Mrs. R, would you?”

  She does.

  Over the next couple of minutes, and in silence, Vaughan takes his various tablets. When he’s done, he stands up, ties the sash of his robe, and nods at the door. “Come on, Craig, let me walk you out.”

  Walk him out? He just got here.

  Resigned, Howley nods at Mrs. Richardson, who’s standing at the counter now, scrubbing at the soda stains with a spiral wire brush.

  On the way out, Vaughan starts coughing. It escalates, and to get it under control he has to pound his chest with the palm of his hand. Howley finds this alarming.

  “You okay?”

  “Do I sound it?”

  After he’s regained his composure, and as they’re crossing the foyer, Vaughan turns and says, “So, Craig, tell me, what do you make of these shootings over the weekend?”

  Howley exhales loudly. He doesn’t know, and at this point he doesn’t really care. He’s more concerned—or, at any rate, baffled—by Vaughan’s behavior. It’s clear that the old man is unwell, and very frail, but also t
hat he’s as sharp as ever, and as calculating. The fact that they haven’t discussed either the succession question or the proposed IPO is no accident as far as Howley is concerned. This other stuff, the Carillo trial, the shootings … Howley sees it all as smoke and mirrors, a form of misdirection.

  Sleight of hand.

  Or is it?

  In truth, he can’t be sure. Because the thing is … could Vaughan have actually forgotten what he’d called Howley up here to discuss?

  It can’t be discounted as a possibility.

  “I don’t know, Jimmy,” he says, eyeing the old man warily now. “I refuse to believe any of this conspiracy stuff in the papers. There’s no mystery about it, really.” He shrugs. “It’s simple. The murder rate goes up in a recession.”

  Vaughan shakes his head. “I think you’ll find the most recent stats contradict you on that one, Craig.” He starts coughing again, but manages to contain it this time. “Big drop in violent crime, five, almost six percent last year alone.”

  Okay, whatever, Jesus.

  “Well, Jimmy, what do you think?”

  This is what he wants, isn’t it?

  Vaughan presses the button for the elevator and the door whispers open. “Whatever this is,” he says, “I think it goes pretty deep.” He holds his arm against the elevator door to keep it open. “It could be some form of, I don’t know … bloodletting.” He looks very weak all of a sudden, and a little spaced. “I don’t think we’ve seen an end to it.”

  Howley nods and steps into the elevator cab.

  It goes deep? Bloodletting? An end to it?

  He’s not quite sure what the old man is talking about. But maybe—it occurs to him—just maybe, the old man isn’t sure either. In fact, maybe he’s losing his marbles. Maybe this is the end of an era, or the start of a new one. Howley has a quick vision of himself steering Oberon to a successful IPO, and then beyond, to his own rightful place at the table, CFR, Trilateral, Bilderberg, whatever—the old man, meanwhile, stuck here in the apartment coughing his lungs up, fumbling with tablets, sucking his food out of a straw, and watching endless coverage on TV of some tawdry celebrity murder trial …

  Howley turns around.

  Maybe he should think about rearranging the furniture in Vaughan’s office, because chances are this decrepit old bird in front of him now won’t be leaving home anytime soon.

  Unless it’s in a box.

  “Okay, Jimmy,” he says, looking out from the overly ornate interior of the elevator cab. “Good night.”

  “Yeah, Craig, old sport,” Vaughan says, but quietly, a sudden and unexpected glint in his eye. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  5

  AT THE COUNTER IN HER LOCAL DINER, sipping coffee, waiting on a bagel and cream cheese, Ellen flicks through her notebook, the most recent few pages of it. But there’s nothing there. It’s all doodles and arrows and mini-mindmaps and word lists—hieroglyphic shit in her own handwriting that soon even she’ll be unable to decipher. This is what happens when you lose the thread of a story, or can’t find the shape of one in the first place.

  She puts the notebook down and stirs her coffee. There’s no reason to, it’s black and unsweetened, but she does it anyway.

  One of the little diner-y things people do.

  Like shaking the packet of sugar before you open it, or chewing on a toothpick.

  She glances up and down the counter.

  Skinny guy in a business suit perched on his stool at one end, burly construction worker spilling off his at the other.

  Where’s Norman Rockwell when you need him?

  The bagel arrives, and she starts into it, eyeing the notebook, unwilling to let this go. Since expounding her theory yesterday to Max Daitch, Ellen has made little or no progress. Probably because it wasn’t much of a theory to start with. What was it she said? Different perps, no connection, same perps, bunch of clowns?

  Something like that?

  Or that specifically.

  The counter guy is passing, and she holds out her cup for a refill.

  The official line hasn’t changed in the last twenty-four hours either. Maybe there’s hard evidence somewhere that she’s unaware of—or maybe it’s a carefully engineered consensus, or maybe it’s just intellectual laziness, she doesn’t know—but the continuing and remarkably consistent media assumption seems to be that a group of domestic terrorists, as yet unidentified, was responsible for the two killings. Within those parameters, there is a modicum of theorizing, and the usual lingo is deployed—jihad, radical, global … battlefield … threat level. Repeated reference is now also being made to that earlier report about intel analysts picking up noises in Yemen relating to possible targeting of Wall Street executives.

  But what strikes Ellen most is that there hasn’t been a single mention anywhere, at least not that she can see, of the differing methods used in the two shootings, and of how weird that is, and of what it implies—

  Quick sip of coffee.

  —namely, that the shootings may well have been separate and unconnected, which would also mean they were random and coincidental, thus rendering all of that speculative Homeland Security–speak in the papers and online pretty much irrelevant. The alternative scenario is that the shootings were indeed connected, at least circumstantially. For the moment, the how and why remain unknown, but what the differing methods would seem to imply is that maybe there was no method, or very little method, and that the perps were simply amateurs.

  As far as Ellen is concerned, if it’s the first, there’s no story here worth pursuing. It’d just be two routine homicides. But if it’s the second—

  She takes her last mouthful of bagel.

  —there is.

  So she’s going with the second.

  With the amateurs, the clowns.

  The lone wolves, the stray dogs.

  Because if that’s what these guys are, amateurs, and not a highly organized terrorist cell—not pre-installed units, not strings of code in some elaborate phase of video gameplay—then there’s no reason why she or any other moderately intelligent person shouldn’t be able to get inside their heads, work out what they’re up to, second-guess them even.

  She twirls the coffee spoon between her fingers for a moment.

  Is that being overly ambitious? Perhaps. Wouldn’t be the first time, though.

  She looks around.

  Regrouping.

  Okay, most parties with an interest in this—Homeland Security, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, the NYPD, CNN, Fox, the WSJ, the Times, half the blogosphere—are just assuming that these perps are experienced professionals, possibly with a background in the military or in special ops. Little Ellen Dorsey, on the other hand, and based solely on a fucking hunch, has decided otherwise—that they’re newbies, isolated, and largely clueless.

  It’s not much of a competitive edge, and maybe she’s deluding herself, but it’s all she’s got.

  She pays and leaves.

  And there isn’t much of a window here, because if she’s right about this, it’s bound to become apparent to everyone pretty quickly—one more development is all it’ll take, and that could happen at any time.

  Walking back to her apartment, she decides that with the lack of any intel on the perps, the only other likely route into the story is through the vics. Why them? Who were they? What did they have in common? Did they ever meet, or cross paths professionally? And if so, does this tell us anything?

  She gets home, clears some space on her desk, and settles down to work.

  Over the course of the day she trawls through dozens of business websites, gathering and collating references to the two men. She reads profiles, magazine articles, blog posts, anything she can find. She prints out some of this stuff, pinning loose pages of it onto various corkboards around the apartment and laying others out on the floor. She moves quickly from one spot to another, highlighting passages with a red marker as she follows a line of thought, swirling and daubing red streaks o
n paper like a hopped-up Jackson Pollock. She spends a good deal of time on the phone and writing e-mails, putting out feelers, questions, requests for information.

  She doesn’t eat anything. She drinks a lot of coffee.

  But none of this really gets her anywhere. Because although it turns out that Jeff Gale and Bob Holland had quite a lot in common, there’s a predictability to it all, and a banality. They both served, for instance, on a couple of the same boards; they were both members of the same golf club for a while; and they both had former wives who went to the same high school. She finds gala charity events that they both attended and infers a certain degree of casual social contact between them, at lunches, openings, the occasional weekend in the Hamptons.

  But what she doesn’t find, or stumble upon, is any kind of sinister nexus between Northwood Leffingwell and Chambers Capital Management. She finds a nexus, alright, but it’s the bigger one—the one that links them all together, the banks, the hedge funds, the private equity shops. She knew this—of course she did, it’s axiomatic now—but it still comes as a shock to see it laid out like that in such unequivocal terms.

  And it’s no help really.

  Because it doesn’t tell her anything.

  By late evening she’s tired, addled from too much caffeine, her brain engorged with terabytes of useless information. In an attempt to reverse this, or at least to calm it—to calm what she considers her attention surplus disorder—she takes a long, hot, fragrant bath. Lying there, in the flickering candlelight, she listens for the weird sounds that her building occasionally tends to make, or that tend to ripple through it—bumps, thuds, muffled voices—and that for some reason she can only ever seem to hear at all clearly from here, from the bath.

  Not that she wants to particularly.

  But it has become a routine, a little ritual for unwinding, for emptying her brain after too many hours at the keyboard.

  Delete, delete, delete.

  Ten minutes in, however, and she’s thinking again, speculating, unable to help herself. If these guys aren’t jihadis—and she doesn’t for one second believe they are—then what are they? Who are they? The Tea Party? Occupy Wall Street?