The sun came up and we switched from Foster’s to coffee.
“It’s got to be Sykes,” I said, closing the last of the file folders.
“Sure looking that way,” Lonnie said. His eyes scanned the coffee table, now covered in files and papers. “Sykes and Webber had to give Reed a chunk of the company to keep him.”
“Reed, meanwhile, had transferred copyright interest and ownership in his books to the Sirius Corporation.”
“Which he probably created to get some tax breaks …” Lonnie speculated.
“Then the Sirius Corporation became a pipeline,” I added. “A pass-through corporation to hide what he and Webber were planning. You got a legal pad or something? I’ve got to write this stuff down or I’m going to lose it.”
He disappeared down the hall, then came back with a pad and pen. I took it from him and started making notes.
“First, the book becomes a megahit. The taxes are killing his ass, so Reed sets up Sirius, with himself, Victoria, and the kids as sole shareholders.”
“But Victoria and the kids never hold enough to have any kind of control,” Lonnie said.
“Of course. Reed’s not giving up control of anything to anybody. Ain’t his style. So he goes back to contract.”
“The question is why he decided to stay with Spearhead in the first place. A big trade house in New York probably would have given him the five mil up front, no questions asked.”
I tried to put myself in Reed’s place, to think like he’d think, to maneuver like he’d maneuver.
“Yeah, but at a big publisher he’d be just another pain-in-the-ass, bestselling author,” I said. “At Spearhead, though, he was king of the frigging hill. You look at Reed’s history, what was he?”
“A player,” Lonnie said, smiling.
“Exactly. It was the game that mattered. He wanted to win, but once he was a winner, it was off to the next game, the next deal. That was the shark ego at work. He had to keep moving or he’d die.”
“So he decides to work his way into the power structure at Spearhead?”
“Yeah, and then once that’s done, he’s off to a bigger game. So the first thing he does is negotiate his way into partial ownership of the company.”
“And then he allies himself with Webber,” Lonnie said. “And between them the two of them own enough shares to take the company over.”
“They set up Harvest Moon in the Caymans,” I said, “to disguise their moves for as long as they can. Eventually, Sykes is going to find out.”
“But by then it’s too late.”
I made a few notes. “At least that’s the way it was supposed to work.”
Lonnie picked up a file and opened it. “What I can’t quite place is why, in Reed’s will, Webber is named his literary executor.”
I looked up. “You mean why not Victoria?”
“Yeah.”
I leaned back, stared at the splotched ceiling of the trailer.
“Don’t forget,” I said, “Victoria and R. J. didn’t exactly have the strongest marriage in the world. Maybe R. J. figured if she was going to divorce him anyway, it was better not to have her in control of his literary estate if anything happened to him.”
“Still,” he said, holding up another folder. “It seems odd that in the living will, the power of attorney is divided into two parts. Victoria has the POA over his business affairs, but Travis has the say-so over all his literary affairs. Seems confusing.”
“You know,” I said, “I did this article once, a feature on the Du Pont plant out in Old Hickory. Rayon City, they call it. And in the research I read about this old guy—let me see if I can remember—Flanagan, yeah, that’s it, Henry Flanagan. A financier, supposed to be a financial genius robber-baron type who worked for the Du Ponts, later went on to make a fortune in Florida real estate. Built the Florida East Coast Railway. Anyway, every evening at the end of the day, all Flanagan’s top boys would gather in his office for a drink and ol’ Hank would hold up his glass of bourbon and deliver the same toast every night. Know what it was?”
“No,” Lonnie said. “But I got a feeling you’re going to insist on telling me.”
“Confusion to our enemies,” I said, holding my coffee cup toward him and toasting. “I’ll bet this was just R. J.’s way of keeping some shit in the game.”
Lonnie tossed the file folder onto the coffee table. “Guy was a piece of work, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah, and in a strange way, I think I would have … well, hell, I hesitate to say I would have liked him. You know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” Lonnie said. “He was never boring.”
“The question now is, what do we do with all this?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Take it to the cops?”
“Oh, yeah, that’s a great idea! Uh, excuse me, officer, I just happened to be breaking into this house, see? And I found all these files and stuff that just happened to jump into my bag when I wasn’t looking, and when I found ’em at home and read ’em, lo and friggin’ behold, I figured out who the bad guy was.”
“All right, smartass, let’s hear your ideas.”
I leaned into the couch and put my feet up on the table, weary and fuzzy-headed. Ideas, ideas …
If only I had any.
I thought maybe a few hours of sleep would clear my head, give me the chance to recharge and refocus. I felt like a window had been opened, and even if the truth was not visible through this window, at least some part of it might be. I had to grab on to whatever I had and start pulling, like a loose thread on a coat, and see what unravels.
Only problem was that as exhausted as I was, sleep wouldn’t come. I lay in bed not tossing and turning, but perfectly still, on my back, my hands at my side, staring up at the ceiling and seeing little patterns in the swirls of dried, flaking paint. The edge of my vision was brittle, fragile, as if I’d crack into a million pieces if a stiff wind came from an unexpected direction. But still, no sleep.
There were no messages on the answering machine. For once, I’d gotten a break on that count. But it feels curiously lonely to come home to an empty answering machine. I felt out of touch, detached, alone. I almost wish there had been some, so I’d have something to concentrate on and keep my mind from spinning off in dozens of different directions at once.
So they think I killed Reed and they think I killed Mrs. Hawkins. And you’re a burglar and a thief. And you need a shower, too.
And Marsha wants out.
Live with it, guy, because there’s nothing you can do about it. I guess I can understand it; who wants to live the rest of his life on the fringes? That was certainly where I was headed if I wasn’t already there. No security, no steady paycheck, no health insurance, no unemployment insurance; no 401(k), no SEP, no Keogh account, no IRA. None of the safety nets of life that middle-class American baby boomers nearing the turn of the millennium are so obsessed with. Thirty years ago we were on the front lines, smoking joints and sticking flowers down the barrels of National Guard rifles manned by clean-shaven boys our own age while chanting Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?, something that strikes me today as both brave and unfathomably cruel, all at the same time. And now the obsessions in our lives are investments and cholesterol levels, marriages gone stale and retirement, who’s going to pay for the kids’ tuition and the parents’ nursing-home bills.
“Stop this,” I whispered. “Turn the brain off. Switch all circuits to ‘off.’ ”
I got up and turned on the television. Good Morning, America had just broken for a local news segment and the smiley-faced anchorette came on. She led off with another drug killing on Jefferson Street, then a six-car fatal smashup on Briley Parkway.
Slow news day, I thought.
Then the painfully bright-eyed, cheery lady dropped a bomb: “The district attorney’s office announced late last night that the Davidson County Grand Jury probe into operations at the T. E. Simpkins Forensic Sciences Center has been dropped as a result of yesterday evening’s resignation of Dr. Henry Krohlmeyer, Metro Nashville Medical Examiner.”
Okay, I’m awake.
“The surprise resignation came after a late-night meeting in the mayor’s office. According to mayoral spokesman Tammy McCallister, Dr. Krohlmeyer met with the district attorney and the mayor and an agreement was reached whereby Krohlmeyer would resign after first dismissing the entire staff at the medical examiner’s office. In return, all allegations of wrongdoing at the blah-blah-blah …”
Dismissed. Canned. Terminated. Sent packing.
The entire staff fired. My God, Marsha’s never been fired from a job in her life. This is going to crush her. I picked up the phone, dialed her number like a reflex.
Busy.
I set the handset back down. For all I knew, she didn’t want to hear from me anyway. I stared at the wall as the voice on the TV droned on.
“Council members are expected to approve the agreement negotiated between the city and ACA, the Autopsy Corporation of America, at tomorrow night’s meeting. Dr. Frank Wilson, president of ACA, said yesterday afternoon that the company was ready to take over operations of the medical examiner’s office immediately.”
Yeah, I’ll bet he was. To pilfer one of their metaphors, the body won’t even be cold yet.
The world was being remade right in front of me. This, I realized, was a whole different reality.
I showered, shaved, made a pot of coffee and another bowl of low-fat, low-taste health cereal. I also tried Marsha’s number about ten more times, getting nothing but a series of busy signals.
Maybe she had the phone off the hook. Maybe she was on the line with her lawyer instructing him to sue the bloody hell out of those bastards.
I’d find her later. I’d do what I could to help; despite our differences, I cared deeply about her. Her welfare was important to me. Maybe in the end that’s all we can expect love to be, because it seems that to expect anything more was to ultimately face disappointment.
For now, I had the feeling I knew who’d killed R. J. Reed, and as the morning went on, I gradually figured out how to prove it.