stuck in my mouth and one half-nailed through the molding, which I was about to pull out, unhappy with the coping job I’d done at the corner joint. I had to keep the twelve-foot-long piece of trim jammed in place with my left hand while I slipped the hammer in its holster and fished the cell phone out with my right. The phone’s persistent ring tone lent a lunatic accompaniment to the maneuver. I flipped it open and pushed the talk button.
“Wha’,” I said into the phone, or something like it as I spat out the nails.
“Drinking on the job?”
“Hey, Jackie. Can I call you back in a minute?”
“What’s the matter? You sound strained.”
“That’s why I need to call you back,” I said through my teeth.
As she started to ask another question I flipped the phone shut and stuffed it back in my pocket. My next trick was to dig a small block of soft pine out of my shirt pocket to stick between the hammer head and the expensive molding so I wouldn’t ding it when I pulled out the nail. All with one hand. Another lesson on the advisability of coping miter joints properly the first time.
The phone started ringing again.
I pulled the nail and lowered the molding safely to the scaffold a few seconds before my left shoulder and challenged temperament both gave up the fight.
Throwing the phone at the masonry fireplace on the other side of the room would have been the easy thing to do. Instead I answered it.
“Jesus Christ I said I’d call you back.”
“Are you alright?” asked Jackie. “You sound terrible.”
“From now on I’m leaving this thing in the car.”
“You’re supposed to have it with you at all times. That’s the point. And you can’t get mad at me when I’m doing you a favor.”
I shook out my shoulders, dropped my jaw and took a deep breath. “I’m not mad. I’m always glad to hear from you, no matter what the circumstances,” I said softly.
“Especially when I’m calling with interesting information.”
“Especially. What is it?”
“George Donovan is getting ready to do what he said he would do. Maybe. The original severance documents were prepared by the general counsel, a guy named Mason Thigpen. What did you do to him?”
“I’m not sure. I vaguely remember a lot of blood and really big security guards.”
“Donovan has yanked your agreement out of Thigpen’s office and given it to an outside lawyer, on the basis that the general counsel’s interest in this is adverse to the corporation’s.”
“You lost me at ‘yanked.’”
“Outside counsel has been retained to examine your agreement and make the necessary modifications, if corporate management deems it appropriate, to allow you to participate in the ongoing settlement of the intellectual property suit brought by a group of plaintiffs. Most of whom worked for you, by the way, a fact Donovan is telling the board warrants some careful consideration.”
“How the hell did you get all this?”
“What the hell do they pay administrative assistants and what the hell gender are they, usually?”
“Can you get a copy of my agreement?” I asked.
“I thought you had a copy. Silly me.”
“I did at one point. But it was probably in that car I lost in downtown Bridgeport. Long story.”
“I don’t want to hear it. My guess is there’s a clause that says for consideration you waive all employment claims, including any compensation beyond the amount of the severance, which includes royalties or the proceeds from civil litigation, which would likely include the intellectual property action. All they have to do is rewrite that clause to specify your agreement doesn’t include settlement money, and because they went to the trouble to be so specific about every other form of payment, you’re in. Of course, somebody could still contest that exclusion, but as you know, everything is contestable by everybody all the time, which is how we in the legal profession like it, thank you very much.”
“I can think of people who might want to do that.”
“Contest it?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Not the nice lady who heads up Human Resources. She’s all for it.”
“You talked to her? Jesus.”
“I’m your attorney. I’m allowed. They’ve been fielding these inquiries full tilt since the settlement got under way. I made it all sound very routine. I didn’t push anything, just asked simple questions. Nobody got wiggy. Not to worry.”
“I’m worried about this coming unglued.”
“I know,” she said. “But I couldn’t do what you wanted me to do without talking to the people who have the information. Next I’m talking to Tucker, Blenheim, the outside counsel, to see what they have to say.”
I’d seen Jackie in action. If she said it was low key, it was low key. And I knew how isolated and overlooked they were in HR. George Donovan probably couldn’t find their offices without a map of the building. But Marve Judson was another story. A legitimate threat.
I told Jackie about Ackerman’s visit.
“Judson can do that?” she asked. “Hire somebody who’s been fired by the big boss?”
“Not exactly. Which is why he’s working the fiddle with his buddy’s PI firm. But he’s making the right calculation. If Donovan found out he’d have to weigh the risk of canning a senior guy like Judson—who wouldn’t go quietly—against whatever damage Ackerman might cause by staying in the picture. I’d say pretty minimal as long as I keep my mouth shut, which Donovan trusts me to do, given my vested interest.”
“Holy crap that’s Byzantine.”
I unsnapped my tool belt and lowered it slowly to the floor. Then backed against the wall and slid down until I was sitting on my butt. All around me was the clatter of construction—the snap-pop of pneumatic nailers, the high-pitched whir of circular saws, thumping hammers and the brainless blather of talk radio.
But I wasn’t listening, as recollection dislodged my mind and sent it off to some other place. A place of cowed silence, acreages of office space enclosing a vast checkerboard of work stations and cubicles, where the only mechanical sound was the low hum of copiers and fluorescent lights and desk phones trilling like captive birds.
Glass-walled individual offices lined the periphery of the building where I’d worked. Aquariums with the aerators turned off. That’s why I lived in a lab office on the ground floor that for some reason had a huge corner window looking out on a broad, green lawn that appeared to extend out to the horizon, though in fact stopped at a band of trees planted to dampen the noise blowing up from Interstate 287.
My official office was eight stories above my head. Same corner location, more toxic atmosphere. In the basement I could stay close to the design engineers and research scientists who produced the intellectual foundation for the products and services applied by the people sitting above. Applications in the service of rapacious machinations that reached full flower on even loftier floors at company headquarters in Manhattan.
“I’ve got a little more on Iku Kinjo,” said Jackie, regaining my attention. “Not a ton.”
“What?”
“She was adopted by a pair of academics. An historian and a sociologist. Lived in Brooklyn, taught at Manhattan College. Lifetime political activists. Both busted in the Chicago riots of ’68. Did the pacifist lecture circuit, started a soup kitchen near campus, gave heavily to worthy social ventures. I’d want to meet them if they were still around.”
“Dead?”
“Fifteen years ago. Car accident.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Also Jewish.”
“The parents?”
“Hyman and Naomi Rothstein?”
“Probably.”
“Pretty secular household, though, is my guess. Kept Iku’s birth name. No bat mitzvah I can dig up. No connection to any synagogues within forty miles of their apartment. In fact, I don’t think they were part of a
