looked like a comfortable position, and I considered trying it myself. Instead, I lit a cigarette. Without looking up, Donovan moved slightly away from me. Health nut to the end.
“The Mandate of ’53 became moot the day you turned our board meeting into a brawl.”
“Hardly a brawl. One punch. Well deserved.”
“I’d say misplaced,” said Donovan. “You should have saved it for your financial director. Far more deserving.”
“Ozzie Endicott? You asked me about him at your house. You wanted to know if I still talked to him.”
Donovan flicked errant bits of wind-borne tree fluff from his bright white pants.
“Back before you left the company, Marve Judson came to me with an interesting bit of information about Mr. Endicott. He’d been held by the Stamford police for questioning in regard to a drug transaction. Subsequently released, but Marve had an acquaintance on the police force who alerted him. At Marve’s suggestion, we mounted a discreet internal investigation.”
“Discreet for sure. I never heard a thing.”
“Endicott was, in fact, a rather committed drug user. Amphetamines, which are apparently highly addictive. And expensive, especially if your goal is to keep your habit under wraps.”
I finally had a firm picture of Ozzie in my mind. A little wild-eyed, a little frantic, but usually good humored. I’d known the type for years. Driven by the job to go way beyond the job’s requirements. That’s all I thought it was. I never made the effort to know any more than that about Ozzie, or any other employee.
“He embezzled money,” I said.
“Oh yes. Quite a bit. Very clever scheme. The man was remarkably capable. You can achieve a lot if you never go to sleep.”
“Like destroying your job. How come he didn’t?”
Donovan smiled something like a genuine smile.
“I always said you were the smartest guy in the company. Don’t disappoint me now.”
I stood up and shook out my joints, trying to get a little extra blood to flow up into my brain. I tried to picture Marve Judson talking to Donovan, then sitting down with Ozzie. Relishing the moment of omnipotence. Wielding the delicious power of dangerous information. Ozzie’s beloved career in the palm of his hand. What pleasure. What delightful leverage.
I snapped a look at Donovan, who was waiting calmly on the park bench for me to catch up.
“You had him by the balls. He’d do anything you wanted. What did you bastards do to him? Ah, Jesus,” I said, as the jolt of realization thrilled across my mind. “I know what you did. Holy crap.”
I sat down on the grass, unable to move any closer to Donovan at that moment. Afraid of what I might do.
“You had him cook the books so you could sell off my division without seeming to violate the Mandate of ’53,” I said. “All he had to do was hide enough revenue to keep TSS under a certain size. Fontaine got the bargain of the century. You and the other insiders got a tidy jump in stock value and the worst that happened was Mason Thigpen got a sock in the nose.”
Donovan looked a little like a proud parent.
“See? I knew you could do it,” he said. “Unfortunately, that wasn’t the worst that could happen.”
I lay back on the grass and looked at the sky. It had been blue, but was beginning to haze over. I could hear seagulls, but they weren’t in view. I pictured them circling above the north shore, plucking up bivalves to smash on the rocky beach below.
“Somebody found you out,” I said, propping back up on my elbows so I could see his reaction. “How did that happen? Iku?”
His face stayed in neutral.
“How no longer matters,” he said. “The fact is, there are people who know that the sale of your division was not only based on intentional fraud, but that it has exposed the entire company to hostile takeover. You can imagine how my wife and her family will take the news.”
I stood up and brushed off my blue jeans. Not as neatly pressed as Donovan’s white slacks, but more resistant to messy tree life or the salt mist coming in off the sound, which had begun to condense on the park bench. The sun was over my shoulder, so Donovan had to squint to look up at me.
“So what are you planning to do?” he asked.
“Find out who killed Iku Kinjo.”
“If you continue down that path it will cost you a tremendous amount of money. If you’re lucky, that’s all it will cost.”
He said that last part to my back, since I was already heading down that path, walking back under the greying sky and through the freshening breeze, with one eye on a nearby stand of trees and the other on Amanda’s pickup. My hope was to make it all the way back to Oak Point, home of the little bay and the dog, the fading light and a brighter life than I deserved.
The conversation had still left a lot of things unresolved, but at least one burden had been lifted from my already overburdened heart.
I was done with George Donovan. This time for good.
TWENTY
“BUT WHY, SAM?” said Jackie. “Why when I’m so overbooked and tired and in need of personal hygiene, starting with a soapy shower and dental floss?”
“It’s way too early to be in bed,” I said. “You still have that old computer at home, right?”
I was on the landline back at the cottage. Before she could fill the phone with complaint I caught her up on the past few days. It was enough to revive her attention, if not her spirits. I told her I really needed her to find some things on the Web. She asked me for the millionth time why I didn’t get a PC of my own and look it up myself. I told her I could do that, but then she’d miss out on all the fun.
“What a doll.”
I waited for her to go to the back porch and boot up the good old HP. Through her portable phone I could hear the sound of keys tapping, ice in a glass and a match being struck.
“No dope until you do the search,” I called into the phone.
“I’m not even going to dignify that,” she said, coming back on. “What am I looking for?”
“Not what. Who. Oswald Endicott. Located somewhere in Connecticut.”
“Westbrook, according to Tucker.”
“Okay, Westbrook,” I said.
I waited through another minute of key taps.
“Whoa,” said Jackie, in a barely audible voice.
“What?”
“We’re too late,” she said.
“We are?”
“He’s dead.”
“He is?”
“Give me a second to read.”
I gave her a few minutes, which I used to light the first of the next day’s Camel ration.
“This from the online edition of
She read the time and date.
“That’s tomorrow.”
Jackie was quiet on the other end of the line, but I could hear the keys rattling like machine-gun fire.
I took the phone with me out to the screened-in front porch and sat at the pine table so I could look at the
