house.
'I didn't see anything about her in the file,' I tell him. 'Do you remember her?'
'We talked to a lot of people. I don't recall anyone like that.'
'Well, it's occurred to me – if she had such a big crush on Tom, maybe she stalked him, found out he wasn't gay. Then she snapped when she discovered he was seeing Barbara.
'Sounds like a long shot, but I'll look into it.' A pause. 'Listen, David, if you think you know who jumped you, you should tell me. There're laws against that. With you being in law enforcement, it could even be felonious assault.'
'Hey, I'm just a freelancer,' I remind him. 'But thanks for your concern.'
After breakfast. I head over to where I probably should have gone my first week in town: the austere ten- story triangular steel and terrazzo fortress at the corner of Toland and LaButte, which the discreet letters, FSI, incised in steel beside the main door identify as the headquarters of Fulraine Steel Industries.
Why, I ask myself, did it take an ambush on the street to finally bring me here? The easy answer is my residual bitterness toward Mark and Robin Fulraine. But I know there's more to it – my old guilt over not having immediately reported what I heard between the au pair and Belle Fulraine the day of Mark's seventh birthday. Even though I know better, I'm still burdened with the belief that if I'd told someone, Belle might still be alive.
Sitting in the waiting room on the executive floor, I study the corporation's annual report. There's a glossy picture of CEO Mark Fulraine, looking as handsome as I remember him at Hayes. The golden locks are gone now. His hair appears darker, thinner, and is combed back, giving him a sleek, well-tended look. But the smile's the same, the charming grin of the star athlete, lower school student council president, scion of one of Hayes's four founding families. The face of a man born to rule.
I read an optimistic summary of the company's prospects. A pie graph shows that only seven percent of FSI's revenues now derive from steel. These days the company's into all kinds of other things from manufacturing high- end stereo equipment, operating a chain of retail sporting goods stores, making high-capacity disk drives and assorted Internet ventures. In my admittedly naive view, FSI looks like an incoherent grab bag. I think back to my days at Hayes, trying to recall whether Mark was bright. Jerry Glickman and I were tops in our class in academics. Mark, I remember, fell somewhere in the middle.
I'm scanning the list of his Board of Directors, when an attractive young woman with a shag cut approaches with a smile.
'I'm Jane Bailey, Mr. Fulraine's assistant. He's free to see you now.'
As she leads me through the door to the executive suite, she chatters on about how excited Mark was when told I'd stopped by.
'Soon as he heard, he cut short his meeting and had me clear his calendar for lunch. You'll be eating in our executive dining room. Chef wants to know what you'd like. Lobster, steak, or chicken?'
I tell her chicken will be fine.
The floors are plushly carpeted, the furnishings all made of steel, there are abstract designs engraved on steel plates encased in steel frames and abstract steel sculptures scattered about exhibited on steel pedestals.
Mark greets me from behind an oval, matte-finished steel desk.
'Dave Rubin!' He grasps hold on both my hands. 'Hey, you're looking great, pal!'
Before I can answer, he's off on a riff about our classmates, some of whom I only vaguely remember.
'Jock Sturgis is FSI general counsel. He and I roomed together at Yale. Norm Carter's doing great. He's exec v.p. over at Hallowell Paints. Whatever happened to your old buddy – Glickstein?'
'Jerry Glickman.'
'Yeah, what's Jerry doing these days?'
'He's professor of orthopedic surgery at Harvard Medical School.'
'I'll be damned! Hope he holds his scalpel steadier than he held the old basketball!'
He claps my shoulder. 'Real glad you stopped by, David. You left so suddenly in the middle of seventh grade. Then your dad…' He shakes his head. 'Things work out all right for you in California?'
'I still live out there. San Francisco now.'
'You went to Stanford, right?'
'Pratt. That's an art school in New York.'
'Sure, great place! One of our design guys went there. Got kids?'
I shake my head.
'I'm sending mine to Hayes, but they'll finish up at boarding schools in the East. My older boy's headed off to Groton in the fall. Get him some of that, you know, Eastern polish.'
All this hail-fellow-well-met stuff makes me want to puke. Also I'm angry with myself for allowing him to lay down the field of play. I decide to cut the bullshit short.
'I gave my name at the desk as David Rubin,' I tell him, 'but now I'm David Weiss. When my mother remarried, I took my stepfather's name.'
He stares at me. 'I think I heard about that. Can't remember who told me… anyway…'
Silence. It's brief, last just a couple seconds, but it's deep enough to express the gulf between us, the gulf we could never bridge even when we were kids.
On the way to the FSI executive dining room, I tell him how I happen to be in town.
'Courtroom sketch artist, huh? I remember at school you were always drawing up a storm.'
'As I recall you didn't like one of my drawings very much.'
He laughs. 'Hell of a fight we had. Do any boxing these days?'
It's an absurd question, but I politely shake my head.
'We got a gym downstairs. Occasionally I work out on the light bag. No sparring. Haven't done that since Hayes. Just as soon not get my face messed up. Wife wouldn't like it.' He beams.
We study each other over lunch.
'We never liked each other much, did we, Mark?'
He smiles. 'I wouldn't put it like that. But, yeah, I know what you mean.'
'Why do you suppose?'
'Just one of those things, I guess.'
'Still there's a connection, and not just our years at Hayes. We each lost a parent when we were young. You know about the connection between your mother and my dad?'
He looks uneasy.
'Dad was a caregiver. 'Your mom needed help and my dad tried to give it to her. Later I learned she approached him the same day she met Mr. Jessup.'
He shakes his head. 'I don't really want to talk about this, Dave.'
'David,' I correct him. 'Okay, I understand. But thing is, Mark, since I got here I've been looking into the Flaming killings in my spare time. People seem to know about that. Someone's been around the motel asking about me, and last night on Riverwalk I was attacked by three thugs. It was a warning to lay off.'
He raises his eyebrows. 'Really?'
Studying him, I can't tell a thing. Either he had nothing to do with it, or he's one very cool CEO.
I describe the attack. 'Sounds familiar, doesn't it?'
He shrugs, but of course he knows exactly what I'm talking about: the very rough Hayes School version of 'Capture the Flag.' There was a twenty-acre wood on school property where we played. In the Hayes version, when prisoners were taken they could be worked over for information in accordance with certain highly prescribed school rules. You couldn't beat a prisoner to make him talk, but you could haze him in various ways. One way was to blindfold him, then tie him to a tree, then touch hi with something scary like a garden snake. Often just the threat was enough to make a younger boy spill his guts. Another specialty from the list of school-sanctioned tortures was bagging – tying a bag around a prisoner's head, then pushing him around and twirling him till he fell down dizzy and confused. The object was to break your victim, make him cry, then divulge the whereabouts of his team's secreted flag. You couldn't inflict physical injury, but terrorization and humiliation were considered fair.
