be walking out of here in no time, so you don’t gotta worry about that. Understand?”
Angela nodded.
“But listen,” Bobby whispered, “the police are gonna want to talk to you and it’s very important what you say to them. You listening? They found Dillon in your bathtub, but you don’t have to worry about it. He came after you and you killed him in self-defense – it’s as simple as that. But here’s the important thing – when the police ask you about Fisher hiring Dillon to kill his wife you have to say you know nothing about that. Remember – you knew nothing about that. Whatever you do, don’t finger Max. I don’t wanna see you get in trouble and this is your only way out of this mess. So just tell the police you know nothing about Max – tell them the robbery was all Dillon’s idea. Max had nothing to do with it, got it?”
She managed to smile, then said weakly, “Oh, I understand, Bobby. It’s really sweet of you to try to protect me. But there’s one thing you’ve got to understand, too.” Her voice was fading and she had to pause to take a breath. Bobby had to lean close to hear her say, “I get half the money.”
That night Angela was the top story on all the newscasts. She claimed that her live-in boyfriend, Thomas Dillon, had killed Deirdre Fisher and Stacy Goldenberg and that Fisher’s husband Max had nothing to do with it. She also said that Dillon killed that cop, Kenneth something.
Bobby knew he could do it now. He could show up at Fisher’s office Monday morning and go for his full bank account, his stocks, his cars, get him to sell that fucking townhouse. It was all there for him to take. Even half the take would be a nice score. But, for some reason, he couldn’t get psyched up about it. Part of it was the idea that he’d have to split the money with that lying bitch, but that wasn’t all of it. He needed to do something, to show that he still had what it took to get the job done. The business in the park had really gotten to him, shaken his confidence. He had to prove to himself that he hadn’t lost the touch.
He called Victor. He got his voicemail, said, “I’m gonna leave an envelope at the desk for you. Don’t say I never gave you nothin’ you dumb fuck.” Then he hung up, feeling nice and pumped.
Yeah, he knew exactly what he had to do next.
Twenty-Six
I love storms.
Monday morning, Max wasn’t expecting a party in his office, but he thought there would at least be a few smiling faces. Instead, no one even said hello to him. Max didn’t understand it. Didn’t anyone read the papers or watch the news on TV? Didn’t they know that Angela had cleared his name? He’d fire all these bastards, see what they thought then. Christ, couldn’t an innocent guy get a break?
Max went to Diane Faustino’s desk and asked her to please come into his office. He had steel in his voice, thinking, You wanna play hardball, baby? All right, then come to Daddy, sweetie. Come to Daddy.
“What for?”
“I’m your boss – I don’t need a reason.” He let his eyes turn to stone. He’d seen Eastwood do that.
Diane breathed deeply, then followed Max.
In his office, Max asked her to shut the door then he said, “All right, now what the hell’s going on here?”
“Going on with what?” Diane said coldly. She was still standing near the door, looking like she was staring down a man who’d raped and killed her family.
“The silent treatment,” Max said. “You’d think I was Charles Manson or something.”
“The police came back here Friday afternoon, after they took you away.”
“So?” Max said.
“They were talking to everyone, asking a lot of questions.”
“That’s what police do,” Max said, trying to seem patient. “When somebody gets shot they go to their office and ask a lot of questions.”
“You don’t care, do you?”
The question confused Max. He wasn’t sure whether Diane was trying to change the subject or not. “Care about what?”
“You really don’t know, do you?” Diane said. “You’re pathetic.”
“That’s out of line,” Max said. “If you don’t-”
“Everybody thinks you did it.”
Max stared at Diane. He couldn’t believe she had the balls to talk to her boss this way. What the hell was happening to the world?
“Did what?” he said.
“Hired that guy to kill your wife,” Diane said, “hired somebody else to shoot Angela.”
“I didn’t hire anybody to shoot Angela.”
“But you hired somebody to kill your wife?”
“I didn’t hire anybody to do anything.”
“I don’t believe you. Nobody believes you. We knew you were an asshole, I just can’t believe I’ve been working all this time for a murderer. And no, don’t bother firing me – I quit.”
“Will you just calm down?” Max said. “Jesus, I hate it when you get hysterical.” He wondered if she had any valium. Women always had that stuff and God knew he could use some too. He’d been having chest pains again lately and needed something to ward off a heart attack. How much could one decent man take?
Diane stormed out of the office, letting the door slam behind her. To hell with her, Max thought. If an employee wasn’t loyal to her boss, what use was she? Besides, accounting people were a dime a dozen and it was a known fact that the Chinese were better than Italians anyway. He’d make a call to a headhunter and tomorrow morning there’d be ten Chinese guys lined up for Diane’s job. His heart pounding, he looked at his Rolex, went to the drawer, poured a large glass of vodka, and gulped it down, spilling some on his tie, thinking, Aw, c’mon, gimme a break.
There was a knock on Max’s door. Diane begging for her job back? That was fast. But instead it was Thomas Henderson, NetWorld’s CFO. He told Max that he was resigning, that he just couldn’t work here anymore. Max said this was fine with him. A CFO would be harder to replace than an ordinary accountant, but fuck it, Max didn’t want anyone working for him who didn’t have loyalty to the company.
Eleven more people resigned during the next half hour, including four of his Senior Network Technicians, a few cable installers, and two of his best PC technicians. Goddamn it, his whole company was hemorrhaging. Now Max was starting to get frightened and more than a little drunk. As they filed in and out of his office, he said to one guy, “When the going gets tough, the tough get fucked.” He knew that wasn’t right, was it? What-the-fuck ever. He said to some woman, “Easy go, easy come for me, baby.” Like he didn’t give a goddamn, but he did, oh yeah. After another glass of Stoli he screamed at another woman, “Get out of my fucking face!” Max realized he was losing it. It was one thing to lose a couple of people, but all of a sudden his entire company was falling apart in front of him.
Max ordered the temp who was answering phones today to call all the headhunters NetWorld dealt with and to transfer them to his line as soon as she got through. Later, when the headhunters returned his calls, Max told them to set up appointments to interview people for the vacant positions. This made Max feel a little more at ease, until clients started calling. He realized he was slurring and the damn vodka was empty, How the hell’d that happen?
At first, there were just a few smaller clients, calling to cancel their service and consulting agreements. They were five- to ten-thousand-dollar-a-year clients that Max wouldn’t miss, but then a few bigger clients, where Max had placed full-time consultants and did steady business, called to say they were planning to look for a new company for network support. All of the clients had the same story – they didn’t like the bad publicity that Max and NetWorld were getting so they had decided it was best to take their business elsewhere. Max tried desperately to save the clients, but nothing he could say worked. It was like he was shouting and the world was, what, deaf? He
