Warren was my second interview of the day. Alice Hoyt had been my first, and she too had been sober and confident and eminently presentable, though that’s where the similarities ended. Alice was medium height and broad-shouldered, and there were a lot of laugh lines around her full mouth and dark eyes and a lot of gray in her short Afro. She had graduated public high school in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, and although she had served in the military too, it had been in the army as a lance corporal. From there she’d joined the NYPD and attended Queens College at night for a BS and, later, an MS in criminal justice. She’d spent over twenty years on the job, fifteen as a detective and five as the boss of a detective squad in Midtown North. From there she’d gone private, to a DC firm that did a lot of corporate consulting and, as Alice told it, employed at least as many publicists as it did operatives. After five years, she was tired of the travel and of the time away from her husband and three kids.
“I’ve been away from Brooklyn too long,” she’d said, with a wry smile.
Warren’s deep voice wound down. It was my turn to talk again.
I went back and forth with him for another twenty minutes, and I mostly paid attention. We exchanged firm handshakes and Mrs. K showed him out, swooning only slightly as she did. I went into Ned’s office.
Ned wasn’t there, but my sister Liz was. She was sitting on Ned’s sofa, her shoes off and her long legs propped on the teak coffee table. She looked up from a sheaf of papers and pushed narrow reading glasses onto her forehead.
“Where’s your boss?” I said.
“Lunch meeting. You do more interviews?” I nodded, and Liz grinned. “Any bodily fluids spilled in there?”
“Not today.”
“Off your game, huh?” Liz dropped her glasses back on her nose and returned to her papers. I took off my suit jacket, loosened my tie, and sat. I put back my head and closed my eyes. I heard Liz turn some pages, and after a while she spoke.
“What’s wrong with you?”
I answered without moving. “I didn’t sleep much last night.”
“I take it there was no upside to that.”
“Not that I could tell.”
“What was the problem?”
I opened an eye. She was still scanning her papers. “I got fired yesterday.”
She looked up. “Surely not for the first time.”
“It doesn’t happen so often that I’m used to it,” I said. “And this time I’m not even sure of the reason.”
Liz stared at me for several moments without expression. “Well… you can always reconsider Ned’s offer. We’ll find you a nice little office down the hall, maybe a cute assistant…” I flipped her the bird and she went back to her papers. I closed my eyes, and thoughts of Nina Sachs and her case spun in my head.
An hour of sitting at the ferry landing and another few spent turning in my bed hadn’t improved my understanding of why Nina had given me my walking papers, or brought me any closer to figuring out where Danes had gone to or why he hadn’t come back. I’d gone over and over what I knew about him and what I could only guess at, and no matter how many times I did, it never amounted to much.
I had come to know that Danes was an unpleasant and difficult man, with a knack for putting people between a rock and a hard place. I knew also that his basic orneriness had been salted in recent years with anger and resentment over his damaged career and his thwarted attempts at salvage. I knew that on his last day at Pace- Loyette, that anger had been on the boil. He’d argued with Linda Sovitch at lunch and argued some more with Dennis Turpin, and then he’d stormed out. And gone home. And packed a bag. And stopped his mail and maid service. And the next morning he’d gotten in his car and driven away.
After that it was all question marks and conjecture. Where had he gone? Why had he stopped calling for his messages? Why hadn’t he returned? Who else was looking for him, and why? The big questions swirled with a host of smaller ones. I was fairly certain that Danes had had an affair with Linda Sovitch, but I didn’t know for how long or how it had ended, if indeed it had. The only version I had of their lunchtime argument was the story Sovitch had told me- and it was not one I had a lot of faith in, any more than I had in the little show that her husband had staged for me.
The door opened and Ned came in, my brother David trailing behind.
“They want twenty percent,” David said, “but I think they’ll go for-”
Ned cut him off. “We’re overpaying as it is. If they’re trying to hold us up, then I say wish them luck and show them the door.” Ned’s voice was tired and impatient. He went behind his desk and scrolled through his e-mail. David stopped in the center of the room and looked irritable. Then he saw me, and his irritability became scorn.
“Sorry I’m late, Johnny,” Ned said. He looked over Liz. “Am I late for you too?”
“I’m early,” she said.
He nodded and went to his wall of shelves and produced a glass of ice water from somewhere. “Want some?” he asked us. I raised my hand and Ned brought me a glass. Then he sat next to Liz and looked at me. “How did it go?”
“Yes, do tell,” David said, perching on the edge of Ned’s desk. “I hear such interesting things about your interviews.” His eyes sparkled meanly. Ned frowned.
I drank some water. “Bradley looks better on paper, and you’d probably feel more comfortable with him at first, but Hoyt will do a better job for you.” Ned’s brow was creased and he pursed his lips. I reached over and handed him the two rA©sumA©s, and we were quiet while he scanned them. David interrupted.
“How can that be?” he said. “I looked at those CVs. Bradley has just the kind of experience we want.”
“Bradley’s an empty suit,” I said, too quickly.
Ned looked up, his face blank. “Is that why you assume I’d be more comfortable with him?” he said. David grinned nastily. Shit.
I shook my head. “No, that’s why I think he appeals to David. But the reality is that Bradley’s cut from more or less the same cloth as a lot of the people around here.”
“And that’s a bad thing?” David said.
“I’m not going to debate that with you. But one thing it doesn’t mean is that he’s the best person for this job.”
Ned looked at the rA©sumA©s some more. “And you don’t think he is?”
“In my view, he’s strictly a hands-off guy. Most of his Wall Street experience seems to be in self-promotion and empire building; it sounded to me like he delegated everything else. I didn’t think that’s what you were after.” I looked at David. “Of course, I could be wrong.”
“And Hoyt?”
“She’s less buttoned down- a little rougher around the edges- but she’s a whole lot more hands-on. She’s run a detective squad, she’s run high-profile cases, and she’s run task forces too. And after twenty-plus years in the NYPD, I think you’ll find her political skills are up to snuff.”
“But she’s never done this kind of job before,” David said.
“Neither have I, but you were ready to give me a shot.” Liz snorted behind her papers, and I thought I saw Ned smile.
David colored and looked at me. “He was ready; I didn’t get a vote.”
My eyes were hot and I was suddenly very tired. I got up and pulled on my jacket and headed for the door. “You have my opinion,” I said to the room. “Do what you want with it. Hire Bradley; I’m sure he’ll work out fine. Better yet, hire that Tyne guy. With him you get a floor show.”
“Johnny…,” Ned said, but I didn’t stop. I closed the door behind me and didn’t glance at Mrs. K on my way out.
“It sounds to me like she gave you her reasons for calling it off,” Jane Lu said. “You just didn’t like them.” She walked across my bed and sat cross-legged next to me and didn’t spill a drop of what she carried on the tray. There were two mugs of coffee, a bowl of quartered oranges, croissants, and a crock of jam. Jane was wearing one of my sweatshirts and nothing else. It was Saturday morning and it was pouring rain outside. I rolled over and rested my cheek against her thigh. It was warm and smooth and I would’ve been happy to spend the day there, but it was not to be. Jane was going into the office.
“It’s not a question of like,” I said to her thigh, “it’s that her reasons don’t make sense.”
“Not wanting to spend more money isn’t an unreasonable thing,” Jane said, biting into an orange slice.
