Foursome (19 page)

I said to Antonelli, “How come my badge doesn’t have ‘John Cuddy’ on it?”

She twisted her neck to speak over her shoulder. “If nobody’s expecting you, you’d be seen in one of those unsecure conference rooms in the lobby. If you are expected, that person already knows who you are.”

We reached the end of the large room, where a bank of three elevators waited for us. Antonelli hit the button for the middle one, causing it to light up and the doors to open. The buttons on the others didn’t follow suit.

As we stepped into the mirrored box, I said, “Private elevator?”

“Yes. To Mr. Davison’s office suite.”

“The president?”

“Yes.”

As the doors closed, I looked back toward where we’d come from. “Kind of a hike for him to save a couple of flights.”

Antonelli gave me the smile again, one that could grow on you. “Mr. Davison believes he should see the staff every day and they should see him. From his military service, I think. So he walks—”

“The parade ground while the troops are doing calisthenics.”

Antonelli didn’t quite turn off the smile. “Something like that, I suppose.”

The doors opened, a secretarial cluster in front of us, two women, one older, one quite young, bustling around desks for three. Indirect lighting shone on slate-colored carpeting that mimicked the outer walls. Large green plants, their pots on casters, reached skyward.

Antonelli said, “This way, please.”

We turned right and entered a conference room with no interior windows and a view of the parking lot through the exterior ones. There were three men seated in admiral’s chairs around an elliptical Plexiglas table on steel trestles. Two rose as we walked in.

One of the risers was a white male in his mid-forties wearing an olive drab poplin suit, white shirt, and rep tie. He had sandy hair cut short and brushed across, even features, and a raccoon look around his eyes and cheekbones, as though he wore aviator sunglasses outdoors and needed no corrective lenses indoors. His jaw seemed to be having spasms back near his ears, and I sensed that he resented me at first sight.

The second riser was a black male in his early thirties wearing a navy blue blazer, gray slacks, a collar-stayed shirt and twill stripe tie. His cropped black hair was thinning, giving his crown a slightly satanic widow’s peak. The nose was broad, as were the lips as he smiled and buttoned his blazer, showing what appeared to be a Rolex Oyster beneath the cuff on the left wrist.

The man who stayed seated could have doubled for the actor Glenn Ford in his late fifties. The salt-and-pepper hair was combed forward to a point just onto his forehead. Floppy ears, a jutting chin, and half-moon glasses under hawking eyes. He wore a flannel shirt, tatty blue jeans, white socks, and some kind of moccasins crossed behind one of the trestles supporting the conference table. I saw him nod almost imperceptibly toward Antonelli, acknowledging some silent signal she’d sent him while I was watching the other two men.

Antonelli introduced them in the order I’d thought of them. “John Cuddy, this is Dwight Schoonmaker, our head of security.”

Olive drab just lowered his eyelids to me.

“And this is Tyrone Xavier, who’s been subbing for Steven.”

The blazer leaned forward with a continuing smile and shook my hand.

“And this is Keck Davison, our president.”

Davison said, “Cuddy.”

I thought, What, the janitor have another commitment? “Good of you all to see me on such short notice.”

Schoonmaker and Xavier sat back down as Antonelli touched a seat for me and herself took an empty chair with a legal pad and two sharpened pencils in front of it. Nobody else had anything in front of them except their attitudes.

I moved to the chair she’d designated, which put me in the center of the long axis of the elliptical table, Davison at the head. The effect was I could look at just one person at a time. I decided to pick Keck Davison.

Antonelli said, “We thought that it would be more efficient for you to be able to interview all of us together.”

Still watching Davison, I said, “And why is that?”

Antonelli paused for a moment, as though not sure she should stick to the script of her running the meeting. Then she said, “Why, in case one of us doesn’t know the answer to a question, perhaps one of the others will.”

“That’s not the impression I get.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I get the impression somebody’s seen Apaches, and you’re busy closing the gates.”

One corner of Davison’s mouth went up.

Antonelli said, “Mr. Cuddy, we really are doing our best to cooperate—”

An aggressive voice from Schoonmaker’s direction rode over her. “Cuddy here isn’t interested in cooperation. He’s interested in firebombs.”

The corner of Davison’s mouth went down.

Antonelli said, “Dwight, perhaps if we—”

Schoonmaker said, “Cuddy thinks—”

Keck Davison didn’t have to ride over him. The president’s hand went up in a stop sign, and Schoonmaker’s voice quit as though he’d been vaporized.

“Anna-Pia, I wonder if you and the boys could excuse us while Mr. Cuddy and I have a little talk, see how he can help us with our business?”

Davison’s accent came out more hillbilly than southern, with “Anna-Pia” sounding like “Aunt Pee-yah,” “help” like “hep,” and “business” like “bid-ness.”

If it weren’t for the deadening effect of the carpet, I think all three chairs would have scraped back in unison. They filed out, Antonelli first, Xavier second, Schoonmaker hovering for a stutter step behind me as he joined them and somebody closed the door gently.

K
ECK
D
AVISON TUGGED ON
one of his earlobes. “Now just
what
am I supposed to make of you, son?”

I didn’t say anything.

“You see that brain trust we just shooed out of here? They spent yesterday afternoon and all this morning preparing themselves for this ‘joint interview,’ as Anna-Pia called it, and you go and shoot it all to shit in about a minute-five.”

I still sat quiet.

Davison grunted what might have been a laugh. “Kind of tough to get a rise out of you, is that it?”

“Mister Dav—”

“Keck, long’s we’re one-on-one here.”

“That short for something?”

“No. I had me a momma, she was long on the letter ‘K.’ Her daddy had been Klan down in Alabama before she come up to West Virginny, so she figured she’d name each of her boys with a K, get her ‘KKK’ after a while? So my oldest brother was Kevin, and the next one Kyle, and the third one Kurt; but then my daddy and her didn’t stop having fun, but she did run out of names she knew, and so I got ‘Keck,’ and my littlest brother, he got ‘Kemp.’ ”

“Sorry I asked.”

A real laugh this time, a little braying in it. “You never served in the diplomatic corps, am I right?”

“And you never pronounce it ‘West Vir-
ginny
’ in your head, do you?”

Davison tugged on the other earlobe. “You’re seeing through all my defense mechanisms, son.”

“Not in this lifetime.”

He let go of the ear and squared his shoulders. “All right, Cuddy. In the clear, or at least what I remember about how to talk that way. What do you need?”

Very little of the hills in that last. I said, “Somebody cut down three people very methodically, very cleanly, but with just enough muff around the edges to put Steven Shea in the middle of what looks like a bungled multiple murder. If he is being set up, then somebody with resources probably did the killing.”

Davison’s eyes got bright. “Go on.”

“Now, it’s possible that the target was one or more of the people actually killed, the others included to blur things and implicate Shea as a convenient husband-gone-berserk.”

“Granted.”

“It’s also possible that Shea was the real target.”

“They’re so good at everything else on this, be awful sloppy not to notice he wasn’t there when the arrows started flying.”

“No, I mean Shea as the one they wanted to get out of the way without it seeming that getting rid of him was the reason for the killings.”

One nod. “Which brings you to DRM.”

“Right.”

Davison blew out a breath. “I just don’t see it, but that don’t make it so. I take it you’re going to be wanting to see everybody separately, poke and prod some.”

“Yes.”

“Who do you want to start with, son?”

“You.”

Davison never faltered. “Go ahead.”

“How did Shea come to be here?”

“You want it short or long?”

“Long would be nice.”

The man settled in the chair, his legs straight out under the table, his arms crossed on his chest. “I started this outfit fifteen years ago. Before that I was a project engineer for another company when the father of my roommate from VMI got himself appointed to the right congressional committee. He wanted the opinion of somebody who’d flown in combat on how things the taxpayers bought really worked. One thing led to another, and thanks to me, my old company had the inside track on a prototype the Navy needed built for a missile guidance system. That project got me exposure in the right places, and pretty soon some venture-capital vultures gave me seed money for a project of my own. That played out right handsome at about twenty bucks to the dollar, and ten years ago we moved from an old airplane hangar to here. Early eighties, son, it was like we were printing money instead of diagrams. But I could see the handwriting on the wall, and it was saying somebody was about to shut off the faucet that fed the trough.”

“Which meant?”

“Which meant that I had to find a way to open a new market for what we did. Oh, I could have folded the tent completely, those venture fellas got paid back so handsome, they would have kept me on as kind of a poster-boy, but I didn’t want that. So it just happened that Steven Shea was trying to sell us one of the computers his company was pushing a few years back, and damn if he didn’t impress me as a man could sell a widow a funeral suit for her husband with two pair of pants. So I hired him away and sent him off around the world with some impressive graphics and videos. After banging on doors across three continents, Steve brought one almost home.”

“Almost?”

“This country—we don’t need to use names, I hope—this country three generations ago was using blunt spears to herd mangy cattle. Now the honchos in its current government decide they would just love to have what we can provide.”

“Which is?”

“Let’s just say it’s classified.”

I leaned back in my chair. “Doesn’t wash, Keck. You a design firm or an arms dealer?”

Davison took off the granny glasses and gestured with them. “Ordinarily, I wouldn’t go any further without Anna-Pia getting you to sign a nondisclosure agreement. But I’ll tell you what, son. Let’s just talk hypothetically. Say I’ve got this engineer, he comes up with something. … You watched the Desert Storm coverage?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Our boys got these tanks can see on a viewer the heat images of the Iraqi vehicles.”

“With you so far.”

“Well, let’s say my engineer comes up with something better than what our tanks use. Only it’s simpler and pretty easy to fabricate and then assemble if you add some components available on the open market.”

I said, “And it’s for planes.”

Davison used the glasses to nod for him. “It is. The pilot in our hypothetical case might use our product to track the thermal trail of a vehicle right back to its source.”

“The vehicle itself.”

“Right.”

“So, the country could buy your gadget, attach it to some other gadgets, and then put the finished product in their existing planes.”

“Basically.”

“Which would give them a pretty nice advantage without replacing their whole air force.”

“An advantage which, given their neighbors, they could dearly use. As a defensive weapon that would discourage incursion.”

“And Shea brought all this together. …”

“Right man, right product, right customer.”

“Almost.”

Davison blew out another breath. “Almost. This thing from Maine hitting the news, it’s made his contact over there very nervous about us. We have competitors who would love to swoop down on this one, persuade our customer that their product is nearly as good as what we could deliver.”

“Care to name them?”

“What, the competitors?”

“Yes.”

“You’re thinking one of them did this?”

“Shea thinks so.”

“Well, like I said, others do. And it’s not impossible. It’s just that … , well, our competitors might try to hire away that engineer. Or maybe compromise him. Or plant some drugs or whatever on Steve while he’s traveling, get him clapped into some jail out of
Midnight Express
. But killing his wife and the other two? I just don’t see another American company thinking this deal of ours could be worth that to them.”

“And even if it were, the killings haven’t scotched your deal completely.”

“No.”

“Thanks to Tyrone Xavier?”

“Yes. Tyrone, he’s been amazing, I have to tell you. Picking up the pieces, holding everything together.”

“How is the sales guy compensated in a deal like this?”

Davison lifted the corner of his mouth again. “That kind of gets negotiated.”

“What was negotiated with Shea?”

“Well, it’s pretty complicated.”

“I’ll bet it’s pretty simple, Keck, we’re just talking magnitude of the dollars.”

Davison looked off, out the window toward his under-maximized parking lot. “Steve would have made between half a million and one-point-two, depending.”

“Quite a magnitude.”

Davison’s voice got quiet. “Last few years, I’ve put back some of what I took out, keep the doors open. Oh, I had to lay off some good folks, but I couldn’t stand treat for everybody I’d like to have. This project comes in, son, and I can swing the doors wide again, welcome back some good souls and pull my money back to my own accounts.”

“Which is really why we ‘shooed out’ the brain trust a while ago.”

Davison raised his voice to the lecturing level. “You go stomping around like a horny bull, our customer could get wind of it, think there’s something major wrong not just with Steve but with the way we do business. I cooperate with you, I expect gentler treatment.”