Graveland: A Novel (7 page)

What did he do yesterday? Nothing. It was a Sunday. He slept half the day and flicked through the pages of the
New York Times
and watched TV.

Oh … that was it. He remembers now.

He watched part of a documentary on some cable channel about the architect Frank Gehry, and it reminded him of how his own career as an architect has turned to dust. What bothers him is not the alternative life he has ended up leading, here in Mahopac, and at Winterbrook Mall, so much as the stuff he never got around to doing in his original life, professionally speaking, at any rate—the civic buildings, the bank offices, the bridges … the grand unrealized projects.
That’s
what bugs the crap out of him whenever he thinks about it. Which, to be fair, isn’t that often. But when he
does,
like last night, and now this morning, the feeling tends to linger, and thicken.

He waits until Lance has arrived before calling the regional manager. The place is quiet, and they’ll be lucky if three or four people wander in all morning. Though given the state he’s in today, Frank doesn’t want to take any chances. He talks to this guy at the same time every Monday, to go over numbers and staffing issues, and while it’s a perfectly routine call, it’s never that easy. Only in his late twenties, the regional manager is a bit of a jerk and clearly perceives himself to be on some “upward trajectory” within the Paloma management constellation. Frank gets all of this and plays along. He’s not an idiot. It’s part of what he has to do if he wants to keep getting a paycheck every month. But he doesn’t have to like it.

“Frank, my man,” the regional manager says when the call is put through, “talk to me.”

“Saturday,” Frank says at once, emphatically, and as if that’s all that needs to be said—one word, nothing else, not even the guy’s name.

Which is Mike.

“Saturday? What do you mean, Saturday? I don’t understand, Frank.”

“I mean, Saturday,
Mike
. Fifty units of the LudeX.” Then, instead of a judicious edit, he lets the tape roll. “Jesus, what was that meant to be, some kind of a fucking joke?”

“I
beg
your pardon?”

Hesitating, Frank looks out over the stockroom from his little office in the corner. No contingency plan here, it would seem. Though whatever this is, it didn’t just happen.
Something
is spurring him on. It feels like anger, but if so, what’s he angry about? Not the LudeX situation, that’s for sure. He couldn’t give a shit about the LudeX situation. Is it his increasing dread, then, his anxiety, but redirected somehow, transmuted into this belligerent little snit he seems to be having? Maybe, but he’s confused and doesn’t feel entirely in control.

“It was insane,” he says. “We were turning customers away all day.”

“We allocated—”

“Oh come on, allocated. That’s ridiculous.” He leans back in his chair. “I don’t know, do you people sit around all day thinking this shit up?
Allocated
.”

There is a short silence. Then, “Frank, have you been drinking?”

Frank laughs at this. “No,
Mike,
I haven’t. It’s a little early in the day, don’t you think? But is that all you can come up with? I’ve been
drinking
?”

“What the—”

“Because I question your fucking
judgment
?”

“Jesus, Frank.”

There is another silence. Frank presses the back of his head against the wall. He’s being reckless here, and he isn’t sure why—why now, why like this. But what does strike him is that in terms of tone, whatever about content, there’s no reason why
any
conversation between himself and Mike shouldn’t unfold in precisely the way this one has. It’s what should be normal. His being deferential to Mike, on the other hand …
that’s
what’s absurd. At the same time, if he doesn’t climb back through the looking-glass, and pretty quickly, he’s going to be in serious trouble.

“Listen to me, Mike,” he says. “What I—”

But he freezes. He can’t do it. Not at the moment.

“Frank?”

“Let me call you back later, okay?”

He puts the phone down.

After a couple of seconds, he gets up out of the chair and starts walking across the stockroom, expecting the phone behind him to ring at any second. He hopes it doesn’t, and actually suspects—on the basis that Mike must have been as relieved to end the conversation as he was—that it won’t.

He goes outside to the loading area and takes a few deep breaths.

Anyway, this probably isn’t a situation Mike would be all that well equipped to deal with—disaffected staff member getting confrontational, using abusive language. He might be trained for it, in theory, but given his age it’s unlikely he’s had any direct or relevant experience. With jobs so hard to come by these days, people tend to be more careful in their behavior.

Frank stares out over the vast, largely empty parking lot to the rear of the mall.

So … what was
he
thinking? What was on
his
mind?

With jobs so hard to come by and all.

He doesn’t know. Could this be a turning point, though? A tipping point?

Maybe.

But to what?

In the absence of a cigarette to smoke, or a soda to drink, he takes out his cell phone and scrolls down through his list of contacts.

He stops at Lizzie’s number.

He didn’t want to call her yesterday, because that would have been too soon after their conversation of the night before. No doubt today is still too soon.

But he’s worried about her.

He makes the call. No answer.

Leave a message
.

He doesn’t.

What would it be? I’m worried about you? I love you? It makes my heart ache just to say your name?

With his stomach jumping, he puts his phone away, turns around and goes back inside.

*   *   *

On his way up in the elevator, Craig Howley straightens his tie. He’d have liked a little time to freshen up before coming here, but it was a busy day. Hectic actually. The worst part was the two hours he spent on a conference call with three executives from a struggling Asian hotel chain, Best Pacific—a company whose senior and subordinated debt Oberon recently acquired, an act that then necessitated Oberon’s shedding the chain’s pension fund along with seventeen hundred of its employees.

Tough, yes, certainly, but what planet were these people living on? Barking at him over the phone wasn’t going to change the basic facts of the situation.

Vaughan’s absence didn’t help much either, it has to be said.

The elevator door slides open.

At which point Howley remembers just where he is, and what he’s in for here. The foyer to James Vaughan’s Park Avenue apartment is a palace of onyx and alabaster, a trompe l’oeil cathedral. Howley has lived on Park himself—though a good bit farther up, and it was at least fifteen years ago, different job, different marriage, different life. He currently lives in a handsome townhouse on Sixty-eighth, but this place is simply of a different order.

“Meredith!”

And there she is—sculpted purple sheath dress, crimson lips, coruscating eyes, raven black hair. Gatekeeper, keeper of the flame. Howley more or less hates this woman, but he has to admit that he has a weird, tingly kind of crush on her at the same time. He couldn’t imagine having sex with her, wouldn’t want to in a million years, nor could he imagine even having a meaningful conversation with her, but there’s something there, something that renders—not her, actually, but
him
incomprehensible.

“Craig, how
are
you?”

And the pussycat voice. Over the phone, it’s like a joke. In person, it’s more like an intimidating sex toy, black, solid, shiny.

Unknowable, but in your face.

A lot of people, Howley included, have expended a good deal of time and energy speculating about the nature of Vaughan’s relationship with this woman. Of course, the knowledge that five fairly formidable wives preceded her only complicates matters. Howley himself knew Ruth, who stretched back into the early nineties, and who at the time seemed like a perfect lady, smart as a whip and rake thin—a victim of cancer, sadly, but also, in many people’s eyes, the calculating
bitch
who took over from Megan, his eighties wife. To those in the know, however, Vaughan’s
real
wife—the way people have a
real
president, the one they grew up with, and that in a strange way defines them (LBJ in Howley’s case)—was Kitty. She stretched from the early eighties right back to the mid-fifties. She was the sweetheart, the mother of his children, the woman behind the man. The first two wives, the early ones, Howley knows nothing of. He assumes they were probably a bit like this one, sexy, distracting, ill-advised.

“I’m good,” he says, mwah-mwahing her. “Kept on my toes, you know, with the boss out sick and all.”

“The
boss,
” she says, mock dismissively, and leads him along the main hallway. To Howley’s surprise, they head for the kitchen. He’s been to the apartment many times before and is usually led into the library or straight into the dining room. This is his first visit to the kitchen, which is huge, brightly lit, and fitted out with cabinets and surfaces of brushed steel, black chrome, and polished marble.

Vaughan is seated on a high stool at a long counter. He looks small and frail. There’s a bowl of something in front of him. He glances up.

“Craig.”

Howley approaches and nods at the bowl, which contains some kind of soup or chowder. “Getting a head start there, Jimmy, are you?”

Vaughan shrugs. He’s wearing a bathrobe and hasn’t shaved. Howley has never seen him like this before, never seen him out of a
suit
before.

“Yeah,” he says. “What are you gonna do? Sue me? Mrs. R there will fix you something if you’re hungry.”

Howley looks at him.
If he’s hungry?
Of course he’s fucking hungry. He’s been working all day and was expecting dinner. He glances to his left. Mrs. Richardson, Vaughan’s longtime cook, is busy over at the sink scrubbing something, a baking tray or a pot. Howley looks back, hesitates, and then says, “You know what, I’m good, thanks. I’ll eat later.”

“Suit yourself.” Vaughan indicates a stool on the other side of the counter. “But sit with me, will you?”

Howley pulls out the nearest stool and sits down. A little farther along the counter, an open copy of the
New York Post
is lying next to a can of Dr. Thurston’s Diet Cherry Cola. Meredith slides onto the stool in front of the paper, hunches forward, and starts reading.

“So, Jimmy, how are you feeling?”

Vaughan makes a face. “Lousy. I’ve got ten different things wrong with me.” He takes a slurp from the bowl, then looks up at Howley. “Believe me, you don’t want to know.”

And he’s right. Howley doesn’t.

But at the same time it’d be useful to know what they’re dealing with here. Vaughan looks pretty awful, it has to be said—pathetic, really … stooped, unshaven, pale, dribbling chowder. It’s hard to imagine a route back from
this,
and to something like a vigorous investment committee meeting or a tricky client lunch at the Four Seasons. It’s shocking how rapid the deterioration has been. The old man seemed fine on Friday.

“Are we going to be seeing you back at the office anytime soon?”

The moment Howley says this, he regrets it.

“Jesus, Craig.”

Because it’s not as if Vaughan has been out sick for weeks. He’s missed a single day. It just felt like a very
long
day.

“No, I meant…”

“Ha,” Vaughan says, his spoon suspended over the bowl, “either you can’t handle the pressure or you’re itching to rearrange the furniture in my office. Which is it?”

Howley tenses. He isn’t comfortable having a conversation like this in the kitchen, with Meredith there, and the cook listening in. “Jimmy—”

“Just tell me, should I be worried?”

“Look, I, er—”

Vaughan cracks a smile, a sour one. “Oh,
relax,
Craig, would you?” He shifts his focus back to the spoon. “I was just kidding.”

“Right.”

The next mouthful of chowder Vaughan takes has a chunky piece in it that requires chewing. The chewing goes on for quite a while, and Howley becomes exasperated. He’s just about to ask why he was summoned up here in the first place when Meredith slaps her hand down loudly on the countertop.

They both turn to look at her.

“These
people
.”

Howley tilts his head to get a glimpse of what she’s reading. It’s a two-page spread covering the Connie Carillo trial. In between blocks of text, he can make out pictures of Judge Roberts, of Ray Whitestone, and of Connie herself.

Vaughan puts his spoon down. “What’s the matter, sweetheart?”

She flicks the back of her hand against the spread.

“
This
. I’ve had enough of it. They’re like vultures.” She shakes her head. “Poor Connie.”

Vaughan shrugs. “What do you want? It’s a murder trial.” He turns back to Howley. “You been following this, Craig?”

“As much as anyone, I guess. It’s hard to avoid.”

“Yeah, tell me about it. Meredith here was at Brearley with Connie. Isn’t that right, Mer?”

She tenses. There is silence for a moment. “Just because I was at school with her doesn’t mean—” She stops and slides off the stool. “Oh, what would
you
know? Finish that slop there and take your medication, would you?”

She grabs her soda roughly, spilling some on the countertop, and storms out of the kitchen.

“My word,” Vaughan says, picking up his spoon again. “What’s eating
her
?” He takes another sip of chowder. “So, Craig. What do you think? Is Senator Pendleton going to take the stand?”

Howley can’t quite believe the way this is shaping up. It’s certainly not what he had in mind. Nevertheless, he looks around, thinking … Connie Carillo, Pendleton. He heard something about the trial this morning. People were discussing it in the elevator.