The Last Bender, Chapter 4

CHAPTER FOUR

Monozone was a quiet place at seven in the morning. I sat in my cubicle thinking, Stronghole is not a bad man. Anyone’d want to work with him. He had a good reputation. And that was amazing in an outfit like this. We sometimes pissed side by side or shared an elevator. Two years before at the Christmas party, he was the guy ahead of me on the bonus line, both of us waiting for a turn on Santa’s lap. So foremost in my mind was, can I trust him with the little piece of paper, and what should I look for when I showed him the headline I was trying to stop reading:
SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE!!!
Stronghole was not a bad man. Or so I had assumed when it didn’t matter. Why Laraby would pair us up was a pointless speculation. Laraby was the dragon of his Centaur world.
I opened Stronghole’s file. He was five years my junior. Trained as a marine and joined Special Forces. Two years of combat duty, numerous citations for bravery, a purple heart. Did college in three years and got his PHD in Biophysics. He liked to sail, garden and spend time with his wife and daughter. He had a cat.
Born Timothy Joseph Stronghole, he preferred to be called by his last name, which was pronounced STRUNGil. Yeah, right. He grew up in Five Joints, had hard working parents. In high school he played violin and made the regional orchestra. Graduated with highest honors at age seventeen. Worked with his father in the rag trade to earn money for college.
At eighteen, two weeks before entering Harvard, he is accused of murdering his girlfriend’s stepfather. Indigent, he draws Kaz Malevich for his court appointed attorney. A guy they should have sued for malpractice. Kaz cut a rotten deal with the DA; in exchange for dropping first degree murder charges, Stronghole pleads nolo to a third degree manslaughter charge and enlists to fight overseas. Stronghole knows it’s the only way out, so he takes it. A year later his girlfriend’s brother confesses to the murder. They hold him for six months and hang him by Summary Judgment.
Strungil indeed.
So I was paired with a choir boy. Stronghole is a good man. Anyone would want to work with him. But I didn’t want to work with him or anyone. I didn’t want to work at all.
Laraby walked into my carpeted cubicle. He dropped five newspapers on the desk and said, “Jesus fucking Christ, Jack.” Then, after a long bloodshot pause, “Let’s go to breakfast.” He stretched his face into a grin. I had to return it. But I always felt repulsed returning his grins. When my face was like that, it felt like the face of a man who needs to be liked.
The elevator was full of slow, middle aged women in pink blouses and skirts like wall to wall. Men bulged out of their collars. They were DOA, softened up by the second mortgage. They were crow meat now. The elevator opened and we fell out like junk from a closet, wincing in the pale sunlight.
Laraby hurried along. We made for the shadows across the street, raced through the polished granite and gold glass to our favorite joint. I sank into the red banquet, looked over the bloodstained menu and picked at a piece of dried hamburger. It was hard to tell if it had been cooked or not.
“They’re scared Jack. Upstairs they’re scared. The company is afraid.”
I couldn’t figure out about the hamburger. When it gets that grey and hard it actually could be a piece of snot, whatever. I pointed at it and asked, “Do you think this is raw or cooked?”
“My gut is killing me,” he said, releasing his belt a notch. “What difference does it make, it’s dead.” He breathed loudly and examined the menu as if he hadn’t eaten two meals a day there for the past twenty years. “I’ll have the turkey club, no mayo, black coffee and a short stack with sausage.”
“Save it for the waitress.”
He looked at me over the menu. “Dr. St. Claude didn’t come in today.”
“Maybe he’s checking to see who’s naughty and nice.”
“St. Claude is the most important R and D guy we got. Monozone out-bid Barensonoble by raising them two million in cash and a bunch of other crap like stock. His wife and mistress haven’t seen him in days. Waitress–” he tromboned. “We’re ready.”
A harried, rickety woman whirled around and flung her lips and eyeballs at us. A reef’s worth of shellfish dangled from her ears. Her hair was a lost kingdom of sausage curls. In one hand she clutched a pack of Eucalypt 100s, in the other a Zeppo, checkbook and pin.
“Just a sec, I’ll be right there,” she said, whirling back around to do whatever business it was Laraby had interrupted with his bright fanfare.
I said, “So St. Claude is a muckity muck. The company’s in hock to him for five, ten. That’s deep. Monozone figures with so much in, they can’t afford to let some head hunter take him. So even if he’s a wash, they don’t admit it. Say he tries to bolt, why that’ll only encourage others. So maybe he fakes it, to draw a walk. Five, ten years down the line he pops up under a new name and the cheap perfume he brewed up in our alembics cashes out in somebody else’s hand. Fit the bill?”
Laraby wasn’t even looking at me. He was checking out the waitress’s ass. Gradually his attention returned. Pretending he had heard me, he said, “Yeah, something like that. We don’t figure he’s blown town yet. Word has it he likes to live big. Plays golf out on the island with the paisley set. Those guys are shit eaters and he likes to pretend he’s one too. It’s always the same deal with these eggheads, Jack. You gotta watch out. I’m waitin’ for a ransom note. And if he betrayed us, then his eyes and balls are in a jar in the bureau, back there. Well, now we gotta sit on this thing and see if it floats. Already we got something like ten no shows. We don’t even know if their families have called the cops.”
“Well Laraby, maybe it’s time we talk about the warehouse.”
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
“That’s what you said before.”
“It’s how I feel, Jack. I’m just miserable about it.” He made a sad face.
“This Pechardine could be good cover for us, if it doesn’t crap the other way. What gets more hoo ha in the press, kidnap or unsolved murder? Let’s add it up. You got suspense with one, is she gonna die, and vengeance with the other. Have you heard from the cops yet?”
“Haven’t. But the day is young. How many in the warehouse did it say?”
“Four or five gallons of blood in the Post, seven in the Standard and I haven’t seen the Chronicle yet.”
“Well, where the hell is the warehouse? Why aren’t you there? Why do I pay you?”
“I just saw it on the news this morning. And I got the paper and listened to the radio on the way in.”
“You’re very thorough. I admire it. If you have time to stop reading and watching television, maybe you and Stronghole could start sweating St. Claude out. See what his wife and that other dame, what’s her name, say. You never know. I’ll put out feelers on the street. See what the competition is up to.”
The waitress returned to take our order. Laraby leered at her crotch, acting like he could smell it through the greasestained apron. To her, he was just another boiled pink bastard whose two bucks wasn’t worth a second of the mental masturbation, drooling and cunt farting that went on in his reptilian brain. The fact was, Laraby couldn’t wait to get back to his money; money got him all wet. This slobbering over waitresses was his way of trying to act normal. He said, “I’ll have the corned beef hash, three poached soft, wheat toast, a side of bacon and a short stack. And I want the real maple syrup.”
“We don’t have any of that,” she said, drilling into a spot between his eyes. She’d never find a thing there.
“It says here on the menu. Real Maple Syrup.”
“Lemme see.” She looked at the menu. “Oh yeah, see here? The little ‘R’ in a circle? That means ‘registered trademark’. That means it ain’t real and don’t have to be.”
“Bring some strawberry jam and honey then. Coffee, o.j. small and fresh squeezed. Half and half for the coffee and water right away. And tell Jeffrey I said go back to the real syrup.”
“The only real things around here are the assholes. What’ll you have, mister?” She gave me the soft look, figuring me for square. I ordered and when I said thank you and smiled she showed me what was left of her teeth. Then she hefted a buspan full of dishes through the swing doors and shouted out our order. I waited to see her face in the little round windows and said to Laraby, “Give it to me straight.”
“They want him back no matter what.”
“What about the stiffs? What if he’s dead? There’s a room full of blood, a bunch of murders in a warehouse with the same MO, and you and me, we don’t have a plan.”
He stared at his fingernails and said, “No one will ever know what happened in that room.”
“No, but we don’t control that warehouse investigation either.”
“Don’t you know somebody there? That friend of yours, Linda.”
“I don’t know any Linda. And I don’t do business with my friends.”
He snorted. “They don’t scare me a bit. They don’t have a body. No body, no case.”
“Don’t you wanna know what happened in that lab?”
He looked up from his hands. His eyes were shot, like they’d been up all night watching t.v. in the dark. Then they looked like they’d seen everything there was to see and didn’t care. “What do you want to know a thing like that for?” he asked.
I held his eyes as long as I could. Then, gazing through the window at the people, who looked like flat gray suits on hangers, I asked, “What about everyone else who was there? What happens when the cops show up and see through me and start to lean hard on the little drunk who drove the Zamboni?”
“No one saw a thing. There was nothing to see.” I knew better than to say that I had seen plenty. “Find St. Claude,” he said. “When the cops come, cooperate.”
“Right. When they ask, why you got ten people missing, I say, we got labor problems, it’s a sick out. Or maybe we laid ’em off. Did we lay ’em off Laraby? If so, then why did we lay ’em all off? Where did they go?”
The waitress plunked down the coffees.
“As you say. Call it RightSizing. Show them motivational movies. Say we cut the project.”
“What project should I say we cut?” I hated it when he left things to me like that.
“Rat poison,” he said sipping off the top of his coffee.
“Rat poison,” I repeated dully.
“Yeah, rat poison. Why not?”
“Let’s see. Dr. St. Claude, Nobel Laureate, esteemed poisoner of rats.”
“Yes, a bit like Catherine, Empress of Russia, Fucker of Horses.”
“Just for laughs Lar, what do we do about the corpses?”
“Corpses? But there weren’t any!” he said, becoming jocular as the coffee caused uncharted chemical migrations in his brain.
I pressed him. “The blood. What about the blood?”
“I keep saying it Jack, ‘What blood?’ That’s all you gotta do is say to them, ‘Show me the blood.'”
“I mean, for my own purposes, what can you tell me about the blood?”
“Oh that,” he said with disgust. “We couldn’t type it. Lab estimates six, seven people.”
“How’d it get on the ceiling?”
“Look Jack, this is unimportant.”
“Not to me it’s not. The blood on the ceiling bugs me.” The waitress arrived and dealt the plates. Finally there was something to distract Laraby from molesting her with his eyes. He had the food to diddle now.
“So you got an idea about this blood thing,” he said, egg dripping off his fork. “Shoot.”
“Well, I dunno. My guess is they were bled somehow. They weren’t blown up, or there’d be brain and fragments all over. They couldn’t have been shot. Maybe stabbed in the neck. Or maybe they were, I dunno, pressurized in some way. You know, something plunged in their hearts.”
“Could be, could be.”
While the eggs and grease congealed on my plate, I decided to try something else. “Look,” I began. “What makes you think they’ll buy any of it? I think we need to say something fucked up happened and we need to be upset, I mean, mad, confused, in disarray. And we act like we’re trying to cover up the disarray. You know, employees weeping, taking personal days, terror in the ranks. There’s already rumors all over the place. We want news crews, reporters, demands, talk of revenge. And we got to act like that’s just what we don’t want.”
Laraby stopped eating. A cube of potato flecked with pink clung to his lower lip. He looked like a spirochete about to burrow into glans. “You mean make a stink, Jack?”
“Yeah make a stink. Work it out for yourself.”
“I don’t need to. That’s why I pay you. But no more murders, hear? At least not at the lab. Wherever those half dozen boards show up, if they ever do, will be fine.”
“Let’s just hope not anywhere near that warehouse.”
“You need to disconnect the two then. Do what’s necessary. Don’t make mistakes. Clean up behind you. A clean shop is a safe shop. There’s money to be made, power to take.” He went back to purring over his food.
“There’s more,” I said. “How do you know St. Claude is alive?”
“He’s alive all right. He’s the only one worth anything in this whole thing. Only a psycho idiot would punch his ticket.”
“So my first move is to run down the personal leads–his wife, his girl, noise around the office. I’ll work up some P.R. to honk at the press.”
“Yeah, yeah. Waitress! More coffee! More water! God damn it, Jack. Willya look at that woman? I’d like to fuck her tits.”