Feast of Murder(2)

The light changed and McAdam crossed, looking both ways twice, trying to understand the mentality of people who left work at noon on Fridays in the summer. McAdam had always been a man obsessed with work and obsessed with image, the only two things that seemed to him to have any real effect on a life. To leave work to take Mrs. Halstead Vandergriff to a benefit—or to spend the weekend at Mrs. Charles Inglesman’s country place in Cornwell Bridge—that was one thing. To leave work to have a few extra hours to spend in a hovel of a beach house out on Long Island Sound was beyond him. And yet people did do it. They did it all the time. That was why the city was so deserted at times like this.

McAdam walked the half block up to his apartment building, waited patiently—and with a smile on his face—while a doorman he didn’t know opened up for him, and headed for the elevators. He would never have admitted it to anyone, even to himself, but deserted places always made him terrified. Even his apartment, devoid of any humanity besides himself, was intolerable to him. He called for an elevator, watched a set of doors bounce open in front of him with no delay at all, and stepped inside the car. The car had thick pile carpeting on the floor and walls inlaid with colored glass. He ought to calm down now, he told himself. He ought to get his mind organized and concentrate on the future, in spite of the fact that the future held a lot more trials and a lot more depositions. It also held a lot more money, and money was something he and everybody else he knew always seemed to need.

The elevator got to the penthouse floor. McAdam took out the tiny key that would make the elevators open here and used it. The elevator doors opened directly into his foyer and he stepped out. Quiet, quiet, he thought. Then he reached into his inside jacket pocket and came out with a small manila envelope. He felt the hard side of the mason jar bumping against his hip and took that out, too, putting it down on the occasional table. Then he picked the mason jar up again. Maybe he would eat some of this melon rind marmalade. Maybe it would be interesting. He felt himself start to giggle and suppressed it. Quiet, he thought again. Quiet, quiet, quiet. He turned and sent the elevator back downstairs, to all the ordinary mortals who had to get to their apartments through empty corridors and endless halls.

“Quiet, quiet, quiet,” McAdam said aloud, and then started to laugh.

A year and a half ago, when the Feds had first approached him with their deal, Donald McAdam had done a few quick calculations. If he played it wrong, he would lose everything. If he played it right, he could save a little or a lot, depending. What he could not do was save it all. If nothing else, the business would have to go. McAdam Investments—a public company by then, with stock quoted on the American Exchange—would have to crash and disintegrate in the glare of scandals and revelations, like Drexel Burnham Lambert before it.

Except it hadn’t.

It hadn’t.

And now—

The manila envelope was still in his hand. McAdam put it down on his occasional table and turned it over and turned it over again. He picked it up and put it down again. Finally, he picked it up and carried it with him into his living room with the wall of windows looking uptown.

Quiet, he told himself again.

And then he started to laugh for real, hard and gasping, because it was so funny.





2


For Jonathan Edgewick Baird, the real problem with being in prison was not the stigma—in his case, there wasn’t much of that—but the casual assumptions of half of everybody he knew that because he was in prison, he couldn’t also be in the office. Of course, in some ways that was true. Sixteen months ago, he had pleaded guilty in federal court to three counts of insider trading. Fourteen months ago, he had been remanded to the Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury. Since then, his official residence had been a small square room with bars making up one wall and a peculiar hard-plastic covering on the floor. Even so, he was neither down nor out. He had founded Baird Financial Services thirty-two years ago. He had run it ever since. He was running it now, in spite of the fact that his partners—his younger brother Calvin and good old Charlie Shay—were down there in Manhattan on the scene, supposedly making decisions. Like a Mafia don with the unfortunate luck to have landed in Sing Sing, he was ruling his empire from inside.

Actually, there was nothing Sing Sing–like about it. Danbury wasn’t the poshest of country club prisons—Allenwood was that—but it came close. The inmates were all financial types, with a couple of spies thrown in. Newspapers and magazines were delivered to the mailroom every morning. In the evenings, the cell blocks looked like enforced reading rooms for Yuppies. Behind the bars, men in prison uniforms pored through the fine print of Barron’s and Forbes, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. They did deals, too. Almost everybody here had phone and library privileges. Almost everybody here was operating a business or doing a deal or running a scam. Sometimes, listening to the hum that rose and fell around him, day and night without surcease, Jon thought he had not been sent to prison as much as to a form of Business Purgatory. That was one of the reasons why he had been so diligent at his shipbuilding from the day he got here. Shipbuilding was what Jon Baird did for a hobby—building ships in bottles, to be precise. He’d done two since coming to Danbury, including the one he had finished today, sitting proudly on top of his filing cabinet. It was not as good as it could have been, because the bottle he had used was made out of shatterproof glass, the only kind of bottle the prison authorities would allow him to have. It didn’t matter. It was better than contemplating his sins.