Feast of Murder(3)

Tonight, Jon was contemplating his roommate, a too-youngish man in his forties named Bobby Hannaford. It had been a long and stressful day, just as long and stressful as any he had ever spent in the Baird Financial offices in the World Trade Center. Like many of the prisoners here, he had almost unlimited visiting privileges. He had seen a stream of people, each and every one of whom had seemed dedicated to giving him a headache. Calvin, Donald McAdam, Courtney his temporary secretary, Charlie Shay: coming on top of yesterday, when Jon had seen his ex-wife Fritzie, it had almost been too much. He was beginning to get on in life now. He was sixty-two.

He lay on his bunk, a barrel-chested, bandy-legged little man who looked vaguely like a cross between Hemingway and Benjamin Franklin, and considered Bobby’s greying head. Bobby’s greying head was bobbing up and down, back and forth as he paced from one end of the cell to the other. It wasn’t much of a stretch, but Jon knew from experience that it suited remarkably well. Bobby kept running his hands through his hair and swiping the backs of them across his lips. Jon thought he must have looked much the same way, when he’d first been caught doing whatever he had done with Donald McAdam.

“I’ve thought about it and thought about it,” he was saying, “and the only way I can justify what you’ve done is to think you’ve got some kind of plan in mind. Some kind of trick. You’re supposed to be a financial genius. You could have something up your sleeve.”

“I could,” Jon said. Then he stared at the ceiling and sighed. His meeting with Donald McAdam had been held behind closed doors, in the secluded room provided for matters of “confidentiality.” So had all his other meetings, both today and yesterday. Word had gotten out all the same. It always did.

Bobby was standing just above him now, looming. “You could,” he repeated. “Does that mean you do?”

“No.”

“But how could you? How could you? This is Donald McAdam we’re talking about. The man who put me in here. The man who put you in here. The man who put half of Danbury in Danbury and half of Allenwood in Allenwood. And he’s sitting in that damned apartment in New York, ordering out for caviar.”

Could you order out for caviar? Jon supposed you could. He’d never tried. He sat up and sighed again.

“Bobby, listen to me,” he said, “I don’t like Donald McAdam any more than you do—although it isn’t true, you know, he isn’t responsible for putting me here—but the thing is, I have no choice. Baird Financial owns McAdam Investments. McAdam Investments is sitting on a pile of assets no one will touch as long as McAdam has anything to do with them—”

“I heard that,” Bobby said. “I hope it’s true.”

“Oh, it’s true enough,” Jon said drily. “Even the middle management drones at the banks don’t want anything to do with our Donald. I don’t suppose I blame them.”

“I want to applaud them,” Bobby said.

“If you’re going to applaud them, you can hardly castigate me.” Jon swung his legs over to the side of the bunk. “I have to get rid of him. The only way I can get rid of him is to buy out his contract. I’m buying out his contract.”

“If this was a different kind of prison, you could get rid of him in better ways than that. And it would cost you less money.”

“With my luck at crime, it would cost me twenty to life in Attica and Attica is not like here. Hand me my tooth mug, will you? I broke another bridge last night and my gums ache.”

“Another bridge?”

“The same bridge,” Jon admitted. “And that was my spare, of course, Charlie brought it in for me yesterday, we talked about that. Now I’ll have to wait until my dentist makes up another.”

“Twice in one week,” Bobby said. “You couldn’t do better if you were cracking them with hammers.”

Jon took the mug Bobby handed him, swirled the salted water in it through his mouth, and put the mug down on the floor. Bobby had stopped pacing, but he hadn’t stopped moving. He fidgeted and bopped like an overexcited four-year-old. Jon wondered what kind of man Bobby had been to do business with—all that bobbing and weaving, all that childishness and neurosis. Jon had made it a point in his life to deal only with grown-ups, but other people didn’t. From everything he’d heard, Bobby had been a successful man. Jon just couldn’t imagine at what.

He got up, took his tooth mug back to the sink, and left it on the rim. He didn’t want to rinse it out, because it would take the devil’s own time to get a replacement for the warm salt water. He made sure it was steady on the porcelain and went back to his bunk, wandering in and around Bobby on the way. Bobby had gone back to pacing.