“My dad is in jail,” said Ruby to Virginia. “But he’s not really a criminal.” Virginia looked away. “His boss took advantage of him. Now my dad is in jail, and his boss is still free. And very rich.”
“This is my favorite part,” said Pat. “He’s just been talking about how he wishes he could go back and do things differently.” She began to read: “‘But I can’t go back, except in my head, which I do every night. My cell is my new LinkAge time machine. I go back and rework my mistakes and then I go forward to be reunited with all of you.’ Isn’t that wonderful?”
While Pat read, Will picked up his steak knife and studied himself in its blade. Then he shot Virginia a sharp blue glance that plucked a single startling cord inside her.
“I want to hear more,” said Ruby.
“‘Before I went to jail,’” read Pat, “‘I was very concerned that I not be afraid. I was afraid to be afraid, if you know what I mean. I didn’t realize that I already was. I’d been afraid for years. That’s why I ran so hard at the end of each quarter. I’m not saying it was all bad. The work could be exhilarating. It was hard to come up with a new raft of numbers at the last moment. The adrenaline would start pumping. You had to think hard and fast for days. But adrenaline is fear. Skiers say they own their fear. That doesn’t change what it is. When you’re afraid, all you can see is the immediate problem. You see these numbers, this quarter. I was running like a rat on a treadmill, and I didn’t know it. Who was I afraid of? Neil? Riley? When you go to Rumson, be careful of…’” She trailed off.
“What do you mean?” said Ruby, narrowing her black button eyes. “Are you going to Rumson?”
“Well, yes,” said Pat, laying aside the letter. She took off her glasses and folded them up as delicately as a praying mantis folds its legs. “Virginia and I went today.”
“Why?” said Ruby.
Pat gave an exaggerated shrug. “I’m doing a garden for Yolande,” she said.
“That’s disgusting,” said Ruby.
“The Culps are planning to leave the country,” Virginia said suddenly.
“What?” said Pat.
“That’s why they made such a show of how excited they were about the garden,” said Virginia slowly. “They want everyone to think they’re staying. But they’re afraid Neil is going to be arrested. Didn’t you see how freaked out the wife was when you told her about the old gangster fleeing to Europe?”
“That’s hilarious!” cried Pat. “Ginny, you are so clever.”
“What are you going to do about it?” asked Ruby.
Pat laughed. “What could I do? Tell? Who would I tell? My husband’s in jail. But I might ask for expenses in advance.”
“I hate you,” said Ruby.
“People around here seem very unhappy,” Will said slowly. “You’d think they’d be happy because of all the money they have, but they’re not.”
Virginia loved it when a high-level plot was revealed at the end of a mystery. A paranoid solution justified any feeling of discontent. But there was no real cover-up here. Riley Gibbs and Neil Culp, as the iconic directors of the LinkAge fraud, had got the biggest cut of the spoils. But many, many people had profited while it was still churning along. If Jesse James had used the LinkAge method, he would have paid off everyone who worked at the banks he robbed and then convinced the depositors who lost their money that as long as they didn’t change the system they too had a chance at being a Jesse James someday. There will always be losers, just make sure you’re not one of them. He probably would have been made an advisor to the president.
Hundreds of Gibbs and Culp collaborators lurked at lending institutions, investment banks, consulting firms, and financial newsletters. Thousands more didn’t exactly know about the accounting crimes, but didn’t want to know, either. Being with Pat had given Virginia a better idea of how pervasive the corruption was. What “authorities” would Pat (or Virginia) inform of Neil’s possible intentions? They already knew everything, and they had done nothing. It’s like when everyone speeds; you can’t stop all the cars on the road.
Ruby had stormed off, followed by Pat. As Virginia pretended to concentrate on the dark and winy heft of the chicken, Will stood up, examined portions of Frank’s letter from afar, then glanced around and pocketed it.
Virginia escaped to her room, which had been subtly rearranged since she’d left it that morning. No, no, she had to get hold of herself. Pat had a cleaning lady. Or someone like that. The dogs began to howl again.
CHAPTER
21
Former LinkAge salesman Phillip Hipkins had “dropped from sight,” according to Ellen Kloda, but there was an address Pat might try. Virginia, bunched up in the front of the Touareg, meditated on the phrasing. Had she “dropped from sight” when she left Maine? She was trying to avoid touching a carefully folded white paper bag on the floor mat. She told herself that it was just a bag, but someone else’s discards were gross, no matter how nicely folded.
Pat and Virginia drove to Wayne, less than half an hour away. The houses in the area were half stone-face and half aluminum siding, new enough to be flimsily constructed and old enough to show it. The address they sought was down a short street. A young woman with a red bandanna wound around her head sat on the front steps and smoked a cigarette.
“What luck!” cried Pat, pulling up to the curb.
When the young woman realized they were getting out of the car, she stood, started to throw away the cigarette, then changed her mind, checked on the remaining length, and took another hungry drag.
“We’re looking for Phillip Hipkins,” said Pat, her voice going through its usual high-noted curlicues.
“He’s not here.” The woman was in her twenties; the shoulder-length hair under her bandanna was thin and blond; and her face was scrappy-looking, despite its even features.
“But he does live here?” pressed Pat.
“For more than three months.” It was not a fact she was happy about.
“My husband used to work with him.”
“Oh.” The young woman relaxed, lost interest, scraped the end of the cigarette on the cement step. “He’s already down there.”
“Down where?”
“With the rest of them. Out on Forty-six.” When Pat just looked at her, she added, “Isn’t your husband at the lunch?”
“Frank is actually in jail,” said Pat, and for the first time she looked a little embarrassed.
“Jesus,” said the young woman. “And I thought my father was bad. What did he do?”
“He was one of the LinkAge accountants who, you know…”
She took this in slowly. Then she said, “I’ve got to get back to my kids.”
“We’re here about a reimbursement check,” said Pat, not showing the best judgment, if his own daughter had reservations about him.
“I really do have to get back to the kids.” The young woman eyed her front door.
“I lost everything, too,” said Virginia.
“And she’s my best friend,” said Pat.
“Oh, all right.”
Her name was Myra, and her two toddlers were sitting in front of the TV in the living room, watching a talking yellow sponge. Their attention was not diverted by the presence of two strangers. “Come into the kitchen where we can talk,” said Myra, picking her way through a scattering of guns: army green, navy blue, and battleship gray. “Boys,” she added by way of explanation.
“What a nice house!” exclaimed Pat. “I love the picture.” A framed child’s drawing of some sort of animal was the only decoration.
“So who’s your husband?” asked Myra as she moved dirty plates off the dinette set.
“Frank Foy.”
Myra shook her head. “Never heard of him. He’s one of those big bug criminals? A mastermind?” She ran an appraising eye over Pat’s leather car coat. “I thought they all got away with it.”
“Frank wasn’t big enough to get away with it,” said Pat. “If you know what I mean.”
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“No,” said Myra, “I don’t.”
“He got caught up in this thing, and now he feels awful about it. So many people have suffered. I got your father’s name from Ellen Kloda. Do you know Ellen?”
“No.”
“A wonderful woman. Frank’s only true friend at the company.”
“That company destroyed my father,” said Myra. “He lost his job, his savings, his pension, his wife, and his house all in about six months. He had nowhere else to go, so he came here. He walks around like he got kicked in the stomach. My husband says I’ve got to tell him to leave, but right now I just can’t, even though it’s turned out to be a disaster.”
“I’m sorry,” said Pat.
“I don’t mind for me so much,” said Myra. “And my husband isn’t around a lot. But I mind for my kids. My father is angry all the time, and I don’t like the kids to see him like that. It riles them up. It riles everybody up.”
“I know,” said Virginia sheepishly. “I threw a glass.”
“Really?” said Pat with interest.
“The only thing that calms him down is his lunch with the Marks,” said Myra.
“That sounds nice,” said Pat. “Who, exactly?”
“The Marks,” Myra repeated. “I don’t think all of them are really named Mark. My father isn’t, obviously. But the two guys who organized it were Mark Upshaw and Mark Land, and a few of the first people they asked to join them were called Mark. Because of the double meaning. It’s sort of a joke.”
“Oh,” said Pat.
“They meet at BreeZee’s,” said Myra. “But I would be careful if I were you. They’re pretty pissed off.”
When Pat and Virginia got back into the car, it occurred to Virginia that she should ask whether they were going to go out to this lunch, but it didn’t seem to matter enough. She frowned out the side window.
Route 46 was a strip lined with franchises. Their entrances, which were as frequent as every hundred yards or so, continuously sucked in and belched out more cars. BreeZee’s was on the right side of the highway, which was handy, because there didn’t seem to be any way to get over to the left. In an SUV waiting to exit, a teenage driver had one hand on the steering wheel and the other in her mouth. She was staring wide-eyed—and biting her nails.
“I guess there’ll be a lot of guys like Hipkins here,” said Pat.
“I guess so.”
“I think I’m nervous,” said Pat. “But I know I’m going to survive, and that’s what matters, right? Right, Virginia?”
Virginia did not answer. What was Pat talking about survival for? It was maddening.
The parking lot was huge, broken up by baffling concrete markers, and painted with irrationally placed arrows and lines. They were evidently supposed to regulate traffic flow but it was hard to tell exactly how. BreeZee’s was marooned in the middle: a pink stucco façade that turned a blind eye to the world. Thick tabletops, high-backed banquettes, and oversize menus suggested that it would be the ample portions, not the taste, that would justify the inflated prices.
A couple of long tables had been pushed together by the far wall, and three men sat together amid the picked-over disorder of maybe a dozen completed meals. Pat strode on back, the flaps of her leather coat stiff and her matching taffy-colored clutch firmly placed under one arm. “I can’t believe I caught you!” she said.
Two of the men looked up with puzzled annoyance. The third, the one whose curly gray hair had missed its last couple of cuts, said, grinning, “Sit down. Tell us what you’re selling, and we’ll each take two.” He was wound as tight as a watch.
Pat did take a chair, a couple of seats away from him. Virginia remained standing, reluctant to inconvenience the waiters and aware of a keener disturbance in the air, some kind of crawling nervousness.
“I’m looking for Phillip Hipkins,” said Pat.
“Now why would a woman like you be looking for Phil Hipkins?” The flirtatiousness was heavy-handed, hard to listen to.
“Hipkins? Which one was he?” The other two men consulted each other.
“It’s complicated,” said Pat. “I’m Frank Foy’s wife.”
“The lowly accountant who corrupted an entire Fortune 500 company? How interesting.” This was from the flirt. His tone had soured.
Pat laughed. She could always talk. She just sailed right through. She didn’t have to understand what was going on in a room. “He’s awfully sorry. Is your name Mark?”
The man shook his head. “Ted. This is Mark Upshaw.” He pointed to the skinny fellow. “And Mark Land.” He indicated the light-skinned black.
“We were all rich once,” said Upshaw. “Hard as it is to believe. We would come in to work and check the stock price. Then we’d check it again at lunch.”
“It was never real for me,” said Ted. “It was real for other people, I could tell. But it was never real for me.”
“I’ve got to go…,” said Land, turning to leave.
Ted drew a breath. “I could feel the end,” he said. “But no one knew exactly how it was going to go down.” Everyone was listening to him. The Marks, Virginia, even the waiters. “Enron had already disappeared, leaving behind nothing but a puff of smoke. At LinkAge we all thought, Jesus, the smoke over there used to be a billion-dollar company. I don’t mind giving a nice spin to some facts. I’m a salesman, that’s my job. But it’s tough when you don’t have any idea what the facts are. The bonuses that year were really chintzy. Word came down that lunches were going to have to come in at under twenty dollars. In Manhattan! Can you believe it? They were cutting costs right out of our wallets. And you could read on the Yahoo! message board what kind of Christmas the top brass had. They got millions and millions of dollars’ worth of bonuses.”
Like Frank’s, thought Virginia. For the garden.
“It was a real challenge,” said Ted. “After the arrests we expected to go bankrupt at any minute. Toward the end we’d go out for a few hours at lunch, just as if we were Riley Gibbs and his cronies, and we’d take a friend or two and get really shit-faced. But we’d always get the chits upstairs by the end of the day. We’d parcel them out in different ways. One guy actually wrote in the space for customer or contact ‘George W. Bush.’ The girls downstairs knew what we were doing and tried to push the expenses through right away so we wouldn’t get stuck with them. Everyone started putting stuff in their briefcases. You know, the stuff that accumulates over the years like photos and mugs, but also pens, paper, enough to equip a dozen Shakespeares.”
“Oh,” said Pat. Virginia thought she was going to jump out of her skin.
“You remember Neil Culp’s retirement party?”
“Sure,” said Pat.
“I don’t mean I went,” said Ted. “I wasn’t invited. But everyone knew all about it. It’s not like they tried to keep it a secret so no one’s feelings would get hurt. Just the opposite.”
“It was really boring.”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Ted. “But Johnny Spaulding did go, and somehow he got hold of all these big cutouts of Culp.”
“There were these huge photos scattered around at the party,” Pat explained to Virginia.
“They weren’t just photos,” Ted argued. “They were freestanding cardboard cutouts, about three-quarters size.”
“The High Risk boys started dancing with one of them really late,” said Pat. “The band was gone by then, though, so it looked pretty dumb.”
“There was a band?” asked Mark Land.
“Yeah,” said Pat. “It wasn’t very good.”
“After the arrests,” said Ted, “the cutouts started appearing all over the building. If you went up to the cafeteria for coffee in the morning, there he’d be, Neil Culp, with a mouth balloon saying, ‘Let them eat cake.’ Or you’d go to the men’s room and Culp would be saying, ‘You’ll find the accounts in the third stall from the left.’ That kind of thing. Eventually someone from upstairs would show up, but meanwhile everyone would have seen it. A
nd who knows, management might not have even minded, figuring Culp was taking some of the heat off them.”
Two waiters started to ostentatiously remove glasses and silverware. Ted began to talk faster. “I was going up the elevator one night to pick up my wallet—I’d forgotten it earlier—when I ran into Johnny Spaulding with a big suit bag. One of the cutout’s feet was kind of sticking out, so I said, ‘Don’t forget your shoe there.’ Don’t forget your shoe! It was great. We were the only ones in the building, because no one was working late by then. Spaulding didn’t care if I knew.
“You may not believe it, but I cheered when the stock price fell under five dollars. And I wasn’t the only one. You could hear the cheers all over the building. It was a relief after all those months. We hated that company so much we didn’t care what happened to us.”
Then, without warning, Ted jumped up and bolted out the door.
“My goodness,” said Pat.
“What do you expect?” said Mark Upshaw, his hostility unmasked. “When people get hit hard, either they punch back, or they turn on themselves. You’re lucky he didn’t wring your pretty neck.”
“Pat—” said Virginia.
“What did you want to see Phil Hipkins about?” said Mark Land quickly.
“I just heard he had some problems.”
“I guess,” said Upshaw. “But at least he didn’t have a total meltdown, like Ted.”
“We can’t all be Johnny Spauldings,” said Land. “Spaulding’s incredible. He lost bundles on LinkAge, but he’s made a lot of it back in wind farms. I saw him on TV just the other day talking about renewable energy. He’s put together his own farm with over a hundred turbines. Returns can top twenty percent. That’s where I’d put my money if I had a nickel.”
“I’m glad there are still some happy endings,” said Pat.
“Yeah,” said Upshaw. “Wind farms are an incredible tax dodge.”
“Really,” said Pat.