Poisonfeather (Gibson Vaughn #2)(40)

If Susman had seen her . . . She didn’t finish the thought. She saw now how complacency and overconfidence had crept into her thinking in the time since she’d landed in Niobe. She felt safe in Niobe, and that had made her lazy. Well, it stopped now. This was the homestretch, and with that damn interview in circulation, the situation had become dangerously fluid. It was time to tighten up her ship, and Merrick’s phone was the first step. She wondered what had been urgent enough to bring Susman down from his perch on the Upper East Side. What could the two possibly have to discuss now?

“Any idea what they talked about?”

“Those rooms are private. All I can say is the lawyer didn’t look none too pleased neither. I thought he was gonna wring Merrick’s neck.”

Wring his neck? Susman was a lot of things, but a neck-wringer wasn’t one of them.

“What did the lawyer look like?”

“Oh, big fellow. About six two, two twenty. Brother filled out that suit.”

“Susman was black?”

“There some other kind of brother?”

“And you’re sure his name was Susman?”

“What it said on his ID.”

Now she really was worried. Someone posing as Henry Susman had visited Charles Merrick in prison. A pretty brazen move, and confirmation that, as she’d feared, the interview was drawing flies. But then why hadn’t Merrick blown the whistle on the imposter instead of going along with it? Could it have been the partner that she’d long suspected Merrick had? It had never occurred to her that they would be reckless enough to meet at the prison. Maybe the partner recognized how foolish the interview had been even if Merrick couldn’t.

Nothing but conjecture, unfortunately. She didn’t know a damn thing now except that she really needed Merrick’s phone.





CHAPTER SIXTEEN


The visitation room at Niobe Prison reminded Guo Fa of the old Shanghai Railway Station of his childhood—yellow light falling to a stained floor that would never come clean again. The burnt smell of electricity. Fa sat at a narrow metal table and studied the inmates engrossed in quiet conversation with loved ones. He rarely thought of his wife, who lived back home, but he missed her now. A distance had sprung up between them after the miscarriage that had almost taken her life and had rendered her barren. When this was all over, he would call her more regularly. He was her husband and should do better, no matter how disappointed she might be with his career.

At the next table, an inmate cradled his son. Fa assumed it was a boy; he had trouble judging the sex of white babies, but Americans liked to color-code their children, and this one was swaddled in blue.

It was an interesting country. Some of his colleagues held a romantic fascination for its culture, but Fa kept it at an objective distance. China and the United States were rivals, not sweethearts, and it didn’t pay to become enamored of these laowai. Despite their protestations to the contrary—their delusional American exceptionalism—there was nothing special about them. For sixty short years they’d mattered as a country. Perhaps in another five thousand they might have a case. Until then, they should remember that they were little more than children. Pompous children, at that.

The rear door of the visitation room opened, and Merrick came through. The devil himself. Fa had built this moment up in his mind for years, but all he could think was that Merrick was shorter than he’d expected. Yet every bit as grand as his portraits suggested. A guard pointed him to Fa’s table, and Merrick’s chin, tilted imperiously upward, turned in his direction. Fa saw Merrick hesitate, wondering at the identity of his visitor, then make his way over between the tables like royalty among lepers.

“Henry Susman, I presume.” Merrick brushed off the seat of the chair before sitting opposite Fa. The Susman line seemed a private joke of some kind, so Fa smiled politely. Merrick smirked at his own cleverness.

Fa waited until Merrick was settled. It seemed an elaborate pantomime until everything was just so. Merrick looked up expectantly.

“Well?”

“Do you know the recidivism rate in this country, Mr. Merrick?”

If the question caught Merrick off guard, he didn’t show it. “I’ve no idea.”

“Sixty percent.”

“That high?”

“Within the first year. Do you know why that is?”

“Why is that?” Merrick asked, leaning forward to read Fa’s name tag. “Mr. Lee Wulff . . .”

“A felon such as yourself must declare his criminal record on job applications. And since it is not illegal to discriminate against convicted felons, few will hire them. What option does the criminal have but to resume a life of crime?”

“A tragic cycle,” Merrick agreed.

“Certainly you will never be permitted to take the Series 7 exam, never be a stockbroker again.”

For a moment, Fa saw regret in Merrick’s face, but the man blinked hard, and when he opened his eyes again, the arrogance had returned. Still, it satisfied Fa to know that Merrick could be ruffled.

“I wonder to myself: What will become of Charles Merrick after he leaves this place?”

“What is it you want?”

“To help you through this difficult transition.”

“To help me? And how would you do that?”

“Money, of course. A great deal of it.”