The Guest Room(23)

…

In his mother-in-law’s elevator, he realized that he was murmuring to himself. He shook his head and told himself he was doing this only because he was overwrought and he was alone. He was in no danger of becoming a street mumbler.

But he did recall how strangely sensitive he became on airplanes, especially when he was traveling alone on business. Movies seemed sadder, novels more poignant. He recalled watching a comedy—a wistful little bauble about a pair of aging lovers—he had seen a few months earlier with Kristin, and this time having to dab discreetly at the edge of his eyes. Another time, about fifteen minutes after takeoff, he had pulled a werewolf novel from his bag and started to read. When the werewolf was killed, he had put the book down and found himself…unmoored. Wow, he remembered thinking, you’re losing it over a fictional dead werewolf? Seriously? He considered whether he was emotionally stunted.

But maybe it was merely his lack of control on an airplane—every passenger’s lack of control on an airplane. A subconscious fear of flying. The reality that flights are often about beginnings and endings.

Then again, perhaps it was just the loneliness—the being alone.

Outside his mother-in-law’s building he stood for a moment on the curb. This, he decided, was being alone. It dwarfed the loneliness that could besiege a person at thirty-five thousand feet. He was as alone as he’d ever been in his life.

He shook his head. He gathered himself. He hailed a cab.

…

Even though it was a Saturday morning and he was interrupting her weekend, Richard was surprised to see that Dina Renzi was wearing blue jeans, a flannel shirt, and pink and black Keds. But her raincoat was Burberry and her attaché was a Bottega—he knew the weave from the women who carried them in his office—with buttery soft cinnamon-colored leather. He guessed that she was his age, her hair a yellow reminiscent of straw. It was a darker blond than that of the girl who had danced at the party, f*cked his younger brother, and then epoxied herself to the back of one of the men who had brought her, stabbing him over and over with a kitchen knife. This morning the lawyer had pulled her hair back into a ponytail; he imagined it snaking its way through the half-moon hole in the back of a ball cap when she wasn’t at work, just the way Kristin did with her hair whenever they took in a game at Yankee Stadium. It was a fashion statement that Richard found wholesome and sexy at once. She had two rings on the ring finger of her left hand, both with serious rocks in them.

The firm rented the western half of the nineteenth floor of a building on Park, six blocks north of Grand Central. There were a few younger lawyers working in the office that Saturday, too, also in jeans; two were in one of the firm’s conference rooms, the magnificent ash table awash in documents and legal pads, and a third was in his windowless, but still nicely appointed, office.

For what Richard guessed was the fourth time in the last ten hours, he told someone what had occurred. Each time he did, he found himself adding some details while omitting others. He would remember a different moment, a different sensation, a different facial expression. With this lawyer, he kept seeing the faces of the two dead men. He recalled the pudgy hands of the thug—and now they were thugs in his mind, not bodyguards or handlers or managers—who had been shot in the front hall. He thought of the thick gold chain around the neck of the one who had bled out on his living room floor, and how it had sunk partway into the crimson runnel carved into his throat. He was reminded of how he and the other men had cowered during the violence. Not a one had tried to save the poor bastard.

When he had finished, he asked her the question that had been gnawing at him all morning long: “Do you think I am in actual legal trouble?”

“No. At least not criminally. And I really don’t see any civil exposure. You’re positive there are no videos, correct? No photos?”

“Well, pretty positive. All of the guys were told to keep their phones in their pants.”

“Pity they didn’t keep everything there. What is your wife thinking?”

“She is thinking I am despicable. As, I guess, I am.”

“Is she going to leave you?”

“No. I don’t believe she will.”

“Your marriage will be okay?”

“Yes. I love her. She knows I love her. I believe our marriage will be fine.”

“How do you think Franklin McCoy is going to respond? My impression is that you guys are not exactly the wolves of Wall Street.”

“We are pretty conservative. And a lot of our clients are as conservative as we are. I’m a managing director. I work in mergers and acquisitions.”

“So, what will your bosses think?”

“Of me? Of the party?”

“Either. I was thinking of the party and of the publicity that’s coming. The deaths of two people in your living room and your front hall; the Dionysian tone of the whole affair.”

“Obviously, they won’t be happy.”

“I assume your clients won’t be either.”

“No.”

“But no one’s going to fire you?”

“I don’t think so.” He thought of the company’s CFO. He thought of his direct boss, a guy a few years his senior named Peter Fitzgerald. Peter was the head of mergers and acquisitions, a job Richard knew that he was in line for someday. The fellow was a great-grandson of one of the firm’s two co-founders, Alistair Franklin. He was the sort of boyish, ageless preppie who, despite being somewhere in his mid-forties, looked like a groomsman at a Brick Church wedding—and the most priggish one at that. He was, it seemed to Richard, tragically humorless—and likely to be the firm’s CFO eventually. Richard believed that he and Fitzgerald had an amicable relationship, though not an especially close one. They were, alas, never going to be friends.