“Yet you haven’t called the police.”
Silence.
I sat in Corning’s chair. “Why don’t you take a seat and we’ll have a little chat.”
He sat stiffly.
“How long have you worked here?”
“Fourteen months.”
“Fourteen months. Long enough to know that not everything that happens in this office is aboveboard. You’re smart. You know that you should probably have reported some of these things to somebody. But it’s your first real job and who could blame you if you listened to your boss when she told you that everybody does things this way. Business is business.”
His face was set.
“But, as I say, you’re smart. And no doubt you understand by now that at least one of your clients, me, does, in fact, blame you for conniving in irregular, unethical, and very probably illegal activity. But perhaps you and I can work something out.”
He wavered for a moment, then sat as straight as a plumb line and lifted his chin. How annoying. I could break something—it probably wouldn’t have to be a bone, a desk lamp would do—but he was young, and I’d bought him chocolates last time I’d been here.
“Do you know what money is, Gary? It’s a lubricant. Money makes the things you want possible. It can’t buy love, but it can buy sex, and respect. Money gets you security and attention. It can buy health and it can pay for justice. So if I said I would offer you an undreamt-of sum, what would you do? If you could have anything in the world, what would it be? Take a minute to think about it.”
He crossed his left leg over his right, linked his hands over his knee, and began to sweat.
Dornan would ask for an empire of some kind, six thousand coffee shops all over the world, and guaranteed bargains every time he shopped. Maybe he would ask for Tammy back. My mother? For all political and business negotiations to be reasonable and rational. Luz would want a pair of leather trousers and permission to have the light on all night. Kick, oh, I would bet my bank account I knew what she wanted: the impossible.
Gary cleared his throat. “To be in charge. I’d want to run my own real estate office.”
It’s impossible to look at someone and know whether they are being brave. For an agoraphobic, walking down the street is a heroic act. For someone with absolutely no imagination, running into a burning building to save a baby is not hard. Bravery is relative. Perhaps it’s the same with dreams.
“Staying out of jail would be the first step, and I can help you with that. Let’s begin with you bringing me my file. I’ll make us some coffee.”
There was no espresso machine in the break room, but I found a French press and an interestingly scented light Arabica blend. While the kettle boiled I leafed through the magazines and newspapers on the table. One was the Seattle Times with the story about the drugging.
Back in Corning’s office, Gary was kneeling on the floor by the filing cabinet, looking baffled.
“It’s gone,” he said.
I considered. “What else is missing?”
“How did you—”
“What else is missing?”
“A lot.”
“How specific is the loss?”
“I don’t understand.”
"Particular files, files that are connected in some way, or random chunks?”
“I don’t know.”
“Find out. Do you want cream or sugar?”
He was still riffling through files when I brought back the coffee. I settled comfortably behind the desk and sipped, content to wait now that he’d begun.
“I’m going to have to cross-check the computer records file by file against the paper files to know for sure what’s gone, but I can tell you one thing I’ve noticed. She’d had me make calls about three lots in the last couple of months that are connected. More or less. I mean, literally. They’re next door to each other. Contiguous.”
“Is one of those lots mine?”
He nodded.
“You said more or less.”
“That’s the thing I don’t get. There’s one lot between the others that isn’t for sale. It’s the Federal Center. You can’t buy that. Also, I don’t remember any calls to other investors about these other three lots.”
“You think she wanted it for herself?”
“I don’t know. And it’s pretty useless land, anyhow. Warehouses. Who wants those?”
“Close the file cabinet and come sit. Talk to me about real estate here in Seattle.”
I TOOK THE Seattle Times with me and read the story carefully in the car. I tried to imagine I was Corning. I highlighted the names of those admitted to Harborview Medical Center. I asked the MMI for a map.
At Harborview, I found that they had all been released, except for one man, Steven Jursen, who had been transferred that morning to the University of Washington Medical Center.
According to the MMI, the UW Medical Center was less than a mile from Kick’s house. I drove down her street, even though it wasn’t strictly on my route. Her van wasn’t in the driveway. I wondered if she had got the flowers. Of course she had. Benjamin was an efficient concierge.
The lobby of the medical center was stuffed with art. The floors were clean enough to eat from, if I’d wanted to eat. Nothing was white. The elevator took an age.
Jursen was in a private room. The door was partly open. I stepped close, lifting my hand to knock, and the smell hit me: that hospital scent of disinfectant and fear and floor polish, of bleached linens and sugary drinks, of sleek equipment with its contacts recently wiped down with alcohol and ready to lie cold and stinging against warm skin. I knocked. No response. There again, if he was on a ventilator, there wouldn’t be. I pushed the door open.
He was asleep. Sunshine poured through the large window, gilding the brushed steel and putty white of the equipment standing ready around the room. He was breathing on his own. On the set, I remembered a man in his late fifties with hard hands and grey hair who wore overalls and walked with slightly bowed legs. A manual worker all his life, whose parents or grandparents had come from Sweden and had expected a hard life of hard work. No great ambition for success, just a steady job with one company, maybe in construction, who paid him on time and took care of everything. A mid-twentieth-century man trying to live in the twenty-first.
Asleep, he looked quite different, not younger but purer, untouched by the experience and compromises of age. A preacher from the eighteenth century, say, who knew he was doing God’s work. I looked at his chart. He’d been off the ventilator since midnight. There were EKG records and an order for an echocardiogram and something called a MUGA test. Under marital status a woman had written in blue ink: divorced. I adjusted the slant of the blinds so that the sun wasn’t in his face, and watched his chest rise and fall, then went to find a doctor.
I DROVE A circuitous route—no one followed me—to a café on Boat Street that I’d read about. I pulled into the parking lot. It was lunchtime and I was hungry, but I didn’t get out of the car; I doubted my hunger would stand in the face of food that tasted of sulfur and burnt rubber.
Jursen had congestive heart failure. The overdose had nearly killed him—an overdose he’d been fed because he was connected to me. His near-death was a consequence an order of magnitude greater than spoiling a few rolls of film, and very public. Corning was running scared, scared enough to try to erase her tracks, starting with pulling the tail on me. Good. I would let her stew in her own juices another day or so. Fear would do my work for me.