The Fate Merchant

Chapter 17

Chapter 17

     Frank closed and locked his office door, rounded his desk, and dropped into his chair. The springs creaked under the sudden weight. It was three-thirty in the afternoon, only six and a half hours since he’d gathered everyone in the conference room and told them that Barry Watts had been murdered the night before. Six and a half hours since the gasps and the crying and the questions had started.

     “What?!”

     “Oh my God!!!”

     “You saw him?”

     “How did it happen?”

     “What did the police say?”

     “Where’s Gleason?”

     It was that last question that had quieted the room: two words, loud and clear, cutting through the babble, snuffing it out like a blanket on flame. Heads had turned toward Roy Harper standing with his arms crossed at the back of the room, his eyebrows arched, his face innocent and tinged with concern. “Anybody seen Arnold?”

     Frank had wanted to point at Roy Harper/Paul Hyatt. He wanted to shout: Tell us where you were last night. Tell everyone how you caused that mall to collapse, how you changed your name, and Barry found out, so you sliced his guts and left him to bleed out on his kitchen floor, you sick son-of-a-bitch.

     How was he supposed to address him, anyway? Roy? Paul? He settled on Paul -- there was something about calling him Roy that gave him the feeling that he was complicit in the lie. A greasy, nauseating feeling that made him want to take a shower.

     But he hadn’t said anything. He’d choked down the impulse. It hadn’t been the time to point fingers. And he had to admit that the question had been a good one. Where was Arnold Gleason? He was normally at his desk, without fail, no later than 7am: first one in, last one out.

     Frank had arrived at 7:15, the pent up energy from the previous night’s discovery propelling him through the early morning stillness of an office whose employees rarely showed up before eight. He’d marched up to Arnold’s office and knocked.

     He knocked a second time.

     And a third.

     He tried Arnold on his cell phone. The call had gone straight to voice mail.

     At eight, he spoke with Carol Green, Arnold’s assistant, a forty-five year old brunette who Frank suspected had come out of the womb with a day planner in one hand and a stack of Post-it notes in the other.

     She checked her watch, and then checked her calendar, fearing she’d missed something. “His morning’s free,” she said, tapping her bottom lip with the nail of an index finger. She frowned at the calendar in the way one might frown at an old friend displaying the first vague signs of senility. “He should be here.”