Suicide Season Read Free Page B

keeps an eye on his investments, that’s for sure.”
    “Naw, he just wants to look after his favorite and only nephew.”
    “You tell him that when we miss a payment.”
    “I hope I never have to. Fill me in on McAllister.”
    After Loomis dropped me off last night, with a final reminder of how important this account could be toward establishing the reputation of Kirk and Associates, I spent an hour going through Haas’s personnel file and then following up with some time in the library on points that the official documents only hinted at. Of course all I found in the newspapers was what received public notice at the time—a biographical note when Haas served as a director of the United Way drive a few years back, a squib from a social column about one of his trips to the Caribbean with his attractive wife Margaret and his two lovely children Austin, Jr., and Shauna. These are little things, but they help fill in the background; and, on very rare occasions they can turn into something important. But after a lot of reading, I didn’t see how.
    “And this guy Haas is the one who did it?”
    “That’s what we’re supposed to find out. Very quietly.”
    Bunch, who couldn’t stay in one place more than five minutes when he was awake, moved to the office window and gazed down at the semis and vans and delivery cars that choked Wazee Street this time of day. “We’ll want a twenty-four-hour on Haas.”
    That meant hiring some freelancers for routine surveillance, and I began listing the p.i.’s that could be trusted to do decent work. It was a short list. “McAllister gave me permission to tap Haas’s office phone.” I spun a key across the desk to Bunch. “Here’s a pass key; might as well do it this afternoon after the offices close.”
    “How about his home phone?”
    “That too.”
    “How hard is it going to be?”
    “I’m glad you asked.”
    “That’s what I was afraid of.” Bunch began pulling on his soaked sweat shirt, the muscles of his arms knotting as he shrugged into it. “All right—I’ll check it out. You want me to go ahead and make the plant if I can?” The sleeves had been cut off, and the waist, so that the thick, hard flesh of his belly showed.
    “Yeah. McAllister might give us twenty-four hours before he starts calling about results.”
    “I never met one of those rich guys who didn’t want things done yesterday.”
    “When did you ever meet someone like McAllister?”
    “That’s what I said: I never met one.”
    He left me trying to puzzle that out. The tread of his large running shoes made the ancient floor of the remodeled warehouse creak as he started down the metal stairs. In the office above, a piano began thumping deliberately up and down the scale, its muffled chords like a final shred of summer: open windows on a hot afternoon and some kid in the neighborhood pinned under the eyes of a piano teacher. And the day outside looked like it still had some summer in it, too; the sky’s blue was bleached by heat, and the hard, cloudless glare made the worn brick of the warehouses and factories in the district seem sharp and brittle. But beneath the appearance of heat, the sun had a lower angle—a shorter intensity, a longer shadow, something that hinted at how brief these bright days would be and how soon winter would close around the city. My father had liked this time of year; it reinforced his melancholy, he said, with a sort of visual carpe diem. Then he’d apologize for being morbid. “Some people find greater happiness in being unhappy, Dev. Don’t let an old man’s self-indulgent gloom rub off on you.” But I suppose that it already had. I couldn’t remember a time since my mother’s death when I was eleven that my father hadn’t carried around the faint aroma of sadness. Even in the midst of hilarity—one of my birthdays, for example—a moment would always come, no matter how brief or secret, when his laughter had a forced note and the thought deep in his