Graveland: A Novel (28 page)

The only problem is, that will mean going back up to Atherton, and he isn’t ready to do that yet.

After a while, a thought strikes him.

Who did Ellen Dorsey meet when she was up there? What, if anything, did she find out? She told him some stuff in that bar, but he can’t remember any of the details. And in the car on the way down here,
he
did most of the talking.

He slides over and sits on the side of the bed.

What does she know? What can she tell him?

*   *   *

It’s early evening, neither of them particularly wants a drink, so they meet in a diner. It’s on Ninth Avenue between Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth, a real dive, but Ellen knows the owner, the food is actually good, and they won’t be disturbed.

“What can I get you?”

Frank looks up at the waitress with something like mild panic in his eyes. It’s as if he’s never been in this situation before and he doesn’t know what to do.

“Er…”

He drums his fingers on the table.

Ellen studies him. He looks awful. Tired, pale, shaky. It occurs to her that he probably hasn’t slept or eaten much in the last couple of days.

“The grilled chicken sandwich is good,” she says, to move things along, and on the basis that a grilled chicken sandwich will more than likely fit the bill.

He nods.

“Two, please,” Ellen says to the waitress. “And an iced tea.” She looks at Frank again, and he nods again. “Two.”

They surrender their menus.

The place is nearly empty. They have a booth by the window, looking out onto Ninth.

“Thanks for agreeing to see me.”

“No problem.”

He explained to her on the phone that obviously things had changed since the previous time they’d spoken, that the help he’d needed then was not the help he needed now. That what he needed
now
was just to ask her a few questions.

Fine by her.

On the way down here she tried to anticipate what those questions might be, but she couldn’t really settle on anything. What did he expect from her? As soon as he starts, though, it all begins to make sense. He talks for five minutes straight, articulately, and through his obvious exhaustion, and
pain,
mapping out in detail what he refers to, with sphincter-grinding restraint, as his “dilemma.”

His need to understand before he can grieve.

Their food and iced teas arrive. The waitress distributes plates and glasses. They murmur their thanks.

Ellen welcomes the brief interval.

She’s curious. Frank hasn’t actually asked his questions yet, even though it’s clear to her now what they will be. But the thing she’s wondering is, doesn’t he have anyone else to talk to? She gets it about the ex-wife. But doesn’t he have any friends he can confide in, the way he’s just confided in her? She’s good at talking to people, at getting them to open up to her, she knows that, but this is hardcore.

Reaching for his iced tea, Frank looks at her, and it’s as if he can hear what she’s thinking.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“For what?”

“This. The long preamble. I haven’t really been able to
talk
to anyone. Since the other day.” He sips the tea. “It’s funny, you know. When I was working—as an architect, I mean—all my friends were architects, or in that world, and when you lose that, the work, when you get kicked out on your ass, you lose the friends as well. No one wants to get infected. And hanging out with other people who got canned isn’t much of an option either.”

She nods along. “I know. It’s more or less the same with journalism. I’ve seen it happen.”

“Yeah. So. Anyway.” He puts the glass down. “Here’s the thing. That’s not my daughter I’ve been reading about for the last two days. Political activist? Militant?” He shakes his head. “Lizzie was a bright kid, but she … I never once…” He seems reluctant to pin it down. “She wasn’t interested in politics.”

“Maybe so,” Ellen says, “but this was a lot more than politics. Plus, she was at college. Shit happens at college. People change, they get into stuff.”

“I know. I know. But—” He looks out the window, and then back at Ellen. “That’s what I wanted to ask you. Who you spoke to up there, what you heard, if you met anyone or saw anything. I know you told me some of this stuff at that bar, but I wasn’t exactly at my most focused.”

She thinks about this for a moment. The thing is, Ellen’s understanding of what happened is that Lizzie became central to events only when she spoke to the negotiator. Up to then it was all about the Coadys. They were the ones who carried out the shootings, who had a backstory and a supposed motive. Lizzie was just the girlfriend. She barely figured. But then she spoke, she read out those demands—this girl, this
kid
—and suddenly the story lit up like a fucking pinball machine … out here, in the media, but maybe
in there
as well, in the apartment. Maybe Lizzie’s real involvement started right at that point, when she answered the phone, and once she
got
involved there was no route back. Once she voiced those demands, it was an easy next step to picking up the gun and pulling the trigger. Though why she was the one who answered the phone in the first place, and read out the demands, is—and probably forever will remain—a mystery.

But is that what Frank Bishop wants to hear?

Probably not.

In any case, it’s only a theory—pieced together from her conversations with Val Brady and others, from what she’s read and from her general feel for these things, her instincts as a journalist.

And she may be wrong about all of it.

Besides, he didn’t ask for her opinion.

“Well,” she says, deciding to simply lay out the facts for him, “I did speak to a few people at Atherton. But remember, when I went there I didn’t have any names, and Lizzie’s only came up at the very end, which is why I went chasing after you.” She stops and glances for a second down at her grilled chicken sandwich. “It was what I found in the library, and in the archives, that led me to Julian Coady’s name. And this was stuff that more or less underpinned what they were about, what they
did
. In an ideological sense.”

Frank looks at her. “Ideological?
Really?
”

“Well … yeah.” Ellen is aware that a lot of the big-name protest groups have been dissociating themselves from anything to do with the Coadys and Lizzie Bishop, almost as if the whole thing were an embarrassment to them. Much has been made—in certain quarters—of the list of demands and how naive, or generic, or even just derivative, it was. But actually, on reflection, there was nothing that Ellen came across in the
Atherton Chronicle
pieces, in the radio interviews, in the opinions expressed on the
Stone Report
or by Farley Kaplan, that was in any way inconsistent with mainstream activist thought. The only dividing line—apart maybe from tone, and register, and levels of paranoia—was the question of whether or not the use of violence could be justified, and
that
question was as old as the hills. She turns and looks out the window, at a passing limo, a black streak of light on the avenue. “I don’t know,” she then says. “They certainly put a lot of thought into what they were doing.”

“They?”

Ellen hesitates, then picks up her sandwich and takes a bite out of it.

“Yes,” she says, chewing and nodding. “Look, there were three of them. They were in that apartment together, and for a
week
. During which time two, nearly three, assassinations were carried out. That didn’t just happen. They talked about this stuff, they planned it. And probably for months.” She puts her sandwich back on the plate, realizing that she’s straying here from hard fact, drifting back to opinion. But it’s difficult not to do. “Alex and Lizzie were a couple, Frank. And Alex and Julian were brothers. In and out of each other’s lives. However misguided it was, what they did was planned. It also didn’t come out of thin air, it was based on … stuff they were exposed to. Ideological stuff. They weren’t just going around shooting people randomly. This was a program.”

“What do you mean?”

Ellen pauses, thinking. She picks up a french fry.

Dips it in ketchup.

He’s staring at her, waiting.

In all the coverage of the shootings she’s read, seen, or heard, the victims have been referred to simply as Wall Street bankers—they’ve been lumped together into one easily identifiable, monolithic group.

But—

Her
coverage, if she’d gotten to do any, would have been more specific, more nuanced.

“What do I mean?” she says. “They had a program worked out. Of assassinations. They weren’t just randomly shooting bankers. They wanted one from each of the three pillars of the system … one guy from an investment bank, one guy from a hedge fund, and one guy from a private equity firm. They got two and narrowly missed the third, the private equity guy.”

She pops the french fry into her mouth.

Frank continues staring at her. She wants to nod at his chicken sandwich and say,
Come on, eat up,
but the moment isn’t right.

“How do you know this?” he says quietly. “Are you guessing?”

“No.”

She’s guessing to
some
degree—about the dynamics in the apartment, about what went on between Julian and Alex and Lizzie. But she’s not guessing about their overall plan. She explains to Frank about ath900 and Farley Kaplan’s interview on
What Up?

He seems stunned. It’s a level of detail he hasn’t heard from anyone else.

“The cops,” he says, “the authorities, the FBI, they’ve all been really cagey about telling us
anything
.”

“That’s pretty normal, I’m afraid. But this is stuff I came across by myself.” She picks up her iced tea and takes a sip. “The FBI possibly doesn’t even know any of this yet. They came to the case by a different route. They had an informant, apparently. Inside the group Julian was associated with. We just happened to converge.”

There’s a lengthy silence here, during which Frank, head down, seems to be processing what Ellen has told him.

“Come on,” she says, taking her chances. “Eat up.”

He glances at the sandwich, and shrugs.

“You look like shit, Frank. If you don’t take care of yourself you’re going to get sick.”

He raises his head. “The private equity guy?”

“Yeah?” She gives a quick, puzzled shake of her head. “What about him? Scott Lebrecht. Black Vine Partners. The one that got away.”

“Black Vine Partners. What do
they
do?”

Ellen is the one who shrugs this time.

“I don’t know. Private equity. LBOs. Asset stripping. They buy companies with debt, fire the employees, dump their pension funds, suck all the cash out, and then … skedaddle. It’s not how
they’d
portray it, but…”

There is another silence. She studies his face, his eyes. He’s lost in thought.

She nudges his plate across the table, just an inch or so.

“Don’t want to sound like your mother, Frank, but Jesus,
eat
something, will you?”

He looks at her, then nods. “Yeah, okay.” He lifts the sandwich up off the plate and takes a bite.

She does the same.

They eat in silence for a while, chewing solemnly, gazing out at the passing traffic on Ninth Avenue.

*   *   *

The next morning, Howley has his meeting with the producer from Bloomberg, and they set things up for late on Friday afternoon. It’ll be a wide-ranging interview with, by agreement, no holds barred, but no real surprises either. He intends to mount a general and fairly robust defense of private equity, he’ll talk up some deals that are in the pipeline, and he’ll lay out his position vis-à-vis any prospect there might be of an IPO. He’s done TV before and knows what they want, knows what tone to adopt. He’s not one of the flamboyant guys, he’s not charismatic, so it’ll be a question of slipping his message in under a cloak of unprepossessing middle-aged baldness and cautious, dense, meandering syntax.

It’s a reflex thing, but Howley feels he should be running all of this by Vaughan. He’s not going to, of course. They’ve moved beyond that—or, at any rate, are in the process of doing so.

Apropos of which, lunch with Paul Blanford yesterday proved to be very interesting. Howley knew Paul years ago through a Pentagon connection, and although they hadn’t been friends exactly or done any formal business together, enough of a mutual impression remained for Howley to be able to get Blanford’s attention and then bear down fairly heavily on him. The fact that Oberon once owned Eiben-Chemcorp certainly made things easier—but without the personal link Howley wouldn’t have been able to cut
quite
as straight to the chase with Blanford as he did. He circled the issue for a while and then dived in by expressing “deep concern” about a possible breach of protocols at Eiben that had just been brought to his attention. It was in relation to a particular set of clinical trials, he said, and this was especially worrying in the light of a recent DOJ investigation into how pharmaceutical companies were carrying out these very sorts of trials.

Blanford was dumbfounded and wanted to know more. He wanted to know exactly what Howley was talking about.

Howley wasn’t about to oblige at this point, but what he did was remind Blanford that Eiben-Chemcorp was no stranger to this kind of thing. There were various instances he could have cited here, most of them taking place long before Blanford’s time. In the early days of Triburbazine, for example, there was a damaging product liability trial involving a Massachusetts teenager who murdered her best friend and then killed herself; there was the botched takeover of Mediflux amid allegations of research results being suppressed; and there was the more recent scandal of widespread résumé fraud by a CRO hired by Eiben. But what Howley chose to cite instead was something he himself had read about just days earlier in Vaughan’s “black file”—those disturbing rumors from about ten years ago of a so-called smart drug called MDT-48 being leaked onto the streets with rather alarming consequences. The reason Vaughan had brought this story, among others, to Howley’s attention was to illustrate what a bad idea going public would be. Back then the Oberon Capital Group had sold Eiben-Chemcorp in the full knowledge that these rumors were about to break, and had then brazenly shorted the buyer’s stock—hardly the kind of trading practices that would bear much public scrutiny.