Jake's 8 (11 page)

He gave me an annoyed look and said, “Come in, will ya? I pay for heat, you know.”

This is going to be fun, I thought.

I walked in and closed the door behind me. Mr. Sumner was already walking down the hall. After five steps, he walked into a room to his right. I stood there with my coat on. I was getting annoyed. I opened a door that all but said closet and found a hanger and hung up my coat. As I did, I heard conversation coming from the room Mr. Sumner had fled into. I took heart that it wasn’t going to be just me and this grouchy client.

I followed Mr. Sumner’s trail down the hall and around the corner and found myself in a formal living room. It was probably called the parlor when the house was first built. A brass chandelier hung over the room. It was an 1890s monster—I knew this from a few weeks I’d spent following the long, shapely legs of an architectural student. It had been retrofitted from gas to electric. I made a note of it. That would be worth ten minutes of conversational time killing.

Mr. Sumner had already sat himself. He seemed to be in a defensive crouch within a paisley, wingback armchair. He was eyeballing three other men sitting opposite him. Normally I’d be glad for the company. Three hours of Mr. Sumner alone wasn’t a pleasant thought. But these three looked like they had an ax to grind against Mr. Sumner’s skull.

“I’m sorry,” I said chirpily. “I thought it was just to be Mr. Sumner and myself tonight.”

Silence.

I turned my smile up to the Tom Cruise wattage.

Still no one spoke. Or looked to me.

So I crossed the room and stuck my hand into the chest of an ancient looking character who rested his liver-spotted right hand on a drug store aluminum cane.

“Jake Gibb. How are you?”

The man looked bothered but took my hand. He rolled his eyes as we gripped.

“Herbert Sumner,” he said. “I’m that thing’s father.” He pointed a crooked index finger with a dirty nail at my firm’s client, the supposedly haunted Henry Sumner. Since I’m a mid-westerner, hobbled by mid-western manners, I smiled in response and said nice to meet you and moved on.

The gentlemen sitting next to him was more Henry Sumner’s age. His sixty-five years made him at least thirty years younger than the first man. He beat me to the handshake.

“Ross Reinhart,” he said. “Henry and I were business partners once upon a time.” I looked back to Henry Sumner who I would have described—if he wasn’t a grown man drawing a Social Security check—as pouting and petulant.

The third man was already standing when I got to him. He had about ten years on my thirty-four but had a full head a hair that was cut in a youngish but out-of-date style.

“Rick Sumner,” he said. “I’m the son… and grandson,” he said nodding to the ancient man two chairs down. Our shared youth—at least compared to the wall of wrinkles that was sitting around the room—and his actually treating me like a human made me like him automatically.

Uninvited, I took a seat in a leather upholstered club chair wedged into a corner lined with bookcases. The leather squeaked, creaked and groaned. When I looked up all eyes except for Mr. Sumner’s were on me.

“Did I interrupt something?” I asked. “I can leave.”

“No,” said Henry Sumner in almost a shout. “You stay but throw them out,” he said waving a finger at his three guests.

“I’m an investment advisor not a bouncer, Mr. Sumner.”

Mr. Sumner started up with another shout but was cut off by his son.

“We were just having an intervention of sorts, Mr. Gibb. My father… My father is a difficult man and part of the difficulty is he can’t see how difficult he is.”

I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. It squeaked.

“My father says he’s haunted. He wants to move to escape ghosts. But the only thing that haunts him is guilt. Regrets maybe, but most assuredly guilt.”

“I’ve no guilt,” Mr. Sumner chimed in. “Regrets, either.”

His son sighed and looked down. The look on his face was of defeat. This was a conversation that had the feel of having been going for years.

“If you’ve no guilt then you’re a sociopath,” the elder Mr. Sumner said. He was trying to project his voice, but it creaked and cracked.

“Let me tell you about my son, Mr. Gibb… this client of yours,” he said. The old man’s voice was warming up. “The only regret in my life is not aborting him as soon as I knew he was in his mother’s belly. We had the option. His mother was not supposed to even conceive. She had....” He paused over a long dead-to-modern-culture sense of decorum when speaking of a woman personally. “She had internal issues. It made intimacy… ” he groped for a polite word. “Uncomfortable,” he finally said. “The doctors told us that she would never be able to have a child.”

A cast of sentiment fell over the elder Sumner’s eyes.

“She was a beautiful woman. A broad face always eager to smile. Beautiful, thick hair. A figure that made the wimpiest of men feel manly. And she laughed at my jokes.”

“And Ma had a large trust fund,” Henry Sumner piped in.

“Yes, she had a large trust fund. Women with large trust funds can be lovely none-the-less.”

The old man went on.

“Even though it was uncomfortable for her, she accommodated my needs. I was a young man still with a young man’s energy, you see. She was a good woman. Then one day I came home and she put my hand on her stomach and smiled at me and I knew. But I didn’t smile. I remembered what the doctor said. We went to him the next day and the doc suggested we end the pregnancy… that the delivery might kill them both. She would have none of it. She had faith everything would be all right. She told me so. She so wanted a child and a son in particular. She so wanted one. Me? I would have been happy to adopt. I’d already talked to the orphanage out in Campbell County. There were plenty of deserving children needing a home, but I couldn’t say no to her. So we decided to keep the child and I spoiled her for those nine months that I thought might be our last nine months together. She beamed every day of it—even through the hard, painful times. But if I had to do all over again—knowing what this son of mine would become—I would have urged her to abort and adopt.”

“You made her unhappy,” Henry Sumner piped up again.

“No. No, I didn’t. Especially not then.” The old man’s voice had become strong. “Now, shut up!”

Spittle launched out of the old man’s mouth and sprayed his shirt and pants.

“I worried and I fretted and when the day came they both survived,” he said. “She had been hurt, but the doctor said she’d be okay. And she loved her new son so much, and for a few years, I did too.”

“A few months later I went to her, but her uncomfortableness during intimacy had, by then, become unbearable pain. We didn’t speak of it, but I stopped trying. It was too much for her and after a couple of years I found relief elsewhere. We never discussed it, but there was an unspoken understanding between us. Unspoken but understood just the same.

“I built my business and she kept our home and raised this, this son. What was it Booth Tarkington wrote? He belonged, as most American children do, to the mother’s family. His mother spoiled him and her family treated him as a prince. He was the only grandson. That ruined him. It made him into a selfish, mean child who became a selfish, mean man. That or he was just born evil.”

I interrupted. “Maybe I should head home,” I said.

“You’re going nowhere,” said Henry Sumner. I gave him a look to adjust his attitude. He gave a nervous look to the other three men and made the necessary adjustment. “Stay. Please?” he asked me.

I sat back down.

“Now here’s the thing, Mr. Gibb,” said the old man. “Here’s the day that ruined my life and destroyed my wife’s—his mother’s. Somehow this creature learned of his mother’s and my understanding. He hired a private detective. A private detective who took pictures. Pictures of me with a perfectly nice woman who I cared for deeply. Her husband had similar problems and had turned to the bottle. The detective took pictures of this perfectly nice woman and me having dinner at The L&N Steakhouse. Pictures of us sharing an ice cream on Fountain Square. And pictures from a room on the seventh floor of one hotel into the room on the seventh floor of another hotel. Pictures of me and this perfectly respectability woman being intimate.”

“He was twenty-one, mind you. Twenty-one and hiring detectives to follow his father.”

“You were cheating on Ma.”

“We had an understanding,” the old man said. “And you didn’t just tell her about it. You showed the pictures to your mother. Pictures. You didn’t leave her with the soft knowledge a wife has, but you rubbed her nose in the hard evidence. Then you showed her father and her brothers and their lawyers.”

The old man was in a rage but was held to the chair by his age. His nostrils were flaring and what chest he still had was heaving.

“They pressured her into divorcing me, Mr. Gibb. We had made happiness out of our lot. Maybe she could have overcome seeing the pictures. I doubt it. Maybe. But not the pressure her father put on her. Or the pressure her brothers put on her. And definitely not the pressure our son put on her.”

“And you were out. Out of the family. Out of the trust fund,” Henry Sumner shouted at his father.

“Yes, I was out. I was out of a marriage that I treasured while you became the sole beneficiary of your mother’s trust fund.”

I looked to Henry Sumner glaring at his father. On hearing those last words, I swear that he sat back into his paisley, wingback armchair with an expression of smug satisfaction. I was stunned into silence.

Then there was a faint laugh. It was Mr. Reinhart.

“I guess I shouldn’t complain too much then. All he did was steal my business. Or at least my half of the business.”

“You were bad at business,” Mr. Sumner said.

“No,” Mr. Reinhart said. “I was bad at picking business partners.”

Mr. Reinhart then turned to me. “Mr. Gibb, you work with Mr. Carmichael. You trust him?”

“I don’t work with Mr. Carmichael,” I said. “I work for him.”

“But you trust him?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Implicitly?”

I gave it a moments thought then nodded yes.

“I did too. I trusted this man,” he said pointing to Henry Sumner. “We were in that building out on the Double A highway, together six days a week, twelve hours a day for twenty years. Extruded plastics. I was the engineer and could build anything clients wanted. I ran that shop floor. I helped our customers. I trusted him to do the bookkeeping and the accounting but mostly the sales. We made good money. We were building something wonderful.

“Something wonderful,” he repeated. “And then it all went to hell.

“I knew something was wrong early one week. My partner here didn’t show up on Monday and I couldn’t get a hold of him. Then Tuesday I got to work and all kinds of files were gone. Then on Wednesday there were padlocks on the building and a sheriff looking for taxes and a bank representative looking for a mortgage payoff and seventeen employees holding bad paychecks.

“My partner over there—the good businessman—had set up this complicated structure. He’d fudged the books, he’d skimped and cheated and protected himself quite well. When the whole house of cards fell he was walled off behind shell companies or dummy corporations or whatever it is they’re called.

“Twenty year’s work gone in a matter of days.

“I tried to dig myself out of it. But the debts were too big and I was too tired by then. I drank too much. My wife had to quit her clubs and then she had to get a job and we had to downsize. My daughter had to quit Brown and enroll in at U.C.”

That last tidbit struck a little too close to home. I was wanting to thump my client along with the other three men.

“I guess my family wasn’t as strong as I thought it was. My wife finally threw in the towel. My daughter’s soft, pretty face became hard as she saw all her friends back east move on with the help of rich daddies, and she was working for some grimy little shop to pay off student loans. My son—he was sixteen at the time—he got pulled from the City Day School and tossed into a swamp of a public school. He never seemed to recover from that.”

“See,” Mr. Sumner interjected suddenly. “You just said it. Your family wasn’t as strong as you thought it was. Don’t lay all this on me.”

“You struck the match, Henry. You started the fire. You overstressed us and we collapsed. Maybe we shouldn’t have, but maybe we wouldn’t have without your help.”

I noticed my throat was dry and my nerves were fraying. A bottle of Pappy Van Winkle was giving me the come hither look, but from what I was hearing about Mr. Sumner, he seemed the type to drink the Pappy himself and fill the empty with Ancient Age. No matter. Even Ancient Age would be all right tonight. I was about to reach for the bottle when Henry Sumner started up.

“So what’s your gripe,” he said to his son.

“You know my gripe.”

“Your mother?”

“Your wife.”

“I never beat her.”

“Is that a brag?”

“She had it okay.”

“She was a sensitive woman, Dad. Nervous. She wasn’t strong. Instead of caring for and supporting her, you used it against her. You were worse than hateful to her. You were indifferent. You nurtured that kernel of doubt she held that she was worthless. You watered it by coming home smelling of your whores. You fertilized it with neglect. You saw her wither and I swear to god you enjoyed watching it.”