I slept the rest of the day away. When I woke in the evening, Lotty brought me a bowl of her homemade lentil soup. I lay in her guest room, luxuriating in the clean room, the clean clothes, the peace of her loving care.
It wasn’t until the next morning that she showed me Marcena’s red recording pen. “I took your foul clothes to the laundry, my dear, and found this inside. I assumed you want to keep it?”
I couldn’t believe it had still been on my body after all I’d gone through—or that Bysen and Grobian hadn’t found it when they had me unconscious and in their power. I snatched it from her. “My God, yes, I want this.”
47
Office Party
“If the shock gives him a stroke and kills him, I’ll be singing at his funeral.”
William’s thin fussy voice hung like a smear of soot in my office. Buffalo Bill’s full cheeks were sunken. His eyes under their heavy brows were pale, watery, the uncertain eyes of a feeble old man, not the fierce eagle stare of the corporate dictator.
“You hear that, May Irene? He wants me dead? My own son wants me dead?”
His wife leaned across my coffee table to pat his hand. “We were too hard on him, Bill. He never could be as tough as you wanted him to be.”
“I was too hard on him, so that means it’s all right that he wants me dead?” His astonishment brought some of the color back into his face. “Since when did you sign up for that liberal swill, spare the rod, spoil the child?”
“I don’t think Mrs. Bysen meant that,” Mildred murmured.
“Mildred, for once, you let me speak for myself. Don’t go interpreting me to my own husband, for heaven’s sake. We’ve all heard the tape that Ms. Warshawski played; I think we can agree it’s a sad chapter in our family life, but we are a family, we are strong, we will move past this. Linus has kept it out of the papers, bless him”—she directed a grateful look at the corporate counsel, sitting in one of the side chairs—“and I’m sure he’ll help us work out an arrangement with Ms. Warshawski here.”
I leaned back in my armchair. I was still tired, still sore around the arm sockets from having my arms lashed behind me for two hours. I had a couple of broken ribs, and my body still looked like a field of ripe eggplants, but I felt wonderful—clean, newborn, that euphoric sense you get when you know you’re truly alive.
By the time Lotty came on the little recording pen, its battery was dead. She wouldn’t let me leave her place to get a charger, but when I explained why I was so desperate to listen to it she relented enough to let Amy Blount bring my laptop over. When I hooked it up to my iBook, it sprang obediently to life and spilled its digital guts for me.
Thursday night at the warehouse, there had actually still been enough juice in it that it had recorded William, Grobian, and Jacqui. Grobian’s shot at me echoed horrifyingly through Lotty’s living room, followed by a satisfied exclamation from William that I hadn’t heard at the time. The pen had died on the way from the landfill to the hospital; it only gave me part of Grobian’s and William’s quarrel, but I got enough of Grobian’s highly colored language that I could really grow my vocabulary if I replayed it a few times.
After we downloaded it to my Mac, I asked Amy to make about thirty copies: I wanted to ensure they were spread far and wide, so that even the best efforts of Linus Rankin, or the Carnifice detectives, couldn’t eliminate them all. I sent a bunch to my own lawyer, Freeman Carter, put some in my office safe, sent one to Conrad and another to a senior police officer who was a friend of my dad’s, and, after debating it up and down with Amy and Morrell, finally sent one to Murray Ryerson at the Herald-Star. Murray was madly trying to persuade his bosses to let him go up against the Bysen money and power; whether they’d ever let him dig into the story was still up in the air.
In the meantime, the recording so bolstered my story that it forced the state’s attorney—nervous about going up against Bysen money and power—into motion. Grobian and William had been charged on Friday with assaulting me, but were released almost at once on I-Bonds. On Monday, though, Conrad’s team arrested them again, this time for murdering Bron.