Payback: A Novel

By Sam Stewart

Someone’s poisoning an artificial sweetener and people across the country are dying at random. It’s part of a plot to get back at Bob Mitchell, the company’s president, a decorated war hero trailed by a past, whose secrets, if exposed, could blow up his future. The police have nothing, the body count’s nine, and Mitchell’s got four days to track down the killer or the man kills and again explodes Mitchell’s life.
 
From Hollywood, where death is just the hook for a movie, to Switzerland, where sex is just a numbered account, Mitchell’s hunt leads him to a shattering discovery, a long lost lover, and a battle as ferocious as any in the war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504009256

Book preview

OPENERS

Mitchell had a small beach house in Baja, not far from La Paz, on the Gulf of California. He’d bought it fifteen years ago under the false name of Julian Sorel and he’d paid for it in cash—two hundred and fifty thousand pesos, or just about twenty thousand dollars, U.S.

Under the floorboards, nailed down neatly—in high school he’d always had a talent for shop—was a Mosler strongbox with ten thousand dollars, most of it in well-worn twenties and tens. He could have made it livelier than ten thousand dollars but his own inescapable sense of morality had kept it as it was. His planning had been vague. If he ever had to take it and run like a fugitive, the money, he figured, was a running start but he’d have to come up with the finale on his own. He considered that fair and, with sensible precautions, went on about his life.

His thought about disaster: If it happens, it happens. You could live with your weather eye cocked to the horizon, you could look for indications of disaster in the air, but the chances were the fucker had a mean sense of humor and would just come winging out of ordinary blue.

When Mitchell got awakened that Saturday morning—he would always remember it—the sky had been blue.

***

They sat at the counter of a Greek coffee shop on West 57th. They were waiting out the rain. They were both in their twenties, the girl in a khaki duffle coat opened to a fisherman’s sweater. She was blond, like the man. They were sitting very close in a kind of conspiracy of youth and good looks.

The girl said, I think we ought to go for the last one.

The man cocked his head. He had very blue eyes. He said, "Are you kidding? It was seventeen hundred."

But consider the view.

He laughed. The apartment had been next to a garage. He nodded. "The only apartment in Manhattan with a living room directly overlooking Detroit.—Jesus. The waiter had delivered the coffee. The man said, You’re absolutely certain it’s decaf?"

The waiter said, Certain.

The man pushed his rimless glasses down his nose. "Well … okay. But if isn’t, he threatened, I’ll call you up at four in the morning and complain."

The waiter said, Funny, though it actually was. He moved down the counter and lit a cigarette.

The girl said, … sugar bowl.

The guy said something inaudible; smiled.

The girl leaned over and suddenly kissed him on the tip of his ear, then whispered, I love you.

Love in the eighties. He shook his head sadly. All you need is eighty million dollars for a pad.

We’ll manage.

I know.—Drink up, he said quickly. And I’d like you to seriously think about the Bronx.

It was Saturday morning and a lull in the rush. The waiter had stood around leaning on the counter. The waiter had overheard everything they said and would subsequently tell it to the Post and the News and to several squadrons of Manhattan detectives.

But none of that would happen till Tuesday afternoon and by then he’d forgotten almost anything important. He could only remember that the victim was cute, and the guy she’d been sitting with was scared about the coffee. He added: I guess he didn’t sleep much anyway. I mean, that night.

***

The actress was stricken with the full-blown fury of a clothes tantrum. She stood in her bedroom at seven in the morning surrounded by every single article she owned, or every single article remotely appropriate for nine o’clock breakfast at the Beverly Hills. On the floor, on the bed, hurled and crumpled in utter frustration, were fourteen blouses and thirteen skirts, seven pairs of shoes, and a riotous selection of jewelry and belts.

The actress was standing there glaring at the mess, hating her wardrobe, hating her body, hating herself.

She could see it in the mirror. She could see something else: She was not beautiful when she was angry. This would not work out. The first thing she had to do was relax.

Breathe, she told herself. Deep.… Slow.… When you met a producer, you had to be calm. She had to, she told herself sternly, be calm. She had to come on like a young Joan Collins, it said in the script—brimming with confidence and acting like she didn’t give a shit about the job.

She stood there for a moment absorbing her thought and then suddenly, dazzlingly, smiled in relief. That was the answer then, wasn’t it, she thought. Acting. She would simply sit there and act. She would act like an actress who was bursting with confidence and didn’t give a shit. That, she could do.

She moved down the hall. In the kitchen she fixed herself a small pot of coffee and a thin slice of toast. She would sit there quietly. She’d have a little coffee, she’d have a little toast … and how about possibly the yellow Armani with the blue silk sweater and forget about the belt.

Setting the coffee on the living room table, she went to the handbag she’d used last night, took out the sweetener she’d stolen from the restaurant, and settled on the couch. She ate a little toast; she drank a little coffee.

***

The producer waited for exactly an hour in the Loggia Restaurant. Nobody showed. Then he thought, maybe she’s too Joan Collins, and waggled for the check.

***

Mitchell had breakfast in the dusty little city of Consuela, Guatemala. It had taken him three hours to get there over terrible roads. He didn’t want to be there but he couldn’t insult an entire little city. On the other hand, he wasn’t about to wear a suit. He’d arrived in Consuela in a sleeveless T-shirt, a faded pair of jeans. The weather was stunning. Eleven in the morning, the humidity and temperature were locked into a race—trying to beat each other to 100 and giving it their best. They arrived, dead heat, at a quarter after twelve while Mitchell was standing in the local zocalo—the public square. The town of Consuela was giving him a medal. The town had to deal with this elation outdoors because the only suitable municipal buildings had been razed by an earthquake—everything fell and everything else had been pounded by a flood, and Mitchell had responded with a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of antibiotics. Mitchell was receiving a small silver medal. He figured he ought to get a large silver medal for the stamina and fortitude of standing there receiving the small silver medal.

A local photographer wanted his picture but Mitchell made a gesture at his clothes and said no.

***

The woman said softly, I don’t understand you.

The man made a face. He said, Understanding is overrated, and motioned for the waiter. You want some dessert?

Just coffee.

Two coffees, he said to the waiter, who nodded.

Was it all satisfactory, sir?

Except the conversation.

The waiter looked embarrassed. He managed a gentlemanly shrug and went off.

Nice touch, the woman said.

He looked at her. I’m just getting tired of explaining—

—the gypsy in your soul?

My decision, he said.

Oh for God’s sake, Harry. It’s male menopause. You woke up, forty, and discovered you’d never won the Pulitzer Prize or the Nobel Peace Prize or—

A fight with my wife …?

She laughed at that one. Well … like the saying: lose a few, lose a few. She glanced through the window. I just don’t understand why you want to leave Manhattan when—

Look. I want to live in Hawaii, that’s all.

"Oh no. You want to think you want to live in Hawaii. You don’t even think it, Harry. You just want to. I mean, face it. You are urban."

He sighed.

The waiter came back with the coffee.

The woman said, Why don’t you take a leave of absence. You want to, we can rent a little villa on the beach, but for God’s sakes, darling, don’t quit your job.

He stared at the coffee. You mean that? You’d try it for a couple of months?

Absolutely, she said, figuring he’d possibly last about a week, or until he got seven mosquito bites. Skoal, she said, lifting her cup to him.

Prosit.

***

The man arrived at County General Emergency in general acute tetanic convulsion. The intern, an overworked kid named Pakula, was surprised at the total far-outness of the fit, which appeared to be a testament to living rigor mortis. The stiff, he reported, was amazingly, almost catatonically stiff. The only time he’d ever seen a body like that—or at any rate a body that wasn’t in a morgue—it was needle-head junkie; a bozo with the needle still frozen in his fist. He even remembered what the poison was, too. A designer concoction. Synthetic smack. Except this would be different. Figure: To begin with, the victim was old—a neat, very clean, kind of chubby old man—like the guy that played Santa Claus: Edmund Gwenn. He didn’t have arms like the Southern Pacific and besides, he’d been stricken in a Taco Charlie’s on the Hollywood Strip. So Pakula said nothing, or at least he said nothing for the hospital record, and by that time the body had relaxed into death. On the other hand, he almost got chatty with the cop. A wiry-haired fellow from Hollywood Metro. But then, on the other hand, Pakula was hungry. He hadn’t had breakfast and he hadn’t had lunch and if he didn’t take a break now, he wouldn’t have coffee and he’d crumble on his feet. So the cop said, Amigo. You got any theories? and Pakula shook his head.

***

Mitchell went over to meet Leo’s plane at L’Aurora Airport on the steamy outskirts of Guatemala City. He got there at three.

Mitchell had a couple of salty margaritas at the airport bar while Leo sat stoically and smoked a cigar. Leo was firm—refusing to eat, drink, or be merry with absolutely anything south of the border. Leo had arrived with a smoked turkey sandwich from the Beverly Wilshire, a can of pâté, a box of Granola, and a bag of Famous Amos.

Mitchell took Leo over to the factory he’d built at Las Flores and took him on a tour, pointing at the vats that would hold the penicillin, the machinery for spitting out the painkillers, heart drugs, and anti-infectives.

Leo walked around eating Amos’s cookies.

Leo said, You make something here for a penny, export it to the States, you can sell it for a quarter, you can beat the competition, you can still make a pile.

Leo said, Shrewd.

Mitchell said no. Mitchell said, I make something here for a penny, I can sell it here for something like three-for-a-nickel. I can still make a profit and I’m giving the people here some high-grade medicine at tabs they can pay.

Leo looked around at the concrete evidence of Mitchell’s perversity.

Leo said, Schmuck.

***

The surfer had brought a little picnic to the beach. At a quarter after three he conceded he was hungry and forced himself over to a blanket on the sand. The beach was deserted. It was, he’d decided, a day for professionals, the hard-core neck-riskers ready for the risk—sixty-degree air, thirty-degree water, but the California breakers had been rolling like a dream.

The surfer kept grinning. He huddled in his sweatshirt, back to the wind, blanket wrapped around him; his teeth chattered slightly on the corners of his grin. He poured a little coffee from his Scotch-plaid Thermos and suddenly and happily lifted it in toast. He thought: To the entire Pacific Ocean. He thought, patriotically: Long may she wave.

He sipped at his coffee and registered a momentary flicker of alarm. A split second later and the surfer was dead before he knew what had hit him, his hard young body just a relic in the sand.

Nobody found him till the following morning—a sunny Sunday—a day when the amateurs flooded to the beach, and by that time he’d stiffened into true rigor mortis, his face in a grimace, his fists in a ball.

Nobody came upon the pale yellow packet that was crumpled and wadded and waiting in his hand.

That wouldn’t happen till the middle of the night.

***

By Sunday at breakfast, the actual body count was still only five.

***

Mitchell, that morning, was sitting on the terrace of a three-star hotel room in Guatemala City. The woman in his bedroom, sulking on his bed, was from Venice, she’d told him, as in Venice, California. She was here buying Indian boleros for Saks. She’d said it with irony; the girl wasn’t dumb and in fact was pretty smart. She was also attractive—good body, good company, good vibes, good in bed, but she seemed to think something here was leading to a future. A couple of sentences that started with, And maybe when we get to L.A.…

Mitchell’d said Maybe, and ambled to the terrace. The terrace was surrounded by large leafy hedges and he sat in his jockey shorts, lighting up a cigarette and staring at the ground.

He was thinking that any other man in his position would at least stop to wonder if he might fall in love, but he knew himself well; knew that if he tried it, he could go through the motions but he couldn’t go the mile.

The girl came out to him, shrugging philosophically and stripping off her gown.

Might as well get myself a good even tan, she said cheerfully, and sprawled on the green-and-white canvas recliner.

He looked at her body now. Laid out in state. He knew what she was doing.

She said to him, Just because it’s one of those things doesn’t mean we stop fucking, though—does it?

He sighed. It made him unhappy to have made her unhappy. She wasn’t a girl who would have said that before. He shrugged. You just told me how you want to get a tan.

She said, And I do, and then looked at him with anger. But I don’t believe you cast any shadows, she said.

***

Later, he’d think of it and wonder if the line had been a prophesy, a curse, or just a statement of the facts.…

***

At a little after sundown, the actress’s body was found, half-naked, on the living-room sofa, a packet of brand name artificial sweetener apparent on the floor.

The end was in sight.

CAT

1

Mitchell was yawning as they got off the plane and said he wasn’t in the mood for any Hollywood party.

Leo said, It isn’t any Hollywood party, it’s in Laurel Canyon. It’s a Laurel party. Then he said, Why am I apologizing for it, it’s a Hollywood party. Guy who’s giving it’s a hotshot producer. Leo hit the ramp and shifted his suitcase. You know what he makes?

Yeah, Mitchell said. Terrible movies.

Right, Leo said. Two mil a year. He looked up at Mitchell who was dealing with a large elaborate yawn. Leo said, You better watch that, you know. I’m not kidding. Any day now, it’s nineteen-forty-seven. There’ll be Un-California Activities Committees. And you know what’ll happen? They’ll take away your license. They’ll call me as a witness and to save my own ass I gotta tell ’em: ‘Your Honor, he is unpatriotic. A man who’s been living in the star-studded banner and he doesn’t like stars.’

Mitchell glanced over. Or studs, Mitchell said.

Leo just laughed. Leo was sixty and a champion black belt in public relations, an éminence grise in an area where everybody else was under thirty or died trying. Leo made out. He was trim, incredibly furrowed, but tan.

They moved through the terminal and threaded through the crowd. Mitchell thinking only of a long hot shower and a long cold beer. Maybe a Sunday night television movie. Fall asleep to it.

Leo said, Quarter of seven.—Have you got any bags?

I don’t know, Mitchell said. I worry. Any airport that calls itself LAX …

You’re funny, Leo said. So I’ll meet you at the entrance. In the meanwhile, you’ll possibly contemplate your sins.

I doubt it, Mitchell said.

He lit a cigarette now and paced around the floor. Waiting for three weeks of sweated-in clothes, bottle of tequila, Indian belt. The trip to Guatemala had gone pretty well, the factory was geared up and ready for production, and he hadn’t gone down there and acted like a gringo-imperialist ass, so he felt a little mellow; patient. He was moving to a Mexican beat.

So was the baggage.

Leo at the entrance, leaning on the hood now and smoking a cigar, looking arrows at his watch. Leo had a stretched-out silver Mercedes and a tall black chauffeur. Leo once told him, If I were what I ate I’d be a Maalox tablet but luckily in Hollywood you are what you drive.

The car had everything. Television, telephone, tape deck and a bar.

And a blonde. She was sitting in the corner in a sable. Blank; a showgirl with Midwestern eyes; about thirty. Leo slid over on the seat. Putting his hand over Mitchell’s shoulder, he said to the lady, Now you see this face? You’ll forget you ever saw it and remember what you said about mature older men.

The girl said to Leo, I think he’s mature, and to Mitchell, I’m Debbie.

Mitchell said, Debbie, it’s very nice to meet you.

Leo said, Handsome, polite, but an ass. As in stubborn. Leo grinned. I’m continuing my lecture.

Mitchell said nothing, yawning now, leaning his back against the leather, watching the taillights zoom along the road. Leo had to talk. Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly.

Leo said, The deal in Guatemala—okay. Like I told you this morning, you might break even. Chalk it up to P.R. You want to bring low-cost drugs to the peasants— He turned back to Debbie. Pharmaceuticals, he said. This guy runs a pharmaceutical company. In case you turn out to be an undercover cop. He turned back to Mitchell. Where was I?

You were telling me to cut out the research.

Exactly, Leo said. You want to deal with reality, the research has to go. You have to understand this. Stockholders tend to be short-term thinkers. What they want is their dividends. They want another Ralph Lauren shirt. They want it now, and they don’t give a shit about paralyzed veterans or Guatemalan peasants. They don’t even know where Guatemala is but they know where Saks is. You follow what I’m saying? Mitchell said nothing. Leo said to Debbie now, Where’s Guatemala?

Debbie gave it thought and said, Where you just were?

Case rests, Leo said.

Mitchell watched some taillights zooming for a while. Then he said, Yeah, but does she own any stock. Debbie? Do you own any Tate Pharmaceuticals?

Do I? Debbie asked.

You do in a manner of speaking, Leo said. It’s the one that makes the artificial sweetener.

Oh.—Good, Debbie said.

Case rests, Mitchell added, and thought he had it wrapped because Leo was actually silent for a second.

Mitchell watched a Bentley passing on the left; lady in back of it lining up a snort. Roadsign ahead: Los Angeles 8, Bel Air 17. Final scorecard in the Ballgame of Life.

The trouble, Leo said, is you’ve been dreaming out loud. You’re forgetting your purpose. The purpose of business is business, Leo said. The only thing that saves you is the fact that you can be such a bastard when you want.

Mitchell said nothing.

Leo said to Debbie, The man can be a shark. He gets hold of the sweetener. Beautiful maneuver. Then he takes the money and he pours it down the drain. He puts it into research. He tries to get paralyzed guinea pigs to walk.

Mitchell said patiently, That’s what he does.

"Why?" Leo pressed.

Because somebody has to. Because somebody has to be a long-term thinker and a long-shot taker or we’re going down the tubes. We’ll choke on our own pragmatism, Leo. What’s the matter with you anyway? You’re starting to sound like you’ve been listening to Cy.

Leo said nothing. He fiddled with the unlit cigar in his hand. Okay, he admitted. He invited me to dinner and he did his little shtik. So let me tell you how it goes: Cy wants you out of there and don’t underestimate the slimy little fucker.

Debbie said, Is that the slimy little fucker we met at Capalbo’s?

That’s right, Leo said. That was Cyrus Tate. Scion of the founder. I think you said he looked like a child molester, right?

And Mitchell had to laugh. Picturing Cy with his nervous little body and his speedy little eyes.

Leo said, He told her he’s a movie producer and she thought he was even too degenerate for that.

Mitchell laughed again and said, "No, he produces, and he almost gets it right. I think he came closest with Thursday, the Twelfth. Am I right, Leo?"

No. You’re wrong, Leo said. You can’t just dismiss him. He hates you in an actually biblical sense. He’d like to see you stricken with some seven-year boils. And he’ll fight you. You’re gonna have a proxy fight. Watch.

Mitchell just shrugged again and lit a cigarette. Nothing that Leo was telling him was news. The stockholders’ meeting wasn’t slated till August but already he’d caught the little stirrings in the wind. The troops had been massing. The last bitter dregs of the Tate family were even now rising from the bottom of their barrels, a family so quarrelsome that Thanksgiving dinners were served without knives, and now they were apparently united in a cause. Trying to get him to be drummed from the chairmanship and kicked off the board. Well … he could get overconfident about it and that, he was aware, would be asking to be kicked. But the thing was, he couldn’t take it seriously either. Cy was a jerk. Such an obvious jerk that even the most venal stockholder would have to be aware that he couldn’t run a vacuum cleaner let alone a company. So Mitchell wasn’t worried.

Except, on occasion, in the middle of the night.

Leo said, You can’t just wait for it either. What you ought to have’s a personal publicity campaign. I can get you an article in—

No, Mitchell said.

You want to just listen to a—

"No, Mitchell said, so try listening to me. I told you to begin with. No personal publicity. Not ever. Not once. Not under any circumstances. No.—Would you like that again, Leo? Watch my fist. No."

Leo stared. What’s the matter with you anyway?

Plenty, Mitchell said, and let it go at that.

But of course Leo didn’t. Leo kept talking while Mitchell kept yawning and looking at the road, saying nothing, trading smiles with