Chris Knopf writes elegant, intelligent, thrillers that actually thrill. His latest book Dead Anyway is the perfect place to start reading if you haven’t yet been introduced to Chris’ work. It’s a pleasure to feature him on Bish’s Beat and present the first chapter of Dead Anyway ...
Chris is the author of ten books, including two series set in the Hamptons, one starring Sam Acquillo (Black Swan, 2011) and a spin-off featuring Sam’s lawyer, Jackie Swaitkowski, including Ice Cap, released June, 2012.
The first in a new mystery thriller series, Dead Anyway, launched in September 2012, received starred reviews from PW, Booklist, Kirkus and Library Journal. It was also Book of the Day in Kirkus and has been reviewed on two major NPR affiliates.
Visit Chris'd website: www.chrisknopfmystery.com
DEAD
ANYWAY
Imagine this: You have a nice life. You love your beautiful, successful wife. You’re an easy going guy working out of your comfortable Connecticut home. The world is an interesting, pleasant place.
Then in seconds, it’s all gone.
You’re still alive, but the world thinks you’re dead. And now you have to decide. Make it official, or go after the evil that took it all away from you.
Arthur Cathcart, market researcher and occasional finder of missing persons, decides to live on and fight, by doing what he knows best – figuring things out, without revealing his status as a living, breathing human being. Much easier said than done in the post-9/11 world, where everything about yourself and all the tools you need to live a modern life are an open book. How do you become a different person, how do you finance an elaborate scheme without revealing yourself? How do you force a reckoning with the worst people on earth, as a dead man?
"An absorbing update of the classic film, D.O.A., that finds its author so completely in the zone that not a word is wasted, and the story seems to unfold itself without human assistance." --Kirkus, starred review
DEAD ANYWAY
CHRIS KNOPF
CHAPTER 1
I remember
Florencia dressing that morning. I was
still in bed, propped up on the pillows, ostensibly reading a book. Moments earlier we were as intimate as two
people could be, utterly entangled in mind, body and soul.
Though even then,
as I watched her brush out her hair and slither into her pantyhose, I knew she
was a separate person, already engaged in the coming day, where she would live
apart from me, as her full self, focused and absorbed in her work. I would have plenty to absorb me as well, but
never drifting far from that bedroom, and that instant in time. Physically, I’d be one floor below, in the
den, at the oaken desk Florencia had given me for Christmas. My mind, at the behest of my clients, would
be traversing the earth in search of hidden information – that part of my mind
that wasn’t lingering with recollections of the morning, the smells and feel of
skin-on-skin, the transcendent lightness of unrestrained adoration.
She faced me as she
slipped on her pumps, somewhat awkwardly from a standing position, made more so
by the pencil skirt that gripped her knees.
She smiled through a wave of black hair that fell across her face,
amused by her own clumsy impatience. I
smiled back and resisted the urge to reach out to her, to grab her wrist and
drag her back into bed where I could reverse the process, rewind the clock and
delay the inevitable day. I had my
chance when she leaned in to give me a perfunctory kiss, and a stroke on the
cheek, but I let her leave unaware of my impulse, unfettered by my reckless
longing.
***
Half an hour later
I was dressed and sitting at my computer, on my second cup of coffee and
regular bowl of granola, strawberries and brown sugar. I was working at my job, the one I’d invented
for myself, which I usually called free-lance research. Sometimes, in moments of self-adulation, I’d
describe myself as a Samurai of the Information Age. A fact hunter. If there was something you really wanted to
know, and the usual avenues to acquiring that knowledge had failed you, you
could hire me to acquire it for you, or break the news that what you wanted to
know was unknowable.
I loved this
work. Most of the well-paying projects
amounted to classic market research – quantitative and qualitative studies
involving surveys, focus groups, phone calls and face-to-face interviews. I wasn’t particularly specialized, the
subject matter could be anything from toothpaste to social attitude trending,
though I’d built a modest reputation for getting answers that eluded other
people.
I’d noticed an
inverse relationship between the size of the firm doing the work and the
quality of the results. So maybe that
was the key:my company had a
staff of one. Me. And a corporate culture that put a premium on
persistence and a willingness to leave the comfort of the computer screen and
track answers back to their source.
This meant a fair
amount of field work, another favorite of mine.
Not only did it get me out of the house, it compensated for my total
indifference to formal exercise. Otherwise
the extra forty pounds of body weight I lugged around would have been more like
sixty. Or worse.
The non-marketing
work was usually the more rewarding, if only for the diversity of
assignments. For example, that day I was
laying the groundwork for a missing persons case. A law firm, one of my regular clients, was
trying to close the books on a class action suit they’d won years before. Their accountants had advised them to clear
out an escrow account holding the remnants of the settlement, earmarked for a
plaintiff they’d yet to locate. My job
was to find him or his heirs, tell them they were going to come into a bundle
of money, or give up and chronicle the thoroughness of the undertaking,
providing justification for turning the remaining proceeds over to the
state. I always began by
duplicating the efforts of earlier researchers, which involved a computer
search and phone calls to the last known place of residence. Aside from confirming their records, I knew
this would shake out a few facts they’d overlooked, or hadn’t looked for hard
enough. These fresh leads would be the
ones I’d chase down first.
I looked forward to
the next stage, which amounted to getting in a car, or an airplane, and going
to where my subject was seen. Then I got
to knock on doors, visit bars and clubs, or churches and hospitals, putting
together the links of a chain that usually ended at the home of my quarry. Since few of the people I looked for were
intentionally hiding (though I once tracked down a fugitive from a nasty
divorce case), good news generally followed.
My law firm clients
had private investigators who could have done this part of the job just as
well, or better, but they were happy to let me provide a turnkey package, and I
was happy for the diversion.
This was not the
most lucrative part of my practice.
Which is why it was nice to be married to an understanding woman who
owned an insurance agency. I pulled my
weight, contributing equally to our savings and the expenses at our home in
Stamford, Connecticut, but it was clear where the latent wealth of the family
resided. With 28 employees and
established relationships with sturdy carriers, her company churned out enough
revenue to assure a reasonably affluent life for as long as we wanted, which as
far as I could tell would be a long time.
That’s because
Florencia also loved her work. She’d
say the only people who thought insurance was boring were people who weren’t in
the insurance business. She claimed
those in the know understood they dealt in life and death, safety and
disaster. Hopes, dreams, triumph and
disappointment were their stock in trade.
She believed the
reason people in the insurance business seem reserved isn’t because they lacked
feeling. Rather, they were so exposed to
daily triumphs and tragedies that they had to protect themselves, or risk
collapsing under the weight of the emotional freight.
I’d done a fair
amount of research for insurance companies, so I could see her point. Even though I could never match her passion
for underwriting, claims adjustment, loss ratios and actuarial tables.
Few could.
***
That day, I worked
until 3:30, when despite a sandwich and serial snacking, hunger began to
interfere with my concentration, as it always did. The choice was to either munch on more empty
calories – like a toasted bagel, or handful of potato chips – or capitulate
completely and have a mid-afternoon lunch, usually the more wholesome decision
in the end.
So I dug a wad of
chicken salad out of a big plastic container, pre-made by Florencia, and
stuffed it between a toasted, buttered bagel with lettuce and tomato. A concession to both nutrition and
indulgence. When I got back to my desk I
was sated, but not happily so. The meal
resisted digestion, so that two hours later it felt like a ball of
unreconstructed protein and tri-glycerides sitting like a brick in my stomach.
This forced me out
of my chair for a walk to the post office, which was about a mile from our
house. A walk long enough to create the
illusion that I was metabolizing all those useless calories.
I had an uneasy
relationship with my body and its most prominent feature – my bulging
midriff. For health reasons, I wished
for a sleeker profile. But vanity was
never a motivation. I knew I wasn’t an attractive
person. Rippling abs wouldn’t have
changed that. They wouldn’t have grown
hair on my balding scalp or turned my fleshy features into Brad Pitt. That Florencia, an undeniably beautiful
woman, had overlooked these shortcomings was the root of my greatest surprise
and delight. And gratitude.
I was, however, an
energetic forty-two-year-old man.
Especially when focused on the task at hand, the current quest. I could live on minimal sleep, and even
bypass meals. I could stride with
purpose (running was always out of the question) for hours if need be. In short, in the right circumstances, I was
one of the most vigorous schlumps you’d ever meet.
It was in this mode
that I walked briskly in the clear, spring weather to the post office, where I kept
a P. O. box. Much of my research
involved correspondence not possible over the Internet, so the oft-derided
snail mail system was for me a vital resource, one called upon almost daily. Not giving up my exact location was a soft
security measure.
I wasn’t by nature
very sentimental. If my neighborhood
post office was useless to me, I’d never have walked into the place again, with
no regrets. Which would have been a
shame, because I liked it there. It was
an antique operation, thus far eluding modernization. The postal workers were all much older than
me. There was stained oak woodwork and
uniformed people sitting behind arch-top windows. The floors were marble and the stamp machines
solid brass. The posters and official
notices stuck to bulletin boards were the only evidence you hadn’t flashed back
in time. That and the aggressive
impatience of the clientele winding their way down a gauntlet of red velvet
rope.
When I got to the
window I presented my P.O. number and driver’s license. The woman disappeared for a few minutes, then
returned with a stack of mail and over-stuffed 9x12 envelopes.
Included in the
mail was a check from one of my favorite clients, climatologists for whom I’d
been running regression analyses. They
had contracts from academia, government and industry, the prefect trifecta,
resulting entirely from their ruthless objectivity. Their job was to predict the weather. Not tomorrow’s rainy day, but what the mean
temperature and sea level might be five years from now. These guys didn’t just cleave to the data,
they were the data. Pure play
empiricists. I didn’t pray at the same
altar as they did, but I knew the liturgy.
That’s why they
needed me. The regression equations
they’d designed couldn’t be controlled by mathematical formulas alone. They needed a little finesse – a tweak or two
here and there to stabilize the results and keep the models in reasonable
balance. And then, an explanation of
what it all meant that anyone, scientist or CFO alike, could understand. They never told me I was meeting their
objectives – I never heard a single spoken word from any of them – but they
continued to send bundles of CD’s filled with variables and parameters, always
paid their bills in less than ten days and never asked me to redo the work.
When I first got
the gig, they gave me an application that turned my PC essentially into a smart
terminal connected through the web to their massively parallel processing
arrays. That was another reason I liked
the assignment – the chance to mess around with staggering computational power
from the comfort of my home office.
On the way back to
the house, I countered some of the wholesome effects of the walk by getting a
double scoop chocolate ice cream cone. I
was on a first name basis with the head scooper of the place, illustrating yet
another of my self-gratifying routines.
Though not without
a penalty. I leavened the worst of my
fleshy face with a huge Elliot Gould moustache started in college and never
shaved off. This was the only feature
that ever sparked admiration from the opposite sex, in particular Florencia,
which explained why I never shaved it off.
Most foods were
easy to work around, but ice cream cones, not so easy.
***
When I got home, I
was surprised and pleased to see Florencia’s car in the driveway. Along with an SUV, dark maroon with a trailer
hitch, roof rack and decal on the left rear side window granting parking
privileges at a local university.
I called to her
when I went into the house. She called
back from the living room. The sun was
still high in the sky, but that part of the house was amply shaded by a pair of
sugar maples, so when I walked into the living room I didn’t see her right
away. In her black pencil skirt and blue
blouse, she almost disappeared against the dark leather couch. She sat stiffly upright, knees held tightly
together and hands shoved under her thighs.
She stared at me, not answering when I greeted her.
“Sit down,” said a
voice from behind me.
I spun around and
saw a man sitting in a small side chair.
He wore an almost comically over-sized trench coat, with a belt and
raglan shoulders, a black baseball cap and sunglasses.
His legs were
crossed and he held in gloved hands a gun with a long silencer.
My mind sizzled
with alarm and my heart shot into my throat, making it hard to speak.
“Who are you?” I
managed to choke out.
“Sit down,” he said
again, and stood up, waving me toward the couch. I did as he asked and she grabbed my hand in
hers, which was cold and wet.
My heart was
spinning hard in my chest and I took deep slow breaths to try to bring it under
control.
The man took the
stuffed chair across from us and put the gun back in his lap. He looked about ten years older than me,
somewhere in his early fifties, based on the hair sticking out of his baseball
cap and the condition of his skin. His
nose was long and thin, his lips red.
Like me, he had jowls, though his hung more loosely from an ill-defined chin. I didn’t know the color of his eyes. They were hidden behind the sunglasses.
“Nice house,” said
the man, looking around. “You do your
own decorating?”
I didn’t see
Florencia nod, so fixed was I on the man’s gun, but she must have, because the
man nodded back.
“I admire that,” he
said. “My wife is always after me to
hire a decorator, when I keep telling her, you’re very artistic. What need do you have for such expensive ridiculousness? I think it’s all the TV shows, with these
fags coming in and turning some shit hole into, what, a room at the
Waldorf? All bullshit, of course, but it
gets the women all worked up.”
“What do you want?”
I asked.
“Nothing. I’m all set.
Had my last cup of coffee of the day before meeting up with your lovely
wife.”
“I mean, what do
you want. Why are you here?” I said.
He looked down at
his gun, as if surprised to see it in his hand.
“Oh, you mean,
like, why am I sitting in your living room with this gun? Why indeed.”
“He told me you’d
be killed if I didn’t come with him to the house,” said Florencia. “I only know him as an appointment. A life prospect.”
“A life prospect,”
said the man. “There’s your irony for
you.”
Florencia’s hand
tightened on mine. I wondered if I could
move fast enough to grab the gun before he could shoot me. Not only if I was fast enough, but if I had
the strength to overcome him. The baggy
overcoat hid his physique, which could have been far more formidable than mine.
As if to settle the
question, he picked the gun off his lap and pointed it at my chest.
“I’m here to
perform a simple transaction. You’re
both professional people. You know
transactions are best made efficiently with a minimal of back and forth.”
He reached into an
inside pocket of his overcoat and pulled out an envelope.
“Actually, in this
case, I simply give you this piece of paper.” He handed the envelope and a pen
to Florencia, who picked the items gingerly out of his hand with her long,
elegant fingers. “You read it and fill
in the blanks. Or I shoot you. I already know one of the answers, so if you
like risking your life on one in five odds, go for it.”
“What is it?” I
asked.
He shook his head.
“That’s only for
your wife to know,” he said. He looked
at Florencia. “You tell him and I shoot
him in the balls.” He lowered the gun to
underscore the point.
The flap of the
envelope was unsealed. Florencia pulled
out and unfolded a sheet of paper and started reading. I wanted to look down, but I’d already been
warned. I didn’t know enough to test the
boundaries.
I heard Florencia
make a sharp intake of breath.
“And if I don’t?”
she asked.
“The usual,” he
said, then reached the gun across the divide between us and flicked the muzzle
across her right breast. “Maybe after
you and me have some fun and games. You
like fun, don’t you gorgeous?”
I wondered again
about the probability of reaching him from a sitting position, wrestling away
the gun, and holding him powerless until the police arrived. I must have telepathically communicated this,
because the man reacted by shooting a hole in my left thigh.
“Jesus Christ,
Forgiver of Sins,” he said to Florencia, “do I have to wait all day for you to
fill out that mother fucking thing?”
A second after
hearing him say this I was consumed by monstrous pain. I yelled and cried, and wept with fear and
agony. I clutched at the wound and
watched blood rush out between my fingers.
Florencia’s hands clutched along side mine, until the man tapped her in
the face with the muzzle of the gun and told her to sit back in the sofa.
"Do it or I put a
few more holes in the dumb fuck,” said the man.
“He’s not dumb. He’s brilliant,” said Florencia. “You just don’t know that, you stupid
bastard.” Her hand raced across the
paper, which I tried to read with no success.
Florencia handed
back the paper. The man folded it along
the creases and put it back in the envelope, which he stuck in his inside coat
pocket. I saw all this through a liquid
veil, my eyes gushing tears, my brain barely able to comprehend what was
happening.
The man sat back in
the chair, making himself comfortable.
“We need to call
him an ambulance,” said Florencia, in a calm, measured voice. “I did what you asked me to do.”
“You did,” said the
man. “I gotta give you that.”
Then he shot her in
the forehead.
I felt the spray of
blood and brains splash across my face.
I yelled, I think, though I don’t remember for sure.
“No hard feelings,”
said the man. “That ‘stupid bastard’
thing aside.”
Then he shot me in
the head, too.
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