ONE
The Chairman died the way he had lived: alone. Sometime between two and four A.M. on a muggy Wednesday in late July, while the rest of the New York City sweltered through the worst heat wave in history, 66-year-old James L. Dwyer walked into the bathroom of his East 58th Street townhouse, ingested a mix of prescription drugs, ironically manufactured by our own corporation, left a note on his study desk and convulsed into permanent sleep.
At least that’s the way it seemed to the Filipino houseman who found Dwyer when he let himself in at four to prepare the Chairman’s usual steak and eggs breakfast. Dwyer had always been a punctual riser.
The houseman, Aguinaldo, was a former Manila EMS attendant who checked for a pulse and tried CPR, but the body was cold, the color gone. He phoned me instead of the police.
“The Chairman always told me, if there’s a robbery, or any reason to call the cops, phone Mr. Acela if you can’t reach me. He said there might be important papers here. He said—”
Aguinaldo was starting to ramble, so I interrupted. I told him he had done the right thing. I calmed him enough so he could answer questions. “Was the front door locked when you arrived?” I asked.
“Yes, Mr. Acela.”
“What about the patio door and the windows?”
Aguinaldo took some minutes to check. “All locked from inside except his bedroom window. That one was open by an inch, but it’s on the third floor.”
“Any furniture out of place, drawers open?”
“It does not look like a break-in, sir.”
“Did you touch anything besides the body?”
“I read the note. But it makes no sense for him to do this. Did you read the Wall Street Journal article about his big deal last month? It called him Lucky Jim.”
“Don’t touch anything else. Don’t phone anyone. I’ll be there in half an hour.”
I hung up and sat for an instant, stunned, in my den in Devil’s Bay, Brooklyn, the boyhood neighborhood to which I’d recently moved back after twenty-six years away. The first-floor windows were open in my remodeled Cape Cod, and I could hear the sound of surf half a block away. I hadn’t been sleeping. I’d been glued to my TV for the last few hours, watching the disturbing news from Washington. The President—a good and fair man—had resigned tonight, citing health reasons, handing the reins of power to his number two, a man known for extreme right-wing inclinations.
In fact, the summer so far had been marked by numerous sudden departures in the capital: a Supreme Court Justice; a crusading Washington Post editor; the head of the FBI, my old boss, another good man.
I shut off the TV, remembering the rest of what Aguinaldo had said.
A contract to come up with antidotes for chemical and biological weapons, sir. The Journal called it one of the richest pharmaceutical deals in history.
The shock was sinking in. I’d visited the Chairman just hours ago in his townhouse for one of our periodic late-night report sessions, and found him furious and drinking too much rather than confident, his usual self. It was not unusual for him to conduct business at home at ten P.M. I think he did it to have company.
I think I’ve made a terrible mistake, he’d muttered at one point.
And a few minutes later, God help us all—the whole country—if I’m right.
He stared at me and I’d had the oddest feeling that he could see inside me. Then he’d nodded as if he approved. I can trust you. He’d added, bitterly, Not like some other people who I thought were friends.
Because of this, and because scandals in the company three years ago—graft we’d dealt with in private—still left tensions, I discarded the idea of sharing the news with other officers until I saw for myself what had happened. I showered and shaved quickly, trying to clear my mind for what would be a long, grief-filled day. I’d be looking at the body of a man who had become a mentor late in my life, and might, with time, have become a friend. I’d be explaining to angry detectives why they’d not been summoned before me. I’d be briefing Lenox’s acting CEO—a man I did not like—on what I found, as well as news reporters, depending upon how our publicity people decided to explain the ultimate indignity that a man—rich or poor—can inflict upon himself, his own death.
“Your reputation is like your soul,” Dwyer had told me when he hired me away from the FBI. “You don’t notice it when you have it. But lose it and go to hell.”
I also remembered more of what he’d muttered tonight, while pouring a double scotch. They’d like me to disappear. Maybe I should.
Had these been words of a man so distraught that he’d kill himself soon after, or a cry from a man in danger, I asked myself now.
I chose a somber summer-weight dark blue pinstriped Armani suit, a crisp white shirt and a somber tie in quiet cobalt. It would convey grief and power. I would need both today. I slipped into shined Bruno Maglis. My silver watch was a wafer-thin Rolex, my wallet Florentine leather. The haircut came from Madison Avenue, not Sal’s Clip Joint on Duane Street anymore, not since I’d left government employ, and the black BMW waiting in my driveway was new, leased by the corporation.
I was 44 that night, at the peak of my success and the brink of disaster. I headed security for one of the world’s richest pharmaceutical corporations. My ironclad contract guaranteed me two years of high income whether I lost my job or not. Hundreds of men and women—security guards, bodyguards, corporate investigators and even quasi-military protectors in Latin America—reported to me in three continents. I had the use of the Lenox Pharmaceuticals jet, and a company apartment on Fifth Avenue on nights I slept in Manhattan. My expense account was quadruple anything I’d ever enjoyed in the Corporate Crime office at the FBI.
I even had access to a luxury company condo in Venezuela, where I’d occasionally taken feminine companions, other type-A New Yorkers who understood the rules of our sun-drenched tête-à-têtes: to meet and enjoy the bed, to fly home and part as friends, to take on no personal obligations impeding our separate climbs and lives.
These days it was only at dawn and only rarely, in that brief period of clarity that precedes the rising sun, to be swept away by the day’s distractions, that I’d started to suspect that I—Mike, for Michelangelo, as my now dead parents had dreamed of greatness for their only child; last name Acela, for the village outside of Naples from which my peasant grandparents emigrated—had transformed myself into a lonely man.
There was no time to think about that now. I poured espresso—my personal drug of choice—into a silver gocup, and starting the BMW, flashed back to Dwyer’s words on the day he interviewed me to replace Lenox’s retiring head of Security. An accountant had come to the Chairman with suspicions of corporate malfeasance: fraud, dummy subsidiaries, links between executives and organized crime. Dwyer needed to know if the story was true.
“Mike, if you come to work here, you’ll do whatever has to be done to clean us up, even if it means bringing down a Board member, even if that person is my friend. You’ll run a private security force protecting our forty-eight thousand employees. Your jurisdiction will extend from our boardroom to our factories, loading docks, labs, computer records. But it will stop there.”
“Meaning what?” I’d asked, suspicious but impressed with his quiet confidence. We’d been in his sun-drenched corner office at headquarters near Battery Park, in a new tower completed since the World Trade Center disaster. The Chairman was always a booster of the city in which he had grown up.
“Meaning that justice is private in our world. You’ll have a free hand inside the corporation, but the rule is, come to me when you find things out. I’ll fix them. Not the FBI or the police. If you can’t live with that, walk out now and I’ll respect you for it.”
“I won’t break laws for you.”
“No, but you’ll bend them, just like you do for the FBI. You’ll make deals to protect people and achieve greater good. At the Bureau you have the luxury of letting your superiors decide which suspect gets arrested and which gets a deal. Who gets protected and who gets prosecuted. Here, I decide. I choose how to keep the company strong. It’s still justice.”
“I’ll report to you first,” I agreed after a moment. “But if you ignore things I find out, I’ll go my own way,” meaning that my self-respect was not for sale. Only my ability. “The question is, can you live with that?”
He’d surprised me then—laughed at our bull-male posturing, poured two scotches and we’d toasted our devil’s bargain, dangerous trust between strangers. A month later I’d come to Lenox and started collecting my FBI pension after twenty years on the job. Until then the Bureau had been the only place I’d worked since I was 18, a lucky summer intern chosen from thousands of applicants for two precious slots.
Within six months at Lenox I’d confirmed the stories the Chairman had heard. Our Chief Financial Officer had been fired and was still paying back monies he’d diverted. The Deputy Chief had “resigned” to “spend time with his family” and eleven million dollars had been chalked up to operating losses. They’d looted the company to pay for lavish lifestyles. But our stock had remained high, our investors had saved millions and no one outside Lenox—not the Justice Department Fraud Task Force, not the Wall Street Journal, not even the families of the fired execs—had ever learned the truth.
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