Part 27:
The car pulled away. A few people on the sidewalk turned their heads. Nobody knew who he was. To everyone on the street, he was just a silver-haired man getting into a car. Ryan turned from the window. Delia was at the desk. She had her folio open and she was making small ticks next to items on a checklist.
Marcus and the two men with him had already left the room. They were down the hall standing outside Linda Marrow’s cubicle waiting for her to finish the call she was on because she didn’t know yet that her life had ended at 11:42. She thought she was going to lunch at 12:30. Celeste was sitting in Rhinoc’s chair. She had not chosen to.
She had sat down because she had needed to sit down. Her hands were on the arms of the chair. She was looking at nothing. Celeste? Yes. You all right? I am very tired. Yeah. I do not think I have felt this tired in 6 years. Okay. He came around the desk and stood next to her, not too close, the way a person stands near another person when they do not want to impose but do not want to leave. What do you need? He said.
A sandwich. Okay. A bad one, a deli sandwich, roast beef, too much mustard, white bread. Okay. And a small bag of chips. I can do that. Ryan? Yeah. Will you sit with me while I eat it? Yes. He went down to the deli on the corner of Cherry and St. Paul, the one with the handwritten specials board where somebody had misspelled coleslaw as coleslaw for at least 3 years.
He bought two sandwiches and two small bags of chips and two cans of a local soda that Marlene used to drink. Not because he was thinking about Marlene, but because it was the one that was cold. He carried the paper bag back through the cold noon air, past the black Crown Victoria that had already come back for another passenger, past the news van that had started to set up on the other side of the street because something in the building had started to leak even before the press release had gone out, and he rode the elevator back up to nine
and walked into Rinehart’s office. And Celeste was still in the chair with her eyes closed now. He set the bag on the desk. She opened her eyes. You got me the soda I like. That was a guess. It was a good guess. Yeah. She unwrapped the sandwich. They ate in silence for a while. She was right. It was a bad sandwich.
The bread was too soft. The mustard was the cheap yellow kind. She ate it like it was the first meal she’d had in days, which from what Ryan could tell might have been close to true. When she had finished about two-thirds of it, she put it down. Ryan. Yeah. I want to tell you something about my father. Okay. When I was 11, I caught him cheating at a board game. It was Monopoly.
It was my birthday. He had been moving money from the bank to his own pile when I wasn’t looking. I saw him do it. I called him on it. He laughed. He told me that in business, everyone cheats and the only question is whether you get caught. I did not argue with him, but I remember thinking very clearly that I did not want to become a person who believed that.
Okay, I became that person anyway, Ryan, for a while. In my 20s, after he died. There was a year where I was signing things I had not read and hiring people I did not know and giving my lieutenants authority I should not have given them because I did not know how to run the company and I was ashamed to ask. I gave Rinehart a lot of rope in that year.
He learned in that year that I would sign what he put in front of me. He made decisions in that year that shaped what he could do for the next six. You were in your 20s. I was in my 20s. I know. It does not excuse it. It explains it. That’s different. Yes, it is different. She picked up the sandwich again.
She took a bite. She set it down. I want you to understand, she said, that what happened to you was partly my fault. Not just Carl’s fault. Not just Rhineck’s fault. Mine. If I had been a better CEO at 24, Rhineck would not have had the room to build what he built, and you would not have been standing on that dock at 11:47 on a Tuesday. Celeste.
Yes. You don’t owe me that. I do. No, you really don’t. I was at that dock because of Carl. I was out of a job because of Rhineck. But I was in that conversation with Everett Sharp because of you. And I was in this office this morning because of you. And I have $60,000 in my bank account because of you.
And my daughter has new boots because of you. Whatever math you’re doing, it already balanced out months ago. She looked at him. You have a way of making a person feel absolved, she said. I’m not absolving you. I’m just telling you to stop accounting for a debt you already paid. She was quiet. All right, she said. All right. Finish your sandwich.
I’m finishing it, Walt. The cleanup took the rest of November and most of December. The federal case against Douglas Rhineck, Everett Sharp, Linda Marrow, and Carl Voss moved as federal cases move, which is not fast in any sense a normal person would recognize, but faster than those cases usually moved because Celeste’s legal team had, in cooperation with the US Attorney’s Office, handed over a case file that was essentially pre-built.
Delia had done that. She had been building the file for 3 months before Ryan ever showed up. And the work Ryan had done in the windowless room had filled in the last operational pieces. Carl Voss was arrested at his house in Rutland at 6:30 in the morning on a Wednesday. He had been sitting in his recliner again, watching the news.
