Page 64 of The Lie Maker

And yet, somewhere, buried inside him, in a place that was not always easy to find, Michael wanted to be good, to believe he was not a bad man. He loved his wife, was devoted to his son, helped little old ladies cross the street, for Christ’s sake.

But he was in too deep now to walk away from Frohm. They were each other’s prisoner, had too much on one another.

So when that next time came, Michael was ready.

The manager of three dollar stores in the Milwaukee area, part of the Frohm empire, was found to be stealing from the company. Michael dealt with it.

Three months after that, a man who oversaw nine Frohm fast food franchises in Nebraska was known to be selling DVDs and VHS tapes of child porn. That alone, Frohm said, was reason to have him dispatched, but if the man were arrested, he might try to get a shorter jail sentence by telling all he knew about Frohm’s kickback schemes and other illegal practices.

Michael dealt with him, too.

Things were going along fairly well. And then, nearly a year after the Gartner incident in Chicago, came the assignment that would change Michael’s life forever.

“Len says he’s retiring, but he’s not,” Frohm said.

He was speaking of Len Klay, a top executive in Frohm’s empire. A senior vice president who knew every aspect of the company’s operations, from the cheapo motels to the dollar stores to the fast food chicken outlets. Sixty-five years old on his last birthday, which happened to be in March. They had a celebration in the office. There was cake, streamers were hung. There was booze. Lots and lots of booze. Klay announced, to everyone’s surprise, that he was winding down his work schedule, and within a few weeks would be out the door and spending a lot of time at his house in Vermont, fishing three seasons of the year, cross-country skiing in the winter. “At least as long as my knees hold out,” he said, and everyone laughed.

Klay, since buying the place a decade ago, had spent much of his free time there, and since his wife’s passing two years earlier, had made the place more of a primary residence, having sold the family home in Boston and renting a modest condo for when he was in the city.

Not only was Klay going to spend time sitting on the end of his dock come summer, dropping that line into the water, he was intending to dedicate himself to a new hobby—painting. Not the house, he said when someone at the party made a joke, but landscapes. Watercolors. Didn’t expect to sell any of them or have some gallery beg him to do a show, but he found it satisfying, something to nurture the soul.

“He’s fucked us over,” Frohm had told Michael a few weeks later. “He’s taking a consulting job with Agamemnon.”

Frohm’s nickname for Agamom Inc., which also just happened to own a chain of discount motels, restaurants, and other assorted entities. One of Frohm’s biggest competitors.

“He can’t,” Michael said. “There’s a noncompete clause in his contract. And it goes for at least ten years once he no longer works for us.”

“It’s off the books.”

“Your source is solid on this?”

“Don’t need a source,” Frohm said. “I have the recordings.”

Frohm said that Klay’s working for the opposition had the potential to be devastating. Klay knew all of Frohm’s marketing and financial strategies, and would know how to undermine them on behalf of a competitor.

“It’s the ultimate betrayal.”

“Why would he do this?” Michael asked, but he knew the answer. There was hardly anyone in Frohm’s employ who hadn’t been victimized, humiliated, or manipulated by the man. Michael knew that as well as anyone. He’d allowed himself to be bullied by Frohm, to be molded into a different kind of person. Why should Klay be any different? Frohm had dressed him down in meetings, mocked him behind his back. (The man had a stutter, and Frohm liked to mimic it, sometimes to Klay’s face.)

What made Klay different from Michael, evidently, was that he was going to get even. Or at least try.

“You know what to do,” Frohm said.

Michael understood. And when he left Frohm’s office, he turned off the mini tape recorder he kept in his pocket.

He drove to Vermont.

Len Klay’s place was near the small town of Salisbury, just like the steak, on a small body of water called Lake Dunmore. It was about a four-hour drive from Boston, less if the traffic wasn’t bad.

Michael left before dawn, hoping to get to Len’s place before eleven. He’d thought about calling ahead, making sure the man was there, coming up with some excuse about having him sign papers for something that he’d dealt with while still at the company, but decided it was better that there not be a record of any phone calls between them. Not only that, but what if, before Michael’s arrival, Len happened to mention to someone that he was expecting his former boss’s assistant?

No, best to arrive unannounced.

There was a Glock in the glove compartment, but Michael wasn’t sure he’d need it. There might be easier ways to dispose of Len Klay, an old man and not especially fit, even if he did cross-country ski. And there’d be no trying to change Klay’s mind, like he’d tried with Gartner.

He made good time, and, with occasional consultations of the map on the seat next to him, didn’t get lost. Len Klay’s place was more than a cottage. It was a home. Set back from the road and nestled among the towering trees, it was a white, two-story structure on a tract of land that sloped gradually down to the water’s edge. The houses along this road were spaced well apart, the neighboring buildings barely visible through the woods.

Michael had noticed few cars parked at the other residences along this stretch. He guessed that many of these places were second residences for people from Burlington or Boston or Albany, probably even Montreal, which was closer, by at least an hour, to Salisbury than Boston was.

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