Page 46 of The Lie Maker

I let that sink in a moment. I wondered what my own father might have done, presented with that scenario. I couldn’t imagine he’d have said no.

Scorsese hit a button and the side door slid open. I got out of my seat, squeezed my way around the middle one where Gwen had spent the trip, and stepped out onto the street.

“One thing,” Gwen said. “You’ve been dancing around this from the beginning of your story. What’d your dad do? Why’d they arrest him?”

“Oh, that,” I said. “I finally got him to tell me before they drove off with him. He killed some people.”

“Killed people?”

I nodded. “I guess he was what you’d call a hit man.”

Twenty-Seven

June1996

Michael Donohue’s beeper went off.

He kept it clipped to his belt. Not much bigger than a box of matches, it had a digital readout on the upper edge that showed the number of the person trying to reach him. All Michael had to do was glance down to know who it was.

Not that there were that many people it could be. His wife, Rose, had the number. A few other senior people in the Frohm organization. And, of course, the president and CEO himself, Galen Frohm.

Sure enough, that’s who it was.

Michael had been strolling through the Faneuil Hall marketplace, having slipped out of the office to grab something for lunch. Once a week, duties permitting, he treated himself to an order of deep-fried oysters, tartar sauce, and a Coke from one of the vendors in the food colonnade, found an outside bench, and ate them leisurely while watching tourists and locals shopping, eating, exploring.

He was only halfway through his lunch when he was summoned. That’s what it was when you heard from Galen Frohm. You weren’t being asked to drop by when you had a chance. You weren’t being asked to give him a call at your earliest convenience. You were being told to drop whatever you were doing and get your ass up to his office immediately. You were being summoned.

And you absolutely moved your ass when you were Galen Frohm’s personal adviser and number-one problem solver. It didn’t matter whether you were having lunch a block away, in the middle of dinner with your in-laws, or having sex at seven o’clock on a Saturday morning. If Galen sought your presence, you went.

It was the nature of the job, and Michael knew it when he signed on. He’d learned, the hard way, what happened when you didn’t play by Galen Frohm’s rules.

Once—and only once—he’d ignored the page. He had bought his young son, Jack, a radio-controlled speedboat, a sleek, beautiful model about two feet long, and early on a Sunday morning they’d gone to the Boston Public Garden lagoon to try it out. Jack was just getting the hang of it, managing graceful turns with the boat, careful not to hit any swans, when Michael’s beeper sounded.

“Shit,” he’d said under his breath. A mere nine hours earlier he’d been to the boss’s house to discuss some troublesome workers attempting to form a union at seventy of the four hundred cut-rate motels the company owned across the country. If they were successful, employees at the chain’s remaining operations would become emboldened. This situation had to be dealt with before it got out of hand.

“This thing is a fucking brush fire waiting to happen,” Frohm had said.

Michael did not disagree, and said he would consider some options and bring them to Frohm on Monday morning because, although he did not tell Frohm this, he had promised Jack he would spend Sunday with him.

So when the beeper sounded, Michael ignored it. I left it at home, he would tell the boss later. The battery was dead. Something like that. Fuck him.

Big mistake.

When he and Jack got home, Rose told him Frohm had called the house four times looking for him.

“Didn’t you take your damn beeper?” she’d asked him.

Frohm had grown angrier with each call, she said, and it was hard to tell whether Rose was more annoyed with her husband or the man for whom he worked. “There are three of us in this marriage,” she’d said more than once, echoing comments made by Princess Diana around that time. But the third party in Michael and Rose’s marriage wasn’t a lover, but a childlike tyrant who believed the world revolved around him.

Michael went straight to the Frohm residence, where he was shown by one of the staff to the man’s office. As he entered, he found Frohm was not alone. His daughter, about ten years old, Michael guessed, was demonstrating some high-kick moves she’d learned in a dance class and Frohm was putting his hands together in soft applause. But when he saw Michael, dance time was over, and his mood immediately turned sour.

“Get out of here, you little witch,” he told the girl. “I have to talk to Michael here.”

The child ran from the room, and the moment she was gone and the door was closed, Frohm lit into him.

“You are mine!” he bellowed. “Every fucking minute of every fucking day, you are mine, and you will make yourself available to me regardless of whether you are in the middle of an epic shit, a blow job from MissAmerica, or fucking open-heart surgery! You get that?”

He got it.

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