Beauty: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

it. I need you across the board.”
    “We used to be a smaller plant but a bigger company, and I don’t know it all, but I’m here. What I’ve got, you’ve got.”
    She wasn’t all that obvious with it, but Carol was studying him. Dave assumed she wanted to go out of Elizabeth’s Fish with a good report card herself, and for that she needed to know if she could trust him. He wondered if she had a sense of humor. He said, “Trust me,” and she laughed. Definitely a good sign. Mary Wells came on the radio, and he looked for a reaction.
    Carol said, “I’m from Detroit.”
    He said, “Pittsburgh and Detroit. Steel to wheels. Where do we start?”
    “Those other four have something else still working, and I’d like to shut it off. Can you help me there?”
    “If you’re asking whether I have something working myself, the answer is no. I don’t have any part in anything working, and never have. To your actual question, our second in command in Finance is a straight arrow, and she’s been in the company a long time. She could plug leaks, and she’d know places to look that I don’t. Annette Novato. So far, all I’ve heard her mention is missing electricity.”
    Carol said, “You stayed out of it.”
    “I’m here. But I stayed out of it. I did my job. I’ll call Annette and have her lock up the checks.”
    “Are you going home after that?”
    Which Dave took to mean that Carol planned on working late and wanted him to sign up. What the hell? “I could stay,” he said. “It’s Motown night on the radio. We can order in. It’s not the city—people go home when the bell rings, so we’ll have the building to ourselves. You want me to see if I can get Annette to come back?”
    Dave thought he liked Carol. She was to the point, seemed to know what she was doing and did it, had a sense of humor, knew Motown.
    She said, “No, but would you lead me through town to the old plant on the harbor? It’s still listed in the assets.”
    Yep, working late to check out a not-exactly-decrepit fish-processing plant, especially after a five-hour drive and a quick-draw boardroom massacre—in Dave’s book, that counted, earning your keep.
    “It still has the old lines in place. I can get you keys.”
    “It still has the old lines?”
    “It has everything. It has the ghosts of fish.”

Too Old a Zebra
    I t was dark when Carol followed Parks down through the heart of town to the harbor. Elizabeth’s Fish took up most of a little spit of land that reached into the harbor, and even in the dark she could tell that an original building had been expanded and connected and connected again to other once-separate buildings along the water. Those would have been the growth decades in the business, when the generations of the family that really built Elizabeth’s Fish were smarter and more ruthless than anybody else and had the added benefit of an ocean full of fish.
    There were broken security lights, a section of Cyclone fence falling off its poles; Keep Out signs had their first graffiti; in places, the asphalt underfoot was broken to gravel.
    Parks said, “Shut a plant, and next day it’s Halloween.” He said it offhand, but he didn’t sound happy.
    With the shadows and the night, with the added emptiness of water out beyond the building, the plant would have felt big to someone who wasn’t accustomed, but Carol had been around bigger operations.
    By the splashes of light from the working security poles, she could see that the biggest investment for some time had been in the façade. The respectable generations would have said, Let’s make the place look respectable. After that, every several years, as the amounts of fish and cash flow subsided, it would have been a matter of choosing new colors for the repaintings and then slapping up a new version of the old logo. Carol might be able to find evidence of the German tenure, but probably not the Japanese. The Japanese were selling even as they bought.
    “Go home,”