Hard Stop by Chris Knopf

Author:Chris Knopf [Knopf, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780307374196
Google: fLih_JRLaXYC
Amazon: B003KVKRG8
Goodreads: 13532940
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Published: 2009-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

That night I finally got through to Joe Sullivan. I’d called him at home on my cell phone from a table at the Pequot. He’d been tied up with the DA for a few days, and his wife, whom I’d never met, was none too delighted by my intrusion. He used a clever ploy to hustle me off the phone—the promise of a full forensics briefing, delivered at the crime scene.

Mollified, I went back to The Wealth of Nations, a single, abridged volume I’d bought from the library when they were clearing out their stock.

“The root of all evil?” I asked Dorothy Hodges, holding up the book.

“Not to me, and I’ll ignore the stereotyping,” she said, dropping my drink on the table as gracefully as you could with three-inch-long black fingernails.

“I’ve got Das Kapital back at the cottage. I’m going to put them in the middle of the room and let them fight it out.”

“They did that already. Smith won.”

“They taught you that at Columbia?”

“Marx belongs in the fantasy–science fiction section. Lovely dreams.” She used one of the black daggers at the end of her fingers to scratch her head through greased orange hair. It wasn’t my favorite Dorothy look, though it was hard to pin down what was, since it changed almost by the day.

“Maybe I won’t bother reading either of them and you can just explain it to me,” I said.

“Easy. People yearn for community, but they’re biologically hierarchical. Trouble is, hierarchy’s defined in two ways. Brawn and brains. Brains run the kitchen, but they need brawn at the front of the house. It’s a natural symbiosis. And the rest of us have to eat whatever they dish out.”

“The Pequot Theory of Economic Interdependency?”

“Money doesn’t suck. Not having money sucks. Using money for stupid things sucks.”

“Like the time you bought tropicalbirds.com at fifty bucks a share?” said her father, sliding a chair into the conversation. “Don’t get me wrong. Dotty’s a hell of a stock picker.”

“Not really,” said Dorothy, though clearly pleased with the compliment. “I’m just a mid-cap index kind of a girl with a taste for the occasional social-conscience buy. Which do very well, by the way, most of the time.”

“There’s so much about the world I don’t understand,” I said with deepest sincerity.

“You don’t think we could live on what comes out of the till, do you?” Hodges asked me as we watched Dorothy disappear back into the kitchen. “A restaurant’s a cash business. If you play it right, you get to hold the suppliers’ money just long enough to put it to work without pissing ’em off. Dotty’s been floating the delta since she was in high school.”

Back when I was married and had a regular paying job I handled all the family finances. My wife Abby resented this, and from this remove I can see why. It was an implicit insult to her financial acumen, entirely untested and perfunctorily rejected. I wasn’t a bad money manager but I wasn’t exactly Warren Buffett, or Angel Valero.

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