Free Suicide Season by Rex Burns

wasn’t going to give. “Do you have a record of what you found?”
    Without answering, Bartlett reached for a logbook and began turning pages. He stopped and slid a finger down the sheet, “Seven classified documents all properly checked out.” He read their call numbers. “Five incoming letters, one drafted response, fourteen in-house memos, one desk calendar with notations, one daily appointment book with notations.” He looked up. “That was the proprietary material. The rest is listed as personal effects. They were sent on eighteen October by registered mail.”
    “Do you still have the calendar and appointment book?”
    “We keep them on file for one year.”
    “May I have them?” I reminded the man, “Mr. McAllister said ‘everything.’”
    “Sign this form.”
    As I filled in the “Received by” line and dated it, Bartlett went to a large metal filing cabinet and pulled out one of the lower drawers. It moved heavy and silent like a morgue slab and the man, deliberate as ever, thumbed through the labeled brown envelopes until he came to Haas’s.
    “Here they are.”
    On my way out I resisted the impulse to smile at the TV camera mounted high in a dim corner which, I knew, led to one of the small screens in front of Bartlett’s cold eyes. Instead, I returned the desk man’s friendly nod and picked my way back through the fast-melting remnants of snow.
    The printouts were only a little more complete than the ones I had searched earlier, but I didn’t expect too much new. Their main purpose was to refresh my memory about the details of the man and the case, and to complete the financial records up to the date of final payment. They also detailed the death benefits to his survivors. I jotted down the amounts and the methods of payment. Haas had arranged distribution so that Margaret’s life would be comfortable if not extravagant, provided she managed the money well; and the children had separate reserve funds for college or their maturity. It wasn’t the document of a reckless man or one who was counting on a sudden and large windfall from some outside source. But of course it may have been drawn up long before the proposals were stolen—if Haas was the one to steal them.
    The appointment book held an hour-by-hour list of the meetings, calls, cryptic names, and memory cues that a busy man used to organize his time. His secretary would have kept the more formal log of those who made their appointments in advance, and that’s what all those slanted lines must have been that blocked out time by fifteen-minute units. If it wasn’t an office visit, a name was written in and presumably Haas went there. Gradually, as I studied the pages, the routine of the man’s office life took hazy shape: the first hour, from eight thirty to nine thirty, was always blank—time for assimilating the previous night’s work or for organizing the day to come. Then the office visits, appointments with whoever the secretary introduced over the intercom. On Tuesdays and Fridays, regularly scheduled meetings were held at eleven; these were marked out with a line and initialed “Mac.” The afternoons were much less organized, and here were the more personal notes of meetings outside the office, trips to sites or to manufacturers’ showrooms, of an occasional afternoon marked “Tee-off: 2:10” or “dentist.”
    I began entering the names and initials of the visited and the visitors into my computer, coding each one with a recall number and programming the machine to seek first the sequence and then the frequency of the visits. Here, too, a vague pattern began to emerge. The in-office lists showed an increasing number of meetings with “Don” which started with one in February and then became nine in the two weeks before Haas’s death. A number of random singles filled in a lot of space, and several short names or initials had consistent meetings, usually one every week or two. The afternoon list, those where Haas