Dead Anyway

by Chris Knopf

  “What, I shouldn’t have?” Natsumi asked.

  “No, I’m just not used to it. Too long a feral man.”

  “It’s not a banquet. Chicken pot pie and mixed greens. And wine, at least for me. You can drink tap water.”

  While we ate I told her more about my meeting with Little Boy and his two muscle heads.

  “How are you going to manage the exchange?” she asked.

  “I’m still working on that. Any ideas?”

  She thought about it.

  “Make the switch in the parking lot of the Balkan Bakery. You told me Little Boy never commits crime in his own neighborhood. By the same token, no one will interfere with his transactions, or even acknowledge anything’s going on. It’s also an assurance to him. You’d be beyond crazy to pull any crap right in the heart of Bosniak central.

  “Isn’t this committing a crime?”

  She shrugged.

  “It’s a business deal. Try it out on him. See what he thinks.”

  I had the chance to do that the next day when Little Boy called me on the cell I’d given him. He told me he was willing to invest $100,000 in the first go ’round. To test the concept and to work out the downstream market. I proposed Natsumi’s approach for the exchange, with an honest description of the rationale. He surprised me by buying the whole argument.

  “For sure, we’re not going to kill you in our own backyard,” he said. “So maybe we can later have a little more trust, eh?”

  We made arrangements for me to meet him at eleven P.M., an hour after the Balkan Bakery closed. He’d bring the $100K in cash, a scale and testing gear. I’d bring the gold.

  When I got home, I was able to tell Natsumi that she had a future in criminal transaction logistics. She looked proud of herself.

  “When you add that to professional blackjack dealer, I sound quite sinister.”

  We didn’t talk much more about the plan since there wasn’t much to say. I was going through with it, and we’d done all we could think of to keep me safe, so there was little point in belaboring the obvious concerns. Instead, Natsumi went back to her paper, which had grown from ten pages to nearly fifty, prompting her to ask if she was reinforcing stereotypes of the Asian overachiever.

  “Thirty-eight years old, and you’re finally graduating from college?”

  “Point taken.”

  FOR MYSELF, I went back to my favorite evening pastime, reviewing Florencia’s financials. That night, I remembered the lease on the property in Scottsdale she’d arranged through spacejockeys.com. I went in other private files and saw the address was 358 Jacaranda Boulevard, Suite 35. I pulled up a Google map and pegged the spot as deep within a heavily commercialized area of the city. Google asked if I wanted a street view, and I thought, sure, why not.

  It was a fairly new brick building in a complex that included a Marriot Hotel and Morton’s Steakhouse. Florencia’s space was on the top floor at the end of a long hall. I googled the building’s address, and got the leasing agent—a commercial real estate firm—and three other businesses connected with the location: an advertising agency, geological surveyors and a brokerage house. None were at Suite 35.

  I wrote the real estate agency and asked who was leasing Suite 35. I was surprised by the nearly instantaneous response, apologizing that such information was confidential, but there were still many highly desirable vacancies in the building which she’d be eager to show me. Would tomorrow at ten be convenient?

  She included an attachment with photos and specifications. The smallest space in the building was five hundred square feet, and thirteen out of twenty units were empty.

  I went back to the spacejockeys contract and dug deeper into the language. I saw that the lease amount was contingent upon which additional services the renter required. The ones Florencia selected were listed by a number code. So I went back to the spacejockeys web site and opened the screen where you picked through your options.

  Her number codes corresponded to security alarm, monthly janitorial and mail forwarding services. The same three I’d chosen for my office in Evanston, having no need for incidentals like furniture, phone service, broadband access or receptionist. Why get all this when the address is just a pass-through?

  Since the financial program I’d installed for Florencia was web-based, and built on a browser, it was searchable, a feature I really liked when I was weighing different packages. You just had to be within the broad functional category, like AR/AP, aging, balance sheet or general ledger. I went through all of them, pasting the address into the search box, and racking up “no results” at each one.

  That left only two other possibilities, Florencia’s personal account and the premium trust account. I started with Florencia’s account and the spacejockeys contract came up instantly. There were no other notations, so I moved on to the premium trust account.

  As with her personal records, the premium trust account was bolted to the floor. Only one other person, the comptroller Damien Brandt, had access, though only to make deposits of clients’ premium payments, not withdrawals. These could only be done by Florencia, and only she could do the monthly reconciliation, essentially balancing the account. In addition to accounting for deposits and disbursements, this segment of the software listed all the carriers who held the policies the disbursements funded. Most of the carriers were fully set up to handle the flow of premium funds through electronic transfers. Routing numbers and bank codes were contained within the program, so she could simply point and click to take an appropriate action.

  Five of the carriers, four with names I recognized, still required paper checks. The fifth was an outfit called Deer Park Underwriters, located at 358 Jacaranda Boulevard, Suite 35, Scottsdale, Arizona.

  I NEEDED all the time I had left to retrieve the gold and meet Little Boy. I told Natsumi I’d call her when I was on the way home with the money.

  “If you don’t hear from me, don’t call the police. There’s always the possibility they’ll grab me and try to force me to give up my source. It may take a while to work that out.”

  “Okay,” she said, “I understand. Don’t tell me you’re sorry in advance or any of that. We’ve already talked about it.”

  It was a very cold night. Without a moon, and the air crisp and brittle dry, the stars were clean little pinpricks and the Milky Way a black cloth sprayed with iridescence.

  I brought along my own scale to Gerry’s shop. Before I left the apartment, I pegged the price I looked up on the web to the amount of gold I needed to load. The resulting cardboard boxes filled with bars took up remarkably little room in the trunk.

  With no traffic to contend with, the trip to the Balkan Bakery only took about twenty minutes. In the lot were two big SUV’s and a step van. All black. Men were standing around and leaning against the van under a dusky floodlight, hunched against the cold and smoking cigarettes. I flicked off my lights before I turned into the lot.

  “Hey, Mr. G.,” said Little Boy, “I gotta admit, you got guts.”

  “I also have your product. Do you have my compensation?”

  “That’s why we’re here. Come into my office and we get this over with.”

  He walked over to the van and opened the rear doors, inviting me in. Since there was really no way to guarantee I’d have the money in my hands either before or immediately after delivering the gold, I just popped the trunk and told the nearest Bosniak to bring it to the van. I watched while he and another transferred the heavy little boxes. They stepped back when they were done and I followed Little Boy into the van.

  It was a remarkably pleasant environment. There were two low, soft leather seats along one side of the vehicle. On the other side was a long couch in the same material. In the middle was a big round coffee table. The carpet on the floor and the wood paneling were elegant and understated.

  Little Boy unpacked the gold and stacked the bars on the table. He took the scale and testing equipment out of a compartment at the front of the van and set up shop.
I sat in one of the leather chairs, which swiveled, and watched him work.

  “I’ve been paid in gold plenty of times, but never really thought about getting into the business itself,” said Little Boy, in a convivial mood. “But why not? Sure, it’s heavy, but you can stuff a lot of money into a very small package.” He looked up at me. “And who’s it going to hurt? Not like drugs, or girls, or numbers, or even boosting trucks filled with cigarettes. These are all not only sinful things, but bad for people.”

  “I agree with you,” I said. “I’m hoping for a long-term relationship. As soon as this connection expires, I’ll open another. There’s no limit here. And for you, very little risk, if any at all.”

  We continued to make small talk, which found its way into a discussion of professional basketball, a subject I knew nothing about. Luckily, Little Boy was so loquacious the conversation was really more pontification on his part. He only relented when the last bar had been analyzed. He looked at me with a hard face.

  “Mr. G., I’m very disappointed with you.”

  I felt my heart begin its involuntary ascent up into my throat.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “This isn’t the amount we agreed upon,” he said, waving his hand dismissively at the stacks of gold bars. “What do you take me for?”

  “It is the amount. You must have missed something. That happens. You need to check again.”

  “I spend all this time and you expect me to spend it again?”

  I showed him the piece of paper on which I’d tallied up the total weight loaded into the Outback.

  “That’s what’s sitting there,” I said, in an angry but even voice. “Give me your scale and I’ll prove it to you.”

  Little Boy’s perpetual grin broke into an all-out smile.

  “I’m not saying it’s not all there. It is. I’m saying that amount is worth at least a thousand dollars more than the current price per ounce. You give me too much, Mr. G.”

  I sat back in my seat. I’d forgotten I’d thrown in a little extra just to be sure I wouldn’t be under, depending on whatever price fluctuations might have occurred since I last checked. My plan was to throw in the overage as a gesture of goodwill. Instead I’d handed Little Boy the perfect excuse for scaring the crap out of me. I told him just that.

  “Thank you, Mr. G. So you weren’t just testing me, eh?”

  “No. Though that might have been a good idea.”

  He laughed and swatted my chest with the back of his hand. It stung, but I pretended it didn’t.

  “Very good. I like that. So now I suppose you want your money.”

  “That’s customary.”

  “You don’t talk like a person who steals gold,” he said, as if informing me of something I might not have known myself.

  “I think people who steal come in all varieties. It’s a universal human affliction.”

  “See. There you go again.”

  “So, the money,” I said.

  He stood up and got a small leather bag out of the same compartment that held the testing gear. He dropped it in my lap.

  “American dollars,” he said. “Real, not counterfeit. Unmarked hundreds. Count away.”

  Count I did, not that I thought he’d short me. Not counting would have been a sign of weakness. He waited silently until I was finished, which I confirmed with two thumbs up. He smiled another of his wide smiles and reached out his broad hand. I took it.

  “I need some time to replenish supplies,” I said. “I’ll be in touch. And don’t forget to refer me to Austin Ott.”

  He continued to shake my hand after I released my grip, increasing his.

  “It’s not exactly fair you know where I live and I don’t know where you live,” he said.

  “It’s not fair you have a family to love, a brotherhood to embrace you, an entire community to keep you safe. I have only myself. If my life isn’t secret, I’m defenseless.”

  He dropped my hand and pursed his lips, a telltale of complicated thought.

  “I’m starting to like you, Mr. G., despite my better instincts. Take your money and get out of here before you disappoint me. I don’t get over disappointments very well.”

  I did as requested, acknowledging in the privacy of my own mind that I was starting to like Little Boy as well, for no good reason on earth.

  CHAPTER 18

  I woke up about five the next morning and, after making a big pot of coffee, returned to the computer. I went back into the premium trust account at Florencia’s agency and started adding up the premium payments to Deer Park Underwriters. I went back seven years, when the trail ended at the point I brought the new system online. The records for the prior eight years were on magnetic tape stored in a warehouse somewhere, out of reach of the World Wide Web.

  Still, the tally had hit $6.5 million over the last seven years.

  I left the financial system and moved into operations, tracking the clients who’d been sold policies covered by Deer Park Underwriters. There weren’t any.

  I once worked for an insurance company that sold directors and officers liability coverage. Built into the policy was protection against employee fraud and embezzlement, which could result in a suit against management for failing to enforce adequate controls. My job was to research and document the various ways employees could dip their hands in the corporate cookie jar. Some were very clever and elaborate. Some bold and brilliant in their simplicity. I immediately recognized where this fell. Somewhere in the middle.

  I called up the contract with spacejockeys and asked for a review of the account. In particular, I wanted the destination for all the mail forwarded out of the Deer Park Underwriters address.

  The answer was immediately forthcoming: Blue Hen National Bank of Newark, Delaware, lockbox services. Contained in the forwarding information was an account number and access code. I jumped into the Blue Hen online banking site and spent a tense two hours cracking into the account. The trickiest part was sending an email from Florencia through her personal email system requesting a new username and password. Once I finally broke through, the result was as expected.

  The paper checks made out to Deer Park Underwriters were deposited in a Blue Hen lockbox account labeled Claims Clearance. Every three months, the account was swept clean and the money wired to another bank in the Cayman Islands.

  I’d seen it before. I knew what it was. A fissure opened up in the floor beneath me and I nearly fell through. My heart seemed to catch fire as it clawed its way up into the upper reaches of my chest. No, no, no, can’t be, I whispered to myself, while the cold, calculating animal at the center of my mind was saying, oh, yes it is. It’s exactly what you think it is.

  I knew then what it meant when people said their world had turned upside down. They meant it literally. It was only after I slid off my chair and lay supine on the ground for a half hour that equilibrium returned.

  I went out to the kitchen where Natsumi was tapping away at her laptop, books open all around her on the kitchen table, kitchen chairs stacked with papers, CD cases and other books. She looked up happily, then changed her expression when she saw mine.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “Not sure. It’s too fresh. Need some processing time.”

  “Okay. Can I get a headline?”

  “I’m not sure, but I think I’ve slid into a parallel universe.”

  “Really.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and pulled my shoulders in, as if braced for a blow.

  “I wish I could trust my own brain,” I said.

  “I think you can. It’s a good brain.”

  “Was.”

  “Tell me about this new universe,” she said.

  “It’s a place where Florencia was stealing money from her own company.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  I left her and went to my bedroom to lie down. I tried to go limp, releasing my frame from the painful pull of gravity, assessing the grip of knot
ted muscles and inflamed joints. The sun was starting to come up, but the shade was down, leaving the room in brooding shadow.

  I played a movie in my mind. The opening: it’s the end of the year and a big client wants to use leftover budget to pay their premium well in advance of renewal. Florencia graciously accepts their check to hold in an escrow account. When another big client sends in their premium payment, half their money goes to Deer Park Underwriters. The other half goes to the legitimate carrier, with the balance made up from the other client’s escrow account.

  The next month, some of the premium money coming in covers the deficit in the escrow account, some of it goes to fully fund other coverage, but a bit of it slides into Deer Park Underwriters, eventually working its way to the Caribbean. Month after month, year after year, the performance is repeated. Over time, Florencia’s commercial insurance business grows until significant amounts are moving through the premium trust account. Good fortune allows all policies to be in force when needed, while some of the froth is steadily drawn off and sealed up in a vessel that makes Switzerland look like a colander.

  Natsumi came in and sat next to me on the bed. I opened my eyes.

  “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to tell me,” she said.

  “Yes, I do. I got you into this. It would be unfair to with-hold anything that could have an effect on you.”

  “There’s something you don’t understand,” she said. “And maybe that’s because I haven’t spoken the words. So I guess I’m the one who’s withholding.”

  I sat up on my elbows.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m glad I’m here. I wouldn’t have prescribed the way things happened, but there was something predestined about the way it did. I loved working at the casino. I loved going to school. But now I’ll have the degree, and I can’t go back to my job. I understood it was time for my life to move into something new, but I needed a big bang to make it so.”

  She took my hand. “When you sat down at my blackjack table I was almost knocked over by your urgency and grief. I could feel your battered, calculating mind. Don’t ask me how, but I’m not a psych major for nothing.”