Revenge of the Cube Dweller

by Joanne Fox Phillips

  When Lucy and I were in high school, we both had after-school jobs at Joseph Magnin, a high-end department store in downtown San Francisco. Lucy was sixteen and worked in the gift-wrapping station. I had lied about my age and at fifteen was hired in the Juniors department.

  When it came time for our eighteen-year-old sister, Blondie, to graduate, our mother and Mrs. Cosmos, across the street, had fixed Blondie up with Spiro Cosmos to go to their high school prom together. Neither Blondie nor Spiro was very excited about the other, but since neither had any better option, both agreed to go along with the arrangement.

  “Blondie, that dress is way too small,” I said as she handed me the silver lamé gown to ring up one afternoon in late April. Chubby Blondie was always on a diet, but discipline was not her long suit, so the regimens never lasted more than a day or two.

  “I’ll go on a diet. I have a month before the dance. It’ll be good incentive for me.”

  I shook my head. There was no way Blondie, at least a fourteen, was going to skinny down to a size eight in a month, but I knew better than to take issue with her delusion. The dress cost more than $100, a huge sum in those days, and it represented at least a month’s worth of tips from her waitress job.

  At home, Blondie hung the dress on the closet door so she could look at it every morning when she got up, presumably to keep the lasagna at bay. Still, as the days wore on, it was clear that her goal was unrealistic, and panic was starting to percolate inside her.

  The hair salon at Magnin’s was at the top of a curved ornate staircase with red plush carpet that was the focal point of the store entrance. The Juniors department was right next to the salon, and I waved to Blondie when she came in for her hair appointment the Saturday of the dance.

  “What are you going to do, Blondie? Can we find you another dress?”

  “I have a plan. But keep quiet. No matter what. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said and went back to my department.

  A few minutes later I heard a scream from near the staircase and watched as customers and employees ran over to see what had happened. There at the foot of the staircase was Blondie, legs akimbo. Even from the top of the stairs I could tell she wasn’t hurt badly, so I ran and got Lucy.

  We charged down the stairs and told the store manager, Mr. Gamble, that this was our sister.

  “We’ve called an ambulance. It should be here shortly. We are so sorry this happened.”

  “Lipstick,” Blondie mumbled. “Lipstick.”

  Lucy and I exchanged looks. I went to the top of the staircase and there on the second step was a Revlon lipstick in Passionate Pink. It looked brand new.

  “Is this yours?” I asked Blondie as the paramedics were loading her onto a stretcher.

  “No. That’s not my shade,” Blondie answered dramatically. “I think I sprained my ankle. Does it look swollen?”

  Lucy and I looked at Blondie’s ankles. Each looked as chubby as the other.

  “Hard to tell,” Lucy replied.

  Mr. Gamble let us both off work to accompany Blondie to the hospital, where the doctor wrapped one of her ankles in an ace bandage. Not a serious injury, he told us, but she should stay off of it for a few days just to be safe. A nurse came by with some crutches for her to use.

  “If you didn’t want to go to the prom, Blondie, why didn’t you just pretend to be sick? That’s what anyone else would have done,” I said while we waited for the number 2 Clement Muni bus to take us home.

  “No one would have believed me,” Blondie said. “They would have thought I was faking.”

  Mama just sighed and muttered some Greek expression under her breath when the three of us arrived at the house. She was well acquainted with how Blondie’s mind worked and must have suspected the injury was neither real nor accidental. Still, she didn’t pursue the matter beyond what we told her. Spiro sent flowers and candy to the house and we spent the evening watching the Mary Tyler Moore Show and eating chocolates. In an effort to thwart a lawsuit, Mr. Gamble refunded the cost of Blondie’s gown, which Lucy wore to her prom two years later.

  Blondie never worried that Lucy or I would tell Mama or Mr. Gamble about her caper. She understood the bond between sisters too well. The following week when I found a Rexall Drug receipt for one Passionate Pink lipstick in the wastebasket I was emptying, I tore it into tiny pieces.

  Fifteen minutes later I hear the joyful sound of Mazie packing up. With the ding of the elevator signaling her departure, I emerge from my hiding place, stiff and aching.

  I skedaddle back to my cube on the sixth floor, lest Mazie or Amy forget something and return. I pop a couple of Advil, washing them down with the glass of water on my desk that I abandoned on Saturday. I fish through my purse to read the text whose ding was almost my undoing. It is from Lucy. Call me. Flights are expensive.

  This can wait, I decide, and I quickly log in to my computer and access the testing I worked on last week. I pull the payment file and this time filter for vendors set up by Mazie and processed by Amy. Mazie can’t process an invoice on her own, but with her daughter able to, the control structure has been breached. There are too many to see any pattern, so I review the payment instructions looking for red flags such as PO boxes or foreign wire accounts. The list is much smaller now, and I can see, as I suspected, that this fraud is much bigger than what I had previously found.

  In addition to the changing of a legitimate vendor’s banking information back and forth, there are at least five fictitious vendors—among them Larson Consulting, MCAL Electric, and other parts of their names or initials—whose checks are sent to PO boxes, and others are sent to what appear to me to be Cayman accounts. I know what Cayman accounts look like because Winston and I used to have a place on Seven Mile Beach for years and wired the annual maintenance fee. When the condo sold, I kept my half in a Cayman account so as not to repatriate my funds and avoid—or better, “defer”—U.S. taxes.

  Bishop has international operations, and foreign payments are not unusual, so it is unlikely that anyone who isn’t already suspicious will notice the foreign activity. It looks to me like the PO box scheme started two years ago, while the Cayman wires to three similar vendors began fairly recently. It is typical of fraudsters to start slowly and then build up their operation as they gain a better understanding of the system and what gets caught and—most important—what does not. My initial calculations put the theft well into the millions of dollars, and it seems to have increased dramatically in recent months.

  This is huge. Bigger than Moe’s South Texas fraud. It is the type of thing that auditors learn about but rarely see firsthand. More common are forged expense report receipts or stolen inventory, little stuff by comparison. This really could be a promotion for me. Regardless of how evil the Bishops are, a change in title from Staff Auditor to Principal or Consultant would do wonders for my résumé. I might even be invited to speak at a conference or audit roundtable.

  I decide not to go back to the ninth floor since I wasted so much time hiding under Jane’s desk. I want to hack into Baldwin’s e-mail, and I want to make sure it cannot be traced to my computer if someone looks into it later.

  I grab a lunch at Braum’s, a favorite Oklahoma creamery, on my way out of downtown. No wonder I am gaining weight. Mason is right: What do I expect with a diet of candy and milkshakes? Heading south to the same library I used the day before, I marvel at the true beauty of Tulsa’s early spring. After the coldest damn winter I have ever experienced, spring has come. As if overnight, the town has been painted in white blossoms from the Bradford pears and then bright pink with redbuds. Tulips have sprung up and pansies, sparse and leggy during the winter, have erupted to blanket the landscape in deep purple and yellow.

  Southeast Texas is completely different. Houston is tropical, which means there are really only two seasons: hot as hell and beautiful. Occasionally a cold front will blow in, and it may get to as low as the teens, but only for a single day, and then it goes back to the high fi
fties or mid-sixties. Generally, you cannot tell the season there by the landscape.

  My phone rings. I don’t like to talk on the phone while driving, but I remember Lucy’s text and don’t want her to have to wait.

  “Why didn’t you call me, Tanzie?” she chides.

  “God, I’m sorry. It’s been a busy morning.”

  “I found a flight, but it’s $1,500 round trip. I didn’t want to make the reservation without getting your okay first.”

  “Fine. What time do you get in?”

  “Not until 10:30 at night. There’s a three-hour layover in Houston.”

  One problem with Tulsa is that it is very difficult to travel into and out of. There are only direct flights to a handful of hubs. All other destinations require connections, which add time and potential delays and lost luggage. I used to laugh at an upscale seafood restaurant that bragged that their fish was flown in daily. If it takes me twelve hours to get to the coast, what chance does a fish have? I pull over and give Lucy my credit card information, and she gives me the flight numbers.

  “Thanks, Tanzie. See you tomorrow. This is going to be great!”

  “If it’s as much fun as hiding from two accounts payable clerks all morning, I’m not so sure.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing. I’ll tell you later.”

  The library is empty, and I resume my spot at the back computer. As anxious as I am to hack into Baldwin’s computer, I am fixated on knowing exactly how the Mazie/Amy caper is carried out. I’m still not sure how Amy can process the invoices without a third person providing electronic approval. I log in as Amy Larson and goof around on her accounting software. Amy cannot set up a vendor, but she can enter an invoice that then has to be approved by someone else. I knew from my previous audits that each invoice has to be entered by one clerk and approved by another.

  Most companies have the engineer or manager who authorized the work perform the electronic approval. Bishop, however, is woefully behind the times and has clung to paper copies of things long after others, including their software manufacturer, have moved to paperless systems. So at Bishop, the approving manager submits a paper invoice to Accounts Payable, where Amy or an equivalent clerk enters it into the system as pending. Then it’s approved electronically by the other accounts payable clerk, who relies on a signature on the paper copy. After that electronic approval is entered, the payment will process, and checks are cut or wires are sent without additional human interaction.

  The process is excruciatingly inefficient, and vendors complain often and loudly about how long it takes for them to get paid. Still, Bishop is big and a good client for most, so the extra time required for payment is just a cost of doing business.

  I wonder if there is a third person involved in the scheme. It is large enough to satisfy the criminal greed of an entire ring. Someone other than Amy has to be approving the invoices; the system requires it, and it cannot be Mazie. I need to do a little more research before presenting this to Frank, but that can wait until tomorrow morning. Then, I can look at the payments to see if there is a common approver, which might imply another ring member or two.

  I log in as Baldwin, noting right away an e-mail from Sullivan Kimball to Bishop explaining the results of his research. The memo references LEAR_2008_17_Houston_Gas and indicates that back then Wagner Jones had put together a task force to determine how best to assess the condition of the Galleria section of pipe. The most expensive alternative required remapping the pipeline to determine exactly where it was, as well as gaining access to certain of the properties in order to perform excavation.

  Wagner’s team had been in contact with the property division, but no one had been able to find the right-of-way records. Each parcel had potentially needed to be renegotiated with the current owner to gain access, and that had the potential to add time and money to the project. Furthermore, if corrosion were found, they would have had to shut down the pipeline for several months to make necessary replacements, adding loss of revenue to the ever-depleting bottom line.

  A cheaper alternative was mentioned involving a “smart pig” that might have been able to adjust for the difference in pipe diameter. Wagner had been getting bids from some companies in Houston, but Sullivan couldn’t find any of those proposals in the files. As far as Sullivan could tell, the Houston project got tabled when a crude leak in Kansas consumed the limited EH&S resources, and Wagner was diagnosed with lung cancer and retired in January 2009. Apparently the Houston project had fallen through the cracks when Sullivan took over the department.

  Baldwin had responded with an e-mail asking for an in-person meeting to discuss this further. Instead of “Sincerely” or “Kind Regards,” Baldwin had concluded his email “Chapped.”

  I download the e-mail to my flash drive, lest Baldwin decide to erase this correspondence as he had the others.

  Just as I am about log off, the computer screen goes to the home page. Press Control+Alt+Delete is on the screen. Then it flashes: This computer is locked and being used by another user BRBishop.

  I jump back. “Shit!” I look up but no one is around me to complain.

  I’m not sure what just happened. Could the message mean that Baldwin logged on and the computer kicked me off? Could he figure out that I was in his computer remotely? My palms begin to sweat and a hot flash erupts in my cheeks. I gather my things and hurry out of the library.

  Once home, glass of wine and cigarette in hand, I feel a bit calmer. He probably didn’t even notice. I noticed because I got kicked off. I decide it will be best to pose a hypothetical question along those lines to Todd and find out what went on at Baldwin’s end of the screen, and not to expend energy worrying about the unknown. Instead, I focus on other details.

  Baldwin and Bennet’s meeting with Sullivan tomorrow evening will be important, and I am annoyed that it will take place face to face. Maybe there will be a write-up recapping the discussion in someone’s email, but that might be a stretch. On the surface, the pipeline issue is plain enough. One crisis is replaced by a bigger one and then gets forgotten altogether. Still, I desperately want to better understand the Bishop Group’s “going forward strategy” in all of this. Surely it will not be confined to deleting files and keeping their fingers crossed. Maybe something will be discussed in the Monday executive session I plan to call into. I will just have to wait and see.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Monday morning executive meeting is scheduled for 8:00 a.m., an hour and a half before our weekly Internal Audit update in Hal’s office. I dial the conference number at five minutes till from my cube, using an earbud to ensure my privacy. If someone walks by, that person will think I am listening to music while I work. After yesterday, I am committed to planning everything I do and figuring out plausible explanations for my behavior just in case. I don’t want to find myself crammed under another desk any time soon.

  “Welcome to the one-source Instameet conferencing center,” says a pleasant female computer voice. “Please enter your passcode followed by the pound or hash key.”

  I enter my code.

  “You are the fifth person to join the conference. At the tone, please say your name and then press the pound symbol.”

  The tone sounds, and I press pound without identifying myself. I have witnessed Hal and others making conference calls, and they never identify themselves. I wait for someone to ask who has just joined, but no one does.

  I can hear talking among the conference room attendees, but the meeting has not officially started yet.

  “Let’s begin, gentlemen,” Baldwin says at exactly eight o’clock.

  Each business unit head takes a turn at articulating the anticipated weekly events from deals in the works, progress on large projects, or market conditions that could impact expected financial results. It is no surprise to me that the European operations are suffering big time due to their recession. Things are not great in most of the domestic units either, but none of that i
s as bad as the looming problem of the Texas situation.

  “As you are aware, I have been in contact with our EH&S group to help us understand the events leading up to the Houston pipeline explosion,” says someone. “We will be having a special meeting this evening with legal and EH&S to better understand our options going forward on this.”

  “Skip, are you on the line?” This sounds like Bennet. Skip is the vice president in charge of Human Resources, who from all appearances is not part of the normal meeting guest list. He is calling in from his office on twenty-nine rather than joining the celebrities on thirty.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Perhaps you can update the group here on Project Titanic.”

  “Sure, Bennet. My team is exploring opportunities to rebalance our general administrative costs given the expected increase in legal fees and potential settlements and fines should Bishop be held liable for the Houston situation. We are currently exploring many strategic alternatives, such as outsourcing certain corporate functions or evaluating other departments as fit for purpose. As you may remember, we had started a similar initiative three months ago when the crude markets became ‘backwardated’ and the marine segment encountered some headwinds, so much of the legal legwork has been easy to leverage. Our timeline on this is to begin this morning with some top-level items and have something to you gentlemen by next Monday’s meeting on the broader elements. This is aggressive, of course, but we are committed to adding value during this critical time at Bishop.”

  HR tends to speak its own language, but my rough interpretation is that cost cuts will have to be made so that Bishop’s bottom line can absorb the costs of killing my friends and their neighbors. Instead of the top executives taking the hit in their salaries or annual bonuses, the pain will be shifted to the rank-and-file employees, who will find themselves out of work in one of the worst recessions since the Great Depression. It seems that some of the firings will occur today, since it sounds to me as though they went down this path pretty recently but abandoned it for unknown reasons. HR, of course, is hoping to be spared from the cutbacks by proving that they are great team players. Good luck with that.