C T Ferguson Box Set

by Tom Fowler

  “It could,” Jessica said with a nod.

  “It would have to be something pretty bad if it’s money-related, and she’s hiding it from him.”

  “I think it would.” Jessica nudged away her empty plate. “What are you going to do now?” she said.

  “There’s someone else I want to ask about this. Then I think I need to see the Fishers together.”

  “I think that’s a bad idea,” said Jessica.

  “The whole thing about not investigating my client?” I said.

  She nodded. “Yes, and you might reveal whatever she’s keeping from her husband.”

  She made sense. “OK, fair enough. I won’t investigate her . . . for now. I’ll see where else the rabbit hole goes.”

  “I think that’s a good idea.” Jessica sipped some tea. “It all may lead back to the wife anyway, but I think you have to branch out first.”

  “Good thing I went to college," I said.

  When I got to the restaurant, Joey Trovato was already there. I remembered he liked this place, and I liked it enough to eat there with him. “Jesus Christ, look at you,” he said as I approached the table. Joey stood and gave me a bear hug. I embraced him and pounded his back, both as a sign of friendship and to try and get him to let go before I suffocated.

  Joey was a black Sicilian with a light mocha skin tone and wavy black hair. For his whole life, he fought the battle of the bulge but could never be counted among the victors. Joey stood six feet tall on the dot, two inches shorter than I am but outweighed me by at least 100 pounds. He was fat, to be sure, but his girth belied a surprising amount of strength and athleticism. I could outrun Joey, but I knew a bunch of people who couldn’t. Especially if they carried food as he pursued them.

  “How are you, Joey?” I said. I slid onto the chair opposite him. “When’s the due date?”

  “You’re hilarious,” Joey said. “I’m a growing boy. I gotta eat. Ah, I’ve been good. Business hit a slow spot for a while, but it’s picked up again. I’m regional now. People coming from all over the state, DC, hell even some from northern Virginia and southern Pennsylvania.” After we finished four years of college, Joey learned the science and art of setting people up with new identities.

  “Good, especially since you can’t exactly hand out business cards.”

  “Ain’t that the truth?” A waiter came, handed us menus, and introduced himself. We placed our drink orders, and he walked away. “So what the hell happened to you? You went overseas, and all I got was a bunch of emails, then some phone calls asking for help.”

  “I tried calling you a few other times. And I told my parents to check on you at the holidays, make sure you had a place to go.”

  “They did. They did.” Joey smiled wistfully. “Your parents are good people. What happened to you overseas? Why’d you come back all of a sudden?”

  I told him, in a lowered voice, about the hacking and piracy ring, our arrests, the edited version of my 19 days as a guest of the Hong Kong penal system, and everything since. Joey shook his head. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “What a fucking story.”

  “Yeah. You know the rest. My parents are shoving their altruism on me. Thanks for helping me with the background, by the way. There’s no way I would have sniffed being a PI without it.”

  “I still can’t believe you’re a private eye,” he said. Joey looked at me and shook his head.

  “We all have our crosses to bear.”

  “Looks like we both ended up with jobs helping people, in our own ways.” The waiter brought our drinks. We placed our orders. Joey asked for two appetizers and an entrée with an extra side. I wanted only pasta with a side salad. Joey raised his glass of soda. “To us . . . helping folks,” he said. “What a fucking pair we make.”

  “Hear, hear.” I knocked my glass into his.

  We exchanged war stories until the appetizers showed up. Joey ordered both mozzarella sticks and fried calamari. I don’t think I could have eaten both of those, and he still had a heaping plate of food coming later. Joey picked up a mozzarella stick, dunked it into the marinara sauce like an angry LeBron, and shoved the entire thing into his mouth. I looked away and admired the fake Donatello on the wall. When Joey took a large piece of calamari, I grabbed a mozzarella stick. He said something around his mouthful of food sounding like, “Hey!”

  “You’ll thank me later,” I said. “I’m pushing back your stroke by a half-hour.”

  “And speeding up your own.”

  “Unlike you, I’ll burn off the calories later.” I dipped the mozzarella stick in the marinara and bit off half of it.

  Joey smiled, dunked the calamari in its vat of marinara sauce with a force suggesting a deep-seated hatred of squids, and ate it. “How do you know I didn’t get sensitive about my weight while you were gallivanting all over the globe?”

  “Because it’s you.”

  “Fair point.”

  “It’s good to catch up.”

  “But. . . .” Joey eyed me as suspiciously as someone cramming a whole mozzarella stick into his mouth can eye someone.

  “I also asked you here for your professional opinion.”

  “You don’t need a new identity.”

  “Nor do I want one.” I lowered my voice again and went over the whole situation with the Fishers. Joey listened while gorging himself on his appetizers. I paused while the waiter freshened our drinks, then picked up again when he left. “It bothers me,” I said when I’d finished, “her lying about her finances.”

  “How the hell can I help?”

  “You relocate people. You see them at their worst. They come to you with money, desperation, and a bad beat story. You’ve probably heard worse than a husband who might be diddling someone at work and a wife lying about money.”

  “I have.” Joey finished off the mozzarella sticks. I used his momentary distraction to snag a piece of calamari. He chuckled at me before continuing. “She’s hiding something. It’s gotta be related to money. She wants the husband to think they’re poorer than they really are because she’s blowing cash on something.”

  “Drugs?”

  Joey shrugged. “Usually. She look like a druggie to you?”

  “No, but I’ll admit I wasn’t looking for the signs.”

  “She’s your client, you know,” said Joey. “You’re not supposed to investigate her.”

  “And she’s not supposed to lie to me,” I said.

  “People lie. You lie. Get over it.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t think the husband is cheating. Her lie is something I can pick at.”

  “What are you going to do next?”

  “It’s bad form to look into my client, so I guess I’ll investigate the cheating angle.”

  “Even though you don’t think he’s a cheater.”

  “Even though,” I said.

  “What if he is?” Joey said.

  “Then I guess I need to buy a fish-eye lens and practice hanging out of trees.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  “If there’s nothing there, though, I’m coming back to Alice.”

  “You’re awfully worked up over her telling a lie.”

  I sipped some iced tea. “I guess I am,” I said. “Am I making too much of it?”

  Joey shrugged. “Maybe. She could be a cokehead for all you know. Or it could be nothing.”

  “I wish I knew which was more likely,” I said.

  Chapter 5

  Jessica and Joey had convinced me to back off Alice Fisher. I would comply, for now, but if my instincts were right, and Paul wasn’t diddling someone at the office, then I’d come back to Alice. In the meantime, I looked into Paul’s coworkers at Digital Sales. Their website, with a little prodding, was helpful enough to give me an organization chart. I looked into all of the women of Digital Sales. They had helped me out by having a heavily male workforce.

  Digital Sales was a company of sixty employees. Of those, only eleven were women, and only one of the women appeared at t
he top of a division on the org chart. She would be Mary Dietz, whose social media pages revealed a marriage full of children and hugs. I knew wedded people could cheat, especially with other married folks, but I decided to rule out those whose marriages looked happy. At least on my first pass. On the second pass, I could plumb the depths of matrimonial misery.

  It turned out all of the women of Digital Sales were hitched save for executive assistant Sally Willis. Her Facebook and Instagram pages overflowed with pictures. Many of them showed Sally out in the town, in the company of a succession of men. I spied wedding rings on the fingers of a couple of the men. Nothing said Sally and these men were anything beyond friends. Other than Sally, I could infer unhappiness in the marriage of only one woman. I didn’t have much to go on.

  Paul Fisher had a boring social media presence. He lacked Instagram or Snapchat, his LinkedIn contacts were almost all coworkers, and his Facebook yearned for an update. He and Sally were contacts on LinkedIn, but the overlap stopped there. Sally told me she didn’t like Paul Fisher. It may have been true. I couldn’t find anything online to disprove it, at least not yet.

  The woman whose marriage didn’t consist of sunshine and puppies was Debbie Wilder. Like Paul Fisher, her social media presence consisted of LinkedIn and Facebook. Her Facebook featured many pictures with men not her husband and also not Paul Fisher. I felt it likely this meant nothing—only a foolish cheater would be so brazen about it, after all—but it was more than I found elsewhere.

  Still, none of it gave me anything concrete. I had no smoking gun, or even a sparking and smoldering one. I did some mining in the rabbit hole of this case, and I figured to do more later. For now, however, the burrow led to Alice. I went after the Fishers’ financials and found them within a few minutes.

  Other than one bounced check six months prior, the Fishers had no red flags in their account. Their balance often skirted zero, especially following the crush of bills the first week of the month. Alice transferred funds to another account at least once a month, always a few hundred dollars. She also took out a personal loan of $5000. What was she doing with the money? It could be enough to support a drug habit. I got the account number from the transactions and accessed it. It was a personal checking account with a debit card. Alice withdrew money from ATMs often, usually two hundred or three hundred at a time. Possibly to finance a drug habit. Combined with her solitary loan, it didn’t paint a good picture.

  I could go back to Upper Chesapeake and ask if Alice showed signs of drug abuse, but I got the feeling I was persona non grata there. Alice’s boss probably wouldn’t talk to me again. Then I remembered Erica Souza. She had the most contact with me of anyone there, so her opinion may not have been tainted by the security guard getting called to show me to the elevators.

  I did some clever Googling to find Upper Chesapeake’s employee directory. Once I found Erica’s number, I called her. She answered on the third ring.“Upper Chesapeake, this is Erica.”

  “Erica, this is C.T. Ferguson.”

  “How may I direct your call, Mr. Ferguson?”

  “You can keep it right where it is. I’m the detective who talked to you yesterday.”

  She was silent for a few seconds. “And the one who badgered Mr. Dunn.”

  “Would you believe me if I said he had it coming?” I said.

  “Did he?” Erica said.

  “You and I both know he did. I have a couple of questions I’d like to ask you, if you don’t mind. They’re confidential. I can meet you somewhere.”

  I heard her sigh into the phone. “I haven’t had lunch yet. The café isn’t very crowded this time of day. Buy me lunch, and we can talk.”

  “Give me a half-hour,” I said.

  Thirty-six minutes later, I walked into the café. I got to Upper Chesapeake ten minutes before, but it took that long to find a parking place, eventually settling on one only requiring me to walk about a mile to the hospital. If I arrived with a leg injury, I would have needed an amputation by the time I reached the door. Erica sat a table near the back, one leg crossed over the other and her arms folded under her chest.

  “I know I’m late,” I said, approaching her with my hands spread. “In my defense, I had to park in Abingdon.”

  A smile slowly spread over Erica’s lips. It didn’t stack up to Jessica Webber’ or even Sally Willis’, but a man could get used to it. “Parking here is terrible,” she said. “If we didn’t have a staff lot, I don’t know what I’d do.”

  “Probably have very toned calves.”

  She blushed. “Are you hungry?”

  “Not really, but I’ll stand in line with you and keep horny doctors at bay.”

  “My knight,” she said with a smirk.

  We got in line at the front of the café. There were only two people ahead of us, and not many more sitting and eating. I ordered an iced tea. Erica got a turkey sandwich, a salad, chocolate pudding, and a soda. The chocolate pudding had turned into concrete in the cup. I wondered how many spoons Erica would break trying to eat it, to say nothing of her teeth.

  Back at the table, Erica nibbled on her salad. “Thanks for lunch,” she said.

  “Thanks for seeing me after the events of yesterday,” I said. “I figure I’m probably not too welcome in your department right now.”

  She smiled. “You could say that. Dunn wanted to press charges for harassment, I think. Someone talked him out of it.”

  I shrugged. “At some point, I’m sure someone will try to say I harassed them. One day, it might even be true.”

  “It just might.” She nibbled on her salad some more and took a bite of the turkey sandwich. She hadn’t even looked at the pudding yet. “What did you want to talk about?”

  “You know I’m looking into the Fishers.” She nodded. “I have reasons to . . . question some things in their finances. Have you seen anything from Alice to lead you to think they have money problems?”

  She frowned over another bite of her sandwich. “Not that I know of,” she said. “She may not mention something like that to me.”

  “Do you have any nursing training?” Erica shook her head as she ate. “Work with folks who do?” She nodded. “Any of them talk about Alice?”

  “In what way?”

  “Drugs,” I said.

  “Drugs?” She frowned again. “I haven’t heard anything. I’m not a nurse, so I might not be in on all their gossip. If someone had a drug problem, I’m sure they would be gabbing about it.”

  “Any way you can ask? I know it might be hard to fit into a conversation, but you strike me as a resourceful girl.”

  She smiled over a drink of her soda. “I manage. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Good.” I took out a business card and handed it to her. She looked at it and smiled. “What?” I said.

  “Is that really your slogan?”

  I rolled my eyes. “I knew it was awful.”

  I spent the rest of the day looking into a dojo where I could train and getting dinner. Once the clock hit seven-thirty, I set out for the Fishers’ neighborhood. I still didn’t have a plan for getting into their house, but I hoped inspiration would strike me on the drive. It didn’t. I drove up and down the Fishers’ street. Medium-sized single-family homes made from a cookie cutter stared back at me. Two houses were for sale, and one of them looked vacant. Inspiration struck.

  There was plenty of street parking, so I left my Lexus near the Fishers’ house and walked to it. I saw two Toyotas in their driveway. At least half the houses on the street had garages, including both of those for sale. I went to the door and rang the doorbell. If Alice answered, this could get awkward. Thankfully, Paul Fisher came to the door. He looked an inch taller than me, but thin, probably around 170 pounds. His brown hair showed a few wisps of gray at the temples and framed a face that sped past tired and now approached haggard. He opened the door wide enough to poke his head out. “Can I help you?”

  “I hope so,” I said. “I’m thinking about buying a house
in this neighborhood, and I was hoping I could talk to you about it.”

  “Sure, come on in,” Paul said with a smile. “I got home a few minutes ago, and my wife is still upstairs. Excuse the mess.”

  “Looks fine to me.” I harbored no concern for how neat the place looked. I wanted to see signs of unexplained wealth, unexpected poverty, or obvious hiding places for drugs. The Fishers owned a very middle-class house. Their carpet screamed to be replaced, but the walls had been painted in the last year or so. Pictures of family hung there. There weren’t any paintings or any elaborate throw rugs. The furniture in their living room looked straight out of a discount store. I didn’t see anything to make me think they were awash in cash or suffered cash flow problems.

  “You said you’re looking in this neighborhood?” Paul Fisher said. I took a seat on the medium brown couch; he sat in a matching recliner snapped into a position too far forward. I didn’t envy his spine.

  “Yes. My family is still in Virginia. I’m moving up here for work, and I figured I would do a little advance scouting.” When in doubt, try social engineering. It works.

  “Good plan.” He held out his hand. “I’m Paul.”

  I shook his hand. “Trent,” I said. My middle name.

  “What line of work are you in, Trent?”

  “Finance.” I heard footsteps coming down the stairs. “I’m starting with a new company soon.”

  The sounds moved into the kitchen. I looked to my left and saw Alice Fisher. She saw me and did a double take but recovered quickly. I didn’t know whether Paul saw her reaction. Alice busied herself in the kitchen and tried not to pay attention to me. Paul didn't let her get away with it.

  "Honey, this is Trent," he said. "He's looking to buy a house in the neighborhood and wants to know what we think about it."

  "Oh, that's very nice," Alice said after a moment.

  "Trent, do you want anything to drink?"