Joseph insisted it could be done. “It’s really shouldn’t be difficult,” he said. “Dad told me there used to be an old Chinese laundryman in his neighborhood who’d write a Chinese character on a piece of paper and then tear the paper in half. One half was your receipt for the laundry. When you came back, he’d just match pieces. Now, that’s all a shredder really does. Nowadays, there are machines sorting out physical garbage like bottles and tin cans so fast you can’t follow it. There’s no reason why shredded paper couldn’t be sorted on the basis of relationships. Matching characters, maybe. Every character that’s been cut has a mate. It could match cut edges by the fiber.
“It would take some doing,” he went on, pulling the ever-present ballpoint out of his pocket, scribbling away on a scrap of paper I’d rescued from the wastebasket and talking as he drew diagrams. “It could be a kind of copier, smoothing out the strips, then reading the information on the pieces the way a scanner does, then doing a quick computer matching, then...”
He kept on thinking aloud, but I was only half listening, since it all sounded impossible, but it was then I came up with my idea. Joseph didn’t like it a bit, but he finally decided to go along with me. Joseph may be honest, but I’m persuasive.
So, three months later, the first customer for our deshredder was Mr. Cranston, himself. I couldn’t think of anyone who would have wanted one more than Cranston. We’d rented a small downtown D.C. office, furnished only with a desk, a few chairs, a massive shredder in one corner and Joseph’s new invention, the Marjoe Deshredder, in the opposite corner. I had insisted Joseph not be there at the time of the sales pitch. Sid and I would manage far better without him. I’d also made it clear to old man Cranston he wasn’t to bring along any of his experts. One fiasco, I figured, was enough.
Cranston was skeptical as I fed some printed matter into the shredder. He followed me across the room and watched while I dumped the resulting bundle of shredded paper into the opening on top of the Marjoe. I kicked on the power, pressed the start button and it began to grind away.
“It will take a while,” I said, “There’s a lot of sorting to be done before it can make a photocopy of the rearranged paper.” As I was talking, the machine hiccuped, spewed the shreds into a wastebasket at the other end and turned out a photocopy of the original. It wasn’t perfect, but it was definitely readable. The lines of the shredded paper were visible. Some letters were broken, but the quality would definitely meet the standards Cranston Investigations, Inc. set for itself—finding out what the stuff in the trashcans said.
I handed Cranston several sheets and told him to go ahead and try it. He was shaky, but not just from age. My guess is he was trembling at the thought of all the secret information the deshredder could open up for him. First, one sheet went into the shredder, then another. I told him to leave some of the shreds behind, since the deshredder could be calibrated to handle the blanks.
That sold him. The copies had missing strips, but again the sheets were readable, and anyone doing the reading could easily figure out the missing letters.
“How much?”
Sid was taking notes on his lap top. “Five million,” I said.
Cranston laughed and waved a dismissive hand, but I could see his mind racing. The thought of all those embassy trash cans bursting with shredded paper, maybe even shredded FBI files—the possibilities for almost infinitely profitable espionage must have had him salivating.
We bargained. Actually, he bargained. I didn’t. I just repeated five million a few times, then finally told him there was no point in discussing it further, we had another prospective customer coming in later, so it was five million or no deal.
It was five million!
Sid filled him in on the details. No promised payments, not even a certified check. It had to be cash. Five thousand, thousand-dollar bills would be just fine. The deal had to be completed by the next day. Cranston really groaned at that. “You people act like you don’t trust me,” he complained.
“The reason we act like we don’t trust you is because we don’t,” was my answer.
But he finally agreed to everything. Sid would draw up the contract, send him a copy, and any details would be ironed out by noon on the following day.
I added, a propos of nothing, “This office will be under tight security from now until noon, tomorrow.” I then threw in, as a kind of afterthought, while waving my hand in the general direction of the deshredder, “We wouldn’t want to have anything happen to an expensive investment like this, now, would we?”
I think Cranston scowled at me, but he was turning to leave, so I can’t be sure.
So, next day, we all showed up. Joseph and I had to both be there to sign the agreement, and Sid, of course, who was along to make any last minute changes. We’d also added a security guard, an enormous Samoan who called himself Letuli Taofinu’u. His six-foot-seven, three-hundred pound bulk seemed to fill the room, and certainly gave the impression our investment was being well guarded.
Cranston had brought in two armored-car guards, lugging three suitcases. He also had someone else along who I was convinced had to be the same electronic expert who had stolen the selective voice amplifier. He wanted to try the machine, and I waved him over to the shredder. Pulling out a dollar bill, he fed it into the machine. I showed him what buttons to push after he fed the resulting shreds into the deshredder. He shook his head in amazement as a replica of the dollar came out the other end, not one which would pass at the bank or even at the corner grocery store, but one which was clearly recognizable for all it claimed to be, a fairly decent reconstruction of George along with all his numbers and curlicues.
“How does this thing work, anyway?” he asked, carefully examining the bill. If I hadn’t stopped him, Joseph would have jumped up and started explaining. Probably would have broken out his screwdriver and started dismantling the machine.
“Sorry,” I broke in. “Once the machine is yours, you can do whatever you want with it. We’ll even throw in a manual to show you how it works. But until the contract is signed, hands off!” The expert, a short little man, gave a non-committal grunt and started to finger the buttons on the machine. Letuli stepped in front of him, and with the permanent scowl on his face getting deeper, asked me, “You want me to throw him out?”
The expert probably wasn’t sure but Letuli was going to aim him at the window, and we were nine stories up. In any event, he backed off in a hurry.
The rest of the meeting, except for a couple of minor hitches, went off smoothly. We still had a week’s rent to run on the office so we signed it over to Cranston. We even threw in the shredder—”To sweeten the pot,” Sid said.
Cranston insisted we sign a total secrecy waiver. It wasn’t hard to figure out why. If his victims found out Cranston Investigations, Inc. had a workable deshredder, the shreds would go right into burn bags and not into easily accessible wastebaskets and trash cans. And, of course, we had nothing to lose by swearing confidentiality. Sid agreed and was about to whip out the waiver on his lap top, when Cranston took a completed form from his pocket. That’s when it seemed like time for quid pro quo.
“If my clients sign, then we want your silence too.” Sid said, “You’ll have to agree you won’t reveal where you got the deshredder. Doing so will cover us if you get caught rummaging around through the wrong trash cans.”
Cranston protested. “Look, there’s five million in cash changing hands. How can I write off a cash business expense of this magnitude to the IRS if I can’t describe what I bought? Unless I have a bona fide agreement with you with a description of the sale item, they’ll claim I lost the money at the track.”
I shrugged and said, “Let’s just call it a ‘selective voice amplifier.’“
The look on Cranston’s face indicated he didn’t much care for me, but the suggestion made sense. He had gotten—stolen, really—the amplifier from us. It was a simple thing to substitute a description of it for the sake of the contract. We final
ly all signed, but only after I’d given the suitcases a quick check to make sure some of the wads weren’t just old newspaper clippings. The agreement looked nice with Joseph’s bold signature at the bottom and my “Mary Carpenter” right next to it.
It took us no time to get to the bank, since we had a limousine taxi standing by. Letuli and the suitcases took up much of the room, and we all made quite an impression as we trooped into the bank. I thanked Letuli and handed him several hundred-dollar bills. His scowl faded into something like a grin and he said, “Be sure to ask for me next time you need a guard.”
The bank manager was nervous, even though we’d alerted him. But he was prepared for us, with a counting room manned by three clerks. He confessed he’d never seen so much cash all together at one time. While the clerks were counting out the money, he cleared his throat and said in a low voice, “You know, the bank will have to report a deposit of this magnitude to the government.”
“No problem,” Sid said. “We’ve already cleared with the IRS. They’ll get their share.”
While the counting was continuing, Joseph was sitting off to the side with his ballpoint doodling on the corner of one of the thousand-dollar bills, the bank manager was supervising the count, and Sid was asking me how the deshredder worked.
I laughed. “You’re almost as bad as Cranston. The answer is, it doesn’t work. The shredder we had installed is really a copier first and then a shredder. It copies whatever is fed into it and then shreds it. Joseph rigged it so the shredder communicates the copy to the supposed deshredder. After feeding the shreds to the deshredder, the quality of the copy is controlled by the buttons. I could have produced any quality copy at that point.”
“So the deshredder doesn’t put the pieces together at all?”
“Right. It ignores them. Just spews them out while it’s making a copy of the paper which was originally fed into the shredder.”
“But suppose Cranston had come in with some shredded stuff of his own.”
I shrugged. “It was a gamble, of course. As it turns out, he just wasn’t very smart. By now, though, he’s probably a lot smarter.”
Sid’s mouth dropped open, then he said, “And he can’t complain, either. He doesn’t have a shred of proof—you’ll pardon the expression—he bought the machine from you.”
I laughed. “Right. All he’s bought from us is what he should have bought long ago—a selective voice amplifier for five-million dollars.”
At that moment, the bank manager announced the total. “Four-million-nine-hundred-ninety-four thousand dollars.”
Joseph looked up from his doodling. “I’ve got one of the bills, here.” Then he frowned. “That was dishonest. He shorted us five-thousand dollars.”
Sid and I guffawed.
Joseph ignored us and went back to his doodling, muttering, “If I included a fiber sensitive sorter, I’m sure I could produce a real deshredder.”
THE GRIEF COUNSELOR
There were days when Ramona Shields felt a grief counselor could stand some grief counseling herself, and today was one of those days. She had just taken Marcy Timmons’ folder from the file cabinet and kept shaking her head as she went over the transcripts of the previous two sessions. Marcy had lost her husband in a recent commercial plane crash, and the airline was picking up the tab for the counseling. They paid well for the service but, even so, Ramona was ready to pack it in because Marcy was unreachable—totally unreachable. To all intents and purposes, she was completely unaffected by the loss of her husband.
In her seventeen years as a counselor, Ramona had seen enormous variation in reactions to the loss of a loved one, and the most difficult people to deal with were those who, like Marcy, seemed incapable of showing any response at all to the tragedy. Overwhelming grief, denial, dazed bewilderment, confused guilt—these were common, heartrending reactions, and Ramona had almost always been able to help the victims. But the totally flat response, the seeming unemotional reaction, was something she had never been able to really cope with, and Marcy’s current state was by far the most extreme example of this retreat into herself. She showed no sorrow, no anger, no despair—nothing!
Ramona reached into the file cabinet for Marcy’s folder and checked back on her first notes. “Age 20. Married three years. One child, a girl—Tanya—two years old. Husband a successful attorney of international law, fifteen years older than his wife. Was returning home to Los Angeles after a brief business trip to London. Missed his flight in New York, went on standby and boarded at the last minute. Marcy was notified of the crash at 4:00 am. She did not accept the airline’s offer to fly her to the crash scene. Later refused to take part in the memorial ceremonies.”
Her particular reaction was not unheard of, but it ordinarily accompanied an overwhelming denial of the death. Marcy’s emotional response, or rather her lack of response, most certainly did not include such a symptom. She recognized the death. It was the appearance of not caring which was impossible for Ramona to handle. Marcy’s reluctance to continue with the counseling, followed by her passive acceptance of it with a shrug of her shoulders was especially disturbing. While Ramona had never had such a case, she had heard of similar reactions ending in suicide. The thought frightened her.
The tapes of the interviews were worse than the transcripts, since the long pauses where nothing was said didn’t show on the printed page. What did show was Ramona doing most of the talking, which was exactly the opposite of a grief counselor’s reason for existence. For the bereaved to be able to unburden themselves to a sympathetic listener about the pain of bereavement was a first and essential step in the healing process. Marcy appeared incapable of taking the step.
In fact, what response she gave to Ramona’s probing was either inappropriate or non-committal. Her statement, blurted out in the early moments of the first interview, about how her husband’s death was a “disappointment” had prompted an uncharacteristic and unprofessional reaction from Ramona. “Surely you don’t mean that,” she had said before she could catch herself. What had followed was to be found neither on the transcript nor on the audio tape. Marcy had seemed to smile…or had Ramona merely imagined the strange flicker of emotion sweeping across her client’s face? Whatever the expression, it was the sole indication of feeling Marcy had shown in the two previous sessions.
Ramona sighed, flipped on the intercom and asked the receptionist to show Marcy in. Standing up to greet her client, Ramona decided this would have to be the last session, convinced as she was she would be unable to break through the barrier Marcy had so carefully and completely erected. Resigned to the futility of the next fifty minutes, Ramona still felt it wouldn’t hurt to try another tack.
Following the usual “How are you, today?” she asked, “What financial arrangements did your husband make for you and Tanya?” Ramona was well aware counselors were not supposed to probe unnecessarily into a client’s financial situation, but this seemed like one of those occasions calling for a breakthrough by whatever means it took. Besides, the question was innocuous enough.
Marcy seemed puzzled. “I really don’t know much about our finances. Willard took care of all that. His attorney contacted me and said something about the will and insurance. I guess there’s more than enough to keep paying the mortgage on the house.”
At this point, Ramona knew she was witnessing a case of clinical depression. She had suspected it much earlier, but today’s session was the clincher. Why else would this woman with a small child show so little interest in how she was going to survive? Perhaps the flatness of tone antedated the plane crash. “Didn’t your husband tell you anything about his financial situation?” she asked.
Unlike at the two previous sessions, Marcy suddenly began to show a trace of emotion—a dim spark of encouragement for Ramona.
“Willard was always secretive—about everything—or almost everything.” A trace of a wry smile accompanied the statement. “included anything to do with finances, his work, just about anything
he did. He thought I was stupid. I wouldn’t understand. I really wasn’t worth talking to.” There was now emotion enough in her voice, and it expressed unadulterated bitterness.
Ramona rushed in. “So you felt left out?”
“Left out?” The flat tone accompanying Marcy’s earlier responses was now entirely gone. There was a rising inflection as she repeated the question, then added, “He left me out of everything.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“He never gave me explanations for anything. When I first knew him, he was always kind and considerate. He gave me the impression he was hanging on to my every word. After we got married, it all changed. He had nothing but contempt for me.”
“Was he abusive?”
“He was nothing but abusive. He specialized in put-downs, especially in front of our friends. Nothing I ever did was right or sensible.”
“Was he physically abusive?”
“Some. He backhanded me a couple of times. He really didn’t need to be physical. His verbal abuse cut far deeper, and he really enjoyed making me feel miserable. His specialty was having affairs and then flaunting them—even inviting his girlfriends to the house.” She paused, then added, “So you see, he didn’t keep everything from me.”
Before Ramona could even nod her head in response, the dam broke. “Willard made my life a living hell. And I could see him more and more beginning to treat Tanya the same way he was treating me. The minute he would come into the room, she’d rush over to me and cling to me. Seeing what was happening to her was harder to take than anything else.”
“Did you consider divorce?”
“Definitely. And I told him so. He laughed and said I had absolutely no chance of having even visitation privileges with Tanya. His is one of the most successful law firms in California, and he was ready to bring in top divorce lawyers to oppose me. Knowing him, I was sure he could and would.” Marcy’s eyes were flashing.
Expect the Unexpected Page 33
