Even Money

by Stephanie Caffrey

  “Can you make any sense of these?” I asked Carlos, thumbing through a few of the papers.

  He picked one of the sheets off the top and examined it. “Susan Weitz, it says on top. Zero zero two one six,” he added. “Must be her account number or something like that. Here, take a look.”

  On top of the page was the woman’s name, as Carlos had said, and beneath it was a series of numbers. The first number was 5,000, and then in a column on the right side was a series of smaller numbers: 1,000, 1,500, 1,800, and so on. It was all Greek to me.

  “It doesn’t make much sense,” I said, giving it back to Carlos.

  “I think it’s a system,” he declared, pointing at the sheet. “This woman started with five thousand down, up here, and then she was paid out these amounts over here.”

  I looked at it again, still confused. “You think these are the dates? These numbers next to the payouts?”

  He shrugged. “It could be. They all start with a number between 1 and 12. Here’s 716, followed by 815 and 919. Could be July 16, August 15, and September 19. I’ll check some of the other sheets.”

  “First, put that one back exactly where it was,” I cautioned, trying not to sound like a schoolmarm.

  Carlos muttered something unintelligible but did as he was told. He then picked up another sheet which had a longer list of entries on it.

  “This one’s for Lorry Rifkin. She put in ten grand and has been getting payouts for more than a year. And then she put in another ten just last month,” he said.

  “Or he,” I murmured.

  “Huh?”

  “Lorry can be a man’s name, too,” I said. It was one of those observations you make but then immediately regret.

  Carlos made a face, as though the thought offended him. “Not on my watch,” he said with mock gravity.

  “If you had a son, what would you name him?” I asked. “Rock? Hunter? Something uber-manly like that?”

  He thought for a second. “Carlos Junior, of course.”

  I sniffed. “So you’re one of those people. Good to know.”

  “What?” he asked, feigning offense.

  “Never mind,” I said, waving him off with my hands. “Let’s keep looking around.”

  We puttered around the room, fingering sheets of paper and the other vestiges of whatever business this was. I was most interested in the scissors and glue stick, items that were much more up my alley than a bunch of papers with numbers scribbled on them.

  Careful not to make a mess, I picked up some paper scraps that were lying around next to the scissors. They were mostly little rectangles about two-inches long and maybe a half inch across, and many of them had little bits of printing on them. One said Novgorod Ventures, while another one just had a dollar sign followed by a string of numbers. It would have been nice to see a completed sheet of paper to get a clue as to what they were doing with this stuff.

  “Can you make any sense out of this?” I asked. Carlos was thumbing through a giant, blue binder.

  He came over and held up a few of the little scraps, which looked downright tiny in his meaty paws. “They’re cutting this stuff out of somewhere, and who knows what they’re pasting in its place.” He was looking around the room, pointing his light at all of the tables.

  “You mean they’re doing an old-fashioned cut and paste job?” I asked. The thought of it sounded downright quaint.

  “Who knows? I’d like to see what the final product looks like,” he said, echoing my own sentiments.

  We dug around some more but mostly just found more of the same. And then it occurred to me to check the wastebasket.

  “Tsk, tsk,” I said as I dug through the trash, trying to stifle my horror at the American male diet which seemed to be fueled largely by potato chips that may or may not have ridges on them. And I was the last person on earth to be judgmental about someone else’s diet. But still. “Shame on them. They don’t recycle. Look at all this paper in here.”

  I fished out a dozen or more partly crumpled sheets of paper. A few of them were useless, but the rest looked promising. The majority of the sheets looked like profit and loss statements from oil exploration companies with authentic-sounding Russian names.

  Carlos turned his phone over and began typing away on it.

  “This is a legit company,” he said, looking up. “It’s even on the NASDAQ.” He seemed excited by what he’d found. “You see what they’re doing here?” he asked.

  “Kind of?” I murmured.

  He ignored me. “They take legitimate statements from real oil and gas companies and then cut out the parts that don’t fit with whatever story they’re selling. So if a customer asks to see some paperwork, they can show them the statement from Novgorod Exploration or Smolensk Energy or whatever, and it all looks normal. I bet it’ll show an amount of money that matches up to whatever the customer’s investment was,” he said, sounding satisfied.

  “And it’ll look good because it’s on authentic company stationery,” I piped in, finally getting the picture.

  “That’s what makes the effort worth it. People believe what they want to believe, so all they have to see is a statement or two, and they’ll stop asking questions,” he said.

  “Makes sense to me,” I said. “Hell, I didn’t even see a statement at all. These must be for the more curious investors.”

  “Yeah.” He sniffed. “The smarter ones. Anyway, it explains what that guy was doing in here. Inventing money that didn’t exist.”

  We pawed through a few more papers, finding much of the same thing on each one. Someone had invested a fixed amount, say ten thousand, and had received various payments on roughly a monthly schedule.

  And then an idea popped into my head. “Maybe they’ve got a sheet on me. That would confirm what we’re looking at anyway.”

  Carlos met my eyes and nodded somberly, a tacit approval of my idea. He started rummaging through the stacks of papers.

  “Careful!” I hissed. “You’re messing them all up.”

  “They’re already messed up! If anything, I’m doing them a favor.”

  I let out a deep sigh, knowing it was pointless to protest. If a man was going to make a mess, there was no getting in his way. It was Perpetual Adolescence 101.

  I dug in to help him, trying to keep a modicum of order to the sheaves of papers.

  “Eww,” I said, picking one up. It was a log of the investment of someone named Andrea Kucheck, and it had a giant red stain on it.

  “What do you think this is?” I asked, holding it up in disgust.

  Carlos shrugged, unimpressed. “Ketchup? No, wait,” he said. “Maybe it’s blood. Blood from a murder!” His voice was a little too enthusiastic.

  “Are you mocking me?”

  “Someone has to,” he said cryptically. “Anyway, it’s good to see they eat vegetables, too.”

  “Ketchup is not a vegetable,” I protested.

  “What’s it made out of?” he asked, thinking he had the upper hand.

  “Corn syrup, vinegar, and salt.”

  “And?”

  “Red stuff.” I shuddered at the thought of the dried-up ketchup. No wonder it stinks in here, I thought, and then I placed the stained sheet of paper in roughly the same place it’d been.

  Ten more minutes of rummaging got us nowhere.

  “Maybe you’re so important that they used something other than ratty, old legal pads to keep track of your money,” he said, sounding like he meant just the opposite.

  I thought for a minute. “Do these things have any years on them? Or just months and days?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, like, do they say 2017 or 2015 or something on them? Maybe these are all old, and the newer ones are in the computer,” I suggested.

  He riffed through them again. “No years that I can see. But a lot of them are for multiple years. Like this one here has an entry of 0921, 1023, 1124, 1227, and then 0129. So it goes back a ways.”

  “Weird,�
� I said. “Care to try the computer?”

  “I’m bad at computers,” he said.

  I pursed my lips and sat down at the desktop computer in the corner of the room. As if sensing my movement, the screen came to life. It said hello to me and then asked for a password.

  “Just hit Enter,” Carlos said.

  I did as he suggested, and voila! “I thought you were bad at computers.”

  “I am,” he said. “I never have a password, so I am easily hackable.”

  “Who would want to hack you? You have nothing of value,” I said, chiding him.

  “I don’t know, the Russians?”

  “What the hell would the Russians want by hacking the computer of a half-wit bouncer?” I asked. “No offense.”

  He grinned. “No offense taken.”

  I clicked on the Start button and found the last documents that had been accessed. Most of them were spreadsheets.

  I clicked on the first one and then felt Carlos leaning against me to read it over my shoulder.

  “See? You were right, kind of,” he said. “This is a newer investor, looks like from this month.” He pointed to the four-digit date code on the far left of the spreadsheet.

  “Who do you think Maureen Findley is?” I asked, referring to the name on top. If I was reading it right, she’d sunk ten thousand into the thing just a few weeks earlier.

  “Maybe that’s one of our girls’ real names,” he suggested.

  “Could be,” I said. I didn’t know the real names of half the strippers where I worked. They came and went so often that it was hardly worth the effort.

  “Pull up the directory this document is from,” he said. “Maybe you’re in there.”

  I clicked a few buttons in vain but finally found what I was looking for. The folder was simply called Oil. Inside it were more than a hundred spreadsheet files. I sorted them alphabetically and then found what I was looking for.

  “McShane.xls,” he said, pointing at the screen. “Pull it up.”

  “Well, duh,” I muttered. I double-clicked on it and was then treated to a document that showed exactly how I was involved in the whole thing. It listed my initial investment as well as the small payout they’d already given me. And that was it.

  “Not much,” he said. “Are those the right dates?”

  I examined both of the four-digit entries. “They look right to me.”

  “So at least we know what we’re looking at with all these things. They must have gotten more organized lately, using these spreadsheets. I can’t believe they didn’t start out doing it that way. These handwritten pieces of paper are ridiculous,” he said, holding one up.

  “Well,” I surmised, “they probably didn’t expect to get so big. It might have been just five or six people for a while, and they figured it was enough to scribble down their figures on scraps of paper like this.”

  “And then they struck oil,” he muttered.

  “Huh?”

  “Strippers.”

  I smiled. “Ah, yes. The mother lode. A bunch of ignorant, hair-brained young women awash in easy cash. It was richer than the deepest well in Saudi Arabia.”

  He shrugged. “It makes sense, if you think about it.”

  “I know. Frankly I’m surprised we haven’t been scammed like this before. It seems so easy. We’re a bunch of sitting ducks. But it makes me feel stupid, even now.”

  “Check out some of the other files,” he said.

  I closed out my own file and then scanned the list, looking for familiar names.

  “Here’s Kayla,” I said, pointing at the screen. “And Sarah.” I recognized half a dozen other names in the directory, which contained about forty different files.

  “Wait,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  Carlos was thinking. “If you open the files, it’ll leave a trail, right? It’ll show up in the list of most recently accessed files.”

  He had a point. I had already disturbed things by pulling up my own. I thought about it for a few seconds and then began looking for something to write with. I spotted a red pen underneath some loose papers and then found a piece of scrap paper to write with.

  “What are you doing?” Carlos asked, genuinely perplexed.

  “Watch and learn,” I said. I clicked File, which showed me the spreadsheet program’s most recently accessed files, and then I began writing them down in order. When I was finished, I showed it to Carlos who was frowning at me.

  “I don’t get it,” he admitted.

  “Once we’re done poking around, I can just open up all these files in this order. Then the list of recently accessed files will look exactly like it did when we started, with no one the wiser. It’ll be like we were never here.” I tried to hide my pride in the idea.

  He was still frowning, searching for some kind of hole in my logic. It was almost as if he wanted me to be wrong. But finally he just shrugged in defeat.

  We spent the next twenty minutes in the dark room staring at spreadsheets on the monitor. It seemed that no one had gotten in for less than ten grand. In fact, many of the investors who’d started with ten had then deposited twenty and then fifty and so on. One woman, whose name I didn’t recognize, was in for a quarter-million bucks. When you added them all up, it seemed to be well over two million dollars. And that wasn’t counting all of the investors on the handwritten sheets.

  “I’m going to check Miranda and Kayla now, out of curiosity,” I announced. I clicked on Kayla’s spreadsheet and felt Carlos leaning closer, his breath warm against my ear.

  Like me, she had started with ten thousand but then had upped it another ten soon after. She’d gotten some regular monthly payments, which of course she’d squandered on handbags.

  “Nothing interesting with Kayla,” I murmured.

  “Pull up Miranda. We probably should have started with her,” he said.

  I clicked on the spreadsheet file, but nothing happened. I clicked again, and this caused the computer to start thinking very hard, whirring angrily to life as though I’d disturbed an elderly man from a much needed nap.

  And then it flashed an error message. “File not found,” I read aloud.

  “What the hell?” Carlos muttered.

  I opened up the file folder and tried clicking again with the same result. And that’s when we heard the noise.

  “Was that the door?” Carlos asked.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  My mouth immediately became drier than the cool Nevada air outside. We had both heard something, something that sounded like a door opening, but then nothing had happened. Normally someone walks in a door and then flips on a light and goes about their normal business. But now all we heard was a deafening silence.

  Even in the dim light, I could see that Carlos had frozen in place, just like I had, waiting to see what would happen next. It occurred to me that we were completely and utterly trapped. The bedroom we were in had only the one exit, and so if someone was actually in the house, we’d be pinned there with no way out.

  We listened, straining to discern even the slightest hint of movement, but the silence continued on unabated. In the near blackness I was attempting to make eye contact with Carlos, but his head was still tilted sideways, like a hawk homing in on a mouse a hundred yards away.

  And that’s when we heard it, the unmistakable sound of a light switch flipping on. What followed were a few hesitant steps causing the floorboards to creak.

  “Hello?” a man’s voice called.

  Instinctively, we both remained silent, hoping to wait it out. The steps had frozen, as though the man was straining to hear us thinking.

  “Anyone here?” he asked again, a little more confidently. The voice didn’t sound at all familiar.

  Again, we kept mum.

  After about ten seconds the man began moving again. We heard the refrigerator door open, and a bottle of something was placed on the counter. A drawer opened, followed by the whoosh of the bottle as he opened it. This was a good sign, I
figured. People who believed they had intruders in the house didn’t go and grab a beer out of the fridge.

  What had we done to make him suspicious? We hadn’t moved anything in the kitchen, and all of the lights in the house had remained off. The window. We’d left the window open behind us. But an open window didn’t necessarily mean anything. He hadn’t gone into a panic about it. Now the question was whether he was going to enjoy his beer in the kitchen or bring it into the office where Carlos and I were crouching down like gargoyles.

  I could hear Carlos’s soft breathing next to me. Unlike me, he wasn’t hyperventilating. The expression on his face, to the extent it was visible, was one of calm consideration. At that moment I resolved to pay him more.

  We heard steps and the creaking of more floorboards. And then, in the silence that ensued, we heard the bottle being placed back on the counter or a table. And then a soft click. It was the click of a door being closed, but it wasn’t the door through which he’d entered.

  Carlos turned to me. “He’s in the bathroom! Let’s go!” he whispered.

  I stood up and spirited myself out through the kitchen and tried to open the door as silently as possible. Carlos was right behind me. The little half bathroom was situated almost right next to the door, so it was fifty-fifty whether the guy would hear us or not. I opened the screen door and bolted out. When I turned, Carlos was propped in the doorframe, as though waiting for something. And then it came, whatever it was, and he almost silently pulled the door closed and then bolted towards me. After a mad dash of about forty yards, we slowed down our pace so as not to draw attention. I couldn’t help stealing a glance behind us. Much to my relief, there was no shotgun-wielding man standing in the door shouting at us. Everything appeared normal. We’d gotten away with it.

  “What were you waiting for back there?” I asked, dying of curiosity.

  “The toilet.”

  “Huh?”

  “I figured that the toilet would make enough noise to cover the sound of the door closing behind me,” he explained.

  “What if he didn’t flush?” I asked, still winded.

  “He did.”