by Kim Oh
“Take care of this for me, will ya?” He stays in the doorway rather than stepping into my tiny office, as though it’s some kind of trap. From there, he tosses a plain white letter-sized envelope onto my desk. Yes, it’s that envelope. “Just route it over to McIntyre when you get a chance.”
Then he’s gone, slipping out of the building without even saying thanks to me. Nobody ever did.
I’m not so scared of the guy that as soon as he’s gone, I don’t get sulky and resentful about being asked to do something right when I’m packing up and getting ready to go home. So instead of dialing up the combination on my desk’s bottom drawer, which I’ve already closed and locked, I just stuff the fat envelope into my backpack, turn off the lights, and head for the elevator.
Stupid as I am back then, I’m not even thinking about what might possibly be in the envelope. I know that Badooch is actually a courier for the branch operation that his immediate boss Pomeroy runs for Mr. McIntyre. And Pomeroy is in the habit of folding up all sorts of multipage reports and bundles of receipts, then sending them over like that. I figure this one is also something of the sort. No big deal.
Matter of fact, it’s such a non-deal to me that I completely forget about the envelope in my backpack. I don’t remember it at all until I hear that thug Michael talking to one of the other security guards, in the hallway outside my cubbyhole. They would never keep their voices down, since for them I didn’t really exist at all.
“Find him yet?” That was Michael buttonholing the other security guy.
“Nope.” The other one shook his head. “I’ve got all sorts of people out on the street, asking if anybody’s seen Badooch – so far, nothing. Complete nada.”
“Damn.” Michael was all kinds of irritated.
“You know what I think?” The other security guy sounded hyped-up. “Badooch had a lot of enemies. He really had a knack for getting people mad. I think somebody iced him.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised.” I could see Michael’s big ugly face go all brooding. “Little bastard could’ve swung by here and made his delivery before getting himself killed. That would’ve been nice.”
The two men had walked away, still talking about unpleasant things. And my mind had started racing.
In my backpack was the delivery that they were talking about. The envelope that Badooch had tossed onto my desk – that must be it. Michael and everybody else – they didn’t know that Badooch had come by after hours and given the envelope to me, before he got himself erased off the face of the earth. For all they knew, whoever had iced him – to use their charming phrase – had thrown him and the envelope he had been carrying in his jacket into the same hole they’d dug for him, or under the same bridge on the river. They didn’t know I had it.
Which made a problem for me. I had been holding on to the envelope for two days now, while everybody had been searching for the vanished courier. I was still thinking I had a shot at going from grunt accountant to the company’s Chief Financial Officer – more than a shot; I thought it was a sure thing. That was mainly what I didn’t want to screw up. I didn’t care what was in the envelope sitting at the bottom of my backpack – though I was already starting to think it might not be just paperwork. And here I had been waltzing in and out of the building with it, for two days now. That looked bad – real bad. I was supposed to be detail-oriented, executive material, and here I was schlepping around with something that I shouldn’t even have taken with me in the first place. I should’ve locked it up in my desk, then gotten it to McIntyre first thing the next morning. And I had screwed that up, without even intending to. Not good.
I didn’t know what to do. And neither did my younger brother – I always talked over things like this with him, when I got home. But he didn’t have a clue as to a course of action, either.
Naturally, what I should’ve done is go right on in to McIntyre’s office and ’fess up, tell him what happened, here’s the envelope – he and I would’ve had a good laugh about it all. In fact, he would’ve been so impressed with my honesty and what a loyal, hardworking employee I was, he would’ve made me CFO right there on the spot, instead of waiting for the big corporate reorganization he was planning. That’s exactly what would’ve happened – right after every flying pig in the universe came in for a landing on the aircraft carrier deck of my overheated schoolgirl imagination.
But I didn’t do that. That didn’t happen.
Instead, I spent the next day and the day after that, even more scared and mousy at work. The plain white envelope was still there in my backpack – I didn’t even dare touch it. And then a week had gone by, and nobody had said anything to me about Badooch having given me the envelope before he disappeared, and then another week went by.
I hadn’t been able to stand it any more. The tension had my gut in a knot even tighter than it usually was. I finally sat down at the kitchenette table and pulled the envelope out of my backpack. Donnie had been sitting there in his wheelchair, and he had watched me do it. He had looked at the sealed envelope, how thick and fat and heavy it was, then he had looked up at me. Our eyes had met, with the envelope trembling in my hands, and a little message had silently passed between us. We both had known what was in it.
And what would happen now, if anybody found out I had it . . .
* * *
That was the envelope I had just dug out from underneath the sweaters in the bedroom closet. That I had just torn open, so that Donnie and I could see all the money inside it.
I turned the envelope upside down and dumped out its contents, a green haystack in the center of the table.
It took us a while to count it all. Then recount it.
I sat back in my chair, stunned. I looked up and saw Donnie smiling at me.
“Well,” he said. “I guess we don’t have to worry about paying the rent for a while.”
TWELVE
“Okay,” I told Donnie. “We have to be careful about this. We have to be smart.”
We sat there with the lights switched off, the curtains already drawn before I had torn open the envelope. Two conspirators without a plan, their minds racing. Mine felt like a white rat sprinting inside of those wheels that go round and round without ever arriving anywhere, but unable to stop or even slow down.
“I know,” said Donnie. His smile was gone now. I could tell that he had been thinking. And hard. “If we’re not smart, we’ll be dead.”
That was one way of putting it.
“Here’s what we should do.” Little Nerd Accountant Girl had also been thinking. “We can’t just spend it. I mean, spend a lot of it. Just as little of it as we can, just to get by. Right?”
In deep serious mode, my younger brother nodded.
“The less of it we spend, the less likely anybody will know we have it.” I leaned over the stacks of bills. “That’s the main thing.”
“Do you think they’re watching you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so. When Mr. McIntyre had me tossed out – that was probably the end of it as far as he was concerned.” I could still remember the disgusted look on my former boss’s face, as if I had been literally transformed into a sack of overripe trash. Fit for nothing now, except being taken to the dumpsters out in the alley. “He probably doesn’t even know I exist anymore.”
“Are you sure?”
“I told you – I don’t know.” The rat was running even faster inside his little wheel. And still not getting anywhere. “That’s why we have to be careful. He doesn’t care enough to have me watched – but there might be somebody around here who works for him, or who knows somebody who does.” In this neighborhood, that was highly likely. “Somebody like that sees us acting like we have a lot of money, they know I used to work for Mr. McIntyre, they know I got fired, they think about it –” The rat was going so fast, I was practically hysterical. I gripped the edge of the table with both hands and took a deep breath, trying to calm myself. “They’d go and tell him, wouldn’t they?
And he might figure it out, where that money had come from. This money. And then we’d be in trouble. Big trouble.”
“Okay.” Donnie nodded. “I understand.”
Little Nerd Account Girl – or that person who used to be her and was now already in the process of becoming me – sat there staring at the money for a couple minutes longer, before she spoke again.
“We can’t just pick up and leave,” I said. “That wouldn’t do us any good. If Mr. McIntyre decides he wants to find us, then he can find us. Wherever we go.”
“Sure –” Donnie was tuning into the wavelength of this new world in which we had found ourselves. “We’re safer right here where we are. ’Cause they wouldn’t expect us to do that, if they thought we had their money. Stay right here, I mean. They’d expect us to run away. So that’s exactly what we can’t do.”
“Right.” The rat was now approaching Mach speed inside its little wheel. “So we have to stay right here. And not spend any of the money, except what we absolutely have to. Okay?”
He nodded. “Okay.” There was a wheel spinning inside his head, too. I could see it behind his eyes. “So you gotta be doing whatever you’d be doing if you didn’t have this money. Right?”
“What . . .” My turn for a slow nod. “What would that be?”
“A job,” said Donnie. “That’s what you were already thinking you had to do. Go out looking for another job.”
This is an indication of what a crummy world we live in. Here I get thrown out on my ear like a sack of trash, I get my head whanged in a motorcycle accident, there’s a pile of money on the table in front of me, that I’ll get killed over if anybody finds out it’s here – and I still don’t get to take any time off. What do you have to do to get a vacation these days?
“All right.” My nod became even slower and more deliberate. “I’ll start tomorrow. I mean – that’s what I would’ve been doing, anyway.”
I piled up the money and slid it all back into the envelope. At least we had a plan now.
The only problem – it just wasn’t a very good one.
As I found out . . .
* * *
“Do us both a favor, sweetheart.” The bartender looked up at me, as he was polishing a glass with a towel. “Just turn around and leave.”
I stood right there in front of him. “Why?”
“Are you kidding?” He inspected the glass, holding it up and turning it in the light, then picked up another one. “Look at you. You’re so far under-age, it’s illegal for you to even be thinking about coming into a place like this. And spare me whatever phony ID you’ve got in your purse. I don’t want to see it.”
With some black shoe polish, I had managed to get the purse part of my business-lady getup into presentable condition again. As long as nobody looked too hard at me. The jacket and the skirt took some more doing, but at least I could go out in public with them. I’d picked up another pair of panty hose at the drugstore on the corner, then slipped into a gas station ladies’ room to pull them on before heading to the first stop on my list.
“What’s the big deal?” I never used to talk like that, when I had still been Little Nerd Accountant Girl. Maybe it was the whack on the head. “You’re not even open.” The chairs were stacked upside-down on the bar’s tables. “And I don’t want a drink.”
“So what do you want?”
“I want to talk to the manager.”
He eyed me with suspicion. “What about?”
“A job.”
“You gotta be kidding.” He pointed to the stage at the side of the bar, with the brass stripper pole bolted to the floorboards and the ceiling, up by the switched-off lights. “I don’t know what you’ve heard at whatever high school you should be in right now, but you gotta be of age to do that, too. Come back in a few years. Or better yet, don’t bother.” He smiled as he looked me over. “You’re not exactly cut out for the gig, if you get what I mean. Don’t take it personal – it’s just reality.”
That reality was something I was already familiar with. What he meant was that I didn’t have the natural talents – or implants; same thing – and general air of predatory sexuality possessed by the woman with long red hair down her back, sitting over by the stage, moodily reading a newspaper with her arms over the back of the chair. She looked like a hard number, but I could imagine that she did pretty well from the tips that would get stuffed into her garter belt whenever she was performing.
“That’s not the job I want.” Did I really have to tell this guy that? “Look, is the manager in or not? I just want to talk to him. And then I’ll get out of your hair.”
“Okay, okay. If it’s that important –”
He came out from behind the bar and led me over to a door at the side, way past the restrooms.
“Mr. Stavros?”
“Do I know you?” The balding guy behind the desk, with the papers spread out all over it, along with a copy of The Daily Racing Form, looked up at me. “If you’re selling Girl Scout cookies, I’m only interested in the Thin Mints. Those, I like.”
“Maybe you remember me,” I said. “We met when you came over to McIntyre’s offices. A couple of months ago. There was some mix-up with the rental agreement for this place, and I went over the payments ledger with you –”
“Oh, yeah.” He nodded. “Now I recall it. Kathy, right?”
“Kim, actually.”
“Sorry. I meet a lot of young women in this business. Hard to remember all their names. But I remember you. You were a lot of help. My butt was in a jam.”
“Kind of.” I gave him a smile. “Took some doing, but we got it all straightened out.”
The man had reason for remembering me with some degree of gratitude. I really had bailed him out back then. There had been some confusion about a missed lease payment, and for some reason Mr. McIntyre had gotten all pissed off about it, to the point of having Michael hanging outside my cubbyhole while I had gone over the books with the sweating bar manager sitting in front of me. Just as if Michael was going to rip the guy’s head off if every nickel wasn’t accounted for. I’d finally found the missing money – the guy who’d been taking care of the bar and nightclub accounts before I took over had misfiled a couple of checks – and I had phoned up to McIntyre’s office and explained everything. Michael had slunk off down the hallway like a Rottweiler who’d been deprived of an anticipated bone. The bar manager had smoothed his unraveling comb-over back across his brown-spotted scalp and told me that if I ever needed a favor, to look him up.
That’s what I was doing now.
“So what can I do for you?” He pointed to the chair at the side of his desk. “Have a seat.” A flicker of concern shaded his eyes for a moment. “Nothing wrong back at the office, is there?”
“I wouldn’t know.” I set my purse on my lap. “I don’t work there anymore.”
“Oh.” With obvious discomfort, he fiddled with a pen on top of the papers. “Guess it’s true then, huh?”
“What is?”
“Well . . .” His rounded shoulders lifted in a shrug. “I’d heard there’d been a big shake-up over there. Guess they call that sort of thing a reorganization now, huh? We used to just call it giving people the boot. I think that was better, instead of being all pussyfoot about stuff like that. Anyway, the word’s out that McIntyre’s going all corporate and stuff. That’s his business, I suppose.”
I didn’t like the sound of what I was hearing. The word being out and all that. “Could I ask what else you heard?” I was still being all polite and Nerd Accountant Girl-ish. “I mean . . . if it’s something you feel you can tell me . . .”
“Yeah, well . . . it’s not exactly good, is it? When stuff like that happens. It never is. I mean, I have to fire people around here, bartenders and the dancers and all. It happens. It’s not easy. For anyone involved.”
Actually, it had seemed easy enough for McIntyre to throw me under the bus. But I wasn’t going to argue with somebody I was hoping to get a job fro
m. “You heard I got fired?”
“I asked about you. From the people I got it from. And they told me that there’d been some kind of falling-out, between McIntyre and his head accountant. Which I figured was you. I’m really sorry about that. It seemed like you were doing a good job and all. You were able to get me off the hook with him, at least.”
Taking a deep breath, I pulled myself up straight in the chair. “Then I suppose you can guess why I’ve come here to see you.”
“I overhead you talking to my guy out front. You’re looking for a job.”
“That’s right.” I nodded. “I figured you could use a bookkeeper. A good one. Like me.”
“You do, huh?”
“Well . . . you weren’t too organized before. That mess with the rent payments probably wouldn’t have gotten to that point, if you’d had somebody watching out for these kinds of things.” I smiled as I pointed to the mess of papers on his desk. “It doesn’t look like you’re exactly on top of stuff now.”
“You got that right.” He looked at the papers in disgust. “I don’t even know what half this stuff is. Running a place like this was easier, back when I took over from my old man. We did it on a cash basis then. Long as you kept your liquor supplier happy, and the cops paid off, there wasn’t much else you had to worry about. Now I got IRS forms to fill out, might as well actually be in Greek for all I can make out of ’em.” One of his burly hands swept across the desk. “Who comes up with all this stuff, anyway?”
“That’s why you need an accountant. A bookkeeper. Somebody who can take care of everything, so you don’t have to. You can just run the business, the way you like. Without being concerned about anyone coming in and shutting you down, because you didn’t file the right papers on time.”
“Tell me about it. I do need that. I know I do. And it’s not just the feds – there’s all kinds of problems I got. We’re making good money here, this kind of place always does, but I’m losing track. I think one of the bouncers is raking off the door fees, and there’s some punks coming around, shaking the girls down for a cut of their tips . . .” He shook his head. “That’s the problem with losing track of the numbers, when you’re running a business. Any kind of business. It’s like blood in the water. You bleed a little and these jerks get a whiff of it, they think they can come in and rip you off even more. Gotta watch every freakin’ dime these days – that’s what it comes to. Just out of self-defense. Can’t trust anybody anymore.”
