“What do you care? She’s not your momma.”
“Masami Okada-Caines is a bedrock of this island’s corporate community. Anyway, it’s impossible. She’s the one who called me.”
Rewind twenty-four hours. I’m in my apartment doping myself up and spilling everything to my computer as your stand-in. Everything. Torments, lamentations, fuckups. Martin’s at his office in obstinate denial. He gets a call from CAM.
The CEO herself. The dragon under the mountain. She says she’d asked an employee to call BRMS some days before, but she suspects this person did not obey. Martin confirms there’s no record of such a call, but she says no more on the subject. She launches into her demands. She wants BRMS to handle a due-diligence update on (that’s right) Clocktower. Team leader: shock and awe, etc. She wants a meeting right away; he sets it for the next day (this afternoon) so he can do some preliminary digging. He calls Nikea into his office, swears her to secrecy on pain of demotion.
“She’s a gifted specialist in computer forensics,” said Martin. “Now, just to be clear, we knew that whatever she found at this juncture wouldn’t legally be evidence because of the circumstances of the search. But we’re not going to court; we’re just asking questions. Besides, often in this kind of search, Nikea finds things that lead to other kinds of evidence, you follow?”
I hope I had a snippy comeback. Anyway, Martin asked this person to infiltrate CAM’s network and look for things pertaining to Char Richards, Clocktower Insurance, Bull’s Head Shreds, and Aetna Simmons. It took an afternoon, that’s all. Next morning, Martin called me.
“Char’s not dumb enough to leave that kind of trail,” I said.
“You mean she’s smart enough to try not to,” said Martin. Whereupon followed a long-winded explanation intended to showcase his knowledge on the subject. Basically, nothing’s safe. The best way to avoid leaving a digital trail is not to use electronics at all.
Yet when it came to Aetna, the gifted specialist came up empty. I brought up the W-2. Martin said the IRS had no record of any such thing.
“Like she never existed,” he said.
There was a bunch of emails between “richardsc11” and “okada-cain”, both @alum.wharton.edu. “Your brother went to Wharton,” said Martin.
“So Masami stole his email address.”
“He and Richards were in the same class.”
“That must be how Masami got to know her.”
“Kenji, they have a very close relationship.”
“Martin, you must’ve noticed. He’s with the other team.”
“Not that kind of relationship. They’re friends. Like I thought you and my wife—”
“We are friends, Martin, best friends. Don’t bother trying to cheapen it.”
“I don’t have to try,” etc. This went on until somebody looked at the clock. For the record, I’d like you to notice that he started it.
He brought out his laptop with a terrific sigh. Meanwhile, I explained. “This operation took intelligence. Masami has it, Erik doesn’t. I know these people.” Martin didn’t answer, just gave me the computer.
“Thought you were trying to cover all this up,” he grumbled. “I thought that was why you went to Gavin.”
On the screen was a report by teamster Nikea, who in order to do all that hacking, wade through what she found, and compile the methodical document before me, must’ve stayed up all night. The report was replete with Martin’s influence: years of correspondence culled, sorted, and summarized in three sections under headings chosen for their relevance to team leader’s requests. The actual emails were included in support of Nikea’s findings.
Section One intended to describe the logistics of the CAM-Clocktower embezzlement scheme. This section was almost empty. One message celebrated Masami’s procurement of the perfect little cottage. Otherwise the emails implied that logistics had been verbally agreed upon.
Section Two had meat in it. Every time there was a problem, a flurry of flustered argument flew between Bermuda and New York. Nikea summarized each one.
One problem was Myrtle Trimm. At the beginning of the project, Myrtle got fifty grand up front. In addition, Masami promised three thousand a month for a cottage advertised at less than fifteen hundred. All Myrtle had to do was look the other way. However, because she was Bermudian and a spiteful flibbertigibbet, not looking just wasn’t an option. She peeked. She got suspicious. She sneaked into Aetna’s place. She found something and threw it in Masami’s face, declining to specify what it was.
It must have been damaging. For although Nikea wrote that the old witch couldn’t squeeze any more money from Masami, I knew she got a lot more out of Aetna, who paid forty-eight hundred a month. So when Aetna disappeared, Myrtle went ballistic. She left harassing voicemails in the sacrosanct inbox of Masami Okada-Caines. She told Masami they’d continue their arrangement at the elevated rate, or the police would find themselves inundated with evidence: evidence of crookedness which Masami had concealed by exploiting innocent old ladies. Over the years, during several inexplicable bouts of inefficacy and abnormally garrulous supplication, Masami put all this in emails to Char.
When Aetna vanished, Char was first to hear of it; “okada-cain” neglected to keep track of the headlines. Cutting accusations as each correspondent accused the other of helping Aetna to escape, Char in her dry way, Masami in atypically whiny tones. The argument died when Char pointed out that neither of them could afford that kind of risk. She then expressed concern for what Aetna might have left behind. Harmful evidence was already on the loose—ten suicide notes of growing notoriety—and what if there were more? Masami was unconcerned. She evinced a deviant and naive confidence that Aetna would resurface when she read about herself in the news.
Char conceded Aetna was a tool, a sucker, and a supplicant, but that made her just as susceptible to other people’s promises as she was to her colleagues’. It was up to them to find her, find out what she’d said and done, and find a way to (in Char’s American phraseology) neutralize any threat that Aetna posed. Since Masami was disinclined to be helpful—an allegation which Masami answered with weak and wheedling protests—Char announced that she’d fly out and investigate herself. She interviewed Myrtle, who refused, pending some exorbitant payment, to elaborate on her suspicion that her tenant had never been quite right.
After that, the emails ceased. Nikea conjectured that the authors switched to verbal communiqués.
Throughout Section Two, Nikea mistook Masami for Erik. Martin denied this, stubbornly overestimating Erik and underestimating the extent to which his forensic specialist succumbed to the influence of the psychological context described in Section Three.
The emails in this section were from several years before the scheme took shape. Obviously they comprise actual correspondence between Erik and his college buddy from an era long before his Momma-sama cloaked herself in his email address and birdbrained idioms. The stuff is vintage Erik: Char’s the only person in the world who appreciates him, only person he can trust. He whined about me, about Masami and Barrington, his professors, everything. Eventually Char shot back that at least Erik’s parents hadn’t disowned and disinherited him, going so far as to tell some people he was dead, cutting him off financially, kicking him to the curb almost literally, and for what?
Love, Char wrote, that’s all. Char the hunter, amemasu. She went on: At least Erik wasn’t female and wasn’t black, so at least he had a chance of being able to make a living without selling his body, etc. Control issues, wrote Nikea. Clearly what Char saw in Erik was an opportunity to get to know Masami. Nothing more. And yet Char wrote Love.
The misanthrope to whom nothing was sacred. The vengeful, gluttonous, self-righteous bitch who purchased a living woman to generate dead people’s paper trails and then used our love, my loving you, the only worthwhile thing I’ve ever done, to dangle you from the cruel end of a fish
hook. Blackmail, nikkou, to make sure we won’t get in the way. So Char can continue ramping up her numbers, bloating Clocktower’s profit margins even though she’s been found out. Our love, Nabi, our delight and our anguish, as just another deadbolt to safeguard the impunity of the powerful.
If I’d had anything left in me to vomit, I’d have done it then and there. “Love? Char? When? Who?”
“Nikea plainly wrote Details unspecified,” said Martin. “And beside the rest of it, that’s pretty immaterial, don’t you think?”
I couldn’t say this to your husband, but it wasn’t just immaterial. It was the ghost of Char’s humanity. Which from the looks of it was murdered not just by racial injustice but, well, like mine was murdered. From right up close and personal. Besides that, what she wrote, one long-ago day when the scheme was just the possibility of a seedling in the dark soil of her mind, is frankly worthy of me. I must paraphrase rather than quote.
Clocktower, she said. We decide how you measure your time. We do this by determining the dollar-value of your death and thereby of your life. Our position is that of a buyer. We can honor an agreed-upon fee for your demise, or we may conclude it isn’t worth the money and decide not to make the purchase. What seems to devalue a life is when the person who lives it chooses to curtail it. If you don’t think you’re worth your time, why should we? To put this another way: those who forge into the unknown instead of waiting for disease and cruelty, those who take control instead of letting us do it for them are worth less than nothing, not even a promise.
She said it all quite casually. I imagined the words rolling out in her dark voice as naturally as fog rolls in over the beach. It led me and Martin to further disagreement about Erik. The woman who wrote that, I argued, might play with Erik as a kiskadee plays with a lizard, but she wouldn’t be so stupid as to entrust him with anything important. Martin clung to the simplistic counterargument that any messages to and from Erik’s email address must have been sent to or composed by Erik. Mr. X-Ray Vision accused me of defending my brother at the cost of my own “dubious acumen.” I retorted that I’d never waste my time defending Erik, who’d done me no such courtesy and never would. It was Martin who was hiding from the truth out of an asinine desire to pretend that the world ran like the clockwork in his head.
Our discussion had grown heated by the time I pointed out that neither emails nor report mentioned Nabi. At least not by the name which Martin and I normally attribute to her. This was a clear indication that Masami alone knew the details of the scheme in their entirety, including the truth about Nabi’s involvement. My consternation spiraled till I knew beyond doubt that Masami was the one who’d lured you away from me, just to complete my destruction. So I told Martin in no uncertain terms that when he went to meet the dragon, I’d be right there with him.
I’m no longer sure how I arrived at these conclusions. At the time I was shouting. Martin yelled, “Absolutely not,” and we did more shouting. It ended with the appointed time taking us by surprise, Martin running to his Honda and me to my MG. My car is faster.
AS10.
A scrap (5.5” X 4” approx.). Stripped. Handwritten (black/blue-black). Final draft? (For fuck’s sake who are you?) Is there ever such a thing? No one says goodbye anymore except in pop songs. At this stage there should be no more doubts (n.b., doubtful authority of should).
You’re going to want to know: when did I give up? Was it with Char? When I started working for the chemist? Or did I contrive to cling to some illusory purpose until this afternoon when I careened into the city, rushing rain made a river of the tiny expressway, and my MG skidded as I tried to overtake Martin but he accelerated and we very nearly crashed? Was it when he pounded on the Close button as I threw myself at the elevator’s maw, seeing Thomas Hardy’s heroine who flung herself into the wilds bereft of every hope?
We ended up in there together, muttering. “You better stay out of the way and let me handle this.” “Because you’ve handled it so well already.” “You need your head examined.” “I’d suggest the same but air conditioning repairmen tend to be booked solid in the summer.” And so on.
I cannot have believed that Masami would know where you’ve gone. Athens, Vienna… But those pictures, you see, the safe and easy happiness enshrined above your hearth. Someone should secure that. It was all I had left to do.
It so happened that Masami was outside her door talking to Motomura. They got to see us bearing down on them, tumbling over each other like boulders in a landslide. “Pay no attention to this person, Mrs. Caines!” said Martin, as I hollered something about life and death. Masami said, “Quiet.” And we shut up.
“Thank you for coming, Mr. Furbert. It is fortunate that you brought my son with you.”
“It is?”
“Motomura-san, we are not to be disturbed.”
A silent door trapped us in the belly of the dragon’s lair. A timeless, dark, and bloody place. It stunned me every time I had the misfortune to find myself in it, thankfully not often. The air was cold; it felt like Mars. A giant red and black Rothko had a wall to itself. In front of it cowered an antique globe worth a hundred thousand dollars. The whole place was like a Rothko, brooding and devouring, reeking of intimidation and foreignness. That’s what they made her feel when she came here, so she plays it up and gives it back in spades.
The ashen harbor was relegated to the wall behind her altar-like desk. Tiny and far away was the strip of banana-yellow condos where the Furberts made their home. The view seemed frozen, captured like a photographic image, beyond the reach of my experience of time.
Exhausted, I said, “I’m no threat to you or them. I just need your assurance that Bull’s Head—”
“Please don’t interfere. You are here as a courtesy.”
“Who is Aetna Simmons?” I demanded.
Masami said, “I haven’t the foggiest.” Mild as a pickle in a jar. As I practically swooned into a chair, she said, “You will have a chance to speak when I address my questions to you.”
Martin said nothing. Clearly he’d done business with Masami before. He’d met her at his wedding and other social functions. As he sat down, he looked like he was in the presence of divinity.
“Mr. Furbert, what we have to discuss will strike you as irregular. A due-diligence investigation of a firm with which I’m already in business. Of course our own risk management department conducted this analysis before we took over Clocktower’s account. Their counterparts investigated us as well. All inquiries concluded to mutual satisfaction. Recently, however, certain possibilities came to my attention.”
A moment before I realized that the chill running down my shirt was the dragon’s gaze upon me. My plans included cajoling and threatening. Not going well. Martin saw me dithering and took advantage.
“Well, I’m sorry to say it, Mrs. Caines, but if Kenji told you what he told me, then some of it might be true. Specifically, there’s evidence that Clocktower was involved in something under the table, aided by someone in this company.”
“Nothing so crass as falsifying documents.”
“As yet there’s no evidence one way or the other,” said Martin, earning a deadly frown. “But we can’t rule it out. Respectfully, Mrs. Caines, it all hinges on Aetna Simmons. Who she was and what she did for these people.”
The chill returned. “Well? Do you know the answers to these questions?”
“Why are you pretending that you don’t? Martin knows—”
“I don’t know any such thing,” said Martin. “There is evidence enough to suppose that someone—”
“These falsified documents. What are they, if they exist?” said Masami.
Martin fidgeted. “You realize my work is just beginning. You and I have yet to draw up a contract.”
“Come to the point, Mr. Furbert.”
“It has been suggested to me, albeit without ha
rd evidence, that these people are concocting the kind of documentation that would enable Clocktower’s life underwriters to invoke, under false pretenses, legal suicide clauses which would preclude the payment of death benefits.” He made it all sound very technical. Like something way beyond a confetti maker.
“Suggested by whom?” said Masami.
“Fake suicide notes,” said the confetti rep. “Look, the show’s over.”
“Perhaps.”
“You’re not thinking there’s some truth in this,” said Martin.
“My son may be a vengeful, foolish liar, Mr. Furbert; but there is no threat to this company or my family that I will not address with the utmost seriousness. As you said yourself, we can neither confirm nor rule out any hypothesis at this juncture. But there’s an aspect to this matter that to me is even more important than the methods involved or their ultimate objective.”
She swiveled in her chair like a pilot in a cockpit. Beady eyes fixed on me like a bomber on an unsuspecting target.
“Ten days ago my elder son came in here railing about fraud, embezzlement, and one of my largest accounts. He refused to provide details.”
“Yes, that’s typical,” said Martin.
“Therefore, that very day, I asked a trusted member of my staff to contact BRMS and learn if it would be worth our while for a neutral investigator to update our intelligence concerning Clocktower. This person responded to my orders with delays and excuses, and ten days later I have received no report. I must assume that either this employee forgot my direct orders and hoped I would do the same, which is inconceivable; or they willfully disobeyed me, which is so unwise that I assure you it never happens.”
This diatribe was thrown at me like darts at a detested photograph. Masami turned to Martin and continued: “You will excuse me, Mr. Furbert, but I must be absolutely sure. I must be sure that Erik-Katsuo, my younger son, has not contacted you or any of your colleagues.”
Drafts of a Suicide Note Page 35
