The Player

by Brad Parks

  He gave the gun one final jab into her face, then stood up and went to his black bag once more. He removed a legal-size manila folder that contained a thick stack of paper. As he opened it, I saw it contained five stapled documents of identical thickness. He placed the first one down in front of Marcia.

  “Settlement agreement?” she said. “I’m not going to sign a settlement agreement! Barry, this is going to bankrupt the company!”

  “Yeah, but not for at least a hundred and eighty days. It’ll take at least that long for anyone to even figure out what’s happened.”

  “But, Barry, you built this company,” she said. “It’s half yours.”

  “No, actually, it’s all yours,” Barry said. “I’m dead, remember? My will leaves everything to Vaughn. Which means, in essence, I’ve left everything to you. You are right now the sole owner of McAlister Properties, with total authority over the company’s decisions. Let me spare you reading all that fine print: you are signing off on an eight-million-dollar settlement.”

  And that’s when I finally got it. The settlement. The 180 days. Why Barry needed to involve Imperiale. Why Barry needed Marcia even more.

  Or, more accurately, why he needed Marcia to disappear, and Imperiale to disappear along with her.

  I got it then. It was twisted. But, then again, so was Barry McAlister.

  * * *

  As Marcia Fenstermacher signed away a fortune—all the while swearing to Barry that he wouldn’t get away with it, that he was a fool, that he was going to hell, etc.—I worked it all out.

  Start with the obvious: if Barry had tried to just transfer eight million dollars out of the company account and into his own, it would show up on the quarterly P&L statements that McAlister Properties submitted to its mortgage holders. Those lenders would take appropriate legal action to make sure they could still get their mitts on the money and Barry would have to fork it right back over.

  But if that eight million was being paid to settle a lawsuit, the banks wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. Barry would only have to pay the money back if McAlister Properties went bankrupt within 180 days. In bankruptcy court, any transaction a company makes in the final 180 days before it declares bankruptcy can be reviewed by the court and voided.

  Yet, Barry was leaving McAlister Properties in such disarray, there was no way it would be filing for bankruptcy—or doing much of anything else—in the next 180 days. Of its two namesake architects, one was dead, the other one was presumed dead; and its new owner, Marcia, would be considered missing in action. The company would limp along for a year or more before anything would be decided. The settlement would be untouchable.

  Enter Imperiale. The money had been dumped into his escrow account, as any good settlement money should be. It would look to all the world like Will Imperiale, sleazebag personal injury attorney, had simply gotten a big payoff, then run away rather than share it with his clients.

  Once it dawned on people—in particular, those fifty or so clients who were owed 50 percent of that settlement—they would look high and low for Imperiale and never find him.

  Because he was already dead.

  Meanwhile, I was sure Barry had found a way to pump the escrow account dry. That money was probably already offshore somewhere. Perhaps in Switzerland. Perhaps on a little Caribbean island where Barry figured he and Lisa could live quite happily on eight million dollars for the rest of his life.

  And I should have known. I should have known the moment I saw Elizabeth McAlister’s tiny angel statue was missing the night before. It hadn’t been knocked over by fire trucks or anything of the sort. It had been taken by a man who was still strangely sentimental over the wife who had run off. It may well have been among Barry’s last acts: lovingly wrapping up that piece of marble and packing it away for a long trip to wherever.

  Around the time I got this all worked out, Marcia had signed all five copies. Barry had dumped her onto the floor next to Tommy and was wrapping her in duct tape. I watched him working, looking like a Just For Men dropout with his bad dye job.

  That’s when I figured out the last piece. Why Barry had dyed his hair black. Why Lisa was suddenly brunette. Or at least I had a theory. One way to confirm it:

  “Marcia,” I said. “Do you keep your passport in your house somewhere?”

  “Yeah, why?” she said.

  “Shut up,” Barry ordered. “Both of you.”

  I didn’t need to say any more to her. It would just have discouraged her.

  But I knew why her house had been broken into this morning: Barry needed her passport.

  These weren’t just random disguises. Barry was trying to pass as Will Imperiale. And it would work, too. They both had big noses and ridiculous hair-dye jobs. No one looking at their passport photos would be able to see beyond those things.

  Lisa was a less-convincing Marcia Fenstermacher. But she was still probably good enough. While their bodies were different, you couldn’t see that on a head shot. They were roughly the same age and their faces were close enough that a random customs worker or Transportation Security Administration employee—bored and tired and with a long line behind him—wouldn’t bother to stop her. After all, she was just a nice woman from the suburbs going on vacation to the British Virgin Islands. Or wherever.

  If investigators ever really started working on it—which was doubtful—it would appear that Willard R. Imperiale, Esq., had taken an eight-million-dollar payday and run off with Marcia Fenstermacher, the woman whose signature was on the settlement papers.

  I thought about how Barry had likely snookered Imperiale into playing his part. Barry had probably waltzed into Imperiale’s office and told him he was about to get the easiest payday of his life. In exchange for some portion of the proceeds, Barry was going to agree to settle this lawsuit. That’s why Imperiale had been promising his clients quick money. Barry had told him that’s what he was going to get.

  “How much of a kickback did Imperiale think he was giving you?” I asked Barry, who was almost finished with Marcia. “That was the deal, wasn’t it? You told Imperiale that McAlister Properties had eight million bucks that was ripe for the plucking and he only had to give you, what, a million? Two million?”

  Barry was ignoring me. But I saw what looked like a little bit of a smile cross his face.

  It all worked out. Barry was getting a comfortable retirement—and running off with a woman he’d always had a crush on. Lisa was getting her escape from all those creditors and piddling lawsuits and was being given the life of luxury that she had married Vaughn for in the first place. Plus, she was getting a pretty good slice of revenge on the woman who had wrecked her marriage.

  And all they had to do to make it work was kill the man whom they both had once professed to love.

  And a lawyer.

  And a secretary.

  And a pair of newspaper reporters.

  Even though we weren’t integral to the scheme, there was no way they could leave Tommy and me alive. I had known that already. Now I really understood why: the moment anyone knew Barry McAlister was not dead, the whole jig was up. The banks would never let him get away with what was obviously a scheme to pump money out of a failing business before it went belly-up. The courts would seize whatever money he had.

  So Tommy and I were just the poor sots who got in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was assuming Barry was going to arrange for all three of us not to be found. Hired killers tended to be good at that sort of thing. And there was enough money on the line that Barry could afford the best.

  I glanced over at Tommy, both of us looking ridiculous in our duct-tape bondage, and shook my head. “Remember what I said about outliving Brittany Murphy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I take it back.”

  He was never allowed to say it. He wasn’t allowed even to think it. He felt like some kind of deviant for admitting it to himself.

  We live in a society that constantly reinforces the belief—through book
s, through movies, through Hallmark cards and commercials and Father’s Day nostalgia—that the birth of a child ought to be a joyous, precious event, one of the great days in any human’s existence.

  But the way Barry McAlister viewed things, Vaughn’s birth had ruined his life.

  He was married to a gorgeous woman before that baby came. They lived in a nice house in the suburbs. They enjoyed themselves. He worked hard to provide for them. She had been sort of self-centered, sure. But there was enough attention and affection left over for him. And he felt the pride of having a beautiful woman on his arm. He could remember thinking how fortunate he was, how happy he was. He couldn’t wait to get home and see her every night. He had the perfect life.

  Then, wham. Baby. And it was like a dark cloud had passed over everything. She had a difficult delivery. She couldn’t nurse the child. She suffered through a horrible case of what he now realized was postpartum depression—back then they called it “baby blues”—and, in some ways, never really recovered. She was miserable all the time. She stopped paying any attention to him, stopped having any energy for him. It was like she stopped loving him. She was constantly angry. Before long, so was he. Coming home at night became like walking into a dungeon. Even her looks faded.

  Then she just took off, leaving behind the kid and her feeble excuses. When he heard about her death a few years later, it was like completing the circle of agony. He had always held out hope that she might come back to him. No. More than that: he knew she would come back to him. Then the cancer got her. He told himself that if he had been around, she would have gone to the doctor more regularly. Or he might have noticed the lump. Instead, she was gone forever.

  And maybe Barry should have resented only his wife, not his child. But it wasn’t that easy to separate the two of them. All he knew was that he had been fine, and then he was miserable. And the clear dividing line between the two was the birth of his son.

  Things certainly didn’t get any easier when his wife left. He was a single dad at a time when there was really no such thing. He struggled constantly to find child care. He had no social life because of Vaughn—there was no going out on nights or weekends when you had a kid to watch. He had no sex life because of Vaughn—no woman seemed to want Barry when it meant also taking on his little anchor. He had nothing beyond work and parenting. Because of Vaughn.

  So, yeah, Vaughn had ruined Barry’s personal life. And he could sort of accept that. He could tell himself it wasn’t the kid’s fault.

  But when Vaughn ruined his business as well, that was too much.

  Barry could never understand why Vaughn hadn’t been satisfied to stick just with residential. They had a good thing going with their apartment buildings. Yeah, it was hard work. And it wasn’t particularly glamorous. But what was wrong with hard work? Who needed glamour? It gave them a good, steady income. They could prudently expand their holdings without too much risk.

  But Vaughn was like his mother. Always concerned with appearances. Always wanting flashy things. Always having this dream of the Really Big Deal.

  And somehow he persuaded Barry—against Barry’s better judgment—to sell off everything and let him chase it. So that’s what Barry did, putting the proceeds from his life’s work into Vaughn’s hands and letting him go into the high-stakes world of commercial real estate.

  It worked for a while. Then Vaughn just flat screwed it up. He got so wrapped up dreaming of deals that would run into the hundreds of millions that he forgot the basic principle of property management: you need to keep the tenants happy. If you don’t have tenants, you don’t have anything.

  His cash flow went negative right about the same time he came up with this other scheme—to take millions of dollars of cleanup money for a brownfields site, pocket it, then use it as seed money for this new project that would supposedly get him back in the black.

  When Barry learned about the brownfields thing, he wanted to kill Vaughn right there. It went against everything Barry stood for in business, every principle upon which he had built McAlister Properties, everything he thought he had taught his son. They were going to get caught. He knew they were going to get caught.

  Then those construction workers started getting sick. And Barry started thinking about his options. He couldn’t just let Vaughn ruin everything and bankrupt them. He started coming up with a plan to save them.

  It was when Vaughn lost Best Buy that Barry realized he needed to put his plan into action. The thing was hopeless. McAlister Place and McAlister Center were money sieves. Now McAlister Arms was destined be a loser before Vaughn would even be able to get a foundation poured.

  They owed millions. What little equity there was in those buildings was going to go to the banks. Barry was going to lose everything.

  So Barry put a plan into place to get it all back. Then he convinced the former Lisa McAlister there were eight million reasons to join him.

  CHAPTER 9

  As his final step in turning us into duct-tape mummies, Barry McAlister used what remained of the roll to gag us.

  So there we were. Totally immobilized. Huddled in the corner next to one another. And mute.

  Lisa was mostly just pacing around the room, looking at various pictures and renderings of McAlister Arms, McAlister Place, and McAlister Center—like she was just a random visitor to the office, waiting for a meeting.

  Barry had taken a seat at Marcia’s desk. He had put both guns down next to the keyboard and was typing on her computer. What he was doing, I couldn’t see. Was there a Web site called FugitivesFromJustice.org where he could get tips for a well-funded life on the lam? But, no; he kept swearing occasionally, like he didn’t like what the machine was showing him. He kept glancing at his watch.

  Every time I felt like neither of them was looking in my direction, I would test my bonds to see if I could get them to budge, even a little. If I could get a little wiggle room going, I thought maybe I could get some leverage and …

  And, well, nothing. Even if I did manage to, say, get my hands free, my legs were still wrapped up tight. And my captors were still armed.

  The only thing we had going for us—and it wasn’t much—was that if Barry had planned to blow our heads off here at the office, we would have long ago been dead. He planned to kill us somewhere else. And maybe in the process of moving us, we’d have a chance to do … something.

  This, mind you, is the equivalent of the football team down three scores thinking it still has a chance with under two minutes left. But I had to cling to something.

  Barry continued looking at his watch, continued his swearing and muttering. Finally, he said, “Okay, where the hell are those guys?”

  “I don’t know,” Lisa said. “Why don’t you call them?”

  “I told you, that’s not how it works with guys like that,” he said. “I don’t even have their number.”

  “Well, I don’t know what to tell you, sugar.”

  Barry looked at the computer screen a little more, then decided, “We’ll be fine. This is why I had us fly tomorrow morning. We’re okay.”

  They eventually switched places, with Barry pacing and Lisa seated at the desk. I had no idea how much time was passing. I couldn’t see a clock, and my cell phone, which is how I usually checked the time, was currently in about eight hundred tiny pieces inside a cloth bag. The tinting of the windows made it tough to tell how close to sunset it was getting, but the shadows cast by the buildings were definitely getting longer.

  Meanwhile—and not that this was my biggest problem at the moment, but still—I was starting to get incredibly uncomfortable. I could shift positions only so much. I wanted to lie down—if only to take some pressure off my seriously numb ass—but I worried that if I went on my side, I’d never be able to get up again. So I stayed where I was, trying to battle through the various parts of my body that kept getting pins and needles. I swore my butt was never going to regain circulation.

  Still, the gag was the worst. Not only did it m
ake it impossible to talk—one of my favorite things to do—it made it hard to breathe, perhaps the only thing I liked to do more. He had left our noses exposed, but have you ever tried breathing with only your nose for an extended period of time? It’s hard to fight the feeling that you’re just not getting enough oxygen.

  Occasionally I’d make eye contact with Tommy or Marcia. They didn’t seem to be having any more fun than I was. Tommy was mostly staring at the carpet. Marcia kept intermittently closing her eyes.

  “Why don’t you call the guy who calls them?” Lisa said after a while.

  “No,” Barry insisted. “They’ll be here. They must have gotten caught in traffic or something.”

  Maybe, if we were lucky, they—whoever “they” were—had gotten caught in the mess on I-280. Even if it was just delaying the inevitable, it was something.

  I tried to distract myself by thinking about what was going on at my parents’ house. I was, by now, at least an hour late. My poor mother had probably been in a full panic by 4:35 and turned into an absolute wreck when I hadn’t shown up by 4:45. My brother and sister and their respective mates would have given up trying to calm her down by 4:50. At 5:00, my father would have insisted they just leave without me. Either that, or he would have found a tranquilizer gun. Tina was probably plotting a variety of creative ways to kill me—as if that weren’t already being taken care of.

  Thinking about Tina naturally turned my thoughts to the baby that would soon be stirring in her womb. My baby. Suddenly, I was convinced she was a girl—I don’t know why—and I found myself thinking of all the things I wanted to say to her; how I would hold her when she was scared and laugh with her when she was happy; how I planned to play princesses with her or climb trees with her or braid her hair or teach her how to shoot a layup; how I was going to scare the hell out of her first boyfriend and dance with her at her wedding if she ever found a guy perfect enough to deserve her.

  I imagined what she was going to look like. She would have dark hair, no doubt about that, perhaps curly like Tina’s. Maybe she would get my blue eyes. She would probably end up being tall and slender—again, like her parents. I hoped she’d be smart and passionate, like her mother. And maybe my greatest gift to her would be my sense of curiosity about the world and my joy for all the things in it. Could that be hereditary?