Baiting & Fishing

by Meredith Rae Morgan

Chapter 14

  The sidewalk on the Overseas Highway was well lighted, so they ran to the bridge before sunrise. They were not the only ones running early. They arrived at the approach to the Seven Mile Bridge a little while before sunrise. The old bridge had been converted to a walking, running and biking path that juts two miles out into the water. They ran nearly to the end and stood by the railing waiting for the morning show to begin. It was chilly. They stood with their arms around each other, only partly for warmth.

  Sunrise in the Keys is only slightly less glorious than sunset, and has the advantage of being at a time of day when fewer people are out and about, so it seems more intimate. They watched the fireball rise from the sea and turn the water from black to purple and, eventually, to its usual daytime palette of green and blue. Ray rested his chin on Marcella's shoulder. She leaned her head against his cheek. They watched the sun rise in silence. When it was fully light, they ran back in the direction of the motel. They stopped for breakfast at a likely-looking spot a mile or so away from the motel where they gorged on grits, fried fish bites and home-made biscuits. Too full to run they walked hand-in-hand the last mile back to the hotel.

  It only took them a few minutes to gather their things and load the car. Ray turned in the keys well before the 11:00 a. m. checkout time. As they prepared to leave, he asked, “You still want to go over the bridge?”

  She said, “Yes, if you don't mind.”

  He turned right and drove in silence across the Seven Mile Bridge while they both marveled at the beauty of the scenery and the incredible feat of human engineering and labor that made it possible to drive across open ocean. He asked her if she wanted to go all the way to Key West. She said she didn't unless he wanted to. He shook his head and told her he did not plan to go back to Key West, ever again. She took his hand in both of hers. He believed that she knew all too well how difficult it was to leave your childhood home behind forever.

  They turned around on Bahia Honda and headed back across the bridge in the other direction, toward the mainland of Florida. The scenery on the eastbound trip was as spectacular as the vistas they had enjoyed heading west. They talked very little, too engrossed in the scenery and their own private thoughts.

  It was mid-morning in late October. The traffic was light (at least as far as traffic in the Keys goes). The weather was spectacular. Ray drove fast enough to keep from being run over and slow enough to enjoy the scenery. Periodically he stopped at roadside pull-offs to let the line of cars behind him pass by. It had been a long time since he'd had a day with absolutely no deadlines or plans. He apologized to Marcella for behaving like such an old fart. She laughed and said she was having a wonderful time.

  As they passed through Homestead he said, “Unless you want to do some shopping or some such, I plan to avoid Miami.”

  She shrugged, “Please do. I have not been to Miami since Roland died, and I frankly was never that crazy about it before.”

  “Yes. Sorry. I forgot about that.”

  She smiled, “You know that is one thing I like about you. You do not seem to be obsessed with that story. Sometimes I think you don't even know the story at all.”

  “That is very close to the mark. When all of your trouble was going on, I was down in the 'Glades working on an environmental story. Anyway, I spent a pretty fair chunk of that period sleeping in the cab of a rented pick up truck or bunking on the couch of a Miccosukee Indian family who sort of adopted me. They had a TV, but most of the time it was tuned to game shows and reality shows which were the only shows the matriarch of the family – and owner of said TV – watched. When I went to town it was usually to spend time in newspaper archives or libraries. I sort of missed the whole Techtron disaster. When you first moved to Sarasota and there was a big flurry of interest, I frankly had to look you up on Google to find out what the buzz was about.”

  She howled. “How many hits did you get?”

  “I dunno. Something like 300,000.”

  She shook her head and was quiet for a long time. “Would you like to hear the story?”

  He thought about that. On the one hand, he knew he sure as hell would love to hear the story from her lips. On the other hand, he had promised her confidentiality. He shook his head. “I would love to hear it, if you want to tell it. But, I want to caution you. Please don't tell me anything that hasn't been published already. Even if you give it a different interpretation and different meaning, don't tell me anything I might be tempted to use.”

  She thought about that for a while, “The problem with that is I don't know what has been published because I stopped reading the papers very early on in the game. I couldn't handle it.”

  She paused, “Here's what I'll do. I'll tell you what I think the public knows or what I wouldn't mind for the public to know. I still want everything that went before my marriage to remain private between you and me.”

  “As I told you the other day, I left graduate school at U. S. C. because I suddenly had the wherewithal to relax and have fun. The initial trust fund my benefactor had set up was enough for a student to live on, if I were careful, but it was not enough to live on permanently. When he died, he left me a bequest that added enough to the trust fund to live on, very comfortably, for the rest of my life. I did not need to work. I could simply enjoy life. I wasn't in the league of the super rich who could spend wildly, but I was set for life if I were careful.

  “As you might expect, that was pretty heady stuff to someone with my background. As if he anticipated that, the bequest included a provision giving the Trustee control over how much money I could take out at any one time. That particular attorney and I had a sort of love-hate relationship for years.” She chuckled. “Much more hate than love to be honest, in both directions.

  “As I told you, I sort of drifted around for a while. I lived in New York City for a time, then I moved to London. At one point in the late 1970's, I took a trip around the world. That was incredible.

  “When I came back to the States, I decided to try to do something useful. You will understand that it would be difficult for a person to grow up the way I did and not feel passionately about species endangerment and/or clean water.

  “I got involved in a couple of environmental organizations. I moved to Galveston because I wanted to be near the ocean but I didn't want to go back to Florida, and I really hadn't liked L.A. I traveled a lot working with the Ocean Conservancy.

  “I met Roland Wilson in Palm Beach during the charity ball season in 1992. I was not really rich enough to be part of that scene, but a woman I worked with at the Ocean Conservancy was a filthy rich denizen of Palm Beach society. She invited me down for the charity ball season. I didn't have anything better to do, so I went.

  “Roland was from an old aristocratic family in Atlanta. They were sort of Georgia blue bloods. They were comfortable, but they weren't exactly Palm Beach rich either. He was interested in economic development as well as social and educational issues. I don't remember who invited him, but I think he ended up in Palm Beach that season sort of like I did: an outsider invited by a Palm Beach insider. In both cases, perhaps they misjudged how much money we actually had and wanted us to make large donations to their charities.

  “We met at one of the balls. You can't have lived your whole life in Florida and not have heard about the Palm Beach balls. It's quite an experience. I think they are the most hideously disgusting experiences imaginable. They'll spend $5 million to throw a party ostensibly for the purpose of raising money for charity; the charity will end up with maybe a few hundred thousand or a million. The whole thing is an excuse for the super rich to try to outdo each other with over-the-top entertainment. That first time I went there, I was overwhelmed by the opulence of it all.

  “Roland saw it differently. He was underwhelmed by it. He thought the whole Palm Beach set lacked breeding and class. The folks in the Palm Beach behave as though they need neither because they have enough money to do as they please. Roland was always a sno
b when it came to that. He didn't care about how much money people had, or didn't have. The only thing he cared about was whether or not the person had class, which he defined a little differently than you would ordinarily think. For him someone with class was someone who was honest and decent and truthful. He didn't care if you knew which fork to use at a fancy dinner, which was good because it took me years to learn all that etiquette stuff and I know I embarrassed him more than once with my gauche behavior. He didn't like Palm Beach because he thought those people were phonies. I think he was right about that.

  “The weird thing is there was always a sort of phoniness about Roland, too. He was too good to be true in some ways, but he was kind of a bastard in other ways. There always seemed to be something artificial about him.

  “And I will say this before you do: I am perfectly aware of how much that sounds like a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

  “Anyway, he hadn't yet spun off the vision of a laptop computer for every poor child in the third world, but he was definitely headed in that general direction. He was all about economic development of depressed areas, including those in the U. S., although mostly he focused on the Third World.

  “He captivated me with his vision. He had breeding and class, which I lacked, but we shared the same vision that those who 'have' ought to share with those who 'have not'. In a way it wasn't much to go on, given the enormity of all the other differences between us, but it was something. More importantly, we each had something the other lacked. We also learned very quickly that our personalities were opposites, but in many ways complementary.

  “I fell in love with him largely because I thought he was everything I was not: comfortable with his money, socially at ease, and he seemed to have a purpose in his life that I lacked.

  “It took me a long time to understand what Roland saw in me. I eventually came to understand that he admired and even envied my fearlessness. I can take about anything life dishes out. My most profound experience as a kid was standing in the aft of the boat a few days after my mother's funeral. Dad was in the wheelhouse, oblivious to my very existence, much less presence on the boat. I was ten years old. I had lost my mother and I was utterly bereft. Everything in me cried out for Dad to hold me in his lap so we could cry together. He was a kind, generous and loving man, but it never once occurred to him that I might have, as they say today, 'issues'. His cure for his grief (and, make no mistake, my father loved, adored and idolized my mother; his grief was enormous and he never really got over it) was to throw himself into his work.

  “The few months after Mother died, we worked constantly. It never crossed his mind that I might need consolation from him. I can't fault him for that. I didn't even fault him at the time because I knew how deeply he was hurting. He had no consolation to give. Still it is a big deal, at ten years of age, to know that you are pretty much on your own, at least emotionally. Dad fed me, clothed me (at least as well as befitted a second mate on a fishing boat), and made sure I went to school often enough to keep the truant officer away. Beyond that, I was totally on my own. At first, I was terrified. Somehow I managed to survive. I don't think I've been afraid of anything since.

  “Roland liked that because he was a sort of coward. He had a good heart and he was smart, but he was weak and he was afraid to take risks. Significantly, he was easily deceived. I know there are a lot of people, including the thousands of his former employees who lost everything they had when Techtron collapsed, who think he was a criminal. In my heart, to this day, I don't think that's true. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm deluding myself to cover up for the fact that I hitched my wagon to a star that fell so dramatically. Whatever the reason, I still have trouble seeing Roland as the perpetrator of the crime and not one of its many victims.

  “The press spun the story as one of greed. They said Roland got greedy and went along with the scheme to rip off Techtron's stockholders by falsifying the records on revenue. I have never believed that. I know from up-close observation how easily he could ignore huge issues that were right in front of him if they were 'difficult'. I know how he trusted the people around him to do the right thing. I know that his was the vision that set the whole thing in motion, but he did not have the technical ability to understand the complex accounting weirdness that was going on, the interest in details to try to figure it out or the courage to confront people when the questions started to bubble up around him. Roland was a big-picture kind of guy. He left the details to others. The press and, therefore, the American people saw him as the Bad Guy: A real-life Gordon Gecko whose Greed cost him and his employees everything they had.”

  She paused, shook her head and studied her hands for a long moment.

  He was holding his breath, but he could not stop himself from asking, “Do you know who was behind it?”

  She thought about that for a minute and then said with a wry look, “I suppose the truth of that is that we all sort of were.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She shrugged, “I believe that whoever was behind the whole thing presented themselves as his friends and loyal employees, while they were systematically setting him up. The rest of us who were close to him didn't do enough to make him pay attention. There were a couple of people within Techtron who were worried and who tried to warn him that something was wrong. He ignored them. I was not involved with Techtron at all. My job was to be the wife and charity-lady, so I didn't know what was going on. But, I've got great instincts, and my instincts told me that something smelled. I tried to tell him. He pooh-poohed it. I let it go to avoid making him mad.”

  Ray asked, “Are the bad guys in jail?”

  She thought about that for a minute and said, “Remember, I don't know the whole story myself, but, I think that the people who are in jail are guilty of the things they were convicted of doing. There was stock manipulation. There was bogus accounting. There was every manner of lying and conniving and screwing with numbers. The people who are in jail were involved in that stuff.

  “I have always thought there was more to it. I have nothing to go on except the gut feeling I had when we went to some remote places where schools or government agencies were supposedly buying the computers we were selling. I always had the feeling that more was going on than selling computers, but I never could figure out what it was.”

  “Drugs?”

  She made a face, “No, I don't think so. In fact, I'm pretty sure it wasn't drugs, but I think there was some kind of other deals going on. I just don't know what.”

  “Did you ever say anything to your husband?”

  She paused for a long time and said, “I will answer that, but please don't use it. I did mention to him a couple of times that I had a creepy feeling about some of his customers. I never knew about the corruption within Techtron, because I had hardly any contact with the Techtron people. I had all kinds of bad feelings about Techtron's customers. They were bureaucrats in developing countries. Many of them had access to money (a lot of money!) for the first time in their lives and they were the only ones in their circle who did. I thought there was rampant and ubiquitous bribery and corruption. I was concerned and I mentioned it to Roland a couple of times. He told me not to worry about it.

  “He thought that for one thing it was sort of the price of doing business in certain countries and, what was more, he saw himself as kind and generous and he felt that if we could help people out by putting a few extra dollars in the pockets of our clients' employees, well, what would be the harm. I assumed he knew more about it than I did, but I never liked the feeling that Techtron was involved in kickbacks and bribery. What is more, I never shook the feeling that there was more to it than the normal amount of palm greasing that is more or less a cost of doing business in some parts of the developing world.

  “Today, I feel like an idiot that I never even suspected all the bad stuff that was going on right here under our noses at Techtron while I was worried about payoffs to small time bureaucrats in poor countries.
”

  He thought about it, “But what if you are right? What if there was large scale corruption and bribery – or worse – going on. That would account for some of the hundreds of millions of dollars that are still missing and it would also explain a lot of the accounting irregularities.”

  She made a face, “It might explain the missing money, but it doesn't explain what they were doing behind the scenes that would have required them to spend so much in bribes. I mean, I can understand their paying kick-backs to bureaucrats in order to get contracts, but I can't imagine that would account for the millions upon millions of dollars that have never been found.

  “In any case, for the first few years of our marriage, life was good. Roland and I were sort of the king and queen of Atlanta. We were America's do-good billionaires trying to educate the poor children of the world. It was swell for a while.

  “But when it all came crashing down, Roland couldn't take it. There were people in the company who stood up and did the right thing, cooperating with the government and telling the truth. There were a few who checked out and headed for Argentina or somewhere with no extradition treaties with the U. S. The worst of them scurried around trying to cover up what they had done, and making things much worse. Ultimately, the company collapsed. Some of the people turned state's evidence. Some maintained their innocence. All of them were guilty of something. A bunch of people went to jail. Thousands upon thousands of Techtron's employees lost all their retirement savings, and its investors lost money, too.

  “I swear to God I have never been so angry about anything in my life as I was when Roland killed himself to avoid going to jail. That may reflect poorly on me as a person. I'll admit to you that my anger has almost overwhelmed my grief. I loved him when he was alive, please understand that. I really did. And I supported him until the end. But, killing himself and letting me and his few remaining friends and supporters deal with the mess alone was, in my opinion, an act of cowardice that I will never be able to forgive.” Her voice trembled with anger. Her eyes were hot and dry. She clasped and unclasped her hands in her lap.

  He drove for a while in silence and let her compose herself. Eventually he cleared his throat and said, “Forgive me, but I have to ask this question. I swear it will never go past me, but I have to know. Do you feel that you owe the employees of Techtron something? Do you feel the least bit bad about living in luxury when so many of Techtron's employees were left with nothing?”

  She glared at him as if he were an idiot, “I would most certainly feel that way if I were living on money I got from Techtron or from Roland. I am not. I live on my own money. It did not come to me from Roland or Techtron or anyone connected with either of them. The liquidator took the houses and cars. I sold the yacht and turned in that money to the government. I feel bad about the people of Techtron who were screwed by their employer. I don't have any of that money. If I did, I would give it back to the Techtron employees. ”

  She chuckled, “Or, I would be in jail and the government would have it like they have the rest of the money they somehow managed to find.”

  He said, “I thought the government was giving that money to the Receiver to go back into the Techtron retirement plan.”

  She laughed, “Don't be naive! The Justice Department agreed to turn over to the retirement fund any money it recovered after taking out the government's expenses for prosecuting the case. They recovered about $50 million. So far the government has kept it all. I know this because Roland was enrolled in the Techtron retirement fund. As his beneficiary, I get legal notices from the Plan. The balance in the retirement fund is still zero.” She made a noise in the back of her throat. “You want a story about how who is now taking a turn raping the former employees of Techtron? There's one.”

  She looked out the window for a few minutes and then said quietly, “I'd like to change the subject, if you don't mind.”

  Ray nodded and reached out to pat her hand.

  After a few minutes he asked her if she had ever been on an air boat. She told him she hadn't. He made a sudden stop at a roadside gas station and mini-market. The young native American woman at the counter greeted him with a warm smile and a hug. He introduced her to Marcella and asked if her father was around. She shook her head and said he was in Tampa for a tribal meeting at the Hard Rock Hotel.

  He laughed, “Do you appreciate as much as I do the delicious irony of a bunch of Indians getting filthy rich off white people losing their money in a gambling casino??”

  The girl laughed. “I don't know about filthy rich, but at least we're not on welfare anymore. We laugh about it all the way to the bank. The board of directors has a running joke about how they have plans to put smallpox infested blankets on the beds of the hotel.” She giggled and made what was supposed to be a sheepish face, “What do you need Dad for?”

  Ray said, “My friend here has never explored the 'Glades and has never had the serene and peaceful pleasures of riding on an air boat with your father.”

  She laughed and said that she hoped they would come back soon in order to rectify that gap in his friend's life. They chatted for a while and then Ray and Marcella continued on their way, promising to come back soon for a tour.

  Ray took a turn at story-telling, filling her in on his time in the Everglades while her life was coming unglued in Atlanta. She asked a lot of questions and made it clear she would love to explore the Everglades with him and his Miccosukee friends. She told him that, given her background, she understood as well anyone how important the water and wildlife are to the life of the state. He smiled thinking that she really was something of a do-gooder at heart.

  He dropped her off at her house and then headed home. He debated about checking his voice mail, but decided to do so just in case he had got lucky and the editorial meeting scheduled for Wednesday morning was canceled.

  He had no such luck on that score, but among the messages on his voice mail was one from Karen Thompson in Atlanta. She said she had found out that the Wilsons were members of the Buckhead club and, as she suspected, they were much more active there than at church. Roland played golf, Marcella played tennis and visited the gym nearly every day. They were regular diners in the restaurant. There was nothing particularly unusual about their participation in the club.

  Ray returned her call. They chatted for a couple of minutes and he asked her if she would be interested in doing some more research. He said, “This could cost a little money, because I want you to go as deep as you can go, even if it means paying for information. I'll send you a couple of hundred dollars to get started. Let me know if you need more.

  “I want you to help me fill in the gaps in this story.”

  He told her the story Marcella had given him speculating as to the approximate date ranges. “I want to know whatever information you can dig up on her. There is no screaming rush on this. Let me know whatever you can come up with.”

  She chuckled on the other end of the phone. “I love being friends with reporters. I'm a sort of frustrated Jessica Fletcher; I love to solve mysteries. I'll get back to you.”