AHMM, July/August 2012

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I sat down on the bed. “I'm all ears.”

  “I am going to ask you to reconsider, or at least to postpone your decision until after we dine. Do you know why it was that Miss Enola decided to hire you?”

  “She said it's because I'm a woman.”

  Fredericks smirked. “Well, of course there's that. But only a certain kind of woman might be considered.”

  “Big blondes?”

  Her face went solemn. “Please do not make light of this, Erica. I am talking about who you are, not what you are, but even more about who Miss Enola is.”

  This time I think I might have blushed.

  “The reason she decided to consider you is because you had made it very clear that your motivation in working as a private investigator was to help people who can't help themselves.”

  I know I blushed then. “Oh.”

  “Erica, that idea is the only thing that gets Miss Enola out of bed in the morning.”

  “This is too weird. She's a private detective herself, and successful as hell, judging from this place. So how come I've never heard of her?”

  “She prefers to be called an investigative analyst rather than detective, since she demurs from collecting evidence herself—I believe that will be your contribution. You've never heard of her because she is, shall we say, exclusive. To call her clientele select is something of a euphemism. They come to her by reference only, and she is extremely discriminating regarding whom she will accept, even when the references are satisfactory. There are far more important criteria.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She paused. “Looking around here, you may be impressed by all that she has. She is surrounded by fine objets d'art, and every comfort consistent with a subtle and refined nature. You might think that she has gained the world. But this is nothing compared to what she has lost.”

  It didn't take a genius to light on Miss Enola's most obvious disadvantage, so I asked. “How exactly did she wind up in a wheelchair?”

  Fredericks frowned. “It isn't my place to speak where she has been silent, Erica. But I will say that if you think that Miss Enola is a zealous Xanthippe who finds joy in inflicting her will on others, a heartless harridan motivated by her own petty sense of prerogative, then you suffer from a meaner incapacity than she. A crippled imagination is the worst affliction of all. Trust your imagination, Erica. I promise that it will be rewarded.”

  Wordy, right? I guessed Fredericks had been one of those snob English majors who wrote incomprehensible free verse and read opaque fiction to prove how smart they were, but I was still impressed.

  The question was whether Fredericks was pitching a dramatic speech to arouse my curiosity so I'd stay, or if she was being on the level and there was more here than met the eye. I reckoned the bloated pomposity of her plea was unintentional, since being pompous rarely recommends sympathy, so maybe there was something to what she said—but I was pretty weary of the high-handed way Miss Enola was treating me. I changed the subject.

  “So, Fredericks. Harvard, right? English Lit?”

  “Vassar, actually. You?”

  I guffawed. “Three semesters at Fresno State in theater arts.”

  She smiled, but it was a friendly smile. “An actress manqué, then.”

  “I don't know what manqué means, but don't worry, Fredericks. I didn't move to Hollywood to be discovered or anything.”

  “And yet that's precisely what has happened,” she said, and then she left.

  Huh.

  I dug into my purse, pulled out my cell, and speed-dialed Sherwood Brothers. I stared at the check in my hand.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said. “You're not going to believe this.”

  * * * *

  The portfolio was full of goodies. There was a state-of-the-art smartphone, with a Bluetooth earpiece, hallelujah! Adios to my primitive prepaid cell, and welcome back wireless social networking. There were the keys to the Tesla and the penthouse. Also a stack of about fifty business cards reading

  * * * *

  Erica H. Wooding

  Licensed Field Agent

  F. I. A. T.

  The Fowler Investigative Analysis Team

  with both the smartphone's number and one labeled “McKinley Building” printed below my name, no other address. And a small-business credit card with my name on it, oh my goodness. From the cards I deduced that Miss Enola had decided to hire me even before our interview.

  Cal Ops’ background information about me was there in a thick manila folder. It contained a lot more than I would have imagined, all of it strictly accurate, even to my high school letters in track and volleyball and my mediocre transcripts from Fresno State. I didn't need to ask how they'd got hold of all this—I'm a skip tracer, remember?

  And then there was the case file.

  A lot of it I didn't understand. Expert network firms. Channel checkers. There was a lot about offshore bank accounts and the Securities and Exchange Commission investigating insider trading at hedge funds, like I even knew what a hedge fund was except that it had something to do with greed. One name popped up again and again: Oliver Long, B.A. Stanford, M.B.A. UCLA Anderson School, Vice President for Account Management for the Manufacturers Trend Research Group (MTRG), whatever that was. Frankly, reading it all was starting to make me go cross eyed. But then came some stuff I could sink my teeth into.

  Long had disappeared into thin air. Now we were talking.

  * * * *

  I wandered into the kitchen mainly out of curiosity to see who was cooking, but my cover story was to offer to help. I'm no foodie, but I do know my way around kitchen knives and pots and pans.

  Given that this was an industrial-sized kitchen, I fully expected Miss Enola to have a bevy of private cooks, but she was preparing everything mostly by herself, with Fredericks assisting. Miss Enola looked rather silly in a tall paper chef's hat and a cotton apron that looked more like a surgeon's smock than anything else, but her face wore that frozen humorless mask that signals absolute concentration. At that moment she was precisely cubing slices of eggplant with a long, damascened Santoku, the knife slithering through them at full speed and clicking on the cutting board like a telegraph key in an old western. On the stove beside her, onions and garlic were sautéing in olive oil in a wide cast-iron frying pan. My mouth watered.

  Fredericks tossed the salad.

  Most of the counters were only three feet high in deference to Miss Enola's wheelchair, but a couple were tall enough to stand at. The most interesting thing was the low six-burner stove, a custom job no higher than my knees.

  “Wow, that smells great,” I said. “What are we having?”

  “Nothing fancy,” Miss Enola replied. “Simple cuisine du pays. Crepes avec ratatouille nicoise."

  Okay. “Anything I can do to help?”

  “You can help by not getting underfoot.”

  Right.

  Fredericks looked up from her labors. “Veronica Cross will be here in about half an hour, Erica. If you would be so kind, greet her when she arrives and offer her a glass of sherry in the drawing room.”

  I didn't know where the drawing room was, or even really what a drawing room was other than something from Jane Austen, but I figured it must be the room where I'd find the sherry. I felt I should know who Veronica Cross was, but I couldn't put the name to a face.

  “I read the file,” I said, more to be saying something than for any other reason.

  “Of course you did, my dear,” Miss Enola said. “But we'll discuss that after supper.”

  * * * *

  I found the drawing room not far from the vestibule. The sherry was in a round, broad-based cut-glass decanter, on a sideboard next to another one filled with port. Pretty masculine tipple, I thought, given that we were in something of a henhouse, although there wasn't any whiskey or brandy there, which I guess there would have been had there been any concessions to the Y-chromosome afflicted. I'm not much of a drinker myself, being more your basic diet-soda connois
seur.

  When the doorbell rang, I answered it. That's when I remembered.

  “I know you. You're Veronica Cross!” All right, the fact that she was Veronica Cross probably wasn't that much of a surprise to her.

  “Call me Nicki,” she said, extending her hand, beaming like I had just handed her a four-foot-long million-dollar check from the Lotto. “You must be the new girl.”

  “Erica. Erica Wooding,” I said, taking her hand. I did find it a little, what's the phrase?—cognitively dissonant to hear the word girl drop so casually from the mouth of a big-time feminist lawyer. But I was starstruck.

  Really good lawyers, like good doctors and good ministers, have the gift of putting people immediately at ease. This gal had it like a biker broad has tattoos, except that Nicki was stylishly sporting a rough silk suit worth more than my car. Her black hair, pale makeup, and shoes were letter perfect, but that just amplified the effect. I guess it was charisma—I mean, she carried an alligator attaché case that with anyone else would have drawn your attention away from whoever held it. Not her, though.

  “Miss Enola and Fredericks are in the kitchen,” I said. “If you'd like some, I was asked to offer you some sherry.”

  “Don't bother,” she said, marching in. “I can serve myself.”

  She poured for both of us, parked herself unceremoniously on the sofa, and said, “So, Erica, tell me about yourself.”

  If I could pump somebody like she did me, I'd call myself a detective. I don't think there's anything about myself I didn't gratefully tell her all about. When I got to my education, she asked, “So what did you learn in theater arts?”

  I said, “Don't date actors.”

  We both laughed, and only then did I realize how she'd played me. I guess I got that blank look on my face that betrays vulnerability because she put her hand on my knee and said, “Don't worry, Erica. We're friends.”

  And you know what? I believed her.

  I was saved from gushing my appreciation by the sudden appearance of Miss Enola. Everything stopped. She has that effect. In this instance, though, it wasn't for more than a second.

  “Enola!” Nicki got off the sofa and crossed the room, bending down to give Miss Enola a hug. Miss Enola clenched her eyes shut as if she were squeezing a long-lost sister and holding back a decade's worth of tears. All right, so she was prickly, but at that moment I knew that Miss Enola really did have a heart.

  I decided I might spend the night after all.

  * * * *

  Dinner was fabulous. But what made the meal truly interesting was the conversation afterwards. Fredericks wasn't there for that. She vanished as soon as she bused the table.

  “The SEC was ready to fall on Oliver Long like a nonunion coal mine,” Nicki said. “His disappearance has seriously crimped their plans.”

  “Nicki, I don't really understand any of the ins and outs,” I said.

  “Let me explain,” she said, and then she did.

  So I was treated to Networking Firms 101. I won't bore you with all the details. Suffice it to say I learned all about channel checkers and other minutiae, and what it boiled down to was that MTRG, the company Oliver Long worked for, specialized in setting up meetings between people with too much money and people with too much information, and charged a commission to do it. The idea was to educate the high rollers so they knew enough about the industries being traded and market conditions to make intelligent investments. It was all pretty complicated, but the bottom line was that Oliver Long and MTRG were suspected of using this as a front for insider trading by dealing in trade secrets under the counter. Sort of like a prostitution ring disguised as a dating service.

  “It might not be the whole company,” I said. “Long may be doing it on his own and the rest are just patsies.”

  “The management certainly claims they know nothing about it,” Nicki replied, “but they're the ones setting up the deals. They are not mere naifs.” (Honest, that's the word she used.) “They know the score. Investors want as much information as they can get, and it doesn't get any better than trade secrets. If MTRG can deliver trade secrets disguised as networking services, they can make a lot of money, and I mean a lot of money. There's a complex financial trail leading back to Long from his investors that doesn't stand up well under scrutiny, and it's hard to believe he's acting alone. Unfortunately, we can't ask him.”

  “Because he's done a runner to keep from going to jail.” I sighed. It looked like I wasn't out of the bail bonds biz after all. “All right, so it's a standard skip trace. I thought I was done chasing down felons, but I guess not. How big is the reward?”

  “We are not bounty hunters, Erica,” Miss Enola said, radiating disapproval. “We aren't looking for Oliver Long.”

  “We aren't?”

  “Well, in a sense we are,” said Nicki. “We're actually trying to find a member of Long's crew.”

  “Let me guess. We're trying to find the guy who squealed on him to the SEC.”

  “You misunderstand, Erica,” Miss Enola said. “In this case, the term crew does not refer to Mr. Long's criminal associates. It is meant quite literally and refers to the crew of MTRG's corporate oceangoing superyacht, which vanished at the same time as he.”

  “The man whom the FIAT has been engaged to find is named Ray Zielinski, steward aboard the motor yacht Chengfeng," Nicki said. “I'm told it's a Johnson 103, whatever that is, worth seven and a half million, which makes its disappearance of interest to quite a few people. The boat is technically homeported in Curacao in the Dutch Antilles, but MTRG's lease of the vessel includes a berth in Marina del Rey. We're not interested in it for its own sake. We only want to make sure that Mr. Zielinski is alive and well.

  “So you see, I am your client. My client is Ray Zielinski's wife, Melita. She hasn't seen him in five days and she's worried.” She pulled an eight-by-ten photo out of the briefcase and handed it to me. It was a standard department store studio portrait of a couple dressed in their Sunday best, a pretty Filipina woman and a big-boned blond man with a flattop, gray eyes, and wide, high cheekbones. As I memorized the face, Nicki said, “According to his wife, Mr. Zielinski hated Mr. Long, but he needed the job to support their family. He's the last person on earth to assist Long in escaping, yet both he and the yacht are gone.”

  Nicki looked me straight in the eye, her manner solemn. “I think Ray Zielinski, along with the rest of the yacht's crew, was kidnapped.”

  “So the first order of business is to make inquiries at MTRG,” Miss Enola said.

  * * * *

  I'll say this for the Tesla. Although it will never replace Rhonda in my heart, it's a lot of fun to drive. Cute too: an exotic low-slung red sports car that wouldn't look out of place being driven by an Italian movie star. After supper, I got behind the wheel with Fredericks in the passenger seat and drove to my apartment. There wasn't much there that I really needed, but enough that I loaded it up in my own car, which unlike the Tesla has enough space in it for stuff that takes more room to pack than French lingerie. I borrowed ten bucks from Fredericks to gas up Rhonda, and off we went. By the time we got back to the McKinley Building, it was late, so we both headed off to bed.

  Sometime around three in the morning, I awoke to the sound of hysterical sobbing. Worried, I slipped into my faux fur-lined moccasins and padded through the maze of screens, looking for its source. It faded away just before I found Miss Enola's room. Fredericks was there in flannel jammies sitting by Miss Enola's bed, her hair bound in a single thick braid like something out of a storybook, holding Miss Enola's left forearm folded at the elbow against her left shoulder. She held a thin empty syringe in her right hand. Miss Enola was breathing deeply, eyes closed.

  Fredericks looked up at me. “It's all right. I'm an RN—all part of the job. I've given her something to help her sleep.”

  “Oh.” I wasn't sure what to think. “What's wrong?”

  Fredericks made a tiny frown. “Not to be evasive, but even if the stipulation
s of my employment allowed me to disclose anything of a personal nature regarding Miss Enola, which they expressly prohibit—there's still the matter of patient privilege.”

  Should've seen that coming. No point in getting up in arms over it. “But she's going to be okay?”

  Fredericks gave the slightest nod of her head. “She'll seem fine by morning. She probably won't even remember. She's had a stressful day.”

  I watched Fredericks bend the needle against the nightstand and drop the hypodermic into a small plastic sharps container, which she deposited in a doctor's bag on the floor.

  “You should go back to bed, Erica. You've got a full day tomorrow. Miss Enola's hairdresser will be here by eight.”

  “What's that got to do with me?”

  “Oh, he'll definitely want to meet you before he sees Miss Enola.” Fredericks smiled thinly and looked down at her patient. “The gray is starting to show. A girl's got to look her best, doesn't she?”

  * * * *

  I ran into him the next morning as he got off the elevator.

  He was in his forties with a salt-and-pepper Caesar haircut, which I thought a little passé but what do I know, and had a face that belonged on the cover of a romance novel. He wore a muscle shirt under a black leather suit and cockroach-killer ostrich cowboy boots with silver tips on the toes.

  “You must be the new girl,” he said, his eyes darting all over my head. “I'm Wayne. May I?”

  He reached out and touched my hair.

  “Too much time at the beach, you naughty thing,” he said, “but by applying heroic measures, I think I can make you presentable. What's your name again?”

  “The New Girl,” I said. He looked a little confused, so I said, “Actually it's Erica.”

  Fredericks appeared by magic again and took him by the elbow. “Not too chic, Wayne. You know Miss Enola's preferences.”

  “Freds, my sweet, say no more—I am as patient as a Galapagos tortoise. And don't worry that magnificent brain of yours about my being too flamboyant with your new helot's pretty blonde head. Elegant restraint is my very métier. Too chic? Mais non! Just chic enough to make all those skinny weathergirls on TV sick with envy.”