The Devil's Analyst

by Dennis Frahmann

  Danny didn’t have the slightest idea what the woman was talking about. Despite constantly restating his desire to become more involved, he never dove into any of the firm’s strategies. He vaguely recalled some presentation from Orleans about projects with weird code names like Dakota and Rough Rider. He had no idea what any of those names represented.

  “On the other hand, some of the other developments underway seem quite off-mission, and I don’t understand why your company funds them. For example, take this project to speed up the mass transmission of big sets of data. Great concept with a well thought out approach, and if successful, highly valuable. Easily patentable. But really . . . it’s the foundation for a totally different company. Frankly, if I do become one of your directors, I will likely encourage Josh to cancel the project. Perhaps he wouldn’t want me on the board after all.

  “Oh, how I have rambled on, and it does appear little of this is of interest to you.” Linsky set her coffee cup down, but it seemed she had found out what she sought. Danny wondered what it might be.

  Danny took advantage of her motion to stand up. “Thank you for coming, and I’ll be sure to tell Josh how interested you are in the company’s projects.”

  That was likely to be another of Danny’s failed promises, because he doubted he would recall the conversation well enough to report it.

  Linsky stood as well. “Do tell Josh one thing for me. Let him know that after reading his brief, I totally agree that in this unsettled financial climate, a sensible next step could be to sell or merge this company. It could be so much more stable than going public. I like people who think in a contrarian way.”

  Danny quickly looked away. He couldn’t let her see how startled he was.

  He walked with her through the office, to the front door of the suite, and stayed by her side until the elevator arrived. He watched as the doors closed, not because he was being polite, but because he needed the time to process her bombshell. Josh never once mentioned selling the company.

  Cynthia lounged in the hot desert sun, idly watching a hummingbird as it darted about the large century plant in her father’s garden. Typical of the homes in this Scottsdale subdivision, the backyard was a mixture of desert plants and lacy-leafed mesquite trees, which filtered the sunlight but never completely provided shade. On a March morning, the air felt a bit nippy, but pleasant. Her parents bought this sprawling adobe-style home as their winter getaway. What she would never comprehend is why her father decided to live in the desert year-round, since it seemed almost torturous that someone like Red Trueheart, lover of ice fishing and raised in the cool winds of northern Wisconsin, would subject himself to the stifling dry heat of an Arizonan summer.

  Her mother no longer put up with it. Even in the temperate spring, she found excuses to spend time in their small condo on Chicago’s lakeshore. While she claimed her decorating business demanded it, Cynthia and her father both knew there were no real clients for her mother. For Barbara Trueheart, being an interior decorator was at best a money-eating hobby and at worst a self-delusion.

  But Cynthia engaged in her own evasions. Reclining in a lounge chair, gazing over the Sonoran desert just beyond the house’s back wall, and staring at the mountains to the north was Cynthia’s route to avoiding reality. Retreating to her parents’ home as a spoiled child let her escape the demands of the real world.

  These days she was always fleeing. She raced from Los Angeles, Danny, and Josh because they were too painful a reminder of Chip’s murder. For a few days after Chip’s funeral and memorial service, she forced herself to appear steady in Lattigo. She felt she owed that to the tribe, and to his sister Jackie who had flown home from Paris. The service had been heartfelt but far too long. The community’s grief was real and too palpable for her to bear, so she moved on. She told no one about her pregnancy, not even Jackie. Whatever they might say in response would just seem wrong. And she didn’t know where she could go next.

  She bore Wisconsin as long as she could but the days were too cold and the nights too long. Each moment was too silent and too filled with memories. The house, the town, the business, and every tree and snow bank only reflected her grief. So she sought escape in Arizona with her father.

  Certainly she was a miserable companion but her father loved her too much to say so. He was an active guy. He wanted to be on the golf courses, hitting balls with his pals, or taking trips into the mountains to go fishing or hunting or whatever he did to keep his retired days active. But since he loved her, he stayed at home and puttered while she sat in the sun and tried to read or at least to avoid thinking.

  In the darkened interior she could hear the phone ringing. Her father appeared at the sliding glass doors, opened them, and handed her the cordless phone. “It’s your detective,” he said before heading back into the cool of the living room.

  She should have stopped Denkey’s investigation. No one, including the police, expected to make any progress in Chip’s case. Allowing Denkey and his team to continue the pursuit was simply throwing money to the wind.

  “Hello, Samuel,” she said.

  “You didn’t call yesterday as planned,” Denkey remonstrated. He was a stickler for detail, but there was no reason to talk when the man never reported anything new.

  “Something has turned up,” he said. “It probably means nothing, but I wanted you to know. You need to decide if we should take it further.”

  She felt a flutter of hope, and tried to pull the emotion back. Two months ago, she held her final conversation with Chip, and a month ago the police appeared in Los Feliz to report his body’s discovery. Among all those days, weeks, and months, her hopes and fears cascaded atop one another in waves of emotions. Now at last she found a quiet place, as though she were on a gentle stream slowly flowing down a deep valley. She just wanted to lay back, let her face turn toward the distant sky, and float between the featureless walls that defined her despair. What she didn’t want to do was drop her feet into the muck of the stream below. She wasn’t about to fight for the strength to stand upright, and there was no way to fathom the energy required to scale those walls. Yet, maybe . . .

  Denkey, knowing none of this, continued to talk. “One of the new people on the team, Patricia, came up with this. When we didn’t find many calls on Chip’s cell phone records during his last two days, she wondered if he suspected his phone was bugged. She postulated that he might have picked up a cheap cell phone. There seemed no way to track that avenue, especially if he bought it with cash. But Patricia’s a detail person and she wanted to canvass the cellular phone places near the Bonaventure Hotel. She hoped to hit on someone who remembered him.”

  “Did she find someone?” Cynthia asked, knowing the answer had to be yes, otherwise why was he calling?

  “Not really,” Denkey replied, “but when she was in the Bonaventure, she checked out every level in that massive lobby and noticed a bank of pay phones by the elevators closest to Chip’s room. She checked to see if they were still working. Most places these days have had the pay phones torn out or they’ve fallen out of service. Everyone’s using their cell phones, especially in an expensive business hotel like the Bonaventure.

  “That’s when she noticed some graffiti by one of the phones . . . she recognized it as the logo for American Seasons, and she thought, ‘What if Chip used a pay phone to reach people? What if he was here doodling as he talked?’

  “To make a long story short, we secured the records for the calls made and received by that phone for the days just before Chip’s disappearance. Pay phones don’t get used a lot, so it wasn’t hard to identify if any of the calls might have been Chip’s.”

  Cynthia felt as though her feet were beginning to drop down into the mud, and even though she wanted to remain floating aimlessly, she knew she couldn’t.

  “And were they?” she asked.

  “We think so, at least two of them. One was to Arnold Twin Feathers. He heads the Tringush tribe here in Southern California. They’re the
biggest Native American casino operators on the West Coast—certainly someone that Chip would know, given that both the Lattigo and the Tringush are leaders in Indian gaming.”

  “And the other?” she asked.

  “He called your father.”

  The float was over and Cynthia was standing upright, already scanning the walls for an escape path. She needed to scramble out and understand this.

  Denkey was quiet for a moment as he waited for a reaction. Finally he asked, “We haven’t followed up with either person. Do you want us to?”

  “No,” she replied. “I’ll talk to Daddy myself.”

  Red Trueheart looked at his daughter with dismay. “Cynthia,” he started, “I wasn’t trying to keep anything from you. Chip and I talked all the time. If he had said anything out of the ordinary that day, I would have told you. But it was just our usual talk.”

  “Daddy, you probably were one of the last people who spoke to Chip. When exactly was this call and what did he say?”

  “It was nothing, baby. The kind of call he and I had all the time. I didn’t bring it up because frankly it never occurred to me that it was important. Besides once he was gone, I didn’t want to remind you of what you lost.”

  “Daddy, can’t you see that I would need to know?”

  Red went to the sofa and motioned his daughter to sit next to him. “Listen, I loved your husband. I know I was a prejudiced fool back when you two first started dating. I thought he was too old for you, and I didn’t want my little girl having anything to do with Indians.

  “Well, I was wrong . . . on every account. That whole mess with the start of American Seasons. Everyone knows that Chip saved the day. He did, you know, and I figured out how he did it for all the right reasons. Just like I realized he truly loved you.”

  Cynthia was still. Even in death her husband amazed her. She never realized there had been any bond between her dad and her husband. For the first time, she wondered guiltily how her father was dealing with Chip’s murder. Maybe he hurt as much as she did. She reached out to take his hand. “Daddy, I never knew you two even talked. But was there a reason that he called that morning?”

  “I don’t think so. It was early, but I always get up at five, so I didn’t find it odd that he would call before breakfast. He knew I’d be up and about. But Arizona’s an hour ahead of L.A., so I guess it was even earlier for him. I remember he mentioned he was going to a breakfast meeting, but he didn’t say anything more about that. We just chatted about the usual stuff, like how my golf game was going and whether I’d visit the two of you in January. He promised that we could go ice fishing on Big Sapphire Lake. That was about it.

  “I miss him, Cynthia, I really do, and I know that he didn’t do any of those things that some people say he did. He was a good man.”

  Cynthia felt tears forming at the corner of her eye. It was the first time she and her father were talking about Chip. “I have to tell you something, Daddy,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”

  “I know that, baby. I recognize the signs from when your Mum had you. It makes me happy. You won’t be alone.”

  They sat there for a few moments without talking, and the silence strengthened Cynthia. Finally, she said, “I don’t know what to do next.”

  “Baby, you’re not one to do things alone. You always needed friends around you. I think you’ve got to rejoin the world, and it should start with Danny. You would have married him back in high school if he had been interested. You were goofy in love, teenage-style.”

  She smiled, with tears drying. “I do miss him,” she admitted.

  “Then you should call him.”

  As Cynthia stood, her dad stifled a small groan. “What?” asked Cynthia.

  “Nothing really, just that I remembered how Chip did say something odd right at the end of the call. We were talking about ice fishing, like I said, and about fishing in general back in Thread and Lattigo. Somehow that weird hat Pete Peterson always wore came up and Chip asked me if I was really certain that Pete was dead.”

  Danny weighed ten pounds less than he did at the end of the last century—and that was less than three months ago. Maybe if his New Year’s resolution had been to slim down instead of understanding the business better, he would weigh just as much but actually comprehend Premios better. But he knew resolutions didn’t work that way, although in a way, it was the business that drove his weight loss. Trying to cope with the company that linked Josh to him and led to this new obsession with trekking the hundreds of stairs that linked their backyard to Los Feliz Boulevard.

  He first walked the flights of stairs the day after the break-in and the police’s report of the discovery of Chip’s body. Feeling hopeless and unneeded, he hungered to do something that felt relevant. Checking out the stair street provided that purpose. He reasoned that if someone broke into their basement, then they probably left by the series of steps. Perhaps if he carefully walked the stairs in both directions, he might find a clue.

  Unless a used condom or an abandoned cigarette lighter was the key to unlocking all the turmoil, Danny’s search that day was in vain. But he did learn something. Descending and then climbing up several hundred steps proved to be both exhausting and freeing. On the way down, while trying to be observant and looking for potential clues, his mind kept wandering. As he contemplated lives glimpsed in the houses bordering the stairs, he was tempted to knock on their doors to see if any of them had suffered burglaries. But his issues began to dissolve into the background.

  On the route back up, something else took over. The hundreds of steps became his massive Stairmaster, and he simply became focused on placing one foot higher than the last, until he discovered he was in a Zen-like state. He exited the last flight of stairs feeling calm and able to go on.

  As a result, walking the route became his daily routine; sometimes he even did it twice, jogging up and down once, and then walking the second time more slowly. After a month of this behavior, Danny was in far better shape than before, and he found it easier to fall into a state of reflection.

  Once, maybe, talking to Josh would have provided that easy calm, but now Josh was one of the things he had to consider. So much was going on in his life, and he couldn’t fit all the pieces together. Someone launched a cyber attack on Premios, and yet Josh was never worried by it. Someone, maybe the same person, electronically lifted a million dollars from Chip’s firm and made it look as though Chip did it. When Chip tried to investigate, he was murdered. And someone broke into the house, violating all sense of personal safety. All these things couldn’t be a random coincidence. Surely, they must be connected. But what could be the link? And why did none of it upset Josh?

  When he tried to discuss it with Josh, Josh declared the items unrelated. Josh suggested the break-in was nothing more than neighborhood hooligans or maybe tramps from the park looking for something to hock for their next fix. Josh also doubted that Chip’s murder was in any way connected to the computer virus that hit Premios. Danny couldn’t believe Josh’s worldview . . . because one simple story from Kenosha capsized his long-held trust in Josh.

  Perhaps if they could really talk about Danny’s concerns, things would be different. The problem was that Josh was obsessed with business. Danny understood that the markets were wobbly and realized that could imperil the launch plans. But he couldn’t understand . . . or Josh wouldn’t tell him . . . why the public offering itself was so important. The two of them were rich from the sale of their first company, to say nothing of Josh’s many investments in real estate as well as the New Loon Town Café. They could survive any downturn. The idea for Premios was sound, and as a couple, they should be willing to take a risk. Instead, Josh viewed the whole thing as a giant gamble in Vegas that he was determined to win. But Danny knew they weren’t playing roulette or craps.

  Unless Josh wasn’t telling him everything. It was amazing how much Kenosha’s story about Josh and the kid in accounting shook Danny’s belief in the man he loved. Climbing the c
oncrete steps every day only pounded deeper cracks into his faith in Josh.

  Danny knew he owed the guy the benefit of the doubt. How could Danny even be sure that Kenosha’s tale was true? He never questioned Josh, nor did he ask anyone in the office. But he knew it wouldn’t make a difference. Sometimes, things just rang true.

  Deep water often sloshed about behind the dikes Danny built to protect his life, and he always avoided peering over the edge. He wanted Josh to be a certain kind of person, but the slow trickle of doubt had started. Danny’s solitary hikes gave him too many opportunities to rethink fifteen years of life. What once seemed Josh’s exuberance now seemed a cutting remark. When once he welcomed Josh’s willingness to shield him from difficult times, Danny now questioned what he wasn’t being told.

  Danny had also acquired a second newfound obsession—the literary works of Jesus Lopez. Danny drove to the big bookstore near the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood and scoured the stacks to find everything by Lopez. When that yielded insufficient results, he went online to order the rest from Amazon.com. He found a few out-of-print titles in used bookstores. While Lopez never was a best seller, he was prolific. An entire shelf in Danny’s library was now dedicated to Lopez.

  In some way Danny realized The Dumping Ground was the most uplifting and hopeful of Lopez’s books. At least it didn’t deal with dismemberment or murder, just the raping of the soul. Because of that, Danny couldn’t understand what prompted Lopez to write it.

  As he climbed from one landing of the stair street to the next, Danny tried to recall the details of his first meetings with Lopez. In the past he always got caught on the ways Lopez reminded him of Oliver. But today, he turned it around and wondered what Lopez thought of him. From this different lens, Danny realized that Lopez had been unusually interested in him as a student. In retrospect it seemed suspicious. Danny’s writing was never strong enough to justify such an immediate and intense interest.