Black Bird

by Greg Enslen

  Someday, it was all going to blow up in somebody’s face. Abe just hoped he’d be there to see it.

  David spoke up, interrupting Abe’s thoughts. “Doesn’t she have money?”

  Abe smiled and leaned forward, planting his elbows on the desk blotter. “She has more than twenty or twenty-five thousand put away, just in T-Bills and other investments. Listen, David, your Aunt is perfectly fine. The only reason I suggested that she move was that she is in that big house all by herself, and I only suggested that she move into a smaller place. I explained to her that she would save a lot of money. Even though the house is paid for, she still spends a lot of money to heat it and cool it, and there are probably rooms that she hasn’t even been in in a long time. And when she forgets to send in the electric payments, the power company gets a little upset.”

  He was talking about the little three-bedroom row house like it was mansion with several wings, but even that didn’t seem to get any reaction from David. He just sat there, nodding along, driving Abe crazy. What was going on inside that head of his? Abe continued, trying from another direction. “All of the money from your father’s will is safe and sound, don’t worry.”

  David cringed visibly at the mention of his father, an almost scary expression that made Abe even further curious. Was the Beaumont boy truly haunted by the memories of his dead father, like people said? It was popular speculation around town that David would probably be leaving town as soon as he could after he received the first payment of his father's will. That money was sitting in an envelope in Abe’s desk, and today was the boy’s 18th birthday. The boy must be itching to ask for the money, but Abe wanted to get this business about his Aunt out of the way first. And he wanted to see how long the kid would go before he asked.

  Most people said that he was just running away rather than face his father’s legend and try to make peace with it. Everyone who lived in Liberty had heard The Story a dozen times. Maybe a hundred times. Abe had even heard that David had just dumped his girlfriend, a cute little brunette he’d seen around, in anticipation of his leaving. Cutting all the strings to this town, preparing to leave. Abe could see it in his eyes; the boy was concerned about making sure his Aunt was taken care of so that he could leave without any guilt. But would the kid really leave? Somehow, Abe just didn’t think the kid had it in him.

  He decided not to bring up David‘s father again, but only because he had the information he wanted. It wasn’t because he didn’t want to hurt David again. Actually, he would’ve enjoyed that.

  Abe continued. “And with Clinton in the White House, interest rates will continue to climb and she’ll be getting more of a return on her money. As will you, since most of the money in your account is also in T-Bills, with some real estate thrown in, just to be sure.”

  David knew all about that, but he didn’t want to talk about that. The fact that David’s account contained a small portion of the property that the new mall was built on had guaranteed that the cash payments he would be getting on each birthday for the next ten years would be handsome amounts. Abe had been smart and seen the opportunity coming and bought small lots of property for both David and his Aunt, and when the property was sold to the mall developers, Abe and those who had invested through him had both made a tidy profit.

  David didn’t say anything, but Abe could tell he was itching to finish the discussion and get his money. Why else would he get up early and come in here to Abe’s office? He wanted to get his hands on his money, the same as Abe would want to if the roles were reversed. Abe was pretty sure the kid would just go out and blow it - Abe didn’t think the kid had the guts to do anything decisive, especially something as drastic as moving away. The kid just didn’t have the guts to actually do anything.

  Abe continued. “I went to see your Aunt to talk to her because I wanted to suggest that she consider selling the house. You don’t live there any more, haven’t lived there for several years now, and I don’t think it’s doing her any good to be rattling around in that house all by herself. She spends too much money heating and air conditioning that place, and I think she would be better someplace smaller. Don’t you?”

  The boy thought about it for a moment as Abe watched him. After a few seconds, he nodded. “Yes, Mr. Foreman, you may be right. I don’t like her living there all by herself, either.”

  Abe smiled. “Oh, I know you don’t want her there. And there are all kinds of little houses, or apartments, where she could live and maybe even meet some new people, get out more often. I know that she would enjoy things a lot more.”

  David nodded again, obviously liking the idea of her getting out. Maybe the kid was thinking it would get her off the sauce. “Yeah. Maybe that would be good for her.”

  Abe plunged ahead, inwardly delighted at how easy the kid was to manipulate. Maybe someone would talk him out of his money, too. “The sale of the Mall property was the best thing that ever happened to your Aunt’s financial position. She could, combined with the proceeds from the sale of the house, easily buy one of those nice town homes that they are building out west of town.” He paused for effect, thinking about the handsome percentage of the transaction fees and finder’s fees he would earn from this little move, and then continued. “So, are you going to talk to your Aunt about this? I certainly think she would more likely sell the house if you told her that you supported the idea. And if you do manage to convince her, just call me and I’ll have everything taken care of. You won’t need to worry; I’ll help her pick out a new place and everything.”

  It was Abe’s turn to look a little sheepish. “I just need your help on this one part, okay?” It was good to make David feel like he was helping out. Of course, he didn’t need to know about the legal transfers fees surrounding the sale of the house and the purchase of a new one. Nobody really needed to know that - that was between Abe and the Realtor, a good friend of his who would be more than willing to thank him monetarily for setting the deal up. Oh, and between Abe and the guy down at the Mercedes dealership - a new car would be a good way for Abe to spend his earnings on this little deal.

  David seemed to think about it for a little while longer, and then nodded yet again, seemingly making up his mind. The kid took forever to think about things! “Okay, I’ll talk to her about it.”

  Abe stood up and smiled. Another victory for him, and for psychology in general. Abe could go ahead and start looking at new cars - he already had the money from David‘s Aunt spent in his head. “That would be great, David.”

  The boy looked at him for a long moment, and then he stood too, his hands playing with his baseball cap, and it reminded Abe of a little kid getting ready to ask his parents for a favor, or maybe an advance on his allowance. “Do you have the first payment here, or should I go to my bank?”

  Amusing, Abe thought.

  “I have the first check here, David. I bet you’ve been looking forward to this for a long time, haven’t you?”

  The boy nodded, like a kid in a candy store. You could almost see the thoughts flying through his mind, almost unable to wait for Abe to hand it to him.

  Abe took the check out of his desk and slowly pulled it from the envelope. It was made out to David and he knew it because he’d checked it earlier, but now he spent a long moment checking it over again, prolonging the boy’s anticipation. The check was right here, and the kid could see it, but he couldn’t have it until Abe was finished.

  Finally, he nodded very gravely and turned and handed the check to the boy, who took it gingerly. “Now, don’t sign that until you get to the bank and are ready to deposit it. And don’t spend all of it in the same place. That’s a lot of money, and you need to be careful with it. Your father would’ve wanted it that way.” Abe waited, but the reference to his father got no reaction from the kid - he was far too absorbed in reading the check and the numbers on it, followed by all those zeros.

  The kid looked up at Abe, and it almost looked like he was going to cry. Abe almost laughed out loud - this
kid was so weak, so uncontrolled! He was an emotional wreck, and having this money would probably push him over the edge. The kid was never going to leave, or go anywhere, and this first check would be spent before the bank had even cleared it. A new car, or a computer, or something else, and the money would be gone. Abe was sure of it, looking into the kid’s crystal green eyes. There was no man in there.

  “Thank you, Mr. Foreman. I think I’ll take it to the bank right now, but I promise to speak to my Aunt about what we talked about.” The boy spoke to Abe but his eyes never left the check.

  Abe nodded even though the kid wasn’t looking. He was sure that all of his suppositions about the kid were right, and now he was sure what his next move would be. The Aunt’s money was safe and sound in her T-bill account, but this kid’s money was still under Abe’s discretion. A little creative bookkeeping and Abe could play the market with most of the kids’ money, because the money would be paid out annually and Abe still controlled the account. The kid would never check on the status of the principal - he would be far too concerned with spending his annual payment. And there was over two hundred grand in the account. Yeah, maybe he could play the market, or take a little trip, or buy his girlfriend a little something. Or maybe take a little trip with his girlfriend. Or a big trip, for that matter. The paperwork for the account had been long stashed away, and there was no way the kid could know that he was entitled to a lump sum payment of the entire account just by asking. It was a provision of the account, of course, but Abe wouldn’t tell him. And if the kid asked, Abe would strongly disagree, saying that he had much more experience in managing large sums of money than the kid and therefore was much more qualified to manage his account. Of course the kid could get an advance or something like that, but Abe would be dead before he let the kid take a lump sum. This kid was dumber than even Abe had thought, and now Abe knew that he could run riot over this kids’ account and no one, especially the kid, would be the wiser.

  He showed the kid out, already trying to decide what to do first. The commission Abe would make from the transfer of the Aunt’s house was chump change compared to the amounts of cash he could skim off the kid’s account. Probably the first step would be to set up a dummy corporation in the kids’ name, then move some of the account over to it “for tax purposes”, and then Abe could get to work on it.

  Just the thought of it made Abe smile.

  Her bag lunch was simple and straightforward, taken in the cafeteria one floor up from her ‘office’. The floor above hers, floor six, bustled with people and excitement, and Julie felt a pang of resentment for all of these busy people seated around her in the cafeteria, all chatting with friends and coworkers or busily working on important projects during their lunch breaks. She felt like a school kid on a field trip to a busy, bustling office building, and all she had brought with her was a sack lunch and her paperback book.

  She finished up her sandwich and wrapped up the remains of her banana and drink box in the brown paper of her lunch sack, collected her purse and book, and started out of the cafeteria. She thought she could feel the eyes of others on her, but she was probably just imagining it, nervous. It was her first day, and she didn’t know anybody.

  Just like back in school.

  Her family had moved around a lot when she was younger. Her father had been a career Navy man, always out to sea on one of his “Big Boats”, as her mother had used to call them, and every time she would talk about the boats with a strange, jealous look on her face. As a young girl, Julie had always wondered: how could anybody be jealous of a boat? The only times her Dad seemed to be around for an extended amount of time was when they had had to move from one location to another, and her father would appear seemingly by magic and help them unpack, get them settled into a new house and at new schools, and then he would be off again for six months or a year. In a sense, she hadn’t really had a father, only a mysterious and gentle man who, on occasion, came to Julie’s house and helped them move.

  But she had gotten used to it, and she was used to the new-school mentality. She had grown up, constantly being exposed to new things and new people, and she felt that somewhere inside, it had made her a better person.

  Or maybe she was just kidding herself.

  She left the huge cafeteria and started down the hall, looking for the particular stairwell that would take her back down to ‘her’ floor, about which she was already starting to feel very possessive. All of this commotion, all of these people, maybe it wasn’t THAT great. At least on her floor, she could concentrate, if only she had something to concentrate on.

  She found the right stairwell and was about to blindly push the door open when it popped open as if on its own accord. She jumped back to avoid being hit, bumping against another person walking down the hall, their head buried in a report. Julie stood back against the wall, one hand over her chest. The other person that she had bumped into mumbled something and moved on down the hallway, already buried again in their papers.

  A nicely dressed man emerged from the stairwell, looking apologetic. “Oh, I’m sorry, Miss Noble. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  She smiled. “That’s okay, I just wasn’t looking where I was going.” She looked at his quizzically for a moment. “Do I know you?”

  He extended his hand. “No, but I was just down at your office, looking for you. I am Mike Wallace, Deputy Director of Personnel. We need to discuss your future here.”

  Mike Wallace‘s office, though not nearly as large as Darren Paynod’s, was equally as impressive to the casual observer. Wallace had an amateurs’ interest in interior decorating, and in Julie’s opinion, he seemed to have a distinct flair for it.

  Everything in the office had been done in a very angular, very modern style, even down to the hexagonal rug on the floor, knitted with an odd, abstract design. Nothing in the room seemed cold or inhuman, just modern. Sleek.

  Wallace sat behind his desk, looking at her file. His desk was made completely of large sheets of smoky gray glass, and he had had it built especially for him. Of course Wallace had paid for the desk himself; the bean counters in accounting down on the third floor would never have gone for something so odd, so drastic, on the normal office redecoration budget.

  She had been sitting in his office for over five minutes and, except for his initial offer of a chair, he had yet to say anything.

  Julie shifted in her seat and straightened her skirt absently. She looked at the neo-abstract lithographs on the walls, and realized that all of them in the room were related; variations on the same theme, and many of them used the same colors in subtly different ways. She spent a long time looking out of the line of windows at a group of trees outside, swaying easily over Connecticut Avenue in the early fall breeze. The leaves were just starting to change, and the colors looked strangely muted through the thick and smoky glass of the window. She looked at her nails and noticed that one of them was in danger of chipping soon, and decided that next time she got them done she would have a French Cut, which meant the nails would be filed flat on top and painted white, but only on the ends. She mentally calculated her checking account balance as close as she could, and wondered abstractly if the check she had just sent off to GMAC for her car payment had cleared yet.

  “Am I making you nervous?” Wallace asked her, the ghost of a grin on his face. He didn’t look up.

  She sat up a little straighter, but only a little. “No, sir.”

  Wallace looked up at her and for the first time noticed just how intense her gaze was. It seemed as if she had been able to read his mind, knowing that he had just been making her wait to see if he could get a reaction out of her. His mind tallied up one point for her.

  Oh, and she was very pretty, too. Now he knew what Paynod had been talking about. But how had he known?

  “Well.” He looked back down at her file. “It says here that you are very good with computers.”

  The question hung in the cool air of the modern, spacious office for severa
l long seconds as Julie tried to decide whether it was rhetorical or not. She finally decided it wasn’t.

  “Yes, I am pretty good with them.”

  Wallace sat back in his chair, an odd angular chair that looked as it had been stolen from the set of some science fiction movie, and regarded her for a moment. “Miss Noble, you’ll have to do better than that. If I didn’t know any better, I would think that you’re not at all confident about your abilities. Now, let’s try again, shall we?” He placed an elbow on each side of her open file and asked again.

  This time she came back without a moments’ hesitation, and Wallace could see that look again, an expression that looked like a simmering, smoldering fire was burning somewhere behind her blazing greenish-blue eyes. “Yes, I’m very good with computers. At the Academy, I helped to set up a Local Area Network, or LAN, that services all of the central computer terminals on the campus, and the LAN connects all of the personal computers in the individual dorm rooms. We, that is, Dr. Morrison from Computer Sciences and I, set up a mid-line electronic mail system that linked all of the campus PC’s together by 24,000 BPS modems, allowing anyone with access to a computer to instantly send and receive information to any other linked terminal on the Academy campus. This required the addition of several miles of new telephone wire. The system was so successful that the Academy officials approached Dr. Morrison and I with a second project.”

  She took a breath and continued. “We then started converting all of the historic case files and case records and storing them in a large multi-access CD ROM system with 10 millisecond respond time, all controlled by two Compaq 4876 mainframe servers that regulated access to the information and handled and maintained the security of the files. This system allows end-users to download three pages of text per second using a 12,000 BPS modem, or eight pages of text per second using a 24,000 BPS modem. We set up and completed the CD-RW system, and then hooked it into the LAN network to allow campus-wide access. Next, we constructed a message center, and using a commercially purchased Gateway, we connected...”