Purely by Accident

by Jim Beegle

  He went into the bar and quickly settled on a couple of hot dogs, a bag of chips, and a beer drawn from the tap. Finding an empty table in the corner of the room he sat down and ate his lunch, washing it down with the beer while he continued to consider his next move. What should do about his discovery? He wanted to know more about how Cecil had taken the money and what he had done with it. It might not have any bearing on what he would do with it now, but it was simply part of how his mind, trained in the discipline of software engineering, dealt with any thought process. Before he could move forward he had to know what was in the past. It was that simple. He could no more change the way he approached this, or any other problem, than a rooster could stop crowing at sun up. It was just in his nature. He wondered where he could find out more about the money. The robbery? Was his friend really a robber? He could not bring himself to think in those terms so he simply chose to detach Cecil and the money from the act of how it had found its way to the banks scattered around the world. He still needed to know where it had gone and how it had ended up where it had. The idea of going somewhere and reading through the thousands of hits that would come from a general Google search did not appeal to him. Even though he knew he could get some of the information he wanted that way, there had to be a better way to do this.

  As he finished his lunch and walked back to the gate his mind began to consider the first step he had laid out for himself: where to find more information. He took a seat in the boarding area and in a detached manner watched the planes land and take off. About forty-five minutes after arriving at the gate his flight was announced and he boarded the plane. It took about fifteen minutes for all his fellow passengers to board, but once everyone was on and in a seat, the plane rolled to the taxiway for the first leg of his trip back to Dallas. Just as he had done when coming to Nassau, Mark admired the ocean and the things sticking out of it as they flew to Miami. It was relaxing and he enjoyed the brief interruption to his the problem now nagging at his active brain.

  When he arrived in Miami he had less than two hours to clear customs and connect to the Boeing 737 that would take him all the way to Dallas. When he got to the departure gate that he would have to pass through on his last leg to Dallas, the agent there was already announcing early boarding for the plane. He boarded with a group of others when his group was called for general boarding. Settling into his seat he began to feel the effects of the beer at lunch, the early morning walk on the beach, and the less than five hours of sleep he had gotten the night before. When the plane reached five hundred feet it turned to the northwest and began to fly over the Gulf of Mexico and toward Dallas. Mark leaned his seat back, turned off the overhead light, and decided to rest for as much of the flight back as he could. It did not take long for sleep to overtake him. Just as he was drifting through that stage of falling asleep where your body was already sleeping but your mind was still partly awake, the significance of the fact that Cecil had worked at the Southwest Bank of Houston came to him. With this new awareness also came the solution to his first problem: more information about the heist. He smiled and drifted off with this new discovery.

  The plane landed in Dallas a few minutes early. It did not matter much since it still took the plane fifteen minutes to cross two of the numerous active runways and find the empty slot at the designated terminal. Mark took his briefcase from under the seat and his luggage from the overhead bin and joined the rest of the people who had traveled with him from Miami as they spilled out of the plane and into the terminal building. He walked a few feet beyond the boarding area to a trashcan. He removed his receipt for his flight and the bill from the hotel and tore them into several pieces before he deposited them into a waste can on the concourse. No record, in this country anyway, now existed of his trip to Nassau. This final act of heeding Cecil’s warnings about security accomplished, he moved on with the crowds walking through the airport. Being very familiar with the DFW International Airport it did not take him long to thread his way through the passengers and vendors to his car. It was sitting and waiting for him in the short-term lot, right where he had left it. The drive to Highland Park was not much trouble because most of the Wednesday commuters were either already home or at their favorite watering hole. Mark slid his white Malibu into the garage and brought it to rest beside Amy’s dark blue Lexus. Amy hated driving in the DFW International airport complex. He knew she had either taken the shuttle to the airport or more than likely had one of the other people in her traveling entourage pick her up. He closed the garage door and went into the house.

  He did not stay up too much longer after he arrived home. He drank another beer from the bar in the living room and sorted through the mail that had been collecting at the base of the front door—deposited there in a pile where the postman had dropped it through the slot in the door. It was just the usual collection of bills, junk mail, and shopping circulars. For the most part, very little of it was addressed to him. Less than three hours after his arrival back home he was in bed. Ten minutes after that he was sound asleep.

  The next morning he got up to the relentless demand of the alarm clock he had set the night before. He wandered downstairs to make coffee deciding that he much preferred to have the new day announced to him by a crisp female British voice than the screaming of the alarm clock. Once the coffee was started, Mark went back to the bedroom he sometimes shared with Amy and into the adjoining bathroom to prepare for the new day. He showered and shaved. When he finished he threw on his robe and went downstairs to gather a cup of coffee from the freshly brewed pot before dressing.

  Twenty minutes later Mark joined the masses as they worked their way south on the Dallas toll way to the heart of downtown. He arrived in his office at seven thirty and went directly to the break room for more coffee. Since he was still officially away, he had allowed himself to wear jeans, a flannel shirt, and the sneakers he had worn on the beach in Nassau. Not that he really disliked suits and ties, but he much preferred jeans to just about any other clothing. He had already sorted through the stack Sandy had put on his chair when she arrived and stuck her head in the open office door.

  “How was Paris?” she asked him collecting things he had already dropped in his out basket from his review of the stuff she had left for him.

  “Just like Dallas, except more expensive and almost everyone I met talked funny.” He looked up from something he had been reading, Sandy was just shaking her head and smiling. “What’s on the front burner?” he asked.

  “There is a status meeting in Phoenix that you are supposed to be at on Monday.” Mark rolled his eyes.

  “You know what it’s about?” he asked her. She just shrugged her shoulders in reply. “DECCO wants to know why I am behind and why what code they have now doesn’t work.”

  “And the answer is?” she asked.

  “I am behind because I’m always going to meetings to tell them why I am behind. It doesn’t work because they haven’t corrected the code that doesn’t work that I told them didn’t work almost a year ago,” he said shaking his head. “These guys believe that you should pull up the flowers in the garden just to see how the roots are doing.” Sandy smiled sympathetically. “I know, I know …” he said raising his hand in the air as if she held a gun. “ Please find out when I need to be there and make me a flight reservation if you would please.”

  “No problem.” Sandy told him as she walked out the door that joined his office with hers. As she left, he could not help wondering if she had already made the reservations. He worked without further interruption for three hours. Every now and then he would hear Sandy answer the phone and inform the caller that “No, she was sorry but Mr. Vogel was not in the office this week.” He could not help but smile.

  At eleven thirty, he walked into Sandy’s office and told her he was going to lunch. He also told her he had a few errands to run while out. He would be back but he did not think it would be any time before three.

  He left, deep in thought. Not
over the software that he had been working with that morning but about the pieces of Cecil’s puzzle that had fallen into place for him on the flight back into Dallas the night before. What had fallen into place as sleep washed over his tired mind and body was the simple fact that five years ago, in one of its many buying binges, the Intercontinental Bank of Commerce had purchased Southwest Bank of Houston in a complicated stock and cash swap that made a few people rich. That was the first piece of the puzzle; remembering that had given Mark a small bit of relief. The fact that the name of the bank Cecil worked for was familiar to him when he read it had nagged at the back of his mind until the memory had kicked in last night. That memory also held, he hoped, the answer to his second problem: information about the robbery and the path the money and Cecil had taken from Houston. That part of the possible solution actually had a name: Ms. Marin Yates, formerly of Houston, and transferred to Dallas right after the merger. Marin worked in the International Division with Amy. It was to the floor that housed the International Division of IBC that Mark was heading for now.

  He was not a frequent visitor to IBC but had been there enough times that all he had to do to gain entrance to the building was wave at the guard at the front desk. The guard waved back as Mark headed for the elevator bank in the center of the two-story open atrium area that made up the main floor of the lobby. He rode in the car by himself and without any intermediate stops to the fifteenth floor. As with the lobby guard, the receptionist controlling the entrance to the International Division recognized Mark and smiled at him as he opened the glass door that led into the complex of offices on that floor. Marin did not work directly for Amy, but she worked a good deal with her. When he finally reached her office door she was deep in thought, hovering over several papers laying on her desk. Mark stopped in the doorway and leaned on the doorpost looking at her as she continued to read, unaware that she was being watched.

  Marin Yates was in her mid-forties. She was a little under five feet, eight inches tall and had medium dark red hair. She didn’t look forty, but younger. Most of that could be attributed to the pace she kept working for IBC as much as anything else. She had come to work for Southwest Bank of Houston when she was twenty years old and freshly minted out of the Harris County Community College system with a two-year degree in business. She had started as a clerk and continued to go to school to earn a bachelor’s degree in international business. She had been married twice in the time between joining Southwest and the merger five years ago with IBC. She had two children who were grown now and still living in Houston, although she did not get to see them as much as she would have liked.

  Marin had just gone through the second of her divorces when the merger with IBC took place. When she was asked to move to Dallas to work in the new consolidated International Business Division she jumped at the chance to get away from Houston and the memories it held.

  Mark cleared his throat and spoke. “Met any overworked ranch hands lately?” Marin jerked her head up to see who was speaking to her. When she recognized Mark and heard what he said, she blushed. The reference to ranch hands was something that still made her blush.

  Mark had met Marin on his ranch in Runaway Bay, of all places, about two years ago. A month or so after Mark had repaired the main house on the property to a point where it was habitable, Amy had come to him and asked a favor. She had just been promoted to her new job as Assistant Vice President for International Product Marketing and was about to close, she hoped, her first big deal with a group of Germans. Germans, Amy told Mark, were crazy about all things Western. One of the most popular television programs in Germany at that time was simply called Cowboys and Indians. They loved the clothes, the horses, and the lifestyle of the Old West. This, she told him, is where Mark came in.

  She wanted to throw a cookout for these particular Germans on their place in Runaway Bay. Her clients could dress up in their jeans and newly purchased boots and hats and enjoy the wide-open spaces. And while they dined on steak and all the trimmings, which Mark would agree to cook for them, Amy would make her pitch for a good portion of the portfolio they intended to invest in the United States. Mark didn’t mind helping and had agreed to the request quickly and without too much coaxing from Amy.

  Thus, on the following Saturday IBC hauled their German clients out to Runaway Bay for an afternoon of good food and, they hoped, a great deal of money. This was an expensive affair but well worth the cost. They made the trip not by stagecoach but in a fleet of air-conditioned Lincolns rented for the occasion. Eleven people made the three-hour trip that morning from Dallas; eight of the German clients, Amy, Amy’s boss, and Marin. Amy’s boss, Hamilton Hunte, also had roots that traced back to Southwest Bank in Houston. He had been promoted shortly after the merger. The new president, Alan Ketchem, was also a transplant from the former Southwest Bank of Houston. Hamilton, in turn, talked Marin into coming to work in Dallas when the new International Business Division had been formed.

  Mark’s job that day was to man the grill and make sure that the beef, intimated by Amy to have come from the non-existing herd right there on the ranch, was prepared to each individual’s preference. The truth about the origins of the meat was a little less romantic and a lot harder to trace. It had, in fact, come from the IGA in Runaway Bay, where Mark had ordered it, over the phone, a few days earlier. How they got from the hoof to that particular store was a mystery to Mark, but like most stories of the Old West the details about the beef could be adjusted to the need of the storyteller, in this case, Amy. It seemed to please Amy’s clients that the beef was of a very local variety. She had hired a couple of professional bartenders to look after liquid refreshments from a rented bar she had set up in the main room of the house. Not long after they arrived, mesquite smoke drifted around the outside of the house while expensive brands of Famous Grouse scotch and Gibson whiskey flowed inside. Mark had even gone so far as to dress his part, wearing jeans, a red-and-white checked shirt, a cowboy hat, and boots. It actually wasn’t so much of a concession to Amy as she might have thought. It was pretty much the way he dressed whenever he was out there. The only concession this time was an effort to make sure this outfit was at least clean and the boots had a recent application of polish.

  He worked at the large grill for several hours until everyone had been fed, including the bartenders. When he was sure everyone had eaten their fill he cooked a steak for himself. He then loaded it up on a plate and headed into the main house. Marin was standing in front of the assembled group of well-fed and slightly drunk Germans pointing to items being projected onto one of the blank walls in the main room. When Amy saw him entering the house she gave him a sharp look that left no doubt in Mark’s mind that he was not welcome now that the sales pitch was in full swing. He stopped in his tracks, looked crossly at Amy, but retreated to the barn where he ate, washing his steak down with a beer pilfered from the bar as he left the house. Once he finished eating by himself he decided that he would morph from cook to ranch hand and see if he could coax the water pump that brought water from the well to the horse’s trough into working with more regularity then it had recently.

  He was inside the corral with the dismantled pump when he noticed a pair of boots come into his line of sight on the outside of the rail fence that made up the corral. He figured it was one of the Germans inspecting the lay of the land and did not look up from his work. It wasn’t until he heard her voice that he stopped what he was doing and took in the newly arrived visitor.

  “Is this a working ranch?” Marin asked leaning on the fence.

  “No ma’am,” he told her looking back down at the pump, “most days nothing works around here except me, which is why I am always up to my eyeballs in problems.” He stood up and looked at Marin on her own level.

  “Do you live here all the time?” she asked him. He did not say anything to her as he wiped his hands on a rag he had taken from his pocket; he just shook his head. “What does a part-time ranch hand do the rest of th
e time he isn’t fixing things and cooking?”

  It began to dawn on Mark that this woman had no idea who he was. Just like the beef and the scenery, she thought he just came with the package. He smiled to himself and decided to play along for as long as he could.

  “Oh”, he said drawing out the word, “this and that I suppose. What do you do when you aren’t running around in the country in shiny new Lincolns?” he asked her pointing to the cars parked near the barn.

  “I work at a bank in Dallas.” She stuck out her hand toward Mark. “My name is Marin. Marin Yates. I work with Mrs. Vogel, the woman that owns this place.” Mark took her hand, smiling, and shook it.

  “Pleased to meet you, Ms. Yates.” He tried his best to lay on as thick a West Texas accent he could. “My name is Mark, and I sleep with the woman that owns this here place.” First shock, then bewilderment crossed Marin’s face. Mark decided to help her out. “But, it’s legal.” he said now laughing. “I married her, to make her an honest woman.” Now shock moved across her face as she realized that the man shaking her hand was Mark Vogel, Amy’s husband. Her face turned deep crimson and she took a step back.

  “Oh, God I’m sorry I had no idea … I thought you were … oh God.” was all she could say.

  “I hope when you work with my wife you speak in complete sentences or it would be real hard to carry on a conversation with you for very long.” he said now laughing harder.

  “I am really sorry,” she said gaining some measure of composure. “I didn’t mean to insult you.”