A Legitimate Businessman

by Dale Nelson

  His phone buzzed, and the number that flashed across the car’s infotainment screen was not one he recognized. Jack rolled up the windows and closed the sunroof. “Hello, this is Frank Fischer,” he said.

  “Good evening, Mr. Fischer. My name is Special Agent Katrina Danzig with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and I’d like to ask you a few questions. Is now a good time?”

  Nineteen

  Jack Burdette needed a drink.

  And so did Frank Fischer.

  Burdette rolled slowly to his home on Dry Creek Lane because every inexorable foot brought him closer to realities that he did not want to face and questions for which he had no answers.

  Jack could no longer see the game Reginald was playing because it appeared as though the woman he just spoke to on the phone was very much a federal agent. It was hard to envision Reginald LeGrande informing to the FBI, but Jack just couldn’t see that it could be anything else. If Reginald was indeed running a game, Jack was wholly unable to see it for what it was.

  Jack sat in the Audi’s dark cockpit for a long time, pressed back into the seat because of the angle of his driveway. It made him feel like he was strapped to a rocket on a launch pad he couldn’t control, headed for a destination that he didn‘t know.

  The air was cool and light when he exited the car, but it brought him no comfort and did nothing to calm his racing blood. Jack slowly trudged into his house, lifelessly showered and then changed into a pair of loose-fitting jeans and a light blue Kingfisher t-shirt.

  He walked into the kitchen and pulled a Robert Biale Pagani Ranch Zinfandel from his in-counter storage unit, grabbed two glasses, and walked barefoot out to his deck. Jack poured himself a glass and leaned against the railing, watching the sunset over the Sonoma Valley. The sky was a darkening orange, and already the valley below the mountains was fading to a dusky blue. Evening light bathed the mountains on the far side of the valley in a crown of fire. Below him, the trees and the vines on the slope that his wooden deck lorded over stood silent in the cool, burgeoning night. How many more times would he get to enjoy this view?

  If this was a con, Danzig gave a command performance. Jack pushed back where he could to test her, and she parried well each time. She even told him that she wanted him to come down to the Federal Building in San Francisco tomorrow to answer some questions, strictly voluntary, of course. That was an incredible gamble for a con artist, because the entire thing folded if Jack called them on the bluff. He thought through the scenarios and realized there were any number of ways they could play it to avoid going into the Federal Building that also got him out of Sonoma for the entire day, thereby separating Jack from anyone who might help. Still, he thought.

  Jack told her calmly that he wasn‘t going to the Federal Building. If she wanted to talk to him, then Danzig would have to come to his house where Jack would have his attorney present, as well a Sonoma County Sheriff’s deputy to prove that Danzig actually was a federal agent. Danzig gave him a variation on that universal cop line about how only guilty people asked for lawyers and that she could assure him she was, in fact, a federal agent. Danzig also said that if he liked, she would call the Sonoma County Sherriff’s Office herself and save him the trouble. Jack responded with Frank Fischer’s long-held distrust of the government to counter the former and something about the correlation between the quantities of nickels in relation to the number of times someone posed as a government agent to scam him out of money. They finally agreed that the meeting would take place at Hugh Coughlin’s office the next morning.

  Jack did a reverse number lookup on her number, but it came up blank. Then, he called up the website for the FBI’s San Francisco field office and dialed the number. He went through a series of prompts asking him if he had a tip or was asking for general information before finally getting to an operator. He asked for Katrina Danzig. The voice on the phone said it was after duty hours but would relay a message if it was urgent. Jack said it wasn’t and would call back in the morning.

  Jack realized they probably wouldn’t confirm or deny the identity of an agent over the phone for security reasons, but this didn’t leave him any more settled. The odds were starting to stack up in Danzig’s favor that she was who she said she was.

  Jack began to puzzle out the cold, Machiavellian logic behind Reginald’s giving Jack to the feds. They must have gotten to him, and he probably gave them Jack in exchange. Either that or the FBI came to Reginald to get Jack. But how did that explain the Carlton job and Reginald both offering it to Jack and then running a crew when Jack turned it down? If Reginald truly was an informant, why dime Jack out on a job for which the FBI had no jurisdiction? Or, for that matter, why offer Jack’s name at all since he’d been working in Europe almost exclusively for nearly twenty years? Other than owning and using a false passport and some light-hearted money laundering, what possible interest was he to the U.S. Government?

  Maybe the fact that an American was running amok in European jewelry stores for the last twenty years was proving to be an embarrassment to Europol, and they decided to leverage the FBI to put a stop to it. Jack shook his head. There was a time when it would’ve been just the opposite, but Americans weren’t as popular as they used to be.

  Jack told his attorney of his phone call with the alleged Special Agent Danzig. Jack said he didn’t know why the FBI had contacted him and said they hadn’t even told him what it was about. They agreed to meet an hour before the agents arrived.

  He took a drink and tried to forget it for now, knowing full well that he couldn’t. Jack hoped that he could at least push it below the surface of his mind.

  With his free hand, Jack texted Megan, and she said she’d be over in a few minutes.

  Jack drank slowly. Equal parts of him longed to see her and dreaded her arrival. He thought of hard truths.

  Megan arrived in her beat-up Wrangler, wearing dusty jeans and a shirt that was faded from the sun. She wore her hair up in an absent-minded ponytail, and there were traces of pink on her cheeks from being outside all day. Jack met her on his front step. “I left as soon as we closed up shop,” she said.

  “I told you Corky could handle it.”

  “We’re running a business, Frank,” she said in a scolding tone.

  This was already not going the way he’d hoped. Jack said, “Come on in,” and waved her toward the door. Megan looked down at the Kingfisher logo on his shirt and smiled. “I love that shirt,” she said as she passed, patting the winery’s emblem on his chest. Her mood seeming to lighten, and Jack felt an electric surge when she touched him. “That was such a fun day.”

  It was from the release party for their 2010 vintage.

  Jack led her into the kitchen. The orange-red Spanish tile was cool beneath his feet. Jack’s kitchen was a huge open space in the center of a long room that was mostly windows. There was a dining area with a long table in an open space to the left of the kitchen. To the right was a space just large enough for two Manhattan chairs to look out of the windows that gave a two-sided view of the Sonoma Valley.

  They stepped out onto the back deck.

  “Will you please tell me what in the hell is going on? First the FBI shows up and wants to talk to you, and then you tell me that it’s some kind of scam. Frank, I don’t even know what to think anymore.”

  “Well,” he said slowly. “It’s complicated, but I think I can explain it.”

  “I don’t see what’s complicated. Either the FBI is looking for you or they aren’t.”

  Jack poured two glasses, and Megan immediately put up two hands.

  “I don’t want a drink, Frank. I want you to tell me why the FBI was at our winery. Did you do something? Is this about that stupid offshore stuff?”

  Jack drank deeply and then exhaled, thinking of not only what to tell Megan but how. He thought he’d settled on a path but the call from Danzig changed things. Jack was convinced that she was what she said she was, which could only mean that Reginald was working with them in so
me way. That changed the game significantly.

  The Frank Fischer identity was the best that money could buy, but with their resources, the FBI would eventually unravel it, and Reginald would be able to give them a hell of a head start. When that happened, all Jack could do was disappear, to leave everyone he loved behind and vanish.

  Jack had done that once before, and those were scars that had yet to heal.

  It was not something he was eager to try again.

  But in this moment, Jack didn’t see how he could survive with the Fisher identity intact, let alone the life that was built around it.

  There were no good options here, just a handful of dirty bad options and the choices between them.

  And even if Jack found a way past the feds, he knew Reginald would keep coming at him because the amount of money at stake was just too great. Reginald wouldn’t stop unless he was dead, and Jack knew that wasn’t in him to do.

  So what was the other option?

  Reginald was going to expose Jack unless he paid up, and Jack wasn’t about to do that.

  I can’t see him stopping unless I pay him off or kill him. So, we’re back to that, he thought sourly.

  Jack thought about offering a payoff of a much lower sum than what Reginald was demanding. There was a chance that Reginald would be willing to accept the fifteen million Jack had left. But that too, had risk. Reginald would expect to know why he wasn’t getting the full amount. Plus, he would assume that Jack was deceiving him and that there was more money to be had.

  But maybe that was the game all along.

  Reginald admitted on the phone that he’d left Jack with an impossible choice because he wanted Jack to “know what that felt like.” Then, once he knew he’d gotten Jack to his breaking point, he’d force Jack into paying him whatever money he had, maybe even selling off the winery to cover the debt. There was another, more diabolical possibility. Reginald was doing this to make Jack work off the debt, to take the kind of high-risk, high reward jobs that he’d been pressuring Jack to perform for years. But that was just trading the prospect of an American prison for a Dutch one. Then, a cold stone formed in the pit of his stomach. It was what Reginald said when Jack confronted him on the phone, but Jack was too drunk or too angry to pick up on it. I just wanted you to stay hungry enough that you’d keep working for me.

  Sharpe.

  Sharpe was a plant.

  Jack knew now that Reginald was spying on him this entire time. He’d know the winery was an exit strategy. But, if someone on the inside was siphoning off funds, just enough to keep them below profitability, Jack would still have to take a few jobs a year for them to stay afloat.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said.

  The impossible choice was Sharpe. Reginald didn’t know that Sharpe had taken the Sine Metu money. Probably when Sharpe disappeared, Reginald put two and two together. He decided that was the right time to call in the job. Jack passed ,and Reginald made the decision to cut him loose.

  “Frank?”

  “Sorry,” he said, just then realizing that he’d been silently swimming against a rip current of thought for a while. Jack looked across the short space between him and Megan. She wore a pensive, nervous, and confused expression. It was the look of someone who knew they were about to walk into a bad situation but had no idea of the depth of it.

  “This is complicated and is a little hard for me to explain.”

  Jack’s head was swimming. This was a hell of a time for an epiphany.

  “You can tell me, Frank.” She leaned in and touched his knee. “Whatever it is.”

  Jack breathed deeply. The night air was quickly turning crisp. He closed his eyes for a few moments, and when he opened them, he saw Megan’s soft stare in the soft lingering light of dusk. “I am being blackmailed. The gentleman you met the other day, the one pretending to be a distributor, is a former…business associate of mine. His name is Reginald LeGrande.”

  “Why is he doing this?”

  “Well,” Jack said slowly, “my name isn’t really Frank Fischer. I‘ve been living under an assumed name, and Reginald knows that I’ll go to some pretty great lengths to keep that a secret. He’s demanding that I pay him an insane amount of money or he’ll tell people I care about, tell the police.” Jack indicated to her with an open palm.

  “Well, if he‘s blackmailing you, why not just tell the FBI? I don’t understand.”

  “That’s where it gets complicated.”

  “Are you in witness protection or something?”

  A flash of inspiration hit him, and Jack thought she’d just teed up a perfect exit ramp for him, but he decided against it just as quickly.

  “No,” he said shaking his head in a negative. “It’s nothing like that.”

  “Why would he care if you’re living under an assumed name? Changing your name isn’t illegal.”

  “Not when you do it through the courts, it isn’t.”

  Megan’s face went ashen, and she whispered, “Oh.”

  Jack clenched his teeth and tried to think if there was another way around this. There wasn’t. When he spoke, hot tears welled in his eyes, and he hoped Megan couldn’t see it. “I did some things when I was younger that I’m not very proud of. I made some mistakes, stupid, dangerous ones. I had to run away, and when I did, I created a new identity to protect my family. If I’d have done it the legal way, some very bad people might have found out, and my family could’ve been hurt. So, I moved out here and paid someone to give me a new name. Then I just lived my life.”

  “Your money,” she said flatly. “Is that why you keep it offshore?”

  “Originally, yeah, I didn’t want the IRS digging too deep into my background, but everything I told you about why I do it is true. Why do I want to pay taxes to a government that wastes trillions of dollars on wars that we never got to vote on or decide…”

  Megan held up her hand and he stopped the rant. She stared down at the table, but there was a faraway look in her eyes. Long moments passed in silence. Jack studied Megan’s face. Other than an occasional tic around her eye that she sometimes got when she was straining, Jack couldn’t deduce what she was thinking. She picked up her wineglass but just held in both hands, cupping the bulb the way you did a coffee mug on a cold day and stared out at the darkening valley. He could see the line on her jaw tighten and then relax as she clenched and unclenched her teeth.

  Maybe minutes had passed in the stiff silence, or maybe it was just seconds. Jack knew how nerves could play on your sense of time. He’d experienced it on the job often enough, waiting, waiting, waiting for some trigger, some action for what felt like hours, stiffly crouching only to look down at your watch and see just minutes had passed. The blank stare, the utter lack of reaction...Jack couldn’t stand it anymore. He had to know.

  “Meg,” he prompted. “I know this is a lot to take in.” Jack spoke softly and cautiously.

  Megan didn’t respond. She just nodded, but when she did so, she started rocking back and forth in her seat slowly, as if the action required every muscle in her body. She just said, “Yep,” and kept rocking.

  “If you didn’t do anything wrong, I don’t understand why you can’t just go to the FBI and tell them that this LeGrande guy is trying to blackmail you. Surely that’s worse than whatever it was that forced you to change your name.”

  “Well, that’s hard for me to explain.”

  Then, Megan exploded. “You keep saying that.” Her voice was just south of a shout. “Why is it hard to explain?” Finally, she turned in her chair to look at him, twisting her body so that she could lean across the arm of the chair. It was an aggressive, challenging position. “Explaining cancer to a child—that’s hard to explain. Telling your parents that a marriage is falling apart and that it’s both your fault and his, that’s hard to explain. I’ve done both of those, so I understand ‘hard to explain.’ So tell me, Frank, what’s so hard about it?”

  “Megan,” Jack said softly but firmly. “No one knows my r
eal name, and no one ever will. That’s to protect my family. I made a mistake a long time ago, and in order to keep them safe—particularly my little sisters—I disappeared. I wouldn’t risk their safety, not for anything. What I’m about to say, I’ve never shared with anyone. Literally, no one, and if I tell you, I need your word that it’s not going to get out. You can’t tell Hugh, you can’t tell the FBI, no one. I will leave out certain facts, but I’ll be as honest as I can. Hopefully, you can at least understand some of the decisions I made, even if you don’t agree with them. Do I have your word?”

  “I’m not going to lie for you, Frank,” she said. “If the FBI asks me, I’m going to have to tell them.”

  Jack closed his eyes for a moment, knowing she was right.

  Then, she put her hand on his knee and said, “But I won’t tell anyone else. You have my word.”

  He inhaled a breath of cold and took a drink to steel himself. “I grew up in a Chicago suburb and when I was a kid, my family was pretty well off. My dad was an investment banker. I’d always been into cars. My dad got me into them, and I started racing karts at an early age. I was pretty good. When I was fourteen, and doing really well on the amateur racing circuit, my dad’s business partner swindled him. I don’t know if what my dad was doing was totally aboveboard or not, he never talked about it, but when his partner ran out with the money, a bunch of people came to collect.

  “We lost the house, their retirement, college savings, everything. Lawsuits took whatever was left. We were on food stamps by the time I got my driver’s license. My racing career was over. I started working at this garage in Cicero to help make ends meet. I knew cars pretty well and was helping out as a mechanic, changing oil and whatever they needed. Turned out some mob guys owned the place. By then they knew who I was, knew the shape my family was in, so they asked me if I wanted to make some extra bucks driving cars for them. Errands, driving guys to meetings, stuff like that. I didn’t know exactly what they were into, but then I didn’t much care either. Money was money, and we needed all we could get. So, this goes on for a couple of months, and the money was pretty good, you know, so I didn’t ask questions. They started to trust me more. Sometimes, I’d go out with them, and other times I’d just drop a car someplace or another. Like, delivering it to someone.” Jack saw the anticipated next question forming on her lips and said nothing. “I didn’t ask. All I knew was that my dad, who was spending all of his time with lawyers either trying to get back what his partner took from him or trying to stay out of jail or both, didn’t have to worry about putting a little bit of food on the table.”