A Legitimate Businessman

by Dale Nelson

  Jack paused the story and walked back into his kitchen. He retrieved a bottle of ‘09 Peregrine and returned to the deck with the opened bottle. He filled both glasses, knowing he’d need some insulation against what was to come. Jack took a deep drink, savoring both it and the warmth of the wine as it hit his stomach. He continued. “So, one day the guys at the garage gave me an assignment. Gave me the keys to a car, some old beater Lincoln, and told me to drop it at some address.” He moved the hand holding his wine glass in a circle in the “as-you-do” gesture. “But this time, they tell me, ‘don’t look in the trunk.’ And they were serious about that. But, I was a seventeen-year-old kid. You tell me not to look, of course that’s the first thing I’m going to do.” Megan smiled, not understanding that it wasn’t a joke. “I drove a couple miles, and it was killing me, so I stopped and popped the trunk. By now, I knew these guys were gangsters, but I figured it was like crap games and unions and shit. What I found in the trunk was a couple pounds of heroin.” Jack stopped, his own eyes going to the horizon. Then he took a drink and continued. “An idea hit me. I didn’t know how much any of this was worth, but I knew it was a lot, maybe enough to solve our financial problems.” Jack pinched his eyes shut and rubbed them with his free hand.

  “Please tell me that you didn’t do what I think you did.”

  Jack nodded slowly, heavily, sadly. When he opened his eyes again, they were moist. “I did. All I could think about was being a hero. A seventeen-year-old boy doesn’t think about consequences, he doesn’t even think about the inevitable and logical question his parents would ask—like, ‘Where did you get this money?’ He only thinks about being their hero. I drove the car into Cabrini Green, quite possibly the worst place on Earth for a teenage white boy with a trunk full of heroin to be. I can’t even describe in words how stupid that was. I roll up to some guy selling shit on a corner and ask him if he wants to make a deal. He looks at me like, ‘Are you for real?’ Then he asks me if I know where I am. He tries to sell me something, so I tell him I’m not buying. I’m selling. I get out, walk over to the trunk, and pop it, like some big shot. I don’t know what I expected, that he’s going to introduce me to someone. I don’t know. Like some fucking corner thug is going to give me a half a million dollars for what’s in the trunk of my car instead of what he would do...what he did do, which was to pull a pistol on me. I moved to close the lid of the trunk, and he knocked me upside the head. I went down, and he kicked me a few times before getting into the car and taking off. So, now I’m in the middle of hell, and I have to walk out. Got jumped a couple blocks later, beat to hell, and had everything I had stolen. They even took my shoes so I would have to walk out of there.”

  Megan’s hand went to her mouth, stifling a gasp.

  Jack exhaled, steeling himself.

  “I couldn’t go home. It’s not that I didn’t think I could explain the beating...or the shoes.” Jack’s voice warbled again, and then it broke. He paused long seconds to compose himself. “I just couldn’t face them after I failed. So, I wandered around most of the night barefoot. And now, the realization of what I’d done started to hit. Anyway, it didn’t take the mob guys long to figure out what happened, or at least, that I didn’t do what I was told to do, so they came looking for me. By the time I made it back to my part of town, it was just after dawn. They found me. They grabbed me and threw me in the trunk. I was pretty sure that was it. Took me to the garage and asked me where the car was, so I told them. I told them everything I did and why. They said that I’d just cost them about half a million dollars—this is the eighties, mind you. We’re talking about a lot of money.” Jack leaned against the railing and looked down at the dark shapes beneath him that he knew to be vines. “To this day, I don’t really know why they spared me, and there are days I wished they hadn’t. At the time, they said that the lesson was worth more than killing me. Whatever that meant. After keeping me in the garage for most of that next day, they piled me into the car, and we drove to my neighborhood. They said they were going to let me live because they understood why I did what I did, but that if I was in trouble, I should’ve come to them instead of stealing from them. So, I had to leave.

  “They said if they ever saw me again, they wouldn’t do anything to me, but they would hurt one of my little sisters as an opener. To prove their point, they drove me by my youngest sister’s school as they were letting out. They slowed the car to a crawl, and one of them pointed her out to me.” Jack hung his head in shame and in grief. “Jennie was walking down the street, pigtails and a lunch box. She looked over at the car and saw me, and it took her a second, but then she recognized me. I remember her looking confused, like why was her big brother in this car and wasn’t stopping. They held us there for a few long seconds and let that sink in. The last image I have of any of my family is my six-year-old sister with this confused look on her face, starting to wave to me and then stopping as the car drove away. That was the last I ever saw of them, of any of them.” Jack’s voice warbled, and then it broke. His shoulders racked with sobs.

  Jack waited until he could compose himself, and then he continued. “They drove me a couple miles from town and dropped me in a parking lot. The one guy got out of the passenger seat and dropped a pair of white and red Nikes next to me. Said I needed shoes for all the walking I was going to do. Then they left me. I waited until they were gone, and I stole a car to spite them. I’d walked enough.”

  “Didn’t you ever try to go back?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “You don’t think they’d want to know you were alive? After all this time? Those mob guys can’t possibly still be in business, and even if they are, do you really think they care about something that happened what, thirty years ago?”

  “When I disappeared, my family thought I was dead. My father killed himself later that year. It was just too much for him. He’d guessed that I was probably doing something illegal that got me killed. They knew about the garage, about the people who owned it, but they looked the other way because they needed the money. My mom raised my sisters on her own. I learned all this about ten years ago after I had the same thought you did, that I could just go back, that the people I was mixed up with wouldn’t possibly remember me. Once I realized what I’d done to my family, I knew that there was no way I could go back to them. It would just open those old wounds, not to mention how much hurt was compounded over the years.” Worse, he knew, was that they would rightly blame him for the ruin of their family, and that was something Jack could neither face himself or put his mother and sisters through.

  “I couldn’t legally change my name because that would reveal that I was still alive, which then sets in motion all of the horrible things I just described to you. At this point, I could probably do it, but again, there’s always the possibility that mom and my sisters will somehow find out.”

  “You don’t think that if you explained that to them, to the FBI I mean, that they’d understand?”

  Jack scoffed, actually scoffed aloud at the thought. “They’re cops, Meg. They only see things one way.”

  “Ugh,” Megan practically shouted, her voice resonant with frustration. “Blackmail is a hundred times worse than anything you did when you were a seventeen-year-old. Surely, Frank, they won’t fault you for what you did. Particularly in light of what’s happening now. But even if they did, I have to believe the statute of limitations on being an idiot has run out. Now you’re putting everything you’ve worked for, we’ve worked for at risk, and for what?”

  “They’ll shut the winery down if they find out that my identity is fake, not to mention exposing me for who I am. Then my name gets out and my family finds out that I’m still alive and they get thirty fresh years of pain.”

  Megan stood so abruptly that it pushed the thick patio chair back a foot. He simply deferred to the harsh scrape of the chair legs on the deck. He knew Megan McKinney well enough to know that she would have one of two reactions to what he just told her. She would eit
her explode with the full force-of-nature fury that only an angry Irish woman possessed, or she would run. Jack had hoped for the former. An argument implicitly meant there was a position that could be countered, even reconsidered.

  Flight meant resolution.

  Jack stood, but she pushed past him and maneuvered around the chairs to the door leading into the house, pausing only to look back at him. “If you don’t tell them the truth, they’re going to believe whatever LeGrande tells them about why you’re hiding, and you’ll have to take your chances with that. If you do that, you’re going to lose everything, Frank.”

  And she was gone.

  Jack wanted to call after her, but he knew it wouldn’t do him any good, so he resisted the urge. If she was anything, Megan was both willful and defiant. Her mind was set that she needed time, and if Jack pushed her now, he knew it would only end one way, and that was badly. She fast-walked through his house, now out of sight, marked by the sound of echoing footfalls to the front door. Then a car door, ignition, and the sad sound of car tires on pavement carried her away.

  Until Jack heard that final sound of her Wrangler backing out onto Dry Creek Lane and quickly fading into the night, he fought off every urge, every base instinct to go after her. All he wanted was to scoop her up in his arms and tell her all of the ways this was going to be fine. Even if he knew they were lies. But Jack wanted to say them anyway, because he wanted Megan to stay at whatever price that came at.

  When the sounds of the Jeep driving away faded into silence, Jack said, “It would’ve been easier if I’d have just told her I was a thief.”

  Twenty

  Jack barely slept and when he did it was fitful.

  He finally gave up at four, ground beans, and put on pot of coffee. Jack occasionally sat but mostly paced until the sun rose over the Sonoma Valley. Jack had largely pushed thoughts of his family back into his subconscious. The human mind was a miraculous thing, but it could be tricked into believing something was true when it was not, given sufficient passion and repetition. Police and attorneys on both sides of the courtroom used that to their advantage, coaching witnesses to the desired conclusion by assisting recollection. If you said something enough times, the mind started to believe it was true. Jack repeated the mantra of avoidance for years until his mind accepted cowardice as simple truth. There were a hundred ways Jack could have contacted them before or after his father’s suicide that would not have put his sisters in any danger. He could have, at least, given them some semblance of closure, if not an explanation. At the absolute worst, he could have given them a locus for their anger.

  Instead, Jack ran as though every mile was one farther from his guilt, and he convinced himself that it was the only choice he could have made.

  Jack Burdette was a construct born of necessity. It was a cutout persona designed to fit a narrative and to give him some much-needed security.

  Frank Fischer was who he truly wanted to be. Fischer was a successful businessman and entrepreneur. Someone who’d gambled on himself, won, and was now in a position to carve out a comfortable, fulfilling life as a reward. Fischer earned the right to honestly reinvent himself. Frank Fischer was a man who’d left his other life behind. He maintained no ties with his former business associates, with ex-bosses or old rivals. Now, he lived his life according to the rules that he made for himself because he’d earned that right. Frank Fischer spent his days doing something that gave him purpose.

  Certainly, Fischer had a past. It was one that was expertly crafted and refined over the years. He was also a man who didn’t believe much in talking about where he was from and believed very much in where he was. More than once when an employee asked him in a quiet moment about his life, the way one did in trying to figure out a boss, Fischer would simply motion to the mottled tan-and-green hills of Sonoma underneath a perfect lapis sky and say, “Who cares what no-name town you came from when this is where you ended up?” Part of the persona was that he wanted to come across as the rakish, enigmatic businessman, the slightly eccentric guy who kept most of his money offshore because he didn’t trust the government to hold it. Frank Fischer wanted to keep people guessing because that made him interesting, but not interesting enough to dig any deeper.

  As Jack, he was simply a master thief, and questions about his past were easily dodged. People tended to talk on jobs, it was a natural tendency to want to fill the nervous hours, but Jack was always cagey about this. He worked under aliases when he was with people he didn’t know, and even as “Jack Burdette” he simply refused to talk about himself. Enzo and Rusty now knew that he was a winemaker in California, but he trusted them. Inasmuch as you can trust anyone in this business.

  Trust was a matter of economics, nothing more.

  When distilled down to its essential components, the fabric of trust was held up by the value of the knowledge possessed. Did the person with information have more or less to gain by maintaining that trust or by betraying it? Enzo wanted a quiet villa on the Rivera or Lake Como or both. Jack knew that the Watchmaker wanted to travel on a long dime and eventually settle down again, try life with a higher caliber woman than he had the first time. His cut, which Jack was happy to pay, would help Enzo get the second chance at the life he’d originally wanted. Jack wasn’t worried about him.

  Rusty was an enigma and had his own secrets to bury, but as sure as he was of anything, Jack believed Rusty wanted to keep playing the game as he had been. He’d probably be disappointed to know that Jack planned to retire and focus on the winery, not because of the money Jack would pay him, but because Rusty lived for the kinds of challenges Jack threw his way. Still, Jack had a feeling that this wouldn’t be the end of his relationship with the fixer. If anything was clear over the last few hours, it was the knowledge that Jack would need a full-time damage controller for some time to come.

  Jack believed Enzo and Rusty knowing about his alter ego was an acceptable risk. Their knowledge of his identity would not jeopardize him. Nor was Jack concerned about the identity itself. The Frank Fischer driver’s license, social security card, and passport were real—it was the documents to get those things that were fake. The SSN he’d been using belonged to a dead person, and he’d gone through a fairly elaborate con to convince a mid-level drone at the Social Security Administration that it was his death that was falsely reported as part of a larger identity theft scheme. They’d issued him a new card (keeping the existing number) but removed his records from the so-called “death database“ they maintained. As far as the U.S. Government was concerned, Frank Fischer was a real person.

  But even that tightly constructed lie would only hold up under so much scrutiny. The Frank Fischer legend would pass a civilian background check or any credit inquiry or serve as proof for ID, and it had for some time. Jack never intended for this to hold up against a serious and persistent criminal investigation. It might take them a few weeks, but eventually the FBI would be able to prove that Frank Fischer was a cutout. At that point, they would dive into Jack Burdette and find that name was also fake. That would eventually lead them back to Jack’s birth identity and his family and renew a lifetime of buried pain. At a minimum, they’d have him on felony counts of fraud, tax evasion, and falsifying documents, to say nothing of the charges that he’d face if they were able to connect him with Jack Burdette’s resume.

  Jack reasoned that Reginald had been working with the FBI for more than a decade. They’d probably gotten to him when he was in prison. The early-release story now made much more sense. Looking back on it, when the second-and-third-tier guys Reginald crewed over the years periodically got pinched, Jack simply assumed that was cost of doing business, the risk you ran in being a thief. Now, it was clear that Reginald was just handing them over to the police. Likely, it was part of the deal. But what really troubled Jack was when he thought of the post-mission debriefs he and Reginald conducted. It had become a ritual to him, both a shared experience and a chance to learn from a master thief. Now, it was plain that
his mentor was simply gathering facts all along so that one day he could hand Jack over too.

  How could he have been so blind to a decade-long con?

  Fury boiled up inside him.

  He could picture his hands closing around Reginald’s neck, or the look on that weathered and liver-spotted face when he saw Jack at the other end of a pistol, that silver-blond mullet billowing out with the force of impact before he fell to the ground. The thought was satisfying for a moment, but Jack knew it was fantasy and nothing more. Killing Reginald would kill the investigation of Jack Burdette, professional thief, but that would just birth the investigation of Jack Burdette, First Degree Murderer. He also knew that no matter what Reginald had done, Jack was no killer. He just wasn’t. Jack was a career criminal, fine, but the gulf between thievery and murder was so wide it was impassable in his mind.

  So, how to stop the investigation?

  How to convince the FBI that Reginald was just some kook scam artist coming after a legitimate businessman?

  Another, darker question swirled in his mind. Reginald had said that if Jack didn’t pay him, he would turn Jack over to the authorities. Jack hadn’t, and Reginald seemed to have made good on this threat, and yet, he was still asking for the money. How would he plan to walk that back?