A Legitimate Businessman

by Dale Nelson

  Jack watched the sunrise, or rather, watched the western sky brighten as the sun rose behind him, knowing that he had no answers to the questions that plagued him throughout the night. Then he showered, changed into a navy Zegna suit, pink micro-stripe shirt that he left open collar and drove into town. Jack had breakfast at Grace’s Table in downtown Napa, which made the best cornbread he’d ever tasted. From there, he walked two blocks to Coughlin’s office, which was on the second floor of a peach stucco shop complex that shared a block with the Andaz Hotel. Jack walked up the exterior flight of stairs and into Hugh’s office. Coughlin preferred to do most of his business from his home, which was a modest house in the foothills with a much nicer view than the parking garage he was looking at right now. He was pissed off that he had to come into the actual office, pissed off that he had to wear a suit, and pissed off that he had to meet with federal agents.

  They arrived a few ticks before noon.

  Danzig was short. Jack figured she was about five foot five and was a little too into CrossFit for the good of those around her. She kept her brown hair short, and it curled around her ears, doubtless to conform to some bureaucratic notion of style. Danzig dressed in a dark gray pantsuit and white open-collared shirt. She didn’t wear any jewelry that Jack could see. Smart. It left less for a potential combatant to grab onto. She had a handbag, but Jack suspected that was more to carry the interview tools, so she could lose that in a scuffle. He could see from the slight bulge on Danzig’s hip that she carried her service pistol on her person rather than in the bag.

  The other agent was taller, and Jack judged him to be in his mid-thirties. He was decidedly less athletic than his partner. The man had the look of someone whose physical glory days were about fifteen years ago but who worked out as though he were still clinging to that particular ghost. He wore Brooks Brothers, though not particularly well. The suit had high armholes designed to give a slimmer look, but the agent got his height from his legs rather than his torso. He appeared to be carrying about ten pounds too many, so the suit gave him more of a bell-shaped look. The salesman should’ve known better. Then again, if this guy could afford a five-thousand-dollar suit, he wouldn’t be in the FBI.

  Danzig looked both Jack and Hugh up and down, clearly sizing them up and then introduced herself. When she spoke, her voice was deeper than he would’ve expected. Not quite raspy but it clearly had some miles to it—Kathleen Turner as a private eye. “Good morning, I’m Special Agent Danzig.” she held out her badge and credentials for them to see. Jack always wondered why they did that. The average person wouldn’t be able to tell if they were real or not. “This is Special Agent Riordan.” She leveled her dark-eyed gaze at Jack. “Mister,” she began and then laid in an intentional pause as if she was searching her memory for the right name, “Fischer, I presume?”

  “That’s correct,” Jack said, nodding. “Frank Fischer,” he said for her benefit. “This is my attorney, Hugh Coughlin.”

  There was a brief and curt exchange of greetings, at the end of which, Coughlin led them over to a conference table in the back of his office that sat beneath of a window that looked out on the second floor of a parking garage. On one wall, there was a series of portraits taken of the same perspective at the same vineyard in each season, meant to show the progression of time. On another wall, a framed copy of Wine Spectator where Coughlin made the cover, standing next to two now-legendary winemakers. The lead story was about how he’d brokered the deal to merge two highly successful operations into what was now a multimillion-dollar viticulture empire. Other artifacts of Coughlin’s career hung about the office, all of which identified him as a businessman and wine expert.

  Jack was already second-guessing the logic of having the meeting here.

  “Shall we get started?” Coughlin asked when they were seated.

  Danzig reached into her bag and removed a black, leather folio containing a legal pad and several documents.

  Danzig spoke, her voice slightly elevated and authoritative. “Today is Wednesday, July thirty-first, 2013. My name is Special Agent Katrina Danzig, and I am conducting this interview with Special Agent Richard Riordan” She looked at Jack. “Please state your full legal name, date of birth, and occupation.”

  Jack paused a moment, noting that she clearly stipulated his “legal” name but didn’t prompt him with one, obviously a bowshot.

  “My name is Francis Thomas Fischer. My date of birth is February second, 1968. I am the owner and proprietor of Kingfisher Wines.”

  “This interview is taking place at the law office of Mr. Hugh Coughlin, Mr. Fischer’s attorney. Thank you,” Danzig said. She asked Jack to provide his current address and cell phone number and then turned to Coughlin to do the same. “You stated, for the record,” she placed heavier than normal emphasis on the latter, “that your legal name is Francis Fisher.”

  “I prefer to go by Frank,” he said convivially.

  “I’d like to get a little bit of background on you, if we could, Mr. Fischer. We performed a cursory search, but there was very little public information available on you. You don’t maintain any social media accounts and have been relatively hidden from public life.”

  “Maybe I’m just not that interesting,” he said. When the joke didn’t land, Jack said, “Technology and music are kind of like a train, Agent Danzig. At some point, everyone chooses their stop, and they get off. Mine was a while ago. As for being ‘hidden,’ that implies I have something to hide. I think it’s more accurate to say that I’m just a private person.”

  “Indeed,” she said. “Let’s go back to something you just said about technology. Were you or were you not a ‘technology consultant’ for a number of years? How is it that you could effectively perform that service if you, as you say, got off the train?”

  “Using something doesn’t make you an expert in it. The key to understanding social media is understanding how people think and act, not wasting your time with your face in your phone. Besides, my consultancy was more with advising others on how to run a technology business. I leave the engineering to them. The winery has a Twitter feed and a Facebook page. You’re welcome to ‘like’ us,” Jack said, his voice smug.

  “That’ll do,” she said. “What we’re trying to establish is the type of relationships you maintain. In this day and age it stands out when someone doesn’t communicate with people from various stages in their life, given how easy it is.”

  “Maybe I’m just old fashioned.” Jack’s response was intended to sound like a dodge, and it was.

  “Where are you from, originally?” she asked.

  Jack noted that Danzig didn’t pursue her previous line of questioning any further, despite his laying the trap of his evasive answer. This was useful information for him. A less-experienced interviewer would have bitten or even openly challenged him.

  “Chicago suburb,” he said.

  “What high school did you attend?”

  “Morton East, Class of Nineteen Eighty-Six. John Denver went to my school, though it was a few years before me, obviously.”

  “Are your parents still in Chicago?”

  “My parents are dead.” Jack’s tone was cold, flat, and emotionless in a way that conveyed a very deep pain, something that was so profoundly painful to him it made it sound as though he was totally empty.

  Danzig set down her pen and looked up at him. “How did they die?” Danzig asked, just as emotionless, though hers was clinical.

  Jack took a moment to answer, though the look of abject horror and offense on Coughlin‘s face spoke as loudly Jack’s silence.

  “I fail to see how this is relevant,” Coughlin broke in.

  “No,” Jack said in a tone that was purposefully devoid of emotion. “It’s fine. My mother died of cancer when I was fourteen. My dad took to the bottle. He was a full-on drunk by the time I could drive.”

  “Alcoholism run in your family?” Danzig asked.

  Jack recognized the tactic. She was trying to set
him off, raise the temperature of his blood to force a hasty answer, to get him off guard.

  “I said he was a drunk, not an alcoholic. Do you know the difference? Alcoholism is a disease, like cancer. You can’t decide if you get it; you just decide if you’ll make it worse. Being a drunk,” Jack stabbed the air between them with two of his fingers, “that’s a choice. When I graduated high school, I ran as far and as fast as I could. I came out here and I never went back. Told him I’d talk to him again when he dried out. I was angry with my father for spending more time with Jack Daniels than with me after mom died. He lasted about two years. One night he drank a fifth of whiskey and shot himself in the head. I think people blamed that on my leaving, so no, I don’t keep up much with my family.” Jack leveled a flat gaze at the agent across the table from him to let her know that she’d gone too far.

  “I’m sorry to bring that up, Mr. Fischer. Please understand that we need to be thorough. You said you came out here and attended college?”

  “San Jose State, though I didn’t finish. I got an internship with a software company and they hired me full-time in my junior year.”

  “What company was that?” Danzig asked, not looking up from her notation.

  “Pinnacle Software, though they aren’t around anymore.” The cheerful, carefree almost wistful lilt returned to his voice. “Netscape bought us in the mid-nineties. I stayed on through ninety-five or so before I quit. I had a ton of Netscape stock, which I cashed out shortly after the IPO. I took a sabbatical for a few years.”

  “Seems like an odd move for a mid-level software engineer in his late twenties.”

  “I had about a million dollars in the bank by the time I was twenty-seven. Most of us lived like hermits because all we did was code, never had time to spend any money or enjoy being in our twenties. At that point, I’d seen two places in the United States.—Chicago and Silicon Valley. I wanted to travel, and like most twenty-seven-year-olds, I thought a million dollars was a legitimate fortune.”

  “Spend any time in Europe?” she asked, now looking up.

  “Little bit. France, Italy, Spain. Kind of funny, really, I spent a couple years traveling Europe and ended up staying in places that looked a lot like California.”

  “How about Turin?”

  Jack noted that she referred to the city by its proper Italian name rather than the Americanized “Torino.” That wasn’t a mistake.

  The charming, chatty expression Jack wore drained away. “I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, no reason. Like I said, we’re just trying to establish who you are.” Danzig held her gaze, locking eyes with Jack for a long breath.

  Jesus, LeGrande had been thorough. While Reginald hadn’t been present for any of those years, he certainly knew about Jack’s exploits in the notorious “School of Turin” and seemed to have handed over those details to the FBI, key details from which they could begin deconstructing the Frank Fischer legend and establishing him as Gentleman Jack Burdette. Danzig was intentionally telegraphing her strategy here—essentially saying, “We know who you are.”

  They said nothing further about Turin.

  Riordan took the lead and launched into questions about Frank Fischer’s background that plodded on for another hour as they dutifully and painfully reconstructed Fischer’s life in the nineties and two thousands. They repeated questions or asked them in a different way, often circling back to things he’d said before in other lines of the conversation, looking for holes, holes that lined up with whatever information Reginald fed them. Jack told them about how he’d made a lot of money in Netscape’s IPO, which was true, and then lost nearly all of it when the tech bubble burst a few short, heady years later—which was also true. He told them how he was running a technology consulting practice by ‘01 and bet big on Google, which obviously paid off. By ‘05 he was mostly playing the stock market and had largely moved his consulting practice to Europe because they were about a decade behind the U.S. in software development. The Europeans were hungry for his knowledge and the lessons the Americans learned in the nineties. He founded Kingfisher in ‘06 and formally retired from the tech scene to make wine.

  Danzig asked how often he traveled overseas, and Jack’s answer was several times a year while he was consulting, not quite once a month but close. She countered with specific dates and locations over the last decade, all of which Jack knew to be times where there were specific thefts committed that Reginald would have knowledge of. Each time, Jack rebuffed saying he didn’t remember the specific dates or places he traveled to, but most often it was the UK, Germany, Switzerland, and later, some Eastern European countries that were starting to build a technology base.

  Riordan, voice impartial, added, “So, you’ll have these specific dates in your corporate files, I assume? You’d be billing these trips to your clients, no?”

  “I think you’re giving my ‘files’ a little too much credit. If I’m traveling for Kingfisher, like, say when I was in Italy a few months back to meet with some Sangiovese growers, I’ll have records for that. The consulting stuff I don’t keep too close a tab on.”

  “But there are records. Invoices, ledger entries, that sort of thing?”

  “I don’t maintain that business anymore, so I’m not really keeping up with the books, you know?”

  So, this is how they were going to come at him, Jack mused. Start by breaking apart his decade-long alibi by trying to prove Frank Fischer was never in a consulting business. Once they did that, he wouldn’t be able to disprove he wasn’t doing jobs with Reginald. In fact, their strategy might even be to just get Jack on the fact that he was living illegally under an assumed name with fraudulently acquired documents. Or, at least have that as a backup in case they couldn’t prove he was a thief.

  “But you do have these records? You can prove that you were in Europe on those dates, meeting with clients?”

  “Where are you going with this?” Coughlin demanded. “Are you investigating whether or not my client was a good accountant?”

  “Mr. Coughlin, we don’t think Mr. Fischer was ever meeting with clients. The dates on this list indicate when jewelry thefts occurred at various locations throughout Western Europe. We believe these thefts were planned and executed by a man named Jack Burdette. A credible source has provided convincing evidence that your client’s real name is Jack Burdette. Further, we have reason to believe that your client is implicated in dozens of jewelry thefts conducted in Europe dating back to the early nineties.”

  “This is outrageous!” Coughlin thundered. “He was a programmer in the nineties.”

  “Did you know him when he was working as a programmer?”

  Coughlin said nothing, recognizing the old courtroom trick for what it was.

  “What do you have to say to this, Mr. Fischer?”

  “That I think you have me confused with someone else.”

  “I wonder if I’m actually the one who has you confused with someone else.” Then she added, “As I said, I have an informant who says he’s known you as Jack Burdette since 1991. His description matches you exactly, and he even provided these photographs of you.” Danzig drew a small envelope from her folio, opened it, and removed several headshots of Jack that Reginald had taken to forge his travel documents.

  “Do you recall these photographs being taken?”

  Coughlin, now red-faced, held a hand up. “Frank, don’t say anything else. This interview is over.”

  “Mr. Coughlin, we can have the interview here, or we can arrest your client and continue this in an interrogation room at the Federal Building. Which will it be?”

  “There’s no proof that those were given to you by this supposed source,” Coughlin broke in angrily. “For all we know, those are old DMV photos or corporate head shots from the winery.”

  “We’ve already established that your client intentionally maintains a very low profile and does not engage in social media. Therefore, by his own admission, there are going to be very few p
laces where his photograph will appear online and could be co-opted as you suggest.”

  “I just gave you two.”

  “I can assure you that’s not where they came from.”

  “Actually,” Jack broke in, tapping his finger on the table near the photos but careful not to touch them. “These look like pictures we took for the winery.” Jack kept his tone and cadence slow and somewhat hesitant in the beginning, as though he were recalling some filed away facts. He added confidence to his answer as he continued. Turning to Hugh, he said, “We did a bunch of promotional shots early on, remember? We had a lot of press events, and we always sent photos out with them to include in the articles. It wouldn’t be hard for someone to get ahold of those. And there are plenty of pictures of me in various trade publications. Anyone with a reasonable skill in Photoshop could doctor those to make it look like that,” Jack said, pointing at the photos on the table.

  “Why would someone want to do that?” Riordan asked.

  “Why else? To blackmail me.” Before either Riordan or Danzig could pick that up and run with it, Jack continued. “A few days ago, I got an anonymous phone call from someone saying that he was going to tell the police I was a career criminal, just like you say, unless I paid him several million dollars. He said that by the time anyone figured out the truth, the damage to my winery would’ve been done. Said that I should, and I’m quoting here, ‘invest in silence.’” That was one of Reginald’s favorite phrases, and he used it often, particularly when Jack was referencing one of his rules. If these feds had spent any time with LeGrande, it was a good bet they’d heard him say it.

  “So, you’re saying that someone contacted you and attempted to blackmail you. What day was this?”

  “Monday.”

  “Did you report this to the police?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if you’ve actually done your homework, you’ll know how I feel about the government and its law enforcement. I don’t have a lot of faith in your system. I came forward when my CFO embezzled close to ten million dollars from us. All I got from the State was a bunch of bullshit about how these things take time but that I should be prepared for the fact that I probably wouldn’t get my money back. But the word got out, and that obviously signaled to someone that I had deep enough pockets for a blackmail run. You can appreciate why I didn’t want to come forward. Now, just after you accuse me of being a thief,” Jack air-quoted the word derisively, “then you have the gall to question why I didn’t come forward after the blackmailer called. Jesus Christ.”