Confessions of a Red Herring

by Dana Dratch

  From the look of it, the Pipers had been barely scraping by for a long time. How desperate were they now? Could Alan Piper have visited Coleman to try to win back his old job? Or in a last-ditch effort to stop the blackballing?

  What would Piper have done if Coleman refused? Or, more likely, if Coleman just laughed off the whole thing as a good joke?

  I could have walked through that door blindfolded, and still known exactly where I was. It smelled like every Starbucks everywhere. Delicious.

  The lunch rush was over, so the place was nearly empty.

  The heavyset barista—who went about six feet, and sported blue bangs, a gold brow piercing, and a sparse soul patch—didn’t look like an “Ellen.”

  In the back, a small, thin, harried-looking woman with close-cropped, mousy brown hair was wiping down tables. Bingo.

  “I’ll have two medium mocha lattes,” I said.

  I love the coffee. But memo to HQ: that “tall,” “grande,” “venti” stuff isn’t fooling anybody.

  “Whipped cream?” the barista asked.

  “Definitely.”

  If I was splurging five dollars for a cup of chocolate coffee, I wanted my money’s worth.

  I paid and stuffed another fiver into the tip box. The gold piercing went up an inch.

  Two minutes later, I grabbed my coffees and headed for a table in the back.

  “Ellen?”

  The woman whipped around, surprised. She wore little makeup. But professional stage pancake couldn’t have camouflaged the deep, dark circles under her eyes.

  “Do I know you?”

  “I used to work for the same company as your husband. I was wondering if we could talk for a minute.” I held out one of the coffees.

  She just stared at me.

  “Mocha latte,” I said. I’ve heard there are women who don’t like chocolate. But I’ve never met any.

  “You work at Coleman & Walters?” she asked, eyes narrowing.

  “Fired. Last week.”

  “Justin, I’m taking my break now,” she shouted to the barista, finally taking the cup from my hand.

  From the register, Justin waved.

  She sank into one of the chairs and took a sip of coffee. I popped the lid off mine and proceeded to eat the whipped cream.

  “Have you got a lawyer?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “We tried that. But we had to let him go. He said we had a good case, but we couldn’t afford him. And even if we could have gone the contingency route, Alan’s heart wasn’t in it.”

  “My brother’s paying for mine. I couldn’t have swung it, otherwise.”

  She nodded.

  “We had a little money in savings, at first. Too much to qualify for legal aid. But Bobby’s medical expenses are enormous, even with the insurance. He’s autistic, and he has epilepsy and asthma. This job just barely covers our COBRA premiums, these days. And I was lucky to get on here.”

  I nodded and felt like a schmuck. What was one dental bill compared to what this family had been through? What they were still going through?

  “They canceled my insurance,” I said. “C&W. Told the insurance company that I’d dropped it when I hadn’t.”

  “They’re bastards. Total bastards. Alan gave that son of a bitch everything he had, every spare minute, every brilliant strategy, for the last seven years. You know why? Everett Coleman kept dangling the promise of a vice presidency. Giving Alan his own group within the firm. Creative control. When it still hadn’t materialized after a few years, I told Alan he was crazy to stay. That was when I realized that Everett Coleman was never going to give anyone else an ounce of autonomy in that company. His company.”

  So how would Alan have reacted if he’d learned about Coleman’s plan to rebuild the agency with a bunch of young turks? If Alan discovered he’d not only been fired, blackballed, and bankrupted—but played for a chump for seven long years? Could that have been the final insult that drove him to kill?

  I decided to prime the pump. “They’re blackballing me. I can’t even get a job interview.”

  “Standard C&W procedure. Right out of the Everett Coleman playbook.”

  “Destroy the enemy.”

  “And if you’re not Everett Coleman, you’re the enemy.” Ellen shook her head. “I know business is business. Heaven knows, I’m not young and naïve. But I think he enjoyed playing God. Using people as pawns and tossing them away. It gave him a thrill. It sounds simplistic, but the man was evil. Pure evil.”

  “Any idea who’d want to kill him?”

  “I did. But I’m not sure I could have stabbed him only once,” she said with a rueful snort. “If I’d gotten started, he’d have had a few more holes in him.”

  There was no easy way to ask what I had to ask. I opted for the Band-Aid approach. “Could Alan have done it?”

  You’d have thought I’d asked her if Alan could drive a stick shift.

  “You know, I really wish he could. After Coleman fired him, he just lost heart. Retreated into himself. The only time he even left the house this month was to go to the funeral.

  “Most days, he doesn’t even change out of his sweats. But he’s terrific with the boys. And they’re crazy about him. When the kids are home, the three of them have a great time. When they’re not around, he never leaves the sofa. Of course, that sofa is now at my mom’s house. That doesn’t help. But at least it’s a roof over our heads.”

  “He wouldn’t have gone down to C&W last Sunday to try and get his job back? Or talk Coleman into letting up on the blackballing?”

  “No. As bad as things are, he doesn’t want to go back. And Everett Coleman wouldn’t have backed off even if Alan had asked him to. Just the opposite. Coleman would have seen it as a sign of weakness. And Coleman hated weakness. It was like waving a red flag in front of a bull.”

  Or a white flag in front of a bully.

  “He even blamed us for Bobby’s condition. Told Alan more than once that the problem was we coddled the boy. That we needed to toughen him up. Can you imagine saying something so cruel about a sick child?”

  Unfortunately, knowing the man who said it, I could. I shook my head.

  “So you never believed it might have been Alan there last Sunday?”

  “I know it wasn’t. My parents were away for the weekend, and I pulled a double shot—sorry, coffee-speak—a double shift here. Alan was with the kids all day. He wouldn’t have left them alone. And with Bobby’s medical problems, we can’t trust sitters.”

  I nodded.

  “Any idea who might have done it? Or wanted to do it?”

  “Wait a minute! I remember you! You’re the one from the newspaper story. The impaler!”

  I sighed. Explaining my connection to a murder was becoming routine. How weird was that?

  “I’ve talked with the police. They’re satisfied I wasn’t involved. But someone at C&W started a rumor campaign. Walters, I suspect. Even though they keep pointing the police in my direction, I’ve been officially cleared. That was in the papers this weekend.”

  When the police flack admitted on-air Sunday morning that I was “not a person of interest,” even Mira’s paper had to print it. On the second-to-last page of the metro section. Next to an ad for a three-day tire sale at Big Jimmy’s Oil-N-Lube.

  “You’re trying to find out who did it!”

  I nodded.

  “And you think it was Alan?”

  “No, but I think Alan might know things that could shed some light on who did. I only lasted three months at C&W. Your husband survived seven years. He’s seen things. He knows the players. And if Coleman was trying that hard to destroy him, Coleman must have been afraid of what he could reveal.”

  “They’re trying to destroy you, too.”

  “I was a convenient scapegoat. I’d had a falling-out with Coleman the Friday before he was killed.”

  “What kind of falling-out?”

  All in, as my father used to say. “He tried to give me to a
client for the evening.”

  “That man was scum. Why do you even care who killed him? Hell, give ’em a medal.”

  I had to admit, she had a point. I paused.

  “Even though the cops have cleared me, the C&W crowd is still trying to keep my name in it. They’re telling everyone who’ll listen—and in this town, that’s everybody—that I killed Coleman because I was working undercover for my old newspaper, and he found out about it. It’s a lie. But it means the paper can’t hire me back. And no one else will even talk to me. If I ever want to work again, I need to make sure the real story comes out. And, between you and me, I think it was one of them.”

  Ellen considered the information and shrugged.

  “Did Alan get anything when he left? Any severance at all?”

  “Are you kidding? They even kept us from getting unemployment. Claimed it was ‘termination for cause due to substandard work performance.’ That’s a laugh. It was Everett Coleman’s plan the clients hated. But Coleman made sure that Alan was the one who led the meetings and signed off on everything. Coleman had a paper trail a mile long to back him up. Lawyers out the wazoo. Mountains of files. Hearings. Depositions. You name it. He cleaned us out.

  “We went from a $150,000-a-year job with benefits to nothing. Overnight. Alan made a big chunk of his money in bonuses. But they pulled some legal maneuver and C&W got to keep that. Threatened to come after us for the last one, too. Claimed they had evidence of ‘long-standing breach of contractual obligations.’ It was all bullshit. But between the out-of-pocket for Bobby’s medical bills, the insurance premiums to keep the coverage we did have, two mortgages, and the lawyers’ bills, we were wiped out. In less than six months.”

  “Seven years with a top firm, and no job nibbles at all?”

  “Coleman was the face of the firm. Any good thing that happened, he soaked up all the limelight. When I finally realized that, I started urging Alan to jump ship. But, thanks to Coleman, no one else recognized his real worth. So the money wasn’t there. And Alan was happy at C&W. He may not have liked Everett Coleman, but he loved his job. I didn’t want to be some dissatisfied harpy. So I backed off.”

  I nodded.

  “A few weeks after Alan left, we heard that Coleman was putting the word out that Alan had stolen money from the firm.”

  “Embezzling? That’s a pretty serious charge. I’m surprised that one didn’t make the papers.”

  “It was all whispering behind the scenes. Nothing official. Nothing he even hinted at to the authorities or the unemployment people.”

  “Because then he’d have had to prove it.”

  She nodded. “He just made a few phone calls. Said he wasn’t going to bother reporting it, of course. That it wasn’t that large an amount. But that money was definitely missing, and Alan was the one with access. Claimed Alan made a habit of padding his expenses in a big way, too. From what we heard, Coleman trumpeted that he was sympathetic because he knew we needed the cash for Bobby. Said he’d personally repaid all of the money out of his own pocket and wasn’t going to prosecute.”

  “Coleman the hero again. And once word got around . . .”

  “The smaller companies already couldn’t afford to have Bobby on their insurance. The bigger ones believed Alan was either incompetent or a thief.”

  I patted her hand. “I’m so sorry.”

  “About a month later, Alan found out that the new industry slang for publicly embarrassing yourself and getting canned was ‘pulling a Piper.’ I think that’s when he just gave up.” She sighed. “How in the world do you bounce back from something like that?”

  Good question. And it definitely put my situation into perspective.

  “Look, I understand what you’re trying to do,” she said finally. “And I hope you come out of this OK. Hell, if it’s one of them, I hope the bastard gets the chair. But if someone took out every single one of them tomorrow, it still wouldn’t make life one bit better for my family.”

  Chapter 31

  It’s a lot harder to sell something when you’re not that convinced yourself.

  Later that afternoon, I finally told Baba about my night job. She was not pleased.

  That made two of us.

  When I came out to the living room at 5:30, she was sitting on the sofa waiting for me, her purse in her lap.

  “I come,” she announced, standing.

  “I can’t do that. There’s no place for you to wait.”

  “I clean,” she said.

  “OK, why do you want to come with me?”

  “Is not safe. Is night. Murderers in office. Thieves in street.”

  I sat down on the sofa. “It’s a lousy job with bad hours. And I’m going to come home stinking of toilet cleaner.”

  Forget the thieves and murderers. The biggest danger I’m facing is lung damage from the petrochemicals.

  “And my boss, who pays in cash, under the table, will use any excuse not to pay us. But it’s safe. We all go to the office together in a van. We stick together while we’re there. “

  Too much, frankly. I could use a little more alone time to nose around.

  “And the van drops us right back at our cars. I keep my doors locked and come straight home.”

  Except for the night I met Trip for breakfast. No need to mention that.

  “And Nick always waits up for me.”

  Nick’s a night owl and would be up anyway. No need to mention that, either.

  “Besides, it’s just for a couple of nights, tops. Once I retrieve that recorder, I’m gone. Nick, help me out here.”

  “She’s right,” Nick said. “Compared to some of the stuff she did as a reporter, this is nothing. Tell her about that double murder at the milk plant. Man, I will never look at a carton of chocolate milk the same way again.”

  Baba glared at me. I glared at Nick. He grinned.

  “Not helping?”

  “Not helping. What Nick is trying to say is that this is a safe job.”

  Grinding and soul sucking, but safe.

  “Yeah, when you think about it, you were in more danger when you actually worked for the public relations firm,” he said. “I mean, you were probably sharing an office with a potential murderer.”

  “So not helping.”

  “Hey, I’m just saying.”

  But something he said sparked an idea. “Why don’t you give us a minute,” I said to Nick.

  “OK, I’m taking Lucy for a walk.”

  Once they left, I took Baba’s hand. For her part, she’d fixed her gaze on the living room wall. From her expression, I was expecting the wall to give way any minute.

  “No one at my former job knows I’m cleaning their offices. By the time I get there, they’ve all gone home. It’s just the cleaning crew. If one of my ex-coworkers wanted to hurt me, they’d come here. I need you here. To help me protect everybody.”

  “Humf!”

  “Not buying it?”

  “Don’t kid a kidder.” My father’s words in Baba’s voice. Who said she had a limited grasp of English?

  “They really don’t know I’m there. That’s the point. I am careful. And I will come straight home. But I can’t take you with me.”

  “What Nicholas said is true? About reporter job?”

  “Uh, yeah. Although usually we show up after something bad happens, not during. The milk plant thing was kind of an exception. Rare. Very rare.”

  “Humf!”

  * * *

  A half hour later, after I parked at Gravois & Co., I phoned Nick.

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Hard to tell. She’s been locked in the bathroom since you left.”

  “Crying?”

  “Cleaning. If she doesn’t come out soon, I’m gonna be knocking on your neighbor’s door.”

  “Good luck with that. Oh, and Nick?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Keep Thursday evening open. I need your help with a little errand.”

  I swung out of the car and made my
self a promise. After this night was over, Coleman murder or no Coleman murder, I was going to sleep for twelve hours straight.

  It hadn’t exactly been a restful weekend. And a houseful of people made afternoon naps a thing of the past.

  Well, as soon as I snagged that digital recorder, I was out of here. I could live off Peter’s check until my freelance money started coming in and keep normal, non-vampire hours again.

  Gravois was a riddle wrapped in a hairy enigma. First, he handed me an envelope. Inside, I found two fifties—most of my pay from last week. Even eight dollars light, it was a hundred dollars more than I was expecting.

  Then he announced we were cleaning floors eight, nine, and ten—and put me and Elia on toilet duty. I pleaded lingering bronchitis. He was unmoved. Maria and Olga giggled. I’m guessing I know who had toilet patrol on Friday.

  I pulled them aside. “Look, I’m still feeling lousy, and I need a break from the fumes tonight. If you volunteer to clean the toilets, he won’t care. He just wants someone to do it.” I held up a fifty.

  Maria looked over at Olga and snatched the bill. Then Olga put out her hand. I placed the other fifty in her palm.

  Easy come, easy go.

  Elia had been watching the transaction warily from a distance. “We’re on dusting duty,” I told her.

  “You are funny,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Yeah, that’s me. A little ray of sunshine. Let’s hit that conference room first.”

  Since leaving C&W last week, I’d worked harder and longer than I ever had in my life. I’d earned a grand total of $120—less than half of what my bank had charged me in penalty fees.

  And I’d just given away most of it.

  When I turned the knob on the conference room door, it didn’t budge.

  Stubbornly, I tried again.

  “Ocupado!” an irritated male voice yelled from within. Walters.

  What was he doing here? Didn’t any of these people have homes?

  “Excúseme, porfavor,” I replied, doing what I thought was a halfway decent accent.

  Elia rolled her eyes.

  “Hey, one of my college roommates was from Mexico City,” I stage whispered.

  “So you can speak Spanish?”