Some Books Aren’t for Reading

by Howard Marc Chesley

  “Mr. Firestone isn’t in. Shall I leave word for him?”

  “Do you know when he’ll be back?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t.”

  “Yes please. Ask him to call me as soon as possible.”

  I tried to do some work while I waited for Chuck to call me back. Of course I couldn’t. I checked the price of the stock and it hadn’t moved from $2⅛. I decided that I would make sure that the money was in the bank and that the check hadn’t been cashed. I couldn’t access that account online, so I called Wells Fargo.

  When I reached the automated Wells Fargo menu I was asked to key in my account number. I didn’t know the number, but I had the checkbook in the car and I retrieved it and was about to call Wells Fargo again when my phone rang. I expected Chuck.

  “Mr. Fourchette?”

  I had no idea who this was.

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Ashton LaVin in the accounts section of Seymour Schein on a recorded line. I’m calling because we have a deficit in your trading account here. It’s for twelve thousand six hundred and fifty-nine dollars.”

  Shit.

  “Yes, I know about it.”

  “Normally we expect those deficits to be paid in a forty-eight-hour period. Is that all right with you?”

  “No problem.”

  “Then we can expect payment before close of business tomorrow?”

  “Okay.”

  “If you like you can give me a bank account number and I can arrange transfer right away on the phone.”

  “No, that’s okay. I’ll take care of it tomorrow.”

  “How will you be doing that?”

  “I’ll stop by the office with a check.”

  “That’s great, Mr. Fourchette. I’ll note it on your account here.”

  “Okay. I have another call and I need to go.”

  “No problem. Have a good day.”

  I hung up and redialed Wells Fargo. At the prompt I entered the account number for the joint account and then my social security number. I was greeted with the voice of a woman who sounded like she was in Texas.

  “Hello. May I have your account number please?”

  “I just keyed it into the phone.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll need it anyway.”

  “Then why did I have to key it in?”

  What did I care? Why was I wasting time with this? I’ve already spent more time than if I gave her the fucking number. She replied in a disarmingly folksy voice.

  “You know, honey, people ask me that question all the time and I never got a good answer myself.”

  I gave her the number and she laughed warmly when she asked me for my social. She was clearly good people. For a moment I felt like I had an ally and I wanted to believe that somehow she might be helpful in getting me through this.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in Beaumont, Texas.”

  “That’s near Galveston, isn’t it?”

  “We like to say that Galveston is near Beaumont.”

  I forced a chuckle as I waited another second for her to pull up my account on her computer.

  “Okay, darling. I show an account balance of four thousand three hundred and twenty-seven dollars and sixty-seven cents.”

  “What?”

  The account was down $105,000. Obviously the check had been deposited immediately and cleared.

  “Four thousand three hundred and twenty-seven dollars and sixty-seven cents. The last debit was for check number one hundred and five for one hundred thousand dollars even.”

  “When did you receive that check?”

  “It shows it was paid yesterday. Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Fourchette?”

  “No. You’ve done it.” I hung up. I was oddly, disconnectedly, ethereally calm for a moment. Probably the same calm you feel an instant after a knife has plunged into you. And then when I picked up the phone my hand was shaking. I dialed Chuck’s office again.

  “This is Mitchell Fourchette. I’m calling again for Mr. Firestone.”

  I pressed my arm on the desk to stop the shaking. There was nothing I could do about the quaver in my voice.

  “I have your message for him, Mr. Firestone.”

  “Did he pick it up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know if he picked up his message?”

  “I leave it for him on his computer. I don’t know if he picked it up.”

  “Is he in his office?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Can you go look? It’s important.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t do that. But I did give him your message.”

  “Then he received it.”

  “I’m sorry. I have another call. I have to put you on hold.”

  Then I heard a dial tone. She had hung up on me. I called back.

  “This is Mitchell Fourchette. We were disconnected.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Fourchette. I have left another message for Mr. Firestone.”

  “Would you tell him that if he doesn’t call back within the hour that I’m going to have to go to my attorney.”

  “I will give him that message.”

  This time I hung up. I didn’t really have an attorney. True and I hired a real estate attorney for two hours to go over the real estate contracts when we bought the house, but he was just a tired old guy in a sleepy office in a fading two-story building in Marina Del Rey.

  I got in the Volvo and drove to Century City. I parked underground and traveled on the escalator to the elevator bank and then ascended to the twenty-fifth floor.

  On the elevator I thought about True and what I would tell her. Should I portray myself as hapless and vulnerable—a victim of a professional scammer? That would make me weak in her eyes, but relieve me of some responsibility. I didn’t want to appear weak to True. I knew that our bond was based partly on my strength.

  I could just open up, tell her the whole truth, about how I misread the market and lost the money in JDSU and how I was humiliated and didn’t want to tell her—so much so that I risked everything for a chance to set things straight. It was a foolish action driven by my desperation not to lose the things which were most dear to me. In the end it was only money that had been lost. The elevator doors opened on the twenty-fifth floor.

  The waiting room was empty save the receptionist.

  “Hi. I’m going to see Chuck Firestone.”

  She was surprised when I continued resolutely past the reception desk directly to the office hallway.

  “I’m sorry, but you can’t… Is he expecting you?”

  I hadn’t been to Chuck’s office, but the suite wasn’t that large and I could cover it in a minute or two. The receptionist followed me and although I tried to sublimate my anger, I think she could tell from the way I walked that it wouldn’t be good to get in my way.

  I saw a young ex-college football player type wearing khakis and a white shirt.

  “Where’s Chuck?” I inquired in a polite voice that may have been in conflict with my aggressive stride.

  “I think he went into Nate’s office.” He pointed to a door down the hall, not really taking heed of me until he saw the receptionist in pursuit. I saw the door that read NATHAN ROOS on it. It was a quarter open. I opened it the rest of the way to find Chuck standing in front of the desk of a natty, silver-haired guy, presumably Nate Roos, a partner in the firm.

  I planted myself inside the door. Chuck’s jaw dropped. Nate looked to the receptionist who shrugged to indicate that she tried to keep me out.

  “I tried to reach you, Chuck. You didn’t answer my calls.”

  “Nate, this is Mitchell Fourchette. He’s a client.”

  “I would have thought you would have called me,” I said to Chuck.

  “I’m sorry, I got backed up.”

  “You told me you wouldn’t cash my check.”

  Chuck feigned surprise.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You told me you’d hold m
y check and wouldn’t cash it.”

  “There’s a misunderstanding here, Mitchell.”

  “Biogram is down to two and a half points and I’m completely ruined. You said you wouldn’t cash the check.”

  “Mitchell, we got you out. Not like Schein who are so fucking slow on the trigger that they closed out below your margin. You don’t owe us anything.”

  “You mean it’s all gone?”

  Chuck turned to Nate to explain, taking on the air that the worst part of what was happening was that I was embarrassing him in front of his boss.

  “Mitchell bought a position in Biogram from us.” Nothing about holding the check. Nothing about his assurances. Then he turned to me. “Nobody saw this coming. We all got hurt, Mitchell. Believe me we’re holding a lot more than you are.”

  “You said you were going to help me out! You lying, cheating motherfucker!!” I yelled and an instant later two broker/ex-USC linebacker types appeared behind me at the door.

  Chuck turned to Nate. “I’m sorry about this, Nate.”

  Nate replied to him as if I wasn’t there.

  “The guy’s just upset. I understand.”

  “Mitchell. I’m really sorry about what happened. But you can’t come in here and act this way. Do you understand?”

  Nate interjected addressing Chuck.

  “Did you tell Mr. Fourchette that you were going to hold back a check for him?”

  “No. Of course not.” He pretended to be insulted.

  “Nothing like that? Nothing that could be misinterpreted?”

  “Nothing.”

  Nate spoke calmly to me in defense of the liar. “The firm isn’t allowed by the SEC to hold checks. We try very hard to run this business by the book.”

  Chuck had the gall to look at me and nod his concurrence.

  “You are a lying motherfucker, Firestone!” I screamed. This was too much. It would not stand.

  I lunged for him and I was immediately grabbed by the two linebackers at the door. I squirmed, but it was a useless show. They pushed me against a wall and held me. The receptionist watched from the hallway.

  “Do you want me to call building security?” she asked.

  To my credit I saw the hopelessness of my situation and let my body go slack.

  “I don’t think that’s necessary,” Nate said.

  “The check isn’t legal. I signed my wife’s name.” I said after the guys eased their grip on me.

  Nate looked to Chuck who averted his eyes in response.

  “The check requires both our signatures. I signed hers. Chuck knew I did it.”

  There was a long pause while Nate considered what I had said.

  “Apparently the bank seems to be satisfied. If you forged a signature I would say that is more a problem for you than anyone else, Mr. Fourchette.”

  He was right, of course. There was the problem with the law on this issue and moreover there was the problem with True. I would have to tell her. The fact that I had totally depleted her father’s inheritance was not a secret I could keep forever.

  But I didn’t tell her that night. Not after we ate takeout Indian food from Hurry Curry down the street (Caleb is a young fan of samosas) and not after we all worked in the garden, planting tomato seedlings. It was light until eight o’clock and the sun bounced yellow into the garden off the side of our pale house and lit us all in a warm Kodachrome glow. True said that I seemed preoccupied but didn’t ask me about how our investments were doing.

  The next day on my way to work I avoided passing Chuck’s house, partly because it was a painful reminder of recent events and partly I didn’t trust myself not do something foolish. I didn’t have a solution to my problem but even in my agitated state I knew it wasn’t to be found by pounding on his door. Also his proximity to my house and to True made me want to keep a boundary between us. Alternate routes were easy on the square grid of our neighborhood.

  On my way in to work I stopped at the bank and took a cash transfer check from my Wells Fargo MasterCard for twelve thousand dollars and then stopped by and paid Seymour Schein. For most of the day I thought about the ways I could replace the money. I looked at all my credit cards and they amounted to about $40,000 minus the $12,000 I had already borrowed. I could try to squirrel some money away from my paycheck, but that wouldn’t amount to more than a thousand a month and I’d also have to pay back the credit card debt.

  Any attempt to get money back from Roos and Selvin was fraught with problems. As far as I could tell, what happened was a matter for the civil courts or formal arbitration. I would never be able to pursue it without True finding out. Moreover, whatever chances I had of succeeding in court were subsumed by my forging of True’s signature.

  I could have just admitted that I forged the signature, take my lumps with True and then pursued a lawsuit. But it had to boil down to my word against Chuck’s, and I didn’t know how a jury would be able to ferret out the truth.

  A simple solution would be to tell True, ask her to attest that the signature was really hers or was signed for her with her knowledge (I think there’s a legal term for that) and then I could try my hand at suing them. As I said, however, I wasn’t ready at that point to open up to True. Not that I didn’t expect that ultimately she would vouchsafe the signature. She would have no other choice. And I trusted we could get past that in our relationship. I wasn’t there yet.

  I considered robbing a bank, more as an exercise in lateral thinking than a real alternative. I considered it enough to find out that the FBI statistic for solved bank robberies is a tempting 18 percent. Also in the realm of out-of-the-box thinking I ran the suicide scenario. I have $100,000 in life insurance with True as beneficiary, but if the idea was to replenish the inheritance account without True knowing, this was less than half the amount required and without me around to supervise covering my tracks she would obviously find out what happened anyway. Anyway I felt cornered, and angry with myself, but not yet suicidal.

  It occurred to me that if Chuck was an heir to the Firestone tire family, perhaps I could recover something from them. I could call Firestone père and tell him that his son was up to no good and that I would drag Chuck and the whole family and the good name of Firestone Tires in the mud unless he made good on my loss. Or instead of a threat I could appeal to his better nature and rely on his pity and sense of fair play to make me whole again.

  I searched the Firestone genealogy from original tire maker Harvey Firestone on the internet but I couldn’t find a Chuck or a Charles that was the right age and geography that fit a scion of the Firestone family tree. There were, however, innumerable Charles Firestones that didn’t fit. When I tried to connect my Chuck Firestone with Roos and Selvin I found out that he was listed on their roster as Charles A. Firestone, but I couldn’t glean anything else about him from their website, nor did I find anything revealing about what appeared to be a Charles A. Firestone (probably the same) who had appeared in a few wealth management seminars around town. I put him together in a search with both “St. Paul’s Academy” and then with “Oyster Bay, New York” and got nothing. Like everything else about him, his provenance was in doubt.

  I considered Vegas. I did have money left on the credit cards. I could borrow $10,000 and take a shot. Roulette seemed most likely as my card skills were nonexistent. In roulette I have a 47.5 percent chance of winning at each turn. If I could win at the first turn, which was definitely doable, I could put my $10,000 stake aside and play the rest with house money. Then at least there would be nothing lost. But although I tried to tell myself that my string of bad luck meant that things were about to turn around, I couldn’t help but feel doomed before the start.

  I wanted to contain this until I found a solution. True did not make a habit of reading financial statements and she left online access to our bank accounts to me. While I knew that I could not remain indefinitely on a path of nondisclosure, there was not much pressing me to tell True right away. There was too much at stake not to app
ly the best possible timing. I didn’t want to get it wrong.

  And so I waited. I think I turned inward during this period. I tried to be pleasant and participative. I had early on made peace with the clients at Turtle Wax by saying that my son had taken a fall and had to be taken to the emergency room but thankfully he was all right. (I don’t like using Caleb for this purpose and have an eerie feeling that somehow saying these things invites karmic pushback.) I worked late hours and brought home flowers and little food treats. We took a drive north past Ojai in the Volvo to see the fresh wildflowers on the Carrizo Plain—Apricot globe mallows, Canterbury bells, fiddleneck, and acres of poppies. But these simple pleasures were barely an escape from the gnawing truth.

  One night we left Caleb with a neighborhood sitter and went to the movies to see Gladiator with Russell Crowe. The film was a bit of a disappointment. Afterwards, we bought frozen yogurt and ate it in the car. True eats at half my speed, so I usually finish mine and drive home while she eats hers.

  “The stock market went up today,” she said between bites.

  In fact, there had been a small rally after a series of disastrous days. But True never talked about the market. For a brief moment I feared she knew something and my stomach felt light.

  “Really?”

  “That’s what the paper said. It said that stocks have been going down, but they went up today.”

  “They’ve been doing an up and down thing for a while.”

  “I was wondering how we were doing.”

  What did she know? Clearly this was the time to come clean if there ever was a time.

  “So you’re interested after all?”

  I used driving as a reason not to look her in the eye.

  “Of course I’m interested.”

  “We’re doing okay.”

  “Are we making money or losing money? You can tell me.”

  She said it sweetly, signaling that if I chose the latter it would be okay. She couldn’t know the real truth and maintain this calm.

  In retrospect I think I should at least have let her know about the $50,000 that I had lost in JDSU. That would have at least been an entrée into more difficult matters. But I had recently been schooled to distrust my instincts and maybe that is why I chose not to tell her about our mutual problem.