by Dan Flanigan
As he neared the archway, he noticed drops of dried liquid on the floor. Maybe it’s the red paint that they used for the trim on the house. He passed through the archway into a narrow hallway. The basement walls were crumbling. Chunks of the plaster littered the floor. He decided to follow the drops of paint. Maybe it’s not red paint, he thought, as he turned a corner in the hallway.
The man—huge, ugly, and fierce—stood not more than five yards away, a couple of long strides away. His hands and arms and the front of his shirt were spotted with red liquid that was not paint.
O’Keefe almost choked on his fear. He wanted to run, but he was frozen like a rabbit freezes when panic seizes it and it is so scared it cannot think to run. He decided he would go for the giant’s testicles. He would keep his hands high as if he were going to box with this monster, but he would kick out with his foot when the giant was a stride away from him. If his kick proved true, the giant would double over in pain, and then his knee would crush the giant’s nose back against his skull. Then he would run. To the van. Where the weapons were. But if he missed the first kick, it would probably be all over for him. The giant’s upper arms looked like the haunches of a steer.
“What is it, Roy?”
The female voice came from somewhere behind the monster.
“Roy?”
The giant said nothing.
The woman came into view. O’Keefe said nothing. He couldn’t tell whether she was the secretary he was supposed to be meeting or the giant’s accomplice in some unspeakable butchery. She had red hair, but there was no blood on her.
“Mr. O’Keefe?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, trying to keep his voice from breaking. “I knocked, but nobody answered.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t expect you this early. Come on in.”
O’Keefe waited for the giant to move. He was not going to pass him, give the giant a chance to grab and crush him. The woman acted as if everything was just fine, but O’Keefe was not so sure. The blood . . .
“Roy is pelting, Mr. O’Keefe. Skinning. Mink.”
O’Keefe acted like he knew that all along.
“Come in, and we’ll show you how it’s done. Come on, Roy.”
Roy turned abruptly and lumbered into the room the woman had come from.
She smiled and held out a hand with five bright red fingernails for him to shake. “I’m Jane,” she said.
“Is that Tarzan?”
Jane laughed, and he liked her as soon as she laughed. She was forty or close to it and rather pretty. She did not need as much makeup as she wore.
He followed her into a typical basement room that contained a typical basement workbench, except that blood was spattered all over it. On the floor O’Keefe saw three devastated piles: a pile of mink bodies with the fur still on; a pile of mink skins or furs, he didn’t know what to call them; and a pile of skinned mink bodies, naked and desolate, exposed and violated.
“Show him how it’s done, Roy.”
Roy grabbed one of the still furry bodies and affixed it to a small machine on the worktable.
“That’s a pelting machine,” she said.
O’Keefe was not really paying attention. He hadn’t come for this, and he wanted it to be over quickly. Roy operated a lever on the machine, and the machine neatly sliced and stripped the mink’s fur from its body. Then Roy flung the fur onto its pile and the little naked bloody body onto its pile. It seemed to O’Keefe that a crime of some kind had just been committed.
“Interesting,” he lied. “How much is that one worth?”
“Hardly anything,” she said. “It’s not a high-quality mink in the first place, and this isn’t the pelting season. But it would just starve to death otherwise. We’re running out of food. We’re trying to keep the best ones alive as long as we can.”
Roy grabbed another mink. O’Keefe turned away. The woman must have sensed his discomfort. She smiled, and it reminded him of a nurse’s smile just before she pokes you with the hypodermic needle.
“Would you like to see the live ones?”
He nodded.
“Come on.”
He followed her back through the hallway and the garage. The light blinded him for a moment when he walked out into the sun. He pushed the sleeves of his cotton sweater up to his elbows. It had turned into an Indian summer day. Roy had not accompanied them, which pleased O’Keefe immensely. He had started to tag along, but she had said, “Roy, why don’t you go ahead and finish up the pelting and then clean up in here?” Roy complied, saying nothing, and O’Keefe wondered if the giant could talk. He followed her onto the dark path that led through the trees toward a hole of light, where the stand of trees ended. O’Keefe thought of Hansel and Gretel abandoned in the forest.
She stopped suddenly and turned around to face him, and he thought for a moment that she would start crying. “I’m afraid your investors aren’t going to get much of their money back,” she blurted. “Everything’s mortgaged to the hilt. There’s no money left, at least any that I know about.”
“What happened to it?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t.”
She turned around and started walking down the path again. They emerged from the grove of trees into a large field. The cages were built up off the ground and lined down the field in a series of long, parallel rows. There were more cages than he had expected, at least two hundred, he estimated, maybe more. He caught up to her and walked alongside her.
“About a year ago, Lenny started keeping the bank accounts to himself.” She was still very troubled and seemed to be trying her best to give a complete answer to his question about the money. “I suppose it’s the same old story. It just got frittered away. Houses, cars, jewelry, trips to exotic places. Lenny and Tag lived pretty high on the hog.”
“Tag?”
“Lenny’s wife. That’s her name—‘Tag.’”
“Funny name, huh?”
“If there was any money left, I guess Lenny took it with him. But I still can’t believe he took off. It’s not like him to do something like that.”
“Maybe he didn’t want to stay around to face the music.”
“That’s not it,” she scoffed. “You don’t know Lenny. That wouldn’t have scared him a bit. He’d have explained it all away and probably sold the same people enough contracts to start another mink farm.”
They were walking between two rows of cages that faced each other. More than half the cages were empty. From the occupied cages, small, dark creatures peered at them through the wire mesh that covered the doors. He peered back at them. The cages were quite large. A man could sleep in one of them if he tucked up his feet a little. The minks seemed to know what fate had in store for them—either starvation or Roy and his pelting machine. He had a strong urge to start opening the cage doors and set them free. What the hell kind of people wanted to make their fortune off killing minks and skinning them?
“The investors would travel down here. In their campers, mostly. The whole family. And he’d bring them down here to the cages. And he’d point to one of the cages and say, ‘There, Mr. and Mrs. McGillicuddy, those are your minks, the very ones.’ And then, a week later, he’d show Mr. and Mrs. Jones the same minks and tell them the same thing.”
“So you knew what he was doing?”
“Is this for the record?”
He liked her and did not feel like lying to her. He lied to so many people. It went with the job.
“Maybe,” he said.
“Who cares anyway? What can they get from me anyway?” She silently answered her own questions. The answers were “no one” and “nothing.”
“I didn’t really know the first couple of years what was going on,” she continued. “The money just rolled right in here and rolled right back out again. For two years he paid them like clockwork. Incredible returns on their money. Double their money in a year sometimes. I know. I wrote the checks. Most of them were happy to reinvest it. Wouldn’t you be?”
He said nothing, but yes, he would have been, and he remembered what Harrigan had said. “One born every minute. I bet they’ll sell you a mink or two while you’re down there.”
“And who was I to figure anything out?” she asked herself. “Just a small-town girl not even smart enough to get out. The high school homecoming queen gone to plump. Do you believe that, Mr. O’Keefe? You’re looking at the 1969 homecoming queen for Boondocks County Consolidated High School.”
“Why shouldn’t I believe it?”
She was growing too heavy and getting tired, but you could see in her face, in the large, round intelligent eyes, the pretty nose, the soft skin just above the freckles on her cheekbones, why they had crowned her their queen.
“Knocked up the night of the last football game. I never even graduated. Divorced now. Two kids. Stuck. Stuck in every way you can be stuck. So what did I know? But then I started understanding how damn little, really, the pelts brought when he sold them. I mean, these are real crappy minks, real inferior breeds. And the cost of feeding them is outrageous. And the way Lenny and Tag lived so high on the hog. Well, it became obvious, even to one such as me, that the place didn’t even break even, let alone produce those incredible returns on investment.”
“A Ponzi scheme.”
“What’s Ponzi?”
“Not a what, a who. It’s the guy’s name who invented the scheme. Back in the 1920s or something. You give your investors these fabulous profits. But it’s not from the investment at all. It’s from the money put in by new investors. But as you bring in more and more investors, you have to come up with more and more money to keep all those suckers happy. And there’s only so many suckers out there, so it gets harder and harder to get new investors. And then, well, that’s all she wrote.”
“But what’s funny is that Lenny really ran out of new investors a long time ago. A year ago or more. He just stopped selling. I think he convinced himself he’d become a country gentleman or something. He fell in love with the farm and the lakes and the big house on the hill and the trips to Florida and Arizona. And he just stopped taking care of business.”
“Florida and Arizona?”
“Yeah. Especially Arizona. Tucson or somewhere down that way. They loved it. Or at least Tag did. She’s a horsewoman type.”
“And no new investors in the last year?”
“Hardly any. Except for Mr. Canada.”
“Who’s that?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen him, never talked to him, don’t know his address, don’t know his phone number. Lenny was real secretive about him. But he poured some bucks in here in the last year, I’ll tell you that.”
“Do you think Mrs. Parker knows who Mr. Canada is?”
“I doubt it. She always acted like she was too good for this Mickey Mouse farm and this Mickey Mouse town. As long as Lenny brought the money in, I don’t think she cared where it came from.”
O’Keefe stood in front of one of the cages, thinking about Mr. Canada and Lenny Parker and Lenny Parker’s wife, the woman with the strange name. He looked at the half-starved mink inside the cage. It was afraid but did not cower. It paced back and forth at the rear of the cage, head to the front even as it turned to pace back the other way, muscles taut, always watching O’Keefe’s and Jane’s hands. It knew that it was the hands that killed. Its body seemed brave, even insolent. Only in its eyes could you see the fear. The eyes knew it was trapped, and doomed.
“Imagine that,” he said. “All your life in a cage. Your destiny—screw your brains out until Roy comes after you with his pelting machine.”
CHAPTER 7
ON THE WAY back to the house she kept talking, volunteering information. She appeared to be open and candid, withholding nothing, but she would be hiding something, and it would be O’Keefe’s job to discover that hidden thing.
“I was here from the first,” she said. “I helped remodel the house, build the cages, type the sales materials, everything. It was exciting. Most exciting thing this little burg had ever seen. Something special. Lenny and Tag just knocked the town off its feet. It was kind of like a fairy tale.”
“Are any of the investors from around here?”
“I don’t think so. He never tried to sell anything around here. He went out of his way not to.”
Back in the basement Roy was busy pelting the last of the minks, and he did not bother to look up at them when they passed through the pelting area. His gut hung over his belt, but there was no fat on those arms.
O’Keefe followed her upstairs, and she showed him around. The kitchen had been redone in high-modern style. The front of the house had been transformed into office space. Lenny had a large office next to an even larger conference room.
“Do you have a picture of Lenny?” O’Keefe asked.
“I’ve got better than that. I’ve got a video of one of the investor seminars. You can see Lenny in action.”
In the conference room she inserted a cassette into a VCR hooked up to a big-screen television. A man in his early thirties smiled at the camera and a room full of people. He stood next to a large American flag on a pole and a row of cardboard dollar signs as tall as the man himself. In front of the dollar signs was a stand holding flip charts. Like Anderson and Lufkin, the man had a small American flag pinned to the lapel of his suit. Lenny Parker was not handsome, he was pretty. His short hair looked like it never had to be combed. He is more than clean cut, O’Keefe thought, he is razor cut. The man on the TV smiled patronizingly at his audience. His smile told them that he understood, that he was harmless and loving, that he had only their best interests at heart, and above all, that he was sincere. “Such a nice young man,” is what people would say about him.
“Is everybody here?” he asked sweetly.
O’Keefe’s dislike of Lenny deepened considerably as soon as he heard his voice, which oozed a studied, cloying gentleness. It could have been a kindergarten Sunday school class. The voice soothed and coaxed. A close shot of Lenny. Soft, smooth skin, no flaw in his complexion. O’Keefe looked for the telltale flicker of a muscle in Lenny’s face, but he could not find even a flicker, not even a hint of nervousness. O’Keefe tried to look into Lenny’s eyes, but they revealed nothing. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, O’Keefe thought, Lenny Parker’s soul was neither good nor evil, it was vacant. The only odd thing about the eyes was their brightness, brighter than they should have been—they proclaimed a triumph that had not been fairly won.
“You just can’t know,” Lenny said. “I can’t find the words to express how much Tag and I appreciate you being here today. And you’re not going to regret it either. Because a large number of the people in this room are going to embark today on the road to a new life of prosperity and freedom from financial cares. That’s just a dream for most of the world. Most of the hard-working people of this country live a life of anxiety about their financial future . . .”
Jane hit the pause button on the remote control device.
“Do you want to hear the whole rigmarole or just the highlights?”
“Just the highlights.”
She hit the “Fast-Forward” button and held it for a few seconds.
“How old is Lenny?”
“Lenny and Tag both turned thirty-three this year.”
When she hit the “Play” button again, Lenny had folded his hands in front of him.
“The world’s just turned its back on the simple things, the true things, the real things, the things that made this country great. What’s happened to patriotism? To morality? To religion? To financial responsibility? And you know what I mean by that. I mean not spending more than you earn, whether you’re a country or a family.”
He had driven the last point home with his voice and a finger pointed at the audience. The applause was spontaneous, honest, loud.
“Look where people are investing their money today. The stock market, for example. Why, you might as well just go on out to Las Vegas and throw your money down on
the craps table. Who knows what’s going on in that stock market? Nobody. Not really. One day it’s up, the next day it’s down. Some guys come on TV in five-hundred-dollar suits and act like they know what’s going on. But just ask them to predict what’s going to happen the next day, let alone the next year. It’s an open fraud, that’s what it is. “What about Social Security? I don’t even need to say anything about that, do I? The biggest con scheme ever foisted off on the American public.”
The applause was louder than before, and a few people whistled and stomped their feet.
“How about company pension plans? Look what happened to the railroad workers. Look what’s happening all over. They’re going broke. They can’t pay the benefits. These companies are making promises to the hard-working people of this country that they can’t keep. And a promise you can’t keep is a lie.”
Heads in the audience nodded vigorously in agreement. One woman wept.
“How about your IRA? How about the money you’ve got in the bank? Well, those bankers are giving your money to every hustler that walks in off the street. They’ve given it to foreign countries. Billions of it. So we’ll have to fight wars to ever collect it. Then you say, ‘But Lenny, my deposits are insured by the full faith and credit of the United States government.’ And I say, ‘What faith? What credit?’”
Jane hit the “Fast-Forward” button again. The speeded-up film gave Lenny’s presentation the flavor of one of those old silent-movie slapstick comedies. This is how Lenny’s pitch ought to be shown, O’Keefe thought. The fast-forward dissolved the phony sincerity of Lenny’s performance into farce.
Lenny had not yet told a lie, only a series of small truths that he manipulated to serve a larger, unspoken falsehood. The falsehood would be the next item on the agenda. Lenny brandished a pointer at various charts and graphs. He wore a Rolex wristwatch and a gold pinky ring with a big diamond embedded in it.
“You know, it’s the simple things, the real things, the true things, the things we’ve turned our back on that are going to save us from the terrible predicament we’ve gotten ourselves into.”