by Dan Flanigan
There had been sin and repentance. Soon the collection basket would be passed.
“That’s why a mink contract is the best investment there is right now. That’s why a mink contract is going to be the best investment ten years or twenty or thirty years from now too.”
“All you’ve got going for you is . . .” Lenny paused to heighten the drama. “Nature! Imagine that. Nature itself on your side. The instinct of the mink is to breed, and breed, and breed some more. So you start out with just two minks. And those two aren’t going to waste any time producing another six or eight. And what did it cost you to have ten minks all of a sudden? The price of some food and a few cages. And then those ten pair off. There are five pairs there, each producing six or eight more minks. And on and on. Geometric progression.”
O’Keefe remembered that it was the fur trappers and traders who had first thrust into the virgin womb of the American West, standard-bearers of a new empire of insatiable growth and unlimited consumption, hacking their way through the helpless forests, slaughtering the wild, doomed creatures that sheltered there. It had been a miserable enterprise all in all, but there had been adventure in it. Their souls must have quivered in delight at the awesome spectacle presented continuously before them. Here were their descendants, there on the big-screen TV. They bred minks in cages and devoured them with pelting machines.
“And you don’t have to wait for your money. Not like real estate or pension plans or Social Security or IRAs. You take some of those minks right away and sell the fur. And all of a sudden you’ve got your money back. And you’ve still got all these minks going on doing what Nature tells them to do.”
Jane engaged the “Fast-Forward” button again. O’Keefe looked away. He did not want to watch this Keystone Cop anymore.
“Here’s the big finale,” she said.
The room was hushed. Lenny bowed his head. He seemed about to cry.
“My family . . .” Again, a long pause for effect. “We were so poor. And that was all right. For me, at least. Thank God for this country, where a poor boy still can be anything he wants to be. At least they haven’t taken that away from us yet.”
More applause. More bobbing heads, nodding in vigorous and wholehearted partnership with their deceiver. More women crying, wounded to the soul. Ah, the shameless perfidy of the system we live in!
“But my parents . . .well, it was different for them. They died in a welfare home. I was still too young and poor myself to be able to do anything for them. I was barely out of high school. I visited them every week though. And it was a terrible place. A filthy place. They never complained. But I could see it in their eyes. They died in want, and in despair.”
Real tears glistened on his face. “They had worked so hard all their lives,” he said, building to an anguished, raging climax. And then he shouted: “AND THAT WAS THEIR REWARD! TO DIE IN WANT AND IN DESPAIR!”
The tears stopped, and his voice became quiet and gentle again. “And I vowed right then and there to dedicate my life to helping the hard-working people of this country escape that terrible trap that my parents fell into in their dear old age.”
“I’ve seen enough,” O’Keefe said, trying to conceal his disgust.
“One more thing.”
She fast-forwarded the tape for several seconds. Lenny still stood there talking. O’Keefe never wanted to hear Lenny speak again, unless in a courtroom with Harrigan mocking and savaging him on cross-examination.
“So those of you who are ready now to begin a new life of solid, real prosperity, you’re welcome to come up here and sign right now. But first, remember, I told you I’d have a surprise for you. Remember, I told you to keep your ticket stubs?”
“Did the investors pay to go to those seminars?” O’Keefe asked in amazement. Jane nodded.
“Well,” Lenny continued, “we’re going to have a raffle, and guess what the prize is?”
He extended his left arm in presentation of something off camera. She walked into the picture wearing a full-length mink coat. The women in the audience sighed collectively in praise of the coat. O’Keefe nearly sighed himself, but not in praise of the coat. She smiled at the audience, but her eyes bore a message of cool disdain. She pirouetted like a fashion model. She was tall like a model but not so thin. Her long, lush hair made the coat look shabby by comparison. Completing her pirouette, she faced the audience again. She seemed to know what a tawdry exhibition this was, but she was a thing apart, and she knew that too. “You can’t touch me, not really,” she seemed to be saying. It may have been arrogance, or it may have been an admirable natural dignity, O’Keefe couldn’t tell which. And he thought he detected another, more tender thing that seemed something like sadness. Her beauty lanced at his longing like a scalpel slitting open a vein. Watching her, he thought his heart might break. He tried to look into her eyes. Clear aqua pools, infinitely deep. There was something in the eyes he had seen before but could not identify now. Then she walked out of the picture without even saying goodbye.
CHAPTER 8
“THAT’S TAG,” SAID Jane.
“You’re kidding.” That’s what Lenny had called her on the video, but it seemed beyond impossible to O’Keefe.
Jane’s laugh had a bitter edge. “She has that effect on everybody.” She sighed and switched off the VCR.
“Extraordinary in every way,” Anderson had said.
“Tell me about Mrs. Parker.” He tried to make his curiosity sound professional in nature. Jane laughed that quick, bitter snort of a laugh again. “Maybe I should say ‘no comment.’ It will probably sound like sour grapes, but I don’t like her.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not really sure. It’s not because she’s haughty and stuck up, which she is. It’s not because she’s unfriendly, which she is. It’s because . . . it’s like there’s no feeling there. She’s ice. Dry ice. And she didn’t love Lenny . . .”
Well, Tag, you can’t be all bad then, O’Keefe thought.
“And he knew it too. The last conversation we had he started to cry and said, ‘Jane, I’ve lost her. I’ve lost her.’ And I wanted to tell him he was wrong. He didn’t lose her. He never had her in the first place. You just can’t have someone like Tag. She’s self-sufficient. Like an island.”
“Did she take off too?”
“No, she’s still here. Selling everything as fast as she can.” There was a moment of silence as they both thought about Tag. “Do you want to see the books and records now?”
“Yeah, but tell me about Lenny first.”
“Well, I thought he was a sweet guy. I mean, he lied a lot, but he was still a sweet guy. Sort of helpless really. You just saw him do the only thing he could do. Me and Roy did the rest. But the last year or so he changed. You couldn’t tell from one day to the next, sometimes from one hour to the next, what he was going to do or feel like. He was like . . . like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
He thought she might cry. Her secret had been easy to detect. She loved Lenny, and he had broken her heart. He guessed that she knew where Lenny had gone or that she had some way to contact him. If he could not coax that information from her over the next couple of days, he would tell Harrigan to take her deposition. She was the kind of person who would have difficulty lying under oath.
“How about those books and records?” he said.
“What do you want to see first?”
“The general ledger. Cancelled checks. Deposit slips. Do you have records of the investments and the investors?”
“I think so. Lenny handled all that at the end, and he may have taken some of it with him, but I’ll show you what’s still here.”
After she brought the items he wanted, she stood beside him, hesitantly, as if she did not want to leave.
“If I have any questions, I’ll take notes and ask you later,” he said.
“Okay. I’ll just go into the kitchen and have some coffee. Or maybe I’ll go downstairs and talk to Roy.”
“You mean th
e Incredible Hulk can talk?”
“He’s not as bad as he looks.”
“That’s not saying much.”
She smiled and walked away. A good person, O’Keefe thought. Lenny and his mink farm had given her a purpose in life, now both of them gone. Her future stretched out in front of her, empty and bleak. A part of her soul was dying.
The entries in the general ledger were cryptic and unrevealing. The larger deposits were labeled “investment” and sometimes “pelt sales.” Sales of pelts had brought in far more money than O’Keefe would have predicted. He made a note to ask Jane about that. Were there receipts from the sales? If mink pelts brought in that kind of money, then it was a much more lucrative business than Harrigan had thought. But Harrigan was almost never wrong about such things. As Jane had told him, investments had declined precipitously in the last year, but the investments that had been made, apparently by this “Mr. Canada,” were large amounts deposited every few weeks. He found a demand notice from a local bank threatening a lawsuit if certain loans were not paid in full immediately and made a mental note to go see the banker in the morning. The larger expenditures were labeled “farm improvements” and “mink purchases.” There were thousands of dollars of expense reimbursements and many more thousands of dollars of “loans” to Lenny Parker. On the back of one deposit slip someone had scribbled the word “Angie’s.” He wondered about that but saw no other references anywhere to that name.
The cancelled checks did not tell him much either. The loans and expense reimbursements to Lenny and the payments to the investors had been made by check. Yet no checks to Mr. Canada. His business was cash-and-carry all the way. And a little more than a year ago Lenny had started making large cash deposits and withdrawals. Many of these were not described in the general ledger. Lenny could have been stashing cash, but why then why had he so carefully documented the “loans”? Probably to seem honest, O’Keefe thought. Just like his sales pitch. Small truths in the service of a big lie.
A separate ledger book showed the amounts contributed by investors and the returns paid to them. Anderson had a sheet. Lufkin had a sheet. Both had invested more than they had admitted to at Harrigan’s office. He looked for Mr. Canada’s sheet. It should have been there between “Calkins” and “Carswell,” but that page had been clumsily ripped out.
JANE WAS SITTING at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee, when one of the lines lit up on the telephone in the kitchen. She tiptoed to the telephone and carefully lifted the receiver, which would make a small clicking sound on the other end of the line. She wondered how good a detective he really was and what he would do if he caught her listening.
“Hello,” a woman answered on the other end of the line. It was Mary, Harrigan’s wife.
“Is Mike there?”
“Who’s calling?”
“It’s Pete.”
“Well, can’t you say, ‘Hello’?”
“Sorry, Mary. Too preoccupied, I guess.”
“Everybody’s too preoccupied. That’s the trouble with the whole damn world.”
“Hello, Mary.”
“Hello, Pete.”
If Mary expected O’Keefe to say something else, he was unable to oblige her.
“I’ll get him,” she said.
Jane heard the woman raise her voice and say, “Mike, it’s for you. It’s Pete.”
Harrigan came on the line. He even had a speakerphone in his study at home. “Well, how much have you invested so far?”
“I think you’ve got a disaster here, Mike. No money in the bank. Everything’s mortgaged to the hilt. There’s a secretary here named Jane and a creature named Roy who helps around the place. Neither of them has been paid in a couple of weeks. Lenny’s flown the coop with any money that was left. His wife’s still here, but she’s selling everything they owned. I imagine she’ll be gone next.”
“Can you tell anything from the books and records?”
“Not much. It was sort of cash-and-carry around here this last year.”
“You mean Lenny was carrying off the cash.”
“Looks like it.”
“All right—here’s what we do. I’ll have the company in bankruptcy right away. That’ll hold the bank off for a while. Do they have a mortgage on the minks too?”
“They sure do.”
“You know what I tell my clients—never take collateral that eats.”
“Well, this collateral isn’t eating very well.”
“So the bank’ll have to cough up the money for the mink food to protect its collateral.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t know if the judge will give it to me, but I’ll try to get a restraining order against the wife to keep her from taking the money anywhere or spending it. We’ll ask the judge to make her give us an accounting. She’ll have to show us the money didn’t come out of the mink farm. I guess we can’t do anything about Lenny right now. We don’t have enough on him yet to get the authorities interested enough to chase him into whatever hole he’s crawled into. We’ll have to find him and pry that money back out of him ourselves.”
“Did you know that Lenny’s wife is Ernest Anderson’s daughter?”
“No. He didn’t tell me that, the old fart.”
Harrigan pondered in silence for a few moments, then said “Well, tough shit. It’s the investors as a group we have to protect, not Anderson personally or his daughter either. Have you talked to her yet?”
“No.”
“See if you can talk to her. She may be the only link to any money in this deal. Watch her. In fact don’t take your eyes off her. Try not to let her get out of town until after tomorrow. Tell her Daddy sent you or something. If I get lucky, I’ll have a restraining order by Monday afternoon. But if she gets out of town before we can serve the order on her, say ‘sayonara’ to her and the money too.”
“Is one of your clients a ‘Mr. Canada’?”
“Never heard of him. Funny name.”
“He’s got a bunch of money in this deal. All within the last year or so.”
“How much?”
“I can’t tell. Are you ready for this? The ledger sheet on him has been ripped out of the book.”
“Well, this is getting real interesting, isn’t it? Not the usual old humdrum stuff here. Why don’t you go see the wife right now? And I know I don’t have to tell you, but keep your eye on the money.”
“Always.”
Jane hung up the receiver as softly as she could and moved quickly back to the kitchen table. She just had time to pick up her coffee cup before O’Keefe came through the kitchen door.
“Finished already?”
“Not quite. Do you have a copy machine?”
“They repo’d it last week.”
“I have to go talk to Mrs. Parker if she’ll talk to me. But I’ve got to come back and take some notes. Can you wait for me?”
“Sure. I could use the overtime.”
O’Keefe laughed with her. She was made for joy, he thought, but life has furnished her something else altogether.
FROM THE FRONT window of the house Jane watched O’Keefe pull out of the parking lot and down the driveway into the trees. She certainly had not been expecting someone like him. She did not remember now exactly what she had expected. A hard-bitten type, a down-at-the-heels type, a suave type, anything but him. He looked like a college kid with his lavender sweater, blue jeans, and topsiders. He had called her “Ma’am” though he was probably older than her. He seemed like a boy who had prematurely aged. And what was a detective doing with a van like that, a real cockwagon? His interrogation of her had been superficial, like he wanted to avoid putting her on the spot. Some kind of detective! But why shouldn’t it end like it had begun, as a kind of comedy of errors, with not one person from beginning to end, from Lenny to O’Keefe, having the slightest idea what he was doing?
She walked into the conference room and looked at the ledgers and bank records he had been examining. Had th
ey told him anything? Was there really any mystery to solve? It had just been a bad idea, not even really a fraud. Lenny and Tag had just frittered the money away. All those “loans.” Well, she knew one thing. Lenny had sure not spent any of the money on her. The best she had rated was a weekend at the Marriott in St. Louis. And that had been early on. At the end the best she had rated was a few minutes on that couch over there, Lenny bucking and grunting on top of her. And if Tag had not kicked him out of bed at home, there probably would not even have been the couch.
For the last year Lenny had been nutty as a fruitcake. From one day to the next, Jane had not known where or even who he would be. Poor Lenny. His life had turned into a nightmare. When he had called last night, he had been super-paranoid again. He had wanted to know about everyone who had called or come by.
“Why don’t you just come on back?” she had asked him. “You’ll have them eating out of your hand again in a month.”
“You don’t understand,” he had whined. “It’s too late for that now.”
“Come off it, Lenny,” she had said in disgust. She was tired of his dramatics, his grandiosity, his paranoia. He had hung up on her then. She had cried. Maybe she was missing something. Maybe Lenny had reasons to be afraid that she did not know about. She remembered that the change in Lenny had begun about the same time Mr. Canada had started putting money into the place.
She sat down on the couch, her and Lenny’s love nest. It had never been much, Lenny and the mink farm, but it was the best thing that had happened to her since way back in high school when she had let Randy screw her that night, even though she had known it was the worst possible time. From cheerleader to mother in nine short months. She did not want to remember what her life was like before Lenny and his mink farm had come to town. Hanging around at the local saloons, picking up men and bringing them home for the night. One night she had been huffing and puffing away in bed with one of them, only to look up and see Anna, her six-year old, standing at the bedroom door watching. At least Lenny and the mink farm had rescued her from all that. But it was ending now in the same way everything else in her life had always ended. She was a few years older and had nothing to show for it except a broader behind. She brought her upturned palms to her eyes and tried to press back the welling tears with the tips of her fingers, but she broke down and bawled like a baby. She stretched out on the couch and grabbed hold of the cushions, as if her grip on them was the only thing that could keep her holding onto the world at all. Just when she thought she would never stop crying, she fell asleep.