‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Let’s go.’ I lead them to the car. As I walk, I realize at last whose face I just saw – who it was that ascended to the Old Dominion executive suite. The face was that of my neighbour – the man across the street, the carnivorous velociraptor with the bulbous head and feral eyes.
But that’s impossible. I saw the face for only an instant, and my brain – overtired, burdened by our recent humiliation at the sales meeting upstairs – surely must be playing a trick on me. As I climb into the passenger seat of Vanderbeek’s car, I try to put the episode out of my mind.
By the time we pull into Tao’s parking lot, an hour and a half later, I’ve succeeded, and I think no more about the man in the elevator, or the failed meeting, or the imminent termination of my short-lived career as a corporate turnaround specialist.
CHAPTER 13
Back in my office, I check my voicemail. There is just a solitary message from Gordon Kramer, ‘checking in’ and making sure I kept my appointment with Dr Liago yesterday – ‘or else’. I call Gordon back right away, and leave him a message that the appointment went fine. The last thing I need is for Gordon to think I went AWOL, and have him show up with a set of handcuffs at the Tao office building.
I glance at my watch. While this morning’s failed meeting at Old Dominion means I won’t be bringing any new cash in through the front door, at least I can stop it from leaving out the back.
It’s time to pay a visit to the corporate embezzler who has been stealing millions of dollars from my company. I finger the piece of paper where I wrote the address of the thief – the real address, where the money actually winds up: 56 Windmere Avenue, Sanibel.
It’s time to pay a visit to 56 Windmere Avenue.
My phone rings. It’s a soft muted tone. The Caller ID says ‘Reception’.
I pick up. ‘Yes, Amanda?’
‘You have a second, Jim?’
I’m already on my feet, the phone receiver wedged against my shoulder, the paper with the Windmere address clutched in my hand. ‘Actually I’m on my way out the door—’
‘There’s someone who wants to see you.’
‘Now?’ I have no appointments scheduled. It must be a salesman – someone selling printer toner or payroll services. ‘I don’t have time. Just take a card and tell him I’ll be in touch.’
‘Jim,’ Amanda says, and I realize now that her voice sounds urgent. ‘His name is Tom Mitchell. He’s from the police. He wants to ask you some questions.’
I meet Tom Mitchell in the boardroom. He’s a handsome man – broad-shouldered and trim. His hair is the colour of pewter, like old, heavy silverware your grandmother leaves you when she dies. In contrast, his eyebrows are jet black, and they arch theatrically, as if Tom Mitchell hasn’t believed a word anyone has said since 1992.
He is not, technically, ‘from the police’, as Amanda claimed, but rather (I learn this from his impressive business card) an agent from the Special Crimes Unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Tampa Field Office.
We sit across from each other at the long black conference table. After he hands me his card, he says, ‘Thank you for meeting with me. I know you must be up to your eyeballs in work.’ He has a Panhandle accent – ah-balls for eyeballs – and his honeyed lilt makes each word sound like a gentle caress.
‘Not a problem.’
‘So.’ He smiles at me. ‘You’re the new guy in town.’
‘I suppose.’
‘When did you arrive?’
‘Two days ago.’
‘And how do you like Florida, Mr Thane?’
‘Well, to be honest, it’s very hot.’
‘Ain’t it though.’ He places his hands on the surface of the table, drums his fingers, and stares at me for what feels like a long time. Finally, he says: ‘You probably know why I’m here.’
‘You code in Java, and you’re looking for a programming job.’
‘Ha,’ he says, in a tone that does not sound much like laughter. But then again, it wasn’t much of a joke. ‘Not exactly. No. You may have heard that I’m looking into the Charles Adams case. Did they tell you about him – about what happened?’
‘Just that he disappeared.’
‘That sums it up perfectly,’ he says, and smiles. He sounds strangely upbeat, considering he’s talking about a man’s disappearance. Maybe he’s happy that he doesn’t have to explain any intricacies of the case to me, since there are no intricacies – the case being exactly this: Man walks out of front door of house. Man vanishes.
I wait for Tom Mitchell to say more about Charles Adams. But he doesn’t. Instead, he looks at me, smiling, as if inviting me to volunteer my own information. I have no idea what he’s waiting for. That I’ll rise from my chair and shout, ‘It was me! I did it’?
But I don’t. Instead I look down at his business card. ‘Special Crimes Unit,’ I say, reading the title under the embossed logo. ‘What is that – some kind of super investigative agency?’
‘Yes,’ Mitchell says. ‘A super agency. I work closely with Aquaman and Green Lantern. They’re waiting for me in the car.’
Now it’s my turn to laugh.
‘Seriously,’ Mitchell says, ‘it’s not very glamorous. The way I describe my little group is that we investigate the things that fall between the cracks. Crimes that don’t quite belong anywhere else.’
‘Oh?’ I say, trying to sound interested.
‘For example, crimes that cross jurisdictions. Crimes that are politically sensitive. Things that politicians want to seem upset about. Things like gambling, racketeering, child pornography, that sort of thing.’
‘And missing CEOs?’
Do I see a flash of anger on his face – for just an instant? As if he’s not sure why he’s on the Adams case, either? If I did see it, it’s gone in a moment, and he’s a good soldier again. He shrugs. ‘Well, now, not all our cases are high profile. Sometimes we just look into things that don’t belong anywhere else. Charles Adams being a good example.’
I lean back in my chair, make a show of glancing at my watch. ‘So how can I help you, Agent Mitchell?’
‘Well I’m not sure,’ he says. He thinks about it, as if he truly is trying to figure out how I might help him. After a moment of this theatrical pondering, he says: ‘I guess I’d like to know if you’ve noticed anything since you’ve been here.’
‘Noticed anything?’
‘Anything unsavoury?’
I am suddenly conscious of the sheet of paper in my pants pocket, the note with the sharp crease digging into my thigh like a guilty memory. On this paper is scribbled an address: 56 Windmere Avenue, Sanibel. And at this address, I will find the person who has embezzled millions of dollars from Tao Software. Yet despite my awareness of this paper, and despite its digging insistently into my thigh, I hear myself say to Tom Mitchell: ‘No. I can’t think of anything worth mentioning.’
‘The reason I ask,’ Mitchell says, and he leans forward, as if confiding a secret, ‘is that we suspect Mr Adams was mixed up in some unpleasantness. He knew some very nasty people.’
‘Venture capitalists?’
‘No,’ he says. He doesn’t crack a smile. He stares at me. Then, quite suddenly, he asks: ‘Have you ever heard of Ghol Gedrosian?’
I shake my head. ‘Is that some kind of... some kind of lamb dish?’
‘It’s a person, Mr Thane. He’s a person. A person of interest.’
‘Whose interest?’
‘That’s an expression. It means he’s someone we’d like to talk to.’
‘What’s stopping you?’
‘Just the fact that we don’t know where he is.’
‘You have two missing people, then.’
He spreads his palms in a small gesture, something between an admission of failure and a plea for forgiveness. ‘I suppose you’re right.’
‘I wish I could help you,’ I say. ‘But I’ve never heard of him.’
‘No,’ Mitchell says. ‘I wouldn’t expect tha
t you had. He’s not exactly part of your milieu.’ He lingers on the word milieu, insinuating that I’m the kind of man who might just use such a word, maybe over lunch at the country club. I want to tell him that no one at AA uses the word milieu, unless it’s a kind of French liqueur I haven’t yet discovered.
Mitchell rises from his seat. ‘I won’t take any more of your time, Mr Thane. I came mostly as a courtesy, to let you know we haven’t given up on Charles Adams. We’re going to keep looking for him.’
‘That’s very reassuring, Agent Mitchell. Thank you.’
‘Do me a favour, though, will you? If you notice anything – anything at all – I want you to give me a call. My number’s on that card.’ He leans over, taps his own business card, which is lying on the table in front of me.
I look at the card, dumbfounded. ‘Is that what these things are for?’
He smiles and wags his finger at me. ‘You’re a funny man, Mr Thane.’
‘That’s what they tell me. Would you believe it hasn’t helped me in my life at all – not a single bit?’
‘I do believe it. No one likes funny people. We think you’re hiding something.’
‘Maybe we’re hiding the fact that we’re not really funny.’
‘See?’ he says. ‘There you go again.’ He points and shakes his head. ‘You’re like a nightclub act.’
A nightclub with a ten-drink minimum, I want to say.
But I merely rise from my chair and shake his hand.
‘I promise to keep you informed, Agent Mitchell,’ I say. ‘If I notice anything at all.’
Ten minutes later I’m driving West on Route 867, over the Sanibel Causeway, to the island of the same name off the Florida coast. I lied to Agent Mitchell when I told him I hadn’t noticed anything ‘unsavoury’ at Tao. In fact I’ve noticed three million unsavoury things – those dollars stolen from my company’s bank account and delivered to an imaginary firm called ITS.
Of course there’s no mystery behind the missing money. The culprit was Charles Adams. I knew it even before Agent Mitchell showed up and told me that the former CEO was mixed up with dangerous people. All the evidence pointed to Charles Adams. No one else at Tao – no one other than the CEO – had the authority to sign cheques for such large amounts. Joan Leggett could find no paperwork supporting the ITS cheques – no invoices, no receipts – because there was no paperwork.
Charles Adams skulked into his office late at night, or early in the morning, entered bills into the corporate accounting system, and printed and signed the cheques himself. The cheques that came out of his laser printer travelled through the US mail, to a Naples post office box, and then into the hands of... someone. Who? Charles Adams himself? More likely, one of his mysterious associates – one of those ‘dangerous men’ that Joan Leggett had seen waiting for him at Tao.
Why didn’t I tell Agent Mitchell any of this? Partly it was because of Tad Billups’s warning to me, to ‘protect’ him, and to protect his investment. But there’s something else too. I feel a peculiar closeness to Charles Adams – a man I’ve never met, a man who’s likely dead. I’ve walked in his shoes: owed money to frightening men, felt the walls closing in around me. I understand men like him. Because I am one.
Sanibel Island is – despite the best efforts of its Chamber of Commerce and its Rotary Club to portray it as a young person’s paradise – really just a large retirement community floating in the middle of the ocean. It sits there, in the Gulf of Mexico, stocked with old people at varying levels of decrepitude.
As far as retirement cities go, it’s an odd one. You notice it as soon as you cross the Causeway. What you notice is: it’s not quite rich, and it’s not quite poor. Looking at the houses, I can’t decide whether the island is an aspiration, or a cautionary tale. Maybe it’s a little of both – a place where people travelling in opposite directions meet in the last years of their lives.
It’s no Nantucket, no Sea Island. There are no estates, no rolling lawns. It was built too long ago for that, in an age before air conditioning, and so the houses are crowded and small, from a different era – the era before McMansions and three-car garages. It’s a snowbird community, filled with people who flee brutal winters or needy grandchildren. It’s crowded in December, packed in January. But today, in the middle of July, it’s hot – very hot – and most of the houses I pass are deserted and shuttered.
The house where I finally arrive – 56 Windmere – is about what I expected: a run-down ranch-style box, aluminium siding, a screened-in side porch, and brown, overgrown grass that hasn’t been mowed in many weeks. How many weeks? I try to estimate. Maybe six – maybe the same period of time that Charles Adams has been missing.
I drive past the house, turn the corner, and park a block away. I’m not sure what I’m going to do at 56 Windmere, or who I’m going to find there, but I don’t want anyone to see my car, or find me snooping around.
I leave my car unlocked. I trudge through stultifying heat, listening to cicadas scratching out mating cries in the grass. How the hell do insects have the energy to screw when it’s this hot? No wonder there are so many bugs.
I approach the house. There are no cars in the driveway, and the windows are dark. I ring the doorbell.
No answer. I wait, ring it again, knock loudly.
A minute goes by, then two – enough time for even an elderly person to make his way off the crapper and come to the door. But no one does. Either the elderly occupant is physically stuck to the seat, perhaps due to an unfortunate suction accident, or there is no one home.
I try the knob. It’s locked. I retreat down the steps and wander through overgrown lawn, around the perimeter of the house, my shoes swishing through dry grass, nettles catching on my chinos. I circle the screened-in porch. If someone approaches me, and asks what I’m doing here, I still have a plausible excuse: Why, I’m just checking to see if my friend is at home, napping on the porch. Of course, if anyone bothered to quiz me about my friend’s name, I’d soon be led away in handcuffs. Not for the first time, mind you.
But the porch is dark and empty. My friend is not napping on it. In fact, I doubt my friend, or anyone else, has slept in this house for a long time. It has a forlorn, abandoned look.
I circle to the backyard. Now I’ve crossed a line. If someone confronts me, I will have no excuse. Even friends don’t peek through their friends’ rear windows.
Florida doesn’t have basements, because you can’t dig a cellar in a swamp. So most houses are built on raised concrete platforms. I stand on my tiptoes and peer into a double-hung window.
I see a small, dark bedroom. I know it’s a bedroom because there’s exactly one item that is bedroom-like within it: a thin scraggly futon on the floor. No sheets, no blankets, no box spring. The carpet is water-stained and threadbare. A cheap desk is pushed up against the far wall.
My investigation would probably end here – really should end here – except that I notice that the window’s sash lock is unfastened. I’m no expert at home intrusion, but it doesn’t take much to see it: the top and bottom windows are misaligned by half an inch, almost as if someone is inviting me in. Anyone standing this close could see the window was unlocked. Anyone would be tempted to enter. Anyone.
So I tug the window upward. I expect an alarm to blare, but it stays quiet. The window rises smoothly in its track, opening wide enough to allow entry even to my portly frame.
I give one more glance behind me, making sure that no nosy neighbour watches, then I hoist myself up. I fall inward, onto the floor, and wheelbarrow with my hands onto the carpet. I pull myself into the house. My feet land with a thump. I’m in.
I’ve made a lot of stupid choices in my life. Most of them were made under the influence of alcohol, or pills, or crystal meth, or just sheer desperation. But at least my stupid choices have, until this point, been based on some kind of reasoning. It’s true that my reasoning may have been degraded and flawed – you can’t parse constitutional law when you’re ja
cked up on Wild Turkey and coke – but at least I had reasons – misguided ones, drug-induced ones – but they were still reasons.
In contrast, standing in this dark bedroom at 56 Windmere, I can’t for the life of me come up with one plausible excuse as to why I’m here. I have just broken into someone’s house. How in the world can I justify that? And then the reason comes to me, and it’s worse than having no reason at all. I’m doing the thing that I always do: I’m fucking everything up. I’m destroying my own life.
I can imagine the newspaper headlines: ‘Software Executive Breaks into House’. I can imagine the conversation with Tad Billups: ‘Yes, Tad, I’m aware that you gave me one last chance to get my life together, but you see, I had to find out what was in that old abandoned house.’
But here I am. So I might as well. These words ought to be etched onto my tombstone – probably will be – ‘Might as well’ – because they sum up my life perfectly, and surely will explain my death. It’s my reason for doing everything I have ever done.
Might as well.
It’s the motto of every hooker, of every addict, of every tattooed two-bit thug, of hapless death-row inmates, of crank whores lost on drugs. It’s how we got to where we are.
Might as well.
All right, Jimmy. Since you’re here, you might as well have a peek inside that desk.
Desks make for good peeking. Desks have papers inside them. And papers have names. And a name is what I seek. The name of the person who has been stealing from my company.
I go to the desk, and the floorboard creaks. I stop and listen. Surely it would be obvious by now if someone else were in the house with me – wouldn’t it? – but I stand very still nevertheless, counting to twenty. I listen for footsteps, for snoring, for water running through pipes, for the murmur of soft daytime TV. But I hear nothing.
The desk is a cheap IKEA model, one of those particleboard designs that you assemble yourself just once in your life, maybe when you’re twenty, and then – after you finish – vow that from now on, you’ll splurge the extra fifty bucks to have someone do it for you. There’s a wide drawer along the top, and three narrow ones to the side. I look inside the big drawer. Just dust, a chewed pen, a dead spider. The other drawers are empty, too. Whatever I was hoping to find isn’t here.
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