By then he and Nanette would be heading east, toward Texas, in the used car they’d bought more than a year ago. He’d gotten the brakes fixed, the head gasket replaced and what have you, so that the vehicle was completely reliable for the getaway. And, most importantly, the final transfer of the funds he’d siphoned off, little by little, had been completed three days ago. The computer crash would cover his nefarious deeds for weeks, time enough to set up his new life with the younger woman.
Naturally, Roger would be a suspect, but he’d be gone, no forwarding. The cops and the firm would hammer at Claudia, give her a rough going over, but she was innocent. She didn’t have a clue about his plans.
“What time will you be back home? I know you’re going to have drinks with Wayne and the guys.”
“What time is Janice supposed to be here?”
“About 7:30, she said.”
“Alone?”
His wife dangled an earring from her lobe. “Good question.” She blew him a kiss. “You have such a suspicious mind.”
“I’ll be back here no later than 8.”
“All right. See you then, Rog.” She gave him a peck, then gripped his lower face in her hand. Using her tongue, but keeping her fresh carmine lips off his, she probed his mouth. “Love you.”
“Love you too.”
As she hummed and walked down the stairs, he stood at the railing, watching her go. He remained there, hearing her car start up and fade away. After tonight, he’d never see her or his daughter again. But he was resolved, he was going to spend the second half, well, really, if he was lucky and kept exercising and watching what he ate, the next thirty years with a woman twenty years his junior, plus some two and a half million dollars in ill-gotten gains richer.
That was an amount a bling bling rapper like 50 Cent or actor Tom Cruise might sneer at, hardly enough for them to get out of bed. But it was sufficient for a humble man like Roger Crumbler.
The down payment had been made through intermediaries on a condo in Port Saint Charles in Barbados. And through budgeting and living within their means, they’d be comfortable. They wouldn’t be driving Jags or Bentleys, nor vacationing on a whim, but it’s not like they’d have to subsist on Top Ramen.
And should the need or notion arise, Roger had also entertained money laundering for a select list of individuals. Certainly more than once over the years, several clients of the firm had hinted at such. Millionaires, more than the middle class, were willing to step over the line to hold onto that which they felt entitled to by birth or happenstance.
Wayne Wardlow, the Carlson Foundation’s executive director, was not a possibility in that department. Though it was Wayne who had inspired Roger.
“Hell yes, I’m tappin’ that ass,” he’d joked. Referring to a woman, a freelance writer Wardlow had met doing an article about socially involved foundations for Los Angeles magazine.
“Okay, P. Diddy,” Roger had remarked to the man whose face should illustrate WASP in the dictionary. They were in the locker room getting dressed after their basketball game and shower.
“I love black pussy—you don’t know what you’re missing, son.” Wardlow knocked him playfully in the shoulder.
“And you have lost your natural cotton-pickin’ mind,” Roger said, slipping into his trousers.
“Rog, getting some on the side at our age is cheaper than buying a sports car, and a damn sight more fun.” He then grabbed his crotch like an oversexed sophomore in high school and bucked his hips.
Okay, it wasn’t really fair to lay this at Wayne Wardlow’s doorstep. Roger was a grown man. He made the decision to kindle a romance with Nanette, who’d flirted with him that day at the Barnes and Noble in the Grove. A pretty woman like her browsing in the Social Science section, able to cite the specific failures of strongman Robert Mugabe’s policies in Zimbabwe, and argue the cultural significance of the late Rick James’s music. How could he not be hooked?
His cell phone rang, and he knew only too well the number on its screen.
“How does it feel to be a geezer who has two women panting to fuck the shit out of you?” Nanette said huskily.
“You have a way with a phrase, have I mentioned that?”
“Are you hard? Or did the old lady drain you?”
“I want you so bad.”
“Me too.”
“Everything ready?”
“Ready and steady.”
He hesitated—should he mention his daughter coming to town?
“What? Worried? Having second thoughts? That’s understandable, this is serious.”
“Don’t I know. Everything’s fine. I can’t wait to see you.” Don’t say anything, don’t put a jinx on this opportunity.
“I’ll be thinking about you all day, Roger. Wish you were here to find out how wet I am.”
“I will soon, baby.”
“You got that right.”
He pressed the cell off and nodded his head. They’d even accounted for this. For the last few months he’d been using disposable cell phones, also carrying his regular one for his wife’s calls.
Outside, Roger sat in his idling car, looking at the house he was not going to see again after today. It was far from a palace, but they’d lived in this two-story Spanish-Mediterranean since Janice had been three. The paint jobs, the patching, the lawn that needed re-seeding, staying here while Claudia took Janice to the Valley during the ’92 riots—a pint of Jack Daniel’s and a revolver he’d never fired, his false fortifications. There had been the hole in the roof beneath the tiles that had ruined their bedroom ceiling, those ornery possums prowling in the bushes in the backyard he’d chased off with a golf club, the time Janice learned to ride her bike up and down the block. The house was the touchstone to a vast chapter in his life.
He backed the car out of the driveway and made a slow tour along Curson, taking it all in as if for the first time—the old timers and the others, the newbies with their walls enclosing their front yards, the redone homes with the Southwest flare replete with landscapes of cacti and native plants—how his neighborhood, his part of Mid-City, had changed in the years they’d lived here.
Roger waved at Dorothy, one of his long-time neighbors, walking her Chow mix. He choked up, but pulled it together and moved on; there was no time for cheap sentimentality. After making a turn at the signal, he picked up speed heading east on Olympic, nearing L.A. High where he’d gone his junior and senior years, lettering in basketball and track. His folks—his dad had worked for the county as a bus dispatcher for the then Rapid Transit District, and his mom a legal secretary—had saved enough to move from what they called the east side in those days, South Central now, and bought a tidy one-story on Norton just south of Pico.
His father had died in ’99 and his mother, still active and working part-time at a senior center, had moved back to Oakland where she was from. How would what he was about to do affect her? Would it age her? Would she hate him? Blame Claudia? Take it out on Janice? No, his mother was a rational, strong woman. She’d probably denounce him from the pulpit of her church and pray for his lost, misguided soul. There’d be a round of “amens” and shaking of heads and comforting their troubled sister by the congregation. She’d done what she could to raise him right, some people are just born to be bad, they’d commiserate.
To get his mind off his mother’s pending disappointment, he turned on the radio. He was pleased to hear that the forecast was sunny and breezy, a typical day in L.A. At Highland, he went north.
At the office he reconciled the inconsistency with the Carlson financials after one phone call and a subsequent fax from his buddy at the County. In deference to his friend Wayne Wardlow, he’d also stolen money from his foundation. If he hadn’t, then Wayne would have come under suspicion and scrutiny. And that might disclose his friend’s continuing relationship with his paramour, and that would surely weigh on Roger’s conscience.
“Happy birthday, Rog.”
“Thanks, Gabe.” The son had s
tepped into Roger’s office.
“Just want you to know, it’s all downhill from here.” Gabriel Nathanson was twice divorced and fifty-four.
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Nathanson clapped him on her shoulder. “I’ll see you over at the Bounty, I’ll buy a round.”
“That’s great, Gabe.”
“I tried to get that drip Marty to come along, but you know how he is.”
Roger dredged up a camaraderie chuckle it had taken him years to perfect. “Yes, I do.” Martin Nathanson’s idea of cutting loose was putting ketchup on his scrambled eggs.
“And next week, let’s you, me, and sourpuss sit down, okay, partner?”
“Sure, Gabe. I look forward to it.”
The son left, whistling.
There it was. Roger was going to betray a firm with a reputation for spotless honesty and forthrightness of, well, of more than sixty years. Would they recover from the taint his theft would smear them with, or sink under a sea of accusations and blame? That and the avalanche of lawsuits sure to come. And though Roger was not much of a standard-bearer for the race, there was that too. A black man, albeit middle class and middle-aged, married for over twenty years to a white woman, but a black man nonetheless, who had gained the trust of his Jewish bosses and in effect stolen from them. What would be the fallout from that? Strenuous finger-pointing at the next CPA convention, for sure.
And what of the betrayal of his wife and daughter? Wasn’t that the biggest crime of all? Running off with a younger black woman, fine as she may be? His stomach gurgled as he admonished himself. This was a time to keep his mind focused, not a time for butterflies and second-guessing. He wanted to call Nanette, wanted so desperately to hear her say how much she loved him, how she’d never felt this way about a man before.
He suppressed the urge and went about his tasks, forcing himself not to watch the clock, not to mentally count down the hours till he started anew. Never again the same old 9-to-5, mortgage-paying, block-club-going Roger. The hours eked by and finally he was sitting in the back room of the Bounty on Wilshire in what was becoming part of the growing Koreatown.
The HMS Bounty was a time warp steak-and-booze emporium left over from the days of pounding down a couple of Scotches over lunch, when cholesterol sounded like the name of a new hair color line. It was where you could find a booth named for L.A. native Jack Webb, and across the street from the ghost of the Ambassador Hotel where presidential candidate Robert Kennedy had been assassinated in 1968. The hotel was no more, and a high school and shops were being built on the grounds.
“Here’s to my ace, Roger. May the next fifty be yours for the taking,” Wayne Wardlow toasted after they’d sung an off-key but effusive “Happy Birthday.”
The waitress brought out a chocolate cake, his favorite.
“Of course, we only used five candles for symbolism’s sake, since we didn’t want to torch the joint,” Wardlow joked, getting a round of guffaws.
“Here’s to you, Roger,” Gabe Nathanson echoed.
“Thanks, gents.” Roger clinked his glass against the others’ and drank. This was his second gin and tonic and it was going to be his limit. It was seventeen past 6:00 and it was getting harder for him to laugh and seem at ease. He had to go home and find out about his daughter, a last intimacy with Claudia, he owed her that, and then Nanette. One foot right before the other, Roger. Just like walking across the street. Though you could get run over.
“What’s up, champ?” Wardlow sidled up next to him. “Looks like you got something on your mind.”
“Being fifty.”
Wardlow had more of his whiskey. “I hear that. But things change, yeah? Don’t want to look back and have a trunk full of regrets.” He upended his tumbler and signaled for another. “Getting this age, too old to be innovative but just enough juice left in the tank to try something different, it hits you, doesn’t it? You can keep doing what you’re doing, stay in that rut till you maybe make retirement, and hope you can still manage to wipe your own butt and have enough to buy a few beans and tortillas. Or take a chance on something.” He looked off, beyond the walls.
“Exactly,” Roger agreed.
Later, after the goodbyes and a promise to play nine holes with Wardlow and a couple of the fellas, Claudia called him on his cell as he headed home.
“Janice isn’t here.”
“What? She turn around and go back?”
“No. Her cell phone is suddenly disconnected. I couldn’t leave a message, and I haven’t heard from her.”
“You just now telling me this?”
“Don’t yell at me. It’s just a little past 7:30, the time I figured she’d be here.”
“You’re right, I’m sorry. Think she’s at one of her friends’ houses? Could she have stopped on the way and maybe dropped her phone and broke it?”
“Then why wouldn’t she use their phone to call?”
“Look, it’s not dire yet or anything. We should be calm.”
“I am, I’m just, you know, could it have something to do with why she came down?”
“I don’t know. We have some of her friends’ numbers. Girls from high school.”
“I’m going to call them.”
“Okay. I’ll be home shortly.” He hung up and rang Nanette to fill her in.
“Why didn’t you tell me she was coming to town?”
“I didn’t think it was going to be a big thing.”
“So what are you going to do?” she asked.
“I can’t take off till I know what’s going on with Janice.”
“I know that, I’m not the unfeeling ho,” she barked.
“That’s not what I meant. I can’t stop the virus. Anyway, everyone’s gone home, it would be my code and time stamp registered on the alarm pad if I went back to the office now.”
Her tone softened. “What about the money in the accounts? We can access the funds at any time, right?”
“Theoretically, yes. But once the hard drives are probed, I can’t be sure there won’t be traces. When they attempt to resurrect the files, they’ll dig deep. The virus was merely a way to give us the time we needed to get to the islands.”
“Then find your daughter, darling, and call me back. It still won’t make a difference if we leave tonight, tomorrow, or next week. Those computer files won’t be recovered that fast. In fact, when they go down and you’re around being all concerned, that will be even better, less attention on you.”
“Okay. Talk to you soon.”
“Okay, baby.”
Roger arrived at his house and was surprised to see his wife’s car wasn’t there. She called him on his cell as he unlocked the front door. “Janice had some car trouble, I went to pick her up. Should be back in half an hour.”
“Fine, I’ll be here.” Roger went inside, checking the time and gauging his next moves. The virus had launched, it was real now. He was elated. He was getting aroused as he fantasized about the money and his woman. Giddy, he took out his BlackBerry and punched in a code. The results on his screen sobered him. He put in more numbers, and again got the same results. Zero.
Reeling like he’d been hammered by a heavyweight’s blow, Roger dropped to his knees, fighting for air. He dropped the BlackBerry before him, as if it were a totem he could invoke favor through. The accounts in the Swiss banks and the one in the Caymans were empty. He kneeled there, blinking and kneading his hands. There was only one other person who knew about them. He rose, a man with renewed purpose.
Not fifteen minutes later, Roger Crumbler was surprised when Nanette answered her door. She lived in a duplex near Motor he’d helped her rent under a false name.
“Hi, Rog,” she said as he rushed inside.
“Well?” He held the BlackBerry in front of her face.
“Well, what?”
“The money, Nanette, the goddamn money I risked everything to steal. For us.”
“I don’t have it. Obviously.”
“Really?�
� He stalked through the apartment, not sure what he’d find or do as he looked in the bedroom and the closets. “You’re full of shit, baby. You must have the money. No one else knew about the accounts but you.”
“Keep your voice down, Roger.”
“Fuck that.” He was breathing hard, sweat glazing his brow. Fists balled, he blared, “You’re playing some kind of game with me, aren’t you? Think I’m stupid.”
“Roger, if I had the money, why would I be here waiting for you?”
He grabbed her arm. “You tell me.”
“Let go.” She jerked free. “So let me get this straight, you’re claiming the money is gone all of a sudden? The money from the accounts you set up, the money from the accounts you created passwords for? That money?” She glared at him, nostrils flaring.
“Oh, I see. Very clever. Make it seem like you’re the innocent here. When it’s perfectly clear you’re trying to pull some shit on me.”
“What about this, asshole. What if you planned this all along, come storming in here pretending you can’t find the Benjamins, and be all outraged and get me sucked in. Then send me off to look for the money and you take off with it. Shit,” she said, disgusted. “Without me giving you the backbone, you’d never have stolen that money. You’d keep being a glorified bookkeeper until you got your gold watch and your once-a-week handjob from your wife.”
“Shut the fuck up. I need to think.” He wanted to beat the truth out of her.
“You shut the fuck up.” She shoved him. “And get out of here. Now that I see what a pussy you really are, I wouldn’t go to the corner liquor store with you.”
He was shaking in anger. “Now you hold on.”
“Get out of her before I call the cops on your useless ass. You probably got all nervous and hit the wrong key, sending our money to some South American dictator’s account.” She laughed hollowly. “How the fuck could I have seen a future with you? You’re pathetic, Roger.”
“You’re not getting rid of me. We’re going to find that money together. This is my only chance, Nanette.”
Los Angeles Noir Page 23