Baiting & Fishing

by Meredith Rae Morgan

  Ray grinned and laid his hands flat on the table. “Okay. You have my attention.”

  Johnston stood up and headed for the door. Ray followed. Before Ray got into his car, Johnston handed Ray his card, saying, “Call me if you turn up anything you think I should know about.”

  Ray put the card in his pocket. He doubted he would need it. He reckoned that anything he could find out, the cops could discover as well. There had been a couple of times when he'd stumbled across information the authorities could not have known; in those cases he had shared the information with the police, but generally he preferred to let cops do their own investigating. Ray worked alone.

  After driving home, he ran for a while on the beach at Siesta Key, taking Midnight Pass Road all around the island. He couldn't run very fast, but he still could run pretty far for a 62 year old geezer who previously smoked three packs of cigarettes a day. Besides the house, the running habit was the only good thing that had come out of his short and stormy marriage to a local news anchor who has swept him off his feet and then flown off on her broom when a larger TV market came calling.

  When he first moved to Sarasota in 1974, he bought a ramshackle house on Siesta Key, where condos and hotels were beginning to sprout around the edges but the interior of which was still almost completely Old Florida. After he got married, his wife convinced him to tear down the wooden house and build a more modern concrete block and stucco structure. They fought about that a lot, like they had fought about every other damned thing in the world, but in the long run he was glad she had made him do it. He bought his original house for $20,000 in 1974; his wife spent $55,000 on the renovation. He thought that was an exorbitant amount of money at the time, and had raised plenty of hell about the extravagance of the project. Ray's house was the smallest and plainest house in the neighborhood, but it was valued at well over a million dollars. He took delight in thinking of all the property taxes he was not paying to the State of Florida since, according to its screwed up tax structure, his property tax rate was based on the original purchase price of his home, not its present assessed value. He was grateful for that screwed up tax structure because he knew if he had to pay taxes on the current value of the house, he'd have to sell it and, on his salary, he would not be able to touch another property anywhere near the coast.

  When he got home from his run, he flipped through the mail and then showered. After that, he took a pitcher of mint tea and his laptop out to the screened-in porch which was his “home office” and logged onto the Internet to begin his review of the Techtron story.

  Chapter 2

  Ray spent several hours reading and taking notes in a spiral school notebook, using several colors of ink and highlighters, according to a method he had developed over years of researching stories. It was almost midnight when he realized he had finished off the pitcher of tea and had to pee urgently. He turned off the computer, closed the notebook which was about half filled with scrawled notes he might or might not be able to read tomorrow, and got ready for bed.

  After checking the doors and windows, he lay down on his back with his hands behind his head. He was amazed to learn he had somehow completely missed the biggest corporate scandal of the decade. He was fascinated by the story. Knowing how it ended didn't make it any less intriguing, perhaps especially because his gut told him Steve Johnston was right. He had a very strong feeling that the ending everyone “knew” wasn't the “real” ending at all.

  At first glance, it seemed to be a garden variety corporate corruption story. Roland Wilson had presented himself to the world as an incredibly smart entrepreneur. Maybe that was true – at first, anyway. Wilson had understood the significance of the computer boom very early. While Gates and Balmer were building a software empire and Jobs was building a hardware empire, Wilson focused on components. He invested in companies that made all sorts of parts for electronic equipment: chips, circuit boards, wiring, cables. His companies made components used by both Mac's and PC's, as well as printers, fax machines, and later cell phones, digital cameras, video games and God knows what else. He hopped on the wireless bandwagon early.

  Wilson didn't make or manage anything at first: he just invested. He started his career as a CPA, and always had an accountant's mentality about business. The only thing that was important to him was the bottom line; he didn't care if the profit came from increasing sales or cutting expenses. At first, he invested his own money. Soon his friends and associates learned he was doing well, so they started investing in the same companies.

  Eventually he developed partnerships and hired fund managers to manage both his money and that of his other investors while he studied and picked the stocks to buy. After a few years of that, he started buying larger and larger blocks of stock until soon he owned all or most of the stock of many of the companies he invested in. He was very careful not to run afoul of anti-trust laws, so he created holding companies and worked through other entities when it appeared he was close to gobbling up too much of a particular segment of the computer hardware industry. Within a decade, there was probably not a computer or electronic gadget in the world that didn't include at least some parts made by companies Wilson owned or controlled.

  He could have continued what he was doing and competed with Warren Buffet for the title of worlds' greatest stock picker, but he could not resist the allure of creating his own empire. He decided to build his own brand of computers. He said he wanted to build small, basic computers that would be very inexpensive. He styled himself as the Sam Walton of the computer world. His plan was to make computers anyone could afford, and sell them to everyone. He concocted a grandiose plan to sell cheap computers to schools in the Third World. He advertised his company as essentially a humanitarian endeavor, offering the Internet and computer technology very cheaply to the masses, in particular the poor.

  He named his company Techtron.

  At the beginning Techtron appeared to be on the fast track to success. The computers were basic, and MacIntosh users in particular looked down on them, referring to them as the “AOL of hardware” but the American public loved the concept. Techtron did not expect to sell many computers in America, where better computers were available and people had the money to pay for them. Wilson's market was the rest of the world, in particular the developing world.

  Wilson took the taunts of the tech-snobs in stride and planned to laugh all the way to the bank. Since Techtron would buy most of its parts from other companies that Wilson owned or invested in, he stood to amass an enormous personal fortune whether Techtron itself made any money or not. Wilson always admitted to flirting with the monopoly line, but the Feds watched him closely and he was never caught actually crossing it. There were rumors of questionable business ethics and “creative accounting” early in Techtron's glory days, but in the post-Reagan era when corporate America was the new Wild West, and the business tycoons were the Cowboys, the analysts did not voice concern about behind-the-scene accounting technicalities, at least not as long as the stock was rising.

  Wilson hired the best technical computer designers in the world to build his computers. He built state-of-the-art factories in a dozen third world countries and made a big deal out of the fact that more than 85% of Techtron's employees had been previously unemployed and living in poverty. His computers were not fancy and they did not come with a lot of bells and whistles, but they were serviceable and inexpensive, and they were made by people many of whom were earning wages for the first time in their lives.

  When chips got small enough, Techtron switched to manufacturing exclusively laptops, designed with school children in mind. Wilson expected school systems everywhere in the world to line up to buy his computers. Initially, that was what happened. At one point, there was an 18 month waiting list; the factories, which had all kinds of start-up problems due to their remote locations and inexperienced work force, could not keep up with the orders. Soon the computers became unavailable for purchase by individuals, supposedly because there we
re so many schools and governments ordering them in lots of hundreds, or even thousands.

  Wilson and Techtron appeared to be headed in the direction of being one of the greatest corporate success stories in American history, with a cool humanitarian twist. Wilson styled himself as a sort of People's Capitalist. The press ate up his marketing promotions, and publicized him to the max. The American people ate it up, too. Roland Wilson became an instant cultural icon. Techtron's stock was one of the hottest stocks of the 1990's.

  Ray had a niggling suspicion that Wilson's humanitarianism was just an “act”. In its coverage of the story the American media, collectively, had decided that Wilson was basically a “good guy who went bad.” They interpreted his suicide as a sort of repentance in the end. The media read the entire Techtron story through that lens, and found some evidence to support the theory. Ray had to admit that could even have been the truth. Wilson certainly wouldn't be the first (or last) person in history who started out with a great idea to benefit humanity, and then got greedy.

  Ray, however, knew enough about how those “widely held” media assumptions originated to know it was rarely wise to trust them. He concentrated on teasing out the facts behind all the assumptions, and a slightly different picture started to emerge for him. It was not a clear picture. It was rather like like those “magic eye” pictures where what you can see depends on how you look at it. Ray had the growing sense that Wilson's humanitarianism was sort of a gimmick from the beginning but there seemed to be no real facts to support that. Ray's gut had been wrong from time to time. In this case he knew he was predisposed to try to look at things differently, so he wasn't too quick to trust his hunches.

  He decided to quit thinking about it and try to get some sleep.

  Just before he drifted off it occurred to him that he needed to come up with a story to write to justify his salary for the month. He would have to put the Wilson story on the back burner for a few days until he could earn his paycheck.

  Chapter 3

  A few days later, Ray turned in two stories. One was about the arrest of what appeared to be a serial rapist. Ray liked police stories that gave him the opportunity to have a continuing story on which to report regularly. It gave him the chance to get his byline in the paper on a daily basis, keeping his name in front of the reading public. That was important – or had once been important – in the newspaper business. Ray preferred not to think about the diminution in importance of newspaper bylines.

  He also liked crime stories because they were easy to write. Over the years he'd written many such stories and he had most of the the ones from the last twenty years saved in his word processor. Since crime stories were frequently very similar, he often recycled his articles, having convinced himself that copying his own articles didn't constitute legal plagiarism. He could occasionally crank out a 2500 word article in under an hour, depending on how much old material he was able to use. His editor had never caught on to his recycled articles.

  The second article he turned in was a long feature article for Sunday's local pages about the closing of what was nearly the last old tourist motel on Siesta Key. Years ago, Ray had appointed himself the unofficial eulogist for old Sarasota landmarks being torn down as a result of “progress”. He hated watching the demise of the pre-Disney Florida he loved. He had a scrapbook filled with articles and a shoe box full of photos. He planned to turn those articles into a book ... someday. His working title was Paradise Lost, Redux. He was in no hurry to start writing it because he was depressed enough.

  Having submitted those two articles, Ray had lived up to his obligations to the paper for the month, other than the follow up reports on the rapist. He was a friend of the detective heading up the investigation. He would check in with his buddy every day or so. That story would be easy.

  He decided to resume his research on the Wilson saga. His contract with the paper gave him latitude to pick his own stories and the freedom to spend the time necessary to digging up information on stories that might or might not pan out. That was perhaps the one compensation of his longevity with the paper. Occasionally a senior editor would ask him to look into something in particular. He always did some investigation in response to those requests. He did not always write anything about what he learned. The previous management of the paper was very good about that. They were newspaper people who knew he had great instincts. The editorial staff had known him well enough to know his instincts were usually right. The new management was a corporation that was more interested in having employees who did what they were told than in telling good stories. Ray, and nearly everybody else at the Times, assumed that his days were numbered.

  Ray was not one for worrying about the future. He lived very much in the moment. His current moment found him in the morgue at the Times. The paper had most of the last five or six years' worth of articles stored digitally in searchable databases accessible from every workstation in the building. To access older articles, reporters still had to go to the morgue and dig out roll after roll of microfilm. Few reporters actually did much in-depth research any more. Those that did bitched about what a chore it was. All but Ray. He loved spending hours alone in the morgue.

  He was vain enough that, in addition to whatever subject he was researching, he allowed himself to be sidetracked, looking up articles he had written. Over the years, he found that he had at least one article in most of the old issues he reviewed. He liked to read his old stuff. He remembered most of his “big” articles, but a lot of his smaller news pieces caught him by surprise. He generally liked what he saw, except for his really early work. Reading the articles he wrote in the first ten years or so of his career was painful, but he forced himself to do it if for no other reason than to remind himself how far he had come.

  Even though Steve Johnston had told him not to worry about the fall of Techtron in his research, he knew he needed to have a general sense of the time line and who was involved, if for no other reason than to learn which bad guys had gone to jail so he would know who he could ignore when he started digging deeper. He spent several hours poring over the stories, jotting notes and making hrmphing noises in his throat. Every now an then he would nod vigorously and write something down in red ink. After what seemed to Ray to be only a few minutes, the archivist came over to him and said, “Ray, we'll be closing in fifteen.”

  He looked up, somewhat bleary, but with eyes wide in surprise, “You're kidding!?”

  She laughed and patted his shoulder, “No, I'm not. You need to get up and stretch, Ray.”

  He stood up and discovered that all his joints were stiff and sore. He wouldn't have time for a run at the beach before dark, so he headed for the gym. He hated going to the gym, but he kept a membership because of days like today, when he worked until after dark, or those days when it was too stormy to run outside. With his sedentary job, he tried to get in at least a couple of hours of running a day, usually outside. He only resorted to the gym when it was unavoidable.

  Almost from the second he walked into the gym, he considered leaving. The place was overrun by high school cheerleaders. It was August. Football season was fast approaching. He guessed the cheerleaders were training for the upcoming season.

  Cheer leading was different now than it had been when he was a kid. Unlike the little tarts he remembered, who simply jumped around on the sidelines shaking their pom-poms to distract the adults and jiggling other parts of their anatomy for the benefit of the adolescent boys, these girls were actual athletes who did some pretty amazing gymnastics. Their moves could be impressive on the sidelines of a football game, but he wasn't happy with the giggling and talking in the gym. He hated talking in the gym. Just as he started to fume, silence fell.

  Five boys – obviously football players – walked out of the weight room and hopped on exercise bikes directly in front of the cheerleaders on their elliptical machines. Ray smiled to himself thinking that perhaps things hadn't changed so much after all. The good thing was that the girls w
ere finally quiet. The bad thing was the boys were talking and showing off for the benefit of the girls. Ray was both amused and annoyed to find that, in addition to the usual smell of sweat and disinfectant, the place reeked of teen-agers in heat. He reminded himself once again he'd been meaning to turn his spare bedroom into an exercise room for years. Maybe the time had come to do it.

  When he got home, he stood at the sink and ate half of a Cuban sandwich left over from lunch the day before, washing it down with fat-free buttermilk from the carton. Unlike the stereotypical bachelor pad, Ray's home was immaculately clean, thanks to the worlds greatest cleaning lady, who came in once a week to scrub it from top to bottom. Ray helped his own cause by being borderline obsessive about neatness. The cleaning lady charged him less than she charged most of her other clients because she did not have to pick up after him.

  Ray loved the sense of order he found in his home. All too often the world outside seemed to be chaotic and downright terrifying. Inside his house, where everything was clean, neat and well-organized, he felt safe.

  He did not mind straightening up or occasionally cleaning up messes in between Elena's visits. He hated, however, to wash dishes, so he used as few as was possible, hence his tendency to eat out of the container while standing at the sink, or, more often, to eat out altogether.

  When he had finished his “dinner”, he took a pitcher of tea, his cell phone and his spiral notebook to the screened porch. As he had gone through the Techtron stories, he had made a list of the reporters he knew who had filed stories on the subject. Even though he worked for a small paper in a backwater market, he had been in the business forever and he knew a lot of people. He started making calls.