The Evil That Men Do

by Michael Blair

  “I could use a Scotch,” she said, half to herself, no longer seeming quite so cool. Sighing, she slumped on to her spine, stretching her legs out in front of her. I felt a touch against my ankle. She coloured and sat up with a lurch. “Pardon me,” she said.

  “I’m sorry if my inquiries are causing you distress,”

  I said.

  “You have no idea,” she said, trying to smile, achieving

  only moderate success. The sharp angles and planes of her face had softened, making her look younger, more vulnerable. “I feel a little ridiculous, if you must know. I thought I was made of sterner stuff.” She shook her head. “I suppose this isn’t making much sense to you.”

  “More than you might think,” I said. “I’m acquainted with Mr. Thomason. He’s insinuated himself into the life of one of our clients.”

  She swallowed, the flesh of her throat and upper chest mottling. “A woman?”

  “Yes,” I said, feeling a chill. “I don’t want to cause you any more distress, Ms. Stadler, but I’d appreciate anything you can tell me about him. How long did he work here?”

  “A little more than a year,” she said, regaining some composure. “Thank god it wasn’t longer or we probably wouldn’t still be in business. He left about eighteen months ago.”

  “Can you tell me anything about his background?”

  “Not a thing, Mr. Riley. Everything we thought we knew about him turned out to be completely bogus.” Her expression hardened. “I can tell you, however, that I hold him largely responsible for my husband’s death.”

  Her late husband’s name, she told me, was Patrick Fournier, and he had been Excel Wood Products’ general manager, a position she currently occupied. He had hired Lawrence Thomason in anticipation of the retirement of the company’s long-time sales manager. He was everything they were looking for: good-looking, personable—I wondered if we were talking about the same Lawrence Thomason—and eager. His credentials were top notch. He had experience in high-end retailing, the hospitality industry, marketing, and even claimed to have a degree in industrial design. And his letters of reference were impeccable, glowing with praise, and, as it turned out, as fictional as his résumé.

  “We should have realized something was wrong when Rudy, our sales manager, left two months before he was due to retire, claiming ill health. He hadn’t taken a sick day in his life. But a few days later Lawrence—he didn’t like being called Larry—announced his first big sale, nearly a million dollars, to a small chain of luxury hotels in the southeastern US.”

  The deal fell through four months later, but not before Thomason had rung up thousands of dollars in travel, accommodation, and entertainment expenses, and Excel Wood Products, assured by Thomason that a signed contract was imminent, had spent thousands more on design, presentations, as well as wood and finish samples.

  “Lawrence was inconsolable, almost pathetically so. It was all an act, of course. Over the next few months he appeared to redeem himself with a handful of smaller sales, but they turned out to be the work of our other salespeople, for which he took credit and claimed the commissions. One of them quit in disgust and I’m ashamed to say that we terminated the other based on Lawrence’s accusations of inappropriate behaviour. Completely false, of course. After he left and the truth came out we tried to rehire her, but she refused to come back, justifiably angry that we hadn’t supported her. She could have sued us for wrongful dismissal, but she didn’t, accepting instead Mr. Faber’s offer to create a trust for her kids’ educations. We were very lucky.”

  “How did you learn Thomason wasn’t the person he claimed to be?”

  “Patrick got suspicious when Lawrence landed a multi-million-dollar deal with a chain of high-end retail stores in the American Midwest and began running up more travel and entertainment expenses … ”

  Irene Stadler’s narrative was interrupted as we were joined by Elke and a gnomish man in his sixties. He wore work clothes, flecked with fine sawdust, and his hand, when I shook it, felt as though it had been carved from a block of hardwood. His name was Gerhardt Faber, known as Gerry, and he was the owner, along with his sister Elke, of the company that their father Gunter had founded sixty years before.

  Following the introductions, Faber went to a small bar fridge built into a credenza at the far end of the room and took out two of cans of Beck beer. He held one out to me and raised his bushy white eyebrows in query.

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  “Irene?” he said. She shook her head. He put the second can of Beck back into the fridge, exchanging it for a can of club soda, which he handed to his sister, along with a glass from the cabinet of the credenza. He sat down, popped the tab on his beer can, and drank deeply.

  When he finally came up for air, he said, “If that son of a bitch ever shows his face around here I’ll run him through a goddamned wood chipper. She tell you”—he pointed his chin at Irene Stadler—“the bastard killed her husband, who was also my best friend?”

  I looked at Irene Stadler. Her eyes were half closed, and her face was suffused with grief.

  “Ms. Stadler told me she holds Thomason responsible for her husband’s death. She didn’t say he’d actually killed him.” Peripherally, I saw Irene Stadler slowly shake her head as she looked down at her hands on the tabletop.

  “Might as well have,” Faber said. “By the time we realized the Mariondale deal was a crock, that the so-called ‘chain’ was just a single hardware store in Minneapolis, we’d invested goddamned near thirty thousand on PowerPoint presentations, industrial design, tooling and exotic woods. Patrick blamed himself, but we were all taken in by the bastard. Christ, if Patrick hadn’t finally double-checked Thomason’s references and discovered they were all fake, that his whole résumé was shit, we’d’ve spent even more and probably gone bankrupt doing it.”

  Faber reached across the table and placed his hand on Irene Stadler’s arm. Tears formed in her eyes and streaked her cheeks. She wiped them away with her fingertips.

  “Do you mind me asking how your husband died?” I said, looking into her eyes, which were no longer quite so steely.

  “He had a heart attack while driving home from visiting his mother in Côteau-du-Lac,” she said. “He crashed through a guard rail into the old Solange canal. He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.”

  “I’m very sorry,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “And this happened after you’d discovered Thomason was a fraud?”

  Irene Stadler nodded. “Not long after, but yes.”

  “I’m sorry to have to ask you this,” I said, “but is it possible that Thomason had a more direct hand in your husband’s death?”

  Gerry Faber made an ugly sound in his throat. “Believe me,” he said, “that occurred to us, too, but the police didn’t find any evidence that Patrick’s car had been tampered with or run off the road. And Patrick had a pre-existing heart condition.”

  Standing, Faber drained the beer from the can, crushed it as if it were made of aluminum foil, and dropped it into a recycling bin. He held out his hand. I stood and shook hands with him again.

  “Let us know if the bastard dies, or if we can testify against him in court, but otherwise I never want to hear his name again.”

  He left the conference room, his sister following him out. I turned to Irene Stadler.

  “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

  “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” she said. “If only it didn’t hurt so much. Is there anything else?”

  “Did you file charges?” I said, remembering that Nina’s background check on Thomason hadn’t found a criminal record.

  “Gerry wanted to,” she said. “But our lawyer told us there wasn’t much point. There was no evidence of actual fraud. I mean, he didn’t submit fraudulent third-party invoices, and although his t
ravel and entertainment expenses were high, they were documented. It would’ve been difficult, if not impossible, to prove he’d fudged them. You couldn’t believe a word that came out of his mouth, of course, he lied about everything, but he was totally convincing, as if he’d cast some kind of spell over us. The most we could have had him charged with was submitting a fraudulent CV, references and credentials. But, well, we were remiss in not doing our due diligence, weren’t we?”

  “When I told you that Thomason had insinuated himself into our client’s life, you asked me if our client was a woman.”

  “Yes?”

  “Forgive me for asking, Ms. Stadler, but were you—?”

  The skin around her eyes paled as her composure began to crumble again. I changed tacks. “Was Thomason involved with any of your female employees?”

  “You were going to ask me if I’d had a romantic relationship with him, weren’t you?”

  “I was. Please don’t take offence.”

  “I’m not offended, Mr. Riley. But I’m ashamed to say that I wasn’t immune to his looks and superficial charm. Few of our female employees were, even Elke. Trite as it may sound, though, I loved my husband very much.”

  “It doesn’t sound trite to me at all,” I said. She hadn’t really answered my question, but I let it go.

  “You’re an unusual man, Mr. Riley.” Her smile was almost warm.

  It was my turn to be discomfited. “Am I?”

  “In a good way, though.”

  “I’m relieved to hear it.”

  “Lawrence Thomason was also unusual, but not in a good way.”

  “How so? I mean, besides being a fraud.”

  “Well, for one thing,” she said, “even though he’d made passes at nearly every woman in the company”—her smile reasserted itself for a moment—“myself included, they were clumsy, half-hearted efforts, as if he didn’t really mean it, that he only did it because he thought it was expected of him.”

  “Did he follow through on any of them?”

  “No, although Patrick’s secretary at the time did manage to pin him down once. She was a very attractive girl, but she practically had to beg him to go out with her. Getting him into bed, she told me, was even more of a challenge. And when she finally did drag him to bed, she said it was like being made love to by a robot or a male version of one of those wind-up inflatable sex dolls. He was just going through the motions, she said, not really interested.”

  “I’m guessing there wasn’t a second date.”

  “No. He did ask her out again, but again, it was a half-hearted gesture. Despite his apparent masculinity, there was something weirdly sexless about him.”

  That was consistent, I thought, with his apparently nonsexual relationship with Terry. I couldn’t bring

  myself to call it platonic. Nina and I had had a platonic relationship, maybe had one again. Terry and Lawrence Thomason’s relationship was—well, I wasn’t sure what it was. Whatever it was, it must be frustrating for her, I thought, given her enthusiasm for sex when we’d been living together. I found myself wondering what her sexual relationship with Chaz Brandt had been like.

  “Does she still work for you?”

  She shook her head. “No. She got married last year and moved to Toronto.”

  “Could you tell me if the company leased a BMW for him?”

  “A BMW? Hardly. We have a small fleet of Toyota Corollas for our salespeople.”

  “That should do it,” I said, standing. “I won’t take any more of your time, but if I could I trouble you for his address and telephone numbers.”

  “No trouble at all,” she said.

  We went to her office, where she opened the drawer of a utilitarian steel file cabinet and walked her fingers through the hanging files. Finding the file she was looking for, she took me out to the reception area. Elke was somewhere else, so Ms. Stadler copied the dozen pages on the machine behind the reception desk. Handing me the copies, she said, “I hope this will help get him out of your client’s life.”

  “So do I,” I said.

  She offered her hand. I took it. She had very long fingers. I wondered why I’d ever thought of her as cool and severe. Once you got used to the sharply sculpted bone structure, she was a very attractive woman.

  “I appreciate your help,” I said.

  “My pleasure,” she said, as she released my hand, with some reluctance, I thought. “If you need anything else … ”

  She handed me a card. As I took it there was an almost electric sensation as our fingers came into momentary contact, as if some form of energy had been transmitted between us. Her mouth softened as her lips parted and the colour rose in the long curve of her neck. She seemed to be having trouble breathing. God, I thought, having trouble breathing myself. Was she offering herself to me? I don’t usually have that effect on women.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have a personalized card,” I said, almost stammering.

  “I don’t think I’ll have a problem remembering your name,” she said, voice taking on a soft, warm burr.

  She tentatively took a half a step closer to me. My pulse quickened under the heat of her gaze. I knew, almost for a certainty, that if I asked her out for dinner or a drink—or to accompany me to the nearest motel—she’d accept.

  Then the phone on the reception desk rang, and Elke emerged from another room to answer it. Irene Stadler blinked and stepped back, as the walls of social convention came up again.

  “Ships that pass,” she said, with a sigh and a wistful smile.

  “Yes, indeed,” I replied.

  Chapter 19

  In the Volvo, as my heart rate returned to normal, I spent a couple of minutes going through Thomason’s file. It included two phone numbers, a landline and a cellphone. Both, I discovered upon calling them, were in service, but the people who answered claimed not to know anyone named Lawrence Thomason. I had no reason to disbelieve them, but I made a note to get Nina to run a reverse directory search to see if the landline belonged to the address in the file, apartment 810 at 2000 de Maisonneuve West. I scanned Thomson’s CV and letters of reference, but given that they were fictional, they weren’t likely to provide any insight into the man.

  I drove downtown. The address in Thomason’s personnel file was located two blocks east of Atwater and the old Forum hockey arena, abandoned by the Montreal Canadiens hockey team in the mid-1990s. Nearly twenty years after being converted to a cinema, shopping and restaurant complex, it was largely unoccupied, and the surrounding neighbourhood still showed signs of the economic shock of the team’s departure.

  After spending a few minutes cruising the side streets looking for free parking—I had no change in my pockets and hadn’t replenished Rocky’s supply of quarters—I gave up and parked on Sainte-Catherine in front of a sports bar terrasse that occupied almost the entire width of the sidewalk, as well as a wide strip of the street, for half a block. For some reason the pay station wouldn’t accept my credit card, nor did the machine take paper money. I was forced to beg a surly waitress to exchange a ten-dollar bill for five two-dollar coins. I fed two of them into the pay station for a little more than an hour’s parking.

  The afternoon sun was warm on my face as I walked north on Saint-Marc to de Maisonneuve. Number 2000 was a nondescript grey-brick building, with a dépanneur to the left of the entrance and a dry-cleaning store to the right. The vestibule was bright and clean. There was no doorman. The directory listed a P. Humphrey as the occupant of apartment 810. I dialled the door code for the apartment, but there was no response. I dialled the code for the superintendent in apartment 002, which I presumed was in the basement. Again, no response.

  I took out the iPhone and dialled the number on the rental information sign on the wall next to the directory. A recorded message informed me in French, then in English, that there were no vacancies. The message was followed by
a click and a dial tone. Pocketing the phone, I went into the dépanneur. At the rear of the store, as I had expected, a door led to the lobby of the apartment building. It wasn’t locked, and the middle-aged Vietnamese woman at the cash paid no attention to me as I went through into the lobby. Taking the elevator to the eighth floor, I rang the doorbell of apartment 810, which produced a scrabble of claws on hardwood and a hysterical yapping, but no human response. I tried, and failed, to imagine Thomason as the type to possess a yappy little dog.

  I took the elevator down to the first sub-level and found a door labelled 002, through which I could hear the babble of an American TV talk show. I pressed the doorbell button, producing a strident buzz. The TV voices faded, and a moment later the door opened, revealing a compact, ebony-haired woman in her twenties. She had a complexion the colour and texture of melted milk chocolate and the darkest eyes I had ever seen, irises as black as the pupils.

  “Si, yes?” she said, looking up at me, expression wary.

  “I’m looking for the superintendent,” I said. “El portero. Conserje.”

  “Mi marido no está aquí,” the woman said, shaking her head. “No here.”

  “Do you know where I can find him? Donde está?”

  “No here,” she said again. She made a sweeping gesture. “Work.”

  “In the building? En el edificio?”

  “Si.”

  I held up the iPhone. “El número de teléfono, por favor?”

  She held up a finger. “Momento.” She closed the door, returning a moment later to hand me a slip of paper on which was written a telephone number.

  “Gracias,” I said.

  “De nada,” she replied, and shut the door before I could ask her husband’s name.

  I took the elevator up to the lobby, where I dialled the number the woman had given me. A man answered. “Hello?”

  “Am I speaking to the superintendent of 2000 de Maisonneuve?”

  “Yeah, I’m the super,” he said in unaccented English. “How can I help you? I’m kinda busy right now.”