The Eavesdropper

by Edward Trimnell

  “No. I—became involved with someone else, shortly before Donnie and Bethany got back together. And no, don’t ask who it was—because I’m not with that person anymore, either. I didn't even tell Donnie who the other guy was. But Donnie didn't take the news very well. He became—abusive.”

  “What did he do?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about it. Not specifics. Let’s just say it wasn't good, okay?”

  Yeah, not good. If it was Donnie Brady we were talking about, I could easily imagine the worst.

  “Did you report him to anyone?”

  “No. It wasn't exactly like that—something I could report. And anyway, it’s over. Donnie’s sold himself the story that our break-up was all his idea. He doesn't pursue me anymore, at least not overtly. He gives me this sarcastic grin whenever I see him.”

  I recalled that day in the elevator, the way Donnie had smirked, how Ellen had practically fled from the elevator.

  “Meanwhile, I do my best to avoid him. Sometimes I can’t with us both working at Thomas-Smithfield.”

  “I can’t believe you took up with him to begin with.” I knew I was out of bounds here, but I couldn't help it. The past few weeks had been among the worst in my life, filled with betrayals. This felt like another one.

  “Stop it, Frank. Just stop it. I’m telling you this, but it’s not like you have the right to interrogate me about my personal life. I had connections to Donnie Brady even before I worked here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s complicated. I come from this really poor family, north of Cincinnati—just south of Dayton, actually. My dad is a machinist, but he’s spent half of the last twenty years unemployed. Tough times in the rust belt, you know? Donnie comes from that same area and background. He just barely made it through college, from what I understand.

  “Anyway, my younger brother, Elias, was friends with Donnie’s younger brother. Elias is, let’s say, a little slow. Also a little impressionable. He looks up to Donnie.”

  “And so you decided to look up to Donnie, too?”

  “Cute. No, Frank. That’s not what I’m saying. Donnie can be very persuasive, when he wants to be.”

  I thought about Donnie’s easy success with Bethany. Even I had to admit that he emanated a certain dark charisma. Sid possessed a similar dark charisma, for that matter, only of a more sophisticated variety.

  “Who was the other guy you were involved with? Are you still involved with him now?”

  She had told me not to ask about this, but I couldn't help asking. I also wondered if it was really over.

  “Frank. Enough. No, I’m not involved with anyone now. No one. I’m one hundred percent single, and I’m going to stay single for the foreseeable future.”

  Chapter 68

  Ellen declined to tell me anything further about her personal history, but there were to be additional revelations that night.

  She seemed eager to talk, as if the enormity of all this were suddenly weighing on her mind. And who else was she going to talk to about this, other than me?

  “Andrei Sokolov,” she said, referring to some notes she had jotted down in advance on a yellow legal pad. Forty-five years old, born in Smolensk, Russia. It was still the USSR when Sokolov was born, of course.

  “He served with the Soviet armed forces during the war in Afghanistan. Not the recent one in which the U.S. invaded to oust the Taliban. I’m talking about the Soviet invasion and occupation in the 1980s.

  “Sokolov was some kind of a commando. The Soviets called them the Spetsnaz. Maybe the Russians still call them that; I’m not sure.

  “Sokolov, no doubt, already had plenty of blood on his hands from his time in Afghanistan. Then after the fall of the USSR, he became an enforcer for a branch of the Russian mafia, one headed up by his former unit commander in Afghanistan. That would be one Boris Kuznetsov, age fifty-one. Kuznetsov has a very similar background.”

  I listened to her, speechless, as she finished.

  “So they’re pretty dangerous guys. Don’t go back to that office of theirs, no matter what.”

  “I have no intention of going back,” I said. “But tell me, Ellen, how did you know about all of this?”

  A shadow of mild alarm crossed her face—or so it seemed to me. Then she recovered.

  She shrugged. “I do research. The Internet.”

  Yes, the Internet. I somehow doubted, though, that the detailed curricula vitae of minor figures in the Russian underworld were readily available—in English—via Google.

  You’re not telling me everything, Ellen, I thought. There’s something major that you’re holding back. And what would that be?

  But I wasn't going to call her out—not now; I wanted her to keep talking.

  “What else?” I asked. “I can see that you’ve got more written down on that legal pad of yours.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do. Bethany Cox: She has a criminal background. Nothing like Sokolov and Kuznetsov, mind you. It’s mostly nonviolent stuff: check fraud, tampering with evidence, shoplifting.”

  “Wait a minute,” I interjected. “Thomas-Smithfield doesn't hire people with criminal backgrounds. And certainly not for a position like a salaried purchasing agent.”

  “Yeah, you might wonder how either Donnie Brady or Bethany Cox got hired. Donnie Brady may aspire to be a criminal mastermind, but he doesn't have a criminal record—not yet. He has a college degree, though not the sort of degree that would ordinarily be required for his job. He has a degree in physical education, of all things. Bethany has taken only a few community college courses, and she didn't do very well in those.” Ellen smiled—not kindly—at Bethany’s folly.

  “Then how did they get hired?” I prodded.

  “From what I can tell, Donnie Brady simply slipped through the system. It happens. He was hired a few years back, when there was a lot of shuffling of HR managers. There could have been a lapse of oversight. That’s my theory, anyway. Bethany’s case, however, is more straightforward. Sid Harper green-lighted her, personally walked her through the hiring process.”

  “That means that she and Sid have a history that goes back at least a few years,” I said.

  “You could say that. She was one of the major factors in Sid’s breakup with his wife. Sid has been divorced for a few years, as you already know. What you might not know is that his two adult children refuse to speak with him, refuse to have anything to do with him.”

  I was dying once again to ask her: How did she acquire her information? She certainly didn't read the details of Sid’s failed marriage on the Internet. But I sat back and let her talk. She was a treasure trove of information tonight.

  I suspected that she had been holding all this in reserve for quite some time. She was unbottling it tonight. Maybe she saw it as a compensation for rebuffing me, for the truth about her and Donnie.

  “Sid makes a lot of money with the company. But he also has financial problems. He’s made some bad investments, and he gambles. Most of his success at Thomas-Smithfield, it turns out, can be attributed to toadying up to the right people, and blustering to get his way with others. Like my manager in the accounting department.

  “And there’s more to it. Sid doesn’t believe that he's been properly recognized within the company. He thinks he should be one of the company’s four vice presidents. But he’s been passed over multiple times.”

  Since the very beginning of all of this, one of my first questions had been: Why would Sid involve himself in such a risky undertaking? Those pieces were falling into place now.

  “I think I understand, finally, why Sid, a highly paid manager for the company, would take on an embezzlement scheme. He needs the money, plain and simple. And because of Bethany.”

  Ellen nodded. “Those things, yes, and what I just said: He doesn't believe that the company has given him a fair shake. He thinks he should be a vice president, but he’s still a manager in the purchasing department. The embezzlement is his f
orm of payback, you could say.”

  And how, exactly, do you know Sid’s motivations so well, Ellen? Or are you merely extrapolating? Once again, I restrained myself from asking the obvious questions. If I pressed her on that score, she would simply clam up.

  “The scheme originated, ironically enough, with Donnie and Bethany. They were doing it small-time. They had set up a single shell company, and they managed to slip a few small purchase orders through the system. Only a few thousand dollars a month. That would be small enough that Thomas-Smithfield’s internal checks and balances might miss it; but it could be a significant amount for Donnie and Bethany.

  “Then Sid got involved through Bethany. She probably told Sid because those two were already sleeping together, and had been, off and on, for years. Maybe he caught on to what she was doing, and she brought him in.”

  “What about the Russians?” I asked. “How did they work their way in?”

  “Sid was responsible for bringing the Russians in. Sokolov was the boss of an illegal bookmaking operation that Sid had used to place bets. To poorly place bets, I should add. Sokolov was into Sid for back gambling debts, so Sid convinced him to get involved in the embezzlement operation as a way to get his money back with interest. But that was also part of Sid’s grand plan to expand the operation. With the Russians’ expertise, they could set up a lot more shell companies, and bilk the company for millions, instead of a few grand.”

  “But surely they knew they would get caught, eventually.”

  “Not necessarily. Thomas-Smithfield has literally thousands of vendors. Once a vendor is created in the system and purchase orders are issued, the system is relatively automated. There simply isn't enough administrative manpower to check the validity of every single payment.

  “They made a mistake, of course, by setting that one up in the Cayman Islands. That was the one that caught my attention. But after that, they set them all up with U.S. banks. After the money is in a U.S. bank, they disburse the funds to offshore accounts. But no one at Thomas-Smithfield has any visibility of the money beyond the initial payment.”

  “Still,” I said, “someday all that money will be flagged in an audit.”

  Ellen shook her head. “No. They thought of that, too. The purchasing system is connected to the accounts payable system, because vendor payments are connected to purchase orders. When they’re done using a particular supplier, all they have to do is go into the purchasing system and delete the supplier record. That requires management override, of course—which they have.”

  I thought of how Sid had altered the open items report in order to build his case against me with Anne Hull. Of course.

  “That’s why the copies of those files are so important. That box in my bedroom is our insurance policy, if Sid gets nervous and decides to pull the plug on the whole plan—or otherwise cut his losses.”

  I nodded. Everything that Ellen Trevor had told me made sense. All the connections were lining up for me now.

  There was only one connection that didn't line up: There was no way that she could know all of this—not unless there was a major connection that she was still hiding from me.

  Chapter 69

  I had thought that I was done with eavesdropping. Hadn't eavesdropping already created enough problems for me?

  But I was to engage in a significant act of eavesdropping one final time.

  It was the day after Ellen's revelations. I was still trying to tease out how she could have possibly known all the details she had revealed. And why had she told me what I knew to be only part of the story? I could not escape the conviction that Ellen Trevor was still concealing as much as she had disclosed.

  It was in that state of mind that I happened to see Sid and Donnie arguing near the stairwell. It was shortly after noon, and the third floor was sparsely populated. They were in a remote area of the floor, and no one was paying attention to them.

  Except me.

  From my initial distance, I could make out no words, but I could interpret body language. I saw Donnie making threatening gestures at Sid, stepping dangerously close to the man who was both his co-conspirator, and his manager at Thomas-Smithfield.

  Sid, for his part, was attempting to calm Donnie down. But I could also tell that Sid was rapidly losing patience. I recalled what I had overheard him say about Donnie in the hotel room the night before: About him being a wild card who had no common sense.

  I knew, given all that had happened recently, that Sid and Donnie weren't arguing about anything concerning the purchasing department of Thomas-Smithfield. (Did they even attend to their work-related functions at all, anymore? I briefly wondered. Sid, at a minimum, would have to maintain an outward appearance of engagement.) Sid and Donnie were talking about the money, the Russians, Ellen Trevor. Maybe Bethany. Or possibly me.

  I decided that I had to get closer.

  I couldn't approach them directly. I walked to the far side of the floor, and approached via a meandering route where I was shielded by the angles of the building. For my final approach, I dropped to my hands and knees, and crawled into an empty cubicle not far from the stairwell—a maneuver that would not have been possible had this not been during the lunch hour. I pushed my body against my unknown colleague's desk, and strained my ears to listen.

  Did I look ridiculous? I'm sure I would have, had someone seen me. (And more important, I would have had no plausible alibi.) But only last night, I had scrunched my body between a bed and the wall of a hotel room, while Sid and Bethany coupled.

  When you're a spy, you do what you have to do, I thought sourly.

  “I’ve been talking to Bethany,” I heard Donnie say.

  “Good for you,” Sid said.

  “She said that you blame me for the foul-ups we’ve been having.”

  “Bethany said that?”

  “She didn't say that in so many words. But she says that you think I’m an idiot. Bethany said that.”

  “Donnie, how could Bethany possibly know what I think of you? But while we’re on the subject, yeah, you’re an idiot. And here you are, proving it again. Now, shut up about this matter here in the office, or you’re going to get us all—”

  I couldn't see, but the sound suggested that Donnie had shoved Sid. This was an unignorable breach of corporate protocol. If anyone had seen them, there would have been a mandatory HR investigation. And the results of that investigation would have been, well—who could say?

  “All right,” Sid finally snapped. “You want to have this out? Fine. But not here. Meet me at Braxton Park. There’s a clearing down the main trail. We can talk there.”

  “I’ll see you there in ten,” Donnie said icily.

  Putting myself in Sid’s shoes for a moment, I could easily understand why he would not want to talk to Donnie in the office. That much was a no-brainer. Nevertheless, his choice of Braxton Park as a meeting place was more than a little odd—even for Sid of late.

  Perhaps he wanted to avoid being seen with Donnie anywhere remotely near the Thomas-Smithfield building. Beechwood was urban/suburban sprawl at its worst, and there weren't many private places within a ten-minute drive of the office. Braxton Park was an oasis of wooded seclusion, a holdover from the days when Beechwood was still a semi-rural community on the edge of Cincinnati.

  But I now had to assume that Sid made few choices at random. He had directed Donnie to proceed to the first clearing, which would place them out of view of the main road. The main parking lot of the park would have been sufficient if Sid had only wanted to talk. I therefore had to conclude that Sid had something else in mind.

  Chapter 70

  And yes, I had every intention of finding out what that something was. I was taking a risk, I knew. But I had gone this far. I had already taken many risks. What was one more? Moreover, I might overhear a piece of information, or an unintended revelation that would eventually prove indispensable. Know your enemy. This was the only line I remembered from a cursory reading of Sun Tzu’s The Art of W
ar.

  I heard them take their leave of each other, and depart in separate directions. Sid headed down the stairwell, while Donnie set off for the elevators. In doing so, Donnie passed right by the place where I was hiding.

  I had successfully trailed Bethany to the hotel yesterday. I supposed I could successfully trail Sid and Donnie to Braxton Park—since I already knew where they were going. But this time it might be even more difficult for me to avoid detection.

  I had no idea where Donnie would be parked in the company parking lot, but I did know that Sid’s red Mercedes was always parked in the front side lot. I doubted that Sid, like Bethany, had ever taken note of my anonymous Ford Fusion.

  The best thing to do was wait a few minutes, let them go ahead of me. They should already be in the clearing when I arrived at the park.

  Five minutes later I drove past Sid’s usual parking space: It was empty. So far, so good.

  I parked in the main parking lot of Braxton Park. I saw Sid’s Mercedes and several other cars. One of them would be Donnie’s. I parked in a corner of the lot, where my car would draw as little attention as possible. The parking lot ran into a woods at the far end. On either side were soccer fields and baseball diamonds. This being January, they were not in use.

  I stepped out of my car. There was a damp chill in the air and the skies were overcast.

  I recalled the instructions that Sid had given Donnie: a clearing down the main trail. I looked back into the woods and saw an opening in the winter-bare trees that had to be the trail Sid had referred to. There was no other trail.

  Here goes, I thought.

  Even this time last week, it would have occurred to me that it wasn't too late for me to simply return to the office. I would even have had time to go through the drive-thru at Wendy’s or McDonald’s, I would have thought.

  But I was a different person now, or at least I believed that I was. I couldn't turn away. Sid was determined to have my job—at the very least—no matter what I did. Turning away wouldn't make things better.