No Hiding Behind the Potted Palms! A Dance with Danger Mystery #7

by Barton, Sara M.

“I didn’t know I wasn’t allowed to shut my office door for a private conversation,” I snapped, standing up. “Next time Tony has to tell me that his mother was diagnosed with an illness like cancer, I’ll be sure to notify you, so you can join us.”

  “Don’t you take that tone with me, Dori! I won’t have it!”

  “I’m out of here,” Tony announced, edging his way past the agitated assistant.

  “Tony,” I called after him, “I’m so sorry about your mother. Please give her my best.”

  “Thanks, Dori.” He still had a stricken look on his face. For a moment, Gloria almost seemed like she wanted to start over, but by then, I was in no mood. After all, Ralph was selling the company out from under my feet, with no notice. No wonder he was so excited about buying our shares.

  “What were you two talking about?” Gloria’s face was so close to mine, I could see her crooked incisors. I took a step back, retreating from the stormy girl Friday, and then thought better of it. I turned and went back to my desk. She started to follow me. “I asked you a question!”

  Chapter Eleven —

  “You have a problem with Tony sharing information about his mother with me? I’m not allowed to discuss her illness with him without your permission?” The truth was Tony had told me about his mother last week, but there was no reason to tell Gloria that. I decided to turn the tables on her and hit her where it hurt. “What kind of monster are you?”

  Gloria recoiled at that, as if I had struck her across the face. She did, after all, pride herself on her public image as the gracious bearer of all things warm and kind at Dynamic Productions.

  “I just don’t want you causing trouble for Ralph by going behind his back,” she told me. “He’s been very good to you over the years and I would hate to see you repay him by causing trouble with the other employees.”

  “Anything else, Gloria? Because if not, I’d like to get back to work,” I announced, my tone frosty. I picked up the phone, my hand poised to dial.

  “No…no.” For a long moment, she stared at me, as if searching for the right words. I kept my gaze steady, which seemed to disconcert her. With a “hrrump!”, she turned abruptly and left. I watched her blow out the door like an angry wind, her gauzy black dress swaying with her hips.

  Gloria didn’t realize it, but she had just given me a good kick in the seat of my pants, waking me out of the lethargy of the last few years. It happened in a flash. One minute, I was the victim of a horrific plot to ruin me and the next, I threw on my armor, picked up my lance, and got my battle plans in order. In that instant, time and space converged, and I suddenly realized that all this time I spent running away from the truth about what happened to Kevin was what allowed Ralph, Gloria, and the Winks to destroy my life. I was so afraid my son’s death was my fault, I was so afraid I could have protected him and didn’t, I let people walk all over me. I didn’t dare blame anyone else for making a mistake, lest I have to accept the blame for my own failures. But as I sat there, staring at Gloria, it suddenly occurred to me that I was a good person. I taught Kevin as much as I could about how to stay safe. That drunk driver killed him, not because he had one too many, thanks to a momentary lapse in judgment, but because he chose not to accept responsibility for his actions over years. He and his addiction to Canadian Club killed my little boy, and I was damned if I was going to continue to let the bastard off the hook because his widow was tearful, begging me to forgive her at Kevin’s funeral. I could still remember her sad, red eyes as she gripped my hands. Bosco had walked away, angry, and at the time, I had thought him wrong. But now I was beginning to understand.

  There were other people all around Matthew Horner, who knew that he was impaired the day he got behind the wheel. He had six drunk-driving arrests and two previous crashes, one that injured another woman. He had a history of being a dangerous man.

  I thought about the people who didn’t stop him that day when he was at the Humpback Bar, the letters and cards I got from people who were sorry they didn’t take the keys away, sharing their guilt. Somehow, I let them off the hook, too, and I took their burden as my own. Even the insurance company was dragging its heels on the settlement. They tried to claim Matthew Horner lied when he applied for auto insurance, putting the car in his wife’s name, and therefore, he was an uninsured driver. We were still waiting for the trial to begin.

  As I sat there at my desk, reviewing my own actions, I saw that I was no different than the people around Matthew Horner, allowing George in my life because I saw myself as a powerless victim. I didn’t want to be perceive as mean or unmerciful, so I went out of my way to embrace the unembraceable, the unworthy. If I hadn’t cared so much about being kind, I would have been enraged. All the anger that I felt at Kevin’s unnecessary death suddenly surged up in me, and I decided once and for all that I was going to stand up for myself. That was my money that helped Ralph build this company. That was my house that was destroyed. That was my heart that George trampled. I was not going to take it any more. No more being the victim. I made up my mind I was going to take back my life, get what was mine, and the hell with the guilty. They needn’t bother sending me an invitation to their pity party. I had more important things to do than attend.

  I put down the receiver and quickly forwarded the emails from Mary and the others to my personal account and to Bosco before deleting them from my Dynamic account. I went into my computer and cleared my history, emptied the cache, and deleted the cookies. Once all that was done, I picked up the phone to call the Prop Shop.

  “Hey, Harry. How’s it going?” I said loudly into the receiver. Seconds later, I heard the click as Gloria listened in from the outer office. I spent a few minutes chatting about Roger’s love life, and how frustrating it was for Harry to see his ex out and about town with his latest paramour. Then I got down to business.

  “Do you still have those disco balls? I’m going to need them. I just got an offer from another company that wants us to do a ‘Saturday Night Fever’ retro thing for their chiropractic office.” Even as I spoke, I was making notes on my tablet. “Can you give me a price on them?”

  “Do you realize those things are almost antiques now?” Harry laughed. I shared a couple of ideas with him about some other items that might work and then listened eagerly to his suggestions of possible sites to use for filming the retro dance scenes.

  When I got done on the phone, I signed up for a couple of new email accounts on my tablet, inventing four new companies looking for video production services. Dr. Evans Ranger was the non-existent chiropractor located just over the border, according to the email I sent myself at Dynamic. The White Gardenia was a restaurant down in Greenwich, in the process of getting their liquor license and remodeling their restaurant space, hoping to open in three months with a media blitz. The owner, Jonathan Valenti, wanted to know if we also handled other services, such as social media. The third company I invented was Hawthorne In-Home Care, a Kentucky company with three branch offices opening soon in the area. The fourth was for Venerable Jewelers, inquiring if we had any experience in shooting short educational pieces for trade shows. They wanted to run looped footage on how to properly clean silver, jewelry, and crystal at their booth at the Montreal convention. I made sure all the faked emails showed up in my Dynamic email account before I picked up my briefcase and headed out to a fictional meeting with a prospective client. I told Gloria I would be back in an hour. She didn’t even bother to look up as I passed her desk. Would she open them in my absence? Would she mark them as unread, as if she hadn’t snooped on me? I remembered the handful of times I returned from lunch after I first met George and found my computer screen lit up. Gloria had claimed that she accidentally brushed the keyboard when she left paperwork for me, but now I understood. The girly conversations we had in the office were a reinforcement of George’s efforts to romance me. Gloria had read his emails to me. It wasn’t a coincidence that she mentioned thingsin George’s communications that echoed my feelings. She was read
ing the script, word for word. She was George’s eyes and ears on the ground, confirming for him what I liked and didn’t like about him, so he could adjust his seductive techniques. For a brief moment, I felt like a complete idiot. But then I reminded myself that I been deceived, and if I was going to survive this beating, I was going to have to stop feeling bad about making mistakes and get on with fixing the problem. That gave me focus. As my head began to steer me in the right direction, I felt a renewed strength. My heart felt lighter as i glimpsed the light at the end of the tunnel. I thought about Kevin, my little boy, and how he would have wanted justice.

  “Make it fair, Mom,” he once said to me after his bike was stolen. “I know that kid took it!”

  The look of devastation on his face drove me to journey four blocks with my son, to Danny Abrams’ house, where I knocked on the door and waited to confront his mother. At first, Monica hadn’t believed her son was guilty of stealing Kevin’s bike. She wanted to believe that it was someone else’s problem.

  “It’s in the garage,” Kevin had insisted. “I saw him put it there.”

  Sure enough, Danny had tucked Kevin’s bike in the corner, behind the lawnmower and the leaf blower.

  “That’s Danny’s bike,” she replied.

  “No, it’s not! It’s mine! Danny’s is over there!” Kevin had pointed to the second bike, now resting in the opposite corner of the garage, by the lawn furniture.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Monica Abrams had said. “He might have two bikes.”

  At the time, I had commiserated with her, understanding how mortified she was that her only son had stolen a bike. Kevin was appalled.

  “Mom, I want my bike back!” He stood in front of me, pleading. That’s when I marched over to that bike by the lawnmower, grabbed the handlebars, and wheeled it out into the open. Kevin’s stickers were all over the handlebars. I recognized the seat that we had bought at Mike’s Mountain Bikes three weeks before. I had looked Monica steadily in the eye and told her we were taking Kevin’s bike back, that she would have to deal with her son’s bad behavior. She had started to protest, but I knew the bike was Kevin’s. At the time, I felt sorry for her because she so clearly didn’t want to confront her son’s bad behavior. She hadn’t wanted to believe her little boy capable of being a thief. Looking back, I realized I should have kicked her lame ass and told her to be a real parent. Real parents not only protect their kids, they protect people from their kids when they get out of line. People are human. We all have made mistakes that need real fixing.

  I headed for the Lucy B. Tongren Public Library, two blocks away, where I signed onto a public computer. I created web pages, two on Blogger and two on WordPress, for the fictional companies. On the Hawthorne In-Home Care page, I typed in “website under construction”. I wanted the companies to look legitimate enough to be attractive targets for Ralph and his criminal cohorts, but not established enough to seem overly sophisticated. I used the same email addresses and vague contact information that I had used in the emails to myself. I sent myself a couple more inquiries, asking for prices on the prospective jobs. The beauty of being in the commercial business was that I had no problem being creative and quick. In less than an hour, I set my trap. It was time to go back to the office.

  I ran into Dom in the parking lot as he was loading equipment into the van. He rolled his eyes and nodded in Ralph’s direction. The door to Dynamic Productions was open and the animated conversation looked anything but romantic between the lovebirds. Gloria looked like she had rained all over his parade. I squeezed past the pair of them as they stood by the doorway and headed into my office, where I printed out the latest emails from the fictitious companies. I left them on my desk.

  Kendall was finishing her first run-through on the Red Dragon Garden footage. I popped my head into the editing room, to see how things were going.

  “So far, so good,” she told me. “I think we have what we need. Any chance we can start putting things together tomorrow?”

  “Absolutely,” I promised.

  “Dori!” I heard Bosco’s voice in the outer office. “Sorry I’m late. Any chance you’re ready? I’ve got to get back to work. I have a crisis!”

  I stopped in my office to retrieve my briefcase and purse before following him out to his car. He was making a phone call as I climbed in. Reaching over, he squeezed my hand.

  “Right. Right. Yes, I know. As soon as I have anything for you. Okay.” With that, Bosco hung up. “Let’s get the hell out of here before Ralph tries to corner me again. I have no intention of raising the white flag yet. How was your day?”

  It took me ten minutes to fill him in, including my trap to catch Ralph and Gloria. He drove as he listened, his eyes forward, barely glancing at me. I couldn’t tell what his reaction was to my plan, but I knew he was thinking about it. Suddenly, with his blinker on, he pulled into the parking lot of Holcomb’s Surf and Turf.

  “What are we doing here?” I asked nervously. If we were going to argue, I preferred not to do it in public.

  “What are we doing here? What are we doing here?” He turned towards me, his voice rising. “Are you kidding me? I am buying you the biggest lobster and the tenderest filet mignon they have in this joint!”

  “You are?” Bosco wore a huge grin on his face.

  “I am. That was absolutely brilliant, my love. What a stroke of genius. Let’s hope Ralph takes that bait. That will move this along nicely. After dinner, we’ll stop at Walmart and pick up a few disposable phones, so Ralph and Gloria can call their new prospective clients. Let’s work this like a real sting and get the evidence for the prosecutors.”

  Chapter Twelve —

  Two hours later, we were sitting in the living room of Bosco’s apartment, sprawled on the sofa. I was filling in the details of the phony websites. We activated the new phones, recorded voicemail messages in our altered voices, and then I added the phone numbers to the blog sites. I concentrated on loading stock photos and doing some graphics, to jazz up the visual appeal, and then I designed logos for the non-existent companies and added them. Bosco was reviewing credit reports on Ralph and on Gloria.

  “Did you know that Dynamic Realty Trust owns Gloria’s condo?”

  “As in Ralph bought the place for her?”

  “Exactly.”

  “When?” I wanted to know how long the two of them were shacking up.

  “Six years ago,” was his reply. “She was still working at Temps, Inc. then. What I don’t understand is where she got the money for her boat.”

  “Gloria has a boat?”

  “She does. It’s a 24’ Tige RZ4 model, year 2008. She paid just over $62,000 in cash for it, and she’s the registered owner. Her salary from Dynamic Productions is just under $28,000. She’s got no other income, according to her credit reports.”

  “How could she afford a boat like that?” I wondered.

  “How indeed,” Bosco agreed. “It looks like Ralph and Gloria have been living the high life for quite some time. You should see his charges for entertaining clients. Apparently, he’s been meeting them at the casinos or racetracks. All the hotels are within a mile or two of Atlantic City, Ledyard, Montville, Sarasota, Queens, and Niagra Falls. Or should I say Viagra Falls, in Ralph’s honor?”

  “So, Ralph’s been playing and we’ve been paying?”

  “Pretty much. You know, I went over that financial report he gave us before we gave him the $25,000 to expand. It looked legitimate, right down to his bank statements. On closer examination, it looks like he Photoshopped the documents. They’re all forged. I can’t believe he fooled us this way. I can’t believe I was this dumb.”

  “How do you think I feel?” I shook my head. “I went to work every day. I sat in the room next to him. I let Gloria get me a cup of coffee and it never occurred to me the two of them were robbing us blind.”

  “More importantly,” Bosco pointed out, “they brought the Winks on board. That explosion was no accident.”

  “But
why blow up the house? That’s the part I don’t understand.”

  “They always planned to blame you, Dori. They need you to look guilty. If Tony is telling you that Ralph says you’re having a mental breakdown, we need to bring the cops up to speed now. We have to show them these credit reports. We have to show them we’re legitimate partners in Dynamic Productions. And we have to tell them about the Winks.”

  “In other words, everyone is going to know what a fool I’ve been?”

  “No, babe. Everyone is going to see that you came to your sense and took back your life. No more Ms. Nice Girl, vulnerable to predators. You’ve grown a set of cajones. It’s time to use them.”

  “We need to find that missing equipment, too, before I get blamed for that.”

  We spent the rest of the evening writing up a timeline, documenting the missing money and equipment, as well as the padding of bills. We worked side by side, in companionable silence, broken by occasional commentary. Finally reaching the end of the time line, I put my tablet on the coffee table.

  “Bosco, you know what I really need?”

  “What’s that?” He barely looked up from his clipboard, not even bothering to stop writing.

  “I need the serial numbers of the missing equipment if we’re going to track that stuff down. I’ll have to go in tomorrow and go through the files.”

  “Why wait till tomorrow?” he said, looking at me through his glasses. Let’s go take a look now.”

  “But it’s almost ten,” I pointed out.

  “What happened to the new Dori? Look, kid. If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a forensic accountant, it’s that you secure the evidence as soon as you become aware of its existence. You never let the bad guys get the jump on you by giving them time to destroy documents. Let’s rock and roll. Let me just forward these files to Honshield Walker and we’re out of here.”

  Twenty minutes later, we were about to pull into the parking lot for Dynamic Productions.