by Neil Plakcy
“You want to open this can of worms, be my guest,” Rick said. “You met Hank Quillian at the FBI when that neighbor of yours was involved in the online art theft. Give him a call and show him what you have. But don’t come crying to me if things backfire.”
“Great to see you have so much faith in me.” I stood up, scraping the wrought-iron chair on the pavement and leaving my half-empty coffee cup on the table. “Come on, Rochester, let’s go.”
“Be that way,” Rick grumbled, but he didn’t say anything to convince me to stay.
By the time I checked my email, later that day at work, Rick had sent me Agent Quillian’s email address and direct phone number. I called Quillian and explained what I’d discovered about Beauceron in broad terms, and we made an appointment for me to come to his office the next morning. I was lucky that it was a slow time at Friar Lake and I could take off two days in one week.
I spent the rest of the day on Beauceron, checking and double-checking everything. I amplified the simple report I had prepared for Rick, adding details and printing out both the real and fake spreadsheets. I had an old one-gig jump drive and I put all the documents on that as well.
That evening, as I followed Lili into the kitchen, I told her I was going to Philadelphia the next day. Rochester was right behind us, because he knew the kitchen was where the food was kept. “Do you remember that FBI agent I talked to about that guy who was stealing from Mark Figueroa? I’m going to show him the information I found on Beauceron.”
“You can’t just email it to him?”
“I want to explain it.”
“Uh-huh.” She stared into the refrigerator, then closed the door. “Since no elves appear to have made a grocery run and stocked our fridge without us knowing, what shall we do for dinner?”
Rochester knew the word “dinner,” and it made him crazy that we didn’t appear to be doing anything about his. “How about hoagies?” I asked as I opened the container of Rochester’s chow. “I can run down to DeLorenzo’s and pick them up.”
I’d grown up on DeLorenzo’s hoagies, made on fresh-baked rolls with hand-sliced meat and cheese, and I was pleased that the Thai couple who had bought the place after Mr. D died had kept up the traditions.
I fed Rochester, called in our order to the sandwich shop, then drove into downtown. DeLorenzo’s was behind the post office on a narrow street that ran parallel to the canal. A line of shotgun houses spanned the narrow chunk of land between street and water.
I was surprised to find Catherine in line at the deli counter when I walked in. “You’re clued in to all the local spots,” I said to her.
“Yeah, Tammy turned me on to this place. The kids love sub sandwiches and I like the fact that everything here is fresh.”
It was funny how using a single word could mark someone as a native, or not. In the greater Philadelphia area, we called them hoagies; subs and hero sandwiches were indicative of an outsider. I wondered for a moment how Ethan and Maddie would grow up—still rooted in New York? Or would they accept Stewart’s Crossing as home?
“I have to admit, sometimes I come here just so I can walk along the canal,” Catherine said, as the clerk was wrapping up her last sandwich. “It clears my head, especially when the kids are acting up or I’ve been fighting with Doug.”
Her smile was sad. “Guess I won’t have that to worry about anymore.”
She paid for her sandwiches and I stepped up and got the ones I’d ordered on the phone. As I walked out, I saw Catherine’s car driving slowly down Canal Street and I remembered what she’d said. She was familiar with the canal and the towpath, and of course she must have known that Doug couldn’t swim.
I pushed those thoughts aside. Catherine had a reason to want Doug dead, but I couldn’t believe that girl I’d known back at Eastern was capable of murder. And there was the whole Beauceron issue.
Not to mention the fact that Rick had already made up his mind that Doug’s death was no one’s fault but Doug’s own.
Over dinner, Lili said, “I spoke to Tamsen this afternoon, and she invited me to join her and Catherine for a girls’ morning out on Saturday,” she said. “Catherine needs cheering up, so Tamsen booked us appointments for manicures and pedicures, and then we’ll go out to lunch.”
“I’m sure that’ll be good for Catherine,” I said. I was glad that Lili got along so well with Tamsen, too, because if she and Rick ended up together it was important for them to be friends, too.
“You think you could watch the kids for a while?” she asked. “I kind of volunteered you.”
“Me?”
“I thought it would be good for you to spend some time with Ethan and Madison, since you knew their dad,” she said. “And I know you get mopey sometimes over not having kids. This’ll be a good wake up call for you.”
I snorted, but I agreed.
***
I slept badly that night, worrying about my meeting with Special Agent Quillian the next morning. What if he didn’t believe me? Suppose he confiscated my computers and tracked where I had been and what I had done?
I kept reminding myself that I had a very reasonable explanation for where I got the material, and there was no reason for Quillian to challenge me. With luck, he’d already have heard rumors of illicit operations at Beauceron and would thank me for my help and send me on my way.
Rochester was unhappy that I was leaving without him, and he stood by the sliding glass doors and watched me walked out through the courtyard and close the gate behind me, an expression of desolation on his face.
I caught the Septa train from the Yardley station into the Reading Terminal in center city, then walked the few blocks to the FBI office at 6th and Arch, on the edge of Chinatown. It was a tall, glassy office building and as a convicted felon, it gave me the creeps to enter such a bastion of law enforcement.
Hank Quillian was in his early thirties, with the kind of weathered, wary look I’d come to associate with ex-military guys. He had a bristly crew cut and wore a dark suit, blue tie and white shirt, what I’d come to consider the standard attire for G-Men. But then, he was the only one I’d met, so maybe it was just him.
A year or so before, Mark Figueroa had hired the son of one of my neighbors to help out at his antique store. I didn’t trust the guy, partly because Rochester didn’t like him. He’d gone on to seduce Mark and steal from him, and my investigation had led me to the FBI. I’d liked Hank Quillian then and I trusted that he’d do the right thing with my information.
“Rick Stemper says you’ve been messing around in one of his cases again,” Quillian said, as he sat down across from me in one of the Bureau’s interview rooms. “But he told me I ought to see what you’ve got.”
“I’ll tell him I appreciate his referral,” I said. I went through how I’d reconnected with Doug, and how after the seminar was over he had come to my room with his laptop and showed me the first spreadsheet, from the defunct shopping center. “We looked at the numbers together and I agreed with him, that they didn’t look right.”
He held up a hand to stop me. “Do you mind if I record this interview?” he asked. When I agreed to the recording he clicked a couple of buttons on a tape and introduced himself, adding my name and the date, time and location of our conversation, and then asked me to recap what I had just told him, for the record.
I did, then continued. “The spreadsheet showed that the owner of the shopping center was receiving rental income on each of the spaces, but Doug knew the two anchors were both closed. Most of the other storefronts were empty, and the few that remained looked like they were struggling.”
“What led you to believe there was anything illegal in that?” Quillian asked. “Could have just been bad bookkeeping.”
“That was my first thought,” I said. “But then while I had my hands on the keyboard my dog knocked my elbow, and I accidentally hit a couple of keys that took me to the last cell in the worksheet, where there was a hyperlink to another sheet.”
“The amazing Rochester,” Quillian said.
I was impressed that he remembered my dog’s name. But Rochester had played a part in that previous investigation, though Rick had tried to minimize it so that neither of us would look too wacky in front of the FBI.
“That’s right, Rochester.” I paused. Here was where I was going to deviate from the truth, and I knew I had to keep the details simple. “The link took us to a master spreadsheet that had separate sheets for each of the company’s investments. When we compared the numbers for the shopping center on both sheets, we realized that the numbers on the second sheet were much more realistic. They represented that the shopping center owner had stopped making payments on his loan months before.”
Quillian looked at me. “So you found some financial irregularities. Why do you think this is a case for the FBI?”
“Beauceron is a financial advisory firm. They put together investment funds like REITs and then solicit consumers to invest in them. If the numbers they present on potential income are doctored, isn’t that fraud? And if Beauceron has clients in multiple states, that would be interstate fraud. Isn’t that covered by the FBI?”
“It is. But let’s step back for a minute. Why did Mr. Guilfoyle come to you for help? You’re not an accountant, are you?”
“I’m not. But Doug and I went to college together, and when we reconnected I told him about my computer background. He was looking for some way to compile and analyze all the data he had found, and he thought I could help with that. I was able to write and then run a couple of macros in Excel to pull all the data together into one place.”
I opened the manila folder I’d brought with printouts of the Beauceron spreadsheets, and then flipped through them. “As you can see, there were a lot of spreadsheets, and Doug didn’t have the time or the computer skill to go through them all.”
“How many of the properties did you find that had anomalies?”
“About a dozen.” I closed the folder and pushed it toward him, then pulled the one-gig jump drive from my pocket and passed it across the table to him. “All the data is on this drive as well.” I took a deep breath. “The true spreadsheet is password protected. The password is in a document on the drive.”
“Where’d you get the password?”
Here it came. “Doug supplied it. I don’t know where he got it from.”
“You didn’t break the password yourself?”
I knew that Quillian had learned about my hacking background previously, and now I was sure that he remembered it. And I had learned enough about legal procedure to know that if the FBI knew I’d hacked the password, anything I found after that would be inadmissible in court.
“I didn’t have to. Like I said, Doug gave it to me.”
He raised his eyebrows, but all he said was, “Why didn’t Mr. Guilfoyle come to us himself?”
“He was hesitant to raise any alarms at Beauceron because he needed his job,” I said. “He and I talked about passing the information on the authorities after he got a new job. At least he wanted to stay until the end of the month to collect his commission check.”
“Do you believe that his death is connected to this information?” Quillian asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Rick Stemper has already decided that Doug’s death was a suicide – he had too much to drink, he was depressed, and he went into the canal. With him gone, I felt an obligation to contact you. Doug was an honest guy and he’d have wanted the victimization to stop.”
He slid the jump drive into his computer and checked it for viruses, then downloaded the information on it. “I’ll take a look at this material,” he said. “If I have any further questions I’ll be back in touch.”
He shut off the tape recorder and handed the drive back to me. I figured that was my cue to leave. I shook his hand, thanked him, and walked out into the spring sunshine.
I felt satisfied. I’d passed on the research Doug and I had done to the FBI. It was time for me to step back and let the wheels of the world move on. At least I’d try to.
I walked back to Reading Terminal, where I walked around the market picking up donuts from one of the Pennsylvania Dutch stalls, fresh artichokes and asparagus from a farm stand, and a big head of spinach.
When the West Trenton local arrived, I climbed on board. As the train racketed over the ancient tracks, passing mile after mile of industrial parks and commercial buildings behind a narrow screen of trees, I was transported back to my childhood.
My mother had a cancer scare when I was young, and she felt that the hospital at Penn had saved her life, so every time we needed to see a doctor we went down there, often on the train. I remembered shopping trips with her to long-defunct stores like Nan Duskin and Blum’s, which had a mezzanine level with a railing that looked over the first floor, and when I was really little I’d curl up under a rack of dresses and stare out at the people below me.
All those rituals of childhood, never to be relayed to my own kids. Never developing new rituals that would bond me to them, that would leave someone behind to remember me after I was gone.
It was nearly five o’clock by the time I got home. I logged into my college email and did some work until it was time to fix dinner. I boiled the artichokes and made a quick oil and vinegar dressing for them, then sprinkled the asparagus with kosher salt, wrapped the stalks in a damp paper towel, and stuck them in the microwave. I put a couple of chicken breasts under the broiler and sautéed the spinach with garlic, salt and pepper until it was wilted.
“This is a treat,” Lili said, as she sat down at the table across from me. I had to admit the food smelled great.
“I had some time to kill at Reading Terminal,” I said. “Are you still on for your mani-pedi on Saturday?”
“Yes. Catherine needs more cheering up than we thought. You remember that life insurance policy her divorce attorney had Doug take out?”
“The one for five million dollars?”
“Yup. It had a suicide clause for the first two years of the policy term. Because the police ruled Doug’s death a suicide, she won’t be able to collect a penny.”
“Wow. That’s terrible.”
“You bet. We’re going to meet Tamsen and Hannah at Catherine’s at ten,” she said. “Ethan’s going out with friends, but you’ll have Madison, Justin and Nathaniel to wrangle. You’ll be okay with that, won’t you?”
“What am I supposed to do with them all?”
“You’re a teacher,” she said. “You’re accustomed to dealing with a whole classroom of kids. You’ll figure something out.”
“My students are older,” I protested. “And I have lesson plans.”
“So wing it. I have faith in you.”
I looked down at Rochester, who sat eagerly beside me hoping for a tidbit. “Will you help me, puppy?” I asked him.
He woofed and nodded his head.
“See, there you go,” Lili said. “You’ll be fine.”
Lili volunteered to do the dishes, since I’d cooked, and I fed Rochester and took him out for his walk. I still felt unsettled about my trip to the FBI office. I’d done what I intended, and passed on the information about Beauceron. But it felt like there was something else I should be doing. “What do you think, boy?” I asked Rochester, as we walked around the lake. “What else can I do?”
He didn’t answer, just kept pulling forward on his leash.
26 – Cuckoo
Time moved slowly on Friday. I was still unsettled from my visit to the FBI the day before, and there was little to do at Friar Lake to take my mind away.
It was early afternoon when Rick called. “Can you do me a huge favor? I just heard from Tiffany and she’s completely freaked out. She went out on a job interview this morning and while she was gone, somebody broke into her apartment. She called the local cops right away and they came and took fingerprints, but she needs somebody to hold her hand and help her clean up. I have to give a deposition in Doylestown this afternoon so I can’t go up
there. You think you could?”
I agreed, and he said he’d text me the address. “But I have Rochester with me,” I said. “Will she be all right with him?”
“She’ll have to be.”
After we hung up, I stared out the window and wondered what kind of trouble Tiffany had gotten herself into now. She didn’t seem to have a lot of money, so why would someone break into her apartment—especially during the light of day? Because of the kind of guy he was, I was sure Rick had been generous with her when they were married, so she might own some expensive jewelry or electronics. With the price of gold so high, even small earrings or pinky rings could be enough motivation for a junkie or other low-life to break in.
Rochester and I left Friar Lake a few minutes later. Instead of driving all the way back downriver to Yardley to get onto I-95, I took route 611 north through the Pennsylvania countryside. Cliffs butted up against the tight curves of the winding roads and I was surprised there could be so much wilderness right in the middle of one of the most populated parts of the United States.
As I navigated the interchange for I-95, I ran into a sun shower, that weird combination of sun glaring at my windshield through a screen of rain. A few minutes later I passed through it and into brilliant sunshine, and a fuzzy rainbow stretched over the industrial landscape. It reminded me of the line from Springsteen’s “Glory Days” about the gas fires of the refineries. Something kind of trouble was clearly brewing in Tiffany’s life, and I hoped Rick and I would be able to figure it out before it exploded.
When I got close to Tiffany’s address I snagged an on-street parking space. Rochester was loving the urban smells and I had to keep tugging him forward, past a mattress outlet, a carpet shop called Sav-on-a-Roll-A, and a convenience store selling international phone calling cards, the front window a hodgepodge of flags from Latin American countries.
Tiffany’s apartment was over a frozen yogurt store on a cross street a few blocks from downtown Union City. The lock on the exterior door to her building was rusty and looked like it hadn’t worked in years. No need to buzz her to let us in.