Passing Semis in the Rain: A Tina Johnson Adventure

by Karen Goldner

  "He's here," I whispered.

  Teresa looked at me like she half expected me to be joking.

  "Vraiment," I said. "Two o'clock," referring to the direction and not the time.

  Therese looked at Ann and then casually beyond, into the dining room, her eyes turning faster than her head. "Quelle chance," Therese said.

  "Oui."

  Denman was accompanied by another man, a few years younger and a couple of inches shorter. His yellow golf shirt did not flatter his pale complexion. An out of town guest, perhaps. Certainly he looked more like a tourist than a Miamian.

  The two men walked toward us, following the maître d'. There was only one empty table, and it was far enough away that they would be unlikely to overhear us once they were seated. Now or never.

  Therese began as we had rehearsed. Upon seeing Denman she had held her phone to her ear. Now she slammed it to the table. Denman looked toward the sound and had to pause to let some other patrons through the narrow space between the tables.

  "Mon Dieu! He is trying to rob me! Does he think I'm an idiot?" Therese exclaimed. Denman did not rush off after the patrons had cleared his path.

  "What's wrong?" I was trying hard to channel Ann. This might have been easier if I had acted in the high school musical the summer after junior year rather than working at McDonald's.

  "Ce stupide"—Therese used a word that meant something a lot stronger than stupid—"has decided he can renegotiate my fee. I told him I would find the money elsewhere." Even sitting down, Therese could manage a flounce.

  Denman took two short steps, then stopped to let a server by. He didn't look like the kind of man who normally yielded to wait staff. We seemed to have caught his interest.

  "Can you get it in time?" Ann asked breathlessly. After all, her measly paycheck was on the line. "I thought we had to show them the financing package next week."

  "I can buy a few days." Teresa was doing a superior job of sounding like someone who was putting on a false show of confidence—and she was doing it in a French Canadian accent.

  Denman had slowly passed our table and now turned toward us. Therese caught his eye and instantly ignored him, looking furiously and desperately at the menu, as if it were a list of investment bankers. I smiled weakly at him, embarrassed that my boss had attracted attention in a crowded restaurant. My eyes quickly dropped to the menu, too.

  For a moment it looked like he might approach us, but he apparently thought the better of it. His pace sped up as he walked over to join his pale friend, who was already seated at a table for four.

  I worked very hard to keep my head toward the menu while noticing that Mickey Denman had selected the seat at his table where he could best keep an eye on us.

  The waiter finally took our order. We sipped our iced tea, and put part two into action.

  I went to the ladies' room, which unfortunately did not lead me past Denman's table. That would have been lucky, but we had not counted on it. My job in the bathroom—or, rather, my second job, because after all that iced tea I truly needed to use the facilities—was to call Teresa's phone. Teresa's job was to let the phone ring once or twice to make sure Denman heard it, and then pretend to get bad news.

  As I returned to the table, she was speaking French with just a soupçon of desperation. She hung up and gave me a smile, well-practiced, to betray her fear. I waited expectantly.

  "They are insisting to see the package on Friday morning."

  "Why?"

  "Je ne sais pas." She pursed her lips and shrugged. Her voice dropped. "It gets worse. They want the money wired by close of business Friday." I let my eyes widen and hoped my expression was one of despair, not glee, because Mickey Denman was staring right at us. It seemed unlikely he had heard the conversation, but he definitely saw our faces.

  Therese dialed a number and spoke in French. She began the conversation with a face full of confidence; about twenty seconds later her smile disappeared and her shoulders slumped. She looked at Ann and shook her head non. Ann bit her lip. Teresa put on this act once more before our salads arrived. We ate in depressed silence. I noticed that Denman's service was quite a bit faster than ours; they were already well into their sandwiches.

  Therese played with texting from time to time, her face looking longer each time she examined her phone. Ann had a portfolio open when the salad arrived, and had knocked it off in her hurry to make room for the server. She bent over awkwardly and retrieved everything but one card. Trying to be helpful, Ann asked, "What about that other group in Yaoundé?" Therese shook her head again, her expression solemn.

  Denman did not make his billions by dawdling over lunch. He and the pale man were working their way toward us to leave the restaurant. He stopped at our table and picked up the business card that had fallen, face up, from the portfolio.

  "Excuse me Miss, um, Miss Gauthier. You seem to have dropped this." He got the name off the card as he handed it to me.

  Ann blushed slightly and said, "Oh, this belongs to my boss," nodding toward Therese. "Thank you."

  I nearly held my breath. Now was the moment of truth. Would he take the bait?

  "I could not help but notice that you seem to be in a tight spot. Is there something I can do to help?"

  Bingo.

  Therese looked at him the way a super-confident international businesswoman would look at some guy who thinks that picking up a dropped business card entitles him to an audience.

  "Non, merci. It is a minor financing problem which we will have resolved by the end of the day."

  Denman smiled arrogantly. He had probably experienced his fair share of minor financing problems and knew that she was playing hard to get while desperately needing his help. He pulled out his wallet and found his card while his pale friend looked me over.

  "Mickey Denman. I finance a lot of projects, minor and otherwise." His friend laughed at that. "Please give me a call if you'd like to talk." He paused. "Oh, I'm sorry. How rude. This is my friend and associate, Frank D'Angelo."

  32

  I was proud that neither of us dropped our forks or our jaws. My mouth went dry but I was afraid my hand would shake if I picked up the water glass. Instead, I smiled politely and put my hands in my lap.

  Although Teresa was no doubt trying to keep her stomach from her throat, Therese had no interest whatsoever in this pale man in the yellow shirt. She had more important concerns, and Mickey understood that.

  "It was nice to meet you, Miss Gauthier." He turned and followed Frank D'Angelo, who was making his way toward the maître d’ stand.

  We were silent until we saw them enter the elevator and the doors shut behind them. Even then, we allowed ourselves only a quiet attagirl before returning to our roles. No need or time to draw out lunch anymore, so we rushed through our salads and headed to the condo, squealing in the Vue all the way home.

  I had changed out of Ann's clothes into shorts and a t-shirt when Mark called. He had set up some sort of alert that would notify him if anyone did an Internet search for Therese Gauthier. Someone had.

  "The IP address is blocked, so I can't tell where it is coming from, but someone has visited a couple of the pages I set up for her."

  "Sounds like he's taking our bait," I said. I wondered why I had not become a spy instead of a telemarketer. This was exciting.

  Mark insisted that I tell him everything about meeting Denman. When I got to the end, the part about Frank D'Angelo, he made worried noises.

  "It's not such a surprise," I said. "Denman is an owner of the bank, and D'Angelo is mixed up in the finances somehow. I hope he didn't recognize me."

  "He's seen you before?"

  "No, but he knows Christine, and we look alike."

  "Tina, you look like a lot of beautiful women." I loved how Mark talked to me. "He wouldn't have any reason to think that you were the woman that Christine was using as her other identity. You were simply an attractive assistant in a restaurant. He was probably leering, not looking."


  I wanted to agree with Mark about that, but I had a lingering doubt. I think he did, too, because he changed the subject, telling me that he was going back on full time at his teaching job in the fall. I didn't get to hear about his good news as much as I'd have liked, because Teresa knocked and we needed to get back to business.

  "What should we do now?" I asked her. "Denman won't call this afternoon; he'll want to make us sweat."

  "We need to figure out what D'Angelo is doing with Denman," she said. We sat down in the living room; Teresa on the chair, me with my legs curled under me on the couch.

  "So can we assume that D'Angelo is the money behind Denman? Which means that they are the two links between the mob and the bank?" I was thinking out loud.

  "That may be jumping the gun," Teresa said. "We can be reasonably sure that Denman is the guy who bailed out National Bank and Trust. And we think that Denman used illegal money to do it, because of those loan accounts. And we know that D'Angelo worked for the mob and also took care of the drug cartel's money. But we don't know that the money Denman used came from D'Angelo. Maybe they were just having lunch?"

  I looked down my nose at Teresa and we smiled in agreement that her suggestion was ridiculous.

  "Didn't you say that 1980 was a strange time to have enough money to go into business?" I asked her.

  "Yes, interest rates were sky high. Businesses were paying interest rates that were more like credit card rates, and those were the lucky ones who could get a loan in the first place."

  "So how does our friend Mickey Denman, a kid from Missouri—and let's even assume that he made decent money as a construction engineer for a while—how does such a guy have the credit to get the financing to start a construction business in 1980? If he couldn't borrow it, where would it come from?"

  "The mob?" asked Teresa. "That's sort of a leap, isn't it?"

  "If I hadn't been shot at, stabbed, and seen a classmate die with a bullet in her stomach, I might agree," I said. "But think about it. Maybe he had a rich uncle. It's possible. But I'm willing to bet that he got the money from the mob or a drug cartel."

  Teresa's eyes narrowed in thought and she began nodding. Then she stopped. "But wait, you're talking about his original construction company. That wouldn't necessarily link either of them to the bank."

  "Unless that's how Denman got in bed with the mob, or the cartel, and that relationship has been going on for thirty-five years. So he was the front man for the cartel."

  "Or the mob," Teresa pointed out. "We still don't know the source of the money."

  "We actually don't know much at all," I admitted. "But there is clearly some disagreement between Frank, who according to Christine was in a criminal group that was separate from the drug cartel, and the cartel itself, and that disagreement involved Frank's handling of the cartel's money."

  "I don't know that it matters a lot which group was the source of the money."

  "Oh, I think it matters quite a bit. First of all, it gives us some sense of who has been after me, and how likely they are to return. Second, it may let us play them against each other."

  Teresa gave me a little bow. "I'm impressed," she said. "You have become truly devious."

  "It's just self-defense." I shrugged. "And if you don't know the rules of the game you never have a chance to win." I thought a minute. "What about Moreno's assassination? The cartel was behind that. Frank knew about it, but I got the impression from Christine that he and his organization were not directly involved. This is complicated."

  Teresa stood up, pulled a few sheets of paper from her portfolio pad, and dug a pen out of her purse. She walked over to the dining room table and looked at me until I got off the couch.

  "Okay, I've done the first part, getting supplies," she said with a grin. "Now it's your turn. What should I write down?"

  At the table I had her tear the paper into pieces. On each one we wrote the name of someone we knew about: Christine, Frank, Denman, Susan, Passenger Guy who had killed Christine, even President Moreno. Then we moved the pieces around on the table for a while, trying to clarify the relationships. Nothing.

  "I wish we had some colored yarn and photographs and thumbtacks," I said, trying to break up the frustration. "That always seems to work in the movies."

  Teresa kept staring at the papers and moving them around. I needed a break and went to the window. The turquoise water and the light gray, nearly white beach were like a postcard. There was one fluffy white cloud passing by. I watched a little boy playing on the beach, scooping sand into a rough castle and digging a moat. A second boy with bright red hair carried a plastic bucket filled with water to him and gently emptied its contents into the moat. The redheaded boy went back to the ocean to refill and to spend some time looking at his feet under the water. In his absence a little girl walked up with a yellow plastic mold. She and the first boy argued for a minute, then he relented and the two of them started reforming the castle with her sand mold. The redheaded boy returned to find that the moat had been filled in and his water was no longer welcome. I couldn't see his face but imagined his disappointment at being shut out. He stood there for a moment and then walked toward another group of children, offering his water to them. I was happy for him that they let him play, and then it hit me.

  "What if Denman started with one of the groups and ended with the other?" I asked.

  Teresa looked up from the table.

  "What if he started his business with money from, say, the mob, and then later ended up in bed with the cartel?"

  "How would that have worked?" asked Teresa. She stopped moving the papers around.

  I thought a minute."Let's say Denman used mob money to start his construction business. That was 1980, before his sons were born. So he's this young ambitious guy and this is the only source of money he can get. He probably figured he'd be able to handle it. Then he has kids and maybe he stops feeling so in control. I've been wondering why he would have closed up Denman Construction and begun Denman Enterprises, why he would go from having a big company to basically this secret empire. There are lots of reasons, I guess. But what if he did that as a way to try and get rid of the mob?"

  "I don't know anybody in the Mafia," Teresa said dryly, "but I'm guessing that you can't get away from them as easily as having your lawyer transfer a bunch of assets."

  "Exactly," I said. "So maybe he took money from the cartel to get rid of the mob?" My brain was one second behind my mouth or I would not have said something so dumb.

  "That doesn't make any sense," Teresa said. She was speaking for both of us.

  "I think we need to know more about the boys." I had already begun to dial Mark's number.

  33

  Thursday morning at nine fifteen, Tammy Wilson placed a call for her boss, Mickey Denman, to Therese Gauthier. Conveniently, Ms. Gauthier was available to speak with Mr. Denman and did so after pushing the speaker button on her cell phone.

  "Just wondered whether you were still in the market for financing," Denman began. Miami is really not the South, at least not as far as pleasantries and small talk are concerned.

  "We still have a couple of options available," Therese said defensively.

  "Then I could be a third. I could not help but overhear a reference to Africa, and I have actually been interested in looking into opportunities there."

  "You were listening to my private conversation?" Teresa winked at me and I suppressed a giggle.

  "It's a small dining room, and I make it my business to be aware of what is happening around me." Denman's arrogance was grating.

  Therese waited. Denman waited. I nodded to Teresa, go ahead.

  "Yes, it is an investment opportunity in Cameroon."

  "What kind of opportunity?"

  "I would prefer to discuss this in person."

  Denman called for Tammy and his phone muted for a minute. When a voice returned on the other end, it was Tammy, advising that Mr. Denman had a few minutes available at eleven thirty, but would need to
leave promptly at noon for a luncheon engagement.

  Teresa thanked Tammy and disconnected the call. We high-fived and got into costume.

  Denman Enterprises was in an unmarked suite at the end of a hallway on the thirty-second floor of a downtown Miami office building that had been Class A during the Clinton administration. We might not have found it except for a friendly receptionist at the accountant's office next to the elevators on thirty-two. She pointed us down the hall to a door that looked like the janitor's closet.

  There was no sign, not even a small one. Dubious, I rang the bell, and we were buzzed in. We were ten minutes early because we had spent fifteen minutes in the coffee shop on the building's street level and another five in the lobby of the bank on the main floor.

  Tammy was seated at her desk in the corner of the small lobby. She was nearly surrounded by lateral filing cabinets. Some were light gray and some darker, giving the impression that they had been purchased as demand required, and that there had been a lot of demand.

  She peered at us over half glasses, her white blonde hair short and fashionable for a woman in her sixties. Therese and Ann introduced themselves, and Tammy offered espresso or sparkling water while we were waiting for Mr. Denman.

  We sat in the two lobby chairs with a small table in between them. No couch or newspaper or even a plant. Apparently Denman Enterprises did not expect to receive many visitors.

  Tammy served the bottled sparkling water with glasses, which was a classy touch. I finished mine before Teresa did, but we both were done before Tammy's phone buzzed at eleven thirty five—very old school—and she ushered us into Denman's inner sanctum.

  There was nothing about Mickey Denman's office that I did not expect. His dark wooden desk was immense. Behind it were a matching set of bookshelves and a credenza, adorned with ornamental books and framed photographs. Denman holding up a marlin, Denman and the current Mrs. Denman smiling at a cocktail party, a picture of five beautiful children wearing green and red and sitting around a Christmas tree. His desk was covered with stacks of papers, effectively communicating "I am too busy to spend much time with you." His desk phone was vintage 1996, complete with buttons for different lines. A small dictation recorder sat next to it. The only concession to the twenty-first century was a laptop and it was sitting closed, to one side of the desk.