by Susan Wolfe
Kind of laughable, when you thought about it. Not even Einstein the Paralegal could compensate for this idiot CEO.
Because that’s what it all came down to, a terrible CEO. All those other morons and misfits were just manifestations of Roy’s bad judgment. If you got rid of every one of them, Roy would just hire some more. Look at Large Romeo replacing Terkes, for example. Roy had more bad ideas than a stable had horseflies. Withholding Ken’s bonus. Promoting Coppola. Probably negotiating with Voldemort right now to replace Sally as head of HR. Pitiful.
And she wasn’t the only one who’d sacrificed a lot for Lumina Software. Look how hard Zack had worked, and Quan, and all the software engineers working around the clock to get the 6.1 out. Staying up night after night to finish the audit on time. Winning the patent case. And for what? Dead bang nothing. The company was finally caving in on itself. There hadn’t been enough collective energy in that last executive meeting to power a light bulb.
This was what Ken meant about feeling like a fool.
What good did it do to use your special talents if you just ended up here, anyway?
Of course, she’d been using those talents in a shortsighted way. Her father had warned her that Sally might be the wrong target. The only solution that had ever made sense was getting rid of Roy himself. Maybe if she hadn’t been distracted by all the horseflies . . .
Not that she’d ever had the slightest chance of taking out Roy. The guy was invincible. After all, Sally had more or less accurately listed his many colossal failings in the course of her unfortunate power grab, and the board’s only response was to tell him to knock off the little, obvious ones and then leave him in charge to wreck everything else. Must be because Wall Street loved him for all that cost-cutting. Nobody, including Georgia, was ever going to puncture that.
Unless whatever Sally had on Roy made a good shiv.
Georgia remained convinced Sally did have something on Roy, but who knew if it was bad enough to get him fired? If it had been, wouldn’t Sally have used it against him already, after the humiliating way he let the board just frog-march her out of the company? Georgia certainly couldn’t judge, because she’d shut down her research as part of her wholesome resolve to stop taking wild chances and stick to the safe, respectable job she’d actually been given.
See, now that was the thing: Being cautious sometimes posed its own risks (not to mention that it got a little boring). She drummed her fingers on the seat a few times. Who could say for sure what she’d have found if she’d pursued it? She might have been locked and loaded by now for the present emergency.
She sighed so heavily that her cheeks ballooned.
What was she talking about? Roy Zisko was unassailable. Start messing with him and who knew where you’d end up?
Where was she ending up now? Her company was being reduced to rubble by a CEO out of Saturday Night Live.
The harm was already done, or shortly would be. If Ken Madigan was giving up, it really must be hopeless. He had worked so hard with such intelligence and no encouragement for a long time. He had given his all, his completely talented all, to that stupid company. How could so much effort be allowed to just gurgle down the drain?
Maybe it couldn’t.
Ken was giving up because he had used all his talents to the best of his ability and could see it wasn’t enough. But Georgia had different talents than Ken. Not as laudable, certainly, but valuable at the right moment. Peculiarly suited to the problem at hand, maybe.
But she could never pull something like this off in a week, when she didn’t even have a plan yet. When she hadn’t studied Roy with her quiet mind and found his fault lines. There was simply no time.
Which was exactly what everybody had said about the side deal audit. And how did Ken respond? People are counting on us to do it, he said. If we don’t do it, I want to know it’s because it we couldn’t do it. And how do we know what’s possible unless we give it our very best?
At that moment the clouds thinned and Orion flashed an appearance, his belt and sword winking at her from the cold, black sky.
Well, thought Georgia. Well. She had such confidence in Ken’s judgment, but she knew one thing that Ken didn’t. She knew about the Griffin family special talents.
She had sidelined those special talents prematurely. The point had been to keep things stable for Katie-Ann, but now she didn’t have that choice. The current situation was about as stable as a heifer on a high wire, with equally predictable results.
She needed to know what Sally had on Roy. Probably useless, of course, but ‘probably’ was no reason to admit defeat. What if this was finally her chance to make the decisive difference? How would she know unless she tried? Tried it for Ken. For Katie-Ann and her college money.
At that instant the moon broke free of the clouds entirely, and bathed the wet sidewalk in brilliant, silvery light. Georgia tossed the blanket into the back seat, jumped across a puddle and ran up the steps to her front door.
Katie-Ann had already disappeared into the dark bedroom. Good. Georgia pulled her chair up to the coffee table and opened her notepad. The best approach was to get the Board to fire him. After all, they’d definitely come through on Burt Plowfield and Sally. But Roy’s sterling reputation on Wall Street insulated him from his own incompetence, so the board members needed a real jolt, and how was she going to deliver that in nine—ouch!—make that eight days?
Better to freak Roy out and get him to resign. Self-deport, as Mitt Romney would say. But how? Roy was profoundly unfazed by Sally’s treachery, even though the Board members were horrified by it. He evidently felt invulnerable, exactly like Glen Terkes. Roy probably believed he was the finest and most prized CEO in Silicon Valley, and maybe the most beloved to boot. Must be great to be so stuck on yourself. Whatever Sally had on him had better make a good solvent.
She knocked on the metal rim of the entry to Lucy’s cube. “Lucy, can I ask you something? I’m looking at the resume of a key employee at a company we might buy, and something on there just strikes me as implausible. Should I assume their HR department checked it all out before they hired him?”
“No.” Lucy shook her head emphatically. “It really depends. A lot of times they just spot check for low-level people.
“But always for an executive?”
“Well, not always even then. We’re more conscientious about fact-checking our senior people, but then sometimes a senior guy is terrified of having his current employer find out he’s looking before he’s landed the new job. So then we make the offer contingent on everything checking out after the fact.”
“But you do check it after he’s hired?”
“Well . . . that’s the thing.” Her shrug was apologetic. “Sometimes we pretty much forget about it. I mean, we know it’s all probably going to check out, and if staffing is a little thin . . . Anyway, what did you find that’s implausible? I’ll look into it now.”
“Would you? Perfect. I won’t bother you with it yet, though. Let’s see where the acquisition’s going first.”
When she closed her eyes to sleep that night she saw an old-time black-and-white wall calendar, where the days tore themselves off and zoomed away until there was nothing but a square of blank cardboard hanging on a paint-chipped wall.
The next morning she called in sick with the stomach flu.
The University of Washington kept her on hold forever, and then referred her back to Degree Clearing House. If she didn’t like the answer she got there, the woman suggested, she could always have the employee obtain a set of transcripts himself. Georgia hung up and sat there, tapping on Roy’s resume. She noticed that Degree Clearing House said Roy’s B.A. was granted in 1987, the same year he’d listed for the PhD. Coincidence? If the undergrad date was accurate, and if his employment history was right, then he couldn’t have spent any time at all getting a PhD.
Was that what Sally had on him? He’d made up his PhD? Boy, that would be irritating. After all, why limp along with a par
alegal certificate from Heber Springs Correspondence School, when she could have given herself a B.A. from Harvard?
But did making up college degrees wreck people’s careers? She went online and investigated, and the answer was an unequivocal maybe. Looked like they often were fired in disgrace, but not always:
1. David Edmondson, CEO of Radio Shack: Fired.
2. Ron Zarella, CEO of Bausch & Lomb: Not fired.
3. Terrence Lanni, CEO of MGM Grand: Resigned (which of course just meant that by timely consent he’d avoided rape.)
4. Scott Thompson, CEO of Yahoo: Resigned (ditto.)
So it might be enough, but you couldn’t count on it.
What she found even stranger was the seemingly fake high school degree. She could see making up a PhD out of need for prestige or whatever, but a high school degree? Everybody graduated from high school, and nobody cared which one. Well, maybe they cared if it was some snooty prep school, but nobody cared about a public school one way or another.
She called the high school. The front office shunted her off to the school librarian, who grudgingly went into her stack of yearbooks and confirmed that no student named Roy Zisko was listed in 1977, ’78 or ’79. When Georgia asked her to expand her search back to 1975 and forward to 1983, the gracious lady balked.
“You know, I’m sorry, but I’m starting to neglect my other duties here. If you want to look at several years, you’re welcome to come in and take all the time you need. I’m here every day between 8:30 and 5.”
“Sort of far for me to come, is the problem.”
“Mm-hm.” No sympathy.
“Can I just ask, is there another high school with ‘Klamath’ in the name?”
“Hm-mm. Not around here anyplace.”
“Well. Okay, if I decide to come, do you need to know in advance?”
“Hm-mm. I’m here every day the school’s open.”
“Okay. Thanks very much for being so patient with me.”
“Mm-hm.” Evidently not that patient. But then a grudging, “You’re welcome.”
Had Roy actually fabricated his high school, too? Seemed like he must have, but why? Did something happen at his real high school he didn’t want people to know about? And if he’d never gotten his PhD, what took him so long to get his B.A.?
In the middle of the night she sat straight up: What if Roy had gone to that high school and then changed his name?
She slid quietly out of her sleeping bag and crept into the living room on bare feet to look up the distance to Klamath Falls, Oregon. Ugh! Six hours one way, and the gas would be hugely expensive. They’d be stuck eating pasta all week. Probably a wild goose chase she couldn’t afford in dollars or time, with only seven days to work with.
But the specificity of that nondescript high school . . . She drummed her fingers on the card table for a long minute, then glanced at the time on her computer. Two-thirty. If she left by 4 she could get there and be finished by lunchtime. Which left her an hour now to go online and find the earliest photo of Roy she could get her hands on.
She’d have to set the alarm across the room for Kate. Good thing she had new tires on her car. Where was that Punch Brothers CD? She stood up, stretched, and went to make coffee.
It seemed like forever since she’d exited I-5 at Weed and begun winding through high desert ranch country along Highway 90. She finally entered the sprawling no-neighborhood of Klamath Falls at 9 a.m., and stopped at Terry’s Donut Center to tank up on coffee and sugar. She pulled into the school lot at 9:40, and stopped at the front office for directions to the library.
Mrs. Jones, the librarian, acknowledged they had spoken the day before, then led her through the aisles to the set of yearbooks. She pulled the books for each year from 1975 to 1983, plunking each new volume onto the stack in Georgia’s arms.
“Here. Why don’t we set you up here where it’s quiet? Looks like you might be here a while.”
Georgia lined up the yearbooks in sequential order, pulled her blurry printer copy of the younger (but not that young) Roy from her backpack, and set to work. First she flipped through every book to confirm that there was no Roy Zisko for any of the years. Then she returned to the book for 1979, the year that had been listed. She began by noting the name below each senior class photo, looking for any Roy. The student named Roy Coleman had big blue eyes. The student named Roy Gaddis had evidently missed photo day, since the square above his name was occupied by some cartoon pelican. No other Roys. She began flipping slowly through the activity/organization photos, searching for any other photo of Roy Gaddis. When she looked at the wrestling team she gave a start of recognition, and leaned in to take a closer look.
A kid was squatting in the front row of the photo, staring out at the camera with little, close-set black eyes and a beaky nose. She glanced at the list of names: It was Roy Gaddis.
With shaking hands she opened the ’78 yearbook and scanned the junior year photos for Roy Gaddis. There he was, sporting a cheesy and obviously fake smile, minus the jowls, the glasses, the arrogance, and yet . . .
She jumped up with the ’78 yearbook and carried it over to the librarian. “I think I found him,” she said. “Any chance you’d remember him?”
Mrs. Jones closed the cover to look at the date and scoffed. “Lord, honey, do I really look that old?”
“Oh, of course not. Ridiculous. I wasn’t thinking how long ago it was. Would there be anybody here who is old enough to remember?”
She considered. “Well, our English teacher’s been here quite a while. Mr. Lardy. He’s probably your best bet, though he wouldn’t remember every student, of course.” She glanced at the big, round clock on the wall above the circulation desk. “Might catch him on his lunch hour. Let’s walk over there.”
Mr. Lardy stood up from his half-eaten lunch with obvious reluctance and came to the door. “Yes. How can I help you?”
“George, this lady is looking for a student named Roy Zisko, who graduated from here in 1979. I figure you’re the oldest fossil here in our museum.” She chuckled. “Would you mind taking a look, see if you remember him?”
“Actually, it was Roy Gaddis,” Georgia corrected, holding the book out to show him the picture. “I had the name wrong.”
“Gaddis,” he echoed. “Then I don’t need to look. You with the police?”
Police? She was confused. “He was a friend of my mother’s. I’m trying to find him for her surprise birthday party.”
“Well, I’d say you’re outta luck. If the cops haven’t found him in thirty years, you probably won’t find him now.”
A little chill raced across Georgia’s shoulders. Could she be this lucky?
She made her voice sound casual as her pulse began to thud in her ears. “Sorry?”
“Hold on a minute,” Mrs. Jones said, reaching for the yearbook. “This that kid they wanted for check fraud?” She brought the yearbook photo close enough to scrutinize it with interest.
“That’s the guy,” Mr. Lardy confirmed. “But they didn’t just want him for check fraud. They were pretty sure he and some older guy were using the money to buy heroin and then selling it to high school kids, including one kid who overdosed and died from it. They never proved the heroin part, but they did convict them both of check fraud, and then managed to let Gaddis slip through their fingers before sentencing. You never heard such an uproar. Year after he graduated, I think. They put out a reward and everything, but never did find him. Destroyed his parents, really. Alice turned gray overnight, and Roger developed heart trouble and died a few years later.”
Georgia concentrated on keeping her jaw from dropping open. “Well, this is a surprise!” she said brightly. “You remember what he looked like, Mr. Lardy?”
He squinted into the distance, bobbing his head slightly from side to side. “Well, sort of. Why? You think you’ve spotted him?” That little smile was downright condescending. Unattractive, really, especially with those old guy wattles.
She held up the
fuzzy printer photo. “Does this look like him?”
He took it from her and glanced at it. “No, not that I can tell. He’d be a lot older by now, anyway.” He handed it back. “Not likely anybody could recognize him after all this time, assuming he hasn’t out-and-out disappeared from the face of the earth. Lotta people said they’d seen him, but none of it amounted to anything. Sort of like Elvis spotting, you know? Too bad to disappoint your mother, but let her know she’s better off. He’d probably just steal her silverware.” He snorted. “What’s your mother’s name, anyway? Maybe I remember her.”
“Oh. Not likely. She went to a different school.” Okay, time to end this conversation.
“I’m surprised she didn’t know all this.”
“You know, Mr. Lardy, she probably did. She never told me about it, though, and she has no idea I’m doing this surprise party. I’ve just been following up on people who signed her old yearbook. Anyway, thanks very much. Appreciate your help.”
She sat in her driver’s seat, blinking at the windshield, waiting for her heart rate to slow. If something seemed too good to be true, it usually was. Definitely worth another hour of research, though, to see if she could be sure one way or another. She reminded herself to drive carefully as she turned her key in the ignition.
She found the Klamath Falls public library, and asked for any newspapers from 1979 to 1981. She ended up in the basement with several rolls of brittle plastic film and an ancient microfilm reader that squeaked when she turned it on and the spindle began to rotate.
Sure enough, the story was there. Apparently they’d forged $38,000 in money orders the year he turned 16, and then another $52,000 after he turned 18, which meant he was tried as an adult. Same photo of Roy Gaddis as the one in his junior yearbook. And Gaddis was the only one who disappeared, evidently. The other guy, Jack Drummond, had spent a year in jail.