Bad Business

by Robert B. Parker

  "Hence," I said.

  "Yeah, hence. I went to the fucking Wharton School, remember. So now you've got a deal worth ten simoleons, and you credit that. But how much actual cash you got?"

  "A simoleon," I said.

  "See?"

  "Is that what's going on at Kinergy?"

  "I believe so."

  "And the advantage of that is that it inflates your revenue?"

  "Yes."

  "Which makes your stock worth more?"

  "Yeah, and if you need to show an even bigger profit you can just move the curve."

  "Predict that knives will sell for two-fifty," I said."And then I can show a credit of twelve-fifty."

  "Exactly."

  "And it's legal."

  "Sure, mark to market is perfectly legal, often useful, sometimes necessary, in companies where a reasonable curve can be projected. But it's less, ah, less appropriate for a company like Kinergy, whose product may fluctuate wildly because of war, or climactic events, or political decisions, or economic circumstance, or the death of some Arabian sheik."

  "And you might find yourself with a cash-flow problem."

  "Yeah. You have to pay your employees, for example, in cash. If you have debt to service, and if you're cash poor, you have to service that in cash. And you have to do it now, not five years from now."

  "So," I said. "Worst case?"

  "You can't pay your bills. You go bankrupt."

  "Is that what's going on at Kinergy?"

  "Might be," he said. "It seems to me that they should be showing more loss and less profit than the lOQs are reporting."

  "You think someone's cooking the books?"

  "Something's going on," Marty said.

  "When you do the audit," I said, "can you find out what it is?"

  Marty looked at me as if I had just said something in Greek. "Am I the world's best CPA?" he said. "Of course I am. If there's chicanery, will I find it? Of course I will."

  "That's a relief," I said.

  50

  When I woke up in the morning on the couch in my living room, I could hear my shower running. At least Adele was clean. I put on my pants and had coffee made and orange juice squeezed when she strolled out of my bedroom with her hair in place and her makeup on.

  "God," she said. "Coffee and orange juice waiting. What a husband you'd make."

  "This morning my accountant, with the blessing of Bob Cooper, begins his audit at Kinergy."

  "Really? I can't imagine."

  "I think we should go over there and be handy if he wants to talk with you."

  "Your accountant?"

  "Yes. Marty Siegel."

  "To Kinergy?"

  "I'll be with you," I said.

  "You think it's important?"

  "Yes."

  "Will Vinnie come with us?"

  "Sure," I said.

  "I guess that will be okay," she said.

  I took my turn at the shower. There were several pairs of highly impractical-looking ladies' underwear drying on my towel rack. I tried not to blush. As I was getting dressed, Vinnie showed up for work.

  "You know a skinny little guy with long hair and big glasses?" Vinnie said.

  "I do."

  "He's got your place staked out." I walked to the front window.

  "Corner of Arlington," Vinnie said. "Across Marlborough." I saw him. He was wearing a blue seersuker suit, and his hands were jammed into the side pockets.

  "Might be staking out Emerson College," Vinnie said.

  "Nope," I said. "It's me."

  "Want me to buzz him?" Vinnie said.

  "No, we'll leave him alone, see what he does."

  I took my coffee to the window and watched Long Hair while I called Hawk on his cell phone.

  "Where are you?" I said.

  "Not your business," he said.

  "What are you doing."

  "Very not your business," he said.

  "Oh that," I said. "Long Hair's showed up in front of my house, corner of Marlborough and Arlington. Blue seersucker suit. Big glasses with black frames."

  "Okay," Hawk said. "Lemme finish up here."

  "Make it quick."

  Hawk laughed.

  "Person I with don't want that."

  "Whoops," I said. "Well, do your best and call me when it's over."

  "Be over already, you hadn't called me up in the middle," Hawk said. "I'll call you when I'm on him."

  I t was a large orange juice and two coffees before Hawk called.

  "Got him," he said.

  "Okay, long leash," I said. "Let's just see where he lives, who he is, that sort of thing."

  "Sho," Hawk said.

  With Long Hair behind us we walked to my car. I could see that it was annoying Vinnie.

  "How 'bout I just put one in his foot, or maybe a knee?" Vinnie said.

  "No," I said. "Gratifying though it would be."

  "Are you talking about shooting that man?" Adele said.

  "Yeah."

  "Why is he following us?" she said.

  "That's what I think we'll find out," I said. "Hawk's behind him."

  A dele started to turn her head.

  "Don't look," Vinnie said, and she froze.

  "Wouldn't see him anyway," I said. "I expect we won't see him until he's through tailing Long Hair."

  "So how do you know he's there?"

  "He said he was there."

  "But . . ."

  "Hawk never says something ain't so," Vinnie said.

  "Never?"

  "Nope."

  I beeped the power locks on my car doors. Vinnie opened the passenger door in front and Adele got in. Vinnie got in the back and I drove.

  "So you want this man to follow us," Adele said.

  "Yes."

  "What if he doesn't have a car."

  "Then he's really an amateur," I said. "But it doesn't matter if he follows us or just goes home. Hawk will find out who he is."

  V innie was turned in the backseat, looking out my back window.

  "He's got a car," Vinnie said.

  I n my side mirror I could see a yellow Mazda Miata pull away from where it was parked by a hydrant.

  "Nice car for a tail job," I said.

  "Blends right in," Vinnie said.

  "And you think Hawk is somewhere behind him?"

  "Yep."

  "And after this man eventually stops following us and goes home, Hawk will follow him there and find out who he is?"

  "Yep."

  "What if Hawk loses sight of him or something?"

  I n the backseat, Vinnie laughed.

  A dele turned and looked back at him.

  "Well, it's certainly possible, isn't it?"

  "No," Vinnie said, "it ain't."

  51

  K energy provided us what they called a liaison executive, a slightly overweight, currently blond woman in a dark blue suit named Edith, and put us all into a vacant office. I knew how it came to be vacant. It was Gavin's. Marty had brought two helpers with him. The helpers were women, and good-looking. In the years I'd known Marty, all his helpers had been women, and all of them had been good-looking. It made me wonder sometimes about the nature of the hiring interview.

  Marty commandeered the desk that used to be Gavin's. The helpers set up their laptops on a conference table that had been moved in. Marty suggested Adele pull a chair up to the desk and join him. She did. Vinnie headed for the outer office.

  "No," Adele said. "Please, Vinnie. If you could stay."

  V innir said "Sure" and sat at the end of the conference table and looked at nothing. Marty smiled at Adele. She smiled back.

  "Tell me what you know," Marty said.

  Since my job was simply to ensure compliance, I decided to take a break from the complexities of accounting and went and sat in the outer office at one of the empty secretarial desks. I was a bit big for the armless secretarial chair I was in, but there weren't any others. I put my feet up on the secretarial desk and made do.

&nbs
p; I was still there with my feet up and my hands laced comfortably across my stomach about ten minutes later, when Bernie Eisen came in with a couple of other suits he didn't identify.

  "What the hell is going on here," Eisen said to me.

  "Audit," I said.

  "Audit?" Bernie said. "An audit? Whose audit? Who's auditing us."

  "Me."

  "You? You? You can't audit us."

  I didn't hear a question there, so I didn't answer it. Eisen looked past me to the inner office.

  "Who the hell is he?"

  "Marty Siegel," I said. "World's greatest CPA."

  "Adele and Edith are both in there," he said.

  "True," I said.

  "For God's sake, what is Adele doing in there?"

  "Talking to the world's greatest CPA," I said.

  "Get her out of there," he said to the two suits. The two suits looked puzzled.

  O ne of them, a sturdy-looking curly-haired guy who reeked of health club, said, "Get her out?"

  "Get her out," Eisen said. "If she won't come, goddamnit, drag her."

  The suits looked even more uncertain.

  The health-club guy said, "Bernie, we can't just drag somebody."

  The other suit was balding and tall and looked more like cycling and tennis than health club. He shook his head and kept shaking it.

  "God knows what she's telling him," Bernie said. "I'm getting her out of there."

  "Bernie," I said. "See the guy at the end of the conference table? The one sort of half asleep looking at the ceiling?"

  "What about him?"

  "I fear that if you touch her he will shoot you."

  "Shoot?"

  "Vinnie is very short-tempered," I said.

  Bernie stared at me for a moment.

  Then he said to the health-club suit, "Get security up here."

  "I think you should consult first with your CEO," I said.

  "Coop?"

  "The very one."

  Bernie stared at me, then he nodded the cycle/tennis guy toward a phone on the desk beside my crossed ankles.

  "Call Coop," Bernie said. The suit dialed a number.

  "Bernie Eisen," he said after a moment. "For Bob Cooper."

  He handed the phone to Bernie.

  "Coop?" Bernie said after a moment's wait. "Goddamnit, Coop, you got any idea what's going on down here in Gavin's old office?"

  Bernie listened silently for a moment.

  "Well, I think you need to get down here," Bernie said. He listened again.

  "No, Coop. Listen to me. You need to come down." He listened.

  "Okay," he said and hung up.

  I smiled at him. He turned away from me. The two suits stood without purpose near him.

  "You guys may as well go back to work," Bernie said. "Coop and I will deal with this."

  "You want security up here, Bernie?"

  "No. Just go ahead back to work."

  Bernie stood and stared in at Adele as if he could somehow impale her on his gaze. We were quiet until Coop swept in. "Spenser, great to see you," he said and stuck out his hand. After I shook it, Coop turned to Bernie and put a hand on his shoulder.

  "Bernz," he said, "I'm sorry. I understand your concern and it's my bad that I didn't give you a heads-up on this."

  "You see Adele in there?" Bernie said.

  "Adele is fine. We have nothing to hide here, Bernie, that I know about."

  "Coop," Bernie said. "That's not the point. We have nothing to gain from this. There's no good in it for us to have some quite possibly hostile entity rummaging around in the way we conduct our business."

  "Oh, come on, Bernzie. Don't get your knickers all twisted. I welcome any inquiry into any aspect of Kinergy's operations. I believe that the inquiry will simply underscore the fact that we run one of the great companies. And, however unlikely, if there is something amiss, no one wants to know it more than I do."

  "Coop . . ."

  "Bernie," Cooper said, and his tone became a little harder. "I have authorized this audit."

  E isen took a breath and held it and let it out slowly. Then he turned without a word and walked out. Cooper grinned at me.

  "Don't mind Bernie," he said. "He cares a lot about this company."

  "He cares a lot about something," I said.

  Coop grinned harder.

  "Anything you need," he said, "you just let Edith know. And if there's any problems, send them straight to me."

  "Right," I said.

  Coop was so enthusiastic it was easy to forget that he was being blackmailed into this.

  52

  Susan joined us for dinner at the new Davio's in Park Square.

  "Did you see that man follow us back from Kinergy?" Adele said.

  V innie nodded.

  "Did you see Hawk?"

  V innie shook his head.

  "How do you know he's there?" Adele said.

  Susan smiled.

  "He's there," Vinnie said.

  "But how do you know?"

  "We know," Vinnie said.

  "We do?"

  V innie nodded at me.

  "Him and me know."

  A dele looked at Susan.

  "What is this?" she said. "Some sort of secret society?"

  "Yes," Susan said. "That's exactly what it is. Full of unsaid rules and regulations which none of them will even admit to knowing."

  "Is it just the three of them?" Adele said.

  "No," Susan said.

  She looked at me.

  "Who else is a member?" she said.

  "This is your hypothesis," I said.

  "Okay," Susan said. "Well, there's some cops. Quirk, Belson, a detective named Lee Farrell; the state police person, Healy."

  Susan took a ladylike slug of her Cosmopolitan.

  "And a man named Chollo from Los Angeles, and a man named Tedi Sapp from Georgia. Anybody else?"

  "Bobby Horse," I said.

  "Oh, yes," Susan said, "the Native American gentleman."

  "Kiowa," I said.

  "Kiowa, of course," Susan said.

  "Little dude from Vegas," Vinnie said.

  "Bernard J. Fortunato," I said.

  "See," Susan said, "if you lull them into it they'll admit to the existence."

  "And what are you," Adele said, "that you know all this, den mother?"

  Susan laughed and had a little more of her pink drink.

  "I'm scoring the club president," she said. "Gives me special status."

  "So why are they so certain that Hawk is where he said he'd be?"

  "Because he's like they are," Susan said.

  "And they'd be there?"

  "If they said so."

  "And," she nodded at me, "does he ever tell you why they're all like that?"

  "They don't know they're like that," Susan said.

  "What do you two think of what she's just described?" Adele said.

  "I think I'll have some linguine," I said.

  "Veal looks nice," Vinnie said.

  "Don't even bother," Susan said.

  A dele took a long breath. Susan was glancing around the room, and her glance stopped and rested.

  "Excuse me, there's two people I really want to see."

  She got up and walked two tables down from us where a slim dark-haired man was having dinner with a slick-looking woman. Susan kissed them both, and spoke with them in high animation. Susan in high animation is like watching a bigscreen re-release of Gone with the Wind: all the color, all the drama, all the excitement. Adele and I watched her. I was drinking beer. Adele and Vinnie were sharing a bottle of red bordeaux. Vinnie wasn't watching her. Even as he sipped his wine Vinnie was looking at everyone.

  When Susan came back to the table, I said, "Who's that guy you were kissing?"

  "Tony Pangaro," Susan said. "I'm surprised you don't know him. He's been involved in every major real estate development east of the Mississippi River since the Spanish American War."

  "Gee," I said. "He doesn't look that
old."

  "Exaggeration for effect," Susan said.

  "Fair's fair," I said. "Can I go kiss his date?"

  "No."

  We ordered dinner. Vinnie ordered another bottle of wine.

  "Marty tells me the audit is progressing," I said to Adele.

  "Yes. He seems like such a smart guy."

  "He said you've been very valuable."

  "Good," she said. "I'm glad. He's awfully nice."

  "In a sort of sharkish kind of way," I said.

  "Sharkish?"

  "Exaggeration for effect," I said.

  V innie sampled the second bottle of bordeaux and nodded and the waiter poured some for each of us.

  "Now that the whistle has been blown," I said to Adele, "and the audit's under way, there really isn't any danger to you anymore."

  "Oh, no, I still want to stay at your place," she said.

  "There's no reason for anyone to kill you," I said. "Unlike Gavin, if that's what happened, it's too late to prevent you from talking."

  "Please," Adele said. "If I move back home, at least let Vinnie stay with me for a while longer."

  "That would be up to Vinnie," I said.

  A ll three of us looked at Vinnie. He was drinking some wine. He finished, put the glass down, and shrugged.

  "Sure," he said.

  A dele looked at Susan.

  "Do you think it will be all right?"

  "If he says it will be all right," Susan said, "it will be all right."

  A dele nodded slowly, looking at Vinnie.

  "Susan," she said, "you sound like the rest of them."

  "She is," I said. "Wait'll she shows you the secret handshake."

  53

  Hawk showed up in my office just before noon with several sandwiches in a bag. He took one out and handed it to me.

  "Six grams of fat," he said. "I figure, I eat enough of these and I get to do one of those commercials."

  "Hawk," I said. "You were born with two percent body fat, and you've trimmed down since."

  "So we lie to them."

  "We?"

  "I thought you might want to get in on it," Hawk said. "I'll eat a couple and see if my belt feels loose."

  "How 'bout coffee," Hawk said.

  "I made a fresh pot," I said.

  "When?"

  "Yesterday."

  "Be fine," Hawk said.

  I poured us two cups and opened one of the sandwiches.