Roux Morgue

by Claire M Johnson

  “Um, right. Money laundering, but we don’t know how.”

  He snorted. “That’s helpful. Needle in a fucking haystack.”

  “It’s the best I’ve got.”

  Even though his face was in shadow, I could hear him rolling his eyes.

  “Where does the controller sit?”

  I turned on the flashlight again, and pointed it in the direction of cauliflower guy’s door. I had a moment of panic that he locked his door at night. While television makes the credit card/lock thing look easy, I bet it’s not. But luck was with us. The door was shut but not locked.

  The glow from the screensaver bathed the room and the two of us in that peculiar artificial computer light, like a strobe light without the strobe.

  Well, Thom may fail big time as a burglar but as a computer hacker, he knew his stuff. The second he sat down in front of the computer his posture gentled and the partial sneer he usually had on his face disappeared. I probably looked the same way standing in front of a mixer. That feeling that you knew this world, that there weren’t any secrets; in fact, you owned this world. Thom pulled a couple of disks out of his pocket and shoved them in the machine, and a black screen with a bunch of white type appeared.

  “What are you doing?” Not that I would understand a single word of what he was saying, but I needed some buzz words from him to assure me he knew what he was saying.

  “Keylogging,” he muttered.

  “And that would be?” I prompted.

  “Tells you what key sequences you’ve typed in. Lucky for us, you can download this stuff off the Internet.”

  Another reason not to do my banking by computer.

  The computer blinked a couple of times. More black screen, white type shit.

  “Bingo, we are cooking with gas,” he muttered under his breath.

  “Where are the fields and blue sky? The Windows screen. That looks scary. Like the type is yelling at you.” When I see anything other than the Windows default on my screen I start hyperventilating and have to blow into a paperbag.

  “That, my technology-challenged kitten, is DOS. No, I’m not going to explain it to you because you wouldn’t understand it anyway, and I don’t want to waste my time. The field will come up in a second…Yes!” A few more clicks and the classic Windows field appeared in all its glory. My pulse, which had raced to stroke-inducing heights after dumping all those cleaning supplies on Thom’s head, slowed just a tad, putting my pending aneurism on hold. “See? All the lovely directories lined up in a row. What sort of software is this beotch using?”

  “It’s a guy.”

  “Of all people, you are the last person I need to be giving gay slang lessons to, Ms. Fag Hag of 2006,” he huffed. He turned back to the screen, clicked some more, and then turned to me with a really evil grin. “It’s the same software I used at American Fare. Honey, this will be a piece of cake.”

  “You are enjoying this far too much.”

  “Quiet you. Park that hetero ass of yours in a chair and sit back for a bit.” After that, he began scrolling through directories and files, murmuring phrases like, “No you don’t,” and “That was stupid of you,” and “Come on,” as if he and the controller were playing some sort of game. Then he got silent and his shoulders stiffened.

  “Thom?”

  “Shhh, just a minute.”

  There was more scrolling but he’d ditched the obnoxious patter. The suspense was killing me. I began kicking the desk legs.

  “Stop that or I’m going to stab you with a pen. Per day. How many seatings?” he demanded in a flat voice, his eyes never leaving the screen.

  “Three total. Lunch, then the two at dinner. You had the last seating,” I responded, puzzled.

  “Five days a week?”

  “Yeah. What—”

  “So simple and so sweet. Who ever devised this is a genius, betting that the I.R.S. flunky who reviews their returns wouldn’t know a soup spoon from a teaspoon, and they were right.”

  “Stop heaping praise on your fellow criminals and start explaining what’s so freaking brilliant about this?”

  But Thom wasn’t listening; he began rifting on the set-up, the pros and cons, continuously scrolling through files, bringing up other folders. “Controller is definitely in on it, but receiving? Debatable. Accountants? Also debatable. This could all just be paper. All of it. Wouldn’t necessarily have to…hmmm, must have taken quite some time to set up the credit card thing. I knew it. Legit bank accounts. At least three months before recycling the numbers, then—”

  “Tell me,” I demanded and thumped him on the shoulder.

  “Ow, you awful woman, that hurt,” he complained, rubbing his shoulder. “I’m guessing a hundred tables in that dining room?”

  “Ninety.”

  “You have three seatings total per day, right? Hazard a guess on the average tab, keeping in mind that lunch won’t bring in as much revenue as dinner.”

  I thought about the cost of lunch versus dinner, wine, how some people drink like fish, other’s don’t drink at all or have only one glass; lunch probably comes in at around sixty per head, dinner probably eighty per head, but then the dinner crowd tends to drink up…

  “Eighty-five bucks per head?”

  “Based on the tables surrounding me and the hollow legs of those hags, I’d up that to ninety on average. Look at the deposits. You do the math.”

  He brought up a screen that showed the daily totals, then the weekly totals, and finally the monthly totals. Math and I are mortal enemies; adding and subtracting is about as complicated as I want to get, and here Thom was asking me to do division! But even I could tell that the numbers didn’t add up.

  We were making way too much money on any given day, even supposing that people were ordering magnums of Cristal.

  “Someone’s inflating the number of lunches and dinners sold?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly it. Fake restaurant tabs. This is so diabolical. I’m truly impressed. Don’t quote me,” he held up a hand, then smirked, “yet, but I think they’re doubling their turnovers. Two seatings at lunch and four at dinner. Which is legitimate for any other restaurant but not this school. Even at my most conservative estimates, they’re funneling over $300,000 per month through this place, but I bet it’s probably more like half a million. A quick glance at the VISA receipts? A lot of the credit card patrons are ordering the most expensive wine on the menu. And if tonight’s menu is any indication, they are using actual menus. In fact, the only thing they’re faking are the customers.”

  This would be so easy to do. It would take some organization, but once you had the credit cards set up, it would be a piece of cake.

  “Do you think they rotate the cards?”

  “I know they rotate the cards,” he said with a self-satisfied air. “Keylogging. A hacker’s best friend. He connected with the bank this morning, allowing me access to his password. I brought up all the credit card action for the last six months, chose a name, and started searching. The same name and account appeared twice.”

  “But what about food costs? You have all this revenue, I mean tons of it. It wasn’t that long ago that this place was bleeding money. The board of directors would have to know that this school couldn’t possibly generate that sort of income.”

  Unless the entire board is corrupt.

  Thom frowned, the glow from the screen highlighting the grooves on either side of his mouth.

  “The food cost is problematic, I agree. There are two ways this could play. One, they are manufacturing receipts so that the revenue isn’t out of whack with the costs. Anyone with a scanner and Photoshop could produce fake receipts. Or your suppliers could be part of the scam. All that would need to satisfy your average I.R.S. flunky is that your revenues are in line with your expenses.”

  He clicked some more, brought up a bunch of invoices, and then began crowing, “I’m a genius. I’m brilliant.” Poking a finger at the screen, he said
with not a little reverence, “Look see. You’re paying twice the going rate for strawberries, at least thirty percent more for your dairy; and the liquor? The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that a good chunk of your suppliers are in on this because the checks to them would have to correspond with the invoices. Your garden-variety I.R.S. agent would compare invoices to checks, expenses to revenues, and if it jived, then there’d be no reason for an audit. This is very big, Mary. This isn’t little ole me using Photoshop to crank out a bunch of green cards. We are talking organization and lots of it. Let me burn a CD of these files. This is very, very clever. Lots of balls to juggle, but it’s all out in the open, nothing to hide from the I.R.S. This guy sends in the school’s returns electronically. No one actually comes to the restaurant or the office. It’s really very smooth. I’m impressed. It’s perfect on paper. Here’s a CD with the financial history for the last six months. If the hard drive gets wiped, you’re covered. Someone needs to move money from business to business to business, and this school has become the outlet for the credit card end of it. I’d be curious if all these credit cards were issued from the same bank. So much crime, so little time.”

  I didn’t have any pockets, so I put it in the hood of sweatshirt.

  “Thom, these people are looking to spend the rest of their lives in federal prison. You avoided rubbing elbows with them by the skin of your teeth.” I reminded him.

  He began shutting down the system, closing tabs, and covering his tracks. “I know that. But once you start thinking like a criminal, it’s astonishing how easy it is. And don’t tell me differently. Your shoulders have that rigid set to them, which means you’re going to get all moral on me. You orchestrated this break-in like a pro. Let me delete all this history and then we’re done. Where’d you put the mops and things? Let’s put them back and then hit the trail.” He logged out.

  “Uh, no, we can’t. Security cameras are going to pick us up the minute we leave.”

  He turned slowly to face me.

  “Mary, are we spending the night in that closet? Did you deliberately forget to mention that little fact?”

  “Hmmmm.” I scratched one shoulder.

  “Did you also plan what I was going to say to Amos when he wakes up and thinks that I’m a cheating little whore because I didn’t come home tonight?”

  “Thought that was part of the apology package.”

  “And when he finds out that you jeopardized my parole? A tidbit I had no intention of telling him?”

  I’d never gotten that far, frankly.

  “Are you guys living together? I didn’t know.” Which made me feel six hundred kinds of guilty because in another time I’d have known that about Amos.

  “Since I am working at that hellhole for children as part of my community service, for minimum wage, I might add, and Amos hasn’t worked since American Fare, we decided to pool resources. Plus, believe it or not, we care for each other. As in a relationship.”

  I ducked my head, not knowing what else to say. Back to the drawing board. I needed to get us out of here.

  “Do you think you could stand to kiss me?” I said in all seriousness.

  His eyes enlarged to the size of dinner plates; he stared at me in abject horror.

  “K…k…k…k…kiss you?” he stuttered.

  I nodded.

  “Surely you’re joking?”

  “I’m not exactly doing cartwheels at the thought of it, but yes. Kiss me.”

  “The answer is no. Absolutely not. I don’t do women. Please don’t take this personally, but the thought is making me ill.” He did a full-body shiver and then wrapped his arms around himself. “Girl lips were never part of the equation. No, no, and a thousand times, no.”

  “The only way to get you out of here without the cameras seeing your face is if we make like sluts. If you wear my chef’s jacket it will cover up your jacket so there’s no way for anyone to identify you from earlier tonight. We’ll take the service elevator down to the garage, sucking face the entire time. The second the elevator doors open, I’ll put my hands on your cheeks, which I’m hoping will conceal most of your face. You back me up again the wall so that the camera only sees the back of you. Don’t angle your face when we kiss, that way, hopefully, my face will hide most of yours. We need to keep this up all the way to my car. Then we shove you down into the front seat, and I drive you home.”

  He folded his arms around himself even tighter.

  “Please, Thom?” I begged. It was now one a.m., and I had to be back here in less than six hours.

  “Are you sure there are cameras in the garage?”

  I thought of the leer on the guard’s face earlier today.

  “Dead sure,” I said with emphasis and hoped he didn’t notice my blush.

  “You’ll probably be fired for this. They will think you’re seducing a student. Holding romantic trysts after hours on school property.”

  I nodded. “I thought of that already. But I really can’t see any other way out of here.”

  “For me?” Which sounded snide, but he didn’t have his usual sneer pasted on.

  “Yeah, actually,” I admitted. “I owe you one, you know that.”

  We stood there for several minutes; at an impasse.

  “Let’s get a knife from the dishroom. We are abandoning Operation Infecting Thom with Girl Cooties and now adopting Operation Tablecloths.”

  ***

  “This is ridiculous. I can’t see a thing.”

  “Not my idea, remember? Line your eyes up. Ow! That’s the third time you’ve stepped on my heel.”

  “You didn’t cut the slits evenly. My eyes are actually level with each other. And while you were at it, a hole for my mouth would have been appreciated. So that I can breathe. Perhaps I’m being unreasonable.”

  “Suck it up! I’m not the one with the irrational hatred of ‘girl lips.’”

  We were stumbling down the staircase to the garage, tablecloths over our heads to conceal our identities. Feeling an increasing anxiety that we were pushing our luck every minute we were in the school, we’d done nothing more than hack slits into the tablecloths with a butter knife. Unfortunately we hadn’t hacked enough, and in order to walk and see, we had to prop open a slit with one hand, while our other hand gripped the handrail. Which basically made us half blind and unsteady on our feet.

  The tension between us dropped exponentially when we reached the door to the garage. Of course, the minute we came into view by the garage cameras and then sidled into my car, I was busted, but at least Thom would get out of the school, with no one the wiser as to his identity.

  “My car is at the far corner of garage near the guard kiosk.”

  “That was smart. What part of ‘clean getaway’ didn’t you understand?”

  “FYI. I’m assigned that space. It’s that Subaru wagon—”

  “As opposed to all the other Subaru wagons in this garage? Trust you to have a boring car.”

  “A boring car that runs.” I clicked on my remote control. “Your side is open.”

  We’d made it. I could navigate the exit with this stupid tablecloth over my head, drive to Amos’…

  The gate to the garage began to roll back and the garage filled with light. From headlights.

  “Duck!” I yelled.

  Chapter Thirty

  I made to grab the door handle, but my hand got caught in the folds of the tablecloth. I began to panic, which escalated into a crushing claustrophobia as I fought with the tablecloth to get my hands and head free. Finally, I grabbed one end and wrenched the blasted thing off my head.

  “Chef Mary?”

  “Mary?”

  Coolie and Marc stood there in front of Marc’s van, their bodies shadowed in the harsh light from the headlamps. But there was no mistaking that Audrey Hepburn silhouette, nor that Texas drawl.

  There was no rational way to explain why I was fighting a tablecloth at one thirty in
the morning in the school’s garage without sounding like a total lunatic.

  So I did the next best thing. I turned the tables on them.

  “What are you guys doing here? It’s after one a.m.” I snapped.

  “I was worried. You weren’t answering your cell,” Coolie replied. “You were so weird today.” I couldn’t argue with that. “So I called your uncle’s house to see if you were okay and you weren’t there. We came to the school thinking that maybe you were still here; that something had happened. Like maybe you’d gotten into another fight with my father…” Her voice trailed off.

  Her concern was well founded, but hell. Why is it that I want people to care about me, but when they do, it’s always irritating? I groaned out loud. My plans to get Thom home safe and sound with no one the wiser just collapsed. Perhaps I could say I was working late and then crashing at Amos’ place. But that would mean actually crashing at Amos’ place, because something told me that there was no way I was getting out of this garage without an escort home. If Thom hadn’t been hiding on the garage floor next to my car, I would have called it a night and just gone back up stairs. I was going to be on the phone for the next five hours lying to various relatives, ex-husbands, and angry Irish cops about why I was still at work. Because dollar to donuts, Uncle Dom would have called my mother who would have called Jim who would have called O’Connor. Why O’Connor wasn’t here already was a complete mystery.

  The thought had just formed in my head when the gate, which had clanged shut earlier after they had pulled in, opened again.

  We all turned and watched the dark shadow of a long Town Car pull into the garage behind Marc’s van. Five men got out. The gate closed. Not O’Connor then, but the next best thing.

  Uncle Dom. Thank God. I couldn’t distinguish him among the other men because the glare from all those headlights reduced them to nothing but silhouettes, but we could all go home now and get some sleep. I’d have them follow me over to Amos’ house and…

  “Melissa, come here,” ordered a voice.

  “No, Daddy,” Coolie shouted back; she walked toward me and found my hand and held it tight.