Black's Beach Shuffle: A Rolly Waters Mystery

by Corey Lynn Fayman

  “What else would I mean?” Alesis said.

  “I don't know.”

  “Well, when you figure it out, you can give me a call.”

  Maybe he would give her a call. She probably had options, too. Maybe they could get together sometime and compare their options. He understood it was all the rage among the young professionals these days, sitting at Starbuck’s, trading stock tips and sipping their lattes.

  “Planning a trip?” Rolly said, indicating the magazine.

  “Someday. I’m hoping. Venice and Florence and Rome. I’d like to stay in one of these villas someday.” She held out a photograph. “I’m planning to use some of the money I’ll get from selling my stock.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “It’s either that or marry a rich geek.”

  “Geek?”

  “You know, nerds, the guys who work with computers. They’re the ones who really make the big money.”

  “Plenty of them around here, I guess. How do you feel about musicians?”

  “Rich or poor?”

  “In transition.”

  “It all depends on which direction they’re headed.”

  “But you don’t rule them out?”

  “I don’t rule out any man who’s got money.”

  The door to Ricky’s office opened and Fender stepped out. “Rolly, you're still here. Good. Ricky asked me to show you around, help you get started.”

  The intercom on Alesis' desk buzzed.

  “Yes, Ricky,” she said.

  “Alesis, is Mr. Waters still here?”

  “Yes, he's standing right in front of me.”

  “Well, King thinks you should give him a tour around the building. Let him have a look around, whatever he wants to see, including the lockup room.”

  “Sure, Ricky. But I thought Fender was going to show him around.”

  There was a pause. Fender’s jaw seemed to lock up. It looked like he was trying to swallow an egg.

  “Fender can go with you, too.”

  The egg slipped down, disappeared from Fender's throat. Alesis got up from her chair, gave her skirt a quick tug to keep things properly covered.

  “All right, Mr. Waters. It looks like you'll have both of us for company. What would you like to see first?”

  “I guess the standard tour. I'd like to get the lay of the land first.”

  Alesis frowned at him for a split second, as if she thought there might be an insinuation somewhere in his remark. She relaxed, seemed to decide there wasn't an insult intended and started back down the hall. She’d probably heard her share of smart cracks from men with bad manners, but Rolly wasn’t one of them.

  “Follow me, boys,” she said. “We’ll go to Rohan first.”

  “Rohan?” Rolly asked Fender.

  “Oh, it’s from that book,” Fender said, “you know, the Hobbits and Elves.”

  “Lord of the Rings?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Curtis came up with it. The engineers are the Hobbits. Marketing people like me, we’re the Elves. We live in Rohan.”

  “You’re pretty tall for an elf,” Rolly said. Fender shrugged his shoulders.

  They walked down the hall past the top of the stairs to the other end the building. There were more plaster gargoyles hanging on the wall and a large jagged piece of bent metal that had been twisted, warped, and distressed just enough by some artist to make it worth thousands of dollars, Rolly guessed. They walked past the sharp-edged sculpture and continued down the hall.

  “What does CVO stand for?” Rolly asked Fender.

  “CVO?”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard of CEOs. But on Ricky’s door it said CVO.”

  “Oh, that. It stands for Chief Vision Officer. Ricky doesn’t like to use traditional titles. He says it’s limiting.”

  And Ricky was not a man to admit he had limits, thought Rolly. At least not in front of his employees.

  “This is our marketing department,” Alesis said, waving her hand as they entered a large open room. The room contained two flimsy fold-out tables placed end to end. Alesis paused just like a real tour guide, allowing Rolly to take in the scene.

  A dozen or so young men and women sat at the tables, crammed into folding chairs, facing computers. They were all talking loudly, but apparently not to each other. Rolly looked closer and saw they were all wearing tiny headsets attached to cell phones. The cell phones lay on the table or were clipped to their belts. A heady sense of excitement filled the room, enthusiasm mixed with a faint whiff of desperation. These people were so close to making it big they could taste it, so close they were willing to work on a Sunday, ready to sacrifice every waking hour to make it happen, afraid they might fall behind, miss their chance. It was intoxicating, a mixture so rich you could get sick on it, like a kid rushing to finish his Halloween candy before his parents threw it away, or a drunk begging extra drinks from the bartender just after last call. Rolly felt caught up in the excitement in spite of himself.

  Every few seconds, a person at one of the tables would get up, hurry over to another side of the table, talk intently for a few seconds with someone else in the room, then step away from the table and start talking again into thin air. A swirling energy filled the space as its occupants orbited the tables, spun off like random electrons. They switched positions without any recognizable pattern, forming new nuclei, then broke apart again and returned to their initial positions.

  “I’ve got my own office,” Fender said, pointing towards the corner of the room. There was a row of office doors running along the opposite wall. They walked over to the last door. Pinned to the wall outside the door was a handwritten sign on lined paper. It said “Fender Simmons, V.P. – Promotional Incentives.” Fender and Rolly looked inside.

  “Hey, Derek, hey, Rod!” Fender called out to the occupants of the room. The two young men inside focused deeply on their computer screens, as if they expected to find thousand-dollar bills hidden inside. They grunted at Fender without looking up. Another computer stood in the corner, surrounded on three sides by piles of paper and marketing detritus—t-shirts, bumper stickers, and Eyebitz.com-inscribed coffee mugs.

  “That’s my desk there,” Fender said, pointing at an empty spot amongst the piles of junk.

  “V.P., huh? Not bad,” Rolly said. “What does ‘Promotional Incentives’ mean?”

  “I’m in charge of creating mindshare.”

  “Oh,” Rolly said. Another non-traditional title and job description from Ricky, no doubt.

  “A lot of V.P.s in this part of the building," Alesis said, almost under her breath.

  “They won't talk to you if you're not a V.P.," Fender said, sounding a little wounded. “If you just call up a client and tell them you're Joe Schmo, salesman, they hang up on you. They'll wait if you're a V.P. They'll wait and listen to what you’ve got to say. You get to define your own destiny.”

  Alesis rolled her eyes. She turned and started walking again.

  “This way, gentlemen. Next stop, the Zoo.”

  “The zoo?” Rolly asked.

  “The nerds, the geeks,” Alesis said. “That’s where we keep them.”

  “I thought they were Hobbits.”

  “Whatever,” Alesis replied, “I call it the Zoo”

  They walked back to the stairway, down to the lobby, past the guard’s desk towards the back of the building. They took a left down another hallway, this one painted deep red, with more gargoyles and framed headshots. Before long they came to another large room. It was open also, with an uncovered ceiling that displayed gigantic steel beams, electrical conduit, and ventilation ducts. The floor of the room was divided into two sets of small offices, a large open space between them. The offices were built out of translucent white plastic hung on aluminum framing. They were dark inside except for the soft phosphorous glow of computer screens, which illuminated the faces of the occupants, casting shadows as if they were ghosts.

  “This is it,” Alesis said, pausing for effect. “The Zoo.”<
br />
  In the large open space between the plastic enclosures, there were heavily padded sofas and chairs like the ones in the lobby. Two of the chairs had been turned over, and from behind each of them two young men, armed with toy guns, faced off against each other in some sort of shootout. Little plastic pellets flew through the air like a scene from a Hong Kong gangster movie. Three other men, barefoot, wearing shorts and beach shirts, were tossing a Frisbee, leaping to catch it while diving over one of the sofas, crashing softly on the cushions as they fell. Alesis forged ahead. Rolly followed her, heard a yell. He ducked as an errant throw of the Frisbee flew by his face. The disc glanced off Fender's ear and fell to the floor.

  “Sorry,” sang out one of the Frisbee tossers, a skinny pale kid, who didn't look a day over eighteen, with glasses and a tattoo of what looked like a penguin on his arm. Fender picked up the Frisbee, tossed it back with an errant wobble. Alesis slowed her gait, added the tiniest wiggle. It was enough. The action halted as the boys stopped to watch her pass. One leapt on a chair, crouching and pining like a lonely raccoon.

  “My little code monkeys,” Alesis said. “That's what I like to call them.” She sounded motherly, but that little hip action Rolly had seen wasn't so motherly.

  “What do they do?” Rolly asked.

  “They’re the programmers, the guys that work on the software,” Fender chimed in.

  They reached the other side of the room, took a right around the corner of one line of white plastic boxes, passed by the open doorways of the offices. In each one, the occupant was playing what looked like the same computer game, blasting away at camouflaged monsters. The game players laughed and swore at each other through the translucent walls.

  “Doesn't look like they're working much now,” observed Rolly.

  “The engineers set their own schedule,” explained Fender. “Ricky says it's the wave of the future. Employees should define their own agenda.” It sounded like a quote directly from Ricky's mouth.

  “So where is this special computer, the one that uses the Magic Key?”

  “We’re almost there now,” Alesis said.

  They took another turn into a shorter hallway. There was a fire door at the end of it, sunlight peeking through at its seams. There were two rooms on their right. The first room was empty, except for a man who sat on the floor in a yoga position, eyes closed. He had dirty blonde hair and the largest hands Rolly had ever seen. He was dressed in baggy shorts and a Hawaiian t-shirt. He wore a puka shell necklace against his tanned skin.

  “This is it,” Alesis said as they stopped in front of the second door, which was closed. “You can see the computer up there.” She pointed above the door, where a closed circuit T.V. monitor hung. On the screen was a fuzzy black and white picture of a plastic box, about two feet high, locked inside a metal cage. Small lights ran around the top of the cage, blinking in sequence.

  “Well it looks pretty secure,” Rolly said.

  “That’s only half of it,” said Fender. “The computer casing has a special ‘poison pill’ feature. If you remove the cover the whole thing explodes.”

  “It explodes?” Rolly wanted to laugh. “Really?

  “That’s what they tell us. Ricky says it’s there to prevent reverse engineering.”

  “Well, I guess that would do it,” Rolly said, not quite sure what reverse engineering was, but certain an exploding computer would help prevent it.

  “Boys and their toys,” Alesis said, rolling her eyes again. Rolly was beginning to like her attitude almost as much as her looks.

  “Can we go in?” Rolly asked.

  “We can’t get in without Ricky’s security card,” Fender said. “Ricky or King has to be here.”

  “Or Curtis,” Alesis said.

  “Or Curtis.”

  “So tell me about Curtis. What’s he like?”

  Alesis and Fender glanced at each other, as if hoping the other would respond. Fender started.

  “We don’t really see him that much. He’s kind of a super-geek.”

  “Ricky said he was hard to get hold of. Doesn’t he come into work like everybody else?”

  “No, he mostly stays out at the house,” Alesis said.

  “The house?”

  “The BFH,” Fender said. He looked down at the floor, twitching the dunce card between his index finger and thumb. Alesis shot an almost imperceptible glance over at Fender. There was something a little vicious in her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” Rolly said, “I don’t understand.” Fender looked up at him.

  “The house where the party was. Curtis lives there.”

  A hundred questions shot through Rolly’s brain simultaneously, creating a hot, bubbly liquid that ran down his throat and swished around in his stomach. He saw a dark shadow floating across a swimming pool. Was Curtis dead? He couldn’t be. Ricky said he had received an email from Curtis this morning. Had Curtis been at the house when Rolly found the man in the pool? He might have been.

  “What does BFH mean?” Rolly said, trying to think of something to say to keep his composure. Alesis sighed.

  “It means Big Fucking House,” Alesis said. “Curtis likes to call it that. It’s his idea of a funny joke.”

  The yoga man in the room they had passed started playing harmonica, blowing a slow, worn out blues riff in the key of B flat. The guy wasn’t half bad, but he wasn’t exactly Sonny Boy Williamson either. Fender, Alesis, and Rolly stood in the hall looking at the picture of the computer on the television monitor and the blinking lights that surrounded it, the metal box that held the secrets of Eyebitz.com, the secrets that could only be unlocked with the Magic Key.

  “Well, I don’t really need to go in,” Rolly said at last. “I’m afraid it’s just a bunch of blinking lights to me.” An exploding computer wasn’t something he wanted to mess with right at the moment.

  A Detour

  For the third time in the last eighteen hours, Rolly found himself driving his old Volvo wagon out to The Farms. He was headed for the mansion on the cliffs, the BFH, in search of the elusive Eyebitz.com employee, Curtis Vox, the man who had emailed Ricky that morning to report that the Magic Key had gone missing. Rolly knew now, deep in his heart, that there was more to this whole thing than a lost disk. He knew he was in over his head. Because Curtis Vox surely knew something about a dead man floating in a swimming pool, even if no one else did.

  Curtis Vox didn’t own the mansion on the cliffs. According to Alesis, he was living there courtesy of a rich Eyebitz.com investor who owned the house. The investor lived in Mexico, rarely used the place.

  Rolly felt a rough edge gnawing inside him now, an ugly excitement, like a rusty knife twisting inside his brain. It was the feeling he used to get when someone brought a bottle of Jack Daniels backstage before a gig. He tried to resist dangerous things, but somehow he couldn’t.

  He passed the granite monoliths at the entrance to The Farms. His nervousness started to scream. He found himself thinking of Leslie again. She lived with her husband one street away from where he was now. He passed the turn that would take him to the mansion and headed for Leslie’s instead.

  Leslie had stayed with Rolly through some of his worst years. She had put up with him when he was drunk, stoned, sleeping around. She had listened to him lie at eight o'clock in the morning, alcohol on his breath, the smell of other women on his shirt. She had been steadfast, supportive, and patient, like a beautiful mound of garden mulch. She gave him more chances in life than anyone else ever had. Except for one day when she hadn’t, when she packed up her clothes and her fancy kitchen utensils and left him for good. The day before, Rolly, Fender, and Matt had gone to L.A. to see the man from Capitol Records.

  Leslie lived with Joe now, her husband, a doctor. They owned an old California ranch house at the outer edge of The Farms, on a small canyon just off the private access road that led down to Black’s Beach. They had two Labrador retrievers, a Siamese cat, and a parakeet. Leslie had a good life, better than anythi
ng she could have had with Rolly.

  He found himself at Joe and Leslie’s driveway. He turned in, all the time thinking this was a bad idea, wondering why he suddenly wanted to see her. He felt vaguely ashamed, like a man who couldn't let go of his past. He hoped Leslie was at home by herself. Joe wasn't a bad guy, downright decent, in fact, but Rolly wanted her all to himself. Seeing her might settle him down. Part of him wanted to brag, too, tell her he was working on something that was a big deal, legitimate. He wanted to tell her about the ten thousand option shares he was going to get.

  But he wasn't going to have any luck today. Leslie's BMW was gone and Joe was standing outside, next to his Jaguar, throwing a tennis ball to the dogs. Once you started down the driveway, you had to go all the way in, make a loop in order to get back out. Joe saw him coming. Rolly had to say hi. He waved at Joe, pulled alongside the Jaguar, and rolled down the window.

  Joe smiled. “Hey, Rolly, what brings you to the coast?” Joe was a doofus, a likable guy with a doctor’s brain and a heart like a clear summer day. He worked up the road at the Scripps Clinic four days a week, tending to wealthy old ladies, and at a free clinic in San Ysidro one day a week, tending to children of poor Mexican immigrants. He spent all his free time and money on Leslie. Rolly wished that Leslie had married a jerk, so he could pretend he still had a chance of reclaiming her affection. But Joe was the hero. Rolly was the jerk.

  “Hey, Joe. I had some business in the neighborhood. So I thought I’d stop by.”

  “Leslie’s out.” Joe picked up the tennis ball the dogs had dropped at his feet, threw it back out for them to retrieve again.

  “Yeah, I figured.”

  They were silent a moment, watching the dogs. Rolly decided he might as well do a little investigative work while he was here, make his reason for visiting not quite so transparent.

  “Hey, Joe, you know anything about the house that’s down at the other end of the street?”

  “Which one?”

  “At the end of Starlight. Looks right over Black’s.” Rolly described the house.